The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 not only became a turning point of American history, but witchery became entrenched in the placemaking of Salem’s urban supernatural. As such, Salem’s cultural trauma has become a desirable focus of the tourist gaze, specifically through its annual ‘Haunted Happenings’ event. Drawing upon conceptual underpinning of dark tourism, semiotics, collective memory, and social identity, as well as Foucault's ‘heterotopology’, we argue Salem is a place that is disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and even transforming. We argue Salem is where material realities and (re)imagined supernatural spaces collide to co-create a dark tourism place. Indeed, Salem is where we consume reflections and illusions, as well as engaging with atrocities and misdeeds of the problematic past. In turn, Salem and its supernatural placemaking exports its tragic history, which not only expresses difficult heritage but also ruptures the past to reclaim cultural and mercantile advantage. We advocate contemporary placemaking of Salem within realms of the urban supernatural and cultural trauma creates Salem into a Foucauldian heterotopia. It is here that Salem reflects the reality of our contemporary globalised community, where it is a world within a world, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside.

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Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983; 1998) has been praised as a novella demonstrating a “gradual development of exquisite suspense” and distinguishing, in its subtlety, “the true ghost story” (Bann cited in Scullion, 2003: 296). This article examines James Watkins’ 2012 film adaptation with particular focus on representations of the complex relationship between death and screen, which will be addressed through a close reading of the novella alongside its filmic adaptation. Both Hill’s (1983) novella and Watkins’ (2012) adaptation are littered with representations of trauma, death, and the experience of dying, predominantly by women and children, who functioned on the outskirts of Victorian society and whose existence remained largely confined to the margins. As such, this article serves to establish how the film adaptation upholds the Gothic through the representations of trauma, death, and dying in relation to Hill’s (1983) novella with particular focus on the supernatural spectral haunting of Jennet Humfrye and the death that surrounds her at every turn. In terms of Watkins’ (2012) film adaptation, my discussion will focus on those previously oversimplified representations of gender to demonstrate Watkins’ critical commentary on the marginality of female trauma.

Read Adapting representations of death from page to screen in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983)

The moral quandary of killing ‘monsters’ is not new and the horror genre has made a point of walking a line between perceptions of good and evil. As the taste for violence and gore increased these discussions lessened and the ‘monster’ became fodder for the visceral brutality and righteous salvation of humanity. Using selected supernatural and fantasy texts this article explores the morality of killing everything that is not human. Additionally, though death marks a beginning for many of the protagonists in the shows cited, the article examines the impact of a final death for show characters. In a world where death is not necessarily the end for some, how is it navigated when it does eventually come for others? This article explores the development of the sympathetic other in telefantasy texts Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (1997-2003), Supernatural (2005-2020), iZombie (2015-2019), Z Nation (2014-2018), In the Flesh (ITF) (2013-2014), and Lucifer (2016-present).

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Read Call for Papers: Fearful Sounds (Audio and Horror)