CFP Metafictional Horror Cinema: The Screen as Mirror

13.04.2026

Scream (1996).

Edited by Sérgio Dias Branco (University of Coimbra, Portugal) and Ana Maria Acker (Ritter dos Reis University Center, Brazil)

We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection titled Metafictional Horror Cinema: The Screen as Mirror, to be submitted to the UWP Horror Studies series. The volume explores how horror cinema reflects on its own formal strategies, lays bare its narrative and technological mechanisms, and confronts viewers with unsettling modes of self-awareness.

The volume will explore the role of metafiction within horror cinema, from postmodern genre revisions and reflexive found-footage films to avant-garde and hybrid works that fracture narrative logic, collapse diegetic boundaries, break the fourth wall, or explicitly implicate the viewer in acts of spectatorship and violence.

Metafictional horror draws attention to the constructed nature of cinema, often blurring boundaries between fiction and documentary, performance and possession, audience and victim. By making genre conventions visible, these films challenge the stability of horror itself. At the same time, self-reflexivity does not necessarily diminish the intensity of the horror experience. Instead, it often produces new forms of affect in which intellectual awareness and visceral response coexist.

We seek contributions that analyse films and audiovisual works in which horror becomes self-aware or formally reflexive, including — but not limited to — the following areas:

• genre parodies and deconstructions (Scream, The Cabin in the Woods, Behind the Mask);
• reflexive found footage and mockumentaries (Lake Mungo, The Poughkeepsie Tapes);
• avant-garde or experimental horror (Inland Empire, Skinamarink, Antrum);
• horror narratives centered on authorship, narrative collapse, or recursive storytelling;
• spectatorship, diegesis, and medium-awareness as mechanisms of fear;
• meta-possession, performance, and the body as sites of narrative rupture;
• horror across digital and multi-platform environments, including desktops, smartphones, surveillance systems, livestreams, and AI-mediated or algorithmic perspectives.

We especially welcome contributions addressing global, transnational, and underrepresented traditions of metafictional horror cinema, expanding discussion beyond dominant Western canons.

Abstracts Due: 8 May 2026 (250–300 words)

Include a short bio (100 words) and institutional affiliation (if applicable).

Notification of Acceptance: 29 May 2026.

Submit proposals or inquiries to: sdiasbranco@uc.fl.pt and ana_acker@yahoo.com.br

Colóquio 221, “Camões: Novas Artes, Novo Engenho”

30.03.2026

Já saiu o último número da revista Colóquio da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Este número é dedicado a Luís Vaz de Camões, “Camões: Novas Artes, Novo Engenho”. Inclui um artigo meu: “O Canto e o Olhar: Luís de Camões e o Cinema Português”. Um agradecimento à equipa da revista, em especial à diretora Joana Matos Frias e à Ana Marques Gastão.

Two Conference Papers Accepted

11.03.2026

Matewan.

Two recent papers accepted for conference presentation:

• “A Lógica do Indeterminado no Cinema” [“The Logic of the Indeterminate in Cinema”] to be presented at the XV AIM (Association of Moving Image Researchers) Annual Meeting and International Conference in May;

• “Beatitudes of the Coalfields: Prophetic Christianity, Class Solidarity, and Working-Class Thought in Matewan (1987)” to be presented at the annual conference of the WCSA (Working-Class Studies Association) in June.

Conversa sobre Ominous Homelands in World Cinema

22.02.2026

Informações detalhadas sobre este livro recente e relevante da minha colega da Faculdade de Letras, Susana Araújo, aqui.

Slowness as Antidote

13.02.2026

Sarah Lahm (University of Leeds) has written a insightful article on Pluribus (2025-present) and slowness for the Critical Studies in Television online blog, in which she references my recent piece on Steven Zaillian’s Ripley (2024) for the same publication. It is well worth reading here.

Slow Television, Vivid Crime

06.02.2026

Ripley.

My new essay on Steven Zaillian’s Ripley (2024) for the Critical Studies in Television online blog is out. Read it here.

The Hand That Feeds and the Hand That Starves

03.02.2026

November.

November (2017) is an acclaimed Estonian folk horror film written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, based on Andrus Kivirähk’s best-selling novel Rehepapp ehk November (“Old Barny aka November”). It is a tale of unrequited love and untamed violence populated by possessed machines (kratts), spirits, werewolves, plagues, and the Devil. In general, critical acclaim focused on its stylistic qualities, particularly the peasant scenes in vast landscapes reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings, and the alluring black-and-white cinematography by Mart Taniel, which received the Spotlight Award from the American Society of Cinematographers. These combined features create a haunting atmosphere that matches the existential angst permeating the film, not unlike that found in Béla Tarr’s post-1988 cinema.

The film can be easily read through the prisms of religion and politics. Sarnet’s social portrait mixes Estonian paganism, the rooted beliefs of peasants, with Lutheranism, the Christian denomination brought by German aristocrats. Yet Lutheranism is also understood and lived in peculiar ways by the rural population—e.g., the pastor is described as “the hand that feeds”, but also as someone who must be turned “stupid” by dark magic. The narrative takes place in the nineteenth century, when Estonian national identity began to emerge in the region between the Baltic Sea and its easternmost arm, the Gulf of Finland—what is called the Estonian Age of Awakening (Ärkamisaeg). At the time, the land was known as the Governorate of Estonia, a province of the Russian Empire where the peasantry was ruled by the German aristocracy. The film connects the emergence of Estonian identity with the popular rejection of a small foreign elite, the German upper class, which lives in a decadent manor where a large table is successively set for banquets that are never shown while the peasants starve outside. It is not just the small farmers who suffer. Class exploitation extends indoors to the housekeeper, who steals dresses from the baroness to sell them, as well as to other servants at the manor. “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”, wrote Karl Marx in Capital, Volume 1, chapter 10, section 1. November draws on the tradition of Gothic Marxism exemplified in this passage by employing syncretic religiosity along with supernatural elements to render the dying days of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

World Poll

26.01.2026

Sinners.

Issue 116 of Senses of Cinema is now out, and I’ve contributed to the World Poll, highlighting ten films from 2025 in alphabetical order.

• No Other Choice (Eojjeolsuga eobsda, Park Chan-wook, 2025)
• A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
• The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024)
• One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
• The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025)
• The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)
• Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)
• Sirât (Oliver Laxe, 2025)
• Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025)
• It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadof-e sadeh, Jafar Panahi, 2025)

Ten films are hardly enough to account for a year of cinematic art – and I am still catching up with important titles such as The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025), or I Only Rest in the Storm (O Riso e a Faca, Pedro Pinho, 2025). Other films, including Drop (Christopher Landon, 2025), Souleymane’s Story (L’histoire de Souleymane, Boris Lojkine, 2024), or Young Mothers (Jeunes mères, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2025), also came close to making the list – and are well worth seeking out. These ten titles highlight particularly compelling examples of fiction cinema released in 2025. I limited the scope to fiction films not because documentary is less important, but because I wanted to focus on constructed worlds, where meaning emerges through mise en scène, image, sound, and genre rather than direct record. The selection is guided by clear stylistic imprint and a strong sense of variety: they look, sound, move, and think differently. Several work through genre – thriller, horror, mystery, action – using recognisable frameworks to process power, belief, race, violence, and collective anxiety. Others move in the opposite direction, toward austerity or contemplation, privileging duration, landscape, and bodily presence over narrative payoff. Ways of looking at people – and of staying with them – recur throughout the list. What matters is not only who these films attend to, but how that attention is shaped aesthetically. Some articulate a reparative mode, grounded in attention, ritual, music, and communal survival. Others push toward harsher, tragic registers, where choices are constrained and loss takes hold. Taken together, these films suggest cinema as a humanist endeavour that remains plural, contested, and driven by form.

You can read other picks and observations here.

Review of James Lorenz’s The Theological Power of Film

23.01.2026

The latest issue of the Irish Theological Quarterly includes a book review I wrote of James Lorenz’s The Theological Power of Film, which I describe as “a confident and meticulously argued contribution to the increasingly sophisticated field of theology and film”. It is available here.

João Botelho: “Filmo um texto como se fosse um rosto”

08.01.2026

Recebi hoje a minha cópia do livro João Botelho: “Filmo um texto como se fosse um rosto”, organizado por Golgona Anghel, a quem muito agradeço o empenho e a perseverança na publicação desta obra. Esta colecção de ensaios tem um conjunto de contribuições relevantes para o estudo da obra cinematográfica de João Botelho na sua relação com a literatura, nomeadamente um texto de um colega do meu departamento na Universidade de Coimbra, Manuel Portela, sobre a montagem do livro em Filme do Desassossego (2010). Inclui ainda capítulos de Alexandra Lopes, António Guerreiro, Daniel Ribas, Elisabete Marques, Fernando Cabral Martins, Fernando Guerreiro, João Dionísio, Maria Brás Ferreira, Mário Avelar, Paulo Cunha, Ricardo Vieira Lisboa, e Susana Nascimento Duarte. O meu capítulo tem o título “Uma Personagem na História: Filmar O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis”.