Monsters have always rampant border crossers, from Dracula's journey from Romania to Whitby, to the rampaging monsters of Godzilla movies across global cities. This volume studies how their transnationality reflects an era of global crisis. Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness with depictions of monsters or monstrosity. This book, however, explores cultural flow as it relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers and audiences. It also examines the ramifications of representations of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered by the Covid pandemic, which frames much of the content of this collection. This ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe and societal and human vulnerability with its significant expression in artistic terms.
Steven Rawle is an associate professor of Media Production at York St John University, UK. His books include Transnational Cinema: An Introduction (Palgrave, 2018), and Transnational Kaij: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Partners in Suspense: Critical Essays on Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock (Manchester University Press, 2016), and Basics Filmmaking: The Language of Film (Bloomsbury, 2015). His writing has appeared in Film Criticism, Asian Cinema, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Fandom Studies.Martin Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and is the Course Leader for Film Studies and Media & Communication at York St John University, UK. His research focusses on European Art Cinema, American Independence, the Mountaineering Documentary and Cinema and Social Justice. His last two books were Women in the Work of Woody Allen (2018), and The Mountain and the Politics of Representation (2023). He is a co-editor for Amsterdam University Press' Cinema and Social Justice book series.
