Monsters in and Among Us

About this book

"This collection of essays interrogates contemporary visualizations of the Gothic and the monstrous in film and media. The ongoing fascination with evil, as simultaneously repellant and irresistibly attractive, in the Hollywood film, criminological case studies, popular culture, and even public policy points to the emergence of "Gothic criminology" with its focus on themes such as blood lust, compulsion, godlike vengeance, and power and domination. Rather than assuming that film and the media tell us little about the reality of criminological phenomena, "Gothic criminology," as instantiated in this collection of essays, recognizes the complementarity of critical academic and aesthetic accounts of deviant behavior as intersecting with the public policy in complex, non-reductive ways.". "The contemporary monsters the writers examine in this anthology include the pedophilic homosexual priest, the hypermascuIinized rogue cop, the masculinized mother, the drug addict, the white-collar criminal, and the serial killer and terrorist as well as corporate entities such as police departments nurtured by monstrously corrupt practices, unbridled capitalism as vampiric, and the proliferation of Gothic images and metaphors in popular culture spawning paranoid and useless public policy."--BOOK JACKET.