Youth and Horror: An International Conference

The Youth and Horror Research Network is delighted to invite submissions for its international conference, taking place in person on 1-2 July, 2025, at the University of Birmingham, UK.

A collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Northumbria University, the Youth and Horror Research Network is an AHRC-funded, interdisciplinary, international network of scholars, educators and cultural partners, which aims to investigate and impact scholarly and public understandings of the relationship between children, youth and the horror genre. The relationship between children and horror has persisted throughout the history of youth culture, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes to the ongoing popularity of Halloween and transmedia franchises like Doctor Who, Goosebumps and Stranger Things. For today’s youth, who are growing up in an age characterised by anxiety and instability, horror has the potential to help them understand the world around them, other people, and themselves. However, the meeting of young people and horror consistently attracts controversy due to unsupported perceptions that the genre is a harmful influence upon children and young people, echoed by an emphasis in scholarly research on ‘negative’ media effects.

The Youth and Horror Research Network therefore aims to encourage renewed scholarly consideration of the benefits, pleasures and risks of youthful interactions with horror, building on foundational work in this area (e.g. Martin Barker, David Buckingham, Kate Egan) and recent contributions to the field (e.g. Filipa Antunes, Sarah Cleary, Catherine Lester).

Call For papers

We invite submissions for 20-minute papers on topics examining the intersections of horror, youth and childhood, with an inclusive and flexible approach to how any of these terms may be defined, and in relation to a broad range of media (including film, television, video games, online cultures, literature, comics, toys etc.). Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Interpretations and/or histories of horror texts addressed to children, or other horror texts which are encountered in youth;
• Intersectional approaches to the relationship between youth, horror, identity and/or monstrosity, e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability, class;
• International perspectives on youth and horror, especially outside of the UK and the US;
• New reflections on media debates and moral panics about youth and horror, e.g. the 1950s Horror Comics Campaign, the 1980s ‘Video Nasty’ scandal, the 1980s Satanic Panic;
• Attitudes of censors and regulators to the issue of youth and horror (including parents as regulators, children as self-regulators, as well as official bodies e.g. BBFC, MPA, Ofcom, local councils);
• Children's/young people’s fandom of horror, or adult fandom/nostalgia of childhood horror texts;
• Definitions and boundaries of genres, tastes and audiences, and how these are affected by the meeting of youth and horror;
• Cross-media adaptations of texts relating to young people and horror;
• Aesthetics and modes of horror for young people (including, for instance, animation);
• Theoretical approaches to youth and horror, e.g. cognitive, phenomenological/affective, psychoanalytic, behavioural/developmental;
• Archival and memory research on young people’s encounters with horror;
• The roles and uses of horror in education and wellbeing e.g. mental health;
• The role of horror in childhood play;
• Climate crisis as horror and its relationship to youth;
• Horror-related distribution, broadcasting and marketing for children and young people;
• Practice-as-research approaches to youth and horror. 

Send 300-word abstracts and 50-word bio to youthandhorror@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the end of Monday 13 January, 2025.

We also welcome submissions for papers or panels presented in non-traditional formats (e.g. video essays and reflections). Please reach out with a speculative enquiry if you have ideas.

We especially encourage submissions from scholars from backgrounds that are typically underrepresented in the academy, and scholars outside of the UK. We have a small number of bursaries to offer to international participants in order to facilitate attendance of postgraduate, independent, and precarious scholars, or scholars who are otherwise without recourse to institutional funds. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please state this in your submission. Due to funding restrictions, we are sadly only able to offer bursaries to scholars working and residing outside of the UK.

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About the organisers

Dr Catherine Lester is Associate Professor of Film and Television at the University of Birmingham, and Principal Investigator of the Youth & Horror Research Network. Her research centres on the intersections between children’s culture, the horror genre and cult media with a particular focus on horror films and television made for children in Britain and the US. Her key publications in this area include the monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury 2021) and the edited collection Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence (Bloomsbury 2023).  

Dr Kate Egan is Assistant Professor in Film and Media at Northumbria University, and Co-Investigator of the Youth & Horror Research Network. She is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (MUP, 2007), Cultographies: The Evil Dead (Wallflower, 2011), and (with Martin Barker, Tom Philips and Sarah Ralph) Alien Audiences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and she is co-editor of the Hidden Horror Histories book series (LUP). She is currently developing further research on audience memories of horror film and television.  This includes a monograph, Remembering Ghostwatch: Horror, Childhood and the Home, and an edited collection, Researching Horror Fans and Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, with James Rendell (University of South Wales).