Adam Lowenstein and Max Bledstein on “Horror Film and Otherness” (Columbia University Press, 2022)

Max Bledstein interviews Adam Lowenstein about his new book Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, 2022), which examines the treatment of social difference in horror. Through detailed and thoughtful close reading of films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele, Lowenstein provides a compelling account of how horror depicts identity. Lowenstein and Bledstein discuss the genre’s complexities, some of its many critics, and its enduring (but evolving) significance.

Read more about Horror Film and Otherness on the Columbia University Press website. Use the discount code CUP20 at checkout for a 20% discount.

Adam Lowenstein is Professor of English and Film/Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness (2022), Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (2015), and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005), all published by Columbia University Press. Lowenstein is especially invested in horror studies, and is the Director of Pitt’s Horror Studies Working Group as well as a board member of the George A. Romero Foundation. He played a central role in the acquisition of the George A. Romero Collection for Pitt’s Horror Studies Archive. He has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, New York University, and Tel Aviv University, and received a Macgeorge Fellowship from the University of Melbourne as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Max Bledstein is the current Online Editor and incoming Associate Editor for New Review of Film and Television Studies. He teaches film and media in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, where he completed his PhD thesis on Iranian horror cinema. Several essays based on his thesis have won awards, including the 2022 Graduate Student Award (co-winner) from the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the 2021 Graduate Student Writing Award from SCMS’s Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), and the 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award from the Horror Studies SIG of SCMS. His work has appeared in Monstrum, Iranian Studies, Inks, The New Americanist, and Jeunesse. He is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Comics.


Click here for Adam Lowenstein’s article “The Jewish Cronenberg: a cinema of therapeutic disintegration” in issue 15.2 of New Review of Film and Television Studies, part of a special dossier on David Cronenberg edited by Lowenstein and Adam Charles Hart.

Stay tuned for issue 22.3 of New Review of Film and Television Studies, “Horror Studies Now,” which will be guest edited by Max Bledstein.


Want to listen to more? Here’s another podcast episode we’ve featured, on Stacey Abbott’s BFI Classics volume Near Dark