[Commlist] CFP - Youth & Horror: An International Conference

Youth and Horror: An International Conference

1-2 July, 2025

University of Birmingham, UK

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. by Martin Barker, David Buckingham, Kate Egan) and recent 
contributions to the field (e.g. by Filipa Antunes, Sarah Cleary, 
Catherine Lester). 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 /at/ contacts.bham.ac.uk) by the end of Monday 13th 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.

Follow us on Twitter/X: https://x.com/youthandhorror

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).


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