[Commlist] CFP - Selling Scary Movies: Horror Film Promotion & the American Market

*Selling Scary Movies: Horror Film Promotion & the American Market*
*Edited by Richard Nowell*
While American horror cinema is among the most widely examined of all 
entertainment formats, scholarship on this topic has mainly focused on 
film content or its reception. Consequently, despite representing the 
most profuse component of horror’s inter-textual relay, the marketing of 
such films remains under-theorized and supported by a relative paucity 
of case-studies. Indeed, the promotion of scary movies still tends to be 
imagined rather reductively as a nightmarish mix of terror, loathing, 
threat, violence, and monstrosity, exemplified by such taglines as “be 
afraid, be very afraid” and “keep repeating it’s only a movie!”. This 
collection of essays therefore seeks to broaden conceptions of how 
chillers, thrillers, and the like have been promoted on the US market. 
It shall do so by uniting diverse approaches focusing on the industrial, 
social, discursive, and aesthetic dimensions of horror film marketing 
across a range of industry sectors, windows of release, and time 
periods. In so doing, the collection aims to expand the terms under 
which one of the most pervasive yet poorly appreciated aspects of 
American audiovisual culture may be understood.

Accordingly, the editor of this collection solicits original essays of 
6000-8000-words offering a variety of perspectives on topics including 
but not restricted to:
Marketing campaigns of individual horror films
Repacking horror films across windows of release
Marketing campaigns across horror film trends and subtypes
Horror film and print advertising
Horror film and audiovisual advertising
Horror film and radio advertising
Horror film and viral advertising
Horror films and synergy
Horror films and publicity tours
Exploitation sector marketing
Marketing indie/elevated horror
Marketing specialty horror
Mainstreaming horror
Targeting horror at specific audiences
Promoting imported horror on the American market
Horror in the marketing of non-horror films
Non-horror elements of horror film marketing

Please send 200-word abstracts plus a short academic bio to 
(_richardandrew.nowell /at/ amu.cz) <mailto:(richardandrew.nowell /at/ amu.cz)>___by 
31 May 2025. Naturally, if anyone has any informal questions and 
queries, please send me an email and I will respond swiftly.

At present, Richard Nowell is sketching out a due date for chapter 
submissions of January 2027, but obviously this can only really be 
provisional at this point. For the record, once a line-up is in place, 
Richard Nowell will be approaching Anthem Press about including the book 
in its "Series on Exploitation and Industry in World Cinema", of which 
he is a board member.

Richard Nowell is a Researcher in Audiovisual Theory and History at FAMU 
(The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). He 
is the author of /Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film 
Cycle, /the editor of /Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror 
Cinema/, and has published widely on the industrial dimensions of scary 
movies.
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