[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 replay, 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 may be understood.
Accordingly, the editor of this collection therefore 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.

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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