Agnieszka Jeżyk’s Contemporary Slavic Horror across Media promises to fill a nagging scholarly gap when it comes to horror production in eastern/central Europe. In her short but compelling introduction, Jeżyk asks us to consider how fears and geographies commingle to produce diverse narratives of “individual and collective anxieties” (xxi), of repressed traumas and the national uncanny, and of regional and temporally specific responses to war, memory politics, post-Soviet identities, restrictive gender roles, ethnic strife, and cultural nostalgia. Twelve original contributions, skillfully grouped into four clusters—horror and media, horrors of war, haunted geographies, and horror transgressions—offer well-rounded discussions attentive to the specificities of the regions and the socio-cultural tensions that are often lost in translation. Of note is the fantastically broad scope of material: readers move from music videos to historical horror games, from neo-Gothic fiction to mainstream genre fiction, from contemporary experimental film to decades-old national cinemas, from music and subcultural festivals to art-horror paintings, and from British slashers to Polish war movies.
The collection’s biggest and, frankly, indisputable strength lies in opening up Slavic studies scholarship to horror production on a hitherto unprecedented scale. While eastern/central European horror production can be found scattered around in different research fields, for the most part it has been confined to horror studies, Gothic studies, game studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies, and Jeżyk is the first researcher to guide the conversation firmly into Slavic studies territory. That framing turns out to be crucial for understanding both when the collection works best and when it falters slightly. Some of the strongest entries rely on their authors’ vast knowledge and intimate understanding of eastern/central European cultural production, which are in turn bolstered by horror studies staples such as the uncanny and zombies, as well as horror-adjacent cultural and philosophical concepts such as necropolitics and hauntology. A case in point, Volha Isakava’s discussion of two post-2014 Ukrainian war films employs Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma and Mark Fisher’s hauntology to investigate how the different temporal orientations of the two films “create cinematic hauntologies” and “express the trauma of war” (55). In a chapter devoted to the arguably very first full-fledged Czechoslovak horror, The Ferat Vampire, Daniel W. Pratt probes the limits of both Julia Kristeva’s feminine semiotic and Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine, and explores the opening of “a space for a potential technofemininity” (157). Brittany R. Roberts’s insightful analysis of IC3PEAK’s music videos reveals their art as “a unique site of resistance to Putin-era necropolitics” (4).
A fair share of contributions offer sound introductions to cultural texts that remain fairly unknown beyond their respective eastern/central European audiences. In this vein, readers can encounter, among others, Marek Debnar’s superb chapter on Jozef Karika, a contemporary Slovak master of horror; Jonathan Owen’s discussion of the subtle subversion underpinning the unassuming Czech horror film Prague Nights; and Svitlana Krys’s fascinating close reading of Dmytro Bilyi’s Ukrainian neo-Gothic fiction. What I find particularly appealing is the fact that the collection does not shy away from controversial texts. In one such contribution, Kris Van Heuckelom and Marta Wójtowicz discuss the figure of the Polish Final Girl both in recent British cinema and in Wojtek Smarzowski’s hyper-divisive and (in)famous war film, Volhynia (Hatred). Matthew M. Mucha explores national trauma and Polish collective memory renegotiation in Igor Ostachowicz’s provocative novel Night of the Living Jews, while Helena Goscilo discusses Ewa Juszkiewicz’s and Aleksandra Waliszewska’s art, though sadly, not much space is devoted to the rather divisive reception of the latter’s work.
The Slavic studies angle has one unforeseen consequence, namely the somewhat unclear positionality of the research collected in the volume. Jeżyk ends her introductory essay with an uplifting-sounding message that the collection “is meant as a platform to give voice to the Other” (xxviii), which begs the question of academic positionalities and power hierarchies involved in such a statement. If I am reading Jeżyk’s objectives correctly, the collection is framed as an “educational, methodological, and critical” effort (xxvii); therefore, readers are invited to unlearn their potential biases and to critically re-evaluate western marginalization and spectacularization of eastern/central Europe and its horror cultures. The collection thus acts as a direct and necessary intervention into the reification of eastern/central Europe as unruly wildlands straight from Eli Roth’s absurdly xenophobic Hostel. But how can the collected chapters truly intervene in the Othering of eastern Europe if that same gesture of Othering appears to undergird the entire collection and its very raison d’être? The question remains: who is giving the voice, to whom, and under what conditions? Perhaps this is a broader philosophical question relating to the status of eastern/central Europe within a Slavic studies imaginary and to the difficulty of actively un-seeing eastern/central Europe as an ever-late-to-the-party peripheral cousin or a mere hauntological doppelganger of the west. And that process is still ongoing.
All things considered, Contemporary Slavic Horror across Media is a valuable and much-needed intervention, and even if its politics are not always clear, the message remains hopeful: it is high time to take Slavic horror seriously.
