Labors of fear : the modern horror film goes to work

**How work and capitalism inspire horror in modern film.** American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in __Psycho__, and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of __The Texas Chain Saw Massacre__, horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity. Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror’s critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as __The Shining__ and __Dawn of the Dead__ responded to deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and rising numbers of women in the workforce. __Labors of Fear__ explores these critical issues and extends them in discussions of recent works such as __The Autopsy of Jane Doe__, __Midsommar__, __Survival of the Dead__, __It Follows__, __Get Out__, and __Us.__ Covering films ranging from the 1970s onward, these essays address novel and newly recognized modes and conditions of labor: reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, social media and self-branding, intellectual labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment. In its singular way, horror continues to make spine-tingling sense of what is most destructive in the wider sociopolitical context of US capitalism. "The book explores the role of all sorts of labor, and sometimes its lack, in horror films and how the "monstrousness of work" has long played a part in the genre. It addresses not only the economic restructuring that defined the 1970s and 1980s but also modes and conditions of labor that have emerged or gained greater recognition since that period: domestic and reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, the digital economy, social media and self-branding, intellectual and imaginative labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment"-- Provided by publisher