Announcing Millennial Nasties by Ariel Powers-Schaub from Encyclopocalypse

Torture porn, shock-for-shock’s sake, violence that doesn’t serve the plot, and characters you hate – what was going on in the 2000s in horror cinema? And why were audiences hungry for it? Millennial Nasties takes a critical but appreciative look at an oft-ignored subset of horror. This book dissects the English-language horror films of the 2000s and the cultural events they were responding to. Processing tragedy and war throughout the world, keeping pace with films from other countries, and swinging wildly away from the safe horror of the 1990s, the 2000s brought grisly kills and shocking gore to cinema audiences and home viewers. Films once dismissed as torture porn, their nasty slasher friends, and the remakes of this era have found a new home, and that home is a subgenre called Millennial Nasties.

Foreword by Zoë Rose Smith, founder and owner of Zobo With A Shotgun and EIC of Ghouls Magazine.

Ariel Powers-Schaub is a horror film critic and analyst from the midwestern United States. She is a writer and a podcaster who champions 2000s horror. Her first horror memory is being terrified, but fascinated, by Hexxus, the pollution monster in FernGully (1992), and she has been chasing that feeling ever since. She is obsessed with Halloween and probably planning this year’s party as we speak. Find her across social media platforms at @Ari_Hellraiser.