New Special issue

Abstract

What do the dreamlike Venice, the city of death, have in common with Los Angeles, the city of dreams? "Cultured" New York with "industrial" Detroit? A suburb of the United States with the center of Rome? They are all settings of contemporary fear. Cartographies of terror taking the form of cities. Labyrinths for the anxieties of our time. Cities are reflected in the genre as dense centers of human activity, harboring both dreams and nightmares, and providing fertile ground for filmmakers to explore emotions that only make sense within the framework of urban life. In these approaches, isolation and alienation become central themes.

In the first chapter, Jordi Sánchez-Navarro discusses the representation of some legendary Italian cities in horror cinema and their relationship with the concept of the terrifying sublime.
Jorge Gorostiza analyzes, through the names and urban morphology, how imagined cities and invented towns function in cinematic fiction.
Victoria Santamaría Ibor explores ghettos and residential suburbs in her chapter.
As a symbol of the collapse of the 20th century, Detroit is the favorite setting for contemporary terror, analyzed by Lluís Rueda.
Ángel Sala invites us to explore the thousand and one horrors of the total city, the great urban megalopolises of modernity.
Antonio José Navarro takes us on a special Spanish cartography of urban fear.
Carlos Tabernero focuses on the representation of abandoned cities.
The volume concludes with a selection of films briefly commented on by Xavi Sánchez Pons and Ángel Sala.