Alan Wake Story Explained

Terrifying Texts

From Faust (1926) to The Babadook (2014), books have been featured in horror films as warnings, gateways, prisons and manifestations of the monstrous. Ancient grimoires such as the Necronomicon serve as timeless vessels of knowledge beyond human comprehension, while runes, summoning diaries, and spell books offer their readers access to the powers of the supernatural--but at what cost? This collection of new essays examines nearly a century of genre horror in which on-screen texts drive and shape their narratives, sometimes unnoticed. The contributors explore American films like The Evil Dead (1981), The Prophecy (1995) and It Follows (2014), as well as such international films as Eric Valette's Malefique (2002), Paco Cabeza's The Appeared (2007) and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981).

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Narrative Instability

This book introduces the concept of 'narrative instability' in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend's poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text's plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite - or rather, exactly because of - their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male, middle-class Americans.