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In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills's posthumously published \"Manifesto\" not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, race, and racisms which has been published since 2003. Scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills's work will recognize that the essay was a \"critical exploration of [how] a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present day [sic] social realities.\" Reid has invited a wide-ranging Tolkienists who have read the essay to respond, briefly, on the significance of the essay to their work Additional Keywords racism; ores; Mills, Charles W. \"The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orcish Manifesto\"; Race and racism in fantasy literature; Tolkien, J.R.R.-Race and racism; Tolkien, J.R.R-Characters-Orcs

Although C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956) are still hugely popular today, some critics have accused the books of representing masculinity and femininity in an outmoded way. The three Walden Media films, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), appear to adopt a more contemporary perspective, especially as far as the representation of fighting girls is concerned. While Lewis seemed slightly reluctant to show women playing an active role on the battlefield, Andrew Adamson, who directed the first two films, lets Susan, the female protagonist, fight alongside the boys and even gives her a leading role in the battle scenes of the 2008 film. However, the presence of fighting girls remains largely symbolic, because they are artificially put forward in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and because their actions are presented in a stereotypical fashion in Prince Caspian. As for the director of the third film Michael Apted, he treats Lucy, the female protagonist who replaces her older sister Susan, in a much more egalitarian way.

This article concerns itself with the cinematic emotion of dread. Within Horror Studies, cinematic dread has been theorized as a temporal emotion, mostly centered around the confrontation with the monstrous, after which dread evolves into other cinematic emotions of shock and/or horror. For this reason, the function of dread within the horror film experience is only recognized in relation to other emotions it should precede. However, this article argues that dread plays a crucial emotion in the affective workings of some horror films that fall under the term “dread-full” films. Through the close reading of two case studies, namely It Comes At Night and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the article reasons that dread exists as an inseparable part of the viewing experience of these films and in doing so, argues that the emotion of dread is inherent to the overall cinematic horror experience.

One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body “exists only to be read” (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope’s conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins.