Ever since horror became wildly popular in the 1970s, journalists have warned against the dangers of increasingly explicit forms of violent entertainment. Xavier Aldana Reyes takes a different stance in Body Gothic , celebrating the transgressive qualities of this genre. Reyes considers relevant popular literary and filmic movements of the past three decades and reads them as updates in a long gothic tradition that goes back to the eighteenth century. Body Gothic contains case studies of key texts in splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn, and surgical horror.