MADHOUSE MOVIES (UPDATED)

SHARON PACKER Announcement
Location
United States
Subject Fields
Film and Film History, Health and Health Care, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Popular Culture Studies, Psychology

Madhouses in movies, a staple of cinema since its inception, more recently surfaced in streaming media, which has become equally important to the traditional big screen. This essay collection addresses the many manifestations of media "madhouses," w chapters from many academic disciplines. Essays are 3,000-5,000 words, directed to a general educated audience, and focusing on the content and aesthetics of the films themselves, or on the sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic implications of “incarceration.” We view screen media as “the royal road to the collective unconscious” that reflects society’s attitudes and experiences, fears and fantasies. This collection does NOT include memoir/clinical cases/political polemics—but innovative, even iconoclastic, ideas are welcome. Possible topics: High Anxiety & Hitchcock’s Spellbound; Star Trek’s Prison Planet (and other SF madhouses); asylums in silent cinema; Hannibal Lecter’s incarceration in institutions for the “criminally insane”; Arkham Asylum as the archetypal involuntary institution; comedic interpretations of psych hospitals; romanticized renditions of rest homes in “weepies” (women’s films) of the 40s and elsewhere; films inspired by Lovecraft's stories and/or family history of hospitalization; supernatural asylums; Dracula's madhouses; psych hospitals in film noir, etc. This peer-reviewed collection is in contact with McFarland books. The editor wrote monographs on Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists; Neuroscience in Science Fiction Films; Movies and the Modern Psyche, and Dreams in Myth, Medicine & Movies and edited essay collections for Arkham Asylum: Essays on Psychiatry and the Gotham City Institution; Mental Illness in American Pop Culture; and A History of Evil in American Popular Culture. PL EMAIL 300-500 WORD ABSTRACT (w short resume) TO DRPACKER@HOTMAIL.COM by July 1, 2022. 

Contact Information

EDITOR: SHARON PACKER, MD

DRPACKER@HOTMAIL.COM

Contact Email
Drpacker@hotmail.com