The advent of AIDS coalesced cultural fears around otherness, sexual danger and the tension between nature and science. Horror films often explore the body made unfamiliar through infection or mutation. Blood Born traces the spectre of infected bodies, and their cultural resonance with AIDS – in sexual, racial and border-defying terms. How much did early representations of AIDS borrow from classic horror texts? Do works as diverse as Cronenberg’s films and Charles Burns’ graphic classic BLACK HOLE inevitably demand rereading through the lens of HIV infection?
Karen Herland fell in with a bad crowd with a taste for horror at a young age. Currently, her research focuses on the social and cultural construction and marginalization of bodies considered threatening or challenging to traditional norms. She is a Co-Director of Montreal’s Monstrum Society and sits on the Monstrum Journal’s editorial board. She has taught at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies since 2012. Amongst her recent publications are “ ‘Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine’: Sound and Fury in The Snake Pit” in Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema (2014) and “Horror and the Last Frontier: Monstrous Borders and Bodies” in Firefly and Westworld.” Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond.(2019), A lecturer in popular/visual culture and sexuality studies at Concordia University, she has been involved in teaching their interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS for more than a decade and has served as the Director of the university’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series.
