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.