Elder Horror: Essays on Film’s Frightening Images of Aging

As the baby boomers gray, cinematic depictions of aging and the aged are on the rise. In the horror genre, the elderly are often eccentric harbingers of doom—the crone who seeks to restore her vitality, the pensioners who bargain with the supernatural to cheat death, the ancient ancestors who haunt the living. This collection of new essays explores how various filmic portrayals of aging—as an inescapable horror destined to overtake us all, as a terrifying time of reckoning with the past, as a portal to unimaginable powers—reflect our complex attitudes towards the elderly.