Horror has always played with the idea of beauty. Preserving it. Destroying it. Punishing it. Turning it monstrous.
Across the genre, it takes many forms. The woman at the mirror; the virginal final girl; the ageing body recast as grotesque; the outsider marked as excessive or other; the scarred, disabled, or altered body framed as spectacle; beauty that's racialised, exoticised, withheld, or denied altogether.
Beauty is never neutral. Cultural norms decide which bodies are admired, which are scrutinised, and which are treated as monstrous from the outset. Horror doesn’t invent these hierarchies. But it does reveal them.
DEAD PRETTY is the first book from The Nottingham Horror Collective. A collection of essays exploring beauty across a century of horror film, literature, and visual culture.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We’re opening submissions for DEAD PRETTY: Beauty and the Horror Genre.
We’re looking for essays that interrogate beauty in horror. That sit with discomfort. That look closely at what beauty demands, and what horror exposes.
We’re interested in writing that explores things like:
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Beauty as surveillance, discipline, or control
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Ageing, decay, and bodily change
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The beautiful monster / the monstrous feminine
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Body horror and transformation
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Racial visibility, erasure, stereotype, and reclamation.
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The gaze, spectatorship, and looking back
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The representation of women across different historical moments in horror cinema.
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Beauty as something often tied to systems of privilege and power.
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Work that explores coded desire, gender nonconformity, trans embodiment, and the ways horror might create space for identities that resist normative expectations.
As ever, we’re drawn to work that expands the conversation, challenges dominant readings, and brings new critical lenses to the genre.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
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Essays: 3,000–4,000 words
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Tone: Academic or personal-style essays welcome
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Media: Horror film (primarily), but also spanning TV, literature, games, visual culture.
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Referencing: Chicago style
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Payment for works: As always, we pay our contributors £50 per chosen essay.
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Multiple submissions: You can submit as many essay ideas as you like!
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Previously unpublished work only please.
Please send us:
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A 300–500 word abstract detailing what your essay will be exploring.
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A short bio with your pronouns
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Examples of your writing (if available).
Deadline for abstracts: 1st March 2026
Deadline for finished essays: We are aiming for latest 30th April.
Send to: thenottinghamhorrorcollective@
ARTISTS
We've not forgotten you! We will be sending a separate call for submissions for artwork. Keep an eye out in March for this!
KICKSTARTER
DEAD PRETTY will be funded via Kickstarter.
Backing the project helps us pay contributors, produce the book properly, and keep independent horror criticism alive outside institutional publishing. As always, this will be a lovingly-made and beautifully-designed small press publication, created by horror fans, for horror fans.
More details on that coming soon.
Let's get this dread.
Emily & Ruth
