Roger Luckhurst

Roger LuckhurstRoger Luckhurst teaches at Birkbeck. Zombies: A Cultural History is available from Reaktion Books.

From The Blog
2 November 2015

Dover Press has reissued William Seabrook’s 1934 memoir Asylum, an account of his self-committal to a mental hospital in an attempt to cure his chronic alcoholism. Seabrook, who committed suicide in 1945, is probably most famous now for introducing the zombie to American popular culture in 1929, but he was also a bestselling journalist, travel writer, pulp anthropologist, Great War veteran, primitivist, sadomasochist, occultist, and fellow traveller among the Modernists in New York, London and Paris.

Stir and Bustle: Corridors

David Trotter, 19 December 2019

The West Wing’s signature idea was the walk-and-talk: an elaborately choreographed tracking shot which follows several characters at a time as they navigate the corridors of the White House while engaged...

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Two Sharp Teeth: Dracula Studies

Philip Ball, 25 October 2018

Few writers​ have seemed less likely to produce a modern myth than Bram Stoker, not only because of the limits of his ability and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously...

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The Thrill of It All: Zombies

Michael Newton, 18 February 2016

My friends’ toddler staggered towards the zombies; the zombies staggered towards him. Soon they were among us. Blood congealed around eye sockets; cuts slashed down cheeks; eyes whited out. One cadaverous...

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Necrophiliac Striptease: Mummies

Thomas Jones, 6 February 2014

‘As weary academic Egyptologists often explain,’ Roger Luckhurst says, ‘Ancient Egyptian culture actually had very little concept of the curse.’ The real mystery that he has set out to solve has...

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Into Thin Air: Science at the Séances

Marina Warner, 3 October 2002

Eva C., one of the most sensational ‘materialising’ mediums of the early 20th century, was much photographed in the act of producing spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or...

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