A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN HORROR AND RELATED AREAS
vol. 8, no.2, December 2025  |  ISSN 2561-5629​

Vegan and Animal Liberation Horror
Edited by Mike Thorn

Editor: Kristopher Woofter
​Associate Editors: Alanna Thain, Lynn Kozak
Reviews Editor: Anne Golden  |  Editorial Assistant: Adam Hill
OVERVIEW
Welcome to Monstrum 8, Issue 2, a special issue focusing on "Vegan and Animal Liberation Horror." Guest edited by horror scholar and fiction writer Mike Thorn, this robust issue presents six feature essays, two works of original fiction, a dossier of retrospective reviews, and two essays in our student forum.
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Feature essays cover both literature and the moving image from a broad range of perspectives. From reorienting human and more-than-human animal perspectives in the essays by Poulomi Choudhury, Dru Jeffries, and Britt MacKenzie-Dale,  to epistemological and ontological shifts in the way we think of human and more than-human ecologies in the essays by Zoë Anne Laks, Jenni Makahnouk, William Taylor, and the Introduction by Mike Thorn, the contributions to this special issue explore the challenge of thinking beyond harmful anthropocentric and hegemonic capitalist world systems.
For the first time, this issue of Monstrum includes new fiction. In "The Playground," celebrated horror author Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Under the Poppy, Straydog) traces a shift in ecological sensibility to what might be called a necessary violence. And with "Cogno," Mike Thorn (Darkest Hours, Peel Back and See) brings us into the terrifying world of tech-bro longevity at the expense of ... maybe everything. A selection of retrospective reviews considers literary and cinematic texts that strive to reorient human and nonhuman animal perspectives, including a critical reassessment of the (anti-)anthropocentrism in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), the vegan aesthetic of Rob Zombie's films via House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and the brutal struggle against becoming-animal in Stuart Gordon's grim King of the Ants (2003).

Our student forum includes two essays by emerging scholars that continue the issue's investigations of radical otherness.  A product of the SSHRC-funded "Horror Ecologies" workshop by CORERISC held in summer 2024 at Dawson College, Emerson Reault's essay reads Ginger Snaps as a trans allegory, reconsidering the film's metaphorical "curse" as less one of becoming a woman, than that of an understanding of one's embodiment regardless of gender. In their essay, Luka Romney looks at radical empathy for the "animal" Other via Julia Kristeva's concept of herethics in two of Larry Cohen's most provocative 1970s films, It's Alive! (1976) and It Lives Again (1978).

This issue of Monstrum received key funding support from a SSHRC Connection grant (611-2023-0375) "Horror Ecologies: Un/human Body Genres, New Materialisms, New Methodologies."
– Kristopher Woofter
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Contributors: Fred Barrett, Poulomi Choudhury, Dru Jeffries, Kathe Koja, Zoë Anne Laks, Britt MacKenzie-Dale, Jenni Makahnouk, Emerson Reault, Miriam Richer, Luka Romney, William Taylor, Mike Thorn

Acknowledgments: Monstrum would like to thank our editorial board, as well as our collaborators, contributors and peer reviewers. Special thanks to Ildikó Glaser-Hille, Carl H. Sederholm, the Dawson College Office of Academic Development, the SCMS Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group, and the Collective for Research on Epistemologies and Ontologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC).
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​Cover illustration by  Joss Richer
Monstrum is published by the Montréal Monstrum Society (MMS). We are grateful for the generous support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).  |  Monstrum est reconnaissant du généreux soutien du Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) et le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada (CRSH).
FEATURE ESSAYS
Click the titles for a full-text PDF.
INTRODUCTION: Vegan and Animal Liberation Horror Worlds
MIKE THORN
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Seeding Vegetal Sovereignty: Plant-Based Witches and the Horrors of Gardening in The Manor
ZOË ANNE LAKS

Abatthorror: Tracking the Animal-Industrial Complex in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh
POULOMI CHOUDHURY
The Creation of the zagimekwe (Mosquito-lady): David Cronenberg’s Rabid as an Inadvertent Anishinaabe Creation Story
JENNI MAKAHNOUK

​“The factory is a fertile body”: Impersonal Flesh, Miscarriage, and the Failure of Queer-inhuman Affect in Elle Nash’s Deliver Me
WILLIAM TAYLOR
“Hear My Tale”: Bearing Witness to the Nonhuman, from Frankenstein’s Monster to the Animal Industrial Complex
BRITT MACKENZIE-DALE

“Oh, you’d probably like it if you didn’t know what was in it”: Carnism, Cannibalism, and Repression
in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
DRU JEFFRIES
FICTION
Click the titles for a full-text PDF.
The Playground
KATHE KOJA

Cogno
​MIKE THORN
RETROSPECTIVE
​REVIEWS
Click the titles for a full-text PDF.

​Citizens of Ulro: A Review of Olga Tokarczuk’s
​Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead 
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)
MIRIAM RICHER
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HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (Rob Zombie, 2003)
“They All Run Like Scared Little Rabbits”: The Vegan Ethos of Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses
(Lionsgate, 2003)
MIKE THORN
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​Stuart Gordon’s King of the Ants
(Anthill Productions, 2003)
FRED BARRETT
STUDENT FORUM

​Click the titles for a full-text PDF.

​Ginger Snaps as a Trans Narrative
EMERSON REAULT
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IT'S ALIVE! (Larry Cohen, 1974)
“All Mixed Up”: It’s Alive!, It Lives Again, and Kristeva’s Maternal Herethics
LUKA ROMNEY