Introduction
1. Civilised Against Savage: South Africa as realist-horror narrative in Africa Addio
2. Africa Adios?: Is this Africa? White-fright in Seventies South African horror
3. Apartheid's State of Emergency: The South African Nightmare in the 1980s
4. South Africa USA: The Beloved Country as Location
5. Born Free: The 'Pure Blood' of the Post-Mandela Horror Film
6. District 9 and a New Generation of South African Horror: Blockbusters and Bloodshed in the New Century
7. Conjuring the Ghosts of Past and Present: The Tokoloshe and South Africa's New Supernatural Cinema
Conclusion
Interviews
Bibliography
Index

This is the first study to explore South Africa both in horror cinema and as a formidable producer of celluloid scares.
From framing the notorious apartheid system as a mental asylum in the ground-breaking and criminally underseen Jannie Totsiens (Jans Rautenbach, 1970) to such seventies exploitation shockers as The Demon (Percival Rubens, 1979) through to the blockbuster hit District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) and beyond, this book suggests that South Africa should finally obtain its rightful place in the canon of wider genre studies and horror cinema fandom.
Taking in the 80s nightmares of Darrell Roodt and concluding with an analysis of the recent boom-period in South African fright-films, including discussion of such contemporary efforts as The Tokoloshe (Jerome Pikwane, 2018) and the Troma-esque leanings of Fried Barry (Ryan Kruger, 2020), South African Horror Cinema focuses on ever-changing identities and perspectives, and embraces the frequently carnivalesque and grotesque elements of a most unique lineage in macabre motion pictures.

Calum Waddell is a lecturer in film at the University of Lincoln and the author of books focused on marginal genre cinema, such as The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film 1959-1977 (2018), which addresses some of the key blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s. His recent writing, including 'Cinethetic Racism and Orientalism in Early Italian Exploitation Films' (in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, 2020) and 'Savage Man, Savage Cinema - the Strange Undocumented Lineage of Arthur Davis' (In Film International, 2019), have continued his exploration of race representation in popular exploitation genre cycles. He has also written about film for such major newsstand magazines as Dazed, Infinity, SFX, Total Film and many more. Waddell's documentary work includes Me Me Lai Bites Back (2016), an acclaimed look at the life of one of Britain's formative Southeast Asian film stars, A Very English Exploitation: Inseminoid and the Shock Cinema of Norman J. Warren (2020) and The Last Word on the Last House on the Left: The Legacy of Horror's Most Controversial Classic (2021). In 2018 he directed and produced the documentary feature Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa, which won the Best Film Award at the annual Derby Film Festival.