This weekend, you might be gearing up to host a movie marathon with your friends and debate which childhood Halloween classic is the best. Or maybe you’re a horror enthusiast who plans on curling up with a Stephen King book instead. Wherever your interests lie, Halloween is the perfect time to celebrate your love of horror. But goblins, ghosts and possessed dolls don’t have to remain a hobby. Why not go deeper into the horror genre and research its history, the characters, the use of suspense or the authors behind the most famous horror works? 

The University Libraries offer research consultations to help you refine your research questions, foster effective search strategies and choose the best sources for your projects and assignments. Schedule a 30 – 40 minute in-person or virtual appointment with a research librarian specializing in your area of interest.

So, what does this process look like in terms of Halloween and horror? 

We spoke with Success and Engagement Librarian Katerina Allmendinger and learned how the library consultation process works. Here are Allmendinger’s recommendations:

Before your consultation,  prepare several questions and talking points about aspects of your project to give the librarian an idea of how to guide you through the research and writing process. Let’s say we just finished reading a trio of horror classics: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Bram Stoker and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. All three works feature “monstrous” characters assembled or fueled in some part by human anatomy: Victor Frankenstein creates a Creature out of human body parts, Dracula is nourished by human blood and kind Mr. Jekyll’s body is transformed into evil Mr. Hyde in the wee hours of the night.

With these observations, we might ask: How does humanity contribute to the creation of monsters? What’s the significance of humans perceiving these characters as monstrous when they are composed of human parts and possess human qualities? Do humans have inherent monstrosity within us? Are we the real monsters? 

Any successful project or essay requires relevant and credible resources. Bibliographies are great for entries on genre, authors and terminology and provide links to other relevant sources. Book reviews explain how readers and authors often perceive tropes and techniques. Journal articles go more in-depth on analysis and trends over time and link concepts from literature with other subjects. 

After discussing the research questions, you and your consulting librarian can brainstorm a broad set of keywords corresponding to the authors and/or topics of interest before plugging them into the databases. In our horror example, we came up with the following keywords and subjects:

• Horror AND (body OR bodies OR embodied)
• Horror AND (monster OR monstrosity OR monstrous) AND human
• Gothic
• Science fiction
• Otherness 

Next, we head to the database—ProQuest Literature Online,  EBSCO Arts & Literature and Gale Literature Resource Center, in this case—pop in the keywords and direct the database to search for them in the results’ titles, summaries and abstracts. From there, we apply filters to weed out source and document types, language, publication date, peer reviews, etc.

We are met with 334 results, but wait, some of these include literary criticism of films. We don’t have the time to skim through 334 sources. So, what do we do? Lets modify the search to “books or book or literature” to exclude any results about movies. This leaves us with 187 possibilities.

Depending on how extensive your project or essay is, you might repeat this process multiple times in various databases until you find what you’re looking for. Some databases even have a feature that allows you to save your search history, which is helpful for long-term projects or for searching across multiple databases. The deeper you go, the narrower your search becomes. We used our broad set of keywords for our horror project as a starting block and tried out similar terms like “monsters in literature,” “supernatural in literature,” and “human body” to explore further results. 

By the end of the consultation, we had five potential resources related to our research questions, the literature and interest. One of our results, “Reorienting the Gaze: Monstrous Bodies in Remediations of Frankenstein,” popped up in Spanish, but for those who are not fluent, luckily this article comes from a journal that publishes work in English with Spanish translations of the title, abstract and keywords. (Note: not all databases have this feature, so be diligent in your search). Other results included an article discussing how monsters (like the vampire Dracula) have been used to represent “otherness.” Another analyzed societal fear of human degeneration and how the character of Mr. Hyde illustrates the potential for the monster that lives within humans to emerge. 

Once your consultation comes to an end, your librarian may follow up with you either by sharing notes and tips for further research or by sending an email with more information. If you feel that you would benefit from another consultation, feel free to make another appointment. 

Now, you can get back to your Halloween movie marathon and impress your friends with your knowledge of the use of monstrous characters and human bodies in horror. No jump scare needed.