Night Terrors
Guest of Honor: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Guest Scholar: Sarah Juliet lauro
March 19-22, 2025
Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside
Night Terrors can be conceptualized both internally, as the shadowy corners of humanity's subconscious, and externally, as the unseen thing that lurks in the shadows under the bed, in the woods, or in the quiet depths of space. In many ways, both internal and external nightmares are manifestations of our anxieties, fears, and worries, which are buoyed by the nebulous unknown. Given the timelessness and cross-cultural similarities of human experiences, and as a creations of culturally-specific concerns and forms, sharing terrors give us the glimmer of hope that we can defeat these things. On internal levels, it means facing our fears, drawing on inner strengths, and creating community. Externally, it means making visible the unseen, and through the reliance on community, rendering monstrosity benign and defeating it. Proposals might consider traditional horror elements (e.g. ghosts, vampires, werewolves); stories of how children face their fears; the monstrous Other - including culturally-specific monsters like the Baba Yaga; how fear and terror are represented in art and visual media; the terror of new technology; revisiting ancient terrors; ways that terror can be culturally situated; how to build space in order to confront our fears or other iterations of nightmares.
The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is an annual scholarly conference devoted to all aspects of the fantastic (broadly defined) as it appears in literature, film, and the other arts. The ICFA is held every year in March in Orlando, Florida, USA.
