Impending Crises

Over the last few decades, increased production of films and series that have fantastical structures has been observed, especially in Romance language-speaking countries and the US. A renewed boom in the genre is thus apparent in those nations which had already been at the epicentre of the production of fantastic narratives in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the contemporary works convey a latent ontological uncertainty that arises from unusual handling of language, images and sound. The articles in this book examine the question of whether and how images, sounds and dialogues in fantastic films/series—and, sometimes, novels—that have gone off the rails can be interpreted as allegorical counterparts of contemporary thinking in society which has also gone awry.