UCLA

This thesis examines “new horror” as an emergent affective formation in contemporary Chinese digital fiction and online popular narratives. Rather than treating it as a continuation of traditional horror narratives taken up by ghosts, supernatural beings, or graphic violence, this thesis argues that new horror legitimizes a suppressed genre long stigmatized by discourses of sensory excess and superstition through its entanglement with fantasies of space. By examining adjacent popular genres, including Backrooms fiction, rule-based weird fiction, and Infinite Flow novels, this thesis attempts to answer how these writing forms and fantasies of space refract social realities that official discourse cannot accommodate. New horror inaugurates what this thesis calls a mixture of feelings, a diffuse feeling without a fixed object, folding together anxiety, nostalgia, longing, and dread into a shared emotional grammar shaped by spatial experience and rules, entangled with discussions of gender and subjectivity. In so doing, this thesis suggests that capturing horror as a negative, unspecified affect offers visibility into transformations in social consciousness within contemporary Chinese youth culture that remain incomprehensible, opening alternative ways of imagining the present and futurities.