Greetings!

My name is Jess. Currently, I am enrolled in the Master’s Degree Program in English here at Aarhus University and I will be interning here at the Recreational Fear Lab in the Fall semester of 2025.

Historically, I’ve never been very keen on horror. I’ve always been someone who startles easily. In particular, I’ve always been very susceptible to well-executed ambience and tone.

That is something that has the potential to really make my skin crawl! And although they are quite dated by our current contemporary standards, I still remember the amount of night terrors suffered playing the Resident Evil trilogy back on the original PlayStation as a kid and how those old horror games in particular really sat with me throughout the years!

Though admittedly, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less of a scaredy-cat and have begun to see the value in putting myself out of my comfort zone.

My interest in horror fiction principally stems from my interest in genre fiction, which I have done various papers on during my time at AU, most notably my BA-project. It was during a course last semester in which we read horror through a historicist lens that my eyes opened to the value horror has as a genre when it comes to telling very poignant, relevant stories.

I don’t really know why theories surrounding genre fiction was the topic that I ended up gravitating so heavily towards. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always been fascinated with the (in my opinion rather arbitrary) divide between “high culture” and “low culture,” when works like Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein are hailed as part of the literary canon.

Horror as a genre often being panned for its “low-brow” shock value and “surface level depth” situates it perfectly within the literary vs. genre discourse that I am so fascinated by, and I don’t know… Perhaps I just like sticking up for the little guy!

During my internship I am hoping I will have the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the horror genre, and I’d hope to be able to use some of the lab facilities to conduct experiments on the reception of horror media – in particular games – because it not only is a topic that fascinates me, but is something that I may also carry with me into my MA-thesis.