The new millennium has seen a flourishing of horror cinema production in Europe. This is a phenomenon involving different media, national cinematographies, international partnerships, and the development of niche subgenres. Countries such as Germany, Greece, Norway, the Republic of Ireland, Russia, Spain, France, the UK and Hungary have witnessed a new proliferation of the genre across a range of films, directors and co-production agreements that can compete in number with the rich genre landscape of the 1970s. I argue that the tension between the national and regional settings of the films on the one hand, and the transnational context of their production and distribution on the other, can suggest how popular cinema is the site for a new mapping of Europe. As seen through the prism of the horror genre, this mapping reveals recent trends in the industry, as well as an innovative cultural representation of European journeys. The idea is to consider the different policies which form the backbone of the contemporary film industry on the continent, so as to portray a European space that goes beyond touristic postcard cities, engaging with backward regionalisms in place of cosmopolitan realities.

The close relationship between travel and cinema has been at the centre of several scholarly investigations (see for instance Eleftheriotis 2010) and of course it is at the basis of genres such as road movies and travelogues. Horror cinema often uses the trope of the journey as dangerous trespass in a hostile environment, facing alterity and uncanny dislocations. The discovery of exotic locations and the feeling of danger at the unknown have been exploited in hundreds of films from King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) to An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), from the Italian mondo films to the cannibal series. I argue that the flourishing location business favours a rediscovery of the so-called ‘rural horror cinema’ (see Clover 1992: 124–37; Bernard 2014: 168), also defined as the ‘road horror movie’ or ‘travel horror cinema’ (see Ballard 2008), a subgenre traditionally characterised by border crossing, touristic activities and more or less exotic locations.

Rural horror is understood as the subgenre whose most significant representatives are Tobe Hooper's Texan Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and whose plot line can be summarised by a group of city dwellers travelling into an unknown location who face backward and ultimately murderous and/or monstrous locals.