Love Never Dies
Romance in Horror Movies
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sept 29, 2026
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A romance editor looks for love where you’d least expect it—and discovers what our favorite horror films can tell us about sex, society, and ourselves
“A bloody love letter to those horrors that have drenched the silver screen. The Happily Ever After here . . . is a comprehensive list of grisly films that pluck on our heartstrings . . . only to rip the whole organ out and hold it up to the movie projector’s light.” —Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside
If Sinners and the 1999 cult classic The Mummy taught Emma Cole anything in the year she spent bingeing scary movies, it’s that we love to swoon, sweat, and scream. We seem to crave the uncanny and the transgressive. Emma would know: Her day job as a Harlequin book editor revolves around steamy stories that ruffle feathers and rip bodices. In Love Never Dies, she shows how our favorite horror films flirt with familiar tropes and themes to give us romantic subplots that are just as spine-tingling.
Emma takes readers behind the scenes of films like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, exploring how and why movies blur the lines of horror and romance. The books dives into
The “Dark Moment” and how it signals an HEA (Happily Ever After) Why not having a lover (spoiler alert) saved Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in HalloweenRosemary’s Baby, Interview with the Vampire, and Gothic horror’s comeback How romance, especially monster romance, is often a stand-in for uncomfortable truths
From vampires and monsters to slashers and psychological thrillers, Love Never Dies explores the enthralling nature of horror romance films that are full of heart. It’s just that sometimes, those hearts are on the outside.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cole, a romance editor at Harlequin, delivers a comprehensive study of romance tropes in horror films. While genre purists may be turned off by stories that blend the happily-ever-after endings of romance with the goriness of horror, Cole argues the pairing makes perfect sense: "Both genres require high stakes and very high emotion." Beginning with early horror films, Cole finds "love triangles" in movies like Island of Lost Souls (1932), in which a man is separated from his fiancée after being shipwrecked on a mysterious island, where he becomes infatuated with a human-panther hybrid. The pairing of human protagonists with inhuman beings (the monster romance trope) often reflects anxieties around "the Other" and interracial relationships, Cole explains, as seen in Dracula and King Kong. Elsewhere, Cole questions whether slasher films are inherently antiromance, noting the subgenre became increasingly misogynistic in the 1980s, with films like Friday the 13th killing off or punishing women for their promiscuity. Turning to the 21st century, she notes a decline in romance horror films as studios have become less interested in mid-budget genre movies, but that "doesn't mean romance in horror is completely dead," she says, pointing to recent films like Fresh, Companion, and Sinners. Smart and passionately argued, this is a trenchant ode to all things steamy and scary.
