Film Studies Olson compiles books and articles on landmark films (
Rosemary's Baby,
The Exorcist (film),
The Shining (film),
The Devil's Backbone,
Batman Begins,
The Dark Knight,
The Dark Knight Rises,
The Batman (film),
Pan's Labyrinth, and
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio), asking the movies' cast, crew and film scholars why the films become iconic. Introduced by
Academy Award winners including Guillermo del Toro and
Pixar's
Lee Unkrich, his film books' structure and style of investigation-from-the-inside-out led to the volumes being called by
The Washington Post "a major contribution to film studies and scholarship." Anna Taborka agrees with del Toro's characterization, and describes Olson's tome on
The Exorcist and all its prequels and sequels (at date of printing) to be largely interested in "discovering more about the social, historical, political, [and] economic contexts in which those films were made." Xavier Aldana Reyes' sees the film studies as operating as dual roles (both general and scholarly): they are "companion" books with lots of interviews for "teachers and those fans who may be interested to find out more about their favourite director and two of his most significant films." Yet Reyes' finds that Olson's more sophisticated reading and "guidance in his questions manages to also steer discussions towards more revealing aspects regarding the perceived psychology and motivations of well-loved characters."
Michael Dirda argues that his film books gained notability by their uncommonly large size and completist ambitions. In "750 amazing pages, editor Danel Olson has assembled stills from the movie and casual photos from the set, ... [and] an equal number of interviews with major cast members." Noted by reviewers for their recurring interest in and depiction of trauma, David Cowen contends that irony, surprise, and reveals are the key feature of the film studies: for instance, "as the interviews in Olson's collection reveal, the makers of
The Exorcist did not expect the public to be so affected." Laurent Vachaud maintains that Olson's books are notable for their re-creation of the psychological tensions that exist on the set and in shooting locations that reflect how masterpieces come with conflict and pain, established by interviews with crew like
The Shining cameraperson Ray Andrew, who was fired for refusing to work overtime without pay, and then was filmed by the Director's daughter Vivian Kubrick as he walked in away shamed post-dismissal. Other critics, including Steven Puchalaski, find the deep-dive approach make an insightful but "exhausting tome (a
50-page essay analyzing
The Shining's music? Good Grief!)". Because of the "extensive" and "meticulous approach to information gathering" and "comprehensive recounting of every facet of the films,"
Fangoria has named his film studies in their "Book of the Month" program.
New Gothic Anthologies Olson's six anthologies of new stories from 2007 to 2013,
Exotic Gothic, contain what critics charactered as the "New Gothic," featuring over 120 international emerging and established authors charged to create neo-Gothic fiction.
Exotic Gothic 3 became a Finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and
Exotic Gothic 4 won the World Fantasy Award's Best Anthology. Notable for featuring many authors whose stories became films that fought formula (from
Camille DeAngelis,
Adam Nevill,
Sheri Holman,
Nick Antosca,
Stephen Susco, to Joyce Carol Oates), Lois Tilton of
Locus magazine argued Olson's series compilation "rejects the romanticizing, the domestication of the traditional tropes: ... What we have here is very dark stuff ... disturbing ... really creepy." Gail Brasie remarked on the wider gender representation of authors listed on the
Exotic Gothic series' table of contents, and the equal number of male and female contributors in the final volume, because women "are often underrepresented in [other] anthology collections." Brasie also claimed that
Exotic Gothic series stood out in the first part of the 21st Century because "there is very little of the 'exotification' of non-white or non-Western spaces and people; where there is, the characters engaging in this thinking are usually destroyed." and curating the entire short-fiction oeuvre of a single author. As
The Washington Post reports, Olson began compiling and editing "sumptuous hardcover editions of supernatural and fantasy classics.
Writing Madness, for instance, gathers Patrick McGrath's "New Gothic" short stories, with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, artwork by Harry Brockway, and an afterword by scholar Danel Olson."
Writing Madness went on to win the 2018 World Fantasy Award in the Professional Category, but before publication, Olson first asked the author if "he might consider housing all his papers at University of Stirling in Scotland" where the editor was undertaking a PhD. McGrath's "immediate answer was to say
Yes." Currently, the Patrick McGrath Archive at University of Stirling (established 2015) holds all the author's books of automatic writing, several drafts of his novels, rare photographs, research materials, a complete set of his first editions, and his comments upon screenplay adaptations of his works, consulted in forming
Writing Madness.
Neo-Gothic Canon In attempt to establish a neo-Gothic canon, Olson conceived, compiled, and edited a volume of fifty-three original essays from international contributors of what he and they considered the canonical works.
The Washington Post concurred with many of the selections this library reference book
21st Century Gothic offered, arguing that it presents "the major works of this genre published in the past dozen years, including
Peter Straub's
A Dark Matter,
Neil Gaiman's
The Graveyard Book,
James Lasdun's
The Horned Man,
Joe Hill's
Heart-Shaped Box,
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's
The Shadow of the Wind,
Cormac McCarthy's
No Country For Old Men,
Susannah Clarke's
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and
Elizabeth Kostova's
The Historian. These are fascinating books..."
9/11 Fiction Studies Called by
Anthony Magistrale "America's guru of post-9/11 inspired Gothic art and popular culture," Olson's formation and critical treatment of an emerging canon of post-9/11 terrorism literature relies on his original theory of the "Traumagothic."
Studies in the Novel characterizes this theory as one where fictive or cinematic characters express their verbally "unrepresentable" trauma through a disguised but coherent system of occult, supernatural, or morbid symbols. Olson records and categorizes their sighting of missing persons, doppelgangers, grotesque violence, ghosts, and the sublime, or their imagining of sex, madness, disrupted time, and the uncanny during the
war on terror, and translates it to a language. Caitlin Simmons credited his theory as "the first of what will hope fully become many investigations of the link between trauma studies and 9/11 literary culture."
Johan Anders Höglund compares Olson's re-interpretation of the symbolic meanings of the American Gothic to a new language "articulating an era of grief, guilt, and conflict, from the ruins of the
Twin Towers to the atrocities of
Abu Ghraib." == Selected publications ==