The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic [1st ed.] 9783030331351, 9783030331368

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series: Welcome to Hell (Clive Bloom)....Pages 1-28
Front Matter ....Pages 29-29
Latin American Horror (Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, Inés Ordiz)....Pages 31-47
Dark Tourism (Joan Passey)....Pages 49-62
Two Twentieth-Century Mexican Writers (Antonio Alcalá González)....Pages 63-76
Dark Urbanity (Tijana Parezanović, Marko Lukić)....Pages 77-90
Contemporary Australian Trauma (Jessica Gildersleeve)....Pages 91-104
Postcolonialisms (Gina Wisker)....Pages 105-122
Strains of the South (Naomi Simone Borwein)....Pages 123-142
Indigenous Alterations (Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson)....Pages 143-162
Hillbilly Horror (Tosha R. Taylor)....Pages 163-180
Southern Agrarianism and Exploitation (Gerardo Del Guercio)....Pages 181-190
Front Matter ....Pages 191-191
British ‘Hoodie’ Horror (Lauren Stephenson)....Pages 193-210
Green Trends in Euro-Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s (David Annwn Jones)....Pages 211-223
Ecocriticism and the Genre (Emily Alder, Jenny Bavidge)....Pages 225-242
The Wilderness (Kaja Franck)....Pages 243-257
‘Queer’ Representations of Rural and Urban Locations (Paulina Palmer)....Pages 259-273
James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror (Simon Brown)....Pages 275-289
Re-defining the Genre with Mo Hayder (Sian MacArthur)....Pages 291-302
Stephen King (Brian Jarvis)....Pages 303-317
Front Matter ....Pages 319-319
Aleister Crowley and Occult Meaning (James Machin)....Pages 321-335
Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story (Timothy Jones)....Pages 337-353
Front Matter ....Pages 355-355
The Gothic Romance (Holly Hirst)....Pages 357-372
Georgette Heyer (Holly Hirst)....Pages 373-389
Front Matter ....Pages 391-391
Abjection and Body Horror (Xavier Aldana Reyes)....Pages 393-410
Torture Porn (Tosha R. Taylor)....Pages 411-429
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (Mark Richard Adams)....Pages 431-445
Front Matter ....Pages 447-447
The Asylum (Laura R. Kremmel)....Pages 449-465
Psychopaths, Sociopaths and the Psychotic Mind (Lauren Ellis Christie)....Pages 467-484
Beyond the Unfeeling Narcissus to Patrick Bateman (Robert K. Shepherd)....Pages 485-502
Front Matter ....Pages 503-503
Zombie Folklore to Existential Protagonists (Kelly Gardner)....Pages 505-520
The Sentient Zombie (Kelly Gardner)....Pages 521-538
Front Matter ....Pages 539-539
Transmedia Vampires (Simon Bacon)....Pages 541-553
The Post-human Vampire (Simon Bacon)....Pages 555-567
Monstrosity, Performativity, and Performance (Laura Davidel)....Pages 569-585
Front Matter ....Pages 587-587
Encounters with the ‘Hidden’ World in Modern Children’s Fiction (Chloé Germaine Buckley)....Pages 589-607
Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Fiction (Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi)....Pages 609-622
Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics (Julia Round)....Pages 623-642
Lemony Snicket (Valeria Iglesias-Plester)....Pages 643-657
Front Matter ....Pages 659-659
Ghostly Gimmicks: Spectral Special Effects in Haunted House Films (Laura Sedgwick)....Pages 661-677
Universal Horror (Brian Jarvis)....Pages 679-694
Arthouse Cinema (Stacey Abbott)....Pages 695-709
The Horror Genre in Balkan Cinema (Tanja Jurković)....Pages 711-724
Slavic Cinema (Agnieszka Kotwasińska)....Pages 725-743
Gender Politics in a High-Camp, Lowbrow Musical (Joana Rita Ramalho)....Pages 745-763
Roger Corman (Murray Leeder)....Pages 765-779
David Lynch (Brian Jarvis)....Pages 781-797
Front Matter ....Pages 799-799
Doctor Who: Identity, Time and Terror (J. S. Mackley)....Pages 801-818
Nigel Kneale and Quatermass (J. S. Mackley)....Pages 819-835
Dark Costume in Contemporary Television (Stephanie Mulholland)....Pages 837-851
Wildlings, White Walkers, and Watchers on the Wall of Northumberland’s Borderland (Chelsea Eddy)....Pages 853-863
Grand Guignol, Inside Showtime’s Penny Dreadful Demimonde (Tanja Jurković)....Pages 865-877
Front Matter ....Pages 879-879
The Blasphemous Grotesqueries of The Tiger Lillies (Joana Rita Ramalho)....Pages 881-903
The Return of the Past in the Lyrics of Black Metal (Antonio Alcalá González)....Pages 905-915
Front Matter ....Pages 917-917
Interactive and Movable Books in the Tradition (Jen Baker)....Pages 919-937
The Evolving Genre of the Vampire Games (Jon Garrad)....Pages 939-956
The Digital Haunted House (Erika Kvistad)....Pages 957-972
Anxiety in the Digital Age (David Langdon)....Pages 973-984
Horror Memes and Digital Culture (Tosha R. Taylor)....Pages 985-1003
Virtual Desert Horrors (Alison Bainbridge)....Pages 1005-1018
Immersive and Pervasive Performance (Madelon Hoedt)....Pages 1019-1031
Front Matter ....Pages 1033-1033
Fashion Gothwear (Victoria Amador)....Pages 1035-1048
Walking with the Lancashire Witches (Alex Bevan)....Pages 1049-1062
The Influence of the Genre in High Fashion (Jennifer Richards)....Pages 1063-1074
The Geisha Ghost (Jenevieve Van-Veda)....Pages 1075-1090
Front Matter ....Pages 1091-1091
Three French Modernists (Giles Whiteley)....Pages 1093-1108
Dark Modernisms (Matt Foley)....Pages 1109-1120
Front Matter ....Pages 1121-1121
The Postmodern Genre (Joakim Wrethed)....Pages 1123-1136
Heterotopian Horrors (Marko Lukić, Tijana Parezanović)....Pages 1137-1151
The New Batman (Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis)....Pages 1153-1167
Front Matter ....Pages 1169-1169
Global War from Tokyo to Barcelona (Naomi Simone Borwein)....Pages 1171-1190
Posthuman Interstellar Gothic (Holly-Gale Millette)....Pages 1191-1208
Degeneration in H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson (Antonio Alcalá González)....Pages 1209-1222
Lovecraft, Decadence, and Aestheticism (James Machin)....Pages 1223-1237
Back Matter ....Pages 1239-1253

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic Edited by Clive Bloom

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic

Clive Bloom Editor

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic

Editor Clive Bloom Ilford, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-33135-1 ISBN 978-3-030-33136-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Angela Waye/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

He grappled with a hostile atmosphere that surrounded him with menaces. There came the echo of distant baying, growing louder, reverberating through the empty halls, filling his ears. Stricken with horror, he dashed out as fast as he could. —Guy Endore, The Werewolf of Paris (1934)

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Lesley Kacher for her help and assistance in organising the manuscript, Ellie Henderson, Emily Wood, Lina Aboujieb, Aishwarya Balachandar and the Production team at Palgrave and the members of the International Gothic Association who all helped to make this volume possible.

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Permissions

The editor wishes to thank the following for permission to quote from their work: Dame Carol Anne Duffy for permission to quote from The Lancashire Witches (2012) ‘One voice for ten dragged this way once’, ‘Superstition’, ‘Ignorance’, ‘Crone’, ‘On the wind’s breath, curse of crow and rook’, ‘Landscape’, and ‘The same old witness moon’ in Alex Bevan, ‘Walking with the Lancashire Witches’; Martyn Jaques of Tiger Lillies copyright Misery Guts Music Ltd in Joana Rita Ramalho, ‘The Tiger Lillies’; Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd for images from June and School Friend, Jinty, Tammy and Misty in Julia Round, ‘Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics’.

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Contents

Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series: Welcome to Hell . . . . . . . . . 1 Clive Bloom Global Gothics Latin American Horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz Dark Tourism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Joan Passey Two Twentieth-Century Mexican Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Antonio Alcalá González Dark Urbanity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Tijana Parezanović and Marko Lukić Contemporary Australian Trauma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Jessica Gildersleeve Postcolonialisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Gina Wisker Strains of the South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Naomi Simone Borwein Indigenous Alterations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson Hillbilly Horror. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Tosha R. Taylor Southern Agrarianism and Exploitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Gerardo Del Guercio

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Hostile Environments British ‘Hoodie’ Horror. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Lauren Stephenson Green Trends in Euro-Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . . . . . . . . 211 David Annwn Jones Ecocriticism and the Genre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Emily Alder and Jenny Bavidge The Wilderness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Kaja Franck ‘Queer’ Representations of Rural and Urban Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Paulina Palmer James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Simon Brown Re-defining the Genre with Mo Hayder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Sian MacArthur Stephen King. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Brian Jarvis Occult Gothic Aleister Crowley and Occult Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 James Machin Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Timothy Jones Gothic Romance The Gothic Romance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Holly Hirst Georgette Heyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Holly Hirst The Body in Pieces Abjection and Body Horror. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 Xavier Aldana Reyes Torture Porn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 Tosha R. Taylor Clive Barker’s Hellraiser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Mark Richard Adams

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Psychological Gothic The Asylum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449 Laura R. Kremmel Psychopaths, Sociopaths and the Psychotic Mind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 Lauren Ellis Christie Beyond the Unfeeling Narcissus to Patrick Bateman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 Robert K. Shepherd Zombie Gothic Zombie Folklore to Existential Protagonists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505 Kelly Gardner The Sentient Zombie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 Kelly Gardner New Vampire Gothic Transmedia Vampires. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 Simon Bacon The Post-human Vampire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555 Simon Bacon Monstrosity, Performativity, and Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 Laura Davidel Young Gothic Encounters with the ‘Hidden’ World in Modern Children’s Fiction. . . . . 589 Chloé Germaine Buckley Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623 Julia Round Lemony Snicket. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643 Valeria Iglesias-Plester Gothic Film Ghostly Gimmicks: Spectral Special Effects in Haunted House Films. . . 661 Laura Sedgwick Universal Horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 679 Brian Jarvis

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Arthouse Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695 Stacey Abbott The Horror Genre in Balkan Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Tanja Jurković Slavic Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725 Agnieszka Kotwasińska Gender Politics in a High-Camp, Lowbrow Musical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745 Joana Rita Ramalho Roger Corman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 765 Murray Leeder David Lynch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 781 Brian Jarvis Gothic Television Doctor Who: Identity, Time and Terror. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 801 J. S. Mackley Nigel Kneale and Quatermass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 J. S. Mackley Dark Costume in Contemporary Television. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837 Stephanie Mulholland Wildlings, White Walkers, and Watchers on the Wall of Northumberland’s Borderland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 853 Chelsea Eddy Grand Guignol, Inside Showtime’s Penny Dreadful Demimonde. . . . . . . . 865 Tanja Jurković Gothic Music The Blasphemous Grotesqueries of The Tiger Lillies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881 Joana Rita Ramalho The Return of the Past in the Lyrics of Black Metal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 905 Antonio Alcalá González Interactive Gothic Interactive and Movable Books in the Tradition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 919 Jen Baker

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The Evolving Genre of the Vampire Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 939 Jon Garrad The Digital Haunted House. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 957 Erika Kvistad Anxiety in the Digital Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 973 David Langdon Horror Memes and Digital Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 985 Tosha R. Taylor Virtual Desert Horrors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1005 Alison Bainbridge Immersive and Pervasive Performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1019 Madelon Hoedt Gothic Lifestyle Fashion Gothwear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1035 Victoria Amador Walking with the Lancashire Witches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1049 Alex Bevan The Influence of the Genre in High Fashion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1063 Jennifer Richards The Geisha Ghost. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1075 Jenevieve Van-Veda Theoretical Gothic Three French Modernists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1093 Giles Whiteley Dark Modernisms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1109 Matt Foley Post Modern Gothic The Postmodern Genre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1123 Joakim Wrethed Heterotopian Horrors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1137 Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović The New Batman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1153 Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis

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Post Human Gothic Global War from Tokyo to Barcelona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1171 Naomi Simone Borwein Posthuman Interstellar Gothic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1191 Holly-Gale Millette Degeneration in H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson . . . . . . . . . . 1209 Antonio Alcalá González Lovecraft, Decadence, and Aestheticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1223 James Machin List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1239 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1241

List of Figures

Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics Fig. 1 Inside front cover from Misty #15. Art by Shirley Bellwood, lettering by Jack Cunningham, writer unknown but likely editor Malcolm Shaw. Misty™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved. . . . 629 Fig. 2 ‘The Puppet That Came to Life’. June and School Friend, 13 February 1965. June and School Friend™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 Fig. 3 ‘The Button Box’, Tammy #632. Tammy™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 636 Fig. 4 Tammy and Misty, 19 January 1980. Cover by John Richardson. Tammy and Misty™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved. . . . 637 Interactive and Movable Books in the Tradition Fig. 1 Anatomical fugitive sheets. ‘Anathomia oder abcontrofettung eines Weibs leib’ (1564) (Source Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 920 Fig. 2 Promotional poster for David Stewart’s The Secret Journal of Victor Frankenstein (2009). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 922 Fig. 3 Screenshot from Dave Morris’ Frankenstein (2012). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 924 Fig. 4 From Charles Fuge’s, A Spooky House of Horror (1998). . . . . . . . . . 928 Fig. 5 J.H. Brown’s Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions (1864). . . 930 Fig. 6 Jacob Marley’s ghost appears A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book (1986). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 932 Fig. 7 Frankenstein: A Graphic Pop-Up (2010). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 933

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List of Figures

Anxiety in the Digital Age Fig. 1 The image is accompanied by text which reads: ‘One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13, 1986’ (SomethingAwful.com, 2009). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 978

Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series: Welcome to Hell Clive Bloom

In 2019, London was host to an immersive zombie exhibition at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane in East London attached to the television show The Walking Dead, a new play about Dracula was staged at the London Library and an art installation, sponsored by the Ben Oakley Gallery and called ‘Monster’ by Giles Walker, featuring headless clowns and other freakery, was set to be held in an empty warehouse near Greenwich later in the year if sufficient crowd funds could be raised. Exotic drinks and fried insects may be consumed at tables inlaid with skeletons at the Victor Wynd Museum and cocktail bar in Hackney and elsewhere in East London the enthusiast may visit the Jack the Ripper Museum in Cable Street or eat at the Serial Killer Café in Brick Lane, or even shop at a Romanian convenience store called ‘Dracula’ in the suburbs. In front of the prestigious Royal Academy, Cornelia Parker exhibited a scale model of the Bates Motel (called ‘PsychoBarn’), whilst The Woman in Black, Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel has been playing since 1987 and has been in the West End since 1989, the second longest running non-musical after Agatha’s Christie’s The Mousetrap. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was yet another example of immersive theatre, playing during May of 2019. Last and most significant of all, is the Grand Guignol of The London Dungeon, a horror experience originally devised as a ‘wax museum’ now a horror venue currently with nineteen shows, twenty actors and two thrill rides. One may multiply examples from around the world, but in London alone the gothic experience seems alive and thriving.1 With the appearance of Covid-19 in 2020, London became, for a moment, an empty space: a dead city of a gothic apocalypse. Every new medium, from film to television to the Internet and social media, has remoulded gothic tropes for a new generation. At the same time older gothic tropes are constantly revisited and reworked in new contexts. The gothic sensibility saw the rise of science fiction through Mary Shelley, detective fiction through Edgar Allan Poe and dark romance through the likes of the Bronte sisters. Vampires, wolfmen and zombies fill our screens, video gaming platforms and social media. C. Bloom (*)  London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_1

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Frankenstein’s monster make-up, as created by Frank Pierce for James Whale’s film of the same name is perhaps the most important gothic image of the last century, influencing everything from films to toys, to Halloween costumes; and then there is Dracula (1897). Bram Stoker’s tale has not only become the most influential Irish novel, but its protagonist is one of the most popular fictional characters, influencing literature and culture in ways thought most unlikely when the book made its first appearance. Such monsters are the nightmares of modernity. It is a genre that may be deeply serious or simply entertainment of a most visceral kind. Moreover, the very nature of its often popular and pulp appeal is the fact that the very seriousness it avoids allows for serious issues to emerge as a latent set of subtexts, not necessarily fully understood by its author(s), nowhere more obviously than in the work of H. P. Lovecraft who now has a commanding place in gothic and steampunk culture with numerous novelistic homages to the Cthulhu mythos, as well as in pulp video games, artworks and tabletop gaming. Above all, the Gothic is both high culture and a low culture experience of mere pleasure (often at the same moment), destroying barriers of taste and refinement to allow for intellectual debate which incorporates both. Nowhere is this more obvious that in the packed lecture theatres of prestigious universities where the Gothic has become as important in literary, cultural, media, film, feminist and sociological studies as more traditional subjects. Despite the fact that gothic entertainment had flourished in both literature and film from the start of the century to the early 1940s, a taste for atomic, alien and radiation monsters almost extinguished the genre. Now audiences had to ‘watch the skies’ (the last line from Christian Nyby’s 1951 science fiction film, The Thing from another Planet) rather than watch their backs and horrors from outer space replaced terrestrial monsters. Horror and gothic filmmaking were out of favour, but films such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s Dead of Night (1947), with its iconic ventriloquist’s dummy, kept interest alive. The 1950s were also a lean time for gothic fans although later in the decade the taste revived, heralded by the new Hammer horrors and by Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) based upon M. R. James’s Casting the Runes and rather sillier stuff such as the comedy thriller, The Bat (1959) directed by Crane Wilbur who adapted the story from a book from 1908. The Bat ran as a double bill in the United Kingdom with Terence Fisher’s The Mummy (1959). By the late 1950s, Hammer Films had reinvented the gothic horror genre, going back to the Universal film classics and remaking them as Victorian melodramas, and in so doing recreated Dracula and Frankenstein for the ‘modern’ age. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) was followed by Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959). The new terrors were themselves only able to exist because of the success of Hammer Horror’s profitable adaptations of the science fiction television series The Quatermass Xperiment (1953). The series was first reworked as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) directed by Val Guest and capitalised on the new X rate horror category. The Hammer horrors followed. Technicolour blood and gore, overt sexuality and psychopathic violence were key features of films whose modernity was a peculiar form of nostalgia for an attenuated Victorianism.

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Nevertheless, a ‘debased’ and often plagiaristic form of the genre was also invented for children during the 1950s. The appearance of the subculture of gothic comics such as Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear brought writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft to the attention of younger readers (through highly plagiarised rewriting) who then were free to source the original stories. Despite the horror comic scare and legislation brought in by the British government in 1955 (partially initiated by the Gorbals Necropolis ‘vampire’ scare), gothic tales were back for a new generation. Meanwhile Roger Corman went back to Edgar Allan Poe to produce a series of films whose gothic look influenced (quite unconsciously perhaps) the gothic fashion of the late 1980s. His colour-coded use of mise en scene and strange hallucinatory dream sequences remain part of a psychedelic age. In the 1970s the production company Amicus went back to Weird Tales for its anthologies of shudders, often borrowing Hammer stars like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee to play in their portfolio stories. Occasionally they even borrowed directors too. As Corman created sensuous landscapes so William Castle created three dimensional gimmicks that have been reinterpreted in even more gothic terms and, of course, in the 1960s with the television reruns of the Universal series and renewed interest in Charles Addams, the supernatural and Gothic became central to children’s television with series like The Munsters (1964–1966), The Addams Family (1964–1966) and Scooby Doo (original series, 1969), not to mention Bewitched (1964–1972) and I Dream of Genie (1965–1970), all being must-see programmes after school. Whilst for many years The Simpsons have produced amusing Halloween specials. Before the growth of academic studies of the Gothic there were dedicated bibliophiles such as Montague Summers, collectors such as Michael Sadlier and enthusiasts such as August Derleth, whose cause was the author they loved or the rare volumes that they catalogued. The extraordinary growth of both the gothic industry and gothic studies is largely due to a combination and coincidence of factors. The academic study of gothic books had at least to wait until the revival of the weird, ghostly and horrific in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Pan, Panther and Corgi as well as other paperback imprints revived the likes of Arthur Machen, R. E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (without whom we would not have a gothic Batman whose nemesis lives in Arkham Asylum!). This led to the revival of writers like Denis Wheatley whose The Devil Rides Out (1934; film 1968) To the Devil a Daughter (1953; film 1976) and The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948; film 2006) made both a literary and filmic comeback. Wheatley’s lifelong interest in Satanism, the occult and black magic were later published in his non-fiction account The Devil and All His Works (1971), a book that influenced a generation of younger readers. Ghost hunters such as Harry Price and his investigations at Borley Rectory in the 1940s were rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, his books reprinted and his life reassessed in books such as Paul Tabori’s Harry Price: Ghost-Hunter (1974) published by Little Brown in the Denis Wheatley Library of the Occult. The incredible rise in the fortunes of the occultist Aleister Crowley were such that he ended up, alongside Edgar Allan Poe, on the cover of the Beatles ‘Sergeant

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Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1968), not least because Wheatley referenced him in The Devil Rides Out and other novels. Crowley’s own books were reprinted and his ideas widely circulated, whilst novels such as Moonchild (1917) and Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) were reprinted in American paperbacks in 1970 and 1972. Cheap and lurid paperback covers lured teenagers and young adults to Edgar Allan Poe whilst an older counter culture embraced Poe, Crowley and Tolkien. Because of YouTube it is possible to watch the melodramas of Tod Slaughter or the delights of the films of Val Lewton and fit them into the ‘lost’ history of British or American gothic film and popular entertainment. In the case of Tod Slaughter, a world of forgotten working-class melodramatic entertainment and values is again revealed (his version of Sweeney Todd was played by his company ‘The Barnstormers’ at the Independent Theatre Club, in Great Queen Street, London). In the same way it is possible to watch an Alexander Mc Queen gothic catwalk show or gothic animation. Gothic imagery flourishes in the new social media. Music videos are readily available on numerous platforms and such platforms allow for new gothic culture to emerge in the animations such as Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl or the vlogs of entertainers and lifestyle gurus such as Aurelio Voltaire (The Lair of Voltaire) or the impassioned arguments of amateur horror film critics or television aficionados. The possibility of gothic renewal and of nostalgic revisiting now seem endless. Indeed, the very definition of the Gothic as the expression of an atmosphere filled with anticipation or dread cannot, any longer, properly be applied to gothic lifestyle, fashion or music as it might have been only a few years ago. The term Gothic may have become broad and inclusive, but it must still retain its original features in order to be recognised even if the recognition proves false. Gothic clothing developed in the post punk atmosphere of do it yourself make and mend, defiantly defining its black clothing, tatty lace, jet black hair, white pancake make-up and kohl against mainstream fashion. It was a fashion of exclusion and alienation in keeping with the nihilism and economic depression of the late 1970s and early eighties rather than emulating the aesthetic nihilism of the late nineteenth century. The appropriation of gothic tropes for high fashion labels with its ‘heroin’ thin models and edgy horror subject matter intended to épater le bourgeoisie was itself a form of aggrandisement into the world of youth culture. Horror, now always associated with the idea of the Gothic, on the other hand is a visceral consequence of anticipation and in that sense may or may not be Gothic at all. It is perfectly possible to have a gothic film which is without horror (Rebecca [1940]; Dragonwyck [1946]) and it is possible to have a horror film that has nothing of the Gothic (28 Days Later [2002]; Witchfinder General [1968]; The Wicker Man [1973]), yet gothic horror as a term has existed long enough to make clear distinctions difficult and pedantic. Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic storytelling always leads to a horrific revelatory denouement and as such may claim to be the first set of tales that may be explicitly designated gothic ­horror. It is clear that definitions created by the original eighteenth-century writers have to be heavily qualified, stretched to breaking or abandoned in the face of the modern zombie which have no real origins beyond the 1930s and whose

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reinvention is a result George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), a visualisation of events during the Civil Rights movement. Study of gothic culture is therefore both dynamic and chronological and has to take into account cross ­influences from diverse areas and be alive to the possibilities of homage, pastiche and irony. The adolescent reading of future academics became a source of serious enquiry in the 1980s when horror and gothic pulp authors were revisited by p­ ost-modernist scholars and when psychological (especially Freudian ideas of uncanniness) and sociological readings (especially Marxist and post-modern readings of popular culture and literature) were in the ascendant. The writers of horror were the ‘other’ of F. R. Leavis’s canonical authors and a breath of fresh air in a restricted academy. This alternative canon was then opened to cultural studies, psychoanalytic readings and research from feminist and later ethnic researchers. Gothic writers whose work had faded or been forgotten, now returned in new scholarly editions ready for dissection and there was a vogue for compilations of essays on the gothic and introductions to what was a fledgling subject, whilst Edgar Allan Poe was given the full attention of French post-modern theory in the journal Yale French Studies. The gothic tales of forgotten authors were republished and their place in literary history rethought; the silent gaps were finally being filled. In this way Ann Radcliffe and the writings of long-forgotten women gothic novelists were put back into the purview of academic research. New terms were mobilised: the uncanny, abjection, liminality, to be replaced by further theorising in the world of disability, gender stereotyping and ecological studies. Yet study could not really begin until the appearance of both published reprints of classic or lost works and the reruns of Universal films on television. This led inevitably to nostalgic pastiches such as Mel Brook’s and Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein (1974) (an almost Yiddish pastiche with undertones of Marx Brothers slapstick and verbal wit) and Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (play 1973; film 1975), a mash-up of science fiction and gothic film elements mixed with a dose of gender confusion and glorious cross-dressing. The real turning point may be considered the appearance of video and Betamax, followed by the appearance of the televisual pause button, and the creation of YouTube uploads and other reproductive media which allowed multiple viewing. DVDs came with sub titles and commentary, and deleted scenes which could be evaluated and discussed by academics and enthusiasts alike. The rediscovery of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931) and the ability to re-run Hammer films allows for a serious ­re-evaluation of Jimmy Sangster’s scriptwriting, Terence Fisher’s directing and James Bernard’s music and what makes their work ‘classic’. Video and disc technology is central to the re-evaluation of films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) and reworking their themes would be difficult without this technology. Even the return of Ed Wood’s campy low budget films has much to do with new technology. Goth culture needed multiple stimuli that could be revisited and analysed. That having happened, real debate could take place and facts and concepts checked especially with regards to ephemeral or peripheral material.

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We live now in an age of international gothic where the genre has crossed borders, as much alive in Brazil as London or New York and where discussion of zombies and vampires is both an intellectual holiday and a serious focus of attention. Nowadays there is no single overarching definition we can bring to bear on a culture that encompasses literature and club culture, television and fashion, video games and urban studies. The fruit of all these years of focus has been the creation of an academic gothic community and a huge range and diversity of opinion. Yet the Gothic is always meant to entertaining as well as intellectually stimulating. The Gothic as cultural phenomenon has now travelled beyond a limited selection of books or films. This makes it a very dynamic field with new books and new discoveries stimulating further discussion. Such discussion will inevitably change older definitions and invalidate previous boundaries, creating new areas of interest, informed by, but no longer held back by, older theories. The recent translation of an alternative version of Dracula ‘written’ by the Icelandic author Valdimar Assmundson and published in Iceland in 1901 under the title Markt Markanna or Powers of Darkness is an example of a ‘lost’ work providing new areas of discussion. This version, first fully translated into English by Hans Corneel de Roos and published with extensive notes, presents a quite new version of the Dracula tale, apparently, although contentiously, authorised by Bram Stoker himself and indeed, there is much discussion and controversy still regarding the origins of the Swedish and Icelandic versions. In architecture, the restoration of both the Houses of Parliament and Strawberry Hill suggests there will be more to be done in terms of research into neo-gothic buildings as well. How might we define gothic culture, gothic art and gothic taste? On the one hand the Gothic is a sensibility, on the other the effect of having such sentiments. In this equation there is a moment in history when sentiment and cultural expression became one expression of cultural identity. In this equation there is no before and after, but a synchronicity that has gothic effects produced through a gothic way of thought, emotion and expression. Of course the Gothic may be defined by a particular era, as once it was in literary histories of popular reading. We can mark the period exactly from 1764 to 1820 or from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Thus a beginning and an end, of sorts, is constructed. Nevertheless, it is clear that different gothics and different gothic sentiments pervade the neo-gothic arts dated around the Romantic and post-French Revolutionary period, which are connected to, but different from those feelings and sentiments that fill gothic melodramas in the mid-nineteenth century or which inform gothic fin de siècle dalliance with the occult. Thus, there is a puzzle at the heart of gothic literature. Not only does it develop in a diametrically opposed way to gothic architecture and design, which stands for the most part for the revived medieval and Tudor, imperial aspirations and high Christian virtues, but it does so within that framework as its inherent opposite. Hence it may be argued that gothic literature and culture are both misnamed, through historical accident or is gothic literature the subversively repressed of the virtues listed as the features of the architectural revival? If the gothic’s origins are to be found in historical circumstance and artefacts, they are also a reminder that the sentiments expressed in such artefacts held within

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them a fascination of a quite different sort. If that is accepted then there must be two gothics, one wholesome and the other unwholesome, one pure and one corrupt, expressing themselves as doppelganger mirror images. Thus the Gothic is both an epistemological conundrum and a history of artistic expression with a chronology that may be followed. It is, perhaps, either and both and this being so the circle cannot yet be closed, either on its historical trajectory or its meaning until the period of its formation and development finally fade into dead history. For the contributors to this volume such problems are significant.2 Giles Whiteley defines the genre with elegant simplicity, for him, the Gothic is a form of macabre writing, either terrific or horrific with supernatural themes and featuring narratives set in the middle ages. Valeria Iglesias-Plester sees ‘the main aspects as foreshadowing, the use of labyrinth-like structures’ including, ‘the haunted’ [which may be a house or a person or family], whilst Marta Vega sees space itself and setting as forming the tone of gothic feelings. Marius Crisan suggests the links is between the real and the imaginary, between man and divinity and between life and death. As such the gothic narrative is effectively one of childhood and adolescence, but as Agnieszka Kotwasinska points out it is also a world of decay and dust. Dust and decay are for Eric Parisot ‘about the artistic articulation of fear(s)— whether personal, social, cultural, political or historical. Some of these fears we may be aware of, but the best gothic art is able to tap into or articulate fears which we are not yet cognisant’ and therefore for James Rattue such fears represent ‘our repulsion from, and attraction to, the potential undoing of the human’. Holly-Gale Millette reminds us of the origins and continuance of gothic themes ‘such as the sublime, the subliminal, the grotesque, the revenant, the uncanny in the aesthetic, political and social structures of sentient life forms – past, present and future’. Whilst Manuel Aguirre sees the early gothic as originating as ‘an aesthetic mode which later crystallized into a historical genre’. For Aguirre, the Gothic postulates a ‘second space’ beyond the limits of the rationalist enterprise and endlessly negotiates the threshold between the human reality and that of the numinous ‘Other’ where the terrors of power (and the power of terrors) act unchecked. We can, of course define the Gothic by its monsters and its relationship with the importance of religion as does Aspasia Stephanou who suggests that, the genre ‘is characterised by the presence of supernatural phenomena, including vampires, ghosts, zombies and the occurrence and repetition of the past and the uncanny. The problem is defining the supernatural as that which comes from without and revolves around the idea of a theistic universe’. Looked at philosophically and from an historical viewpoint, Cleo Cameron comments that, ‘the gothic suffers from delusional dualism, when in actuality it is defined by radical monist materialism—experiencing the sublime gothic supernatural, the individual’s suffering mind, via symbiosis with the nervous system, which tortures and torments the body through its reactive imaginings when exposed to the metaphysical dualism implied by the apparently witnessed supernatural episode’. In all its forms, Brian Jarvis remarks, the Gothic represents a ‘politics of excess’ and ‘delirium’, and Martina Barlett sees this emerging from the collision of ideologies which cannot be reconciled. In this way, encountering the other’s

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foreign-ness in all its physicality may trigger the gothic impulse as a reflection of one’s own culture as Carol A. Senf believes. As Emma Dallamora argues, ‘the gothic is acutely about the unconscious and this argument agrees with Jessica Gildersleeve’s, that such repressions are mainly unconscious. Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaino believes the Gothic moves through the eras, reflecting the fears, the desires, the spaces, and the bodies that reflect the most salient (and perhaps most ingrained) aspects of society’s deepest recesses. Nowadays those fears revolve around the body, technology and the non-human’. Catherine Redford considers that, ‘the gothic is characterised by an anxiety about otherness, and particularly a fear that this otherness’. Hence, ‘this darkness, speaks to something familiar within us’. The Gothic is a mode of cultural production that pertains to the exploration of otherness and uncanny familiarity, and is therefore focussed on the construction and dissolution of boundaries, the obsession with death, violence and the grotesque. It is often set in claustrophobic spaces, either real or imaginary. One of its most prominent features is its ability to mutate and adapt to different times and spaces, becoming an effective reflection of societal fears. The Gothic is above all a hybrid mode: it often appears in collaboration with other literary forms, modes and genres. Where fear is disguised so may other subject matter. Paulina Palmer points out that this leads to the possibility of a genre as an ‘appropriate vehicle for the representation and analysis of queer sexualities and genders, especially the experiences of secrecy, loneliness, the hidden, liminality, and living on the margins between queer and heterosexual cultures that queer and LGBTI communities often experience’ and the number of gothic novelists from marginalised groups certainly bears this out. Such ideas are widened by Dara Downey who gives this explanation: ‘One of the most useful definitions of the gothic is actually a line from The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James who writes that ‘an unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred’. Downey thinks ‘that this encapsulates many of the dynamics of class, gender, and knowledge that the genre repeats and rearranges in various ways and thus some of the terms can be moved around or substituted to account for different relations in terms of class, race, gender, and so on’. This being the case Julia Round returns the argument to the world of ‘haunting’ with its connotations of ‘excess and contradiction’ revealing ‘the hidden meanings of fear and attraction’, simultaneously giving us too much information (the supernatural) and also not enough (the spectral and unseen). Antonio Alcalá González points out that, ‘in the gothic [world], human beings find it impossible to escape from the past lurking behind them’. David Ibitson suggests it is genre that allows a ‘willingness to look awry, or askew, at society, to reveal what others may want to hide or ignore; to reveal uncertainties about society that have been rendered monstrous by their being ignored…’. ‘[Or]… it is about the return of social and psychologically repressed neuroses’.  Indeed ‘in broad terms the Gothic is an undead past that disrupts the present…though such temporal discombobulations can haunt the present from the (possible) future as

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well’ suggests Simon Bacon. Thus, Mark Bernard finds racism at the very heart of the (American) gothic project. He argues that, ‘the most compelling aspect of the gothic is how it depicts anxieties regarding the way the past will consume our present and preclude our future; in America, this past is haunted by Native American genocide, slavery, and other racial injustices, and American gothic tries to contend with the horrors from the past that infect our present’. David Jones points out that the ‘gothic is a hybrid and hybridising term, used [both] to characterise shifting layers of meaning involving expressions of dark, frightening and repressed urges as well as social, sexual and familial transgression and violence, and the perceived barbarism of wilder (sometimes primitive) styles of creativity’. This leads Marie Mulvey-Roberts to conclude that hybridity is central to the very nature of gothic productions. She considers that, ‘the gothic seems to have been a process of moving from the margins to the mainstream and by doing so becoming increasing difficult to define due to its capacity for absorption, hybridity and even appropriation’, a point reiterated by Jarlath Killeen who notes that ‘the term would have to be limited by the meanings circulating in the period, but given the way “Gothic” is promiscuously employed in popular culture now, … it is important to be as open as possible’. Whilst it may be ‘promiscuous’, in a real sense, gothic is the literature of the traumatic, whether it be the physicality of the monstrous or the trauma of bodily disintegration or even the return of the dead, gothic caters for morbid fascination and serious critique. In the present century gothic pleasure may encompass music, fashion, lifestyle, social media, art installations and amusement park rides. Coincident with these conceptual boundaries is the chronology of the Gothic itself. In its chronology is the genesis of gothic ideas, sentiments and tropes, but as might be inferred from its definitions the ideas themselves may belong to a more ahistorical perspective which is greater than the evolution of events. Thus terms such as liminality, abjection or the uncanny may have an interpretive base greater than one or more chronological occurrences. Nevertheless, there is a chronology which we can outline. The first phase is, course, pre-gothic, lasting from the seventeenth century to the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. The idea of the Gothic (as distinct mode of expression) originates with a reaction to neoclassicism in thought and ideas with a growing emphasis on indigenous n­ on-Roman British history, such as that of the druids, burial mounds and Stonehenge investigated by clerical antiquarians from the seventeenth century onwards. The term ‘goth’ was adopted in architecture by patrons and architects looking for an ‘authentic’ Christian medieval (English) vernacular style, a style which finds expression in the work of John Vanbrugh and later in Strawberry Hill. This resulted, both by design and by accident, in an interest in revolutionary, unusual, bizarre and outre concepts in design, for which new words such as ‘gloomth’ and ‘serendipity’ were coined (by Walpole) to express the feelings evoked by the architecture. Gothic literature however emerged from a fascination with death and momento mori as threatening rather than consoling, resulting in Walpole’s own nightmare

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induced The Castle of Otranto which combined the natural style of the contemporary novel with the superstitions, supernaturalism and intrigue of an imagined feudal past. Walpole’s ‘amusing’ nightmare regarding his own house joined architectural Gothic to literary Gothic by the merest chance. Shakespearian plotting from Hamlet, Richard III and Macbeth linked eighteenth-century sentiment to medieval imagery and imagined language. The second phase lasted from the 1780s to the 1790s. This is really the height of the gothic revival in literature with over two hundred known examples of the genre produced in English alone. Gothic was expanded to create the theatre of spectacle where there was a split between those who believed gothicism was a metaphor for Godlessness and those who, influenced by De Sade were believers in a Godless universe where only appetite and power succeeded. The contradiction is best described by comparing Ann Radcliffe (whose idea of ‘terror’ leads to God) or Joanne Baillie whose plays suggest the Gothic is a place of lost composure with Matthew Lewis or Charlotte Dacre (who embrace both horror and perversion). The genre was now seen as either the triumph of virtue over evil (the evil usually being entirely human) or the triumph of Luciferian instincts over rationalism. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, we also witness the beginnings of German supernaturalism as originated in Gottfried August Burger’s poem Lenore (1773), based on British border ballads and then reabsorbed into British literature itself and thereafter rewritten and quoted in other gothic novels such as Dracula. Such German influences suggested the Gothic was more attached to demonic disruption and damnation in a universe bereft of spiritual guidance or the hand of God. Major themes also began to emerge such as the ‘corpse bride’ and the necromancer/who first makes an appearance in William Beckford’s Arabian tale Vathek (1782 in French and 1786 in English) which itself introduces the other side of the gothic imagination—orientalism. From 1800 to the 1840s there is the architectural triumph of medievalism as the principle of high Anglicanism and imperialism expressed by the building of the Houses of Parliament and the colonial administration buildings in colonial capitals, the general church building programme and the appearance of new gothic craft wares, silver and furniture, the new garden cemeteries such as Highgate and Kensal Green, the ideology of the ‘Young England’ movement, the later industrialised architecture of Tower Bridge and novels such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1818). Scott’s own Scottish baronial style was reflected in the remodelling of Windsor Castle and Bavarian King Maximillian’s building of Hochschwangau in Bavaria. Such reactionary and conservative ideas were the consequence of the threat of the French revolution and the collapse of social hierarchy, but this also led to radical ideologies of the existential self in a non-Christian Godless world exemplified by Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein (1818), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Charles Maturin’s fantasy about a Kafka-esque bureaucracy in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The ideological debates around the break-up of a recognised social order include the rise of the concept of an individualised (Romantic) imagination. This

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created a new ontological perspective wherein the individual became the basis for the sense of reality. Personal reality soon became personal realities where heightened imagination was both liberating, but also a solipsistic trap leading to ­insanity. Those locked in their own heads would now be subject to doubts regarding the validity of the outside world. The major shift from external dangers to internal fears and the idea that the ‘architecture’ of the mind now became the real landscape of terror, led to the rise of psychologised stories and poems which were concerned with hallucination, perversion, murder and drug addiction. Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Edgar Allan Poe spent much of their literary careers investigating such strange states of mind. By the 1840s, the original eighteenth-century sense of the Gothic had now long descended into popular culture. This older external gothic was now confined to popular journalism and cheap fiction serials like James Rymer and Thomas Pest’s Varney the Vampyre (1845–1847) or serialised melodramas like Rymer or Thomas Prest’s The String of Pearls (1846–1847) which introduced Sweeney Todd. Village magic lantern shows and penny gaffs made up the bulk of common gothic experience. The internal (and more intellectual) gothic and the popular sensational version influenced new genres such as the detective novel and the dark romances of the Bronte sisters. Gothic tropes were now used as ironic decoration or as comic setting by British writers such as Charles Dickens, but had also been taken up in the revolutionary atmosphere of Paris by French artists such as Victor Hugo and Charles Berlioz. By the 1840s, the Gothic has even entered the vocabulary of European revolutionaries such as Max Stirner and Karl Marx, who were fascinated with the resonance of the rhetoric of the spook. The 1850s to the 1880s was the apex of gothic architecture and design. In Bavaria, Ludwig II began building Neuschwanstein as a shrine to Wagnerian values. On the stage and in literature old-style Gothic was eclipsed by ­middleclass social melodrama set in domestic, if (often) gothic, architectural space. Nevertheless, by the 1870s and 1880s, the Gothic revived with the work of Sheridan Le Fanu and Robert Louis Stevenson. This phase is accompanied by the absorption of the new wave of spiritualism coming from America which will influence the occult novels and short stories of the 1890s. Between 1890 and 1918, the Gothic as occult literature made a remarkable revival. This was an amazingly productive period where old tropes were revived and rethought. Not only is there a revival of old defunct tropes such as the vampire, contemporary influences started to take on new gothic nuances. Paramount is, of course, Jack the Ripper in 1888 and the rise of violent anarchism in the 1890s. Spiritualism and séances, occult societies and eastern esoteric beliefs thrived and ghost stories dominated the popular magazines and anthologies. The era includes Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells, M. R. James and Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce and Hanns Ewers, M. P. Shiel, Vernon Lee, Algernon Blackwood and Robert Chambers, and the wonderfully named ghost writer, Oliver Onions. In the 1920s and 1930s a remarkable weird literature that embraced magic, esotericism and the erotic came from the pen of Dion Fortune whose influence

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on gothic occult writing has largely been ignored. Roughly between 1890 and the 1930s there occurred the golden age of weird fictions: tales that explored the rent in the veil of reality and the peculiarities which may lurk beyond, taking on occult and phantasmagoric imagery, hinting at bizarre perversities, Darwinian and scientific degeneracy, the peculiarities of modern psychology and spirituality and the ever present opiate paranoia of unseen ethnic conspiracies and apocalyptic horror (as in Lovecraft). Whilst the nineteenth-century version embraces the hidden, occult and the otherness of beyond the grave, the twentieth century has explored the blankness of space and of meaning. Both take on ‘non-meaning’ or that meaning beyond rational explanation on the margins of consciousness. In contrast and in concrete bricks and mortar, the Gothic had been increasingly industrialised (see Tower Bridge and Liverpool Anglican Cathedral) in ways that see its last full flourish. Oddly, both weird fiction and late gothic architecture embrace the fears and aspirations of a world on the brink of modernity. Even more importantly, the first moving image reinterpretations of gothic sensibility were now being produced in films such as Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein (1910). Numerous other short films were produced in the period up to 1919 referencing vampires, golems and other monsters, now all lost. Nevertheless, despite the crumbling of old film reels, from 1918 to the end of World War II, the dominance of cinema was paramount, with film above all, reinterpreting the nineteenth century’s representations in literary and stage Gothic through the use of moving imagery and sound accompaniment. Nowhere is the impact of gothic ideas on modernity stronger than on the birth of surrealism in its relationship to film, where filmic technique was able, for the first time, to show complex patterns of psychological alienation and the distortions of surrounding space, explore the passing of time and of memory, visualise synchronicity, alchemy and psychoanalytic insight. These influences were a revelatory moment for Andre Breton who had just seen Nosferatu (1922) as well as to Luis Bunel and Maya Derren. If Salvador Dali went further back to illustrate Walpole and Dorothea Tanning concentrated on Ann Radcliffe, they still came to their subjects through film. German Expressionist cinema led the way followed closely by Hollywood. American scripts were mostly, but not always rewritings of earlier plays which themselves reworked older novels or stage productions, thereby reusing themes for a visual medium which were previously seen as defunct. Set in imaginary versions of the past or an imagined Bavarian, Ruritanian or Transylvanian setting, films made the world of gothic imagery come alive. Meanwhile, horror literature embraced science fiction with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and August Derleth in pulp fiction, and even ‘Marxist’ ideas appeared in Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris (1934). As these chapters show beyond the Cold War and through the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the Gothic has continued to evolve and grow from film and literature to television and comics, to music, fashion and lifestyle, interactive games and now to environmental and identity politics. The Gothic is without doubt the longest lasting popular genre in world literature, continuously reinvented throughout the history of modernity as part of modernity itself. This, perhaps extraordinary statement may be justified by

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reference to its ubiquity in a whole range of media over the last 250 years. If we take gothic literature to have been first created in the middle of the Enlightenment by Horace Walpole, then we can map its various organic changes up to and beyond the twenty-first century. The gothic sensibility, which grew as a counter to the philosophy of the period soon adapted itself to the politics of the French Revolution and the new psychological sciences of the nineteenth century. It helped form movements from the picturesque to Romanticism and post-Romanticism, and moved through the nineteenth century picking up concepts of personal disturbance, occultism and domestic violence. By the twentieth century it was immediately adopted by film whose visual vocabulary was found perfect for exploring disturbed states of mind, hallucination, trauma and the spectral. The term Gothic is a contradiction: on the one hand, it means a Christian, progressive architecture based on medieval principles, whilst on the other, this same architecture is the setting for suspense, supernaturalism, danger, derangement and horror. The Gothic provides a space to discuss issues otherwise banned or censored or so dangerous to societal norms as to appear revolutionary. It exists to allow cultural prohibitions to be disguised as art in order to create a space to explore themes as diverse as physical and mental alienation, borderline states of being, spirits, ghosts and demons and necromancy, incest, fetishism and necrophilia, drug-induced and hallucinatory disturbance, gender construction, sexuality and perversion, predatory violence, the dangers of the urban landscape and its anonymous crowds (think, for instance, of the importance of Jack the Ripper in German Expressionist films such as Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), or the many Ripper films made in the 1960s and 1970s, and even critiques of class, monstrosity, disability and trauma, which may all jostle in disguised form as literary entertainment. German Expressionism, with its distortions of visual imagery, was well suited to represent the political, psychological and cultural trauma of the First World War. Horror and psychological disturbance, plague and monsters fill Expressionist Cinema from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919/1920) to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and from Carl Boese and Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1920) to Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) and beyond into Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) with its scenes with the scientist Rotwang and the Cathedral clock’s skeleton. German Expressionism converted literature into visual images. Although there had been plenty of nineteenth-century images of the Gothic in both print, lantern shows and theatre, it was the success of the German expressionists to find an exact analogue of gothic tropes in the visualisation of distortion, shadows, lighting and set design. German films incorporated a new filmic sense of the Gothic which was only partially aligned to its literary forbears. Silence and dread were soon incorporated into Hollywood’s vocabulary. Tod Browning’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925; 1929) and James Whales’ Frankenstein (1931) both are cognisant of the influence of German visual tropes as is Alfred Hitchcock, then working in Britain and whose film version of Mrs. Henry Lowndes’ The Lodger (book c.1914; film 1927) incorporates an expressionist palette as does his later Blackmail (1929) with

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its vertiginous walk up to the villain’s rooms. Such visual tropes went into the very language of film with tropes from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari reprised in Merian C. Copper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), Hitchcock’s entrance scene in The Lodger (1927) being revisited for Peter Blatty’s film of The Exorcist (1973). It is Germanic renaissance medievalism as originally conceived in the middle to late nineteenth century that had its most lasting effect on the work of Walt Disney whose own interest in gothic folk tales and the Brothers Grimm is everywhere evident in his early works such as The Three Little Pigs (1932) and Snow White (1938) with its forest referencing the Klingsor’s Garden decorations in the Singer’s Hall in Ludwig’s II grandiose hermitage, Neuschwanstein which influences the Disney logo and theme parks to this day. Thus twentieth- and twenty-first-century gothic filmic images now vie with, and often are more important than, linguistic tropes to provide another layer for gothic semiotics. The importance of Hollywood even after the absorption of the German Expressionist film style as well as the emergence of American horror actors such as Lon Chaney and Vincent Price and directors such as Tod Browning, William Castle, Roger Corman, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Eli Roth and numerous others meant that American Gothic looked inward. The phasing out of British directors and European actors in the 1940s meant that the United States could both absorb and replace European Gothic tropes with homegrown ideas. European Gothic slowly became peripheral to the modern American vampire for instance. In 1976, Ann Rice created the Vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, its central characters finally destroying Dracula and European gothicism in an extraordinary act of cultural appropriation. The slick young vampire kid of the small town schoolyard whose qualms about drinking blood sit alongside his immense wealth fit an American modernity far removed from the old-dark-house school of American Victorian horror which grew out of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce and the early twentieth-century pages of Weird Tales. What replaced the evil of vampirism was Satanism, covens and black magic conspiracies which were ushered in by Ira Levin in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Peter Blatty in The Exorcist (1971) and by Richard Donner in The Omen (1976). These were themselves pre-dated by Guy Endore’s American-in-Paris wolfman horror, The Werewolf of Paris in which a werewolf tale is intertwined with the siege of Paris and the politics of the Communards. The book’s peculiarly interest in violence, blood and sexual perversity was based on the equally perverse and decadent writings of Hanns Ewers. Nowhere is the occult and Satanic more revisited than in David Lynch whose visual terrors seem to be attached to a demonic parallel universe residing in subterranean ‘lounges’ and corridors decorated in the plush red décor of a 1950s cinema. Demonic characters haunt every episode of Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). We are presented, in episode eight, of the second series which aired in 2018, with the most gothic and surrealist episode in modern television. Lynch’s tours de force of occult weirdness, however are often so convoluted and overlaid as to be ‘meaningless’, instead resonating as a purely visual and

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hallucinatory or dreamlike experience with a confusion of shapeshifting, demonic possession, Lurch-like characters such as the ‘Giant’/‘Fireman’, portals to hellish ‘waiting rooms in Limbo, parasitic doubles, demons’ (‘Bob’; ‘Judy’;‘the Arm’) and warped or distorted timelines, making the very ordinariness of American small-town life, with its ‘cherry pie’ and ‘damned fine coffee’ seem sinister and superficial, hiding the real hell beneath the surface. All of this is composed, at least in the original series, as a soap opera pastiche, a subject he has originally experimented with in his very black ‘situation comedy’ Rabbits (2002). As agent Dale Cooper reminds his colleagues in Twin Peaks: The Return, ‘we live inside a dream’ in which the Manichean forces of good and evil eternally battle for supremacy. Here, however, fear is produced from the duality of the known and unknown where evil cannot be explained or fully consciously understood. The images of Twin Peaks produce an America made into a demonic landscape, both uncanny and normal, because nebulous and indefinite, a horror of the inexplicable and irrevocably seen, of that which should not exist under the surface of that which does—American diners, 1950s and 1960s pop music, formica tabletops, wholesome American food and small-town neighbourhood communities. American Gothic created its own vocabulary in the nineteenth and early twentieth century from its national characteristics and homegrown fears. Thus American Gothic is full of cursed or ‘haunted’ mansions (both in the eastern seaboard as well as southern states), lonely roads, dense forests, tumbledown shacks and degenerate bayous and swamps. The United States has created its own unique regional concept of the perverse in the southern gothic quagmires of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. H. P. Lovecraft created a whole mythic geography of New England degeneracy around Arkham, Miskatonic University, Red Hook and the dreaded ‘Necronomicon’. Grant Wood’s painting ‘American Gothic’ (1930) added another level of rural degeneracy, at first unrelated, except by coincidence, to the language of American gothic imagery, as did Hopper’s painting ‘House By the Railroad’ (1925). Hopper’s house, with its strange haunting solitude became The Bates Motel and later the home of the Munsters (still later the film set featured in the series Desperate Housewives!) whilst Wood’s iconography became part of the opening sequence of the movie version of The Rocky Horror Show in which Riff Raff and Magenta recreate in tableau the famous pose of the farmer and his wife. The contemporary American monstrous must incorporate such areas as consumerism, physical beauty and wealth (see for instance Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho [1991]), must in a word, be an American businessman’s success story. As such the monstrous, per se, is denuded of horror or threat and instead becomes a metaphor for victimhood and exclusion. Victimhood is a focus of early films such as Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Hollywood land has its own inherent Gothic, the Gothic of faded Spanish architecture, best described in James Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943) the noir thriller where the trope may have been invented. This idea of the grotesque combined with a nostalgia for a lost golden age of West coast celebrity is reworked in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) as well as Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, played by

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Gloria Swanson and Baby Jane, played by Bette Davis both attempt to return from their own version of a living death, being forgotten by an unforgiving film industry. Their final return surrounded by the corpses of those they loved, provides a fittingly macabre trope for the harsh nature of celebrity culture and faded talent from an age that has already past and should not return. It is, in these films a fate meted out to women who cling to the rags of lost glory like the living revenant Miss. Haversham in Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations (1861). Such sentiments also pervade the work of David Lynch with the reprised Spanish Hollywood Gothic of Mulholland Drive (2001) in which a central character, Betty played by Naomi Watts dreams of being famous, finally to be destroyed by the demonic forces of failure. Nowhere is Hollywood homage more obvious than in the work of Tim Burton whose sense of the genre is that of a slightly rye and knowingly arch affection, usually deployed as a reverential, knowing and comic mise en scene rather than that of originality of setting and purpose. His frequent return to rethinkings of classic early Gothic such as in Vincent (1982), Frankenweenie (1984), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Corpse Bride (2005) and Sleepy Hollow (1999) are marked by heightened colour, grotesque make-up and musical numbers, and, like Edward Scissorhands (1990) are often wilfully sentimental. All are marked by a reverence for silent movie gesture and narrative (Edward Scissorhands is a 1990s reworking of Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) or they hark back to a nostalgia for lost actors of a type of B-movie golden age such as Vincent Price. Where Burton is of account is in his scrupulous rendition of gothic detail and his almost overwrought and caricatured manner of working with both drawings and puppets. Through multiple gothic incarnations he has effectively turned Helen Bonham Carter into the most recognisable ‘gothic female’ in modern film. It is in his re-rendering of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (theatrical musical 1979; film 2007) that he accomplishes both reverence and innovation. With Sondheim’s permission, the choral numbers were rewritten and the story narrated as a nightmare vision of urban depravity and revenge in which everyone goes to the hell that Sweeney’s revenge finally brings. There is no happy ending, only a final blackout laced with fountains of blood, the dwellers of Victorian London being reduced to cannibals eating the flesh of Mrs. Lovett’s meat grinder. In thus referencing James Whale (in Sweeney’s make-up) Burton creates an expressionistic landscape both claustrophobic, isolated and inexorable; rainfall is tainted into urban corruption and turning into blood as it falls. Jonny Depp, eaten up with bitterness, is not Tod Slaughter with his noted melodramatic comic laughter and his sly catch phrase ‘can I polish you off, sir?’, rather here is a type of urban malevolence without hope or pity based on the ghost of Jack the Ripper, a quite different, but equally charismatic bloodthirsty monster. There is always change and mutation according to cultural shifts. America itself is the new gothic landscape. Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and Rob Zombie have turned the backroads and backwoods of the country into killing grounds where innocent (and usually very good looking) college students head off on vacation, run out of fuel, go seek help at apparently empty shacks or collapsing wooden

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mansions and are killed off one by one by masked, deformed and otherwise monstrous degenerates who wield power saws, machetes and hammers in order to torture and mutilate their victims. The old dark house was given a new twist in the 1970s when it turned into the haunted and empty small town house where unspeakable murders have been committed, but whose price does not deter a happy nuclear family moving in only to be traumatised by a past that cannot be exorcised (see, for instance Jay Anson’s ‘factual’ retelling of The Amityville Horror [1977] or Stephen Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist [1982]). The shift in FBI strategy in the 1970s from looking for communists to searching for serial killers also changed the focus of American horror and gave urban and campus landscapes a gothicism hitherto ignored, with movies like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1988) and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the Thirteenth (1980) establishing the slasher movie as a new genre, different in kind to that originating with Robert Bloch’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1962). These shifts remade the Gothic in an American image, but in so doing required the Gothic to discover new analogues for its original tropes. American occult terrors lurked in the hidden corners of New York loft apartments and Brownstones and the homes of Washington diplomats and forests around small towns. This very American and almost nihilistic spirituality could not be combatted by anything other than the full weight of a revived Catholic Church, ready with exorcisms, holy water, prayer and candles. Such Catholicism, with its rituals, empty cavernous churches and warrior priests fighting the ancient evils inherent in the American condition, is, ironically, bereft of religious anchors and floating in a secular, consumerist hell—the American dream turned into nightmare. Catholic symbolism is now, however the rather lazy cliche of American gothic filmmakers of recent decades, entirely emptied of its original power and social meaning. Other countries followed suit, their national concerns becoming a national modification of ‘Anglophone’ gothic imagery and language to their particular needs. In Italy the taste for gialli, a peculiar variation on the slasher movie, followed a decade in which British actors such as Christopher Lee were the stars of Hammer horror copycat movies featuring all the paraphernalia of an older nineteenth-century gothic world. These films, mostly made in black and white were eventually replaced by full colour renditions of a modern Italy rendered in ­fascist-modernist architecture that had little to do with the origins of the genre. Dario Argento’s oevre is one based on a dreamlike and nightmarish twilight world where cinematography creates a peculiarly strange and alienated mise en scene inhabited by deranged black-gloved murderers who stalk victims in films in which there is a mixture of sex, violence, knives and extreme violence. In Profundo Rosso (1975) and Tenebre (1982), the slasher film takes on the qualities of type of hallucinatory surrealism peculiarly Italian in feeling and expression. Films for the growing Spanish speaking audiences of America saw Browning’s Dracula reshot at night and acted out for a Hispanic audience with Bela Lugosi replaced by Carlos Villarias and Browning giving way to George Melford. In Spain itself, during the 1970s older gothic stars such as Boris Karloff would make

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appearances in poorly made vampire flicks. Jesus (Jess) Franco also began making highly erotic versions of gothic classics in the 1970s alongside ‘remakes’ and reworkings of classic Dracula and Frankenstein themes. Female Vampire (1975) is one of a number of films which mixes horror and sex. In the film the vampire Irina Karstein (played by Lina Romay who is nude for almost every scene!) has taken to living in modern day Madeira and kills people by draining their vitality during sex. Such overt sexuality was unknown to British or American gothic films where any eroticism was heavily censored. In Franco’s movies the Gothic is eroticised and violence replaced by sexual games. Meanwhile, in Latin America during the 1980s the older European tropes, especially of vampires, were used to ‘gothicise’ contemporary social issues and as political critiques of dictatorial and exploitative regimes. The transition into transcultural ‘Gothico Tropical’ was first used in Luis Ospino’s ‘Pura Sangra’ (1982) as a commentary on Colombian poverty, class division and uncaring dehumanised capitalism.3 In the first decades of the twenty-first century the work of Mexican director Guilermo del Toro has reinterpreted the Gothic through the lens of a fantastical rethinking of the ‘repressed’ history of fascism in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the romantic possibilities in the old Universal horror franchise with films such as The Shape of Water (2017), whilst the Spanish based tale The Nun (2018), directed by Corin Hardy returns to gothic literature’s earliest tropes whilst referencing American films such as Daniel Meyrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Sean Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) including, for good measure, a cast of millennial youngsters. Whether in film or literature, television or interactive gaming, the Gothic becomes the space where secular fears reside and may be explored with the bonus of entertainment. Such space may only be relatively safe. As the Gothic grew through the last decades of the twentieth century the boundaries of the genre’s taste and decorum, worked out through long practice, began to change. Stephen King was a relative conservative in reworking essentially 1950s gothicism, but he and James Herbert, although writing within the genre widened it to include scenes of abjection (Carrie [1974]) and disgust (The Rats [1974]). Both however were relatively conservative with references to Universal Films in Herbert’s later books like The Magic Cottage (1988). King has a lasting obsession with a childhood in the 1950s. Herbert looks back to the ruins of the Blitz. Clive Barker changed pulp horror, for he was interested in the sadistic and perverse within occult in suburban England. The creation of the Pinhead universe in The Hellbound Heart (1986) and the Hellraiser films was a Sadeian step into the pleasure of violence and the violence of pleasure. It coincided with the creation of the Torture Garden night club and the gender fluidity of ­sado-masochism. Sado-masochism pleasure combined with the frisson of fear was also to be found in Whitley Streiber’s Communion (1987) a supposedly authentic story of alien abduction recalled through psychological therapy. Thus aliens, extreme sexuality and occult rituals were added to the gothic repertoire with the emphasis on body parts, bodily fluid (all shades of green and white and with the consistency of mucus), dismemberment and, above all blood, not the tomato blood

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of the Hammer horror films, but a new dark, viscous filmic blood which pools and spurts. Dark oozing or spurting blood, not ‘red’ splatter blood and beheadings seem the new symbol of trauma in gothic film. The appearance of body gothic and torture porn has realigned Gothic with freakdom, but lost the earlier compassionate connection in tales such a Victor Hugo’s moral tale The Man Who Laughs (1869) and the silent film version by Paul Leni, or even Browning’s Freaks. Modern freakdom now combines weird science with zombification. Hence the Second World War may be ‘gothicised’ in ways that teeter on the brink of both racism and bad taste, but, nevertheless, stick closely to the gothic tropes of the dark forest and the subterranean dungeon and dark corridors of the eighteenth century. These are now metamorphosised into the atomic or experimental bunker, apparently abandoned but actually filled with the terrible detritus of a forgotten or repressed past—the past of an abandoned experimental hospital where plastic sheets and coils of electric wire suggest torture chambers and where the lights never work. Into this world the adventurers sally only to find blood-spattered walls and undead mutants. Such tropes are taken from the experiments of Josef Mengele and the horrors of Auschwitz. Most notorious of these films is Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (2009) where the protagonists fall victim to a mad German dissectionist, but there is also the film series originated by Steve Barker in 2012 which pits a hapless group of soldiers against insane Nazi doctors and zombie stormtroopers, on which theme variations abound. In The Devil’s Tomb (2009), directed by Jason Connery. Cuba Gooding Jnr leads a group of mercenaries into a labyrinthine tunnel to fight the Nephalim of the Book of Genesis. Eli Roth seems intent upon reproducing horror from extreme nightmarish trauma. In this way he has dallied with film imagery that teeters upon torture pornography and the extremes of voyeuristic pleasure. His film Inferno (2013) is a version of the banned Italian film Cannibal Ferox (1981) directed by Umberto Lenzi which was itself a type of faux snuff movie about Brazillian cannibals and was banned in a number of countries. Such films seem to cross the line from being ‘political’ critiques of the destruction of the jungle by industrialisation to gruesome pastiches of the innocent American abroad caught up in the extreme violence of primitive savages. Each book or film picks up a number of tropes and wilfully or unknowingly reworks them for its contemporary audience and ecological gothic is an easy and contemporary way of making inexpensive movies with an environmental message. Whether it is a film set in mitteleuropeen backroads (Severance [2006] directed by Christopher Smith), Polish forests (Shrine [2010] directed by Jon Knautz), the depths of the Scottish Highlands such as Neil Marshall’s werewolf adventure Dog Soldiers (2002), Irish bogs or English moors (Paddy Breathnack’s 2002 remake of Shrooms or the Leprechaun series as well as Xmoor [2014] directed by Luke Hyams), each is a return to the exotic and orientalising modes of earlier iterations. Such reinterpretations often also reproduce the racist and xenophobic stereotyping they eschew. Gothic literature has always been both tasteless and perverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out in regard to his son’s reading choices. Poe may be considered ‘tasteless’ in tales such as ‘Berenice’ (1835) or ‘Ligeia’ (1838) with

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their necrophilic and fetishistic endings. The decadence of horror movies such as the banned videos of the 1970s and 1980s (the ‘video nasties’ in Britain) or Six’s Human Centipede II (2011) which provide very visceral entertainment may be more than an effect of corruption of taste due to the exhaustion of appetite. The notion of a decadent age suggests, not merely exhaustion, but nostalgia for a golden age, but what age is the golden age of gothic film and how is that to be judged and by what criterion? Gothic taste mutates. Even at its origins the smell of sulphur and bad breeding stuck to works like those of Matthew Lewis, if not to Ann Radcliffe. Tastes change, but one cannot help but think that breaking good taste is partially what subversive gothic art is about and conservative gothic imagination tries to suppress. Hence two gothic worlds utilise the same imagery but for different purposes. The original tropes of the genre include moving from familiar and safer territory into foreign and therefore dangerous lands (mostly Italy, Spain and Germany, sometimes the East, and later, the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania), wicked aristocrats, castles, dark passages, dungeons and cellars, wild mountain landscapes and forests graveyards, bats and moonlight, lightening and thunder, threatened virgins, dark curses and dire warnings, occult practices and livid monsters or the undead which stalk battlement and chapel alike are still the tropes we have in contemporary versions of the genre which remain remarkably unchanged or are changed to mirror contemporary fears which are may not be too far away from their origins in the conservative version the genre. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 reworking of Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), an isolated and temporarily abandoned and ‘haunted’ hotel, complete with maze substitutes for a ruined castle; in James Wan’s Saw (2004) it is an abandoned warehouse that substitutes. Tropes are developed and attenuated, but stay true to a distant origin. Peter Blatty’s nove, The Exorcist (1971), ground shifting turn into child possession and occultism, still began in the Middle East and a priest- archaeologist who uncovers ancient evil. Ridley Scott put the Gothic into space complete with fanged monster and dripping passageways in Alien (1979). Thomas Harris reinvented gothic literature with tales of an ‘aristocratic’ and monstrous psychopathic killer with six fingers and oubliettes full of victims, who is chased by a heroine of stoic proportion through museum crypts filled with deaths head moths; Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code (2003) rethought part of the plot of the Matthew Lewis’s The Monk with psychopath albinos and forbidden mysteries hidden deep in the Vatican. Elsewhere, Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) reconstructs the dungeon as a touristic torture chamber in an abandoned facility in Slovakia, whilst in Hostel II (2007) he includes a scene clearly based on the supposed blood lust of the Countess Bathory and finishes with a pastiche of a Slovakian medieval folk festival. The black comedy, Severance (2009) directed by Christopher Smith, exchanges a Germanic Black Forest for a patch of forbidding nowhere in a former Soviet country (as does Brad Parker in The Chernobyl Diaries [2012]), whilst The Nun returns to ­eighteenth-century tropes regarding the Catholic Church. Indeed, in The Nun we have murder, revenge from a ‘bloody and malevolent bloody nun’, haunted seminaries, graveyards, thunderous skies, doubles and Catholic priests, most of the film

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centred on Spain as Dan Brown chose Italy. This is gothic nostalgia reworked as contemporary setting. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the Gothic really needed no imagined historical setting to work in film, although allusion to the past was a prerequisite. Modernist Gothic is most evident in the Universal quickie, The Black Cat (1934) directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig and Bela Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Verdigas, a mad architect and a ­revenge-filled doctor fight a strange psychological battle over a female American honeymooner, Joan Allison injured after a bus crash whilst in Hungary. The house that the architect Poelzig lives in is modernist deco dream, but it is built over a prisoner of war camp and fortress. In the old gun casements the architect stores dead women exhibited as fetishistic trophies. Everything in the house is contemporary but everything alludes to the past, the doctor returns as living ‘revenant’, the architect’s wife (Karen played by Lucille Lund) moves as somnambulistically as a vampire and is dressed accordingly, the architect himself is an occultist with a hint of Aleister Crowley and he is finally flayed alive as the house/castle is blown to smithereens killing all inside except for the two honeymooners, typical American innocents abroad. As Verdigas remarks, in this high tech modernist edifice, ‘even the phone is dead’. The old tropes (now clichéd) are often updated as technology changes. Thus the strange environment of a laboratory and of modern technology replaced outdated equipment in Whales’ version of Frankenstein, where the technology of the mad scientist’s laboratory is no longer the vague suggestions of Mary Shelley’s book, stranded in a time when such technological advances were impossible to describe. The electricity of Frankenstein’s lab, Frankenstein’s lab coat and the fact that his assistant Fritz stole the brain from a medical university’s demonstration theatre constitute a modernity quite unlike the actual period of the original book’s creation. Nevertheless, this is counterposed by the fact that the laboratory is in an abandoned tower (with no electrical connection), that Fritz is a hunchback cripple, and that the stolen brain is ‘abnormal’. That the tower is constructed on German Expressionist lines, is at the centre of a horrific mountain storm and has a dungeon, more than compensates for the syringes, van der Graf generators, operating trolleys and surgical equipment, and the cinematic converter lamps that attempt to make the laboratory look ‘modern’. Thus tradition is preserved in modernity. So it is with later films where the banality of modern life is the natural setting for gothic fear, especially for those films set in the United States where suburban houses contain bathrooms (Hitchcock’s Psycho) telephones (I Know What You Did Last Summer) and televisions (Poltergeist) and even toilets (The Nun) that harbour dark malevolence. Nowhere in an American kitchen is ever safe, the basement simply there to avoid. Suburbia contains horrors in ordinary objects as the Japanese film industry understood with Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge (2002 as Ju-On and remade 2004) with its haunted lofts and hallways, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) with the fear of video technology, Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989), with its erotic obsession with metal or Nbuhiko Obayashi’s bizarre Hausu (1977). Nowhere has the Gothic been more successfully reinvented

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than in Japanese film of the last three decades with its images taken from folk fears, reproduced through the lens of filmic technique of the modern quotidian and mundane. Equally, platforms such as YouTube offer a smorgasbord of strange photographic images and backstories ever available for gothic appropriation. Even real ‘murders’ such as that of Elisa Lam (Lam Ho Yi) on 30 April 1991 at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles whose bizarre behaviour in a lift and corridor was caught on CCTV and appears even more disturbing than that of the corridor footage central to the weird goings-on in The Grudge may be appropriated. Lam’s inexplicable death has spawned an industry of gothic explanations, conspiracy theories, accounts of serial killers and featured in films such as Dark Water (2005) and a number of television detective/horror stories. Thus art imitates life and life becomes a source of the macabre. Lifts in hotels have been a source of unease since the tsunami of blood which issued from closed elevator doors in The Shining. ‘Found documentary footage’ filmed on grainy handheld cameras, and first used in The Blair Witch Project now inform many low budget gothic horrors set in lonely or abandoned buildings. Yet, staples remain. Haunted asylums and silent hospitals still create a gothic frisson whether it be William Friedkin’s The Exorcist III (1990), Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island (2010) or The House on Haunted Hill (William Castle 1959; William Malone 1999). Despite a century of change the Gothic holds its own place in popular culture. Children as young as two or three regularly watched the Count von Count (a Bela Lugosi parody complete with purple skin, cloak and fangs) on Sesame Street and he now also appears on The Furchester Hotel, a Muppet show spin-off for very young children. Older children may watch Vampirina, a schoolgirl vampire based on Elvira’s 1960s look, read the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine or delve into Lemony Snicket. At the cinema there’s the cartoon world of Hotel Transylvania, or films such as Scooby Doo for an older child audience. At the same time the Addams family came to the big screen in 1991 and 1993. Dark vampiric heroes now haunt obsessional adolescent females in romance literature similar to that written by Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century. Shelves are dedicated in bookshops to this subgenre, whilst in the late twentieth century there were television, film and book series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), True Blood (2008–2014) and Twilight (2008–2011). Young women may have more agency than in Radcliffe’s day, but the tropes remain largely the same. Wolfmen have been updated from their filmic origins in Stuart Walker’s The Werewolf of London (1935) and George Waggner’s The Wolfman (1941) to inhabit films like John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1881) and Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981), which references The Wolfman, but also were reimagined as a ‘feminist’ version of coming of age in movies such as in Ginger Snaps (2000). More than any other film Ginger Snaps seemed the horror film for the millennium. Two EMO sisters of a loving but un-noticing suburban family are faced with harassment and school bullying as well as the onset of menstruation and sexual awareness. Adolescent female ‘trauma’ over periods (constantly referred to in the film as the ‘curse’ or the ‘cramps’ and graphically displayed in blood-red visuals

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which are both abject and terrifying), allows the narrative to take in both teenage angst and werewolf terrors; one sister growing a phallic tail, fur and fangs as sexuality dawns into animal lust, whilst the other ‘plain’ sister searches for a cure with her scientist boyfriend. The film ends as a type of old dark house slasher without closure or explanation. Yet if Ginger Snaps reinvents the Gothic for the teenager, so Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods (2011) is a film for horror aficionados. The film puts a very final line under the lost-in-the-woods gothic of old. Its comic apocalyptic message, put over by a group of victims clearly based on Scooby Doo’s gang (with ‘Shaggy’ as the central character), makes it both a pastiche and a nihilistic critique of the manipulations of modern horror culture. Of course, it is H. P. Lovecraft’s dreaded ‘Old Ones’ who finally rise to create the apocalypse which in Lovecraft is always avoided. As has been shown the Gothic does not stand still. Reworking old tropes and inventing new ways those tropes may be expressed is central to the gothic sensibility and new analogues follow as technology changes and society evolves. The old battlements and dungeons of the crumbling gothic castle may be rethought within contemporary spaces. Zombies now shamble across apocalyptic spaces and dead little girls descend backwards down the stairs of anonymous suburban houses. New twentieth-century monsters have emerged from the urban landscape too. Zombies and serial killers and urban scare figures taken from German fairy stories fill our films and the Internet. ‘Victor Surge’s’ creation of the Slender Man in 2009 as a ‘creepy pasta meme’ was a modern rewriting of the Pied Piper tale emphasising the closeness of supernatural danger and childhood innocence in an age preoccupied with the fear of paedophiles and with the obsession of constant parent surveillance. Slender Man tells us the world has lost its innocence and danger is always in your peripheral vision. The repertoire has widened too. The psychopathic clown has joined the repertoire of horror monsters. Almost always a deranged and deformed male, the clown has the same liminality as a vampire, an utterly ambiguous figure at once amusing and comforting and at the same time terrifying and monstrous, a mask of sheer malignity on his face and a grin hiding razor-sharp teeth. Moreover, the clown also belongs to the freaks and deformed protagonists who inhabit the horror circus of fear. It is in the circus that children first encounter clowns, who later return as the nightmares of adult memory, both something repressed and something h­ alf-forgotten, creatures who exist neither as reality nor simulacrum. Stephen King thinking about a new book and reminiscing about the Universal horror monsters recalled, I had an idea …that I wanted to write a really long book that had all of the monsters in it. I figured if people think I’m a horror writer… ‘I’ll get all of monsters together…; I’ll get the Vampire, I’ll get the Werewolf, and I’ll even get the Mummy…. But then I thought to myself, There ought to be one binding, horrible, nasty, gross, creature kind of thing that you don’t want to see, [and] it makes you scream just to see it. So I thought to myself, What scares children more than anything else in the world? And the answer was ‘clowns’. So, I created Pennywise the Clown.4

The figure of the psychopathic clown is now ubiquitous, turning the ‘infantalised’ comfort of Ronald McDonald into psychopathic nightmare: the eater eaten.

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Clowns may be found in films such as Killier Clowns from Outer Space (1998), Spawn (1997), House of a Thousand Corpses (2003) directed by Rob Zombie, Zombieland (2009) directed by Ruben Fieschler, Stitches (2012) directed by Conor McMahon, as well as appearances in television programmes and series such as Stephen King’s It from 1990 directed by Tony Lee Wallace (and revived for the screen in 2017 by Andy Muschietti) or American Horror Show, or as a masked rock musician in groups such as Slipnot). The clown is no longer portrayed as an innocent, slapstick comic in a circus with a red nose. Clowns are now figures of terror, malevolent freaks out to kill children, teenagers and party goers; even The Joker (dressed as Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight [2008]) has taken on the motley and King’s Pennywise and Zombie’s Captain Spaulding have now joined the pantheon of memorable filmic horror characters. The reappearance of the voodoo doll in the likes of Chucky (series beginning 1988) and the puppet in Saw (series beginning in 2009), as well as the maniacal laugh, pancake make-up and psychotic intent of the Halloween clown and living doll return us to the early gothic world of the circus freak, occult demon and the physically perfect automaton of European nightmares. With interactive augmented reality games such as Silent Hill Origins (2007), BioShock (2007), Gone Home (2013), Bloodborne (2015) and Night in the Woods (2017) and fairground thrill rides (with names like ‘Vampire’ at Alton Towers theme park) we can experience what once we could only imagine. The Gothic is the genre that describes itself, the genre of mutation continues to mutate into the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it is in the sphere of goth lifestyle, that mostly problematises the subject. Goths do not, in general, take an interest in gothic literature and may not even like horror movies. Their focus on bands, festivals and clubs which began in the 1980s is not directly tied to gothic history, but was (and remains) rather an independent reaction to dull working life. Gothic tropes inform gothic lifestyle but they have been modified for a new generation, now themselves middle aged. The emphasis on Victorian mourning wear and tight bodices for women and frilled shirts and heavy boots and leather coats for men with steampunk accessories for both genders as well as a considerable interest in Victorian imperial uniforms, cross-dressing and the affectations of Marie Antoinette suggest something quite different from the mainstream of Gothicism and even though the main gothic festival in England is held at Whitby with its associations with Dracula, a Dracula cosplay character is rarely encountered on the street during festival time. Even so, and despite the lack of interest in gothic literature, gothic lifestyle adheres to a tradition of gender fluidity, romanticism and masquerade inherent in gothic art from the nineteenth century, but dressed in an homage to the costumes from a Corman movie or a Hammer film by Terence Fisher. In this case the reproduction of Gothicism is a simulacrum of a simulacrum without origin or history, an experience of pure superficiality which nevertheless, wears a mask. Gothic lifestyle or cosplay amounts to the most serious form of carnival and cabaret where deception and seduction cloak a reticence regarding authenticity and where the authentic self is revealed only in the theatrics of serious play. Goths whose day time jobs may be mundane or tedious ironically become themselves or become their ‘other’

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inherent or repressed selves in goth-inspired costume—revelation in disguised form. Moreover how does one reconcile bands such as Siouxie and the Banshees, The Cure or The Sisters of Mercy who insisted, despite appearances, that they were not goths, or account for the work of illustrator Edward Gorey (perhaps the purist goth of all) whose Victorian cautionary tales he has referred to as surrealist rather than Gothic. Such conundrums complicate and confuse the issue of what exactly defines the gothic sensibility.5 This book is an exploration of the question: what has the Gothic become in the last hundred years? This volume contains seventy-two chapters covering the full range of gothic developments between 1918 and the present, written by the world’s leading experts in the area. It forms the first volume of a series of three works which explore in the most acute and careful detail the development of the genre since its inception over 250 years ago.

Notes 1.  A full study of the urban gothic of London by the editor will appear in the Palgrave Pivot series (2021). 2.  The following are definitions from contributors to this volume and members of the International Gothic Association. 3.   First brought to my attention by Leanna Talevera. 4.   For the complete discussion see, https://www.thatericalper.com/2017/09/23/time-stephenking-met-pennywise-ronald-mcdonald/. 5.   ‘Hauntology’ is perhaps the most obvious rethinking of the Gothic for twenty-first-century enthusiasts and appeared around 2003 to express interest in post-1960s popular culture. It not only includes filmic, televisual and online representations but is also interested in new age-ism, homoeopathic cures, occult and pagan ideas and the eerie. It is a culture of edge lands, and liminality, music and nostalgia and may ultimately be a very British phenomenon with the same roots as Edwardian ruralism.

Bibliography Addams, Charles, Drawn and Quartered (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1943). Addams, Charles, Homebodies (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1954). Addams, Charles, Black Maria (New York, Simon Schuster, 1960). Addams, Charles, Monster Rally (New York, Pocket Books Inc., 1965). Addams, Charles, Favourite Haunts (London, WH Allen/Virgo Books, 1977). Addams, Charles, The World of Charles Addams (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992). Addams, Charles, The Addams Family Album (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992). Anson, Jay, The Amityville Horror (London, Pan Books Ltd., 1983). Austen, Jane, and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia, Quirk Books, 2009). Barker, Clive, Books of Blood: Volume Two (London, Sphere Books Limited, 1984). Barker, Clive, Books of Blood: Volume Three (London, Sphere Books Limited, 1984).

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Barker, Clive, The Hellbound Heart (London, Fontana, 1991). Bataille, Georges, Literature and Evil (London/New York, Marion Boyars, 1990). Bloom, Clive, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (London, Continuum, 2010). Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990). Botting, Fred, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1995). Brunvand, Jan Harold, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: Urban Legends and Their Meanings (London, Pan Books Ltd., 1981). Burton, Tim, Tim Burton by Tim Burton (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2009). Cain, James, M., Double Indemnity (London, Pan Books Ltd., 1983). Conrich, Ian, and Laura Sedgwick, Eds., Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Coolidge-Rask, Marie, London After Midnight (The Imaginary Book Company, [1928] 2012). Davies, David Stuart, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Ripper Legacy (London, Titan Books Limited, 2016). Davison, Carol Margaret, and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Eds., Global Frankenstein (London, Palgrave, 2018). Endore, Guy, The Werewolf of Paris (London, Panther, [1934] 1963). Estleman, Loren D. Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes (London, Titan, 2010). Estleman, Loren D. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula (London, Titan Books, 2012). Forshaw, Barry, British Gothic Cinema (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Gorey, Edward, Amphigorey (New York, Penguin, 1972). Gorey, Edward, Amphigorey Too (New York, Penguin, 1975). Gorey, Edward, The Gashlycrumb Tinies (New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [1963] 1991). Gorey, Edward, Amphigorey Also (New York, Penguin, 1993). Gorey, Edward, Amphigorey Again (New York, Penguin, 2007). Groom, Nick, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2018). Hanna, Edward B., The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (London, Titan, 2010). Haslam, Jason, and Joel Fafelak, Eds., American Gothic Culture (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Herzogenrath, Bernd, The Films of Tod Browning (London, Blackdog Publishing, n.d.). Hill, Susan, The Woman in Black (London, Mandarin Paperbacks, 1995). Johnston, Derek, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Jones, Darryl, Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). Kerr, Gordon, Cthulhu (London, Flametree Publishing, 2014). Killeen, Jarlath, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). Lee, Vernon, The Virgin of the Seven Daggers (London, Penguin, 2008). Leroux, Gaston, The Phantom of the Opera (New York, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1986). Luckhurst, Roger, Zombies: A Cultural History (London, Reaktion Books, 2016). MacArthur, Sian, Gothic Science Fiction: 1818 to the Present (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Manville, Roger, Masterworks of the German Cinema (London, Lorrimer Publishing, 1973). McEvoy, Emma, Gothic Tourism (London, Palgrave, 2016). Moore, Alan, Bolland Brian, and Higgins John, Batman: The Killing Joke (London, Titan Books Ltd., 1988). Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell, From Hell (London, Knockabout Comics, 2006). Morrison, Grant, Arkham Asylum (New York, DC Comics Inc., 1989). Nelson, Victoria, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge MA, Harvard, 2003). Nelson, Victoria, Gothicka (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2012).

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Olson, Daniel, 21st Century Gothic (Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2010). Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, and Maria Beville, Eds., The Gothic and the Everyday: Living Gothic (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Rice, Anne, Interview with the Vampire (London, Warner Books, 1996). Roberts Chris, Livingstone Hywel, and Emma Baxter-Wright, Eds., Gothic: The Evolution of a Dark Sub Culture (London, Goodman, 2014). Ross, Clifford, and Karen Wilkin, The World of Edward Gorey (New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1996). Round, Julia, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co., 2014). Scharf, Natasha, Worldwide Gothic (Church Stretton, Shrops., Independent Music Press, 2011). Skal, David, J. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (London, Andre Deutsch, 1990). Skal, David, J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (London, Plexus, 1993). Sonser, Anna, A Passion for Consumption: The Gothic Novel in America (Bowling Green, University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Strieber, Whitley, Communion: A True Story (New York, Avon Books, 1988). Theroux, Alexander, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 2000). Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, Ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, New York University Press, 1996). Wisker, Gina, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (London, Palgrave, 2016). Wolfreys, Julian, Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture, 1800– Present (London, Palgrave, 2018). Wood, Gabby, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London, Faber and Faber, 2002). Woolrich, Cornell, Black Alibi (New York, First Ballantine Books, 1982). Woolrich, Cornell, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (New York, First Ballantine Books, 1983).

Television Addams Family, The Dr Who Munsters, The Penny Dreadful Scooby Doo Whitechapel

Comics Haunt of Fear, The Tales from the Crypt Weird Science

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Websites and YouTube Asian horror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjjGBR18n4Y Phantom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EExGWC0_OZA http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602571h.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T93x32Hkgj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-4_dwFeLIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfVj7RtsYxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suYKHimQwt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzcyPweRyC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gjrwV-XLRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi2tTPPUNL025.00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WczgvZzoBL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v1.08=HWr_benB_QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSk-SGNBsS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fC3QzG_nGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCUQg_j9yPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS_fq9ii4Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVqm1-rEttc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHA3wkltCns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7apuW_2lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VSb91YO2bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rKHSpt02DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2O7blSSzpI https://www.creepypasta.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_JK8uIywJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BChuMtWjYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNKg8dvtqSQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHKGoPSJsB4

C. Bloom

Global Gothics

Latin American Horror Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz

In his introduction to the influential Antología de la literatura fantástica/The Book of Fantasy,1 Adolfo Bioy Casares defines The Castle of Otranto as representative of a tedious genre of castles, spider webs, storms, and bad taste.2 This judgement summarises the canonical view of the Gothic in Latin American criticism during the larger part of the twentieth century, a rejection that, in many cases, had more to do with terminology than with a dismissal of gothic forms. The Antología includes short stories featuring vampires, ghosts, and old castles; although associated with the Gothic in European countries and in the United States, these were branded motifs of fantastic literature in Latin America. Moreover, the Gothic has been considered by some to be a sort of colonial imposition in Latin America, a foreign mode of representation that does not reflect regional identities. Other forms on non-mimetic representation have also been traditionally rejected in favour of a focus on magical realism and/or lo real maravilloso, defined by Alejo Carpentier as the literary representation of Latin American and Caribbean beliefs, identities, and relationships with reality.3 Even though some critics have put forward gothic readings of magical realist texts,4 the two modes’ relationships with the uncanny or supernatural event are diametrically opposed: whereas magical realism accepts it as a part of reality (therefore defining Latin American understanding of the world as a fusion of realism and fantasy), the Gothic’s representation of said event is often connected to fear. However, more contemporary literary critics and writers—such as Emil Volek, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Wendy B. Faris5 among others—have pointed to the artificiality of the connection between magical realism and Latin American identity. Some have claimed the need to carry out more inclusive analyses of Latin American literature that go beyond artificial conceptions of

S. Casanova-Vizcaíno (*)  Binghamton University-State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] I. Ordiz  University of Stirling, Stirling, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_2

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nation and begin considering the multi-territorialised realities of literary products in the era of globalisation.6 But even in this moment of increasing interest in redefining local literatures, it is still more common to use terms such as terror and horror to describe the type of literary imaginations that criticism written in English would call Gothic. It is not our intention here to make a value judgement on the use of one term of the other. Nonetheless, we believe that an understanding of the Gothic as a mode that is possible (and definitely present) in Latin American fictions does not attempt to reject or obscure other readings of regional fiction; but rather aspires to advance and enrich criticism by considering new tools to examine existing cultural products. Following similar premises, there are some critics who have been increasingly centring their attention on Latin American Gothic. Some examples of monographs and edited collections which study this mode in the subcontinent include Ecos góticos en la novela del Cono Sur/Gothic Echoes in the Novel of the Southern Cone (2013) by Nadina Estefanía Olmedo; From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America (2015) by Persephone Braham; Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas (2016), edited by Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos (2016); Selva de fantasmas. El gótico en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos/ Jungle of Ghosts. The Gothic in Latin American Literature and Cinema (2017) by Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez; Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture (2018), edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (2018); and Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film (2019) by Carmen A. Serrano. EljaiekRodríguez, interestingly, discusses the process of tropicalisation in relation to Latin American Gothic as a practice of recycling, transforming, and deterritorialising the Gothic, with the aim of highlighting the artificiality of the mode’s construction of Otherness.7 Other critics understand the Gothic as a mode of representation rooted in local realities and histories that mirrors different processes of modernisation including, but not limited to: colonisation and occupation; formation of nation states after independence; and the failure of national projects that lead to violence and inequality.8 Apart from these texts, which specifically use the Gothic to interpret local manifestations of terror and horror, many other volumes have explored the presence of monsters in Latin America and the Caribbean. Some examples include Rosana DíazZambrana’s and Patricia Tomé’s Horrofílmico: Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe/Horrofílmico: Approximations to the Film of Terror in Latin America and the Caribbean (2012) and Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema (2018). This chapter offers an overview of some of the authors, themes, and tropes which have been studied as gothic in recent criticism with the aim of proving not only the existence of the mode in the subcontinent, but also its relevance in Latin American cultural production. Even though there are a considerable amount of gothic texts in the Latin American canon in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we have chosen to mention only a few so that we could centre our attention on texts published in the last thirty years. The publication of these works partly coincided with an increasing critical attention to the Gothic, as well as with the inclusion of critical theories that invite an understanding of the Gothic as a mode intrinsically connected to globalisation, such as Glennis Byron’s globalgothic.9 At

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the same time, our analysis does not intend to become an all-encompassing theory of Latin American Gothic, but rather to look at some fictions that, in our opinion, represent the different ways in which Latin American and Caribbean authors have engaged with the gothic imagination. We have focussed our brief approximation of the Gothic in Latin America into the analysis of three of the mode’s canonical monsters—zombies, cannibals, and vampires—followed by a section describing one of the most recent directions that the Gothic is taking in Latin America: the conscious appropriation of its global tropes to criticise and denounce local issues pertaining to past and present histories of political, social, and gendered violence. Our analysis, thus, attempts to combine the exploration of different manifestations of monstrosity that originated in Latin America and the Caribbean (the zombie and the cannibal) with other international figures of monstrosity which, although native to other parts of the world, have been widely explored by Latin American authors since the nineteenth century—specifically, the vampire. This multifocal approach aims to underline the complexity and transnationality of Latin American and Caribbean Gothic forms, as well as claiming their relevance in contemporary literature written in Spanish. Zombies and cannibals are the Caribbean’s contribution to the gothic mode. The origins of these creatures are rooted in the region’s folklore and history of colonisation. Specifically, the trope of the zombie, or living dead, has its roots in Haitian Vodou culture. At its inception, the zombie was in fact the soulless body of a plantation slave controlled by a Vodou priest or bokor. For Haitians, therefore, the zombie does not represent a menace to the living, but rather to the dead, who risk being resuscitated, zombified, and enslaved. As such, this creature represents lack of freedom and exploitation, and its portrayal, as noted by Dalton and Potter,10 touches on notions of race and colonialism. At the same time, its connection to Haiti—where the first black Republic was proclaimed in 1804 after the triumph of the slave rebellion—makes the zombie the perfect trope to represent social unrest.11 The idea of a controlled body that is both living and dead, exemplified by Haitian zombies, permeated North American culture during the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). This can be seen in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), considered the first zombie film, in which a woman travelling in Haiti with her fiancé is transformed into a zombie by a Vodou master who works in a sugar plantation. The film’s storyline perfectly exemplifies what Braham has identified as the central theme of the Gothic: violence against women. This is also present in other Caribbean gothic texts with zombies or other forms of zombism,12 such as the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Dominican13 writer Jean Rhys; the collection of short stories Pasión de historia y otras historias de pasión/Passion for History and Other Passionate Stories (1987) by Puerto Rican author Ana Lydia Vega; and Cuban writer Mayra Montero’s short story “Corinne, muchacha amable”/Corinne, Amiable Girl (1991).14 Therefore, the image of the Haitian zombie was not originally associated with the gory, monstrous creature who rabidly devours human flesh, as popular culture has come to depict it. It wasn’t until George Romero’s zombie films—Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978)—that the Caribbean zombie and its

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connection to slavery gave way to the metaphor of neoliberal consumption.15 Though Night of the Living Dead explores issues of racial segregation—the hero in the film is Ben, a black man living in rural America who is ultimately killed by a white sheriff—it is in this film that the ghouls (the term used to identify the zombies) first appear as monsters who attack in hordes and feed off the flesh of living humans. As a posthuman creature (whether in the form of a slave without a soul, or of a cannibalistic monster), the zombie in the Latin American and Caribbean imaginary has gone through a variety of intertextual processes that link it to different global models. This has to do with the trope’s fluidity and capacity to convey different meanings.16 As such, the zombie is able to represent multiple social issues—racism, consumerism, and migration among others—in different contexts that reflect a crisis in both modernity and postmodernity. In twenty-first-century Caribbean and Latin American narratives, the zombie appears as a contemporary creature whose presence denounces, or at least makes visible, social injustice, without necessarily resorting to a particularly grotesque appearance. This can be seen in the work of two contemporary Caribbean writers from Puerto Rico: in Pedro Cabiya’s novel Malas hierbas/Wicked Weeds (2010) and in Jotacé López’s short story “Coffea Arabica+” (2016). In Cabiya’s text, the main character—a zombie scientist looking for a cure to his zombism—takes the form of what Emily Maguire has identified as the “sentient zombie”, a creature who is completely aware of his status as living dead.17 But Malas hierbas is also the story of the main character’s colleague, Isadora, a woman of Haitian descent who travels between the Dominican Republic and Haiti on a mission to discover the origins of zombism and the practice of zombie trafficking, and who may or may not be—the plot does not fully reveal this— responsible for the main character’s undead condition. As critics have explained, Cabiya’s novel touches on issues of social alienation18 and national identity or dominicanidad (Dominicanness), and exclusion in Caribbean society.19 As both Braham and Maguire have noted, the novel ultimately deals with the main character’s lack of humanity and desire to connect to something bigger than himself. Human (or zombie) trafficking is also a topic in López’s short story. However, in “Coffea Arabica+”, zombies are presented as merely secondary characters: they are a group of unidentified immigrants brought to an unnamed island in a futuristic setting to work on coffee plantations. This horde of zombies, who according to the first-person narrator are hard to tell apart, are not only reminiscent of the Haitian version of the myth, but they can also be seen as neo jíbaros, or contemporary peasants in rural Puerto Rico. Similar to their Haitian counterpart, these zombies are the victims of a master, in this case a corporation known simply as “La Compañía” (The Company) that controls over 80% of the coffee production on the island. Moreover, the zombified peasants are the silent victims of a black market that kills and dismembers them in order to sell their body parts as lucky charms. The remaining parts of the body are turned into compost and used to fertilise the coffee crops. Like the Romero films, López’s text tackles issues of consumerism and the exploitation of the land. In this sense, the presence of the zombie makes

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visible how enslaved labour is the means to control and, using Kerstin Oloff’s theories, also commodify nature.20 Moreover, in “Coffea Arabica+”, the zombie itself literally returns to the land that he/she works. Its body, either fragmented or as a whole, is what makes consumerism possible and what is consumed. Other representations of the zombie in contemporary Caribbean narrative are more reminiscent of the Romerian monster, a decomposed corpse who wanders around looking to consume. In the short novel El killer/The Killer (2007) by Puerto Rican author Josué Montijo, however, there is a twist to this model: the zombies are actually drug addicts who, instead of attacking humans in hordes, live as homeless and solitary wandering creatures who desperately need to find his or her next fix of heroin. The first-person narrator, named José Aybar, wakes up one day and decides to cleanse the city by killing all the tecatos—the colloquial term used in Puerto Rico to identify homeless drug addicts—that he identifies as “living dead”. For José, these creatures not only contaminate the landscape (their filthy bodies are covered in oozing ulcers) but they also represent the useless excess produced by a capitalist society. Tecatos do not work: they beg for money, steal, live on the margins of the city and society, and take drugs. But, just like a traditional zombie, José himself is a serial consumer, though in his case he devours different forms of visual and written fiction, both from high culture and popular culture. The novel, therefore, resembles an extremely violent video game where the main character feels the urge to kill—a calling of sorts—every single creature that crosses his path, creating a gory spectacle. In Montijo’s splatterpunk novel the zombie is the actual victim, doomed from the start. There is no salvation for the tecato, only death either at the hands of “el killer” or from drugs. This violent form of life (and death) that the novel presents exemplifies some of Puerto Rico’s most pressing issues in the recent past: drug trafficking and addiction, violence, and social inequality. The last part of the novel is José’s diary, in which he describes every single one of his killings and which he sends to a journalist for publication in the island’s main newspaper. Ironically, by silencing and erasing the body of the tecato-zombie, José manages to make it more visible than ever in the form of a chronicle that the whole population will presumably consume.21 Despite presenting two different images of the zombie what López’s and Montijo’s zombie texts seem to tell us is that the perverse logic of late capitalism, defined by materialism and lack of humanity, is inescapable. All that remains is consumerism and human waste. Zombie fictions have also proliferated in Latin American countries outside of the Caribbean. In the last two decades, these monsters have appeared in narratives that deal with specific local histories set in contemporary urban Latin America. Some of the topics explored in these fictions are: Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the short stories “Setenta y siete”/Seventy-seven (2018) by Francisco Ortega22 and “Nefilim en Alhué” (2011) by Omar Pérez Santiago from Chile; Argentina’s 2001 socio-economic crisis in Leandro Ávalos Blacha’s novel Berazachussetts (2007); and familial relationships in “Auténticos zombis antillanos”/Authentic Antillean Zombies (2001) by Argentinean writer Ana María Shua and “El hombre que fue Valdemar”/The Man Who Was Valdemar (2015) by Mexican author

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Norma Lazo.23 These powerful metaphors prove that terror continues to haunt the literary and cultural imagination of the Latin American continent in the form of cannibalistic consumption. As such, zombies serve as both the witnesses to and the extreme consequences of a traumatic past, as well as an unbearable present. Like zombies, cannibals are posthuman creatures. However, one of the most disturbing features about them is that, unlike contemporary zombies, nothing in their physical appearance necessarily reflects their monstrosity. Moreover, cannibalism is a taboo and, as such, it is always practised in secrecy. As with serial killers, cannibals look like us and live among us, which makes their presence even more uncanny and horrific; they are human yet they lack humanity. They do not adjust to or follow social norms, and their monstrous nature means they are unable to establish relationships with ordinary humans; they live on the boundaries of civilisation and they represent a transgression of social, moral, and even gastronomical boundaries. As Jennifer Brown explains, cannibalism implies both ambiguity and a series of contradictions: to eat human flesh is disgusting, yet it is also an exclusive practice that only a few people can enjoy.24 At the same time, for cannibals, humans are merely meat, as well as a delicatessen.25 The very act of eating, therefore, defines the cannibal as an Other who, in turn, separates and distinguishes him or herself from others. Cannibals repeatedly kill to consume and satisfy their needs. This notion of extreme and violent consumption puts the cannibal at the centre of critical discourses on consumerism, materialism, and power. Cannibals entered Western literary imagination with the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean—so much so that the Americas became synonymous with cannibalism [or anthropophagy] in literature in the period after the conquest and colonisation of the New World.26 In his seminal study on cannibalism and cultural anthropophagy, Carlos Jáuregui explains how in Christopher Columbus’s diaries, the word cannibal—used to describe the Caribs, the indigenous population of the Lesser Antilles—became the mark of barbarism and Otherness. Even though Columbus himself claims that he did not encounter any such creatures on the islands that he explored, his depiction of the region and its peoples led to the belief that monstrosity was an inherent characteristic of the Caribbean population.27 This can be seen in the cultural and historical evolution of the trope, starting with Shakespeare’s character Caliban (an anagram of the word cannibal) in his play The Tempest: a half-human, half-monster slave who works for Prospero, his white European master. Drawing from Shakespeare’s text, in 1900 Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó developed the philosophy of arielismo in his essay Ariel to explain what he considered to be the defining ideology of Latin America. Based on the character Ariel from The Tempest, a spirit who works for Prospero after being saved by him, arielismo was conceived as a way to oppose Latin America’s noble and spiritual culture (a harmonious combination of Greco-Roman culture, nineteenth-century thought, and Judeo-Christian custom) to the United States’ utilitarianism. Nevertheless, arielismo has been deemed by critics as elitist and out of touch with the region’s history of colonisation, exploitation, violence, and racism. Years later, in his 1971 essay, Calibán: Notes Toward a Culture in Our Americas, Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar instead proposed Caliban as a

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symbol of the resistance of the Latin American people in the face of colonisation, and in the context of the United States’ imperialism vs. Cuba’s newly implemented socialism. As such, both Rodó’s and Fernández Retamar’s works, lay out the grounds for an ongoing cultural debate on Latin America and its people that situates the trope of the cannibal at its centre. As Jáuregui further explains, the concept of cannibals and cannibalism is very rich and complex in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the cultural history of the continent, cannibalism relates more to colonialism and to the act of naming rather than eating.28 It is a powerful metaphor that names or refers to an Other, who is at times a submissive native, and at others a rebellious slave-monster. These ideas of encounter, Otherness, and monstrosity appear in two short stories from twentieth-century Latin American fiction: “Historia de caníbales”/Story of Cannibals (1924) by Peruvian writer Ventura García Calderón and “El hambre”/ Famine (1950) by Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Láinez. In García Calderón’s tale, told in first-person narrative, Víctor Landa tells the story of Lucien Vignon, a French explorer travelling to the Peruvian jungle in Iquitos where he meets a tribe of cannibals. In his efforts to avoid being eaten by the natives Vignon captures and kills an elderly woman and marries a young Indian woman whom he takes to Paris and where she quickly adapts to the European lifestyle. Years later, upon Vignon’s return to Peru to finish his exploration of the land, he is captured by his wife’s tribe, killed, and devoured in an act of vengeance and defiance towards the so-called civilised world. According to the members of the tribe, Vignon’s wife has become “civilised”; that is, she has allegedly become flirtatious, she has learned how to lie, and avoids bathing in the sacred rivers of her native land. In Mujica Láinez’s short story, a group of Spanish settlers during the foundation of Buenos Aires in 1536 have been corralled by the native’s bonfires. With all supplies gone, and unable to escape and search for food, Baitos—the crossbowman—takes refuge in his tent and remembers how he and his brother, Fernando, lived in poverty in Spain and dreamed of a more prosperous life in America. Consumed by an increasing hatred of the nobles who continue to live a life of wealth despite the soldiers’ dire circumstances, and in a desperate attempt to quell his hunger, Baitos attacks Captain Doria—whom he recognises by his fur coat— and, like a wild beast, cuts off and chews his hand. As Baitos desperately eats his kill, he gets a glimpse of a body killed by an Indian arrow in the distance. In a horrific twist, the crossbowman realises that he is actually eating his own brother— Fernando—who was wearing the captain’s fur coat. Fernando is still wearing the ring that belonged to their mother, the same ring that confirms to Baitos that he has become a savage cannibal. Driven to insanity he takes flight, convinced he can feel his brother’s hand choking him to death. Both of these stories challenge Latin America’s defining dichotomy: civilisation and barbarism. For nineteenth-century Latin American thinkers, Europe represented a civilisation that opposed Latin America’s wild and barbaric nature. However, García Calderón’s tale redefines “civilised” and “civilisation” as “treasonous” and “false”, whereas Mujica Láinez’s story attributes cannibalism to white Europeans, who are themselves the victims of the colony’s system of

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oppression. These fictions present gothic characters and atmospheres while also generating and destabilising certain dichotomies—in this case self/Other, civilisation/barbarism—that lie both at the heart of the region’s intellectual and cultural debate and of gothic fiction. In twenty-first-century Latin American and Caribbean narrative, the cannibal resurfaces as a gothic character not directly linked to specific moments of the conquest and colonisation of the region, but rather to some of the socio-economic consequences of neocolonialism and imperialism that have turned Latin America into a space of contention between members of opposing social classes. Ironically, in some of these stories, the act of consuming human flesh is not the true source of horror. Instead, rabid consumerism, materialism, social inequality, and political violence are now the driving forces that produce horror and that potentially lead to the emergence of cannibalism. Some of these issues can be seen in “La dignidad de los muertos”/The Dignity of the Dead (2012) by Puerto Rican writer Ana María Fuster Lavín and “Caníbal”/Cannibal (2018) by Bolivian author Liliana Colanzi. In “La dignidad de los muertos”, the main character, Celedonio Fernández—a poor fisherman living in the coastal Puerto Rican town of Loíza—spends his days recovering the dead bodies of those who have been victims of violence and thrown to the sea, those whose families cannot afford a funeral, and those who have been neglected by the government and died poor and homeless. Fernández’s work is seen by the townspeople as a way to dignify and recognise the poor, and he is therefore considered a hero. This changes when he is incarcerated for allegedly killing and eating Lisamar, the daughter of the island’s governor, who immediately uses his political and economic power to discredit and destroy Celedonio. After pressure from the media and the population, Celedonio is eventually pardoned. However, it is then that both the readers and the governor discover that he did indeed kill and cannibalise the woman. Celedonio claims that he did it to force the governor to hear his pleas for state aid for new housing. What the story suggests is, therefore, that the literal and monstrous cannibalism carried out by Celedonio is merely a tool to expose another type of cannibalism: the one practised by the privileged upper class who not only consumes merchandise but metaphorically “consumes” (lives off) the lives of the poor, left to mend for themselves. Similar to Mujica Láinez’s short story, where Baitos is both a victim of his social class as well as part of the violent colonisation of the territory, in Fuster Lavín’s tale Celedonio is the monster who makes visible the socio-economic inequalities that have been caused by years of colonialism in the island; he is a victim and a murderer, and his only real chance to change his status in the social structure is by eating a person from the class that has marginalised him. In contemporary Latin American narrative, cannibalism does not always have a material presence. Rather, it can linger in the background as a threat that never fully materialises. This is more obvious in Colanzi’s short story, in which two lovers from Bolivia, who are also drug traffickers, arrive in Paris at the same time that the news is reporting that a cannibal is on the loose, attacking people. The security cameras from the airport catch a glimpse of the monster who, in fact, looks more “like a teenage rock star” than a “butcher”.29 The cannibal could

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be anywhere, and he is, indeed, everywhere: his is an omnipresent image in the media, one that is constantly being consumed by viewers. As the first-person narrator watches the newscast her lover, Vanessa, leaves the hotel room to make a ­drop-off and disappears into the streets of Paris. The narrator is left wondering about her whereabouts and worrying about her possible fate at the hands of the cannibal. Meanwhile, she also reflects on her life before she met her lover and how it changed after starting a relationship with her; how, despite Vanessa’s occasional disdain, travelling and living wild adventures with her has actually saved both of them from a life of poverty and from the monstrosity of their suffocating everyday life in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. By the end of the story it is clear that Vanessa will never come back, that the cannibal will never be apprehended, and that the narrator will now be completely lost and at risk of returning to her old life. In Colanzi’s story, therefore, cannibalism is barely an actual practice (it is just glimpses of images and fragments of reports on the television). Instead, it is more of a presence that, although menacing, is far less dangerous than the protagonists’ ­fast-paced world where the dull past is always haunting the present. According to Mimi Sheller, in the context of the Caribbean—though we could extend her analysis to Latin America in general—both cannibals and zombies are tropes that show how the region has been consumed time and again by others, beginning with the European conquest and colonisation in the fifteenth century all the way to contemporary tourist practices, mainly carried out by white Europeans and North Americans.30 In this process, the Caribbean has been constructed as “difference”; it has been incorporated into discourses of modernity only to be expelled afterwards.31 What the stories of cannibals and zombies in twenty-first-century Caribbean and Latin American literature propose, however, is that this process of ingestion and inclusion followed by radical elimination no longer depends on a foreign and powerful Other. Rather, this relationship of domination established in that first encounter between the colonisers and the colonised has created the conditions that have led to what we could call “domestic monstrosity”. That is, these monsters are actually a product of internal racism, violence, and social exclusion that the inhabitants of the region impose on one another. In that new dynamic—a direct result of years of colonialism and of current neocolonial practices—zombies and cannibals can be both killers and victims. Even though vampires are not originally Latin American, their presence in the region’s literature goes far back. Latin American gothic vampires already make an appearance in the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of the modernista movement.32 This is not surprising if we take into consideration the European roots of the vampire myth and the source of inspiration of the modernista authors: French symbolism, the Parnassian movements and some North American authors, including Edgar Allan Poe.33 Some examples of the appearance of this myth in nineteenth-century modernista prose include, among others, the short story “Thanatopia” by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (written in 1893 but first published in 1925); “Vendetta” (1908) by Dominican34 author Fabio Fiallo; “El almohadón de plumas”/The feathered pillow (1917) and “El vampiro”/The vampire (1927) by Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga; “Vampiras”/Female vampires (1912) by

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Peruvian writer Clemente Palma; and Honduran author Froylán Turcios’s novel El vampiro (1910). These works reproduce, to varying levels, the quintessential elements of nineteenth-century European and North American vampires, from female vampires described as supernatural femme fatales to the terrifying ambiguity generated by the possibility of life after death. Both Quiroga’s “El vampiro” and Darío’s “Thanatopia” explore the power of technology to bring a beloved woman back from the dead, with all the consequences that such an endeavour might bring along (which were famously delineated in the English tradition by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). The incorporation of this topic answers to the modernistas particular relationship to scientific progress, characterised by both fascination and rejection. In Fiallo’s “Vendetta”, however, the woman in the story is not dead but asleep, and her beauty and chastity dazzle him to the point of bleeding her to death despite her pleas. These stories, alongside Palma’s “Vampiras”, reproduce the myth of the female vampire—and, to some extent, women in general—as a supernatural femme fatale who is both alluring and lethal to men. Quiroga’s “El almohadón”, on the other hand, equates the coldness of a loveless marriage with vampirism: the vampire, a viscous monster hiding in the newly wed Alicia’s pillow, sucks her blood while she sleeps, in the same way that the coldness of her husband’s demeanour drains her energy until she dies. Because of the structure and topic of the tale, as well as due to the fact that Quiroga considered Poe one of the maestros of short story writing,35 “El almohadón” has been extensively discussed by critics as having a Poesque style. Froylán Turcios’ novel El vampiro exemplifies a similar universal approach to literature which, in general terms, could be attributed to modernismo as a whole.36 Whereas the literary vampire finds its roots in European folklore, the story draws from ­pre-Columbian myths to construct the vampire villain who, according to Carmen Serrano, ­represents fears associated with the detrimental effects of modernity in Central America.37 Contemporary Latin American vampires reflect a postmodern response to nineteenth-century European gothic paradigms: whereas some authors approach the vampiric myth from a parodic perspective (often with the aim of generating a comical effect) others reproduce easily recognisable motifs of vampire fiction that reflect the intertextual conversations established with the gothic tradition. These fictions reappropriate characters, scenes, and key passages of well-known vampire narratives to displace them, transpose its main elements, and, in some cases (and using Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s theoretical background), “tropicalise” them.38 Examples of these processes are the creative appropriation of Dracula’s voyage to London in the ship Demeter in the novellas El viaje que nunca termina/The Journey that Never Ends (1993) by Peruvian author Carlos Calderón Fajardo and La ruta del hielo y la sal/The Route of Ice and Salt (1998) by Mexican writer José Luis Zárate. Zárate’s text is the most obvious homage to Bram Stoker’s original, since it includes a direct translation of the extract from Dracula containing the Demeter’s logbook. This extract, which details the horror of the captain’s last days as he experiences the strange events that make his crew slowly disappear, is combined

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with Zárate’s own contribution: excerpts from the captain’s diary. In it, the captain narrates his obsessive sexual desire for the sailors of the ship who, after being bitten by Dracula, come back from the dead in search of his blood. The predatory desires of the captain are described in a way that makes them parallel to the vampires’ craving for blood, reducing the men to their basic (almost animalistic) instincts. The explicit language used in the captain’s diary distances the novel from Stoker’s Victorian original, but the homage to Dracula and the intention to recreate the lost story of the Demeter are evident. Calderón Fajardo’s intertextual evocation of the ship’s voyage, on the other hand, is less literal but more parodical. El viaje que nunca termina tells the story of Englishwoman Sarah Ellen’s trip from England to Peru. Sarah Ellen is a historical figure who died in the coastal city of Pisco in 1913 to which, according to popular belief, she fled after being accused of vampirism in her home country. In Calderón Fajardo’s story, Sarah Ellen travels across the Atlantic in a ship that also carries her coffin and, as in Stoker’s ­original, witnesses how the members of the crew slowly disappear. The parody resides in the author’s manipulation of gothic tropes, which includes s­ elf-reflective and extradiegetic references to the mode, its characters, and its motifs. El viaje’s homage to Dracula, as well as its ability to intertwine the history and the myth of Sarah Ellen, has been deemed by Rosa María Díez Cobo to be a literary representation of a type of intercultural hybridisation that exemplifies both Latin American postmodernism and Peruvian global Gothic.39 Literary vampires are often described as citizens of the world, figures who are not bound to national frontiers and are therefore related to travel in a broad sense.40 As entities that transgress many boundaries (life/death, human/animal, known/unknown, present/past), vampires are, thus, bound to destabilise limiting conceptions of time and space. This is undeniably true for both Zárate’s Dracula and Calderón Fajardo’s Sarah Ellen and it becomes a defining factor of the main protagonists of Mexican author Adriana Díaz Enciso’s vampire novel La sed/ The Thirst (2001). The novel tells the story of Sandra, a young Mexican woman living in Veracruz who is seduced, bitten, and turned by vampire Samuel. They embark on a trip that takes them sailing around the world in Samuel’s ship with mortal Izhar, lover of both. The novel is focalised through Sandra and Samuel’s perspective, which allows the reader to be familiar (and empathise) with the feelings of the vampires. This process, which humanises the Other by granting it a voice, illustrates the late twentieth-century evolution of the vampire epitomised in English literature by Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. La sed exemplifies a type of contemporary literature written in Latin America that aims to explore universal topics beyond conceptions of nationhood and national identity—the vampire, in this context, becomes the perfect representation of a gothic subversion of these limits. Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa’s “Isabel”, included in the volume of short stories Prosa rota/Broken Prose (2000), also engages in an intertextual dialogue with a global gothic tradition. The gothic elements included in the story are mixed with motifs and tropes from erotic literature and melodrama, which creates a postmodern portmanteau that deconstructs literary genres and narrative devices, such

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as the role of the narrator and the characters in literature. The author Carmen Boullosa becomes a character in her own fiction at the same time that some of the characters turn into narrators. Simultaneously, the line differentiating reality and fiction is constantly put into question by the writer’s proclamation that the story is true and “it’s happening right now”.41 Boullosa’s main character transforms into a vampire after her partner breaks her heart. As a vampire, Isabel leads a chaotic existence defined by sexual encounters and murder, spreading a deadly plague which kills thousands of people in Mexico City and around the world. Isabel becomes a monster who serves her own sexual pleasure, but also a romantic heroine with a broken heart. She is, at the same time, the victim of a man and a victimiser of many men, and therefore challenges the conventions of the horror movie, of melodrama and of historical and societal expectations. Moreover, her sexuality transcends gender, race, and class, as she brings to her bed people from all backgrounds. As a challenge to heteronormative conventions, Isabel puts forward a model of pansexuality that breaks with the imposed decency of the body in the context of patriarchal societies. The subversion of the story can also be interpreted as a critique of the failed discourses that fuelled the creation of Mexican identity in the nineteenth century42 and to the social inequality of contemporary Mexico.43 Considered “the most Gothic of all major Latin American writers”,44 it seems necessary to include Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in any discussion of this mode in Latin America. Fuentes’s 2004 literary interpretation of Dracula is, moreover, one of the best-known contemporary Latin American literary vampires. The author published “Vlad” as a short story within the volume Inquieta compañía/ Restless company, a collection of gothic tales that reinvented (and Mexicanised) some of the tropes of the genre. The story was published independently as a novel in 2010 and translated into English in 2012. “Vlad” narrates the story of Vladimir Raku, an aristocrat from the Balkans who wishes to move to Mexico City, which, according to Eljaiek-Rodríguez,45 vividly exemplifies the deterritorialisation (or “putting out of place”) inherent to the tropicalisation of the Gothic. “Vlad” is, in fact, a reinterpretation of Dracula with a Mexican tone, which acts both as homage and as parody, not only of Stoker’s original, but also of its adaptations to the big screen, of other literary and cinematic vampires, and of the historical contexts that allegedly inspired the myth.46 Like some filmic adaptations of the myth— including Francis Ford Coppola’s version—Fuentes’ novel evokes Vlad Tepes as a historical figure. Vlad, like Coppola’s Dracula, wears an embroidered long robe and “never drink[s]… wine”.47 Fuentes’ vampire owes his baldness, bright white skin, and “long glassy nails”48 to the undead put onto screen by F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog. Moreover, the description of Minea (Vlad’s “daughter”) necessarily brings to mind the vampire child Claudia of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles as recreated in the screen by Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994). As in the case of “Isabel”, “Vlad” becomes a pastiche of historical accounts and intertextual references to the gothic tradition and the horror genre with a Mexican tropicalised twist. Vampires infiltrate Latin American literary imagery via the Modernista movement and a series of authors who looked for inspiration in European forms and

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tropes. As a transnational figure that precisely represents infiltration, the vampire has been reinterpreted, reimagined, and reterritorialised by many Latin American authors. These portrayals update this timeless creature and imbue it with local elements, exemplifying some of the transnational movements of cultural products that define the Latin American global Gothic. Whereas it is hard to anticipate what literary cultural productions in Latin American and Caribbean countries might be heading towards (and it is not our intention to attempt to come to an overarching, generalising, and limiting conclusion), many twenty-first-century gothic fictions in the continent seem to reflect a self-awareness of the transgressive possibilities of the gothic mode. In many cases, many Latin American gothic writers are avid readers of gothic literature from different world traditions; most of them, moreover, are aware of the possibilities of the mode to question and criticise social realities. A critical perspective and an awareness of a global terror and horror tradition is combined, in these cases, with an interest in reflecting local systems of oppression, and social and ecological injustices. Examples of these types of fictions include, among others, two internationally acclaimed volumes by Argentinian writers: Mariana Enríquez’s Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2016)/Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) and Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (originally published in 2014)/Fever Dream (2017). One very clear example of contemporary authors’ self-awareness and international influence when writing gothic fiction is Mariana Enríquez’s proclamation that, with her writing, she is “creating a new tradition of Latin American Horror”,49 that is, laying the foundation for new horror folklore that reflects Argentinian local issues. This is particularly relevant if we take into consideration the worldwide recognition that the author obtained after the publication of this volume, now translated into several languages including English, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, Hebrew, and Japanese. Her stories tackle different societal problems from a fiercely critical perspective. The short story “No Flesh Over Our Bones”, for instance, attempts to take the conversation about mental health issues outside of the medical discourse by focussing on a woman who falls in love with a skull. This macabre romance reminds the reader of the common graves opened during the Argentinian military dictatorship, a historical event that still haunts those from the younger generations as well as many of Enríquez’s characters. This is the case of the adolescent girls of “The Inn”, a powerful story that combines this haunting of the country’s past with the fears associated with a queer coming of age. Many of the author’s stories (and “The Inn” is one of them) explore religious imaginary and traditions as a source of fear and horror, exemplifying what we might call a gothification of religion. This is clearly seen in the author’s treatment of Catholic religion (the faith she was raised in50), although that is not the only system of belief whose horrors she explores: in “The Dirty Kid”, Enríquez tried to recover local superstitions such as San la Muerte, a northern saint that, as the author explains, has its origin in Guaraní traditions and was semiadopted by local Christians.51,52 The story also becomes a penetrating critique of the unjust social systems that, after years of economic crises, have allowed an

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impoverishment of the disadvantaged in urban areas in Argentina. The horrors of poverty are intertwined with an ecological perspective in “Under the Black Water”, a story in which the pollution of the river Riachuelo, in southern Buenos Aires, hides a Lovecraftian water monster that feeds on sacrifices from poor local neighbourhoods. “Things We Lost in the Fire”, the story that gives name to the volume, adopts a feminist perspective to explore the horrors of inequality and violence against women. A group of Argentinian women decide to start burning themselves to protest a growing wave of femicides and the standards of beauty that oppress them. The year 2015, during the time of writing, witnessed the foundation of “Ni una menos” (Spanish for “Not one [woman] less”), a fourth-wave grassroots feminist movement which was started by a collective of female artists, journalists, and academics in Argentina but has spread across several Latin American countries protesting femicides, the inequality of gender roles and the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and objectification, and defending the legality of abortion and transgender rights. Understood in this context, Enríquez’s story can be considered the literary representative of this contemporary feminist criticism, exemplifying a transgression which is explored through the gothic mode. Schweblin’s Fever Dream also tackles issues of environmental degradation using an intensely claustrophobic mode of narration which reproduces gothic tropes such as the anxieties of motherhood, fear of death, the possibility of life after it, and the interconnection of present and past. The story has the form of a dialogue between Amanda, who tries to recollect the disturbing events that separated her from her daughter, and David, who interrogates her about these memories. The novel takes a critical stance against the use of carcinogenic agrochemicals used in crop fields in the rural areas of the country, commercialised by companies such as Monsanto, which are having disastrous consequences on the health of the inhabitants of these areas. In the novel, as in some of Enríquez’s stories such as “Under the Black Water”, the source of terror is intrinsically connected to the deadly consequences of raw capitalist enterprise for the disadvantaged. In this regard, Schweblin and Enríquez’s fictions represent one of the tendencies of contemporary Latin American Gothic: a self-aware use of the mode as a subversive tool to interrogate and criticise the contemporary status quo and its systems of oppression. The texts discussed in this chapter constitute some of the most salient examples of the different ways in which Latin American Gothic has understood and represented monstrosity. Writers of what we are considering gothic fiction reformulate figures that originated in the region (such as zombies and cannibals), while also appropriating and tropicalising gothic forms produced by other traditions (such as vampires), exemplifying the multi-territorialisation of both Latin American literature and the Gothic. By making these forms visible, gothic narratives are able to draw attention to local realities that represent the consequences of uneven relationships between the centres of political and economic power and the Latin American periphery. While some texts put forth contemporary portrayals of a past of occupation and colonisation, others engage in a critical depiction of twentiethand twenty-first-century systems of oppression, such as social inequality, foreign

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intervention, and neocolonialism. The Gothic, thus, becomes a recurrent fictional tool to express the anxieties of the past and the present in Latin America and the Caribbean; through its constant appeal to the grotesque, fear, and the uncanny—as well as in the use of fragmented, complex, and hybrid narrative forms—the mode proves to be deeply ingrained in Latin American literary tradition. The new directions that the Gothic is taking in the region, moreover, point towards an increasing transnationality of its forms and topics. These forms, we believe, will continue reflecting the social and cultural richness of Latin American countries while also speaking of their common histories.

Notes

1. We are including the title of the published translation in italics. For volumes not translated into English, we have included our own translation in romans. 2. Adolfo Bioy Casares, “Prólogo”, in Antología de la literatura fantástica, ed. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1976), 7–14. 3. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (San Juan: La Editorial UPR, 1994). 4. Lucie Armitt, “The Gothic and Magical Realism”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 224–239. 5. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); Emil Volek, “Realismo mágico entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad: hacia una remodelización cultural y discursiva de la nueva narrativa hispanoamericana”, INTI 1, no. 31 (1991): 3–20. 6. Ángel Esteban and Jesús Montoya Juárez, “¿Desterritorializados o multiterritorializados?: la narrativa hispanoamericana en el siglo XXI”, in Literatura más allá de la nación. De lo centrípeto y lo centrífugo en la narrativa hispanoamericana del siglo XXI, ed. Francisca Noguerol Jiménez et al. (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011), 7–13. 7. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez, Selva de fantasmas. El gótico en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2017), 10. 8. Inés Ordiz and Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, “Introduction: Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Persistence of the Gothic”, in Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 7. 9. Glennis Byron, Globalgothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 10. David Dalton and Sara Potter, “Introduction: The Transatlantic Undead: Zombies in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures”, Alambique: Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía 6, no. 1 (2018), accessed January 23, 2019, https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1162&context=alambique. 11. Sarah Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 27–63. 12. Persephone Braham, From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 157. 13. From the island of Dominica. 14. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 51–53. See also, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic:

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S. Casanova-Vizcaíno and I. Ordiz The Caribbean”, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 229–257. 15. Dalton and Potter, “Introduction: The Transatlantic Undead”, 2. 16. Sarah Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie. 17. Emily Maguire, “The Heart of the Zombie: Dominican Literature Sentient Undead”, Alambique: Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía 6, no. 1 (2018), accessed January 23, 2019, https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1154 &context=alambque. 18. Braham, From Amazons to Zombies, 163–165. 19. Maguire, “The Heart of the Zombie”. 20. Kerstin Oloff, “Zombies, Gender and World-Ecology: Gothic Narrative in the Work of Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Montero”, in The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, ed. Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 47. 21. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, “‘Matar a todos los tecatos’ y revivir los géneros modernos: gótico y splatterpunk en la narrativa puertorriqueña actual”, Revista Letral, no. 14 (2005): 110–123. 22. Collected in the anthology King. Tributo al rey del terror/King. Tribute to the King of Terror, edited by Jorge Luis Cáceres. 23. Elton Honores, “El zombi en la nueva narrativa latinoamericana”, in Terra Zombi: el fenómeno transnacional de los muertos vivientes, ed. Rosana Díaz-Zambrano (San Juan: Isla Negra Editores, 2015), 237–250. 24. Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. 25. Ibid., 4. 26. Carlos Jáuregui, Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2008), 14. 27. Ibid., 48–51. 28. Ibid., 16–17. 29. Liliana Colanzi, “Caníbal”, in Nuestro mundo muerto (La Paz: Editorial El cuervo, 2016), 66. 30. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 143–145. 31. Ibid., 1. 32. We are using the term modernista in Spanish to differentiate it from North American modernism. 33. Carmen Serrano, “Duplicitous Vampires Annihilating Tradition and Destroying Beauty in Froylán Turcios’s El vampiro”, in Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 71. 34. From the Dominican Republic. 35. Horacio Quiroga, “El decálogo del perfecto cuentista”, in Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1996), 159–160. 36. Serrano, “Duplicitous Vampires”, 75. 37. Ibid., 72. 38. Eljaiek-Rodríguez, Selva de fantasmas. 39. Rosa María Díez Cobo, “The Vampiric Tradition in Peruvian Literature”, in Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 215. 40. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 111. 41. Carmen Boullosa, Prosa rota (Ciudad de México: Plaza Janés, 2000), 182. 42. Rosana Blanco-Cano, “Revisiones a las narraciones históricas mexicanas en Duerme (1994) e ‘Isabel’ (2000) de Carmen Boullosa”, Espéculo 40 (2008), accessed December 20, 2018, http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero40/boullosa.html.

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43. Inés Ordiz Alonso-Collada, “La reinvención del cuerpo femenino y la deconstrucción de los géneros: Vampirismo y subversión en ‘Isabel’ de Carmen Boullosa”, in La (ir)realidad imaginada. Aproximaciones a lo insólito en la ficción hispanoamericana, ed. Inés Ordiz Alonso-Collada and Rosa María Díez Cobo (León: Universidad de León, 2015). 44. Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, “Gothic Fuentes”, Revista Hispánica Moderna 57, no. 1/2 (2004): 297. 45. Eljaiek-Rodríguez, Selva de fantasmas, 144. 46. Inés Ordiz Alonso-Collada, “El vampiro literario mexicano en el s. XXI: entre el homenaje y la parodia”, in Vampiros a contraluz: constantes y modalizaciones del vampiro en el arte y la cultura II, ed. Diego Díaz Piedra and Sandra Rodríguez Fernández (Granada: Comares, 2015). 47. Carlos Fuentes, Vlad (Champaign, Dublin, and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), 37. 48. Ibid., 37. 49. Mariana Enríquez, “Creating a New Tradition of Latin American Horror”, Literary Hub (2018), accessed January 16, 2018, https://lithub.com/creating-a-new-tradition-oflatin-american-horror/. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. These topics had been explored by the author in previous publications, such as “El aljibe”/The Well (in the collection of stories Los peligros de fumar en la cama/The Dangers of Smoking in Bed [2009]) which exemplifies a continuation of themes and topics that configure the author’s literary universe and the Argentinian horror tradition.

Dark Tourism Joan Passey

Dark Tourist, a Netflix documentary series released in 2018, follows journalist David Farrier as he “visits unusual – and often macabre – tourism spots around the world”.1 The series includes popular tourist sites and events, including sites of exorcisms, irradiated sites, haunted forests, JFK assassination tours, and World War II re-enactments. The documentary asks how the touristic intersects with the dark—how is the repulsive sometimes attractive? This chapter explores this question to situate ‘Gothic tourism’ in relation to dark tourism and thanatourism. It establishes the relationship between the touristic, the literary, and the Gothic, from the dawn of the railway to Thorpe Park’s Fright Nights. It will begin with an overview of gothic literary tourism in the nineteenth century, before asking how sites associated with gothic novels have become promoted and embraced as tourist sites. It goes on to demonstrate how tropes and motifs associated with Victorian gothic novels have influenced the perception and reception of gothic tourist spaces, tours, and events. Primarily, it will look at how the Gothic can be used to both create a safe distance between the tourist and the horror of the place or event, and is used to generate terror through dislocation, unfamiliarity, and temporal discombobulation. This temporal severance is essential to our understanding of a gothic tourism, as the mode so often relies upon the re-emergence of histories— most often, in these case studies, a distinctly Victorian gothic aesthetic. The railway rose alongside popular literature. The increased popularity and accessibility of both shaped the perception of the Victorian period and its sense of mobility, trajectory, and progress. The first British railway line opened in 1830, and the network spread quickly, reaching tendrils across the country—by 1850 over 6000 miles of track had been laid, by 1880 the network extended for 18,000 miles, connecting towns and cities, and changing the perception of space and mobility across class divides.2 This increased access to cities and regions created a sort of conceptual contraction of space, drawing Britain’s railway stations

J. Passey (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_3

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in towards each other—creating a sense of the claustrophobic exaggerated by booming population growth and the expansion of cities and suburbs. Victorian Britain was loud, bustling, interconnected, and shuttling rapidly towards a notion of modernity both exciting and terrifying. There were worries about landscapes being decimated by railway lines, railway accidents, and the relationship between the rail and other types of transgression—across social and moral boundaries as well as spatial ones. These anxieties surrounding the railway as an unstoppable force of change (both potentially excellent and disastrous) provided ample fuel for writers of the period. Not only were there a multitude of pamphlets, maps, and guides to the railways, but plots and narratives were being driven by the new potential of rail. At the same time, William Henry Smith saw the potential of the relationship between trains and reading and opened his first railway bookstall on 1 November 1848. Passengers wanted cheap books and newspapers with which to wile away the time on board— reading, after all, was significantly easier on a relatively smooth train than a bumping stage-coach. W. H. Smith’s were phenomenally successful book vendors, and popularised yellowback publishing—the sale of cheap, easily reproducible novels backed with yellow boards.3 Of particular interest to the travelling public were sensation novels and gothic novels. There was something, perhaps, about the fear of railway travel that whet the palate for tales of destruction. Maybe something even in the shuttling towards modernity that led to a public craving for re-emergent, ever-present pasts. Ghosts haunted the railway lines—whether victims of the terrible accidents so beloved and sensationalised by the popular press, or attracted somewhat to the thresholds and transgressions created by travelling at such speed. The dark, dank subterranean caverns of the underground system in particular lent themselves to spectral happenings. Charles Dickens’ ‘The S ­ ignal-Man’ is perhaps the most well-known example of a ghost story feeding from the popular perception of railways as dangerous, even fatal, and maybe haunted, places. Since the ghost train has occupied a place in the folkloric and popular imagination. Passengers were not just travelling for work, but for pleasure. Tourism was on the rise, and came in many forms—health tourism, seaside tourism, tourism for intellectual and spiritual enrichment, literary tourism, and the dawn of a gothic tourism. Train tickets were cheaper than ever before, and railway companies laboured to encourage the public to indulge in the traditional summer holiday—to enjoy the sites and pleasures on one’s own doorstep. John Urry argues that much of tourism is dependent upon a desire for ‘difference’, and with the rise of the industrial revolution bringing with it bustling cities and air pollution, tourists from inner cities fled in droves towards the countryside and the seaside for fresh air and a change of pace. This desire for ‘difference’, however, occasionally manifested in more disconcerting or fantastical ways. The longing for ‘difference’ was not just a want for a change of scene, but for an escape from reality. Guidebooks distributed by railways and emerging specialist guidebook publishers geared towards tourists were punctuated with regional folklore, fairy tales, and local monsters. Coastal guidebooks pointed out the locations of drowning and wrecking sites. Others illustrated the horrendous histories of local castles and prisons.

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The Victorian tourist seemingly desired a taste of the strange and horrendous, safe in the knowledge they were soon to retreat back to the warmth and safety of their homes. The temporary nature of the touristic journey provided space for a brief dip into the terrifying, and generated a thirst for gentle thrills, compounded by the novelty and potential dangers of railway travel itself. The complementary growth of popular readerships and railway access meant that tourists were often in pursuit of the literary. Tourists flocked to Tintagel, on the North Coast of Cornwall, in pursuit of Tennyson’s Arthur, following the incredible success of his Idylls of the King (1859–1885). This boom arguably coincided with a rise in celebrity—one could not just travel to a different site in Britain at incredible speed and low cost, but into the mind’s of their idols through the tangible sources of literary inspiration. The Victorian tourist could follow in the footsteps of the greats—and was very much encouraged by the railways to do so. More than that, the traveller could enter the fantastical landscapes of literature and legend. This fascination, too, had a seat in literary realism, where the sites of literature become verifiable, tangible, and believable, as well as accessible. Yet simultaneously literary tourism could be a step into the imaginary, sometimes even into the past, a movement from the real to the unreal. Sometimes this pursuit of the literary celebrity became more explicitly morbid—as in the popular pastime of visiting the graves of poets.4 Sir Walter Scott’s home at Abbotsford, and the Bronte’s Haworth Parsonage, became not just literary tourist sites, but explicitly gothic, haunted touristic sites—places to go to encounter the remains or ruins of literary stars.5 Sarah Chauncey Woolsey’s 1886 children’s book What Katy Did Next describes the eponymous Katy solemnly visiting Jane Austen’s grave with her family, showing how gothic literary tourism (and specifically ‘tombstone tourism’) was not just motivated by literary texts but became subject matter for literature. Of course, there had been a sort of gothic literary tourist long before then—late ­eighteenth-century visitors to Netley Abbey articulate their experience in gothic terms, illustrative of a fixation on the gothic ruin as a site of touristic pilgrimage.6 The definition of ‘Gothic tourism’ has been the subject of some debate, sit­ uated as it is in relation to other modes of ‘dark tourism’, ‘thanatourism’, ‘disaster tourism’, and, as aforementioned, literary tourism and tombstone tourism. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term ‘dark tourism’ in 1996.7 Philip R. Stone, too, has done extensive work on defining dark tourism, most recently in the form of The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies (2018).8 Emma McEvoy’s Gothic Tourism (2015) describes gothic tourism as ‘both more and less than dark tourism’.9 Catherine Spooner rejects a conflation between ‘dark tourism’ and ‘Gothic tourism’ as ‘dark’ does not reflect the internal complexities of the term ‘Gothic’.10 There is a long and complex relationship between darkness and the birth of a consumer-orientated and highly organised touristic industry. In their earliest days travel company Thomas Cook took people on the railway to see hangings in Cornwall—the proximity of the jail and the railway station being such that visitors could simply stick their heads out the window to witness the gory sight (site). There is a thirst here in the gothic touristic mode for a public

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spectacle of gore, and one could perhaps easily draw a line between the furore for public hangings and the queues outside London Dungeon. There is a danger though of oversimplifying the Gothic or evacuating it of meaning entirely. There is, too, a necessity to define ‘Gothic tourism’ in relation to but as distinct from these other forms of morbid tourism. Thanatourism, or death tourism, can be used to encompass tombstone tourism and disaster tourism, but gothic tourism is not always death tourism. It can be more fictitious and fantastical, and more about a dislocation from reality than confronting the horrors of reality. This chapter takes gothic tourism to be something explicitly (if even at times tangentially) literary, as something preoccupied with re-emergent or ever-present pasts (or hauntings), and something which is as much about entertainment as horror—a mode which seeks to attract through repulsion, and repulse through attraction. Gothic tourists recur in literary history. Travel is central to the Gothic, providing opportunity for dislocation, isolation, and representations of otherness and the unknown. To travel somewhere new is to be exposed to the unfamiliar, to provide potential for the uncanny, and to explore engagements with strangers and strangeness. Travel explicitly leads us to the alien, to the thrills of transition and thresholds—the breaching of borders and boundaries generating anxieties over permeability, mobility, and transgression. Loci of travel provide liminal spaces. Where, after all, is more uncanny, more gothic, more liminal, than an airport? The Gothic has lent itself to meditations on the foreign and the far since its inception. Arguably, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe with their Mediterranean climes provide the reader with a sort of virtual tourism—the opportunity to be transported to the vineyards and convents of Italy without leaving the safety of one’s home. Indeed, there is something of the experience of reading gothic fiction which in itself is a form of tourism—of venturing out into an imaginary landscape, riddled with danger, safe in the knowledge of inevitable return. We talk frequently of the power of narratives to transport the reader from the everyday, taking them on a journey, an adventure. We discuss reading and the trajectory of narrative in the terms of transport and movement. Our authors and protagonists are our travelling companions. We gain insight into territories (and times) otherwise difficult (or impossible) to access. The Gothic is dependent upon distance, and specifically upon safe distances, where the space (temporal or spatial) provides both room and licence to palate the palatable. As with tourism, there was an anxiety that reading could change you; that a tourist would return different from how they set out, fundamentally altered by the experience of alterity, somehow open and permeable to the excesses of the travelling experience. The same goes for readers, and especially readers of gothic fiction—how could the mind explore such horrors, such extremes of feeling, such perversions of morality, without returning to reality somewhat contaminated? Travelling, whether through a gothic narrative or into a gothic space, seemingly provides licence for transgression. It is worth asking to what extent many celebrated, canonical gothic texts serve as travel narratives. While travel narratives are not always tourist narratives, they share many features and can employ the same gothic tropes of dislocation,

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alienation, and strangeness. Frankenstein (1818), for instance, opens with, and was inspired by, travel. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, while travelling along the river Rhine in Germany in 1914, stopped in Gernsheim, 17 kilometres from Frankenstein Castle, the supposed home of a number of bizarre and mysterious alchemical experiments. Later, while travelling through Geneva, Shelley found the sights (and sites) to motivate her narrative. As a further example, the l­egendary stay in the Villa Diodati is completely inseparable from the history of the Gothic. Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Polidori’s stay in Geneva is perceived as the fertile breeding ground of the Victorian Gothic as it came to be. Not only did it birth Frankenstein’s monster, and spawn the modern, alluring, aristocratic vampire through John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1816), but it provided a mythos implicit in the creation of the Gothic—a fascination with the biography and travels of gothic progenitors. It causes us to ask ourselves—from what terrible minds could these terrible tales occur? It also situates the British ­nineteenth-century gothic revival firmly on the European mainland—close but not too close, foreign but familiar, somewhat strange but increasingly accessible and seemingly encroaching. These stories were only possible due to the frustration of the tourist experience. In the ‘year without a summer’ the abysmal weather conditions forced the young travellers to remain inside, surely a tourist’s worst nightmare. Loathe to waste the journey and eager to wile away the time, they challenged each other to a ghost story competition. It is this sort of boredom, particular to the frustrated tourist, that lends itself to rumination on horrors, and provides imaginative space for the breeding of the fantastical. That there is no reference in Mary Shelley’s journals to the Castle Frankenstein as a potential source of inspiration has by no means impeded the tourist’s desire to explore the location. The Castle has never been developed into a commercial tourist destination on any significant scale, and most of the year it is free to access. Yet, even such a tenuous connection is motivating enough for gothic tourists, and there is a restaurant in the castle promoting ‘Horror Dinners’, a horror-comedy dinner theatre regularly hosting shows based on Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and even Jack the Ripper, bizarrely interspersed with Abba tribute acts.11 The choice of themes is an insight into the perception of the Gothic as a mode seemingly defined in the popular imagination by a particular time and a particular place. The idea of a ‘Horror Dinner’ also provides ample opportunity to reflect on the idea of gothic consumption and the willingness of tourist organisations to capitalise on the camper or kitschier aspects of the Gothic. This camp tourist Gothic presents a digestible mode of Gothic—a defanged version, suitable for the whole family. These wholesome thrills with their recognisable names and iconography provide a tame experience of the Gothic. The universal appeal of such gothic figures as Dracula and Frankenstein may even serve the same comforting effect as seeing a McDonalds abroad—ironically not unfamiliar, and distinctly un-strange. Frankenstein has generated other tourist industry opportunities across Europe. In Plainpalais in Geneva, the site where the monster commits its first murder, stands a grotesque, hulking statue in tribute to the tale. The monster’s stitched faces gurns forth from a hunched body, ribs protruding, bolts shining in the glaring

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light of flash photography. It is common practice for the tourist to stand under the monster’s outstretched arm in an embrace, or they mimic the creature’s hulking posture, or to clutch at its gnarled hand like a small child, dwarfed by its stature. Plainpalais has embraced its status as the famous site of a fictional murder. A local historian charges $140 for a Frankenstein tour of Geneva.12 The Geneva tourist board website proudly claims that “Frankenstein emerged on the shores of Lake Geneva”.13 Clearly the tourist industry is as aware as it was in the nineteenth century of the tourist’s longing to confront monsters far afield. Born on the same shores was John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819). This narrative, too, was seemingly inspired by Polidori’s travels as Byron’s doctor around Europe, featuring as it does the young Englishman, Aubrey, accompanying the terrible Lord Ruthven to Rome and Greece. Polidori’s barely failed criticism of his blood-sucking boss takes the form of a travel narrative, where the horror arises from a threat seemingly located in Europe arriving in England. This plot-point may have provided the motivation for another vampire narrative-as-travel narrative—Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The canonical gothic work is centred on a number of journeys, and opens with Jonathan Harker as tourist and visitor to the border of Transylvania, Bukovina, and Moldavia. Dracula’s resulting ‘collision’ with the coast of Whitby on the wrecked Demeter reverses the roles and renders Dracula himself  a strange visitor to strange shores—curiously, bringing with him the dirt of his homeland. The variety of movements within the novel have presented tourist opportunities across multiple sites. This has been seen to provide some insight into contemporary anxieties about borders, boundaries, and ‘invaders’ in a period of globalisation. While the British revelled in being tourists, tourists  to the country were the source of some concern, as a microcosm of imperial desires. The image of the gothic tourist then is so rife with metaphorical associations as to be projected upon or stretched to accommodate a multitude of contemporary concerns. Bran Castle in Romania is considered to be the inspiration behind Dracula’s castle in Germany, but like Frankenstein Castle in Germany, has only tangential links to the narrative. Unlike Frankenstein’s Castle, Bran is more explicit, energetic, and commercial in its establishment as a gothic tourist destination. Outside of Romania it has come to be known as ‘Dracula’s Castle’, having capitalised on its vague associations with the figure of Vlad the Impaler, a seeming inspiration for Dracula. There is no evidence that Stoker knew anything of Bran Castle, and the Castle plays on its fictive associations—its website claims that “[v]isitors to Bran Castle should make the distinction between the historic reality of Bran and the character of the Count in Bram Stoker’s novel. Dracula exists in the imagination”.14 The Castle’s touristic energies depend on this suspension of the belief— Bran Castle as home of Dracula is as fictional as Dracula itself, and this provides justification for their claim. Gothic tourism necessarily requires the tourist to bear in mind at all times that the experience is either a fictionalisation or an exaggeration or sensationalisation, and it is this cognitive distance which provides safety from the horrors at hand. Gothic tourism, then, is a genre of dislocations and fragmentations acutely dependent upon performance and façade. Because Bran Castle

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is Gothic it is given licence to be inauthentic. The Gothic, after all, is a genre founded on forged manuscripts and false claims to historicity—Bran Castle claiming Dracula as its own mimics the process of Horace Walpole claiming to have found the manuscript of The Castle of Otranto (1764). A certain degree of bold, swaggering piracy is expected of the engineers of gothic tourism as much as it is expected of gothic authors, and it is the waft of suspicion surrounding authenticity which provides space for a distinctly gothic toying with the flimsy boundaries between the real and the unreal—or the real and the perceived. It is necessary to note here that Otranto, while being a canonical mainstay and founding father of gothic criticism, has not possessed the mainstream public imagination in the same way as texts like Frankenstein and Dracula. Regardless, tourist machinations surrounding Otranto in Italy make sure to point out the gothic literary link—indeed, a description of Otranto on a tourist website states that “[t]he bones and skulls of the martyrs of Otranto are now stacked behind glass in the cathedral in a manner that would have satisfied Walpole’s Gothic imagination”.15 The implicit suggestion here is that there is something about these sites which must have conjured gothic feeling and inspired gothic narratives; that it is not just necessary to visit the site in order to immerse oneself in the location of a favoured text, to experience it first hand, but that there may be opportunity to be similarly inspired (or haunted) by the space’s nascent gothic energies. These tourist destinations are not just haunted by their associations with gothic fictions, but were maybe Gothic all along, the fictions just being a natural documentation of their dark powers. Perhaps, then, gothic tourists visit these sites to be similarly possessed or to have their own gothic imaginary potential stoked. A perhaps more thoroughly gothic touristic site in association with Walpole is Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s home in London. The house relies upon a similar transportation of the tourist into the gothic imaginary.16 A recent installation elsewhere in England takes this in more disconcertingly literal terms. While no one would be likely to call Isambard Kingdom Brunel a gothic figure, the tourist destination featuring the restoration of his most famous ship, the SS Great Britain, takes the tourist on a distinctly gothic journey. The new Brunel museum is dominated by a towering, leering head of Brunel, replete with stovepipe hat and cigar. On the mezzanine level the tourist can walk through a spongy, pink corridor, where they slowly realise that they are treading through the soft sinews of Brunel’s brain. They enter a space which they soon realise is behind the eyes of the Victorian great, and projected on the inside of his skull are a series of memories relating to Brunel’s life story, filmed from his own perspective. Jets of steam disorientate the tourist/voyeur, who hears Brunel’s thoughts accompanying the images. The graphically anatomical experience does not necessarily relate to gothic fiction, but is a definitively gothic experience, and illustrative of the preoccupation with entering the mind or imaginary of historic figures, and the very literal ways in which this desire can be met by heritage destinations invested in tourist revenue.17 This preoccupation with visiting the sites of gothic literature clearly continues well into the present day and is motivated by more contemporary texts as well as the Victorian classics. Stephen King’s bestselling novel The Shining (1977)

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draws explicitly on the gothic anxieties of tourism. It centres specifically on the uncanniness of the hotel as structure—as home that it is not a home (unheimlich), a transient space, seemingly unfixed, and made liminal by its very function. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining was inspired by King’s stay in a real hotel, the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, which later became the filming location for the 1997 TV miniseries of the novel. The hotel has since become a site of pilgrimage for horror fans eager to sleep in the building which has inspired so many nightmares. The hotel seems uncomfortable with its role in horror history. The clean, white website refers to King’s novels, and even offers an after-dark tour, but the language used is consciously hesitant to indulge in gothic melodrama. It refers to the ‘hotel’s history, architecture, folklore, and pop culture’, yet leans away from talk of hauntings and paranormal inspiration. It seems to see its brand as an historic luxury hotel at odds with King’s tale of terror. While the hotel does not wear its gothic credentials on its sleeve, it still caters to the needs and interests of visiting King enthusiasts. Room 217, the room in which King stayed, has a framed photograph of the author with the hotelier.18 It seems the hotel may have been more keen on its associations in the past, as successful paranormal tours of the hotel have more recently been scrapped, or are no longer available on the website.19 Not every gothic tourist site is keen to capitalise on its gothic status. Indeed, the tension between attraction and repulsion used for promotional purposes by other sites seems to be read as unattractive or inconvenient for sites wanting to brand themselves in other ways. A gothic tourist destination does not necessarily need to be entrenched in a specific cultural reference point, like a text or an author, but can instead be defined by a more generic sense of gothic aesthetics. The flexibility and slipperiness of any potential definition of the Gothic allows it to be a ‘feeling’ as well as a specific canon. The Independent’s travel section, for instance, offered a list of ‘The Big Six: Gothic Hotels’ in 2010, describing The Night Hotel in New York City as ‘a dark and brooding bolt-hole which lurks just off neon-lit Times Square’. It ‘feels very Gotham City, with sumptuous inky fabrics’.20 The ‘Gothic’ as a term has cultural capital and still functions as a significant signifier for tourist and travel promotional agencies. Ryan Murphy’s anthology television show American Horror Story took inspiration from the Stanley Hotel and the Overlook Hotel for season five, American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–2016). It also clearly derives plot points from the true crime story of H. H. Holmes’ ‘murder castle’. In 1893 Holmes began building a multipurpose building (part of which he intended to open as a hotel) especially designed to torture, murder, and dispose of the bodies of clientele. The narrative captured the public imagination at the time and has persisted through numerous true crime publications, documentaries, biographies, and resurgences in television shows—Holmes features as a ghost in an episode of Supernatural, and is visited by time travellers in an episode of Timeless. An illustration of the murder castle has even been produced as a jigsaw puzzle. The story provided inspiration for Robert Bloch’s 1974 novel American Gothic, and has become a central tenet of America’s crime history. Holmes has been referred to as ‘America’s First Serial

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Killer’, and a 2013 History Channel series entitled American Ripper attempted to both draw Holmes parallel to, and suggest a relationship with, Jack the Ripper. This is demonstrative of the significance of Holmes to America’s history of violence, and how this history is bound up in the uncanny image of the gothic hotel as a site of potential horrors. Tourist company Weird Chicago host the popular ‘Devil & the White City Tour: Chicago’s First H. H. Holmes Tour!’, alongside tours such as ‘True Crime and Mystery Tour: The City’s Most Macabre Tour!’ and the ‘Blood, Guns & Valentines Gangster Tour’.21 While H. H. Holmes is an example of death tourism or true crime tourism, he also feeds explicitly into a narrative of gothic fiction, showing the constant and insistent interplay between the gothic and touristic desire. This relationship is also clearly present in narratives surrounding Jack the Ripper, gothic fiction, and gothic tourism. Importantly, both of these murderous figures are late Victorian—temporally proximal enough to be recognisable monsters, and distant enough to be safe, defanged, and seemingly exploitable without being too macabre. Jack the Ripper has been so extensively rewritten and reimagined in the popular imagination as to have become transformed into a fictive object, effectively erasing the realities of his victims and transforming them, too, into touristic commodity objects. One Jack the Ripper tour in London even includes hand-held projectors, enabling the tour guides to project post-mortem images of the victims onto the walls of their murder sites.22 This ‘tour with Ripper Vision’ seemingly performs the same function as stepping inside the mind of Brunel—allowing the tourist to not just inhabit the site of the events but the mind of the central figure.23 A gothic framework, with its notable associations with the fictional and the literary, seemingly allows the tourist industry to dislocate these sites from their realities. An appeal to gothic sensibilities and aesthetics justifies the severance of touristic entertainment from real-life narratives and enables the seeming evacuation of sympathy or sensitivity. The Jack the Ripper tours become a spectacle, exploiting acts of heinous violence again women through the guise of entertainment. Ripper has become as sanitised and seemingly Disneyfied as the figures of Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, and Dracula as used in sites like Castle Frankenstein. The kitsch elements of Victorian Gothic have served to obfuscate or confuse the ‘true crime’ aspects of Ripper tourism, allowing tourists to engage in the spectacle as an entertainment due to a level of cognitive dissonance generated by gothic aesthetics. Ripper tours are just one part of a larger industry of gothic tours and city walks. Most regions have some variant of the ‘ghost walk’—a public tour around areas thought to be haunted. These walks sometimes take the form of a ‘paranormal investigation’, allowing tourists to indulge in an element of performance, amplifying the sense of the walk being a simulation and highlighting the gothic distance between the real and the unreal—their function as paranormal investigator is as ‘real’ as the legends. Ghost tours may involve the tour guides dressing up, and if so, this dress is frequently Victorian, feeding from the established relationship between the Victorian period and the Gothic, and allowing tourists to practice temporal tourism as well as spatial tourism. This functions as a mode of gothic

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tourism as it is dependent upon a certain sense of a Victorian uncanny derived from the mainstream popularity of Victorian Gothic fiction. This is a tourism fixed in a specific time period. The promise (or threat) of ghosts—figures of the past manifest in the present—further exaggerates this unreliable temporality, enabling a sort of simulated time travel. This in turn exaggerates the otherness of the tourist in the space, separated in both time and space, and exaggerating the unfamiliarity and thus novelty or ‘difference’ of the experience. The level of morbidity of a ghost tour can vary wildly depending upon the intended audience, from the family friendly to the more adult oriented. One ghost tour in the city of Prague offers the opportunity for tourists to pose with their head in a noose at the tour’s conclusion, posed next to a figure of the Grim Reaper. Another industry to emerge adjacent to ghost walks is the paranormal investigation industry. Companies have arisen to provide the specific experience of a ghost hunt. While ghost tours may sometimes suspend belief to play with the idea of being ghost hunters, paranormal investigation companies geared at tourists tend to take the process more seriously—for instance, From Dusk Till Dawn Events offers the opportunity to ‘become a real Ghost Hunter’. These events, too, are often explicitly associated with a very particular type of Victorian ghost and Victorian and Edwardian Gothic imagery. From Dusk Till Dawn offer a ‘seance experience at the Old Edwardian School Nottingham’, ‘The Old Edwardian School Ghost Hunt’, and experiences at abandoned Victorian asylums and police stations. These tours rely upon a specific set of visual cues to suggest gothicity. Gothic Revival architecture, it seems, is key to the appeal of the ghost hunt. Contemporary ghosts seem like a significantly less attractive option, and there is a definitive shortage of ghost hunts in 1980s brutalist inner-city comprehensives. Instead, these companies prioritise halls, manors, and castles, drawing from a gothic aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Other gothic touristic experiences are more material. While a ghost walk or ghost hunt offers the tantalising possibility of the whisper of something spectral, other attractions force tourists to confront more visceral figures in the form of actors. The London Dungeon, as an example, recreates gory events from London’s history with sets, special effects, and costumed characters. The theme-park-style attraction has featured sections based upon Bedlam, Sweeney Todd, Mary Queen of Scots, and of course, Jack the Ripper. Like the Jack the Ripper tours, London Dungeon relies upon a certain set of aesthetics of excess which dislocate the experience from its historical realities.24 The London Dungeon is a version of the common ‘haunted house’ format, otherwise known as ‘houses of horror’ or ‘terror attractions’.25 These attractions often promote themselves through extremity, warning that they may not be suitable for visitors with certain health conditions.26 The more exaggerated the warnings, the more desirable the exhibit may be for tourists. This seems to be a mirror to warnings and anxieties surrounding reading sensation fiction in the nineteenth century—a concern that even a simulated experience may be so horrific as to alter one permanently, or cause irreversible physical or psychological damage. There is a worry here that even the fictional can have real-world impact, threatening the

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boundary between the real and the unreal—there is something contagious about this sort of horror which threatens to seep into the real world. Some of these terror attractions are permanent fixtures and others are seasonal events, usually around Halloween. Fright Nights at Thorpe Park have gained increasing popularity, as one such seasonal example. These events usually market themselves through fragmented CCTV footage compilations of screaming tourists. While these attractions are often updated on an annual basis, they do tend to repeat certain key tropes, such as images of Victorian and Edwardian ghosts, ­nineteenth-century ringmasters, and Victorian asylum sets and patients. Again, these thrills are dependent upon a gothic framework or a set of anticipated motifs which are synonymous with ‘scares’. These gothic signifiers are used as a shorthand for tourists to safely anticipate the event’s thrills, as gothic aesthetics serve the dual function of both familiarising and de-familiarising the tourist. Even the most family friendly and seemingly culturally sanitised theme parks embrace gothic aesthetics. One of the most famous rides in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Tokyo DisneySea, and Walt Disney Studios Park is The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. The different versions of the Tower of Terror are set in varying historical periods, but all rely upon an idea of a generic, haunted past to generate unease. The Tokyo DisneySea version, for instance, is set on New Year’s Eve 1899, relying upon the liminal uncanniness of the fin-de-siècle. Part of the popularity of the Tower of Terror experience is its simulating of the tourist experience. Tourists staying at hotels while visiting a theme park enter into a hotel as part of the theme park, allowing tourists perform the role of tourists. This feeds into the uncanny simulations of the theme park more generally, capitalising on the uncanniness implicit in the inauthenticity of the various reimaginings and recreations of the Disney Park experience. The uncanniness of the theme park simulation for the tourist was emblematised by the street artist Banksy in the summer of 2015 through the installation of Dismaland. ‘Dismaland Bemusement Park’ was constructed in a disused lido in Weston-super-Mare, coastal tourist town and Banksy’s hometown. Banksy described the experience as a ‘family theme park unsuitable for children’. It included various satirisations of images and logos associated with Disneyland. Its brief opening period across the summer and chosen location are reflective of anxieties surrounding the impact of tourist economies on regions, particularly coastal regions. As a native, Banksy would be acutely aware of the disastrous effect of seasonal trade on local communities, as well as the impact and quantity of abandoned leisure spaces in deprived coastal areas, such as lidos. Dismaland’s ruined lido was surrounded by various tragic perversions of familiar touristic images—a giant sandcastle, replete with multicoloured pinwheel, strikes an uncanny image, towering over the site at a ludicrous scale. A ferris wheel, frozen, glares over an armoured police van sunk into the lido, surrounded by deckchairs. Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage is upended, her body hanging from a window. Frowning workers in neon-pink high-visibility vests and plastic mouse ears hand out black balloons emblazoned with ‘I am an imbecile’. Ariel, the Little Mermaid, perches on a rock in dirty water but is seemingly glitching, a broken

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image. Disneyland is not the only themepark brand under direct attack—a giant killer whale emerges from a toilet to jump through an impossibly small hoop, into an impossibly small paddling pool, the venom aimed this time at SeaWorld. Banky’s installation distilled a number of anxieties surrounding dark tourism and gothic tourism—not only the idea that people are fundamentally attracted to the repulsive, or that tourist industries market themselves according to gothic motifs, but that there is something fundamentally dark, exploitative, and destructive about tourism itself. Banksy glowers at tourism as a seasonal industry, its capitalistic machinations, its artificiality, its impact on local communities, the misery of customer service in tourist industries, the artificiality of marketized, consumable cheer. It is no coincidence that Banksy decided to transform Disney’s iconic castle into a gothic ruin—decayed, blackened, and skeletal. Through Dismaland, Banksy draws explicitly on the semantic relationship between the Gothic and the touristic, the performative, the real and the unreal, to paint gothic tourism as an artificial ruin in its own right.

Notes

1. “Dark Tourist,” Netflix. Accessed 17 February 2019. https://www.netflix.com/gb/ title/80189791. 2. John Mullion, “Railways in Victorian Fiction,” The British Library. Accessed 19 November 2018. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/railways-in-victorian-fiction. 3. Richard Cavendish, “The First W.H. Smith Railway Bookstall,” History Today. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/first-wh-smith-railway-bookstall. 4. Samantha Matthews, “Making Their Mark: Writing the Poet’s Grave,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola J. Watson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25–36. 5. Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 6. Dale Townshend, “Ruins, Romance and the Rise of Gothic Tourism: The Case of Netley Abbey, 1750–1830,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 3 (2014): 377–394. 7. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon. “JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 198–211. 8. Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, and Tony Seaton, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 9. Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (London: Palgrave Macmillan: 2015), 201. 10. Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise of the Happy Gothic (London: Bloomsbury: 2017), 166. 11. “Dinnershows,” Frankenstein Restaurant. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.frankenstein-restaurant.de/events/dinner-shows. 12. John Malathronas, “Frankenstein’s Monster Inspires Travel Trail,” CNN Travel. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/on-the-trail-of-frankenstein/index.html. 13. “Celebrate Frankenstein’s 200th Anniversary,” Geneva Live. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.geneve.com/es/topicblocks/frankenstein-200-ans/. 14. “Count Dracula: The Myth,” Bran Castle. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www. bran-castle.com/dracula.html. 15. “Otranto,” Italy Heaven. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.italyheaven.co.uk/ puglia/otranto.html and Nina Burleigh, “A Gothic Tour of Italy,” The NY Times.

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Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/travel/a-gothic-tourof-italy.html. 16. McEvoy, Gothic Tourism. 17. Martin Booth, “Stepping Inside the Mind of Brunel,” B24/7. Accessed 8 February 2019. https:// www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/features/stepping-inside-the-mind-of-brunel/. 18. “Ghosts of the Stanley Hotel ad a Night in Room 217,” Amy’s Crypt. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://amyscrypt.com/stanley-hotel-room-217/. 19. Barb Boyer Buck, “Stanley Hotel Ghost Story Supported by Evidence of Room 217 Event,” Estes Park News. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.eptrail.com/ estes-park-news/ci_25288538/stanley-hotel-ghost-story-supported-by-evidence-room. 20. Katie Monk, “The Big Six: Gothic Hotels,” The Independent. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/hotels/the-big-six-gothic-hotels-2016735.html. 21. Weird Chicago. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.weirdchicago.com/. 22. The Jack the Ripper Tour. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://thejacktherippertour.com/. 23. “Ripper Vision,” The Jack the Ripper Tour. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://thejacktherippertour.com/ripper-vision/. 24. See Emma McEvoy on Gothic tourism and the London Bridge Experience in “London’s Gothic Tourism: West End Ghosts, Southwark Horrors and an Unheimlich Home,” in Gothic Tourism. 25. Terror Attractions UK. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.terrorattractions.co.uk/ terror_attractions.php. 26. House of Horror UK. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.houseofhorror.co.uk/faq.

Bibliography Booth, Martin. “Stepping Inside the Mind of Brunel.” B24/7. Accessed 8 February 2019. https:// www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/features/stepping-inside-the-mind-of-brunel/. Buck, Barb Boyer. “Stanley Hotel Ghost Story Supported by Evidence of Room 217 Event.” Estes Park News. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.eptrail.com/estes-park-news/ ci_25288538/stanley-hotel-ghost-story-supported-by-evidence-room. Burleigh, Nina. “A Gothic Tour of Italy.” The NY Times. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www. nytimes.com/2011/10/30/travel/a-gothic-tour-of-italy.html. Cavendish, Richard. “The First W.H. Smith Railway Bookstall.” History Today. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/first-wh-smith-railway-bookstall. “Celebrate Frankenstein’s 200th Anniversary.” Geneva Live. Accessed 8 February 2019. https:// www.geneve.com/es/topicblocks/frankenstein-200-ans/. “Count Dracula: The Myth.” Bran Castle. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.bran-castle. com/dracula.html. “Dark Tourist.” Netflix. Accessed 17 February 2019. https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80189791. “Dinnershows.” Frankenstein Restaurant. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.frankenstein-restaurant.de/events/dinner-shows. Foley, Malcolm, and J. John Lennon. “JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 198–211. “Ghosts of the Stanley Hotel ad a Night in Room 217.” Amy’s Crypt. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://amyscrypt.com/stanley-hotel-room-217/. House of Horror UK. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.houseofhorror.co.uk/faq. Malathronas, John. “Frankenstein’s Monster Inspires Travel Trail.” CNN Travel. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/on-the-trail-of-frankenstein/index.html. Matthews, Samantha. “Making Their Mark: Writing the Poet’s Grave.” In Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, edited by Nicola J. Watson, 25–36. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. McEvoy, Emma. Gothic Tourism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Monk, Katie. “The Big Six: Gothic Hotels.” The Independent. Accessed 8 February 2019. https:// www.independent.co.uk/travel/hotels/the-big-six-gothic-hotels-2016735.html. Mullion, John. “Railways in Viction Fiction.” The British Library. Accessed 19 November 2018. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/railways-in-victorian-fiction. “Otranto.” Italy Heaven. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.italyheaven.co.uk/puglia/otranto. html. “Ripper Vision.” The Jack the Ripper Tour. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://thejacktherippertour.com/ripper-vision/. Spooner, Catherine. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise of the Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Stone, Philip, Rudi Hartmann, and Tony Seaton, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Terror Attractions UK. Accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.terrorattractions.co.uk/terror_ attractions.php. The Jack the Ripper Tour. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://thejacktherippertour.com/. Townshend, Dale. “Ruins, Romance and the Rise of Gothic Tourism: The Case of Netley Abbey, 1750–1830.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 3 (2014): 377–394. Watson, Nicola J. The Literary Tourist. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Weird Chicago. Accessed 8 February 2019. https://www.weirdchicago.com/.

Two Twentieth-Century Mexican Writers Antonio Alcalá González

The characteristic gothic anxiety about the past found fertile territory in the pens of Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes; two writers with high concerns about the national identity of their country. They explore the borderlands of the real and the unknown to express their view on the effect of the past upon the condition of their country in the twentieth century. Given the fact that the Gothic is considered in Latin America, as an Anglo-Saxon cultural product, until recently their works had commonly been read under the eye of a perspective aligned with Magical Realism. However, in Rulfo and Fuentes gothic fiction, the supernatural element is not accepted as part of the real as Magical Realism would suggest.1 The ghostly presences that perturb the real in their fictions cannot be normalised; moreover, they end up defeating any attempt from the protagonists to eradicate them from their realities. The four texts chosen for the present analysis were published during the 1950s. Fuentes’ “Chac Mool” and “Tlactocatzine del Jardín de Flandes” [Tlactocatzine, from the Garden of Flanders]2 were first published in the collection Los Días Enmascarados [The Masked Days] (1954),3 Rulfo’s novel, Pedro Páramo, was published in 1955 two years after “Luvina” appeared in the anthology El Llano en Llamas [The Burning Plain]. They four exemplify the writers’ adaptation of the Gothic to the Mexican context to express a concern which constantly appears in their works: to explore and interrogate the way Mexico has constructed its identity in relation to its past. Before exploring them in detail and reaching a comparison between the two writers’ use of the Gothic, it is essential to explore that past responsible for shaping their country towards the twentieth century. Carlos Fuentes once defined Mexico as “País inconcluso, México, paciente y sereno, esconde sin embargo la rabia de una esperanza demasiadas veces frustrada. Éste es un país que ha esperado durante siglos, soñado, el tiempo de su historia”. [Mexico, unconquered country, patient and serene. However, it hides the rage of a

A. Alcalá González (*)  Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_4

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hope that has too often been frustrated. This is a country that has waited, dreamed for centuries, the time of its history.] (En Esto Creo, 189). This reflection is the result of looking at the history of a nation that spent three centuries as a European colony to later live a century of uncertainty about its identity, arriving into the twentieth century still missing it. The history of Mexico is but a series of repetitions of events that promise to be crucial in defining the identity of the country but end up bringing a return to the problems inherited from the Colonial past. The process leading to this permanent repetition that makes the past look as inescapable started when the Spanish crown stablished the Viceroyalty of New Spain after having defeated the Aztec empire and replaced its political and economic authority (strongly based on the payment of tribute) over the rest of the neighbouring kingdoms in most of what is the present central and some parts of southern Mexico. After the Independence from a European power, the national project first had to face the challenge of leaving behind social and political practices related to the perpetuation of strongly marked hierarchical groups (called castas [castes]) proper from a colony but not adequate for an independent democratic country. However, this initial fight was lost. The Independence War was started and won by criollos (children of Spaniards but born in Mexico) who achieved to rule the country under the same scheme of hierarchies and oppression but without having to be accountable to the Spanish crown. That is a strong reason why right after Independence, the first form of government in Mexico, though short-lived, was an empire. Joel Poinsett, ambassador in Mexico, wrote the following lines in 1829, just 8 years after the Independence war had been won: The character of this people cannot be understood, nor the causes of their present condition be fully developed without recurring to the oppression under which they formally labored. It would lead you into error to compare them with the free and civilized nature of America and Europe in the Nineteenth Century. They started from a period nearer to the age of Charles the fifth, and it is even a matter of some doubt whether this Nation had advanced one step in knowledge and civilization from the time of the conquest to the moment of declaring themselves independent. (11–12)

For this young nation, that seemed to the foreign eye to be far from the social advances reached in other countries, the nineteenth century was a period of political internal turmoil and two foreign military incursions. On one hand, there was the Mexican-American War in 1846–1848 which was entirely fought in Mexican ground. The peace treaty that marked the end of this conflict made Mexico cede over one-third of its territory as the losing side. On the other hand, there was the Second French Intervention in the 1860s that managed to place a European aristocrat in the throne of a Second Mexican Empire for a period of three years. The difference among classes remained and become even more evident entering the twentieth century; on one hand there were those with power and money (the government and the landowners); on the other, there were exploited peasants who did not even own the land they cultivated since that belonged to the owners of the large estates called haciendas. The Mexican Revolution started as a result of the accumulated social tension; as its name implies, the revolutionary war was but cyclical disturbance that ended at the same point where it had begun: with a

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reduced group (the winning side, now formed by the bourgeoise classes that emerged from the war, controlling the country and its economy) while large sectors in the countryside and later in urban areas remained exploited in exchange for low salaries. According to Adolfo Gilly, the ten years that the war lasted rendered only the destruction of one state and its replacement by another, thus establishing a new relationship between those who had power and those who did not (364). In 1915, American Businessman, William O. Jenkins described in the armed forces the Mexican tendency to blindly served an oppressing hand that was inherited from the Spanish conquest and remained after the Independence movement and the subsequent episodes of turmoil in the country: “The country is completely demoralized, and the soldiers have long since lost all conception of personal privilege or property rights, and accept as authority only some whom they fear” (362). Oppression remained, and the new type of interaction was simply a continuity of the tradition of subordination that had existed since Colonial times. The result entering the 1950s was a country in which those who were oppressed and ignored the most were the poor sectors from rural areas most of which were formed by indigenous groups still not assimilated into a Western style of life. Despite the existence of these groups, the different Mexican governments have traditionally insisted upon not looking at themselves as a country that results from the combination of both the Spanish and the indigenous tradition: There has never been a process of convergence, but rather, one of opposition. There is one simple and straightforward reason: certain social groups have illegitimately held political, economic, and ideological power from the European invasion to the present. All have been affiliated through inheritance or though circumstance with western civilization, and with their programs for governing there has been no place for Mesoamerican civilization.4 (Bonfil Batalla 28–29)

As a result of this imposition of a Western perspective over a society that is the result of its Spanish–Mesoamerican past, “the majority of Mexicans have a future only on the condition they stop being themselves” (30). Fuentes himself pointed out at this neglection of the indigenous past in his country: México es un país mestizo e hispanohablante, pero sigue siendo, también un país indio. Un repertorio de posibilidades que hemos olvidado o aplazado o expulsado de nuestros conceptos del tiempo progresista nos aguarda calladamente en el mundo indígena, reserva de todo lo que hemos olvidado y despreciado… [Mexico is a mestizo, Spanish-speaking country, but it is still an Indian country. A repertoire of possibilities that we have forgotten, postponed or expelled from our concepts of progressive time, a reserve of everything we have forgotten and despised, is there, silently awaiting us in the indigenous world…] (En Esto Creo, 278)

To share their preoccupation for this country missing to integrate all the components of its past in a long-postponed search for its identity, Fuentes and Rulfo relied on a recurring borderland trespassed in gothic texts: the line between past and present. According to Jerrold E. Hogle: “The regressive and progressive nature of the Gothic has been and remains [emphasis in the original] necessary to deal with the social unconscious of modern humanity in all its extreme contradictions spawned

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by its looking backward and forward so much of the time” (7). The Gothic constantly hints towards what cannot be recovered; it points to the history that lies behind us without the either linguistic or geographical possibilities to regain what remains as a lost Other when contrasted with the present (Savoy, 6–7). Thus, one of the functions of the Gothic is to remind individuals that the failures in their present can be traced back to the desires and deeds on which their present was founded and built. It attempts to raise awareness of a lost promised (and frustrated) present which has been complicated by past mistakes and, therefore remains a frequent and unresolved motif. Terror arises from exposing these flaws in the present of both characters and readers. In doing this, what we usually take for granted is turned into uncertainties about what went wrong and well. Punter explains that terror can produce questions about memories and reconstruction (Punter, 146). Thus, it provides an opportunity to look at events from a different perspective that challenges the traditionally applied ones. To look at the Mexican past from a different perspective, Fuentes replaces the old European castles and ruins with old large houses in the centre of Mexico City. These structures have their own secrets which lie confined in dark and private inner gardens, upper dark rooms and basements. As for Rulfo, he chooses towns abandoned in the dusty and dry countryside where the advance of time seems to be inexistent. Either set in Mexico or in any other context touched by the Gothic, such spaces resemble the same obscurity governing the characters’ doubts about the limits of their own beings and the surrounding world. Such an uneasy feeling comes from facing and having to accept the terrifying presence of experiences and bodies that breach the limits of the familiar. They force us to acknowledge the fragility of the boundaries we have established to define our world and ourselves. No matter what setting it makes use of, the Gothic always returns to interrogate the conventions on which man and his civilisation have constructed their discourses of meaning and definition. When such cross-examination takes place, the human systems become blurred since operating in deformed ways. The transgressions that break limits and boundaries in the Gothic point at the idea that there are as many versions of the world as perceptions of it can exist. Although there is an official account accepted by the social group, there are always myriad forms of unrecognised versions of events. The Gothic fulfils the role of giving expression to such manifestations of unacknowledged history, and when doing this, it enables authors to question and reveal what lies beyond the realistic accounts of an event: “At all events, the gothic writer insists, ‘realism’ is not the whole story: the World, at least in some aspects, is very much more inexplicable – or mysterious, or terrifying, or violent – than that” (Punter, 186). Being detached from realistic chronicles of events, gothic narratives emphasise that the context surrounding us is much vaster than what we take for granted. Thus, Rulfo and Fuentes rely on the Gothic to point at neglected faces of the Mexican reality and question what went wrong behind the present of his country. These four narratives have in common the irruption of transgressive presences into spaces that trap the protagonists inside them. They end up collapsing after finding it impossible to overcome the haunting of these manifestations from their past.

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In “Luvina”, the story that was first published from the four chosen for this study, the narrator, who used to be a rural professor in the fictional town that provides the name for the story, gives his account of the place to a listener, whose condition as a listener gets confused with that of the reader, and who is about to move to that town to do the same job. This voice describes the town providing its complete name: San Juan Luvina. This emphasises the fact of the existence of multiple realities around the town, for, as commonly in Mexico, it can include the name of its santo patrono [patron saint] or just be named without it. The place lies on a stony land of silence and solitude surrounded by ravines where day and night are equally cold. It almost never rains there provoking that “la tierra, además de estar reseca y achicada como cuero viejo, se haya llenado de rajaduras” [in addition to being parched and shrunken like old leather, the land has gotten filled with cracks] (Rulfo Burning Plain, 101) In such a place where nature seems dead, human presence is reduced to minimal evidence: -- ¿Viste a alguien? ¿Vive alguien aquí? –Le pregunté. – Sí, allá enfrente… Unas mujeres… Las sigo viendo. Mira, allá atrás tras las rendijas de esa puerta veo brillar los ojos que nos miran… Han estado asomándose para acá… Míralas. Veo las bolas brillantes de sus ojos… Pero no tienen que darnos de comer. Me dijeron sin sacar la cabeza que en este pueblo no había de comer… [“Did you see anyone? Does anyone live here?” I asked. “Yes, there in front … Some women … I still see them. Look, back there, behind the cracks of that door I see some shining eyes looking at us… They have been peeking here… Look at them. I see the bright balls of their eyes… But they do not have food to share with us. They told me, without taking their heads out, that in this town there was nothing to eat…”] (105)

In this town of monotony and death, “Nadie lleva la cuenta de las horas ni a nadie le preocupa cómo van amontonándose los años”. [Nobody measures the hours. Nobody worries about how the years are piling up] (106). The time of death is people’s only hope as it is death what keeps people around since they express a strong reluctance to leave the bodies of their dead behind: “Pero si nosotros nos vamos, ¿quién se llevará a nuestros muertos? Ellos viven aquí y no Podemos dejarlos solos”. [Who will take our dead if we leave? They live here and we cannot leave them alone] (108). The narrator does not make clear what the townspeople mean by this since the interpretations can be that either they do not want to leave the tombs of their relatives unguarded, or that these ones remain roaming around the town after death. In this place of hostility towards life, where the dead are the only concern of the living, Rulfo made his first experiment with the gothic impossibility to escape from the past. On one hand, there is the strong connection of the living with death. On the other, there is their cyclical way of life which obeys to what they call the law, “Los hijos se pasan la vida trabajando para los padres como ellos trabajaron para los suyos y como quién sabe cuántos atrás de ellos cumplieron con su ley” [The children keep all their lives working for their parents as they did for their own just as countless ones before them obeyed their law] (107). Both instances make the past an unescapable burden that makes it impossible for the inhabitants of the town to leave a place where the geography and time build

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a gothic chronotope of never-ending suffering just like Rulfo’s country cannot escape from committing the same past mistakes once and again. Concerning Pedro Páramo, the figure around whom all the stories in the novel of the same name develop, is a landlord who represents the ruling groups in Mexico; those that have replaced each other over the years. They have imposed their views, like this man who tyrannically governs Comala. On the other hand, Páramo’s neglected son, Juan, stands for the Mexican people, fragmented and confused, caught between the present and the legacy of their own history. The text is divided into nearly 70 fragments, varying in length from less than half a page to several ones. Reading this novel takes the reader into constant switches between Preciado’s narrative time and the events in the life of Pedro Páramo and his last wife, Susana San Juan. Both narrators, Preciado and the omniscient speaker who relates the events from Páramo’s times,5 rely on dialogues to construct their narratives. As a result, the novel is narrated in large part through the connection of different voices, and we come to understand that most of those voices pertain to a number of ghosts who stand for those past memories that Juan, the Mexican present, can only listen to as distorted echoes. The reader is gradually led to realise that every single character, Juan Preciado included, is a ghost connected to different scenarios or times. They are wandering souls who cannot abandon the world of the living, and it is around them that the gothic atmosphere in the text develops. They turn Comala into a claustrophobic prison where the past is permanently haunting Preciado’s present in the form of these ghosts who lived in the town in the times of Pedro Páramo. This produces a flux between three different times, and makes the reader take an active role created by the text structure: Pedro is the past, Juan becomes the present from which he narrates his experience inside a tomb, and the reader is reading the text in a future time after all the events and dialogues in the novel have occurred. This movement between times creates a process in which the past imposes itself upon the present and future since the dead remain in the town haunting the present with their voices—voices that reach us through Juan’s narration. Avery Gordon indicates that “to be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effect” (190); this is confirmed in Comala, where the ghosts cannot leave because, as Juan is told, there are not enough living people who can pray for them: Si usted viera el gentío de ánimas que andan sueltas por la calle. En cuanto oscurece comienzan a salir. Y a nadie le gusta verlas. Son tantas, y nosotros tan poquitos, que ya ni la lucha le hacemos para rezar porque salgan de sus penas. No ajustarían nuestras oraciones para todos. Si acaso les tocaría un pedazo de Padre nuestro. [If you could see the crowds of souls that are loose in the street. They appear right after twilight. And nobody likes to see them. They are so many, and we are so few, that we no longer try to pray for them to alleviate their sorrows. Our few prayers wouldn’t be enough for so many. If anything they would be getting a piece of the Lord’s Prayer]. (Rulfo Pedro Páramo, 55)

Their dialogues are the axis around which we, the readers, move inside the secluded town. When asked if Pedro Páramo was the main character of the novel, the author explained that the story’s focus is the townspeople themselves, the penitents who died in sin.6

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They create a present which is haunted by the return of the past but lacks the possibility to establish a proper dialogue with it. Rulfo indicated that his characters break through the boundaries of time and space, given that the dead have neither time nor space (Sommers, 518). The role of these ghosts in Rulfo’s text is to underline the historical absence of a unified society in Mexico. Preciado meets the spirits at different times and places and does not see more than two of them together. And when the voices become too strong, fear makes him collapse. His journey portrays a lack of understanding of the division between past and present, and life and death. Similarly, in a way, to Juan and the Revolution, Mexico seemed to have learned nothing from the war that could have helped plan a better future for the country. As a result of his gradual passive travel from door to door, Rulfo progressively guides Juan and the reader into the recollection and assembly of pieces that give sense to the story of the town around Pedro echoing the fragmented society in the writer’s country. Juan’s journey ends in his tomb from which he hears the reflections coming from Susana San Juan who is in a neighbouring tomb. What makes Susana very important in the text is her perspective of time as a fluid present; in it, current events are moulded by the past, and those in the future are always visible in a very near horizon. When she tells Rentería (the town priest) that he is dead, it is because she knows that everyone is alive as a necessary step prior to being dead. This understanding of time fuses with her relationship with death, which she brings not only to her father but also to the whole town. As a child, when her father sent her into a cave to look for gold coins, the only thing that she could bring to the surface was a skeleton that broke into pieces when she touched it: “El cadáver se deshizo en canillas; la quijada se desprendió como si fuera de azúcar. Le fue dando pedazo a pedazo hasta que llegó a los dedos de los pies y le entregó coyuntura tras coyuntura. Y la calavera primero; aquella bola redonda que se deshizo entre sus manos”. [The body broke into pieces; the jaw fell off as if it were made of sugar.7 She gave him pieces one by one until she reached the toes and she handed him joint after joint. The first part she gave him was the skull; that round ball that fell apart in her hands] (Rulfo Pedro Páramo, 96). She comes back from that experience as a changed person who understands that nothing is permanent. Such a perspective allows her to transcend time and comprehend that death is not to be feared since it is a necessary step in life. She can sense her father when he comes to say goodbye after his death because her mind is trapped between her physical reality and a world of ghosts. However, from the perspective of the omniscient narrator and Pedro, who are limited to a traditional frame of reference that only considers the present, the only conclusion is that Susana is not from our world. During her days at Pedro’s side she manages to remain isolated in her mind, in a semi-conscious state that allows her to live in a world of her own, disconnected from the reality outside: Susana San Juan, metida siempre en su cuarto, durmiendo, y cuando no, como si durmiera. La noche anterior se la había pasado en pie, recostado en la pared, observando a través de la pálida luz de la veladora el cuerpo en movimiento de Susana… Desde que la había traído a vivir aquí no sabía de otras noches pasadas a su lado, sino de estas noches doloridas, de interminable inquietud. Y se preguntaba hasta cuándo terminaría aquello. Esperaba que alguna vez. Nada puede durar tanto, no existe ningún recuerdo por intenso

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A. Alcalá González que sea que no se apague. Si al menos hubiera sabido qué era aquello que la maltrataba por dentro, que la hacía revolcarse en el desvelo, como si la despedazaran hasta inutilizarla. Él creía conocerla… ¿Pero cuál era el mundo de Susana San Juan? Ésa fue una de las cosas que Pedro Páramo nunca llegó a saber. [Susana San Juan, always in her room, sleeping, and if not, seeming asleep. The night before he had been standing, leaning against the wall, looking at her body in movement through the dim light of the candle… Since he had brought her to live here, he knew of no nights at her side other than those painful nights of endless concern. And he wondered when it would end. He hoped that someday. Nothing can last forever; no memory, regardless of its intensity, can last forever. If only he knew what was hurting her on the inside, what disturbed her sleep, as if she were being torn apart until rendered useless. He thought he knew her… But what was the world of Susana San Juan? That was one of the things that Pedro Páramo never knew]. (100–101)

This ability to transcend time allows her to evade any attempt by Pedro to impose his authority on her as he has done with the rest of Comala. Her view of time and her contact with death allow her to establish a dialogue with the past. Juan, on the contrary, is unable to understand what happens around him because he lives in a permanent present that blocks his possibilities of perspective. From her early experience with the skull in the cave, Susana learned that corpses are dead and unmoving, while ghosts are dynamic entities. When Juan becomes trapped in the gothic closed space where the past is in constant irruption, he fails to understand what Susana reveals through her reflections; she is the only one in the text who understands that the past lives in the present just as the ghosts of her father and her first husband move beyond the barriers of time and place. On the other hand, throughout the novel, Preciado remains in a passive role, guided from gate to gate towards his final resting place, without resistance. When the two narrative lines are contrasted, Rulfo’s concern is clear for the reader: a passive acceptance of the present will lead only to the tomb, with no understanding of how the process occurred. Rulfo’s gothic discourse on the past as an unavoidable returning burden that imposes itself upon the inhabitants in San Juan Luvina and Comala is directed towards an emphasis on the condition of the rural areas of Mexico where the condition of the people did not change after the Revolution. In the case of Fuentes, he transplants the Gothic into the metropolitan area of Mexico City to similarly highlight the lack of movement towards the construction of a future in which the past can finally be left aside. As the nerve centre of a centralised country, Mexico City is a scenario where buildings and other elements from all the ages that have modelled the present of the nation coexist together. The past is there, right in front of the city inhabitants: “Mexico cannot forsake the gods, myths and superstitions of its Pre-Columbian past, residing just below the surface of the contemporary reality” (Jaeck, 314). Nevertheless, this past, though palpable in the metropolis, is almost ignored and not given its proper importance as the crucial parameter of the city. It lies evident, right in the face of its inhabitants, but almost forgotten inside museums or left to rot behind modern glass and steel. Fuentes himself claims that the once Aztec city of Tenochtitlan lies on a rocky and quaking subsoil on which all its times and identities (pre-Columbian, baroque, neoclassical, nineteenth-century and modern)

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have been constructed through many centuries (En Esto Creo, 287). The combination of rock and mud on which the capital of the country has evolved reflects the neglected position given to the Mexican past. While some of its features are solid and permanently present, others have been left to sink in corners of blurred memory. This past is the indigenous heritage that has been related with the bottom of the social ladder from the times of the New Spain. Mexico City gathers the architectural memories of a Mesoamerican and Colonial past, in addition to those of the country that was reborn, first after the War of Independence and then as a result of the Mexican Revolution. When all these times are ignored, the city falls into the category of a gothic one that becomes a space rejected and refused to be acknowledged by the civilised embodied in its inhabitants (Mighall, 54, 61). Fuentes’ protagonists are trapped inside architectural realms within this city, haunted by unavoidable presences of a past they insist on denying. According to Fuentes, the answer for the city and its inhabitants is to acknowledge the presence of these memories of all ages in front of them: A country of simultaneous times, where past is present and all of history happens or can happen, at the very moment… skyscrapers next to shanties, supermarkets near garbage dumps. Mercedes-Benzes run races with burros and the TV antenna is the new cross of faith. The god of fire is a little boy spitting flames in exchange for a few centavos. But couples love each other next to the walls of ancient convents; the veterans of the Revolution survive surrounded by memories… The greatness of Mexico is that its past is always alive, and not as a burden… Memory saves it, filters, chooses, but it does not kill. Memory and desire both know there is no living present with a dead past and no future without both: a living present that transformed into a living past… We know that nothing has an absolute beginning or an absolute end. (A New Time, 216)

For the author, the past is not a closed, passive field, but an active and multidimensional open one that can be reinterpreted through the imaginative space provided by creative writing. In his fiction, he shows an almost obsessive concern with the rewriting of history. In fact, he sees humanity, and everything around it, as containing traces of what was and will be. This happens because we live in our time, but are also ghosts from preceding ages, and omens of those to come (En Esto Creo, 197). In his view, if Mexico’s future has never materialised, thus falling into a never-ending frustration, it is because the country will never be completed as a project until it faces and regains the past it has decided to neglect. His gothic fiction points at the origin of the failure that has prevented Mexicans from reaching a future that never seems to materialise. Their own lack of ability to understand the need for the past in order to look ahead and plan for tomorrow is the root of such evil in his stories. To achieve this, he presents stories full of transgressions of time that bring about conflicts between different ages. The result of this is an uncertainty of identities that fall into a constant struggle between change and continuity generating a doubt concerning limits that is never solved. “Chac Mool” introduces a statue of the same name of which several examples are commonly found in Mesoamerican ruins. It can be described as an idol in a reclining position with his head up and turned to one side, holding a tray over his abdomen. The one in the story breaks the boundaries between stone and flesh

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when he starts showing the texture of flesh on his torso and hair on his arms after humidity8 fills the basement where he is kept. After this event, the working and social life of Filiberto, the protagonist and owner of the sculpture, collapses. His career never achieved the promises of his youth, and he now recognises that the little success he had achieved was an illusion. Becoming a servant of the Chac Mool, he begins to wonder whether he is just imagining things or living in a delirium (Fuentes Cuentos Sobrenaturales, 16–17). His common place reality is replaced by what he calls: “otra realidad que sabíamos que estaba allí, mostrenca, y que debe sacudirnos para hacerse viva y presente”. [another, monstrous reality which we knew was there, but left aside, and which must make us tremble to become alive and present] (18). The petrified past becomes incarnated as a body that is not stone, man or animal, but something else: “Tan terrible como su risilla –-horrorosamente distinta a cualquier risa de hombre o animal” [As terrible as his little laugh—horribly different to any human or animal laughter] (21). This fluid entity ends up taking control of the present inside Filiberto’s house. Nevertheless the living idol falls into human temptations turns into a mere perversion of the past unable to dialogue with the present: Apareció un indio Amarillo, en bata de casa, con bufanda. Su aspecto no podía ser más repulsivo; despedía un olor a loción barata; su cara, polveada, quería cubrir las arrugas; tenia la boca embarrada de lápiz labial mal aplicado, y el pelo daba la impresión de estar teñido. [A yellow Indian appeared, wearing a dressing gown and a scarf. His look could not be more disgusting. He smelled like cheap lotion and the powder on his face was intended to cover his wrinkles. The mouth was covered with asymmetrically applied lipstick, and his hair seemed died]. (24)

When Filiberto reflects upon his life and its outcome, it is as if this one was but a mere metaphor of the whole Mexican nation in a race with other countries to achieve a prominent position in the world: No hubo reglas. Muchos de los humildes quedaron allí, muchos llegaron más arriba de lo que pudimos pronosticar en aquellas fogosas amables tertulias. Otros, que parecíamos prometerlo todo, quedamos a la mitad del camino, destripados en un examen curricular, aislados por una zanja invisible de los que triunfaron y de los que nada alcanzaron. [There were no rules. Most of the poor remained there. Others got higher than what we could foresee in those spirited nice social gatherings. Others, like me, who seemed to have extremely promising lives, stayed in the middle of the road, disemboweled in an extracurricular exam, and isolated by an invisible ditch between the successful ones and those who did not reach anything]. (11)

His life is a monotonous and unsuccessful one that he fills with his pastime: his collection of pre-Columbian Mexican art. However, this is but a failed approach that turns the past not into something live, but in a mere inert ornament. About this, Fuentes once wrote that: “No puede haber presente vivo con pasado muerto. Cuando expulsamos al pasado por la ventana, no tarda en regresar por la puerta principal disfrazado de las más extrañas maneras”. [There cannot be a live present with a dead past. When we throw the past through the window, it does not take

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long to come back through the main door disguised in the strangest fashions] (En Esto Creo, 277–278). When the idol takes control of Filiberto’s life, the roles are subverted and what once was becomes so alive that it can take control of a present that never manages to reach a mature age: “Mi idea original era distinta: yo dominaría al Chac Mool, como se domina a un juguete: era, acaso, una prolongación de mi inseguridad infantile; pero la niñez ---¿quién lo dijo?--- es fruto comido por los años, y yo no me he dado cuenta” [My original idea was that I was to control the Chac Mool as one controls a toy. Was that, perhaps, an extension of my childhood. But childhood -who said that?- is a fruit devoured by the passing of years and I have not realised that] (21). Filiberto’s failed attempt to keep the past of his culture alive and under his control plays havoc when the Chac Mool becomes a perverted meeting of the Mexican indigenous legacy and its present. The protagonist’s experience proves that regaining the past is not enough if we are not unable to understand it and establish a dialogue between what was and is. This lack of connection with the past makes Filiberto an unfinished, immature entity that seems to go nowhere, just as the writer’s country is condemned to remain unless it confronts time as a flux in constant change. In “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes” the narrator is sent by his boss to inhabit and make warm a house his company has just bought. The place is situated close to the city centre, on Puente de Alvarado Avenue.9 Though guarded against decay by a couple of old servants, this old house has been empty since 1910 when the family that owned it left for France after the Revolutionary turmoil started. Like Filiberto’s the narrative is based on entries from the protagonist’s diary. His boss calling him güero [blondie] (Fuentes Cuentos Sobrenaturales, 40), the way to call a person of lighter hair in Mexico, indicates that he may look like a European rather than a Mexican. The house dates from the times of the military French occupation, the Second Mexican Empire under the rule of Maximilian I (former Archduke of Austria) and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium. The latter suffered a mental collapse after the defeat and resulting execution by the firearm of her husband. Though old, the house is described as a very live place: “La mansion es en verdad hermosa, por más que la fachada se encargue de negarlo, con su exceso de capiteles jónicos y cariátides del Segundo Imperio”. [The mansion is really beautiful no matter how much the façade tries to deny it with its excess of Ionic capitals and caryatids from the Second Empire] (40). It is a place without a phone that seems to have isolated itself from the present in the city. Within its walls, the past is not seen as decay or abandonment, but as something full of vitality. In just one day inside it, the protagonist feels “un fluir que corresponde a otros litorales, me han inducido a un resposo lúcido” [a flux that corresponds to other coasts that have induced me into a lucid rest] (41). Later, on his second day there, he finds the way to open the window that leads to the garden. This space works as a time portal that alienates him from the physical location of the house inside Mexico City. He has realised the urban context where his identity was shaped has been left apart by entering the house. Its geographical centre, the garden, is described by him as

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a space of “siluetas de la memoria” [memory silhouettes] (41) that seem to bring back a repressed remembrance. In it, he meets an old woman who reveals herself little by little. At first, she is only perceived as a face that stares at him. When she turns her back, she is only visible as a small black and bowed lump. On the third day, he sees her more clearly: Era una viejecita… tendría ochenta años, cuando menos, ¿pero cómo se atrevía a entrar, o por dónde entraba? Mientras desprendía las flores, la observé: delgada, seca, vestía de negro. Falda hasta el suelo… Ensombrecía la cara una cofia de encaje negro, ocultando el pelo blanco y despeinado de la anciana. Sólo pude distinguir los labios, sin sangre, que con el color pálido de su carne penetraban en la boca recta, arqueada en la sonrisa más leve, más triste, más permanente y desprendida de toda motivación. Levantó la vista; en sus ojos no había ojos… era como si un camino, un paisaje nocturno partiera de los párpados arrugados, partiera hacia adentro, hacia un viaje infinito en cada segundo. [She was an elderly lady… may be 80 at least… scrawny, dressed in black. Her long skirt reached the ground… A black lace bonnet shaded the face, hiding the old woman’s white and messy hair. I could only distinguish her bloodless lips. They went into the slightest, saddest and most permanent smile which lacked any motivation at all. She raised her sight, but there were no eyes inside her eyes… it was as if a road, a night landscape, went inside every second towards an infinite journey]. (45)

This deadly presence in apparent mourning comes into the garden and leaves it through a pathway that is just there, expanding the borders inside the house. On the following two days he starts receiving letters from her. He listens to her slow steps “sobre hojas secas” [over dry leaves] (46) outside his door every time when she leaves the letter right before midnight. The relationship between the woman and the garden never disappears since it is the portal that allows her to interact with the protagonist. On his fifth day in the house, the last in the diary, he realises it is impossible to open the door of the house. He also confirms the garden and its flowers smell like a tomb. To this point, the reader is aware that the lady and the death that surround her are there to reveal something to the narrator. She becomes a ghost from the narrator’s past whom he had forgotten about. She mourns her having lost him not in the past, but in the present where he has transgressed the limits between the dead and the living. She is there to guide him back to his normal state as her ghost eternal companion. As they come closer to each other, the sights that turned into letters become conversations in which she makes clear to him they are to remain there forever, inside a “Satisfacción de soledades compartidas” [Satisfaction of shared solitudes] (49). She starts calling him Max and her final revelations are condensed in her also calling him “Tlactocatzine” (the royal name given by the indigenous people from Mexico to Emperor Maximilian I). The final piece of the puzzle is his discovery of her own royal seal: “CHARLOTTE, KAISERIN VON MEXIKO” (49). The concluding lines of the narrative confirm to the protagonist that he is no longer who he was before the interaction of space and time in the mansion started. This place works in his experience as the frame that allows the ghost of his past to arrive and remind him of what he had forgotten for the sake of the modernity outside the house. He is the European noble who came to Mexico in order to rule as an emperor and was later mourned by his widow. His final re-encounter with his repressed true self makes it clear that any attempt to leave previous experiences behind is unsuccessful since his past is what defines

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his present just as the city where the mansion is located is the result of a succession of past events. As done by other gothic writers before them, Rulfo and Fuentes point at the existence of more realities than the one traditionally accepted behind the formation of the present. In the “Chac Mool” and “Tlactocatzine del Jardín de Flandes”, Fuentes’ protagonists exhibit the lack of understanding that the indigenous past and the Second Empire from the 1860s, respectively, are an undeniable part of the present of Mexico. Concerning Rulfo, his reflections on the isolated dead towns of the countryside expose the desolation left after the Revolution despite any discourse intended in the present to portray it as having brought an improvement for the country. Their proposals prove that the attempt to build an identity for Mexico is to be based on the flux of multiple realities existing in its past. And only when the country starts acknowledging the existence of these multiple times that have moulded its present, it will be able to build its identity and move towards the future.

Notes 1. Lucie Armitt establishes the role of the supernatural element as the distinctive element between the Gothic and Magical Realism. According to her, the supernatural presence in a gothic story does not transform the realistic context used as the setting for its appearance, nor is it to lose its effect as a startling element; on the contrary, a ghostly appearance in Magical Realism is accepted as an existing part of everyday without producing a shocking effect. In her own words: “Where the magical realism embraces the foreign, whether spiritual or extraterritorial, the Gothic fights to keep the stranger at bay but fails, intimating a cultural failure which Western cultures have perhaps found it easier to identify with than to overcome” (225). 2. All titles and quotations of Fuentes’ and Rulfo’s works present in this chapter are taken from originals in Spanish, and all the corresponding translations have been done by me. 3. More recently, both stories were published again in the collection Cuentos Sobrenaturales [Supernatural Tales] (2007) which, together with Inquieta Compañía [Restless Company] (2004) gathers the supernatural short fiction of Carlos Fuentes. 4. Mesoamerica, meaning “Middle America” in Greek is a name that experts have given to a region from Central Mexico to Nicaragua whose indigenous peoples at the time of the Spanish conquest shared a cultural heritage. 5. The time difference between the two story lines is at least that of one generation since Pedro, who is told to have died many years ago, is also Juan’s father. 6. Juan Rulfo once commented that according to popular belief in Mexico, dead characters cannot leave their place of death (Sommers, 518). 7. During the traditional Mexican celebration known as the Day of the Dead, people pay homage to their deceased relatives by placing on an altar a decorated sugar skull with the dead person’s name on the forehead. 8. Fuentes‘ text mentions a blurred relationship between the stone idol and the Aztec god of rain, Tlaloc. 9. Contrary to the rural settings of Rulfo that can stand for a multiplicity of isolated towns in the arid countryside of central Mexico, Fuentes makes use of real names of streets and neighbourhoods in the centre of Mexico City in most of his fiction. That is the area of the metropolis where all its times can still be appreciated; there are some pre-Columbian ruins here and there, at the side of multiple architectonical styles from the different times of Mexico as an independent nation.

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Bibliography Armitt, Lucie. “The Gothic and Magical Realism.” Modern Gothic. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 224–239. Baldick, Chris. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford: OUP, 2001), xi–xxiii. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo “The Problem of National Culture.” The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Tomothy J. Henderson (Durham: Duke University, 2002), 28–32. Fuentes, Carlos. A New Time for Mexico. Trans. Marina Gutman Castañeda and Carlos Fuentes (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). ———. Cuentos Sobrenaturales (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2007). ———. En Esto Creo (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002). Gilly, Adolfo. La Revolución Interrumpida (Mexico City: Editorial Era, 2007). Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 3–19. Jaeck, Lois Marie. “Houses of Horror or Magical Kingdoms? Past Times Revisited with Miguel Ángel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar.” Ciencia Ergo Sum, Vol. 6 (No. 3), 1999, 312–318. Jenkins, William O. “Mexico Has Been Turned into a Hell.” The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Tomothy J. Henderson (Durham: Duke University, 2002), 357–363. Poinsett, Joel. “The Mexican Character.” The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Tomothy J. Henderson (Durham: Duke University, 2002), 11–14. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror Vol. 2, The Modern Gothic (Essex: Pearson Education, 1996). Rulfo, Juan. “Luvina.” El Llano en Llamas (Mexico City: RM, 2012). ———. Pedro Páramo (Mexico City: RM, 2012). Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998). Sommers, Joseph. “Los muertos no tienen tiempo ni espacio (un diálogo con Juan Rulfo).” La ficción de la memoria: Juan Rulfo ante la crítica. Ed. Federico Campbell (Mexico City: Ediciones ERA / UNAM, 2003), 517–521.

Dark Urbanity Tijana Parezanović and Marko Lukić

The impact of the unprecedently rapid development of cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century extended far beyond contemporary industrial requirements and immediate social and political consequences. The changing landscapes of urbanity have to this day maintained a strong influence on literary, cultural, and popular imagination, which does not cease to respond to the challenges posed by the constant growth of modern cities. For nearly two centuries, the existence and survival of the modern man, as well as people’s perception of their surroundings and the place humanity occupies within it, has been directly dependent on physical aspects and mental consequences of city streets, buildings, waterfronts, any edifices or features of the urban landscape. Urban landscapes have always presented an architectural reflection of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s interdependence, with their twofold aspect of a progressively entrepreneurial spirit on the one hand, and the poverty and social problems this spirit bred on the other, the latter being easily located in slums or else different parts of the city which inspire visitors with unease as unknown, uncharted, and potentially dangerous zones. The allure cities hold for imagination is also twofold, with delight and fear working as two sides of the same coin. This can be noticed in some of the earliest narratives which incorporate urban space as a crucial element: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which feature a detective well-versed in the city labyrinth, with the powers of reasoning that he uses to successfully confront and conquer the unknown, were at the peak of popularity precisely in the period when London newspapers were weaving the story of Jack the Ripper, his mysterious presence and murderous haunting of the gloomy alleys of the East End. Both figures, the detective and the serial killer, are products of the same modernity that gave birth to the city, and both are inextricably linked with different aspects of the urban imagery. More recent

T. Parezanović (*)  Alfa BK University, Belgrade, Serbia M. Lukić  University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia

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narratives, such as the two that will be analysed in this chapter: The Midnight Meat Train (2008), directed by Ryûhei Kitamura, and Candyman (1992), directed by Bernard Rose, both based on Clive Barker’s stories, exemplify the gradual development of the criminal and investigator figures—the development that, following the given comparison to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, moves towards the elimination of any crucial differences between the two. This merging of two seemingly opposing drives is conditioned precisely by their original rootedness in the rise of urbanity. In order to explain the changing aspects of individual relationships with urban life, this chapter will rely on the concept of the flâneur, the stroller or loafer, first introduced tentatively by Charles Baudelaire to represent a type of the modern man in the increasingly more urbanised world. Furthermore, the chapter will also briefly explore the approaches to urban environments as elaborated by the human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, whose contributions provide a potential theoretical outline of the dark alleys and locations so typical for the topography of the gothic city. In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (1863), Baudelaire presents the figure of (necessarily male and usually well-to-do) idler, a connoisseur of city streets who, intoxicated with the buzzing urban surroundings, indulges in close and long observation of the crowds of people and their activities. Baudelaire refers to this figure as the man of the crowd, basing the concept on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 short story with the same title. The man of the crowd is an anonymous watchful observer who initially takes pleasure from the mere practice of observing, which also justifies his idleness: he does not do anything or otherwise take participation in the activities he witnesses on the pretext of getting to know people, their past and present circumstances, by watching them meticulously. In the proneness of his senses to receive the pulse of life in all its variety, the man of the crowd most resembles a child, or a convalescent, who seems to be breathing in the essence of life with great rapture. However, while he may admire life and draw strength from it, the man of the crowd refrains from consuming it: although ravenous, his appetite for living within the crowd remains unsatiated, and the man of the crowd preserves his solitary individuality—his “I”—by denying himself any identification or merging with the “non-I” that appears in the forms of people or the increasing offer of merchandise provided by the growing urban economy.1 The earliest and greatly multifaceted take on Baudelaire’s essayistic description of the flâneur came from Walter Benjamin, who initiated a surge of scholarly interest in the meaning and significance of this figure as exemplary of urban living. The flâneur was, in Benjamin’s sketches collected into the unfinished Arcades Project (1991) and written during the 1930s, still largely tied to Paris, although this connection was merely convenient. The Parisian Arcades, covered passages built in the early nineteenth century as shopping areas, were a distinctive feature of Paris as much as a symbol of modernised trading practices and the mentioned urban economy. In Benjamin’s view, they provided space in which the flâneur could feel at home and where his fascination with the surrounding urban life could acquire a more specific manifestation in the shape of the goods exhibited in the windows of numerous stores under the arcades. Exposed to the rapidly increasing variety of stimuli, the flâneur can no longer preserve his initial detachment or refrain from

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consuming, and the progress of his gradually developing interaction with what the surrounding space offers—the transformation of his “I” into the other, “non-I” entity—takes different directions, two among which bear relevance to any analyses of the urban modern gothic narratives. The first of these is the very obvious and logical growth of the observing flâneur into a detective or investigator. This can even be seen in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, where the narrator is, among other things, able to recognise gamblers in a large crowd of people by the fact that their thumbs are slightly separated from the other fingers.2 Such inductive reasoning is at the root of his observations, and it leads towards making generalisations about people, classifying them in accordance with their profession, status, background, and affinities. The crucial point of the process, as Benjamin notices, is the search for the criminal, with whom the observer/detective becomes inextricably linked. As modern cities grow into urban jungles, with different sorts of predators lurking behind every corner, the idleness of the flâneur in the midst of the entrepreneurial spirit of progress is legitimised primarily through the role of hunter he acquires as he starts to identify and track down criminals. As Benjamin observes in his considerations of Charles Baudelaire as a poet in the era of capitalism, every lead the flâneur follows inevitably takes him to the source of crime.3 There is, however, an ambivalence at the very heart of this statement, which has more recently been critically addressed,4 while it also forms the foundation of numerous contemporary urban horror narratives, including The Midnight Meat Train and Candyman. Namely, if every lead the flâneur follows takes him towards crime, does that imply that he is the perfect detective, never failing to catch the dangerous criminal, or that he himself becomes entangled in the world of crime? The flâneur’s anonymity in the midst of multitudes, which he preserves regardless of his evolution from the initial detached position, also potentially makes him the perfect—untraceable—criminal. Detective fiction depends on the reasonable preservation of this binary opposition, the clear distinction between the detective and the criminal. Still, the similarity between the two does not go unnoticed in the very classics of the genre. Thus, Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” describes his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty as “the Napoleon of crime”, “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans”.5

The distinction between the two is stressed by the fact that the ultimate criminal sits motionless, whereas the detective is searching as he walks the streets; most of the other characteristics, however, are the same. The genius thinker, the one that remains undetected/anonymous while letting nothing escape his observation, the connoisseur of the web that urban jungle is woven into, positioned right in its centre, the idler who does little but think and plan—this provides an adequately complementary description of Baudelaire’s man of crowds, but as thinking and planning take a criminal (in the case of Professor Moriarty) or crime-solving turn (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), it becomes clear that detachment is no longer an

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option, as the web forces the flâneur to stay inside, leaving him merely with the option of choosing the side he will work for. The gothic sensibility of modern horror, on the other hand, works precisely by shattering the established binary opposition. The aggressive flâneur6 that is the product of the intersection between the gothic/horror genre and the social concept of flânerie functions like a Jekyll/Hyde figure, mirroring at the same time all that is good and progressive and all that is murderously primitive. Detectives/investigators/hunters in both The Midnight Meat Train and Candyman become themselves master criminals while maintaining the original outlook of observant infatuated strollers. The second direction in which the flâneur develops is conditioned by his inability to resist the allure of commodities in the conspicuously more ­consumerism-oriented society. He gradually stops refraining from mere admiration of the exhibited goods and starts consuming them.7 He becomes a buyer, an archetype of the p­ resent-day visitor of the malls, which are merely our contemporary manifestation of Parisian Arcades. What the genre offers as a specific take on this consumer stroller is, however, a bleaker vision of an individual whose appetite can no longer be satisfied by commercial merchandise. Relying on the tradition of serial murderers such as Jack the Ripper, the aggressive flâneur, as the central figure of modern urban gothic narratives, treats people as goods, consuming their lives in acts of sacrifice, vengeance, or preservation of a mystically dark order that operates below the level of city streets. While attempting a reading and an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of a gothic or dark city, it becomes almost immediately obvious that the analytic approach cannot be limited to the understanding of the subjective experience of the individual characters that are usually either stranded or somehow left to the devices of the harsh, dangerous, and potentially morbid urban surroundings entrapping them. It becomes, in fact, necessary to address its symbolic value achieved through the interaction between actual space—that which can be defined in geographical and topographical terms, and the later emotional inscription done by human beings. More precisely, the gothic city is constructed on the binary relationship between the notions of space and place, where the notion of space once again is defined by the actual topography, an urban project or architecture, while the idea of place, marked by the moment of inscription of meaning and emotions into space, assures countless interpretative opportunities. This theoretical polarity, promoted by numerous human geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Tim Cresswell, and others, allows for an interesting first step in understanding what a (dark) city may look like. Tuan, for example, among different theoretical readings of space, relates the idea of fear as a key characteristic of any larger city, in spite of the logical and obvious initial attempts to create a safe environment. He elaborates on how the cities become disoriented environments, with houses collapsing on their inhabitants, fires breaking out, and heavy traffic threatening the citizens.8 This is amplified, as Tuan continues, by the growth of cities, by the imposed increasing spatial division between the rich and poor population, as well as the increasing crime rate. London in the eighteenth century, for example, was

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characterised by ill-lit streets and the reluctance of townspeople to venture outside after dark due to criminals operating boldly in the heart of the city.9 This sensation of fear exalted by the dark urban surroundings becomes additionally emphasised by Tuan in his elaboration of the importance of light in the process of articulating and defining space. In his text, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Tuan presents the evolutionary process of creating a “place” premised on an anthropocentric concept and the organisation of space according to the body of an individual.10 This theoretical concept presents an individual lost within a forest, subjected to the disappearance of any source of light. In that precise moment, the individual becomes utterly lost in a sea of darkness. He or she can move, but the movements are purposeless since they are leading nowhere, while simultaneously being dangerous. It is only after the reappearance of a distant light that a person is able to discern what is in front of his/her body and what is behind, what is on the left side and what is on the right, with the promise of a safe place shining in the distance. This combination of an anthropocentric perception and articulation of space/place, together with the inherently dark and dangerous urban settings offered by most gothic/dark cities, proposes a unique insight into the functioning of this type of spaces. The ominous absence of light characterising these spaces conditions the proposed narratives to have characters placed within various gothic urban narratives that are no longer exclusively exposed to the potential monstrous threat, but instead are imperilled by the surrounding space itself. The simple promise of a potential demise offered by the looming urban surroundings, coupled with the self-perpetuating fear and anxiety amplified by the individual himself, leads to the creation of a very specific kind of narrative construct as well as atmosphere. The specificity of the setting becomes even more relevant with the introduction of the image and concept of the previously analysed flâneur. More precisely it is only with the introduction of the concept of the flâneur that the actual nature of the gothic city gradually, in dependence of the narrative at hand, becomes exposed. Furthermore, it is only through the introduction of this (potentially aggressive) urban stroller that the viewers are allowed to appreciate the initial exposure of a potentially gothic space, as well as its later corruption while transitioning into a gothic place. It is the flâneur, through his human and anthropocentric articulation of space, combined with his specific movement patterns, that provides a unique insight and the possibility to further explore the dark aspects of an urban environment, as well as to metaphorically “consume” (or be consumed by) his findings. Ryûhei Kitamura’s film The Midnight Meat Train could therefore be used as a fitting example through which to observe not only the close connection between the dark city and the flâneur, but also the previously mentioned crucial (de)evolutionary process and final birth of the aggressive flâneur as an active staple within the horror genre. The film’s narrative develops around Leon Kauffman, and his attempts to make it as a photographer. His work, focused almost exclusively on the urban environment of New York City, allows him to roam the streets, connecting and merging with the large crowds, while distantly observing and documenting various life segments and moments, confirming in such a way his almost perfect status of a flâneur. However, the same status prevents him from actually

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interacting with his surroundings. In his use of photography—which, especially as street photography, in addition to journalism provides yet another modern take on flânerie11—he finds a perfect instrument for the urban realities, while attempting to understand what the city really is. When questioned why the city is at the centre of his attention, he simply responds that no one has ever captured it, that no one succeeded in seeing what it really was, what the actual heart of the city looked like. He is therefore situated between the actual status of the flâneur, together with his detachment from the surrounding life and crowds, and his actual need to venture outside of his position of an observer. His photographs consequently remain undetermined, retaining and projecting a sense of uncertainty, and conclusively unable to portray what the city really is. As a gallery owner comments while evaluating Leon’s work, “It’s melodrama, arresting but empty. I want to know what comes next. I want to see the face of the businessman when the filth touches him. The next time you find yourself at the heart of the city stay put, be brave, keep shooting”.12 Consequently, Leon now decides to expand his detached “flâneur-based” behaviour and initiate a more dynamic interaction with his surroundings, transitioning from a romanticised observer of the city into a chronicler of its (darker) realities. This moment is marked by his following of a group of delinquents, who after a night in the city decide to take the subway towards an unknown destination. Leon follows them and soon discovers that instead of taking the train they decided to attack a young girl. Instead of helping the victim, he opts for taking some pictures first, and only after that goes on to directly oppose the assailants. The leader of the group, surprised by the interruption and the fact that he is being photographed, tries to confront Leon, only to be faced with more clicking of the camera and Leon’s question—“Ever starred in a movie before?”,13 while pointing at the surveillance cameras located above them. The assailant decides with the rest of the group to flee, leaving Leon to console the victim. This is a turning point within the narrative, rearticulating the passive flâneur into an active participant through his decision to intervene in the occurrences that are taking place around him. This is confirmed a moment later by the final breaking down of the initially defined construct of the flâneur by Baudelaire and Benjamin when the surveillance camera records his interaction with the assailants. The camera objectively records the events, but also creates a new reality for Leon, now pushed forward and exposed to the dark parallel reality of the city. Although his position as a flâneur has now been transmuted into something else, he still retains his role as an observer. After being praised for his new photographs, Leon is encouraged to continue with his newly discovered approach to observing the city, which in turn leads him towards the last stage of his transition. While walking the streets of New York City one night, he observes a strange figure of an elegantly dressed man. The man leaves the subway, checks his suit, and continues walking, while carrying a leather case, towards an unknown destination. Intrigued by the appearance and behaviour of the figure, Leon starts following him and taking pictures, only to be suddenly stopped by the man himself now aware that he has been followed. During the brief scuffle, Leon notices a strange ring on the man’s finger, a detail that will later on reveal the connection between the death of the

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previously saved young woman and the mysterious dark figure. After more following and some research, Leon discovers the name of the man to be Mahogany, that he lives in a hotel, and that he is employed as a butcher at a local meat processing factory. These details, however, become almost irrelevant with the discovery that Mahogany was the primary suspect for a series of murders which occurred during the past one hundred and fifty years, and Leon, now further intrigued and driven by his desire to discover the metaphoric (and actual) secrets of the city, starts obsessively following Mahogany. The culmination of this obsession occurs when Leon, during one of his stalking expeditions, remains trapped in a subway car within which Mahogany murders and butchers a number of passengers. The earlier analysed relationship between the flâneur and crime emerges again, and Leon is simultaneously horrified with the scene in front of him, and also unable to stop discovering and observing. This exposure of the main character to the darker side of his urban surroundings, to the horrors which are dwelling and taking place in the physical innards of the city, directly affects him, and the flâneur is now exposed to yet another change. The initially established dynamic of the flâneur—the follower/observer and the followed, of the curious stroller attracted to crime, disappears, or more precisely becomes inverted. Now aware of his stalker, it is Mahogany who starts following Leon, observing him together with his friends and girlfriend. The final climactic confrontation, in accordance with the customs of the genre, shows Leon trying to stop the monster. Dressed almost exactly like Mahogany, wearing a metal apron, and equipped with hooks and knives taken from Mahogany’s workplace, he enters the same subway wagon as the previous night, only to find his girlfriend trapped, as well as Mahogany waiting for him. Their visual resemblance emphasises once again the inverted and now mixed roles, accentuated even more by their violent physical confrontation, further blurring their distinctions. The end of their confrontation, and their metaphoric unification, occurs almost ritualistically, with Leon killing Mahogany, and Mahogany’s haunting last words “Welcome”.14 The main character is now exposed to the final reality of the city he was exploring. By questioning the conductor of the train, he discovers that at the heart of the city there is an underground world inhabited by creatures that thrive on human flesh. Mahogany’s job was to act as a butcher and provider for these creatures whose existence preceded even humanity itself, a position that now belongs to Leon. The ending, although conforming to gothic and horror narrative traditions, points out the successful completion of the flâneur’s exploration. Leon Kauffman starts as a simple stroller, an observer of the emotionally void space(s) of the city, which reflects on his objective but emotionally barren photography. It is only through his need to push forward and explore the city much deeper, to become involved with its individuals and its (violent) dynamics, that he discovers and accepts his own attraction to what is actually beneath the city’s surface. By doing so, by inscribing emotions into the surrounding urban space, he discovers a different city, a place of death and darkness, a place within which the flâneur’s actual, and until then suppressed, desires can be realised.

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In one of the early scenes of Candyman, Trevor Lyle, a University of Illinois professor and husband of the protagonist Helen, ends his lecture on urban legends with the following words: “these stories are modern oral folklore… they are the unselfconscious reflection of the fears of urban society”.15 The film focuses on one such urban legend—the story of Candyman, a talented artist and well-educated son of a slave who by the end of the nineteenth century had become a prosperous man with a successful business. However, Candyman—who remains anonymous despite the familiar background story—committed the one offence against social order that an African-American must never make: he fell in love and conceived a child with a white woman. The retribution was prompt and savage: his hand was sawed off, honey poured over him and his body left to the mercy of bees; finally, his dead body was burnt on a pyre. Urban legend has it that, a century later, he still appears to people who pronounce his name five times looking in the mirror; the apparition is anything but ethereal because those who dare invoke him face immediate brutal death as Candyman slaughters them with the hook that stands in place of his lost hand. The Candyman story most certainly is a reflection of the fear of retribution that the modern society might feel due to the bloody history it was built upon—the history of lynching in this particular case. Although rarely made explicit, this fear is omnipresent and forms the dark side of the urban progress of the twentieth-century American society. This is a motif stressed visually at the very beginning of Candyman: as the busy expressways in Chicago give way to the skyline filled with high-rises, thus stressing the architecture of urbanity, what appears to be an immense swarm of bees starts gradually looming behind the buildings, a tenebrous cloud made up of the sins and dreads of civilisation. In a method similar to that applied to The Midnight Meat Train analysis, the workings of the dark side of urbanity can in this case also be observed through the concept of flânerie, which is in Rose’s film given a fresh innovative perspective. The story of Candyman comes into the focus of Helen Lyle, a graduate student working on a thesis on urban legends. This position establishes Helen immediately as a flâneur type, although perhaps an uncommon one for the simple fact that she is a woman. The positioning is made based on several of Benjamin’s notes in the Arcades Project and Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, some of them already referred to. For instance, she is intoxicated with the mystery of the story she explores, and she is indeed led straight towards crime whichever route she takes. Research of digital databases does not suffice for Helen; in order to write a groundbreaking thesis, she considers it necessary to actually visit some of the legendary locations of Cabrini Green, the housing project over which Candyman’s ashes were scattered, now the site of some gruesome murders attributed to him and a ghetto quarter cut off from the “respectable” parts of the city, where Helen’s friend and fellow student Bernadette would not even drive past as “the gangs hold this whole neighbourhood hostage”.16 As the film progresses, brutal crimes indeed appear wherever Helen finds herself as either the victim or the (still unrevealed) perpetrator. These include her being beaten up by a gang in a men’s toilet on Cabrini Green, as well as her sudden waking up in Anne-Marie’s apartment after the encounter with Candyman, all

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covered in blood. Flâneurial intoxication is clearly evident in numerous scenes which feature Helen’s eyes in close-up, accompanied usually with Philip Glass’s “Helen’s Theme”, but is perhaps the most evident when she first spots the mural of Candyman in the apartment of the murdered woman on Cabrini Green, or when she first sees the “real” Candyman in the University parking area. Helen experiences vertigo and what appears to be a strong headache in both cases marks the fact that what intoxicates her also starts absorbing her entirely. It is, additionally, clear that this intoxication is, in Benjamin’s words, anamnestic, imbued with a recollection of the (collective) past.17 It is a trademark of the flâneur that every street leads him not solely towards crime but into the past as well. The layers of history and collective memory, which is in Candyman well represented through urban legends, unfold before the flâneur’s steps and hold him under the spell.18 It is, as has been mentioned, necessarily him that in traditional critical and historical approaches assumes the role of the urban stroller. Scholars have largely denied the possibility of the existence of a woman flâneur, or flâneuse—the term that would have, as noted in a recent study by Lauren Elkin,19 embodied the female spirit of idle strolling had it ever been used in any context similar to the one in which the masculine form appears. Women who had any connections with the open spaces of the city were usually, even in the period of rising modernity, portrayed as streetwalkers, prostitutes who can perhaps only be observed as commodity on offer in one particular branch of the market. Within the structure of gendered space, women’s respectability relied upon their relegation to the confines of their home and, possibly, ladies’ lunch clubs, or, in the event of the ­working-class women, their place of work.20 Women were not supposed to loaf about the streets, and even those who unfortunately did, the streetwalkers, were not to follow anyone but rather attract attention and be followed. (We might at this point evoke yet again the narrative of Jack the Ripper and its various forms, such as the one given by Alan Moore in From Hell: prostitutes are reduced merely to those elements of the streets that the stroller might take interest in. In gothic narratives such as this one, they might only evolve inasmuch as they take on the role of the hunted, the victim.) In other words, the dialectic of flânerie (in the phrasing of Walter Benjamin)21 could not have applied to women. The follower and the followed, the observer and the observed, the viewed by all and the hidden—these descriptors always refer to a man. Introducing a woman in this role is an emancipatory contribution of Candyman, but gender in the case of the present narrative does not serve to postulate the idea of the flâneuse as generically different from the flâneur (as Lauren Elkin emphasises in Flâneuse, speaking of a figure inspired and formed in its own right). Instead, it serves to stress the liminal position, or the instability, of the stroller.22 The stroller is an individual in the state of liminality, not quite belonging to the wealthy classes he (or she) originates from because he is overly infatuated with life on the streets, yet not completely becoming part of the street life as he refrains from taking active participation in it. Similar liminality is inherent in the position of Helen Lyle and subtly stressed throughout the film. As an aspiring scholar and simultaneously a university professor’s wife, she finds it difficult to build a career in a world largely dominated by men (of this world,

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the viewer is given a glimpse through two of Trevor’s colleagues, whose smug intellectualism appears to bear no tolerance for women scholars intruding upon their areas of interest) and preserve her marriage in the face of young admiring female students with whom her husband inevitably interacts. Between these two places, her home and the university, Helen is in fact placeless, and this is brought to clear focus by the end of the film when, her apartment being now occupied by Trevor’s student lover Stacey, she has nowhere to go and can find her sole retreat in Candyman’s den. We might take this to be the turn given by Candyman to the possibility of the flâneuse: she is not anonymous—Helen’s identity and name are all too well established in the narrative,23 unlike those of Candyman—but atopos, and it is her placelessness (made explicit at the end but hinted at throughout the film through the liminal position she occupies) that inspires the horror she comes to experience through the Candyman story. The position of Candyman is, according to the canonised story of his historical background, initially also that of a flâneur type, like Helen. His flâneurial impulse is artistic: as Professor Philip Purcell clearly emphasises in his account given to Helen, Candyman “had a prodigious talent as an artist”,24 documenting and capturing the lives of the wealthy upper classes in portraits (similarly to Helen, who in reverse captures the lives of the poor in photographs, but also not unlike Leon Kauffman, the artist of The Midnight Meat Train). As an artist, he is at first detached from the subjects of his paintings, but his involvement with the world he observes begins with the romance with a wealthy landowner’s daughter whose portrait he is commissioned to paint. The liminal position of such a person is quite obvious: his education and talent make him appear out of place in his surroundings, but, being a black man, he cannot find any place within the white-dominated society. It is precisely at the moment when their placelessness becomes irremediable that both Helen and Candyman become part of the oral folklore, which, in the quoted words of her husband, reflects the fears of urban society. A black man and a white woman are perhaps the two types most prone to the representation of liminality in such a society. However, the initial structuring provided by the film narrative makes a clear distinction between the two, developing the artist flâneur Candyman into a serial, albeit imaginary, murderer, and the researcher flâneur Helen into a detective who aims to expose the past and hunt down whichever murderer has taken on Candyman’s identity. It is through a series of structurally significant scenes that a parallel and, finally, identification between the two of them is established, and this process relies entirely on the aspects of urban spatiality. A closer look into one of the early scenes might be useful in order to explain the spatially based parallelism between Helen and Candyman. As she embarks on her research of the urban legend, Helen realises that the condominium in which her pricey apartment is located, Lincoln Village, was initially built as a housing project to accommodate the poor, just like Cabrini Green. Once it was built, the city authorities discovered that there was no barrier between Lincoln Village and the rich historic Gold Coast—nothing to keep the “ugly” urban landscape of poverty and crime away from the sensitive eyes of the upper classes

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(Cabrini Green is, on the other hand, separated by a highway)—so they decided to adapt the apartments slightly and turn the project into a fanciful apartment block. While the structural difference between the two clearly delineated places is striking, with all the social and class associations it bears, they are essentially the same. Once a careful observer moves beyond the surface level (graffiti-­covered vs. whitewashed corridor walls, for example), it transpires that the layout of apartments in both blocks is identical. It is this spatial experience of the sameness that allows both Helen and Candyman to move freely around places from which they are otherwise socially isolated. Whenever Helen visits Cabrini Green, she repeats to anyone she meets that she is not a cop. Pretending to be one would suit her fine to put the guise of a detective over her stroller’s curiosity; however, she seems to feel at home where she is. The easiness with which she manages to orient herself in the apparently “non-I” surroundings of Cabrini Green anticipates her subsequent identification with Candyman, through which the narrative sustains the Jekyll/Hyde metaphor of urban living. The progress of this identification is easy to follow. Helen first calls Candyman’s name five times in front of the mirror—something which, as she has learnt from her interviews with different people, no one ever dares to do. The next step leads her literally inside the bowels of Candyman. Just as the street, once covered with arcades, comes to be experienced as the interior by the flâneur,25 so does the dilapidated Cabrini Green apartment of a murdered woman give way to recesses that are perceived by Helen (and visually represented) as the interior of Candyman—whether man or story. As she explores these dark insides, the camera pictures her going through a hole in the wall; the wall is covered with a mural showing Candyman’s face, and the hole stands in the place of the gaping mouth— passing through it, Helen symbolically leaves his body, and the overwhelming intoxication she experiences now acquires the value not of a simple stroller’s fascination with the surroundings but of the looming knowledge of the imminent destiny her strolling would meet. Finally, the identification process is completed when Candyman meets Helen in the parking area, explaining that he has come for her. He is himself casually striding across the university premises—the space not unknown or forbidden to him, but through the newly forged interaction turned into the space he now consumes by taking Helen away. The focus is, however, on her: the scene narratively marks her final transformation into an aggressive flâneur, or rather flâneuse, who would, albeit unknowingly, commit a series of murders. Her evolution now follows a clear line from a detached researcher, through voyeuristic photographer and amateur detective, to violent killer—and this is not the end of her path. If anything, the image of the nineteenth-century flâneur came to be, primarily through Benjamin’s sketches, prone to different kinds of inscriptions and interpretations, a liminally open concept onto which, depending on the social and historical context, different ideas have been superposed. His image has thus become part of the lore of modernity, and the same happens to Helen as she in the end sees her face painted on a wall on Cabrini Green, accompanied by the words “It was always you, Helen”.26 She becomes part of modern oral folklore, shedding off the individuality which might have been inscribed with different models

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(of a mother and housewife, or a university lecturer), but which was instead, in the specific context of the 1980s-rising tide of urbanisation, taken over by the dark forces lurking beneath the construction of the city. Conclusively, it could be proposed that gothic or dark cities cannot exist without the complex narrative and phenomenological structures that lurk beneath their urbanised and apparently calm surfaces. Although different narrative cases can be approached in different ways, such as for example the role and function of the flâneur within the context of a city, the idea of the nature of a dark urban setting relies strongly on its symbolic structures, on the mythical constructs surrounding it. By starting with Walter Benjamin’s and Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flâneur, and then moving on towards Poe, Doyle, or any of the contemporary incarnations of the stroller, a clear evolutionary line can be traced. Starting with a progressively more inquisitive approach to flâneurism, to the indulgence of interest towards crime and the interaction with the criminals themselves, the flâneur acquires unprecedented qualities, both as a theoretical construct as well as a, now active, character within a narrative. This progression of interests and dynamics is not however limited to the character himself or herself. It is in fact the nature of the flâneur, and his interactivity with the urban surroundings, that allows for the proper articulation of a dark urban setting. It is the flâneur that locates and observes the darkness in a city, and it is once again through his (de)evolution and acceptance of criminal and violent behaviour that this hidden urban darkness perpetuates itself over and over again. Such a polarity which progressively becomes a unity allows for the (aggressive) flâneur to function within the gothic and horror genre as a gradual explorer of dark spaces, which he critically assesses, only to give in to his or her fascinations, desires, or simply nature. The consequence is the discovery and further articulation of a very specific type of place, a dark and foreboding urban backdrop set as an (im)perfect reflection of our own realities.

Notes

1. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London and New York: Phaedon Press, 1964), 7–9. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 231. 3. “[N]o matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime.” Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1985), 41. 4. Tom McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur,” October, no. 102 (Autumn 2002): 101–122. 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin Classics: New York, 2001), loc. 8998. 6. Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović, “Strolling Through Hell—The Birth of the Aggressive Flâneur,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7, no. 4 (2016): 322–333. 7. “The flâneur’s disregard of the commercial has itself become utopian. This disdain puts him outside the bourgeois pale, a deviant within the larger utilitarian model of society.

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Not even the artist – especially not the artist – can keep the commercial at a safe distance.” Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris,” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 33–34. 8. “[T]he city itself becomes a disorienting physical environment in which tenement houses collapse on their inhabitants, fires break out, and heavy traffic threatens life and limb.” Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 146. 9. Ibid., 160–161. 10. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 36. 11. The development of the idle stroller into a street photographer, with all the voyeuristic implications it bears, has been developed by Susan Sontag: “photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. … The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer ‘apprehends,’ as a detective apprehends a criminal.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: RosettaBooks, 2005), 42–43. 12. Ryûhei Kitamura dir., The Midnight Meat Train (2008). 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Bernard Rose dir., Candyman (1992). 16. Ibid. 17. “That anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge – indeed, of dead facts – as something experienced and lived through.” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 417. 18. “The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward – if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private.” Benjamin, Arcades, 416. 19. Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 20. This refers in particular to the canonical artistic and novelistic representations of women, as well as socially conditioned women’s own representations of women. See, for example, Griselda Pollock’s chapter on “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 70–127. 21. “Dialectic of flânerie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it is this dialectic that is developed in ‘The Man of the Crowd.’” Benjamin, Arcades, 420. 22. “Both surveyor and surveyed, the flâneur is an unstable figure, a beguiling but empty vessel, a blank canvas onto which different eras have projected their own desires and anxieties. He appears when and how we want him to.” Elkin, Flâneuse, loc. 204. 23. According to Lauren Elkin, “[t]he argument against the flâneuse sometimes has to do with questions of visibility” because women are, while made historically invisible, still excessively conspicuous when they do appear in the context of the city. As Elkin states, “[w]e would love to be invisible the way a man is. We’re not the ones who make ourselves visible, … in terms of the stir a woman alone in public can create; it’s the gaze of the flâneur that makes the woman who would join their ranks too visible to slip by unnoticed.” Elkin, Flâneuse, loc. 244.

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24. Bernard Rose dir., Candyman (1992). 25. Walter Benjamin stresses this repeatedly in the Arcades Project. For example, “[m]ore than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.” Benjamin, Arcades, 423. 26. Bernard Rose dir., Candyman (1992).

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaedon Press, 1964. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001. Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Lukić, Marko, and Tijana Parezanović. “Strolling Through Hell—The Birth of the Aggressive Flâneur.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7, no. 4 (2016): 322–333. McDonough, Tom. “The Crimes of the Flâneur.” October, no. 102 (Autumn 2002): 101–122. Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla. “The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris.” In The Flâneur, edited by Keith Tester, 22–42. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Pollock, Griselda. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” In Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: RosettaBooks, 2005. Tuan, Yi-Fu: Landscapes of Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Filmography Candyman. Directed by Rose Bernard. TriStar Pictures, 1992. The Midnight Meat Train. Directed by Kitamura Ryûhei. Lionsgate, 2008.

Contemporary Australian Trauma Jessica Gildersleeve

As a nation haunted by the spectres of its colonial past—or, indeed, its colonial present—Australia has for decades looked to the Gothic as a genre capable of grappling with its complexities. Precisely because of this fraught historical context, it would not be an overstatement to say that the Australian Gothic is dominated by a discourse of trauma. Indeed, it is through trauma, both Steven Bruhm and Jerrold E. Hogle have argued, that the Gothic is best understood: ‘the Gothic itself is a narrative of trauma’, argues Bruhm.1 To be sure, the Gothic as it appears in Australia has always been concerned with the representation of national and cultural anxieties.2 In the nineteenth century and the early parts of the twentieth century, when Australia was still developing a sense of its global and historical position, these were most often expressed as anxieties about any kind of a homogenous or independent national identity. While these themes do remain present in the contemporary Australian Gothic, in the later parts of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, however, these concerns are primarily to do with a sense of shame or guilt about the consequences of Australia’s colonial origins as well as the significance of its early mythologies, such as the Australian Legend. In this way, it can be seen that it is not the topic which has altered in contemporary Australian Gothic, as opposed to earlier gothic narratives of the emerging nation. Rather, it is the attitude to those topics which changes, and which reveals contemporary concerns about the traumas of Australia’s colonial past and their ongoing effects in the present. Thus, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Australian gothic literature and film has become a site for political resistance and for social and cultural disruption. This can be seen in the key themes which remain consistent in the genre over this time, as well as in a range of key contexts for the Australian representation of the Gothic. This chapter will explore these themes and contexts, demonstrating their dependence on a discourse of trauma (and its association with guilt, shame, anxiety). It begins with a discussion of cinema and

J. Gildersleeve (*)  University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_6

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its adaptations in the 1970s and beyond as a significant site of the Gothic in the Australian imagination: in the visual medium the broad and terrifying expanse of the Australian landscape and its strange inhabitants are brought to the fore. Drawing on the notion of a collective ‘villain’ or site of fear in these works, the chapter then moves to an exploration of the female Gothic, from its mid-century conceptualisation of women’s isolation and entrapment, to its more visceral and psychological representation in contemporary literature. The nation’s historical traumas are then examined in detail with a focus on the term ‘Gothic’ for understanding work by Aboriginal authors in this context. Finally, the chapter turns to narratives which consider the relationship between Australia and Europe as Gothic in a return to the genre’s origins and the refusal of resolution which is repeatedly posited in these examples of the contemporary Australian Gothic. As such, the chapter aims to demonstrate the ways in which the Gothic is particularly suited as a structural representation of trauma and oppression in Australia’s fraught historical and social context. Since the ‘New Wave’ of Australian cinema in the early 1970s, film has been one of the most prominent forms the Gothic has taken in Australia. More than this, these examples of gothic cinema are frequently adaptations of earlier novels, establishing a clear link—even dialogue—between Australian gothic literature and film. Indeed, in its focus on themes of oppression, violence and isolation, those critical themes of the Gothic, the history of Australian cinema is also predominantly a history of Australian gothic cinema; Jonathan Rayner even begins his study of contemporary Australian cinema with a chapter on the Australian Gothic.3 Indeed, this tendency towards adaptation (or mutation) in the Australian gothic film also suggests the desire to return to and rework the past, whether that is the colonial past or a later history. Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock have remarkably similar journeys as narratives for public consumption. Both were published as novels in the 1960s (the former in 1961, the latter in 1967), both were adapted to film in the renaissance of Australian cinema in the 1970s (1971 and 1975, respectively), and both were recently adapted again for television (2017 and 2018). Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock thus appear as haunting in their irresolution and their insistence on return. Both films take the eeriness and isolation of the Australian landscape as a source of fear. The unwelcoming expanse of the desert is established in the opening shot of Wake in Fright, a 360-degree panorama of empty plains, shimmering in the heat, interrupted only by the small hotel and schoolhouse, and the ghastly stretch of the railway into the distance. Indeed, the implicit association between this landscape and horror is attested to by the title under which the film was released in the United Kingdom and the United States: simply, Outback. It is a space from which schoolteacher John Grant is only too keen to escape as he begins his days-long journey back to the civilisation of Sydney and the woman he hopes to marry. That emptiness is quickly contrasted with the claustrophobia of John’s effective imprisonment in the small town of Bundanyabba, where he becomes trapped after losing his entire savings in a game of ‘Two-Up’, and the cloistering ‘hospitality’ of the locals, whose persistent invitations to share a beer

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and queries of John, ‘where ya gunna go?’ become horrific in their repetition and the impossibility of refusal. Like Jonathan in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), John is first seduced and then repulsed by this hospitality and, also like Jonathan, finds it impossible to escape: each time he attempts to leave the town he is returned in a horrific cycle of uncanny repetition and nightmarish regression. For Rayner, the hard-drinking, roo-shooting, gambling locals of ‘The Yabba’ signify the dark Other of stereotypical Australian masculinity.4 In this way, Wake in Fright might be seen to represent a national anxiety about the consequences of upholding such an identity and the chaos of its free rein outside the civilisation of the urban centres on Australia’s coast. However, it is not the land or even the township and its inhabitants which are ultimately the source of violence or horror. Rather, it is John himself, the ostensible locus of civilisation, who is the true monster: the horror at the heart of Wake in Fright is in John’s unknown capacity for terrible actions, such as the strange figure he shoots under cover of darkness and the influence of drugs and alcohol, and which is never explained. Under the conditions of the narrative’s uncanny returns, at the film’s end John is returned to the school, his threatening self now dormant but not destroyed. The threat has not been dealt with, the narrative suggests; rather, John’s acceptance of a beer (when on his trip out he had only drunk water) indicates his transformation into a monstrous Other. Picnic at Hanging Rock differs from Wake in Fright in its self-conscious construction of artistry: it is a period film (set in 1900), aimed in part at establishing the serious intellectualism of Australian cinema at the time. Yet, it is a gothic narrative nonetheless, thereby making clear the genre’s interactions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, two schoolgirls and their teacher vanish while picnicking at the eponymous ‘hanging rock’. It therefore belongs to the ‘lost child’ subgenre of the Australian Gothic, a grouping of texts which speak to the terrifying nature of the New World and its strange sounds, animals and landscape. Where Wake in Fright derives part of its horror from the empty expanse of the desert, however, Picnic’s gothic landscape is constructed by the thick bush scrub, so difficult to read and to navigate for the European colonisers, as well as the strangeness of the rock itself, rising from the bush and marked by crevasses and steep drops. The film is marked by its eerie soundscape, the slow and otherworldly music of panpipes, combined with an effect director Peter Weir created by slowing down the sound of earthquakes.5 The otherworldly effect is completed by the girls’ spectral costuming: all dressed in white, and speaking very little, they float across the screen and disappear all too quickly. The film thus establishes a haunting sense of the ineffable that is underscored by its narrative irresolution. Two of the girls and their teacher are never found, and no explanation is provided. Yet, that the rock is also suggested to be a site for Aboriginal spirituality positions Picnic as a narrative which, like the Australian Gothic of the nineteenth century, sees the nation’s Indigenous people as Other, mysterious and unknowable, exploiting them for the purpose of a gothic fear of the foreign. The consequences of this for the gothic genre will be returned to later. Perhaps one of the most popular Australian horror films of the twenty-first century, Wolf Creek (2005) also draws on aspects of Australia’s landscape to inform

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its production of fear: the film is named for the site of a meteor crater, a natural wonder in the middle of the desert to which three backpackers travel. Here, in a nod to the establishment of the Australian Gothic in Picnic, their watches mysteriously stop and their car breaks down. The film thus sets up the viewer to expect a narrative of disappearance, as in the earlier work. While it does uphold that expectation in some respects (the bodies of the two female backpackers are never found), Wolf Creek abruptly disrupts those certainties in its explicit representations of horrific violence. In a similar way, the film disturbs our expectations in its casting of John Jarrett in the role of the murderous villain. At the time, Jarrett was best known for his work on the lifestyle television programme, Better Homes and Gardens, which he co-hosted with his then-wife Noni Hazlehurst, herself primarily associated with her long-time role on the children’s television programme, Play School. Jarrett (and Hazlehurst) had come to represent the figuration of domestic comfort and inoffensive family programming. For Jarrett to transform so entirely constituted an uncanny turn which produced for the viewer a shock similar to that experienced by the characters, as the jovial outback stranger turns into the perpetrator of nightmarish horror. It is true, then, that Wolf Creek should be seen as an originating work in the ‘torture porn’ genre of horror cinema.6 However, the way in which the film constructs this in direct connection to expectations established by an understanding of the Australian Gothic as well as the ways in which these constitute a direct response to the familiarity of everyday life should not be overlooked. In a similar way, the Australian gothic tradition possesses a strong thread of what may be termed the ‘female Gothic’: the adoption of the Gothic to signify the structural oppression at work in gender power relations. For example, the work of Elizabeth Harrower and Thea Astley, both of whom are primarily seen as part of an Australian modernist tradition, can also be identified as adopting features of the Gothic in order to facilitate their feminist critiques of Australian culture and its construction of national identity. Astley’s work has often been compared to the Southern Gothic, particularly for its regional focus and its interest in the stranger or outsider.7 Perhaps its most striking affinity to this genre, however, is in its representation of the quiet abuses conducted behind closed doors, and thus the gothic structures of domestic life. In her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), for example, the accusation of monstrosity is ambiguous, teetering between ‘unkind’ Elsie and her ‘monkey’, her abusive and threatening lover, Harry. Just as in Wake in Fright the heat and dust of the desert had been used to signify John’s claustrophobic imprisonment, so too Girl’s setting in the tropics establishes a stifling humidity which mimics Harry’s stalking of Elsie as she prepares to escape the small town. However, its implicit critique of Elsie’s snobbishness towards the working-class Harry complicates our conceptualisation of the gothic villain and victim. Harrower’s novels of the 1950s and 1960s explore similar themes and, like Astley, she links these to a critique of Australian masculinity and its dependence on concepts of class and wealth. Thus, The Watchtower (1966), is often cited as a gothic representation of the Bluebeard narrative, in which the selfish and controlling Felix traps his wife and her sister in the beautiful birdcage of his Sydney

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home. However, the psychological torture represented in The Watchtower is figured in more subtle ways in Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City (1957). It also depicts the gothic nature of an insidious unkindness at work in a seemingly ordinary marriage, and as in Astley’s novel, it depicts the ways in which this is informed by Stan’s self-consciousness about the class distinction between him and his wife, Esther.8 Importantly, however, the novel shifts the focus of the Australian Gothic from the outback to the urban centre of Sydney, although the uncanniness of the Australian landscape is still pervasive: ‘At the entrance to the suburban cricket ground grows a weird grey tree, ghostly grey and leafless; its flowers carve a scarlet arc across the sky. A coral tree, stark and glorious’.9 Even though Stan is not as deliberately violent or oppressive as Felix, he is perhaps more frightening. Thus, Harrower exposes the gothic discourse of everyday relationships between men and women in mid-century. That Esther’s final words are a greeting to Stan confirms her imprisonment in these structures. Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1987) is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of the female Gothic in Australia. Whereas Astley and Harrower’s works depicted the oppression of women by men, Jolley’s novel describes women’s complicity in their oppression of one another. Lonely Hester unofficially adopts the impressionable Katherine, treating her more as a doll than as a child or even a sister, friend or lover.10 However, one night while driving home the two women hit a mysterious object. The object or creature is never revealed to the reader, and Hester deposits it into the well, but when the women arrive home Hester tells Katherine that there is money missing, so the creature they hit must have been an escaping burglar. The ‘man’ in the well comes to divide the women, as Katherine claims she is regularly speaking with him, that he wants to marry her, and pleads with Hester to free him. The well itself and the mystery it houses thus clearly constitute a site of gothic repression; these can be seen as both individual and collective anxieties about women, their sexuality, and the structures of authority which manage them and in which they participate.11 Indeed, it is in this way that Hester might be understood as not only the villain but the constructor or author of this gothic narrative, demonstrated among the novel’s closing scenes in Hester’s memory of her childhood loss of a favourite doll. In this primal scene of loss, Hester accompanies her father to visit a friend. Playing alone in the shed, she discovers an old toy pram and attempts to use it to ferry her doll, but its lack of ‘covers or pillow’ mean that the doll ‘slip[s] down into the deep well of the pram in a most awkward way’ and becomes ‘wedged somehow’. The doll cannot be rescued: She poked at the small round head of the doll marking and scratching, without meaning to, the sleek shining paint which the doll had for hair. Not wanting to tell anyone, she had pushed the pram back into the shed upset by the offended and hurt look the doll seemed to have on its red-cheeked face.12

The memory is striking for the way in which it figures Hester’s repression of her guilt and what might be seen as a kind of maternal failure. The loss, damage and hiding of the doll thus act as precursors to her injury of the mysterious figure and her covering up of this act. That the memory makes specific use of the term ‘well’ to indicate the space in which the doll is trapped only confirms the association, but

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it is critical to note Hester’s insistence on her lack of blame: the doll slips because the pram does ‘not have any covers or pillow’, she does not ‘mean’ to scratch its head, and she deliberately avoids such an accusation by returning the pram to its dark place in the shed. The description of the doll’s ‘small round head’ with its ‘sleek shining paint’ also recalls the image, just a few pages earlier, of her seeing in the well the mysterious ‘man’s head which, because of being drenched, was small, sleeked and rounded’.13 Hester’s horror at this sight of the man attempting to emerge from the well is in this way shown not simply to be a fear of his revenge or retribution, but more precisely a fear of being found out, of that which she has attempted to repress literally coming to light. Ultimately, Hester permits the well to be closed by a well-meaning neighbour, and thus absolves herself of this inevitably murderous act. That she then converts the experience to a story to be told to some local children suggests her attempt to place it firmly in the realm of the fictional, but the fact that she is the teller (or author) of the scary story for which the children clamour implies a responsibility or guilt which Hester unconsciously recognises. It is on this gothic uncertainty that the novel concludes, with Hester’s threat uncontained. Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015) and Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (2016), both nominated for the Stella Prize (in 2016 and 2017, respectively), Australia’s premier women’s writing prize, constitute more contemporary examples of the female Gothic. Maguire’s An Isolated Incident is in many ways a typical example of contemporary crime fiction or the thriller, focused on the murder of a young woman in a country town. Like Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock, it also calls up the traditional Australian gothic trope of the small outback town as a site of danger. Yet, in its cultural comment on the structural violence which accompanies this individual act, An Isolated Incident also constitutes a contemporary form of the female Gothic in Australia. Indeed, the novel presents an explicit critique of the solution proffered by the crime narrative: the arrest and punishment of the perpetrator. ‘I know it’s how it has to go’, says journalist May Norman, one of the novel’s protagonists; Finish with a last memory of the pretty dead girl and the sound of the jail door slamming shut on the monster who killed her and everyone can feel like the world has been set to rights. … All that’s ended is one man’s freedom to hurt people. Bella’s death isn’t fixed and neither is the world that she died in. The idea that locking up one man could do that, could make everything okay … that’s bullshit.14

Instead, An Isolated Incident emphasises the female friendship and community forged between May and Chris, Bella’s sister, and their determination to seek justice, not just for Bella, but for all of the women suffering under the violence and oppression of this global female gothic narrative. Wood’s novel describes a strange dystopia which takes Maguire’s concerns much further. Several young women awaken to find themselves literally cast out, made Other, as they are imprisoned in an isolated compound, somewhere in the harsh Australian bush, apparently for speaking out about sexual offences committed against them (a gang rape involving a high-profile football player, and an affair with a prominent politician, for example). Wood based the narrative on the true

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story of the Hay Institution for Girls, a ruthless prison designed to punish girls deemed too ‘wayward’ even for the Parramatta Girls’ Home from which they were taken.15 That the novel takes place in an unidentified time, as well as the prison’s administrative title, ‘Phaedra’, suggests that this is a simultaneous past, present and future in which this structural form of the female Gothic is always already happening.16 In their old-fashioned prison dress and the obvious association of the ‘madwoman’ locked in an asylum, the girls’ fate not only recalls the gothic narratives of the past, but perhaps more frighteningly, the inherently gothic ‘management’ of women over centuries. The women are immediately reduced to animals, kept in cells described as ‘kennels’, shorn of their hair, and sent ‘sprawling, exactly as a sheep would totter down a slatted chute into the shocking light and shit and terror of the sheep yard’.17 Yet it is ultimately in the animal that some of the women find safety: when the prison finally collapses and the women think they are to be freed, it is only Yolanda and Verla who realise their manipulation through gifted packages of expensive cosmetics. While the other women are distracted by these material markers of femininity, and thus the milder forms of entrapment in which they have always participated, both Yolanda and Verla escape through their imaginative or magical transformation into animals: a rabbit and a trout. That these metamorphoses are both signified by animals introduced to Australia (rather than native to it), and which are considered pests to the natural environment, complicates this escape of sorts, for it refuses to position Yolanda, Verla and their fellow prisoners as simply small, innocent, victims—cute, furry rabbits caught in a trap. Rather, their out-of-placeness in the bush environment which they will now inhabit constitutes an environmental disruption with its own potentially gothic consequences. Wood thus puts the Gothic to work as a mode for understanding not only the structural abuses bound to gender, but also the ways in which these extend to the colonial impacts of white Europeans on Australia and its First Peoples. Australia’s colonial history is perhaps the richest theme of the nation’s contemporary Gothic, underscoring the way in which this genre is particularly well suited to an understanding of national identity in the past, present and future. Indeed, for Bruhm, it is precisely for the way in which the spectres and nightmares of the Gothic bring us face-to-face with the unsettling past and the traumas of history that it constitutes a confrontation of who or what we think we are.18 The violent history of Australia’s ‘colonial scene’ is a common theme of the contemporary ‘Aboriginal Gothic’.19 However, the very term ‘Aboriginal Gothic’ is a controversial one. The representation of ghosts, vampires and other forms of human or inhuman monstrosity in contemporary Australian Aboriginal literature is not best identified as gothic precisely because of the genre’s European and colonial tradition and the common ‘exploitation’ of Indigenous cultures in gothic works.20 The writer Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson), in fact, refers to the appearance of the ‘Gothic’ in Australian Aboriginal literature as ‘Maban Consciousness’, a sense of the magic and mysticism which is central to an Aboriginal conceptualisation of the world.21 Instead, Katrin Althans makes clear, we should recognise how ‘Aboriginal authors engage critically with the Gothic and enter into a state of creative resistance’.22

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Kathrin Bartha has suggested that even the term ‘postcolonial Gothic’ is insufficient to describe the work of this genre, preferring instead to identify them as trauma narratives.23 Thus, where we might see Australian Aboriginal writing come closest to the Gothic is in its engagement with the disturbances and transgressions of colonial history; it is the colonial encounter, then, that is gothic, rather than the Aboriginal ways of thinking and knowing. In work by Vivienne Cleven, Melissa Lucashenko and Alexis Wright, for example, ghosts frequently stand in for the traumas of Australia’s colonial history and the abuses which took (and take) place at both individual and institutional levels.24 Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002) draws wry attention to a number of tropes of the Gothic: the wealthy and abusive landowner, Reginald Drysdale, his timid wife, Caroline, and their equally violent son, Donald; the strange and traumatised misfit characters of Archie Corella, Sofie Dove and Murilla Salt; the haunted homestead, personified in its sadness, ‘as though the house was a living thing, crying its protest’.25 Even the local store is portrayed in gothic terms—‘Hanging near the window on a coat-hanger was a white dress, the sleeves tattered and the collar frayed. Like everything else in the shop, the dress was covered from neckline to hem in a film of dust’—while outside, in the bush, ‘[t]he skeletal trees bend in death, their gnarled branches reaching skyward like the grasping talons of a witch’.26 Everywhere is haunted in this small town, the ‘grasping’ branches of the trees reaching out to touch, to grab, to clutch passersby, refusing to allow them to be free of the horror of the past. In this sense, Reginald and Donald Drysdale stand in to represent the abuses of the colonial scene but also, critically, the ways these abuses linger in the present because of the refusal or impossibility of telling those secrets: ‘The town could be full of abused women and children – all the hands of Drysdale – and none of em would say a word. That’s small town life; the shame and guilt would keep his secrets forever buried’.27 For this reason, then, for both Murilla and Archie, Donald is ‘[a] ghost so vivid his skin shrinks at the memory’, and Caroline too finds it impossible to remember that her husband and son are dead.28 Indeed, Archie too is figured as a ghost, and it is finally revealed (to both him and to the reader) that he took on the identity of his dead childhood friend in order to seek revenge on the Drysdales for the death of his sister.29 It is only when these characters confront the past—a task led by the fish-like Sofie, who expresses through a fragmented narrative her experience of trauma (her years of abuse at the hands of Donald) and her eventual murder of her abuser—that anything like resolution can be achieved. Like An Isolated Incident, Her Sister’s Eye does figure this in one way through the establishment of female community and friendship at the novel’s end. However, there is no happy ending offered up for Archie/Raymond.30 Connection is one way to escape from the clutches of the Gothic, the novel suggests, but some traumas cannot ever be resolved. Australia’s history, in this sense, will always be a gothic one. Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), on the other hand, explicitly establishes an opposition between the expectations and assumptions of the Gothic genre and the historical connections offered by ‘Maban consciousness’. The eerie songs Jo hears and of which she is initially so afraid are ultimately revealed to be the call of the

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lyrebirds, repeating the stories of the local people as if their voices can be heard directly from the past. She felt the hard burden of superstitious fear inside her evaporating ..,.. … ‘So it’s not mooki!’ she laughed joyfully. ‘Just lyrebirds! Jesus Christ, I was so scared of that talga for so long.’ … The lyrebirds were repeating the song they had heard, and passing it down through hundreds of generations.31

Similarly, although her daughter Ellen is so afraid of the way in which she is marked as belonging to this place—the lines on her palms are a perfect map of the valley—that she puts her hands in the fire in an attempt to destroy this ghostly legacy, both women ultimately come to realise this too as a connection to the past: a sacred responsibility, rather than a traumatic burden. In Mullumbimby, then, the Gothic comes to symbolise a European way of understanding the world and thus a fear of and blindness to the legacies of the past. The explicit reframing of these apparently gothic elements in terms of a Maban consciousness, or even more simply the threads of connection to one’s familial past, means that the ghosts actually come to constitute futurity and hope: … it gradually dawned upon Jo that to destroy the talga of the rockhole, the dugai would have to kill every last Goorie who knew it. They would have to clear the World Heritage forest, and then they would need to destroy every lyrebird in the valley as well, probably every lyrebird for hundreds of miles around …. They would all live, now, with the knowledge of their sacred story place, budharum kalwunybah. Just as the old people had wanted.32

The ‘haunting’ of the past thus enables a reconnection to a history from which Jo and Ellen had been separated. Recognising these ghosts in this way comes to be a recognition of themselves and their place in the past, present and future. This positioning of the nation in relation to its past also takes its form in contemporary Australian gothic narratives which make clear the influence of Europe on its colonies, even now. In Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe (2005), for example, Isaac returns to the Greek homeland of his ancestors in a kind of perverse ‘Grand Tour’, subconsciously seeking an explanation for the trauma and turmoil of his parents’ lives and his own childhood. However, as Isaac moves deeper into Europe, leaving behind the tourist traps and uncovering the horrific truth of child exploitation, drug abuse and violence motivated by racism, sexism or homophobia, he transforms into a kind of vampire—a monstrous symbol of the way terror is derived from the collapse of boundaries, whether those are corporeal, geographical or temporal.33 Indeed, since the Gothic is so often concerned with ‘the anxious permeability of borders of nations, races and identities’, Roger Luckhurst argues, ‘then it must also always be bound up with the questions of transnational interaction and empire’.34 In this permeable and transient figuration, then, Tsiolkas represents Isaac as both consuming and consumed by the traumatic past of his own family and of Europe (and the world). His collapse into the mindless violence of his frenzied attacks on ‘the Russian’ and ‘the American’ towards the novel’s end symbolises the way in which we are manipulated and destroyed by an irresponsible attitude to history. Isaac’s gothic narrative is the only outcome of a failure to

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understand and recognise the abuses of the past. Here, resolution is made possible through the care of Isaac’s partner, an Australian man who acknowledges his own faults and past errors, signified by the swastika tattoo he sincerely regrets. Similarly to Mullumbimby, then, Dead Europe emphasises this connection to the past as critical to the resolution of the gothic narratives of the present. Julia Leigh’s Disquiet (2008) makes a similar point in its interaction between the gothic narratives of Australia and Europe. As in Dead Europe, the middle-aged Australian returns to her ancestral (her childhood) home in France—an imposing, imperious house, filled with memories of her strict and emotionally, if not physically, abusive childhood—fleeing with a broken arm, which remains unexplained, and her two confused children. Olivia’s brother and his wife have also returned home, bringing with them their newly stillborn daughter, whom they refuse to bury. The unhappy home thus calls up every evocation of the gothic haunted house and its symbolisation of what has not been laid to rest. Like Dead Europe, Disquiet is striking for its representation of the Australian Gothic in a European setting, emphasising the way in which the nation’s haunted past and its colonial roots extend beyond its own borders. That the novel ends over the eventual funeral of the baby, and Olivia’s vision of hope for her son, might be seen to suggest a futurity similar to that presented in Dead Europe. In the return from Australia to Europe Leigh, like Tsiolkas, depicts the necessity of confronting the ghosts of the past. However, it is also clear that the real problems raised in Disquiet have not been resolved. Rather, only a temporary peace has been achieved. The Babadook (dir. Jennifer Kent, 2014), one of the most successful recent examples of the contemporary Australian Gothic, is similarly tentative in its resolution of trauma. In some respects it can be read as another example of Australia’s female Gothic, particularly in its presentation of female ‘madness’ and its association with post-natal depression, as well as Amelia’s unresolved grief at the death of her husband as they travelled to the hospital to give birth to their son, Samuel. However, by way of conclusion, I want instead to focus on the way in which The Babadook insists on the persistence of the Gothic in everyday life. Amelia’s care of Samuel has only ever been cursory, and the film’s opening scenes juxtapose the traumatic re-enactment of the accident in her nightmares with Amelia’s performance of motherhood when Samuel cries out in fear of monsters: opening the wardrobe and checking under the bed for monsters but without comfort to the child clutching at her waist, reading to the boy robotically, allowing him into her bed to sleep, but turning away from his small body.35 The true monster of the film, however, is Amelia’s sense of her own failed motherhood. The horror she has faced daily since Samuel’s birth is the horror of being an insufficient mother, a shadow of a mother. In this sense, the Babadook is actually a manifestation not of her trauma but of her own monstrous maternity. Indeed, that Amelia echoes the words and behaviour of the Babadook drives this home. ‘Talk, talk, talk!’ she shouts at the cowering Samuel, in echo of the knock at the door in the Mr Babadook story: ‘Dook, dook, dook’. And later, mimicking both the psychosis of the traumatised father in The Shining and the Big Bad Wolf of the Three Little Pigs—the story she reads Samuel after destroying Mr Babadook—Amelia hangs

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grotesquely from Samuel’s doorway, pounding at his door while shouting, ‘Let me in!’, and then chasing him, calling, ‘Run, run, run, fast as you can!’ Just as she had only ever performed maternity before, now she exposes that performed maternity as monstrous, turning the words of the caring mother—‘Didn’t I tell you not to play with weapons?’—into those of the snarling monster. In the film’s closing scene, the happy reunion of mother and child in the sunlit garden is undermined as Amelia returns to the basement with a bowl of worms to feed the Babadook now living there. As in Disquiet, the best this gothic narrative can offer is a truce with the traumas of the past. There is no way to destroy these monsters: rather, all one can do is appease them. Ultimately, the contemporary Australian Gothic appears to suggest that the Gothic’s promise of conservative resolution can only placate us. If, as Bruhm has it, we need the Gothic because of its ability to dramatise or narrativise the terrible loss of coherence and order we have suffered and continue to suffer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then this articulation of our fears is the only solace the genre appears to offer in the present iteration.36 The Australian Gothic of recent decades articulate Hogle’s assertion that it is in the Gothic that we find a way to make meaning of the traumatic, conflicted, and chaotic world of the contemporary moment.37 It is in the Gothic that we come to recognise and acknowledge the traumas of the modern nation, and through which we attempt to come to terms with the radical unsettling of that context.

Notes





1. Steven Bruhm argues that ‘it is finally through trauma that we can best understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it’ (‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It’, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002], 259–76 [268]). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that ‘Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma’ (‘History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions’, The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend [London, Routledge, 2014], 72–81 [72]). 2. ‘The Gothic, then, is inherently about deep-seated and large-scale, even national and international, traumas that are intimated and yet masked behind hyperbolic symbols of them’ (Hogle, ‘History, Trauma and the Gothic’, 73). 3. Jonathan Rayner, Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000). Rayner identifies the key themes of the Australian Gothic as: ‘a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social ­reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed’, and ­suggests that these ‘reflect a doubt or dubiety in the assertions of national character and ­confidence in national institutions which characterised earlier examples of Australian film’ (26). 4. Ibid., 28. 5. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir (London, Continuum, 2003), 68. 6. Jessica Balanzategui, ‘The Babadook and the Haunted Space Between High and Low Genres in the Australian Horror Tradition’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 11.1 (2017), 18–32 (22).

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7. Kerryn Goldsworthy, ‘Thea Astley’s Writing: Magnetic North’, Meanjin 42.4 (1983), 478–85. 8. Delia Falconer, Introduction to Down in the City, by Elizabeth Harrower (Melbourne, Text, 2013). Falconer notes that the novel depicts ‘a self-made man stripping a woman of privilege until she is his slave’ (ix). 9. Harrower, Down in the City, 7. 10. Gerry Turcotte, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2009), 193. 11. Pilar Baines sees the well as ‘a source of anxiety and a repository of desires, repressed fears and memories – both individual, regarding the female protagonists, and collective, regarding Australian society at large’ (‘Down in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well: An Essay on Repression’, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 61.1 [2014], 46–59 [47]). 12. Elizabeth Jolley, The Well (Camberwell, Penguin, 1987), 163. 13. Ibid., 148. 14. Emily Maguire, An Isolated Incident (Sydney, Picador, 2016), 336. 15. ‘The Stella Interview: Charlotte Wood’, https://thestellaprize.com.au/2016/04/the-stella-interview-charlotte-wood/, 11 April 2016. 16. Phaedra falsely accused her stepson (Hippolytus, son of Theseus) of rape. Theseus punished him by death for the crime. 17. Charlotte Wood, The Natural Way of Things (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2015), 17. 18. ‘The Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created but that also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation …. Each of these social and national traumas was caused by human agency, yet they have rendered humans unable to tell any kind of complete story about them. Thus the Gothic renders them in fits and starts, ghostly appearances and far-fetched fantasies, all attempting to reveal traumatic contradictions of the collective past that cannot be spoken’ (Bruhm, ‘The Contemporary Gothic’, 271–72). 19. ‘Built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive’ (Ken Gelder, ‘Australian Gothic’, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy [London, Routledge, 2007], 115–23 [122]). 20. Katrin Althans, ‘White Shadows: The Gothic Tradition in Australian Aboriginal Literature’, A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, ed. Belinda Wheeler (Rochester, Camden House, 2013), 139–54 (139). 21. Mudrooroo, ‘Gothic Imagination or Maban Reality?’, Australian Women’s Book Review 22.2 (2010), http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/23485/20110817-0001/www.emsah.uq.edu. au/awsr/new_site/awbr_archive/AWBR_150_print.pdf; Mudrooroo, ‘Maban Reality and Shape-Shifting the Past: Strategies to Sing the Past Our Way’, Critical Arts 10.2 (1996), 1–20. 22. Althans, ‘White Shadows’, 139. 23. Kathrin Bartha, ‘The Spectre of Landscape: The Postcolonial Gothic, Preternatural, and Aboriginal Spiritual in Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise’, Preternature 5.2 (2016), 189–212. 24. In Cleven, Lucashenko and Wright, ‘the ghosts conjured … are not the unresting souls of the long dead who wish to take revenge for their deaths; instead, they represent a repressed memory that manifests itself as the shadows of colonial history’ (ibid., 150). 25. Vivienne Cleven, Her Sister’s Eye (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2002), 10. 26. Ibid., 7, 38. 27. Ibid., 168. 28. Ibid., 2, 31. 29. Ibid., 76.

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30. In Her Sister’s Eye, ‘[t]here is the traditional tale of the heroine locked up in a mansion at the mercy of the Gothic villain …. The Aboriginal equivalent to this is the story of the Gothic wanderer Raymond, who is finally confronted with, and overwhelmed by, his long-repressed memories. For him, there is no happy ending and no restoration of order, but a mental and corporeal breakdown’ (Althans, ‘White Shadows’, 152). 31. Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2013), 276–77. 32. Ibid., 278. 33. ‘Terror comes from the breach of boundaries’ (Roger Luckhurst, ‘Gothic Colonies’, The Gothic World, 62–71 [62]). 34. Ibid., 63. 35. Shelley Buerger, ‘The Beak That Grips: Maternal Indifference, Ambivalence and the Abject in The Babadook’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 11.1 (2017), 33–44 (39). 36. ‘We need [the Gothic] because the twentieth century has so forcefully taken away from us that which we once thought constituted us – a coherent psyche, a social order to which we can pledge allegiance in good faith, a sense of justice in the universe – and that wrenching withdrawal, that traumatic experience, is vividly dramatised in the Gothic’ (Bruhm, ‘The Contemporary Gothic’, 273). 37. ‘We need fictions to better understand the meaning for us of anything we choose to represent from the world we have observed, even if that meaning turns out to be traumatic contradictions in our own minds and cultures, and I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be’ (Hogle, ‘History, Trauma and the Gothic’, 75).

Bibliography Althans, Katrin, ‘White Shadows: The Gothic Tradition in Australian Aboriginal Literature’, A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, ed. Belinda Wheeler (Rochester, Camden House, 2013), 139–54. Astley, Thea, Girl with a Monkey (1958; Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2012). Baines, Pilar, ‘Down in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well: An Essay on Repression’, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 61.1 (2014), 46–59. Balanzategui, Jessica, ‘The Babadook and the Haunted Space Between High and Low Genres in the Australian Horror Tradition’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 11.1 (2017), 18–32. Bartha, Kathrin, ‘The Spectre of Landscape: The Postcolonial Gothic, Preternatural, and Aboriginal Spiritual in Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise’, Preternature 5.2 (2016), 189–212. Bruhm, Steven, ‘The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It’, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 259–76. Buerger, Shelley, ‘The Beak That Grips: Maternal Indifference, Ambivalence and the Abject in The Babadook’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 11.1 (2017), 33–44. Cleven, Vivienne, Her Sister’s Eye (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2002). Cook, Kenneth, Wake in Fright (1961; Melbourne, Text, 2001). Gelder, Ken, ‘Australian Gothic’, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London, Routledge, 2007), 115–23. Goldsworthy, Kerryn, ‘Thea Astley’s Writing: Magnetic North’, Meanjin 42.4 (1983), 478–85. Harrower, Elizabeth, Down in the City (1957; Melbourne, Text, 2013). ———, The Watchtower (1966; Melbourne, Text, 2012).

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Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions’, The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2014), 72–81. Jolley, Elizabeth, The Well (Camberwell, Penguin, 1987). Kent, Jennifer, dir., The Babadook (Umbrella, 2014). Kotcheff, Ted, dir., Wake in Fright (United Artists, 1971). Leigh, Julia, Disquiet (London, Faber and Faber, 2008). Lindsay, Joan, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967; London, Vintage, 2013). Lucashenko, Melissa, Mullumbimby (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2013). Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Gothic Colonies’, The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London, Routledge, 2014), 62–71. Maguire, Emily, An Isolated Incident (Sydney, Picador, 2016). McLean, Greg, dir., Wolf Creek (Roadshow Entertainment, 2005). Mudrooroo, ‘Maban Reality and Shape-Shifting the Past: Strategies to Sing the Past Our Way’, Critical Arts 10.2 (1996), 1–20. ———, ‘Gothic Imagination or Maban Reality?’, Australian Women’s Book Review 22.2 (2010), http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/23485/20110817-0001/www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/new_site/ awbr_archive/AWBR_150_print.pdf. Rayner, Jonathan, Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000). ———, The Films of Peter Weir (London, Continuum, 2003). Rymer, Michael, Larysa Kondracki, and Amanda Brotchie, dir., Picnic at Hanging Rock (Fremantle, 2018). Stenders, Kriv, dir., Wake in Fright (Roadshow Entertainment, 2017). ‘The Stella Interview: Charlotte Wood’, https://thestellaprize.com.au/2016/04/the-stella-interview-charlotte-wood/, 11 April 2016. Tsiolkas, Christos, Dead Europe (London, Atlantic, 2005). Turcotte, Gerry, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2009). Weir, Peter, dir., Picnic at Hanging Rock (British Empire Films, 1975). Wood, Charlotte, The Natural Way of Things (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2015).

Postcolonialisms Gina Wisker

Introduction Postcolonial Gothic is doubly uncanny. It takes received, formally legitimated versions of histories, cartographies and lives and opens them up like a suddenly raw, unhealed cut, revealing an ostensibly calm landscape interlaced with livid scars and putrid with hidden, historical violence. Suddenly, everywhere, history and the present evidence the invasion and domination of the lives and locations of those defined (by invaders) as others. The postcolonial Gothic disturbs the calm surface of received and accredited versions of events, offers alternative versions, recovers and retells stories. Its subject is what has been defined as foreign, other to the Northern, often Western and European invaders whose interpretations have historically dominated. It deals in haunted places, haunted lives, silences and hidden secrets and brings a cutting clarity, a suddenly stark horror, dissolving complacency and collusion which established and maintained those received accredited versions, those cartographies and demarcations, those preferences of identity and world view on which colonialism and imperialism thrive. One of its main aims is decoloniality, dealing decisively with colonial traces in knowledge generation traditions, psychological enslavement and a sense of worthlessness engineered through colonial institutions.1 Postcolonial gothic writers use the power of the Gothic, its revelations of dark hidden secrets, legacies and hauntings in the present to expose, then move beyond oppressive misrepresentations of people, places and cultures historically constructed as different, ‘othered’ in colonial and imperial contexts. The postcolonial condition of absence, silence, loss and recuperation from these traumatic states is understood through the lens of the postcolonial Gothic which seeks to explore the melancholic mourning and loss, the invasive violent disturbance of

G. Wisker (*)  University of Brighton, Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_7

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those colonially affected histories and lives which have been hidden and denied. Postcolonial Gothic exposes and devalues a westernised ‘Dracularity’,2 which bled dry the life and ways of people constructed as Other. Using strategies of ghosting and haunting of people and places, figures of vampires, were beasts, zombies, ghosts and mer-creatures, postcolonial Gothic disturbs and defamiliarises the complacent and familiar representations of histories, of ‘norms’, revealing the partial and oppressive. The ever-present colonial past can be ironised, exposed, dubious histories uncovered and wrongs potentially righted through events in the text and suggestions beyond it. Postcolonial Gothic deals with issues of difference, otherising and acceptance, needing to address and redress racism, marginalisation, theft and oppression and to reinstate the histories and myths of a largely hidden ancestry. It can help to reclaim and rewrite the past, revision a lived present and speculate about the future. Postcolonial Gothic intersects with the recent globalgothic,3 which sees transnational flows between Western gothic figures and those from broader global contexts, with exciting interaction between differently originated gothic figures. The pontianak is an example of this, spreading throughout South East Asia and into the US and UK (Zen Cho, ‘The House of Aunts’, 2011),4 the Caribbean soucouyant and duppie moving from Jamaica to Toronto (Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring, 1998).5 Postcolonial Gothic globalises the Gothic, while seeing globalisation, and its destructive relatives, imperialism and colonialism, as themselves Gothic because they defamiliarise and abject people, places and worldviews. It also intersects with Afrofuturism6 (Bould 2007; Lavender 2011; Womack 2013) in its desire to recuperate and rewrite murderous and oppressive histories from a positive perspective, moving forward into new magical, liberating, creative futures (Nalo Hopkinson, The New Moon’s Arms, 2007).7 There is a dark moment in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)8 when with a sudden sweep the light is momentarily removed from the invasive, vital, pirate crew and their stolen hoards of glittering gold and silver, revealing them corpses, skeletal, colourless, their theft worthless, the cavern preserving their soulless booty a crypt. Like such spectral revelation, postcolonial Gothic strips away the ostensible respectability of centuries of duplicitous theft, of plundering and erasing the lives of those constructed as other, stealing their lands and property—material, spiritual and human. Imperialism and colonialism were, and are, much worse than just piracy. With pirates at least there was a brutal honesty—the skull and crossbones flag let you know they intended to steal and kill, hiding the evidence at the bottom of the sea, or in a buried chest. Imperialism and colonialism, on the other hand, entered another country and the lives of others by stealth, offering friendship, godliness and improvement. Postcolonial places are haunted places; everywhere there are traces of erasure of cultures and resistance, built over by the physical and psychological constructions of the imperial governors, the invader settlers. Like the cutting of the light to reveal only death, postcolonial Gothic reveals the damage done to places and people, both the invaded and the enriched ‘back home’. It does so using familiar gothic figures: the ghost, vampire, zombie and mer-creatures.

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Abjection, seen as rejection with disgust, springing from fears generated from within the self and offloaded onto a constructed, then rejected foreign Other (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982; Strangers to Ourselves, 1991)9 is at the heart of the evils exposed by postcolonial gothic writing. According to David Punter, abjection and absence haunt both those invaded, enslaved and silenced and those whose lives were enriched by that invasion and enslavement: The process of mutual postcolonial abjection is, I suppose, one that confronts us every day in the ambiguous form of a series of uncanny returns.10

In the postcolonial imagination, there are haunting presences in the streets of our (once) rich, industrial city streets in the UK, as there are, for example, in the liana-covered, decaying, colonial grand mansions of Jamaica (the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century big houses), Singapore and Malaysia, and the impoverished rural ‘homelands’ where black South Africans were displaced (early twentieth century). It is the job of literature to make links and revive the phantoms to remind of the oppressions and problematic gains of the past. …the peculiar condition of the literary will always be to effect a link between the actuality, the presence of such conditions, however powerful & terrifying, & the imaginary, universality ….in its proper position, in absence.11

Traces and memories return from objects, music, stories, and from buildings and spaces though built over or hidden. In the traces of historically colonised others, we see the mixed histories we all share. It is a perpetual reminder, a mutual haunting. Colonialism and imperialism are also vampiric, leaving victims as drained husks, dead or forever in servitude.12 In discussing Thomas Pynchon’s definition of ‘Dracularity’, the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) defines it as ‘the West’s ancient curse’. Joel Nicholson-Roberts13 building on the work of Anidjar,14 talks of an initially religious-based European and then American ‘obsession’ with the ‘purity of blood’,15 which underpins colonialism and racism. Colonialists and imperialists vampirise and also zombify oppressed people removing and denying education, religion and selfworth. In Erna Brodber’s Myal, for example, postcolonial Gothic exposes entertainment, a musical, misrepresenting people as performative puppets, and worse because ubiquitous, education replacing critical creative thinking with facts and interpretations based on colonial and imperial worldviews, zombifying all concerned. Invasion and transportation were historically often by sea, and some postcolonial gothic writers express the dangers and the opportunities for reconfiguration and change with ghostly vanishing islands (Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005),16 sea creatures such as the octopus representing collusion with invading Japanese imperialist forces (Sandi Tan, The Black Isle, 2012),17 and more positively in Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms, mer-people, free, recuperated ex slaves. Hopkinson ‘s Afrofuturist postcolonial Gothic offers a positive, speculative retelling and reimagining of dark histories, here the murder of transported slaves.

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When considering what we mean by the term postcolonial Gothic, one of the first issues is the way in which the postcolonial relates to the colonial, always a troubled area of discussion. The many theorists of the postcolonial18 argue extensively about whether it means ‘after’ or ‘against’ or, as it is used here, ‘after and against’. Colonial Gothic which perpetuates imperialist and colonial values is rife in periods and places under colonial or imperial rule19 and equally possible in the contemporary period if work is representing as uncanny, foreign in a grotesque and worrying fashion the lands, places, (often seen as empty spaces) which have been invaded and settled, otherising the rightful owners of those lands. The postcolonial exposes the damage of colonial and imperial ways. Postcolonial Gothic uses the strategies of the literary Gothic in that exposure and critique. It focuses on defamiliarisation and damage, the trespassing and theft, traducing of other people’s values, spaces and lives, the betraying of ways of seeing the world and modes of being and the devastation which laid to waste civilisations and human rights. Postcolonial Gothic looks back on the representation or lack of representation of people in places which have been invaded, settled, renamed, exposing as problematic and deadly the core of the colonial, imperialistic turn which saw the people in invaded and settled places as being lesser beings, and often not human at all, which gave invader settlers a wonderful excuse to deny them their human rights and often their lives. Postcolonial Gothic retells the tales of those moments of invasion and settlements, exposing the denigration of others and the destruction of their lives and worldviews. It reinhabits, reconfigures spaces and places, returning the value they had to the people who initially were the traditional owners of the land. In exposing destruction and retelling tales, it offers the opportunity to revalue and restore worldviews, languages, customs, practices, religions, and the invaders found other and so threatening to the historical imposition of their own dominant culture and worldviews. Postcolonial Gothic takes a new and different turn. It otherises the invaders, exposes their destruction, their illegitimate reconfiguration of the lives of others. It also, therefore, revitalises spaces and places by reimagining, writing and bringing them back to new life. Wilson Harris suggests that imagination and writing are powerful, the prison house of history can be destroyed and new futures and interpretations, new stories, constructed. He speaks of: the imagination of the folk involved in a crucial inner re-creative response to the violations of slavery,’ and that ‘the possibility exists for us to become involved in perspectives which can bring into play a figurative meaning beyond an apparently real world or prison of history.20

Considering phantoms, revenants (including vampires), personal and cultural haunting, Abraham and Torok argue it is necessary to uncover hidden histories, re-embrace differently focused versions of the past and move on: the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life, the phantom is therefore also a metapsychological fact: what haunts us are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others…

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…those we are concerned with are the dead who were shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to their grave.21

Much postcolonial Gothic is written and critically discussed exposing the dark past and the legacy of shame, absence and silence and moves beyond any mere ‘frisson’, or ‘pleasure’ of Otherness.22 Instead, it faces up to violent and unpleasant truths. Postcolonial writer Lauretta Ngcobo points out that this is not a pleasurable, anodyne experience, particularly for white readers: We as Black writers at times displease our white readership. Our writing is seldom genteel since it springs from our experiences which in real life have none of the trimmings of gentility. If the truth be told, it cannot titillate the aesthetic palates of many white people, for deep down it is a criticism of their values and their treatment of us throughout history.23

Like the sudden cold clarity in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), postcolonial Gothic reveals uncomfortable, shocking, historical and contemporary truths. However, its revelations are as those of much gothic, value-based and a call to change, revision, to act differently rather than being paralysed, only silenced and shamed or driven either to appropriate histories or camouflage response with layers of academic discourse which distance the issues. As critical, concerned, engaged readers of postcolonial Gothic, we explore how and why writers say what they say, as they do, what might enable or prevent their expression, the conditions of its production and consumption at home and abroad (wherever these are located, from whatever perspective). In doing so, some postcolonial feminist critical responses are helpful to focus reading practices. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sneja Gunew stress the importance of engagement, and rejection of the silencing produced by inherited guilt. They emphasise the dynamic of positive interaction with writers and the histories of people whose stories these writers tell, even if and probably because this interaction first stirs discomfort, then leads to new shared understandings. The problems of speaking about people who are ‘other’ cannot, however, be a reason for not doing so. The argument that it’s just too difficult can easily become a new form of silencing by default… But whites can never speak for Blacks.24

White audiences reading postcolonial texts (including the Gothic here) are urged: Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?25

Engagement and articulation are powerful and important, and stories vehicle this, as Chinua Achebe reminds ‘storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten the usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit— in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university …’26 In writing of Australia, Thea Astley uses the defamiliarisation of postcolonial Gothic to reveal the cover-ups, lies, genocide and horror in the disorienting, tropical heat during the settlement of Australia and emphasises both the destructive power of language in erasure and its restorative and enabling powers of revaluation of the lives of colonised, silenced others in her postcolonial Gothic It’s Raining in Mango (1987).27 Astley exposes the deceit of linguistic cover-ups and

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the deep-seated damage done to all concerned when colonial settler-invader genocide is redescribed to render it necessary and lives irrelevant. Jessica and her young son in tropical North Queensland come across the dead bodies of two old Aboriginal men, butchered by those clearing to settle the bush. She is told: ‘[T] hey’re not human’. ‘“They looked human”, she persisted. “They had all your features”’.28 Her son, going off a little later, finds a heap of stinking corpses and is scarred for life, but the lies, the violence and the casual redescribing to devalue and normalise violence, the power of words to reveal or hide is clear. Shocked, now wanting the truth, Cornelius the journalist, Jessica’s husband writes publicly of the mindless violence, brutality and theft in his piece for a Sydney paper but this is never published, censoring the truth. Language, like education in Brodber’s Myal (1988) falsifies facts and experiences hiding gruesome horrors of mass death, and dehumanisation. Postcolonial Gothic lenses are ‘beady eyes without Anglo Saxon attitudes’29 (as Salman Rushdie characterised the perspective of immigrated settled people in the UK looking at the behaviours around them) and writings offer new versions of the invaders and invasions, the theft, silencing and occlusions of the past. The postcolonial gothic writers considered here are not merely revealing the desolations, they cast a new cold light on the lies and violence, the destruction, and the collusions of colonialism and imperialism, since to survive it was necessary to be silent, and often to embrace or suffer the forced embrace of the foreign invading Other. However, the positive revisioning turn of some postcolonial Gothic can be seen as underpinned by valuing rather than abjecting difference, arguments found in African American and postcolonial writers such as Audre Lorde, who declaims against the destructive underside of constructions of difference underlying colonialism and imperialism and emphasises the personal and wider politics, recognition and celebration of difference, part of the task of postcolonial Gothic: In our work and in our living we must recognise that difference is a reason for celebration and growth rather than a reason for destruction.

The postcolonial Gothic and wide-ranging, globalgothic revengeful figure of the South East Asian originated, vampiric pontianak, a young woman murdered when pregnant with an illegitimate or unwanted child, who preys mostly on other pregnant women (but can happily gut and disembowel men and children with her razor-sharp fingernails) is reimagined positively in Zen Cho’s YA gothic tale ‘The House of Aunts’ (2011). Cho reintegrates a teenage (necessarily orphaned) pontianak cared for by special aunties (who cook parts of people for supper). The girl, Ah Lee, explains her condition to a prospective boyfriend as more complex than being just a vampire. He is unphased and accepts her as she is. Writing is powerful. Returning to pirates and sea analogies with which this essay began, we now focus not on the usual vampires, zombies or werewolves but, recognising that invasion was often by sea, on mer-creatures and mer-people, relating postcolonial Gothic also to the newly defined nautical Gothic. In her introduction to a special issue of Gothic Studies: ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’,30 Emily Alder explores the breadth of

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nautical Gothic, looking at histories of travel across the sea, and at interest in the sea, mentioning ghost ships, Tennyson’s poem ‘The Kraken’ (1830)31 and contemporary fascination with sea creatures represented as monsters, such as the Jaws series (1975–1987).32 Alder notes that Mariaconcetta Costantini (Venturing into Unknown Waters, 2008)33 explores twenty-first-century sea monsters in Dan Simmons’s The Terror (2007)34 and Tim Curran’s Leviathan (2013),35 which recreate the Leviathan, dealing with varied ecological and sociopolitical issues, as did Jules Verne’s earlier, highly influential Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870),36 with its monstrous octopus and exposure of political power, capitalism and slavery. Finally, splicing postcolonial Gothic and Afrofuturism we look at retelling the stories of the past and reclaiming powerful futures. Gothic writers are far from innocent in their treatment of the colonised/foreign Other and directly or inadvertently many postcolonial gothic writers write against that tainted past. Living as he did in Providence, H. P. Lovecraft’s terror and disgust at foreign Others often took the form of powerful, vile, deadly, revolting sea creatures, the many-tentacled Cthulhu and others lurking in the deep sea, poised to invade and take over the world. Depicted as possibly more disgusting and terrifying are the sea creatures, mer-people, fishy folk of ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ (1936)37 in which a young traveller, drawn to the small fishing town of Innsmouth, discovers that the bizarre locals, some interbred from the alien deep-sea fishy folk, are actually remote relatives. The creatures from the sea persuaded local people to accept precious ornaments and endless shoals of fish, a good catch forever, but the price is miscegenation, inter-breeding. Lovecraft’s notorious racism emerges here. He was alarmed at the mass immigration he saw around him in Providence and worse still in New York. It is intriguing and ironic that the fishy folk are at once the monstrous others of his nightmares, infecting and morphing the race, and also if read with newly open-ended postcolonial Gothic, they are duplicitous settler invaders. Three of the texts considered here focus on sea creatures, and coastal places of potential invasion, transportation, or dreaming, and in so doing can be seen to write in relation to and against Lovecraft’s disgust and terror. Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory and Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle are set in Malaysia (then Malaya) and Singapore. Each exposes the fanciful constructions offered by the ostensibly charming and initially friendly representatives of imperial and colonial powers intent on invasion, destruction, erasure, theft and incorporation. Their expose reveals lies and corruption, and retaliation. Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative Afrofuturist The New Moon’s Arms, however, uses postcolonial Gothic to rewrite negative histories and imagine forward into positive futures. Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory rewrites history, demonstrating the role of both recorded versions and myth, depending on who is the recorder and who the reporter. Jasper Lim, son of the in/famous Straits Chinese/Malaysian Johnny Lim, retells the local legends of his father and his own role in Malaysia and Singapore, just before the Japanese invasion. Johnny Lim races through legitimate and illegitimate spaces on his bike, in which he resembles a metaphorical crosser of spaces

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and sides. He is initially seen in a positive light as an entrepreneur, but as with all legends and histories, some of the details are missing and interpretations shift with time. As is revealed, Johnny Lim was often in league with robbers and men of dubious power. Jasper’s first-person narrative paints Johnny as a mythic figure of dubious entrepreneurial crookedness, which is itself both a colonial interpretation of the kinds of effective space and class/culture crossers and identity changers who were able to live under the vagaries of colonial times, especially latterly with wartime rules in a largely liminal free-market state. And it seems to record an upbringing of neglect and deception and deals with querying the myths of power and success which operate in history. Jasper, telling his father’s tale, takes on the role of the transmitter of both a mythical and a more ‘accurate’ history, a role that many postcolonial writers adopt because someone has to remind of the myth and remind of the silence, and also to rewrite and differently interpret the moment. The moment of which Jasper writes is a liminal one, that of the time of British rule and plantation owning, and the crucial moments just before the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore in the Second World War. The history of his father shows him regularly colluding with criminals, political radicals, renegades and some dangerously deceptive invaders. Johnny’s own involvement was to inadvertently welcome and let in a suave intellectual Japanese officer, a precursor of the entire invading imperial army. A similar suave intellectual, dangerous and ultimately deadly, violent figure appears in Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle. The places of myth at the periphery of Malaysia, are seven vanishing islands. There are many fantasies of potential futures, represented in the vanishing islands which rise from then disappear back into the sea at different times. They are both a myth of the place and also a way of representing the power of different myths, those of finding final havens and love, and of false promises of imperial and colonial invaders such as the British plantation owners who represented order but who lost their focus and control, lapsing into drunkenness. Peter and the Japanese commander both have violent histories to hide. Peter, drinking up in the cooler area of the heights, leaves broken, derelict buildings and derelict ways. The Japanese commander, with his suave storytelling inveigling himself into a rich family invades in the most subtle way. Johnny Lim’s son Jasper identifies his father as a monster who inveigles his way into people’s lives and makes a success of his work. Excessively clever at manipulating machinery and minds, Johnny removes the opposition so he kills both a shopkeeper and the mine sub-manager for his own advancement. He is representative of the alternative energies of a version of existence under imperial and colonial rule. To survive you must both collude and do things your own way—challenge, undermine and perform. For Jasper’s mother, Snow, from an old established rich family, this is a story which confuses histories, bloodlines and inheritance, since Jasper might in the end be the son of the Japanese officer rather than of Johnny Lim. The potential mixed or muddled heritage is a form of Dracularity, mixing and invading of blood38 and resembles that of once invaded lands whose spaces and people move on with rather than perhaps truly beyond colonial and imperial histories. Tash

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Aw’s Harmony Silk Factory returns and reuses the mythological places as well as the popular cultural versions, Johnny Lim and his activities and life, in order to expose the subterfuge, the violence, the defamiliarisation and destruction of the imperial invaders, the British and the Japanese, and the collusion of many of the people which enabled them to get in and to take over, and enabled them to efface and silence. Jasper Lim’s story starts out relatively confused, but in piecing things together, he begins to expose contradictions, what really happened and what was thought, and what was constructed, fabricated and imagined, that twin lived experience of factual history and the imaginary. As a postcolonial gothic narrative Jasper’s reimagining and rewriting of this period recuperates the myths, re-understands them, and replaces people, events and interpretations back into history. Simultaneously it exposes the way in which people are confused by or collude with dominant views, even when those dominant views are set to erase them, otherise them, silence them, marginalise them and dehumanise them. The postcolonial Gothic treats places, spaces, people, histories, mythologies, dreams, the imaginary, and tells the story, mixing fact and imagination, representation, metaphor, in order to show there are parallel readings, one perhaps being the one perpetrated historically by those who won, others that operate as popular cultural stories, and others which, when you piece together historical fragments, utterly undercut previously received versions, redescribing people and places which have had certain established meanings. The imposition of and collusion with the invaders’ ways becomes clear, and a reconfiguration of and retelling of stories becomes possible. The imagination, spaces, places, bodies and values are turned around by the postcolonial Gothic and the strategies of the Gothic, of otherising, defamiliarising, of making the familiar frightening in order to destabilise dangerously conventional, silenced kinds of approaches and views, turns things on its head and lets you see history and peoples lives differently—re-empowered and revoiced, and the places perhaps then renamed or newly named, and certainly mapped differently as are people’s lives and values. Like the new Malaysia, Jasper cannot locate his own origins, and they are indeed mixed. Colonial and imperial histories are troubled by the postcolonial Gothic which unpicks old interpretations and rules, revealing the temporary nature of seemingly fixed versions of lives, spaces and places, revealing them to only seem controlled, managed, settled, but actually fabricated, traversed, reconstituted. In Beth Yahp’s Crocodile Fury 39, the great man’s house sits on Mat Salleh hill, named after the legendary historical insurgent Mat Salleh (rather than merely a mad sailor) and his band of men who fought against the British invasion and the modes of being imposed upon them in Borneo, Malaya and Penang (1894– 1905). The imperial settlement entailed the theft of riches, both local and forced foreign imports, deforestation, replanting, reconfiguration, imposition of a dominant other language and semi slave labour. In the case of The Crocodile Fury this is the enforced labour of abused bondmaids, the girl protagonist’s mother and her ghost-fighting grandmother.39 The grand imperialist on the hillside steals treasures, beautiful ornaments and furniture from around the world to bedeck his new

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construction on someone else’s land, and steals his woman from the people of the sea to be his wife. The rich man cut back the jungle and built the mansion from stones carved from a foreign country… Only the natives who built it left traces of a local presence in the rich man’s mansion: their drops of sweat mixed in with the foundations, their blood and crushed limbs marking the beams that held the ceilings up.40

The house has layers of history seeping through its cracks. Both the spatial and ideological fabric are each undermined by the bandit and crocodile power of the jungle. The house is: A mansion abandoned for years by everyone except the jungle. The mansion had been ransacked long ago. It was filled with rubbish and decaying furniture, its fine marble floors were heaved and prised apart by jungle roots as thick as a young girl’s thigh. Its windows were hung with jungle creepers allowing only a feeble light.41

Here magic, superstition and ghosts are tangible presences and the grandmother wields power because she can speak to and manage ghosts. The imperialist landowner capturing his shape-shifting mermaid lover was a violent theft of the place and its life energies and of a woman: The sharp glint of a knife. The rich man gripped. He pulled. The catch of breath in his throat scraped at my throat. The suck of the sea on his mermaid shape almost pulled my arms from their sockets. My feet thrashed wildly in bed… His fingers on the dragon shape, the reptile-shape, the fish-shape eased themselves around a single scale.42

However, as the alternative power of the place and its radical bandit and crocodile energies start to take over from the great man’s rule, down through time, the young girl aligns herself with the sea woman lover and fights against the great man’s control. The rich man could not hold her. The dragon-shape twisted to savage him, the ­reptile-shape slashed its tail, the fish-shape pressed serrated teeth to his flesh.… I reached to tear the lover’s gown from my neck. My face was wet with tears.43

The radical, bandit crocodile, ghostly energies of Mat Salleh’s band, react against the theft and abuse brought by the great man, whose illegitimate power represents that of imperialism. The energy of the crocodile is the energy of the bandit, and of the stolen local woman, probably part sea serpent, with whom the girl aligns herself and at times feels herself merge. It acted against an imperial invasion, a dismemberment of his people, his past and the replacements of all of that with another language and another set of customs. In this place, a grand house falling into ruin, and through the postcolonial Gothic novel the powers, lives and stories which were repressed and hidden come back to haunt, to invade, to rewrite histories, and to offer renewal and re-empowering of those who were considered other. This powerful novel uses mer-creatures, the sea snake woman who comes from the water, bandits, and a shape-shifting crocodile to expose a history of imperialist abuse, and a reclamation of land, space and being. Beth Yahp’s crocodile and sea snake woman represent the active energies of revolt, while in Sandi Tan’s The Black Isle, a huge octopus coupling on the shore

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with Mrs. Nakamura, a fisherman’s wife, originates in a Japanese legend and here presages the imperialistic invasion of Singapore and Malaysia by the Japanese in the Second World War. This version of sex with a sea-creature indicates both the impending violence and collusion with the invading Japanese. They brutally, if only temporarily, took over from the imperial invasion by the British, who wished to develop rubber plantations and make Singapore, on the spice route, the international hub of trade that it still is. So, the violent invasive other is also somehow camouflaged within the people with whom he or they initially reside in order to gain favour, find out and slightly transform, shape change themselves, transmute them. Mrs. Nakamura colludes with the octopus, a creature from the sea in the way that the residents of Singapore were quite happy to collude with the Japanese until the moment at which they started bombing, pillaging and murdering them. So in that story, that particular incident represents gullibility, changing sides, the embrace of the other and its strangeness, all of which are part of the history of imperial and colonial Gothic, and it gothics that invasion through representing it as creature-oriented, and based on naivety, gullibility and a certain amount of selling your own soul. Singapore is both a jewel of an isle (recalling The Jewel in the Crown, imperial India in Paul Scott’s 1966 novel),44 and a black isle ‘dirty with ghosts’. Like so many vital, imperial positions it is a small island at a crossroads of the sea, poised on the edge like a ‘teardrop’ of the Malay peninsula in the spice and silk routes, a key location for trade and then for war. In terms of British Imperialism, Malta, Cyprus, Singapore, Gibraltar, Hong Kong and the Falklands are similarly places on the edge, crossroads between cultures, resting places for invaders and crucial military outposts. Singapore is particularly multicultural, its history of Malay, Chinese, Tamil and European. The moment of which Sandi Tan writes is that just before the Second World War, and through it to beyond. Tan’s Malaysian Singapore-set novel traces the story of twins Li and Ling, who travel with their father from Shanghai and settle first in Malaya, where they try and run a plantation for a white owner. On the plantation are the angry ghosts of young pregnant women who were sacrificed, some of whom turn into pontianaks and take revenge on other young pregnant women, or anyone available, including the bullying, drunken, European plantation owner. The twins and their father move to Singapore just before the Japanese invasion of World War II. Ling is a postfeminist character transiting from a relative innocent through manipulating relationships to enable herself to stay alive. Meanwhile, her greatest gift is her constant perception of the many ghosts lurking in homes, on street corners, angry at development and the erasure of their home spaces (Chinese graveyards in particular). She develops her powers, speaking for them when high rises in Singapore are torn or burnt down and metros forced through graveyards. Her gothic character, as ghost seer, enables her to survive and to physically offer a window into the bustling spirit world with its everyday or revengeful dead in a fast-growing and changing city before, during then after the wartime period. One morning, on a romantic escape to the beach house owned by Daniel’s family, Ling and her wealthy fiance come across a terrible sight, an enormous octopus

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seems to be devouring the fisherman’s wife, Mrs. Nakamura, half in and half out of the water. This is an enactment of a Japanese myth depicted in one of Hokusai’s pictures, ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’, itself based in Japanese octopus mythology from the Edo period, when Shinto was making a resurgence. Mrs. Nakamura the fisherman’s wife might seem to be being devoured or raped but she is in a love embrace, colluding with the violent power of the octopus, invading other, presaging the violence to come with the Japanese invasion: this was no turtle or manatee but a beautiful woman naked, on her back, being crushed alive by a great octopus, its legs were coiled around her fair torso and its slimy head – the size of two pillows – had pressed itself against her face, so close that they were eye to eye. The monster had trapped her so absolutely it was hard to tell if she was still breathing.45

What they see then is not a brutal bestial rape but the entangled bodies of two lovers, one the monstrous Other of the octopus, one the collusive enthralled Mrs. Nakamura. Lovecraft could have written this and shuddered; it emphasises the thrill of embracing the utterly overwhelming Other, and the collusion of the host country, unaware of invasion. It heralds the invasion of the Japanese, who have inveigled their way into families and businessmen’s lives, promising rich futures. Japanese officers such as Taro are authentic, well mannered, charming, and on the point of war, devastatingly brutal and deadly, killing everyone in their way. They are an advance guard, followed by low flying bombers smashing the city. The representatives of the previous imperial power, the British, are arrogant, lazy and drunken. They party through their last moments, hiding their possessions, boozing and breaking their precious bottles of scotch on the pavements below, while Singapore goes up in flames. Their promise of order is revealed as a total sham. Reminding again of Japanese monsters from the sea (the huge Octopus, Godzilla and tsunamis), the planes and forces are invaders from both myth and nature: A tsunami was upon us, a towering wave that would vomit from the bottom of the world creatures far worse than jellyfish … It’s coming! High above, piercing the fog and the gray clouds, were flying metal crosses, appearing one by one until they formed a V. As the planes passed over our heads, the red circles on the base of their wings stared down upon us like blood-filled eyes.46

People, including hosts, are slaughtered in their homes. Women, including Ling, are taken up by the invaders, but Ling colludes in this as a rescue. Taro uses her as his mistress but she survives the downfall of the Japanese, and deploying her sexuality and powers with ghosts, goes on to be an adviser to property developers who need to know where and what friendly or hostile sorts these ghosts are, either for new build, or new purchase, and how to live among them or be rid of them. Survival and change her gender and her special powers are her tactics, but her seeing and communing is with the alternative voices of the people, the dead, the ghosts who sit in the corners of every home, every pavement and in large numbers inhabit the burial grounds sought after for new metro lines and stations. When money and high rise, high stake building takes over the small capitalist consumerist island she warns of bad or good spiritual accompaniment to various

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deals and survives, having used the power of her gender as well as her spiritual power to do so. A postcolonial gothic novel, this relates change in society to everyday and wartime ghosting and seers, speaking for the ordinary people or not, and the trading of sex for survival. So, she uses the system. Postcolonial Gothic, science fiction, fantasy, Afrofuturist writer Nalo Hopkinson challenges the ways in which much fantasy and Gothic derives from a past which saw colonialism, imperialism, slavery and so it is important to revalue, reimagine, recreate the magical tales and ways of seeing the world from postcolonial contexts, from Southern, Eastern contexts, including her own origins, the Caribbean. In speaking of her stories, she differentiates between those of the global North and of Northern history and her own magical legacy: The stories invoke a sense of fable. Sometimes they are fantastical, sometimes absurd, satirical, magical, or allegorical. Northern science fiction and fantasy come out of a rational and sceptical approach to the world: That which cannot be explained must be proven to exist, either through scientific method or independent corroboration. But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview. The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by side each with the daily events of life. …. Best instead to find ways to incorporate both the logical and the illogical to one’s approach to the world, because you never know when life will just drop you down in that hole, into a ceiba space where none of the rules you know operate.47

In her work there are several soucouyants (Caribbean flying vampiric balls of fire) and duppies (ghosts, kept semi alive, preying on blood), mer-people and a variety of traditional Caribbean beings, such as the Lagahoo (part donkey) and Papa Legbara. Her recasting and rewriting works against the constraints and forms of the dominant culture. Nalo Hopkinson’s postcolonial gothic writing links the geographies of the mind with place and history, reclaiming, reinscribing, reconfiguring the Caribbean and Canada, …we certainly inhabit a metaphorical landscape, but how do our histories and our experiences in the world lead us to paint that landscape?…So another strategy I have is to sometimes refuse to write yet another plea to the dominant culture for justice, and instead to simply set the story of the “othered” people front and center and talk about their (our) lives and their concerns.48

Postcolonial gothic writing exposes and writes against essentialising and otherising; avoids seeing postcolonial writers solely in terms of speaking from a subaltern position; rather emphasising how they speak out against oppression, and do so through the imaginative powers of the Gothic, upsetting complacency, silences and absences, and revealing both dark, cruel, destructive secrets and histories, indicting the perpetrators, and celebrating the rich voices, stories, alternative histories and worldviews of those once silenced, absented and destroyed. It can often be seen as moving beyond revelation and denouncement into the rewriting of histories from a positive perspective and so very close to the work of Afrofuturism, which rewrites African-originated histories spliced with speculative fictions to reimagine the history and imagine the positive future. Nalo Hopkinson combines postcolonial Gothic with Afrofuturism to tell the story of Calamity Lambkin, who is ageing gracelessly, wears clothes which

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are an embarrassment to her daughter and refuses to be called mother or grandmother. Resisting her ageing, and in a period of liminality and loss, of her father, of her youth, Calamity rescues a mer-child, Agway, washed up when his parents drowned, and begins to care for and raise him. When she was only a child herself, Calamity (then Chastity) swam too far out with a blue mer-girl, and found her own toes and fingers beginning to fuse together into flippers. Agway realigns her with her childhood, and offers a lifeline. Simultaneously, she learns to respect herself and her ageing, regaining her magical powers as a finder of lost things, while her father’s cashew nut orchard returns and flourishes. The postcolonial Gothic here is magical, evident in Calamity’s powers as a finder and producer. It is also there to retell hidden stories and recuperate celebratory histories. Fictional Caribbean islands Dolorosse and Cabaya carry the secret of a magical survival from the brutality and death of transportation and slavery, when, to avoid death, historical transatlantic slave trade victims jumped overboard (the real history of the Zong, 1781). ‘The people’s arms flattened out into flexible flippers. The shackles slipped off their wrists’.49 They turned into mer-people and now inhabit the waters around those islands, a well-kept secret. Agway goes back to his people, the captive zooquarium seals escape, and Calamity joins protests against the life-destroying corporations. Calamity and her family are released from a stagnating present. Valuing hybrid life in the sea might offer a challenge to over-fishing, and begin to turn the tide against the monopoly capitalism of multinationals. Ecological awareness and hybridity offer some hope for the future. Alternative histories, magic, rejuvenation make this a positive, celebratory narrative. Postcolonial Gothic is dark, exposing the way the other has been constructed and made abject and terrible, the dehumanisation, erasure, silencing. Much postcolonial Gothic does not stop with revelation, instead it moves on from exposure and damage. It reinstates or replaces those invader worldviews with the mythic, magical, spiritual non-imperialistic, non-colonial, often indigenous worldviews and ways. Some postcolonial Gothic splices with, for example, Afrofuturism, using gothic strategies to offer historical re-readings and magical alternative opportunities in the present and future.

Notes



1. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘The University at a Crossroads’, in Ramon Grosfoguel, Roberto Hernández, and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez (eds.), Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without (Lanham, MD: Littlefield, 2016), 3–14. 2. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Pan Books, 1973), 263. 3. Glennis Byron (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Globalgothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 4. 4. Zen Cho, ‘The House of Aunts’, GigaNotoSaurus.org, 2011. 5. Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Time Warner International, 1998).

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6. Mark Bould, ‘The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF’, Science Fiction Studies, 34.2 (2007), Afrofuturism, 177–86; Isiah Lavender, Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013). 7. Nalo Hopkinson, The New Moon’s Arms (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007). 8. Gore Verbinski, dir., Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1982); Strangers to Ourselves (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 10. David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), vi. 11. Ibid., 189. 12. Tabish Khair and Johan Hoglund (eds.), Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Gina Wisker, ‘Celebrating Difference and Community: The Vampire in African American and Caribbean Women’s Writing’, in Tabish Khair and Johan Hoglund (eds.), Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 13. Joel Nicholson-Roberts, ‘On the Road with the Blood of This Kingdom: Theology, Economy, and Blood in The Crying of Lot 49’, Textual Practice, 33.3 (2019), 399–414. 14. Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 122. 15. Ibid., 63. 16. Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory (London: HarperPerennial, 2005). 17. Sandi Tan, The Black Isle (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012). 18. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989); Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 19. Melissa Makala Edmundson, Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 20. Wilson Harris, History, Fable & Myth in the Caribbean and Guiana (Georgetown: Ministry of Information and Culture, 1981), 27. 21. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 171. 22. Jean Franco, ‘Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power and the Third-World Intelligentsia’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 508. 23. Lauretta Ngcobo (ed.), Let It Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1988), 40. 24. Gayatri Spivak and Sneja Gunew, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, Hecate, 12.1/2 (1986), 137. 25. Ibid. 26. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savanna (London: Heinemann, 1987), 153. 27. Thea Astley, It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album (New York: Putnam, 1987). 28. Ibid., 27. 29. Salman Rushdie, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, Sunday Times, 2 July 1982. 30. Emily Alder, ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 19.2 (2017), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.7227/gs.0025. ISSN 1362-7937. 31. Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Kraken’, in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830), 154. 32. Steven Spielberg, dir., Jaws (1975); Jeannot Szwarc, dir., Jaws 2 (1978); Joseph Sargent, dir., Jaws: The Revenge (1987).

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33. Mariaconcetta Costantini, Venturing into Unknown Waters: Wilkie Collins and the Challenge of Modernity (Pescara: Edizioni Tracce, 2008). 34. Dan Simmons, The Terror (Boston: Little, Brown, 2007). 35. Tim Curran, Leviathan (Melbourne: Severed Press, 2013). 36. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1870). 37. Howard Phillips Lovecraft [1936], ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, in ‘The Lurking Fear’ and Other Stories (London: Panther, 1970). 38. Anidjar, Blood. 39. Gina Wisker, ‘Showers of Stars: South East Asian Women’s Postcolonial Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 5.2 (2003), 64–80, 75. 40. Yahp, Crocodile, 4–5. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 135–6. 43. Ibid., 281–2. 44. Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1966). 45. Tan, Black Isle, 183. 46. Ibid., 224–5. 47. Nalo Hopkinson, in conversation with Alondra Nelson, Social Texts, Vol. 71 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002), xii–xiii. 48. Ibid., 101. 49. Hopkinson, New Moon’s Arms, 316.

Bibliography Abraham, N., and Torok, M. (1994) The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Achebe, C. (1987) Anthills of the Savanna (London: Heinemann). Alder, E. (2017) ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 19 (2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.7227/gs.0025. ISSN 1362-7937. Anidjar, G. (2014) Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 122. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1989) The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge). Astley, T. (1987) It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album (New York: Putnam). Aw, T. (2005) The Harmony Silk Factory (London: HarperPerennial). Boehmer, E. (1995) Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bould, M. (2007) ‘The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF’, Science Fiction Studies, 34 (2), Afrofuturism, 177–86. Brodber, E. (1988) Myal (London: New Beacon Books). Byron, G. (ed.) (2013) ‘Introduction’, in Globalgothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Cho, Z. (2011) ‘The House of Aunts’, GigaNotoSaurus.org. Costantini, M. (2008) Venturing into Unknown Waters: Wilkie Collins and the Challenge of Modernity (Pescara: Edizioni Tracce). Curran, T. (2013) Leviathan (Melbourne: Severed Press). Franco, J. (1988) ‘Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power and the Third-World Intelligentsia’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.) (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 508.

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Harris, W. (1981) History, Fable & Myth in the Caribbean and Guiana (Georgetown: Ministry of Information and Culture), p. 27. Hopkinson, N. (1998) Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Time Warner International). Hopkinson, N. in conversation with Alondra Nelson (2002) Social Texts, Vol. 71 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Hopkinson, N. (2007) The New Moon’s Arms (New York: Grand Central Publishing). Khair, T., and Hoglund, J. (eds.) (2012) Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia: Columbia University Press). Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to Ourselves (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf). Lavender, I. (2011) Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Lorde, A. (1984), Interviewed in Black Women Writers at Work, Claudia Tate (ed.) (New York: Continuum). Lovecraft, H. P. (1928) ‘The Dunwich Horror’, Weird Tales, Vol. 29, April, pp. 481–508. Lovecraft, H. P. [1936] (1970) ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, in ‘The Lurking Fear’ and Other Stories (London: Panther). Makala Edmundson, M. (2018) Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2013) Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (New York: Berghahn Books). Ngcobo, L. (ed.) (1988) Let It Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britain (London: Virago Press), p. 40. Nicholson-Roberts, J. (2019) ‘On the Road with the Blood of This Kingdom: Theology, Economy, and Blood in The Crying of Lot 49’, Textual Practice, 33 (3), 399–414. Prawer Jhabvala, R. (1975) Heat and Dust (London: John Murray). Punter, D. (2000). Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Pynchon, T. (1975) Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Pan Books), p. 263. Rudd, A. (2010) Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). Rushdie, S. (1982) ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, Sunday Times, 2 July. Santos, B. de Sousa. (2016) ‘The University at a Crossroads’, in Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without, in R. Grosfoguel, R. Hernández, and E. Rosen Velásquez (eds.) (Maryland: Littlefield), pp. 3–14. Scott, P. (1966) The Jewel in the Crown (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann). Simmons, D. (2007) The Terror (Boston: Little, Brown). Spivak, G., and Gunew, S. (1986) ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, Hecate, 12 (1/2). Tan, S. (2012) The Black Isle (New York: Grand Central Publishing). Tennyson, A. (1830) ‘The Kraken’, in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill), p. 154. Verne, J. (1870) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel). Wisker, G. (2012) ‘Celebrating Difference and Community: The Vampire in African American and Caribbean Women’s Writing’, in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires, T. Khair and J. Hoglund (eds.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Wisker, G. (2003) ‘Showers of Stars: South East Asian Women’s Postcolonial Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 5 (2), 64–80, 75. Womack, Y. L. (2013) Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books). Yahp, B. (1992) Crocodile Fury (Sydney: Angus & Robertson).

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Filmography Jaws, dir. Spielberg, Steven (1975). Jaws 2, dir. Szwarc, Jeannot (1978). Jaws: The Revenge, dir. Sargent, Joseph (1987). Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, dir. Verbinski, Gore (2003).

G. Wisker

Strains of the South Naomi Simone Borwein

In a recent article, Mississippi author Jamie Kornegay describes inadvertently penning a Southern gothic novel1; elsewhere, the American thriller writer Todd Robinson pointedly remarks that he has moved away from a Southern gothic aesthetic.2 In 2015, the Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro tells the anecdote about ­wanting to write a Southern gothic story set in Bournemouth, England, using the style of Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams: “It’s a nice setting but I can’t get it to fit in with any deeper ideas”, extending this issue to cultural representations of setting and metaphor3—as figurative language embodied by an object. The examples of Kornegay, Robinson, and Ishiguro are symptomatic of an underlying complexity in translocating style across geographic and genre boundaries. Southern gothic, as a critical and literary form, exists in a plethora of sub-categorisations and modal expressions. These range from Australian to ­ Japanese subgenres and from realistic, popular, and romantic to horror, thriller, and noir variants, all of which reflect the diaspora of the Gothic as a critical mode. On one level, this trend showcases expansive and inclusive global gothic aims, but also the modification of Southern gothic style by authors—as an artistic mode. Indeed, the formation and continued proliferation of Southern Gothic is equally affected by aesthetic approaches, as writerly practise, that get used to critically define the genre: where tenor, pacing, metaphor, extravagance or economy of words, harsh contrast, and overall structure burgeon out of national conventions of language and culture—for example, distinctive Germanic or Australian narrative models. In these various traditions, changing novel conventions (like realist or fantastic) similarly impact the construction of Southern gothic narratives—often divided between supernatural and realistic forms—that exponentially increase the fragmentation of Southern Gothic in criticism. The problem of strains, or what Bridget Marshall, Allan Lloyd-Smith and others call subspecies of Southern Gothic,4 is critically inspected by scholars like Thomas Ærvold Bjerre in 20175

N. S. Borwein (*)  Western University, London, ON, Canada

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and Meredith Miller in 2013 who seek to differentiate them.6 Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak’s recent description of the genre, embedded in American gothic culture, implicitly reveals changing media and influences that helped evolve early forms of Southern Gothic into new ones—from the Dark or Negative Romantic era of Poe and Hawthorne to the contemporary fusion of aesthetics associated with Southern gothic novels written by horror icons and speculative writers.7 In Southern gothic criticism, debates repeatedly address the limits of genre and the problem of realism, region, and supernaturalism inside and outside the American South—visible in works by Charles L. Crow and Susan Castillo Street, Jay Ellis, Christopher Lloyd, and Michael Kreyling. Of import are issues of social realism in gothic “escapist” fiction that negate the binary of multiplicity—an uncanny praxis of a constantly shifting Other in an increasingly global context, where authorial output creates stylistic simulacra (or anisomorphisms) in divergent cultural spaces. In this chapter an examination is undertaken of strains of Southern Gothic and the complexity around the translocation of style in regional, national, and global variants. It offers useful overviews and definitions, places contemporary examples in current context, and explicates how authorial style and literary outputs juxtapose critical perspectives and classification systems. The argument is bipartite. First, strains are critically encapsulated in and move through definitions in different capacities, thus highlighting the tension between realism, regionalism, and supernaturalism—which stem from various traditions and histories, co-evolving over time. Second, this extends the idea of the critical to the authorial, where the analysis focuses on (a) how key aesthetics in these critical representations manifest across a spectrum of narratives that draw attention to consistent elements of contemporary genre forms; and (b) how narrative structure and form affects these aesthetics and helps develop an understanding of global Southern Gothic and it’s variants. Finally, the analysis in this chapter exposes the powerful stylistic affect of Southern gothic metaphor(s) and themes on the diaspora of genre. Southern Gothic is a cultural cache, a barometer of current sociocultural context in America. It is used as a lurid catchphrase, a by-line to sell news about white supremacy, racial tensions, and murder. Today it is apparent in the Southern gothic rhetoric of American mass media (images of white trash, “draining the swamp”, Civil War symbolism, and futuristic, apocalyptic Southernscapes) as much as in the influx of mainstream reviews and books on the topic: for example, Kat Eschner’s 2017 Smithsonian article on “Why We Love Southern Gothic” to Sam Sacks’s 2018 Wall Street Journal piece “Revitalizing the Southern Gothic Style”. These examples suggest a revision of style, and an increasingly global approach that is typical of much genre criticism and prose. The term “Southern Gothic” was once viewed as an opprobrious, verboten stain—defiled by horror and sensationalism in the era of Ellen Glasgow’s 1935 review “Heroes and Monsters”, itself a rebuttal to Gerald Johnson’s 1935 description of those “horror-mongers-in-chief”, “the real equerries of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones” violence in “The Horrible South”.8 Yet early twenty-first-century American popular culture embraces the term. Recently, authors like Kornegay and M. O. Walsh promote their fictions as Southern Gothic. Kornegay’s 2015 Huffington Post article, “The Evolution of

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Southern Gothic”, and Walsh’s 2015 Guardian article, “Why Southern Gothic Rules the World”, suggest a significant change in the popular reception of the genre over the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. In mass media, where the politics of the apocalypse and the imagery of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy fuse, clearly discernible are the socio-historical underpinnings of the Southern Gothic, the “turf wars” still waged over the geographical and literary scope of the term, and its negotiation of region, realism, and stereotype, as part of what Lloyd calls the long “debate over Southern Gothic”,9 largely fuelled by Southern literati and gothicists. A brief survey of Southern Gothic identifies five distinct periods in the evolution of the critical construction of the genre—derived from inspection of literary production and reception. From the 1800s to 1934, before the term Southern Gothic has been coined by critics, the style is dominated by Poe, though, distinct forms are visible through early figures like George Washington Cable, John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Sims, and William Bulloch Maxwell; Naturalist-Gothic gestalts created by writers like Ambrose Bierce; and a generation later, the works of Old Southern Gothicists from Katherine Ann Porter, and William Faulkner, to Erskine Caldwell, and Andrew Lytle with critics like Henry Seidel Canby in 1931 calling Faulkner the “prime example of American sadism” in his nascent “school of cruelty”.10 From 1935 to 1960 much of what is considered the modern canon is dismissed by critics as grotesquery or pulp fiction. In this period, the term “Southern Gothic” and the “Southern Gothic School”11 are dubbed a national cliché by Cleanth Brooks in 1942,12 while embraced by Louise Bogan in “The Gothic South” (1941).13 The mark of this cliché, the derogatory innuendo, burgeoned from the unspoken stain that haunted Southern Gothic much like it once did European Gothicism.14 Yet in this period, Eudora Welty, Crews, O’Connor, and McCullers produce Southern gothic literature, while Davis Grubb makes mass-marketed Southern gothic pulp. The 1960s to 1990s showcase the emergence of a distinct Southern gothic tradition in criticism with key texts by Edward Stone (1960), Irving Malin (1962), Lewis P. Simpson (1985), and Fred Botting (1996). The rise of classic Horror in the 1980s leads to the incorporation of icons like Stephen King in definitions. From 1990 to 2015, Southern Gothic is increasingly present in the canon. With this increase in critical and literary output comes more fragmentation of Southern gothic styles, diffused between romantic-supernatural, hyperrealist, horror-thriller, and other global forms. From 2015 to 2019, an engagement with horror-realism and fantastical, apocalyptic imagery is dispersed across subgenres, in a postmodern milieu, that mirror the global expansion of research and authorship. This overview of the canon itself is deceptive, because, for example, if one tries to differentiate Old (Realistic) Southern Gothic (circa 1935) from the African American tradition, it is necessary to explore gothic outliers and insiders of the Southern Literary Renaissance critically constructed by Rubin Jr. and Jacobs (1929–1950s)—from Faulkner to Crews, to William Styron, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy, or Barry Hannah—and its parallel in the politically charged

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Harlem Vogue, or Renaissance—typified by authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston, and extended to Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. These two sets of authors represent veins of “black” and “white” Southern Gothic implied by scholars like Miller.15 The same complexity is clear when differentiating popular and scholarly texts, or supernatural Horror and the Gothic from Southern literary forms; doing so traverses mainstream and canonical versions of literary history. Strains of Southern Gothic in definitions highlight aesthetic tension. They have multiple originating sources, and thus multiple aesthetic forms under the umbrella of Southern Gothic that are impacted by first, the mechanics of the diaspora of genre elements within modes used by authors—like John Frow, Wai Chee Dimock describes this phenomena as modal, living, and absorptive16; and second, in contrast, the determinism of genre used by critics, through imperatives to classify and analyse. Recently, Lloyd-Smith (2004, 2006), Bailey (2010, 2011, 2016), Miller (2013) and Bjerre (2017) begin the process of investigating strains. Lloyd-Smith explores four sub-variants: popular, realistic (or Faulknerian), African American, and supernatural17; but, his analysis does not address the global movement of the genre that has emerged in recent years. In 2016 Bailey subdivides the Southern Gothic into the supernatural supranatural (romantic), and realistic.18 Bjerre outlines a larger spectrum of variants, in 2017, extending into the global.19 In literature, issues of style also have an important affect on these ‘subgenres’—from the intensity of Faulkner’s “wild lyrical style” in the pursuit of “a single effect of somber violence and horror”20 to the homogenised suggestiveness, harsh juxtaposition, and exposition in contemporary forms. Modern Realistic Southern Gothic, set in the South is typified by graphic fictions of Southern horror and sadism, tinctured by True Crime elements. Southern horrors evoke slave experience, race, class, criminal, naturalistic, or apocalyptic violence. Human excess is a facet of Southern grotesquery and absurdism. Movements of American literary realism and naturalism (or posthumanism) fortify metaphors of memory, soil, and place. Many modern fictions are metafictive and self-reflexive; narratives engage with the discourse of Southern Gothic as ­socio-literary realism. Realism is a part of standard Southern gothic tropes once utilised in books like Faulkner’s Sanctuary or Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, and revitalised by texts like Tyson’s The Past Is Never. Such tropes include psychologically haunting images of antebellum plantations transformed into urban domiciles, historical fixations projected onto contemporary anxieties; diseased Spanish moss-covered oaks, swamps and bayous; decadence seen as moral and social decay, the villain as deviant, outcast, misfit, and simultaneously victim of his own actions; and bleak nostalgia as a failure of the Romantic ideal, complicated by a postmodern aesthetic.21

These elements mutate into more supernatural and metaphysical manifestations—variously in Morrison’s 1987 Beloved, Martina Boone’s 2014 Compulsion, Cynthia Bond’s 2014 Ruby, or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–2018). In contemporary global and multinational modes, realism and region in many different permutations are balanced against different forms of spiritualism and cultural contexts. However, they generally incorporate localised discourses utilising the

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mode, increased hyperrealism over gothic realism, modern surrealist equivalents, social realism within fantasy narratives (in America, harnessing conspiracy theory and extremism), and the transcription of Southern atmosphere over Southern places—for instance, through metaphors that link tropes, stereotypes, characterisations, and settings. These aspects appear across genre strains as broad terms with many variables, where aesthetics and styles are affected by new media, platforms, and traditions. Consider how narrative impacts genre. Many novels of Southern gothic style are marketed globally under labels like horror or thriller with descriptors like romantic, supernatural, and realistic. The following textual analysis explores works by a spectrum of authors who engage with “Southern Gothic” across geographic, stylistic, and genre lines: (a) Mo Hayder and Craig Silvey (international); (b) Karen Russell and Tiffany Quay Tyson (regional with multinational perspectives); (c) Elizabeth Massie (horror); (d) Greg Iles (realistic regional extension of Old Southern Gothic); and, (e) Cynthia Bond (African American supernatural) and Poppy Z. Brite aka Billy Martin (popular). Together, their prose is indicative of the way style affects genre, and as such extends the idea of the critical to authorial. Additionally, this analysis addresses the nature of Southern gothic metaphor, as a theoretical object that helps construct style, and is a nexus of cultural, literary, and ideological referents. Metaphors tend towards what is essentially anisomorphism. That is an absence of exact corresponding meaning between genre types, directly correlated with how the metaphors are embedded in, and evoked through, the narrative and its settings. In the canon, Southern gothic metaphors encompass, but are not limited to, the following examples: blood and bloodline, home and heredity, enslavement and slavery, the Mississippi River, swamp, plantation and decaying manor house, exquisite and debauched surcease, wraiths and haunting, the Civil War, wounds, magnolias and moonlight, and metaphors of difference—from good and evil to light and darkness—wrapped up in dichotomies of reality and fantasy. In the texts that are analysed here, metaphors include Mississippi blood, voodoo, the hang tree, strange fruit, undeadness, and more. The translation of metaphor across genre strains suggests what M. B. Dagut more generally posits: the great complexity of factors determining the ontology of metaphors—why certain metaphors are created and other not; why a metaphor that is strikingly effective in one language becomes peculiar or even unintelligible if transferred into another.22

Understanding metaphorical anisomorphism is essential to an analysis of style, “metaphors and genres that organize them”23 in various settings. Indeed, Southern gothic metaphors are transcribed across the region with different results. Take the examples of Mo Hayder and Craig Silvey; both authors engage with global Southern gothic aesthetics. While Silvey writes to the Australian and the Southern gothic canon in Jasper Jones (2009), Hayder produces a British form in Poppet (2013). Indeed, genre conventions are altered in these texts; for instance, they use other forms of paganism, animism, and spiritualism (e.g. voodooism(s) and dark representations of Aboriginal Dreamtime), while engaging with aspects of Southern gothic discourse and tradition.

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The beginning of Poppet is stylistically reminiscent of Welty’s 1942 The Robber Bridegroom. Surrealism in Hayder’s passage suggests the macabre, ­horror-filled fairy tales of Welty, which are bound to lyricism and experimental fusions of aesthetics from American folklore to Southern modernism. Indeed, Poppet starts with the “Invisible” silent “MONSTER MOTHER”24 and incorporates the play of shadow and light typical of the Gothic: “light under the door flickers. It moves, dancing sideways”, and “settles”.25 This is followed by physical responses to fear: “heart thumping”, foreshadowing a looming threat: “out there, waiting”.26 The lamp metaphor makes trees unnatural and consumptive through silhouettes that “shift and bend”, alive and twisted.27 Hayder extends this metaphor to contorted doll parts and the practise of voodoo. Through the marketisation of myth, she connects the American South to “the popularized fiction of voodoo”28; she emphasises the translation of strains of myth and metaphor through “Haitian strand[s] of voodoo” juxtaposed to dolls “only” surfacing “in New Orleans”.29 Indeed, the title Poppet is a translation of voodoo metaphors. The etymology of Poppet suggests two antithetic meanings with disparate cultural associations: one an innocent young child, the other a demonic tool of witchcraft. It is likened to dismembered corpses as doll parts. In the novel, the character Caffery “UNPICKS THE dolls and finds they contain a grotesque array of body parts and excretions”.30 Graphically rendered, they “are objects of terror”, relics of fear, that “obey a fixed set of rules”31—evoking the determinism and naturalism of Southern Gothic. As a deconstruction of the poppet metaphor, Hayder describes flesh, “tough and organic-looking in the earth”, reburied in shallow graves in the woodland and garden, and reformed into “dolls”.32 The crime narrative utilises new regional Southern gothic tropes like soil: connected to forensics, investigations, and “fallow pastures”.33 Interestingly, through currency like “the Pakistani and zlotys”, Hayder makes the imagery global and mercantile; in this passage the economy of doll parts is expanded to the composition of “Martian soil” infested with otherworldly contagions.34 A transnational intersection of images is brought back to the sensory perception of pain and the quantification of its duration. Hayder does not directly reference the genre, or invoke the names of canonical Southern gothic writers. Her dark lyricism and use of crime procedurals is part of the British thriller tradition—its gothic rise signposted by Devendra P. Varma in the second edition of The Gothic Flame.35 The style is ultimately embedded in a British aesthetic with local atmosphere and place: “Kingston Blacks”, “kedgeree”, and “the Ghostly village of Priddy”,36 where one can find ancient Neolithic monuments, circles used for ritual purposes, much like Stonehenge, hinting at a more arcane, local, occult tradition in “the Bristol docks” and the Mendips. This multifoliate set of associated imagery is connected to the geological formation of the land,37 adding a local and spatial dimension to the metaphor she employs. Furthermore, these geographical metaphors explored through regional genre often connote globalisation. The novel Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is global Southern Gothic with a palpable Australian aesthetic. As will be seen, the Southern gothic metaphor of the hang tree—a site of cultural trauma, history, and memory—is transposed onto the

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outback, and against a backdrop of Indigenous and colonial Australian markers. Unlike Hayder, Silvey draws overt attention to Southern gothic genre tropes and figures, including “Southern writers” like Welty, Faulkner, O’Connor and Harper Lee, while referencing Faulkner’s 1929 masterpiece The Sound and the Fury, and Mark Twain’s 1894 Pudd’nhead Wilson with naturalistic scenes of body bisection and lynching.38 Yet, the metaphor of the lynch tree is made Australian: a young girl hanging from “the bough of a silver eucalypt” “[i]n the silver light”, in her “dirty cream lace nightdress”39; she is a ghostly visage reminiscent of the Victorian schoolgirls in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) an early Australian gothic text metaphorically invoking Ayres Rock, an Indigenous sacred space; where, gothic terror is reflected on the outback and connotes the fear of colonial children wandering into the primordial wilderness and disappearing forever. This imagery of the hang tree bears similarities to Donna Tartt’s hanging of Robin Cleeves from the bows of a Black Tupelo in The Little Friend—a searing 2002 novel of Southern gothic atmosphere.40 But, Silvey makes the outback “the stuff of nightmares”, through aridity and infestation, hovering insects, “worms burrowing into” “soft flesh”.41 “[T]his is a nightmare” becomes a constant refrain that extends the metaphor to create “a horrible sense of foreboding”.42 As with Hayder, dead bodies are “haunting and surreal” like “wax doll[s]”.43 The character Jasper Jones is a half-Aboriginal figure defined through clichés of Indigenous spiritualism, and the nightmarish events that happen around him. He is described in stark colonial Australian terms; where, Aboriginality and the Aborigine has historically been absorbed into the outback, rendered criminal, deviant, a supernatural figure of white Australian fear.44 Extending the tree metaphor, the landscape is stylistically made alive and monstrous: “the paperbark trees” “leer and lean, their scabby skins hanging from their limbs”.45 They “shroud us”, “look[ing] eerie and ethereal in the silver light”, “in the gloom”,46 using the language and phrasing of the Gothic. Silvey mimics Southern gothic aesthetics. Yet, the Australian style and traditional imagery of “weird melancholy” reconceptualises Southern gothic metaphor through complex white Australian cultural associations of images like eucalypts, marsupials, and Indigenous and colonial themes—drawing heavily on the Australian gothic mode. Sinister in their aspect, analogs of heat, dust, and light are broad metaphors that transcend both the Australian landscape and the American South. Metaphor and setting reveal the interplay between those elements that dominate Silvey’s aesthetic form. Setting is “inevitably stamped with” a regional “set of local interests, views, standards” where “social context” and “institutional setting”, which incorporates genre itself, is affected by the “political position” of the author. Historical context is “contingent” on time and place.47 In Silvey’s novel, “dominant physical metaphor[s]” of the outback leech into and reconstitute acquired Southern gothic ones. Contemporary writers produce regional forms of the genre in the American South, with international and national perspectives, as many Souths and nation spaces in the South. The rhetoric and reality of multiple Souths—where myriad immigrant voices and histories are superimposed onto modern Southern landscape and experience—creates a “local” that can be transnational and global, making

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room for multinational regional narratives and forms. Some examples of texts that exhibit this tendency are Ann Pancake’s 2007 Strange as This Weather Has Been, and works by Tyson, Karen Russell, Amanda Baldeneaux, and Lauren Geroff. They incorporate national or immigrant experience and perspective—through memory, tradition, and voice—into representations of Self and Other that inform Southern gothic elements. On the far end of the spectrum, Karen Russell’s 2013 short story “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” transforms the supernatural vampire into an ecumenical creature—through international atmospheres that mix Southern place and themes, and the humanisation of monsters. Vampires banter about global travel and blood substitutes from coffee to coke that are elixirs with “magical quenching properties”: “We have lived everywhere” from Tunis, to “Bogotá, Dakar, rural Alabama”, “in the blue boot of Italy”.48 The discussion occurs while they reside in a Southern lemon grove, where “fangs in apples, fangs in rubber balls”, “only these lemons” give them “any relief”.49 Russell’s story is an example of the translocation of Southern gothic tropes; through blood she plays with cultural transparency and hints at the diversity of the vampire tradition—for example, putting the European vampire in a bone-bleached Western Australian environment with images reminiscent of the antipodean sanguivores in Jason Nahrung’s novels. Blood lemons situated in the South become metaphors for vampirism and myth as the “strange fruit” conventionally associated with religion, gender, class, and sexuality in the South. Here, the metaphor is stylistically almost unrecognisable from earlier representations, notably Lee Smith’s Strange Fruit, except for the discursive system of images that are built around the lemon grove, which sustain its relationship to Southern gothic tropes. As more quintessentially regional Southern Gothic, take the example of Tyson’s 2018 novel The Past Is Never. The title is a play on Faulkner’s prose from Requiem for a Nun (1951), which is cited in Tyson’s epigraph: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.50 Through her text, the phrase is a reconceptualisation of the past and the genre. It denotes a vanishing point scattered across time, and it brings with it historical memory and “undeadness” as a Southern gothic metaphor. Tyson’s novel is a redistribution of Southern Gothic in a contemporary America impacted by global perspectives, and a reallocation of Other, as insider and outsider, where “undeadness” is deeply associated with the stylistic reinvention of the genre.51 Faulkner’s quote has become a standard discursive trope of regional and national criticism of the Southern Gothic seen in scholarship from Anderson, Hagood, and Turner; Street and Crow; to Ellis. Kornegay notes in an interview with Tyson that she draws on a “strong tradition of southern writers” like Faulkner, Welty, Tartt, Ellen Gilchrist, Beth Henley, and Tennessee Williams.52 The novel is marketed by Skyhorse Publishing in the tradition of Dorothy Allison and Flannery O’Connor: “an atmospheric, haunting story of myths, legends, and … good and evil”.53 But, it includes national perspectives and multiple Souths typical of New Southern literature. Like Poppet, the novel begins with monstrosity: in capitalisation, as forte, “THE CREATURE WATCHED AND”, dropping into sotto voce, “waited”. This

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is juxtaposed to mellifluous metaphors of the four elements. It gives the scene an ethereal aspect—both sublime and horrible. The narrator is floating “beneath the hot sun”, drifting “in the land of alligators and crocodiles, where men walk on water … where the dead rise up to live again” as monsters.54 It is a palpable motif in modern transnational narratives about the global Other, part of transnational discourse on monstrosity implicated by scholars like Jeffrey Weinstock et al.55 Tyson makes metafictive allusions to Southern gothic tales, where backwoods locals “wouldn’t believe a crazy story about some monster in the woods”.56 This reworking of the genre incorporates contemporary fantasy and sci-fi as near social realism. Tyson self-reflexively contrasts science and fantasy, extending this to American conspiracy theory and religion: “You’ll believe in science … in the Devil and monsters and fairy tales … in flying saucers and government conspiracies”.57 From this popular discourse as social realist commentary cloaked in elements of speculative fiction, “[t]here were tales of a Southern Bigfoot” the “Swamp Ape. Every community had its legends”.58 Thus, Tyson ties legend to Southern gothic myth. She makes allusions to contemporary American life, where men search for truth and reason when the world makes no sense, when bombs blow up buildings, when tyrants are elected, when friends hang themselves.59

She links this Southern gothic vision of populist rhetoric to “the curse of the quarry and the secrets of the swamps”.60 The memory of Southern gothic myth is enveloped by the metaphor of Southern history and decay as the dissolution of concrete systems and hierarchies. The novel ends in metaphor, with the water as a conduit to Southern backwoods otherworldliness: “on the edge of the world, where alligators and crocodiles live”61 addressing the reader “You”, as a contemporary global representation of American national Other and Self: “born from cotton slaves and plantation owners”, “healers and murderers”, “liars and truth-tellers”, “criminals and lawmakers”, and “from monsters and saints”.62 She returns, cyclically, to the original image of creatures lurking, voyeuristically watching from a liminal space beneath, above, and beyond: “they aren’t beasts or ghosts or aliens come to read your dreams”,63 but nevertheless, they are inverted into the nightmares of American popular culture. In the American South, Tyson and Russell skew Southern metaphors with national or international allusions. Yet Tyson’s novel retains immutable echoes of the South and its gothic metaphors. Consider how modern Southern gothic style is affected by horror genre conventions—seen in fantasy-horror writers like Robert McCammon, Joe Lansdale, or Cherie Priest. Elizabeth Massie is described as the “reigning champion of the modern Southern Gothic” by the Horror Writers Association.64 Her 1992 novel Sineater is reliant on fanatical sectarian horror and Southern gothic tropes seen in early popular antecedents like Grubb’s 1953 Night of the Hunter. The title of the novel and the figure of the Sineater together function as a complex metaphor for Southern gothic horror. The prologue is a blend of Horror and Southern gothic aesthetics that subvert the Welsh and Appalachian mythology of the sineater—a character absorbing

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the sins of the dead to allow them to ascend to heaven; the story begins with the response to horror by white trash in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia: a boy’s “own fear terrifies him” while other peoples’ “fear excites him”.65 This extends fear to dread, from “the dream” to “the nightmare” as a murder “past the dense thicket”, where the Sineater waits for its victim66—a hollow Southern gothic trope actualised through Horror techniques. Massie presents two “image[s] of the Sineater”; one is a description of monstrosity that is transmitted from person to person like a anthropomorphic virus: “clawed”, “spiked”, and brutally “twisted”.67 The second is a photograph of a terrified character allegorically representing the “natural image” of monstrosity: “a photograph, a statue … stopped in time”, “staring into the woods towards the Sineater”.68 Thus, Massie juxtaposes the unreal with photorealism. Stylistically, the novel draws on corporeal and sensory effects: “surrounded by a dull, soft coating of unrealness”.69 In this space, she reinscribes backwoods religion: “we was assigned of God” in lower-class vernacular.70 The ecclesiastic tenor is punctuated by a fairy tale element; characters “go into the woods alone at night” where “trees” become “the crack[s]” in their “imagination”, swaying, “bowing”, “opening the night”71 into a nightmare. Spectacle is conveyed through funerary images, “a wake” depicting satanic violation: a “crowd swarms” over a corpse “making cuts and hunkering down to suckle the body like a frantic gathering of obscene hairless kittens over a wrinkled decaying mother”,72 as the sexualisation of the macabre, grotesque and autophagic. Spectacle continues through a gasoline-soaked goat, an offering purified by immolation. It “jumps and twitches”; “cries of horror” and torment “cheer the onlookers further”,73 in absurd degenerate caricature. Resonating with the o­ ft-cited protocol of horror evocation described by King in Danse Macabre (1981): terror is “the finest emotion”; “terrorize the reader” then “try to horrify”, failing that, disgust them.74 In Massie’s novel, horror is represented through its aesthetic “movement”, “in disgust”, as a palpable character.75 Sadism and horror-pleasure responses create a sensory dimension to her Southern gothic scenes. For example, coarse sandpaper is applied to a star tattoo on a man’s arm; “[d]ermis is churned up and spit out like tilled soil”, washed away in rivulets of blood.76 Deep layers of flesh beneath the epidermis are a soil metaphor for buried Southern memory used in contemporary regional Southern Gothic.77 The novel ends with the transformation of the protagonist into the Sineater, who is a religious zealot bearing similarities to fanatical false prophets like Enoch Emery in O’Connor’s 1952 Wiseblood. Yet, Massie’s description of backwoods murder and mountain ranges has the atmosphere of James Dickey’s (1970) Deliverance. Thus, Massie envelopes stereotypes of Appalachian mountain folk and Southern white trash in contemporary aesthetics of Horror. Greg Iles’ 2017 Mississippi Blood is a contemporary Realistic Southern Gothic set in the Natchez Trace; it is catalysed by True Crime, like works by Berendt, Walsh, and Kornegay. The novel starts with a grave “in the Natchez City Cemetery”, near a “Turning Angel” chiselled from “white Alabama marble”,78 reminiscent of Styron’s graveyard in his 1951 text, Lie Down in Darkness.79 The novel concludes with the landscape of “Natchez and Vidalia”, where the trace runs

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from Louisiana into the heart of the Mississippi. This is metafictively trussed to “Mississippi blood”,80 the damaged heredity examined by authors like Dorothy Allison or Ron Rash. Within the narrative, Iles actively engages with Realistic Southern gothic discourse through terms like “Southern Gothic” and “white trash”, and themes of apocalypse from natural disasters like Katrina81: indeed, Iles states, “the most dangerous” elements are “a staple of Southern gothic fiction”, connecting this to class, race, miscegenation, and criminality. Iles portrays old racial tensions, where “[n]o exclamation of horror follows”, “but a state of hyperalertness” takes “possession”,82 seemingly a reflection of the polarisation of race relations. The narrator addresses blue-collar paranoia through “white trash” “Flunkies” during the civil rights movement.83 He self-reflexively examines genre tradition, its discourses, and critical issues: for example, concomitant black-white Southern gothic production in the 1930s–1940s between Wright and Hurston and Faulkner and McCullers: “Because my first point of comparison is a mixed-race writer”, James McBride, “and not just” “McCullers” or “Welty”.84 In that vein, Iles repurposes Old Southern gothic images of violation in the bayou, where a black woman is raped by white men at “Lusahatcha Swamp”; they lynch “her husband in front of her”85—but unlike Richard Wright’s 1945 novel Black Boy or Caldwell’s 1931 short story “Savannah River Payday” the imagery is subdued. Through emphasis on this “terrible case”,86 Iles connects these details to crime narrative. He uses surreal imagery reminiscent of Welty in the Natchez to explore realism. “The land seems peopled by luminous ghosts”, but he controverts this spectral presence by stating that “the explanation is simple enough”.87 Indeed, literary realism is heightened by the underlying True Crime plot related to the 1960s “Double Eagle murders”.88 Graphic clinical representations of cadavers, “procedural details” and “FBI agents” who “after examining the corpses” “couldn’t hide” their “excitement” because of the “insignia on those jackets” such as blackletter “neo-Gothic script”.89 The metaphor of Southern blood is tied to crime and the neo-gothic minuscule, as a self-reflexive nod to the construction of the novel. Indeed, the complex use of style and metaphor in Mississippi Blood accentuates True Crime aesthetics within regional Southern gothic conventions, which influence the form metaphors take. Finally, permutations of the genre that oscillate around standard texts—from Charlaine Harris and Anne Rice to Stephanie Meyer—blend popular, fantastic, and supernatural with romantic elements. Martina Boone’s Compulsion is darkly speculative popular fiction, with a transsexual godfather and a haunted, decaying plantation house. Marketed as Southern Gothic by Simon and Schuster, Boone’s novel invokes themes of phantasmal heredity. Supernaturalism and blood are often the catalytic force of spectral layers of these narratives exacted onto “material reality”—usually populated by vampires or wraiths.90 Through these creatures, the soul becomes a metaphor for the spectral nature of the mind. New black Southern gothic exhibits supernatural and posthumanist manifestations of American literary naturalism, folklore, and apocalypse seen in early works by Charles Chestnut, and Hurston, as well as Walker and Morrison: for example

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Cynthia Bond’s 2017 Ruby and Deborah Johnson’s 2014 The Secret of Magic. A Harper Lee Award recipient, Johnson incorporates elements of True Crime into her narrative; while, Bond repurposes magical realism. Both Bond and Johnson evoke richly metaphoric Southern landscapes. Set in Texas, Ruby is a reconstruction of the old black feminine metaphor of sexualised wilderness represented in works from Hurston to Conrad. Upon publication, Hurston’s 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God was criticised by Wright for “facile sensuality” that perpetuated white caricatures of African Americans.91 The metaphor is still problematic because of its association to racial stereotype. In Bond’s text, the central figure Ruby Bell is described as “Strange” and likened to a haint (a ghost in Southern dialect): “Spittle” running over her lips, she slips “into madness”.92 Visual passages of her body swathed in mud, emicting on the soil, as the Grotesque, give way to supernaturalism as she flies “long and graceful” into the piney woods.93 This image is tied to the otherworldliness of the landscape: “Aging night gathered it’s dark skirts and paused in the stillness”,94 itself elusive and foreboding. Bond incorporates hurricane imagery as apocalypse,95 and the bending of trees, as Southern metaphors96 like the iconic lynch tree etched in keloid scars on Sethe’s back in Beloved. In Ruby, the figure, Ephraim, is a metonymy for hoodooism—reflecting the phases of the moon in his purple-rimmed irises, “[t]en crescent moons held captive in his fingernail”.97 He parallels the voodoo priestess, Minerva, in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) with her moon-shaped face, and amethyst hues, used to contest popular voodoo myth.98 In Ruby, madness and black femininity are bound to folklore and supernaturalism, which is slowly subverted through the narrative point-of-view. As part of an African American tradition, novels like Ruby redefine metaphors of sexualised femininity through reappropriations of Southern wilderness. Approximations of popular and romantic Southern gothic stretch from the supernatural excesses of Rice to the graphic extremes of Brite as in the “Exquisite Corpse” (1996). Take the example of Brite’s short story, “The Heart of New Orleans” (2003), which centres around a mortuary. The protagonist, a coroner, describes the morgue in great detail, evolving the tale into a ghost story. The coroner dissects the heart and washes away “blood that had clotted there”, revealing Carolingian-esque script etched into “its inner chambers”.99 The corpse is buried without its heart; he keeps it to read, and transcribe the secret history of New Orleans—as a metaphor for Southern memory. Conversely, Brite’s most recent piece “Last Wish” (2016) is a story of suicide that uses the imagery of the hang tree, “ancient”, “bent, and probably cursed”.100 She stylistically juxtaposes a realistic writing style with intimations of voodoo and supernaturalism through folkloric elements, such as “The horror” elicited by a “raven perched on” a “corpse’s shoulder”.101 Yet, she also utilises claustrophobic Southern images that double as metaphors like the strangler vine and the hang tree. As Sivils notes, trees are “temporal, spatial, and spiritual nexuses”.102 They are metaphors that truss “the character to the land”.103 “Southern literary trees” like the hang tree “are markedly different from” those “found in other regional literatures”.104 Thus, because

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the story is not placed geographically in the South, through overt use of names and locations, Brite binds the narrative to region through metaphor. Conversely, Brite produces the Southern atmosphere in India, an inherently exoticised representation. “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” (1995) starts not in the heart of New Orleans, but in the heart of Calcutta, at midnight.105 It is necrophilic and vampiric, and alludes to somnambulatory zombies through anecdote. The narrator postulates about “what made the dead walk”: “the latest theory” of reanimation involves the mutation of a “genetically engineered microbe” that consumes plastic, “eating” and “replicating” “human cells, causing” reactivation.106 Playing with contagions of zombification and vampirism, the story is stylistically noteworthy. First, Brite is critically positioned within popular (regional) Southern Gothic, and many of her texts conform to this categorisation. However, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” showcases how style is impacted by different geographic considerations, and the careful incorporation of the weird and fantastic as metaphors and intimations. Zombies, as an allegory for the dalit caste, autophagy, and necrophilia, are linked to imagery of historically accurate ritual punishment for adultery in India,107 but instead of rodents eating the women from the inside, in the gutter, it is the dead.108 The point-of-view is staggered, addressing “you”, stating “I”, and describing “they”.109 Thus, Brite comments on the horror of difference: Who is Other? “This is not horror”, but “simply more of Calcutta”.110 This melodic style relies heavily on contrast: beautiful metaphors of “smoky clouds and pale pink light”111 redolent of Capote, Styron, and Faulkner, juxtaposed to “intestines sliding from the shredded ruin of” wombs.112 The final image is framed “among the dead” in “the mud and glory of Calcutta”, where the sky “seemed” “to burn”.113 There, Brite lingers on the metaphor of light and dark, and pain and beauty. In each story, Brite takes nominally supernatural tropes (like non-Haitian zombies) and embeds them in prose written in a realistic tenor often found in memoir, and then redistributes the realism and supernaturalism of the setting and tropes—again harnessing the use of antithesis typical of Southern Gothic. Based on the textual analysis in this chapter, there is a significant distinction between the feel, or atmosphere, of a Southern gothic tale, and those texts that merely mimic genre tropes. While region and realism are palpable influences on the translocation of style, and work in tandem with anisomorphic metaphors, the complex use of Southern gothic metaphor is essential to transferring aesthetics. It is derived from the classic dichotomy of gothic binaries, the graphic Southern juxtaposition of oppositional elements actualised through antithetical terms and metaphors embedded at the level of the sentence, and through contrasting images with setting; as a part of genre convention, it is seen in the imitation of metaphoric style by earlier writers. Metaphors in texts analysed in this chapter include Mississippi blood, voodoo, the hang tree, strange fruit, the madwoman, undeadness, monstrosity, and fanatical religious zealots. But, Southern gothic metaphors appear difficult to translate across regions except as simulacra or hollow figurative images. Take the example of global Southern gothic (International) aesthetics like Craig Silvey or Mo Hayder produce. In these texts, metaphors are tinctured by Australian

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and UK landscapes, cultural normatives, and traditions. Because metaphors are exacted onto narrative landscape, and help constitute themselves in chains of corresponding meanings and implications, and reflect other complex institutional, regional factors, they do not read like authentic Southern Gothic. It is iconoclastic and has its own distinct pace and tenor that stems from three major aspects: (1) regional landscapes and atmospheres; (2) the acquired ontogeny of an object or word fortified by different epistemological systems; and, (3) the Southern gothic metaphors that get mistranslated, but still help create pacing, atmosphere, style, and setting in the narrative. For example, Brite’s “smoky clouds” contrasted to sexual depravity in the Calcutta “gutter” makes this case114; the strong imagistic metaphor used, seemingly drawn from Capote’s n­ ow-canonical lyricism and visualisation, mirrors Southern gothic metaphor from a drastically different region, which gives the feel of a Southern Gothic reflected onto the untouchables (the dalit caste). It is not archetypical of a genre that is bound to the cultural resonance of the American South. Clearly, this style is an extension of the dense metaphoric language of Southern modernism—evolved by authors like Styron, McCarthy, and Hannah—as much as Romantic gothic precursors. Conversely, Massie uses horror cliché, which limits the effect of Southern gothic tropes and themes. Pacing varies in Sineater as a facet of the sensory affects of horror. In “Last Wish”, the languishing, distilled moment of gothic horror is punctuated by brevity; the short story functions as an intense moment—a captured image much like a visual metaphor that forces the narrative to conform to genre. But, strains of Southern Gothic are altered by how metaphor is applied, because metaphors are complex and rich with association: sociocultural, stylistic, and literary. The case of Ishiguro, Kornegay, or Iles reinforces that “Southern Gothic” simultaneously exists, much like the Gothic, as an aesthetic movement, rhetorical tool, and complex nexus of (sub)genres. While critical discourse around the Southern Gothic often amplifies the generic categorisation of global gothic forms, novels in “Translocations of Style” clearly showcase the diaspora of aesthetics in-line with genre scholarship by critics from John Frow to Franco Moretti, exposing the complexity of how style and content are formed in various contexts, across regions and traditions—against conflicting setting, morphology, and nomenclature, through diverse systems and signs. Strains of Southern Gothic are encapsulated in, and move through, critical definitions, always highlighting aesthetic tension between elements. Narrative structure and form affects these aesthetics and succours an understanding of a global Southern gothic mode and it’s variants. They remain unique subgenres in their own right: for example, the Realistic Southern Gothic of Faulkner, Caldwell, Crews, McCarthy, Berendt, and Kornegay; the Global Southern Gothic of Silvey or Timothy Mo; the Supernatural Romantic Southern Gothic of Rice or Harris; the African Southern Gothic of Hurston, Wright, Morrison, Walker, Johnson, and Bond; the Regional Southern Gothic of Tyson or Pancake; the Rural Southern Gothic of Rash or Steadman; and more. They move from regional Southern and multiple Souths to Southern atmospheres across international boundaries. The distribution of genre elements in the novels examined in this chapter is oscillatory; in criticism it is based primarily on three

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main aesthetic factors: realism, regionalism, and supernaturalism. But, in practise, it is shaped in various cultural contexts by novelists who employ a range of stylistic devices. They reconceptualise Southern gothic tropes and metaphors in strange and marvellous combinations that continue to evolve the strains of Southern Gothic.

Notes





1. Jamie Kornegay, “The Evolution of Southern Gothic”, Huffington Post, April 2, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-kornegay/the-evolution-of-southern-gothic_b_6987510.html. 2. Todd Robinson, “Interview: Todd Robinson”, Shotgun Honey, December 19, 2012, https://www.shotgunhoney.com/extras/interviews/interview-todd-robinson/. 3. Anita Singe, “Kazuo Ishiguro: The Book I’ll Never Write—And Other Stories”, UK Telegraph, May 25, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11627759/ Kazuo-Ishiguro-The-book-Ill-never-write-and-other-stories.html. 4. Bridget Marshall, “Defining the Southern Gothic”, in Southern Gothic Literature, ed. Jay Ellis (Salem, MA: Salem P, 2013), 5; Allan Lloyd-Smith, “Key Texts”, in American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 61–62. 5. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, “Southern Gothic Literature”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 1–27, literat u r e . o x f o r d r e . c o m / v i ew / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / a c r e f o r e / 9 7 8 0 1 9 0 2 0 1 0 9 8 . 0 0 1 . 0 0 0 1 / acrefore-9780190201098-e-304?print=pdf. 6. Meredith Miller, “Southern Gothic”, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 632–636. 7. Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak, eds., American Gothic Culture (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 2016). 8. Gerald Johnson, “The Horrible South”, The Virginia Quarterly Review 11, no. 2 (April 1935): 352, 357. 9. Christopher Lloyd, “What Remains? Sally Mann and the South’s Gothic Memories”, in Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 85. 10. Henry Seidel Canby, “The School of Cruelty”, Saturday Review of Literature, March 21, 1931: 673–674. 11. Ellen Glasgow, “Heroes and Monsters”, Saturday Review of Literature, May 4, 1935: 4. 12. Cleanth Brooks, “What Deep South Literature Needs”, The Saturday Review, September 23, 1942: 29. 13. Louise Bogan, “The Gothic South”, Nation 153 (December 6, 1941): 572. 14. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Morrison & Gibb, 1960), 25. 15. Miller, “Southern Gothic”, 632–636. 16. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge”, PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1377. 17. Lloyd-Smith, “Key Texts”, 61–62. 18. Peggy Dunn Bailey, “Talismans of Shadows and Mantles of Light: Contemporary Forms of the Southern Female Gothic”, in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, eds. Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 446. 19. Bjerre, “Southern Gothic Literature”, 1–27.

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N. S. Borwein 20. Malcolm Cowley, “Poe in Mississippi”, New Republic, November 4, 1936: 22. 21. Naomi Simone Borwein, “The Critical Construction of Realistic Southern Gothic in the American literary Canon” (PhD diss., University of Newcastle, 2018), 22. 22. Menachem B. Dagut, “Can Metaphor Be Translated?”, Babel XII 22, no. 1 (1976): 32. 23. G. Tuathail, “Foreign Policy and the Hyperreal”, in Writing Worlds, eds. Barnes and Duncan (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157. 24. Mo Hayder, Poppet (London, UK: Bantam Press, 2013), 7. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Ibid., 272. 29. Ibid., 271. 30. Ibid., 286. 31. Ibid., 272. 32. Ibid., 265, 271. 33. Ibid., 265. 34. Ibid., 177. 35. Varma, “Appendix III”, 1966. 36. Hayder, Poppet, 260. 37. Ibid., 260. 38. Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 6, 7, 16. 39. Ibid., 9–10. 40. Donna Tartt, The Little Friend (New York: Random House, 2011), 14–15. 41. Silvey, Jasper Jones, 303. 42. Ibid., 252. 43. Ibid., 12–13. 44. Ibid., 154. 45. Ibid., 251. 46. Ibid., 5. 47. Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, eds., “Introduction”, in Writing Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3. 48. Karen Russell, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”, in Vampires in the Lemon Grove: And Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), 7. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. Tiffany Quay Tyson, The Past Is Never (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), n.p.; William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage International, 2011), 73. 51. Eric G. Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner, eds., Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2015), 1–2. 52. Jamie Kornegay, “The Evolution of Southern Gothic”, n.p. 53. Tyson, The Past Is Never, n.p. 54. Ibid., n.p. 55. Donna McCormack, “Monster Talk”, in Somatechnics 8, no. 2 (2018): 247–248. 56. Tyson, The Past Is Never, 14. 57. Ibid., 274. 58. Ibid., 243. 59. Ibid., 274. 60. Ibid., 274. 61. Ibid., 274. 62. Ibid., 274. 63. Ibid., 275. 64. Garrett Peck, “Praise”, in Desper Hollow, by Elizabeth Massie (Lexington, KY: Apex, 2013), n.p.; Stokercon 2018, http://stokercon2018.org. 65. Elizabeth Massie, Sineater (London, UK: Pan Books, 1992), 9.

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66. Ibid., 386. 67. Ibid., 291. 68. Ibid., 291. 69. Ibid., 385. 70. Ibid., 22. 71. Ibid., 119. 72. Ibid., 284. 73. Ibid., 289. 74. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (Mumbai: Everest House, 1992), 37. 75. Massie, Sineater, 132. 76. Ibid., 201. 77. Lloyd, “What Remains?”, 91. 78. Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 2. 79. William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1951), 27. 80. Iles, Mississippi Blood, 680. 81. Ibid., 153. 82. Ibid., 189. 83. Ibid., 70. 84. Ibid., 97. 85. Ibid., 45. 86. Ibid., 45. 87. Ibid., 14. 88. Ibid., 9. 89. Ibid., 22. 90. Bailey, “Talismans of Shadows and Mantles of Light”, 446. 91. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears”, New Masses, October 5, 1937: 23–25. 92. Cynthia Bond, Ruby (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 2014), 4. 93. Bond, Ruby, 5. 94. Ibid., 5. 95. Ibid., 7. 96. Matthew Sivils, “Reading Trees in Southern Literature”, in Southern Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2006): 62. 97. Bond, Ruby, 7. 98. John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story (New York: Random House, 1994), 242. 99. Poppy Z. Brite, “Heart of New Orleans”, in The Devil You Know (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2003), 150. 100. Poppy Z. Brite, “Last Wish”, in Last Wish and The Gulf (New Orleans and Los Angeles: Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2016), Kindle Edition, Loc. 28–32. 101. Brite, “Last Wish”, Loc. 54–57. 102. Sivils, “Reading Trees in Southern Literature”, 88. 103. Ibid., 88. 104. Ibid., 88. 105. Poppy Z. Brite, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves”, in His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood (New York: Penguin, 1995), 30. 106. Brite, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves”, 39. 107. Sukla Das, “Punishment”, in Crime and Punishment in Ancient India (Delhi: Abhinav Publishing, 1990), 65–66. 108. Brite, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves”, 33. 109. Ibid., 33. 110. Ibid., 33. 111. Ibid., 33. 112. Ibid., 45. 113. Ibid., 45. 114. Ibid., 33, 45.

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Bibliography Anderson, Eric G., Taylor Hagood, and Daniel C. Turner, eds. 2015. Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Bailey, Peggy Dunn. 2010. “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic”. Mississippi Quarterly 63, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring): 269–290. ———. 2011. “Coming Home to Scrabble Creek: Saving Grace Serpent Handling, and the Realistic Southern Gothic”. Appalachian Journal 38, no. 4 (Summer): 424–439. ———. 2016. “Talismans of Shadows and Mantles of Light: Contemporary Forms of the Southern Female Gothic”. In The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, edited by Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, 445–460. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnes, Trevor, and James Duncan, eds. 1992. “Introduction”. In Writing Worlds, 1–17. New York: Routledge. Berendt, John. 1994. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story. New York: Random House. Bjerre, Thomas Ærvold. 2017. “Southern Gothic Literature”. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford UP. Bogan, Louise. 1941. “The Gothic South”. In Nation 153 (December 6): 572. Bond, Cynthia. 2014. Ruby. London: Hodder & Stroughton. Borwein, Naomi Simone. 2018. “The Critical Construction of Realistic Southern Gothic in the American Literary Canon”. PhD diss., University of Newcastle, Australia. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge. Brite, Poppy Z. 1995. “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves”. In His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood, 161– 182. New York: Penguin. ———. 2003. “The Heart of New Orleans”. In The Devil You Know, 147–162. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press. ———. 2016. “Last Wish”. In Last Wish and the Gulf, Loc. 25–52. New Orleans and Los Angeles: Amazon Digital Services LLC. Kindle. Brooks, Cleanth. 1942. “What Deep South Literature Needs”. The Saturday Review, September 23: 8–9, 29–30. Canby, Henry Seidel. 1931. “The School of Cruelty”. Saturday Review of Literature 55 (March 21): 673–674. Cowley, Malcolm. 1936. “Poe in Mississippi”. New Republic, November 4: 22. Dagut, M. B. 1976. “Can Metaphor Be Translated?” Babel XII 22, no. 1: 21–33. Das, Sukla. 1990. “Punishment”. In Crime and Punishment in Ancient India, 55–82. Delhi: Abhinav Publishing. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2007. “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge”. PMLA 122, no. 5 (October): 1377–1388. Donaldson, Susan V. 2015. “Making Darkness Visible: An Afterword and an Appreciation”. In Undead Souths, edited by Anderson, Hagood, and Turner, 261–265. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Ellis, Jay, ed. 2013. Southern Gothic Literature. Salem, MA: Salem P. Eschner, Kat. 2017. “Why We Love Southern Gothic”. Smithsonian, May 11. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-people-love-southern-gothic-180963145/. Faulkner, William. 2011. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage International. Frow, John. 2015. Genre. New York: Routledge. Glasgow, Ellen. 1935. “Heroes and Monsters”. Saturday Review of Literature, May 4: 4–5. Haslam, Jason, and Joel Faflak, eds. 2016. American Gothic Culture. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP. Hayder, Mo. 2013. Poppet. London, UK: Bantam Press.

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Hughes, William. 2006. “Gothic Criticism: A Survey, 1764–2004”. In Teaching the Gothic, edited by Anna Powell and Andrew Smith, 136–152. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1931. “Hoodoo in America”. The Journal of American Folklore 44, no. 174 (October–December): 317–417. Iles, Greg. 2017. Mississippi Blood. London: HarperCollins. Johnson, Gerald. 1935. “The Horrible South”. Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (April): 201–217. King, Stephen. 1997. Danse Macabre. Mumbai: Everest House. Kornegay, Jamie. 2015a. “The Evolution of Southern Gothic”. Huffington Post, April 2. www. huffingtonpost.com/jamie-kornegay/the-evolution-of-southern-gothic_b_6987510.html. ———. 2015b. Soil: A Novel. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kreyling, Michael. 2016. “Uncanny Plantations: The Repeating Gothic”. In The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, edited by Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, 231–243. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, A. Robert. 1998. “Southern Gothic”. In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 217–220. New York: New York UP. Lloyd, Christopher. 2015. “What Remains? Sally Mann and the South’s Gothic Memories”. In Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South, 85–116. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. 2004. “Key Texts”. In American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction, 37–64. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2006. “American Gothic.” In Teaching the Gothic, edited by Anna Powell and Allan Lloyd-Smith, 136–152. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Malin, Irving. 1962. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Marshall, Bridget M. 2013. “Defining the Southern Gothic”. In Southern Gothic Literature, edited by Jay Ellis, 2–18. Salem, MA: Salem P. Massie, Elizabeth. 1992. Sineater. London, UK: Pan Books. McCormack, Donna. 2018. “Monster Talk”. Somatechnics 8, no. 2: 248–268. Miller, Meredith. 2013. “Southern Gothic”. In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 632–636. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Peck, Garrett. 2013. “Praise”. In Desper Hollow, by Elizabeth Massie, n.p. Lexington, KY: Apex. Robinson, Todd. 2012. “Interview: Todd Robinson”. In Shotgun Honey, December 19. https:// www.shotgunhoney.com/extras/interviews/interview-todd-robinson/. Russell, Karen. 2013. “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”. In Vampires in the Lemon Grove: And Other Stories, 3–22. London: Chatto & Windus. Sacks, Sam. 2018. “Revitalizing the Southern Gothic Style”. The Wall Street Journal, July 19. https://www.wsj.com/articles/revitalizing-the-southern-gothic-style-1532050423. Silvey, Craig. 2009. Jasper Jones. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Simpson, Lewis P. 1985. “Introduction”. In 3 by 3: Masterworks of the Southern Gothic, by Doris Betts, Mark Steadman, and Shirley Ann Grau, vii–xiv. Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers. Singe, Anita. 2015. “Kazuo Ishiguro: The Book I’ll Never Write—And Other Stories”. UK Telegraph, May 25. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11627759/KazuoIshiguro-The-book-Ill-never-write-and-other-stories.html. Sivils, Matthew. 2006. “Reading Trees in Southern Literature”. Southern Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Fall): 88–102. Stokercon. 2018. Homepage. http://stokercon2018.org. Accessed March 1, 2018. Stone, Edward. 1960. “Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic”. The Georgia Review 14, no. 4 (Winter): 433–443. Street, Susan Castillo, and Charles L. Crow, eds. 2016. The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Styron, William. 1951. Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill.

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Tartt, Donna. 2011. The Little Friend. New York: Random House. Tuathail, G. 1992. “Foreign Policy and the Hyperreal”. In Writing Worlds, edited by Barnes and Duncan, 155–175. New York: Routledge. Tyson, Tiffany Quay. 2018. The Past Is Never. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. ———. 2018. Interview by Jamie Kornegay. Authors Round the South. https://www.authorsroundthesouth.com/author-2-author/9335-jamie-kornegay-talks-to-tiffany-quay-tyson. Varma, Devendra P. 1966. The Gothic Flame. 2nd edition. New York: Russell & Russell. Walsh, M. O. 2015. “Why Southern Gothic Rules the World”. The Guardian, July 4. www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/04/southern-gothic-fiction-harper-lee-go-set-watchmen. Welty, Eudora. 1942. The Robber Bridegroom. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company. Wright, Richard. 1937. “Between Laughter and Tears”. New Masses, October 5: 23–25.

Indigenous Alterations Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson

The study of the Indigenous Gothic is largely in its infancy. To date, I have found no major study attempting to outline the history of Indigenous authors writing in the gothic mode, though there are quite a few studies that approach singular texts. The state of Indigenous gothic study can be illustrated by the title of Michelle Burnham’s contribution to Cambridge’s A Companion to American Gothic; her chapter begs the question, “Is There An Indigenous Gothic?”.1 While the dearth of scholarship on these texts is partially a product of low Indigenous representation among authors more generally, the gothic mode has historically been a problematic one for Indigenous peoples. This chapter will briefly outline the historical and literary background which modern Indigenous authors are forced to contend with before moving on to an exploration of the definitional challenges and problematic nature of the “Indigenous gothic” label. Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer (1998),2 I will argue, represents a particularly effective example of an Indigenous text that utilises the gothic mode to confront “the discourse of Indian spectrality”, an early American mode of writing that perceived Indigenous peoples to be dead or dying. Walters’ novel is also illustrative of the epistemological and spiritual differences present in many Indigenous cultures; these differences trouble the use of Western theoretical approaches to a gothic genre that originally began as the dark side of the Enlightenment. There are two gothic tropes in Ghost Singer that this analysis will largely focus upon. When scrutinised closely, it becomes apparent that the novel’s frightening effects operate on two distinct levels: her Indigenous characters experience the ghost differently than do her white, or “Anglo” characters. Another trope of gothic storytelling is the “return to the psychical normal”; the ending of a gothic tale generally explains away, or eliminates, the threat of the Gothic. Indigenous gothic texts often align with the subjectivities of Indigenous characters forced to interact with mainstream, or Euro-American, culture; different moral and epistemological

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outlooks make re-establishing that “psychical norm” challenging, if not impossible. While this “return” is understood as a structural hallmark of American and British gothic storytelling, the oppressive force of Euro-American fracturedness often obstructs psychical normalcy; this is particularly apparent in Ghost Singer, a novel that effectively illustrates how the Anglo mainstream has institutionalised the transgression of Navajo taboos. This survey will rely on a diverse collection of sources, drawing from gothic literary theory, scholarship on Ghost Singer and other commonly identified Indigenous gothic texts, and interviews with Walters herself. In deference to the sensitive subject matter of Walters’ novel, I try, whenever possible, to include the works of Indigenous scholars such as Gerald Vizenor, Sandy Grande, and others. Without these contexts, we run the risk of appropriating Indigenous writing in a way that is not unlike the Anglo scholars working in Walters’ Smithsonian. Before analysing Ghost Singer, I feel it is important to understand that through her “ghosting” of Tall Man (the titular character), Anna Lee Walters is in conversation within what scholar Reneé Bergland has referred to as the “discourse of Indian spectrality”.3 The “discourse of Indian spectrality”, which saw its heyday in the nineteenth century, is a form of literary annihilation whereby America’s Indigenous inhabitants were already presumed dead and gone. It has been argued that authors who engaged with the discourse of Indian spectrality helped “enact a literary Indian Removal that reinforced and at times even helped to construct the political Indian Removal”; in this figuration, removal is achieved through insistent focus on the Indigenous dead, as well as lack of acknowledgement that many Indigenous peoples survived colonisation.4 The tenor of these literary texts varies; some, like poet Philip Frenau, author of the 1787 poem “The Indian Burying Ground”, were drawn to the romantic notion of a noble people vanished from the earth. Use of the “Vanishing Indian” motif is common in the works of other Romantic writers. Some authors, like James Fenimore Cooper, viewed their writing on Indigenous peoples as a kind of preservation effort. Yet, in “preserving” the Native American, these white authors presupposed the inevitability of their departure from the landscape. In his short story “Otter-bag, The Oneida Chief” (1829), John Neal characterises the Indigenous people as “the live wreck of a prodigious empire that has departed from before our face within the memory of man; the last of a people who have no history, and who but the other day were in possession of a quarter of the whole earth”.5 By emptying the American landscape of its Native population, authors help do the work of justifying westward expansion. Neal’s passage, which evokes both drama and romance, creates an Indigenous population that is ripe for imaginative use in the literature of the new nation, while at the same time justifying the displacement of that population in service of that nation. Indigenous people and their “eroding” society, then, are likened to the dilapidated ruins and castles of Europe; the Vanishing Indian becomes a gothic literary device.6 The destructiveness of the “discourse of Indian spectrality” as a rhetorical strategy that depopulated the Americas and undermined moral objections to Manifest Destiny cannot be understated. However, it is important to understand

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that the earliest rhetorical uses of “Indian spectrality” were both Indigenous and subversive; the canonical white-authored texts came later.7 In her study on the discourse of Indian spectrality, Bergland traces how one Indigenous ghost, the mother of the sachem of Passonagessit, was rhetorically resurrected in the oratory and writings of white and Indigenous authors alike for over two hundred years. In 1620, the year of the landing at Plymouth, many Indigenous burial sites were disturbed by the English colonists; these graves included that of the sachem of Passonagessit’s mother. In the speech that resulted, the sachem stated that his mother’s ghost had appeared to him in his sleep; she told him that he must resist the thieves who were trespassing on their land. “I shall not rest quiet”, the sachem reported her as saying. This speech is seen as the first example of the rhetorical use of “Indian spectrality”. She would not be the last Indigenous ghost to populate the white imagination. Nor would she be allowed to rest: the sachem’s mother later makes an appearance in William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (1677), an historical volume. In 1813 her ghost is written into Washington Irving’s “Traits of Indian Character”, as well as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819). In 1829, William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot author, activist, and Methodist minister, invokes the sachem’s mother in his biographical piece, A Son of the Forest (1829).8 Apess’ usage of the sachem’s spectral mother represents a cyclical return; once again the Indigenous ghost is used as a rhetorical tool of resistance. It is important to realise that there is room for Indigenous authors to engage with the discourse of Indian spectrality in ways that are productive and resistant to white American hegemony. Indigenous authors who choose to engage with the discourse of spectrality are not simply subverting it; historically speaking, they are wresting it from a white authorship that has co-opted it for colonial purposes. Interestingly, Apess’ A Son of the Forest was an inherent act of resistance against the Indian spectrality practiced by white American authors; by writing about his own life, as a member of the Pequot, Apess “made himself present within a discourse that figured Indians as absent, voiceless, and silenced”.9 I predict that increased scholarly interest in the recovery of Indigenous literacies will yield more examples of early Indigenous engagement with the discourse of Indian spectrality, and with “gothic” tropes more broadly. Recent scholarly efforts have sought to expand the definition of literacy in the early Americas. By complicating the division between oral and written culture, the range of Indigenous “texts” is enlarged. These texts, despite having no resemblance to written language as understood by Western convention, still communicate Indigenous connections to family, community, and the spirit world across the centuries.10 Without looking to an expanded range of literacies for early evidence of Indigenous interaction with the gothic mode, there are still examples that precede the “Third Wave” initiated by Gerald Vizenor’s The Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Robert Dale Parker, through his compilation of Changing is Not Vanishing, an anthology of Native American poems written before 1930, intended to correct the perception that Indigenous writing began in the 1960s. He notes that although Native American literature is beginning to be taught in schools and

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analysed by critics, very little of this writing precedes N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was a part of an outpouring of Indigenous writing in the late 1960s.11 Parker’s work, leading to the expansion of Indigenous literary history, has yielded some undeniably gothic gems. The life details of Wa Wa Chaw (1888– 1972), likely of the Payomkowishum, are largely unknown to us; the poet believed that she had been sold to the woman who adopted her, and tragically was never able to rediscover family relations or lost tribal affiliations.12 Two of her poems, “Haunted Brains” and “The Indian’s Spirit”, both published in 1922, are imbued with a deep sense of hauntedness. “The Indian’s Spirit” is a poem in direct dialogue with the “discourse of Indian spectrality”: Down in the deep my spirit will creep Out of the window into the air No one knows where. Deathless and lifeless, sleepless of fears Indians will keep their spirits nearCreeping about in the open air No one knows where Down in the deep my spirit will creep, Fearless of sorrow and fearless of time, Indian will seek a spirit to help his creed. Out of the window into the air No one knows where. Indian spirits shall share Deathless and lifeless, sleepless of fear The noise of my spirit shall speak very clear. Out of the windows into the air No one knows where When far into the darkened night a change in the air The Indian spirit shall creep out of no where.13

Wa Wa Chaw’s poem imagines agent possibilities for the Indigenous spectre. The spirit, despite its dubious corporeality, is able to speak and articulate; even more importantly, the poem anticipates an unexpected return from “no one knows where”. While the poems of Wa Wa Chaw, largely written in the 1920s, can be read for their explicitly gothic content fairly easily, other earlier works of Indigenous writing require a more cautious approach. Scholars are increasingly looking for signs of self-expression by reading “against the grain” in documents as diverse as church documents and execution and court statements: seemingly coerced writings may yield signs of resistance while the works of seemingly agent authors may be constrained by historical circumstances. The tension between autonomy and constraint in Indigenous writing is perhaps most evident in the works produced by students in the missionary boarding schools of New England.14 If the Gothic naturally asserts itself in writing that seeks to describe “gothic” circumstances, a “gothic” reading of boarding school documents would not be so far fetched.

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Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer is generally viewed as part of a wave of Indigenous novels that employ the gothic mode. The first, and perhaps most widely known, of these works is Gerald Vizenor’s The Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, a 1978 novel that inverts frontier gothic portrayals of Indigenous peoples as demonic Others.15 Vizenor’s novel, and the novels of many Indigenous writers working in the gothic mode, take part the process of “writing back”, a strategy that reverses the point of view from which a canonical text (or in Vizenor’s case, an entire genre) is written; “writing back” is a way to respond that is both creative and disruptive to hegemonic discourses.16 In Bearheart, the inherently violent Wild West is seen through the Indigenous perspective as Vizenor’s protagonists face off against a diverse cast of white villains, including cowboys and fascists.17 Commonly identified works of Indigenous gothic fiction include Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005),18 Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996)19 Owl Goingback’s Crota (1999),20 and Martin Cruz’s Nightwing (1977),21 among others.22 In recent years, scholars have expanded their focus beyond these “canonical” Indigenous gothic texts from the North American continent. Looking to television, one scholar investigated the possibility that New Zealand’s Mataku (2002–2005), a supernatural anthology series casually described as a “Maori X-Files”, was a transcultural production of “Maori gothic”.23 The idea that Indigenous gothic writing must be understood as a “transcultural” form will be explored more closely as I detail some of the problematising aspects of the Indigenous gothic label. Theorising an Indigenous gothic body of literature inevitably presents a series of challenges. Before analysing Anna Lee Walters’ novel as a gothic text, I feel it is important to acknowledge the problematising elements of the genre. As you will notice throughout this paper, there will be reference to Indigenous gothic “texts” written by authors with widely varying tribal affiliations. While this is not ideal, the number of “gothic” texts written by Indigenous authors is not always substantial enough to break texts into categories based on tribal affiliation, and admittedly, the term “Indigenous gothic” a little too broad. Mainstream ignorance of tribal distinction often leads to a “flattening” of widely diverse cultures through the use of a single moniker. Scholars have also noted the American tendency to “equalize indians as symbolic essences”.24 Some studies have found it more useful to classify Indigenous gothic texts by grouping works by authors with similar tribal affiliations; in this way more discrete categories such as “First Nations gothic” are created.25 This, I argue, is important: understanding tribal worldviews, and taboos, is vital in understanding the transgressions of a text. In “reading” Walters’ Ghost Singer, I argue that approaching Indigenous gothic literature by looking at taboos may be an effective way to understand the tribally specific elements of the text. This lens mitigates certain criticisms related to genre and postcolonial readings, because it actually opens up the possibility of a gothic literature based solely on Indigenous worldviews. Cherokee scholar Thomas King has objected to the labelling of Indigenous literature as postcolonial because this configuration requires the arrival of Europeans as a catalyst for Indigenous literary creation; similar arguments have applied to the labelling of Indigenous literature as “gothic”.26

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This “dependence” on European intrusion as a catalyst is undeniably problematic, as are other aspects of the gothic genre. One of the obvious incompatibilities between Indigenous worldviews and the gothic is the treatment of the natural world. Traditionally, “landscapes in the Gothic…dwel{l} on the exposed, inhuman and pitiless nature of mountains, crags, and wastelands”.27 Of course the “wastelands” described throughout the American gothic canon were the traditional homes of Indigenous peoples. For them, the “wilderness was not hostile, but home”.28 Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart engages in a reversal of the frontier gothic value system that views the woods as a source of evil and death. Scholars have seen an engagement with the pastoral tradition in Vizenor’s text, especially in relation to the novel’s protagonist, Proude Cedarfair, whose ancestors lived among the cedars and considered them sacred.29 Specific relationships with the natural world vary between Indigenous cultures, but some are particularly demonstrative of the incompatibility between Indigenous worldviews and the negative representations of the natural world which proliferate in traditional gothic narratives. The Maori (Maoritanga) have a cultural understanding of spiritual phenomena such as possession, haunting, and a variety of creatures (including tree-like humanoids, or maero/mohoao), as a part of the land, or whenua. Even more imposing entities, like the maero or the heavily clawed ponaturi, share a profound connection to the Maori because whenua is connected to turangawaewae. Turangawaewae, or “a place to stand” is a concept that empowers the Maori in their relationship to the environment, constructing that identity as tangata whenua, or “people of the land”.30 Thus, the creatures, hauntings, and possessions that exist in Maori culture are not cast aside as aberrant forces worthy of gothicisation; they are seen as a part of the chain that ties the Maori to the land, defining their identity in a profound way. For this reason, scholars have stated that any discussion of the “Maori gothic” needs to be approached through a transcultural lens.31 Despite the issues detailed above, allegorical readings of Windigo cannibalism demonstrate how the Indigenous Gothic may work on both transcultural and intra-cultural levels. As popularly understood, the Windigo is simultaneously a folkloric creature and an illness. In folklore, the spirit associated with the bitter north woods, it is known for its cannibalism and appears as an impossibly tall giant with a heart of ice. The illness causes normal humans to “go Windigo” and engage in cannibalism themselves. The Algonquian word from which “windigo” derives is “wetikowatisewin”, a word denoting “diabolical wickedness or cannibalism”. Grace Dillon explains that the Algonquian taboos against self-interest relates to both Windigo cannibalism and imperialism; both represent “the consumption of one people by another”.32 Put another way, the Windigo expresses Algonquian cultural taboos against hyper-individualism and “destructive consumption”.33 The figure of the Windigo has been used in writings that have been classified as First Nations Gothic, and this reading of the creature reveals gothic possibilities that operate on the level of intra-cultural taboo while also expressing, in a transculturally “gothic” way, the horrors heaped upon Indigenous populations by imperialism. Understanding tribally specific worldviews and taboos are an important start point for Indigenous-centred

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readings of gothic texts: fully interpreting Windigo, and his folkloric function in maintaining communal harmony, requires cultural understanding. Gothic literature has historically been a genre that investigates boundaries and pushes extremes.34 Indigenous gothic texts will explore boundaries and tabooed subjects relevant to its own tribally specific context; thus, while they may veer away from more traditional gothic themes in American and British texts. Epistemological differences may also confuse traditional gothic understandings of the “supernatural”, but wherever there are culturally prescribed boundaries, there is space for the Gothic. As explored earlier in this paper, the act of “writing back” is a productive way of reversing foundational gothic texts and subgenres that have been harmful to the cause of Indigenous peoples. Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer illustrates the successful reversal of the discourse of Indian spectrality. However, before moving on to Walters’ text, I think it worth noting that while some scholars insist that the Gothic is a transcultural form,35 others insist that there is a vibrant process of cross-fertilisation between American and Indigenous gothic traditions. Indigenous authors draw on a tradition of tribal storytelling that has always included “horror” stories, as well as the effects, sensations, and storytelling strategies that are not dissimilar to those used in canonical gothic literature.36 Commenting on the challenges of distinguishing between conventions of Euro-American gothic tradition and Indigenous storytelling traditions, Michelle Burnham has described ‘these two cultural and historical sources braid{ed} together in a hybrid production of textual haunting and supernatural horror”.37 Anna Lee Walters’ novel operates against a backdrop of tragic wisdom, a kind of reason that is both straightforward and profound, issuing from the inauspicious experiences of colonialism and Euro-American hegemony; Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor has defined tragic wisdom as “a pronative voice of liberation and survivance, a condition in native stories and literature that denies victimization”.38 The tragic wisdom of Walters’ Indigenous characters, representing a variety of tribal backgrounds, is juxtaposed against the profound lack of understanding demonstrated by her white, or Anglo characters; their inability to take advantage of the knowledge offered them is highly ironic, considering that the major Anglo characters of Walters’ novel are anthropologists working at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian museum. “Opposing epistemic views” have been identified as the root cause of the profound divide in understanding between Walters’ Anglo and Indigenous characters.39 Furthermore, the sense of cultural superiority demonstrated by Donald Evans and the ironically named Geoffrey “Newsome” disallows their incorporation of knowledge generously offered by Indigenous characters: that knowledge, and those warnings, provide a context through which the “supernatural” events of the novel can be understood and dealt with. As I shall discuss later in this chapter, using white frameworks to understand the titular Ghost Singer imbues the character with a level of horror absent from Indigenous understanding. The inability to understand and respect Indigenous contexts in Ghost Singer is a metaphor for the work performed by both real and fictional anthropologists. The publication of Ghost Singer coincides with increased awareness surrounding scholarly abuses of Indigenous remains and artefacts. The novel

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anticipates the 1990 passage of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Rebecca Tillett writes extensively on the state of anthropology contemporary to Anna Lee Walters’ novel.40 However, a quick run of figures gives one of the sense of how grim the situation was: in 1986, two years before the publication of Ghost Singer, the Smithsonian alone held 185,000 Indigenous remains in its collection.41 Some bodies were whole, while others, like the string of ears in Walters’ novel, were held in fragments. The goal of NAGPRA is twofold. Firstly, legislation establishes equal respect and consideration of tribal perspectives in anthropological contexts, especially where ancestral remains are concerned; secondly, NAGPRA legislation aims to prohibit all traffic in Indigenous remains and to “repatriate” all Indigenous remains and artefacts, whether held in private or museological collections. Significantly, the term use of the term “repatriate” echoes tribal suggestion that these remains, often collected from the sites of historical battles and massacres, are effectively being held as “prisoners of war”.42 The 1990s saw a number of challenges regarding NAGPRA, however, the decade also witnessed more positive examples of Indigenous/anthropologist relations. In 1990, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council authorised anthropological study of twenty-three graves in a cemetery, now referred to as Long Pond, which were disturbed during the construction of a private home. Importantly, the anthropologists agreed to rebury the bodies of the tribal members.43 Writing about the contents of a grave belonging to an 11-year-old girl, McBride acknowledged the controversial nature of the medicine bundle and let the reading audience know that he had chosen not to include a photo of the bundle for this reason.44 This instance of Indigenous and scholarly collaboration stands in stark contrast with the treatment of Indigenous dead at the Smithsonian Institute in Anna Lee Walter’s Ghost Singer. Importantly, Walters’ assessment of the situation at the Smithsonian is made more plausible by the fact that the author herself worked at the National Anthropological Museum at the Smithsonian.45 In her study on the discourse of Indian spectrality, Reneé Bergland wrote that when early Native American orators and writers “figured themselves as ghostly, they gained rhetorical power at the cost of relinquishing everything else”.46 Of course, the primarily Indigenous and very-much-alive cast of characters in Anna Lee Walters’ novel mitigates the sacrificial aspects of this rhetorical trade-off. It has also been asserted that the use of Indigenous ghosts represents an acknowledgement that important battles for sovereignty have already been lost.47 As discussed earlier in this chapter, Ghost Singer is a comment on the state of scholarly disrespect that led to the active political struggle of Native peoples to wrest control of their ancestral remains and artefacts. As I will demonstrate, Anna Lee Walters’ novel is engaging with the discourse of Indian spectrality, but spectrality is at work very differently in Ghost Singer; this is in large part due to different understandings of time. Walters herself has commented on her interactions with older people while she was working at Navajo Community College (now Diné College); according to her, the Diné elders did not see time fragmented or broken down, but saw it as “a path ahead of them as well as behind”.48 Other scholars writing about

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Ghost Singer have understood the compartmentalisation of time, and its linear orientation as one way that Indigenous peoples are denied a future and banished from the present; this view of time also supports the separation of the individual from surrounding communities and the environment.49 This is interesting, as Indigenous beliefs about time and ethics predate the Derridean concept of the “new scholar”; in Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida writes about the coming of a scholar who is able to engage equally in intellectual commerce with the living, the dead, and those not yet born, or the “arrivants of history”.50 This radical cognitive reorientation begets an ethical reorientation in which the dead and those who have yet to be born have equal rights that need to be taken into account. This orientation, while “radical” to the Western mind, is fairly typical of Indigenous belief systems, and is employed throughout Ghost Singer. In writing her novel, Walters was inspired by her culture, and in particular by elders she’s met; her approach to temporal understanding has a significant impact on the type of “ghost” story the novel becomes, and she acknowledges writing the novel with an Indigenous audience in mind.51 Throughout Ghost Singer Walters includes chapter subheadings describing place and time, as well as “cast of characters” in the first few pages that outlines important characters and relationships. The inclusion of this information serves a dual purpose: Indigenous readers would expect tribal and family distinctions to be made clear, and the “cast of characters” aids Anglo readers with less knowledge about tribal context. Walters has herself commented on the difficulties of writing with both audiences in mind.52 There is another aspect of Walters’ “cast of characters” that may be surprising to the Western sensibility: LeClair, who is dead long before the events of Ghost Singer, is included with the simple entry “LECLAIR WILLIAMS deceased; friend of Wilbur and Anna Snake”. The presence of a known and loved “ghost”, or spirit person (as the Snakes would refer to him), offsets possible misconstruance of the “ghost” or deceased person as necessarily frightening. The titular Ghost Singer is another type of entity, and is not representative of the majority of spirit people in Walters’ novel. Leclair is so “present” to Anna Snake that when she is discussing plans to travel to D.C. with her husband, she tells Wilbur that he should have asked LeClair if he wanted to go too.53 Speaking to Russell Tallman, Wilbur also mentions that he has seen LeClair, once out in his fields and another time is a dream.54 The ever-presence of LeClair, friend to Wilbur and Anna Snake, establishes important precepts of the novel: seeing spirits is not necessarily a cause for alarm. The presence of LeClair also humanises “ghosts”, which is an interesting reversal of the discourse of Indian spectrality, which has the potential to “reinforce the intractable otherness of Indians”, making them “so other that they are otherworldly”.55 About midway through the novel, it is revealed that Anna has seen spirit people: her people taught her not to fear the dead, nor to feel shame for seeing them. Smiling, Anna muses that “seeing beyond the world” was normal; by her people’s way of thinking, if she couldn’t see dead people it would be considered a kind of handicap of the senses. Every time she encountered spirit people “Anna had learned a fraction more about living and dying”.56 Walters’ novel often privileges the knowledge gained through experience over book learning.

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This is not surprising, as Indigenous scholars have identified “high-context situations” and experiential learning as a hallmark of Indigenous education: “true understanding is based on experiencing nature and life directly”.57 The elders of Walters’ text, through their long life experience, have encountered entities and know how to approach them with respect. This respect is also inherent in the difference in terminology employed throughout the novel. After anthropologist Donald Evans takes the office of a colleague who recently committed suicide, George Daylight, a tribal official of Creek and Cherokee heritage, tries to warn him about the supernatural happenings in the attic of the Smithsonian.58 Throughout the exchange, George uses the term “spirit people” to describe the spectral inhabitants, while Donald mocks his belief in “ghosts”.59 The conversation becomes more heated as Donald refuses to listen to the vital knowledge George is offering. Sighing, George tells Donald about the Tall Man, “this man is what you call a ‘ghost’”.60 George Daylight confers humanity upon Tall Man through his insistence on referring to him as a man, and as a spirit person. This is yet another illustration of one of the fundamental differences between American and British gothic texts and those produced by Indigenous authors: “ghosts”, or spirit people, are not necessarily gothic presences. Spectrality is presenting itself differently in Walter’s novel, and interestingly, the “horrors” of the text are not universal: Walters’ Anglo characters are experiencing different horrors than her Indigenous characters are. It is important to note that the sense of dread produced by Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer operates on two distinct levels. The gothic experiences of Willie Begay and other Indigenous characters are far more nuanced than the sheer terror characterising the experiences of Anglo characters such a Jean Wurley, Geoffrey Newsome, and Donald Evans. These parallel, yet divergent, gothic moments in the text are important: they demonstrate the potential for Indigenous gothic writing to simultaneously engage with and subvert traditional gothic tropes, especially those involving “Indian others”. It is telling that while the Gothic often intersects obliquely with cultural anxieties in Euro-American texts, Anna Lee Walters makes the subtext of her novel painfully clear. As expressed by Allan Lloyd-Smith, “the relationship of the Gothic to cultural and historical realities is like that of dream, clearly somehow ‘about’ certain fantasies and anxieties, less coherent in its expression of them”.61 Past rhetorical uses of the Indian ghost in white writing has been highly destructive to Indigenous causes; in light of this history, Indigenous authors such as Walters are obliged to offer a level of clarity to readers, lest readers misunderstand her use of the “Indian” spectre. In addition, the “dream-like” quality of Euro-American gothic works may itself be a function of “the return of the repressed”, of a deep guilt bubbling to the surface, present but unacknowledged. In any case, the experiences of Walters’ white characters are much more recognisable in terms of genre conventions. As has been established earlier in this paper, “ghosts” in Indigenous gothic texts are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror.62 However, terror plainly characterises the experiences of Ghost Singer’s Jean Wurley, Geoffrey Newsome, and Donald Evans. All three of these characters worked with the Smithsonian’s

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“controversial” collection of Indigenous remains and artefacts in the Smithsonian attic: by the end of the novel two have died under unusual circumstances, and the third, Donald, remains convinced that “this thing wants {him} dead”.63 Again, I draw attention to Donald’s reference to the Tall Man as a “thing”, as something apart from humanity. This “othering” of Tall Man makes him far more frightening than he is to the Indigenous characters in the text. In addition, his assumption that Tall Man is some sort of ravening monster is in keeping with the “gothicized” ghost which will be familiar to readers of the genre. The horror experienced by the Anglo anthropologists in Ghost Singer is related to what the disturbance of what Quechua scholar Sandy Grande refers to as “the deification of reason and measure”.64 The supposed superiority of reason and measure, importantly, is at the heart of anthropology’s dominance over Indigenous study. In Ghost Singer, Anglo anthropologists consistently belittle Indigenous belief systems that they see as inferior and uneducated. Scholars have noted the long history of colonial condescension towards Indigenous epistemologies, but it is important to note that while part of this condescension stems from perceived primitivism, Indigenous beliefs have also been perceived as threatening.65 Anthropology’s authority is largely derived from its control over “dominant ways of seeing;” there is an inherent power imbalance in anthropological study and museological collection through its construction of the “observer” and the “observed”.66 As anthropologists, Walters’ Anglo characters enjoy an elevated hierarchical position over the Indigenous artefacts and people whose remains they have control over; they also enjoy the privilege that comes with the dominance of one’s own worldview. Throughout the text, it becomes apparent that part of the fear felt by Walters’ anthropologists is tied up in the threat they feel to their hegemonic and epistemological dominance. This sense of threat expresses itself in a variety of ways. Geoffrey Newsome is extremely territorial about his attic workspace, and is incensed by the idea that Jean Wurly, who is already dead, might have “violated” it.67 Donald Evans demonstrates an extreme unwillingness to work with Indigenous characters on an “even” footing. Speaking to Wilbur Snake, whom he asks for help, Evans states upfront that he doesn’t want to divulge information about the collection, nor does he want to debate the existence of “ghosts”.68 In other words, he can’t discuss topics that shake his understanding of “reality”, nor will he relinquish his sense of control over the collection of Indigenous remains. The elder Snakes agree to visit the Smithsonian attic to assess, and possibly heal the situation, yet they still have to badger Donald before he will admit what is kept in the boxes that Tall Man has been rummaging through.69 Donald still needs to exert his control of the situation through his tight hold on the museological collection. In many Euro-American gothic texts anxiety is caused by the sneaking suspicion that colonial activity is likely to “bring home an unwanted legacy”.70 Donald’s predecessor, Geoffrey Newsome, experienced this “coming home” in a highly literalised way: a cloth sack filled with the bones of an Indigenous child follows him back to his apartment, appearing on his terrace.71 Loss of control over the colonial legacy represented by the collection at the Smithsonian haunts the Anglo anthropologists of Walters’ novel.

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The sense of “losing control” is particularly potent in scenes where Anglo anthropologists have to confront the reality of a living Indigenous population. Donald and Geoffrey still operate under the assumptions of the nineteenth-century discourse of Indian spectrality, which views Indigenous people as relics of the past with no stake in a shared future.72 Controlling the histories, bodies, and artefacts of a people who has already vanished is much easier than trying to dominate a living, breathing people. Geoffrey’s extreme dislike of George Daylight, even upon first meeting,73 is illustrative of this colonial insecurity: Geoffrey is particularly “disgusted” by George’s culturally unambiguous fashion choices.74 For Geoffrey, George isn’t just challenging his dominance as the curator of the Smithsonian’s controversial collection, he is challenging his worldview that sees Indigenous people as extinct. Donald feels similarly, seeing George’s kind as “overextended”, and living “on borrowed time”.75 It has been pointed out that a creeping understanding of the collection’s humanity is what “haunts” the curators at the Smithsonian; as they start to smell living, breathing people in the attic the dominance of their “way of seeing” is disrupted.76 They are made to question their own beliefs about the veil between life and death, while also being forced to understand that they are complicit in the morally reprehensible anthropological institution. The experiences of the anthropologists in Ghost Singer are largely predicated on what gothic scholars have referred to as “the terror of what might happen”, rather than any explicitly horrific event.77 Throughout the Walters’ novel, it is implied that the Anglo anthropologists are just scaring themselves.78 Talking about Donald’s situation, Junior Snake, son of Wilbur and Anna, tells Russell Tallman that “all this is Evans’s show”, and that “he’s the one who was opened up to it;” continuing on, he explains to Russell that everything is in the mind, that “our minds are the boundaries of our physical selves”.79 Junior’s plastic understanding of mind and body contrasts sharply with the hard boundaries that Donald and other Anglo characters share: their cognitive inflexibility disallows them from sensing the humanity of the collection. This forces the collection to express its humanity, through scent, movement, and finally through the embodiment of Tall Man, the titular Ghost Singer: the collection forces understanding in the face of extreme denial. George, trying to explain the situation in Washington to Russell Tallman, says that “their senses were too damn plugged up!”80 The Ghost Singer, the child whose bones are kept in a sack, and a myriad of other Indigenous hostages of the Smithsonian really have to work hard to “unplug” Donald Evans’ senses: he doesn’t accept the reality of the spirits until Tall Man physically lifts and throws him across the room.81 George Daylight, speaking of the senses, privileges the importance of experiential learning over the book learning of Western education; he echoes Indigenous scholars who identify that this important feature of Indigenous education as culturally distinct.82 The Indigenous characters of Walters’ Ghost Singer come from varied tribal backgrounds, though the text appears to be written with a largely Navajo, or Diné, perspective in mind. “Diné”, the name Navajo peoples use for self-identification, translates as “The People”83; this is how Willie Begay and his grandfather Jonnie Navajo refer to themselves throughout the novel.84 Anna Lee Walters is herself

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affiliated with the Pawnee and Otoe-Missouria, though she taught at Navajo Community College for many years, and dedicates Ghost Singer to its students, past and present. Her own children are fluent in Navajo, her having married a Diné man.85 In reading the “horrors” of Walters’ Ghost Singer from an Indigenous perspective, privileging the Diné worldview makes sense, especially in light of the fact that while other tribal affiliations are made clear, specific tribal practices are rarely referenced. In addition, the two connected story arcs that weave in and out of Ghost Singer’s main narrative revolve around Jonnie Navajo’s family history and the wider history of Diné enslavement by the Spanish. The novel opens in 1830 as Red Lady, great-grandmother to Jonnie Navajo, is kidnapped along with one of her twin daughters86; the other storyline revolves around Anita, the granddaughter of the lost twin, who discovers her Indigenous heritage as her mother lies on her deathbed.87 Despite tribal differences there is a sense of pan-tribal cooperation throughout the novel; Diné epistemology and spiritual understanding does not seem to conflict with those of the Snakes, described as “medicine people from Oklahoma”.88 After Willie Begay begins displaying disturbing behaviour, his friends demonstrate this sense of intertribal cooperation; George is affiliated with the Creek and Cherokee, while Russell’s tribal affiliations are widespread and include Kiowa, Caddo, Pawnee, Comanche, and Cheyenne heritage.89 After they tie Willie up so he can’t hurt himself, George proposes that they help him; Russell is initially unsure, worrying that they don’t “know anything about Navajos!”90 George calms Russell’s anxieties, telling him “it can’t be too different from what your people and my people know;” he also makes it clear that Willie, isolated in Washington DC, has no one else to aid him.91 In evoking Willie’s isolation in D.C., George is making it clear that tribal distinctions, while important, are easily bridged compared with the gap of understanding that exists between Indigenous and Anglo worldviews. As I will explain, Willie’s immersion in the Anglo world is the root cause of his illness; the fracturedness of Anglo thought puts Willie in a position to betray some of his tribe’s most basic cultural taboos. As Rebecca Tillett has noted, Ghost Singer indicates that the “monstrous” is a product of the Euro-American worldviews; these views sustain the abuses of academic institutions against the Indigenous peoples through notions of ownership that are equally applicable to museological “collecting” and slavery.92 One day, while accessing the Navajo collection held by the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, a scalp is brought to Willie and he touches it before he realises what it is.93 Thus, he inadvertently violates strict Diné taboos prohibiting physical contact with the dead.94 Scholars have noted that when Indigenous peoples are “infected” by European contact, ghosts carry “the weight of {that} originary infection”.95 This explains the Ghost Singer’s insistence on showing himself to Willie. Willie’s transgression has put him out of harmony with Diné values. The accidental disrespect he caused through his handling of the scalp, I argue, is an affront to k’é, the Diné system of kinship.96 After the major events of the novel have ended, Willie speculates on the identity of the scalp’s owner. He tells his grandfather Jonnie that during his research in Washington he

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discovered that Narbona, one of the Diné’s most respected leaders, was scalped; Narbona’s scalp later ended up in Washington, along with thousands of other taken for bounty. Remembering his own family history, Willie recalls that the Spanish unsuccessfully tried to scalp White Sheep (father of Red Lady, Jonnie’s ­great-great-grandmother); had they been successful, Willie might have held White Sheep’s scalp in his hands.97 Walters herself never specifies what artefact or body part the Ghost Singer was searching for, because the remains at the Smithsonian are “so mixed up themselves”.98 The profoundly confused nature of the fragmented bodies in Washington means that Indigenous people working in archives run into the possibility of violating not just the taboo, but respectful kinship relations. Thus, immersion in the Euro-American world lays Diné people open to moving out of step with hózhǫ́, the desirable state of being.99 Epistemologically speaking, the Indigenous process of “coming to know” is expressed through metaphors that shared, and internalised.100 Sa’ąh Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ǫ́n (SNBH) is the shared metaphor of the Diné, and it outlines how the Diné should strive to live a life of harmony, beauty, and balance.101 It is the desired state of being.102 After Willie’s transgression, he falls out of step with hózhǫ́. While Jonnie prays for his grandson, he tells him that effectiveness of the prayer is lessened through its invocation in a foreign land. To truly “go forward with {his} life”, he must return home and undergo a ceremony.103 The ritual suggested by Jonnie Navajo is likely that of nayee’ijí, a protectionway ceremony that which aims to restore hózhǫ́.104 There are recorded examples of medicine people using this ceremony to restore hózhǫ́ after accidental transgressions: in the 1950s a Diné boy inadvertently trespassed on the sacred grounds of the Mesa Verde on a school field trip because his school didn’t recognise Diné ancestral teachings and taboos.105 This real-world anecdote exemplifies the spiritual peril that Diné, and other Indigenous people, face when operating in the wider Euro-American world. It has been argued that Indigenous spirituality does not mesh well with the Gothic, dominated as it is by Eurocentric epistemologies that create natural/supernatural dichotomies; conversely, Indigenous cultures suffuse the natural world with spiritual presence.106 While this is an astute observation, I argue that the “Indigenous gothic” of Anna Lee Walters’ novel does not require separate natural and supernatural spheres to function: Ghost Singer articulates the horrors created by the breed of cognitive separation that allows the barbarity at the Smithsonian. In this way, Walters’ text is aligned with George (Maungwudaus) Henry’s An Account of the Chippewa Indians, written in 1848. Henry recounts his experience as an Ojibway performer and his journey through the United States and Britain. At one point he describes his visit to a medical theatre in Edinburgh; he notes that seventy young men “who are to be medicine men”, were dissecting and skinning thirty bodies in the same way that the Ojibway would have prepared venison.107 Like Walters, Henry recognises the unusual ability of the Euro-American mind to divest the dead body of its humanity. The final pages of Euro-American gothic narratives, whether British or American, tend to reinforce culturally prescriptive morality after allowing the reader to engage with darker forces and alternate realities. This “turn” in the

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text is often referred to as “the return to psychical normalcy”.108 In many novels and short stories, this turn is a conservative one which undermines subversive or tabooed elements of a text. However, in works of the Indigenous Gothic this is problematised; Indigenous characters, whose moral and spiritual understandings are at odds with the Euro-American world that they are forced to negotiate, struggle to “return” to a state of psychical normalcy. American morality has the tendency to be selective and fragmented; this is evidenced by the course handling of Indigenous remains in Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer. The comforts of the return to psychical normalcy are difficult to attain for characters who cannot be sure that their most basic cultural values will be respected. The one-page epilogue of Walters’ novel ends with the death of Jonnie Navajo. Having died in the autumn of 1975, he was buried in a mound in a nearby sandstone valley. Jonnie’s grandchildren Nasbah and Willie, accompanied by Willie’s wife, visit the grave and discover pottery sherds lying about; this discovery casts a pall over the party, and Nasbah speculates on the likelihood that the sherds and bones might be hauled away. The novel ends ominously with Willie wishing he knew “that his grandfather’s grave would be safe there.…”109 The uncertainty is punctuated by Walters’ use of ellipses, making it apparent that anthropological trespass is an issue for all Indigenous peoples, not only those who have been dead many years. Walters’ unresolved ending parallels the unsettled anguish of the Ghost Singer; by the end of the novel we are still unsure what Tall Man is searching for in the Smithsonian. If his loss is as simple as a bone, could Jonnie Navajo suffer the same fate? The ending of the novel leaves readers in uncertainty regarding the paths of the younger Indigenous characters. Russell Tallman decides to leave Washington D.C., telling Donald that he was taught to know when fear was appropriate.110 Russell is often told by other Indigenous people that he is out of touch, that he has lived in Washington too long; initially, he has a hard time wrapping his head around the goings-on at the Smithsonian. By contrast, the education that Junior Snake received watching his father help people deal with mysterious forces has better prepared him. When Russell why it all has to be so complicated, Junior chides him, saying that if he really didn’t understand then it was time to go home, and to “touch the earth and taste it again”.111 Russell’s long contact with the Euro-American world of Washington D.C. has dulled his senses, “plugged them up” a bit. Walters’ Ghost Singer begs the question: is it possible to live a life in isolation of tribal people without undergoing ill effects? This is another issue that confounds “the return to psychical normalcy” in Walter’s novel, and in other Indigenous gothic texts. Diné scholars have sought to understand how the oppressive forces of colonisation have disrupted the Diné pursuit of the harmonious path and the practice of k’é, or “compassionate interdependent kinship relations”.112 The irreversibility of colonial contact forces Indigenous peoples into a constant state of liminality and negotiation. Populations affected by colonial encroachment can never wholly return to a state of “cultural purity”, though that impossible desire often may linger.113 While “purity” may be illusory, the relationship between traditional Diné those who choose less orthodox paths is a figuration that aids the preservation of culture while also avoiding identity essentialism. A

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traditional Diné is one who nurtures kinship ties, speaks the language, relies on subsistence farming, participates in tribal governance, and engages with ceremonial obligations; in addition, traditional Diné people are the storehouses of cultural and tribal history. Traditional Diné people are very much respected, and while many different authentic Diné identities are accepted, it is the ancestral knowledge of these traditional individuals that is the tribe’s foundation. Importantly, it is the responsibility of all tribal peoples to protect the rights of individuals to practice ancestral ways of living, regardless of their own life choices.114 The study of the Indigenous Gothic requires an acknowledgement of the challenges presented by hybridity and an understanding that spiritual and epistemological differences produce texts that do not conform with traditionally identified gothic structures. However, the gothic thrives in liminal spaces; the gothic text often dramatises dissention within the self through conflicts between external forces.115 These conflicts are clearly present in Ghost Singer as the Indigenous youth of Walters’ novel struggle to remaining cognizant of traditional ways of seeing while navigating modernity. During an interview about Ghost Singer, Anna Lee Walters was questioned about her choice of Bagels and Lox as the preferred food of one of her Indigenous characters. With typical humour, Walters responded, “I lived in Washington for a while and I had lox, and I liked it….[laughing]… you have to remember, we are a changing people!”116 The interviewer’s question, while surprising, is also symbolic of Americans’ imaginative struggle to visualise Indigenous people living in the present day. This same imaginative failure is exposed by Walters’ Ghost Singer.117 Early Indigenous authors often felt constrained by the discourse of Indian spectrality; William Apess felt a strong need to banish Indigenous spectres because he understood their use as a means of imaginative oppression.118 Conversely, Anna Lee Walters’ use of the Ghost Singer.

Notes

1. Michelle Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” A Companion to American Gothic (Hoboken, NJ, Wiley, 2013), 223. 2. Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer: A Novel (Albuquerque, NM, UNM Press, 1994). 3. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 2000), 3. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, history, and nation (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997), 58. 6. Ibid., 55. 7. Bergland, 20. 8. Ibid., 1–2. 9. Ibid., 122. 10. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 3–4. 11. Robert Dale Parker, Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 3.

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12. Wa Wa Chaw, “Selected Poems,” in Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, ed. Robert Dale Parker (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 310. 13. Ibid., 314. 14. Bross & Wyss, Early Native Literacies, 9. 15. Gerald Vizenor, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (St. Paul, Minn., Truck Press, 1978). 16. Alison Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), 12. 17. Alan R. Velie, “Gerald Vizenor’s Indian Gothic.” Melus 17, no. 1 (1991), 76. 18. Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (New York, Penguin, 2005). 19. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York, Warner Books, 1998). 20. Owl Goingback, Crota (New York, Signet, 1998). 21. Martin Cruz Smith, Nightwing (New York, Ballantine Books, 1990). 22. Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” 228. 23. Ian Conrich, “Maori Tales of the Unexpected: The New Zealand Television Series Mataku as Indigenous Gothic,” Globalgothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015), 36. 24. Grace Dillon, “Foreward,” in Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, wrt. Shawn C. Smallman (Victoria, BC, Heritage House Publishing Co., 2015), 16. 25. Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” 229. 26. Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of ­Self-Invention (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014), 214. 27. Alan Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York, Continuum Publishing, 2004), 7. 28. Velie, “Gerald Vizenor’s Indian Gothic,” 76. 29. Ibid., 84. 30. Conrich, “Maori Tales of the Unexpected,” 40–41. 31. Ibid., 41. 32. Dillon, “Foreward,” in Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, 19. 33. Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” 231. 34. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 5. 35. Conrich, “Maori Tales of the Unexpected,” 36. 36. Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” 230. 37. Ibid. 38. Gerald Vizenor, Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York, Longman, 1995), 6. 39. Erika Aigner-Alvarez, “Artifact and Written History: Freeing the Terminal Indian in Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer.” Studies in American Indian Literatures (1996), 45. 40. Rebecca Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’: The Concerns of the Living Dead in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17, no. 3 (2005), 85–114. 41. Ibid., 91. 42. Ibid., 91–92. 43. Kevin A. McBride, “Bundles, Bears and Bibles: Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Native Texts,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 133–134. 44. Ibid., 132–133. 45. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 90. 46. Bergland, The National Uncanny, 3. 47. Ibid., 3–4. 48. Rhoda Carroll and Anna Lee Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past: An Interview with Anna Lee Walters.” American Indian Quarterly (1992), 70.

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A. E. Schoch/Davidson 49. Aigner-Alvarez, “Artifact and Written History,” 46. 50. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, Routledge, 1994), 176. 51. Norma Wilson, “Anna Lee Walters (1946–),” in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story, Vol. 69, ed. Blanche H. Gelfant and Lawrence Graver (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000), 549. 52. Carroll and Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past,” 67. 53. Walters, Ghost Singer, 120. 54. Ibid., 73–74. 55. Bergland, The National Uncanny, 5. 56. Walters, Ghost Singer, 143. 57. Gregory Cajete, “Foreword,” in Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, ed. Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 2014), x. 58. Walters, Ghost Singer, 122. 59. Ibid., 123. 60. Ibid., 128. 61. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 9. 62. Sugars, Canadian Gothic, 214. 63. Walters, Ghost Singer, 239. 64. Ibid., 225. 65. Sugars, Canadian Gothic, 215. 66. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 87. 67. Walters, Ghost Singer, 42. 68. Ibid., 197. 69. Ibid., 214. 70. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 7. 71. Walters, Ghost Singer, 48. 72. Bergland, The National Uncanny, 15. 73. Walters, Ghost Singer, 45. 74. Ibid., 46. 75. Ibid., 123. 76. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 100. 77. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 8. 78. Walters, Ghost Singer, 148, 217. 79. Ibid., 203. 80. Ibid., 21. 81. Ibid., 130–131. 82. Gregory Cajete, “Foreword,” in Diné Perspectives, x. 83. Farina King, Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 2018), 189. 84. Walters, Ghost Singer, 25. 85. Carroll and Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past,” 66. 86. Walters, Ghost Singer, xi–xviii. 87. Ibid., 37–38. 88. Ibid., “Cast of Characters.” 89. Ibid., 52–53. 90. Ibid., 57. 91. Ibid., 57. 92. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 85–86. 93. Walters, Ghost Singer, 50. 94. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 95, 102. 95. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 11. 96. King, Earth Memory Compass, 190

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97. Walters, Ghost Singer, 206–207 98. Carroll and Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past,” 64. 99. King, Earth Memory Compass, 190. 100. Cajete, “Foreward,” in Diné Perspectives, ix. 101. Ibid., ix. 102. King, Earth Memory Compass, 190. 103. Walters, Ghost Singer, 181. 104. King, Earth Memory Compass, 191. 105. Ibid., 69. 106. Ibid., 215. 107. Sugars, Canadian Gothic, 215–216. 108. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 5. 109. Walters, Ghost Singer, 248. 110. Ibid., 240. 111. Ibid., 203. 112. Larry W. Emerson, “Diné Culture, Decolonization and the Politics of Hózhǫ́,” in Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, ed. Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 2014), 56. 113. Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, 11. 114. Grande, Red Pedagogy, 240. 115. Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” 6. 116. Carroll and Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past,” 71. 117. Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’,” 86. 118. Bergland, The National Uncanny, 16.

Bibliography Erika Aigner-Alvarez, “Artifact and Written History: Freeing the Terminal Indian in Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer.” Studies in American Indian Literatures (1996), 45–59. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York, Warner Books, 1998). Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 2000). Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (New York, Penguin, 2005). Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 1–13. Michelle Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” A Companion to American Gothic (2013), 223–237. Gregory Cajete, “Foreword,” in Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, ed. Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 2014). Rhoda Carroll and Anna Lee Walters, “The Values and Vision of a Collective Past: An Interview with Anna Lee Walters.” American Indian Quarterly (1992), 63–73. Ian Conrich, “Maori Tales of the Unexpected: The New Zealand Television Series Mataku as Indigenous Gothic.” Globalgothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015), 3–49. Martin Cruz Smith, Nightwing (New York, Ballantine Books, 1990). Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, Routledge, 1994). Grace Dillon, “Foreward,” in Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History, wrt. Shawn C. Smallman (Victoria, BC, Heritage House Publishing Co., 2015). Larry W. Emerson, “Diné Culture, Decolonization and the Politics of Hózhǫ́,” in Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, ed. Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press, 2014).

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Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997). Owl Goingback, Crota (New York, Signet, 1998). Farina King, Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 2018). Alan Lloyd-Smith, “What Is American Gothic?” American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York, Continuum Publishing, 2004), 3–10. Kevin A. McBride, “Bundles, Bears and Bibles: Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Native Texts,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 132–141. Robert Dale Parker, Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1–44. Alison Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014). Rebecca Tillett, “‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’: The Concerns of the Living Dead in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17, no. 3 (2005), 85–114. Alan R. Velie, “Gerald Vizenor’s Indian Gothic.” Melus 17, no. 1 (1991), 75–85. Gerald Vizenor, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (St. Paul, MN, Truck Press, 1978). Gerald Vizenor, Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York, Longman, 1995), 1–15. Wa Wa Chaw, “Selected Poems,” in Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, ed. Robert Dale Parker (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 310–320. Anna Lee Walters, Ghost Singer: A Novel (Albuquerque, NM, UNM Press, 1994). Norma Wilson, “Anna Lee Walters (1946–),” in The Columbia Companion to the ­Twentieth-Century American Short Story, Vol. 69, ed. Blanche H. Gelfant and Lawrence Graver (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000), 549–554.

Hillbilly Horror Tosha R. Taylor

Modern horror boasts a conspicuous fascination with rurality. Yet critics have pointed out that rurality has not received the same attention as race, gender, or sexuality in wider studies of the genre.1 While recent scholarship has worked to remedy this relative lack of concern for the ways rural gothic and horror media engage with cultural discourses of rurality, depictions of rural spaces and people still have not yet garnered mass critical fervour.2 Furthermore, contemporary invocations of rural people in mainstream political discussions, particularly in the United States following the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, invite new scrutiny of the relationship between horror and rurality, and particularly of the construction of the “hillbilly” figure found within it. “Hillbilly horror” arises from the rural gothic and is indeed often studied under that label. It also owes some of its origin to the Southern gothic literary tradition (exemplarily expressed in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor). At times, it is nearly identical to horror set in regions that technically are not inhabited by hillbillies, such as the western and midwestern plains. Yet while hillbilly horror, rural horror, Southern gothic, and what McCollum labels Heartland horror are not precisely identical, they overlap significantly and indeed inform each other.3 In all, fear of the landscape as well as of local inhabitants creates a rich literal site for horrific acts to be carried out and for the viewer, a means of ideologically engaging with a dreaded Other. This chapter focuses on treatments of American rurality due to its prominence in the genre’s history. For instance, while the Australian rural horror film Night of Fear (1972) precedes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), American entries have been the main critical concern in the study of the subgenre, and it is the latter that is credited as having cemented the commercial value of hillbilly horror itself.4 Tropes of hillbilly horror pervade mainstream cinema, even rural gothic films that do not belong to the subgenre proper. Perhaps the most famous rural gothic film is

T. R. Taylor (*)  Manhattanville College, Harrison, NY, USA

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one that is not technically a horror film at all. Deliverance (1972) adeptly embodies the urban–rural tension that exists as a discursive backdrop for larger fears of rurality, which are themselves invoked in rural horror films, and does so through deployment of the monstrous hillbilly. While some find the term “hillbilly horror” reductive for its failure to include more innovative approaches in rural horror, the figure of the hillbilly nonetheless looms over much of the study of the rural gothic.5 Indeed, with the ­hillbilly emerging as an ideal cultural villain and scapegoat in nineteenth-century America, modern and contemporary rural horror undoubtedly developed, in part, under this trope.6 My concern in this chapter is less in providing a comprehensive overview of the subgenre or in repeating its history and tropes, which have been welland thoughtfully-documented by previous scholars, and more in approaching rural horror, and specifically “hillbilly horror”, through a lens of cultural awareness of not only “hillbilly” tropes and geographies but also the situating of such rural inhabitants within larger frameworks. Of particular interest to this chapter is the figure of the “hillbilly” not only as a significant manifestation in fictional horror but also as it exists in contemporary social criticism, which may or may not implicitly respond to horror fictions themselves. To that end, while attention will be given to more highly visible works within rural horror such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, films that deploy rural characters from unconventional positions will also be discussed. This chapter, then, regards both the subgenre known as hillbilly horror and the horror of the hillbilly. Although, with some exceptions, they typically focus on interactions between evil rural inhabitants and victimised outsiders, the first source of horror in rural and hillbilly horror films is rurality itself. The place that provides a home to the rural villain becomes an active oppressor of the victim, indeed in many films serving as a prison for them. Isolated roads, sometimes hazardous themselves, create a nearly impenetrable isolation into which people may disappear without a trace. Dilapidated structures look unlikely to house human inhabitants but double as homes and torture chambers. Forests stand as barriers against civilisation and hunting grounds for deranged locals. Open plains and deserts present miles of nihilistic oblivion. The natural world, perhaps at first bucolic, turns treacherous at any moment. In the rural gothic film, no part of the rural is safe. Rural and hillbilly horror still echo the patterns of imperialism and colonialism found in previous gothic literature. The imperial explorer finds both geography and local inhabitants to be dangers to him, and both thus receive a gothic characterisation.7 Indeed, the geographic landscape of the American gothic owes much to the historical guilt of colonialism and slavery, both phenomena in which land carries a particular significance.8 Treatment of place in rural horror is in stark juxtaposition to the frontier narrative.9 Here, rather than celebrating the arrival of a conquering explorer, the narrative presents the explorer figure as an outsider or intruder who will first become imperilled due to their own lack of knowledge of their surroundings. Dangerous locals overpower the outsider, and even if the latter achieves victory in the end, it is only over their immediate attacker, not the landscape itself. In this way, place itself is a locus of haunting. Rather than ghosts, the

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landscape is haunted by what remains of a person or people who have been, in some way, forgotten by larger society.10 Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1964 exploitation film Two Thousand Maniacs!, one of the earliest films to be associated with the term hillbilly horror, creates one of the most conspicuous explorations of American historical guilt figured through rural caricatures. Arriving in Pleasant Valley, Georgia, travellers find themselves in the midst of a society that fetishises the Confederacy. Referring to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression” (a reference to actual Southern Confederacy apologia), the people of Pleasant Valley proudly display symbols of the slave-holding antebellum South as they set upon the travellers, torturing and dismembering them in gleeful celebration. Their acts, the travellers learn, are revenge for Union troops burning their town during the war. To accompany the film, Lewis composed the song “The South’s Gonna Rise Again”, which punctuates its title claim with cries of “yee-haw!”, a common means of emphasising a sense of rurality. When survivors Tom and Terry escape the town and return with the police, they find that the town is completely gone. What they have encountered instead, they soon learn as the officer recounts the legend, is the ghost of the town itself. While the historical trauma explicitly invoked in the film is the razing of civilian towns, the constant presence of Confederate flags, as well as images of white crowds gathered around the torture of captive (albeit white) victims, cannot fail to call to mind the legacy of slavery in Georgia. The film’s millennial update, 2001 Maniacs (2005) largely repeats the narrative of its predecessor and includes Lewis’s song in a revelrous scene of torture led by Mayor Buckman. Southern racism expands beyond bigotry against African Americans when community matriarch Granny Boone refers to one of the tourists as “China doll” and “China girl”. The film updates acknowledgments of historical bigotry by also having characters express homophobia towards gay ­ tourist Ricky. This prejudice is revealed to be hypocritical when young townsman Rufus seduces Ricky. While this scene is revealed to be part of a plan to entrap Ricky, it is clear that the scene is meant to link hypocrisy to bigotry. Ricky’s murder further invokes this reading, as the public spectacles of the first film are again updated here as Ricky is impaled through the anus by a spear. The film’s conclusion underscores the ghostly haunting of the first. As the survivors flee, they are decapitated by a barbed wire that has been strung across the road. Their heads are then collected by a ghost, who promptly disappears. While brutal acts are typically carried out by people in such films, place enables them and indeed, the acts may not be possible without, first, recognition of the place in which they occur. Fear of the rural landscape is integral to American literary history. For early colonists, the rural space was a wilderness, either in the form of the forest or the open plains, with particular recognition of the former as a site of great spiritual and physical danger. Their writing interprets the forest in dichotomous terms, either an untouched reflection of Eden or a space belonging to the devil.11 Early captivity narratives, among the first bestsellers in what would become American literature, conspicuously conflate the wooded landscape with indigenous peoples, who are invoked almost exclusively as backwards villains.12

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In order to foreground place as a source of anxiety and to invert the frontier myth, rural horror requires outsiders as focalisers for the audience and thus intersects with road horror. Narratives in this subgenre centre on the experiences of travellers who are beset upon by locals or those familiar with the alien landscape. Travel, a purported sign of freedom, often delivers protagonists into the opposite. Travellers and tourists are stalked, hunted, and killed, often after being tortured. In addition, road horror inverses the spatial anxiety of the slasher film, in which the familiar space is intruded upon by a malicious force, by presenting familiar figures entering and even intruding upon the unfamiliar space.13 Central to road horror and a frequent protagonist of rural horror is the white, middle-class traveller or tourist.14 While these racial and class identities historically emerge from tensions between groups of people, as discussed later in this chapter, they are first integral to place. In the contemporary context, the white, middle-class traveller replaces the mythological frontier explorer. They are economically equipped to travel and have the leisure time to do so. They possess cultural capital. Yet because protagonists’ lack of knowledge about the space into which they travel is essential to road horror, their identities implicitly contribute to that lack. Encounters with malevolent entities (whether human or monster) and locations are unexpected.15 Even in films in which protagonists, self-aware of the cultural narrative in which they participate, express disdain for the landscape (which is wilder and dirtier than they are accustomed to) or the locals, they do not anticipate the degree to which they will be assaulted. Rather, they assume the capital that privileged them in their home environs will continue to do so here, an illusion that is typically put to rout when violence causes them to realise their geographic isolation. This landscape aids evil locals and creatures, making clear the thematic significance of (un)familiarity with the land. Many rural horror films feature shots revealing that the travellers are being observed, imbuing even the wilderness with a panoptic quality. Foucault’s panopticon is one in which subjects are under constant, omnipresent watch.16 While the panopticon is more readily apparent in urban and even suburban locations, especially with the continuous development of surveillance technology, the rural landscape is no less conducive to surveillance in these films. Trees and brush readily provide cover for rural villains as they stalk their intended victims while simultaneously preventing those victims from being able to orient themselves within the space. Forests are particularly useful for providing malicious agents cover as they observe their prey. Similarly, in The Hills Have Eyes (1977), whose title even suggests surveillance, rocky hills above the open desert fulfil this function just as well. Unlike the surveilling figures of urban and suburban horror, who perhaps more resemble agents of the state and thus more easily correspond to Foucault’s explication, rural villains take on an animal quality as they move through the wild after their prey. Rural geographic features and isolation result in a lack of infrastructure or nearby community that enables many such villains to continue stalking their prey. It is the landscape that drives the four city boys towards the violent mountain men who will rape one of them in Deliverance. Isolated roads may seem to promise

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victims an escape, but often this escape is revealed to be a false promise, as rural isolation keeps the victim from any potential notice by those who might help them while leaving them obvious to anyone in league with their attackers. At the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sally manages to escape captivity and gets into the back of a pickup truck but watches in terror as, wielding his chainsaw, Leatherface gives chase. Injured by his own weapon, Leatherface cannot catch the truck and proceeds to swing the chainsaw. Here he is visually constructed as a dominant figure of the landscape. Sally’s continued shrieking as she observes him reminds the audience that he remains part of this place. In the reminiscent conclusion of House of 1000 Corpses (2003), Denise runs to the secluded road and flags down a car driven by Captain Spaulding, who is revealed to be an accomplice to the evil Firefly family when Otis Firefly sits up in his backseat. Its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects (2005), establishes Spaulding not only as an accomplice but a member of the family. While place is integral to all rural horror films, it has been frequently overlooked in discussions of the subgenre in the context of The Descent (2005). This is a rare film depicting outsider protagonists venturing into Appalachia who are not menaced by locals. Rather, the largely British spelunkers become trapped in an undiscovered cavern system. While the women eventually discover they are being hunted by subterranean humanoid monsters, in the first half of the film, the rural landscape is the primary threat. The women must go far from any signs of human society to enter the caverns and instead of walking freely into an open cave, they must immediately repel downward, reinforcing a sense of entrapment. In one of the film’s tensest scenes, they must drag themselves through a tight, curving tunnel as it begins to collapse. As they are sealed within the earth, they realise they are too deep underground within the isolated Appalachian mountain range to be rescued. The cavern’s geography simultaneously foils them and enables the monstrous creatures to hunt them. Visually, the film remains focused on the internal landscape even as its narrative focus shifts to the women’s attempt to escape the creatures. Eventually, the discovery of old mountaineering equipment reveals to them that, rather than a space waiting to be colonised, the cavern is a tomb for the creatures’ victims. Yet, while the film devotes considerable attention to an internal rural space and indeed takes an innovative approach by locating the rural conflict underground, it does not take an innovative approach to the other major concern of rural horror— rural people. By largely forgoing a road horror plot and showing only a few seconds of the spelunkers’ journey into the Appalachian mountains, the film avoids depictions of any locals. This avoidance allows the film to remain a significant (albeit critically overlooked) entry in recent rural gothic film but prevents it from entering the realm of hillbilly horror, despite being set in the quintessential hillbilly location. Typically, however, fear of the land yields as narratives progress to fear of the hillbilly. What has come to be known as rural horror still requires a human villain.17 In this way, rural horror intersects closely with the slasher.18 The precise construction of that villain may differ according to variations in rural cultural landscapes

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wherever the story is set, with Mick Taylor of Australia’s Wolf Creek (2005) being a prominent example of regional variation. The dominant figure of the rural horror film, however, is the hillbilly. The hillbilly and its equivalent in similar subgenres typically reflects and responds to right-wing politics, especially right-wing populism.19 Ideological, spiritual, racial, and sexual diversity in real rural spaces is typically shirked in such films in favour of a hegemonic monolith: the rural inhabitant is, with very few exceptions, white, poor, uneducated, backwards, and hyper-conservative. Gender roles are rigidly old-fashioned. The rural space stands as a rightwing dystopia, and its people are figured as caricatures of u­ltra-conservatives. (That the fictional hillbillies of rural horror have little overlap with conservative politicians does not seem to matter in such films, just as it does not seem to matter in nonfiction media that also popularly conflate the two.) Particularly in recent years, rural horror and its children seem to issue a warning: if right-wing populism is not checked, this is not only a backwards past but the future. Much gothic and horror criticism has neglected the link between rural caricatures found in such films and the hillbilly’s discursive cousin, “white trash”. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century to describe lower-class whites characterised by uncouth behavior, the term further enabled a construction of whiteness that was simultaneously racist and classist, positioning socioeconomically privileged whites as truly white and “white trash” as an implicit ethnic Other.20 Efforts by white critics to ascribe the term’s origin to antebellum slaves in the South typically overlook the role of the white ruling classes in fostering animosity among poor people of all races and ethnicities.21 As critics and academics from rural and/or working-class and/or poor backgrounds gain slightly more of a foothold in larger discussions of rurality, there is some debate over whether or not the term constitutes a slur, which is worth noting but not within the scope of this chapter to unpack.22 However, despite some academic and critical discouragement of its use, at present, it is still common for the use of the term by non-rural whites to be defended for the purposes of maintaining a sense of a strict but reductive ­rural/non-rural dichotomy.23 The term is a strongly imagistic one that relies on culturally understood markers of lower-class, often rural, whites.24 Such markers include loud, socially unaware, crass behaviour, vulgar speech, failure to achieve hegemonic beauty standards (often accompanied by achievement of a counter-aesthetic), nonstandard dialect features and accents, and a preference for low material culture. Dwellings include the rundown shacks associated with hillbillies but also encompass trailers or, conversely, larger houses as long as they are in disrepair, such as the house depicted in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Beyond its implicit imagery, the term promotes a sense of geographic, moral, and even genetic superiority of non-rural to rural whites and indeed so functioned in the eugenics movement, which included measures to “breed out” poor rural whites in addition to ethnic minorities.25 Furthermore, it represents a liminal abjection due to its racist and classist connotations.26 Emerging from an antebellum racist framework in which people of colour are assumed to be “trash”, the term creates a paradox within that same framework as it seeks to name people not of colour who share the social and economic position expected by a white supremacist society to

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be reserved for those who are not white. In its original use, the term expresses a simultaneous disdain for people of colour who, due to systemic racism, lack social mobility and for whites who, due to varying forms of classism, share that lack to a degree. The existence of “white trash” people historically challenged constructions of whiteness, which cannot be divorced from class, and white supremacist ideology. An overt insult to poor, rural whites, it is also a covert insult to people of colour across the socioeconomic spectrum. Indeed, it is out of such covertly racist notions that disdain for lower-class whites has been propagated by other whites.27 The continued deployment of rural tropes in horror owes something to the discourse of white trash. While white trash is not precisely identical to the hillbilly, their overlaps often result in synonymous usage. Furthermore, by itself, the hillbilly figure also occupies a position of quaintness in non-horror media treatments, such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies, whereas white trash is almost exclusively constructed as a societal pariah who deserves that status. The hillbilly can be a cute, humorous Other, but white trash is an abject one. Thus, white trash conspicuously echoes in the hillbillies of rural horror. Unlike, for instance, their suburban counterparts, hillbilly villains do not appear benevolent at first. Their marked difference, constructed through coded white trash images and speech, identifies them as a danger—not only because of their malicious intentions but also their potential to defile simply through proximity, a fear associated with those deemed white trash throughout the term’s history. Implicitly informed by the cultural baggage of white trash, hillbilly horror boasts a typical set of stock characters who each embody particular discourses. The most prominent hillbilly image is the rural man who is physically strong but morally degenerate. Stereotypical depictions reveal that, first and foremost, hillbilly horror cannot escape the specter of class. As a character trope, the hillbilly may only belong to what is often termed the underclass of America’s socioeconomic spectrum. While some films, such as Two Thousand Maniacs!, do combine imagery of a rural bourgeois—usually through evoking antebellum plantation owners—with a rural underclass, the villains of much subsequent hillbilly horror visibly lack socioeconomic power and resources, as well as the explicit investment in reproducing political and social ills found in the Maniacs films. They are isolationists. Their appearances often bear signs of untreated health conditions, which manifest as congenital deformities, missing teeth, or scars. Their clothes are usually dirty and unfashionable, with plaid flannel, bib overalls, and their like being a favourite visual code. Deliverance, for instance, prominently features a toothless, grinning hillbilly in filthy overalls in close-up as he and his partner, who wears unfashionable suspenders, menace the travellers. During the film’s infamous rape scene, multiple shots frame the hillbillies’ faces in close-up, emphasising their poor dental hygiene. In these shots, their faces become part of the abject horror of the rape itself. The ill-fitting clothing of the Old Man and the Hitchhiker in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre conspicuously mirrors the style of photographs of rural people following media interest in the War on Poverty. Leatherface’s butcher’s apron fulfils a similar visual function as bibbed overalls—both, notably, clothes associated with manual labour. Whereas Two Thousand Maniacs! creates

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its stereotypical hillbilly representation primarily through Rufus who, in stark contrast to most other ghosts of Pleasant Valley, wears bibbed overalls, a dirty sleeveless shirt, and a straw hat, 2001 Maniacs visually codes most of the town in clothes more associated with rurality, leaving town leaders Mayor Buckman and Granny Boone as visual outliers in keeping with their status. In one of its more graphic episodes, The X-Files translates the evil hillbilly for 1990s television. “Home” (season 4, episode 2) sees FBI agents Mulder and Scully travelling to the rural town of Home, Pennsylvania (whose name immediately emphasises the importance of place) to investigate the death and burial of a severely deformed baby. In further reference to Appalachia, the episode makes multiple references to Mayberry, the fictional Appalachian town of The Andy Griffith Show, including naming the local sheriff after Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor. Sheriff Taylor casts suspicion on the Peacock family, who live in isolation in a house reminiscent of the Sawyer home of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Peacock men, Taylor informs the agents, are so inbred that he doubts they are still human. Scully soon identifies inbreeding as the cause of the infant’s deformities. Furthermore, she believes the Peacock men are holding a woman captive in order to breed. In the episode’s climax, however, the woman is revealed to be the family matriarch, who is toothless, facially deformed, and limbless due to an accident and who willingly engages in incest with her sons. The horror of this scene borrows from the same cultural discourses that characterise rural inhabitants as willing prisoners to their own abuse within larger social and economic hegemonies. Tension between the urban and the rural space, manifest in rural horror, forms its own kind of mythos, one in which the rural space enables inbreeding and a dangerous insularity.28 The sense of humour and horror within this mythos relies on the fear that, if separated enough from modern society, man will undergo an evolutionary regression, as Sheriff Taylor believes has occurred within the Peacock family and as is suggested regarding the desert hillbillies of The Hills Have Eyes.29 Physical deformities gain further emphasis in more recent hillbilly characters, further hearkening myths of widespread incest in rural areas. The Wrong Turn franchise (2003–present) features extremely deformed West Virginians as its principle villains. In the first half of the franchise, these characters are even given names that suggest deformity such as Three Fingers and One Eye. The 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes visually reinvents Pluto to emphasise the effects of inbreeding. While the original Pluto’s merely unconventional appearance is owed to actor Michael Berryman’s hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, the new Pluto bears actual facial deformities, which are achieved through prostheses. His updated appearance greatly resembles the incestuous hillbillies of Wrong Turn and “Home”. The unique realism of the original is here replaced by more active participation in a visual trope. In addition, the remake introduces other characters with extreme deformities, including one colloquially labelled Big Brain, who suffers from severe hydrocephalus. Despite statistics that show rural women at higher risk of certain violent crimes than women in non-rural areas, women of rural and hillbilly horror are typically

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constructed as co-conspirators with villainous men rather than sympathetic victims of the same abuses.30 Yet outright deformity is less common in rural women’s depictions, as they are likelier to be depicted as rural translations of the crone archetype or as hypersexual nymphs.31 As the former, they are made abject through their aesthetic divergence from hegemonic beauty standards. They may be older and/or overweight and rendered sexless. As the latter, their beauty helps them lure in their outsider victims, but they may then be revealed to be more psychotic than their male counterparts. A prominent example in millennial horror is Baby Firefly of House of 1000 Corpses, who is conventionally beautiful, seductive in demeanour, and dressed in revealing clothes. While she is not the leader of the Firefly family, she does appear to be the most deranged, as she takes the most obvious pleasure in the suffering of their victims. The same film offers an abject treatment of the white trash woman through Mother Firefly, who believes she is attractive but has moved to crone status. Displaying discoloured teeth, speaking softly, and dressed in lingerie, she exudes an attempt at sex appeal that, to the tourists, is abject in its ridiculousness. She looks cheap. As the family matriarch, she is a caricature of feminine beauty that falls short of her intention due to class markers. In constructions of rural class and aesthetics, there are few opportunities for dynamic challenges to stereotypes. Hillbilly horror especially revels in displaying signs of rural people’s societal disempowerment, but in very few cases does it challenge the audience to recognise these signs as such. For instance, the potentially painful deformities described above are, in keeping with the genre’s larger concern for bodily destruction, treated as cause for horror, but the lack of medical resources that could mitigate such problems is not included as such. Just as the local police of Home simply accept the abuses perpetrated within the Peacock family and thus normalise them, visual and narrative linkages between rural deprivation and its causes within a larger, national context are normalised. Poverty is equated with filthiness and moral degeneracy, which then leads to violence and incest. In such constructions, there can be no positive, benevolent rural experience. Escape and upward mobility are frequent prescriptions for rural people in non-rural discussions, but in these films, they may result in punishment, especially for women.32 Before we meet the villains of The Hills Have Eyes, we are introduced to Ruby, the young daughter of the incestuous cannibal clan who inhabits the rocky hills. Ruby wishes to escape from her family and flee the area, but her wishes are rebuffed by a local even though he himself is preparing to leave. Since rural horror does not frequently depict any upward mobility by rural people, this is more apparent in films of adjacent genres. In the gothic drama Winter’s Bone (2010), Ree faces violence from her own community as she deals with her mother’s mental illness and acts as surrogate mother for her younger siblings in a violent, drug-addled community in the Ozarks. Like many young rural people, she views the military as a means of attaining mobility and escaping the violence that surrounds her. However, a school counsellor encourages her to stay and to continue raising her siblings on her own, which she ultimately elects to do. The film does not reveal how precisely she will provide for the children, despite her age

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and the film’s previous characterisation of her hometown making her economic prospects and access to resources seem bleak if not nonexistent. Remaining in a violent situation even after she has already been victimised is presented as the only ethical option for the rural woman here. Yet, in keeping with societal prescriptions that are contradicted by concurrent disdain for rural people, other films present leaving the rural space as the only way to avoid its horrors, even for the occasional local who is not a villain. The Tall Man (2012) invokes the horror meme Slender Man in a narrative that further suggests rurality itself is a villain. Using imagery similar to that of the meme and borrowing from the meme’s frequent narratives of a mysterious supernatural entity in a suit who abducts children, the film depicts the experience of a teenage girl, Julia, in a rural Washington mining town as, amidst a backdrop of domestic violence, a series of young local children go missing. In the film’s climax, Julia herself is abducted, only to learn that her abductor is not a supernatural entity derivative of Slender Man but a human group who kidnaps rural children and rehomes them in cities. This practice echoes historical prescriptions for eugenics in Appalachia, which themselves echo eugenics and genocide against Native Americans and African Americans.33 The film, however, does not call this practice into question; rather, abduction into the urban landscape is depicted as a positive outcome and perhaps the only solution for rural children and the only way they can escape the certain doom of becoming rural monsters. Taken altogether, these depictions do not create a dynamic treatment of rural spaces or their people. Just as examinations of treatments of women and ethnic minorities have gained traction in the study of American gothic and horror fiction, the larger genre also warrants scrutiny and, on part of its makers, introspection for its relationship to rurality. Some critics argue that the continued proliferation of the hillbilly stereotype in horror contributes to larger anti-rural discourses that normalise the marginalisation of rural people and indeed, filmic depictions of the rural are implicated in the association of the rural landscape with “white trash” inhabitants.34 This is in part due to a tendency to accept embodied stereotypes as indicative of a universal rural reality.35 While we must always exercise caution in linking fictional representations to real-life events, it is clear that the fictions of rural and hillbilly horror may potentially promote acceptance of their mythologies. Reactions to Deliverance, for example, echoed early American frontier narratives, praising the fictional travellers for their bravery and even expressing enthusiasm for the deaths of villainous hillbillies as if they were real people.36 In this way, rural and hillbilly horror invite greater exploration of cultural attitudes implicit in their reception. Furthermore, their continued perpetuation warrants examination of films that do not uphold the typical constructions of the hillbilly. The remainder of this chapter turns its attention to two such films. Often overlooked in horror scholarship, Pumpkinhead (1988) interweaves a road horror plot, a parental revenge narrative, and a demonic monster. On their way to a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains (the location is not specified in the film, but some of its paratexts, including a trailer, identify its setting as being “deep in the Appalachian mountains”), six travellers stop at a general store, run

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by Ed Harley, a widowed father to a young son, Billy. Two of the city boys, Joel and Steve, proceed to ride dirt bikes over the land outside Ed’s store. Joel accidentally collides with Billy, mortally wounding him; the child dies shortly thereafter in his father’s arms. Enraged by grief, Ed travels deep into mountains to ask the grizzled mountain man Wallace for help in finding the witch Haggis. Ed believes Haggis can help exact vengeance on the city kids by summoning the demon Pumpkinhead, whom Ed, as a child in the film’s opening flashback, once saw kill a man accused of murdering a young woman. Wallace refuses but his teenage son, Bunt, directs Ed to Haggis. Using Ed’s and Billy’s blood, Haggis raises the demon, setting it on an unstoppable course of revenge against the six outsiders. The film’s innovative treatment of hillbillies does not shy away from typical rural horror codes. The mountain forests become more foreboding the deeper one goes into them, and the quintessential Appalachian hollow in which Haggis lives (and from which Pumpkinhead must be summoned) is dark, misty, and menacing. The landscape hides Pumpkinhead from his quarry but also aids in his dramatic entrances, as his arrival is immediately preceded by high winds and a diegetic sound similar to that of cicadas. The simplicity of Ed’s lifestyle is shown in stark contrast to the brash, modern ways of the “city folks”. Wallace’s family is a great brood of multiple generations living in ramshackle homes, surrounded by livestock and junk, and, mostly evidenced by the children’s clothes, covered in dirt from their work. Haggis serves as a literal image of the crone. Pumpkinhead himself takes on the role of the deformed rural inhabitant, particularly when the film’s ending reveals that the body of the previous person to invoke him (here, Ed Harley), becomes the next iteration of the demon. Yet the film’s deployment of these images forgoes their standard treatment in horror. The mountain folk are not truly the villains of the film, nor is the audience visually or narratively encouraged to disdain them. Ed is presented as a hard-working, loving father. The first present-day scene of the film establishes a kind relationship with his son, who appears vulnerable even prior to the arrival of the city folk. Ed accepts a handmade necklace from Billy with genuine affection and his promise to “never take it off” is indeed fulfilled in the film’s conclusion when it is visible on the new body Haggis buries in Pumpkinhead’s grave. His desire for vengeance in the immediate aftermath of his son’s death, which could potentially villainise him, cools once he realises the demon tortures its victims before killing them. Plagued by live visions of Pumpkinhead’s actions, he goes to Haggis to beg her to call the demon off, even at the expense of his own life. From this point, he aids the surviving city folks, becoming a sympathetic hero as he offers them shelter and, seeing that any harm he sustains is also inflicted on the demon, attempts suicide. Wallace’s mountain family, too, has great potential for a crude, stereotypical treatment that the film forgoes. Wallace and his kin are gruff, hard folks, but not malicious. Indeed, their refusal to help the city kids who seek shelter with them is a means to protect their own children, as Pumpkinhead “only kills what it’s called upon to kill – them and whatever gets in its way”. He thus stands in stark contrast to the rural patriarchs of other horror films. The film also refrains from the trope of incest within such families. The only potential for incest occurs through the visual

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establishment that Bunt shares a bedroom with his sister; however, the film does not suggest any incest occurs within the family, and the shared room likely only shows the common arrangement of many large families living in small, impoverished spaces. Even Haggis does not quite fit the stereotype. While she lacks the benevolence of the traditional Appalachian “granny witch”, her power is not treated as an object of mockery. It is clear that the locals respect her even as they fear her, and the visual coding of her home presents grotesque objects without cynical humour. As Pumpkinhead comes to life and grows larger beside her in silhouette, Ed and the viewer unironically recognise Haggis’s power. She alone out of the mountain characters appears malicious, but her malice is quietly expressed in her dealings with Ed, whom she views as too “weak” to accept the full price of his request, not the demon’s victims. The sense of moral degeneracy typically imposed upon rural characters here belongs only to Haggis, and so anomalous are her crimes that she has been damned by God and her community. The creature himself, though enough of a monster to horrify locals, is nonetheless part of the local culture as its manifestation of extreme justice, not degeneracy or malice. In the opening flashback, Ed’s parents’ clear understanding that the creature will be hunting that night and their preparation for it by securing the house and barn indicate an acceptance of the creature’s role in the community. Tom Harley’s stern assurance to his wife and son that they will not be harmed as long as they do not offer aid to the creature’s quarry treats the creature as a more acceptable inhabitant of the landscape than the man it hunts, who must necessarily be removed from society for his crimes. While the creature’s legend has not yet been imparted to the viewer, even the first minutes of the film encourage the viewer to realise that the hunted man is not a hapless outsider being tortured by insane hillbillies but, rather, is a local who probably is guilty of the murder for which Pumpkinhead punishes him. The film’s use of a monster does separate it from most hillbilly horror, yet it should be considered within the context of that subgenre as a challenge to its tropes and, furthermore, to the discourses of rural spaces and people from which those horror tropes emerge. Another notable subversion of the hillbilly horror film is Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010). Unlike Pumpkinhead, this film deliberately challenges the genre’s traditions through self-aware inversion of them. Appalachian locals Tucker and Dale travel to their new “vacation home”, a dilapidated shack they intend to fix up, at the same time that nine “college kids” from the city travel to the same area. The film playfully engages with typical visual codes that are interpreted differently by the different characters. In their first encounter with the college kids at a local gas station, Tucker encourages the shy, awkward, sensitive Dale to speak to the girls; to the girls, however, Dale appears as a figure from a horror film, approaching them with a scythe that he, in his fear of them, forgot to put down and laughing erratically. The two parties are brought together again at the lake, when an accident leaves college kid Allison unconscious in the water. Tucker and Dale rescue her, but the other college kids interpret their actions as an abduction. One insists that he saw the hillbillies trying to cannibalise her. Unable to return Allison to her

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friends, Tucker and Dale take her to their cabin where they care for her injury. Upon regaining consciousness and realising that the hillbillies mean her no harm, Allison reveals that she, too, had a rural upbringing and begins a friendship with Dale as Tucker continues working on the house. Meanwhile, led by the increasingly erratic Chad, the college kids mount a rescue attempt. They continue to misinterpret what they see as signs that the hillbillies have kidnapped and are abusing Allison; in one such scene, Allison volunteers to help Dale dig an outhouse hole, but her friends believe she has been forced to dig her own grave. Their efforts to save her are thwarted by a series of fatal accidents: running from the chainsaw-wielding Tucker as he himself runs from a swarm of angry bees, college kid Mitch is impaled on a tree, and, meaning to tackle Tucker, Mike jumps headlong into a wood chipper. Just as the college kids interpret the hillbillies’ actions as Allison’s kidnapping and torture, the horrified Tucker and Dale conclude that her friends have formed a suicide cult from which they must save her. Tucker and Dale are clearly marked as hillbilly characters, and indeed stereotypical interpretations of their dress, speech, and demeanour on part of the college kids lead to the misinterpretation of their actions. To the college kids, these men can only be monstrous villains hellbent on hurting outsiders. Their continued insistence on their interpretation of events leads to their deaths. Having fewer frames of cinematic and cultural reference, however, Tucker and Dale are themselves forced to create their own narrative of what these outsiders must be doing. Their attempts to defend themselves continuously go awry until they themselves must confront the absurdity of the situation. Eventually, however, they become the victims of the narrative as Chad kidnaps Tucker and tortures him. In the film’s climax, Chad reveals that, like Allison, he also has an early connection to the rural, as he is the product of his mother’s rape by a hillbilly. Believing himself to be “part hillbilly”, Chad accepts the typical narrative of hillbillies and attempts to enact it by kidnapping Allison (it is implied he means to rape her) and trying to kill the actual hillbillies. Dale ultimately defeats him not through violence but by exacerbating his allergies. The ultimate villain of the film, thus, is not the hillbillies themselves but the insistence upon and acceptance of the typical hillbilly horror narrative. Despite the long history of negative hillbilly depictions in film and some scholarly challenges to these, there has yet to be major, widespread criticism by the populations most affected by these depictions. There are a number of possible reasons for this, which likely intersect. Social mobility and academic capital are still difficult to achieve for many in rural regions. Indeed, the systemic problems that have affected rural regions that now further manifest in the opioid epidemic that has ravaged places like Appalachia unchecked, geographic and economic barriers to medical care, and conservative policies that limit the quality of primary and secondary education, discourage or even prevent many from gaining the platforms necessary to issue greater critical challenges to anti-rural discourses in genre fiction. Another possibility is a lack of interest within popular media in challenging these stereotypes. Disdain for the rural poor is a common cultural attitude even among

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many progressives. Indeed, following the election of Donald Trump, a number of progressive, liberal, and left-aligned news media websites encouraged maltreatment of rural populations, some even explicitly disregarding outcries by progressive and left-aligned rural critics. The historical pleasures taken in denigrating rural populations, especially if they can be labelled “white trash”, are echoed in such discourses. Because those discourses are normalised and even celebrated, few media outlets appear to find challenges to them worthy of consideration. Continued acceptance of such discourses, exacerbated by urban–rural tension that posits the former as the home of progressive politics and the rural as the home of a particularly backwards conservatism, discourages a recognised need for such challenges. Ethnic, sexual, and ideological diversity within rural regions, is ignored. To many, it seems, the tropes found in hillbilly horror, if not true, may as well be. It is certainly not a lack of awareness of the damning tropes of the subgenre by rural people. Horror is consumed within rural regions just as readily as it is elsewhere, including its rural and hillbilly horror offerings. Self-aware humour invoking rural horror tropes exists within rural spaces. For instance, ­Deliverance-inspired jokes about “purdy mouths” and duelling banjos are no less likely to be made by rural people familiar with the film’s impact than by non-rural people, even though the film’s rural characterisations come at the former’s expense. An ironic pleasure in invoking the images of the rural gothic and hillbilly horror may even serve a subversive function. However, another likely possibility, at least in the Appalachian context, lies in the fatalism that has been documented among many rural inhabitants, especially those who occupy lower places on the socioeconomic spectrum. Here, immediate needs take primacy over concerns for the future, as it is understood that the ability one has today is not guaranteed the next. Literature on Appalachian fatalism has predominantly concerned its relationship to health in the region, as it has been proposed as an explanation for Appalachian people declining seeking medical treatment.37 Fatalism also contributes to an avoidance, when seemingly possible, of distressing tasks, and overlaps with a sense of hopelessness.38 The barriers discussed above undoubtedly bolster fatalistic tendencies. When faced with such barriers and the lack of greater cultural or infrastructural support, it is impractical to devote attention and resources to arguing against the stereotypes found in a subgenre of horror films. We may here recall Wallace’s prioritisation of his family’s safety as Pumpkinhead lurks outside. The purpose of this analysis is not to disparage rural and hillbilly horror or to discourage its viewership. As horror scholars have demonstrated, the larger horror genre is rife with problematic treatments of its subjects, yet these offerings still perform one of horror’s functions: bringing the viewer into contact with cultural fears. Certainly, we may find enjoyable offerings in hillbilly horror even as we call into question its relationship to its subjects. Indeed, some of the subgenre’s entries, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, boast larger cultural value that has been continually demonstrated in both scholarship and filmmaking. Yet there is a need for more dedicated development of this particular area of horror studies, especially with the cultural baggage of history in mind.

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Notes









1. Walter S. DeKeseredy, Stephen L. Muzzatti, and Joseph F. Donnermeyer, “Mad Men in Bib Overalls: Media’s Horrification and Pornification of Rural Culture,” Critical Criminology 22 (2014): 180; Gary S. Foster and Richard L. Hummel, “Wham, Bam, Thank You, Sam: Critical Dimensions of the Persistence of Hillbilly Caricatures,” Sociological Spectrum 17, no. 2 (1997): 157, quoted in DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer, 180. 2. Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Victoria M. McCollum, Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Age of Urban Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2017). 3. McCollum, Post-9/11, 1. 4. Elise Rosser, “A Place for Monsters: Wolf Creek and the Australian Outback,” Monsters and the Monstrous 3, no. 2 (2013): 74; Jacqueline Pinkowitz, “Down South: Regional Exploitation Films, Southern Audiences, and Hillbilly Horror in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs!” Journal of Popular Film and Television 44, no. 2 (2016): 118. 5. McCollum, Post-9/11, 14. 6. See Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016). 7. James Proctor and Angela Smith, “Gothic and Empire,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007): 96. 8. Robert Mighall, “Gothic Cities,” in Spooner and McEvoy, 58. 9. David Bell, “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror,” in Contested Countryside Cultures, eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little (London: Routledge, 1997): 94. 10. Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2009): 10. 11. Michael Lewis, “American Wilderness: An Introduction,” in American Wilderness: A New History, ed. Michael Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 12. Tosha R. Taylor, “American Captivity in Contemporary Horror Cinema” (doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University, 2015), 192–93. 13. Finn Ballard, “No Trespassing: The Post-Millennial Road-Horror Movie,” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 4 (2008): 15–18. 14. Ibid., 22. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; Repr. 1995), 216. 17. Bell, “Anti-Idyll,” 93. 18. Ibid., 94. 19. McCollum, Post-9/11, 2. 20. Isenberg. White Trash, 135–36. 21. Ibid., 150; Julia Leyda, “Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur,” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2000): 37–38. 22. See John Hartigan, Jr., “Who Are These People?: ‘Rednecks,’ ‘Hillbillies,’ and ‘White Trash’ as Marked Racial Subjects,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003): 95–112; Robin Jeshion, “Slur Creation, Bigotry Formation: The Power of Expressivism,” Phenomenology and Mind 11 (2016): 130–9; Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, Introduction to White Trash: Race and Class in America, eds. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–2; Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 23. Wray, Not Quite White, 1.

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24. Ibid., 1. 25. Stephen T. Young, “Wild, Wonderful, White Criminality: Images of ‘White Trash’ Appalachia,” Critical Criminology 25 (2017): 105; Isenberg, White Trash, 194–205. 26. Wray, Not Quite White, 2. 27. Constance Penley, “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” Pornography: Film and Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 100; Leyda, “Reading,” 37–38; Isenberg, White Trash, 136; bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009), 54. 28. Karen Hayden, “Inbred Horror: Degeneracy, Revulsion, and Fear of the Rural Community,” in Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society, eds. Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), 181. 29. Ibid., 95. 30. DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer, “Mad Men,” 189. 31. Ibid., 191. 32. Ibid., 183. 33. Isenberg, White Trash, 174–205. 34. DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, and Donnermeyer, “Mad Men,” 191; Young, “Wild,” 105. 35. Young, “Wild,” 104. 36. Isenberg, White Trash, 277. 37. See, for instance, Elizabeth L. McGarvey, MaGuadalupe Leon-Verdin, Lydia F. Killos, Thomas Guterbock, and Wendy F. Cohn., “Health Disparities Between Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Counties in Virginia,” Journal of Community Health 36, no. 3 (2011): 348, 354; Elaine M. Drew and Nancy E. Schoenberg, “Deconstructing Fatalism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Women’s Decision Making About Cancer Prevention and Treatment,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2011): 164–82. 38. Tommy M. Phillips,“Influence of Appalachian Fatalism on Adolescent Identity Processes,”Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 99, no. 2 (2007): 12–15.

Filmography 2001 Maniacs, dir. Tim Sullivan (2005). Deliverance, dir. John Boorman (1972). House of 1000 Corpses, dir. Rob Zombie (2003). Night of Fear, dir. Terry Bourke (1972). Pumpkinhead, dir. Stan Winston (1988). The Descent, dir. Neil Marshall (2005). The Devil’s Rejects, dir. Rob Zombie (2005). The Hills Have Eyes, dir. Wes Craven (1977). The Hills Have Eyes, dir. Alexandre Aja (2006). The Tall Man, dir. Pascal Laugier (2012). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper (1974). The X-Files, “Home,” dir. Kim Manners (1996). Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, dir. Eli Craig (2010). Two Thousand Maniacs!, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis (1964). Wolf Creek, dir. Greg McLean (2005). Wrong Turn, dir. Rob Schmidt (2003).

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References Ballard, Finn. “No Trespassing: The Post-Millennial Road-Horror Movie.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 4 (2008): 15–28. Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” In Contested Countryside Cultures, edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little, 91–104. London: Routledge, 1997. Curtis, Barry. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. DeKeseredy, Walter S., Stephen L. Muzzatti, and Joseph F. Donnermeyer.“Mad Men in Bib Overalls: Media’s Horrification and Pornification of Rural Culture.” Critical Criminology 22 (2014): 179–97. Drew, Elaine M., and Nancy E. Schoenberg, “Deconstructing Fatalism: Ethnographic Perspectives on Women’s Decision Making About Cancer Prevention and Treatment.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2011): 164–82. Foster, Gary S. and Richard L. Hummel. “Wham, Bam, Thank You, Sam: Critical Dimensions of the Persistence of Hillbilly Caricatures.” Sociological Spectrum 17, no. 2 (1997): 157–76. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; Repr. 1995. Hartigan, John, Jr. “Who Are These People?: ‘Rednecks,’ ‘Hillbillies,’ and ‘White Trash’ as Marked Racial Subjects.” In White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 95–112. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hayden, Karen. “Inbred Horror: Degeneracy, Revulsion, and Fear of the Rural Community.” In Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society, edited by Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, 181–206. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place, 54. New York: Routledge, 2009. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016. Jeshion, Robin. “Slur Creation, Bigotry Formation: The Power of Expressivism.” Phenomenology and Mind 11 (2016): 130–9. Lewis, Michael. “American Wilderness: An Introduction.” In American Wilderness: A New History, edited by Michael Lewis, 3–13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Leyda, Julia. “Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur.” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2000): 37–64. McCollum, Victoria M. Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Age of Urban Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 2017. McGarvey, Elizabeth L., MaGuadalupe Leon-Verdin, Lydia F. Killos, Thomas Guterbock, and Wendy F. Cohn., “Health Disparities Between Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Counties in Virginia,” Journal of Community Health 36, no. 3 (2011): 348–56. Mighall, Robert. “Gothic Cities.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 54–62. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Murphy, Bernice. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Newitz, Annalee, and Matt Wray. Introduction to White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, 1–12. New York: Routledge, 1997. Penley, Constance. “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn.” In Pornography: Film and Culture, edited by Peter Lehman, 99–117. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Phillips, Tommy M. “Influence of Appalachian Fatalism on Adolescent Identity Processes,” Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 99, no. 2 (2007): 11–15. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline. “Down South: Regional Exploitation Films, Southern Audiences, and Hillbilly Horror in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs!” Journal of Popular Film and Television 44, no. 2 (2016): 109–19. Procter, James, and Angela Smith. “Gothic and Empire.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 95–104. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.

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Rosser, Elise. “A Place for Monsters: Wolf Creek and the Australian Outback.” Monsters and the Monstrous 3, no. 2 (2013): 73–82. Taylor, Tosha R. “American Captivity in Contemporary Horror Cinema.” Doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University, 2015. Young, Stephen T. “Wild, Wonderful, White Criminality: Images of ‘White Trash’ Appalachia.” Critical Criminology 25 (2017): 103–17.

Southern Agrarianism and Exploitation Gerardo Del Guercio

Rising as its own genre out of an aspiration and illusory need for mainstream, Southern literature privileged white Southerners to consider their individuality free from the apparent misjudgment of the north. Commencing prior the Civil War would mark the American Southern states as an indisputably distinctive body within the United States, Southern writing has, from its origins, wrestled with complicated questions of individuality and self-recognition. At war’s end, the Southern Gothic at first filled a call for conversing about this new individuality in more stylish although still slippery and tapered terms. Ultimately, this perceived harrying and unadulterated otherness fashioned a means for authentic outcasts and outsiders to communicate themselves in important ways. The Southern gothic genre is a predominantly apt genre for subalterns to express their tales since it was deliberately fashioned to confer and comprehend quirkiness and singularity. The mistrustful white upper class of the New South forged, through a set of erroneous ingenious efforts, an artistic path for authors including as Dorothy Allison to retrieve as a form for the exact individuals they made outcasts. Originally planned as yet another avenue for the proliferation of the narrative of an advantaged small number has created a fictional bastion of the many incidents of Southern life. The scholastic discipline of Southern Studies occurred partly to characterise Southern mores on Southerners’ provisos. In the Civil War years, numerous Southern pro-Confederate efforts to curate writing of the South’s white cultural elite, and convinced designs of Southern exceptionalism without doubt branch from that sequence; yet, Southern Studies as a discipline fulfils an obligatory task in the overall revision of US writing. Southern Studies departments, situated mainly in the Southern states, permit academics to classify and argue rudiments of Southern customs in less prejudiced terms than that of the national lexicon. Stigmatisation against the South the North along with an enthusiastic attentiveness of an exceptional and explicit history are the motivations for the naissance

G. Del Guercio (*)  Montreal, QC, Canada

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of American Literature. The majority of Southern universities started to take on programmes on Southern culture in the mid-1970s, with academic circles settling on the name “Southern Studies” at approximately the same time. In these departments, the research focuses typically on gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, exploring the entire Southern population, particularly individuals marginalised by the elite class. Southern history stories typically fail in their dialogue of the past as a sequence of performances carried out by advantaged Caucasian men. This propensity towards curtailing the existence of the remainder of the nations is visualised in early curations of Southern way of life that almost wholly discusses the life of white genteels, reducing slaves and poor people as little more than panorama and wealthy women desirable household decorations. Southern Studies, on the other hand, takes for granted institutionalised bigotry, plantation life leftovers, and a glorified male order as a cultural centre and from that point consider the histories of everyone else. The South’s communal alleged “otherness”, although significant as well as interesting, can make murky the stories of the truthfully marginalised. The opening chapter Away Down South, entitled “Cavalier and Yankee: The Origins of Southern ‘Otherness’”, James C. Cobb tries to situate the point in American cultural history “at which ‘southern’ began to convey sociocultural as well as geographic distinctions”.1 Despite the fact that Cobb considers his challenge “largely a matter of perception”,2 he nevertheless advocates this instant is most perfectly traced back to a time previous to American sovereignty. With the advent of African slaves in the Seventeenth Century and the South’s prevalent implementation of chattel bondage commenced almost instantaneously to differentiate Southern living from that of the rest of the nation. The affluence afforded by indentured labour turned the Southern landowner into a natural aristocrat. In this chapter, Cobb cites James Fenimore Cooper’s reflections on his exchanges with Southerners: “the South had ‘more men who belong to the class of what is termed gentlemen’ than ‘any other country of the world’”.3 In doing so, a new cultural establishment was well under way in the United States. This perspective of the Southern history and legacy, nevertheless, is, as Cobb continues to argue, narrow: it defines the Southern daily life and distinctiveness of in terms of what honoured white men practised throughout decades and centuries of methodical domination of black Americans (initially as slaves and then s­ econd-class citizens), women, and the lowly. This identity yet impelled the American South to deem themselves a part of a distinctive if not influential cluster within the United States, and years before the Civil War’s outbreak strengthened the longing to discern Southern literature from writing in other parts of the United States. Established in 1834, The Southern Literary Messenger is conceivably the earliest cognisant endeavour to define the South as a matchless intellectual entity within the United States in the logic that contemporary academics term the area, chiefly within the decades connecting the Reconstruction Era and the end of the Civil Rights era. In its first publication, The Messenger’s editorial staff beseeched Virginia’s citizenry to maintain their challenge to curate Southern individuality:

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[i]t would be a mortifying discovery, if instead of kindness and good will, [our benefactor] should be repulsed by the coldness and neglect of a Virginia public. Hundreds of similar publications thrive and prosper north of the Potomac. “Shall not one be supported in the whole South?” they ask, relying on separatist sentiments to create a moral desire to support the South-centric publication.4

With its approach succeeding the Messenger was in print rather frequently up until the Civil War’s closing year when the drain on Richmond’s financed shut the publishing house down. The Southern Literary Messenger’s second edition released in October 1834 applauded its audience for their loyalty in an editorial titled “To the Public, and Especially the People of the Southern States”: “The appeal to the citizens of the south…was not in vain. That such a paper is to be desired in the southern states no one will controvert”.5 These editorials reproduced smugness in the South’s exclusive identity but in addition make public the apprehension surrounding the South’s shaky lifestyle. The paper’s fizzling out in the Civil War’s last year can be merely correlated to a lack of money, although the impugned Southern identity after a financially crippling loss likely influenced results to discard the paper, too. First iterations of the Southern Gothic are traceable to one from t­ime-totime editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, Virginian Edgar Allan Poe. Although Poe’s aesthetic dealt less with explicit Southern gothic metaphors, his acceptance of the gothic visuals persists as one of the initial flowing together of markedly American literature and gothic images. As a consequence, at the same time as Poe is best distinguished as a Gothic or, at for the most part, US gothic author, his association with the forging of the South’s narrative and predilection for the gothic artistic is impossible to downplay, rendering the affiliation among Southern uniqueness and nationalist sympathies even more slippery to unravel. The Southern Gothic rose as a divergent mythical genre near the beginning of the twentieth century, with writer including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, providing an independent autonomist faction in the face of the bigotry- and woman-hating fueled New Agrarian discipline of writing. Though more stylish than their generation, their works were not impervious to the difficult tropes of Southern individuality. First Southern gothic authors were usually white, often men, and studies; still, the genre’s fascination with Southern exceptionalism produces an apt imaginative legroom for the outsider in American writing. Subsequently the call for studying the American South is as authentic as the call for the Southern Gothic. Through this lens, professors are capable to scrutinise the South and all its shades without the romanticism or sightless censure that have a propensity to govern debates of Southern way of life on a public scale. Within the academic world, it suggests a mode into the complicated and multifaceted cultural contexts that have shaped some of the United State’s most noteworthy talent. Contemporary intellectual debates on William Faulkner’s text in particular tend to centre on his vigilantly curated, manifestly Southern tropes as a method of sympathising with the white Southern consciousness in the 1930s, when lifestyles and customs were not only in jeopardy but on the threshold of experiencing an

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important revamp. Faulkner’s works do not take particular issue with what are now recognised as unmerited biased and socioeconomic realities in the first decades of the twentieth-century South; instead, these truths establish a well-known backdrop in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. At stake when it comes to Faulkner are, indeed, history and its place in the present. Later in Away Down South, in a chapter titled “Southern Writers and ‘The Impossible Load of the Past”, Cobb considers the closing stages of an exacting sort of Southern segregation in the wake of World War I, citing Allen Tate’s adherence that “the South re-entered the world – but gave a backward glance”.6 Cobb advocates, on the other hand, that this “‘backward glance’ that marked the full flowering of the literary phase of the Southern Renaissance came primarily in the 1930s…in the absence of a critical historical tradition”.7 Questions of the history’s glory turned overpowering, Cobb advocates, in a quickly altering South. Southern individuality was even more in danger, Cobb argues, with the market triumph of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind that he portrays as “more critical and complex than it appeared”.8 While the narrative is doubtlessly romantic in its treatment with plantation existence, Cobb disputes that the apprehension of the New South are straightforwardly distinguished in the runaway best-seller, noting that although “as a young woman, Mitchell had rebelled personally against the New South’s Victorian social and gender traditions”9 and that the novel itself in the end puts “material comfort”10 at stake, forgoing disapproval of that highly ordered social order and in its place adhering to hope for the lavishness afforded to honoured whites in the Old South. Still, Cobb and others advocate Gone with the Wind is at minimum a ­protoprogressive novel, its edifying impact, if nothing else, is unquestionably communally regressive, and its dependence on socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic standards within both the New South and Old South circles bans any consequential debate of the challenging basis of Scarlett O’Hara’s society. At its finest, the Southern Gothic moves outside reminiscence and pseudo-romance, assuming a universal culture as a backdrop and transitioning to confer history as part of the present. The Southern Gothic thrives as a cultural snapshot when it confines a South that, while inspired with convention, is sceptical, conscious of its unstable state, and “glancing back” with eyes wide open. Faulkner’s work is indisputably discernible by a fascination with character and time. As an author perceptibly and mainly concerned with the history of his community, Faulkner’s achievement as a novelist and commemoration in the literary canon is perhaps ascribed as much to the situations of his time as to his aptitude as a writer. Specifically, since Faulkner was composing in this moment, the general topics of his work are sharpened by the socioeconomic and political certainties of his era. At stake in Faulkner is more than the destiny of a few country Mississippians. For Faulkner, at risk are the potential of the South and the protection of the past. Parley of the Southern Gothic, like parley of the South itself, over and over again delegate into a string of clichés and redundant stereotypes. In 1960, Flannery O’Connor had already grown weary of the sweeping statement of

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Southern writing, stating, “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic”.11 The Southern Gothic is repeatedly epitomised by its staggering metaphors and uncanny sexual norms; however, the Southern Studies academic takes note of the overarching premise of characteristics and disquiet over safeguarding and later reconciling with, a genuinely disconcerting, aggressive, and abusive history. Simply put, whitewashed stories of Southern living have pleaded to the public for decades. From Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Gone With the Wind to Herbert Ross’ 1989 blockbuster film Steel Magnolias, countrywide spectators have made it apparent that fascination about these testimonials of Southern life and, predominantly, Southern women. Faulkner’s experimental novel As I Lay Dying did not earn the same instantaneous monetary achievement of Gone With the Wind. Elizabeth Jane Harrison advocates Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-visioning the American South that Gone With the Wind petitioned to readers and movie-goers with what she terms as “Scarlett’s heroic qualities”12 as well as “the 1930s’ neo-Confederate cause”.13 Harrison fails to concede past a concise dismissal, on the other hand, are “the problematic aspects of the novel”.14 To define Gone with the Wind a “Feminist Farm Fantasy”15 is to overlook what Scarlett is struggling for—a continuation of the Old South and the plantation standard of living. While individuality is indeed at stake in Gone with the Wind, it is so ingrained in Scarlett’s rapport to the agricultural estate that the reader is never enquired to believe the likelihood that the Old South has no genuine position in 1930s America. On the contrary, Faulkner’s work takes for granted the intricate nostalgia and rearward glances of Southern society and scrutinises it as a part of a larger edifying backdrop. In fact, many Faulkner texts, most remarkably As I Lay Dying¸ mark the start of progressive thought within the establishment group of Southern authors. At the same time as labouring through the fascinations and concerns of the time, Faulkner’s works, often challenging, by design antiquated, commence to create the questions that will acclimatise the Gothic to be on the whole wellsuited for those marginalised not solely by the neo-Confederate empathy in a few words discussed in Female Pastoral but by the male ruling class, racism, and strict collective prospects that branch from those principles. As I Lay Dying offers numerous cases in points of Faulkner’s more nuanced liaison with the American South, its history, and its people. In reading As I Lay Dying from a feminist point of view, the reader must mull over Faulkner’s motivation for investigating his own fixations through the female speakers in the novel. Decisively, the male’s chapters in the narrative are inclined to shift the story along while the women’s telling crafts and extends much more of the legends and folklore of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. These female voices in addition proffer musings on the theme that most mesmerise Faulkner: family, beginnings, and his own perception of blood. Tracing the principle of the Southern Gothic back to Faulkner instead of his more predictable colleagues women are not merely the chosen tellers of tales but the logicians and myth guarders. As Faulkner’s characters Darl, Jewel, and even Cash arrive to imperative pious

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and theoretical recognition, the women in As I Lay Dying use up almost all of their time pondering on the philosophical queries that appear over much of Faulkner’s canon. In the sole chapter told by Addie, Faulkner investigates themes of cynicism and lays out a good part of his perception of blood. At the moment Addie starts her narrative she has already passed on and is telling the tale of her sacred death from her casket. Even in death, her dissatisfaction with her kin and her plight in life are apparent, and she has not achieved real lucidity on the important queries of her life. After summoning up her endeavours to unite with her young students through vicious hostility, she narrates the account of how she came to wed Anse. Addie’s cynicism turns out to be a sort of family similarity when she recalls revealing to Anse that her “people” have all died: “‘…I have people. In Jefferson.’” His face fell a little. ‘Well, I got a little property. I’m forehanded; I got a good honest name. I know how town folks are, but maybe when they talk to me…….’ ‘They might listen,’ I said. ‘But they’ll be hard to talk to.’ He was watching my face. ‘They’re in the cemetery.’ ‘But your living kin,’ he said. ‘They’ll be different.’ ‘Will they?’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I never had any other kind.’”16

In this poignant scene Addie endorses Faulkner’s famous appellation, that the past “isn’t even past.”17 Previously in this chapter, she discloses her father’s fascination with passing away, and that he said it was “the reason for living.”18 The book’s scenes take place simply because Addie is dead. Even as Addie still lives in her children’s recollections as a caregiver, mother, source of reassurance, or letdown, her self-written story remains one of brutality and repentance. To Addie, childbirth and motherhood are sacred deaths. She becomes indignant, and her remoteness is noted by her offspring. Faulkner’s representation of Addie as a woman profoundly hurt by her society’s prospects for her and the principles of marriage in the 1930s rural South tolerate her to verbalise to more than domesticity and motherly harmony. As specified by the memories of violent behaviour in her classroom, Addie is emotionally distressed by the lack of union in her life, and her informal conformity to get married to Anse expose just how frantic she is for an attachment. When this bond is not realised by marriage or motherhood, Addie turns indignant and is a secluded figure to most of her children. For Southerners fretful with beginnings and individuality as not only Faulkner but Hurston, O’Connor, as well as Mitchell were, the history impends as a type of originator in that the New South works to search for what came into being only as a result of the South’s disturbed and disturbing history, and for gothic writers, mother figures serve as images for this history and its space in everyday life. Mitchell’s Ellen O’Hara, Scarlett’s mother, the representative Southern belle, is a long-suffering, saintly person who does not live long after the plantation falls. Scarlett’s dedication to and adoration of her mother, an artefact of the Old South, is introspective of neo-Confederate nostalgia and yearning to homecoming to so-called antebellum grandeur. In Faulkner’s viewpoint, origins are not to be

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merely sacred and left in the past. In As I Lay Dying, Addie’s existence is felt most intensely once she dies, and she herself exists in a limbo-like state, not gone from the world and progressing to seize great supremacy in her family’s everyday life nevertheless a manifestly insentient force in the earthly world. To Allison, these questions of character, origin, and blood are additionally intricate by her work’s more tinged and developing declarations on motherhood. Anney is an enabler, a remnant of the underprivileged white division disenfranchised by the plantation scheme. In her essay, “Female Gothic fiction, grotesque realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic”, Peggy Dunn Bailey concedes Allison’s opposition to being labelled a “Southern Gothic writer”, citing a 1994 interview in which Allison, when asked to classify her literary convention, replied, “I belong to the tradition of iconoclastic, queer, southern writer”.19 Although Allison obscures her place in the overall picture of American literary folklore, Bailey associates the arguments and personas of her writings with the protracted history of the Southern Gothic. What Bailey identifies as “distinctly American, frequently Southern, aspect of the Gothic” is the donation of “human beings…as the ultimate sources of horror”.20 Bailey talks about the inevitability of Southern Gothic as a means for the deprived, subjugated, and expelled in the orb of writing from the United States and puts in plain words the dissimilarity flanked by texts in the genre and accepted works featuring gothic or uncanny elements: “The Southern Gothic is fueled by the need to explain and/or understand foundational trauma, the violation or loss of that which is essential to identity and survival but often irretrievable”.21 In doing so, the Southern Gothic becomes essential as an art type, trying to fill a significant opening in the comprehension of the human understanding. The widespread motifs of family and home point to a fixation with origins and their definitive importance in a person’s life, that “foundational trauma”22 Bailey explains. In several Southern Gothic works, the fascination with beginnings is symbolised in queered or otherwise out of the ordinary reproductions of maternity. Keira V. Williams discourses on topics of parenthood in the Southern Gothic in her critique, “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood,” in which she spotlights on the tapered values put in place for Southern women, the perils of challenging those in the least, and the consequence of nuanced depictions of successions of violence, centring on Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina in conjunction with more customary pictures of the Southern mother. In Allison’s book, deprived Caucasian life starts and finishes with indignity and is tainted entirely by pessimistic awareness, both from the more affluent of white southern culture and within the proletariat itself. Although the “white trash” and “ILLEGITIMATE”23 stereotypes compromise both Bone’s and Anney’s logic of identity and independence, the circumstances of Bone’s “white trash” actuality in addition burden her with a simple understanding of her mother, obliging her to contextualise Anney’s submissiveness as more than what Williams terms an

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“uncomplicated [act] of evil”.24 Along with a class-based indignity is the narrow distinctiveness of women in Southern culture. Bone, Anney, and among other women in Allison’s novel fall short both to live up to what the public imagines of them as women and to discover contentment, accomplishment, sanctuary, and autonomy within their class’s own exclusive gender order. The subordinate position women occupy in this Southern culture at large paired with the rejection of individual the Boatwrights experience as deprived whites become an appearance of community preparation for sexual cruelty. The disgrace associated with womanhood by conventional culture and the criticism of the Boatwrights’ collapse to achieve idyllic whiteness and white femininity disgrace Bone and her own mother not just into accepting she merits Glen’s neglect but that she is to be held responsible for his loathsome propensity. According to Faulkner, this minor, domestic position sanctions the women in his novels to serve as prophesies and erudite, but Allison shifts Southern women, still shrewd, still trained to carry on, into a pragmatic interpretation of the twentieth-century South. Thoroughly cast off by the majority and embraced merely as a dominated group by their subculture, the females in this novel have little expectation of discovering a voice within their social order or making ample and consequential modifications within their own lives. The audience perceives this organisation most perceptibly and noticeably queered in Aunt Raylene, the woman landowner on the fringes of town. Satisfied there, where “‘[t]rash rises’”,25 as she informs Bone when she starts spending more time with her. Williams Faulkner’s contentions regarding Southern motherhood are applicable As I Lay Dying as well. The disgrace, or at minimum disquiet, adjoining not only the South’s hope but the forces that established its present naturally motivated its authors to dread their maker. The society that created the New South was certainly grotesque, and instead of dealing with that actuality, the first Southern gothic writers must wrestle with the disquietude of a people that is, like Bone’s domestic life, “held together with lies”.26 These early dialogues, however still centred on white people and over and over again anxious with safeguarding of a problematical history, generates archetypes of the outsider and marginalised that make the Southern gothic genre exclusively, if unintentionally, customised to queer and otherwise condemned writers. While following her in the footsteps of predecessors including Faulkner, Hurston, and Walker, Allison asserts these tales as Southern literature with her roaring success Bastard Out of Carolina. Indeed, the Southern Gothic sustains in the American canon. Bastard not only released a countrywide debate on child molestation and monetary disparity but conveyed to the limelight of modern American writing the veracities and involvedness of Southern living. Without justification or regret, Allison narrates this queer, womanist tale inside the imaginative custom of the Southern Gothic, maintaining the genre for the exile on a worldwide extent.

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Notes

1. James C. Cobb, Away Down South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 2. Ibid., 9. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. James Ewell Heath, “Publisher’s Notice, Southern Literature”, Southern Literary Messenger 1.1 (1834): 1–3. 5. T. W. White, et al. “To the Public, and Especially the People of the Southern States”, Southern Literary Messenger 1.2 (1834): 1. 6. Cobb, Away Down, 130. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Noon Day, 1969), 109. 12. Jane Elizabeth Harrison, Female Pastoral, Women Writers Re-visioning the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1991), 43. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 43. 16. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990), 171. 17. Ibid. 18. Faulkner, 169. 19. Peggy Dunn Bailey, “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic”, Mississippi Quarterly 63.1/2 (2010): 269. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 2012), 4. 24. Keira V. Williams, “Between Creation and Devouring: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood”, Southern Cultures 21.2 (2015): 27. 25. Allison, 171. 26. Ibid., 248.

Bibliography Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 2012. Bailey, Peggy Dunn. “Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly 63.1/2 (2010): 269. Cobb, James C. “Cavalier and Yankee: The Origins of Southern ‘Otherness’.” Away Down South. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 9–33. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. “Margaret Mitchell’s Feminist Farm Fantasy: Gone with the Wind.” Female Pastoral, Women Writers Re-visioning the American South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1991. 43–64. Heath, James Ewell. “Publisher’s Notice, Southern Literature.” Southern Literary Messenger 1.1 (1834): 1–3. O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Noon Day, 1969.

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White, T. W., et al. “To the Public, and Especially the People of the Southern States.” Southern Literary Messenger 1.2 (1834): 1. Williams, Keira V. “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Southern Cultures 21.2 (2015): 27–40.

Hostile Environments

British ‘Hoodie’ Horror Lauren Stephenson

There are several stock landscapes that have become iconic of the horror film at large. The haunted house, the forest wilderness, and claustrophobic suburbia are particularly recognisable as monstrous landscapes, and from The Haunting (Wise, 1963) to Deliverance (Boorman, 1972) and The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999) to It Follows (Mitchell, 2014), these landscapes have become so integral to horror as to take on a life of their own within the narrative. The importance of the landscape is explicit in the categorisation of several horror subgenres, exemplified by home invasion, wilderness horror or haunted house narratives, all of which are defined by their setting, and whose setting dictates the conventions and narrative expectations of each film. Similarly, the hoodie horror is defined in part by its use of landscape; the spaces present in hoodie horror are both rural and urban, and draw inspiration from wilderness horror, survival horror and haunted house narratives in order to create a dominant presence which allows the landscape to become a character in its own right. Not only are these landscapes visually powerful but they are also psychologically and physically affecting. The male bodies within these spaces have intense, symbiotic relationships with their environments, and this chapter will articulate not only how landscape is employed to evince commentaries on class, but also how the relationship between men and space speaks to both the history of class conflict in Britain and the contemporary understanding of the male working and middle-class bodies. In her book on the history of Britain’s council estates, Lynsey Hanley observes: ‘to anybody who doesn’t live on one (and to some who do) the term “council estate” means hell on earth’.1 Having grown up on the Chelmsley Wood Estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, Hanley’s work is an enlightening account of the perceived stigma attached to estate living, felt keenly by both residents and outsiders. She continues: ‘the crushing inevitably [sic] of the saddest lives lived on council estates lends itself to a pejorative shorthand used by the rest of the population’.2

L. Stephenson (*)  York St. John University, York, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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It is these ‘saddest lives’ that have captured the public imagination and the interest of the media, yet garnered little sympathy or empathy from either, leading to ‘poverty porn’ TV programming and a particularly poisonous class rhetoric which refers to the least fortunate in British society as a ‘feral underclass’.3 These representations paint the estate as the habitat which fosters said underclass; a dystopian landscape which has become prolific in British Horror Revival texts. The council estate plays a prominent role in the modern British class narrative, integral to the defamation and fetishisation of the poor. Its use in film and television is reliant upon the audience’s implicit understanding of the estate as a ‘poor space’—a site of both financial and moral bankruptcy. The implicit understanding of the estate as an ‘othered’ space, apart from the gentrified spaces of the city or the bucolic rural backdrop of the English countryside, makes for an effective horrific landscape. The contemporary mythology attached to the estate presents a stark, uncomfortable space with a pre-existing narrative of crime, substance abuse and violence. This mythology, Imogen Tyler argues, is a recent development, compounded if not instigated by Tony Blair’s government. She observes: ‘under New Labour…a powerful consensus emerged that council estates were abject border zones within the state which were not only liminal with regard to wider societal norms and values but were actively antisocial spaces’.4 This ‘territorial stigma’, as Tyler puts it, leads to a blanket condemnation of not only the estate landscape, but also the entirety of its population, encouraging a ‘revolting class discourse that was inscribed upon the bodies of those who lived in these abjectified zones’.5 Hoodie horror, therefore, understands contemporary workingclass Britain as a world of devolution. The working-class are characterised by moral decay, which sometimes also manifests as physical decay, and the regression of this demographic is mirrored in the dilapidation of their ­surroundings. More often than not these landscapes resemble the dystopian worlds of apocalypse narratives, and are set up to emphasise the supposed degeneracy of the space and its residents. The inscription of working-class bodies, both figuratively and literally, is a major preoccupation of the hoodie horror film, as this chapter will demonstrate. However, despite this particular incarnation of classist discourse being a recent development, the classing, and subsequent devaluation, of a landscape and its inhabitants is nothing new. In order to locate this symbiotic relationship between the inscribed male body and its landscape in a specifically British context, one must first investigate past class narratives and realities from which the stereotypes of the ­working-class body and landscape emerged. In 1865, Henry Mayhew published an early example of investigative ­journalism in a collection of three volumes entitled ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, within which he provided a platform for the poor of London to begin telling their own stories to a wider public. However, Mayhew’s work is problematic in its insistence upon identifying the poor by their physical appearance. Within the first volume, ‘London Street Folk’, Mayhew qualifies the ‘folk’ of the title as such: ‘we must allow that in each of the classes above mentioned [beggars, prostitutes, street performers, street sellers etc.] there is a greater development of the animal than of the intellectual or moral nature of man, and that they are all more or less

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distinguished for their high cheek bones and protruding jaws’.6 The implication of this belief is that the poor are inferior not only aesthetically, as suggested by the physical description Mayhew provides, but also intellectually. By likening the ‘street folk’ to the animal, Mayhew effectively removes signifiers of humanity from the poor—they become physically, psychologically and morally deficient. There is no scope here for considering the poor as intelligent, autonomous or morally sound, as such privileges are written off as impossibilities. Instead, the poor are distinguished by ‘their lax ideas of property — for their general improvidence — their repugnance to continuous labour — their disregard of female honour — their love of cruelty — their pugnacity — and their utter want of religion’.7 Whilst Mayhew does indeed speak of both men and women throughout his tome, his assertions and his case studies are often centred on the male population. His pointed criticisms of the poor’s violence, pugnacity and lack of respect are certainly gendered as male issues. Furthermore, upon his visit to a cheap London lodging house, Mayhew observes that the tenants are all male and that the majority are under 20 years old. He speaks of his concern regarding the idolisation of such penny dread characters as Jack Sheppard, the tales of whom are read on an evening for the men’s entertainment. As has elsewhere been observed of the penny dreadful, and much later the video nasties scandal, once again the middle-class moral guardian troubles himself with the leisure-time consumption habits of the poor, sure that this must be a partial cause of their delinquency. Throughout his study, Mayhew employs the medical expertise of a Doctor Pritchard, who believes that one can physically identify the ‘three principal varieties’ in mankind, and claims that men, specifically, can be categorised using certain facial features and/or skull shapes. He asserts: ‘The most civilized races… have a shape of the head which… may be termed oval or elliptical’ whilst ­‘hunters’ or ‘savages’ possess an ‘extension forward of the jaws’. Lastly, he speaks of the ‘wanderer’, with his ‘broad lozenge-shaped’ face.8 Quoting from a medical professional such as Pritchard not only lends authority to these assertions, but also effectively pathologises the poor as being genetically different, suggesting that poverty is almost predetermined by your genetic makeup. In 1876, Cesare Lombroso would use similar physical identifiers to pathologise the criminal, stating in his book Criminal Man: ‘[b]orn criminals, programmed to do harm, are atavistic reproductions of not only savage men but also the most ferocious carnivores and rodents… these beasts are members of not our species but the species of bloodthirsty beasts’.9 The conflation, therefore, of poor spaces and criminal spaces is a result of the qualification of the poor and the criminally disposed as a species apart. Following this route of thinking, the poor space becomes a habitat, a zone which must be quarantined to prevent a contagion of crime and poverty from spreading to the higher classes. The language used by Lombroso, Pritchard and Mayhew requires the use of such medicalised terms to articulate the necessity of enforced separation; just as would be necessary were there an outbreak of disease. By marking the poor as physically different, the disparity in fortunes between the richest and poorest is made reassuringly visible for the middle- or upper- class reader. We can see the same kind of codification applied to the working-class

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space, a space of darkness and decay juxtaposed with the light and progress of the upper-class space. The symbiosis between body and space in class narratives works to distance both from the rest of society. Pritchard, as a medical professional, legitimises the need for solid differentiations between the classes, as Swafford articulates: ‘By putting the poor on display, late-Victorian slum narratives work to solidify and naturalize the boundaries of class’.10 In this way, the paternalism for which Mayhew has been commended is no less damaging than the condemned discourse used by the Blair government over a century later, encouraging the public to accept the inevitability of poverty and poor behaviour within certain British landscapes. Mayhew’s London slums have made way for the modern ‘sink estate’, yet the perception of these spaces, and the rhetoric that surrounds them, remains markedly unchanged. All of the concerns communicated in Mayhew’s work remain the subject of political debate to this day. He notes the poor quality of the education afforded to poor areas, the lack of opportunity and fears that some ‘vagrants’ may be taking advantage of, and abusing, the Ward house system—a ‘benefit’ that was supposed to support men whilst they searched for work. Mayhew, for all his derogatory observations and beliefs, does recognise these failings to be, at least in part, the responsibility of the state and the higher classes. Mayhew could therefore be considered as a social realist long before the cinematic movement came to be. His attempt to shed light on the world of London’s poor is as tonally misguided and voyeuristic as the class tourism and spectacle Andrew Higson recognises within certain social realist films.11 The hoodie horror film, taking its lead from the widely revered social realist tradition, exemplifies the long-standing British fascination with, and fear of, working-class spaces and stories. The hoodie horror is in many ways reminiscent of the Victorian slum narrative, both in its treatment of its subject, and in the context which seemingly inspired it. Both hoodie horror and the slum narrative found popularity during a time of economic insecurity and societal shift, both highlighting concerns around the urban poor. As Kevin Swafford observes of the slum narrative: we might speculate that as [Victorian] Britain faced the horizon and reality of economic decline… The narrative focus upon empire, the condition of the working-class, slum life, and, to some extent, full-scale class conflict served a variety of social and historical purposes, not the least of which was to provide imaginary and symbolic solutions to real social problems in ways that were palatable and reassuring to the status quo.12

This claim highlights the need to consider the hoodie horror film not just as coincidentally similar to the slum narrative, but as part of a cyclical historical phenomenon: the attempt to work through and respond to economic crises via an examination of contemporary social conflicts. As Britain lingered on the precipice of the 2008 financial crash, hoodie horror gained momentum (Eden Lake [Watkins, 2008] kick-started the cycle, fully realising themes present in the earlier The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael [Clay, 2005] and was released just months after the crash was first reported in 2008). In light of Swafford’s observation, the hoodie horror increasingly appears to be a contemporary equivalent to the slum narrative, affirming the necessity of class hierarchy whilst appearing to offer

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solutions in the form of incarceration or murder. The narrative then becomes a tool for misdirection, encouraging the audience to direct their vitriol towards the lower end of the class spectrum, and away from those culpable for the country’s financial misfortune. It would be convenient to condemn the hoodie horror as politically sanctioned exploitation of the working-class, and investigate the cycle no further. However, this approach denies the hoodie horror its importance as an artefact, and would continue down a path of reactionary criticism which devalues horror texts based purely upon their disreputability amongst cinephiles and highbrow intellectuals, preventing a rigorous interrogation of the films and of the world they reflect. Instead, this chapter seeks to situate the working-class landscape and its inscribed bodies within a larger narrative of class conflict, of which the slum narrative is only a small part. In the interim between the First and Second World Wars, providing a better standard of living for those in the slums was prioritised, and the need for housing became even greater when almost 4 million homes were lost to the bombs between 1939 and 1945.13 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the slums were gradually cleared. However, in the early twenty-first century, the attitude towards and representations of council housing are scarcely different to the nineteenth-century portrayals of the slums; the working-class landscape today, however dissimilar in appearance it may be, still inspires the same fascination and horror as the Victorian slums. The council estate also serves as an unavoidable, unwelcome reminder of the enormous chasm between the country’s richest and it’s poorest. The hoodie narrative exposes both fear and guilt on behalf of the state and those further up the class ladder, whose wilful or accidental perpetuation of the class structure often precedes working-class vengeance. The hoodie character has inherited Mayhew’s faceless, transient characterisation and the estate, itself a strange place, enables the hoodie to remain strange to the observer. In his criticism of modern life, David B. Clarke states: ‘the stranger…was immediately proximate in physical space yet distant in social space… [this] gave rise to a new kind of virtual or spectral presence…characteristic of the stranger’.14 On the council estate, where the majority of the population is transient, the tenants can indeed seem spectral and elusive. There can be hundreds of tenants within a single tower block, but with little communal space and no local amenities, the landscape dictates an insular and isolated existence. Nowhere is the essence of Clarke’s statement captured as successfully as it is within Ciaran Foy’s Citadel (2012). Whilst our protagonist Tommy is not the only resident of his estate, the spaces he traverses are so empty, and his exchanges with others so devoid of connection or emotion, that one could be forgiven for thinking that the estate was a post-apocalyptic landscape. Any genuine, human connection Tommy experiences with another person is fleeting and often ends in death, an extreme allegory for the challenge of sustaining meaningful relationships within such an isolated and isolating landscape. Conditions being as they are, it is simpler and less traumatic to remain strangers to each other. Hoodie horrors such as Citadel, Comedown (Huda, 2012) or Community (Ford, 2012) allege that the state has exercised a manipulative control over working-class bodies, using the estate

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space as a kind of quarantine zone for the necessary, but abject, lower classes. Tommy’s estate, whilst largely unoccupied and left to rot, is denied demolition or rejuvenation. Instead, the state persists in housing vulnerable people, such as Tommy and his newborn child, in buildings that are not fit for the purpose. In Community, we see an entire estate’s population supporting and perpetuating a drug ring, with the only interference coming from liberal filmmakers who are easily disposed of. State surveillance in this instance is conspicuously absent, as though the estate has become an island, governed by its own and abandoned by the institutional structures that originally created it. The estate has become a space which stunts social mobility and keeps the working-class firmly at the bottom of the ladder, and the powers that be advocate the preservation of this landscape precisely because it encourages crime and moral bankruptcy. The estate landscape allows the state to justify its vilification of the working class, and prevents the bottom from falling out of Britain’s entrenched class hierarchy. Furthermore, whatever world there may be outside of the estate is completely unknown and unacknowledged. There is no discernible relationship between the estate and the outside world, as close as it may be, and this is a pattern which continues across many hoodie horror texts. The estate is the perfect tool to exemplify this paradox, being a space which is so often in immediate proximity to ­middleclass communities, and yet always apart from them. The boundaries between these classed spaces are permeable, but—in hoodie horror at least—rarely crossed. In literal terms, the distance between the estate and what surrounds it can be a matter of metres, but within hoodie horror the estate functions in much the same way as the Nostromo in Alien (Scott, 1979) or Summerisle in The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) Once the threshold is crossed, the protagonists become aware that they do not belong, finding themselves trapped within the confines of the estate. Jack Halberstam argues that: ‘skin houses the body and it is figured in the Gothic as the ultimate boundary… slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster’.15 In the hoodie horror film, not only can this analysis be applied to literal, physical skin, but it also can be further put to use in analysing the estate. As a body of class significance itself, the perimeters of the estate can be imagined as the skin to which Halberstam refers. As with the skin on the human body, the ‘skin’ of the estate is made up of several layers of meaning. For example, the estate in Community has multiple literal and figurative boundaries. A road runs parallel to the estate, separating it from the nearest town and the surrounding countryside, and inside of that, a band of woodland also forms a barrier. The estate has also gained a fearful reputation of mythological proportions which surrounds and isolates it from the larger landscape. Finally, the patchwork of fences and garages on the periphery of the estate adds yet another layer to the skin which isolates the estate as a cohesive body from the outside world. This ‘ultimate boundary’ between two differently codified spaces is c­ onstantly penetrated by those who leave the estate, and those who enter it (usually uninvited). This constant movement and violation of the estate’s skin weakens it, threatens to destroy it, making it redundant in containing or concealing what

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is within. The estate’s perimeters, therefore, create the monster, which serves as a constant reminder of the fragility of a boundary as exposed and permeable as skin. It is the potential of the skin to fail in its duties that gives it its monstrous status. The estate’s potential to allow the working-class beyond its boundaries, or failure to keep them within, creates a monstrous body. The idea of multiple boundaries can also allude to the idea of the landscape and its boundaries being sutured together. Community director Jason Ford noted himself that his intention for the film was to create ‘a Frankenstein picture about modern day Frankenstein monsters’.16 The act of suturing in the literal sense is a mainstay of horror, and the image of abstract pieces being brought together to form a monstrous whole has been reworked time and again, most notoriously for the antagonists of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991). In hoodie horror, the suturing does indeed happen to human bodies, as we will later explore, but the suturing of the estate is equally evident. Considering Community or Comedown and their estate landscapes, each is notable for its haphazard, chaotic appearance. The various buildings are distinctly council-built in style, and yet the sum of the parts is not aesthetically cohesive—different heights and age of buildings affords the impression of disparate parts being pulled or sutured together. This suturing also suggests that the isolation of the estate, and its incompatibility with the world around it, has developed over time, with greater, newer boundaries joining with the old. In the broader, more figurative idea of the cinematic suture, as explored by Kaja Silverman, the audience become the suture, effectively stitching themselves into a subject position within films where they, as subject, do not exist.17 This encourages the audience to forget the camera’s presence and suspends the artificiality of the cinematic experience. The meaning is made at the joining of the two disparate parts, each needs the other to exist in interpretation. Unpacking this idea with regard to the sutured landscape of the council estate, the intruder is therefore characterised as suture—inserting themselves into the signifying space and giving themselves meaning. As Silverman notes, however, this pursuit of meaning comes at the expense of being.18 What it was to ‘be’ middle-class outside of the signifying space ceases to matter, and the middle-class suture invariably ceases to exist inside of the estate. The middle-class visitors to estates in Harry Brown (Barber, 2009), Community and Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011) find themselves in a place where their ­middle-class identities, and the perceived privileges and wealth that come along with them, crumble or are punctured and dismantled, along with their bodies and other signifiers of their status. The middle-class protagonist does not belong in the ­working-class landscape, and the structures and expectations that would protect them elsewhere were abandoned at the threshold to this unheimlich space. Life appears to lose its value—there is very little to attribute value to the working-class body here, and the middle-class body, particularly to Community’s drug-addled antagonists, is merely a commodity. Often the value of the middle-class male body is perceived as superficial and external to the body itself—denoted by a nice car, an expensive video camera, or designer sunglasses, all of which take on a kind of phallic resonance in the signification of power and maleness. The working-class

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man is seen to covet these possessions far more than the middle-class body itself. We therefore witness a self-inflicted devaluing of middle-class life and the ­middle-class body in the pursuit of a consumer-driven image of middle-classness. In her response to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, Hanley acknowledged that the architecture itself has the symbolic power to erode individual identity to such an extent that class identifiers become irrelevant. Inhabiting space within these structures is enough to invite indifference and contempt from the state and the wider public. In articulating the particular stigma attached to social housing architecture, and how it puts residents in danger, Hanley observes: ‘It’s the perception of social housing, particularly high-rise, as being “for poor people” that leads to the maltreatment of residents, regardless of their class or income’.19 This statement, when considered in conjunction with the estate’s characterisation in hoodie horror, paints a picture of a landscape so tainted by public perception and state neglect, that it poses a danger to any and all within that landscape, w ­ orkingclass or middle class, employed or unemployed, resident or non-resident. The tower block, in particular, is a central focal point in many hoodie horror narratives; perhaps precisely because of how powerfully it signifies class in the public imagination. As a setting for hoodie horror, the tower block is a gothic gift; floor upon floor of endless corridors and identical flats, mimicking the anxiety-inducing characteristics of the labyrinth. The unstable, unusual and disturbing behaviour of residents of the estate in hoodie horror support Hanley’s concern that the estate ‘has insanity designed into it’.20 As Hanley notes, the standard design of council-owned housing works to instantly codify the building as ‘council’ and this design typically relies on row upon row of uniform houses encircling a brutalist tower block. The uniformity of such designs creates a landscape where, to the outsider at least, each street, house and corridor can look the same. Council estate architecture, therefore, is an ideal contemporary gothic landscape, an urban labyrinth where tales of violence and entrapment reside. Like the trope of the haunted castle, the tower block is visually imposing, and its influence and mythology extend beyond its walls, achieving a notoriety that keeps most intruders at bay. Additionally, many of these buildings are in a state of disrepair, and many await an uncertain future as the effects of gentrification seep into city estates. In both Comedown and Tower Block (Nunn & Thompson, 2012), the shadow of gentrification is directly addressed, with each narrative making a centre point of a condemned tower block, bought up by developers and destined to become middle-class space. These reclaimed spaces quite literally throw shadows over the estates below, a visual metaphor for the so-called regeneration of working-class space, which succeeds in driving out working-class residents and moving in the middle classes. As once notorious estates, such as the Thamesmead, are bought up to become artist’s housing, or apartments for young professionals, the obsolescence of the working-class space seems increasingly possible. Once again, the estate and its residents are seen only as commodities, as potential business ventures, compounding the resonance of such spaces being labelled ‘brutalist’. Owen Hatherley suggests: ‘the remnants of brutalism are in the popular imagination precisely what the old slums always were

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— places of crime and intrigue, places where you could easily get lost, where strange people do strange things, and from whence revolt and resistance might just emerge’.21 It is this fear of revolt and resistance which we see exaggerated and allegorised in hoodie horror. Tower Block uses the brutalist landscape to particularly claustrophobic effect. The last remaining residents of a condemned block, due to be demolished to make way for a gentrified middle-class space, are targeted by a lone sniper. It transpires that the sniper is the father of a teenage boy, murdered in the block a year previous. The residents did not act to help the boy, and as punishment find themselves trapped on the top floor, imprisoned in the space that is supposed to be their home. This entrapment is particularly lethal for the men of the block, who desperately try to salvage some of their tough, fearless exterior as the prospect of death edges ever closer. Kurtis, played by hoodie horror regular Jack O’ Connell (Eden Lake, Harry Brown), is a particularly fascinating character in this regard. Initially performing the same thuggish, alpha male role as O’Connell had undertaken for Brett in Eden Lake, Kurtis’ posturing does eventually erode to reveal a moral code and a vulnerability that has long been disguised under a veneer of hostility. This erosion of Kurtis’ masculine performance happens in synchronisation with his physical mutilation and alongside the gradual destruction of the block itself. The destruction of the block is inextricably linked with the male characters’ corporeal destruction. Kurtis’ adaptation, or at the very least acceptance, of the changing balance of power, is reflective of R. W. Connell’s assertion that ‘when the conditions for the defence of patriarchy change, the bases for the dominance of a particular masculinity are eroded’.22 Where Kurtis’ previous persona was built upon a delicate patriarchal structure, internal to the block, which he upheld as alpha, his adaptation is required when an external patriarchal force destabilises the block’s hierarchy. That the block was due for demolition by the external forces of state and big business suggests that even without the threat of the sniper, Kurtis’ masculinity would have been eroded eventually as the parameters of his power were forcibly destroyed by external patriarchal structures. This allegorically speaks to a prior erosion of masculine roles, identified by Andrew Spicer in social realist texts of the late twentieth century: ‘[the men’s] male confidence is eroded because they lack the traditional strengths of working-class masculinity: a secure place as the principal breadwinner of the family, and comradeship with mates at work or in a union’.23 A generation on, Kurtis has replaced the security of breadwinning with the security of superior positioning within a criminal hierarchy, and replaced mates with henchmen, which in and of itself represents the dissolution of meaningful relationships in the working-class male sphere. O’ Connell’s form for playing working-class, roguish characters across a wide range of British film and TV marks him as a pivotal character from the film’s outset—his brand of working-class masculinity suggests a tenacity and pragmatism that makes him a likely candidate for survival. As the siege begins, Kurtis cuts a desperately unlikeable character. His swagger and notoriety as the block’s drug dealer marks him as dangerous and unpredictable When he discovers that Mark and Gary, two of his associates, are responsible for the death of the

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sniper’s son he exacts his own brand of vigilante justice. It is unclear whether this justice is meted out on the behalf of their victim, or Kurtis himself, who is angered that his henchmen have endangered him by acting without his authorisation. Kurtis challenges Mark, who is already suffering with a gunshot wound to the leg, to fight him—a cruel and deliberate move by Kurtis to make a fool of Mark and reassert his authority. The scene ends with Kurtis quite calmly throwing both Gary and Mark into the sniper’s line of fire, apparently unaffected by the violence he is a party to. Many of the characters in estate-based hoodie horrors seem to have a similar blasé attitude to violence, and it is represented as an inevitable consequence of an environment whose hierarchies and profits grow from gang activity and the drug industry. Not only this, but it also suggests that a wider violence in the form of state negligence and police brutality hardens estate residents to what would otherwise be exceptional, violent circumstances. During the narrative, Kurtis effectively moves from one realm of violence to another, and it is his pragmatic attitude to the extremity of his existence that ultimately enables him to persevere when under attack. As he descends from the top of the block to reach salvation on the ground, his returning humanity and the revelation of his sensitivities become more pronounced. The correlation between Kurt’s isolation from wider society and his antisocial behaviour is clearly drawn. Moreover, his descent represents a deflation of ego and a realisation that he does not hold the power he had assumed prior to the attack. In a landscape that is not only brutalist in aesthetic but also in practice, Kurtis has always been under attack in one way or another—the landscape has conditioned him to survive an existence defined by violence. Perhaps it is only his displacement from the top of the hierarchy of violence that will provide an escape from it. The filmmakers’ fascination with the architecture of council estates is evident in that, even in the few hoodie horror films where the hoodies become the victims of greater threats (aliens, serial killers) the estate is still the prevailing setting for the murderous intentions of the antagonists. The estate’s labyrinthine and disorienting nature, particularly potent for those who come into the estate from outside, physically represents the confused, perhaps unstable, psychology of the characters within it, borrowing from a trend which Andrew Higson recognised within ‘kitchen sink’ films (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [Reisz, 1960], A Taste of Honey [Richardson, 1961], etc.): ‘place becomes a signifier of ­character, a metaphor for the state of mind of the protagonists, in the well-worn conventions of the naturalist tradition’.24 However, where Higson identified the gaze in social realism to be ‘the sympathetic gaze of the bourgeoisie’,25 the estate and its inhabitants in hoodie horror are only occasionally regarded with any sympathy, and only afforded it when the threat they pose has been superseded by a greater one. The gaze here shows not just patronisation but also outright contempt towards the working-class which was not present in its ‘kitchen sink’ predecessor. Walker observes: ‘the hoodie horrors were often discussed by the press as lacking a sympathetic outlook for their protagonists’,26 a feature which stands in stark contrast to the perceived sympathetic nature of social realism. Hoodie horrors present the council estate as a concealed, identifiable environment, even when it is not central

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to the narrative, towards which moral outrage and vitriol can be directed. Even in the suburban-set Cherry Tree Lane (Williams, 2010) the spectre of the estate is arguably ever-present; its existence insinuated in the protagonists’ concerns about local drug dealing and by the feature on a local news programme, blaring from the couple’s television, in connection with antisocial behaviour. Neither assumption about the space is flattering but reinforces the idea of the estate as the locus of the horrific. However, for many hoodies, the estate is also the site of their redemption, and so the estate remains ambiguous in its position in much the same way as the films do, moving backwards and forwards between transformative space and destructive power. As with Kurtis in Tower Block, the landscape is often seen as an extension of, or contributor to, the hoodie’s masculine power and identity. For example, within the perimeters of a social housing estate, there are accepted hierarchies of authority which would not hold sway in the world outside of this particular landscape. This link between a working-class man’s power and his landscape is articulated most often by showing many working-class characters exclusively within the boundaries of their estate (Community, Comedown, Attack The Block and Citadel). In several of these films, if working-class men are seen in any other environment, they are transformed from a leader to a marginalised and mocked individual, making their perceived authority conditional upon their environment. Jason Ford’s Community is particularly provocative in its representation of the hoodie and the estate; seemingly drawing inspiration from Deliverance and its hoodie horror predecessor Eden Lake, with its feral, backwoods dwelling antagonists, and Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) with its cross-dressing character ‘Auntie’, as well as fitting neatly into the hoodie horror cycle. The residents of the Draymen estate are similar in characterisation to what Bernice M. Murphy calls ‘the bad backwoods family’.27 Predominantly male (there is a conspicuous absence of female children) and completely self-sustaining thanks to a successful marijuana industry, the community in question is an insular and hostile one. To quote Murphy once more, ‘[t]hey survive, but at the cost of their humanity’.28 The estate in this instance is characterised more as a habitat than housing: a place that the animalistic and inhuman community have made their home. The estate is the culmination of familiar, ­anxiety-inducing stereotypes which have been consistently propagated by the media since the turn of the century. It is therefore pertinent to discuss how the bleak characterisation of the Draymen estate influences the identity of its male inhabitants, as well as exploring the possibility of gendering the estate landscape as male itself. Community opens with some amateur interview footage, within which members of the public speak about the estate with a sense of morbid fascination, echoing the American horror hit The Blair Witch Project. Their responses serve to mythologise life on the estate—none of the interviewees have visited Draymen, nor do they know the people who live there, their stories are based purely on speculation and rumour, and mimic the discourse surrounding class and its signifiers. The filmmakers ask their participants; ‘would you mind answering some questions about the Draymen Estate?’ The replies vary in nature, from banal to dramatic,

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from bickering over the existence of the estate to tales of kidnap and murder. Again, the film borrows from outsiders’ perceptions and misconceptions to create the estate itself. The buildings are in a state of disrepair, there are items of furniture abandoned in gardens, and several windows are boarded up. The houses are stained with damp and visibly decaying. Every view of them is obscured by fences, garages and wire mesh, providing one of several visually imposed barriers to the outside world. The initial shots of the estate communicate an oppressive, confining, claustrophobic space within. Throughout the film, the recurring motif of aliens, seen in graffiti and on children’s clothing, again solidifies the impression that the estate and its residents are somehow unknowable and strange to outsiders. This practice of ‘tagging’ provides a nod to the earlier hoodies who used the garment to prevent identification whilst spray painting, and represents a similar reclamation of public space by the working-classes. It also gives the estate an irreverent, post-apocalyptic feel, recalling the graffiti that litters the dystopian spaces of The Walking Dead (Darabont, 2010–present) or Stake Land (Mickle, 2010). More directly linked to British trauma, the graffiti serves as a warning to outsiders not to approach, recalling the red cross on the doors of plague victims to prevent contagion. This echoes the pathologisation of the poor by Mayhew and Lombroso, and encourages the idea that this poor population have to be contained or quarantined. However, to some degree, the residents of the estate actively encourage a continued isolation from the outside world. Whilst they may not have originally chosen to be placed in class quarantine, Draymen’s men, in particular, have used their alienation to their advantage, creating a microcosm unfettered by social expectation or police interference. The youngest boys on the estate are prepubescent—and with a period of physical development imminent, have begun to train themselves to go into the estate’s main line of business; farming marijuana and using the bodies of intruders as a fertiliser to give the product a unique potency. They are preparing to graduate to murder by torturing and killing smaller animals, establishing with glee their superiority over smaller creatures and their ability to destroy others’ bodies. Unlike several other hoodie horrors, which make a playground the focal point of the estate (Attack the Block, The Disappeared (Kevorkian, 2008)), there is a conspicuous absence of any such childhood iconography here. Instead of adhering to common ideals of childhood and youth, the boys and young men on the estate develop along a similar curve to an alpha predator. While young, they are encouraged to hone their killing skills on small prey—as they grow, their prey gets bigger until, as young adults, their prey becomes other people. The young adult men are lean and muscular in order to hunt effectively, whilst the older men are slower, larger, on account of their backseat role in the ‘hunting’ process. The animalistic nature of these characters is compounded by the way that they communicate through guttural screams rather than using language. The ‘urban jungle’ environment of the estate bleeds into the surrounding woods, suggesting a crucial slippage from civilised space to wild space, from human to animal. Their primitive behaviour is contrasted with middle-class filmmaker Will, whose naivety and clean-cut appearance eventually makes him ideal prey. The children first appear as the filmmakers arrive at the estate—their approach is not seen or heard, suggesting a predatory pursuit,

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and alluding to the ability they possess to navigate the estate unseen. Despite a clear intellectual division between the adult visitors and the children, it becomes apparent that the children have control of the situation, and skilfully manipulate Will and fellow filmmaker Isabelle to keep them inside the parameters of the estate, their knowledge of and relationship with the estate overwrites the apparent physical and social disadvantages. Despite the all-encompassing, and overwhelmingly negative influence of the estate, it does privilege the men on it with the superior knowledge of its ‘body’ which they then utilise to hunt and/or survive. In some cases, the estate and the male bodies within it begin to resemble each other in discreet ways. Graffiti on the walls match images on the men’s clothing and bodies (tattoos) and the physical uncleanliness, aging and deterioration of the men’s bodies are mirrored in the dilapidation of their surroundings, suggesting that the men’s relationship with the estate has transcended psychogeographical bounds and become physically affecting. The close relationship these representations suggest gives the impression that these landscapes belong more to the men on them than any overarching authority. Directly contrasting with this characterisation is Will. Dressed in a casual shirt and beanie hat, he has the stereotypical look of a college student, which again is a privilege we assume the estate’s residents have not experienced (with the exception of Auntie, we never see any of the characters leave the estate, and doubt that they are ever given the opportunity to leave). He is, as Murphy suggests, a typical victim from a backwoods horror—white, middle class and suburban.29 This appearance does not last long, however, as once the sun begins to set the young, feral men come out to hunt, and Will’s body is beaten and brutalised. His status does little to protect him from his torture, in fact it only guarantees it, and throughout the latter half of the film, the residents of the estate take great pleasure in destroying Will’s body, which is recognised as representative of the middle-class social body at large. In this way, Community subverts the use of the de-individualising logic ordinarily targeted at the working-class, refocusing the same irrational and poisonous disregard towards the middle-classes. Paradoxically, despite the ownership that the films’ men exert over ‘their’ estate, the very premise of the social housing estate suggests a lack of ownership on behalf of the tenants. Therefore, this sense of ownership is no more than a performance, and yet it is a performance that convincingly threatens middle-class characters. The residents of the estate are aware of the lack of legitimate ownership, and in some ways their abuse of the estate’s body, as a state-owned space, mirrors the destruction of Will’s middle-class body, a rejection of middle-class values such as home ownership, and a rejection of what social housing has become. In this way, they exert ownership over their situation, but not the landscape itself, a characteristic often associated with survival horror, within which the landscape seems to conspire against the protagonist and take on a life of its own. Compounding the sense that the estate has its own sense of motive, the ­middle-class body politic do not control the landscape either, bringing us back to the conclusion that this particular estate has transcended human ownership and has become a vast, unwieldy space that can no more be controlled than the ocean in Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) or the forests in Long Weekend (Eggleston, 1978).

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It stands to reason, then, that in hoodie horror the working-class man is equally as likely to be under threat within the estate landscape as the middle-class man. Films such as Comedown, The Disappeared and Attack the Block create spectacle from the brutalised working-class body. Attack the Block is an anomaly here, given that its narrative is the only one to feature an external, as opposed to internal, threat to the estate and the working-class (physical and social) body. This changes the dynamic between the landscape and the working-class body considerably. With the estate under attack, it is no longer envisioned as a horrific landscape, but rather as a valued home, endangered by the presence of external forces. In this way, Attack the Block is a home invasion narrative on an unusually large scale, and it provides rare glimpses of the estate as a home, with all the accompanying connotations of comfort, family and security. The block of the title can be understood as a patriarchal figure within the film, with a power and authority greater than the petty criminals we are introduced to at the film’s opening. Several shots place the gang in the foreground, with the block towering behind them, illustrating the influence the block has upon them. In lieu of father figures, who are conspicuously absent throughout the film, the block represents shelter, familiarity and constancy. When the attack on the block threatens to destroy it and all it provides, the boys respond by taking on the outside force with improvised weapons and the type of heroism that would not be out of place in The Goonies (Donner, 1985) or Home Alone (Columbus, 1990) two films which also see children attempting to protect the familial home, in the absence of parental figures. Again, as with the aforementioned films, it is only the young men of the gang who can defeat the evil—police are shown to be ineffectual, and the presence of any other adult authority is scarce to non-existent. In the absence of any assistance from a wider community, the gang effectively shed the limitations and low expectations that are pushed upon them, both by other characters and the audience themselves. In their desire to protect the block, they discover a potential for intelligence and bravery that had not been evident in their previous behaviour associated with petty crime and drug culture. Nevertheless, it is possible that the affection and loyalty the gang feel towards the block is misplaced. The tower stands as an emblem for the failed paternalism of the welfare system, and in this way contributes to the trend of failed father figures within hoodie horror. When analysed more closely, the relationship between the block and the gang takes on a darker tone. The aforementioned shots of the gang and their block reveal the real power dynamics within the estate, suggesting that the state-owned building possesses far more power and control than either the young gang or the estate’s fearsome resident drug lord. As Foucault would suggest, the tower represents: ‘an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him’.30 It is this environment that seems to be encouraging the boys into a life of crime. It is also the environment which fosters a thriving drug culture, a culture that the boys are in danger of being engulfed by. The patriarchal influence of the block is damaging to the boys, and yet it also offers them a semblance of stability. Importantly, this problematic characterisation of the block communicates the

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plight of those relying on the failed paternalism of the welfare system in Britain— the block offers both sanctuary and condemnation. The films discussed here exemplify the inherent Gothic qualities of not only the classed space, but the British relationship with, and perception of, class itself. In British hoodie horror cinema, landscapes are constantly, and noticeably, shaping, influencing and endangering characters and their bodies. The working-class body is seen as both indebted to, and entrapped by, the landscape around it, a paradox that mirrors the one surrounding the cycle itself as it treads the line between exploitation and exploration of the British class system. The symbiotic relationship between body and landscape comes to represent the long-standing treatment of the British working class as ‘other’—this relationship facilitates moral and behavioural codes that oftentimes stand in direct opposition to the supposed societal norm. For the British horror filmmaker, these landscapes have become as iconically bleak and exceptionally dangerous as the moors at night or the abandoned house on the hill. These spaces are part of the fabric of British society and British identity, and can be found in multiplicity in any town or city countrywide. It is the proximity of these spaces and bodies to everyday that resonates so profoundly within the films. This chapter locates the hoodie horror cycle in a liminal space somewhere between exploitation and exploration, between social condemnation and social commentary, which seems appropriate given the extensive discussion of boundaries, borders and liminality throughout this chapter. Hoodie horror is in good company—many of the films considered as influential texts throughout the thesis also reside somewhere on this fragile boundary between art and excess. The Wicker Man, Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) and many of their contemporaries presented extreme, exploitative imagery which has, at various times, overshadowed the insidious and incisive commentaries which underpin their narratives. Whilst hoodie horror does not perhaps match the iconic, canonical nature of these films, they do stand as important artefacts of a country struggling with austerity and a confused political identity in the early years of the new millennium. Hoodie horror has captured a very specific moment, not only within British society but with filmmaking history itself. Even as new folk devils appear to give hoodies a rest from the limelight, one can comfortably predict, having looked back across centuries of class conflict and its cinematic representation, that it will not be so long before the working class has reinvented itself and reappeared, like any good monster, within the realm of the British horror film, to terrorise the comfortable middle classes once more.

Notes

1. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (New Edition) (London: Granta Books, 2012), 5. 2. Ibid., 8. 3. Ken Clarke, ‘Punish the Feral Rioters, But Address Our Social Deficit Too’, The Guardian (05/09/11). 4. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013), 160. 5. Ibid., 162.

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6. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: The Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London: Charles Griffin & Co., 1865), 4–5. 7. Ibid., 4–5. 8. Pritchard in Mayhew, 3. 9. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (5th ed.) (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 348. 10. Kevin Swafford, Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and Its Representation (New York: Cambria Press, 2007), 20. 11. Andrew Higson, Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), 143–150. 12. Swafford, Class in Late Victorian Britain, 19–20. 13. Hanley, Estates, 51. 14. David B. Clarke, ‘Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City’, in David B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), 4. 15. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 7. 16. Jason Ford in M. J. Simpson, ‘Interview: Jason Ford’, M.J. Simpson: Film Reviews and Interviews (14/03/13). http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/interview-jason-ford.html [accessed 06/07/18]. 17. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 18. Ibid. 19. Lynsey Hanley, ‘Look at Grenfell Tower and See the Terrible Price of Britain’s Inequality’, The Guardian (16/06/17). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/grenfell-tower-price-britain-inequality-high-rise [accessed 17/06/18]. 20. Hanley, Estates, 44. 21. Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2008), 42. 22. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (2nd ed.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 77. 23. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 188. 24. Higson, Dissolving Views, 134. 25. Ibid., 150. 26. Johnny Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 87. 27. Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 149. 28. Ibid., 149–150. 29. Ibid., 150. 30. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991), 197.

Bibliography Clarke, D. B. (ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997). Clarke, K. ‘Punish the Feral Rioters, But Address Out Social Deficit Too’. The Guardian (05/09/11).  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/05/punishment-riotershelp [accessed 01/03/15]. Connell, R. W. Masculinities (2nd ed.) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991). Halberstam, J. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London: Duke University Press, 1995).

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Hanley, L. Estates: An Intimate History (New Edition) (London: Granta Books, 2012). Hanley, L. ‘Look at Grenfell Tower and See the Terrible Price of Britain’s Inequality’, in The Guardian, 16/06/17. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/grenfell-tower-price-britain-inequality-high-rise [accessed 17/06/18]. Hatherley, O. Militant Modernism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2008). Higson, A. Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996). Lombroso, C. Criminal Man (5th ed.) (London: Duke University Press, 2006). Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor: The Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London: Charles Griffin & Co., 1865). Murphy, B. M. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Silverman, K. The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Simpson, M. J. ‘Interview: Jason Ford’. M.J. Simpson: Film Reviews and Interviews, 14/03/13. http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/interview-jason-ford.html [accessed 06/07/18]. Spicer, A. Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). Swafford, K. Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and Its Representation (New York: Cambria Press, 2007). Tyler, I. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). Walker, J. Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Filmography A Taste of Honey (dir. Tony Richardson, 1961). Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979). Attack the Block (dir. Joe Cornish, 2011). The Blair Witch Project (dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999). Candyman (dir. Bernard Rose, 1992). Cherry Tree Lane (dir. Paul Andrew Williams, 2010). Citadel (dir. Ciaran Foy, 2012). A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971). Comedown (dir. Menhaj Huda, 2012). Community (dir. Jason Ford, 2012). Deliverance (dir. John Boorman, 1972). The Disappeared (dir. Johnny Kevorkian, 2008). Eden Lake (dir. James Watkins, 2008). The Goonies (dir. Richard Donner, 1985). The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (dir. Thomas Clay, 2005). Harry Brown (dir. Daniel Barber, 2009). The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963). Home Alone (dir. Christopher Columbus, 1990). It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2014). Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975). Long Weekend (dir. Colin Egglestone, 1978). Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, 1960). Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (dir. Karel Reisz, 1960).

210 The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991). Stake Land (dir. Jim Mickle, 2010). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974). Tower Block (dir. James Nunn & Ronnie Thompson, 2012). Urban Ghost Story (dir. Genevieve Jolliffe, 1998). The Walking Dead (Creator: Frank Darabont, 2010–Present). The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973).

L. Stephenson

Green Trends in Euro-Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s David Annwn Jones

As prime examples of Euro-horror films from a peak period of production (1968–1971) the four films under discussion, as well as each possessing a bewildering array of alternative titles in different languages, have been called examples of Eurotrash, slasher movies, video nasties (two appeared on the proscribed list during the relevant release period), Euro-pulp and exploitation horrors. Each of them also draws on distinctive strains of Gothic visual culture. Mel Welles’s Maneater of Hydra/La isla de la muerte (1968) reveals that modern botanical science can breed vegetative monsters as frightening as Mary Shelley’s hybrid nemesis. In watching the film, we follow a series of murders by a voracious bloodsucking plant in a mansion, crypt and overgrown chapel on Baron von Weser’s mysterious island. Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood/Bahia de Sangre (1971), often viewed as a seminal slasher film anticipating Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), deals with the most venerable of Walpole-esque gothic themes, evoking murderous feuds over the inheritance of lands including a wealthy chateau, and deploys a narrative of violence involving secret heirs and illegitimacy. In Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue/No profanar el sueño de los muertos (1974), we encounter dangerous Frankenstein crop-like scientific developments resulting in the raising the dead in a rural Lake District village (actually the Peak District) and local churchyard. There are acts of cannibalism (living dead battening onto the living) and rumours of satanism. Gothic Science Fiction is also evoked in echoes of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). In Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows/La Casa Dalle Finestre Che Ridono (1976), we follow the progress of Stephano, a restorer of the wall paintings, through a complex of incest, torture, necromantic rites and sadistic voyeurism in a ruined villa. Gothic themes are also embodied in a hidden corpse preserved for

D. A. Jones (*)  Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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devotion and a church as the site of recurrent evil. However, it has been more rarely noticed that each film is also a work of nascent Euro eco-horror cinema.

II Maneater, a Spanish-German-Italian production, is Euro-horror cinema’s most sustained and revealing explorations of horticultural collecting and tourism as forms of postcolonial intrusion and theft. In a teasing proleptic visual joke, the film opens with Cecilio Panagri’s camera resting upon neat rows of trees (trimmed and domesticated rather than hostile) on a resort boulevard and then tracking past a row of coaches. Each coach tour guide speaks a different European language. The film’s director, Mel Welles had famously played Gravis Mushnik, a florist who temporarily prospers after encountering a carnivorous plant in Roger Corman’s satirical The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). The theme of aggressive plants has a rich pedigree in Neo-Gothic literature and cinema. Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants (1875) and Swinburne’s poem The Sundew (1862) influenced H. G. Wells’s The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (1894) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). In Island of Lost Souls (1932), Erle C. Kenton’s filmic adaptation of the latter tale, the eponymous villain (Charles Laughton) reveals the threat and wonder of his man-eating tree. It was possibly the success of Steve Sekely’s film: The Day of the Triffids (1962) and then Jack Curtis’s The Flesh Eaters (1964), showing a gorier side of plant appetites, which persuaded Welles to revisit the theme of mutant plants battening on humans, this time in a Euro-horror context. In Maneater, in order to extend his botanical knowledge and save rare and blooms from global extinction, Von Weser (Cameron Mitchell), ironically a vegetarian, nurtures a garden of carnivorous plants in a protective setting and feeds them by luring tourists to his island. The tour chauffeur, Alfredo (Ricardo Valle) who ferries the small group of visitors to the island and drives them to the chateau, eulogises about the sequestered gardens to his party of mixed guests: the elderly James (Rolf von Nauckhoff) and much younger and promiscuous Cora Robinson (Kai Fischer), the botanist, Professor Julius Demerist (Herman Nehlsen), the suspicious hero, David Moss (George Martin), the ingénue, Beth Christiansen (Elisa Montés) and Myrtle Callahan (Matilde Muñoz Sampedro). Demerist chimes in: ‘This island is a horticultural wonderland’, responding enthusiastically to the idea of nature defined by human husbandry. Myrtle seems the most hard-nosed tourist, pausing to photograph one of the Baron’s servants felled by the visitors’ car as if he is no more than an immobilised part of the local scenery, but all the tourists suspect that the strange hole in the dead man’s cheek is more than the ‘incurable illness’ cited as caused by the Baron. The film was shot in a large mansion and its grounds in the Arenys de Mar area of Barcelona and the house is revealed to be a treasure trove of tapestries, statues, armorial shields and axes and dating back to the fourth and fifth century. In a speech following the first evening’s meal (composed exclusively of plants which taste like meat), the Baron regales his guests with his own vision of the

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natural world. He accepts that nature can be ruthless but is more interested in ‘the interplay of nature’ than the Darwinian survival of the species: ‘We, all of us, are dependent for our existence on the lowly earthworm’, he says, closely echoing Victor Frankenstein’s evaluation of worms as a vital principle. Yet the Baron has not left this ‘interplay’ to nature and worms. He is an expert in mutation breeding in the mould of Lewis Stadler, the geneticist (whose work emerged in the 1950s) and he has painstakingly irradiated the germplasm of the plants’ seeds with X-rays and Ultraviolet rays to produce mutations. It is clear that the Baron’s experiments are designed to reverse the usual contemporary bias where humans were routinely clearing hundreds of acres of rainforest. As an affront to the aloof objectivity of science, Cora, rapidly becoming drunk and attempting to strip, turns on the assembled men in their evening suits, saying: ‘That’s my game! I’ll tell you about nature! What do you stuffed shirts know about nature!?’ The ability of the Baron’s plants to incapacitate their prey becomes obvious as the Baron warns James about one of his paralysing blooms: the porcupine plant which releases its thorns against the perceived threat: ‘Don’t touch that plant!’ Soon after, we cut from the sight of Alfredo’s death, the chauffeur salivating in agony in the car outside the mansion, to the Baron’s twitching nursery plants and we are left in no doubt of their deadliness. The Baron’s collecting and scientific manipulation of insectivorous plants from Africa, Asia and South America, though based on a desire to preserve, is closely associated with European colonialism, theft and despoliation of native resources. The Baron’s statue of Shiva the destroyer is an admirable symbol of the revenge of the continents despoiled by Western incursion. After a series of his own ad hoc experiments where Demerist (testing the local soil with his own blood and observing a plant devour a rabbit), the Professor guesses the truth. Regretting the killing of a fellow botany enthusiast, the Baron nonetheless cannot allow this knowledge to be made public, so he turns a button in the Shiva statue and its hidden blade despatches Demerist. Cora falls victim to the killer-tree in her room, the plant making suggestive sucking and gurgling noises as it moves in on her. As the dead bodies accumulate (the Baron making one excuse after another), they are placed in the family vault by Baldi, a servant and his role as an undertaker means that he becomes wrongly identified as the killer. Eventually the Baron and David corner Baldi in the derelict family chapel and he is killed. David recalls that Baldi shouts ‘Arms’ before he dies, giving a clue to the real murderer which the heroic guest takes to be a link to the Shiva statue; in fact, it is a reference to the many-branched tree. As Myrtle is attacked by the tree, we see the plant’s murderous methods in close-up for the first time: its creeping lianas and glistening, phallic stamens which extend to pierce the victim. Beth discovers Myrtle’s body and is herself wrapped in the trees’ grasping branches. James hears her screams and rushes downstairs but is attacked by von Weser, who uses the porcupine plant to immobilise him and

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then hacks at his face with an ancestral axe from an armorial display. David, having taken another axe from this shield, rushes outside and cuts at the tree, its tendrils and trailers oozing vivid red blood. Distraught with the perceived suffering of his prize specimen, the Baron attacks David and a fierce axe fight ensues in a Mediterranean storm. Von Wesser stabs the tree by accident, saying: ‘My God, My God, my dearest, my darling, what have I done? You are bleeding. Forgive, I didn’t mean it. You can’t die!’ Of course, this is an adaptation of Christ’s words on the cross: ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me’? (Matthew 27:46) ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ (Luke 23:34) Though the initial effect of the Baron wailing for his tree is risible, Mitchell brings a surprising conviction to this scene. In trying to supplant God and manipulating his hybrid, this expert in plant breeding finally takes on a Christlike role, laying down his life for his creation. ‘I’m sorry my dearest: take my blood. I’ll be with you. Die with you. I’ll save you!’ The gibbering and spluttering of the tree as its stems ooze gouts of blood over von Wesser’s hands, the roaring of wind and rain, and the Baron’s cry of pain as the camera pulls back to show that the plant has finally accepted his invitation by piercing his eye from behind are the most effective scenes in the film. In a reversal of Prospero’s release of Ariel in The Tempest, von Wesser, scientist-magician of his island is pulled into the tree’s gaping trunk. The last shot: a high, slow and very distorted zoom moving over of the lower trunk and the baron’s drained face, is perhaps the first imagined visualisation from a plant’s point of view in cinematic history. Bay of Blood opens with a wide, diffuse focus on flashing water highlights musically accompanied by an eerie string, drum and harpsichord theme. We track along lakeside and pier and glimpse the expanse of an attractive bay. The film was shot at Lago Sabaudia and in the villa Frascati. We are then given three seconds view of upright cross (a mast), as if to instate the role of the Catholic church in the slaughter which ensues. Our point of view then begins to circle jaggedly as if we are lapsing into insect movement or a demented person’s consciousness and then see an external shot of something plopping into the lake. Early in the development of modern ecology, Bava provides a devastatingly pessimistic vision of efforts to save nature from human exploitation. In discussing his father’s film, Lamberto Bava has remembered how, at the time of working on the production, he and the other writers were starting to talk routinely about ecology though he recalls their lack of real understanding. For a period in considering possible titles for the film, the suggestion Ecology of a Crime (Ecologia del delitto), surfaced yet the production is also a study of ecology as it existed in public consciousness in the early 1970s. The film reveals a cycle of killing and mutual surveillance where characters are seen watching through binoculars, staring between leaves, shining headlights and stumbling round each other menacingly in the lakeside woods. Bava’s role as a

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painter perhaps hints at a knowledge of Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ and the Dutch painter’s manner of showing corrupt sinners circling round a lake and being impaled in highly imaginative ways. Throughout the film we are confronted by humans acting as ruthlessly as insects for territorial gain. Bava invites us to view his characters in a de-familiarised way as if through a microscope. Born in 1914, Bava saw the rise of Mussolini’s fascism and the Second World War ravage his country. Those aristocrats who collaborated with fascism and oppressed the peasant class receive consistent condemnation in his films. Perhaps it is not surprising in the wake of the 1960s ‘Miracolo economico’ with its rapid and largely unregulated expansion of industries, air and water pollution and the ecological disasters at Vajont Dam and the Seveso chemical leak that Bava should generate such pessimism. Simultaneously James Lovelock was beginning to promulgate, as part of the Gaia hypothesis, that the synergies of organic and inorganic life on earth could survive the ongoing mutual self-destruction of humans. The film is as remarkable for the range of views expressed regarding the treatment of the environment as for its graphic violence. In the film’s second scene, Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is abruptly noosed and her wheelchair kicked from under her. In a flashback later in the film, she reveals her’s to be a patrician, aristocratic vision of nature. Her killer is Count Filippo Donati (Giovanni Nuvoletti), who has previously tried unsuccessfully to develop the lake into a holiday resort and has been lured into this murder by his sexual obsession with a younger woman. Soon after, Filippo is stabbed to death and we cut to the bedroom of Frank Ventura (Chris Avram) and Laura (Anna Maria Rosati), his secretary. Ventura (‘Fortune’ in Italian,) is a callous architect, who has neither regard for nature nor the animals whose habitat will be destroyed by his plans for the Donati estate. His one reference to animal life is to ridicule Laura by calling her a ‘squonk’, a mythical beast that whimpers, a sexist jibe at women as imaginary creatures. Frank’s crucifix revealed here in a post-coital context, his murderous greed and the African shields and crossed spears (seen in his apartment later) link him to phallic greed and a Christian heritage of exploitative colonialism. We return to the lakeside with a close-up on the character, Simon’s (Claudio Volonté’s) mouth biting down on a live squid. He encounters his lakeside neighbour, Paolo Fossati (Leopoldo Trieste) an amateur entomologist. Paolo is a conservationist, anxious to protect the lake’s wildlife against the ‘devilries’ of modern development. He justifies his collecting of insects by referring to his own human, civilised values (implying his moral distance from and superiority to insect life). Later revealed to be Federica’s illegitimate son, Simon, who has been brought up largely in isolation like a wild animal, gives his laissez-faire, instrumental vision of the lake and its resources. Paolo’s vision is that of the romantic scientist yet both their revealed viewpoints are destructive of nature, even if on a smaller scale than those of the Count and Frank.

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Simon says: ‘Man should live and let live, and without any interfering’. but Paolo reminds him of his own violence against nature: ‘Even that poor squid was free once, Simon, eh? I study Coleoptera because I love them’. Simon cannot abide such sentimentalism: ‘Sure, but the squirming little creatures still end up under your microscope. Yeah, he’s dead all right but at least I eat my squid. But I don’t kill as a hobby like you do’. Our knowledge of the Donati’s murder gives Paolo’s response to this a real dramatic bite: ‘Good lord, Simon. You make me feel like a murderer’. Simon replies: ‘If you kill for killing’s sake, you become a monster’. Paolo protests: ‘But, man isn’t an insect […] We have centuries of civilization behind us, you know’. Simon counters: ‘No, I don’t know. I wasn’t there’.

He ‘wasn’t there’ because he wasn’t alive centuries ago. Additionally, as an illegitimate son rejected by the Christian church, he has been reared outside the so-called benefits of civilisation. It is a murderously humorous, haunting statement and typical of Bava’s mordant outlook that he situates his transition to films with more challenging violence and nudity within such conflicting dialectics of nature. Further insight into the film’s murders and conflicting views of nature is supplied in a flashback where Frank had formerly visited the Countess in her mansion. Frank tells her: ‘With a property as interesting as the bay we’d feel obliged to improve on its natural beauty: we could make it into a Paradise—’, a view typical of many contemporary arriviste developers. The countess interrupts with ‘-- of bricks and reinforced concrete and sewer pipes. No! I don’t feel the obligation you speak of, social or otherwise, to improve on nature’s innate beauty. I have no greed for property but I was born to this land and you cannot coerce me into selling it, nor usurp it […] The bay is my little acre’. The countess clearly lacks any notional sense of noblesse oblige or social conscience. Her last sentence also shows how she has subverted the position of God shown in Anthony Mann’s film God’s Little Acre (1958). A Roman emperor’s bust is glimpsed fleetingly as the pair talk and we see it standing by her side as she leaves, associations with Italian fascism accordingly evoked. Another vision of natural order, this time as linked to the supernatural is supplied by Anna Fossati, Paolo’s wife (Laura Betti). Regarded as nothing more than a ‘babbling’ fortune teller by her husband, she is a Tarot-reading mystic rather too fond of wine. Nonetheless, as a carefree group of young tourists arrive on the far side of the lake, she predicts their fate accurately by consulting the ‘lines of fire, water and all the earth’, saying: ‘The sickle of death is about to strike!’

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The youths carelessly tear blossom from trees and break into Frank’s home. Brunhilda (Brigitte Skay), swimming in the lake, dislodges the count’s submerged body and the killer, Simon, fearful of discovery, slays her and Bobby (Roberto Bonanni) with a roncola billhook, a good approximation of Anna’s ‘sickle’ and apt enough symbol for an aristocrat’s son reared as a peasant. As Brunhilda dies, we cut to a close-up of the sun’s pulsing orb which sets in a pink-red sky reflected in the lake, the whole of nature tinged with slaughter. Once again, the cross appears at centre screen. Another youth, Duke (Guido Boccaccini) has found an African tribal mask and spear in Frank’s house and as he and Denise (Paola Montenero) have sex, Simon impales them both on the spear. Conflicting views of nature permeate the whole film. In talking to Renata Donati (Claudine Auger), the count’s estranged daughter and another heir to the estate, Anna says that, if the bay is full of insects, the newly arrived Donatis should fit in very well and that if Filippo possessed a soul, so do insects. Reversing his previously stated views on human superiority to insects, Paolo says to Fernando, (one of his captured water beetles): ‘You live in a much saner world than mine’. Later, when Laura goes to look for Paolo, there’s a live beetle cruelly impaled on his table: a direct reference back to the skewering of Duke and Denise. Ironically, it is an accident involving Renata’s children which will restore the ecological balance of the lakeside. House of laughing windows is set in 1951 in a dilapidated village in the Emilia Romagna countryside which used to be a popular thermal spa although, at one point a hotelier confesses that the tourist trade here was always: ‘Non-existent. The only tourists were those German bastards from the 1940s’, an ironic reference to Italian collaboration with the Nazis. To bring back tourists, the mayor, Solmi (Bob Tonelli), afflicted by dwarfism, has been paying Dr. Antonio Mazza, (Giulio Pizzirani) to endorse the quality of the local water and has hired Antonio’s friend, Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) to restore a fresco of St. Sebastian, created by the mentally disturbed artist, Legnani. The church of the fresco was, we are told, used in the last war by the S.S. to store piles of corpses. Avati was evacuated from Bologna into the countryside during the war and his work is influenced by rural fairy tales and the paranormal, particularly a tale about the exhumation of a dead priest who turned out to be a woman. The film opens with a sepia tableau of a hanging man being stabbed by unseen assailants and, at one point, the knife-blade slices towards the camera and audience. Simultaneously, a voice intones: My colours are like syphilis And they contaminate everyone Oh my Lord I must purge myself Get them out – purity. There is a quickening edge of sexual climax in the words: ‘Here we come my Lord, I feel death coming’.

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On meeting Stefano, Solmi intimates: ‘We need to create a native celebrity like Ligabue at Guestalla. Without tourists this town is dead’. Antonio Ligabue is one of the most famous European naïve painters, his feral activities, self-harming and smearing his blood on paintings are important for Avati’s portrayal of Legnani, the so-called ‘Painter of the Agony’, who used to specialise in painting villagers close to death. Avati is also keen on referencing repressed memories of Italian collaboration with the Nazis early in the film and his painter’s name provides another link: Antonio Legnani was a wartime celebrity who endorsed Italian unity with Germany. The stabbing of the suspended man in the opening scene also recalls the methods of fascist torturer, Pietro Koch. Stefano is driven to the village, Pasquale Rachini’s camerawork showing the luxuriant fields of poppies yet, as the restorer starts his job and meets more of the local populace: Lidio, (Pietro Brambilla) the church altar boy and Francesca (Francesca Marciano), a local teacher, we become aware that nature is out of joint here. As Stefano begins to receive phoned warnings to leave the village, we see a boatman, tellingly named Foresti (‘forests’: ‘foreste’ in Italian) bringing Mazza samples of water at the lagoon quayside. Mazza comments: ‘There’ll be no more eels in this river’ as he realises that ‘war surplus’: abandoned equipment and machinery from the last war is decaying in the water. It is clear that ecology is, in this film, also a correlative for attempts to cleanse the psychic health of the community. As Mazza tests the waters, he becomes aware of the continuing activities of the remaining Legnani family members; he tries to warn Stephano but the biologist is pushed from the upper window of his room. Though the ecology of the area has been seriously damaged, the visual schema of the film, paradoxically, seems dominated by rampant growth. After Stephano is ejected from the hotel, the overgrown bushes on the path of the villa to which Lidio takes him to seem to close in around them. On a day’s boating after Mazza dies, the village priest (Eugene Walter) belies the biologist’s words about ‘no more eels’ by saying: ‘Fishing is good around here’ and promptly catching a fish. As Stefano discusses Legnani’s deathly legacy, he sees a woman gathering flowers on the opposite riverbank, the sun blazing behind her, outlining her figure. She is Signora Poppi (Flavia Giorgi) and the blooms which she gathers will later come back to life in sprays which she places in the church. The wildlife of the region is continuously emphasised. Lidio puts a live mouse in Mazza’s coffin to rattle around as he is buried, seemingly mocking the biologist’s attempts to revivify the area. The altar boy also eats rats and Francesca dreams of phallic snails and finds them in her fridge. When the house of laughing windows is located, its fenestration painted with lipsticked, supposedly female mouths (evoking a predatory gaze which laughs and consumes), it features a motif of flowering banks on its façade. The camera cuts from the purple flowers in church to the floral frieze in the trattoria.

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Local songs emphasise the ineluctable rounds and cruelty of nature. Francesca’s schoolchildren’s sing: Round and round the world Round and round the garden To pick a bunch of flowers This version of the traditional ‘Giroi girotundo’ song also hints at the secret sacrificial cult. Mazza had written in his diary: ‘Imagine when they started to run out of dead people’ and the singing children little imagine that they may be ‘picked’ like flowers by the concealed murderers. Francesca is subsequently tortured and killed by the surviving Legnani sisters. Lidio’s sadistic and misogynistic song about his bike being the offspring of a tricycle and a prostitute (‘what a bitch’) which glides on under the sun, crushing crickets anticipates the way he too will be sacrificed. The final revelations that a local paraplegic and a village priest are, in fact Legnani’s surviving sisters who use human sacrifice to contact their dead brother, reinforce our impression of an unholy pact between church and state, blood and soil. The ecological impulse of the film represented by Solmi, Mazza and Stephano remains frail. Solmi is the one villager who seems torn between knowing about the sacrificial rites sustained and hidden by the Catholic church on one hand and the cleansing of the waters on the other. Will his final phone call to the Ferrara police save Stephano’s life? After all, he is responsible for the bringing of Mazza and Stephano to the village and so, indirectly, for their fate. Conversely, will the atavistic hold of superstition and the church controlling the rural population and forcing them to sacrifice their children finally prevail? The Living Dead’s focus opens on a psychedelic blue and red torso to the left of frame and to the right a female African statue, with one of her hands resting on her breast. George Meaning (Ray Lovelock) is setting out on his motorbike to take this statue from his ‘Antiques and Modern’ shop in Manchester to a friend’s house in the Lake District. As he leaves the premises, the words ‘Meaning’ and ‘Closed for holiday’ are playfully juxtaposed. Much has been made of the apparently vicarious inclusion at this point of a naked woman, making a v for victory sign and sprinting from the porch of Manchester Cathedral; everyone caught in the traffic congestion seems to ignore her making us suspect that she is the fantasy embodiment of the lusts of the bus and taxi drivers. Yet we also remember the African statue, (the feminine sacred) and this glimpse of a woman in her natural state prefigures the scenes of male scientists manipulating agriculture and the oppressed and controlled women of the film (one whose breast is destroyed). As in the contemporary song by Neil Young, mother nature seems to be running away in the 1970s. Grau’s Manchester is obviously a highly polluted environment with its cooling towers, dead bird, men wearing pollution masks and taking pills and car exhausts

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spewing smoke. As George drives north, these scenes are all interspersed with shots of green countryside. In a petrol station, Edna Simmons (Christina Galbó) mistakenly reverses her car onto George’s bike, and he bullies her into letting him drive her car to their respective destinations. He switches on the car radio and they hear a commentator saying that ecological problems have been exaggerated, advising against hysteria and citing Goldsmith and Allen’s ‘so-called project for survival […] signed by 33 scientists’ as causing panic. Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen’s A Blueprint for Survival was first published in The Ecologist in January 1972, subsequently developed as a book and which sold in excess of 750,000 copies. The article, signed by prominent scientists, promoted the restructuring of society to prevent the destruction of ecosystems. This diegetic reference to the book is extraordinarily direct. In talking of his film, Grau also commented that humanity had been poisoned by a type of progress that was unconcerned about its consequences. George comments: ‘What rot – ecological problems exaggerated! Of course, when we all die, only the scientists will survive!’ It is a deeply ambiguous response since, presumably, he approves of the scientists signing the article but also mistrusts their privileged capacity to anticipate ecological calamity. Immediately afterwards, the mini is impeded by the City of Manchester Mortuary lorry which tries to stop them from passing in the narrow lane. As George goes up to up to the Lewis farm, asking for the Maddison’s house where Katie (Janine Mestre), Edna’s sister is staying in Southgate, he hears a strange whining and sees a machine in the field. It is a device designed by the Agricultural Department experimental section to destroy insects and parasites with ultrasonic radiation. Simultaneously, Edna by the river-ford below is attacked by a figure recognised later from her description to be ‘Guthrie the Loony’ (Fernando Hilbeck). The zombie goes on to attack Katie, a heroin addict, and to kill her photographer husband (José Lifante). The belligerent Detective Sergeant (Arthur Kennedy) who arrives to investigate the killing, jumps to all the wrong conclusions. In finding Katie’s heroin stash he immediately starts to blame herself and George and Edna as her accomplices in the killing. Katie suffers a breakdown and is taken to Southgate hospital. As we approach the hospital, we see a lorry with men in white costumes and uniforms removing bodies in steel coffins. Doctor Duffield (Vincente Vega) teases George with the idea of booking a refrigerated coffin for himself but alarms sound suddenly because one of the babies has blinded a nurse in the hospital nursery. The baby goes on to bite George. A puzzled Duffield says: ‘Third one born since yesterday with incredible aggression’ The babies all originate from the Southgate river area. Convinced that this aggression and the zombie attack have a scientific explanation, George goes with Duffield to view the agricultural machine again. The technicians demonstrate how the generated sound waves act on the insects’ nervous system to kill one another. Grau seems thoroughly aware of contemporary

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scientific developments. As early as 1963, Andrew G. Gordon written in the magazine Ultrasonics (Vol. 1, Issue 2) of how ultrasound could accelerate seed germination of seeds and destroy bacteria and insect pests. Grau’s film is obviously indebted to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) but the Spanish director has consciously ‘earthed’ the radiation disrupting the ecosystems in his film, the source of this menace being the English Agriculture Department rather than Romero’s outer space probe. ‘Better than DDT’ says one technician of the machine, but George counters: ‘DDT causes cancer’, referencing Rachel Carson’s environmental study Silent Spring (1962). ‘If you want to go back to nature’, replies the operator ‘Why don’t you find yourself a nice, quiet Pacific atoll?’ ‘Oh great’. George replies: All I’d have to worry about then would be atomic fall-out’ referring to the infamous Bikini atoll bomb tests. After recognising Guthrie’s picture in a newspaper, George and Edna investigate his grave in a local church. In some of the most chilling scenes in the film, the couple find themselves in a locked vault attacked by Guthrie. George stabs him repeatedly with a stave but the zombie seizes a spade and sends George sprawling. Guthrie marks the closed eyelids of the dead with blood to revive them in a kind of parody of the Christian rites. More of the corpses arise. Craig (Giorgio Trestini), a policeman instructed to follow the couple, arrives and rescues Edna. Pursued by the zombies, the trio take refuge in the church. As this episode develops, the references to a Christianity which, at best, has allowed the ecological cataclysm to occur and, at worst has bolstered the reactionary forces of the establishment, multiply. One zombie prises up a cross-shaped headstone to batter the church-door. George says: ‘Christ, there’s no way out […] Christ only knows what brought them back to life again!’ which would be weak puns if it weren’t for the ecclesiastical setting and the travesty of resurrected life surrounding the church. Nevertheless, it is in the church setting that George guesses that humans, like cut flowers, might survive for a short time after they die and that the radiation is using this vestigial life to create zombies. Craig is cannibalised but George manages to burn the zombies and he and Edna escape. At the start of the film, George is seen as something of a selfish and sexist young thug but, as the action develops, we see his compassion for Edna and the accuracy of his judgements about the source of the zombies; as his surname denotes, the meaning of the film does rest with him. He runs to the Lewis Farm and smashes the radiation machine. Ironies increase as a coroner who accompanies Kennedy to the site of the slaughter at the church, associates the young couple with Satanists who vandalise cemeteries. Later, when George is temporarily captured, his African statuette is used to bolster this connection, revealing the Detective Sergeant’s overwhelming cultural ignorance. As the undead multiply and the action grows more frenetic, Kennedy’s policeman becomes increasingly focussed upon George and Edna as his enemies,

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mirroring the contemporary resurgence of Spanish reactionary forces against the so-called permissive generation, that ‘permissive rot’ as the policeman terms it. Meanwhile the Agriculture Dept. men have switched the machine back on and it now has a range of five miles. As the bodies of zombies are taken to the hospital, so they come back to life and infect other corpses. In one of the funniest and darkly self-reflexive moments of the film, a hospital receptionist (Isabel Mestre) talks on the phone to her friend unaware of the zombies behind her: ‘So how was the film?’ she asks, painting her nails ‘Tell me all about it’ as if inviting the cinema audience to pass judgement on the film they are viewing. She is as oblivious to her danger as Grau perhaps feels his audience is to the real ecological threat. A zombie looms forward and strangles her with the phone flex as another tears off her breast, a moment towards which we have moving since the opening scenes. Kennedy finally kills George and we cut to a future scene where the policeman is lauded as a hero by the public. Returning to his hotel room, passing fields where the Agricultural machine still operates, he climbs to his room only to be killed by a newly zombified George. The final shot is of the radiation machine’s red turret with rotating lights, the most dystopian of endings. As in Maneater and Bay, the human urge to improve nature and create a wonderland or paradise has given rise to horrifying nightmares. As late in the development of Euro-horror as Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985), we see the influence of Bava’s Bay most tellingly in the figure of Argento’s entomologist, Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance) and Jennifer Corvino’s (Jennifer Connelly’s) power over insects. Yet it is rare to find such an intensity and range of interest in ecology in horror films created over such a short period as the ones discussed here. At the very least, such a convergence deserves our critical attention. From Darwinian themes to concern for ecosystems, from ultrasonic pollution to direct citation of environmentalist theory, these works are remarkable in their emphasis, formulation and reappraisal of eco-issues. Critics have often been drawn to the graphic violence of these productions, to their visual impact and to their relative positions in the development of different strains of horror. Yet each also draws a great deal of its power from anxieties and foreboding about natural cataclysm. They are green screams still heard from that which was, in its own day, a new horizon of fear.

Filmography Bay of Blood/Bahia de Sangre, dir. Mario Bava, 1971. The Day of the Triffids, dir. Steve Sekely, 1962. The Flesh Eaters, dir. Jack Curtis, 1964. Friday the 13th, dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980. God’s Little Acre, dir. Anthony Mann, 1958. The House with Laughing Windows/La Casa Dalle Finestre Che Ridono, dir. Pupi Avati, 1976.

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Island of Lost Souls, dir. Erle C. Kenton, 1932. The Little Shop of Horrors, dir. Roger Corman, 1960. The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue/No profanar el sueño de los Muertos, dir. Jorge Grau, 1974. Maneater of Hydra/La isla de la muerte, dir. Mel Welles, 1968.

Ecocriticism and the Genre Emily Alder and Jenny Bavidge

This chapter explores an urgent and topical dimension to Gothic studies—the ecogothic. Definable on the one hand as attentiveness within and by gothic texts to that thing we call ‘nature’, ecogothic is also a mode of thought, one both critical and enabling, and an ethical stance. We begin by tracing a route through the varied terrain of the ecogothic, from its places of emergence to where it might lead, and end with a series of three case studies through which we explore some frameworks of ecogothic thought. Gothic stories and horror narratives have traditionally given us a mode in which to confront, allay, or even to laugh at our fears. But how does Gothic, and perhaps even more so horror, that guiltiest of genres, make a claim to be a space fit to host questions of environmental justice or to bear witness to the real-world horrors of extinction or geocide? In justifying the study of ecogothic we might find ourselves bumping into some familiar objections to the study of Gothic in general: in the face of the existential threat of climate disaster and the terrors of environmental degradation, isn’t it hopelessly indulgent to enjoy horror stories about that horror? As Catherine Spooner has suggested, there has been a tendency to justify the study of Gothic with reference to its ‘utility’, a need to prove that ‘it is instrumental to some larger good’.1 Defenders of Gothic argue that it is transformative and transgressive, that it is cathartic and a necessary expression of the repressed of any era, that it holds the potential for an ethical encounter with otherness that deseats the primacy of the human, the unitary subject, or the master culture. These are claims which have a strong synergy with the aims and effects of ecocriticism. In common with other analyses of gothic texts, ecocritics can ask what it is that can be said in the gothic mode that could not be brought into representation by

E. Alder (*)  Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Bavidge  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_14

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any other genre or style of writing. Given the disciplinary affinities in ecocriticism with the sobrieties of nature writing and literary realism, some ecocritics have been sceptical about what gothic narratives and motifs might have to offer: in his entry on ‘Environment’ in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, Greg Garrard identifies a potentially powerful source of ecological thinking in queered or postcolonial questioning of human/non-human categories in some gothic works, but dismisses those which belong to the genre of fantasy, arguing that the stock characters of ‘supernatural melodrama’ such as vampires and werewolves ‘contribute little to environmental discourse beyond shallow stereotyping of the “beast within”’.2 Ecocritic Richard Kerridge argues that ecocriticism seeks out work or identifies those elements in work which promotes ‘care’ in readers: care for the environment, care for each other, care for the powerless. No one genre, he suggests, will be capable of effecting this change on its own and the job of ecocriticism should be to ask what any given work or genre is doing to move us out of the impasse caused by the onset of a fearful paralysis in the face of a frightening future. In his essay ‘Ecocritical Approaches to Form and Genre’ Kerridge divvies up the work that can be done by different forms and genres: ‘stark literary realism’ and ‘confessional literary poetry’, he argues, can best address the evasions and ‘splitting’ (itself a good gothic motif) that result from this paralysing fear.3 Kerridge also champions the powers of literary realism and of nature writing as the forms most likely to awaken positive social action and acknowledges the experiments of avant-garde practices and the modernist ‘open field’ practice of poets such as Harriet Tarlo or Peter Riley, which offers the reader an encounter with the material world beyond the lyric-human perspective. Gothic writing does not feature in Kerridge’s analysis of different genres’ responses to climate change and their efficacy in bringing about a response, and he is uneasy about the inclusion of disaster narratives, SF, and horror. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its subsequent film adaptation (2009) are cited as a prime example of the latter; its gruelling catalogue of terrors is ‘reminiscent of sadistic slasher movies’. There is a concern here over the ethics of darkness in literature, but, nevertheless, widening the remit of what ecocriticism is prepared to examine might find room even for those slasher movies as part of its enquiry. Recent critical work in ecogothic foregrounds a range of uses for the Gothic in ecocritical thinking and understands that different kinds of learning emerge from the study of gothic texts. The primary job of gothic ecocriticism might be to spot an ecophobic motif or narrative structure, but alongside the diagnosis of our ambivalent relationship to the natural environment is a separate set of concerns identifying fearfulness and anxiety as motivating forces that break free of a simple rehearsal of nightmare scenarios. Andrew Smith and Bill Hughes, for example, describe the scope of enquiry in their essay collection EcoGothic (2013) as both ‘the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism’ and ‘an ecologically aware Gothic’.4 The distinction is worth dwelling on because it signals the way ecogothic identifies and analyses gothic traces in texts inflected by environmental or other natural sciences, as well as examining the non- or more-than-human world in texts already enrolled to a gothic or horror mode.5

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The essays in EcoGothic draw a variety of environmentalist conclusions from their study of gothic texts. For example, Lisa Kröger describes a ‘Gothic ecology’ derived from early gothic novels as ‘one that suggests it is best for humanity and nature to live harmoniously with one another’6; Catherine Lanone hopes that ‘EcoGothic narratives may be able to shock capitalist logic into changing while there may still be time’.7 Gothic texts may awaken us to other ways of being, William Hughes argues, in ‘the possibility of rapturous, fully engaged experience which is otherwise not available to us’.8 Elsewhere in the volume, gothic fears may be ‘revalued’ when they bring to light erased histories buried by ‘colonial overtones, biases and cultural erasures’.9 Other conclusions are even more concrete, where they identify the advocacy of environmental causes in the work of authors such as Margaret Atwood, where ecogothic becomes part of a narrative drive to ‘critique environmental destruction and advocate restoration’.10 More generally, a feeling often emerges from work in ecogothic that in exposing ourselves to ourselves, in all-out fearfulness and monstrosity, we move closer to ‘understanding our own ambivalent relationships to the environments in which we live’.11 There are important ethical moves going on in gothic tellings, to which we’ll return. Ecogothic has been around longer than it has been named, but Smith and Hughes’s collection helped to cohere it as a critical term that has since gained considerable traction.12 Writers and scholars recognise Gothic, Eleanor Byrne summarises, ‘as always already “green” literature’ in which the more-than-human world possesses agencies of its own.13 Through its sublime environments and experiences, monstrous others, and probings of the limits of the human body and self, the gothic mode is obviously concerned with ‘nature’. Sublime, untamed, and unruly environments—seas, mountains, forests, ruins, cities—ripple through gothic literature and criticism while monsters—animal, human, psychological, technological, theoretical—populate its pages and screens. To an extent, then, gothic criticism has long leaned towards the ecological; the difference has been made by noticing it. Christopher Hitt, in a 1999 essay, saw in the sublime ‘a unique opportunity for the realization of a new, more responsible perspective on our relationship with the natural environment’, through its expressions of ‘encounters with a nonhuman world whose power ultimately exceeds [ours]’.14 Yet the sublime’s own conventions limit it: dependent on the human self ultimately emerging successful from an encounter that never truly threatened it, the sublime ‘describes the validation of the individual through an act of transcendence in which the external world is domesticated, conquered, or erased’.15 In the contemporary day, however, we (and the ‘we’ we use throughout this chapter is ourselves and our culture, call it the west, the developed world, the global north) can no longer maintain such distance; ‘the threat is of [our] own making. And worse, the danger is all too real’. The possibility of no victory against this immediate threat, Hitt suggests, risks producing inertia rather than invigoration; a genuinely ecological sublime would ‘restor[e] the wonder, the inaccessibility of wild nature. In an age of exploitation, commodification and domination we need awe, envelopment, and transcendence’.16

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Whether we can have all three at once is another question. Paradigms that maintain nature’s otherness, with humans either enveloped in the middle or left inaccessibly outside, maintain a problematic anthropocentric perspective. Lee Rozelle, writing in 2006, negotiates the difficulty by proposing that ‘ecosublime’ texts can prompt a double realisation of one’s ecological place along with how uncertain, broken, and unfixable the world is, in order for ‘viewers and readers to realize their purpose as a niche in a realized organic system’.17 As an ecocritical lens, the sublime can move beyond its roots in patriarchal philosophies of human– nature relations—whose structures, nonetheless, persist in modern culture. The safe position of a reader or character as a spectator was comfortably distant from the non-human. It was also aligned with Enlightenment reason and its dominant ontologies: the superiority of thought over matter and the separation from intellectual man from unreasoning nature described by Bruno Latour as the ­‘mind-in-a-vat’.18 Leading to numerous other binary accounts of self and other, hyperseparation from ‘nature’ has had serious social and ecological impacts now and in the (especially western imperial) past.19 Simon Estok characterises the result as ‘ecophobia’, ‘an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism’.20 Just like these comparable stances, the consequences of ecophobia are violent. ‘Ecophobia’, Estok sums up in a recent article, ‘is what allows humanity to do bad things to the natural world’.21 And we are embedded in it. As Estok goes on (not excluding himself), ‘[o]ur participation in toxic lifestyles, our enmeshment with matters of death, pain, and suffering, is something from which we would like to have ethical exception. Toxicity amnesia and eco-exceptionalism are our guides, and we fall into their hands’.22 A form of the resultant guilt and shame is closely allied to fear in texts such as The Road, which reteach an old lesson from gothic tales, which is that the external aggressor is always a figure for the monstrous self: we really have turned out to be the monsters in this story. To examine ecophobia is also to examine our own complicity in the problem—a complicity that may in fact be necessary if we are to examine it at all (field and lab research, wildlife documentaries, and ecocritical research papers are all alert to the problems, but generating them demands certain levels of consumption and travel). What could be more Gothic than finding we are inside the other, and that other is not ‘nature’ after all, but us. Responding to Estok in 2009, Tom Hillard immediately saw rich potential in the Gothic for critical attention to ecophobia.23 Ecocriticism, Hillard points out, ‘largely over-looked representations of nature inflected with fear, horror, loathing, or disgust’, privileging more positive, biophilic representations and attitudes because gothic nature writing ‘doesn’t tell the stories most of us wish to hear’.24 Much contemporary nature writing feels elegiac in tone and speaks the language of loss and memory, while hoping for the best. It seeks to remind us of our connections with the natural world and to promote an ethics of care and a passion to protect. At first, discussions of ecophobia, humanity’s distrustful hatred and fear of the natural world, might seem to stand in nihilistic opposition to such biophilia. Estok, however, calls for the study of ecophobia precisely because focusing

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on biophilia has not worked; while valuable, he sees it as eliding an ­underlying fear of the natural world that impedes meaningful change. By contrast, ‘[a]nalyzing ecophobia allows us to develop an entirely new ethical paradigm within which to house our thinking about nature’, taking ecophobic representations and actions as seriously as we do sexist and racist ones.25 One way of conceiving ecogothic, then, is as the study of ecophobia. Where ecophobia is ‘rooted in and dependent on anthropocentric arrogance and speciesism, on the ethical position that humanity is outside of and exempt from the laws of nature’, the Gothic ‘is wont to remind us that we are shaped not only by where we come from, but by what we eat, and how we interact with the environment and all forms of life’.26 In Gothic, ecophobia might manifest as fear, or disgust, or anxiety, either overt, repressed, or displaced—such as whether the boundaries between human and non-human being are too complete or not complete enough, or a culture’s guilt or denial about its violence against non-human others or against bioregions. David Del Principe asserts ecogothic’s ‘nonanthropocentric position […] the EcoGothic serves to give voice to ingrained biases and a mounting ecophobia - fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is nonhuman’ including an estrangement from it.27 Ecogothic faces that relationship in all its precariousness; retreat can lead only back to hyperseparation. The alternative is inevitably feminist, given feminism’s potentials for promoting the kind of ethical relations between people, species, and things that just social and ecological flourishing requires.28 Yet this biophilic, utopian goal needs the Gothic, too, since the state of modernity itself appears rather gothic. Ecocritic Kate Soper reflects that in the twenty-first century we are suffering unprecedented forms of unease precisely in virtue of our new found powers to control and even create ‘nature’, and caught up in new anxieties verging on panic about the ways in which environmental ‘nature’ is, or seems to be, spinning out of control because of climate change and its unpredictable character and consequences. To add to the confusion, there is the seeming incapacity of affluent Westerners to act in any but the most contradictory ways in response.29

Ambivalence over our power against and vulnerability to a lively nature, contradictions in our behaviour governed by psychological responses as well as political and social structures, unease and anxiety—all point us towards ecogothic. After all, the Gothic has traditionally been ‘a means for confronting (safely) that which is threatening, frightful, and culturally or socially reprehensible’.30 The early gothic novels accordingly sited their frightening material at a distance away in space and time from the reader’s world but spoke to recognisable anxieties; contemporary readers of dystopian novels or players of video games with narratives set in an apocalyptic future (such as Fallout [1997] or The Last of Us [2013]) may feel equally distant and yet closely involved in the scenarios described. Gothic is a site where we can safely encounter and examine fear. It thrives on the complexities of fearful responses and shows us the fissures and blind spots in our everyday, rational minds and worlds into which more unruly unconscious energies might worm their way. It can also become a place where we critically rethink fear and try to unpick cultural ideas about who or what is considered

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monstrous or inhuman. In cases where the object of fearful or appalled response is entirely rational (we might think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987] using the gothic mode to confront the realities of slavery) then stories which involve the supernatural, horror, or motifs of haunting might be a way of articulating anxieties which are unspeakable in any other way. No wonder that unspeakabilities may be repressed by an individual, or by a culture—in this case, the facts of ecological crisis as well as, scariest of all, our own complicity in perpetuating them and our fears that escape may be impossible. But what if escape isn’t the answer? In 2019, it is increasingly evident that a safe position is no longer tenable—or no longer exists.31 Estok, Timothy Morton, Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, and others assert the necessity for confronting what is disavowed and the impossibility of doing so from a safe distance. Not the least striking feature of much recent ecocritical theory is a persistent recourse to gothic language. Shadows are particularly widespread, good at hiding the stories we don’t wish to hear, the monstrous truths we abject or deny or find hard to accept—for example, recognition of unfamiliar forms of agency: ‘the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things’, Jane Bennett notes in Vibrant Matter (2010), is ‘typically cast in the shadows’.32 Hillard draws attention to Rinda West’s book Out of the Shadow (2007), summarising its argument as the way ‘a mature, healthy, and sustainable relationship with place depends on directly confronting the shadow’ or what the psyche attempts to repress.33 In this way we are brought swiftly to gothic lands. Jerrold Hogle has argued that the reason that Gothic others or spaces can abject myriad cultural and psychological contradictions, and thereby confront us with those anomalies in disguise, is because those spectral characters, images, and settings harbour the hidden reality that oppositions of all kinds cannot maintain their separations, that each “lesser term” is contained in its counterpart and that difference really arises by standing against and relating to interdependency.34

Gothic narratives (such as Frankenstein, of which more later) enable a displacement of fears onto monstrous avatars (biological, technological, psychological), but also confront us with them, and may or may not ultimately resolve or contain them. Hogle is ostensibly not writing about gothic ecology here—yet he articulates an ecocentric ethic, a gothic equivalent of the kind promoted by feminist and postcolonial critics like Val Plumwood. A split in our sense of self, especially in attachments to place, Plumwood argues, causes the global north to disavow its impacts on ‘shadow places’ in the global south: ‘These places remote from self, that we don’t have to know about but whose degradation we as commodity consumers are indirectly responsible for, are the shadow places of the consumer self’.35 Recognising the whole globe, including the places we pollute or scour for resources, as our own dwelling place means accepting responsibility, accepting others, human and more-than-human, as entities too, and accepting damaged places. To tackle the construction of nature as Other and the homogenising, polarising, dismissive, and assimilative moves that accompany it (in other words, to counter ecophobia and its effects), requires

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a double movement or gesture […] a depolarizing re-conception of non-human nature that recognizes the denied space of our hybridity, continuity and kinship, and which is also able to recognize, in suitable contexts, the difference of the non-human in a ­non-hierarchical way.36

The Gothic is deft at double movements and at displacing anxieties into denied spaces, only to have them surface again, and it can also force recognition (by readers if not always by characters) of the other as self. This means accepting a number of premises or situations we might not want or find counter-intuitive—the intrinsic value of non-human life, the agency of inanimate things of nature, our complicity in the problems, the imperfections and vulnerability both of ourselves and of the seas and landscapes we once imagined as pristine and durable, the irreversibility of environmental brokenness. To get to this point, as Morton has consistently argued, abandoning our attachment to the idea of ‘nature’, a ‘nonexistent ghost’ that haunts capitalist modernity and impedes the development of ‘the ecological thought’, is essential.37 Instead, Morton conceives a ‘dark ecology’, an ‘ecological kitsch’, in which, using the example of Frankenstein’s creature, [t]he task becomes to love the disgusting, inert, and meaningless. Ecological politics must constantly and usefully reframe our view of the ecological: what was “outside” yesterday will be ‘inside’ today. We identify with the monstrous thing. We ourselves are ‘tackily’ made out of bits and pieces of stuff. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking to prove their naturalness and authenticity.38

Morton challenges us to understand that we have no choice now but to embrace the unpleasant, and Donna Haraway has made an extended case for ‘staying with the trouble’, ‘the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’.39 ‘Our task’, she declares, ‘is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’.40 There is not space here to go very far into Haraway’s arguments, but what we’re getting at is the way that our ecological crises call for new forms of ethical thinking, and writers find resources in gothic language and ontologies. Among other arguments, Haraway promotes a way of being she calls ‘chthonic’, unsafe monsters that make ‘fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital’, and she advocates multispecies kinship or ‘making odd kin’: ‘we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all’.41 Although Morton’s theoretical standpoint is very different from Haraway’s, they broadly concur on this point: ecology, Morton summarises, is ‘a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre of edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise’.42 Some variety of radical intimacy, then, rather than repression, disavowal, elision, or hyperseparation, emerges consistently from these theorists’ work. Gothic may be not just useful here, but essential. Adept at transgressing boundaries and creating monsters without pretending such moves aren’t scary or unproblematic, Gothic can go where other aesthetics cannot. Ecocritical attention to gothic and horror texts (including the most

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culturally and aesthetically disreputable) unearths the elements of such works, with the potential to awaken or challenge readers, to appal us into action, to help us to confront mysteries or difficult subject matter, or to articulate political and cultural trauma caused by racism, genocide, and geocide. ‘Gothic’ is not ‘eco’ just because it includes landscapes and animals or constructs and critiques ecophobia, but because an ecological stance is already built into critical gothic theory; like ecocriticism, critical Gothic draws on feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, animal studies, and post-humanism—and ecocriticism, as we have seen, draws on the Gothic too. Putting ecocriticism together with Gothic need not have taken so long, and perhaps, in practice, it hasn’t. In the following sections, we test out some of the ecogothic frames outlined here on literary examples, starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Frankenstein can be read as an ecogothic text on several scales. As a story of unintended consequences, it remains a story for our time as well as for our culture (broadly, that of the global north). In its own moment, Catherine Lanone suggests, it can be seen as a ‘proto-ecocritical text’, responsive, for example, to the temporary climate change of the ‘year without a summer’, 1816.43 We explore here the ways that Frankenstein interrogates ethical positions in human relations with the more-than-human world, using the figure of the creature to problematise those, presciently. The creature and the construction and telling of the overall narrative together invite ecological readings—Walton’s narrative provides the frame in which we position the other elements of the story, a guide to our interpretation of what we learn, and it begins with a vision of nature. Walton’s first letter, ahead of his departure in search of the north-west passage, exhibits his ambitions for the discoveries to come and his idealising of the Arctic region. In St. Petersburg, a ‘wind of promise’ inspires him to imaginative heights; ‘sailing over a calm sea’, he enthuses, ‘we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. […] What might not be expected in a country of eternal light?’44 Walton’s imagined descriptions of the Arctic reflect contemporary myths of the poles as lost Edens or as sites of access to unknown lands inside a hollow earth.45 As Jessica Richard has shown, the Arctic setting of Walton’s framing narrative is not incidental but embeds the tale in its immediate historical context of polar exploration.46 Drawn by the Arctic’s romantic lure, Walton dwells on its ‘undiscovered’ emptiness as well as its readiness to be ‘imprinted by the foot of man’ and yield its ‘eccentricities’ to the regulation of scientific observations. Walton’s Arctic, sublime yet submissive, exemplifies the natural world’s function as an empty canvas onto which human concerns, ambitions, and fears can be projected. Walton’s desires express dominant assumptions arising from the Enlightenment that the phenomena of the universe are intrinsically knowable and will ultimately give up their secrets to the steady advance of science, of which exploration was a significant tool; nature will bend to human mastery and control as natural philosophers, in the words of M. Waldman, ‘penetrate into the recesses of nature and shew how she works in her hiding places’.47

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The parallels between Walton’s ambitions and Frankenstein’s are clear, as ‘Victor’s tale of over-reaching scientific undertakings is deliberately situated against the Arctic expeditions that were about to set sail’.48 Walton’s hopes for his voyage are reflected in Victor’s belief that ‘in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder’, and it similarly requires a single-minded dedication to the point of obsession.49 The ‘inestimable benefit’ that Walton imagines he will ‘confer on all mankind to the last generation’ is mirrored in Victor’s hopes that he will ‘pour a torrent of light into our dark world’ and ‘[a] new species would bless me as its creator and source’.50 Like the men of science who have inspired him, Victor described how he ‘pursued nature to her hiding places’ and ‘disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame’.51 Relentless application of the scientific method, ‘examining and analysing all the minutae of causation’ of bodily decay, yields the discovery of ‘[w]hat had been the study and desire of the wisest men of science since the creation of the world’—‘so astonishing a power [was] placed within my hands’.52 Frankenstein’s account links his discoveries and ambitions with those Walton seeks. The Arctic and the practices of exploration form a blank canvas for Walton’s desires; the human body and the practices of experimental, alchemical, and anatomical science form another one for Victor’s. The parallels collapse snowscape and bodies into a single construction of ‘nature’ as passive, knowable, controllable, and subservient to the needs of the (white, male, European) scientist. Victor constructs his creature as much out of ideas as out of body parts, out of imagination as well as matter; Walton, too, creates the Arctic through his ambitious imaginings (Richard points to his use of poetry) and through the verbal accounts and myths that have come to him from other explorers and writers. The Arctic is Walton’s own Frankenstein’s creature, pieced together by himself, but nonetheless with agency of its own, ending up as a place of danger and terror instead of wonder and beauty. Neither, of course, live up to their makers’ hopes once Walton and Victor are forced to confront their material reality. Victor, famously, is immediately horrified at his own success as the creature he tried to make beautiful instead looks hideous, while the Arctic becomes, to Walton, oppressive, antagonistic, and deadly: ship and crew are ‘surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict’.53 Ideas about science and nature are one thing; reality is another. Smith and Hughes point out that ‘[t]he creature’s function is to challenge what is meant by nature and to erode Victor’s sense that nature represents a transcendent category of experience’.54 The creature does so in a number of ways. He is a being of uncertain epistemological status, sentient and feeling yet artificially manufactured. Often invoked in discussions of genetic modifications and the boundaries of the ‘natural’, the creature exists on a border between subject and object, both person and thing. Morton, one of the few ecocritics openly to acknowledge gothic tones in his writing, draws attention to Frankenstein’s capacity to prompt ecological recognition of the more-than-human world. For him, the creature stands for the environment. Morton observes that the idea of ‘the environment’ is so indistinct but

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enveloping that most of the time we don’t grasp it, unless something drags it into view and forces us to face up to it. Frankenstein’s creature is such a catalyst: Frankenstein’s creature is the distorted, ambient category of the environment pulled around to the ‘front’ of the reader’s view, the ‘answer of the real’ whose very form embodies a terrible split: the horrific ugliness of alienated social cruelty, and the painful eloquence of enlightened reflection. […] If a poisoned rainforest could speak, it would sound like Frankenstein’s creature.55

Like our damaged bioregions, the creature is a human creation that has turned out ugly rather than beautiful; like shadow places, he is unwanted and disavowed, but yet will not stay silent. The creature draws attention to the injustice of how he has been treated: he might look like a monster, but it’s humans who behave like them. He draws attention to the agencies of place and of things that are usually easy to ignore; if we did not, we might behave differently towards them. As Richard notes, the creature’s own approach to the Arctic does not participate in the structures and attitudes that Walton’s and Frankenstein’s approaches do. Instead, he has some intimate connections to landscapes—the Alps and the Arctic—that are surprising, because he is not a creature of them, but also serve to highlight contrasts between him and his creator. Locating the creature in sublime landscapes links him with wild nature instead of human creation. His superhuman capacity to ‘exist in ice caves’ alarms Victor, and he can move fleetly in terrain Victor finds laborious; in the Alps, he ‘descend[s] the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle’ until ‘lost […] among the undulations of the sea of ice,’ while Victor’s woes make ‘my heart heavy and my steps slow’.56 However, because the creature is not a purely ‘natural’ being, putting him there does something to those landscapes too and distorts a simple sense of their wildness or sublimity. His presence as an unnatural figure in the Arctic draws attention to the nonliving agency of ice and ocean that push back against the endeavours of Victor and Walton. To Walton, the creature is an ‘apparition’, an unexpected sight on the Arctic ice which produces ‘unqualified wonder’ and leads them to believe they are closer to land than they thought. That rational interpretation is incorrect; rather it is the creature’s unreal, artificial qualities of strength and agility that make him a marvellous figure capable of undertaking an improbable journey. His unexpected appearance here prompts a new readerly noticing of the Arctic, no longer just an imagined space of desire but a realm of interaction. In the journey through the Arctic, as he is in the Alps, the creature is better equipped to survive in the frozen world, and again, he merges with it. Trapped on the ice-bound ship, Walton’s crew can only watch ‘the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes, until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice’.57 The instruments of scientific observation prove limited against the irregularities of the Arctic ice as well as irrelevant to the actions of the creature. The crew themselves are cut off from that world, prisoners ‘[s]hut in’ by the ice. For Lanone, ‘[t]his cautionary Gothic tale suggests that Arctic regions are best left alone, lest they might prove home to mankind’s most monstrous progeny rather than a haven for conquerors’, but only if the creature is considered as

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separate from humankind.58 Language, feeling, and agency all declare this not so, but he is not separate from the rest of the world either. The creature emerges from and, in the final lines, disappears into the icy Arctic darkness, claiming it as the space of his funeral pyre and imagining his ashes mingling with the sea. An odd kinship emerges between the creature and landscapes he should not belong to, after the kinship of maker and mate are both denied him by Victor. Half natural, half unnatural, the creature is an unrecognised bridge between the human and ­more-than-human worlds, pulled into view. Frankenstein, we have suggested, operates ecocritically on multiple levels, showing the consequences of failure to redress human-nature ethical relations and to recognise odd kin at the same time as offering, through the creature, a normative vision of what else could be possible. These are conveyed as much in the manner of telling as they are in the narrative events. Greg Garrard’s short essay ‘Ecocriticism as Narrative Ethics’ posits an ethics of reading ecocritically that focuses not just what texts can do in the world, their utility, and not just what they say we should do (or not do), but how the ‘ethics of their telling’ influence us. Instead of dwelling on debates about hierarchies of form or genre, the discussion moves on to the ethical relations modelled within any given text. Garrard discusses the relationship of ecocritical reader to text as a series of negotiations and recalibrations to character, plot, and narrative voice, from which subjective experience an outward-looking politics may arise. Garrard argues that concentrating on the ethics of the telling is the job of the literary critic—not merely to criticise the form in which the author may have chosen to write but to pay attention to how the specificities of narrative form and representation of character alert us to a form of telling which is about negotiation rather than statement, looking at the specifics of the way form and address work on an individual reader without requiring them to sign up to a general theory or set of politics beforehand. The End We Start From (2017) by Megan Hunter, like Julie Myerson’s Then (2011), is about motherhood in the apocalypse, or actually it could be about motherhood as apocalypse, in the way that Emma Donohue’s Room (2010) is not about motherly love surviving criminal abduction but about love surviving the abduction of self that is motherhood. The End We Start From is the first person narrative of a woman who gives birth to her first baby just as a catastrophic flood destroys London and heralds the swift collapse of civil society. A short, sparse novel, The End We Start From embraces some dystopian tropes (in the first few pages we learn that the uninhabitable part of the South of England is known as ‘The Gulp’) but also often slips into an impressionistic, gothic mode more reminiscent of a domestic nightmare like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) than the realist mode of a dystopian thriller. The oblique narrative is cut through with brief italicised paragraphs, sections which sound like biblical stories or myths, stories of creation or destruction. Beyond these moments we have no other context or narrative for what is happening other than the focalisation of the narrator. Sentences are often elliptical and poetic; similes have a Katherine Mansfieldesque slide into odd comparisons, people are often described

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in zoomorphic terms: even the beloved baby is said to have eyes like a shark’s; the narrator’s labouring pregnant body is like a ‘gorilla’, the baby looks at his father ‘as you would a fly’. Alternatively, characters are ghostly: the narrator’s husband and father-in-law become like ‘people fading from a photograph’.59 The novel opens as the narrator is about to give birth, and a series of mysterious phrases distance and disorientate the usual narrative of such an event: the narrator fears the birth of her child as she fears death, and there are whispers of something outside the immediate horrors and pains of the maternal body. From the very first lines, similes and metaphors crowd in on the short sentences with connections to monstrous or terrifying scenarios: the attending nurse has ‘hunched shoulders like the start of wings’. The baby later ‘insists I carry him as if I am rescuing him from a fire’.60 Survivors watch television while the electricity is still on, staring at compilations of TV talent shows where the competitors step forward to plead their case, crying ‘as if begging for mercy’; when refugees arrive in the hills their noise and the anxiety they cause ‘flatten the pillow, they crush the sheets into the crest of a wave. They carry the night away hour by hour’. Like The Road, it’s a story of ‘complete terror and complete devotion’,61 and it could be described as taking place in a similarly gothic setting, although its Gothic belongs to a British rural tradition rather than the frontier Gothic which Andrew Smith identifies in American ‘road’ stories. Unlike The Road, though, the moments of horror are seen as if through latticed fingers over the eyes; the narrator hints obliquely at the worst things that happen or undercuts them with a kind of bleak parental humour—as the family flee their temporary refuge, the narrator realises she has left something vital behind: ‘Nappies’, she whispers to the baby. Louise Squire has argued that certain strands of environmentally attuned contemporary fiction are ‘death-facing’ in a way that anthropocenic culture has, disastrously, not been. Instead of fetishising the ecophobic thrills of fictions which see nature as monstrous, Squire cites examples from environmental crisis fiction (Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann (1999) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) among others), which use death as a theme to explore the limits of subjectivity and human-centred definitions of ‘life’ and seek to repair our relation with death.62 The End We Start From is legible in this way in the sense of what it is prepared to admit. Hunter’s own eloquent description of her novel’s treatment of trauma identifies a ‘kind of silence at the core of the book, a sense that the events leave the characters speechless, literally, and also that anything they do say is relatively meaningless in the face of such cataclysmic change’.63 Characters’ names are reduced to initials—the baby is known only as ‘Z’. This leaves the reader with much space to fill and the gothicised sentences allow in a different more-than-human, or ­end-of-human, maybe even ‘death-facing’ acknowledgement among the general humanist thrust of the book which wants to maintain its faith in the survival of love and care, and to pass that on to its readers through an ethical telling. With its strong sense of place and linguistic affinity with the north-east of England, David Almond’s novels for young people stretch from a mythically inflected Northumberland coast to the ex-mining towns around Newcastle, and

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track his characters’ journeys towards self-knowledge or exorcism of dark forces through a patchwork of edgelands and liminal places (back gardens, beaches, abandoned industrial sites). Within these settings, Almond’s stories are full of transformations, becomings and hybrid forms (paper to animal, man to animal/angel, gods, monsters), and breaks in the surface of the everyday opened by grief, desire, or growing up. Throughout his work an ethics of noticing or witnessing the emotional lives of children is matched to a concentrated ecological attentiveness, informed by an interest in dark pastoral. A narrative tradition of digging deep into the landscape and excavating the shadow side of the British countryside has long been apparent in the work of other British children’s and YA literature authors, particularly Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and Robert Westall. There are ecogothic lines to be traced through this tradition, along themes of fantasy, time travel, weird narratives, and rural occultism. Owls, pits and graves, angels, and dead gods are all part of the shared phantasmagoria of this group. Much ecocriticism of YA fiction has tended to focus on the ecodystopia and the teenage hero navigating such worlds: the Hunger Games trilogy (2008–2010), Julie Bertagna’s Exodus series (2002–2011), or Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries (2015) and Momentum (2011), for example. In Almond’s work, coming-of-age narratives don’t require the backdrop of full-scale environmental destruction but there is certainly an awareness of a post-nature cast to the world and further investigations into the nature and status of scraps of surviving ‘wilderness’. This is often narrated through appeals to an uncertain supernatural or awakening of ghosts and myth: Skellig (1998) casts its owlish fallen angel into a tumbledown shed in Newcastle, to be found by Michael, a boy trying to cope with family trauma as his baby sister lies near to death in hospital. Kit’s Wilderness (1999) tells the story of Christopher, newly arrived in the ex-mining village of Stoneygate who joins a gang led by the charismatic John Askew, who leads his friends into the village’s ‘wilderness’ to play the game of ‘Death’. One at a time they are ‘killed’ and then enclosed alone in an underground space, in a re-enacting of the deaths of nineteenth-century children who really died working in the mines. The narrator records: In Stoneygate there was a wilderness. It was an empty space between the houses and the river, where the ancient pit had been. […] Askew had carved pictures of us all, of animals, of the dogs and cats we owned, of the wild dog, Jax, of imagined monsters and demons, of the gates of Heaven and the snapping jaws of Hell. He wrote into the wall the names of all of us who’d died in there…64

A Song for Ella Grey (2014) is a reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The book believes in the myth: Orpheus is real and he comes to claim a new Eurydice—the Ella Grey of the title, from modern-day Tyneside. There are two important wild places which structure this novel, places wild in their reality and their imaginative force. In contrast to the known urban world and the family houses that contain and sometimes confine teenage passions is the urban playground near to the narrator’s home in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle and, further afield, the beaches of Northumberland. The characters grew up around this area;

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they drink and make out on the grass outside the Cluny arts centre; in the wall which runs along the bank of the muddy little Ouseburn river is a grate guarding a tunnel, and in this gothicised geography, the tunnel leads to the underworld. As an end of year celebration they head north on the bus for a riotous few days on the beach, looking for Greece in Northumberland. The wildness of the children on the beach is idealised and idyllic and forgiving. Its glamour is rough-edged but Almond writes of the adolescent experience of the natural world as ecstatic, visionary, and epic. Later, they’ll return to the same spot to marry their Ella to the mysterious Orpheus who appears among them. The music moved our bodies and we danced. We felt it thrumming in our chests and throats. [...] We felt it running with our blood. We felt it scattering out thoughts. We felt it annihilating us, turning this bunch of Tyneside kids into a single being in which we existed with birds and snakes and dolphins, a single being that blended with sea and sand and sky, a single being with Orpheus at the heart.65

The word ‘annihilating’ here is an interesting one. In one of the novel’s moments of horror, Orpheus will end up torn to pieces by the Furies but as well as such a moment of explicit violence, the child and adolescent’s apprehension of nature also contains within it an apprehension of death, not just an ecstatic communal ‘annihilation’. Almond’s works are not, at least directly, works of environmental crisis but they are ‘death-facing’ in the way that Squire defines. In so doing, Almond employs the gothic mode to talk to his readers about their place in the world and their relationship to place, life, and death. An encounter with Skellig is for the reader an encounter with an unclassifiable being and one who can ruminate on his uncertain epistemological state: “What are you?” I whispered. He shrugged again. “Something,” he said. “Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel.” He laughed. “Something like that.”66

Gothic is a mode which allows an author to say things impossible in any other register, and is a critical attitude which allows us to do a different kind of noticing, producing a different kind of ecological awareness. And its particular strength in talking about uncertainty offers another way of thinking about its ethics. If we think of Brian Massumi’s definition—‘Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together. It’s not about judging right or wrong’67—then Gothic has been dealing in this kind of awareness for a long time, both in literature and film and in the criticism which responds to it. Recent ecocritical theory consistently argues the need for a fundamental change in conceptions of our relations to the rest of the natural world, including what we think that ‘natural’ world consists in. This is a conceptual, imaginative, theoretical move, perhaps, but one that has to take place before practical changes in policy and governance can follow. ‘There will be no greening of the economy’, Jane Bennett writes, ‘no redistribution of wealth, no enforcement or extension of rights without human dispositions, moods, and cultural ensembles hospitable to these effects’.68 It seems strange to suggest that gothic moods could make homes

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for these aspirations, but as we have argued, ecogothic can generate ethical positions for tackling uncertain, uneasy, frightening times. As Hilary Scharper asks, ‘in coming to understand the role of terror and aversion in our attitudes toward the natural world (and how these pattern destructive interactions), can we make different choices for the future?’69 Gothic is a vital mode through which to promote that change in thinking, and as we have seen, many ecological responses are already Gothic.70 Gothic is good at boundary transgressing; it is not afraid to batter at borders that are normally left unassailed. It is open to mixtures or situations that are unsettling or uncomfortable or hard to admit but won’t go away, and capable of embracing what’s ‘bad’ without having to insist on reinstating the ‘good’. In its variety of forms, ecogothic has the capacity to not only enact, bolster, and critique the damaging structures and subjectivities associated with our modernity but also to transgress or subvert them for more progressive ecological ends.

Notes

1. Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London, Bloomsbury, 2017), 17. 2. Greg Garrard, ‘Environment’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 212–18 (218). 3. Kerridge, Richard, ‘Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 361–76 (374). 4. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds. EcoGothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 1. 5. Tom J. Hillard, ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (2009), 689; Jennifer Schell, ‘The Annihilation of Self and Species: The Ecogothic Sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017). 6. Lisa Kröger, ‘Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 26. 7. Catherine Lanone, ‘Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 28. 8. William Hughes, ‘“A Strange Kind of Evil”: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in the Wicker Man’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 55. 9. Alanna F. Bondar, ‘Bodies on Earth: Exploring Sites of the Canadian Ecogothic’, in Ecogothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 74. 10. Shoshannah Ganz, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Monsters in the Canadian Ecogothic’, in Ecogothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 87. 11. Tom J. Hillard, ‘From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 105. 12. A new journal, Gothic Nature, publishes its first issue later in 2019. See http://gothicnature.net. 13. Eleanor Byrne, ‘Ecogothic Dislocations in Hanya Yanagihara’s the People in the Trees’, Interventions 19, no. 7 (2017), 964.

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14. Christopher Hitt, ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999), 605, 609–10. 15. Hitt, ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, 611. 16. Ibid., 620. 17. Lee Rozelle, Ecosublime (2006), 8–9. 18. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999). 19. Val Plumwood, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008). 20. Simon C. Estok, ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009), 208. 21. Simon C. Estok, ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia’, Neohelicon 43, no. 1 (2016), 132. 22. Ibid., 137. 23. Hillard, ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”’; Estok, ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness’. 24. Ibid., 688. 25. Estok, ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia’, 142. 26. Estok, ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness’, 216–17; David Del Principe, ‘The Ecogothic in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014), 1–8. 27. Del Principe, ‘The Ecogothic’, 1–2. 28. This is a point long argued by ecofeminists as well as Estok himself; see, e.g., Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993). 29. Kate Soper, ‘Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature’, The Sociological Review 57, no. 2 (2009): 222–35 (222). 30. Hillard, ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”’, 691, 694. 31. In autumn 2018, the IPCC released a special report highlighting the likelihood of increasing global temperatures exceeding 1.5oC within the next two years. See https:// www.ipcc.ch/sr15/, accessed 22 January 2019. 32. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010), ix. 33. Hillard, ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”’, 693. 34. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 35. Plumwood, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’. 36. Val Plumwood, ‘Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era’, in Decolonizing Relationships with Nature, eds. William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan (London, Earthscan, 2003), 60. 37. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010). 38. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 195. 39. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016), n.p. Kindle edition. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Morton, The Ecological Thought. 43. Lanone, ‘Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming’, 30. 44. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), 7. 45. See, e.g., Hester Blum, ‘John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration’, American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012). 46. Jessica Richard, ‘“A Paradise of My Own Creation”: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003).

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47. Shelley, Frankenstein, 28. 48. Richard, ‘“A Paradise of My Own Creation”’, 296. 49. Shelley, Frankenstein, 29. 50. Ibid., 8, 32. 51. Ibid., 32. 52. Ibid., 31. 53. Ibid., 148. 54. Smith and Hughes, Ecogothic, 2. 55. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 195. 56. Shelley, Frankenstein, 101. 57. Ibid., 12. 58. Lanone, ‘Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming’, 30. 59. Megan Hunter, The End We Start From (London, Picador, 2017), 32 60. Ibid., 19, 61. Ibid., 33. 62. Louise Squire, ‘“I Am Not Afraid to Die”: Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction and the Post-theory Era’, in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, eds. Peter Barry and William Welstead (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 14–29. 63. Lucy Unwin, ‘Q&A with Megan Hunter About The End We Start From’, https:// shinynewbooks.co.uk/qa-with-megan-hunter-about-the-end-we-start-from/, accessed 31 January 2019. 64. David Almond, Kit’s Wilderness (London, Hodder, 2005), 2–3. 65. David Almond, A Song for Ella Grey (London, Hodder, 2014), 158. 66. David Almond, Skellig (London, Hodder, 1998), 158. 67. Brian Massumi, ‘Navigating Movements: An Interview with Brian Massumi’ (2003). Interview by Mary Zournazi, http://www.theport.tv/wp/pdf/pdf1.pdf. 68. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, xii. 69. Hilary Scharper, ‘The Ecogothic’ (2018), https://perditanovel.com/the-eco-gothic-2/, n.p., accessed 22 January 2019. 70. See, for example, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubant, eds., Arts of Living on a Dying Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017).

Bibliography Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010). Blum, Hester, ‘John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration’, American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 243–71. Bondar, Alanna F., ‘Bodies on Earth: Exploring Sites of the Canadian Ecogothic’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 72–86. Byrne, Eleanor, ‘Ecogothic Dislocations in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees’, Interventions 19, no. 7 (2017): 962–75. Del Principe, David, ‘The Ecogothic in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014): 1–8. Estok, Simon C., ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25. ———, ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia’, Neohelicon 43, no. 1 (2016): 127–45. Ganz, Shoshannah, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Monsters in the Canadian Ecogothic’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 87–102.

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Garrard, Greg, ‘Environment’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016). Hillard, Tom J., ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (2009): 685–95. ———, ‘From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 103–19. Hitt, Christopher, ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23. Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–20. Hughes, William, ‘“A Strange Kind of Evil”: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in the Wicker Man’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 58–71. Kröger, Lisa, ‘Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–27. Lanone, Catherine, ‘Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 28–43. Latour, Bruno, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999). Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). ———, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010). Plumwood, Val, ‘Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era’, in Decolonizing Relationships with Nature, eds. William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan (London, Earthscan, 2003), 51–78. ———, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008): n.p. Richard, Jessica, ‘“A Paradise of My Own Creation”: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 295–314. Rozelle, Lee, Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2006). Scharper, Hilary, ‘The Ecogothic’ (c. 2018): n.p., https://perditanovel.com/the-eco-gothic-2/, Accessed 22 January 2019. Schell, Jennifer, ‘The Annihilation of Self and Species: The Ecogothic Sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1996). Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds., EcoGothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013). Soper, Kate, ‘Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature’, The Sociological Review 57, no. 2 (2009): 222–35. Spooner, Catherine, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London, Bloomsbury, 2017). Squire, Louise, ‘“I Am Not Afraid to Die”: Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction and the Post-theory Era’, in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, eds. Peter Barry and William Welstead (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 14–29. Unwin, Lucy, ‘Q&A with Megan Hunter About The End We Start From’, https://shinynewbooks. co.uk/qa-with-megan-hunter-about-the-end-we-start-from/, Accessed 31 January 2019.

The Wilderness Kaja Franck

The Gothic has been particularly effective in disseminating a visual language which has insinuated itself into the human psyche. Though the Gothic may be defined as more mode than genre, it is not difficult to identify its use in modern culture.1 The idea of a gothic landscape or animal brings to mind a clear set of images—wolves, bats, ravens, bears living amongst darkened forests, craggy mountains, windswept moors and frozen tundra. Fred Botting suggests that the gothic landscape can be defined by its remoteness and, in particular, its wilderness.2 Central, then, to the (eco)Gothic is the idea of the ‘wilderness’: defining what is and is not wilderness helps humanity define itself. Wilderness exists in opposition to civilisation, wild animals in opposition to humans. These simple binary structures help to demarcate places that are safe for humankind and those areas, and species, that threaten us. The wilderness is to be tamed, overcome and survived with the hope of creating a fruitful landscape in which civilisation can flourish. As ecological concerns regarding the human impact on the natural world move to the cultural forefront, combining ecocriticism and animals studies with the analysis of the Gothic has offered a prescient way of looking at how humanity perceives our places and spaces. Ecogothic as a contemporary field of study serves as a timely reminder that human fear can have lasting repercussions on that which engenders it. This chapter considers how the idea of the wilderness has impacted both human imagination and behaviour, bringing the wilderness from a zone of liminality to the very heart of the ecogothic. The idea of fearing the wilderness and the creatures within can be broadly described using Simon Estok’s term ‘ecophobia’ which he defines as an irrational hatred of the natural world fuelled by a need to control it—in particular by using (and abusing) both its flora and fauna.3 Estok’s discussion of the term ‘ecophobia’ suggests that humanity’s relationship with nature is pathological. The use of non-human resources is not objective and pragmatically utilitarian, rather it stems from an emotional and subjective revulsion to the natural world, specifically when

K. Franck (*)  University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

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untouched or unused by humans. Anger often stems from revulsion. Both terms, moreover, have a close relationship to fear: we are repulsed by what scares us and this in turn leads to anger and a need to contain anything that incites this sense of fear. Drawing on ecophobia and centralising the notion of fear, Tom J. Hillard elucidates the concept of ‘Gothic Nature’.4 In his exploration of this concept, Hillard uses the gothic idea of the Other, typically defined as anything that exists entirely outside of human understanding. The Other stands in absolute opposition to the human subject; the Other can never be comprehended, and this epistemological and ontological violence threatens to obliterate us. Whilst it is not this chapter’s intention to define the ecogothic, it is integral to the understanding of gothic landscapes, and in particular gothic wilderness, to briefly engage with some of the core aspects of this new field of analysis. In their introduction to Ecogothic (2013), Andrew Smith and William Hughes argue that the gothic problematises the Romantic conceptualisation of nature as whole, instead it becomes fractured and complicated by the presence of the human viewer.5 The concept of ambivalence, central to the Gothic, disturbs a simple, holistic view of nature; Smith and Hughes express the sense that Romantic idealism saw nature as ‘natural’, offering an escape or return to the past, rather than ‘cultural’ thereby ignoring the social and cultural significance of the word.6 Ecogothic readings reframe the sense of nature as an arbiter of beauty and truth. Nature in the Gothic is amoral, it offers nothing but what is read onto it by the viewer. The idea of projecting ourselves onto the natural world versus being overwhelmed by its forms leads us to a discussion of the sublime. Drawing on Romanticism, the sublime is a central tenant of the Gothic, particularly in regard to nature. Edmund Burke explains the importance of the wilderness in creating a sense of awe and terror, which categorises the sublime, in the human viewer: ‘it [the sublime] comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness’.7 Landscapes that are not controlled by humans or remain unshaped by humanity’s needs threaten to obliterate human consciousness. As they do not confirm to human ideas of order or reason, they cannot be fully comprehended. However, Burke’s understanding of the sublime does not lead to the destruction of the human rather it leads to a heightened awareness of the divine, acting as a reminder that humans are at the behest of a higher power. This becomes a reassertion of the human subject viewing the wilderness; in a complex reversal, the power of the human subject over the landscape is returned and human identity is never fully subsumed. In his discussion of the relationship between the Gothic and the sublime, Vijay Mishra defines the gothic sublime as ‘purely negative’, lacking a moral centre, unlike Burke’s religiously infused sublime.8 Rather, the gothic sublime fails to provide the reassurance of an All-Knowing and Compassionate Creator, offering the very real possibility that the human protagonist may be overcome. In the ecogothic, this ‘purely negative’ form of the sublime is found within the wilderness, and threatens to transform and consume the human subject, making them only object. A recent meme on social media succinctly demarcated the two extremes of viewing the wilderness: it showed a sublime landscape, pine-forests and mountains, over which has been written ‘Get lost in nature and you will find yourself’.

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The phrase ‘find yourself’ had been crossed out and replaced with ‘quite possibly die’. Amusing as this takedown of inspirational quotations is, it effectively shows the manner in which humanity has vacillated in its depiction of the wilderness—which I will return to later in this chapter. The ambivalence of the ecogothic can be argued to be centred on this vacillation: an indecisiveness in which nature offers both safety and oblivion—indeed this oblivion is sometimes offered as an escape from the horrors of the human world. Throughout the differing (re)conceptions of the wilderness, what becomes apparent is that humanity, particularly Westernised humans, describes the wilderness to fulfil their needs at particular points in societal evolution.9 The wilderness is shaped by a form of pathetic fallacy which exists beyond fictional narratives, conforming to the needs of the viewer. As such wilderness is less an actual place than a concept. That is not to say that there is no natural world but that the language of the wilderness reflects more about the viewer, writer or filmmaker than the landscape. While an increasing awareness of the impact of humans on the natural world has led to more positive depictions of nature, earlier negative idealisation of both the wilderness and the wild animals has had and continues to have serious impact on the natural world. In many ways the artifice of the Gothic does not attempt to obscure the fact that the concept of wilderness is not an absolute. However, its ambivalence towards the natural world and use of terror has also ensured that certain landscapes and creatures remain intricately connected to their most horrifying depictions. In order to consider the role of the wilderness, as both concept and physical space, and its relationship to ecogothic, this chapter considers the ideas which are central to how it has been depicted and understood. Firstly, the physical landscape, excluding living creatures, is analysed, exposing themes of ecophobia and the fear of the wilderness implicit in many gothic texts. However, the perceived passivity of the wilderness landscape, often disturbed in the ecogothic, contains a multitude of wild creatures. To these ends, it is important to analyse the role of wildlife within wilderness narratives and how they embody the fear, hatred and threat contained within the gothic landscape. Finally, the chapter considers the concept of wilderness today; particularly the effect of the ecological movements and the crisis of the Anthropocene. Wilderness is no longer something that can be easily demarcated. Instead the boundaries between wilderness and civilisation have become blurred. Thus urban locations, such as cities, have become new wilderness zones into which magical and natural elements intrude, creating new hybrid genres. It is not the case that the wilderness is always depicted as dangerous within Gothic narratives. The relationship between the (eco)Gothic and the wilderness has always been complicated, vacillating between fear and desire; the wilderness is often seen as a source of succour away from the dishonesty and violence of the human world. In early gothic novels, characterised in the work of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis, the wilderness takes a more fluid role. In comparison to the ‘purely negative sublime’, described by Mishra, Radcliffe’s use of natural world and the explained supernatural, follow the format of the uplifting sublime described by Burke. When Emily St Aubert, the gothic heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), travels to the nefarious Montoni’s castle where she

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is to be imprisoned, the landscape augurs her predicament. Near her arrival, ‘a vista opened, that exhibited the Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each other’.10 Through frequent use of pathetic fallacy, the emotions of Radcliffe’s protagonists are transferred onto the landscape which remains passive, acting only as beautiful backdrop. The explained supernatural ensures that no part of the natural world cannot be explained through the logic of the Enlightenment. Moreover, in a Rousseauesque use of the wilderness, the natural world is shown by Radcliffe to be an antidote to the corruption of the urban, offering respite in a moment of religious sublimity.11 Later gothic texts, especially those written by British authors towards the end of the British Empire, offer more cohesive examples of the gothic sublime as ‘purely negative’ and, as such, lay bare the ecophobia that is central to many ecogothic texts. Here, the human subject, typically defined in nineteenth-century Gothic as white, male and heterosexual, exhibits ecophobia towards the wilderness since it stands in opposition to all that is logical and rational within Western logocentric thought. The wilderness is the Other, implacable and unable to be known. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is a striking example of the threat of the wilderness to the British protagonist. The narrator, Marlow, explains that as a child he was attracted to the ‘many blank spaces on the earth’.12 However, his experience of travelling into the Congo destroys his dreams, displaying instead the cruel ambivalence of the wilderness. Though the novel expresses racist colonial views towards the Congolese people, a postcolonial analysis of this is beyond the remit of this chapter. Instead, I want to concentrate on the landscape itself. Conrad’s depiction of the landscape of the Congo is one of an obscene proliferation of plant life; its growth is almost violent, overwhelming the Western protagonist. Marlow describes the river he travels as ‘heavily overgrown with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried ranks. The twigs overhung the current thickly’.13 When looking back at this claustrophobic experience, Marlow explains that the ‘mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungle’14 is ‘incomprehensible, which is also detestable’.15 His comments seem to encompass the dark heart of ecophobia, elucidating an essential aspect of ecogothic. This fearful representation of flora is explored by Dawn Keetley who suggests that the vegetal genre of plant horror is typified by the human fear of the ‘wildness’ of plants—they are entirely unfeeling to human suffering and impossible to interpret, ‘incomprehensible’.16 Plant life’s implacability becomes deadly violence when the plant world refuses to remain passive in the face of humanity’s destruction, specifically its need to control and tame the natural world.17 Accordingly, Conrad’s novel ends with the death of Kurtz, the white man who attempted to make a home in the Congolese wilderness. His infamous final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’,18 can be understood as perhaps the most effective invocation of ecophobia. His statement encompasses the sense of despair and fear that the wilderness engenders in ecogothic texts: it cannot be comprehended and defies interpretation. Kurtz appears to have been overcome by the jungle, choking on the effusion of greenness, and his death is the revenge of the landscape which he failed to overpower. By failing to maintain a gentlemanly distance, he has been subsumed by the landscape, never to return to the safety of civilised Europe.

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Similar themes regarding the gothic wilderness are discussed by Camilo Jaramilo in regard to Amazonia. Starting with the publication of José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine [The Vortex] (1924) and charting the depiction of the Amazon through the twentieth century, Jaramillo contends that there is a continuous theme of the Occidental eye viewing this landscape as a ‘green hell’.19 Previously this landscape had offered a paradise for European natural historians and adventurers to continue their work of ‘discovering’ and classifying flora and fauna. Doing so was an attempt to bring reason and order to the chaos of the wilderness, as evidenced in the work of Carl Linnaeus and Comte de Buffon amongst others.20 Rivera’s exposé of the cruelty of the rubber trade, particularly for indigenous peoples, undermined this image instead suggesting that the landscape was fighting back against its degradation. Jaramilo uses the example of the film Anaconda (1997) as a continuation of this theme. As in Heart of Darkness, the film centres on a group of Westerners travelling into the heart of the jungle. They are beset with disaster and disease, before being attacked by a preternaturally large anaconda. This simplistic narrative continues to present wilderness as Gothic and threatening, particularly to European colonisers. However, whilst this can be read as a call for further violence against the landscape in order to tame it, there is also possibility of reading the use of ‘green hell’ imagery as an ecogothic act of resistance in which plant life responds in kind to colonial violence.21 These examples stand in contrast to the depiction of the wilderness in another fin-de-siècle gothic novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Where Heart of Darkness is about colonial incursions into a foreign wilderness, Dracula exemplifies, according to the critic Stephen Arata, ‘reverse colonization’, characterised by a narrative in which the coloniser becomes colonised.22 Written by an ­Anglo-Irish author, Stoker’s novel depicts the protagonist’s journey into the wilderness of Transylvania, relying on second-hand descriptions from Victorian travelogues. Jonathan Harker, an English solicitor, has travelled to this alternative ‘dark heart’ or ‘land beyond the forest’23 in order to meet with the eponymous Count Dracula. Harker’s arrival to Castle Dracula is an iconic image within the Gothic, which has been replicated in numerous filmic adaptations: In the heart of the forests, or wilderness, there lies a crumbling edifice. As he travels to the castle, Harker feels the oppressive weight of the forest: ‘we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel’.24 Similar to Marlow’s use of language, Harker’s description creates a sense of claustrophobia; the trees are encroaching on the road which his carriage takes. The language anthropomorphises the trees suggesting that they are sentient and actively attempting to prevent travel into the wilderness. When the carriage finally arrives at human habitation it looks to be void of life; Harker looks up at ‘a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky’.25 The castle appears to have sprung up from the landscape, being nature-made rather than constructed by humans. The lack of lights suggests that it is haunted by the landscape which has put out any evidence of human inhabitants. The only natural light exists in the form of the moon, an example of the terrifying ‘purely negative sublime’; it shines above the scene with no concern for humanity and remains implacable, unreachable.

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The concept of ‘reverse colonisation’ becomes apparent when, later in the novel, it is made clear to Harker and his comrades that the Count plans to ‘invade’ the British Isles. Moreover, Dracula’s wish is to transform Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, Jonathan’s wife, into vampires. The novel moves from the wooded wilderness of Transylvania to the civilised safety of Britain. Britain’s identity as an island nation meant that it had been almost entirely cultivated; even Radcliffe had to find her ecogothic visions outside of the British Isles due to its lack of wilderness space. Britain’s version of nature was pastoral, a landscape which had been cultivated and made useful. In stark contrast to this benign idealised ‘nature’ was the wilderness of Romania. Rather than use a postcolonial reading of the text, I would suggest that an ecogothic reading shows that this reversed colonisation can be considered in regard to the natural world. Dracula’s arrival on the shores of Britain threatens to bring a return of the wilderness, undoing the work of generations of Englishmen in civilising their nation’s landscape.26 Unlike Heart of Darkness, Stoker’s novel ends with the vanquishing of Dracula. The characters are, with the exception of Lucy and Quincey Morris, untouched. Mina and Harker go on to produce a healthy son who will grow up to be the ideal English gentleman. The fecundity of Mina stands in stark contrast to the final image of Transylvania; when she and Jonathan return to the Count’s castle they find it ‘stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation’.27 Despite the proliferation of tress which Harker previously described, this wooded ecosystem can only be negatively coded as a ‘wilderness’—one which remains unfruitful and untamed. What is clear in the examples that have been discussed is that previous and current ideas of the wilderness ignore the presence of Aboriginal peoples. As I am discussing the wilderness and its relation to ecogothic, my analysis has also tended to concentrate on the plants, animals and landscape that create the ‘wilderness’. This is clearly problematic. Wilderness has come to be defined as a place which has not been affected by human habitation; this definition has been used to both celebrate and violate the natural world. It has also denied the existence and societies of Indigenous populations. In order to analyse the ‘wilderness’, this chapter has consciously adhered to the narrow definition of the wilderness as without humanity. The previously mentioned gothic narratives are therefore haunted not simply by the demonisation and pacification of the natural world but also the denied voices of Aboriginal people. Equally, the author is not writing about their native landscape but projecting their fears onto a foreign wilderness. Turning to North America offers a more complicated perspective, in which both the identity of the wilderness and the nation are more firmly entwined, and, of particular importance, how the presence of carnivorous animals has helped to shape the gothic wilderness. Stories have shaped how humans regard the wilderness: these can be ornate literary texts, popular films or, stemming from childhood, fairy tales. Wilderness stories tend to contain a didactic element—a reminder that the wilderness can consume us, both literally and figuratively. An early and influential example of this is ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The two versions with which most people are familiar are the Brother Grimms’ ‘Rotkäppchen’ (or ‘Redcap’) from Children’s

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and Household Tales (1812), a collation of folk tales from Germany, and Charles Perrault’s more literary, though previous, version ‘Le Petit Chaperon rouge’ (Little Red Hood), published in his collection Mother Goose Tales (1697). In each, a little girl, wearing a red garment, is asked by her mother to take treats to her grandmother’s house in the woods. Straying from the path, she finds herself meeting with a wolf who wants to eat the little girl and tricks her by dressing as her grandmother. This fairy tale introduces many young readers and listeners to the character of the Big Bad Wolf, a rapacious carnivore who hides amongst the trees. Whilst the Big Bad Wolf has been read as a metaphor for masculine violence,28 in regard to ecogothic and the wilderness, I am choosing to regard him as simply a wolf, a much maligned character. The wolf, in this narrative, can be read as a (eco)Gothic animal, an animal ‘other’/Other who embodies the danger of wild animals in the wilderness. This fairy tale, then, becomes a far simpler and more direct warning: stay out of the woods as it is full of wild beasts. Yet, more subtly, there is also an engagement with the importance of pathways and the manner in which humans write themselves into the wilderness. Though biologists and natural historians have provided evidence that animals create their own routes across the landscape, the path in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is human-made. Straying from the path is not just a directive to confirm to gendered ideals of obedience in young women, but a reminder that the wilderness is a threat to the human subject. Human ingressions into the wilderness are dangerous. However, through the use of maps, pathways and roads the landscape becomes knowable and, more importantly, controllable.29 The potential excitement of discovering lands untouched by humanity gives way to the need to remove the threat of the landscape. The wilderness becomes ‘landscapes of the imagination’ defined more by the perception of the individual than by the landscape itself, as suggested in the previous section.30 Despite this, moving away from networks of human ownership of the land, such as paths, causes the individual human to become vulnerable. Though this can be exhibited as a psychological threat, in regard to the wild animal, it becomes a more simple somatic fear: humans can be eaten. Large predatory animals threaten human subjectivity by making humanity potential prey. Viewing one’s self through the eyes of the predator forces the human to see themselves not as subject but as object, in the same manner that humanity views their prey. The presence of the predator disrupts the clear delineation between animal and human. An apex predator, the wolf has become a symbol of the wilderness made flesh.31 ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a reminder that the position of humanity is vulnerable and can only be maintained by constantly policing the wilderness and the animals within it. The wolf’s trickery and anthropomorphism may be seen as literary invention or allegory but it also suggests that animals, especially other predators, are terrifyingly close to the human. In ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, this is both spatially— the wolf is close by in the woods, and ideologically—the wolf exhibits behaviours we associate with humanity. The perception and depiction of animal intelligence causes discomfort in the human viewer as it is another area where the assumption of human superiority is challenged.32 Indeed, in an important piece of animal

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studies, John Berger streamlines the impact of the animal’s presence to its gaze. The act of looking at an animal and having it return your gaze puts the human viewer in the position of the observed as well as the observer; the implicit sovereignty of the human subject is undermined at this moment as we must see ourselves as the ‘other’ through the animal’s regard.33 A brief analysis of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ shows that the presence of the ecogothic animal ‘other’ is an integral part of how the wilderness is depicted and understood. The impact of the wild animal in ecogothic texts, specifically in regard to the wilderness, is more easily expressed through an analysis of New World literature, specifically American Gothic. Though the Gothic started as a British genre, through the self-conscious invention of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it has become more mode than genre being absorbed and utilised in multiple mediums and cultures. The Euro- and Anglocentric view of the wilderness has been challenged and reconceived by non-European societies, drawing attention to the often colonial focalisation of other spaces. In the New World, these ideas tend to find fruition. The beginning of American Gothic literature is marked by the publication of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799). Much like Walpole’s inaugural British Gothic novel, there is a sense of awareness in how Brockden Brown views the place and purpose of the Gothic in this new landscape. He dismisses the need for ancient ruins and superstition which had characterised British Gothic novels. Instead, he suggested that the wilderness of the newly independent USA could act as inspiration for the American Gothic novelist: ‘The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable [for American Gothic novels]; and for a native of America to overlook these would admit of no apology’.34 The natural landscape provides inspiration for the authors of American Gothic. But it is not simply the landscape that it is inspirational but the beings who inhabit it. Brockden Brown’s point of view is shaped by colonial narratives regarding Indigenous people and the animals of the wilderness. The perils of the ‘Western wilderness’ are elucidated in the novel as the protagonist, Edgar Huntly, finds himself attacked by a cat o’ the mountains, known in modern vernacular as a puma, he then kills and consumes it. This attack by a wild animal is integral to the fear of wilderness as suggested in the analysis of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. It is the presence of wild animals that typically invokes the most fear in the human observer; the wild animal paces the line of subject and object. The destruction of the predatory animal suggests the taming or overcoming of the wilderness. Huntly’s baptism in the blood allows him to become a citizen of the New World, born of the wilderness but still ultimately human. The importance of the wilderness is expressed by American ecocritic Roderick Nash who explores the etymology of the word ‘wilderness’ in order to show the irrefutable connection between wild animal, wildness and wilderness, arguing that if the animals were removed then the wilderness would lose its essence.35 His definition of the wilderness comes from the Old English ‘wildeornes’ which he takes to mean ‘the place of the wild beast’.36 The wilderness is defined by the presence of the wild beasts. A notion furthered by Burke who argues, in regard to the sublime, that the wilderness is inseparable from the wild beast; the sublime can be found in the ‘howling

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wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros’.37 The predatory animal embodies the wilderness. His previous statement that the sublime ‘comes upon us’ can be connected to the form of the wild animal showing the potential violence embodied by these animals. Wild beasts are a greater threat than the geography of the wilderness. Where the landscape remains still, passive, waiting to be ‘discovered’ by the Western viewer, wild animals are able to intrude upon human habitation. They rupture the divide between civilisation and wilderness, drawing attention to its inherent weakness and questioning its validity. Brockden Brown’s viewpoint is informed by numerous depictions of the wilderness that had been expressed by European settlers to the Americans. The early settlers to the New World, specifically the Puritans of New England, used religious imagery drawn from Christianity to present the wilderness as a hellish space replete with dangerous predators. Early Puritan writers described the areas surrounding their settlements in the New World as wooded wildernesses filled with dangerous savages and savage animals. William Bradford described the Puritan’s Plymouth settlement as a ‘hidious and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men’.38 The language depicts the wilderness as aesthetically unappealing: a place that evokes a sense of disgust, fear and hatred in the civilised settler. Puritan language made the idea of the wilderness a powerful symbolic notion in American Gothic literature.39 The Puritans felt that their time in the wilderness of New England would lead to the Promised Land as long as they were able to civilise this wild space.40 Writing about the early years of New England, one contemporary commentator wrote ‘that within a few Years a Wilderness was subdued before them [the Puritan settlers], and so many Colonies Planted, Towns Erected, and Churches Settled’.41 The wilderness can only be useful once it has been transformed into a place suitable for human habitation. Any living creatures that prevented the wilderness becoming a useful pastoral settlement were threats to human prosperity. Thus hunting the animal of the wilderness become integral to taming the land itself. In the USA, this could be seen in the almost pathological desire to kill wolves, an idea which appeared to have been transposed from the Old World. One of the earliest laws in Puritan New England was the trapping and killing of wolves enacted by the Plymouth Colony in 1642.42 Wolves were certainly not the only wilderness animal that was hunted to semi-extinction nor destroyed in an attempt to extirpate the wilderness of all dangers. During the height of the British Empire, in the 1800s, there became an increasing trend for hunting narratives set in both British-colonised Africa and India. Though not necessarily Gothic narratives, these texts cohered to the format seen in ecogothic regarding the gothic wilderness. They stressed the dangers and difficulties of venturing away from civilisation in order to hunt wilderness animals.43 Whereas Gothic narratives prioritise fear and ambivalence, often ending in tragedy, these stories promoted the idea of colonial power, reasserting a sense of control over nature—especially foreign nature. In particular, the tiger provides a striking example of how animals have been gothicised. Prior to the British invasion of India, Linnaeus had categorised the tiger as a cowardly creature that ‘plunges his head into the body of the slaughtered animal,

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and sucks the blood’.44 Though the idea that the tiger sucks blood has been disproved by modern ecologists, the image of the cowardly tiger became central to the colonisation of India by British forces. Tigers were depicted as duplicitous and deserving of death. The tiger came to metonymically represent India, particularly the Indian landscape and ‘wilderness’ where disease was rampant and the heat was intolerable. Killing tigers became a symbolic act, a continuation of colonialism in which the wilderness—often a nebulous term when applied to foreign environs—was being civilised through British invaders.45 The metonymic relationship between the wilderness and wild animals is a defining feature of the gothic wilderness. Though a human can leave the wilderness behind, animals are capable of following and invading human civilisation. The power over nature exhibited in hunting narratives is inverted in ecogothic depictions of the wilderness, or at least victory cannot always be certain. However, towards the end of the 1800s it was becoming clear that the destruction of wild animals, particularly apex predators, was having a negative impact on the landscape. The wildernesses which had appeared to be the source of ­never-ending number of animals was becoming depleted and, with it, the concept of the wilderness. In a reversal of fortune, the wilderness was become an increasingly sacred space in which the human could find peace and solitude away from urban life, much as Radcliffe used wilderness landscapes in her gothic novels. This would bring about two effects: firstly, the wilderness would come to be protected, typically as national parks which acted as designated wilderness, and secondly, the concept of the wilderness would come to be applied to cities as well as the natural world. In his description of the Yosemite National Park, located in California, USA, Bill McKibben explains how John Muir, who wrote about ‘discovering’ the valleys in 1870, found a wilderness which was independent of humanity.46 For him, the wilderness is necessarily an unpeopled space, even when this has not historically been the case. Wilderness in this case is restorative. Though McKibben criticised the idea that wilderness should exist as an anthropocentric project for the benefit of wilderness visitors,47 his ignorance about the history of Yosemite is telling. The USA started to secure National Parks and areas of wilderness by the nineteenth century. This was consolidated by The Wilderness Act (1964) which described the wilderness as ‘an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled [sic] by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’.48 Though the intention of this legislation is to preserve and protect areas of nature, this definition of wilderness denies the complex reality of the relationship between humans and the natural world. As Benjamin Johnson argues regarding ‘wilderness parks’, the wilderness in the twentieth century did not exist until wilderness activists invented it.49 In order to save the wilderness, it needs to be defined. The definition that was offered continued to depict the wilderness as being in direct opposition to civilisation and humanity. Its survival became dependent on its ‘purity’. The requirement to demarcate wilderness zones causes these spaces to become gothic texts themselves. When Muir arrived in Yosemite, he stated that ‘not mark of man is visible upon it’ and that the valley was ‘like an immense hall or temple lighted from above’.50 Despite refuting the presence of humankind at Yosemite,

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he immediately uses a simile, based in human structures, in order to express its appearance. As a European-American, Muir transposes his culture knowledge and attitude onto this ‘wilderness’. Moreover, his particular use of the word ‘temple’ heightens his experience to a quasi-religious one; thus his descriptions conform to Burke’s discussion of the sublime. Muir’s language begins the process of framing and containing Yosemite as an object to be enjoyed. (Entirely negating the existence the Miwuk Native Americans who made this area their home.) This was then consolidated when Yosemite became a national park in 1864. As a national park, Yosemite became a place to visit but not too stay; where visitors were able to immerse themselves in the wilderness for restorative effects but without it transforming them to a less-civilised state. The linguistic framework for viewing Yosemite, evidenced in Muir’s description, became physical framing, once it was designated as a national park. The ‘natural’ wilderness was being understood through cultural artistry. Indeed, much like an early gothic novel, the creation of Yosemite National Park was effected through the idea that it had been ‘found’ or ‘discovered’. One oft-used gothic literary device is the ‘found’ text: typically a preface purports that the narrative is much older than its publication date. The effect of this is that ‘found’ gothic novels perform a historicity which they lack. The deliberate obfuscation of the age of the text makes it appear more authentic. Whilst the creation of wilderness spaces such as Yosemite may not be as ­self-conscious in the use of this conceit, nonetheless, the idea that it was ‘discovered’ undisturbed by humans generates a similar sense that the ‘wilderness’ is timeless, antediluvian, a way of returning to an idealised past.51 William Cronon offers a supernatural dimension to the wilderness in his discussion of the movement from Puritan ecophobia to environmental preservation. He argues that in order to justify preserving it, the wilderness needed to be seen as continuously under threat: always just about to be discovered or destroyed. Yet Cronon notes that viewing the wilderness as fragile often meant that it was idealised: a place where the human and non-human mingled, at once natural, preternatural and supernatural.52 The term ‘supernatural’ continues to frame the wilderness in gothic language. More broadly Timothy Morton argues that our continued attempts to define and protect ‘nature’/nature ensure that it remains trapped in liminality between the sacred and the physical so that it becomes ghostlike.53 The battlefield regarding the ideological and real-world place of wilderness has been exacerbated by an increasing sense of urgency surrounding the destruction of nature. Though first used in 1876 by Ernst Haeckel, the idea of ecology and its relationship to the emerging environmental movement of the 1960s has become both more politicised and complex.54 The evidence of humanity’s historical ecophobia has ushered in the Anthropocene, a new era in which humankind must acknowledge the lasting damage it has committed on the natural world. Here an understanding of how we have and continue to depict the wilderness as a gothic space can help to navigate the concomitant emotions of fear and desire that frame human understanding of the world in which we live. Recent ecogothic has, therefore, both acknowledged historical fears surrounding the gothic wilderness whilst closing the gap between wilderness and civilisation.

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In contemporary ecogothic, urban zones are starting to resemble wildernesses. The opening scenes of I Am Legend (2007), an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic novel of the same name published in 1954, features Manhattan in desolation. With seemingly only one human survivor of a z­ ombie-vampire pestilence, the cityscape is overlaid with the same tropes of the gothic wilderness that can be seen throughout ecogothic narratives. Skyscrapers tumble like ruined castles, there are no other humans in existence, and the plant life is reabsorbing human-made structures. This depiction of the city-as-wilderness can be found outside of twentieth- and twenty-first-century gothic texts.55 However, as the environmental crisis continues to be writ large in the media, the idea of the city-as-wilderness and post-apocalyptic Gothic has becoming a growing aspect of the ecogothic. These tropes recur in a number of genres. Zombies run riot as civilisation crumbles and fairies no longer live in woodlands but have moved to the city. The clear lines of definition between the wilderness and civilisation appear to become weaker the more humanity attempts to strengthen them. Such depictions uncover the wilderness at the heart of civilisation, the human-as-animal. Thus the ambivalence of the gothic wilderness has returned to haunt us, a timely reminder of past violence against a depleted world which has committed and a threat that nature may return this violence.

Notes

1. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion Books, 2006); Alexandra Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9: 1 (May 2007), 5–15. 2. Fred Botting, Gothic (New York, Routledge, 2014), 4. 3. Simon C. Estok, ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16: 2 (Spring 2009), 203–25 (208). 4. Tom J. Hillard, ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16: 4 (Autumn 2009), 685–95 (688–9). 5. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Defining the Ecogothic’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–14 (1–2). 6. Ibid., 1–2. 7. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, F. and C. Rivington, 1801), 94. 8. Vijay Mishra, ‘The Gothic Sublime’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 288–306 (294). 9. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1991), 95–111. 10. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 226. 11. Lisa Kröger, ‘Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–27 (17–18). 12. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, Penguin Books, 2000), 21. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. Ibid., 19.

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15. Ibid., 20. 16. Dawn Keetley, ‘Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror: Or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?’, in Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds.), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–30 (1). 17. Ibid., 10–1. 18. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 112. 19. Camilo Jaramillo, ‘Green Hells: Monstrous Vegetations in Twentieth-Century Representations of Amazonia’, in Keetley and Tenga (eds.), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 91–110. 20. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), 11–13; Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, 105–7. 21. Jaramillo, ‘Green Hells’, 104–5. 22. Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33: 4 (1990), 621–45. 23. This term is taken from one of Stoker’s sources, Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania (1888). 24. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Ware, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 12. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. For a comprehensive Ecogothic reading of ‘Reverse Colonization’ in Dracula, see Kaja Franck, ‘“Something That Is Either Werewolf or Vampire”: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Robert McKay and John Miller (eds.), Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2017), 135–52. 27. Stoker, Dracula, 315. 28. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London, Thames & Hudson, 1976), 168–71; Jack Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn. (New York, Routledge, 1993). 29. Estok, ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness’, 210–1. 30. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London and New York, Viking, 1990), 53. 31. Helene Figari and Ketil Skogen, ‘Social Representations of the Wolf’, Acta Sociologica, 54: 4 (2011), 1–16. 32. Rob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Lampeter, Wales, Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 290–303. 33. John Berger, About Looking (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1980), 5. 34. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Philadelphia, M. Polock, 1857), 4. 35. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (London, Yale University Press, 1982), 1–8. 36. There have been a number of possibilities put forth for the etymology of the word ‘wilderness’, however, this is the one that Nash chooses. 37. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 94. 38. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (Boston, Wright & Potter Printing, 1898), 95. 39. Allan Lloyd Smith, ‘Nineteenth-Century American Gothic’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 163–75 (165). 40. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 23–43. 41. Anonymous, ‘An Attestation to this Church History of New England’, in Cotton Mather (ed.), Magnalia Christi Americana, or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620 unto the Year of Our Lord 1698 (London, Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), 1. 42. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill, University of North Caroline Press, 1989), 65. 43. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 257–9.

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44. Carl Linnaeus, The Animal Kingdom or Zoological System of the Celebrated Sir Charles Linnaeus, trans. by Professor Gmelin of Goettingen (London, J. Murray, No. 32. ­Fleet-Street; and R. Faulder, No. 42. New Bond Street, 1792), 147. 45. John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London, Anthem Press, 2012), 37–44. 46. McKibben, The End of Nature, 61. 47. Ibid., 160–1. 48. The Wilderness Act (1964), https://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/documents/publiclaws/ PDF/The_Wilderness_Act.pdf, accessed 5 January 2019. 49. Benjamin Johnson, ‘Wilderness Parks and Their Discontents’, in Michael Lewis (ed.), American Wilderness: A New History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), 113–30 (115). 50. John Muir, The Yosemite (Corelo, CA, The Yolla Bolly Press Book, 1989), 34. 51. Kaja Franck, ‘The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Language, Subjectivity and Animal/Human Boundaries’, PhD dissertation, University of Hertfordshire, 2016. 52. William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (London, W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–90 (72–3). 53. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (London, Harvard University Press, 2007), 14. 54. Andrew Jamison, ‘Ecology and the Environmental Movement’, in Astrid Schwarz and Kurt Jax (eds.), Ecology Revisited (London, Springer, 2011), 195–204. 55. Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Cities’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2007), 54–62.

Bibliography Anonymous, ‘An Attestation to This Church History of New England’, in Cotton Mather (ed.), Magnalia Christi Americana, or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620 unto the Year of Our Lord 1698 (London, Thomas Parkhurst, 1702). Arata, Stephen D., ‘The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33: 4 (1990), 621–45. Berger, John, About Looking (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1980). Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London, Thames & Hudson, 1976). Boddice, Rob, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Lampeter, Wales, Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). Botting, Fred, Gothic (New York, Routledge, 2014). Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation (Boston, Wright & Potter Printing, 1898). Brockden Brown, Charles, Edgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Philadelphia, M. Polock, 1857). Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, F. and C. Rivington, 1801). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London, Penguin Books, 2000). Cronon, William, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (London, W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–90. Estok, Simon C., ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16: 2 (Spring 2009), 203–25. Figari, Helene, and Ketil Skogen, ‘Social Representations of the Wolf’, Acta Sociologica, 54: 4 (2011), 1–16.

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Franck, Kaja, ‘“Something That Is Either Werewolf or Vampire”: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Robert McKay and John Miller (eds.), Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2017), 135–52. Franck, Kaja, ‘The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Language, Subjectivity and Animal/ Human Boundaries’, PhD dissertation, University of Hertfordshire, 2016. Gerard, Emily, The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania (1888). Hillard, Tom J., ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16: 4 (Autumn 2009), 685–95. Jamison, Andrew Jamison, ‘Ecology and the Environmental Movement’, in Astrid Schwarz and Kurt Jax (eds.), Ecology Revisited (London, Springer, 2011), 195–204. Jaramillo, Camilo, ‘Green Hells: Monstrous Vegetations in Twentieth-Century Representations of Amazonia’, in Keetley and Tenga (eds.), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 91–110. Johnson, Benjamin, ‘Wilderness Parks and Their Discontents’, in Michael Lewis (ed.), American Wilderness: A New History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), 113–30. Keetley, Dawn, ‘Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror: Or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?’, in Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds.), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–30. Kröger, Lisa, ‘Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–27. Linnaeus, Carl, The Animal Kingdom or Zoological System of the Celebrated Sir Charles Linnaeus, trans. by Professor Gmelin of Goettingen (London, J. Murray, No. 32. ­Fleet-Street; and R. Faulder, No. 42. New Bond Street, 1792). Lloyd Smith, Allan Lloyd, ‘Nineteenth-Century American Gothic’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 163–75. McKibben, Bill, The End of Nature (London and New York, Viking, 1990). Merchant, Carolyn, Ecological Revolutions (Chapel Hill, University of North Caroline Press, 1989). Mighall, Robert, ‘Gothic Cities’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2007), 54–62. Miller, John, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London, Anthem Press, 2012). Mishra, Vijay, ‘The Gothic Sublime’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 288–306. Morton, Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (London, Harvard University Press, 2007). Muir, John, The Yosemite (Corelo, CA, The Yolla Bolly Press Book, 1989). Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (London, Yale University Press, 1982). Oelschlaeger, Max, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1991). Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987). Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Defining the Ecogothic’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–14. Spooner, Catherine, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion Books, 2006). Stoker, Bram, Dracula (Ware, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Classics, 1993). The Wilderness Act (1964), https://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/documents/publiclaws/PDF/The_ Wilderness_Act.pdf. Accessed 5 January 2019. Warwick, Alexandra, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9: 1 (May 2007), 5–15. Zipes, Jack, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd edn. (New York, Routledge, 1993).

‘Queer’ Representations of Rural and Urban Locations Paulina Palmer

References to urban and rural locations appear frequently in gothic fiction, contributing to the vividness of the narrative and its uncanny dimension. Karl Bell, defining their differences, argues that whereas ‘rural supernatural imaginings tend to be inspired by an agoraphobic sense of vulnerability, the urban supernatural is more likely to be engendered by the unsettling claustrophobia of the built environment and the press of its multitudinous inhabitants’.1 Locations of different kinds, both urban and rural, also play a key role in contemporary gothic texts focusing on queer sexuality and relationships, with writers employing them to evoke the context of the narrative and metaphorically illuminate the characters’ emotional responses. Sarah Waters portrays her protagonist Margaret in Affinity (1999), on making her way through the fog-bound London streets in search of the spiritualists’ reading room, fancifully thinking that, ‘There might have been a dome about me – a dome of gauze’.2 The description, as well as furnishing an eerie image of the city, serves as a metaphor for Margaret’s ­self-deception, deluded as she is by the spiritualist Selina’s false protestations of love. In contrast, illustrating the importance of rural terrain, Jim Grimsley, situating the narrative of Dream Boy (1995) in North Carolina noted for its mysterious Indian burial mounds and derelict slave plantations, portrays the teenage Nathan, on whose discovery of his queer sexuality the novel focuses, encountering, while visiting a ruined mansion in the woods, the ghost of the deceased slave owner and recognising its resemblance to his own homophobic father. The description of the mansion, overgrown with creepers and trees, as well as enhancing the uncanny atmosphere of the episode, metaphorically signifies the concept of familial inheritance. Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) and Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck (2000), the two novels discussed in this essay, though both focusing on queer sexuality and utilising rural and urban sites as settings for the narrative and to evoke the characters’ affective life, differ significantly in historical

P. Palmer (*)  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_16

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and intellectual context. Whereas Condé locates her novel in Barbados and North America and explores the contrary representations of the witch in the two cultures, Knox situates hers in nineteenth-century Burgundy and refers to debates between Roman Catholics and ‘free thinkers’. However, the two texts also reveal features in common. As well as making significant use of Gothic motifs of secrets, spectrality, the uncanny and the monster, in depicting their protagonists’ queer sexual attachments they both focus on mixed relationships. Condé, in recasting the life of black slave Tituba and interrelating the slave narrative with the witch story, describes the interracial erotic attachments that she forms with some of the white women she encounters. Knox in contrast, moving into the realm of paranormal fantasy, focuses on the inter-species involvement that the young vintner Sobran Jodeau forms with the angel Xas whom he encounters in the fields at harvest time. Although the sexuality of both characters is depicted as mobile, with them portrayed forming heterosexual as well as queer attachments, the emphasis is placed on their queer sexual relationships. The themes and emotional situations referred to above are echoed and reworked, as we shall see, in the two writers’ varied representations of landscape. Condé’s aim in writing I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, as Ann Armstrong Scarboro describes in the ‘Afterword’ is, by means of fictional reconstruction, to ‘fill in the blank spaces from lost history’3 by redressing the marginalisation that the black slave Tituba, remembered for her association with the Salem witch trials, has suffered in both historical accounts of slavery and Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. As Condé complains, Miller, having assigned to Tituba the play’s opening lines and portrayed her rejecting accusations of trafficking with the devil, quickly banishes her from the stage. Condé explains Tituba’s marginalisation in both history and drama as due to the fact that ‘She was a black woman’ and, as a result, ‘was forgotten’ (‘Afterword’, pp. 209–10). Condé’s novel is a hybrid text. As well as being an example of historiographic metafiction that introduces intertextual reference to works as varied as Miller’s The Crucible, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and protest songs by Billie Holiday, it interrelates several different literary genres. These include, in addition to the slave narrative that, as Justin D. Edwards illustrates,4 frequently introduces gothic motifs of the haunted house and secrets relating to race, Caribbean fiction portraying the practitioner of Obeah or ‘witch’ as a wise woman and healer. Examples include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Rosario Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito Amor) (1986). A more recent influence on Condé’s novel are texts by American and British theorists and novelists working in the 1970s and 1980s that celebrate the witch as a signifier of the newly emerging l­esbian-feminist movement, associating her with women’s liberation and lesbian sexuality. Whereas the American radical feminist theorist Mary Daly portrays the witch in Gyn/ Ecology (1979) as exemplifying the attributes of female strength and independence that patriarchy seeks to suppress, the French theorist Catherine Clément, utilising a psychoanalytic approach, depicts her in the ‘The Guilty One’ (1987) as a transgressive outcast associated with the feminine realm of the Imaginary. Emphasising the witch’s familiarity with wild rural terrain, Clément portrays her

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living ‘in bramble forests on the heath’ and inhabiting ‘impossible places’.5 As I illustrate in Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (1999), ideas of this kind furnished the inspiration for numerous works of lesbian feminist fiction celebrating the figure of the witch.6 Examples include Jeannine Allard’s Légende (1984), a lesbian romance associating the witch with the forest, and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Albatross Muff (1978) that refers to the protagonist’s Aboriginal ancestry. Condé’s novel introduces similar topics. As well as exploring Tituba’s friendships and erotic involvements with women and emphasising her black identity, she foregrounds her love of rural areas and distaste for urban locations on account of their association with slavery. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert describes how, with the introduction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of colonial and Caribbean elements into British and European fiction, ‘a new sort of darkness - of race, landscape, despair - enters the Gothic genre’.7 Condé opens her novel with reference to this darkness, both elemental and metaphorical. She portrays Tituba’s mother Abena, a house slave to the wife of the owner of a slave plantation near Bridgetown, while lying in bed with her mistress and ‘playing with the long plaits of her hair’ (p. 3), seeking to ‘conjure up the forces of nature … to appease the darkness and prevent the vampires from draining them white before dawn’ (p. 4). Tituba, as a child, cannot understand why Abena, though emotionally and physically close to her white mistress, shows herself little affection and never cuddles her. However, as she discovers on reaching her teens, Abena’s neglect is not deliberate but reflects the ‘darkness’ that entered the Caribbean with the institution of slavery. Her refusal to make physical contact with Tituba is explained by the fact that her daughter’s existence reminds her of the rape by a sailor she suffered on the voyage to Barbados that resulted in Tituba’s birth. Although Abena’s black partner Yao tries to compensate for her emotional neglect of her daughter, his attempts are rendered futile by another disaster. While defending herself against a second act of sexual assault, performed this time by the white plantation owner, Abena seizes a knife and stabs him. Though merely gashing his shoulder, she is sentenced to hanging, the punishment meted out to a slave who attacks a white man. Here the text moves into the realm of body horror as Abena, in the flower of her youth, with her young daughter witnessing the event, is brutally hanged ‘from the lower branches of a silk-cotton tree’ (p. 8). The image haunts Tituba’s childhood and the tree that she previously associated with the beauty of nature now assumes connotations of death. When her stepfather Yao is sold to another master, Tituba herself escapes into the forest fringing the plantation. Here she encounters the elderly Mama Yaya who educates her in the medicinal and spiritual practices of Obeah. As well as discovering how to transform herself into ‘a bird on the branch or a frog croaking in the mud’ (p. 10), Tituba learns to communicate with the spirits of the dead. On encountering the spectre of her deceased mother—‘not’, she thankfully perceives, ‘the disjointed, tormented puppet swinging round and round among the leaves’ (p. 9) that she had seen hanging on the tree but a living woman—she runs into her arms, enjoying the experience of maternal love. As she euphorically describes,

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emphasising the interrelation between the location’s material and spiritual facets and the emotional response it inspires, ‘These were the happiest moments of my life… because my invisible spirits were all around me and the violet sky of the island stretched above my head at night like a huge handkerchief against which the stars sparkled’ (p. 11). However, on remembering her mother’s violent death, she is overcome by a desire for retribution and angrily thinks, ‘I should have liked to unleash the wind like a dog from its kennel so that the white Great Houses of the masters would be blown away over the horizon!’ (p. 12). Though appreciating the safety of Mama Yaya’s cabin and its association with nature, Tituba, impelled by the imperative of sexual desire, impetuously decides to move to the urban site of Bridgetown. While walking in the forest, she chances to encounter John Indian, an attractive young slave from the town. He flirts with her playfully, teasing her about her unkempt appearance. Ignoring Mama Yaya’s warning that ‘He’s a shallow nigger full of hot air and bravado’ (p. 15) and, since he is indentured to the white Susanna Endicott, becoming involved with him will ‘return her to the white man’s world’ (p. 16), she agrees to accompany him. However, on later accepting his invitation to live with him, she is alarmed to discover that she will have to agree to Susanna’s demands to marry him and be baptised into the Christian faith. Life in Bridgetown and Susanna’s home epitomising it turn out to be more oppressive than Tituba had envisaged. Though enjoying the sexual aspect of her relationship with John, she recognises, on perceiving his drinking habits and flirtations, ‘How frivolous was this man my body had chosen!’ (p. 40). Susanna, meanwhile, turns out to be a harsh mistress who frequently criticises her. It is from her lips that Tituba first hears the Anglo-American word ‘witch’, one previously unfamiliar to her. She is horrified to discover that Susanna regards the witch or practitioner of Obeah not as a positive figure who performs spiritual and herbal practices but an evil necromancer who traffics in dangerous spells. On hearing that a slave reputed to be a witch has recently been burnt in the area, she is terrified that Susannah will discover the secret of her involvement in Obeah. Some weeks later, however, while in the act of serving tea to the minister’s wife, Susanna is unexpectedly afflicted by a sudden cramp and shortly afterwards dies. Condé leaves unresolved the question of whether Tituba herself or possibly Mama Yaya, to whom she confided her fears, engineered Susanna’s demise by means of their spiritual powers or whether it is coincidental. However, though no longer capable of dominating Tituba in the flesh, Susanna continues like a vengeful ghost to exercise a destructive influence from beyond the grave. As Tituba and John Indian discover to their horror, she has previously sold them both to the Reverend Samuel Parris, a figure familiar to readers from Miller’s The Crucible as a hypocrite and preacher of hellfire sermons. His entry into the narrative introduces a vividly drawn figure of white monstrosity. Elizabeth Grosz portrays the monster as ‘an ambiguous being whose hybridity endangers and problematizes categories and oppositions dominant in social life’8—and Tituba attributes to Parris human, animal and demonic characteristics. On first encountering him stalking through the Bridgetown streets, she describes him ‘as tall, very tall,

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dressed in black from head to foot’ with a ‘chalky white skin’ and ‘greenish, cold eyes’ resembling those of ‘a snake’ (p. 34). Whereas his black costume resembles Dracula’s austere attire, his snakelike eyes recall the threat the creature voices to Victor Frankenstein, ‘I will watch [you] with the wiliness of a snake that I may sting with its venom’.9 Vijay Mishra describes the Gothic as ‘a genre of fissure and fracture’ with texts evoking on occasion ‘a discourse of instability’ verging on ‘laughter’10—and Tituba’s melodramatic description of Parris borders on the darkly humorous. In fact when she announces to John Indian that ‘I’ve just seen Satan!’ (p. 34), he ridicules her words, playfully observing that ‘Satan doesn’t like daylight. He’s a creature of the night’ (p. 34). Tituba, however, regards Parris as an evil spirit haunting the town, interpreting the hurricane that bombards it that night as provoked by him. She also fears from his penetrating gaze that he has discovered the incriminatory secret of her involvement in Obeah. Becoming a member of Parris’s household, however, benefits Tituba in one respect since it enables her to encounter his wife Elizabeth. The two women’s experience of Parris’s tyranny creates an emotional bond between them and, as Tituba explains with her habitual frankness, ‘We devised a thousand tricks to be together in the absence of this devil’ (p. 41). Elizabeth, as well as sharing with Tituba the intimate details of the oppressive nature of her marriage, including her disgust for Parris’s sexual attentions, astonishes her by exclaiming, ‘How lovely you are, Tituba!’ (p. 38) and comparing her hands to black flowers. Encouraged by these signs of affection, Tituba allows herself to become emotionally and physically close to her. The erotic relationship the two women enjoy, as well as recalling that between Abena and her mistress, looks forward to the lesbian involvement that Tituba subsequently forms with Hester Prynne when imprisoned in Salem gaol. These relationships, while having racial and queer significance, also have feminist import. Challenging what Eve Sedgwick terms ‘the plot of male homosociality’11 that dominates much Western fiction, Condé enables the reader to glimpse the submerged narrative of female attachments. Parris, of course, is unaware of the intimacy existing between his wife and slave. He harshly tells Tituba that ‘The colour of your skin is the sign of your damnation’ (p. 41) and rebukes Elizabeth for ‘Letting this Negress sit next to you’ (p. 39). The urban location in gothic fiction and film, as Emily Alder describes, is typically represented as ‘a dark, claustrophobic space, refracting personal or political concerns onto the Gothic terrain and haunted by doubles and secrets’.12 Condé’s representation of Boston where Parris, while seeking to obtain a post in Salem, lodges with his family for a year, agrees with Alder’s description, though also emphasising its connection with racial oppression. On entering the square where the prison and courthouse are situated, Tituba is appalled to see a public hanging taking place. Feeling that she is being forced to ‘relive my mother’s execution’ (p. 49), she is momentarily deceived into thinking that ‘It wasn’t an old woman hanging there. It was Abena in the flower of her youth’ (p. 49). John Indian increases her gloom by reporting he has heard rumours that the slave trade is in fact gaining momentum, with native Americans as well as Africans being coerced into slavery by poverty.

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Parris’s role in supporting white domination is signified metaphorically by the image that Tituba glimpses of him standing on the quay one morning ‘in the greyish mist … like a ghost in the dirty foggy light’ (p. 43). The spectral simile, while evoking Freudian connotations of the return of the repressed, also portrays him as a signifier of the racial oppression haunting the black community. As Andrew Smith pertinently observes, ‘Ghosts are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our culture … and are messengers about the preoccupations of a particular age’.13 On arriving at Salem, Tituba perceives, as a result of Elizabeth, influenced by Parris, turning against her and their daughter Abigail pestering her with accusations of witchcraft, the dangers threatening her intensifying. When, in order to escape the oppressive atmosphere, she spends the evening in the wilderness fringing the settlement, she finds herself accosted by neighbours who have followed her there. Regarding her as a servant of Satan on account of her skin colour, they request her in hushed tones to concoct a potion to enable them to get rid of a neighbour or even a family member. Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith describes the wilderness as a source of uncanny themes for writers of Gothic on account of ‘the profane presences that it might harbour’14—and Tituba’s description of the way in which ‘Animals, crouched in the dark trees, screeched evilly as I went by’ (p. 64) vividly evokes its uncanny dimension. In both contributing to and reflecting her fears, it forms a pronounced contrast to the benevolent associations of the forest where she previously lived with Mama Yao. Meanwhile Parris’s animosity towards Tituba increases in intensity. Parodically recasting the well-known lyric ‘Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’ sung by Billie Holiday in protest at the lynching of African Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Condé portrays him looking forward to her arrest for witchcraft and seeing, when she is hanged, ‘a magnificent fruit swinging from the trees of Massachusetts’ (p. 75). The words, in addition to recalling the hanging of Tituba’s mother Abena, accentuate the narrative’s sociopolitical significance by prompting readers to compare the brutal treatment of Afro-Caribbean slaves in the seventeenth century with that of black Americans in the twentieth. Another intertextual reference that Condé daringly introduces, appropriated this time from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), is her portrayal of Tituba, on being accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in Salem prison, unexpectedly encountering Hester Prynne. Having described how she herself was imprisoned for becoming pregnant outside marriage, Hester teases Tituba about her feelings of sexual attraction to men. After playfully observing that ‘You’re too fond of love’ (p. 100), she adds, in an intertextual reference to the 1980s feminist movement, ‘I’ll never make a feminist out of you!’ (p. 101). The conversation, developing Tituba’s previous erotic involvement with Elizabeth, concludes with Hester embracing her and, as Tituba describes, ‘showering me with kisses’ (p. 101). Tituba meanwhile pillows her head on ‘the soft curve’ (p. 99) of Hester’s pregnant body and shortly afterwards becomes her lover. As Luce Irigaray, commenting on ‘the multiple and diffuse nature of female sexuality’, observes,

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‘Woman does not have a sex. She has at least two of them. Indeed she has many more of them than that. Her sexuality, always at least double, is in fact plural’.15 In addition to encouraging Tituba to acknowledge her sexual attraction to women, Hester is instrumental in persuading her to confess publicly to the crime of witchcraft. In doing so she in fact saves her life since prisoners who refused to confess were sentenced to hanging. On confronting her three judges, one of whom is Parris, Tituba gives them, again on Hester’s advice, a parodically lurid version of her activities, describing how she encountered the devil in the form of a dog. Although she herself recognises the absurdity of her performance, her white judges regard it as the truth. Here she engages in the practice that Homi Bhaba terms ‘colonial mimicry’,16 ironically performing the role that her white judges expect of her, while secretly exposing their naivety. The masks resembling birds of prey that they wear enhance the episode’s gothic dimension since they resemble those worn by the inquisitors in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Condé concludes the novel by portraying Tituba, on eventually being released from prison, fulfilling her dream of returning to her Caribbean homeland of Barbados. Tituba’s lyrical description of her initial view of the island, with ‘the sun brushing the contours of the hills with light’ and ‘the sugarcane in flower, like a purple cloud above the fields’ (p. 143), as well as evoking her joyful mood, lures the reader into assuming that Condé is creating a conventionally happy ending to Tituba’s narrative. However, as if determined to emphasise the dangers threatening the freedom fighter and practitioner of Obeah, Condé in fact concludes it by recapitulating the theme of violent death that runs as a leitmotif throughout the novel. On hearing that a number of slaves have escaped from the plantations and are embarking on a struggle for freedom, Tituba, still intent on destroying ‘the white Great Houses of the masters’ (p. 12), volunteers to join them. However, she is betrayed by one of her fellows and, on being declared guilty of bewitching the inhabitants of the local village by invoking Satan, is sentenced to hanging. She has little fear of death since she looks forward to re-encountering the spirits of her mother Abena and Mama Yao, who has recently died. Tituba is the last of the prisoners to be executed and, as she grimly notes on walking to the gallows, ‘All around me strange trees were bristling with strange fruit’ (p. 172). Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck, as mentioned above, focuses on the queer relationship that the young vintner Sobran Jodeau, a resident of nineteenth-century Burgundy, forms with the angel Xas and the pleasures and problems that the two encounter. The novel, while differing radically from Condé’s in storyline and historical context, resembles it in its focus on queer sexuality and utilisation of gothic motifs of the secret, the uncanny and the monster. It is also similarly constructed around vivid descriptions of rural and urban landscapes that comment indirectly on the narrative and the characters’ emotional circumstances. Novels focusing on paranormal relationships between angels and mortals, though less numerous than those focusing on the witch, have nonetheless appeared in print. Sharon Shinn’s Archangel (1997), the plot perhaps inspired by the Genesis account of angels descending to earth and, on finding the daughters

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of men fair, forming relationships with them, portrays the angel Gabriel marrying a mortal woman, while Lauren Kate’s fictional series, known by the title Fallen, focuses on a group of rebel angels who form similar inter-species attachments. In addition, regarding queer same-sex relationships, Elizabeth Brownrigg’s Falling to Earth (1998) describes the lesbian involvement that develops between Alice, the manager of a USA computer software firm, and her guardian angel Phoebe. However, although the plot is neatly constructed, like the other ‘angel’ texts cited above, the novel reveals little of the emotional and psychological complexity and range of gothic reference that typifies Knox’s narrative. Knox opens The Vintner’s Luck with reference to a locational motif appropriated from nineteenth-century fiction with gothic associations: the representation of an encounter between two characters in a moonlit landscape. Charlotte Bronte portrays Jane Eyre’s initial meeting with Rochester taking place in the light of ‘the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momentarily’,17 while Wilkie Collins represents Walter Hartright’s encounter with Ann Catherick, the mysterious ‘woman in white’ whom he initially mistakes for a ghost, occurring on a night when, as he describes, ‘the moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky’.18 Knox opens her narrative in a similar manner by portraying the ­eighteen-year-old vintner Sobran Jodeau, in summer with ‘the moon just off full’19 at an hour when, as he admits, ‘decent people were in bed’ (p. 1), secretly leaving the farmstead where he lives. He takes with him two bottles of wine with which he aims ‘to baptise’, as he melodramatically describes, ‘the first real sorrow of his life’ (p. 1). Not only has the beautiful Céleste, the neighbour’s daughter with whom he is sexually infatuated, rejected his advances but also his father, worried by her ­lower-class affiliations, has forbidden him to court her. On climbing the hill overlooking the vineyard where he intends to sit, with ‘the air sweet with the smell of fermenting cherries’ (p. 2), he is surprised to see what appears to be a statue appropriated from the church perched on the crest. A moment later he faints, perceiving with incredulity that what he sees is not a statue but, on the contrary, a living angel. On collapsing, he feels himself rescued not by an arm but, as Knox describes, ‘a wing, pure sinew and bone under a cushion of feathers … the pinions around his ankle’ (p. 3). Nicholas Royle associates the uncanny with ‘a secret encounter’, describing it as generated by ‘strange sights’ and ‘revelations, by what should have been out of sight’20—and Sobran’s encounter with the angel resembles this. On regaining consciousness, he is astonished by the angel’s grotesque appearance reflected especially in the unfamiliarity of his magnificent wings. Maria Parrino describes the grotesque as ‘a protean form that joins trivial and serious elements in such a way that it can be monstrous, absurd and contradictory’21—and the angel’s appearance interrelates all three. However, warmed by a sip of wine and the angel’s apparent friendliness, Sobran plucks up the courage to converse with him and confide in him his problems with his love life. On shamefacedly admitting that, on account of his emotional turmoil, he has failed to take communion for some weeks, he expects him to issue a rebuke—but to his surprise none occurs. Announcing that his name is Xas and predicting that

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Sobran’s future may turn out to be happier than he assumes, the angel promises to meet him again the following year at harvest time (p. 6). Sobran watches spellbound as Xas rises to his feet, ‘the angel wings snapped open, a slack sail suddenly fully fed, and angel and whirlwind were a league away’ (p. 6). The only evidence that the encounter is not a dream is, as Sobran perceives, ‘a few black tipped, fawn feathers sprinkled down over the northern slope of the vineyard’ (p. 6). Knox’s description of the Burgundian landscape, as well as setting the scene for Sobran’s uncanny encounter with the angel, introduces themes that assume importance as their relationship develops. The sensuous description of the countryside and the reference to ‘decent people’ (p. 1) going to bed at a respectably early hour while Sobran himself defies convention by being outdoors drinking late at night hints at his movement into the enjoyable but, he fears, shameful realm of queer sex when he and Xas become lovers. In addition his reference, while walking up the hill, to the ‘crumbling shadow’ (p. 1) that accompanies him on the moonlit grass signals the increasingly intimate involvement between the two characters. As their relationship develops, Xas assumes the role of Sobran’s ‘shadow’, visiting him in secret. Xas’s prediction that Sobran’s courtship of Céleste will be successful proves to be correct. With Sobran’s father unexpectedly withdrawing his objections and Céleste accepting Sobran’s proposal, the courtship flourishes and the marriage takes place. Some years later, however, when misfortune befalls the couple and their young daughter Nicolette dies, Xas, in an attempt to console Sobran, cradles him in his arms, embracing him tenderly with his wings. Up to now Sobran has regarded him merely as a friend and confidant but now, on experiencing this physical intimacy, his attitude changes. He recognises that he loves Xas and desires him physically. Justifying the sexual attraction he feels for him with dubious logic, he reasons that ‘His desire was a triumph. Xas was so fine that of course he, Sobran, should love him. God had made Xas beautiful and framed his subtle tongue’ (p. 50). To his consternation, however, Xas rejects his expressions of love. Acknowledging his fallen status, he confesses that instead of being associated with heaven, as Sobran assumed, he was cast into hell on account of rebelling against God. His personal heresy was to subscribe to the view that God did not make the world but merely discovered it. Sobran reacts angrily to Xas’s confession. Furious at what he regards as his act of deception and fearing that he himself is damned on account of his queer sexual desires, he rejects his friendship. Gay shame, as David Halperin and Valerie Traub illustrate in their study of that name,22 commonly afflicts queer people on account of the oppressive treatment they encounter— and Knox treats the topic vividly. She portrays Sobran taking refuge in the Roman Catholic faith and—to the surprise of his neighbours—reverting to regular attendance at mass. Xas, however, does not desert him but visits the vineyard at night in the hope of encountering him. Meanwhile the secret of Xas’s visits to the area is starting to haunt the local community, with the sight of a man conversing with a winged figure in the fields provoking gossip and comments circulating about an elderly woman, while

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gathering fire wood, discovering an angel sleeping under a bush. Rumour also circulates that Sobran is engaging in an extramarital affair, although his neighbours, to their frustration, are unable to discover his partner’s identity. Friedrich Schelling, as Sigmund Freud notes, describes the uncanny as ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’,23 and the secret of queer sexuality and the emotional stress the individual can experience in concealing or disclosing it are key topics in queer writing. Eve Sedgwick, discussing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, two novels referring to the topic, mentions ‘the unspeakable secret … the open secret … and the secret of the closet’.24 It is, in fact, the Countess Aurora de Valday, the widowed owner of the local chateau, who accidentally discovers the content of Sobran’s secret. Knox, linking the location where the event takes place to the consternation it initially causes, describes the vineyard and fields where it occurs as notably bleaker than when they formed the context for Sobran’s initial encounter with Xas. The river is ‘monstrously swollen’ (p. 119) on account of the heavy rain and the fields partially flooded. On returning home in her coach at dusk from visiting neighbours, Aurora sees in the ‘the broken light of the moon’ (p. 121) and the ‘trees with the light lancing through them’ (p. 122) what she thinks is a swan with open wings falling dramatically from the sky. A moment later, however, as Knox describes, ‘when her eyes at last did their duty and made nonsense of the size of the wings and the body that fell’, she perceives with astonishment ‘an angel drop onto the ground’ (p. 122). Shortly afterwards she sees Sobran, on emerging from the bushes, help the angel get up and take refuge in a nearby wood. On watching the event from her coach, she finds, as Knox describes, ‘her world unexpectedly as full of holes as the casing on a spider’s nest after a shower of hailstones’ (p. 122). Having spent her teenage years living in Paris and mixing with friends with Enlightenment views, she now privately identifies as an atheist. However, the sight she has witnessed makes her rethink her convictions for, as she reasons, ‘If there was an angel there was also a god’ (p. 134). Sobran and Xas, on the contrary, though worried about their discovery, are nonetheless secretly overjoyed to be unexpectedly reunited and, on reaching the shelter of an outhouse, collapse in a spontaneous embrace. Embracing Sobran with his wings, Xas, echoing a comment that Sobran previously voiced about his encounter with an angel bringing him ‘good fortune’ (9), playfully enquires, ‘Do you no longer believe in your luck?’. Forgetting his moral reservations about queer sex in the pleasure of the unexpected reunion, Sobran joyfully replies, ‘You’re not just my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You’re my love. My true love!’ (p. 143). To Sobran’s surprise neither Aurora nor her coachman, the latter following her instructions, divulges his encounter with Xas to the local community and, with his wife Céleste, on tiring of his dour demeanour and obsession with religion having embarked on an affair with a neighbour, he feels relatively safe from scrutiny. He is eager to learn about Xas’s earlier life and, as a result, Knox’s description of location moves from the terrestrial landscape of Burgundy, with its changing seasons, harvests and floods, to the regions of heaven and hell.

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Xas’s account of the heaven, rather than being sublime and celebratory, is pejorative. After depicting the route to the site as involving a mountainous ascent buffeted by ‘winds full of ice like powdered glass’ (p. 78) resembling ‘the fearsome iciness of upper space’25 that Lovecraft depicts in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and ‘the glacial labyrinth’26 in At the Mountains of Madness, he describes how, on arrival, he was met by a burly angel blocking his path. Announcing that he is unwelcome on account of rebelling against God, the angel promptly ‘knocked him out of the air and down onto the permafrost’ (p. 78), injuring his face. As Xas scornfully observes, ‘Angels have cold hearts and thick skulls!’ (p. 149). His description of the landscape is also negative. Parodying Milton’s famous description of Satan’s lament for his loss of access to heaven in Paradise Lost, ‘Farewell happy fields / Where Joy for ever dwells’,27 he refers mockingly to ‘the preposterous grass of heaven, no blade with a corroded edge for in heaven the insects are never hungry’ (p. 46). He also criticises the regularity of the ‘great forest’ (p. 46) fringing it since ‘every tree is the same height’ (p. 46). Whereas the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson describes the city in his poem The City of Dreadful Night (1873) in imagery recalling hell and limbo, Xas, like Milton, describes hell itself as a city, representing it in gothic imagery of darkness. After telling Sobran the story of how he and his fellow angels, on being expelled from heaven, found themselves ‘incarcerated in a horrible sanctuary’ (p. 87), a phrase recalling Milton’s description of hell as ‘a Dungeon horrible’ (Paradise Lost, bk 1, p. 7), he describes the edifices they constructed. However, in contrast to the impressive ‘Fabrik huge…Built like a temple’ with its ‘doric pillars’ (Paradise Lost, bk 1, p. 23) that Milton describes, Xas mentions a gloomy ‘dark walled citadel’. It functions, he tells Sobran, not as a council chamber but a library since it is packed with transcripts of books. As he explains, parodying the concept of the Platonic Forms, heaven contains no transcripts since ‘Angels are in fact the only copies that God tolerates’ (p. 144). Whereas his fellow angels devote themselves to the punitive task of ‘herding the damned in dungeons’ (149), he himself takes refuge in reading while also attempting, despite the heat and semidarkness, to create a small garden. His description of the oppressive and claustrophobic nature of both celestial regions enables Sobran to understand his preference for earth with its regional and cultural diversity. Though having revealed to Sobran his fallen status, Xas has another secret that he has not divulged. This is that Lucifer, who is now officially his master, is ignorant of both his visits to earth and his relationship with Sobran. However, on hearing of them, Lucifer promptly descends from hell to administer punishment. It is Aurora de Valday, who herself has recently become sexually attracted to Sobran, unexpectedly witnesses his arrival. Worried that she has recently seen little of Sobran and concerned about his well-being, she visits the coach house near his home where she knows that he sometimes lodges and, on entering the upstairs room, finds him sleeping with Xas at his side. The angel’s appearance astonishes her for, as she describes, ‘his beauty made many human lovelinesses that she had seen seem like tricks of the light’ (p. 159). While she is engrossed in contemplating him, Lucifer arrives. Knox describes the latter as a terrifying figure

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almost eight-feet tall, ‘immense and perfect’ (p. 164), his huge wings ‘perfumed and opulent’ (p. 164) and his body ornamented with ropes of pearl. Remarking sardonically to Sobran, ‘I’m sure you won’t love him less if there’s a little less of him!’ (p. 165), he unsheathes his sword and, ignoring Sobran’s efforts to protect Xas, proceeds to amputate his wings. After achieving the brutal task, he turns with grim efficiency to ‘sealing the wound where the wing joined the body with a flap of skin, stitching it closed’ (p. 165). The episode of body horror alerts attention, as Xavier Aldana Reyes claims that it frequently does, ‘to the vulnerability of human flesh to attack’,28 while Lucifer’s bawdy comment recalls Mishra’s reference to the dark humour that gothic fiction on occasion displays (Mishra, ed. cit. p. 55). Although, as a result of Sobran’s and Aurora’s care, Xas eventually recovers his health, depressed and humiliated by the loss of his wings he has no wish to remain at the vineyard and leaves the region secretly one night. After being employed by a member of the French aristocracy who is attempting to construct a flying machine and assisting him with the necessary science, he joins a group of itinerant gypsies and travels with them to Paris where, having recovered his balancing skills, he performs in the Funambules district of the city, famous for its carnivalesque associations, as a trapeze walker. The location, peopled as it is by ‘tumblers and freaks’ (p. 190), suits his new persona for, in addition to performing as a carnivalesque entertainer, he now poignantly regards himself as a freak on account of the loss of his wings and inability to fly. Here again reference to location echoes and illuminates the character’s emotional life. Sobran, though devastated by Xas’s sudden disappearance, initially has no way of locating him. However, while staying with relatives in Paris, he happens to come across a handbill advertising ‘a man who walks on the points of swords’ and, remembering Xas’s former balancing skills, visits the Funambules area in the hope of finding him. On eventually discovering him at the theatre, he playfully observes, referring to his shifts of role, ‘I’m surprised to find you alone - Xas, the sword walker, scientist…’ Delighted to be reunited with him, Xas promptly replies, ‘I’m not alone. Here you are!’ (p. 193). He accepts Sobran’s invitation to return with him to Burgundy, agreeing to his proposal that he explains his sudden appearance by appointing him as tutor to his teenage son. Xas proves to be ­well-suited to the role. Sobran’s son, though unaware of his history and his experience of terrestrial and extraterrestrial locations, is impressed by his range of knowledge, especially with reference to the disciplines of history, geography and, of course, theological controversy. The two lovers are eventually separated not by human or angelic intervention but by the inescapable facts of mortality. Unlike Sobran who, like the rest of humanity, ages and eventually dies, Xas, though having lost his wings, preserves his immortality and remains eternally youthful. The novel concludes with him, having lost both his wings and his lover, leaving Burgundy once again. The last image we see of him portrays him ‘turning to face the road’ (p. 237) with its promise of new locations and countries to explore. Condé’s and Knox’s two novels, as well as being of interest for their representation of queer sexuality and utilisation of gothic motifs, are significant, as illustrated above, for their vivid delineation of landscape and location. In

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employing rural and urban areas as contexts for the narrative and to reflect the characters’ moods and affective responses, they link the material dimension with the invisible. The description of the eerie darkness of the Salem wilderness in Condé’s novel where Tituba senses ‘the thousand malevolent eyes’ (p. 64) of the nocturnal creatures gazing at her contrasts with the peaceful sky ‘against which the stars sparkled’ (p. 11) in the forest where she lived with Mama Yaya. Urban regions, associated as they are with slavery, are depicted throughout the novel as uniformly oppressive. Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck, in contrast, moves from representing the rural location of Burgundy with its abundant grape harvests, fragrant summers and provincial gossip to depicting the extraterrestrial sites of heaven and hell and their oppressive regimes and inhabitants. The Funambules district of Paris where Xas works as a trapeze performer, in addition to reflecting his image of himself as a freak on account of circus-style performance and the loss of his wings, also illustrates the unorthodox nature of Knox’s narrative with its interrelating of gothic motifs with paranormal angel fiction and the movement from the landscape of France to the realms of heaven and hell. Together, the two novels give an insight into the varied roles that reference to rural and urban locations play in queer gothic narrative.

Notes

1. Karl Bell, ‘Phantasmal Cities: The Construction and Function of Haunted Landscapes in Victorian English Cities’, in Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (eds.), Landscapes: Super-Nature and Environment (London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 97. 2. Sarah Waters, Affinity (London, Virago, 1999), 126. 3. Ann Armstrong Scarboro, ‘Afterword’, in Maryse Condé (ed.), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1992), 204. Subsequent references to the novel are to this edition and in the text. 4. Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2003), 16, 79. 5. Catherine Clément, ‘The Guilty One’, in Clément and Helene Cixous (eds.), The Newly Born Woman (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987), 54. 6. Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (London and New York, Cassell, 1999), 29–58. 7. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerold Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 229. 8. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Rosemary Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, New York University Press, 1996), 182. 9. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 140–1. 10. Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (New York, New York State University, 1994), 54, 55. 11. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), 36.

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12. Emily Alder, ‘Urban Gothic’, in William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Oxford, Wiley and Blackwell, 2013), vol. 1, 703. 13. Andrew Smith, ‘Hauntings’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), 153. 14. Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith, Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (London: Macmillan, 1989), 151. 15. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York, Cornell University Press, 1985), 45. 16. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994), 13. 17. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre [1847] (Harmondsworth, Penguin English Library, 1983), 143. 18. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1859–60] (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1974), 46. 19. Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner’s Luck (London, Vintage, 2000), 1. Subsequent references are to this edition and in the text. 20. Andrew Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), 2, 45. 21. Maria Parrino, ‘The Grotesque’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. cit., 1, 47. 22. David Halperin and Valerie Traub, Gay Shame (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010). 23. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Angela Richards and James Strachey (eds.), The Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), vol. 14, 145. 24. Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Brighton, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 136–7, 164–7. 25. H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in S.T. Joshi (ed.), The Dreams of the Witchhouse and Other Weird Stories (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005), 181. 26. H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, ed. August Derleth (London, Panther, 1968), 89. 27. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952), vol. 1, Book 2, 11–12, lines 249–50. 28. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014), 18.

Bibliography Aldana Reyes, Xavier, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014). Alder, Emily, ‘Urban Gothic’, in William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Oxford, Wiley and Blackwell, 2013), vol. 2, 703. Armstrong Scarboro, Ann, ‘Afterword’, in Maryse Condé (ed.), I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1992). Bell, Karl, ‘Phantasmal Cities: The Construction and Function of Haunted Landscapes in Victorian English Cities’, in Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (eds.), Landscapes: ­Super-Nature and the Environment (London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994). Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre [1847] (Harmondsworth, Penguin English Library, 1983). Clément, Catherine, ‘The Guilty One’, in Clément and Helene Cixous (eds.), The Newly Born Woman (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987). Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White [1859–60] (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1974). Condé, Maryse, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1992).

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Edwards, Justin D., Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2003). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, in Angela Richards and James Strachey (eds.), The Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), vol. 14, 145. Gardner Lloyd-Smith, Allan, Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face (London: Macmillan, 1989). Grimsley, Jim, Dream Boy (Chapel Hill, NC, Algonquin, 1995). Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Rosemary Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, New York University Press, 1996). Halperin, David, and Traub, Valerie, Gay Shame (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010). Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York, Cornell University Press, 1985). Knox, Elizabeth, The Vintner’s Luck (London, Vintage, 2000). Lovecraft, H.P., At the Mountains of Madness, ed. August Derleth (London, Panther, 1968). Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in S.T. Joshi (ed.), The Dreams of the Witchhouse and Other Weird Stories (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005). Milton, John, Paradise Lost [1667] (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952). Palmer, Paulina, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (London and New York, Cassell, 1999). Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerold Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 229–59. Parrino, Maria, ‘The Grotesque’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 1, 47. Sedgwick, Eve, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick, Eve, The Epistemology of the Closet (Brighton, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Waters, Sarah, Affinity (London, Virago, 1999).

James Herbert’s Working-Class Horror Simon Brown

When he died in March 2013, James John Herbert was Britain’s most successful modern horror author, having sold more than 54 million books worldwide. This in itself is enough to cement Herbert’s place as an important voice in contemporary horror literature (a place which, as will be discussed, he has largely been denied in critical writings on horror), but what is more significant is that his early novels were responsible for a revolution in British gothic literary horror. His first innovation was to recognise changes happening in horror cinema and introduce far more explicit depictions of graphic violence and sex. His second, and far more important impact, was to update British horror writing, setting it within a specifically modern and deliberately working-class milieu. Between them these new approaches not only made his horror novels accessible to a very wide readership, thus ensuring his blockbuster success in terms of sales, but also allowed him to introduce a strong element of contemporary social critique. It is the nature of the shift in British horror that Herbert precipitated, and its legacy, that this chapter will explore. What makes his achievement all the more remarkable is the unconventional origin of Herbert’s writing career, and the fact that the revolution he instigated was done seemingly without any intention on his part. In 1972, when he was 28 years old and working as an art director for a London-based advertising firm, Herbert, in need of a challenge, simply sat down one day and started to write a book about killer rats terrorising London. He wrote it in longhand on a jumbo pad with a ­felttip pen, as he would do with all his books, and completed it in just nine months, working around his full-time job in the evenings and weekends. Herbert’s manuscript was typed up by his wife Ellie (another tradition that continued throughout his career) and he then sent it to six publishers in the spring of 1973. Within three weeks it was picked up by New English Library (NEL), a press that at the time was famous for its pulp paperbacks.

S. Brown (*)  Kingston University, Kingston, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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Despite including graphic depictions of humans being mutilated and eaten by two-foot-long vermin, Herbert did not set out explicitly to write a horror novel. He enjoyed horror books and films, but the genre did not hold a particularly strong fascination for him. Instead he drew inspiration for the tale largely from his impoverished working-class childhood, living in a condemned building at the back of Petticoat Lane street market in London’s Whitechapel in the years following the Second World War. The closeness of his home to the market and the stables behind it, in which the fruit and vegetables were stored, meant that around where he lived rats were rife. A second key aspect that influenced The Rats was the numerous as yet un-developed World War Two bomb sites in the East End where Herbert played as a child, which not only provided a suitably derelict location in which the action could take place, but also the source for the social commentary that would underpin the work. The third element that influenced his choice of subject was a late-night viewing of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Herbert was struck by a speech by Renfield (Dwight Fry) recounting a dream he had about millions of rats with blood-red eyes, and as a visual artist, this stuck in his mind as a particularly powerful image. Putting these aspects together, Herbert took Renfield’s dream and developed it into his tale of murderous mutant rats rampaging through the wastelands of his East End childhood. The Rats was released in hardcover by NEL in the spring of 1974, with a paperback version following in November. The first hardcover print run of 100,000 copies sold out, despite some negative reviews and a degree of controversy. Appalled by the violent content, Martin Amis, writing under the pseudonym of Henry Tilney, slated the book in The Observer, and for similar reasons The Rats was banned from sale in the popular British bookstore WH Smith, which was ironically the chain where Herbert purchased the jumbo pads on which he would write all his novels. Keen to exploit their new asset, NEL asked Herbert what other manuscripts he had for them, but The Rats was his only book, and he did not know if he had another in him. He also still had a day job. However, shortly after, while sitting in a meeting in his high-rise offices, Herbert watched a colleague walk over to the window and open it, and imagined the man suddenly leaping to his death. Herbert then wondered what would happen if all over London workers began to jump from their office windows, gripped by a kind of mass hysteria. Searching for inspiration as to what could cause such behaviour, he once again drew on his youth and the foul-smelling, yellow London smog that blighted the capital until the late 1950s, and hit on the idea of a huge chemical cloud released from the earth, exposure to which would drive everyone mad. Within a year, NEL had published Herbert’s second novel, The Fog (1975), which again became a bestseller. Still, Herbert saw himself as a part-time writer. He refused to sign a contract with NEL, preferring instead to write a book and then negotiate with his publisher, a system that he would maintain until he left NEL for Hodder and Stoughton in the 1980s. By the end of the 1970s, Herbert had written a further four novels (The Survivor, 1976, Fluke, 1977, The Spear, 1978 and a sequel to The Rats entitled Lair, 1979) and had finally, in 1977, stopped working in advertising to write full-time. Before considering how The Rats and The Fog in particular revolutionised British horror writing, it is necessary first to examine the context from which Herbert’s

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work emerged. In keeping with the fact that he wrote The Rats mainly for his own amusement, Herbert was always keen to stress that there was no calculation in what he attempted. He did not try to tap into any prevailing trend or to appeal to a specific audience; rather, he wrote what he wanted and the audience, and the trend, found him. Herbert’s contemporary and friend Stephen King aptly sums up what Herbert achieved by equating him with the punk rock movement that was developing at the same time as Herbert’s writing career in the ­mid-1970s.1 Bands like The Ramones in America and The Sex Pistols in the UK set out to shake the establishment with their raw, unpolished sound, provocative lyrics and in-your-face relationship with their audience in their live performances, a deliberate contrast to the distant, stadium-based concept shows of the early 1970s supergroups. Instead of being cerebral and polished, punk was visceral and confrontational, spitting and shouting obscenities into the front row, much the same way that, King argues, in The Rats and The Fog Herbert grabs the reader and screams in their face, forcing them to pay attention as vermin devour a baby in a crib, or naked schoolchildren pummel the penis of their gym teacher with a cricket bat.2 However, it is not only the connection with punk that makes the timing of Herbert’s first novels both fortuitous and significant. Herbert presented NEL with The Rats just as William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist (1971) was riding high in the bestseller charts, and The Rats was released by NEL just a few months before they also published King’s first book, Carrie (1974). The following year The Fog appeared in UK bookshops around the same time as King’s follow up novel, Salem’s Lot (1975). This proximity to King, undoubtedly the most famous modern horror author, has ensured Herbert’s place at the forefront of the renaissance of horror writing in the 1970s, but it has also meant that Herbert’s contribution is often mentioned as a mere add-on to the more influential King, when in fact the context from which he emerged, and his influence, is markedly different to his American counterpart. Partly this is because Blatty, King and Herbert were contemporaries, but it is also due to the fact that Blatty and King were part of the vanguard of a transformation in horror that was taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Herbert wrote The Rats in 1972, by which time The Exorcist, along with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Thomas Tyron’s The Other (1971), had begun to establish a new form of contemporary-based horror writing in America. A similar movement was also happening in US cinema through Roman Polanski’s film version of Levin’s novel, released in 1968 alongside George A. Romero’s landmark zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968). As is well established in horror history, the likes of Romero’s film, as well as later movies such as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) and William Friedkin’s adaptation of The Exorcist (1973), forced the horror film into the modern world and signalled the death knell for the historically set gothic tradition of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations for AIP in America, and for Hammer films in the UK. The impetus was therefore coming mainly from America, and this has tended to obscure the cultural specificity of Herbert’s role and influence as a UK writer. For while he may well have been familiar with Tyron, Levin, or Romero, for these American books and films circulated in the UK, he was equally familiar with

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the works of Dennis Wheatley, who was by far the most popular horror writer in Britain in the early 1970s, and was a particularly home-grown talent whose novels did not travel and sold poorly in the US. Born in January 1897, shortly before the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, Wheatley became an officer in the merchant navy before taking over his family’s wine business after World War One. When the company declined in the early 1930s, Wheatley turned his hand to a new career as a writer. Although his output encompassed many genres from spy thrillers to historical romances, Wheatley was most famous for the books he wrote about the occult, a subject he researched thoroughly over the years, even meeting the famous British occultist Aleister Crowley. Wheatley’s first such novel was The Devil Rides Out (1936), which featured the character of the Duc de Richleau, an aristocrat, adventurer and occult dabbler, who saves his friend Simon from the clutches of a group of Satanic worshippers, led by the evil Mocata. The Duc would appear in a number of Wheatley adventure and/or demonic-based stories until his final outing, Gateway to Hell (1970), and by the 1960s Wheatley was selling a million books a year, with his Satanist tales by far the most successful. It is therefore not surprising that in 1968 the bastion of English cinematic gothic, Hammer Films, should produce back to back adaptations of two of his stories. The first, Uncharted Seas (filmed under the title of The Lost Continent), is a ‘Lost World’ adventure-style narrative featuring shipwrecked survivors battling sea monsters and old civilisations (in this case a group of Spanish Conquistadors) in a land hidden from modernity. In contrast, the second, an adaptation of The Devil Rides Out, takes a deathly serious view of Satanism as Christopher Lee’s Duc pits his wits against Charles Gray’s Mocata. It is a testament to Wheatley’s popular success in the UK that Hammer should choose to add him to their canon of adapted horror writers alongside Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, and it is equally indicative of Wheatley’s peculiarly English appeal that The Devil Rides Out, renamed The Devil’s Bride, was a notable failure at the US box office. Despite being set in the 1920s, a more modern period than Hammer’s usual Victorian era (the novel was set in 1935), The Devil Rides Out is a comfortable fit for Hammer, since Wheatley’s world was as determinedly aristocratic as that of Count Dracula and Baron Victor Frankenstein. In the film The Duc de Richleau, referred to as ‘Your Grace’ by his servants, is both entitled and phenomenally rich (at one point a friend asks if he can borrow a car, and the Duc dismissively replies, ‘yes, yes, take any one you like’), and those who engage with the occult and those who battle it are equally wealthy and impeccably well-bred. When Mocata arrives at the elegant country home of the Duc’s friends Peggy and Richard Eaton to retrieve two of his Satanic flock who are hiding there, he is immaculately dressed and presents his business card to the servant before being shown into the drawing room where he proceeds to politely threaten Peggy before hypnotising her into compliance. He even returns the Duc’s Rolls Royce, left behind in a forest the night before. The Duc’s companions in the fight against Mocata, in addition to Peggy and Richard, included the aviator Rex van Ryn, and the aforementioned Simon Aron, a wealthy banker, who after being lured into Satanism by Mocata responds by buying a large house with a fully equipped observatory so that the coven can meet in private.

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Yet while The Devil Rides Out fits the Hammer mould, albeit updating it slightly by replacing the traditional coach and horses and hansom cab with an impressive collection of classic cars, its appearance the same year as Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby marked the beginning of the end not just of Hammer’s American backing, but also for its traditional period-set gothic milieu. The historical and the aristocratic settings were becoming increasingly u­ n-relatable in a post-Empire Britain of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, a situation exacerbated in the early 1970s not only by the success of American contemporary set cinematic and literary horrors, but also through the increasing irrelevance of traditional gothic monsters in a Britain rife with economic decline and rampant inflation. In an attempt to stay competitive Hammer responded by placing Dracula in the modern era in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), and in 1976 they incurred the wrath of Wheatley by updating his 1953 novel To the Devil a Daughter to the mid1970s, a modern setting of which Wheatley did not approve. He also did not care for the increased emphasis on sexuality in the film (including a full-frontal nude scene featuring Nastassja Kinski, who is alleged to have been only 14 years old at the time), but sex was one of the main tools in Hammer’s arsenal as it battled for relevance in the 1970s, beginning with the first of the so-called Karnstein trilogy, The Vampire Lovers (1970). This series of films, which also included Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971), was loosely based on J. Sheriden LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872), and while The Vampire Lovers was somewhat restrained, the sequels introduced ever-greater amounts of female nudity and ­soft-core lesbian sex into the Hammer mix. Hammer also upped the levels of gore and bloodletting in its films in the 1970s, which not only drew upon the unprecedented levels of cinematic violence emerging from America in both horror films like Night of the Living Dead and films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969) but also upon another British literary horror antecedent. In the 1960s and 1970s Wheatley’s principal rival in the horror publishing field was Bertie Maurice Van Thal, who under the name of Herbert Van Thal had started in 1959 to edit The Pan Book of Horror Stories, a series of compilations of classic and new horror short stories featuring strikingly provocative covers and, as the years progressed, increasingly violent content. While not a particular horror aficionado, Herbert was doubtless familiar with Wheatley and Van Thal’s work, as well as having grown up reading the EC horror comics of the 1950s such as Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Terror, which did not shy away from graphic images of shambling, oozing zombies and dismembered corpses. In his writing therefore Herbert would emphatically reject and subvert Wheatley’s aristocratic milieu, while at the same time enthusiastically embrace the violence of Pan Horror and EC, and the explicit sex permitted by the liberalisation of censorship in Britain. In doing so, regardless of whether he intended to or not, he took the gothic tropes of Stoker’s fin de siècle vampire tale that had inspired him, filtered them through his working-class background, and democratised horror for a modern British, and later worldwide, audience. This process is visible right from the prologue of The Rats, which takes place in an old, seemingly deserted house. Herbert describes the house in gothic terms,

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referring to it as being detached and faded, set back from the road and surrounded by foliage and undergrowth that hides it from view. Despite its abandoned appearance, the house is inhabited by an old woman who, in the style of Dickens’ Miss Haversham, never leaves, until one week she fails to pick up the food delivery left on her doorstep, and the police break in to find her mad. A crumbling house encircled by undergrowth and isolated from the world, and a strange, reclusive old woman who has lost her mind are clearly gothic tropes, but as Herbert continues he reveals that this is no crumbling mansion in acres of fog-enshrouded moorland, but rather an old lockkeepers’ house by a disused canal off the East End’s Commercial Road. Likewise, there is nothing supernatural about the rats, which are the indirect descendants of Frankenstein’s monster. They are genetic mutants created by atomic testing in New Guinea, and then returned to London and ­cross-bred with native species in this house by a professor of zoology, who of course is also mad. The theme of mad science overreaching itself continues in Herbert’s second novel, in which the fog is not a natural gothic phenomenon but a man-made chemical creation, manufactured by scientists researching bacteriological weapons at the Ministry of Defence science facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Considered too dangerous, the chemical is buried beneath the earth, until underground explosive testing by the army creates a fissure that releases the chemical in the form of a yellow, gaseous fog. As with the old house that opens The Rats, Herbert once again begins The Fog by evoking traditional gothic imagery. As the cloud crosses Salisbury Plain to the west of London, Herbert describes fog-shrouded countryside and aristocratic, isolated dwellings. Early scenes feature a country priest taking a walk through the fields near his church, so lost in thought about his forthcoming sermon that he does not notice when what he refers to as a mist appears around him. At the same time a poacher is encircled by the fog while hiding out on a nearby large estate owned by the unpleasant Colonel Meredith. Driven mad by the chemicals, the poacher breaks into the Colonel’s huge country residence and murders the family, while the more sedate Reverend’s madness manifests by him urinating over his congregation from his pulpit. Meanwhile at an expensive private boys’ school near Andover, housed in a looming, isolated red brick building at the end of a long driveway, the students, in a fit of sexual ecstasy, watch silently as the Deputy Head is castrated with a pair of garden shears. The action therefore begins in a traditional gothic, privileged world in a countryside landscape, but Herbert’s story becomes increasingly democratic and urban in its scope as the fog drifts towards London. After reaching the coast, where the entire population of Bournemouth commit suicide by walking into the sea, the fog heads inland towards the capital, its imminent arrival heralded by two key events. First a group of homing pigeons which flew through the fog over Salisbury Plain return to Hackney and peck their owner to death, and then the pilot of a commercial jumbo jet, which also flies through the fog on its way to London, crashes it into the West End’s Post Office Tower where his unfaithful wife works. Just as The Rats begins in what appears to be a country-based gothic ruin that turns out to be just off the Commercial Road, so too the mayhem of The Fog begins in a more

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traditional-seeming and rarefied upper-class gothic world before arriving among ordinary people in urban environments. This distinction between city and country, the latter wealthy, traditional and gothic, the former mundane, modern and working class, became a significant theme in Herbert’s work, which is replete with large country residences where evil lurks and to which the hero, who is always male, urban and working class, must go. In Lair, Herbert’s hero, an extermination expert named Pender, travels to Epping Forest on the outskirts of London to investigate a sighting of the mutant rats, and finds that they have their lair in a dilapidated, abandoned manor house. In Sepulchre (1987), kidnap and ransom expert Liam Halloran is asked to protect the mysterious Felix Klein, who works for the global Magma Corporation. Halloran’s mission takes him from his company offices in St. Katherine’s Dock to the Magma Corporation headquarters in London’s financial district, and finally to an enormous country estate in Surrey called Neath, where Klein reveals himself to be immensely old and granted immortality by his worship of an ancient Sumerian god named Bel-Marduk. In The Spear, the investigation undertaken by ­ex-British Forces intelligence officer Harry Steadman into arms dealer Edward Gant leads him from his home in London’s Knightsbridge, first to Gant’s mansion in Guildford and then to his enormous estate in Devon. There Gant has sequestered the Spear of Destiny, the object that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, in order to bring about the resurrection of Heinrich Himmler. In all three novels an aristocratic country property hides terrifying evil—natural in Lair, supernatural in The Spear and Sepulchre—and nowhere in Herbert’s work is this equating of old and wealthy country life and sinister forces more evident than in his trilogy of novels featuring the parapsychologist David Ash. Herbert’s Ash trilogy began in 1988 with Haunted, and continued with The Ghosts of Sleath (1994) and Herbert’s final novel, Ash in 2012. Ash is a paranormal investigator working for an organisation called The Psychical Research Institute, and in keeping with Herbert’s theme of city versus country, and the mundane and modern versus the Gothic, the Institute is London based but Ash’s three cases take him outside the city. Haunted leads him to Edbrook, a large house set in substantial grounds near the small village of Ravensmoor, some hundred miles outside of London. The Ghosts of Sleath has him travel to the small, hidden village of Sleath, in the Chiltern Hills close to Oxford, and finally in Ash he must visit the enormous and remote Comraich Castle in Scotland. In all three places Ash is forced to confront a form of evil inextricably bound to history, wealth and privilege. In Edbrook he meets the Mariell family, comprising brothers Robert and Simon and sister Christina, all watched over by their nanny and aunt, Tess Webb. The Mariells are clearly rich. Christina picks up Ash in a vintage Wolseley car, and her brothers meet him in Edbrook’s cavernous oak panelled entrance hall. Like the characters in Wheatley’s novels, the Mariells are as old fashioned and as impeccably well-mannered as their lavish home implies. Robert asks Ash to ‘Permit me to introduce myself’, while Simon responds to meeting Ash with the word ‘Marvellous’. As Ash explores and investigates Edbrook’s library, drawing room, well-stocked wine cellar and formal

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gardens, he discovers Edbrook is haunted by the ghost of a young girl. Despite the decision to bring in an investigator, the Mariells, with the exception of Nanny Tess, are not disturbed by the entity, finding the whole situation amusing rather than frightening. Ultimately it is revealed that they are in fact the ghosts, and that years ago Robert and Christina had died in a fire at Edbrook, and as a result Simon hanged himself. Specifically to torture Ash, the three restless spirits had made an alliance with the spiteful ghost of his sister, Juliet, who drowned when still a child. Ash’s experiences at Edbrook cause a nervous breakdown, but once his recovery is complete he is sent to Sleath, where numerous ghosts have been sighted, including that of a young boy drowned in the bathtub only days before, who appears to his grieving mother. Ash is called in by Grace Lockwood, daughter of the local vicar, and the last descendant of the wealthy family that owned the land and ran the village from their ancestral home of Lockwood Hall, now a ruin on the outskirts of Sleath. Grace and her father seem to be decent people living a frugal but comfortable life, the family having lost its fortune and Lockwood Hall generations earlier and the estate now being owned by a rich magazine magnate named Beardsmore. However, it is revealed that their ancestors were precisely the kind of evil, amoral aristocratic villains that filled the pages of Wheatley’s novels. In the mid-eighteenth century Sebastian Lockwood was a friend of the real-life figure of Sir Francis Dashwood and along with Dashwood founded the notorious group of pagan worshippers known as the Hellfire Club. Herbert specifically links the Hellfire Club to Satanism, although in reality it is more probable that they were simply a group of wealthy and powerful men who met to indulge their various debauched tendencies. The Lockwoods however were genuinely evil. Sebastian was one of a number of Lockwoods who were convinced they were psychopomps, conductors of souls from this world to the next, and to investigate further they murdered people, especially children, and used black magic to try to capture their souls in an attempt to understand the mysteries of death and to grant themselves immortality. The obscene obsessions of the Lockwood family continued right up until Grace’s father, who also indulged in dark rituals at Lockwood Hall. Only Grace is innocent, and it is revealed at the end that Beardsmore is also a Lockwood, the last in a line begun with the bastard son of Sebastian. The inclusion of Beardsmore in The Ghosts of Sleath is significant, since unlike the Mariells and the Lockwoods he is a self-made man, and his presence specifically links old and new money in the practices of evil. Beardsmore may be nouveau riche, but like the corporate puppet Felix Klein in Sepulchre, and the NeoNazi arms dealer Gant in The Spear, he is connected to the same sinister forces as the landed gentry that built the estate that now belongs to him, and in this respect, Herbert again democratises and modernises the traditional gothic trope of past sins influencing and impacting upon the present. Not only does ancient evil endure, but it does so in old buildings owned by new money that stand as atavistic reminders of an aristocratic past that has no place in the modern urban-centric world. Herbert therefore equates timeless evil not only with old money and the aristocracy, drawing upon gothic traditions, but also with new money in the form

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of modern capitalism. This theme reaches its conclusion in Comraith Castle in Ash. Comraith is an ancient Scottish castle that now operates as a sequestered retreat for the super-wealthy, under the watchful eye of a secret society of the UK’s rich and powerful known as the Inner Court. Surrounded on three sides by extensive and heavily guarded grounds, and on the fourth by a sheer cliff, Comraich is built for hiding in, more often than not as a last resort, and so the majority of the guests never leave. Among those living there are Lord Lucan, the British peer who disappeared in the 1960s, Robert Maxwell, the newspaper magnate who supposedly drowned in 1991, several elderly Nazis, an African dictator, a Serbian general and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, all granted shelter by the Inner Court, and by extension absolution for their crimes. At the opposite extremes of Cromraich’s residents, both literally and figuratively, are two special individuals, one a symbol of ultimate innocence, the other of irredeemable corruption. Living in a room at the top of one of the castle’s many towers is Lewis, whose real name is Louis after Prince Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten. Lewis is the son of Diana, Princess of Wales and Prince Charles, born prematurely at only 18 weeks and hidden from the public at the behest of his father due to a condition that left his skin translucent. At the other end of the castle, sequestered in the deepest dungeon, is an un-named misshapen, deformed abomination, a woman who is revealed to be the daughter of Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler. Her psychic abilities, born of her nefarious parentage and decades of isolation and abuse, allow for the emergence of ghostly manifestations from Comraich’s ancient past that terrorise the residents. Once again old and new evil, both born of wealth and privilege, work together as monsters of the modern world are beset by an ancient curse, muttered by Comraich’s original Laird at the time of the reign of King Edward III, as he watched his family thrown from the castle battlements by vengeful Scottish clans. Comraich itself is a combination of high-tech maximum-security residence, luxury hotel and gothic citadel, the ancient dungeons beneath the castle sitting directly below a ­well-appointed cutting-edge hospital. Gloomy stone-clad corridors branch off of elegantly carpeted hallways, and a state of the art surveillance system is monitored from a control centre close to a stone-walled room filled with displays of ancient weaponry such as pikes and axes. David Ash is the readers’ entry into the secretive, debauched, advantaged and haunted worlds of Edbrook, Lockwood Hall and Comraich. Not only is Ash a city dweller who makes his home in Central London, he is also resolutely working class, a smoker, drinker and sceptic, who has as little time for the supernatural as he does for the rich. He is an everyman figure, immediately distrustful of both the sightings he is asked to investigate, and of those who request he do so. Sullen and uncommunicative, and traumatised by the death of his sister, in each novel Ash is progressively isolated by Herbert who has him travel first to the country, then to a large and old property, and finally to a world populated by spirits and manifestations. Ash is therefore typical of Herbert’s central characters, who are another essential aspect of his democratisation of the Gothic. Whereas Stoker’s novel pitted a series of skilled middle-class professionals—Professor Van Helsing, Doctor Seward, the lawyer Harker and the hunter Quincey Morris—against the aristocratic

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Count Dracula, The Rats established Herbert’s theme of a working-class male hero who is both a loner and an outsider to the establishment that he serves in the story. In The Rats Herbert’s hero, Harris, is not a scientist equipped to battle the rat infestation, but rather an ordinary secondary school teacher whose only skills in dealing with the outbreak are bravery, common sense and an in-depth knowledge of the area. In The Fog, Holman works for the Ministry of the Environment, and so is technically more suited to deal with the fog than Harris was with the rats, but Holman too is an outsider, actually working undercover within the government to seek out and report practices dangerous to the environment. The main reason he becomes involved in the battle against the fog is that having been the first person to be infected, and then the only one to be cured because he is exposed before it becomes fully potent, he is immune to the fog’s murderous effects. Halloran in Sepulchre is an expert in the field of personal protection, but while he knows how to undertake a handbrake turn and reverse a car out of an ambush, he is utterly illequipped to handle ancient Sumerian evil. Likewise, Steadman in The Spear is a former spy, enjoying a peaceful life as a private detective, who is dragged back into his old life against his will. While he can handle himself when posing as an arms dealer, he is out of his depth when faced with the zombiefied corpse of Himmler. As a paranormal investigator Ash’s skills are more germane to the situations he faces, but his main focus is in debunking the paranormal and so while he brings with him all the tools of his trade such as remote cameras and talcum powder to capture ghostly (or human) footsteps, he too is unable to cope with genuine supernatural phenomena, so much so that the ghosts of Edbrook drive him to the edge of insanity, and over the threshold of alcoholism. Herbert’s heroes are therefore rationalists, pragmatic men who feel they know and understand the worlds that they inhabit and believe what they are involved in can be solved and understood in a rational manner, but who are all ultimately, in true gothic style, forced to come face to face with the primal, the irrational and the uncanny. Ash, Halloran, Steadman and Harris therefore are meant to represent the reader, or at least the male reader. They are everyday professional men for whom the world of demons, spectres and monsters is unfamiliar and inconceivable, and who belong in untidy London flats, offices and bars rather than manor houses and medieval castles. Like the reader, they are outside of the world into which they are thrust, and this is another example of Herbert’s marshalling and modernising of gothic tropes. Not only do the likes of Ash and Halloran echo Harker and Morris in Stoker’s Dracula, with their decency, tenacity and pragmatism in the face of incomprehensible events, but also the journeys they take to Neath and Edbrook have echoes of Harker’s arrival at Castle Dracula, Jane Eyre finding herself at Thornfield Hall, or the heroine who arrives at Manderlay in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Herbert’s heroes update the gothic ingénues, the innocent thrust into a world of ancient secrets that reach into the present to baffle and terrify them. In Herbert’s work, these central characters also serve the political subtext which is another key aspect of Herbert’s modernising of the Gothic, for it is through them that Herbert articulates his anger at those responsible for contemporary society’s lack of support for working-class people, specifically modern corporations and the

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UK Government. This theme emerges in The Rats and stemmed from Herbert’s own childhood. He escaped his poor background by gaining a place at grammar school, and then by entering Hornsey College of Art in Highgate at 16. This led to his lucrative career in advertising, and a move out of the East End, but Herbert retained a sense of injustice and frustration at the poor conditions of his youth due to the lack of urban regeneration. It is therefore deliberate that the forces of the establishment in The Rats have so little familiarity with an area of London they had ignored for years that they need Harris to show them around. Alongside the rats, Herbert sees the government as the villain, as they first ignore, and then clumsily try to solve, the rat problem. Indeed, Herbert saw the government and the rats as equivalents, telling Fangoria magazine in 1983, that the rats represented the system, and that the novel ended with some of them surviving because in life the system is never fully defeated.3 Harris is therefore an outsider to the government, forced to work with them in the same way that Ash is an outsider in the aristocratic and corporate worlds of Edbrook, Lockwood Manor and Comraich. By equating both old and new money and forms of power with evil, Herbert is able to extend the traditional gothic critique of wealth and privilege normally reserved for the gentry to include contemporary forms of overbearing oppression and corrupt authority, from incompetent and indifferent government departments to the military, to global business and to secret societies, such as the Inner Court who sequester the guilty rich, the Magma Corporation who turn a blind eye to Klein’s deviant and murderous pursuits, and the wealthy members of the Thule Gesellschaft, the Neo-Nazi group led by Gant in The Spear. In Shrine (1983) Herbert even turns his critical eye to the Catholic Church, with his tale of a deaf-mute girl who apparently has a vision of the Virgin Mary in a field by St. Joseph’s Church in the Sussex village of Banfield, and then magically regains her speech. It gradually emerges that all is not what it seems. Alice was conceived out of wedlock on the same spot where she had her vision, and also where, 500 years previously, a sorceress named Elnor was put to death by the Church, an act of violence that means the Church is complicit in what turns out to be Alice’s demonic possession. Alice is the victim, a child from a poor family living in a council house who is beset by Herbert’s ‘system’, forces beyond her control including two unscrupulous businessmen attempting to capitalise on Alice’s fame and healing powers, the corrupt cleric whose seduction led to Elnor’s execution, the demonic evil that infests Alice/Elnor, and the lustful nature of her conception. Underlying all this is a warning about the detrimental effects of poverty and economic decline. Alice’s family is connected to St. Joseph’s not only through her visitation but also by the fact that her mother, Molly, cleans the church for minimum wages. St. Joseph’s itself has fallen on hard times, its congregation steadily dwindling, while Banfield is in the grip of economic decline. In Shrine deprivation, as much as depravity, is responsible for Alice’s fate. Alice’s story is witnessed by a reporter named Gerry Fenn, who is the first to witness Alice speak. Fenn once again is the typical Herbert outsider, confronted by a world he does not understand and cannot initially accept. As with most of Herbert’s tales, however, he is assisted in his entry to this world by an insider,

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who is invariably female and is always on the periphery of the evil world, with one foot inside it (making them privy to some of its secrets) and one outside (meaning they are able to relate to the hero outsider in an ambiguous but ultimately ­non-threatening way). In Shrine this figure is Fenn’s girlfriend Sue, who is Catholic and thus able to interpret some of the meanings of the events surrounding Alice. Having allowed her faith to lapse, what she witnesses with Fenn draws her back to the church and she becomes involved with the organisation of a procession through the village and a mass at the base of the tree where Alice had her first vision, which is where the novel reaches its apocalyptic denouement. Sue however is uncharacteristic of the typical Herbert female character in that she already knows the hero before the story begins, and because during the course of the book she does not sleep with him, mainly because the supposed miracle of Alice renews her flagging faith. In Shrine the role of the hero’s sexual partner is taken on by Nancy, a reporter from The Washington Post, who is therefore even more of an outsider than Fenn. More often however this dual role of insider and sexual partner is the same person. In Sepulchre Halloran learns about Felix Klein’s past through his relationship with Cora, Klein’s personal assistant, whom Klein has corrupted by introducing her to sadomasochistic sex, something which Cora subsequently forces upon Halloran. When Harry Steadman first meets Gant in The Spear, the arms dealer is accompanied by a journalist, Holly Miles, who is related to Gant’s wife and thus has privileged access. After she and Steadman are almost run over by a tank, they sleep together. In The Ghosts of Sleath Ash begins a relationship with Grace Lockwood, based upon a mutual and instant attraction that is the result of some kind of psychic link between them. Grace not only is able to help him navigate his way around the village and people of Sleath, as a Lockwood she is also able to fill him in on the family history before becoming his lover. In Ash the parapsychologist enjoys a relationship with Delphine, a psychologist working at Comraith Castle. She is thus able to reveal its secrets to Ash, while at the same time remaining distant from its corruption, having been manipulated into working for the Inner Court by her father. Like the residents at Comraith, she too cannot leave, and has learnt to turn a blind eye to the Inner Court’s misdeeds, partly by focussing her attention on helping the innocent Lewis. As figures who are both part of the evil but also removed from it, facilitating its downfall through the help they give the hero, Herbert’s female characters represent a merging of the gothic tropes of the innocent and the fatal woman, though not always in equal balance. In the case of Cora in Sepulchre, her seduction of Halloran is deliberate and calculated, albeit under coercion, as part of a ploy by Klein to keep Halloran distracted. Equally in Haunted, Ash is seduced by the ghost Christina as part of his sister’s plan to drive him mad. More often than not, however, as in the case of Delphine and Grace Lockwood, the main female character simply falls for the hero and gives him her body along with her insight. In The Spear, Holly does the same, but is also revealed to be a CIA agent whose mission is to infiltrate Gant’s inner circle and to protect Steadman. While often problematic in the sense that Herbert tends to develop these relationships in a somewhat clunky fashion—the women tend to throw themselves at the hero with remarkable

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speed—it is also possible to argue that Herbert simply assigns his female characters perfectly normal sexual agency. While it is true that they often end up dead—Grace Lockwood for example is torn apart by vengeful ghosts before Ash’s eyes—they are rarely punished because they are sexually active. Herbert therefore includes his semi-pornographic depictions of sex not as a moral indicator but rather because sex is simply a part of adult life, and although his female characters are always seen through the eyes of the protagonist in order to preserve their inside/outside ambiguity, and therefore lack an interior voice and are frequently objectified, he does not judge them for their active sexuality. These women, like the traditional gothic heroine, are trapped in a labyrinth and need saving by the male lead, the difference being that in reaching out to the hero they actively seek their salvation. Here again Herbert brings to bear the notion of class. Despite her titled heritage, Grace Lockwood works in a museum of Medieval Art in France before returning to Sleath to look after her father. Delphine comes from money and power, but is indifferent to it, staying at Comraich because of her selfless commitment to Lewis’ care, and because of a promise to her father. Even though she is more complicit, Cora in Sepulchre is a working-class girl doing a secretarial job at Magma before being hand-picked by Klein to be his PA because he sees in her an English Rose that he can corrupt. These are ordinary women and are thus able to relate to Herbert’s heroes on that level; they are connected to wealth but they, like the men for whom they fall, are not part of it. Only Christina in Haunted is set apart as deliberately evil and manipulative, embracing as she does her aristocratic heritage. Herbert therefore builds his tales around a series of opposites—good versus evil, country versus city, and wealth/privilege versus the working class. But behind all of these is a fundamental clash between the old and the new, between ancient evil and modern misanthropy, and between the traditions of classic gothic literature and the modern world. In the 1970s, Herbert’s work acted as a bridge between the gothic writings of Dennis Wheatley and the evermore creaky Victorian melodramas of Hammer, dragging British horror traditions into the late twentieth century and paving the way for a new generation of British horror writers. The result however is that the legacy of James Herbert is often seen, somewhat unfortunately, as being primarily a slew of pulp paperbacks featuring Britain being attacked by multitudes of evermore absurd killer creatures. These included crabs in Guy N. Smith’s series, the first three of which were Night of the Crabs (1976), Killer Crabs (1978) and The Origin of the Crabs (1979), slugs in Shaun Hutson’s novel of the same name from 1982, and worms, jellyfish and caterpillars in John Halkin’s books Slither (1980), Slime (1984) and Squelch (1985), respectively. Richard Lewis in 1983 produced Night Killers which featured murderous cockroaches, and even cats and dogs had an appearance thanks to Nick Sharman’s The Cats (1977) and Robert Calder’s The Dogs (1979). Printed with lurid covers, just as Van Thal’s collections had been in the 1960s, these books varied in quality and critically have been largely dismissed as lurid exploitation. Their association with Herbert through their short, high concept titles and killer creatures served to drag down his reputation and obscure his very real and

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significant contribution to modern British horror and modern literary horror in general, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Herbert was neither a sophisticated nor a particularly literary writer. His books have a pared-down, simple prose style that simplifies character motivation in favour of narrative momentum. It does not matter for example why the leading female character and the hero sleep together, it only matters that they do, and what they get up to as they do it. Yet two of the most celebrated modern British horror authors, Clive Barker and Ramsay Campbell, cite Herbert as a significant influence, with Campbell for example contributing a new introduction to a limited edition of The Fog published by Centipede Press in 2010, and leading a tribute to Herbert at the Liverpool Other Words Literary Festival in the week after Herbert’s death. Ultimately when it comes to modern literary horror since the 1970s, it is Stephen King, alongside his predecessors and contemporaries such as Levin, Blatty, Peter Straub and Anne Rice that tend to be considered the most influential authors, since with works like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Salem’s Lot, Ghost Story (1979) and Interview with the Vampire (1976) they updated traditional horror monsters (the Devil, ghosts, demons and vampires) into the modern world. Yet each of these tales is American-set, and indeed King is notable for the ways in which he uses familiar brand names to counterpoint the supernatural evil and root his stories in a very real-seeming world. His is, exclusively, a world of Americana, and while American culture undoubtedly has a global familiarity, and King’s tales of good and evil have a transnational reach, it was James Herbert who fundamentally and almost single-handedly broke the hegemony of the Victorian Gothic in British horror writing, and made horror relevant again for a new generation.

Notes 1. Stephen King, ‘Introduction’, in Stephen Jones (ed.) James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 9–16. 2. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York, Everest House, 1982), 339. 3. Martin Coxhead, ‘From Rats to Riches: The Horror Fiction of James Herbert’, Fangoria 30, 1983, pp. 34–37.

Bibliography Cabell, Craig (2013) James Herbert: The Authorised True Story 1943–2013 (London: Metro). Coxhead, Martin (1983) ‘From Rats to Riches: The Horror Fiction of James Herbert,’ Fangoria 30, pp. 34–37. Fisher, Terrence, dir. (1968) The Devil Rides Out. Freeman, Nick (2006) ‘A Decadent Appetite for the Lurid: James Herbert, The Spear and Nazi Gothic,’ Gothic Studies 8:2, pp. 80–97. Grixti, Joseph (1989) Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction (London: Routledge).

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Herbert, James (1974) The Rats (London: New English Library). Herbert, James (1975) The Fog (London: New English Library). Herbert, James (1978) The Spear (London: New English Library). Herbert, James (1979) Lair (London: New English Library). Herbert, James (1983) Shrine (London: New English Library). Herbert, James (1987) Sepulchre (London: Hodder and Stoughton). Herbert, James (1988) Haunted (London: Hodder and Stoughton). Herbert, James (1994) The Ghosts of Sleath (London: HarperCollins). Herbert, James (2012) Ash (London: Harper Collins). Jones, Stephen, ed. (1992) James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (London: Hodder and Stoughton). King, Stephen (1982) Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House). Shober, Adrian (2004) ‘Writing the Possessed Child in British Culture: James Herbert’s Shrine,’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 14:4 (56), pp. 447–458. Spark, Alasdair (1993) ‘Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.’ In Clive Bloom (ed.) Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press), pp. 147–160. Tudor, Lucia- Alexandra (2014) ‘King of the Rats,’ Romanian Journal of Artistic Creativity 2:3, pp. 67–81. Wisker, Gina (1993) ‘Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.’ In Clive Bloom (ed.) Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press), pp. 99–110. Wisker, Gina (2016) ‘Dennis Wheatley.’ In William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (eds.) The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Chichester: Wiley), pp 737–739.

Re-defining the Genre with Mo Hayder Sian MacArthur

If there was any doubt that Tokyo is a novel in which the past and the present have imperative roles then this opening sentence certainly makes this intention clear. In keeping with Gothic tradition whereby ‘the legacies of the past’ create ‘burdens on the present’1 Tokyo is indeed a text in where old and new are positioned side by side; where history and the present are linked in ways far deeper and far darker than can possibly be imagined. Tokyo is a complex novel, one which explores the extent to which the ‘repercussions of the past within the present’2 can consume, overwhelm and ultimately destroy if they remain unaddressed. There is much within Tokyo that can be considered ‘Gothic’ in theme; there is the requisite villain, the innocent female victim, danger lurking at every turn in old and abandoned buildings as well as shameful and forbidden history—but these are oft-replicated and simple tools; Tokyo has a gothic validity and a gothic intent that far exceeds mere ‘hackneyed’3 convention or the clever working of ‘staple Gothic ingredients’.4 The novel is multi-layered and complex and is indeed an example of a contemporary gothic discourse that echoes ‘earlier Gothic traditions while expressing at times an entirely different range of cultural agendas’.5 At first glance Tokyo is not necessarily recognisable as a gothic novel, in that it follows the trend of contemporary ‘Gothic narrative patterns’ which work themselves ‘free of the texts in which we are most accustomed to recognize them…’.6 It is a novel that adopts all of the tropes of the traditional gothic text, but handles them with such skill that (as is true of much contemporary Gothic) whilst we may ‘search for a genesis’ we ‘find only ghostly manifestation’.7 At its heart, Tokyo is a novel that follows the path from innocence to experience. Whilst this is a theme very much a part of traditional Gothic, within Tokyo this theme is granted a modern perspective that includes heavy onus on ­self-awareness and personal growth. This degree of introspection is one of the more easily recognisable features of contemporary or modern Gothic, and it is

S. MacArthur (*)  London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_18

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crucial regarding the extent to which the protagonist will escape from his or her heavy burden of ignorance. In modern Gothic the labyrinths and underground tunnels of old are replaced by a different sort of prison; the prison of the mind. Protagonists are imprisoned by their ignorance and their lack of understanding. In Tokyo knowledge is indeed power and it is only through the acquisition of knowledge that the character Grey can escape the horror of her past. In this rite of passage that distinguishes naivety from knowledge, Hayder calls upon one of the oldest gothic conventions, that of an undisclosed history; a secret that has not only shaped, but continues to influence the present. So in what context exactly does this theme manifest itself within the novel? Certainly, the very structure of the text permits the connections betwixt past and present to be readily made; the novel moves seamlessly between the past and the present in the form of diary entries pertaining to the invasion of Nanking by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937. In a contemporary twist, Hayder replaces the ancient manuscript that was a common feature of traditional Gothic, and gives it a very personal relevance in the form of Chongming’s personal diary. The Gothic has long had a ‘problem of assimilating social anxieties…into a personal narrative in some way that connects the Gothic protagonist to the reader’8 and the diary solves this conundrum wonderfully, but it serves another purpose too—and that is to introduce to the text the traditionally gothic theme of repression. Chongming is a man imprisoned by his personal history, an elderly man haunted by the demons of his past. His diaries and the words written within them are literally the verbal manifestation of these demons—and he has forbidden himself from ever looking upon them again. He fears them, and yet at the same time is drawn to them in much the same way as the monk Ambrosio was drawn to the beguiling Rosario in Lewis’ novel The Monk. Desiring the forbidden has long been a feature of gothic writing, dating as far back as Otranto and even present in more hybrid forms of the genre such as Shelley’s Frankenstein. No matter where it occurs, the result is always the same, and the allure of the forbidden speaks as loudly of compulsion as is does repression. Ultimately Chongming is overwhelmed by compulsion and desire: In all these years I have kept my vow never to revisit that winter, never to read the words I wrote that year. I have kept the vow rigidly, and yet today, for a reason that is totally beyond my understanding…I instinctively reached into the desk drawer for the battered old diary… Why, I wonder, why after all these years do I itch to open the first page?…9

As is typical of the Gothic the weight of the Chongming’s past signifies ‘both beauty and terror’10 and perhaps it is this rather heady combination that makes the diaries and their contents so compelling. Whilst it is true that ‘every society has to insist on repression in order to function’,11 this ‘dominant feature’12 has also to be said of the individual. What it means within the Gothic is that in confronting ‘events of their past of which they do not want to be reminded, but need to address in order to move on’13 protagonists are able to rid themselves of their ghosts, break free of their shackles and ‘come all the way back to the beginning’14 in order that they can continue towards the next stage in their lives.

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Within the text, the significance of the past upon the present affects not only characters, but is an essential part of the complex psycho-geographical aspect of the novel. Readers of gothic fiction will be more than familiar with the concept of psycho-geography within the genre; simply put the link between person and place—specifically the extent to which we are influenced by our physical environments. In traditional gothic writing, this motif manifested itself in a fairly singularly dimensional manner—complex, secret passageway and tunnels beneath a building became physical representations of the dark and dangerous networks operating within the mindset of the villain. As the genre developed and grew in complexity so did the extent to which writers engaged with the concept of ­psycho-geography; single dwellings such as the Otranto castle morphed into multiple dwellings such as the house and the motel in Bloch’s Psycho. In due course, entire towns and cities (Inspector Wexford’s Kingsmarkham and Rebus’ Edinburgh for example) took on significance in understanding the motivations and behaviours of their (fictional) inhabitants. Tokyo adopts this trope to fantastic effect; juxtaposing the old and the new, the traditional and the modern aspect of the city wonderfully. The gloss, glitz and glamour of modern Tokyo with its subways and skyscrapers shows the city in all its modernity, but turn a corner and it is easy to lose yourself in the streets of old Tokyo: Away from the electric roar of commerce there were silent, cool alleys: a warren of cranky little streets jammed into the crevices behind the skyscrapers…15

That Tokyo has a sinister side complete with ‘carnivorous-looking plants’ and ‘dark, breathing’16 spaces is very apparent, but it is also touchingly gentle and sentimental; the Zojoji temple demonstrates beautifully the depth and soul behind this city with its violent and very brutal past. It is a city that is hard to define, difficult to identify with and consequently falls in line with the long Gothic tradition of ‘things not being what they seem’.17 There is more to this than just being simply a source of duplicity however. Of course, this modern city should be a safe place, but as a consequence of careful description and disturbing imagery Tokyo city becomes instead becomes ‘abject…monstrous’18 and we are left in no doubt that there are strong and dangerous forces at work here. Within the text this dangerous force takes the form of the seemingly frail and benign Junzo Fuyuki. With a physical presence that speaks nothing of his capability for utter evil, Fuyuki really is the perfect modern gothic villain, invoking terror in almost all of those who come into contact with him. At first introduction it seems hard to understand the reaction that the ‘diminutive insectile man’19 being pushed in his wheelchair has upon those working in the ‘Some Like It Hot’ bar: …twenty hostesses turned nervous eye to Strawberry, who was moving among the tables, whispering names, calling them up to sit with the group. In her face there was a strange, bloodless look of something like anger. For a moment I couldn’t place that expression, but when she threw back her head and clipped her way across the floor to me, I saw it. All the muscles in her face were twitching. Strawberry was nervous.20

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Those who fear Fuyuki are right to do so; for this modern gothic villain is truly a dangerous man. With crimes limited to neither one place nor one particular time, Fuyuki has an omnipresence and he is just as dangerous a man in present Japan day as he was back in Nanking in 1937. Like Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman, Norman Bates and very many others, Fuyuki wears his mask well; disguise and fakery might well be gothic fodder, but when executed well, they are indeed the source of ‘the most striking Gothic effects’.21 The other villain within the text, and the source of immediate evil and danger for Grey is Jason; arrogant, manipulative, spoiled Jason—who just loves ‘to fuck freaks’.22 Jason is a sexual predator, seeking to control and overwhelm through sexual ownership. His possession of Grey is not limited to just the physical—he intends fully to consume every part of her in order to fulfil his dark and twisted sexual fantasies: He gave a short, dry laugh. ‘You forget I can tell when you’re lying.’… He looked down at it with a long, slow smile. ‘I’m going to get all the way inside you,’ he said quietly. ‘All the way. But don’t be scared, I’m going to do it very, very slowly.’23

Fuyuki’s desires go way beyond sexual gratification. Of course he enjoys the company of the hostesses at the clubs, but what Fuyuki really wants is to stay alive. Immortality has always been a predominant theme within the Gothic; in the earliest manifestations of the genre this theme presented itself through the need of the villain to beget a male heir through which his ancestral lineage could continue. As the genre grew and developed so too did the ways in which this trope was explored; immortality through reincarnation, reanimation, pacts with the devil, and in this example the firm belief that eternal life can be achieved through the consumption of human flesh. Fuyuki’s particular elixir of course has absolutely nothing to do with his surviving into old age, but nevertheless what it does reveal to us is the ongoing importance of ‘imaginative excess and delusions, religious and human evil’ and ‘social transgression’24 within the Gothic. Fuyuki is a man who certainly enjoys many of the comforts of modern life and the privileges that wealth can bring. He is a man of excess; and the Gothic, if nothing else, is ‘a writing of excess’.25 Fuyuki falls within that bracket of gothic villains who operate with neither shame, guilt or any kind of inner torment. It is a feature of some modern Gothic to blur the boundary between villain and victim (consider the abuse that young Francis Dolarhyde suffered at the hands of Grandmother in Red Dragon or the domineering Mother Bates in Psycho), but this simply can not be said of Fuyuki, who falls quite nicely within that camp of despicable individuals who torment and kill just because they want to. Fuyuki, like Hannibal Lecter (pre-Hannibal Rising—certainly he was a far more compelling character when it was believed that he killed just for pleasure and indulgence) and like Temple Gault or Patrick Bateman, has complete and absolute faith in his methods and practices. He commits his transgressions out of an unshakable sense of entitlement and indulgent desire; he does it simply because he can.

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What this does of course is reject that feature of contemporary Gothic that encourages ‘sympathy for the monster’,26 and as a consequence Fuyuki, although powerful, becomes more singularly dimensional in character. It also rejects that tendency within traditional Gothic to focus ‘on the psychology of the villain rather than [the] heroine’.27 The focus within Tokyo largely focuses upon Grey and Chongming and the events in their personal histories that have brought them to Tokyo. Grey’s position within the narrative is complicated. On the one hand she has committed a great atrocity, but it was an act not committed out of malice, rage or spite. Certainly she carries a very great and heavy burden of guilt and shame surrounding the loss of her daughter; an act that was committed in ignorance rather than evil, but nevertheless resulted in the death of her unborn child. It is this notion of shame that leads us to question repression and the role that repression has within the narrative. Repression has always been a fundamental part of the Gothic; traditionally this theme manifested itself in the revealing of a secret that the villain had long tried to keep buried. This ‘haunting return of past trangressions’28 would more often than not take the form of evocative dreams, ghosts or apparitions or the discovery of a letter or diary that ultimately brought about exposure, but in more contemporary Gothic repression is much more to do with unresolved personal trauma. Characters who experience excessive ‘disruption of domestic history’ often suffer deep ‘psychological complications’ that ‘continually interrupt [their] perception of the world’. Consequently ‘the protagonist of the contemporary Gothic often experiences history as mixed up, reversed, and caught up in a simultaneity of past-present-future’.29 This confused chronology manifests itself in the very structure of the novel, which constantly shifts between past and present, but it also defines both Grey and Chongming as characters suspended between past and present, unable to move forward or consider any kind of future until they are able to restore ‘fluidity’ and ‘linear progression’30 to their understanding of their personal histories. Both Grey and Chongming are characters with secrets; unresolved issues from their pasts. It is shame that has forced Chongming to keep his secret for so long, and shame that forces Grey to cover herself so completely, hiding her scars from Jason. Much of Grey’s shame is of course attached to her sexuality; something that she is simultaneously fascinated and frightened by: I didn’t dare say how much I wished I had a boyfriend…if I said anything they’d tell me my outrageous impulses were the root or a greater evil, that I was walking round with a wolf living inside me…I was sure no other girl on earth had got to know the dark tract between her legs the way I knew mine…I was afraid that one day I’d reach down there and my fingers would brush over its wet nose.31

In traditional Gothic the growth from innocence to experience was inevitably the result of the heroine having survived sexual predatory behaviour at the hands of the villain. Walpole’s Isabella, Lewis’ Antonia, Shelley’s Elizabeth and even Le Fanu’s Rose Velderkaust all attract the unwanted attentions of sexual predators who seek to claim and to possess no matter what the consequence. Virginity and

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sexual purity were qualities to be preserved at all costs; sexual defilement was the ultimate horror—a stain on the character that the heroine could ill afford be marked with. In these early examples the virtue of the heroine ultimately remained intact as a consequence of fortuitous and timely intervention by the young hero who would appear just in the nick of time to save the heroine from not only her pursuer, but also the life of shame that would be the inevitable result of defilement. In Tokyo Hayder absolutely rejects this motif, this mark of ‘male Gothic’32 and gives it a very modern spin in that Grey, a sexually active young woman, effectively becomes responsible for her own survival. With no prospect of a dashing young hero to intervene, Grey must learn—albeit the hard way—that Jason is a dangerous predator and that it is not just her virtue and her morality that are at risk, but her life: Jason, I thought, getting to my feet and brushing down my coat, Jason, believe me, you are stranger, stranger and more insane than I have ever been. What I did was ignorant and wrong, but I was never as wrong as you are.33

With the parting shot that she has ‘just made the biggest mistake of her life’34 and that she will regret it until the day she dies, Grey realises this she is very much in a race against time to secure her safety against not only the monster Jason himself, but also the monsters he has brought to her door. Grey’s detachment from Jason, and her growing awareness as to exactly what he is becomes an imperative part of her growing self-awareness and her ability to reconcile with what she did to her unborn child. She is on the cusp not of innocence, as befitted the traditional gothic heroine, but the cusp of maturity. When confronted with Jason’s evil Grey is able to fully recognise evil when she comes face to face with it, and crucially she does not recognise it within herself: I’ve got something important to tell you. You’re wrong when you say we’re the same. We’re not…ignorance…is not the same as insanity. It’s not the same as perversion, or evil, or any of the other things you could accuse me of. Some people are crazy, and others are sick, and there are others still who are evil or freaky or whatever you call it. But this is very important…They are not the same as the ignorant.35

Through Jason Grey has managed to learn a very important lesson—and with this lesson comes clarity and perspective that hereto were out of her reach. It is no coincidence that after this showdown with Jason that Grey returns to her room with a new outlook and a new focus; one which allows her to connect the dots between the information she has been given and to finally begin to realise exactly what it is that she is looking for. The item that she has been charged with identifying is of course the mummified remains of Chongming’s daughter; the baby that was stolen from its mother’s belly by Junzo Fuyuki. Fuyuki has over the course of decades been slowly eating these remains, believing that within them he has found an elixir, a holy grail that essentially is keeping him alive. This aged war criminal’s cannibalism is about far more than retaining health and vitality—far more than healing even. It is about power and the complete control and domination over others; it is about deliberate defiance of those social and moral boundaries that provide security and stability:

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Gothic terrors activate a sense of the unknown and project an uncontrollable and overwhelming power which threatens not only the loss of sanity, honour, property or social standing but the very order which supports and is regulated by the coherence of those terms.36

Fuyuki’s transgression invokes all the requisite ‘terrors and horrors’37 of gothic writing. His cannibalism is at one level a variation upon the theme of vampirism within gothic novels of the Victorian era, but it is also indicative of the growing tendency within contemporary Gothic to expose the dangers of consumer culture. Certainly, the Gothic ‘adapts itself well to the conditions of late capitalism’,38 Fuyuki’s overwhelming brutality absolutely results in the complete domination of those around, people who become mere resources to seize and utilise as befits his desires. Fuyuki is the ultimate consumer, driven perhaps by the ‘­consumptioncompulsion that drives the culture of late capitalism’.39 He is a self-made man of power, commanding allegiance and obedience. He does not expect to be challenged, undermined or have his dominance threatened in any way. Like so many of his villainous predecessors, Fuyuki is a collector; his vast collection of war memorabilia for example demonstrates quite clearly his desire for ownership. It is through acquisition that Fuyuki creates the illusion of power—a behaviour that he learnt back in Nanking, where the display of scalps attached to his belt invoked both terror and admiration; depending of course on which side of the gun scope you sat. What distinguishes Fuyuki from many of his gothic predecessors is the lack of sexual motivation behind his transgression. Early gothic texts are readily identifiable by their strong sexual charge—villains are highly sexually motivated, sexual predators overwhelmed by lust and desire. Similarly Victorian Gothic is largely defined by its concept of unrestrained sexuality as both inhumane and extremely dangerous. Within Tokyo there is of course the suggestion that unchecked sexual desire is not without its risks, but it is certainly not the only danger present within the narrative. Indeed sexuality within the text can not be examined or understood without clearly linking it to the overwhelming theme of entitlement that dominates the narrative. If we look for a moment towards the historical aspect to the novel we can perhaps begin to see just how this theme of entitlement begins to take shape, and identify the extent to which contemporary Gothic is ‘inherently concerned with the incursions of the past into the present’.40 In 1937 Japan was a nation struggling for resources, in economical difficulty and social turmoil. Supremely Nationalist, yet acutely aware of the disparity between its own wealth and the wealth of Western colonial powers, Japan needed a strategy by which to both procure the resources it needed in order to facilitate economic growth and consequently achieve sustainability and stability. This desire for power, wealth and stability led directly to the invasion of Nanking, the events of which serve as the catalyst for the novel. Of course the Nanking invasion was part of a much greater attempt by imperial Japan to conquer republican China; namely the Second Sino-Japanese War, and by the time the Imperial army reached Nanking they had already achieved control of

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Manchuria and carried out successful invasions of Beijing and Shanghai. Riding the crest of these successes the Japanese army advanced towards Nanking and in December of 1937 the massacre began. What we need to ask ourselves, given the context of events, is why Tokyo—a gothic novel—would find a home within these events? What is it about this particular atrocity that sparks imagination? It is in attempting to answer these questions that stability becomes an interesting concept. Ensuring stability is indeed a fundamental part of gothic writing which is ultimately all to do with survival and achieving relevancy and purpose through ancestral lineage or through immortality. The desire for relevancy grows out of the fear of inconsequentiality and of invisibility, and also out of the arrogance of a culture of entitlement. The transgressions of gothic villains throughout all of the various manifestations of the genre have been motivated by the desire for relevancy. In order to fulfil this desire they act with arrogance and entitlement, simply taking the resources that they need in acts of excessive and unchecked procurement. If we can understand and accept this as a motivation, then it becomes clear as to why a modern gothic novel such as Tokyo would find a natural home within these specific events. The Imperialist Army becomes the perfect villain—taking what it needs in order to fulfil its objective without conscience, rationale or self-control. China in turn becomes the perfect victim; possessing the resources, the population and the size that when occupied successfully will bring to Japan not only economic success and stability, but it will send a message to the rest of the world that Japan matters. China was also undergoing massive internal conflict at the time of the invasions, specifically the conflict between Old China—her folklores and beliefs— and New China as she sweeps towards industrialisation and modernity that threaten to leave Old China behind. This is important to note because what makes a gothic victim susceptible to being victimised is her presenting to the villain as someone on the cusp of change; immaturity into maturity, innocence into experience for example. Whatever the root of the change is ultimately does not matter. What matters is that in that moment of change the victim belongs to neither camp and in that moment is effectively without identity, and consequently her vulnerabilities are exposed. Chongming’s wife, Shujin, represents Old China—her way of life, her code of conduct and even her morality are bound in folklore and tradition, and Chongming in contrast represents modernity. Throughout the course of their marriage he is unsympathetic, frustrated and even ashamed of their union: The time I spend fretting about my wife! Thinking about our differences…I had always expected to make a sensible alliance, maybe with someone from the university, one of those forward thinkers…what a disastrous match; the village girl with her ri shu almanacs, her lunar calendars…When the marriage took place…I told no-one.41

The marriage of Shujin and Chongming represents the internal conflict within China at the period; but despite Chongming’s many protestations, for Shujin the voice of the past is too loud to ignore; it is too much a part of her identity for her

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to even contemplate moving away from it. Shujin’s behaviour carries a clear moral message—that we none of us can escape our pasts, and nor should we attempt to do so for they are our pasts, our personal and our collective histories and they matter, they matter very much indeed. It is a conclusion that Chongming himself does in the fullness of time come to realise, but the realisation comes to him too late. He and Shujin do not manage to flee Nanking successfully, and her unwavering belief that she will die in Nanking comes true. The role of prediction, legend and prophecy within Tokyo is significant, as it always has been within traditional Gothic. Chongming is dismissive of his wife’s dreams and sense of foreboding, and he pays the ultimate price for this. Indeed faith and belief hold enormous importance within the novel. Not religious faith and belief as typified early gothic writing, but beliefs of tradition and culture. Chongming’s greatest sin is his arrogance in refusing so steadfastly to take the beliefs of his ‘backward’42 wife. Since earliest boyhood Chongming has been embarrassed by his roots; his traditional family and their ‘superstitious and backward ways’.43 Desperate to be regarded as enlightened, progressive and modern Chongming adopts an arrogance and a pride that unfortunately brings about tragedy. He confesses: I tremble with embarrassment when I consider her, when I consider all my backward and superstitious family…Maybe I’ll never escape either, and maybe this is the worst of the enduring truths about me: the proud young linguist from Jinling University, who is underneath just a boy from a China that doesn’t look forward and doesn’t change – that only stands still and waits for death…I wonder, can I hope to escape my past?44

In contrast, Grey is a character who is acutely aware of the link between her past and her present, and very much connected to her personal history. Throughout the text she reveals details about her upbringing, the beliefs and attitudes of her parents in particular, with honesty: ‘I was afraid of my parents, especially of my mother’45 she confesses, explaining that her mother ‘had always been so certain that she was in control of what I knew and thought about’.46 In contrast to Chongming, Grey’s understanding of the whats and the whys of her actions are clear, and her personal choices are explained with clarity and logic: I know. It’s terrible, and I’ve got no excuse for – for crying about it. I know that. But I didn’t mean to – to kill her. I thought she would live. I’d read about the Nanking babies, in the orange book, and I – I don’t know why, but I thought maybe my baby would live, too…I thought she’d be ok and they’d take her away and hide her somewhere, somewhere my…my parents couldn’t find her.47

One of the strongest themes within the text is that which explores the relationship between acts committed out of ignorance and acts committed out of evil. Understanding the difference between ignorance and evil is paramount for Grey as she navigates her way through the emotional understanding of what she has done. As part of the rite of passage that she must undergo as part of her role as gothic heroine, Grey is required to face head on her deepest fears. For her, these fears lie in the belief that she might fail in her quest to discover the proof of what she read in that little orange book. For Grey the consequences of this are enormous—as

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finding this evidence will allow her to move from under the umbrella of perceived evil and instead rest under the one of ignorance. It is this difference in intention that is the core difference between Grey and Chongming. Grey clearly believed that her baby would live, whereas Chongming handed over his daughter clear in the knowledge that she would die: Suddenly I understood why Shi Chongming had kept this film secret for so many years. What I was watching, I realized, was him measuring and weighing his life against the value of the baby in his arms.48

The film turns out to be somewhat of a double-edged sword; as is typical of modern Gothic things are rarely what they seem and watching it does not bring about the resolution that Grey was hoping for, rather it shows her that there is a longevity associated with the acts that we carry out and the decisions that we make. In a novel that is all to do with the role of the past and the bearings that the past has on our present and our futures of course simple resolution was never going to be an option. Just as Chongming comes to realise with ‘sudden furious determination that China must survive’49 as the China he grew up in and that he is wrong to fight against his heritage, Grey has a similar awakening as a result of having watched the film. In a moment of real introspective clarity she realises that finding the film offers no closure and no escape from the past: …something terrible and inescapable stood up in me: the knowledge that there wasn’t going to be a quiet escape. Alive or dead, our children would hold us. Just like Shi Chongming I was going to be eternally connected to my dead baby girl. Shi Chongming was in his seventies, I was in my twenties. She would be with me for ever.50

What the film does instead, is offer a chance for Grey to forgive herself, to finally understand that she is not evil—ignorant, unlucky possibly, but not evil—and this realisation is crucial to her fulfilling her role as gothic heroine. Marking as it does the ‘end of innocence’51 that is such a defining part of modern Gothic, it belies a growing maturity, self-awareness and understanding that marks the transition from adolescence to maturity. The film also offers an opportunity for Chongming to confront his personal shame. It offers some retribution as it shows that the decision to hand over his daughter was not one borne of evil; cowardice, fear, even poor judgement possibly, but not evil. Following Grey’s success Chongming is of course reunited with his daughter’s remains and in an act of honour and atonement finally lays those remains to rest on the hillside where the horrific events took place. Without doubt the great success of this novel comes from Hayder’s exceptional ability to link the past, the present and the future. And it is this theme that provides the strongest and most credible link to the Gothic. The Gothic is a genre that has never moved away from the core belief that we are not independent creatures moving independently through the paths of our lives. Whether this belief occurs through prophecy, fate, hidden history or our ancestral past and cultural heritage to some extent is irrelevant—what counts is that within the Gothic, and within Tokyo we are all shown to be part of a much bigger scheme—a force far greater than that which we believe ourselves to be part.

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If we accept that throughout history the Gothic ‘takes the form of a series of revivals, each based on a fantasized idea of the previous one’52 then Tokyo should certainly be regarded as a novel with a very modern gothic spin. Villains and horrors abound aplenty, suspense and dread are wonderfully built up within a very dangerous environment and throughout it all, we root for Grey’s success and happiness. The novel questions ‘the dynamics of family’ as much as it does ‘the limits of rationality and passion’53 in much the same way that early gothic novels did. Like many traditional gothic texts, it has a moral too, and perhaps a very modern ‘social significance’,54 in that it is only through accepting our responsibilities that our burdens cease to become negative energies that we carry around with us, and instead they become part of us—a facet of our character that becomes a source of strength rather than shame; an anchor that tethers us to the world around us.

Notes

1. Spooner, Catherine, Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion Books, London: 2006), p. 8. 2. Ibid., pp. 156–7. 3. Botting, Fred. Gothic (Routledge, London: 2003), p. 45. 4. Ibid., p. 44. 5. Spooner, op. cit., p. 12. 6. Ibid., p. 21. 7. Bruhm, Steven, The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It, in Hogle, J. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2002), p. 259. 8. Ibid., p. 261. 9. Hayder, op. cit., pp. 48–9. 10. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror Volume 1 (Essex, Longman: 1996), p. 184. 11. Ibid., p. 183. 12. Spooner, op. cit., p. 156. 13. Ibid., p. 157. 14. Hayder, op. cit., p. 457. 15. Ibid., p. 53. 16. Ibid. 17. Botting, op. cit., p. 170. 18. Spooner op. cit., p. 29. 19. Hayder, op. cit., p. 89. 20. Ibid., p. 91. 21. Spooner, op. cit., p. 98. 22. Hayder, op. cit., p. 274. 23. Ibid., p. 224. 24. Botting, op. cit., p. 2. 25. Ibid., p. 1. 26. Spooner, op. cit., p. 103. 27. Ibid., p. 104. 28. Botting, op. cit., p. 11. 29. Bruhm, op. cit., p. 267. 30. Ibid., pp. 267–8. 31. Hayder, op. cit., pp. 159–60.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Spooner, op. cit., p. 104. Hayder, op. cit., pp. 279–80. Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., p. 316. Botting, op. cit., p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. Spooner, op. cit., p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 12. Hayder, op. cit., pp. 79–81. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., pp. 79–80. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., 453. Ibid., p. 450. Ibid., p. 429. Ibid., p. 453. Spooner, op. cit., p. 23. Ibid., p. 32. Bruhm, op. cit., p. 259. Punter, op. cit., p. 13.

Bibliography Botting, Fred. Gothic (Routledge, London: 2003). Bruhm, Steven. The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It. In Hoglr, J. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2002). Hayder, Mo. Tokyo (Bantam Books, London: 2005). Punter, David. The Literature of Terror Volume 1 (Longman, Essex: 1996). Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion Books, London: 2006).

Stephen King Brian Jarvis

There is a revelatory moment in Misery (1987) when the captive writer Paul Sheldon discovers a scrapbook compiled by his captor Annie Wilkes. The tome is ‘as thick as a family bible’ and documents its author’s long history of h­ omicide.1 For anyone approaching the work of Stephen King and perhaps especially for those whose livelihood involves writing, Sheldon’s response to Annie’s magnum opus is emblematic: ‘[t]his book, dear God, this book was so big’.2 The King oeuvre is intimidatingly monumental. The hardbacks of his novels have the heft of a small headstone. At the time of writing—and this will almost certainly be out of date at the time of reading—King has published 57 slab-like novels and over 150 short stories. Typically, the ‘Stephen King short story’ is really a novella. ‘The Mist’ (1980), for example, weighs in at a very solid 134-pages. Collectively, these fictions contribute to a vast and intricately interwoven multiverse in which characters and key locations crossover. At the centre of this topography lies King’s home state of Maine and fictional towns such as Bridgton, Castle Rock and Derry. These are rendered with a level of detail that rivals Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. In terms of genre, most of King’s world-building belongs to a variegated gothic terrain. In ‘Tales of the Hook’, the writer divides his kingdom into three domains: ‘I try to terrorize the reader. But if… I cannot terrify… I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud’.3 King’s Gothic encompasses the melancholy lyricism of an old woman making a final journey (‘The Reach’, 1985), a young boy being chased by his Roque mallet-wielding father (The Shining, 1975) and a surgeon on a desert island who amputates and then eats his own body parts (‘Survivor Type’, 1981). These diverse gothic landscapes constitute the King heartland, but there are also frequent intersections with and departures into the realms of science fiction and fantasy, westerns and social realism, crime and prison dramas. In addition, King

B. Jarvis (*)  Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_19

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has written a number of essays—often on the subject of writing—as well as screenplays and poetry. The reach of the King empire extends further when one takes into account that each of his works appears in multiple editions and formats including audiobooks, eBooks, graphic novels, musical homage and theatre. There has also been over 80 film and TV adaptations of King’s work. Recent and forthcoming contributions to this ever-burgeoning field include imminent TV series based on Lisey’s Story (2006), The Outsider (2018), The Stand (1978), a second season of Castle Rock (2018–) and big-screen versions of Pet Sematary (1982), In the Tall Grass (1999) and Doctor Sleep (2013). ‘Chapter 2’ of IT (1986) appeared in the summer of 2019 and followed in the footsteps of the highest grossing horror film of all time. Simultaneously, Netflix released season three of Stranger Things: a hugely successful show whose storylines and a line-up of geeky teens would be unthinkable without King’s IT and other coming of age tales such as ‘The Body’ (1982). It is a testament to King’s shaping influence on the landscape of popular culture that he appears as himself in The Simpsons and the show frequently alludes to his canon. King’s first published novel, Carrie (1974), is alluded to in several episodes of The Simpsons and has been referenced over 350 times in TV shows and films.4 Carrie: The Musical (1988) has been performed on Broadway and by the RSC in Stratford. The first and most influential adaptation was Brian De Palma’s film version which appeared in 1976 and made over $33 million for a relatively modest budget of $1.8 million. This success stimulated sales of the original novel. In 1979, King rather modestly declared that ‘the movie made the book and the book made me’.5 By 1980, King was the bestselling author in the world. Sales of his novels and short story collections have exceeded 350 million copies and produced an avalanche of adaptations and spin-offs. In reference to his evolution from aspiring bard to global brand, King has noted wryly: ‘I started off as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force’.6 According to legend, the origin of this economic force was a wastebasket. The writer Tabitha Spruce married Stephen King in 1971. Her husband has confessed that his bride-to-be’s ownership of a portable typewriter was a not inconsequential factor informing his marriage proposal. In the early years of their marriage, the young couple lived in a trailer home and experienced serious financial and creative difficulties. When King threw away the first three pages of a short story about a teenage girl called Carietta White who was both gifted with and cursed by telekinetic powers, Tabitha rescued them from the wastebasket, encouraged her husband to finish the work and offered to help him to develop the female perspective. According to some of his critics, however, the wastebasket is where Carrie and King’s subsequent work belongs. For those wedded to a romantic or modernist model of the artist, suspicion or even hostility is perhaps inevitable when a writer occupies such a prominent position in the marketplace. Harold Bloom is at the forefront in the academy of those who have caricatured King as an assembly line rather than an artisan. When King was awarded a Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 by the National Book Foundation, Bloom was in the vanguard of a backlash. (More recently, in 2015, King was granted the National Medal of Arts by President Obama and in 2018 he received the PEN American Literary

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Service Award.) Bloom described the award as ‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life’ and went on to make a mock prediction that the Nobel prize for Literature would shortly be conferred on J.K. Rowling.7 The Yale Professor contended that King is ‘an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, p­ aragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis’ and that his work does ‘little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat’.8 Literary scholarship is part of the publishing world which King has helped to save from drowning and in 2009, Bloom himself chose to edit a collection of essays on this ‘immensely inadequate writer’. Whilst he was now willing to concede the sociological significance of his subject as a publishing phenomenon, Bloom also continued the harangue against King’s fictional ‘monstrosities’: ‘cliché-writing, flat characters who are names upon the page, and in general a remarkable absence of invention for someone edging over into the occult, the preternatural, the imaginary’.9 When an author has produced so much it would be difficult not to find at least occasional examples of stylistic deficiency. King’s critics routinely remark on the reliance on stereotype in characterisation, excessive description and italicisation, interminable digressions and the crippling flatness of his figurative prose. King has echoed some of these deprecations: ‘[a]ll I can say is - and this is in response to the critics who’ve often said that my work is awkward and sometimes a little bit painful - I know it. I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got’.10 In the ‘Afterword’ to Different Seasons (1982), King refers to his work as the ‘literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s’.11 King’s readership has leapt to his defence. Stephen Spignesi opens his study of Stephen King: American Master with evidence of literary craftsmanship in the following sibilant simile from The Regulators (1996): ‘and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers’.12 The aesthetic virtue or otherwise of King’s writing can of course be debated, but the distinctive features of his literary voice are surely incontestable. King typically writes in the first person and often with shifting focalisation. The accessibility of his work is aided by an exhaustive inventory of reference to TV shows, films, music and commercial products— King is the poet laureate of American pop culture—and a vernacular voice which assumes a confidential intimacy with the reader. The opening line of Needful Things (1991) appears on a separate page in upper case and 20-point type: YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

The following line at the start of the next page continues: ‘Sure you have’.13 King’s prose privileges a vivid immediacy of voice over stylistic flourishes. The opening, or ‘hook’ line is crucial in this regard and King has cited Needful Things as one of his best examples. All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep reading. It suggests a familiar story; at the same time, the unusual presentation brings us outside the realm of the ordinary. And this, in a way, is a promise of the book that’s going to come… Sometimes it’s important to find that kind of line: one that encapsulates what’s going to happen later without being a big thematic statement… I don’t have a lot of books where that opening line is poetry or beautiful. Sometimes it’s perfectly workman-like.14

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In Misery, King’s surrogate author Paul Sheldon is acutely aware of the workmanlike nature of his romantic genre fiction but still takes professional pride in the gift of the ‘gotta’: the ability to craft stories which compel the reader to turn the page and leave his fans, like Annie Wilkes, ‘dying to find out what happened next’.15 Obsession is both a core theme and an M.O for an author who returns compulsively to certain character types, sites and subjects. Whilst there may be some inconsistencies in the quality of the writing across King’s career there is also a marked continuity in content. The metafictional preoccupation with writers, writing and creative struggles evident in Misery is also prominent in ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Dark Half (1989), Bag of Bones (1998) and Duma Key (2008) as well as short fiction such as ‘The Blue Air Compressor’ (1971), ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ (1985), ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’ (1990), ‘Umney’s Last Case’ (1993) and ‘1408’ (2001). This cohort of work stages a dynamic tension between writers and artists, characters and readers. King has a devoted readership that includes fellow authors such as Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead and Bret Easton Ellis whose Lunar Park (2005) is an extended homage to King. Ellis has testified to the formative influence of King on his literary upbringing: He was a major writer for me as a kid, and as an adolescent. I was thrilled every time a Stephen King book came out. I’d spend pocket money on hardbacks. Man, they were the first hardbacks that I demanded my parents get for me. I remember buying IT and thinking it was the most epic horror novel—that it was the Ulysses of horror.16

For much of his career, King has enjoyed a healthy and productive relationship with his fans that includes regular appearances at conventions and book signings as well as an active presence on social media (he has over 5 million followers on Twitter). In 1977, he wrote the first 500-words of a story entitled ‘The Cat from Hell’ and invited readers to complete it. There have also been, however, significant breakdowns in this relationship. During the period in which Misery was written and then published, King was getting mobbed when he left his house and receiving thousands of letters each week including requests and even demands that he resurrect certain subjects. Someone sent him a box full of bones and hair from dead kittens. In 1991, Tabitha King arrived home to discover an intruder with a bomb who claimed he was going to kidnap her husband. The intruder insisted that Stephen King had broken into his aunt’s house over 150 times and stolen from her the ideas for several novels (including Misery). When Stephen King heard that John Lennon had been murdered there was an additional horror because the killer, Mark Chapman, had recently approached the writer in the street and identified himself as King’s ‘number one fan’. In the context of these incidents, Misery reads like hate mail from a writer to his readers. At the same time, much of the King oeuvre constitutes an extended love letter to the gothic and horror genres. King is both a horror author and fan whose aficionado knowledge and manic enthusiasm for the genre bursts from every page he has written. Since his very first published contribution to the genre—a short story entitled ‘I Was a Teenage Grave Robber’ serialised in Comics Review in 1965—King has eagerly disinterred and reanimated seminal gothic

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scenarios and horror tropes. A passion for the genre is underscored by explicit dedications and allusions to favourite authors and in particular Poe, Lovecraft and Jackson. King’s short essay on ‘The Genius of “The Tell-Tale Heart”’ is accompanied by an updated revision entitled ‘The Old Dude’s Ticker’ (1999) which features a Vietnam vet who has a hypersensitive hearing. In a similar fashion, ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ (1993) reworks Poe’s ‘Cask of Amontillado’ in a modern setting when a schoolteacher traps and then buries a gangster inside a car. Poe lay much of the groundwork for American gothic literature in the nineteenth century and Lovecraft renovated the genre in the twentieth: Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale… Lovecraft […] opened the way for me as he had done for others before me…. it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.17

The shadow of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is cast over King’s fiction in its summoning of weird towns and old houses with cryptic sounds coming from the walls, in its staging of occult rituals and portals to alternate dimensions, in its invention of monstrous abominations such as giant rats and elder unnameable gods (see, for example, the novels From a Buick 8 [2001] and Revival [2014] as well as a host of short fiction including ‘I Am the Doorway’ [1978], ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ [1978], ‘Crouch End’ [1979], ‘The Mist’, ‘Nona’ [1980], ‘Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut’ [1985], ‘Gramma’ [1985], ‘The Sun Dog’ [1990], ‘In the Tall Grass’ [1999] and ‘N.’ [1999]). Shirley Jackson is not too far behind Lovecraft in terms of King’s ardent advocacy. Firestarter (1980) is dedicated to Jackson and Danse Macabre includes a substantial critical commentary on The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and ‘The Lottery’ (1948) as Gothic landmarks in addition to highlighting affinities between The Shining (1976) and The Sundial (1958). King’s own writing may not achieve the sinuous elegance of Jackson’s prose, nor the syntactical sophistication and lexicographic exuberance of Poe and Lovecraft, but it has left its own indelible mark on the literary history of the Gothic, cosmic horror and the weird. In addition to the trinity of Poe, Lovecraft and Jackson, King has singled out as shaping influences William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972) as well as the science fiction of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson. In r­ elation to influences from visual culture, King has cited the impact of horror and ­science fiction comics, television (The Outer Limits [1963–1965] and The Twilight Zone [1959–1964]) and film (1950s cold war cinema such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956] and Jack Arnold’s work, Robert Wise’s The Haunting [1963] and the zombie films of George Romero (with whom King collaborated on with Creepshow [1982])). Returning to the gallery of key characters in King we find—alongside the writer—the teacher. In one of his earliest published short stories, ‘Here There Be Tygers’ (1968) a small boy who believes there is a big cat waiting for him in the school bathroom is humiliated by a mean teacher. The teacher in this instance,

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uncharacteristically for the ex-English teacher King, is insensitive to her pupil’s needs and imaginative faculty. Elsewhere in King’s fiction from early work such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Dead Zone (1978), ‘Sometimes They Come Back’ (1978) and ‘Suffer the Little Children’ (1978) all the way through to ‘UR’ (2015), the instructor tends to be depicted as a creative and nurturing soul. High School and College are frequent locations in which we find another key demographic. The problems faced by kids and teenagers as well as their gifts and potential is at the heart of King’s work. The young are seen to possess paranormal abilities and connections to the supernatural sphere in Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, IT, Desperation (1996) and The Institute (2019). King is especially fond of and has done much to canonise in pop culture the figure of the geeky misfit and loner. This character type is imperilled both by natural and supernatural agents. Bullying and child abuse occur in Carrie, Rage (1976), The Shining, Christine and IT, ‘The Body’, ‘The House on Maple Street’ (1993) and ‘Low Men in Yellow Coats’ (1999). Less quotidian threats to the young include cursed toys (‘The Monkey’ [1978]), pagan deities (‘Children of the Corn’ [1978]), resurrected pets (Pet Sematary), demoniac beasts (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon [1999]), slime creatures (‘The Raft’ [1985]), psychic vampires (Doctor Sleep) and werewolves (The Talisman [1984] which was co-written with Peter Straub) and the Devil (‘The Man in the Black Suit’ [1993] and Gwendy’s Button Box [1999]). The evil child is as rare in King as the villainous English teacher, but there are occasional exceptions in, for example, ‘Crouch End’ and ‘Bad Little Kid’ (2015). When adolescents become murderous their actions are explained if not excused by their suffering or manipulation at the hands of others as in Carrie or ‘Apt Pupil’ (1982). Bullies are almost always themselves the victims of bullying at home and King’s vision appears to be founded on a conviction in the fundamental innocence of the young. At times this portrayal slides towards the sentimental and nostalgic, but it also composes a compelling gothic cartography of youth culture—the affective landscapes of childhood fear and those fertile imaginations which produce a dramatically different culture and perception of reality to the adult world. At the other end of the age spectrum, King is distinctive as a writer who regularly engages with the experiences of the elderly. Interactions between the very old and young involving the transmission of wisdom or secret power are dramatised in ‘Gramma’, ‘My Pretty Pony’ (1988) and ‘Cookie Jar’ (1999). One of King’s finest gothic tales, ‘The Reach’, follows an old woman with cancer making a perilous journey across a frozen expanse of water accompanied by visions of her dead husband and lost friends (and the text itself is ghosted by Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Death in the Woods’ [1933]). The eponymous protagonist in Dolores Claiborne (1993) is a 65-year-old widow who narrates her struggles with an abusive husband and as the caregiver for a wealthy woman crippled by strokes and dementia. The novel is dedicated to King’s mother, Ruth Pillsbury King, who was left to raise her children and to take care of infirm parents after her husband abandoned the family. King’s next novel, Insomnia (1994), centred on the experiences of a septuagenarian who loses his wife to a brain tumour. In his grief, Ralph Roberts develops a sleeping disorder and begins to see strange visions whilst drifting through the

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streets of Derry at night. Marriage and family are pivotal to King’s tales of the old and young. Occasionally this involves healthy and supportive relations, but more often as in Gerald’s Game (1992) and Rose Madder (1995) the focus is on domestic violence, spousal abuse and murder. Throughout his career, King has attempted to explore women’s experience of male violence and oppression, but his fiction has also frequently been subjected to allegations of sexism and misogyny. A conflicted sexual politics was evident from his debut novel. Carrie has been commended for its sensitive portrayal of a young woman’s cruel mistreatment at home and school and as a progressive attempt by a male writer to challenge patriarchal taboos around menstruation. Dissenting critical voices, however, have drawn attention to the reinforcement of patriarchal demonology as Carrie’s witchlike powers are linked to her menarche. The equation between reproductive sexuality and fearful female power is supplemented by a hostile depiction of Carrie’s domineering mother and a feral pack of bitchy High School girls. Writing in Danse Macabre (1981), King suggested that his novel was aligned with the agenda of second-wave feminism: Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is a woman feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.18

Around the time this was written, King published The Stand in which the temple and almost everything else is pulled down following a viral pandemic. In the post-apocalyptic ruins, a new society begins to form and one of the survivors, a young and pregnant ex-college student, looks back at second-wave feminism in a dismissive fashion. Women’s lib, Frannie had decided… was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. Liberation, that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves… And the Women’s Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I’d like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny… Thank you, Men.19

Frannie’s potted history concludes with the following recognition: ‘Oh God, she badly needed a man’.20 Whilst the degree of irony here might be contested, the abjection of female bodies and power is incontrovertible especially in King’s earlier fiction. In Christine this demonisation is displaced onto a 1958 Plymouth Fury whose gender identity is made doubly explicit by ‘her’ nickname and the allusion to the Furies from Greek mythology. Over the course of the novel, ‘Christine’ mutates from seductive auto-erotic fetish to a mechanical vagina dentata with metal teeth-gnashing beneath her glossy lipstick-red bodywork.

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Male sexual phobias appear in extremis throughout Misery. Paul Sheldon focuses obsessively on Annie’s mouth with her lips peeling back to reveal sharp teeth glistening with spit. The ‘monster-woman’ is obsessively associated with blood and at one point in her bathroom, Paul is suddenly disgusted by the thought of finding Annie’s tampons. The animal physicality of his female captor is relentlessly reiterated. Annie’s breath is compared to ‘a corpse decomposing in rotted food’ and her sweat smells secretive and nasty, like old sheets thick with dried come. And below the smell of sweat was a smell of very old dirt… something from the dark and sour chambers inside her, something that smelled like dead fish, a dirty wind from hell.21

Paul’s patriarchal hysteria is compounded by the threat of a reversal of gender roles. Annie is a ‘big woman’ with ‘bristly whiskers on her chin’ and ‘other than the large but unwelcoming swell of her bosom seemed to have no feminine curves at all… There was a felling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices’.21 Annie’s mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of Paul is experienced as sexual assault: ‘she raped him full of air… she had forced into him the way a man might force himself into an unwilling woman’.22 Paul’s climactic revenge on Annie is similarly sexualised. Rapist becomes a rape victim as the author rolls up the pages of his book and forces them into the mouth of his ‘constant reader’: ‘Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking CHOKE’.23 In the series of novels which followed including Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder, the focus on sympathetic female victims could be read as artistic acts of apology and contrition for the misogynistic overkill of Misery. Even here, however, we encounter glimpses of disgust and fear in relation to women’s bodies and biological functions—a reflex that can be traced back through passages on menstrual blood and female faeces in Cujo and The Stand to the infamous shower scene in the opening pages of Carrie. Masculinity is perhaps less conflicted in King’s work, but still not without its contradictions. King’s father left the family when his son was two years old. As a boy, King discovered at home a box of fantasy and horror novels that had been left by his father. If King’s horror fiction articulates anxieties about the maternal and feminine, it is also a space in which he works through a relationship to the absent father and the masculine. This enthralment assumes various guises: relations between fathers (and figure figures) and sons; bonds between boys; rites of passage as adolescents approach the threshold of manhood; the display of positive male role models and modes of toxic masculinity. Whilst his first novel hinged on poisoned mother–daughter relations, his second, ’Salem’s Lot, featured a paradigm for the bond between symbolic father and son in the relationship which blossoms between Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. In his next novel, The Shining, King foregrounded a crisis in masculinity produced by cycles of Oedipal violence. The cycle was broken in the sequel, Doctor Sleep, where Dan Torrance has managed to heal or at least live with the traumatic scars left by his father’s violent actions at the Overlook Hotel. Louis Creed, in Pet Sematary, follows in the footsteps of Jack Torrance as the weak father who fails to protect his family. As previously

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mentioned, the abusive husband is a familiar figure in King’s fiction such as Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder. Homosocial bonding is both prominent in King’s work and shadowed by homophobia. Young boys and adolescents in, for example, ‘The Body’ and Christine, fear that intimacy with each other might lead to their misidentification as a ‘fag’. There are occasional instances where King recognises violence against the gay community (for example, the persecution of Adrian Mellon and his partner Don Hagarty in IT), but elsewhere he indulges in cliché (such as the figure of Ollie in ‘Mister Yummy’ [2015]) and bursts of heterosexual hysteria which equate homosexuality with paedophilia and moral degeneracy. There are homosexual and sadomasochistic undertones to the relationship between a Nazi war criminal and his young apprentice in ‘Apt Pupil’. More explicitly, in Doctor Sleep, Dick Hallorann recounts anecdotes about ‘kiddie-fiddlers’ including his own ‘Black Grampa’ who would bite and intentionally burn his grandson with cigarettes and then, on his death, appears ‘naked on [his] bed with his half-rotted prick all rared up. He said “You come and sit on this Dickie-Bird”’.24 Imagery such as this is doubly concerning since King’s fictional universe features very few non-white characters. African Americans appear infrequently and when they do, as in the case of Dick Hallorann, they tend to conform to the archetype of the ‘magical negro’ who supports a white protagonist with their supernatural abilities: see, in this regard, The Stand, The Green Mile, The Dark Tower, The Talisman and Mr. Mercedes (2014). In ‘Dedication’ (1993), one of the few King stories to centre on an African American character, a pregnant hotel maid performs black magic designed to pass creativity on to her unborn son. The spell involves ingesting semen left on bed sheets by a racist white writer staying at the hotel. The racial demographics of King’s fictional universe are predominantly white and also white-collar in terms of class although a number of blue-collar women and men appear in working environments such as hotels and hospitals, schools and shops and garbage dumps and graveyards. Geographically, King tends to avoid the big city in favour of meticulously and vividly rendered rural and s­mall-town milieu. Many of these such as the prime locations of Castle Rock, Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot are based in Maine. In each of these sites, characters are typically embroiled in a moral melodrama involving a spectacular collision between Good and Evil which requires urgent ethical decisions and heroic action. It would of course be reductive to suggest that a corpus as vast as King’s is based on a single scenario, but many of his tales gravitate towards a situational centrepoint where good people are given the opportunity to ‘stand and be true’.25 In ’Salem’s Lot and ‘The Body’, The Stand and IT, Insomnia and Under the Dome, Needful Things and the Dark Tower series, individuals, small groups of survivors and communities confront a fearful threat to their existence and choose to make a stand. The adversary in this Manichean shadow play is the Monster. King’s work offers a veritable encyclopaedia for the different shapes that can be assumed by this pivotal figure with entries on: aliens (The Tommyknockers [1987]); body parts (‘Survivor Type’, ‘The Moving Finger’ [1983] and ‘False Teeth’ [1993]); the Boogeyman (‘The Boogeyman’ [1978]); cars and trucks (Christine, ‘Trucks’

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[1978], ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ [1985], From a Buick 8 and ‘Mile 81’ [2015]); cats (Pet Sematary, ‘The Cat From Hell’); clowns (IT); demons (‘Crouch End’ and Revival); the Devil (Needful Things and ‘The Man in the Black Suit); dogs (Cujo and ‘The Sun Dog’); doppelgangers (The Outsider); ghosts (‘Face in the Crowd’ [1999] and ‘The Things They Left Behind’ [2008]); houses (‘Jerusalem’s Lot’, ‘It Grows on You’ [1978], ‘The House on Maple Street’ and ‘1408’); insects (‘The Mist’); machines (‘The Mangler’ [1978]); mirrors (‘The Reaper’s Image’ [1985]); pagan deities (‘Children of the Corn’ and ‘The Lawnmower Man’ [1978]); paintings (Duma Key and ‘The Road Virus Heads North’ [2001]); plants (‘The Plant’ [1982] and ‘Weeds’ [1999]); rats (‘Graveyard Shift’ [1978], ‘Nona’ and ‘1922’ [2010]); serial killers (‘Strawberry Spring’ [1978], ‘The Man Who Loved Flowers’ [1978] and Mr Mercedes); technology (Cell [2006]); toys (‘Battleground’ [1978] and ‘The Monkey’); vampires (’Salem’s Lot and ‘One for the Road’ [1978]); werewolves (Cycle of the Werewolf [1983]); and zombies (‘Home Delivery’ [1993]). It is evident from this exhaustive catalogue that King’s fiction is crowded with occurrences of a paranormal or occult nature. At the same time, it is often the case that such exceptional phenomena function as a hook back into the everyday. The core of King’s appeal lies in the skilful splicing of the fantastic with the all-too familiar. Whilst the shapeshifting figure of the Monster catches the eye, it is the everyday horror of physical and mental illness, of conflicts at home, school and work, of painful memories, grief and death which lies at the heart of King’s work. And these everyday horrors are deeply rooted in the writer’s personal experience: of creative struggle, of accidents, of alcoholism and addiction, of concerns about the safety of his wife, children and pets, of the loss of his mother to cancer ‘inch by painful inch’.26 If this sounds bleak, we need also to recall that another signature of King’s work is an underlying spirit of optimism. Even in his most apocalyptic stories of mass death and near extinction of the species—The Stand (1978), ‘Night Surf’ (1978), ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ (1993), Cell and ‘Summer Thunder’ (2015)—the reader encounters gestures of hope and the possibility of new beginnings. King has never subscribed to the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft or his successor Thomas Ligotti. Instead, there is an unashamedly sentimental and somewhat romantic sensibility at play even in his darkest works: There must be a huge store of good will in the human race… If there weren’t this huge store of good will we would have blown ourselves to hell ten years after World War II was over… It’s such a common thing, those feelings of love toward your fellow man, that we hardly ever talk about it; we concentrate on the other things. It’s just there; it’s all around us, so I guess we take it for granted… I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil; it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I see a lot of the so-called ‘romantic ideal’ at work in the world around us.27

At the same time, King recognises that we cannot afford to be naïve about the human capacity for what his nation’s Puritan ancestors would have identified as ‘Total Depravity’. This, in King’s schema, is where horror performs a vital social

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function. In ‘Why We Crave Horror Movies’ (1981), King compared Romero’s apocalyptic zombie film Dawn of the Dead to lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.28

King’s finest contributions to the genre are very far from being the literary equivalent of a ‘Big Mac and large fries’ and have kept his Constant Readers (and their gators) well fed for over fifty years.

Notes

1. Stephen King, Misery (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1987), 202. 2. King, Misery, 208. 3. Stephen King, ‘Tales of the Hook’, Danse Macabre (New York, Gallery Books, 2011), 26. 4. Internet Movie Database, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074285/movieconnections/?tab= mc&ref_=tt_trv_cnn#referenced_in. 5. Stephen King, cited in ‘Behind the Best Sellers: Stephen King’, interview with Carol Lawson, The New York Times, 23 September 1979. 6. Stephen King cited in George W. Beahm, The Stephen King Story: A Literary Profile (Kansas, Andrews & McMeel, 1991), 112. 7. Harold Bloom, ‘Dumbing Down American Readers’, The Boston Globe, 24 September 2003. 8. Bloom, ‘Dumbing Down American Readers’. 9. Harold Bloom, Stephen King: Bloom’s BioCritiques (Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2002), 1–2. 10. Stephen King, interview by Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, 16 February 1997. 11. Stephen King, Different Seasons (New York, Signet, 1983 [1982]), 504. 12. Stephen King, ‘The Regulators’ (1996) cited in Stephen Spignesi, Stephen King: American Master (New York, Permuted Press, 2018), 9. 13. Stephen King, Needful Things (New York, Gallery, 2018 [1991]), 2–3. 14. Stephen King, ‘You’ve Been Here Before’ in Joe Fassler (ed.), Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (New York, Penguin, 2017), 26–27. 15. King, Misery, 264. 16. Bret Easton Ellis cited in Spignesi, Stephen King: American Master, 8–9. 17. King, Stephen (2008). ‘Introduction’ to Michel Houellebecq (ed.), H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (London, Orion Publishing Group, 1991), 15. 18. King, Danse Macabre, 171–72. 19. Stephen King, The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (London, Hodder & Staughton, 1990 [1978]), 651–52. 20. King, The Stand, 652. 21. King, Misery, 174. 22. King, Misery, 8. 23. King, Misery, 347. 24. Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2013), 14. 25. Stephen King, Wizard and Glass: The Dark Tower IV (New York, Plume, 1997), 703.

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26. Stephen King, ‘Introduction’, The Bachman Books (London, Hodder & Staughton, 2007), xii. 27. Stephen King, ‘Interview’, Castle Rock News (March 1989). https://www.stephenking. com/darktower/misc/castle_rock_news_interview_(march_1989).html. 28. Stephen King, ‘Why We Crave Horror Movies’, Playboy (1981), 151.

Bibliography Anderson, Sherwood, ‘Death in the Woods’ (1933) in Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), American Gothic Tales (New York, Plume, 1996) 163–74. Beahm, George W., The Stephen King Story: A Literary Profile (Kansas, Andrews & McMeel, 1991). Bloch, Robert, Psycho (London, Robert Hale Ltd., 2013 [1959]). Bloom, Harold, ‘Dumbing Down American Readers’, The Boston Globe, 24 September 2003. ———, Stephen King: Bloom’s BioCritiques (Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2002). Booth, Bob (ed.), Necon XX 2000 (Bristol, Necon, 2000). De Palma, Brian (dir.), Carrie (1976). Duffer, Matt, and Duffer, Ross, Stranger Things (2016–). Ellis, Bret Easton, Lunar Park (2005). Fassler, Joe (ed.), Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (New York, Penguin, 2017). Freeman, Brian James, and Chizmar, Richard (eds.), Dark Screams: Vol. I (London, Penguin, 2014). Golding, William, Lord of the Flies (London, Faber & Faber, 2005 [1954]). Gore, Michael and Pitchford, Dean, Carrie: The Musical (1988). Groening, Matt, The Simpsons (1989–). Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (London, Penguin, 2006 [1959]). ———, ‘The Lottery’ (1948) in Dark Tales (London, Penguin, 2017). ———, The Sundial (London, Penguin, 2014 [1958]). King, Stephen, ‘1408’ (2001) in Everything’s Eventual (2002). ———, ‘1922’ (2010) in Full Dark, No Stars (2010). ———, ‘Apt Pupil’ (1982) in Different Seasons (1982). ———, The Bachman Books (London, Hodder & Staughton, 2007). ———, ‘Bad Little Kid’ (2015) in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). ———, Bag of Bones (New York, Scribner, 1998). ———, ‘Battleground’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (New York, Scribner, 2015). ———, ‘The Blue Air Compressor’ (1971) in Hans-Ake Lilja (ed.) Shining in the Dark (2018). ———, ‘The Body’ (1982) in Different Seasons (1982). ———, ‘The Boogeyman’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, Carrie (New York, Doubleday, 1990 [1974]). ———, ‘The Cat from Hell’ (1977) in Just After Sunset (2008). ———, Cell (London, Hodder & Staughton, 2006). ———, ‘Chattery Teeth’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘Children of the Corn’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, Christine (London, Hodder & Staughton, 2007 [1983]). ———, ‘Cookie Jar’ (1999) in VQR (Spring, 2016), https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2016/03/ cookie-jar. ———, ‘Crouch End’ (1979) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, Cujo (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1981]). ———, Cycle of the Werewolf (New York, Signet, 1983).

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———, Danse Macabre (New York, Gallery Books, 2011 [1981]). ———, The Dark Half (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1989]). ———, The Dark Tower: Volumes I–VIII (1982–2012). ———, The Dead Zone (New York, Signet, 1988 [1978]). ———, ‘Dedication’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, Desperation (New York, Signet, 1996). ———, Different Seasons (New York, Signet, 1983 [1982]). ———, Doctor Sleep (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). ———, ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, Dolores Claiborne (New York, Signet, 1993). ———, Duma Key (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [2008]). ———, Everything’s Eventual (New York, Scribner, 2018 [2002]). ———, Face in the Crowd (eBook, 1999). ———, Firestarter (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1980]). ———, Four Past Midnight (New York, Signet, 1996, [1990]). ———, From a Buick 8 (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [2001]). ———, Full Dark, No Stars (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2010). ———, ‘The Genius of “The Tell-Tale Heart”’ in Michael Connelly (ed.), In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. ———, Gerald’s Game (New York, Signet, 1992). ———, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1999]). ———, ‘Graveyard Shift’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘Gramma’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, Gwendy’s Button Box (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2018 [1999]). ———, Hearts in Atlantis (New York, Scribner, 1999). ———, ‘Here There Be Tygers’ (1968) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘Home Delivery’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘The House on Maple Street’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘I Am the Doorway’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘I Was a Teenage Grave Robber’ in Comics Review (1965). ———, Insomnia (New York, Signet, 1994). ———, ‘In the Tall Grass’ (2012) [co-authored with Joe Hill], Esquire, Jun/July and August 2012. ———, The Institute (2019). ———, ‘Interview’, Castle Rock News (March 1989). ———, IT (New York, Signet, 1990 [1986]). ———, ‘It Grows on You’ (1978) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, Just After Sunset (New York, Scribner, 2018 [2008]). ———, ‘The Lawnmower Man’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, Lisey’s Story (London, Stodder & Houghton, 2006). ———, ‘Low Men in Yellow Coats’ (1999) in Hearts In Atlantis (1999). ———, ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ (1993) in Everything’s Eventual (2002). ———, ‘The Man Who Loved Flowers’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘The Mangler’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘Mile 81’ (2015) in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). ———, Misery (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1987). ———, ‘The Mist’ (1980) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘The Monkey’ (1978) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘Mister Yummy’ (2015) in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). ———, ‘The Moving Finger’ (1983) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, Mr. Mercedes (New York, Gallery Books, 2014). ———, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985).

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———, ‘My Pretty Pony’ (1988) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘N.’ (1999) in Just After Sunset (2008). ———, Needful Things (New York, Gallery, 2018 [1991]). ———, Night Shift (New York, Signet, 1990 [1978]). ———, Nightmares and Dreamscapes (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2012 [1993]). ———, ‘Nona’ (1980) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘The Old Dude’s Ticker’ (1999) in Bob Booth (ed.), Necon XX 2000 (Bristol, Necon, 2000). ———, ‘One for the Road’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, The Outsider (New York, Scribner, 2018). ———, Pet Sematary (New York, Pocket Books, 2002 [1982]). ———, ‘The Plant’ (1982–5) (limited edition, eBook). ———, ‘The Raft’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, Rage (New York, Signet, 1976). ———, ‘The Reach’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘The Reaper’s Image’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, The Regulators (New York, Signet, 1996). ———, Revival (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2014). ———, ‘The Road Virus Heads North’ (2001) in Everything’s Eventual (2002). ———, Rose Madder (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1995]). ———, ’Salem’s Lot (New York, Pocket Books, 2000 [1975]). ———, ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’ (1990) in Four Past Midnight (1990). ———, The Shining (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2011 [1977]). ———, Skeleton Crew (New York, Signet, 1990 [1985]). ———, ‘Sometimes They Come Back’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990 [1978]). ———, ‘Suffer the Little Children’ (1978) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘Strawberry Spring’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘The Sun Dog’ (1990) in Four Past Midnight (1990). ———, ‘Survivor Type’ (1981) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘Tales of the Hook’ in Danse Macabre (New York, Gallery Books, 2011). ———, The Talisman (New York, Gallery Books, 2018 [1984]) [co-authored with Peter Straub]. ———, ‘The Things They Left Behind’ (2008) in Just After Sunset (2008). ———, The Tommyknockers (New York, Pocket Books, 2016 [1987]). ———, ‘Trucks’ (1978) in Night Shift (1978). ———, ‘Umney’s Last Case’ (1993) in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). ———, ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, Under the Dome (New York, Gallery Books, 2009). ———, ‘UR’ (2015) in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). ———, ‘Weeds’ (1999) in Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar (eds.), Dark Screams: Vol. I (2014). ———, ‘Why We Crave Horror Movies’, Playboy (1981), pp. 151–52. ———, Wizard and Glass: The Dark Tower IV (New York, Plume, 1997). ———, ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ (1985) in Skeleton Crew (1985). ———, ‘You’ve Been Here Before’ in Joe Frasier (ed.), Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (New York, Penguin, 2017), pp. 23–30. Lawson, Carol, ‘Behind the Best Sellers: Stephen King’, The New York Times, 23 September 1979. Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (London, Corsair, 2011 [1967]). ———, The Stepford Wives (London, Corsair, 2011 [1972]). Lilja, Hans-Ake (ed.) Shining in the Dark (Forest Hill, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2018).

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Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) in Patrick F. Quinn (ed.), Poe: Poetry, Tales and Selected Essays (New York, Library of America, 1984). Romero, George (dir.), Creepshow (1982). Siegel, Don (dir.), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Spignesi, Stephen, Stephen King: American Master (New York, Permuted Press, 2018). Stahl, Lesley, ‘Interview with Stephen King’, 60 Minutes, 16 February 1997. Wise, Robert (dir.), The Haunting (1963).

Occult Gothic

Aleister Crowley and Occult Meaning James Machin

Weird fiction is a mode closely associated with the gothic tradition from which it emerged. The period 1880–1940 is regarded by some commentators to have been its formative stage, an era designated ‘haute Weird’ by China Miéville, for example.1 It was during this period that writers such as Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood, dispensed with the staples of the gothic genre (haunted castles, ghosts, rattling chains, and so on) and through their fiction engaged with contemporary discourses including those on evolution, degeneration, and psychic phenomena. In the 1920s and 1930s, their innovations were built upon in the U.S. by, most famously, H. P. Lovecraft, as well as other writers for Weird Tales magazine, and therefore shaped much ensuing Gothic and horror media, an influence which shows no signs of abating to this day. Regarding the British haute Weird, one of its defining characteristics is its engagement with contemporaneous occulture. This essay will explore this specific context in more detail, drawing upon the critical writing and fiction of Aleister Crowley; one of the crucial figures—if not the crucial figure—in the occult discourses of the period. I will argue that Crowley’s reactions to contemporaneous weird fiction reveal that, although Machen et al. certainly used occult ideas and tropes in their writing, the use of these ideas was ad hoc and largely aesthetic, rather than didactic and organised. Although contemporaneous occult practice was a clear influence on the weird fiction of the period, attempts to glean ‘truths’ about that occult practice from the tales of, for example, Blackwood or Lovecraft, under the aegis of the contemporary academic conventions of textual analysis, are in practice little different from Crowley’s insistence that such texts contain occult ‘truths’ that can only be discovered by select initiates. The wider context of this essay is, therefore, the possible elisions between hermeticism and hermeneutics, beyond their shared etymological provenance.

J. Machin (*)  Royal College of Art, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_20

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Lovecraft, especially, has been singled out for febrile claims about the alleged occult truths secreted in his fiction, despite his professed atheism and blithe scepticism regarding all things supernatural. The authors of pop-occult c­ rypto-history The Dark Gods (1985), for example, get round the problem presented by Lovecraft’s atheism by arguing breathlessly that Lovecraft was an involuntary or subconscious conduit for supernatural forces: ‘Lovecraft was a classic victim or unconscious medium for the extracosmic “sendings” of the Dark Gods.’2 The trope that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is to a greater or lesser extent founded on a ‘reality’ had by then already precipitated something of an occult cottage industry, the productions of which included various ‘authentic’ editions of Lovecraft’s infamous occult tome the Necronomicon—for example, the ‘Simon’ Necronomicon published by Avon in 1977, or the version published by Skoob Esoterica in 1992— that occupy an obscure space between high-concept hoax and pot-boiling deception. Similarly obscure, though rather more ambiguous in terms of intentionality, is the exact nature of the co-option of Lovecraft’s fiction by practicing occultists. In books like Cults of the Shadow (1975), for example, Kenneth Grant (1924– 2011)—certainly one of the most significant figures in British twentieth-century occulture after Crowley—regularly incorporated the Cthulhu Mythos into his work with little apparent regard for ontological distinctions between fiction and reality. Passages like the following give a flavour of Grant’s mixture of recondite lore and Lovecraftian fiction: The Lovecraftian Coven is assumed to the seventh ray of [the contemporary occult order] The Monastery of Seven Rays. This is the ray of ceremonial magic and it forms a ­space-time corridor between [Lovecraft’s] Yuggoth (Pluto) and the ultimate trans-Neptune planets represented on the [Kabbalistic] Tree of Life by Kether and Chokmah respectively.3

The symbolist roots of contemporary occulture are perhaps evident here; the ‘authenticity’ of the system is of negligible importance compared to its symbolic value to the practitioner. In the late 1970s, the emergence of ‘Chaos magic’ as a new school of occult practice made this disregard for the authenticity of particular mythological traditions explicit. In this, it was influenced by the countercultural occult of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ludic ‘Discordianism’ of, for example, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), which tangled Lovecraft and Crowley into byzantine historical and pseudohistorical conspiracy theories in an act of self-described ‘guerrilla ontology’, in which the intention was to force the reader to decide, ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?’4 In books such as Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos: an Introduction to Chaos Magic (1995), it is argued that any symbolic or mythological system or tradition should be up for grabs by occult practitioners based on functionality, with a happy disregard for ontological status. In advocating this postmodern approach to ritual magic, Hine argues that since ‘more people are familiar with the universe of Star Trek than any of the mystery religions’, rituals that involve evocation of, for example, Mr Spock, are more likely to succeed than those that depend on knowledge of, and belief in, forgotten Babylonian deities or antique Eleusinian rites. Hine then describes his own successes using the symbolic framework of the Cthulhu Mythos

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in his practice, despite—and to the possible reassurance of readers—denying any actual belief in the Mythos in reality. There has been a shift in occult discourse, therefore, away from sincere (or disingenuous) claims that the weird fiction of Machen and Lovecraft, etc. is freighted with ‘genuine’ hermetic lore, to a more playful and sophisticated exploration of such conceits. This explicitly ludic and relativist discourse is very different, for example, from that undertaken by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in their treatment of Machen and the Golden Dawn in their incredibly popular The Morning of the Magicians (1963). Pauwels and Bergier were responsible for at least propagating, if not inventing, several enduring canards about both the author and the order. They inaccurately claim, for example, that Bram Stoker and Sax Rohmer were members of the Golden Dawn, and that the influence of the society on Machen was a profound and transformative one, which—according to Machen at least—was far from the case, as I will discuss.5 It is hardly surprising that the weird fiction of the era under discussion— engaged as it is with the supernatural and hidden, nebulous agencies—should be closely linked with the occult. In fact, it is not only linked, but inextricably so; many of the writers pre-eminently associated with the haute Weird were also fascinated with various occult and esoteric traditions, and frequently actual practitioners. My argument here should not be misunderstood as an attempt to question this very evident fact. Figures as diverse as Machen, Blackwood, Vernon Lee, John Buchan, and Count Stenbock, were all variously involved in the occult renaissance of the late-Victorian period, from engagement with neo-Paganism to actual membership of occult societies. A clear ‘John the Baptist’ figure here is Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873). Lord Lytton, an immensely successful novelist and playwright, wrote several works that would now fall within the ambit of genre writing. For example, his novels Zanoni (1843), A Strange Story (1862), The Coming Race (1871), and the novella ‘The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain’ (1859), all deal with various occult and theosophical themes such as hidden races, hollow-earth theory, mesmerism, psychic phenomena, ghosts, and ritual magic. Lovecraft praised Lytton’s writing for its ‘weird images and moods’, and regarded ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ as ‘one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written’.6 This line of influence aside, Lytton’s occult interests also overlapped with and influenced later weird fiction, and the comparable interests of its authors. One specific example of this is the clear influence of Lytton’s fiction on the emergence of the actual Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from the only allegedly extant mystical ‘Rosicrucian’ sect, which Lytton discusses in his introduction to Zanoni. The alleged existence and provenance of the ‘Rosicrucian Brotherhood’ was first espoused in several anonymous pamphlets in the early seventeenth century.7 The Brotherhood was framed as a benevolent, secret Neoplatonist and Christian society, possessed of ancient mystical wisdom and healing powers. The surname of the putative founder of the Brotherhood, Christian Rosenkreuz, comprised the yonic and phallic symbols of the Rose and the Cross, occult imagery familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of the hermetic tradition.8 By the time

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Lytton was writing Zanoni in the 1840s, the origins and putative reality of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood were both obscure and wilfully mythologised. Zanoni, a ‘Rosicrucian’ novel from such a prominent literary and political figure of the period, therefore attracted the attention of seekers after occult wisdom, and subsequent to Zanoni’s publication, Lytton became a figurehead, voluntary or otherwise, for occult interests in both Britain and the Continent. Nineteenth-century occulture (to use a contemporary term retroactively) developed as a complex and convoluted set of international connections, involving individuals such as Lytton, Eliphas Lévi, Mary Anne Atwood, ‘Madame’ Helena Blavatsky, and involved myriad fraternities, sororities, associations, and ‘fringe’ Masonic societies, both formal and informal. Negotiating this history has always been made significantly more difficult by the enthusiasm of many of the participants for inventing traditions (such as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, for example) in order to give added authenticity to their claims of being the recipients of ancient hermetic wisdom.9 Lytton’s fictional exposition of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood seems to have directly influenced the establishment in 1887 of the occult society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.10 The predecessor of this organisation was the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.), and occasional claims were made by those involved that Lord Lytton was ‘himself a member of the Society of Rosicrucians and Grand Patron of the Order’.11 Although there is (at very least) a question mark over the veracity of this claim, it is still indicative of Lytton’s status in contemporaneous occulture that the claim was made at all.12 The Golden Dawn emerged from what is sometimes called ‘fringe’ Masonry—the attempt by some Masons to steer Freemasonry away from its ostensibly secular post-Enlightenment orthodoxy into areas thick with occult significance and ritual. Susan Johnston Graf describes the Golden Dawn as ‘arguably the most important and influential Western organization of its kind’, going on to say that ‘its materials serve as the basis for many twentieth-century magico-religious groups and for many so-called New Age beliefs’.13 According to Francis King, ‘at first the Golden Dawn was little more than another pseudo-masonic order whose members studied occult theory’, distinguishing itself ‘only by the fact that it admitted women as well as men into its ranks’.14 However, in 1892, one of the founders of the order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), claimed to have made contact with ‘certain super-human, immortal teachers’ who entrusted him with unique teachings and instructed him in singularly potent magical rituals.15 Disregarding the veracity of Mathers’ claims in this regard (as many do), what he in effect achieved was a synthesis between the existing Rosicrucian and Masonic provenance of the Golden Dawn as was, and the Theosophist system of Madame Blavatsky; Mathers essentially co-opting the immortal ‘Mahatmas’ or ‘Masters of the Ancient Wisdom’ of Blavatsky’s Theosophy for his own organisation, re-casting them as the ‘Secret Chiefs’ of the Golden Dawn. For Mathers, a happy by-product of his encounter with the Secret Chiefs was that he could consolidate his position as the society’s ultimate and central authority, by being the sole conduit of communication between the society and the Secret Chiefs. Although Mathers’ assumption of power in this way eventually led to the first of

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many fractious schisms, in 1900 the Golden Dawn attracted the membership of numerous notable fin-de-siècle figures including W. B. Yeats, Florence Farr, Maud Gonne, Arnold Bennett, and Evelyn Underhill. Two members of specific relevance to this essay are Arthur Machen and, to a far lesser degree, Algernon Blackwood, two of Lovecraft’s ‘Modern Masters’ of the weird tale. The specific influence of the Golden Dawn (rather than occult discourse in general) on the literary output of both writers is difficult to ascertain, given its status as a secret society, but—as I will argue below—any such influence tends to be overstated rather than understated. Relevant scholarly examinations have been accordingly speculative. Graf, in her monograph on this specific question, Talking to the Gods (2015), does a fine job in corralling the available information, but nevertheless has to fill in many of the gaps with what amounts to conjecture based on the limited, and circumstantial, evidence available. There is a perceivable frustration that Machen failed to ever disclose ‘some of his questionable experiences during the halcyon days of his youth during the Decadent decade of the 1890s’,16 yet the most obvious explanation for this autobiographical lacuna—that he did not have any—is never entertained by Graf.17 Similarly, in Deborah Bridle’s fascinating and productive discussion of the resonances of the Golden Dawn system and Rosicrucianism in Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams, the argument remains necessarily speculative and associative: the resonances with Golden Dawn ritual are identified purely by close reading of the text.18 In his autobiographical work Things Near and Far (1923), Machen sketches his involvement with the Golden Dawn (which he euphemistically calls the ‘Order of the Twilight Star’) in an episode he describes as ‘the affair of the secret society’.19 In it, he is unequivocally disparaging about the society, its alleged provenance, and the credulity of its members: […] as for anything vital in the secret order, for anything that mattered two straws to any reasonable being, there was nothing of it, and less than nothing. Among the members there were, indeed, persons of very high attainments, who, in my opinion, ought to have known better after a year’s membership or less; but the society as a society was pure foolishness concerned with impotent and imbecile Abracadabras.20

Machen adds a qualifier that ‘it had and has an interest of a kind’, but goes on to assert that as to the story of the society’s vaunted roots in medieval Rosicrucianism and cipher manuscripts made manifest by secret chiefs, ‘there was not one atom of truth in it’.21 Machen specifically identifies the Golden Dawn’s distinctively contemporary syncretism as evidence of its recent invention: ‘That was not the ancient frame of mind; it was not even the 1809 frame of mind. But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and later frame of mind.’22 A historian of the Golden Dawn, Ellic Howe, also provides some additional circumstantial evidence that supports Machen’s claim that the Golden Dawn ‘shed no ray of any kind on [his] path’23: Neither Arthur Machen (‘Avallaunius’, I.-U. [Isis Urania] 21 November 1899) nor Algernon Blackwood (‘Umbram Fugat Veritas’, I.-U., 30 October 1900) was ever very prominent in the G.D. and both joined when the Order’s most interesting period belonged to the past.24

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Elsewhere, Howe writes: ‘I have discovered only two references to Machen (Frater Avallaunius) in the available documents. He was 3° = 8° and hence a relatively unimportant member of the Outer Order in 1900.’25 Howe also observes that although Maud Gonne opined that Algernon Blackwood ‘lent the G.D. a certain literary distinction’, Blackwood was not in fact in the Golden Dawn at the same time as Gonne. Howe then quotes from 1909 correspondence between G.D. members Dr R. W. Felkin and J. W. Brodie-Innes26: ‘“With regard to Blackwood I have not seen him for years but he still works with S[acramentum] R[egis] & Co.”, meaning with A. E. Waite.’27 Once again, the tautological occult tendency to obfuscation confuses matters, especially when combined with knowingly ludic conceits such as Machen and Waite’s The House of the Hidden Light (1904), which despite presenting itself as a recondite esoteric treatise, has been demonstrated by R. A. Gilbert to be more a coded account of Waite and Machen’s nocturnal, alcohol-fueled adventures in Bohemian London.28 Although Machen made his own comparison between the cast of characters in The Three Impostors, and various parties involved in the ‘magical war’ between Aleister Crowley and Yeats, Machen’s comments were retroactive—he was rather remarking on a disconcerting synchronicity between events in the novel and the Golden Dawn intrigue, which happened years after its publication.29 What is undeniable, however, is that one of the preeminent (and notorious) occultists associated with the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley (1875– 1947), valorised the work of Machen, and also Lord Dunsany (not a member of the Golden Dawn), for what he claimed to be occult insights presented as fiction. Crowley’s life and legacy has become overshadowed by his predilection for courting scandal and shocking contemporary mores, and his occasional weakness for self-publicity. It should be recognised, however, that he was also very much a victim of the ambient, institutional homophobia of his age. In 1900 it was a contributory factor, together with his loyalty to an increasingly isolated Mathers (by then resident in Paris), to his ostracisation by most of the London membership of the Golden Dawn. Francis King maybe overstating the case when he writes that ‘the London adepts had heard that Crowley was a practicing homosexual and decided that, in the words of Yeats, a mystical society was not a moral reformatory’, but Crowley’s bisexuality was certainly an issue.30 Writing in 1923, and despite his antipathy to Crowley, Machen fully acknowledges the likelihood that Crowley’s reputation as a ‘fiend in human form’ was the result of malicious gossip: ‘I can by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him’.31 Regardless, Crowley’s bisexuality and his ‘reputation of being a sodomite’ made it impossible to seek legal protection from even quite clear cases of slander.32 In 1910, for example, legal proceedings resulting from an attack on Crowley in the tabloid The Looking Glass foundered on Crowley’s reputation for ‘unnatural vice’: Why did Crowley not himself sue, or testify for Jones [George Cecil, the litigant against The Looking Glass]? Crowley gives his own explanation in his Confessions, but even this necessarily sidestepped the truth: Crowley was a bisexual in Edwardian England […and…] homosexuality was a felony. Oscar Wilde had suffered his not-so-rosy crucifixion only a few years earlier; unless willing to lie under oath, Crowley did not dare take the stand.33

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His subsequent reputation and his branding by the popular magazine John Bull as the ‘Wickedest Man in the World’, the ‘King of Depravity’, and a ‘Wizard of Wickedness’ have inevitably led to intense and lurid posthumous mythologisation.34 However, unlike Wilde, who endured similar treatment at the hands of the popular press, Crowley has subsequently rarely been taken seriously as a writer beyond recondite occult circles. Ever since Yeats’s initial disparagement of his poetry and their subsequent feud (or magical battle, if the participants’ accounts are to be taken at face value), Crowley has been usually regarded as a poetaster and charlatan, when not incorrectly lambasted as a ‘Satanist’. There are at least signs that a rehabilitation may be in process: Richard Kaczynski’s 2002 biography presented Crowley in a refreshingly sympathetic light, and Kaczynski also details Crowley’s initial critical successes as a fin-de-siècle poet.35 Indeed, before his notoriety, Crowley was often treated warmly by contemporary critics; the Outlook, for example, described him as ‘evidently a poet of fine taste and accomplishment’, while the Bookman thought he had potential to be ‘a very considerable poet indeed’.36 Today, comprehensive editions of his short fiction are newly available in mass-market trade paperbacks published by Wordsworth.37 Despite David Tibet noting in his foreword to one of these, The Drug and Other Stories, that Crowley ‘admired the writing of Arthur Machen’, that admiration does not very recognisably manifest itself in Crowley’s own fiction, which—as discussed below—tends towards fictionalised accounts of ‘authentic’ occult experiences or complicated allegory of occult theory and practice, impenetrable to the layperson.38 One anomalous story that Crowley did write in the weird mode is ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’ (1913), in which the eponymous narrator gives an account of a terrifying psychic link between her and her dying husband, through which she vicariously experiences the residual consciousness of his posthumous brain cells. The experience of the subjective processes of disease, death, and decay, traumatises her to the point of suicidal insanity. The language used by Crowley certainly seems informed by his enthusiasm for contemporaneous weird fiction, and in passages such as the following is striking in its anticipation of Lovecraft: Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms— mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most were things impossible to name or to describe.39

This febrile mixture of precise delineation of monstrous hybrid zoology terminating in a claim of exhaustion of the descriptive powers of language will be familiar to readers of Lovecraft, and fits very closely with China Miéville’s delineation of the haute Weird as positing entities that are ‘indescribable and formless as well as being and/or although they are and/or in so far as they are described with an excess of specificity, an accursed share of impossible somatic precision’.40 Nevertheless, ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’ is far from typical of Crowley’s fictional output, much of which—as previously discussed—is written in the

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interests of occult instruction, when not thinly veiled autobiography or satirical, score-settling roman-à-clef (his 1923 novel The Moon Child being a good example of the latter). Crowley also turned his hand to more straightforward detective fiction (the ‘Simon Iff’ series), sardonic humour (e.g. ‘The Ideal Idol’, 1918), and stories that really serve as ingenious mathematical, logical, or lexical puzzles (e.g. ‘The Murder in X. Street’, 1908). As with his posthumous reputation as a poetaster, the enduring hyperbole surrounding the ‘wickedest man in the world’ tends to obscure his real achievements as a writer. A good indication of his actual status at the time he was writing was that he had several pieces included in the English Review, a title started by Ford Madox Ford, which had published work by Thomas Hardy, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad among other prominent authors of the time. Crowley claims that Conrad thought very highly indeed of one of Crowley’s short stories published in the title, ‘The Stratagem’ (1914): ‘I was told—nothing in my life ever made my prouder—that Joseph Conrad said it was the best short story he had read in ten years’.41 However, sceptical one might be regarding Crowley’s name dropping here, ‘The Stratagem’ is an incredibly accomplished piece of literary sleight of hand, and has credibly been compared to Borges.42 However, Crowley’s responses to the weird fiction of his contemporaries are certainly indicative of the enmeshment of fictional and non-fictional iterations of occult discourse at the time. He held Machen’s writing in especially high esteem: ‘I have always maintained that Arthur Machen was one of the most original and excellent minds of England. The distinction of his thought and style is one of the most unmistakable of contemporary literary phenomena.’43 Writing in Vanity Fair in 1916, Crowley described Machen as ‘certainly among the first half-dozen living English authors’.44 In the review sections of the journal Crowley edited and largely wrote, The Equinox, the books under consideration were predominantly non-fictional works dealing with occult, esoteric, and spiritualist matters. However, Crowley and his colleagues’ regard for Machen can be gleaned from the regularity with which Machen’s name was used as a touchstone when criticising other fiction. For example, Crowley’s complete review of Edgar Jepson’s occult thriller No. 19 (1910), is as follows: ‘Arthur Machen wrote fine stories, “The Great God Pan”, “The White People”, etc. Edgar Jepson would have done better to cook them alone; it was a mistake to add the dash of Algernon Blackwood.’45 Crowley’s then acolyte, the poet Victor Neuberg, criticises J. W. Brodie-Innes’s novel Old as the World (1909) because ‘the magic of style that renders Arthur Machen so marvellous is lacking’.46 Once again critical of Blackwood, in Crowley’s negative review of Blackwood’s The Education of Uncle Paul (1909) he claims that unlike Blackwood’s novel, Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907) ‘has blood’ in it.47 It is indicative of Machen’s standing within the occult community that Machen is lauded as an exemplary author three times in the review section of a single edition of The Equinox. Crowley was of the opinion that Machen’s fiction contained useful occult information for the informed and careful reader, and included ‘The Works of

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Arthur Machen’ (referring to a corpus rather than a specific volume) in one of the reading lists he compiled for aspirant magicians, commenting that ‘most of these stories are of great magical interest’.48 Crowley’s failure to expand upon the specifics of this ‘magical interest’ is typical of his writing on fiction, however, with the suggestion being that Machen’s, and others’, fiction contains occulted information that can only be gleaned by assiduous and astute reading by someone educated to a sufficient level in esoteric lore. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, for example, is ‘valuable for those who have wit to understand it’, and he argues that Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark are ‘valuable to those who understand the Qabalah’.49 Even when Crowley is more specific about the relationship between a work of fiction and occult information, it can feel more like the throwing down of a gauntlet rather than actual explication: 741. ‫שתמא‬, the four letters of the elements. ‫ןמא‬, counting the ‫ ן‬as 700, the supreme Name of the Concealed One. The dogma is that the Highest is but the Four Elements; that there is nothing beyond these, beyond Tetragrammaton. This dogma is most admirably portrayed by Lord Dunsany in a tale called ‘The Wanderings of Shaun’.50

Although Dunsany may well have been surprised to learn that his story (actually titled ‘The Sorrow of Search’, 1906) was a portrayal of any such thing, Crowley may well have rejected the claim that authorial intentionality had any bearing on the truth of his assertion. Crowley’s approach to literature was entrenched in the occult and Kabbalistic worldview that an archive of hidden spiritual knowledge is secreted in certain texts, accessible only to initiates. Wilful mystagoguery aside, writing in Vanity Fair about Lord Dunsany, Crowley appears sincere in his belief that such readings are possible, and candid about the difficulties involved in fully parsing the texts. Crowley says of Dunsany that an ‘unsuspected profound of philosophy lies beneath his smooth, subtle, imaginative sentences’, but confesses that he (Crowley) ‘cannot pretend to have assimilated or unified this philosophy, to have known the God that is shadowed forth in all [Dunsany’s] gracious images; to have apprehended the ultimate purport of his message’.51 There seems no doubt in Crowley’s mind, of course, that there is an ‘ultimate purport’ discoverable in the text—as he writes in the Equinox of one Dunsany story: ‘And what shall I say of “The Sword and the Idol” [1909]? Only this; that it is true.’52 However, Crowley then concedes that the worth of Dunsany’s writing does not completely rely on any putative symbolic purpose or intent: ‘Even were it but to wander among the images that Lord Dunsany has thrown off from his soul, the pilgrimage were pleasant.’53 As presented in his Vanity Fair article, Crowley’s enthusiasm for Dunsany seems rooted in an animus against modernity, and the debasement of ‘the true and the beautiful’ in ‘these days of industrialism’.54 It also may have been a sympathetic response by Crowley to Dunsany’s debt to the English style of the King James Bible. As a child, Crowley had been captivated and fascinated by the daily Bible readings, and stylistically, this resulted in a clear and consistent Biblical influence on his own occult writings.55 Similarly, Dunsany ‘regarded his early immersion in the King James Bible as the greatest influence on his prose style’.56

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The seriousness with which Crowley took what he perceived to be fictional expressions of occult gnosis (an ongoing expression of fin-de-siècle symbolism) is indicated by the fact that he not only referred regularly to Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany in his writing, but that he published the latter in The Equinox. Crowley also corresponded with Dunsany, and based on Dunsany’s responses, the resulting dynamic was that of a fan interrogating the object of their enthusiasm. Dunsany’s letters to Crowley are a series of friendly but forthright responses to Crowley’s questions, for instance: ‘No, I never tried hashish, my strongest drug is tea’ (1911).57 The question put to Dunsany in this instance is not a casual one: Dunsany’s ‘The Hashish Man’ (1910) was described by Crowley as containing writing that was ‘the perfection of the sublime in its simplicity’.58 Following on from a previous story (‘Bethmoora’) in the same collection, A Dreamer’s Tales (1911), it concerns the visionary experiences of an insurance salesman, who in his evenings smokes a particularly powerful type of hashish: ‘It takes one literally out of oneself. It is like wings. You swoop over distant countries and into other worlds.’59 There are marked similarities between Dunsany’s description of the hashish eater’s experience and the technique known as ‘astral projection’, foundational to Crowley’s occult practice and that of other members of the Golden Dawn, such as Yeats. Astral projection ‘resembles a controlled out-of-body experience, where one’s consciousness leaves its physical confines and travels in the imagination.’60 One of Crowley’s mentors in the order, Allan Bennett (1872–1923) introduced Crowley to the ‘controlled use of drugs for mystical purposes’, among them being drug-enhanced astral projection.61 It is little wonder, then, that ‘The Hashish Eater’ led Crowley to speculation as to whether Dunsany might be an occult practitioner, disguising accounts of his practice in his fiction (as mentioned below, much of Crowley’s fiction amounted to exactly this). There are certainly precedents in this regard, which indicate that Crowley was interested in authorial intentionalism, and not simply projecting occult meaning onto the texts he valorised. As a Cambridge undergraduate, Victor Neuberg (1883– 1940) first came to Crowley’s attention in 1905 through his poetry published in the Agnostic Journal. This included poems such as ‘Between the Spheres’ (1905), in which the speaker ‘slips out of his body and although still warm from the habitation he has left, feels his ghostly self expand in the aether as he floats through it.’62 A similar trope appears in a 1906 poem, ‘The Dream’, summarised as follows: While lying down [the speaker] feels himself rise out of his body and go walking, a—now familiar—companion beside him; it is only as they talk that he realizes, with a start, that this is something which happens only after one is dead. Wide-eyed, he asserts, ‘I am not dead!’ Instantly, he is jerked back to his body, and wakes.63

These, and other poems of Neuberg’s in the Agnostic Journal, so impressed Crowley that he sought out their author: As Victor related it to a number of people, Crowley just walked into his room in college one day and introduced himself. As Crowley was a former student of Trinity it was perfectly in order for him to visit his old college and to walk up any of the stairscases. He explained his call on Victor, saying that he had read some of his poems in the Agnostic Journal and that they interested him because they showed experience of astral travel.64

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As it proved, Neuberg was to disappoint Crowley on this assumption: Neuberg’s flights were (at that stage at least) imaginative rather than astral. Similarly, Dunsany’s response to Crowley’s questions may have frustrated Crowley, but further demonstrate that fiction involving the tropes of the occult can quite often be just that, rather than evidence of the author’s deeper engagement with contemporaneous occulture. There is a difference between weird fiction, therefore, and ‘occult fiction’: in the latter, the fiction is an instrument to convey a schema of occult information, whereas, in the former, the occult information might be called upon in the general bricolage of the literary construction. As well as Crowley, another distinct exponent of occult fiction was Dion Fortune (Violet Mary Firth, 1890–1946), also a Golden Dawn initiate, whose ‘body of fictional work presents the development of her occult ideas and practices’.65 Moreover, Fortune ‘thought that by reading [her novels] her audience would achieve a kind of initiation’ into the occult knowledge she was setting out to convey.66 It is impossible to claim that any similar intentional or organised occult didacticism exists in the fiction of Machen. This is demonstrated by the fact that viable, credible, and productive readings of Machen’s work have argued variously that they are an expression of Golden Dawn symbolism, Thomist theology, Anglo-Catholicism, and so on. Machen’s occult knowledge was merely one component of a smorgasbord of tropes—selected from as and when each component could be pressed to the service of the narrative and overall aesthetic conceit—rather than given ­pre-eminence through any desire to impart occult wisdom. Indeed, Machen’s insistence on the supremacy and immutably of numinous mystery over all else explicitly decries any claim to revelatory secret knowledge. (This is of course not to argue that Machen was not interested in or extremely knowledgeable about the occult tradition.) In contrast, Crowley’s own short fiction, and indeed his novels, can be classed in many instances as occult fiction in the stricter sense discussed above. ‘The Wake World’ (1907) for example, is a visionary/symbolic tale thick with allegorical significance. It comes with heavy annotations in Hebrew and Latin, detailing Kabbalistic correspondences and so on, and was included by Crowley on his teaching curriculum for one of his magickal orders, the ‘A∴A∴’.67 Crowley’s contributions to and interactions with the weird fiction of his contemporaries are not reducible, therefore, to a straightforward, shared interest in occult practice, or the presentation of occult theory in fictional form. Crowley’s responses to writers such as Machen and Dunsany in fact anticipate subsequent discourse in wider literary criticism. Despite this, Crowley’s approach to literature was consistently predicated on the notion of occult gnosis, and the assumption that inner truths were discoverable in fiction through informed hermeneutics. However, as willing as he was to ignore more general interpretations of texts to co-opt a wide variety of material for his magickal syllabi, this did not stop him from also making fallacious presumptions of authorial intentionality when it came to the occult. Crowley, in common with many literary critics, was convinced that texts contained hidden meanings that could be teased out through careful analysis. We can treat his specific beliefs with as much scepticism as we like, but Crowley’s

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attempts at a hermetic hermeneutics of literature, in which a wide variety of fictional texts are co-opted into the occult canon, and the problems he encountered precipitated by the question of intentionalism, anticipate wider conundrums in subsequent literary criticism generally. The scepticism with which we react to Crowley’s determination to make occult meaning in various fictional texts may be legitimate, but if we are to be sceptical, there is a corollary demand to be sceptical about the convenient good fortune with which any scholar produces the meanings they are looking for in any given text.

Notes



1. China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould and others (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 510–515. 2. Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson, The Dark Gods (London: Panther, 1985), p. 57. 3. Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), p. 188. 4. Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Oakland: Ronin, 1986), p. 2. 5. Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, The Morning of the Magicians (St Albans: Granada, 1975), p. 146. 6. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther, 1985), pp. 421–512 (pp. 450–451). 7. Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 71. 8. Herbert Silberer, Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts. Translated by Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Dover, 1971), pp. 173–208. 9. I explore some of this complicated history in my article ‘Towards a Golden Dawn: Esoteric Christianity and the Development of Nineteenth-Century British Occultism’ (Machin 2013). 10. I will hereon use the term ‘Golden Dawn’ as shorthand for an organisation that was frequently prone to internecine schism, and branching off into affiliate and competing societies, often with varying or different names. For further detail see Francis King’s Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport: Prism, 1989). 11. Victor Alexander, George Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 41. 12. James Machin, ‘Towards a Golden Dawn: Esoteric Christianity and the Development of Nineteenth-Century British Occultism’, The Victorian, 1.1 (2013), pp. 6–7, http://journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/view/32 (accessed 31 May 2015). 13. Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 7. 14. Francis King, Megatherion: The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (London: Creation Books, 2004), p. 22. 15. King, pp. 22–23. 16. Graf, p. 63. 17. I discuss such posthumous mythologisation of Machen, and the blurring of his fiction and biography, in my Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, Palgrave Gothic (London: Palgrave, 2018). 18. Deborah Bridle, ‘Symbolism and Dissidence: Social Criticism Through the Prism of the Golden Dawn in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams’, Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen (2016), pp. 2–18.

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19. Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far (London: Secker, 1923), pp. 151–154. 20. Machen, pp. 151–152. 21. Machen, pp. 152–153. 22. Machen, p. 154. 23. Machen, p. 154. 24. Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1985), p. 52. 25. Howe, p. 285. 26. Howe, p. 70. 27. Howe, p. 70. 28. R. A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in The House of the Hidden Light, by Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite (Leyburn: Tartarus, 2017), pp. v–xxv. 29. Machen, pp. 146–147. 30. King, p. 33. 31. Machen, p. 146. 32. John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (London: Macdonald, 1971), p. 126. 33. William Breeze, ‘Editor’s Foreword’, in The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, by Anonymous, trans. by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Boston: Weiser, 1996), pp. xiii–xx). 34. Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 394. 35. Kaczynski, p. 66. 36. ‘A First Glance at New Books’, The Outlook, 2.46 (1898), pp. 639–640 (p. 640); ‘Jephthah’, The Bookman, 16.96 (1899), p. 172. 37. Aleister Crowley, The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works (Ware: Wordsworth, 2012); Aleister Crowley, The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015). 38. David Tibet, ‘Foreword’, in The Drug and Other Stories, by Aleister Crowley (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. ix–x (p. x). 39. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’, in The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. 261–284 (p. 268). 40. China Miéville, ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire’, COLLAPSE (2008), pp. 105– 128 (p. 105). 41. Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (London: Arkana, 1989), p. 722. 42. Tibet, p. x. 43. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Terror’, The International, XI.12 (1917), p. 384. 44. Aleister Crowley, ‘Three Great Hoaxes of the War’, Vanity Fair (January 1916), pp. 37, 118 (p. 37). 45. ‘The Big Stick’, ed. by Aleister Crowley, The Equinox, 1.4 (1910), pp. 327–345 (p. 328). 46. Crowley, ‘The Big Stick’, p. 331. 47. Crowley, ‘The Big Stick’, p. 331. 48. Aleister Crowley, Magick, ed. by Kenneth Grant and John Symonds (Bungay: Guild, 1988), p. 311. 49. Crowley, Magick, p. 310. 50. ‘The Temple of Solomon the King’, ed. by Aleister Crowley, The Equinox, 1.5 (1911), pp. 31–63 (p. 55). 51. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Art of Lord Dunsany’, Vanity Fair (21 April 1909), p. 505. 52. ‘The Big Stick’, ed. by Aleister Crowley, The Equinox, 1.5 (1911), pp. 79–88 (p. 79). 53. Crowley, ‘The Art of Lord Dunsany’, p. 505. 54. Crowley, ‘The Art of Lord Dunsany’, p. 505. 55. Kaczynski, p. 16. 56. Nick Daly, ‘The Everyday Occult on Stage: The Play of Lord Dunsany’, in The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, ed. by Christine Ferguson and Andrew D. Radford, Among the Victorians and Modernists, 6 (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), n.p.

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57. Lord Dunsany, ‘Lord Dunsany Letters’, 13 March 1911, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 58. Crowley, ‘The Big Stick’, p. 79. 59. Lord Dunsany, ‘The Hashish Man’, in A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen, 1910), p. 154. 60. Kaczynski, p. 55. 61. Kaczynski, p. 67. 62. Jean Overton Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg, p. 110. 63. Fuller, p. 110. 64. Fuller, p. 127. 65. Graf, p. 120. 66. Graf, p. 120. 67. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Wake World’, in The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. 38–56; Crowley, The Drug and Other Stories, p. 628.

Bibliography ‘A First Glance at New Books’, The Outlook, 2 (1898), pp. 639–640. Bergier, Jacques, and Louis Pauwels, The Morning of the Magicians (St Albans: Granada, 1975). Breeze, William, ‘Editor’s Foreword’, in The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, by Anonymous, trans. by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Boston: Weiser, 1996), p. xiii. Bridle, Deborah, ‘Symbolism and Dissidence: Social Criticism through the Prism of the Golden Dawn in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams’, Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen (2016), pp. 2–18. Butler, Alison, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Crowley, Aleister, Magick, ed. by Kenneth Grant and John Symonds (Bungay: Guild, 1988). ———, ‘The Art of Lord Dunsany’, Vanity Fair (21 April 1909), p. 505. ———, ‘The Big Stick’, The Equinox, 1 (1910), pp. 327–345. ———, ‘The Big Stick’, The Equinox, 1 (1911), pp. 79–88. ———, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (London: Arkana, 1989). ———, The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015). ———, The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works (Ware: Wordsworth, 2012). ———, ‘The Temple of Solomon the King’, The Equinox, 1 (1911), pp. 31–63. ———, ‘The Terror’, The International, XI (1917), p. 384. ———, ‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’, in The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. 261–284. ———, ‘The Wake World’, in The Drug and Other Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. 38–56. ———, ‘Three Great Hoaxes of the War’, Vanity Fair (January 1916), pp. 37, 118. Daly, Nick, ‘The Everyday Occult on Stage: The Play of Lord Dunsany’, in The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947, ed. by Christine Ferguson and Andrew D. Radford, Among the Victorians and Modernists, 6 (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), n.p. Dunsany, Lord, ‘Lord Dunsany Letters’, 13 March 1911, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. ———, ‘The Hashish Man’, in A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen, 1910). Fuller, Jean Overton, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (Oxford: Mandrake, 1965). Gilbert, R. A., ‘Introduction’, in The House of the Hidden Light, by Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite (Leyburn: Tartarus, 2017), pp. v–xxv. Graf, Susan Johnston, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

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Grant, Kenneth, Cults of the Shadow (London: Frederick Muller, 1975). Herbert Silberer, Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts, Translated by Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Dover, 1971). Howe, Ellic, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1985). ‘Jephthah’, The Bookman, 16 (1899), p. 172. Kaczynski, Richard, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010). King, Francis, Megatherion: The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (London: Creation Books, 2004). Lovecraft, H. P., ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther, 1985), pp. 421–512. Lytton, Earl of, Victor Alexander, and George Robert Bulwer-Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton (London: Macmillan, 1913). Machen, Arthur, Things Near and Far (London: Secker, 1923). Machin, James, ‘Towards a Golden Dawn: Esoteric Christianity and the Development of Nineteenth-Century British Occultism’, The Victorian, 1 (2013), http://journals.sfu.ca/vict/ index.php/vict/article/view/32 (accessed 31 May 2015). ———, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, Palgrave Gothic (London: Palgrave, 2018). Miéville, China, ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire’, COLLAPSE (2008), pp. 105–128. ———, ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould, Adam Roberts, Andrew M. Butler, and Sherryl Vint (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 510–515. Roberts, Anthony, and Geoff Gilbertson, The Dark Gods (London: Panther, 1985). Symonds, John, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (London: Macdonald, 1971). Tibet, David, ‘Foreword’, in The Drug and Other Stories, by Aleister Crowley (Ware: Wordsworth, 2015), pp. ix–x. Wilson, Robert Anton, The Illuminati Papers (Oakland: Ronin, 1986).

Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story Timothy Jones

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the wickedest man in the world, the Great Beast 666, was the foremost magician of the twentieth century. Exactly what that means, however, is not immediately clear, for it depends on a complicated set of beliefs and disbeliefs that vary widely between individuals within Western cultures. Magic no longer holds the official or legal weight it once did, but there remain substantial numbers of readers who believe in any number of unofficial ideas, including various occult powers. The issue is particularly vexed in relation to Crowley, who sought publicity while making contrary, obfuscating moves, so that there is a sense that he did not want to be seen, at least not straight on. He certainly spent enough time mastering the art of invisibility. In his ‘autohagiography’, he writes of his success in this endeavour. I reached a point when my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. But the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so. In this I was quite successful. For example, I was able to take a walk in the street in a golden crown and a scarlet robe without attracting attention.1

This account is quite different from an account of Crowley’s experiments with invisibility noted by Phil Baker in his biography of Austin Osman Spare. Baker claims ‘there are several stories of him parading around the Café Royal in full regalia, not catching anyone’s eye, until a visitor or tourist asked a waiter who he was. Don’t worry, said the waiter; that’s just Mr Crowley being invisible’.2 It is easy to read the Baker story as comically undercutting Crowley’s seemingly preposterous claim that he could vanish from sight. Yet the tension between the two accounts remains, and although one must be the fact, the other fiction, it seems likely that different readers would support one or the other. Others will find themselves somewhere in between, half-believing in the power of the occult

T. Jones (*)  University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_21

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while half-disbelieving. As of March 2016, around 10% of British people said they definitely believed in magic and around 25% believed in the Devil. In fact, more people apparently believe in ghosts than believe in a creator.3 Hundreds of years since the Enlightenment, and despite the increasing secularisation of British culture, various spiritual and esoteric beliefs persist. The point, in relation to Crowley’s vanishing act, is that it is received differently, depending on one’s point of view. Sceptics read aware that others are credulous, and vice versa. It manages to be both fact and fiction at the same time. This is an uncertain state. Wouter Hanegraaff, considering Western esotericism more widely, describes it as the ‘discredited waste-basket category of rejected knowledge’.4 This uncertainty is an important element of the black magic story, a subgenre of gothic tale that refers to the figure of Crowley with some frequency. The black magic story is a lurid assemblage of fact and fiction that works in the space between contrary beliefs and claims, uncertainties and possibilities. This chapter will point to a handful of key novels in the subgenre, indicating how Crowley became a persistent trope and suggesting that his presence in the stories was a marker that allowed authors to offer their readers the suggestion of occult legitimacy. Like Crowley himself, the black magic story developed into a space where occult ideas and materials were negotiated, reimagined and misread as they were transmitted to a wider public; yet this does not necessarily completely discredit the black magic story as an esoteric document. Crowley was an accomplished mountaineer, having scaled Kanchenjunga, a poet, a pornographer, a theatre producer, a teacher, a traveller, possibly a German propagandist during the Great War, a drug addict, the founder of a commune in Cefalù, a painter, a pioneer of sex magic and, eventually, after his prime, would become a purveyor of ‘Elixir of Life’ pills to try and make a little money. Somerset Maugham, who was acquainted with Crowley in his Paris days, thought him ‘a fake, but not entirely a fake… He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of’.5 The magician specialised in the unlikely. Hanegraaff suggests that Western esotericism has always been ‘imagined as a strange country, whose inhabitants think differently to us, and live by different laws’.6 Crowley himself would probably agree. While simultaneously adopting various scientised rhetorics—his magick, with a ‘k’, was a science as well as an art—he refused to be subject to the ‘laws of intellect’, preferring a vision of the world that would be ‘madness in the ordinary man’.7 Crowley became thoroughly incorporated into popular and pulp literary culture, an emissary from that strange country. The black magic story imagines this other country as adjacent to and hidden within the more familiar nations of Britain and Europe. It was a substantial subgenre of gothic narrative that was widely popular through the twentieth century, although it has faded from view since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. The black magic story emerged against the backdrop of the modern occult revival in Britain, which ran through the last third of the nineteenth century and onwards, into the twentieth. Nick Freeman describes the black magic story as emerging in the first third of the twentieth century, a product of lurid newspaper descriptions of

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occult practices. For Freeman, the stories present a wholly inaccurate representation of the occult revival, interested primarily in producing ‘a spicy puree of rumour and invention’ for a ‘sensation-hungry public’, the product of gothic conventions rather than occult traditions.8 This is of course true to an extent. However, as much as the black magic story is meant to thrill and titillate, this chapter will argue that it is also a place where specifically occult ideas and practices meet wider cultural currents, and, indeed, a place where gothic narratives begin to acquire occult significance. Distortion, and the muddling of fact and fiction, is part of this imaginative encounter and negotiation between the esoteric and the popular. It is useful to distinguish between what Colin Campbell called the ‘cultic milieu’—that is, the immediate contexts and groups that participate in an esoteric ‘underground’9—and what Christopher Partridge describes as ‘occulture’. Occulture is the environment and process by which supernatural, esoteric and conspiratorial ideas emerge and circulate. It is unremarkable; Partridge recalls Raymond Williams’ work on culture when he describes occulture as ordinary. It is everywhere and everyday. Popular culture, for Partridge, ‘disseminates and remixes occultural ideas’10; the black magic story is another instance of this dissemination and remixing. It was authored by practitioners, including Crowley and his contemporary, Dion Fortune, but also by the uninitiated, who nevertheless emphasised the quality of their arcane researches. Dennis Wheatley, the most prominent of them, assured his readers that he had spared no pains to secure accuracy of detail from existing accounts when describing magical rites or formulas for protection against evil, and these have been verified in conversation with certain persons, sought out for that purpose, who are actual practitioners of the art… I feel that it is only right to urge [readers] most strongly to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real and concrete nature.11

Wheatley may well have felt that he had secured ‘accuracy of detail’, but, as discussed above, this is a slippery claim in a field where most knowledge is already discredited. He tends to wilfully misunderstand non-Christian religious traditions as basically Satanic; but he also authored a reference book on the occult, and edited an extensive book series in the field. Boundaries are blurred; the question of authority becomes uncertain. If the black magic story misrepresented genuine occult practice, it did so encouraged by the writings and persona of Crowley himself, who sought to outrage as well as to illuminate. Indeed, Crowley has had a curiously generative relationship with the black magic story, with his public persona as the wickedest man in the world offering other writers material that would shape their narratives. Crowley’s practice of sex magick, in ­particular, became a fixation for the black magic story and Crowley himself became an essential trope. Crowley, or figures that seem to emerge from him, appear in numerous texts. This chapter will focus on representations of Crowley in Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel, The Magician, in Dennis Wheatley’s black magic stories, particularly The Devil Rides Out (1934) and To the Devil a Daughter (1953), and in his own

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effort, Moonchild (1929). But Crowley exceeds fiction. Reportage, biography, autobiography and Crowley’s writing on the occult, all contribute to the legend and lore that surround him. John Symonds wrote the first biography of the magician, The Great Beast (1951), which, although in many respects a hostile reading of Crowley, was a popular success, and perhaps continues to do more to inform popular understandings of him than later, cooler biographies. Again, the boundaries of fact and fiction blur, and Crowley is remixed as he is disseminated. His reception is as important as the facts of his life and writing. Most editions of Somerset Maugham’s The Magician are prefaced by a short autobiographical piece that recounts Maugham’s association with Crowley in turn of the century Paris and notes that the wicked magician of his novel, Oliver Haddo is modelled on Crowley without quite being a portrait of him.12 Much of the action is set in the Parisian milieu in which Maugham met Crowley, and he describes the magician as a Satanic dabbler, noting that there was ‘something of a vogue in Paris for that sort of thing’. While Crowley was a fantastic storyteller, ‘it was hard to say if he was telling the truth or merely pulling your leg’.13 This account establishes the authority of Maugham’s modelling of Crowley, but it also emphasises the uncertainty associated with Crowley’s stories about himself and his claims. This uncertainty sits at the heart of the novel’s plot. At first, the novel’s romantic hero, Arthur Burdon, ‘would have no trifling with credibility. Either Haddo believed things that none but a lunatic could, or else he was a charlatan who sought to attract attention by his extravagances. In any case he was contemptible’.14 But Haddo begins his seduction of Burdon’s fiancée, Margaret, through challenging her view of him as a charlatan while insisting he is, in fact, ‘striving… to a very great end’.15 Margaret is seduced not just by a man but by an esoteric worldview; she is enchanted by him, seemingly in more than one sense. A newfound credence for the occult seems to have a romantic or even sexual dimension. The novel goes on to describe Arthur’s efforts to rescue her from the villain. There is uncertainty about the credibility of Haddo’s claims for much of the novel, until finally his occult power is confirmed: Haddo kills Margaret for ritual, magical purposes, using her blood to create a homunculus, an artificial form of life. The Magician’s descriptions of Haddo established a set of ideas about Crowley that persisted in most depictions of him. Haddo is an outsider, but an outsider who has troubling access to privileged, establishment social circles. We learn of his unpopularity at Oxford: He sneered at the popular enthusiasm for games, and was used to say that cricket was all very well for boys but not fit for the pastime of men… He… like[d] football, but he played it with a brutal savagery which the other persons concerned naturally resented. It became current opinion in other pursuits that he did not play the game. He… was capable of taking advantages which most people would have thought mean.16

This sporting rhetoric highlights Haddo’s unclubbable character. He participates in shared play, but refuses to respect the terms of play and the other players. His preparedness to take improper advantage extends to social milieu, where he is a rakish danger to women who fall under his spell. Maugham seems to suggest

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that there is something grotesque in Haddo’s appeal through frequent reference to his obesity. Yet despite Margaret’s desire for Haddo, together with her loveliness, good nature, common sense, grace and ‘exceeding beauty’ it emerges that their marriage remains unconsummated six months later, with Haddo instead participating in occult orgies in Monte Carlo or seeking out prostitutes.17 Margaret’s seduction and her subsequent frustration disrupt normative Edwardian heterosexual arrangements. Indeed, Haddo sometimes takes on queer characteristics, displaying basically heterosexual appetites while being consistently accorded characteristics that suggest homosexuality. In his younger days, he resembled a statue of ‘Apollo in which the god is represented with a feminine roundness and delicacy’; in the novel’s present, he has a ‘red voluptuous mouth’ and sometimes resembles a ‘a very wicked, sensual priest’.18 In place of the anticipated marital relations, he seeks out extramarital sexual experience which is forbidden or beneath him, being possessed of a ‘devouring lust for the gutter’.19 Moreover, Haddo is possessed of queer feelings; that is, he shares nothing of the emotions, desires or aesthetics of Arthur and other conventional characters. He prefers filthiness to the more conventional appeal of Margaret, and is ‘attracted by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous’.20 The novel does not explicitly label Haddo as a Satanist, and even glancingly engages with elements of Crowley’s thought—his interest in will, love and imagination is noted.21 However, Maugham is basically disinterested in understanding the occult, and while the novel discusses various occult operations in some detail, particularly relating to the manufacture of homunculi, it is just as happy to present rumours of ‘blasphemous ceremonies of the Black Mass… celebrated in the house of a Polish Prince’ and Haddo’s practice of ‘satanism and… necromancy’.22 Crowley reviewed The Magician in a 1908 edition of Vanity Fair.23 The review does little more than accuse Maugham of plagiarism and quote passages from the novel alongside sources it supposedly lifts from. There can be little doubt that Maugham quotes a couple of occult texts closely, although some of Crowley’s complaints are more of a stretch. The odd effect of Crowley’s complaint is to underline the legitimacy of the occult sources in the novel; if anything, it makes it seem as if Maugham is writing about the real thing. But ultimately, the specifics of the complaint are of little interest; its larger theme is more compelling. It is Crowley himself who is plagiarised in the novel—his behaviour, his conversation, his ideas, and his vexed relationship with well-to-do English society. He signed his review Oliver Haddo. It’s a good joke, perhaps in the manner of Haddo himself; when the patrons of the Chien Noir encounter Haddo in the novel, they are irritated because they cannot tell if ‘while you were laughing at him, he was not really enjoying an elaborate joke at your expense’.24 But it achieves more than a simple a joke might. It seems to take back the self that Maugham has taken from Crowley. Haddo returns to his source. At the same time, it plays with the fictionality and factuality of Maugham’s text. If Maugham is a plagiarist, and one of his characters is written by someone else, then who is the author? If the text is modelled on real things, where are the limits of the real in the novel?

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Crowley, seemingly always between jest and earnest, was also between fi ­ ction and reportage. His activities made entertaining copy, while offering newspaper and magazine readers the pleasures of disapproval. The popular weekly John Bull often thundered about Crowley. A May 1923 issue was dismayed that despite a police raid, the Abbey of Thelema on Cefalù continued to hold séances featuring ‘every circumstance of blasphemous indecency’. There was only one thing to do. ‘This creature is an enemy of mankind, and should be dealt with accordingly’ opined the writer under the title ‘A Man We’d Like to Hang’.25 On the other side of the Atlantic, The Helena Daily Independent, adopted a somewhat more measured tone, if not more careful reporting, suggesting that Crowley’s O.T.O. was a black magic love cult.26 Both are instances of popular reportage that is little different in content and tone to the black magic story. The Times, only slightly more circumspect, covered Crowley’s unsuccessful libel case against a publisher—he claimed to have been defamed—quoting from the defence’s lawyer to say that Crowley had put himself before the public with challenge after challenge to all those standards of decency, conduct, and morality to which ordinary people subscribed in their daily lives, reserving to himself, presumably, a freedom which might be described as unbridled licence. Having put himself before the world in that light, could he complain if the world regarded him in the light of that reputation which he had so proclaimed?27

If Crowley had a small genius for gathering public attention, he was ­considerably less adept at controlling the nature of that attention. Throughout his career, he became a character authored by others as much as himself. Moreover, he consistently produced material that helped others frame him as a diabolist rather than a less malign magician. In his introductory handbook to occultism, Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Crowley cheerfully advocates both animal and human sacrifice, ­especially that of a ‘male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence’, claiming to have performed this sacrifice thousands of times himself (Magick 95–6, 95n). The suggestion about child sacrifice is apparently meant as a joke or as a metaphor for masturbation, but this is probably unclear to the beginner. In his own esoteric writings, Crowley continues to tease and provoke, to joke, to play at wickedness. Even when Crowley is writing more-or-less in earnest, his work is not that far from the stuff of the black magic story. Indeed, Dennis Wheatley, the foremost writer of black magic stories, might be one of Crowley’s greatest promoters. Wheatley was a very successful thriller writer, with a career spanning from the middle thirties through until the middle seventies. He shifted books in numbers that few authors could manage, even today. By the end of the sixties, he had sold 27 million books worldwide, with around 70% of those within the British market. A new Wheatley hardcover would sell around 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. Although Wheatley wrote across a number of thriller genres, he became increasingly associated with the black magic story as his career developed, and, by the sixties, these outsold his other works.28 Especially towards the end of his career, Wheatley became closely associated with the occult thriller.

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Where Maugham and Crowley sometimes have their tongues in their cheeks, Wheatley’s depiction of Satanism is always deadly serious, its adherents a genuine threat to Western civilisations, both within and without his novels. ‘The fact is that, although unrealised by most Europeans, in every great city, in the jungles of Africa, the villages of Asia, the plantations of the West Indies, and even in some remote hamlets of our own countryside, Satanism is still practiced’.29 Wheatley draws on xenophobic and whiggish rhetorics to help describe Satanism as anathema to civilisation, and particularly to English notions of civility. Where Haddo was unique or eccentric in Maugham, the basic proposition of Wheatley’s black magic stories is that twentieth-century Britain was in the grips of a Satanic epidemic. How else to explain all the undesirable social changes? The Satanists were everywhere and had a political agenda, looking to wrest control of Britain and Europe from the nicer classes. Their influence could be subtle or catastrophic. On the one hand, eligible young women started involving themselves with the wrong sorts of people, while on the other, black magicians had already caused the Great War and were busily plotting its sequel.30 Wheatley’s later, postwar occult thrillers tend to associate Satanism with socialism and communism. In Gateway to Hell (1970) international black rights movements are described as a front for global Satanism. The first of Wheatley’s black magic thrillers was The Devil Rides Out. It narrates the desperate struggle of a heroic group of friends against an evil occultist, based on Crowley. Originally published in 1934, by the early seventies, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, it had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of Wheatley’s occult novels.31 Freeman notes The Devil Rides Out was first published in the aftermath of litigation taken by Crowley, where he attempted to sue various figures for libelling him by suggesting he was a black magician. The litigation was mainly unsuccessful, but engendered a wave of accompanying press that had recalled Crowley to the public, a decade after the various scandalous reports that emerged from his Abbey in Cefalù; Wheatley was capitalising on an existing popular interest, and the success of the book only expanded upon that interest. The Devil Rides Out was serialised in The Daily Mail, beginning on Halloween in the year of its original publication.32 This is a subliterary venue, but it also suggests a wide reception for the novel, the general appeal that its material—that is, Crowley—was thought to have. In the novel, Crowley becomes the occultist Mocata, ‘a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp’.33 Mocata is represented as an outsider who can turn otherwise suitable people to his cult. He is popular with women although, like Haddo, he gives off queer sparks which seem intended to repel his readers, if not the characters that come into his circle. Like Haddo, he is not quite right, and this wrongness centres particularly on his performance of masculinity and on his sexual preferences. The dangerous Satanist ‘does the most lovely needlework, petit point… he will smother himself in expensive perfumes and is as greedy as a schoolboy about sweets…’; but just as Haddo does, he disappears into the East End for days on alcoholic benders, indulging in various debaucheries.34

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Wheatley seems to have understood Crowley’s commitment to sex magic as a sophistical description of the Satanic mass or sabbat. He extends on the kinds of newspaper and magazine reportage noted above, describing the black mass in extended detail that is usually only ever inferred in reportage. Wheatley imagines that wild, grotesque and potentially abusive group sex is central to the celebration. When the heroes of The Devil Rides Out encounter the sabbat, they fear that they could be watching ‘some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!’35 They watch, hidden, as a cross is destroyed and upturned, uncomely figures dance naked, the Christian host is profaned, and the Satanists eat ‘a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered’ while a human skull rattles around in their cauldron.36 In the middle of all this, the Satanists feast with no ‘knives, forks, spoons or glasses’, instead drinking straight out of bottles and eating with their hands.37 This, perhaps, is just as much of a clue to the horror that lies at the heart of Wheatley’s sabbat as all the rest of the material included. Satanism is understood to represent the collapse of civilisation, specifically, of a conservative Englishness that brings with it a knot of assumptions about gender, class, race and table manners. In The Devil Rides Out, the black sabbat is stretched out over four chapters, horror piling on horror. This is not uncommon in Wheatley—much of his black magic writing features descriptions of occult ritual and practice in instructional detail. This is not limited to the representation of the black mass; readers could probably attempt some operations in numerology and tarot after reading the novel. Wheatley once claimed that ‘I always write two books. First I write a straightforward thriller. Then I write information. People know when they read one of my books that they’re going to learn something’.38 Yet, whatever is learned from reading Wheatley (tarot, numerology, how best to worship demons), this is knowledge that has been twice rejected. If, as Hannegraff suggests, occult knowledge is rejected or discredited, then Wheatley’s occultural work is doubly so, for few practising occultists would endorse it as an authoritative account of occult practice. Then again, this slippery relationship with authoritative ‘fact’ is a vexed issue in occultural fiction. What counts as an esoteric fact? One man’s call to the god Pan is another’s invocation of the devil; Crowley’s sexual rites in Italy shade into the stuff of black magic, even for some of the people who were present.39 Under the pressure of these uncertainties, the categories of fiction and n­ on-fiction become curiously inappropriate. This is reflected not just in the black magic story, but in various texts that surround it. The seventies saw Wheatley editing and introducing The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, a 45-volume series in paperback. The library cheerfully brought together novels and short story anthologies with occult histories and textbooks, with little attention paid to the distinction. If esoteric writing has already been discredited, then it follows that fiction—writing we know not to be ‘true’ in any uncomplicated sense—can sit alongside books that, while theoretical and instructional, do not properly qualify as non-fiction. Wheatley’s blurring of these categories—his presentation of occult ‘information’ alongside thriller narrative—in some ways follows Crowley’s own approach to the magical syllabus. Alongside various grimoires, Crowley recommended

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various works of fiction to the aspiring occultist, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story, the works of Arthur Machen (‘of great magical interest’) and Stoker’s Dracula. Even Maugham’s The Magician is recommended, although with the understanding it is ‘an amusing hotch-potch of stolen goods’.40 Crowley’s magazine, The Equinox (1909–1919) published esoteric instruction alongside tales, plays and poems which often had gothic elements—Edith Archer’s ‘The Vampire’, Edward Storer’s ‘The Three Worms’, or Crowley’s own adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ for the stage. These literary works are distinct from Crowley’s theoretical and practical writing on magic, but Crowley presents literature as contiguous with his magical writings; the categories begin to fold into one another. If occultists like Crowley are useful to the black magic story, spurring and authenticating the imaginative experience it offers, then literary works are, in turn, useful to the occult imagination. The lines between supposed fact and apparent fiction blur, regardless of whether one is seeking initiation, or only weird thrills. This slipperiness carries forward even into biographical accounts of Crowley. John Symonds was Crowley’s first biographer, and unlike some that have followed, seemingly never really fell under Crowley’s spell. His The Great Beast (1951) often describes its subject as appalling. While Symonds was more careful with Crowley’s ideas than Wheatley, it would be very easy to read The Great Beast and mistake Crowley for exactly the kind of Satanist that Wheatley describes. Symonds clarifies what is only ever suggested in distorted forms in Maugham and Wheatley, and, indeed, can be difficult to glean even from some of Crowley’s introductory writings—that the heart of his practice was sex magic. To replace churchgoing with ritualised sex is not, of course, Satanic in itself—but sexual rites have long been associated with the sabbat.41 Symonds usually attempts to treat some of the ideas of Thelema or ‘Crowleyanity’—that is, Crowley’s esoteric thought and his early adherents—but on occasion, the biography suggests that Crowley was indeed a Satanist. Crowley is referred to as a black magician and Symonds has him speaking of ‘Master Satan’.42 Ritual practices involving parodies of the Eucharist wafer made, ideally, from menstrual blood, or perhaps the blood of children, are described. A toad is mocked, scourged and then crucified upside down in an effort to defeat Christ prior to the inauguration of a new age. There’s the bungled ritual killing of a cat, after which its blood is drunk. A goat is sacrificed so that its blood falls over the naked body of Leah Hirsig, one of Crowley’s Scarlet Women, his priestesses.43 Symonds’ descriptions match Wheatley’s for the grotesque and Goyaesque details of sinister magic. Symonds’ Crowley is, however, more than simply a Mocata with a real history. There are flashes of a self-satisfied, limited and playful man beneath the growing legend. Symonds describes how Crowley danced on receiving news of Queen Victoria’s death, saying that ‘the spirit of her age had killed everything we cared for. Smug, sleek, superficial, servile, snobbish, sentimental shopkeeping had spread everywhere’.44 Sometimes, The Great Beast’s Crowley reads as an illicit modernist whose achievement was not in the poetry and paintings he produced, but in an art less studied in the academy. At other times, Crowley is presented as simply repellent, without the queer charisma of Haddo. Symonds pays fastidious

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attention to Crowley’s uncharismatic behaviours—his assaults on his partners, his tendency to shit on the carpet in friends’ houses.45 Like Mocata, he disappears on benders where he drinks and drugs and visits prostitutes. Crowley becomes pathetic in his last years, a befuddled addict in a Hastings retirement home. Better and more sympathetic biographies were to follow, but few if any of them would run to seven printings in their first five years on the market, including a mass market Panther edition. Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter was published in 1953, in the midst of the Symonds’ biography’s publishing success, and features an extended depiction of Crowley himself. Wheatley’s novel seems to follow Symonds in revising Crowley, so that he is no longer the able and dangerous figure suggested by Haddo and Mocata. To the Devil a Daughter instead agrees with Symonds that Crowley was a spent force in his later years, although it also suggests that he was indeed the real thing earlier in his life. One of the novel’s heroes, Colonel ‘C.B.’ Verney, must convince the Satanic magician Canon Copley-Syle that he too is committed to the Left-Hand Path. He achieves this, at least for a short period, by describing his acquaintance with Crowley and even claiming to have been initiated into Crowley’s order at the ‘Abbaye de Thelema’.46 In truth, he has garnered this knowledge from his intelligence work where he has encountered numerous ‘tough customers’, including one of ‘Crowley’s young men’.47 It is C.B.’s ability to describe Crowley’s life and practice to Copley-Syle that allows him to pass as an occultist. Personal acquaintance with Crowley becomes a marker of legitimacy and authority in the cultic milieu. This episode allows Crowley’s career to be discussed in detail over two chapters. The Great Beast is retrospectively distinguished from Mocata, becoming instead only one of many black magicians who threaten Britain and Europe. Crowley’s thought and incidents from his life are described, although these are purposefully construed as Satanic rather than within any other kind of esoteric tradition; for Wheatley, there is little difference. Attention is paid to the details of Crowley’s life, but these facts are used as props in service of a different performance. C.B. basically describes the practice of sex magic, but the only imaginable spirit it could call forth is demonic, for ‘certain types of Satanic entity feed upon the emanations given out by humans engaged in the baser forms of eroticism. As far as Crowley was concerned the orgies were simply the bait that lured such entities to the Abbaye and enabled him to gain power over them’.48 If this is not quite what Crowley understood himself to be doing, it is, in some ways, still near enough as a description; sex magic, in Crowley’s thought is ritual practice where sexual activity is used as ‘the most profound source of magical power’.49 C.B. goes on to narrate various episodes drawn from Crowley’s life. He discusses the ‘Paris working’, an occult ceremony that he claims ended in death for Crowley’s assistant and psychic collapse for Crowley; C.B. understands the magician never recovered, becoming the pathetic figure that closes Symonds’ biography. C.B.’s version is considerably more exciting—and more like a gothic story—than the account given by Victor Neuberg, who actually performed the working with Crowley, and certainly lived to tell the tale.50 Again, the

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untruthfulness of Wheatley’s version of the story might be of interest to scholars of Crowley, but it’s less consequential for readers who are looking for black magic thrills and an imaginative engagement with occultural materials. At the same time, there’s an (I think) unintentional irony laced through the scene. C.B. knows he’s extemporising, making up a lurid story to try to establish his credentials, grasping hold of what he knows of the occult without having quite the depth of expertise he is claiming. The Canon is enthralled, at least at first. For a moment, it seems that a genuine esoteric history is being shared. Another version of Crowley, both factual and fictional, is talked into existence. It is as if Wheatley were describing his own methods. Crowley, like his near contemporary, the Count in Dracula (who, we should remember, was not merely a vampire, but also a student of the occult Scholomance), or various other legendary or folkloric figures, dissolves into popular narrative so that variations of the man proliferate. He contains multitudes; he is legion. He is endlessly revised in narrative, but also in scholarly cultures. Even in his own accounts of himself, various versions of the man emerge. In Hugh B. Urban’s view, Crowley tends to frame himself as a voice leading his followers to freedom through the wasteland of modernity. Where Wheatley, on the other hand, presents Crowley as working towards the collapse all that is decent and civil, Urban argues that Crowley is in many ways the very embodiment of Western modernity in the twenties and thirties.51 But if Crowley sought progress and growth, he nevertheless referred to ideas of Satanism to describe his own rebellion. In his autobiography he wrote that the ‘forces of good were those which had constantly oppressed me. I saw them daily destroying the happiness of my fellow-men. Since, therefore, it was my business to explore the spiritual world, my first step must be to get into personal communication with the devil’—although the particular devil he sought was the one ‘hymned by Milton and Huysmans’.52 At times like this, Crowley sounds like a late decadent. At others, he sits closer to various modernist provocateurs—and indeed there are substantial connections that can be drawn between him and a figure like D.H. Lawrence. They shared a publisher (Mandrake) and Crowley dedicated his collection of stories, Golden Twigs, to Lawrence. Like Lawrence, he was a poet and a painter, although his poetry seldom shows any affinity with the formal shocks of modernism. Both were calling for various forms of liberation and saw a wider sense of human liberation as being intimately connected to sexual liberation. This is a call that Crowley extended into his attempt at an occult thriller, Moonchild. The book was very loosely autobiographical, and Crowley stressed the authenticity of his work, noting that Moonchild gives ‘an elaborate description of modern magical theories and practices’ and that most ‘of the characters are real people whom I have known and many of the incidents taken from experience’.53 At the same time, the novel borrows significantly from The Magician; Crowley plagiarises the writer he accuses of plagiarism. Perhaps it can be read as another piece of taking-back, in the same manner that his review of Maugham’s book might be. Crowley authored his book in 1917, although it was not published until 1929, and then, only in a small edition.54 The book was brought back into print by

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Weiser in 1970, and to the mass market by Sphere in 1972. This delay means that Crowley’s own writing probably did not contribute as much as it might have to the boom in the British black magic story that more-or-less coincided with Wheatley’s career. It was, however, included in Wheatley’s Library of the Occult in 1974, an inclusion which seems to complete the folding of the fictive, the factual, and the instructional presentation of rejected knowledge into one another. If Crowley is the figure who sits at the heart of the black magic thriller, multiplying upon the genre’s pages, then it seems oddly appropriate that Moonchild should feature two characters who are Crowley. Both Cyril Grey and Simon Iff, Moonchild’s heroes, are representations of him. This is of a piece with his writing elsewhere,55 and Crowley sometimes seems to struggle writing about characters other than himself. This leads to a curious lack of outside perspectives in his fiction; there can only be Crowley’s view of things. Those who oppose Grey and Iff in Moonchild are simply wicked and their wickedness must be put down. This moral flatness shares much with Wheatley’s approach, where there are only goodies and baddies, and characters tend to quickly grow to recognise the legitimacy and expertise of the heroes as the narrative progresses. Moonchild follows much the same plot that Wheatley and Maugham do; Cyril Grey struggles against a lodge of black magicians who are working towards a nefarious end. In Maugham and Wheatley, the company of heroes always include a man who has experience of the occult arts, but uses his knowledge against the occultists—the Duke de Richleau in The Devil Rides Out or Dr Porhoët in The Magician. This follows in Moonchild too, for both Cyril and Simon are powerful white magicians, dedicated to the struggle against the evil wizards. The book reiterates The Magician’s plot about the role of the heroine in the creation of a homunculus. Moonchild, however reconfigures or remixes Maugham’s story, so that the creation of the homunculus is not the sinister aim of a black magician, but a heroic magical labour undertaken by Cyril Grey, which has a liberatory, even messianic potential for humankind. Nevertheless, the black magic thriller element is retained, so that Crowley’s former associates in the occult order of the Golden Dawn—barely disguised behind pseudonyms and, in fact, identified by the footnotes that accompanied the mass market Sphere edition of the seventies—have become a Black Lodge, fulfilling the same narrative function that Maugham and Wheatley’s occultists do. Gruesome and gleeful descriptions of black magic, with little to distinguish them from anything in Wheatley, are offered. At one point, the refrigerated corpse of the Golden Dawn notable, W.B. Yeats (‘Gates’) is used as an altar of sacrifice for a goat which has been involved in an act of bestiality, amidst a circle made of assorted tortured cats.56 Yet Cyril Grey’s own, beneficent magical rites are just as likely to titillate or shock readers. His newly discovered magical help-meet, Lisa La Giuffria, is initiated into Cyril and Simon’s occult order. As part of her initiation, she must witness Cyril, who she has fallen for, enjoying sexual relations with another female initiate. Their double act features unimagined manners of coupling so that all Lisa ‘had ever conceived of sensuality, of bestiality’ is surpassed, and she finds that ‘the bacchanal obscenity of it was overwhelming’.57

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Soon afterward, she is approached by another female initiate who complains that she has been violently and probably sexually abused by Cyril and the order, showing various injuries that have been done to her. This, however, is a test, and Lisa passes it by offering to help the girl escape, but maintaining her loyalty to Cyril throughout. The episode reads as an involved form of sadomasochistic play involving ideas of humiliation and mastery. The outré sexuality of the order, and the expectation that despite potential abuse, initiates ought to remain basically loyal, will probably blur the lines between the practice of White and Black lodges for many readers. Wheatley felt that, when a magician summoned any kind of spirit, it was always the Devil called by another name.58 Crowley would argue differently, but Moonchild perhaps struggles to make his point clear. The novel is stranger than Maugham and Wheatley’s work, but remains very much like them, despite being authored by a noted practitioner. The black magic story’s popularity has waned. It chimed especially with other contemporaneous modes of the British Gothic during its heyday—Hammer horrors, the Jamesian ghost story, what would eventually become known as folk horror and perhaps Daphne du Maurier at her most windswept and ghostly. It has less in common with the kinds of narratives that emerged in the wake of the American horror boom of the 1970s. The output of Wheatley and others began to seem antique. At the same time, the shock potential of occult practice has begun to dissolve, as various esoteric traditions found legitimation as new religious movements. Curiously, the eighties and the early nineties were the time of the Satanic panics, which seemed to take up Wheatley’s ideas of a hidden but pervasive Satanic threat59; but perhaps the black magic story, populated by well-to-do heroes circulating around various international locations, did not jibe with all the confusion about reclaimed memories and the ritual abuse of women and children that played out at the domestic level, within families and communities. The imperatives of the Gothic have changed too. As Fred Botting notes, gothic texts since the seventies often reassess material that was once taboo, so that the Gothic’s various transgressive elements are now seen as acceptable and even attractive commodities.60 The occult thriller has not yet really been reassessed and reimagined in these terms. Aside from anything else, the black magic story, with its panting sexuality, esoteric worldview and basically conservative politics does not sit well with what Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall take to be the aim of much critical work that treats the Gothic—the discovery of a humane liberalism and political subversion in the texts being considered.61 Crowley, of course, remains a flexible figure. Colin Wilson, another of Crowley’s biographers, concludes his work by noting that ‘there was only one Aleister Crowley’62; but this is hardly the case. Crowley proliferates. In life, he went by many names, and noms de plume. The man born Edward Alexander Crowley called himself Frater Perdurabo, the Master Therion, he was the number 666, he was the Great Beast; he was Laird of Boleskine and Abertaff, Count Svareff, The Reverend C. Verey, Aleister MacGregor, Sir Alastor de Kerval, Edward Kelly, Adam d’As, Cor Scorpionis, Khaled Khan, Prince Choia Khan (complete with turban), Baphomet and Saint Edward Aleister Crowley. Given

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his multiplicity, it is hardly surprising he claimed the name of Maugham’s magician Oliver Haddo for himself too. In his own work he was Simon Iff, Cyril Grey and a number of others. Crowley, the living man, accumulated a capacious set of selves, some of which were physically performed, while others existed principally as text. He expands. He was Mocata, he was Karswell in M.R. James’ ‘Casting the Runes’, (1911), and again, in Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957); he was Shelley Arabin in John Buchan’s The Dancing Floor (1926), Hugo Astley in Dion Fortune’s The Winged Bull (1935). In all these appearances, Crowley himself is the thing plagiarised, replicated, distorted and remixed, but rather than resisting, he seems to have participated in the process himself. Wheatley offered an introduction to mass market editions of Crowley’s Moonchild, where he suggested that the book will ‘appeal equally to lovers of occult fiction and serious students of the supernatural.’63 In the black magic tale, the difference between the gothic reader and the ‘serious student’ is difficult to maintain, as occult practice, theory and history are described at length and in detail, if not with fastidious accuracy. Yet the issue of accuracy is always unclear in occulture, for it brings together expert and inexpert claims relating to already discredited knowledge and modes of thought. Crowley himself, playful one moment, seemingly in earnest the next, both monstrous and queerly appealing, seems to facilitate this slippage and folding between fact and fiction. In the black magic tales he presides over, knowledge will not stay within the confines of its proper category, but perhaps this is typical of occulture more widely; supposedly secret knowledge takes on a public dimension. At the same time, the black magic tale uses sex magic and other magical practices to stage episodes of the sinister sex and violence that have long been the Gothic’s stock in trade. For Symonds, Crowley was, at times, ‘the grotesque showman’ of a ‘diabolist circus’.64 When he appears in the black magic story, he is a figure much the same.

Notes

1. Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (eds), 1969 (London, Penguin, 1989), 204. 2. Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London, Strange Attractor, 2012), 69. 3. ‘British People More Likely to Believe in Ghosts Than a Creator’, https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/03/26/o-we-of-little-faith, accessed 31 January 2019. 4. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 369. 5. W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician: A Novel, Together with a Fragment of Autobiography, 1908 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), 7. 6. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 3. 7. Aleister Crowley, 777 Revised, 1955 (Leeds: Celephaïs Press, 2004), xi. 8. Nick Freeman, ‘The Black Magic Bogeyman 1908–1935’, in Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford (eds), The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 94–109, 95.

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9. Colin Campbell, ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization’, in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972), 119–36, 122. 10. Christopher Partridge, ‘Occulture Is Ordinary’, in Egil Asperem and Kennet Granholm (eds), Contemporary Esotericism (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2014), 113–33, 116. 11. Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 1934 (London: Mandarin, 1996), n.p. 12. Maugham, The Magician, 9. 13. Maugham, The Magician, 8. 14. Maugham, The Magician, 42. 15. Maugham, The Magician, 84–5. 16. Maugham, The Magician, 63–4. 17. Maugham, The Magician, 18, 125, 142. 18. Maugham, The Magician, 64, 106, 33. 19. Maugham, The Magician, 142. 20. Maugham, The Magician, 87. 21. Maugham, The Magician, 38. 22. Maugham, The Magician, 125. 23. Aleister Crowley, ‘How to Write a Novel! (After W.S. Maugham)’, in Vanity Fair, December 1908, available at https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/periodicals/write_a_novel/novel.pdf, accessed 31 January 2019. 24. Maugham, The Magician, 33. 25. ‘A Man We’d Like to Hang’, in John Bull, 19 May 1923, 10, available at https://www. lashtal.com/2095-old-article/, accessed 31 January 2019. 26. ‘Latest “Black Magic” Revelations About Nefarious American “Love Cults”’, in The Helena Daily Independent, 27 November 1927, n.p., available at https://www.lashtal. com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1927-Nov-27.pdf, accessed 31 January 2019. 27. ‘High Court of Justice’, in The Times, 13 April 1934, 4. 28. ‘Pooter’, The Times, 19 August 1969, 19; Iwan Hedman and Jan Alexandersson, Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley, DAST Dossier 1 (Köping, 1973), 20, 73. 29. Dennis Wheatley, ‘Black Magic’ in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts, 1943 (London, Arrow, 1972), 233–58, 237. 30. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 157. 31. Hedman and Alexandersson, Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley, 20. 32. Freeman, The Black Magic Bogeyman, 105–6. 33. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 11. 34. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 153–4. 35. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 115. 36. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 117–20. 37. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, 118. 38. ‘Obituary: Mr Dennis Wheatley—Novels to Thrill and Inform’, in The Times, 17 November 1977, 16. 39. See Betty May, ‘The Sacrifice’, in Dennis Wheatley (ed), Satanism and Witches (London, Sphere, 1974), 83–5. 40. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 1929 (Secaucus, Castle, 1991), 213–4. 41. See Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 1. 42. John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley, 1951 (London, Panther, 1956), 285. 43. Symonds, The Great Beast, 63, 132, 216, 185. 44. Symonds, The Great Beast, 32. 45. Symonds, The Great Beast, 102, 291, 302, 121. 46. Dennis Wheatley, To the Devil a Daughter, 1953 (London, The Book Club, n.d.), 209. 47. Wheatley, To the Devil a Daughter, 208, 212. 48. Wheatley, To the Devil a Daughter, 209–10.

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49. Hugh B. Urban, ‘The Beast with Two Backs: Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity’, in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2004, 7–25, 11. 50. Jean Overton Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg: A Biography, Revised ed. (Oxford, Mandrake, 1990), 192–206. 51. Hugh B. Urban, ‘The Beast with Two Backs’, 8. 52. Crowley, The Confessions, 126. 53. Crowley, The Confessions, 777. 54. Kenneth Grant, ‘Introduction’, in Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979), 11–17, 11. 55. See William Breeze, ‘Introduction’, in William Breeze (ed), Aleister Crowley, The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works (Ware, Wordsworth, 2012), 7–17. 56. Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979), 165–6. 57. Crowley, Moonchild, 95. 58. Wheatley, ‘Black Magic’, 235. 59. See Bill Ellis, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Lexington, The UP of Kentucky, 2000); David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006). 60. Fred Botting, Gothic, Second ed. (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge 2015), 15. 61. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter (ed), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 209–28, 209. 62. Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (London, Aquarian, 1987), 152. 63. Dennis Wheatley, ‘Introduction’, in Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979), 9–10, 9. 64. Symonds, The Great Beast, 123.

Bibliography ‘A Man We’d Like to Hang’, in John Bull, 19 May 1923, 10, available at https://www.lashtal. com/2095-old-article/, accessed 31 January 2019. Baker, Phil, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London, Strange Attractor, 2012). Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter (ed), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 209–28. Botting, Fred, Gothic, Second ed. (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge 2015). Breeze, William, ‘Introduction’, in William Breeze (ed), Aleister Crowley, The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works (Ware, Wordsworth, 2012), 7–17. ‘British People More Likely to Believe in Ghosts Than a Creator’, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/ politics/articles-reports/2016/03/26/o-we-of-little-faith, accessed 31 January 2019. Campbell, Colin, ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization’, in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972), 119–36. Crowley, Aleister, 777 Revised, 1955 (Leeds: Celephaïs Press, 2004). Crowley, Aleister, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (eds), 1969 (London, Penguin, 1989). Crowley, Aleister, ‘How to Write a Novel! (After W.S. Maugham)’, in Vanity Fair, December 1908, available at https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/periodicals/write_a_ novel/novel.pdf, accessed 31 January 2019. Crowley, Aleister, Magick in Theory and Practice, 1929 (Secaucus, Castle, 1991). Crowley, Aleister, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979). Ellis, Bill, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Lexington, The UP of Kentucky, 2000).

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Frankfurter, David, Evil Incarnate: Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006). Freeman, Nick, ‘The Black Magic Bogeyman 1908–1935’, in Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford (eds), The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 94–109. Fuller, Jean Overton, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg: A Biography, Revised ed. (Oxford, Mandrake, 1990). Ginzburg, Carlo, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). Grant, Kenneth, ‘Introduction’, in Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979), 11–17. Hanegraaff, Wouter J., Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson, Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley, DAST Dossier 1 (Köping, 1973). ‘High Court of Justice’, in The Times, 13 April 1934, 4. ‘Latest “Black Magic” Revelations About Nefarious American “Love Cults”’, in The Helena Daily Independent, 27 November 1927, n.p., available at https://www.lashtal.com/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/1927-Nov-27.pdf, accessed 31 January 2019. Maugham, W. Somerset, The Magician: A Novel, Together with A Fragment of Autobiography, 1908 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967). May, Betty, ‘The Sacrifice’, in Dennis Wheatley (ed), Satanism and Witches (London, Sphere, 1974), 83–5. ‘Obituary: Mr Dennis Wheatley—Novels to Thrill and Inform’, in The Times, 17 November 1977, 16. Partridge, Christopher, ‘Occulture Is Ordinary’, in Egil Asperem and Kennet Granholm (eds), Contemporary Esotericism (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2014), 113–33. ‘Pooter’, The Times, 19 August 1969, 19. Symonds, John, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley, 1951 (London, Panther, 1956). Urban, Hugh B., ‘The Beast with Two Backs: Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity’, in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2004, 7–25. Wilson, Colin, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (London, Aquarian, 1987). Wheatley, Dennis, ‘Black Magic’, in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts, 1943 (London, Arrow, 1972), 233–58. Wheatley, Dennis, The Devil Rides Out, 1934 (London: Mandarin, 1996). Wheatley, Dennis, ‘Introduction’, in Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, 1929 (London, Sphere, 1979), 9–10. Wheatley, Dennis, To the Devil a Daughter, 1953 (London, The Book Club, n.d.).

Gothic Romance

The Gothic Romance Holly Hirst

The term ‘gothic romance’, when applied to twentieth-century texts, predominantly refers to a specific and narrowly defined subgenre of romance from the 1950s–1970s, popularly known as ‘gothics’, whose popularity reached its heyday after the genre-reviving publication of Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn (1960). This conception of the gothic romance allies with a specific formula, which contrasts with those of other popular romance subgenres such as the family saga or the Regency romance. The supposed ur-plot of this gothic romance is Jane Eyre (1847) or a ‘crossbreed’ of the aforementioned with Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938).1 Such a praxis of categorisation arguably developed from the practice of publishing and commissioning entities. Texts were categorised according to plot and marketed with practically standardised paratexts—the infamous ‘women with fabulous hair running away from houses’ covers (a meme among romance aficionados) and blurbs which performatively highlighted expected features. The ability to package and market popular fiction romances within a number of set categories helped to guarantee the interest of a pre-existing audience. As a practical policy, this type of definition has a clear rationale although, as many romance readers and critics will acknowledge, the rigid allocation of a particular subgenre to romance often obscures both a text’s individuality and the ways in which texts often conspicuously do not conform to categorically prescriptive limitations. As a critical practice, the identification of the gothic romance within these limited parameters is particularly dubious. Such a narrowed lens inevitably both focuses on the most formulaic of the genre and ignores the wider points of intersection between the popular romance and the gothic mode whether in texts which are overtly gothic or in those which engage purposefully with aspects of the gothic intertextually, aesthetically, thematically or in the integration of acknowledged tropes. I will seek here to outline and question our current conception of the gothic romance and ultimately

H. Hirst (*)  Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_22

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offer a new definitional model and explore its application to the study of the intersection between romance and the gothic. There has been a gathering movement of romance criticism, often from academics who are readers or writers of romance themselves, which is slowly opening up the field of romance studies. Rather than a ‘top down’ approach (where critical paradigms are enforced on the texts and their readers by an ­often-dismissive academia) we are moving towards a critical practice that engages more directly with those most cognisant of the genre—its readers and producers. Criticism of the gothic romance, however, remains mired within a critical tradition arising out of second and early third-wave feminism and is largely untouched by the changing practices of romance scholarship. In part, this is due to the decline in the popularity of the gothic romance, which has, to an extent, been replaced by the paranormal romance.2 These feminist approaches address the gothic romance as a cultural rather than literary form, investigating the appeal of these escape fantasies and seeking to ‘understand their power over women’.3 The work of critics such as Joanna Russ, Tanya Modleski, Janice Radway, Germaine Greer and Michelle Massé, critics whose voices continue to dominate the discourse, approach the gothic romance as a broadly unified subgenre with a discernible and rigid formula. Lori A. Paige’s recent survey of ‘gothics’ The Gothic Romance Wave (2018) illustrates the way in which the ‘gothics’ changed over the period of their popularity (with increasingly explicit sexual content, queered pairings and paranormal heroes increasingly appearing) but her emphasis on a prescriptive set of ‘standard elements’ fails to move away from these earlier conceptions of the genre.4 The critical projects of those earlier influential feminist scholars involve unravelling the purpose and appeal of these formulaic narratives with theories which revolve around the relationship between hero and heroine—a woman in peril and a ‘dark’ hero. The most exhaustive definition is that of Joanna Russ and it bears detailing at some length as both the most nuanced and the most thorough of the formulae, representing contemporary conceptions surrounding the ‘gothics’. Russ identifies as central features a ‘lonely, usually brooding House’, the arrival of a ‘young, orphaned, unloved and lonely’ heroine, the existence of ‘an older man, a dark, magnetic, powerful brooding, sardonic Super-Male’ and of Another Woman ‘who is at the same time the Heroine’s double and her opposite’. There is sometimes a Child, who must be befriended by the heroine and/or a Shadow Male: ‘a man invariably represented as gentle, protective, responsible, quiet, humorous, tender, and calm […who] is revealed as a murderer’. There is also a Buried Ominous Secret and the relationship between heroine and ‘dark man’ involves doubt as to whether he (1) loves her, (2) hates her, (3) is using her or (4) is trying to kill her.5 Leaving aside the problem of investigating the gothic romance principally or exclusively as a cultural artefact, rather than engaging with individual text as literary works, the problems endemic to this critical approach arise when these features become prescriptive—a form of critical self-fulfilling prophecy. The unjustifiable nature both of the prescriptive application of these definitions and their universalising and reductive tendencies becomes clear when the accounts of different critics are compared. Despite each formula touting itself as the ‘gothic’ recipe there are often significant differences between them. If we compare Russ’ description with that of three other critics of the gothic romance, Tanya

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Modleski in Loving with a Vengeance (1982), Michelle Massé in In the Name of Love (1992) and Ann Williams in Art of Darkness (1995), we find numerous points of comparison but also significant instances of deviation. Each formula insists on a focus on a heroine in a new and isolated location and the pivotal role of a suspicious master of the house or ‘a mysterious man who appears to be some kind of criminal’.6 Here, however, accounts begin to differ. While the ‘dark hero’—‘distant, mysterious, and yet ambiguously attractive and frightening’7—is ubiquitous, accounts of his function and fate differ. For Modleski, this figure must be interpreted but will be ‘proven innocent of all wrongdoing’,8 whereas Massé offers two possibilities: ‘the master of the house is discovered as the evil source of her tribulations’ and an honest, young hero triumphs or the master may also be revealed to be ‘more sinned against than sinning’.9 The differences proliferate from this point. Russ’ shadow-male is notably absent from other accounts. The ‘other woman’, who for Russ is double or rival, is inevitably a dead first wife for Modleski, a source of threat (‘the other woman, the sinister housekeeper, the madwoman in the attic’) for Williams and absent from Massé. A buried secret is fundamental to Russ’ and Massé’s account but in both Modleski and Williams the text’s central ‘mystery’ revolves around interpretation of the ‘dark hero’ and the specific threat of death to the heroine. Williams, alone among all the writers, insists on the presence of seemingly supernatural threats. The formulae discussed above, which are broadly representative of existing paradigms for defining and delineating the ‘gothics’, are not without merit. They map a number of repetitive features and tropes. The discrepancies between them, however, indicate their inability to proffer a definitive delineation of the gothic romance and argues against their prescriptive use. It is also worth noting that each critic’s work bears traces of a concentration on the production of a specific author and their imitators. Massé’s reference, for example, to the narrative importance of the heroine’s fight to trust because she loves (with emphasis on a duty to trust because one loves rather than the desire to trust because one loves) is a common theme of Victoria Holt’s romances but is largely or wholly absent in the work of other prolific writers of ‘gothics’ as Phyllis Whitney, Georgette Heyer or Barbara Michaels. Most problematically, in their concentration on a Jane Eyre ur-plot, these conceptions of the gothic romance frequently ignore the texts’ wider engagement with the gothic mode. They portray the gothic romance as an endless number of iterations of one gothic story and the superficial appropriation of gothic tropes (such as the double) and aesthetic features (the isolated house). Bill Hughes’ conception of the gothic romance, while remaining formulaic, gestures towards this wider engagement with its mapping of ‘key motifs of moonlight, darkness, and shadows; subterranean passages and caverns’10 and their intertextual connection to the strategies of early female gothic romance. Such connections, however, leave us confined within the existing feminist critical discourse regarding ‘gothics’ as primarily depicting the ‘exploration of the meaning of patriarchy for women’ with all its assorted terrors.11 While such a reading is not entirely inapposite, it diminishes the possibility that these books, individually and collectively, explore more than a fairly limited conception of women’s experience as simply a struggle against patriarchal control within the context of heterosexual relationships.

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The prescriptive nature of these formulations and their concentration on a specific element of the plot, namely, the heterosexual/romantic male/female relationship, as the defining feature of the genre not only fail to describe the actual texts, as Paige notes, but distort our understanding of them. In order to exemplify this tendency, I will look briefly at three texts by two of the most prolific and well-known writers of ‘gothics’— Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. They were both prolific—Holt wrote 32 gothics between 1960 and 1993 and Whitney wrote over 70 works between 1941 and 1997— and both influential. In a sense, they represent two different trends within the gothics. Holt, a British writer, is most famous for her historically set Cornish or French texts, and particularly Mistress of Mellyn, which is widely credited as reigniting widespread public interest in gothic romance. She did include a number of ‘exotic’ locations in her later work. Her portrayals of her ‘heroines-in-peril’ are frequently conservative, their principal aims connected to the home and love relationship. Whitney, in contrast, a Japanese-born American writer, set her work in a less historically distanced era, often in America but also in a range of international locations. She depicted increasingly modern or contemporaneous settings in her later works but ‘modern’ heroines were always a feature of her texts. For her, ‘the gothic heroine is the original liberated woman, working when no other woman worked, an adventuress’.12 The differences already evident in their work suggest the inefficacy of formulaic conceptions of the gothic romance in encapsulating even the ‘gothics’ themselves and Paige has tracked further developments in the declining years of the ‘gothics’ popularity which present even more diverse iterations. This potential diversity is made clearer by an investigation of the following representative texts: Whitney’s The Trembling Hills (1956) and Holt’s Bride of Pendorric (1963) and Menfreya in the Morning (1966). Rather than attempting to highlight every problematic assumption of a specific selection of formulae, I will discuss two issues endemic to the majority of formulae. Each indicates a specific way in which the reductive conception of the gothic romance or ‘gothics’ specifically distorts and stymies analysis of the texts on their own terms. The first issue is that of the emphasis on the limited role of the secondary female character. Russ, who offers the most nuance on the issue of secondary female characters, suggests one of two possible relationships arise: antagonism or doubling. In Russ’ formulation, as in the work of Modleski and Williams, the heroine’s relationship to this other woman is mediated through their mutual relationship with the central male figure—the ‘other woman’ is the heroine’s rival in love or a double who represents her possible fate in the relationship. In such an understanding, the text is unproblematically read as an exploration almost exclusively of that male-female relationship rather than an exploration of female ­inter-relationships. However, an examination of Holt’s work, reveals an emphasis on relationships between women. In Bride of Pendorric, there is no singular ‘other women’, rather there are various diversely portrayed other women. There is a tranquil grandmother (the actual threat who is ultimately revealed to be her own supposedly dead twin sister who assumed the grandmother’s place after murdering her); a nervous sisterin-law with a sexual past; the femme fatale nurse of her newly discovered grandfather; the psychic twin; the half-mad serving woman; the dead ‘Bride of Pendorric’ (the grandmother’s sister, who isn’t, of course, actually dead); and the unattractive family friend/governess/budding psychopath. This complicated web of female

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inter-relationships is not exclusive to Bride of Pendorric. In Menfreya, there are multiple female characters and the text’s key relationships are between Harriet and both her childhood friend/sister-in-law, Gwennan, and her nurse, Fanny. Similarly, in Whitney’s The Trembling Hills, female relationships are key to the heroine Sara’s gothic bildungsroman: her loving mother and controlling aunt represent two equal forces pulling in opposite directions. What we find in each of the examples above is a depiction and investigation of a broad range of female relationships from mother and daughter to love-rivals to friends and sisters. The primary antagonist in each example is likewise another woman but they are not rivals for love (as the formula suggests). In Menfreya, for example, the murderer is Harriet’s nanny, the orphan’s mother figure, who undergoes a form of mental disintegration, experiencing increasingly vivid delusions involving the figure of her dead husband. The novel’s focus is on the fraught relationships between mother and daughter figures and servitor and mistress, exploring the obsessive relationships which lead to killing for love. What is also noticeable in the text is the comparative absence of male figures of note. After the death of her father, Harriet’s only major relationship with a man is with her husband. Instead of forming the centre of the narrative, male-female relationships are seen as one of a number of pivotal relationships for the heroine and only one of several sources of potential threat. A narrow focus on secondary female figures simply as doubles or rivals of the heroine ignores the ways in which ‘gothics’ and gothic romances more generally frequently explore a range female inter-relations and use them to investigate a range of female homosocial relations not mediated by a central male presence, depicting and exploring both the possibilities and the dark corners of these relationships as well as exploring varied and complex female subjectivities and a range of issues such as psychological disintegration, projection, obsessive maternal love, child-loss, psychic doubling and internal duality. The second feature of most formulae is the assumption of the ubiquity of the ‘dark hero’ that tall, masterly, somewhat scornful descendant of the Byronic hero who must be redeemed by the romantic relationship. Only Massé suggests this figure may also occupy the role of the gothic villain. These heroes undeniably proliferate within the ‘gothics’. Frequently, they represent and redeem by their own redemption central threats to the female characters—to their physical safety, self-determination and self-worth. In Bride of Pendorric, Favel’s new husband Roc, and the associated possibilities of his infidelity, murderous deceit, emotional blindness and marital control, both represent and mirror pivotal threats in the novel. The central secret of the text, and its central threat, the deceptive identity of his grandmother is mirrored in his own potential deceptive duality; he thereby poses a threat to Favel by the mere fact of her marriage to him and the influence it grants him over her mental, emotional and physical well-being. The behaviour of these dark heroes of ‘gothics’ can often go beyond the merely problematic. In Menfreya, for example, Bevin’s physical and emotional dominance is displayed through an act of punitive marital rape: ‘I had never though that I should fight physically to resist him. But I did; and the more I struggled the more determined he became to subdue me… He was cruel; he was brutal’.13 Most disturbingly, Harriet provides the justification for her abuser. The event which she has described

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as ‘the most shattering experience of my life’, is something she later rationalises: ‘He expected obedience from me, and as long as I gave it I should be treated with respect; but if I had to be taught a lesson, he was ready to do the teaching however unpleasant’.14 Combined with the later suggestion of sensual pleasure during the encounter (the fantasy of rape enjoyment), this incident seems to justify Radway’s conclusion that a central function of the gothic romance is a form of ­self-deceptive wish-fulfilment. She argues that ‘when a romance presents the story of woman who is … mistreated and manhandled…and then suddenly loved, protected and cared for by him…’ she is being told or reiterating for herself the fantasy that ‘acts of violence they must contend with in their own lives can be similarly reinterpreted as the results of misunderstanding or of jealousy born of “true love”’.15 Building on the work of Molly Haskell, she further argues that ‘female fantasies about violence and rape are exploration fantasies born out of anxiety and fear’.16 Massé offers a similar reading, suggesting that these ‘heroes who hurt’ represents a ‘fictional expectation that [women] should be masochistic if they are “normal” women’ as ‘the suffering they experience is really the love and recognition for which they long or at least its prelude’.17 Certainly, Harriet reinterprets her rape as an act necessary to their relationship and thus to his love. It is a lesson she must learn. While these interpretations offer an insight into the often-problematic relationship between heroine and ‘dark hero’, such scenes are not representative of every such relationship. We must look to other interpretations and possibilities from both romance and gothic scholarship to understand the possibilities and ramifications of these relationships for the gothic romance. There is, undeniably, a degree of wish-fulfilment in the construction of romance heroes. The ‘dark hero’ as wish-fulfilment object need not, however, be viewed exclusively through the lens of masochistic female self-deception. Modleski offers a similar but more positive or proactive interpretation suggesting that the relationship between heroine and ‘dark hero’ is a type of revenge fantasy. The often hyper-masculine ‘dark hero’ as a representative of the patriarchal culture which stifles and threatens the heroine is humbled by his love. ‘We want to see [him] grovel at our feet’ hopelessly in love.18 Thus far, our interpretations of this relationship and its interest to readers have assumed two things: a hetero- and allo-sexual (or perhaps hetero- or allo-romantic) readership and authorship (a number of well-known gothic authors including Susan Claudia and Hillary Ford were male writers using female pseudonyms and there are queer texts such as Vincent Virga’s Gaywyck [1980]) and a straightforward identification with the female protagonist. In doing so, they reinforce the heteronormative prejudices that their criticism theoretically seeks to disarticulate. A gothic lens offers other ways of viewing these ‘hero-villains’ who ‘must be redeemed’.19 As Williams argues, gothic ‘dark hero’ romances are always ‘a version of “Beauty and the Beast”’.20 In this trope, as Marina Warner notes, ‘female love and sympathy redeem the brute in man’21 but it may be the very beastliness of the beast which creates the attraction: ‘Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in order to know the beast in herself’.22 There is clearly a wish-fulfilment outlined here but it is not confined to a presumedly hetero- and allo- romantic female readership. For readers

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who identify with the heroine, it offers the ideal or fantasy of their own redemptive power and the concept of a bond solidified and made permanent because exclusive (without her he—in non-beast form—cannot survive). The beastliness of the beast, and specifically its attraction, for the f­emale-identified reader suggests the particularly gothic allure of the transgressive other: without rules, without boundaries, and beyond society’s mores and conditions. In Menfreya, Harriet loves Bevin precisely because he is uncontrollable, domineering and unrepentant, all of which allows her to embrace her own inability to conform to her father or her society’s values. Reader identification with character is not confined by gender or by the focalising techniques of the writer. While the female perspective, either through a first person narrative or overt focalisation in a third person narration, often dominates the narrative, the reader, of whatever gender, may identify across gender boundaries with the object of desire. The ‘dark hero’ offers this reader both validation and the promise of the possibility of redemption. In ‘gothics’, ‘happy endings’ resolve, to a greater or lesser extent, the ambiguities of the text and suffering, spiritual unease, moral degradation and corruption, are resolved by the secular scripture of love. The ‘dark hero’ offers the possibility of exploring and redeeming the reader’s own darkness. I have thus far, while disagreeing with totalising interpretations of the ‘dark hero’, not attempted to challenge his ubiquity. The ‘dark hero’ fulfils a particular role—the representation and redemption of a pivotal threat within the world of the text. He is not, however, the only heroic type. ‘Type’ here does not imply a specific set of characteristics but rather the hero’s relationship to the novel’s threat. The ‘quiet hero’ appears less frequently but with regularity in ‘gothics’. His role is to oppose the threat/s of the heroine’s world both metaphorically (by representing different values) and literally. Nick in The Trembling Hills is an example of this alternative heroic ‘type’. He is an insurance broker who far from being an aristocratic master figure is socially inferior to Sara (once she claims her inheritance) and is financially crippled halfway through the book. His younger sister, who has a peculiar habit of comparing people to food (she compares Sara to ‘onions and vinegar. And peaches’)23 highlights her brother’s stolidity, saying ‘Nick’s like bread…’ As metaphor’s go, it hardly screams dark or mysterious. Nick can date his lineage back to an earlier gothic hero, before the Rochesters and Heathcliffs of the Bronte novels. He can trace his antecedents back to Emily’s Valancourt in Mysteries of Udolpho (1796), the servant hero Ludovico of the same novel, and the practical or scientific heroes of the nineteenth-century gothic. Defined by practical usefulness, a less gendered conception of value (frequently including features such as gentleness, kindness and emotional intelligence), and a total lack of the need for redemption, they neither represent nor redeem the threats of the novel or its world; they oppose them. In Nick’s case, his constancy and level-headedness offer a safe haven for Sara and his work-ethic and comparative poverty oppose the values of the great aunt whose money and status threaten Sara’s identity and autonomy. By removing the ‘dark hero’ as an intrinsic feature and recognising the importance of the characterisation of secondary characters (particularly women) and their diverse relationships to the protagonist, we move away from a homogenous conception of the genre whose ‘meaning’ is to be found in the dynamics of

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the central male/female relationship. Our whole neat conception of the genre starts to come undone. The gothic has always been more than brooding men and dark houses, why should we expect its manifestation in the popular romance to be any different? To maintain an insistence on a reductive conception of a single reproducible plot (however infinite its variations) would be as foolish as to suggest that only Hammer’s Dracula narratives fully represent the intersection of horror and gothic in film. In identifying ‘gothic horror’, we analyse the ways in which ‘gothic horror’ functions as a point of intersection between the ‘gothic’ and ‘horror’. Similarly, we must understand what is meant by ‘gothic’ and by ‘romance’ to identify the intersection point that manifests in the gothic romance. The term ‘romance’, while not free of critical debate, is easier to define in broad strokes. Radway suggests that the ‘romance’ is a ‘love story’ with a ‘closed’ happy ending, which produces a ‘joined’ romantic relationship.24 This ‘joined relationship’ may be a marriage (as in The Trembling Hills), the solution of martial difficulties or uncertainties (Bride of Pendorric) or the start of a relationship. As the following discussion of Du Maurier’s work will show, however, these closed endings are not always unambiguous. In Jamaica Inn (1936), for example, Mary Yellan and Jem Merlyn start a new relationship but Jem’s ominous prediction of a ‘hard life, and a wild one at times’25 over-shadows the sense of romantic closure. Echoing Radway’s emphasis on the female perspective, Williams maintains that ‘the text [tells] the heroine’s story from her own point of view’.26 It should be considered a broadly descriptive rather than prescriptive category, however, as it ignores the possibility of both queer romance and male protagonists. Romances may share focalisation between male and female protagonists or focus on the male character as we find, for example, in Georgette Heyer’s The Quiet Gentleman (1951). Radway argues that for a text to be considered a ‘romance’, the love story will be the focus of the text with any other plot/s occurring on a secondary plane. Russ, however, suggests that this is complicated in the gothic romance as the love story is combined with horror, mystery, and/or suspense plots which are of equal or greater weight than the love story. In Jamaica Inn, for example, the central mystery of the crimes occurring at Jamaica Inn and the identity of the ringleader are of equal, if not greater, importance than the relationship between Mary and Jem. The gothic romance is not unique in focusing partly on a love story. Many gothic texts, from the earliest works to the most modern examples, feature a secondary love story. For a text to be considered a gothic romance, I would argue, the love story needs to be of either equal or greater importance than the other elements with significant narrative concentration on the development of the relationship whether in the form of dedicated narrative time or with an implicit relationship between the love story and other narrative developments. In Jamaica Inn, for example, Mary’s attempt to identify the ringleader of the wreckers does not always involve direct interaction with or concentration on Jem, but the whole process acts as exculpatory exercise offering the possibility of his assumption of the heroic role. The ‘gothic’ part of gothic romance is more elusive. ‘Gothics’ employ a number of the most widely recognised gothic tropes such as the heroine in peril, the

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enclosing and dangerous domestic space, motifs of duality, aesthetic strategies of darkness and claustrophobia, an interest in the blurred boundary between past and present and occasional emphasis on the explained supernatural. However, both ‘gothics’ and gothic romance more broadly do more than borrow and redeploy gothic tropes and aesthetic tics as a type of secondary, parasitic, ‘woman’s gothic’. Gothic scholarship is dominated by conceptions of the mode with a number of intersecting concerns and emphases and we must extrapolate this approach to any definition of the gothic romance. Key features of gothic theorisation are investigations of fear and transgression.27 This concentration on the gothic as an ‘affective form’28 which ‘evokes feelings of horror, terror and revulsion’29 favours more traditionally ‘male’ forms of the gothic and the connection to ‘horror’. They are not irrelevant to the gothic romance. The examples already noted include significant concentration on the protagonist’s fear, a focus on transgressive acts and an underlying, often ‘progressive’, interest in the societally transgressive possibilities offered by the beast/beauty relationship. However, by focusing on fear and transgression as the definitional core of the gothic, the gothic romance is relegated automatically (and unjustifiably) to a secondary plane, a lesser form of the gothic due to their central concentration on the possibilities of love and desire within the frequently heterosexual love relationship. Accepting gothic romance on equal terms as a member of the gothic pantheon of genres and subgenres involves a reassessment of our conception of the gothic. It does not involve a complete rewriting but rather an acknowledgement of the constant tension in gothic texts between the transgressive, the horrific and the nightmarish, and the ideal or desired. This is not a tension between the ‘progressive’ and the ‘conservative’, as gothic romance criticism frequently tacitly posits in its accounts of the gothic romance as a mode of heteronormative wish-fulfilment and ideological reinforcement. There is always an ‘ideal’ in gothic texts, not only in gothic romances. This may be overt (for example, Emily’s longing for the prelapsarian retreat of La Vallé in Mysteries of Udolpho) or less explicitly stated (for example, religious moderation in John Buchan’s Witchwood [1927]). It may be conservative (for example, British Empire and rationalist values against the foreign other in Dracula [1897]) or unconventional/progressive (the sexual politics of works such as Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman [1798]). The ideal may be realised (as in Udolpho) or unreached (for example, in most of H.P. Lovecraft’s works of ‘cosmic terror’30). The ideal, however, always exists and is juxtaposed by a threat/s: the locus of fear. The gothic romance, therefore, is pervaded by an atmosphere of threat. The threats of the gothic romance are the same as those of the wider gothic: ‘threats associated with the supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption’.31 It is not just a ‘heroine in peril’32 but a world in peril, a whole weltanschauung shared by the protagonist and reader. Our identification with the gothic romance’s protagonists leaves open the possibility of this threat’s escape from the text whether it is the fear of male brutality, the fragility of the psyche, paranoid suspicion, or moral ambiguity. In Jamaica Inn, for example,

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the threat to Mary’s moral and ethical identity as she navigates her uncle’s world leaves the reader equally disorientated in the world of criminal ambiguity in which she dwells. The threats of the gothic romance are multiplicitious. They may be reflected and redeemed in the arc of a ‘dark hero’/’heroine’ or opposed by the ‘quiet’ hero. The primary force, however, which opposes and defeats the threat of these texts is ‘love’: an engine of change, an end in itself, a new reality, and the means to create it. It reforms, crosses new boundaries of emotional experience, offers connection to supernatural destiny, provides comfort, changes, softens, saves, and inspires. As it does in many secondary love plots in gothic fiction. It may not be the only ideal, female self-determination is another common ‘ideal’ of the gothic romance, but for the gothic to be a romance it must place love at the centre of its survival strategies. If we view the gothic romance more broadly as the point of intersection between the ‘romance’ and the gothic we find a love story which is simultaneously a narrative of constant and often claustrophobic threat. Armed with this less totalising definition, we are able to appreciate the fuller scope of the gothic romance beyond the boundaries of the Jane Eyre ur-plot. Terry Carr, ex-editor of Ace Books, a frequent publisher of ‘gothics’, affirmed that ‘books like this [gothics] have always been written in England’33 highlighting both the existence of a gothic romance tradition before the heyday of the ‘gothics’ and an awareness of this inheritance. ‘Gothics’, and gothic romances more widely, are frequently marked by an often multivalent and sometimes wry intertextual awareness of other gothic texts and the wider gothic. An oft-quoted influence on the ‘gothics’ is Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Clive Bloom suggests indeed that ‘Du Maurier is to the popular gothic romance: a standard and a reference’.34 The connection to Rebecca is clear but does not lead us far from the formulaic conception of the gothic romance (a young woman entering a dark aristocratic house and married to a mysterious older man she suspects of multiple crimes) except in the equivocation of its ending, which resists a simple optimistic reading. In Jamaica Inn we find a model for a different ‘type’ of gothic romance. In attempting to delineate this other ‘type’ of gothic romance, I am not offering another formula. Rather, I intend to point to other possible manifestations of gothic romance including the term’s relevance to other forms of popular romance. In Jamaica Inn, a young heroine, Mary Yellan, enters a new situation and a ‘dark house’ of sorts but this is where the story parts ways with the young wife or governess narrative in the large aristocratic house. This is a pub not an aristocratic manor and it is one, moreover, which is used as a smugglers’ base. Mary is not a naïve innocent girl introduced into a higher sphere through work or marriage. She is a working class and eminently practical heroine who moves ‘downwards’ into a criminal setting with its coterie of villains from lecherous pedlars to abusive, psychologically disturbed alcoholics. The threat is not a mystery to be untangled so much as the necessity of navigating an overtly dangerous world, both literally and in the figurative sense of maintaining her moral and personal identity. She must survive, attempt to rescue her aunt from the abusive husband who has conditioned her into obedience, learn to interpret who can and cannot be trusted and maintain

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her own ethical and personal identity. The text is defined by her relationships with a number of men, each of whom arguably offers a different threat related to various structures of power based on class, gender and non-gendered knowledge. Her relationship with her uncle-by-marriage Joss defies easy interpretation and is marked by a strange mix of repulsion and attraction. Under his power as both de facto patriarch and gang leader, her resistance takes the form of personal integrity, defiance, rejection, and ultimately an appeal to the authorities. Her ‘romantic’ relationship with his brother Jem, is haunted by the spectres of his elder brother’s moral and physical ruin, the image of her abused aunt who has been betrayed by love and her own views on love as a deceptive trap. Her relationship with Pastor Davey mirrors that of a confessor or advisor and member of the flock. He is, of course, ultimately revealed to be the mastermind behind the wrecking who has been hiding his wolf’s heart in a shepherd’s clothes. She must learn the lesson of his deception—the hypocrisy at the heart of his religion. Mary’s relationships within the text, and the threats they pose of physical violence, dissolution of self, death, or moral loss, are structured upon gendered lines but they go beyond a simple navigation of male–female relationships. They are, pivotally, the experiences of a working-class heroine in a world distanced from the country houses and privileges of the ‘governess romance’. It is a world filled with threats, injustices, and ambiguities which range far beyond the interpretation of the romantic male figure’s possible guilt or threat to herself. Mary’s task in the novel is the need to not only navigate but survive the world in all its gritty, destructive, unfair, morally ambiguous, and imperfect fullness and do so not only as a woman or a working-class woman but as a human whose gender (she is frequently referred to as masculine) has little to do with the moral ambiguities she faces and a world which defies easy interpretation and easy solutions. The ending, as previously noted, offers no ideal world, no solution to the moral quandaries she has faced, to the dangers she has encountered or the threat which love poses to female self-determination. While not necessarily including this ambiguous ending, the ‘model’ for gothic romance offered in Jamaica Inn is found within historical working-class women’s fiction such as the work of Catherine Cookson and Christine Marion Fraser. These writers are rarely considered in the category of gothic romance writers. Publishing categories have categorised them within a specific subgenre whose wider connections to the gothic are almost universally ignored—the family saga. Not only, however, do they adhere to the broader conception of the gothic romance—a love story marked by a constant threat not only to the heroine but to a whole weltanschauung—they also mirror many gothic tropes, plot points, and concerns. The difference between these texts and those more easily accepted as gothic is, perhaps, the working-class identity of the heroine and the often-presumed working-class identity of the reader. Dismissive attitudes to women’s literature and lower-class cultural production remain rife. Catherin Cookson’s The Rag Nymph (1991) offers a useful example of an urban manifestation of this form of gothic romance. The slums of Manchester provide a setting reminiscent of Stevenson’s London, and the heroine, Millie, must survive both her own orphaning and the threat of enforced child prostitution. As with

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Jamaica Inn, there is a variety of male characters who all provide different threats or challenges to the heroine. In The Rag Nymph, as in many working-class gothic romances, there is an overt focus on sexual exploitation, abandonment, and destitution. The world outside the rag-yard, and specifically the men in it from handsome young businessmen to pimps to lecherous paedophiles and randy young lords, threatens enforced prostitution, rape or the objectification of the ­working-class female as a sexual object. The link between these forms of exploitation is made clear when Millie hastily leaves the rich and seemingly respectable Bernard’s cottage after she realises that he offers her only the position of mistress and on her return home is kidnapped by the pimp Boswell. It is her adoptive brother Ben who rescues her and who is ultimately revealed as the love interest. He is a quiet hero whose own lower-class status, self-bettering through education and non-sexual care allow him to offer a safe alternative to the horrors of the world outside their gates. Christine Marion Fraser in the ‘Noble’ series (1994–1997) picks up on many of these same motifs, including the threat and reality of rape. Rape is not, as in many ‘aristocratic’ gothic narratives, a threat, it is an experienced and traumatic reality whose ramifications are explored, as in many such working-class gothic romances. She also explores other gothic themes such as family secrets, hidden identities, threatening fathers, acts of criminal and moral transgression (specifically murder) and transgressive desires. The series provides an example of an interestingly prolific trope within working-class gothic romance—the quasi-incestuous relationship. In this case, it is between an adoptive brother and sister who believe themselves to be blood relations. Magnus is another ‘quiet hero’, who functions as the antithesis both of his brutish and lust-driven father and brother and Anna’s aristocratic birth family, its secrets, betrayals and infidelities. The ‘quiet hero’ reappears as a frequent figure in working-class gothic romance. The world that these texts depict is one in which the aristocratic ‘dark hero’ is frequently a source of fear without hope. In a world which not only recognises but focalizes the inequalities of class as well as gender, a hero who upholds or represents both of those systems of oppression holds little appeal to those who are already victims of them. The safest of all relationships is that of the ‘brother’ who, as Joan Forbes notes in relation to eighteenth-century trends in proto-feminist romances, ‘becomes a prized and cherished means of obtaining respect and affection as well as protection from sexual advances’.35 Du Maurier’s gothic romantic work was influential but she was far from alone in burning the torch of gothic romance in the early twentieth century. The anonymous writer of ‘Vacuum-packed Passions’ in 1974 acknowledged that not only Du Maurier but Georgette Heyer ‘together spawned…the gothic romance’.36 Although chiefly associated with the ‘Regency romance’, Heyer’s work has always slipped the rigid categorisations of the sub-genre and has frequently engaged with the gothic. Novels like Cousin Kate (1968) and The Reluctant Widow (1946) offer seemingly ‘formulaic’ gothic offerings—both depicting young governesses entering houses of peril. However, from her earliest work Heyer has offered examples of another form of the gothic romance—the Austenian gothic. Similarly to

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Northanger Abbey (1818), these texts, often light-heartedly, engage in gothic parody but as Modleski notes, they do not simply ‘burlesqu[e] the gothic tradition, but extract its core of truth’.37 In Northanger Abbey, General Tilney may not, as Catherine suspects, have murdered his wife but he is certainly guilty of neglect and poses a threat both to Catherine’s happiness and her physical safety when he ejects her from his home in the middle of the night. Heyer deploys similar tactics in multiple novels. Devil’s Cub (1932) offers a typical example particularly in its deployment of the anti-gothic gothic heroine. When Mary Challoner is kidnapped by her ‘dark hero’ Vidal she maintains a line of conduct distinctly and overtly different from that of the stereotypical early-gothic heroine. Mary neglects to swoon, shoots her would-be ravisher (as she threatened) and later mothers him through his recovery. She is frequently upbraided by Vidal’s cousin and her friend Juliana for her lack of sentiment. Juliana, an obvious parody of an early gothic heroine, on the other hand, is a heroine of sensibility and longs for the adventures of the gothic romance heroines about whom she reads. When she has a taste of these adventures, through which Mary has already travelled under far worse circumstances, she realises the difference between novel and reality. Her complaints highlight the sufferings previously experienced by the anti-gothic-heroine Mary and highlight how unsuited the traditional gothic heroine is to survival in a legitimately gothic world. Heyer is one of the chief exponents of the Austenian gothic although similar threads of intertextual awareness, gothic borrowing, and gentle parody are frequently found in both Regency romances and historical romances more broadly. Another form and descendant of this form of Austenian gothic is found in the literary mash-ups popularised by Quirk classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (2009) and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters (2009). Both novels build upon the bones of the original Austenian texts, adding in new passages and plots from supernatural fiction including horror and the gothic. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters incorporates supernatural and gothic elements both more successfully and with more nuance than the more famous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and maintains more evenly the tone and feel of Austen’s regency world. The deployment of these elements is varied: Willoughby is an octopus-whisperer who uses his octopus whistle to stage fake rescues in the interests of seduction; Colonel Brandon is cursed to with hideous tentacles; Lucy is a rapacious sea-witch; Jennings is a retired privateer and his wife a captured bride with plans of escape; Robert ends up having his marrow sucked out by Lucy. Each supernatural manifestation is mapped onto the demands of the text. Colonel Brandon’s blighted hopes are worn as a physical curse. Willoughby’s malice is illustrated by his unthinking manipulation of the disaster which has befallen mankind to his own ends. They simultaneously parody the text while uncovering the original objects of its parody with the excess of the gothic machinery. It is impossible to listen to Marianne waxing lyrical about the beauty of the hills while ignoring Edmund’s account of a near-death encounter with quick-sand without a revelation of the original parodic purposes of Sense and Sensibility and the darker implications of the scene in the original that this mirrors. In this example, what is revealed and gothically exaggerated is

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the existing critique of an aesthetic taste which relies on or disregards the human misery endemic in the picturesque landscape. As with Heyer, these texts engage in parody in order to uncover an underlying reality, mixing gothic motifs with obvious humour, to uncover gothic worlds. This chapter has attempted to move beyond a formulaic conception of the intersection between the popular romance and the gothic. There has not been time to map the way in which gothic tropes, more or less superficially, have been mined for encoded descriptions of masculine danger and patriarchal threat in even the most formulaic romances of the twentieth century. Descriptions of ‘vampiric’ or ‘demonic’ heroes abound. Domestic spaces are encoded with danger through the simple addition of gothic motifs of lighting and arrangement. Claustrophobic spaces mimic the entrapment of the heroine in a world she struggles to navigate. Nor has this chapter attempted to do more than gesture towards the potential diversity of the gothic romance. The gothic romance, even when appearing to adhere to popular features of the ur-plot formula, escapes its boundaries. Rather than being predicated on the relationship between hero and heroine, they offer a far wider investigation of (usually) female experience including a diverse exploration of an almost endless panoply of female homosocial relationships and female subjectivities. We should not, however, be confined in our understanding of these texts along rigid gender lines which dismiss the richness of the topics they navigate. Duality, psychic disturbance, systematic inequality, transgressive desire, psychological trauma, tyranny, the experience of physical, and psychological oppression are only some of the issues explored in these texts. They are all themes which may frequently be attached to female subjects within the text, and maybe partially subordinated or run parallel to a love story, but this self-evidently cannot be held to invalidate them or the texts in which they appear (as has so frequently been the case) as anything other than gothic explorations of the transgressive, the troubling and the real. What differentiates the gothic romance from its gothic fellows is not an adherence to a rigid formula which invalidates its claim to meaning or to a developed and dynamic deployment of the gothic mode: is its hopepunk insistence on the reality and power of love.

Notes

1. Joanna Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 6:4 (1973), 666. 2. Joseph Crawford’s, Twilight of the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014) offers an insightful guide to the development of the genre from early gothic romances of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century romance to the Paranormal romance of today. 3. Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: “Gone with the Wind” and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1989), 204/205. 4. Lori A. Paige, The Gothic Romance Wave (Jefferson, NC, McFarland and Company, 2018), 2. 5. Joanna Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me, 667–671. 6. Tanya Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London, Routledge, 1982), 59.

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7. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago; London, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 101. 8. Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance, 59. 9. Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Cornell, Cornell University Press, 1992), 10. 10. Bill Hughes, ‘Exploring Gothic Romance’ on Open Graves, Open Minds, 26 January 2018, http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/ogom-research/exploring-gothic-romance/, accessed 4 March 2019. 11. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Woman, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (London, Verso, 1987), 75. 12. Phyllis Whitney quoted in Lucinda Fleeson, ‘Phyllis Whitney’s Way with a Romance Yarn Makes Her Queen of the Gothic Novel’ in In the Know, January 1976, http://www. phyllisawhitney.com/articles/InTheKnow/1976WayWithARomanceYarn.htm, accessed 4 March 2019. 13. Victoria Holt, Menfreya (London, HarperCollins, 1973), 168. 14. Ibid., 169. 15. Radway, Reading the Romance, 76. 16. Ibid., 141. 17. Massé, In the Name of Love, 2/3. 18. Modleski, 45. 19. Crawford, Twilight of the Gothic, 23. 20. Williams, Art of Darkness, 145. 21. Marina Warner, From the Blonde to the Beast (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994), 297. 22. Ibid., 312. 23. Phyllis Whitney, The Trembling Hills (London, Coronet Books, 1956), 49. 24. Radway, Reading the Romance (London, Verso, 1987), 64. 25. Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (London, Virago, 2013), 119. 26. Williams, Art of Darkness, 101. 27. Fred Botting, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1996). 28. George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (London, Pennsylvania State University, 1989), 8. 29. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, ‘Comic Gothic’ in A Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), 243. 30. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ in The Haunter of the Dark (Ware, Wordsworth, 2011), 523. 31. Botting, Gothic, 2. 32. Radway, Reading the Romance, 31. 33. Terry Carr, quoted in Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me’, 667. 34. Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (second edition) (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2008), 217. 35. Joan Forbes, ‘Anti-Romantic Discourse as Resistance: Women’s Fiction 1775–1820’ in Romance Revisited (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 301. 36. Anonymous, ‘Vacuum Packed Passions’ (1974) in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 287. 37. Modleski, In the Name of Love, 21.

Bibliography Anonymous, ‘Vacuum Packed Passions’ (1974) in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001). Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey (Ware, Wordsworth, 1993).

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Austen, Jane and Grahame-Smith, Seth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (San Francisco, Quirk, 2009). Austen, Jane and Winters, Ben, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (San Francisco, Quirk, 2009). Bloom, Clive, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (second edition) (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2008). Cookson, Catherine, The Rag Nymph (London, Corgi, 1991). Crawford, Joseph, Twilight of the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014). Du Maurier, Daphne, Jamaica Inn (London, Virago, 2013). Du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca (Suffolk, Richard Clay and Company, 1946). Fleeson, Lucinda, ‘Phyllis Whitney’s Way with a Romance Yarn Makes Her Queen of the Gothic Novel’ in In the Know, January 1976, http://www.phyllisawhitney.com/articles/ InTheKnow/1976WayWithARomanceYarn.htm, accessed 4 March 2019. Forbes, Joan, ‘Anti-Romantic Discourses as Resistance: Women’s Fiction 1775–1820’ in Romance Revisited (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995). Fraser, Christine Marion, Noble Deeds (London, HarperCollins, 1995). Fraser, Christine Marion, Noble Seed (London, HarperCollins, 1997). Haggerty, George, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (London, Pennsylvania State University, 1989). Heyer, Georgette, Devil’s Cub (London, Arrow Books, 2004). Holt, Victoria, Bride of Pendorric (London, William Collins and Son, 1963). Holt, Victoria, Menfreya in the Morning (London, HarperCollins, 1973). Horner, Avril and Zlosnik, Sue, ‘Comic Gothic’ in A Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001). Hughes, Bill, ‘Exploring Gothic Romance’ on Open Graves, Open Minds, 26 January 2018, http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/ogom-research/exploring-gothic-romance/, accessed 5 March 2019. Lovecraft, H. P., ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ in The Haunter of the Dark (Ware, Wordsworth, 2011). Massé, Michelle, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Cornell, Cornell University Press, 1992). Modleski, Tanya, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London, Routledge, 1982). Paige, Lori A., The Gothic Romance Wave (Jefferson, NC, McFarland and Company, 2018). Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Woman, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (London, Verso, 1987). Russ, Joanna, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 6:4 (1973). Taylor, Helena, Scarlett’s Women: “Gone with the Wind” and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1989). Warner, Marina, From the Blonde to the Beast (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994). Whitney, Phyllis, The Trembling Hills (London, Coronet Books, 1956). Williams, Anne, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago; London, University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Georgette Heyer Holly Hirst

Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) is widely regarded as ‘the creator of the Regency genre of historical romance’.1 As Cat Sebastian states ‘historical romance has been shaped in Heyer’s image’,2 a debt recognised by critics, writers and readers alike. This association with the Regency romance though has often obscured or minimised the diversity of her output, the generic instability of many of her novels and her frequent recourse to the gothic. Heyer wrote not only romances but detectives, psychological studies, historical novels and contemporary fiction and her work showcases the multivalent ways in which popular fiction deployed the gothic beyond a superficial appropriation of gothic tropes. A close study of several of Heyer’s most obviously gothic texts will, in the first part of the essay, showcase certain modalities of Heyer’s gothic. The second half will focus specifically on Heyer’s romance work and will map out similar, although often more subtle, gothic strategies. An overview of Heyer’s romance work challenges the commonly held formulaic conception of the gothic romance. Her extensive borrowing from eighteenth and early nineteenth gothic tropes and interaction with a range of historical and contemporary gothic sources also challenges a linear concept of the development of gothic romance and the gothic romance hero. It is often in Heyer’s earlier and in her more experimental work that the gothic is most obviously employed, demonstrating an early interest in and continuing will to experiment with the gothic. Three texts—Footsteps in the Dark (1932), A Night at the Inn (1950) and Penhallow (1942)—demonstrate three different but overlapping faces of the Heyerian gothic. These examples are all, in their way, failed experiments, dead ends in her exploration of the gothic mode, but they demonstrate the ways in which she deploys gothic intertextuality and gothic structural patterns, themes, tropes and affects into her work. In these texts, their introduction is often uncritically overt or clumsily parodic but they demonstrate the techniques which were integrated more adroitly into her mature and more celebrated work and in her romance fiction.

H. Hirst (*)  Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_23

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Footsteps in the Dark (1932) was Heyer’s first detective novel and the only one whose plot was developed independently of her barrister husband. It is her most gothic and her reliance on the gothic as both subject of parody and driver of plot is overt throughout. Its status as a failed experiment is underlined by her own suppression of the novel and the fact that she did not return to gothic parody in her detective fiction. However, parody remained a key mode of interaction with the gothic mode in her romance work and Footsteps offers an early example of her exploitation of the gothic in a complex mix of comedic effect and gothic revelation. In Footsteps the related Fortescue and Malcolm families (the three siblings Margaret, Peter and Celia, Celia’s husband Charles and Aunt Bosanquet) move to a lately-inherited country house. The Priory is haunted by the legend of ‘The Monk’, a supernatural front for a ruthless forging operation and our protagonists must solve the mystery posed by his existence. The narrative relies on a number of gothic tropes which it uses to elicit gothic expectations and to parody gothic conventions: aims which both converge and diverge at different points in the narrative. In terms of the overarching plot, gothic antecedents are easy to identify. The central conceit of a criminal gang using ghostly cover is found in early gothic texts such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) with its gang of pirates and their use of a ‘haunted’ wing of the Chateau-le-Blanc. What makes Heyer’s use of this plot more than simple borrowing is that not only the reader recognises the fictional gothic paradigms for the action of the novel; the characters are equally aware. The narrative foregrounds its fictionality and its intertextual debts through the characters’ self-conscious interpretation of their situation through references to fictional tropes. To the Fortescue/Malcolms, the butler Bowers is a ‘life like imitation of the mysterious butler of fiction’3 and Peter’s unthinking heroics make him resemble ‘the hero in a popular thriller’.4 The most consistent intertextual engagement, however, is with gothic sources. Their knowledge of gothic predecessors, and specifically of ‘explained supernatural’ fiction, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, allow them to correctly interpret the central mystery of the story. Charles and Peter never believe the haunting to be anything but the result of human action. They’ve seen this ploy before, time and again in gothic fiction. While the text engages in gothic parody, as we will see, the gothically informed lens of the protagonists is key to resisting the equally gothically fictive strategies of the forging gang in their use of the figure of the Monk. While gothic ‘genre competence’ allows the characters to correctly interpret the central mystery, it also leaves them open to manipulation and misapprehension. Mrs. Bosanquet ‘remember[s] reading a most unpleasant story about someone walled up in a monastery’.5 This memory proves prescient; a skeleton is later found walled up in a priest’s hole. The female half of the party are prepared by their previous gothic knowledge to believe the event and, in fact, Mrs. Bosanquet’s gothic awareness has been deliberately exploited by the villainous Colonel in order to sow panic and confusion. Charles and Peter, the confirmed sceptics, are also led astray by gothic conventions. Misled by generic expectations they are incapable of identifying the Colonel as the arch-forger. Heyer deliberately avoids the physical and behavioural conventions surrounding the gothic villain—his eyes far

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from gleaming with hypnotic power, ‘twinkle’ with humour6—and her heroes are fooled. They suspect instead the figures that correspond to an expected type—the handsome stranger (Strange) and the physically grotesque foreign other, Mr. Duval. They are suspicions that ultimately lead to their discomfiture and Duval’s death. While the text plays, often complexly, with the consequences of the genre competence of its characters, there are also more straightforward examples of parody. The gothic heroine becomes a key parodic target whether in the form of Celia’s excesses or in the depiction of an anti-gothic heroine: one who enacts the role of the gothic heroine while steadfastly ‘refusing’ the type. Mrs. Bosanquet wanders full of curiosity through the house at night but ‘she would have faced untold dangers’7 in search not of secrets but of biscuits. She sees a ghostly figure and promptly faints but decries her actions not as the outcome of a defensible sensibility but as a distressing lapse: ‘I so far forget myself as to scream and faint’.8 She proudly declares that ‘I am not imaginative at all’9 and her responses are uniformly prosaic. Her reaction to the discovery of a skeleton is to disinfect the cupboard. Even while discussing the possibility of communication with the dead, she is primarily focused on the procurement and consumption of an egg. The ­antigothic heroine here fulfils a dual function: to ridicule the hysterical gothic heroine type and simultaneously to offer a different model of gothic femininity. The text’s gothic parody borders frequently on the farcical. At Mrs. Bosanquet’s séance, for example, the text builds tensely to a dramatic finale of mysterious knocks only for bathos to sweep the scene as we realise the cause is the bumbling Detective Flinders, who has locked himself out. Mrs. Bosanquet’s defence of the possibility of the supernatural echoes that of Madame de Menon in A Sicilian Romance—mirroring its terms of cautious possibility and a discourse of ghosts as unable to harm to the living. However, the bathetic end to this scene, taking place as it does within the context of Peter and Charles’ scepticism, implicitly rejects the possibility of the supernatural. Beyond a reliance on bathetic ends to gothic tension, which recurs throughout the text, Heyer also uses a policy of parodic excess as we find in the depiction of Bowers. He is the credulous gothic servant, both mimicking and challenging the classist logic of early gothic portrayals of the superstitious servant by the excess of his fear and its expression, with a marked disparity at times between cause and effect. The portrayal of the ‘redoubtable’10 Mrs. Bowers, on the contrary, openly rejects gothic expectations of the servant, upsetting the paradigm of male bravery and female idiocy or timidity found, for example, in the figures of Ludovico and Annette in Udolpho. She remains impervious to either supernatural or natural threats: ‘I just wish that Monk would come in, that’s all! I’d Monk him!’11 This humorous portrayal attacks the conventions of the gothic though rather than the gothic nature of her reality. While relying on parody of the gothic for comic effect, Footsteps also relies on a more straightforward affective deployment of the gothic. The tone of the novel jumps between the comic and the unabashedly gothic throughout. Bargainnier erroneously refers to The Priory as a ‘pseudo-gothic setting’.12 The depiction of the house not only adheres to aesthetic tropes—the maze of corridors, the antique state of the house, the wildness of the gardens, the comic plethora of secret

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doors—but creates a truly gothic space. The home is not a place of safety but a locus of terror and explicitly of danger. The skeleton in the closet may have been a trick, the lengthy corridors may have most impact on the speed of service but the house is permeable and porous, liable to the incursions of an outside evil and home to an invasive malice. The secret passage which leads to Mrs. Bosanquet’s room, echoing the second door to Emily’s chamber in Udolpho, is a point of entry used by a killer; the murderer uses the passages behind the walls to stalk his prey; the darkened library hides a dangerous intruder in its shadows. This use of an authentically gothic setting, more than the sum of its clichés, an uncanny, permeable, vulnerable, entrapping space becomes a repeated feature of Heyer’s later fiction. The Priory is not the only gothic set piece. There are ruined churches, decaying crypts and even an inquisition-like prison cell. They are locations of authentic terror, which is created not only through the suggestive setting but by the deliberate employment of narrative techniques of suspense. A case in point is found in Mrs. Bosanquet’s encounter with the Monk. Obscurity, the delayed revelation of visual confirmation of audial clues, a slowed, tense pace are all used to terrifying effect. We stand with her, ears straining, candle raised as she peers into the shadows of the library: The dark shape grew distinct in the tiny light. A cowled figure was standing motionless by the fireplace and through the slits in the cowl two glittering eyes were fixed upon Mrs Bosanquet…Even as she stared at I the figure moved, and glided towards her with one menacing hand stretched out like the talon of a bird of prey.13

The Monk is no supernatural figure. He is a man in disguise. The terror of this scene is not counterfeit, however, it relies on the gothic’s ability to uncover reality as it obscures it. The man dressed as a monster is more monstrous than any supernatural creature could ever be. Heyer not only deliberately creates terror but relies on direct recourse to horror with a distinctive style consistent throughout her work. Duval is murdered and the unexpected discovery of his body is relayed in the starkest of terms: ‘in the centre of the squalid little room was Louis Duval, quite dead, and hanging from one of the hooks in the beam’.14 No more is said. This sudden and understated image of a squalid death creates a textual unease which cannot be undone. The image of Duval is the conterpoint to Margaret’s assertion: ‘Who says the age of adventure is dead!’15 The tension between a world of closed endings, romance (Margaret marries Strange), wit, adventure and successful detective work, and the reality of ruined lives, pathetic deaths, self-destruction and misery is maintained awkwardly and intrusively alive by this stark image of the hanging body of a broken man. When captured and imprisoned by the Monk, Margaret hopefully declares ‘People don’t get buried alive in the twentieth century!’16 Peter’s reassurance, the text explicitly declares, is a lie. He knows all too well that that is exactly what could happen. The security of modernity and of a comic ending alike are shown to be disturbingly unreal. This unresolved tension is why the novel is not ‘simply’ gothic parody. It is rather an example of what Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik categorise as

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the ‘comic gothic’ in which gothic elements are used not necessarily to ‘frighten or appal, but to amuse, to stimulate and to intrigue’.17 In the comic gothic, gothic perceptions are mocked and its excesses ridiculed but a ‘gothic’ threat is also revealed. In Footsteps, that world, of false appearances, murderous greed, addiction, despair and threat, is all too close to the surface and is conversely revealed by the parodied gothic tropes of the text. Night at the Inn (1950) is alone among her short stories in deploying the gothic and specifically the horror gothic. It is tempting to think of it like Footsteps as, to some extent, a failed experiment. It is certainly one of the more tonally jarring of her pieces. The attempt to combine a light-hearted ‘meet-cute’ romance and a gothic serial killer sit uneasily together, particularly within the narratively constricting short-story form. However, Heyer’s inclusion of the tale in Pistols for Two in 1960 out of her wider body of short fiction suggests her own belief in its success if not in its popular appeal. It is therefore worth considering the text as a deliberate formal experiment in the gothic. The story is simple but mired in misdirection. It opens with three travellers seated before an inn fire: Mr. Cranbrook, Miss Gateshead and the mysterious and threatening Mr. Waggleswick. The burgeoning relationship between Cranbrook and Gateshead initially leads to a reading of the story as romance. However, a build-up of textual clues relying on existing gothic conventions, including a creeping claustrophobia—inducing fog, a feeling of unease, and dark passageways, lead us to suspect a hidden danger. Our suspicions are misdirected to Waggleswick, who makes a habit of lurking threateningly in corridors and half-strangling people in the night. Cranbook wakes with Waggleswick’s hands on his throat but we learn that Waggleswick is trying to keep him quiet so he can catch the jolly landlord and his motherly wife red-handed. In the tradition of Sweeney Tod, it has been their practice to kill passing travellers, ‘to chop up the bodies of their victims, and to boil down remains in the copper’.18 It is left to our imaginations whether there is a cannibal element and whether the tough mutton and unusually flavoured soup the travellers had partaken of were all too human-flavoured. The gothic flavour of the text is evident. At the most basic level, it borrows and slightly rewrites a staple gothic trope—the treacherous landlord—which we find, for example, in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). The jollity of Lewis’ murderous robber baron is echoed by the landlord with his ‘smiling countenance’ and ‘indulgent good humour’.19 The obvious antecedent for the hints of cannibalism, the secret passage straight to the scene of butchery and the guilty female associate are Sweeney Todd (1846). Unlike Footsteps the characters are ignorant of the gothic antecedents, which leaves them vulnerable. These gruesome motifs of gothic horror are incongruously mixed with a light-hearted romance plot of equal importance. The romance, which is presented humorously by an ironic but sympathetic narrator, sits uncomfortably alongside the references to murder and cannibalism. It would be erroneous to assume, however, that Heyer was simply attempting to unsuccessfully jam these two apparently disparate and uncongenial genres together in an overly short form.

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The key to understanding the narrative texture of A Night at the Inn is Cranbrook’s brief meditation on the crimes of the landlord. John had heard tales reminiscent of this gruesome disclosure, but he had imagined that they belonged to an age long past.20

There is an echo here of Tilney’s famous demand for Catherine to ‘Remember the country and the age in which we live’.21 Waggleswick returns the answer which was implicitly suggested by Northanger Abbey: ‘There’s plenty of w[sic]illains alive today!’22 The hero’s unsettling realisation that evil is era-less, that modernity and barbarity, progress and monstrosity exist simultaneously in his world is not only key to the thematic intent of the tale, as in Footsteps, but to its structural affect. The narrative jumps, sometimes within the space of a paragraph, between scenes with wildly different tones: from wryly observed romance to scenes of nerve-shattering suspense or terror. We move from the light-hearted flirtation of the parlour and follow Cranbrook on his slow passage down the unilluminated corridor. At one point, he puts his hand out and instead of finding the wall, finds ‘something warm and furry’23: Waggleswick lurking in the shadows. Heyer uses a range of common gothic formal tropes in the scene to elicit specific affective responses: visual obscurity, unidentifiable sounds, limited narrative perspective and slow revelation. The reveal does not dissipate the tension but rather redirects suspicion towards a specific person. We then return to the well-lit space of romance all within two pages. Such constant jumps in tone reflect and reiterate the central discovery of the tale: the reality of living in a world whose dangers lurk beneath the surface of a reassuring modernity, a world which is simultaneously not what you had thought it to be at all and exactly what you had thought it to be, where shy flirting and cannibalistic serial killers exist incongruously in the same space. Heyer employs both misdirection and a tonally fragmented narrative structure to create a gothic affect of disorientation and creeping terror. The horror is hidden from Miss Gateshead and we anticipate the couple’s marriage. There is an apparently ‘closed’ ending but the threat of the tale remains. Miss Gateshead may be kept safe from knowledge of her decidedly gothic world but, the tale hints, no one is safe from its reality. What is perhaps most disturbing is Waggleswick’s cheerful pronouncement that several people have been murdered there since Bow Street found out about the landlord’s activities. The desire to catch the perpetrators in the act has taken multiple unnamed and unconsidered lives. They have slipped as easily out of consideration as the murderers had hoped in picking isolated victims. The line between those who murder and those who catch them is rendered uncomfortably unclear by this merging of different forms of indifference and by role slippage within the text. It is Waggleswick, after all, who almost kills Cranbrook in his attempt to silence him. The gothic obsession with transgression, the breaking down of binary oppositions and the worrying proximity of good and evil add to the unease of the text and prepares us for the shifting and ambiguous worlds of Heyer’s later romance works, where the closed ending and comic tone cannot completely banish the shadow of a darker reality.

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Penhallow has no fellow among Heyer’s books. Jane Aiken’s Hodge asserted that it was ‘intended as a contract-breaking book’24 after relations soured with her publisher. This was the dominant narrative until the publication of Jennifer Kloester’s biography and offered a reason to dismiss the ‘disturbing’ text which critics were all too eager to leap on. Kloester argues persuasively, and with abundant documentary evidence, that it was, in fact, a passion project which became something of an obsession although it later left Heyer questioning, ‘Why on earth did I have to write this disturbing book?’25 Often misrepresented as detective fiction, ‘as a detective novel, it is objectively bad’.26 It ‘doesn’t just go against the rules of the game, it violates the nature of the game’.27 No murder occurs until two-thirds of the way through, the murderer is known to the reader before the murder occurs and they are never suspected, let alone detected. Heyer herself referred to the work in a planning letter as ‘a problem of psychology’, ‘a family saga’ and a ‘murder-story’ combined.28 As this combination of factors suggests, a gothic lens is useful in analysing the text as all three are central preoccupations of the mode— family secrets, abnormal psychologies and brutal crimes. Penhallow mirrors many of the gothic preoccupations highlighted by gothic criticism and found outlined in Eve Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. The text focuses on the tortured family relations of the Penhallow family, trapped in rotation around the patriarch, Adam Penhallow. At the heart of the novel is the ‘discovery of obscured family ties’,29 namely the ­quasi-incestuous bastardy of the eldest son, Raymond Penhallow, born to his mother’s sister. It is a secret which drives him to the suicide which ends the novels and produces an in-text assumption of his guilt in his father’s murder. The secret while gleefully revealed by Adam in a moment of rage remains essentially an ‘unspeakable’ truth.30 Raymond takes his own life precisely so that his secret would die with him and ‘it would be as Raymond Penhallow that he would be remembered’.31 His suicide letter is silent on everything but instructions for the estate. His mother when confronted is unable to vocalise their relationship. There is also a thematic concentration on mental disintegration and later on the ‘poisonous effects of guilt and shame’32 in the depiction of Faith Penhallow, Adam’s wife and murderer, and to some extent, in the depiction of Raymond. We see Faith descend into a temporary mental break which leads to murder. Faith ‘little dreams that the horror will only begin with the death of Penhallow’33 as the family disintegrates, new rifts appear, futures are blighted, her son comes under suspicion and her stepson kills himself. The death of her stepson, which hides her own guilt, isn’t a solution to her mental disintegration but rather the seal upon in. Her bid for freedom is revealed as an act of psychological self-entrapment in a vortex of guilt, shame and despair. It is a more darkly gothic text than either of the two mentioned above. Its intertextual engagement with other gothic texts is similarly bleaker. She engages in a complex evocation of contemporary gothic practice, most notably Daphne Du Maurier, entering into dialogue with the books and building a gothic reality which not only infects but conquers the text. In her depiction of Cornwall, Heyer evokes a shared gothic geography, mirroring key locations in Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936) such as Rough Tor and Dozmary Pool. Du Maurier’s reference to Dozmary

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had in turn built on the gothic resonances of the local legend of Jan Tregeagle who was damned to the pool after a Faustian pact went predictably awry. Dozmary becomes a gothic palimpsest. The site of Tregeagle’s damnation being written over by Mr. Davies’ crimes and his disturbing, miscoloured art, the aesthetic embodiment of a damned soul in Jamaica Inn. This in its turn is written over by Raymond’s lonely suicide, alienated both from his family and himself. In an unemotional report, reminiscent of Duval’s hanging, we are told that, ‘He thought there was no point in hanging about, and took the revolver out of his pocket’.34 Here the chapter ends. In this simple, bitter depiction of suicide, a palimpsestic gothic location is evoked to layer both the meaning and resonance of his act. Each minute article of the scene—the choice of location, the bitter-sweet depiction of its wild beauty, the pistol belonging to the brother who is all too eager to inherit—combine to deliver a gothic tableau of mental disturbance, guilt, s­ elf-condemnation, despair, damnation and betrayal and a disturbing gothic affect of inescapable futility. There is also a significant intertextual relationship between Penhallow and Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Like Rebecca, Rachel, Adam’s deceased first wife, continues to dominate the home and imagination of the younger, more naïve second wife. A portrait of Rachel dominates the hall, ‘the painted eyes mock[ing]’ Faith35 and she becomes a haunting presence. While deliberately evoking Rebecca, Penhallow changes key elements of the novel to both challenge a romantic reading of Rebecca and its underlying premises. Importantly, Rachel’s position is diminished in relation to Rebecca’s. Faith ‘would have liked to have thought that Rachel’s spirit brooded darkly over the hourse…but it was impossible to suppose that any other spirit than [Adam] Penhallow’s reigned’.36 Rebecca contains an implicit possibility of female self-governance, dominance and defiance, whereas Heyer reiterates and reinforces the subordinate position of the female in the patriarchal world Penhallow represents. The project is, if anything, more cynical than Du Maurier’s, presenting a world of universal female disempowerment, destroying ruthlessly the concept of romantic love and that of female self-determinism as an antidote to patriarchal tyranny. Penhallow also undermines both the ‘innocence’ and possible happiness of Rebecca’s nameless protagonist in its depiction of Faith and the horror of her marriage. Faith is her counterpart, the dreamy, romantic, naïve, second-wife of the much older man, but not only is she a murderer, she is depicted as a self-deceiver who ‘dramatises herself incessantly’.37 Rebecca receives a bleak retelling. Penhallow is the darkest of her works: a fact reflected and intensified in the narrative strategies of the novel which immerse the reader in the inner psychological torment, specifically that of Faith Penhallow. Penhallow has a hetero-diegetic omniscient narrator and while this may seem inimical to my previous claim, the narrative functions effectively to bring us into Faith’s perspective by mimicking her experience of life at Penhallow. Faith is our anchoring point. Like her we are outsiders, forced by the narrative into the compulsory gatherings of the Penhallows, an outside party to their overwhelming presence, vindictive sniping, petty and strident arguments, physical aggressions and unintelligible discussions. Like Faith, we are overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and the

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overbearing and alien Penhallow family. The narrative mimicks her obsessions, returning again and again to the problem of her son’s future to no purpose. It is the nightmare of Faith’s guilt that directs our reading in the last third of the story. We had been led to hope, as she had, that Adam’s death was the panacea for all ills. Her arguments appeared logical and persuasive and we are as dismayed and shocked as Faith as we see the world of the Penhallows’ crumble. With her we sit on tenterhooks waiting for accusations, arrests, deaths. We know more than she does. We see more. Yet, we are tied to her emotional perspective through the textual replication not of Faith’s point of view but of her experience. The only other perspective with a similar impact on the reader is Raymond’s in the third part of the book. We experience his inability to find a solution and his despair as we follow him through his abortive search of Adam’s papers and his anxious wait for discovery and his journey out to Dozmary Pool…all alone. The reader becomes an unwilling and impotent witness. The increasing narrative claustrophobia, the reduction of focalisation to the ‘experience’ if not perspective of two characters in states of mental collapse, the sense of despairing and desperate inevitability are the affective core of the text. The alienation we feel when reading, echoing the isolation of both Faith and Raymond, is exacerbated by the narrator’s cruelty. We do not find here the light mockery, the affectionate parody of Heyer’s wider oeuvre. Rather, we have a narrator who ruthlessly highlights the stupidity, failings and even wickedness of each actor. The text echoes with seemingly objective ‘she/he was the kind of woman/man who’ denunciations which lay each character’s moral weakness bare. Jimmy is lazy and corrupt. Faith is wilfully helpless and stupid. Ray is dogmatic and inflexible, disgusted by his own mother. Char is overbearing and patronising. Conor is jealous and weak. The most positively portrayed characters, Bart and Loveday, are, respectively, violent and scheming. There is a vein of cynicism underlying the narrative which allows no hope to flourish, makes corruption, decay and betrayal inevitable and leaves the guilty unpunished. In Penhallow, the links to a contemporary gothic tradition are clear and specifically to the work of Daphne Du Maurier—a suggestive interaction. Between them they ‘spawned yet another sub-genre of the modern romantic novel, the gothic romance’.38 The gothic romance is often conceived of narrowly as a chronologically contained sub-genre prevalent in the 60s and 70s which conforms to a formulaic definition stemming from a perceived Jane Eyre ur-plot. However, as Terry Carr, ex-editor of Ace Books, affirms ‘books like this [gothics] have always been written especially in England’.39 Once we recognise the long-standing interplay of gothic and romance beyond the narrowly set boundaries of the 60s ‘gothics’, it becomes clear that the formulaic concept of the gothic romance as a Jane Eyre narrative is both prescriptive and reductive. Heyer’s novels offer evidence of the possibilities of the gothic romance and its many manifestations when considered not as a formulaic production but as the point of intersection between the gothic and the romance. The next section will demonstrate how Heyer’s romance works deploy the gothic. Each example will demonstrate a different mode of interaction with the gothic and, arguably, a different ‘form’ of gothic romance.

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By highlighting the ways in which the examples below echo more or less overtly the techniques already identified—intertextual allusion, the deployment of gothic strategies of terror, gothic thematic preoccupations, gothic parody and the manipulation of gothic expectations—I will seek to re-evaluate much of her romance work as intrinsically gothic and linked to wider gothic concerns within her oeuvre.40 Cousin Kate (1968) is the Heyer romance most readily identifiable with the formulaic conception of the gothic romance delineated by critics such as Joanna Russ, Tanya Modleski, Michelle Massé and Anne Williams.41 Although differing between themselves as to particulars, these formulae take Jane Eyre as the ur-text of gothic romance and usually include a ‘large, lonely, usually brooding House’; a ‘young, orphaned, unloved, and lonely’ ‘Heroine’; A ‘Buried Ominous Secret’; and an ‘older man, a dark, magnetic, powerful brooding, sardonic SuperMale’.42 Cousin Kate matches all but the last of these criteria. It was not marketed as such but it was reviewed as ‘a fully-fledged gothic’43 and is often referred to as Heyer’s experiment in gothic romance. While it is therefore unnecessary to argue for the gothic nature of Cousin Kate, the widespread understanding of it as a formulaic gothic ignores both Heyer’s continuing and developing deployment of the gothic across her output and the actual experimental project of the work. It confines Cousin Kate to a generic category which it was, in fact, trying to overturn. Cousin Kate is an anti-‘gothics’ gothic romance. Cousin Kate is the story of Kate Malvern, an orphan and governess, who is invited by her aunt, Lady Minerva Broome, to live at Staplewood. Lady Broome’s concealed motivation in inviting her is to find a wife for Torquil, who is steadily descending into madness. She attempts to isolate Kate by intercepting her letters, hides Torquil’s developing madness and then attempts to induce Kate into marriage with the offer of riches and the threat of Torquil’s permanent confinement. Luckily for Kate, the practical Philip, Lord Broome’s relative, falls in love with her, offering her his hand and his (it is stressed) modest estate. Their love, however, rather accelerates than avoids the tragic denouement in which Torquil kills his mother and then himself. There are clear parallels with Jane Eyre although Torquil, unlike Bertha, succeeds in eliminating his captor as well as destroying himself. Heyer makes the link to Jane Eyre explicit through Kate’s first view of Staplewood when ‘the sun was setting redly’ which ‘drew a gasp from her, not of admiration but of dismay, since it seemed to her … that the building was on fire’.44 The allusion to Thornfield, and Manderley, is clear and acts both as an omen of disaster and an indicator of the principle intertextual reference point of the novel. As with Penhallow, it is the changes from the original that allow the novel to enter into dialogue with Jane Eyre and to critique aspects of the text which have become staples of the gothic romance ‘formula’. These changes are principally found in the reassigning of character roles. The mad wife and unloved child are combined in the mad son. The enigmatic, attractive master of the house is a ruthless matriarch whose husband is an isolated invalid. In Jane Eyre Bertha is a ‘strange wild animal’ who ‘whether beast or human one could not, at first sight, tell’.45

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Her madness reduces her below the status of human, excuses her treatment and justifies Rochester’s decisions and his Byronic posture. Heyer’s Torquil, in contrast, is a ‘poor, unhappy boy’46 who may advance to murder but who is consistently depicted as a tragic figure. Minerva, the Rochester replacement, who keeps her mad relative in confinement, is the villain with her ruthless schemes to ensure the succession. The final judgement on her comes from the mouth of the amiable Sarah Nidd: ‘if ever a woman deserved to be strangled, she did!’47 Minerva has practically identical motivations to Rochester—class and family-based pride, horror of madness, an absence of affection—but while Bronte urges us to pity Rochester, Heyer insists we vilify Minerva. A complication is introduced in our reading of Minerva by the clear intertextual link to Christina Rossetti’s ‘Cousin Kate’. In this poem, Cousin Kate is the usurping second love who ignores the undeserved fate of the first-person narrator, a rejected mistress. The book title suggests a similar relationship between the two female protagonists of the text who are not competing for a love interest but rather for the affection of Lord Broome and for survival and happiness in their social sphere. This ‘rivalry’ unsettles our condemnation of Lady Broome, forcing us to acknowledge her sacrifices, sense of duty and adaptability to difficult circumstances. Sarah’s final condemnation, however, reinforces the judgement of the text against her and in doing so, reconfirms the condemnation of the Rochester figure and his actions. Lady Broome’s excuses are not good enough, nor are his. Minerva casts a shadow over the gothic romantic ideal represented by Rochester. The novel, in fact, completely rejects the ‘dark hero’ figure so central to formulaic definitions of the gothic romance, challenging both the definitions themselves and the heroic type. Philip, is dependable, patient, lovingly attentive to his elderly relative, intelligent, quick to laugh, supportive, ‘warm and appreciative’,48 sensible, ‘deeply reticent’49 and prosaically practical. He is a ‘quiet hero’ who, unlike the ‘dark hero’ typified by Rochester, does not mirror, represent or get mistaken for the threat raised against the heroine. He opposes the threat, both literally and figuratively, by representing an alternative value system which opposes the forces that threaten Kate—the greed, egotism and pride of Lady Broome and of the dark aristocratic hero of Jane Eyre and the ‘gothics’. As with the non-romance fiction, the gothic is more overtly deployed in Heyer’s early work. These Old Shades is the second book a connected gothic trilogy of her earliest works—The Black Moth (1921), These Old Shades (1926) and Devil’s Cub (1932). These Old Shades, like its predecessor and sequel, demonstrates a form of the gothic Romance divorced from the Jane Eyre paradigm. Placed in context within its trilogy it also acts as a midpoint, mapping the development of the Byronic figure in the gothic tradition and mapped by Joseph Crawford in The Twilight of the Gothic: from Radcliffean villain to anti-hero to the diverse manifestations of dark heroism found in the gothic and paranormal romance forms. In The Black Moth, the villainous Duke of Andover kidnaps the heroine, threatens to rape her, almost kills the hero, and engineers the social disgrace and exile of the hero. While the novel, with its highwayman hero, clearly owes a debt to the adventure romances of Baroness Orczy, its central narrative of female abduction,

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its magnetic villain, its thematic undercurrents of female vulnerability, betrayal, imposture and usurpation, and its narrative focus on the villain Andover point to its gothic roots. It reflects an earlier form of the gothic, and echoes the narrative of female abduction in Radcliffean gothic texts such as The Italian (1798). Andover, like Schedoni, both repulses and attracts the reader. With ‘his thin lips curled a little, sneering’50 he fascinates the reader. The most charismatic character, he can face defeat with humour and is ultimately partially redeemed by his love for Diana. Like Montoni, he acts as an avatar of the threats which threaten the female protagonist—sexual assault, lack of autonomy, a patriarchal society—while representing the forbidden attractions of sexuality, a life beyond society and power. These Old Shades was, in a sense, a sequel to The Black Moth. Andover became Avon, the ‘hero’ of the novel. This rewriting reflects the broader trend of gothic masculinity that the ‘heroine, rather than having a hero (who is entirely heroic) to marry and a villain (who is entirely villainous) to escape, instead has a h­ ero-villain whom she must redeem’.51 Avon retains many of the traits of his predecessor. He is the sort of dark hero that Cousin Kate rejects and who gradually disappears from Heyer’s late work. He denounces himself, ‘I come of vicious stock, and I have brought no honour to the name I bear. Do you know what men call me? I earned that nickname [Satanas], child; I have even been proud of it. To no women have I been faithful, behind me lies scandal upon sordid scandal’.52 He is partly redeemed by his love for Leonie though we learn in Devil’s Cub that he remains ‘a sinister person…quite unscrupulous in attaining his ends’.53 Their relationship demonstrates the trend identified by Marina Warner in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ narratives, a move away from a discourse of male redemption to one in which ‘Beauty has to learn to love the beast in him, in order to know the beast in herself’.54 Avon is the forbidden other that allows Leonie to explore the forbidden in herself. The novel’s gothic predecessors are not found in specific plots so much as in the deployment and manipulation of existing gothic aesthetics. The dark, twisted and warrenlike backstreets of Paris where Avon first meets Leonie, fleeing from punishment and dressed as a boy, evoke the London of Victorian gothic texts by writers such as R. L. Stevenson. We are introduced into a world at once claustrophobic, alienating and threatening which prepares us for the web of sordid secrets and the inexorable advance of a damning vengeance which form the nucleus of the plot. The central plot is one of revenge. When Avon first meets Leonie, he sees in her a method of punishing an old rival: the father who had abandoned her at birth, secretly adopting a boy child. While he comes to love Leonie, this only strengthens the motives for his revenge and he painstakingly sets his trap. He exposes Saint-Vire ruthlessly, leading to his public suicide, a moment of understated horror: ‘There was a deafening report, a woman screamed, and Rupert strode forward, and flung his handkerchief over Saint Vire’s shattered head’.55 His bride, far from redeeming him and his frankly psychopathic impulses, is delighted at the death of her father and Avon apologies: ‘I am very sorry, infant, but I did not actually kill him. I induced him to kill himself’.56 The line between good and evil wavers and we cannot help wondering if we have been siding with gothic villains all along. The story ends with marriage, a seemingly closed comic ending, but the unsettling

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transgressions of the text remain. There is a pattern of ambiguity—good/evil, father/lover, boy/girl—and the gothic undertones of the text, its gathering narrative threat, its insistence on horror and its thematic touchpoints of despair, betrayal and entrapment ensure that this ambiguity is fundamentally unsettling. In Devil’s Cub we follow the exploits of Vidal, Avon’s son. He is a ‘dark hero’ but further removed from the gothic villain than Avon. Where Avon is violent, sinister and seemingly almost omnipotent, Vidal is reckless, indifferent and amoral but depicted as ‘a wild, passionate, spoiled boy’57 whose abilities and villainy are more realistic, more human than his father’s. His love interest, Mary Challoner, is an anti-gothic heroine who, while pretending to be her willing sister, is abducted by Vidal. When faced with the threat of rape, she raises a gun, gives warning and shoots him when he continues to advance. At this point, the scene abruptly descends into bathos. Vidal is chastised, Mary is mortified and for the next few days we watch her mother him to recovery. The mystique of the dark hero is gradually dispelled by Mary’s cosseting and Vidal’s weakness and by the contrast between her common sense and his immature impetuousness. It becomes impossible not to view him as the boy Mary insists he is. However, Mary’s status does not diminish the gothic nature of the text. She is contrasted with Vidal’s cousin Juliana, who is a more typically gothic heroine, ruled by sensibility and strong emotion and prone to dramatic flights of fancy. Travelling alone with Vidal to catch Mary, she becomes aware that her longing for a gothic life—‘romantic’ abductions, forceful passionate men and flights in the night—are untenable realities. It becomes clear that Mary’s anti-gothic heroine is the true gothic heroine, one who can survive a gothic world and loving a ‘gothic man’. Juliana’s ‘sufferings’ revivify the gothic trauma which Mary has made light of, highlighting the gothic reality which Mary has downplayed. Devil’s Cub is an example of the way in which Heyer reinvents the comic gothic, merging gothic trauma, figures, events and motifs with comedy and romance to create a gothic romance which defies mono-dimensional conceptions of the genre. The Quiet Gentleman (1951) offers a fully developed example of the ‘comic gothic’ most distinctive in Heyer’s work—a form of Austenian gothic. The ur-text of the Austenian gothic is, of course, Northanger Abbey in which a gothic lens is affectionately parodied while its insights are simultaneously verified. A gothic world, revealing the mundane threats and traumas of the everyday world, is represented with humour and a comic-ending which neither erases nor discredits the gothic discoveries of the text. The Quiet Gentleman spends little time on the romance and focuses on a mystery of equal or greater weight in terms of both thematic importance and narrative time. Gervase and Drusilla rarely appear together on the page. The novel’s focus is Gervase’s unwelcome return to the family home and the numerous attempts on his life. A similar divided focus is a significant feature of her gothic romances. The Reluctant Widow (1946) is a tale of murder, spies and secret-selling. The Toll Gate (1954) involves a murderous criminal gang and a missing treasure. Such sub-plots, though not always so dominant, occur in the majority of her fiction, introducing a gothic element into her romances. In Regency Buck (1935), for example, there

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is a tale of abduction and betrayal and in The Corinthian (1940) there is a stolen necklace mystery and a brutal murder. In The Quiet Gentleman, the gothic subplot is focused on the hero and his entry into the ancient house where, due to his mother’s indiscretions and his dangerous military career, he has long been considered as good as dead. The discovery that it is his only friend, his cousin Theo, that is attempting to kill him and frame his impetuous brother Martin underlines a gothic thematic absorption in themes of succession, betrayal, usurpation, deception and isolation and an unusual move away from the typical gothic romance concentration on female experience. The Quiet Gentleman reinforces its connection to the gothic through intertextual references to gothic authors and texts, notably Robert Southey and Horace Walpole. This dependence on overt allusion to gothic predecessors is a common technique of Heyer’s romance fiction, which uses these references both to generate gothic expectations and to offer a gothic lens which provokes an alternative reading of the text beyond a surface level of romance wish-fulfillment. Sylvester (1957) revolves around the intertextual mirroring of Caroline Lamb’s gothic roman-a-clef Glenarvon; The Reluctant Widow references Charlotte Smith and Clara Reeve and the female gothic narrative of the entrapped female; Regency Buck alludes to Horrid Mysteries, Midnight Bells, Mrs. Radclyffe’s novels and ‘Monk’ Lewis, setting the stage for the betrayal and abduction of its closing chapters. A similar function is fulfilled by the use of gothic aesthetics and locations. This is most notable in The Quiet Gentleman in the house built by ‘one of Mr. Walpole’s more fervid adherents’ in the ‘Gothick’ style and resembling nothing so much as a ‘rabbit-warren’.58 This depiction is parodic. The ‘Gothick’ nature of the house, while literally undeniable, is presented with humorous excess: ‘Unaccustomed guests, wandering distractedly down ill-lit galleries, discovering stairs that led only to uncharted domestic regions, and arriving fluttered and exhausted…had been known to express astonishment that anyone should choose to live in such a rabbit-warren’.59 There is an unresolved tension here—an example of the Austenian gothic. The house’s Gothick’ depiction works as an accurate shorthand for the gothic reality of the uncanny house—a place not of safety but of threat. However, the comic excess of the depiction makes fun of the trope itself. The parodic deployment of the gothic aesthetic allows for the home to be recognised as a place but in a reflexive move mocks the convention which so excessively and unrealistically encodes this reality. One of the central parodic devices of the novel is the gothic anti-heroine. Drusilla wishes she could faint and act like the heroine of ‘romance’. She longs to be more like Marianne, an accurate representation of a Radcliffean heroine, but she is too busy behaving sensibly and saving lives. Like Julianna in Devil’s Cub, Marianne experiences ‘delightful trepidation’60 at the thought of a ghost, longs for adventure and romance and faints upon meeting it. Drusilla, on the contrary, considers herself too prosaic to believe in ghosts. She cannot escape her own practicality but, because of it, she is able both to decode the gothic mystery and to offer life-saving assistance. She is an anti-gothic heroine in a gothic world of castles, plots, murders, family secrets and greed and she is just the type of heroine such a world requires. Her longing, however, betrays not only the failure of the gothic heroine but also the

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weight of her appeal. Heyer offers, in Drusilla’s long discourse on how she fails as a heroine, however humorous at moments, an achingly sad reflection on the ways fictive conventions dictate and distort reality especially in the lives of women. It is impossible to cover the full range of Heyer’s gothic fiction but this article offers an overview of some of her key gothic texts and the gothic strategies which reoccur in her work. Although Heyer is rarely regarded as an important gothic writer, her experimentation in the deployment of gothic strategies offers a map of the ways in which the gothic continued as a mode in the twentieth century, absorbed, reimagined and utilised across a range of genres. The rich intertextual awareness that Heyer brought to her deployment of the gothic allowed for an often fascinatingly complex dialogue with existing gothic texts, tropes and conventions. Her work challenges the formulaic conception of the gothic romance and the existing critical praxis of viewing it as a sub-genre appropriating the gothic rather than an intersection between the romance and the gothic as modes and popular forms. A number of key trends can be traced to Heyer and her use of the anti-gothic heroine, her development of the comic gothic and her use of parody to create the Austenian gothic illustrate important threads in the development of the gothic and not only the gothic romance.

Notes

1. Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer: The Biography of a Bestseller (London, William Heinneman, 2011), 394. 2. Cat Sebastian, ‘The Heyer Problem – A History of Privilege’ in Essays on the Literary Genius of Georgette Heyer, edited by Rachel Hyland (Overlord Publishing, 2018), 35. 3. Georgette Heyer, Footsteps in the Dark (London, Arrow Books, 2006), 7. 4. Ibid., 291. 5. Ibid., 15. 6. Ibid., 227. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 92. 9. Ibid., 95. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 253. 12. Earl F. Bargainnier, ‘The Dozen Mysteries of Georgette Heyer’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 348. 13. Heyer, Footsteps, 90. 14. Ibid., 208. 15. Ibid., 317. 16. Ibid., 268. 17. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, ‘Comic Gothic’ in A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 243. 18. Georgette Heyer, ‘Night at the Inn’ in Pistols for Two (London, Pan Books, 1974), 136. 19. Ibid., 120. 20. Ibid., 136. 21. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, vol 2 (London, John Murray, 1818), 185.

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H. Hirst 22. Heyer, ‘Night at the Inn’, 136. 23. Ibid., 127. 24. Jane Aiken Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (London, Arrow Books, 1984), 54. 25. Kloester, Georgette Heyer, 235. 26. Madeleine Paschen, ‘The Mystery of Penhallow’ in Essays on the Literary Genius of Georgette Heyer, edited by Rachel Hyland (Overlord Publishing, 2018), 97. 27. Nancy Wingate, ‘Georgette Heyer: A Reappraisal’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland: Prinny World Press, 2001), 316. 28. Kloester, Georgette Heyer, 222. 29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, Arno Press, 1980), 8. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Georgette Heyer, Penhallow (London, Grafton, 1964), 364. 32. Sedgwick, Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 9. 33. James Devlin, ‘The Mysteries of Georgette Heyer: A Janeite’s Life of Crime’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 386. 34. Heyer, Penhallow, 366. 35. Ibid., 34. 36. Ibid., 34. 37. Ibid., 341. 38. Anonymous, ‘Vacuum Packed Passions’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 287. 39. Joanna Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 6:4 (1973), 667. 40. I am indebted to the support and feedback of the members of the Georgette Heyer Appreciation Society for the material of this section. 41. See Joanna Russ ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’, Tanya Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women, Michelle Massé’s In the Name of Love: Women Masochism and the Gothic and Anne William’s Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. 42. Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me’, 667. 43. Barbara Bannon, ‘Forecast Fiction’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 219. 44. Georgette Heyer, Cousin Kate (Watford, Bodley Head, 1968), 36. 45. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London, Wordsworth, 1992), 258. 46. Heyer, Cousin Kate, 315. 47. Ibid., 303. 48. Ibid., 171. 49. Ibid., 172. 50. Georgette Heyer, The Black Moth (London, Pan Books, 1971), 9. 51. Joseph Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014), 23. 52. Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades (London, William Heinneman, 1926), 336. 53. Georgette Heyer, Devil’s Cub (London, Arrow Books, 2004), 266. 54. Marina Warner, From the Blonde to the Beast (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994), 312. 55. Heyer, These Old Shades, 333. 56. Ibid., 338. 57. Heyer, Devil’s Cub, 264. 58. Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (London, Morrison and Gibb Ltd., 1953), 7. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. Ibid., 113.

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Bibliography Anonymous, ‘Vacuum Packed Passions’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland: Prinny World Press, 2001), 287–289. Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, vol 2 (London: John Murray, 1818). Bargainnier, Earl F., ‘The Dozen Mysteries of Georgette Heyer’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland: Prinny World Press, 2001), 341–355. Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (London, Wordsworth, 1992). Crawford, Joseph, The Twilight of the Gothic (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014). Devlin, James, ‘The Mysteries of Georgette Heyer: A Janeite’s Life of Crime’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland, Prinny World Press, 2001), 359–394. Heyer, Georgette, Cousin Kate (Watford, Bodley Head, 1968). Heyer, Georgette, Devil’s Cub (London, Arrow Books, 2004). Heyer, Georgette, Footsteps in the Dark (London, Arrow Books, 2006). Heyer, Georgette, ‘Night at the Inn’ in Pistols for Two (London, Pan Books, 1974). Heyer, Georgette, Penhallow (London, Grafton, 1964). Heyer, Georgetter, The Black Moth (London, Pan Books, 1971). Heyer, Georgette, The Quiet Gentleman (London, Morrison and Gibb Ltd., 1953). Heyer, Georgette, These Old Shades (London, William Heinneman, 1926). Hodge, Jane Aiken, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (London, Arrow Books, 1984). Horner, Avril and Zlosnik, Sue, ‘Comic Gothic’ in A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2001). Kloester, Jennifer, Georgette Heyer: The Biography of a Bestseller (London, William Heinneman, 2011), 235. Massé, Michelle A., In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Cornell, Cornell University Press, 1992). Modleski, Tanya, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (London, Routledge, 1982). Paschen, Madeleine, ‘The Mystery of Penhallow’ in Essays on the Literary Genius of Georgette Heyer, edited by Rachel Hyland (Overlord Publishing, 2018), 97–103. Russ, Joanna, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 6:4 (1973), 666–691. Sebastian, Cat, ‘The Heyer Problem – A History of Privilege’ in Essays on the Literary Genius of Georgette Heyer, edited by Rachel Hyland (Overlord Publishing, 2018), 35–38. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, Arno Press, 1980). Warner, Marina, From the Blonde to the Beast (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994). Williams, Anne, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1995). Wingate, ‘Georgette Heyer: A Reappraisal’ in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, edited by Mary Fahnestock Thomas (Saraland: Prinny World Press, 2001), 305–321.

The Body in Pieces

Abjection and Body Horror Xavier Aldana Reyes

The term ‘body horror’ is used to describe a type of fiction or cinema where corporeality constitutes the main site of fear, anxiety and sometimes even disgust for the characters and, by extension, the intended readers/viewers.1 Its workings involve the inscription of horror onto the human body by virtue of a change, or series of them, that transforms the perceived ‘normal’ body into a negatively exceptional and/or painful version of itself. Mutilation, degeneration and transformation (often hybridisation) are the main catalysts, although non-normative and ‘monstrous’ bodies may constitute cases of de facto body horror, especially in older gothic texts and horror films. This the case of the liminal, gender fluid body of the villain in Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle (1897) and of the body with congenital abnormalities in David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980).2 In the most fantastic of scenarios, body horror may operate alongside the uncanny: body parts may be imbued with a life of their own and carry their own personal, often vengeful, pursuits, or change shape and even location. Although all forms of body horror are connected by their propounding of certain configurations of the body as horrific, there are significant differences between body horror driven by gore and violence, namely, the type of horror that generates fear and disgust through attacks on the bodies of fictional characters, and the body horror that relies on either (super)natural transformations or the voyeuristic attraction of those that are differently abled. The former uses empathetic corporeality and the transferability of pain (the human capacity to imagine it) to create scenarios in which the reader/viewer can be emotionally aligned with the victim and thus fictionally partake of their vulnerability.3 In the latter, horrific scenarios stem from either the decay of the body, its gradual or sudden loss of humanity (physical and/or moral), its uncontrollable nature and desires or else the feelings of disgust it can arouse. In fantasy and superhero films, the human body either inherently possesses or gains additional supernatural powers that enhance it. In body horror, marked corporeal difference is always detrimental and unwelcome.

X. Aldana Reyes (*)  Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_24

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Not all body horror is premised on a sense of fear or disgust for the self, and negative emotions felt towards the non-normative body, especially in the case of transformations or disabilities, may actually be overcome after a period of adaptation for the characters. For example, Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), who wakes up one morning looking like a huge insect, gets used to his new body, and the various actors in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) are, for the most part, shown to be living ordinary lives.4 And yet, in body horror there will always be an element of revulsion associated with the exceptional body. If the main characters themselves do not experience their corporeality with panic, others likely will, and their rejection will mark either the beginning of ­self-loathing or else the quest to annihilate the threat the strange body poses to the status quo. This is what happens to many of the creatures in Universal’s horror films. For the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian et al., 1925), the monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and the werewolf in The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941), their physique is chilling for other characters— something we know from the reaction shots of those who encounter them, who scream in terror—and sometimes it is sufficient to grant persecution and attempted murder. This does not mean that there is no correlation between a monstrous body and monstrous behaviour. On the contrary, where characters are not intended to elicit pity or sympathy, external appearance is likely to mirror evil intentions or dubious moral actions. This is obviously the case in the many adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), where Mr. Hyde is portrayed as either a regressive ape-like figure or else a bestial colossus. In general, the body of the monster, whether spectral or carnal, is intended to be feared. Naturally, fear is not synonymous with disgust, and while all horror is predominantly driven by the emotional imperative to scare, unsettle and disturb, only some horror texts toy with disgust explicitly—especially with the form of disgust that originates in the body. Films like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) and The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) are orchestrated around subtle scares, psychology and moods, and they suggest rather than present their horrors. Disgust does not really feature in them on any significant level. The same can be said about a number of early gothic novels, from Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777) to Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790). By comparison, the affective scenarios or ‘numbers’ in films like The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), both of which belong to the body horror subgenre, rely entirely on the reconfiguration, bloody attack and malignant disfiguration of the body of the characters and monsters in them.5 In fact, graphic violence—mixed with black humour in The Evil Dead—and otherworldly or supernatural mutation of the human are as important as, if not more than, the overarching narratives themselves.6 The same might be said of a number of sensationalist gothic novels, especially of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), where some of the horrors include the rotting corpse of a newborn, the spectre of a bleeding nun or the remains of a prioress trampled by a rioting mob. Because disgust is as essentially corporeal as it is cultural, it is difficult to find body horror that does not,

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to a certain extent, resort to corporeal disgust.7 All body horror is concerned with it on two levels: on a primary one, body horror texts have recourse to images or scenarios where the human body is presented as somewhat disgusting; on a secondary level, body horror texts will, in engaging with disgusting presentations of the body, attempt to generate disgust in readers/viewers. Examining the cultural and socio-historical bias behind these processes (which figures and bodies create disgust), as well as those that remain largely the same (disgust towards the open, vulnerable body), helps us understand the regulations of what is imaginative or visually permissible at any given time and thus of what and who is actively policed and marginalised by specific cultures and periods. This is where disgust bleeds into abjection. Abjection, a critical term strongly connected to the body (to bodily fluids, in particular) in the work of philosopher Julia Kristeva, refers, broadly speaking, to the ‘processes by which something or someone belonging to the domain of the degrading, miserable, or extremely submissive, is cast off’.8 For Kristeva, that which is abjected is always an inherent part of the subject, and the process of abjection an implicit reassertion of the self and its boundaries. She uses the example of the corpse to illustrate this point: ‘refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’.9 Writing in the first person, she explains that an encounter with such images make her feel ‘at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border’.10 The objects and subjects we deem abject, are naturally inseparable from the social sphere; there is a thin, and strongly policed, line between body and body politics. Abjection has thus become a tool through which to express the many forms stigmatisation and exclusion take in different periods for scholars in Gothic and Horror Studies. Abjection can help reveal the subjective underpinnings of the social dehumanisation, be it governmental (systemic) or personal (a phobia or fear), of certain communities to the point where some lives may be perceived to be less important than others or even as wasteful.11 In short, abjection is connected to repression. It does not just monitor taboos about the body, especially its cleanliness, but also the patterns of human behaviour associated with it that are seen as correct and proper, from sexual behaviours (the need to marry before intercourse) to the management of the dead (burial) and of excreta (sanitation). Similarly, abjection constitutes the backbone of cultural representation: what is deemed ‘other’, ‘monstrous’ or ‘disgusting’ is ultimately determined by what, at any given point in history, is perceived as normative and protected as ‘normal’. For this reason, the subjects and objects of abjection, especially in social terms, do not remain static. Gendered abjection is by far the most important type of abjection explored by horror critics in the late twentieth century. Studies by Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, Rhona J. Berenstein and Isabel Cristina Pinedo, among others, have all been key to debates about gender in Horror Studies, but Barbara Creed’s development of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ most obviously draws from Kristeva’s notion of abjection as arbiter of selfhood and decorum and links it to the production of images of fear.12 Focusing on the notion of ‘ritual’, Creed sees the ‘abominations’ of religious discourse as

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key to the construction of the monstrous in horror film: ‘sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest’.13 Because women have historically been aligned with ‘polluting objects which fall into two categories: excremental and menstrual’, their bodies become sources of abjection.14 For Creed, the ­monstrous-feminine manifests in cinema through the ‘notion of maternal authority’, an idea reinforced by the fact that she reads the mother, following Kristeva and psychoanalysis, as representative of the pre-symbolic body.15 This means that moments of disgust in film, especially where the catalyst is a female monster and their reproductive abilities, can be read as more than just instances of social convention, such as aversion to blood or mucus, and as staging a return to the archaic pleasure of ‘“playing” with the body and its wastes’.16 The female monstrous body in horror is intrinsically connected to patriarchal constructions of pregnancy, birthing and menstruation as dirty, but also to the fear of castration, since to become an adult is to enter the symbolic and thus the law of the father. Incredibly important and productive as the ‘monstrous-feminine’ concept has been to Horror Studies, especially in terms of initiating discussions around the representation of women in horror films, there are some psychoanalytic premises at the heart of abjection as applied to filmic bodies that are, to say the least, problematic. Above all, there is a danger that the abjection model inadvertently reifies the very archetypes it aims to denounce and that it does not distinguish between representation—the figuration of bodies on screen—and the affective side of cinema—the way those bodies act to produce certain emotional dispositions.17 While it is hard to deny that constructions of female monstrosity have drawn inspiration from ‘mothering’ and women’s ‘reproductive functions’, this should not be tantamount to suggesting that these characteristics are what make female monsters scary.18 The titular psychokinetic girl in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) can be read as a menstrual monster, for the pig’s blood in which she is bathed during prom night echoes the tortured opening scene where she is humiliated for being scared of her first period. Similarly, the reproductive ability of the alien queen in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) is played in a thoroughly abject tableau at the end of the film. And yet, neither Carrie nor the alien queen are scary because they are female, menstrually or motheringly so; they are scary because they pose a real physical threat to the intradiagetic characters. If they arouse some universal, complex fear connected to psychosexual structures and the symbolic order, as Creed suggests, then this must, by virtue of the fact that it is superseded by cinema’s affective apparatus (sound, editing, make-up), only happen at a level so deep and subconscious as to be virtually imperceptible to viewers. In other words, we are not, at least on a surface level, terrified by the idea of the alien queen as archaic mother or of Carrie as menstruating teenager. More readily, we are emotionally and somatically impacted by these monsters’ superhuman abilities to harm and destroy. There has been a perceived urgency in Gothic and Horror Studies to move past the theoretical limitations of psychoanalysis into theories of disgust conversant

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with aesthetics, phenomenology, cognitivism and moral psychology.19 The evolutionary social sciences also have much to contribute to our understanding of abjection. For example, Mathias Clasen proposes that the reason zombies can disgust viewers is that their decaying bodies connote (in some extreme cases, denote) putrefaction and infection, both of which can be sources of illness and even death. He writes, ‘[d]isgust originally evolved to protect us from pathogenic microorganisms, but was coopted by other cognitive systems to mobilize our condemnation of norm violations (moral disgust) and to protect us from genetically harmful reproductive activities (sexual disgust) such as incest’.20 Apart from being a direct threat to one’s integrity—they are, at the end of the day, after our brains—zombies spark ideas of meat gone off, food that can kill you. As Clasen puts it, ‘we have strongly aversive reactions to cues of contagion, such as the odor and sight of decomposing flesh’.21 Ancestral threats, such as predators and other humans, are genetically central to us, into reflexes and survival instincts like the fight or flight response. Horror, especially audio-visual horror, which can manipulate sound and editing to feign direct visual and acoustic attacks for viewers, taps into and utilises these universal traits to generate shock (the startle effect) and other emotional and somatic cognates. Disgust, under this new light, is recast as an emotional and affective process less dependent on obscure psychosexual dynamics and distant formative childhood experiences and more clearly rooted in the principles of survival, endurance and continuity that drive our lives and those of the characters in horror films and gothic texts. Contemporary thinking around disgust needs to, in turn, shift the parameters by which abjection has been defined to encompass the visceral and instinctive. Abjection, understood as both a system of social and cultural monitoring and as a visceral, evolutionary necessity, is crucial to body horror. Like all horror, body horror must present at least one source of threat to its intradiegetic characters. This source of threat need not be human or, as was at one point argued by Noël Carroll, necessarily a monster, but it will need to have a sense of agency.22 While the vengeance pieces in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971) or the traps in the Saw series (2004–present) are not, in themselves, active sentient subjects, they are extensions of the machinations of evil serial killers. In body horror, the source of threat may continue to be external, especially in gore cinema and in horror where the inventive destruction of the bodies of the victims may be an important element of the narrative. The best example of the latter are slasher films, where events are punctuated by graphic murder numbers. As such, analysing the objects and subjects of fear in films can lead to the type of abject-inflected readings popularised by Creed. We may, for example, continue to trace changes in the ‘monstrous-feminine’ into the twenty-first century. We may also study the journey that serial killers have gone through from social outsiders in the 1970s and 1980s to sympathetic vigilantes in the 2000s and 2010s. Some of the time, however, the source of threat will be internal, especially in transformation narratives, or will be derived from the particularly gruesome depiction of grievous bodily harm. These narratives allow for abject readings that focus on what is considered ‘other’, ‘unappealing’ or simply exceptional. Abjection in these cases is external

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and may be internalised. In all instances of body horror it is possible to analyse the two sides of abjection, the corporeal and the social. Since body horror tends to be reliant on either believable or realistic special effects, discussions of it centre on the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, decades marked by a rise in the depiction of realistic violence in cinema and by significant advances in special effects and prosthetics.23 It would be misleading to suggest that body horror is exclusive to the modern period; it was already an important and often underplayed element of many ‘first wave gothic’ texts, and the reveal of the monstrous body was one of the main attractions of Universal’s horror films of the 1930s.24 However, a number of key factors, including the birth of gore films in the 1960s and the opening up of mainstream Hollywood cinema to explicit violence later that decade (so-called ‘new Hollywood cinema’), as well as the popularity of graphic violence in fiction in the late 1970s and, especially, 1980s, make the late twentieth century an obvious landmark, even a point of origin, for body horror. We may now turn to the developments that took place during this period and analyses the work of some key figures (David Cronenberg, Clive Barker). The last part of my argument concentrates on body horror in the twenty-first century, especially on the films that have continued to use the body of women as a locus for monstrous representation, and on the controversial torture porn phenomenon, much reviled for its violent, sadomasochistic aesthetics. I also propose some areas where the study of abjection and disgust in body horror may continue to offer fertile ground for discussions around representation and identity politics and for horror’s continued engagement with repressive moral and social systems. To provide a neat periodisation of modern body horror is a difficult task, since graphic violence has long been a staple of gothic literature and its related visual and photographic media, to say nothing of drama.25 There are obvious predecessors in cinema, too, from the Grand Guignol of Le Système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume / The System of Doctor Goudron (Maurice Tourneur, 1913), scripted by macabre playwright extraordinaire André de Lorde, to the early shows of severed limbs in American films of the 1930s horror boom, such as The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932) and Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932), and the corporeal horrors of the various early adaptations of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac / The Hands of Orlac (1920) and many a mad scientist film. And yet, these instances of body horror avant la lettre are few and far between and do not constitute a fully fledged body of work, partly because daring attempts were stifled by censorship and restrictions on what could be shown on screen.26 Limitations on content and subject, premised on a perceived need to protect vulnerable audiences from detrimental images of violence and death, were long imposed on television, and had even brought to an early end the life of another significant source of pictorial violence, the horror comic.27 It is therefore unsurprising to find that television has opened up to explicit violence and nudity later, aided by the innovations of subscription channels like HBO at the turn of the century.28 The rise of modern body horror in cinema and literature, then, can be tracked, if somewhat unevenly, over the course of four decades and mapped onto the

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increasing freedoms won by the entertainment industry. It is bookended by Hammer’s return to a more visceral form of gothic horror in the late 1950s and by the decline of the splatterpunk movement in the early 1990s. During this period, body horror became more photo-realistic and could be presented more effectively thanks to developments in special effects. The focus shift towards horror of Fangoria magazine, partly prompted by the success of an article on the craft of special make-up effects artist Tom Savini, seems a good indicator that, by 1980, the foundations of body horror had been laid down. Philip Brophy’s article on ‘horrality’, the first academic piece to use the word ‘body horror’ upon its original publication in 1983 to refer to horror of the 1970s and 1980s, is equally significant.29 In literature, explicit horror, best exemplified by James Herbert’s novel The Rats (1974), would culminate in the writings of Clive Barker, most notably the short stories in Books of Blood (1984–5), and the writers associated with the splatterpunk movement, namely, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Jack Ketchum, Robert McCammon and David J. Schow. The success of the first of British studio Hammer’s period horrors, The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), which combined the trappings of Universal’s monster films with a fully coloured and more explicit approach to the display of horrific and eroticised bodies, is a real cinematic landmark of gothic cinema. The film opened the gates to a slew of similar films both from Hammer and from other European countries, especially Italy and Spain, whose respective exploitation cycles included many continuations and appropriations of existing franchises and characters. Hammer conceived of a highly national type of product whose constituting parts and overall ethos were eminently exportable: they created a model for modern gothic horror based on minimum investment risks and maximum returns, well-known literary and cinematic myths and, importantly, violence and eroticism. The latter were particularly appealing to filmmakers under the cultural stronghold of ideologically conservative regimes. Allegedly, Spanish director Jesús (Jess) Franco managed to convince his producers to finance Gritos en la noche / The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) only after taking them to see Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula (1960), which served as a test run for the type of film he would go on to produce. Charting Hammer’s incremental incorporation of gratuitous and histrionic gore and nudity is a good indicator of how the relationship between Hammer and the horror industry was also reciprocal. The late The Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), where a body is gratuitously hacked to pieces in one scene, can be read as an attempt to up the ante for audiences attuned to the excesses of films such as the Anglo-Amalgamated’s Sadean trilogy—composed of the controversial Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1959), Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960) and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)—Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the gore cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis and George A. Romero’s cannibal zombies in Night of the Living Dead (1968). A director deeply influenced by Hammer’s vision was Mario Bava, who had already assisted Riccardo Freda with the cinematography of the first modern Italian gothic horror, I vampiri / The Vampires in 1957. His La maschera del demonio / Black Sunday (1960) and its memorable opening scene, where a

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metal mask with sharp spikes is hammered into the face of witch Asa (Barbara Steele), owe a great debt to the British studio, but they also developed a stylish approach to violence that was very particular to Italy’s productions of the period.30 Mario Bava, like other directors who made gothic horror films during its first golden age (1957–66), also made ‘gialli’, thrillers containing strong violence, sometimes of a voyeuristic or sadistic type. In fact, Bava’s own La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Sei donne per l’assassino / Blood and Black Lace (1964) were great forerunners of this subgenre. In this light, gothic horror films can be read as one of the multiple ways in which body horror manifested at the time. Similar depraved and nightmarish scenarios where explored in other films: petrified waxen corpses in Il mulino delle donne di pietra / Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), necrophilia in L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962) and torture machines in La vergine di Norimberga / The Virgin of Nuremberg (Antonio Margheriti, 1963) and Il boia scarlatto / Bloody Pit of Horror (Domenico Massimo Pupillo, 1965). The murder ‘numbers’ of the Italian gothic horror film would develop further in the hands of aesthetes like Dario Argento, whose gothic pieces Suspiria (1977) and Opera (1986) elevated the murder scene to new cinematographic heights that bordered on art-house cinema. The late 1970s and 1980s were also significant in terms of the crystallisation of the slasher, a horror subgenre where a number of teenagers are hunted down by (often supernatural) serial killers. The popular Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) initiated a cycle of these films and set the narrative model (a series of murder set pieces strung along by the perseverance and eventual survival of the main character, generally a woman) and a series of unspoken, prudish rules (survival is severely curtailed by indulgence in sex, drink or drugs, or by exploring dangerous places alone). These tropes became so popular that they are referred to openly, and ironically, in the neo-slasher Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). In many respects, slashers were a very modern form of horror that explicitly addressed teenage audiences and offered complex pleasures connected to identification and the empowerment of women. The fact that the sequels to the films mentioned above, with a few exceptions, neglected plot development in favour of graphic death numbers is another innovation the ripples of which can still be felt in contemporary horror. Little has been written about the ways in which the slasher expanded the gothic tradition, especially how it placed boogeymen at the heart of a new type of suburban horror experience. Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Mike Myers of course operate much like the classic Universal monsters, but their lack of humanity and their brute force shifted the parameters of the horror film and of body horror. The crafty, effective destruction of the body at the hands of virtually interchangeable monsters became one of the subgenre’s main draws. With the slasher, body horror went mainstream. Also beginning in the 1970s and gaining momentum in the 1980s was the body horror cinema of David Cronenberg. His Shivers (1975), about a parasite that is

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transmitted sexually and can leave victims in a zombie-like state, was not critically well-received and accused of being depraved and repulsive. The film contained many of Cronenberg’s obsessions: the visual display of carnage, especially the body’s capacity to be reimagined, transformed and pushed to its physical extremes; a fascination with the female body, especially its sexuality and reproductive abilities; and underlying metaphysical concerns about the plight of existence and the difficulties of social interaction. These obsessions are again captured in Rabid (1977), where a woman develops a blood-sucking phallic stinger through which she feeds, and The Brood (1979), where an abused woman gives birth parthenogenetically (i.e. without male fertilisation) to a dangerous group of kinetic children who do her bidding. Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of 1958’s The Fly is the most complex of his corporeal investigations through the language of body horror. The well-known tale of a man who has his genetic DNA spliced with that of a house fly when attempting to teleport, originally a 1957 short story by George Langelaan, is here endowed with new meanings. Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly, the hybrid creature he becomes, is not given a straightforwardly monstrous treatment. Instead, the man-fly is depicted as an excitable and tragic figure. His/its exhortation to girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis) that she ‘is afraid to dive into the plasma pool’, only knows ‘society’s straight line about the flesh’ and ‘can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, gray fear of the flesh’ resonates with Max’s (James Woods) proclamation at the end of Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983): ‘long live the new flesh!’31 What exactly these new configurations of the flesh are, beyond a rejection of the social, and one understands ideological, values we attach to bodies and their behaviours, remains vague, but perhaps this is precisely the point Cronenberg is trying to make. We cannot escape society’s fears of the flesh, its desires and prejudices, its transience and vulnerability. After all, Brundlefly, a fleshly and oozy creature, emerges from the ruins of Seth’s body, and his gradual transformation has long been read as evoking anxieties about the ageing and diseased body, especially the ravages of AIDS.32 In Cronenberg’s best films, the abject manipulation of the body comes close to abjection’s political work, denouncing the ways in which convention constrains corporeality and highlighting the dangers for our health attendant in modern technology. Body horror fiction in the late twentieth century has operated along the same lines, especially the work that writer, painter and occasional director Clive Barker carried out in the 1980s. His Books of Blood were a real game changer and, for some writers, an indication that visceral horror was a potentially lucrative enterprise. Barker’s work, however, provided more than a simple collection of macabre atrocities, and his stories used body horror to various socio-political ends. In his ‘In the Hills, the Cities’ (1984), two Yugoslavian cities, Popolac and Podujevo, follow a ritual that involves their citizens creating gigantic human-shaped towers. When one of them collapses, killing thousands of people, the other one goes berserk. Apart from the stunning imagination it showcases, the story offers a powerful message about national and group identity, as well as the difficulty of overcoming widespread ideologies. As Barker writes of Popolac, ‘[t]hey saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city’s thoughts. And

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they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless’.33 In ‘The Body Politic’ (1985), hands free themselves from the bodies of their owners to start their own revolution. Here, Barker puts forward another strong message about the need to negotiate the distance between individual and collective freedom. There is also at play a transcendentalism, an expansive move away from butchery and towards a reconceptualisation of the body already evident in Books of Blood and the novella The Hellbound Heart (1986) and which drove critic Douglas E. Winter to label Barker’s fiction ‘anti-horror’.34 It has found expression in later works like Tortured Souls (2001) and Mister B. Gone (2001).35 The body may well be torn to pieces, pushed beyond the limits at which it can reasonably function, but in so doing Barker conjures up the human pull between convention and libidinal drives that cannot always be stifled or resisted. This topic is also covered in Kathe Koja’s brilliant novels, especially in Skin (1993), where a metal sculptor ends up transforming her body (via increasingly more extreme forms of bod mod) in a self-destructive bid to explore the limitations of the flesh and of the self. Barker and Koja’s work show how the destruction of the body can be more than gratuitous excess, how body horror can have ontological aspirations. In their writings, the process of abjection is explored in all its contradiction, turning that which is corporeally abjected into something fear-inducing, yet pleasurable and even desirable. The best late twentieth-century text to explore abjection from a social point of view is Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1988). The novel tells the story of a family who work as part of a traveling freakshow and who find ­different ways of dealing with their corporeal difference. One of the main characters, Arty, a man born with human flippers instead of hands due to his mother’s deliberate ingestion of toxic drugs while pregnant, eventually becomes a ­brainwashing prophet. His maniac revenge involves convincing able-bodied people that the only way of escaping their problems and reaching transcendence is to cut off their limbs. This part of the novel would not be so meaningful had Dunn not first taken the reader through the social hardships Arty and his family must face for being differently able. Early on, Arty explains to his sister why ghost and horror stories do not scare him: Those are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that’s what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys – that’s you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath – that’s me. […] These books teach me a lot. They don’t scare me because they are about me.36

In its accomplished and adamant rejection of the ‘monstering’ of differently abled bodies, Geek Love manages not just to debunk the prejudices at the heart of the horror genre, but to rewrite the place of the ‘monster’ within it. Monsters are no longer to be feared or pitied; crucially, they must be understood. Arty eventually goes mad, but it is obvious that his state of mind was caused by the way he was treated by others. With Geek Love, the workings of abjection are exposed, and ‘normative’ society is asked to be accountable for its perpetuation of corporeal discrimination.

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The legacy of the monster-feminine model is evident in twenty-first century horror films. Many now deliberately deconstruct the ‘othering’ of the female body in a knowing gesture that demonstrates how horror can make an active gendered stand by complicating the representation of the subjects and bodies once abjected. Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000), for example, offers a modern take on the menstrual teenage monster previously seen in Carrie. In the film, teenager Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is bitten by a strange creature on the day of her first period and immediately begins to turn into a wolf. The early stirrings of her lycanthropic transformation coincide with the onset of adolescence.37 As Ginger’s body becomes abject in its fertile blossoming—the blood, the pimples, the pain— so does her werewolf self begin to overtake. Simultaneously, Ginger feels the urge to wear make-up and stop hanging out with her geeky, prepubescent sister. The film suggests that the onset of sexuality can be brutal and disorientating in the hormonal and psychological changes it induces, but it also highlights how women’s sexuality is closely policed by men, female peers and their adult guardians. Ginger’s growth into a selfish and horrible monster who undermines her sister and is happy to infect others via unprotected sex paints a complex picture of female teenage identity. Physical alterations brought about by the process of growing up may come dressed in corporeal abjection, but even more horrific is the realisation of the few identity models still available to women (namely, pre-sexual child or available adult). The ‘monstered’ body of the teenage girl is also the source of abjection in the films Teeth (Mitchell Litchtenstein, 2008) and Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009). In the former, a girl’s sexual organs become a literal vagina dentata capable of castrating partners, and in the later a sexually active teenager becomes a ‘maneater’ after being possessed by a demon. In neither is abjection written on the body, but hidden away in its darkest recesses: in Dawn’s (Jess Weixler) labia and in Jennifer’s (Megan Fox) feral, blood-puking alter-ego. Other contemporary films have resorted to graphic body horror in their denouncements of the traditional expectations of the appropriate behaviours of women. In Grave / Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), student Justine (Garance Marillier) develops a primal hunger upon being forced, during a university hazing stunt, to eat rabbit liver. Her subsequent extreme cannibalistic tendencies are richly evocative. Justine’s newly found appetite for the bodies of others may be read as a thinly-veiled comment on the visceral pangs of sexual awakening. Yet its destructive nature and coercive origin seem to point towards the ways in which women are peer-pressured into complying with specific gendered acts. Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau / In My Skin (2002) treads similar ground, with a main protagonist, Esther (Marina de Van) who develops an unhealthy obsession with self-harming that leads her to mutilate her own face and even tear out and preserve a patch of skin. The film implies that Esther’s journey of self-discovery is associated with her apparently perfect life, since it begins after she realises she has seemingly managed to damage her leg without noticing. The interplay between pain, feeling and curiosity, one that is tied up with an oblivious refusal to continue to engage with the social mores that keep her bound to her previous life (her work,

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her partner), is telling: was she really happy or merely pretending? Does her initial incapacity to feel not signify her ideological slumber? Her reawakening, though painful self-exploration, is depicted as a more sincere form of love based on a better understanding of her body and, ultimately, herself. When the Gothic deploys monstrous abjection, this tends to happen through the inclusion of a monstrous body that is presented in abject terms. Either gross corporeality or equally disgusting bodily fluids challenge the closely monitored boundary between outside and inside, or else certain traits are exaggerated (often supernaturally) and turned grotesque and macabre. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) is a good example of a film invested in critiquing contemporary racist rhetoric that conveys its strong message—that black bodies are still socially ‘othered’ by whites, even by communities who see themselves as liberal—by turning abjection upside down. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer dating a white woman, is abducted and hypnotised by her family, who run a brain transplantation programme for those whose bodies have become vulnerable or too old to function. Chris’s body is not monstered here, but rather commodified in a way that reveals how black people are still not treated as equal subjects. This is not just the case because Chris is reduced to his body and his rights are taken away from him. In reversing the racist view that black bodies are different or less desirable than white ones, difference is not overturned. As the film is at pains to show, the celebration of blacks in the film is itself steeped in stereotypes around athleticism, strength and endurance. The ‘Sunken Place’, the regressive mindscape into which Chris falls after he is hypnotised, is one of the most suggestive metaphors in recent horror cinema. His body floats in a nether-space, observing others from a distance through what appears to be a cinema or television screen. This visual construct suggests the social space that racial minorities inhabit in North-American society, as well as how black identity in the popular unconscious is created through (mis) representation in the media and cinema.38 Like the robotic bodies of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), the black bodies in Get Out are mere properties. This is a point emphasised by the fact that the consciousness of the recipient is pushed back. Black consciousness does not disappear, but it is ignored, imposed upon, silenced and disavowed. Get Out shows that abjection is social and that bodies need not be physically monstered to still be ‘othered’ by cultural discourse. The entrenchment in the modern, especially post-millennial, gothic of a clear sympathy for the monster has changed the role and effects of monstrosity, and thus of the type of abjection connected to their corporealities. Vampiric and zombie bodies may still be the subject of abject fear, as in films like 30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007), Daybreakers (Peter and Michael Spiering, 2010), The Horde (Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher, 2010) and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic series (2003–19), but the monsters in such texts are always presented as animalistic and predatorial, and as either lacking consciousness or a moral compass. The rise of the pin-up monster, best epitomised by the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8) and its vegetarian vampire Edward Cullen, as well as by sapient zombie in love ‘R’ in Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies

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(2010), suggests that bodies which were previously a catalyst for physical and social abjection have undergone a serious process of re-appreciation. R’s rotting body only seems to be a small problem for girlfriend Julie, and his monstrosity is ultimately redeemable, as a kiss cures him of the plague and returns him to a human state. Love for the ‘monster’ is connected in these novels with liberal thinking, tolerance and acceptance. In fact, the social reintegration of monsters is facilitated by their allies’ efforts to understand them. This does not only happen in the texts mentioned above, but also in the popular Charlaine Harris series The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–13), its television adaptation True Blood (2008–14), and the series In the Flesh (2013–14) and iZombie (2015–19), where ‘monster’ protagonists are outcasts and must accept forms of socialisation (the consumption of state-prescribed drugs or food substitutes) that actually control and limit their freedoms. Since language is an initial barrier in Warm Bodies, the morale is clear: good will and the desire to learn from one another is the only way out of discrimination and marginalisation. Sympathy for the monster is, partially, a result of the ascent of paranormal romance. It is natural that once quintessential gothic monsters had been co-opted for integrationist purposes, abjection centred on the graphic destruction of the body would once more become central to body horror. Despite its name, the ‘torture porn’ phenomenon, coined in a 2006 journalistic piece by David Edelstein, was not, strictly speaking, pornographic.39 It gained that soubriquet thanks to the intensity and relentlessness of the death and torture scenarios that peppered films made after the success of Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005).40 The delight and detail with which torture, punishment and, in some cases, death was filmed was misread as condemnable voyeuristic glee. In hindsight, not all of the films covered in Edelstein’s article could be said to belong to a distinct contemporary torture horror cycle. A film like The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) may be very visceral and bloody, but it was not aimed at a horror audience. Similarly, Irréversible / Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2003) has since been read as a film firmly entrenched in the cinematic context of what has been termed ‘the French extremity’, the corporeal and transgressive cycle of twenty-first-century films made by directors like Claire Denis, Alexandre Aja, Pascal Laugier and others. However, Edelstein did identify one of the key elements of ‘torture porn’, namely, its complex identificatory alignments via editing and the generation of sympathy for characters who, in turn, become torturers themselves.41 The hypocrisy of films like Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005) and The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (Tom Six, 2011), which try to repudiate and critique the gratuitous violence they simultaneously relish, make their consumption difficult and their dismissal as exploitative fare easy. The best of these films, Saw and Hostel, share a chthonian gothic aesthetic that connects the barbaric punishments visited on the victims—those of the Jigsaw killer in the former and those of the Elite Hunting club in the latter—with their settings and moral codes. Jigsaw’s is a barbaric, Biblical lex talionis, and Elite Hunting represent the inhumanity of neoliberal capitalism, with human bodies

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robbed of their rights and turned into disposable punching bags for psychopaths. The ugly deaths in these films mirror the ugly ideologies of their killers. Abjection here is elicited by the imaginative and graphic destruction of the bodies of the victims, who are torn open and mutilated for the enjoyment of others. In this respect, torture porn is not that different from exploitation and torture films of the 1970s, and many of them, such as The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010), were predictably remade for a gore-hungry public. 1970s and 1980s slasher franchises, notably Halloween and Friday the 13th, were also reactivated during this period, although in some cases the films are equally interested in the traumatic upbringings of the ‘monster’ killers. In Friday the 13th (Marcus Nispel, 2009) and Leatherface (Julie Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2017), abjection is informed by moral monstrosity, which is often the result of ostracism or childhood trauma. These films play like violent Southern gothic origin stories, the economic staleness of certain rural communities—the ones pictured in backwoods horror—transmuting into moral degeneration. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the remakes of Wrong Turn (Rob Schmidt, 2003) and The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006). In their deprivation, the killer families in these films revert to cannibalism. Physical deformities correlate with atavistic tendencies and, naturally, the nastiness of the violence perpetrated. I have identified complicity as one of the main problems for the type of abjection games played by torture horror. Gothic texts have always courted controversy for the amorality of their plots, spectacularising, as they sometimes do, social taboos like incest and criminal behaviours like stalking, coercion and torture. Certain films in the torture horror cycle may, in fact, be read as modern takes on the captive heroine motif so popular in the novels of Ann Radcliffe. In some of them, like Captivity (Roland Joffé, 2007), there is little questioning of the perversity and abuse of authority on the villain’s part. Sympathy is discouraged and the focus remains, as in the slasher, on the survival of the ‘final girl’. In others, like Bernard Rose’s Snuff-Movie (2005), a similar premise (the capture of an actress starring in what, at first, appears to be a snuff film) may be used to criticise surveillance culture and the ready availability of images of death and violence on the Internet. This modern scopophilia is rooted in systems of live feeds and digital informational technologies. In the most ideologically regressive of these torture horrors, however, punishment and murder constitute the sole spectacle. August Underground (Fred Vogel, 2001) and The Bunny Game (Adam Rehmeier, 2010) are made up of a number of murder pieces where people are terrorised and brutalised by a series of deranged killers. Vomiting, slashing, punching and a number of other forms of vexation play out over the thinnest of plots. Both August Underground and The Bunny Game also seek to blur the lines between reality and fiction, as some of the violence is, allegedly, only partially mediated or simulated. In the latter, for example, actress Rodleen Getsic is allegedly branded alive.42 To a certain extent, whether the violence is real matters less than the fact that films may be consumed as potentially so. This is enough to grant their various flirtations with abjection an additional layer of complicitous guilt for

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viewers.43 Although they may be read under a positive light as cautionary tales or as explorations of humanity’s basest, most depraved behaviours, films like August Underground and The Bunny Game also constitute horror’s murkier waters. In them, abject transgression descends into unchecked misogyny. This extreme form of body horror indicates that abjection has moved away from the conventionally monstrous body of the gothic monster and embraced the ‘othered’ mindscape of the sociopath.

Notes









1. I only cover fiction, film and television in this chapter, but body horror manifests across media, especially in horror video games. 2. For a more exhaustive list, see Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque: The ­Body-Monstrous’, in Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman (eds), Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 127–59. 3. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 162–78. 4. The film does, of course, eventually cast its actors through a horrific lens in the film’s closing scenes and thus undoes much of the previous contextualisation and normalisation of the freak body. 5. Cynthia Freeland refers to ‘sequences of heightened spectacle and emotion’ as ‘numbers’. In body horror, these are the scenes where the body either undergoes transformation, is attacked or else becomes the source of fear and anxiety for another character. Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Oxford and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), p. 256. 6. For more on the links between humour and horror, see William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 7. Graphic violence, especially the gratuitous kind, includes a strong element of disgust that is both culturally coded (the display of the open body, normally only found in the medical world) and instinctual (the perception of danger wired into human beings and animals when faced with images of slaughter and/or death). 8. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Abjection’, in William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), p. 1. 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 3. Italics in original. 10. Ibid. 11. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013), pp. 19–21. She concentrates on the cases of ‘chavs’, asylum seekers and gypsies in the UK, but her suggestions are useful beyond the national specificities of her study. 12. Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 83–99; Carol J. Clover, Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);

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X. Aldana Reyes Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (New York: SUNY Press, 1997). 13. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 9. 14. Ibid., p. 10. 15. Ibid., p. 13. 16. Ibid., p. 13. 17. Aldana Reyes, Horror Film and Affect, pp. 21–49. 18. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 7. 19. These debates are captured in Tina Kendall, ‘Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust’, ­Film-Philosophy 15.2 (2011), 1–10. 20. Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 49. 21. Ibid, p. 97. 22. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1990). 23. The case of splatter is very peculiar, since excess and slapstick humour can feature significantly. In cases such as Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), the realism of the graphic scenes is secondary to the impact and histrionics of the spectacle. 24. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: Wales University Press, 2014), pp. 3–8. 25. I am referring specifically to the bloody Jacobean (revenge) tragedy and to the theatre of the Grand Guignol. 26. On the history of the Hays Code in America, which stopped a burgeoning graphic horror industry in its tracks in the 1930s, see Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 30–86. 27. The ban on comic books was imposed in 1954. 28. See, for example, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, ‘Sex, Swearing and Respectability: Courting Controversy, HBO’s Original Programming and Producing Quality TV’, in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007), pp. 62–76. 29. Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen 1.1 (1986), 2–13. 30. The most extreme scenes were edited for the American version. 31. David Cronenberg dir., The Fly (1986); David Cronenberg dir., Videodrome (1983). 32. See Kenneth MacKinnon, ‘The Mainstream AIDS Movie Prior to the 1990s’, in Graeme Harper and Andrew Moor (eds), Signs of Life: Cinema and Medicine (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 33–44 (pp. 35–6). 33. Clive Barker, Books of Blood, vol. 1 (London: Sphere, 1984), p. 200. 34. Douglas E. Winter, Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 191. 35. See Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Clive Barker’s Late (Anti-)Horror Fiction: Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone’s New Myths of the Flesh’, in Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (ed.), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 194–207. 36. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (London: Abacus, 2012), pp. 52–3. 37. See Barbara Creed, ‘Ginger Snaps: The Monstrous Feminine as Femme Animale’, in Hannah Priest (ed.), She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 180–95. 38. For Peele’s thoughts on the ‘Sunken Place’, see Zack Sharf, ‘Get Out: Jordan Peele Reveals the Real Meaning Behind the Sunken Place’, IndieWire, 30 November 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/11/get-out-jordan-peele-explains-sunken-place-meaning-1201902567 (accessed 12 September 2018).

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39. David Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/index1.html (accessed 10 September 2018). 40. For a thorough analysis of the ‘torture porn’ phenomenon, its labelling, condemnation and development, see Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 41. Of Irréversible’s extended, static rape scene, Edelstein complained that he did not understand why he needed to be cinematically tortured himself: ‘I didn’t want to identify with the victim or the victimizer’. See Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex’. 42. Jenny Barrett, ‘More Than Just a Game: Breaking the Rules in The Bunny Game’, ­Cine-Excess E-Journal launch issue, http://www.cine-excess.co.uk/more-than-just-a-game. html (accessed 10 September 2018). 43. See Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘The Mediation of Death in Fictional Snuff: Reflexivity, Viewer Interpellation, and Ethical Implications’, in Neil Jackson, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson (eds), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 211–23.

Bibliography Aldana Reyes, Xavier, ‘Clive Barker’s Late (Anti-)Horror Fiction: Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone’s New Myths of the Flesh’, in Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (ed.), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 194–207. ———. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016). ———. ‘The Mediation of Death in Fictional Snuff: Reflexivity, Viewer Interpellation, and Ethical Implication’, in Neil Jackson, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson (eds), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 211–23. ———. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: Wales University Press, 2014). Barker, Clive, Books of Blood, vol. 1 (London: Sphere, 1984). Barrett, Jenny, ‘More Than Just a Game: Breaking the Rules in The Bunny Game’, ­Cine-Excess E-Journal launch issue, http://www.cine-excess.co.uk/more-than-just-a-game.html (accessed 10 September 2018). Berenstein, Rhona J., Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Bronfen, Elisabeth, ‘Abjection’, in William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), pp. 1–4. Brophy, Philip, ‘Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen 1.1 (1986), 2–13. Carroll, Noël, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1990). Clasen, Mathias, Why Horror Seduces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Clover, Carol J., Men Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Creed, Barbara, ‘Ginger Snaps: The Monstrous Feminine as Femme Animale’, in Hannah Priest (ed.), She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 180–95. ———. ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-Monstrous’, in Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman (eds), Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 127–59.

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———. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Dunn, Katherine, Geek Love (London: Abacus, 2012). Edelstein, David, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/index1.html (accessed 10 September 2018). Freeland, Cynthia, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Oxford and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). Jones, Steve, Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Kendall, Tina, ‘Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust’, Film-Philosophy 15.2 (2011), 1–10. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). MacKinnon, Kenneth, ‘The Mainstream AIDS Movie Prior to the 1990s’, in Graeme Harper and Andrew Moor (eds), Signs of Life: Cinema and Medicine (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 33–44. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass, ‘Sex, Swearing and Respectability: Courting Controversy, HBO’s Original Programming and Producing Quality TV’, in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007), pp. 62–76. Paul, William, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Pinedo, Isabel Cristina, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (New York: SUNY Press, 1997). Prince, Stephen, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Sharf, Zack, ‘Get Out: Jordan Peele Reveals the Real Meaning Behind the Sunken Place’, IndieWire, 30 November 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/11/get-out-jordan-peele-explains-sunken-place-meaning-1201902567 (accessed 12 September 2018). Tyler, Imogen, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). Williams, Linda, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 83–99. Winter, Douglas E., Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic (London: HarperCollins, 2001).

Torture Porn Tosha R. Taylor

In 2006, film critic David Edelstein coined the term ‘torture porn’ to describe a trend in violent, gory horror films particularly exemplified by Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Wolf Creek (2005) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005).1 These films, he argued, presented a troubling narrative and visual focus on extreme acts of torture. He reported being disturbed by such films and questioned the reasons for their popularity. Edelstein acknowledged that gory, violent horror films were not a new phenomenon, but found these more recent films to be distinct from their predecessors due to their high production values and their release in multiplex cinemas. Admitting to having enjoyed violent horror in the past, Edelstein drew a line at this particular trend. His review posed a number of seemingly rhetorical questions that ranged from the ethics of consuming such films to the sense that the viewer (here, Edelstein himself) was being tortured alongside the fictional victim. Other critics quickly adopted the term. Because its initial coinage categorised films retroactively, it appeared to allow the recognition of other films that warranted the label even if they predated Edelstein’s review. Torture porn, it seemed to its detractors, was a greater “problem” than at first realised. As the genre trend continued, so did the use of the label. “Torture porn” now receives wide usage by critics, scholars and fans and encompasses a wide variety of post-2000 horror films. Popular, albeit contested, use of the genre label has not equated unanimous acceptance of early arguments about torture porn. Indeed, Edelstein’s pronouncement has found much opposition. Since the term was coined specifically so that the emerging genre it describes could be castigated, a great deal of subsequent scholarship on the genre has grappled explicitly with Edelstein’s arguments. Monographs on the subject have gone further to challenge greater critical and popular denigrations of the genre, suggesting that many, if not most, of the scholars engaged in the study of torture porn approach it from a position of advocacy for its recognition as a valuable area of the larger horror genre. Yet while there are some

T. R. Taylor (*)  Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_25

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consensuses in lay and scholarly studies of the genre, what we also find in torture porn is a set of rich, complex contradictions—among critics, among filmmakers, among scholars, among fans and within the films themselves. The films Edelstein initially identified as torture porn remain exemplars of the genre. Indeed, while neither their narratives nor their focus on violence was wholly unique in horror prior to their making, their great popularity at the precise point in time at which Edelstein wrote lends them creditable power of influence over subsequent similar films. The themes and tendencies that have been consistently noted in torture porn films are first quite evident in these. While other considerations will be discussed below, applicability of the “torture porn” label is first determined by a film’s particular approach to violence—who commits it and against whom and how much of it is put on display for the spectator. Torture rather than death creates the primary source of tension for characters and spectators, and the camera reveals acts of torture and their effects on mortified bodies in great, visceral detail. In keeping with Edelstein’s original assessment of the genre, films that receive the label focus on human villains; they are only occasionally connected to the supernatural.2 Victims are typically people with whom villains have few or no previous connections. Often, victims are tourists in unfamiliar territory, or, also commonly, they are people the villain has observed over a brief period prior to the main narrative of the film.3 Captivity emerges as a common theme across most torture porn films, as abduction and confinement facilitate the infliction of extremely brutal violence and enable the films’ graphic visual focus on it.4 Saw (2004) and its seven sequels (2005–2017) consistently uphold the typology sketched above. In the first film, Dr. Lawrence Gordon and photographer Adam Stanheight awaken to find themselves in a dirty industrial bathroom in which they have both been chained to pipes. A corpse lies on the floor between them. Tapes that have been planted on them reveal that they are to be the next victims of the serial killer Jigsaw, who forces his captives through elaborate “games” that require them to sustain grievous bodily harm in hopes of earning their release. Both Dr. Gordon and Adam have been tasked with killing the other, and the hacksaws with which they have both been supplied make it clear to them that the survivor is also expected to saw off his own foot in order to escape. Ultimately, Dr. Gordon fails to kill Adam but severs his own foot and attempts to crawl away; meanwhile, Adam learns that the corpse has actually been Jigsaw himself, who abandons Adam to die in the bathroom. Flashbacks and a secondary narrative that occur outside the principle action reveal Jigsaw’s past crimes, which often deploy complex “traps”. The most prominent of these, which remained a visual staple of the franchise, is the colloquially named “reverse bear trap”, a large, spring-loaded metal contraption affixed to the victim’s head which explosively pries the skull apart if it is not unlocked before its timer runs out. Prior to Dr. Gordon and Adam’s abduction, a drug addict named Amanda awakens in the trap; her tape tells her she must cut the key from the stomach of a paralysed fellow prisoner. Amanda is successful, and her survival of the first film’s signature trap becomes key to several subsequent narratives. Other acts

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of torture in the film include a maze of razor wire through which a naked man must crawl and a chair that holds the victim in place as two automatic drills bore through his skull. Physical torture is primarily depicted through these flashbacks in this first film, but as the franchise progresses, torture occurs in the present and the traps become increasingly complex and violent. Jigsaw’s stated motive is rehabilitation. His victims, he claims, have wasted their lives or have behaved ungraciously; therefore, successful negotiation of his traps is meant to teach them how to live. As his expanding network of conspirators begins creating their own traps, however, the traps become purely sadistic. A personal desire to harm someone is, however, the more popular motive in torture porn and drives the captivities of tourists in Hostel. Here, backpackers arrive in Slovakia seeking drugs and sex. Unbeknownst to them, the hostel to which they have been directed serves as a holding and marketing point for the Elite Hunting Club, an international cabal that sells young tourists to high-bidding clients for the purposes of torturing them. Where Saw has most captives tortured remotely using machines, Hostel depicts human cruelty more directly. In the first prolonged torture scene, Josh is pierced by a drill at multiple points, has his Achilles tendon severed, and is made to see his own reflection as his throat is slit. Later, Paxton suffers the loss of several fingers in visual close-up by a chainsaw. After he has killed his captor, he passes other scenes of torture, ultimately discovering another captive, Kana, whose face has been burned and cut away enough to expose her eyeball, which Paxton himself is forced to remove. Wolf Creek locates the tourist narrative to the Australian outback. Here, however, instead of a mysterious organisation, travellers Liz, Kristy, and Ben are abducted by the sadistic outdoorsman Mick Taylor. Mick subjects them to multiple acts of torture, often through grievous but non-fatal wounds. These include Ben’s crucifixion and the “head on a stick”, in which Liz’s spinal cord is severed, rendering her conscious but powerless to defend herself. Films that followed in the vein of these include seven sequels to Saw and two each for Hostel and Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects, Turistas (2006; released as Paradise Lost in the United Kingdom), Deadgirl (2008), Captivity (2009), The Collector (2009) and its sequel The Collection (2012), The Woman (2011), and the Human Centipede trilogy (2009–2015), which is discussed in more detail below. Yet while these films are commonly considered prominent examples of torture porn and receive consistent mention in scholarship, they do not constitute the entire genre. Furthermore, considering their relationship to the larger horror genre, and consideration of the torture porn debate, reveals a much more complicated categorisation. “Torture porn” itself is a contentious label. Initially designed to denigrate the genre, it immediately became a lowbrow label few filmmakers or studios would desire. Its linguistic association with pornography does not bode well for marketing. Its application lacks consistency. Inconsistencies are often based on subjective taste criteria. For instance, Jones finds that auteur films by European directors depicting and aestheticising graphic violence are able to avoid the label when discussed from a positive perspective, while American genre films are not granted

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the same leniency.5 While the French films Baise-moi (2000), Irréversible (2002), Martyrs (2008) and Frontière(s) (2008) have appeared in writing on torture porn, they are not as universally considered to be part of the genre. Film critic James Quandt enabled a separation of violent French films from torture porn by coining “New French Extremity” as its own subgenre.6 Both the nearly identical Austrian original and the American remake of auteur Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997, 2008) have been described as tortuous for the viewer due to their heightened tension as the viewer watches two parents and their young child be tortured, yet they depict very little gore and so their placement among torture porn films remains questionable. Taste appears to be a significant factor in the label’s application. Its early uses often seemed purposeful attempts to simply label horror films the critic or fan disliked; the term’s disparaging, shocking, even politicised nature could validate such personal dislikes.7 While concern for more recent horror will be further problematised below, we must not forget that the passage of time may heighten the perceived taste level of a pop cultural artefact. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), for instance, is a clear forebear to the torture porn film and while it received much criticism upon its release for graphic depictions of violence, it is now considered a classic. Disliking it today could be interpreted as simply a matter of individual taste and risks positioning the viewer in contempt of critical consensus. Disliking a wave of recent films critically panned for their problematic content, however, positions the viewer within what consensus implies is the “right side” of film culture. In doing so, the viewer also positions themselves in a superior position to those on the “wrong side” who consume or even express enthusiasm for such films. The “porn” portion of the term further discourages inclusion of auteur works (despite, for instance, the graphic sexuality of Lars von Trier’s work) and films marketed to appeal to highbrow sensibilities. Comparisons between pornography and horror, of course, pre-date Edelstein’s article. Even pre-2000 horror scholarship draws such comparisons. Writing in the late 1990s, Pinedo finds similarities in pornography’s and horror’s focus on exposing the human body. The former focuses on exposing unclothed and eroticised flesh; the latter focuses on exposing what is beneath the flesh.8 A visual focus on violence and gore aligns extreme horror films with hardcore pornography in particular.9 As this latter category may deploy seemingly violent imagery and language, it enables a linguistic partnership via the genre label. A significant issue thus arises in the conceptualisation of the genre even with specific, concrete examples. Groupings of torture porn films, particularly for the purposes of denigrating the genre, may overlook stylistic, narrative, and ideological variety within those groupings.10 Jones argues that attempts to delineate torture porn as a distinct genre result in a problematic understanding of these films and their connection to the larger horror genre.11 Among the misunderstandings in popular discussions of torture porn is the idea that these films cross a line in their violence.12 Yet, as Jones points out, because the label retroactively applies to very violent films, there is no room for it to not be violent.13 A purportedly supernatural film that seems to be about a possessed doll can, through a narrative twist, actually be about a violent man using a doll to cover his actions as in The Boy (2016), but

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a torture porn film cannot fail to depict torture; the retroactive label simply would not be given to it. Furthermore, based on descriptions of the genre itself, we would assume torture porn films go far beyond most other horror films in their violence, and certainly they must transgress the boundaries found in those horror films that have earned critical acclaim and cultural respect. This, too, does not hold up as a consistent, reliable argument. The brutal violence of the original The Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and I Spit on Your Grave (1978) is repeated in their torture porn-era remakes, yet despite the label’s retroactive nature, it has not universally been given to the originals themselves. Alternatively, some of the quintessential torture porn films do not actually contain the expected level of violence. The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009) may only exist on the border of torture porn. Despite its gruesome premise, the first film shows very little gore. The surgical operation is visually related to the viewer through Dr. Heiter’s simplistic diagrams, which depict no gore. The most graphic image of the procedure is a close-up of a scalpel cutting the first strip of flesh from one unconscious captive’s buttock. Once attached mouth-to-anus, the captives are shown to be in constant pain, but the film declines the opportunity to indulge in more graphic depictions. Even in the anticipated scene in which one captive finally defecates into the mouth of the next, no faeces is actually shown. Thus, despite its explicit, specific origin and several consistent elements, the term “torture porn” cannot be considered a static, clearly definable category. So complicated is the term’s application that Lowenstein argues that the genre itself does not exist.14 Yet this argument, too, poses a problem in that the term’s use has not only brought it into existence but has also been taken up by such a wide variety of users. Questions of what is and what is not torture porn, as well as questions as to motivations behind the term’s use, do not end, however, with films’ themes and content. In theory, torture porn need not necessarily be linked to a specific country. Indeed, Edelstein’s original description of the genre included films from two countries (the United States and Australia) with consideration of a third (France). However, it is typically associated with the United States not only due to the number of torture porn films created by American filmmakers, but also due to its frequent concern for American politics. This may be due, in part, to the culture out of which it emerged. Despite some earlier and non-American films that appear to warrant the label (such as Baise-moi and Irréversible), torture porn rose to prominence and to prominent concern after 11 September 2001. As a result, much of the writing on it (including Edelstein’s original critique) links the genre to 9/11 and the United States’ military response.15 A common critical argument is that what the American viewer finds here is a negotiation of the violence intrinsic to global conflicts in which the United States has become involved.16 Wetmore in particular argues that torture porn films present American viewers with the opportunity to confront the threat of terrorism.17 9/11 brought this threat not only to the forefront of American consciousness but into the American home as the 24-hour news cycle endlessly broadcast images of the Twin Towers burning and collapsing in

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the days and weeks following the attack. For young people coming of age in the early 2000s, torture porn may have reflected the post-9/11 worldview imposed upon them, in which their lives were constantly (perceived as) imperilled.18 The American military response further emphasised this sense of threat, as fears of American troops being targeted for violence on grounds of their nationality alone became heightened. Fear of violence against Americans found an inversion with the revelation of abuses against prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Where the “not American” seemed a dangerous global monster before, now Americans were asked to confront knowledge of their own forces as such. Abu Ghraib has conspicuous echoes in the imagery and interactions we find in many torture porn films. Moreover, post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib torture films necessarily invite those events as discursive contexts.19 Hostel has particularly interested scholars of torture porn, as it presents one of the most conspicuous and overtly political treatments of the intersection of torture and “Americanness”. While the Elite Hunting Club appears to take captives of all nationalities, it is Americans that fetch the highest price. Their ranking in the Club’s prices reflects the newfound American fear that Americans abroad could be at an increased risk of harm.20 Josh and Paxton’s nationality receives emphasis throughout the film as they find themselves increasingly at odds with locals, who shift from seeming welcoming to regarding them with contempt. The aggressive, invasive American superpower is here punished through the torture of two American tourists. It is only the Americans whose torture is depicted in full with dedicated attention. Notably, as the first torture scene of the film, Josh’s torture begins with a shot of him in a hood that bears an unsettling similarity to those forced upon prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The narrative of the tortured American tourist also occurs in Turistas, The Human Centipede: First Sequence, and The Green Inferno (2013). In the first, Americans backpacking in Brazil are taken captive for the purpose of black market organ harvesting. Their selection as victims appears to symbolically punish the United States for capitalistic exploitation of other countries, including those to which the US has closer geographic links. Dutch director Tom Six’s first Human Centipede film sees two American tourists abducted by a sadistic German doctor and joined together (along with a Japanese man) through a grotesque surgical procedure. Directed by Hostel’s Eli Roth, The Green Inferno pays homage to Cannibal Holocaust (1980) as it depicts American tourists being taken prisoner by a violent South American tribe. The tribe tortures the tourists, ultimately meaning to cannibalise them and, in virgin Justine’s case, to mutilate her genitals. In all films’ cases, American tourists’ nationality marks them as victims for extreme brutality. So linked to post-9/11 America is the genre that some critics do not include films outside the United States under the torture porn label, despite Edelstein’s inclusion of Wolf Creek. For example, Featherstone and Johnson exclude the graphically violent, torture-and-rape-filled A Serbian Film (2010) due to its allegorical engagement with Serbian politics.21 The Tortured (2010), which depicts two parents’ abduction and torture of the man they believe killed their son, has

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received the genre label, but its French-Canadian predecessor, Les 7 jours du talion (2010), does so much less frequently, despite showing more acts of torture. East Asian films whose content and aesthetic style might have earned the label had they been made in the West have been categorised under the “Asia Extreme” brand by producer Hamish McAlpine, who used the latter category to distribute East Asian horror through Tartan Films.22 In this case, the distributor’s label functions as a genre label.23 Some East Asian films, such as the Japanese Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001) and the South Korean Oldboy (2003), are sometimes categorised as torture porn, but as with the case of the New French Extremity films, with far less consistency. The primary exception appears to be Grotesque (2009), which focuses on sexual torture. Principle characters’ nationality may thus be used as another metric in determining and unpacking torture porn films. Yet it is not a universal determiner, and a number of prominent fears in the larger discourse around torture porn concern the relationship between films and their spectators and, respectively, relations between characters themselves. Horror films have long been criticised for encouraging spectatorial identification with rapists, torturers, and murderers. These acts of violence are typically considered gendered, as they are predominantly committed by men against women in the genre. Laura Mulvey’s writing on spectatorial identification, which has served as a foundation for feminist film theory, locates the male killer’s perspective within the camera eye.24 Through this alignment, she argues, the spectator looks upon the female victim’s bodily destruction with enjoyment. Mulvey updated her arguments to acknowledge and respond to complexities not initially accounted for in her work, but the dominant discourse around horror has maintained the sense that horror violence uncritically places the viewer in the position of the villain. Edelstein’s characterisation of torture porn assumes the viewer derives pleasure from watching scenes of graphic violence.25 However, his admission that he felt as if he were being tortured while watching torture porn films creates an implicit contradiction, unless the writer discounts himself from the rest of the film’s audience. The assumption that viewers will, like the fictional villains, enjoy seeing acts of torture inflicted on helpless victims participates in the same dichotomous separations found in a number of media that have caused greater societal concern and, furthermore, approaches the horror film spectator as someone with questionable taste and morals. Further complicating the expectation that viewers feel aligned with villains rather than victims is Edelstein’s rhetorical suggestion that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) be included in the subgenre. While he ultimately does not include it, the film more clearly encourages an implicit approval of torture than many horror films. Depicting Christ’s final hours, the film caused controversy and even received an R-rating in the United States (and an initial 18 rating in the UK) for its graphic and prolonged depiction of brutal violence that ultimately culminates in crucifixion. Because the film was made and marketed as a Christian film, its violence is presented as superficially repugnant but necessary. While Saw,

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Hostel, Wolf Creek and a host of other horror films allow hope for escape that is sometimes fulfilled, The Passion not only offers no such hope but also presents a narrative which, by its corresponding theology, requires that this torture be carried out as a positive outcome. Horror-centric scholarship enables a more fluid and complex understanding of the spectator’s relationship to the torture porn film. Such films may allow the viewer to interact with feared violence without posing any real risks to themselves.26 Creed notes the potential to alternate between identifying with the victim and the villain, and this double identification, she finds, further permits voyeurism within a simultaneous sense of safety.27 Curiosity about violence against oneself and others and the desire to see rather than to look away, a desire to which the horror film implicitly appeals, may be satisfied through cinematic engagement. Furthermore, a fluid movement between points of identification may enable the viewer to engage more closely with the horror film in particular, as it may increase interest in the film’s conflict and heighten the tension necessary in the genre. Edelstein also cites greater character development in torture porn films for his discomfort with them; unlike their predecessors, he argues, these films feature distinct characters the audience might actually care for.28 His view positions torture porn against Sontag’s assessment of the viewer in relation to the subjects of violent images; from a place of safety, this viewer engages with the suffering subject but fails to recognise or empathise with their pain.29 However, Edelstein’s argument here is another that makes larger assumptions that should not be generalised. While this first treatment of torture porn credits it with more interesting, unique and developed characters than previous violent horror films, this cannot be taken as an objective rule. Sally of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is hardly interchangeable with Laurie of Halloween (1978) or Nancy of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). It is also a great error to assume that these characters do not inspire sympathy. Conversely, a viewer may not necessarily feel any great sympathy for torture porn’s characters. Character development does not automatically elicit spectatorial identification or sympathy. Indeed, as the Saw franchise expands to provide increasingly complex stories for its characters, many are revealed to be as morally dubious and violent as Jigsaw himself. Their torture as they fall prey to each other’s traps thus does not particularly invite either spectatorial sympathy or identification. Critics caution against examining such films for their encouragement of viewers’ identification with either the victim or the villain.30 Indeed, while identification and empathy are certainly worthwhile concerns in the greater study of horror, we risk oversimplifying the genre and its discursive value by expecting clear spectatorial identification, or perhaps even any spectatorial identification at all. Torture porn seems to especially call this critical tendency into question, as the label’s origin invokes it while the films themselves complicate it. Another common accusation levelled against torture porn is misogyny.31 Certainly the genre is rife with images of women being stabbed, cut, burned, dismembered, raped and murdered, typically by men. The controversial billboard for Captivity brought concern for misogyny in torture porn to the forefront of the

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discussion, as critics and writers, including Joss Whedon, expressed vocal disdain for the images of actress Elisha Cuthbert in increasingly imperilled conditions with captions reading “Abduction”, “Confinement”, “Torture” and “Termination”. Whedon was so disturbed by the billboard that he penned an article entitled “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death” to lament the torture porn genre as a whole.32 While there can be no denying the great level of violence against women in torture porn, this common criticism, too, is not without its complications. Women do appear to make up most of the genre’s victims, thus aligning it with the slasher and supernatural ghost narratives, but torture porn does not necessarily give unprecedented attention to assaulting them. Many signs of women’s peril, such as tearful close-ups and screaming as well as images of male attackers towering over vulnerable female bodies, are hardly unique to torture porn. Despite Whedon’s fears, Captivity failed to show a girl get beaten to death; instead, much of her torture is psychological, with a forced cannibalism scene serving as an anomaly in its physical abjection. A survey of sexual violence in popularly acknowledged torture porn films reveals that they are not as prone to sexualising torture as criticism, or even negative interpretations of the genre’s name, would suggest. Graphic depictions of sexual violence are absent from many of the most widely known and denigrated torture porn films. Hostel, for instance, contains explicit sexual imagery, but none occurs within the context of torture. Josh’s torture by the Dutch Businessman conspicuously evokes sexual threat, but the film does not show the Businessman committing an actual sexual assault. The same is true of Kana’s torture by the American Client. Hostel: Part II (2007) includes a more explicit sexual threat, this time against female victims, but it does not permit the men who make such threats to fulfil them. Here, the most sexually charged scene involves a female client, addressed as Mrs. Bathory in reference to Erzsébet Báthory, who strips naked and orgasms in the blood of her victim, who is suspended, also naked, above her. The scene certainly is coded as a sexual assault, but does not become a conventional one. The Saw franchise avoids sexuality even more conspicuously. None of its eight films includes sexual violence among their acts of torture. The first Human Centipede, which gained far more ground in the cultural zeitgeist than its sexually explicit sequels, limits its sexual threats to a local man who makes crude remarks to Jenny and Lindsay. Even as Dr. Heiter puts sedatives into the women’s drinks to begin their abduction, his lack of sexual intent is clear. In the contentiously included Funny Games, Paul and Peter force Anna to strip in order to make her (and the viewer) think they are going to rape her, but immediately order her to get dressed again. She is shown in her underwear, but the camera never exposes her naked body. Due to the film’s self-reflexivity and deliberate accusations against the viewer themselves, this act subversively entices the viewer who wants to see sexual violence and threatens the viewer who does not. Some films, of course, incorporate elements of sexual violence. Wolf Creek includes a brief scene of sexual assault from a distance of which the spectator loses sight when the focalising character, Liz, looks away. House of 1000

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Corpses (2003) implies that the Firefly family sexually assault their captives but does not depict such acts. The Devil’s Rejects, however, does include two. In the first, Mother Firefly is assaulted by Officer Wydell in retribution for his brother’s death in the previous film. In the second, Otis vaginally penetrates a hostage with the barrel of his gun. In The Woman, quintessential family patriarch Chris Cleek abducts a feral woman in order to “civilize” her through torture that culminates in a rape; his young son, having secretly observed the rape, then uses pliers to tear one of the woman’s nipples off. Eroticised imagery in Captivity’s controversial billboard campaign suggested sexual torture, but the act of rape depicted in the actual film occurs when Jennifer has sex with her captor while believing him to be a fellow captive. “Hardcore” sexual violence does occur in some torture porn films. The Last House on the Left (2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (2010) include brutal rape scenes, but these are remakes of films that were just as brutal in their depictions and thus do not incontrovertibly indicate a recent fascination with sexual violence against women as Whedon feared. The most explicit films in this regard typically do not gain as much mainstream attention, nor do they attain the wide release and distribution enjoyed by the “multiplex” films that initially exemplified the genre. Among these are the Japanese horror film Grotesque, which depicts multiple instances of graphic sexual torture, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011), The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence (2015), Deadgirl and The Bunny Game (2010). New French Extremity films Irréversible, which Edelstein acknowledges, and Baise-moi feature extremely violent rapes, but the NFE film most often called torture porn, Martyrs, features no sexual violence at all. A Serbian Film depicts multiple violent rapes, including the rapes of multiple women, an infant, and a small male child, yet as an Eastern European film that received a much narrower release, it was not interpreted as a sign of horror’s greater problem with misogyny as more popular American films were. Sexual violence in torture porn is not exclusively limited to men assaulting women. Frost, for instance, finds that through a homoerotic subtext and visual coding, Hostel locates its first featured male captive in the position expected of women in horror.33 Australian torture film The Loved Ones (2009) places a male teenager at the mercy of a deranged female classmate, who molests him just out of view of the camera and threatens greater assault later. The suburban American torture porn film Neighbor (2009) features a far more graphic assault by a woman against a male captive. All three films, furthermore, forgo the typical humorous treatment of male sexual assault to instead present it as abject and horrifying. Through this uncommon approach, these torture porn films actually subvert hegemonic sexual discourses. While torture porn cannot be said to subvert all sexual discourses, particularly with regard to misogynistic violence, its engagement with gendered violence does ask us, especially as horror fans, to evaluate our own ethical boundaries. A particular case is that of Deadgirl. As Jones outlines, Deadgirl depicts explicit sexual violence by teenagers against a captive woman, but did not garner the same level of concern as similar torture porn films, such as those that were banned from

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UK cinemas.34 What sets Deadgirl apart from its banned contemporaries, Jones notes, is that its acts of rape and torture are carried out against a zombie.35 The teenage boys do not know that their captive is a zombie when they discover and begin abusing her, but the audience’s knowledge may allow some justification or dismissal of the abuse as legitimate. Screenwriter Trent Haaga makes this justification, and, as Jones points out, his defence of the film engages in a misogynistic dehumanisation of the abuse victim.36 Haaga’s argument equates the Deadgirl’s undead status with a total lack of awareness and indeed an incapacity for it; however, the film imbues her with a greater apparent cognisance than is typical even in zombie films. As she fixes her eyes on the boys and observes their observance of her, Deadgirl appears far more conscious than many cinematic zombies. Haaga’s statements position Deadgirl against other torture porn films that do not depict rape or focus on violence against one particular gender with the argument that the latter are offensively misogynistic while Deadgirl is not, simply because the brutal sexual torture of Deadgirl is committed against a woman who, albeit conscious, is technically no longer alive.37 Haaga has continued to defend the film against accusations of misogyny but has backed away from an insistence that the abuses the film depicts are lesser than those depicted in non-rape-centric films and his admitted positioning of the viewer as either one of the two boys. Perhaps having learned from reactions to his initial defence, he has agreed with the general assessment that his film explores misogyny and that the teenage boys are its true villains.38 On a post that has now been removed from his personal blog, he admits that the sequel would have responded to accusations of misogyny.39 These subsequent statements, however aligned with feminist interpretations of the film, are conspicuously at odds with his earlier attitude towards the film and its critics. His revision accompanied his release of his screenplay for an intended sequel, which reconfigured the dynamics of the first film by having a woman discover the new “Deadgirl” and proceed to use her in a revenge plot. However, this script, too, indicated some disconnect between what misogynistic sexual representation is and what Haaga believed it to be. If we overlook its screenwriter, however, Deadgirl does raise worthy ethical questions. Indeed, if one remained unaware of Haaga’s thoughts and the film’s planned sequel, they could easily interpret Deadgirl as a brutal but feminist exploration of misogyny that uses a captive zombie to illustrate what misogynists think of women, as some feminist reviewers generously did. Jones argues that Deadgirl’s value is in its (accidental) subversion.40 The film does not characterise its rapists as obvious monsters but rather as typical white, middle-class teenage boys. Their actions reflect a toxic masculinity that enables the objectification of women, especially through the nullification of the need for consent on the grounds that Deadgirl cannot actively protest. The inadvertent exposure of harmful behaviours excused for or even expected of such young men occurs most powerfully through the film’s seeming protagonist, Rickie. Throughout the film, Rickie expresses doubts about JT’s abuse of Deadgirl, and his reluctance to participate more actively in her abuse occurs alongside his attraction to the quintessential cinematic high school girl, Joann. After the film’s climax and JT’s defeat,

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Rickie’s previous characterisation makes it seem that he will enter into a wholesome romance with Joann. However, Joann rejects him. The film’s final minutes reveal that, rather than accepting this rejection, Rickie has allowed Deadgirl to bite Joann, thus transforming her into a zombie. Rickie now keeps Joann as JT kept Deadgirl. Here, we see the young man who believes that because he is not like JT, he is owed the girl he desires; when this notion is challenged, he, too becomes a captor and a rapist who refuses to see the victimised woman as human. Deadgirl’s accidental subversion is particularly significant because it is achieved by the film itself rather than by its creators. Here, the torture porn film itself, not a maker or critic, enables an indictment of misogyny. Hyland notes a similar contradiction in the reception of Takashi Miike’s torture film Audition (1999), which, he argues, often sees the film characterised as a feminist one despite misogynistic elements in Miike’s body of work.41 However, based on the existing criticism of the genre, torture porn would seem at odds with feminist approaches to horror or even to feminist viewership. A notable instance of this seeming prohibition occurs in a Broadly interview with horror fans Anna Bogutskaya and Olivia Howe, who relate how their interest in horror led them to form a fan collective. They appear to the draw the line, however, at torture porn. While Bogutskaya does not position feminism and torture porn at complete odds, she and Howe both express distaste for the genre for reasons similar to Edelstein’s.42 Bogutskaya does credit Inside (2007) as a torture-focused film that explores women’s issues and trauma, yet this acknowledgment overlooks explorations of women’s trauma in several torture porn films and, noticeably, grants leniency to a New French Extremity film. The opposition to torture porn expressed in an interview highlighting women’s consumption of horror underscores the impact of discourses surrounding the genre that the genre itself does not always uphold. Popular responses to the genre resemble a moral panic. Film critics and media writers have often described the genre with sensational language. Opposition to torture porn shows concern for morality on part of the films themselves and their makers.43 The lack of temporal connections in anti-torture porn critiques further indicates a desire to interpret these films as evidence of disturbing cultural trends of the twenty-first century. Common arguments are that the rise and consumption of these films indicate a moral decline in society as a whole, that they will condition viewers to desire even more extreme violence, and that they may even inspire viewers to commit acts of extreme violence themselves.44 Torture porn’s popularity inspires additional anxiety and may, furthermore, add to its distinction from previous similar films. Unlike the video nasties that became the subject of a moral panic in the 1980s, torture porn plays across mainstream cinemas to wide audiences; indeed, its multiplex presence is one of its earliest qualifiers.45 Some of the fear inspired by graphically violent films may be due, in part, to the tendency of many horror films to leave much of their bodily violence to the imagination.46 The image itself inspires controversy because of its simultaneous power to conceal or to reveal.47 The torture porn film confronts the viewer with images of utmost

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cruelty and exposes the human body in glorified, graphic destruction. It is thus not surprising that the popularity of such films would inspire great consternation. However, torture porn films have not spread unchecked. Like the video nasties before them, torture porn films have been subjected to censorship and legal prohibition. Distribution of Grotesque was banned in the UK for, according to the BBFC, focusing on acts of sadism, including sexual torture, to a greater degree than the torture porn films that popularised the genre.48 The Bunny Game and The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence were banned for similar reasons. The latter film was later permitted release after some material was cut. To pass British censors, A Serbian Film also underwent post-production cuts. In addition to the re-release of torture porn predecessor Cannibal Holocaust in 2006, New Zealand has banned Hostel: Part II, the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave, The Human Centipede 2 and A Serbian Film. The Human Centipede 2 has also been banned in Australia. Saw IV (2007) was initially banned in Romania. Saw VI (2009) is also banned in Ukraine for its content, while both Hostel films are banned for their content and their political treatment of Eastern Europe. Frontière(s), the 2008 Funny Games remake and Saw VI have been banned in Thailand. Filmmakers knowingly working in torture porn may choose to engage with the fears the genre itself inspires. Although the first Human Centipede film gave less visual attention to gore than many torture porn films, the controversy surrounding it reveals the moral panic around the genre itself. Its sequel, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, capitalises on this panic. One promotional campaign simply depicted viewers reacting to purportedly seeing the film without showing any actual footage. Their reactions are reminiscent of classic ballyhoo practices now translated for the contemporary horror audience; with the exception of one man who appears to be masturbating, they appear shocked, horrified and reluctant to keep watching, and two viewers vomit. The film’s plot itself creates a grotesque parody of the moral panic. A ­blackand-white film featuring a largely non-verbal antagonist as its key focaliser, Full Sequence depicts a security guard’s obsession with the original film. He has devoted an entire scrapbook to images from the film and actors’ photos, and he habitually watches the film at work. Mirroring concerns that torture porn may inspire real-life acts, Martin abducts twelve people, including actress Ashlynn Yennie, who portrayed Jenny in the first film, in order to create his own human centipede. Here, the film violently departs from the visual restraint of its predecessor. Lacking the fictional Dr. Heiter’s surgical skills, Martin simply staples captives’ mouths and anuses together. When members of the centipede fail to defecate, Martin injects them with laxatives, and the faeces that was visually left to the imagination by the first film literally splatters across the camera lens itself. Martin sexually fetishises the centipede and, after wrapping his penis in barbed wire, rapes the final woman in the sequence. The final shot of the film at first implies that this has all been Martin’s fantasy, but an off-camera diegetic sound brings that interpretation into question. Nonetheless, the film’s stark brutality mocks criticism that overhyped the level of violence in its predecessor.

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The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence is the most self-reflexive film of the trilogy. Where Full Sequence takes the original concept into full torture porn territory, Final Sequence ironically engages with the tropes and cultural anxieties surrounding the genre as it simultaneously satirises the American prison industrial complex. All characters in the film are stock parodies taken to grotesque extremes, surpassing even the typical expectations of torture porn villains. Actors Dieter Laser (Dr. Heiter in the first film) and Lawrence Harvey (Martin in the second) return as Bill Boss and Dwight Butler, the former a tyrannical warden and the latter an accountant in an American prison. When the megalomaniacal, violently sexist and racist Bill seeks a way to control the rowdy prisoners, Dwight brings him the DVDs of the previous two Human Centipede films. Surgically attaching all 500 prisoners to each other in the method of the films will, Dwight believes, productively solve the problem. They enlist the help of writer and director Tom Six, who plays himself. At first approving of the operation, Six is eventually driven to vomiting abjection as he sees the real-life manifestation of his concept. These films’ mocking engagement with the moral panic around their predecessor, and indeed around torture porn in general, further reveals a subversive quality in the genre. Certainly, Full Sequence and Final Sequence offer up more graphic brutality than even many horror fans may wish to see, but the metatextual use of a character’s enjoyment of First Sequence as a narrative framework in both offers its own critique. The films that critics so denigrated early in torture porn’s history typically did not go this far, yet were discussed as if they had. Therefore, these films present themselves as merely realising greater cultural fears about the power of the horror film. Despite the above examples, torture porn is not ideologically ­revolutionary. Indeed, even the genre’s advocates find fault in its perceived failure to subvert tropes.49 It frequently relies on their deployment: the naive woman who fails to realise danger, the crude tourist, the ultraviolent monster who pushes human depravity to its extremes. Likewise, it often fails to complicate subjects that warrant complication. Finally, despite the complexities scholars have found in the most popularly recognised torture porn films, many lesser-known films that capitalised on the genre’s popularity do indeed appear to offer little more than already-familiar spectacles of brutalised bodies. Yet close study of torture porn and the writing concerning it shows it to be far more complex than many of its detractors have acknowledged. Furthermore, such study also reveals a number of the contradictions with which we approach violent and horror media in general. Torture porn’s future is now uncertain. As with all cinematic trends, torture porn itself has declined in popularity in recent years. No longer novel, it does not receive promotion for its shock value alone anymore. It may, according to some critics, be effectively dead. However, just as torture porn may serve as a ­twenty-first-century expansion of the wave of violent films of the 1970s and 80s, it is likely to be revisited by filmmakers in the future. Undoubtedly, these new offerings will garner similar criticisms, which will in turn yield more responses. While torture porn itself has died down considerably, the conversation around it remains ongoing.

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Notes

1. David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” New York, January 28, 2006, accessed January 30, 2019, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. 2. Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16–17. 3. Aaron Michael Kerner, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 162; Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2012), 109. 4. Jones, Torture Porn, 8. 5. Jones, Torture Porn, 9. 6. James Quandt, “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum, February 2004, accessed January 30, 2019, http://artforum.com/inprint/ issue=200402&id=6199. 7. Jones, Torture Porn, 2–5. 8. Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 61. 9. Jones, Torture Porn, 15. 10. Dean Lockwood, “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn’,” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 7, no. 1 (2009): 41; Adam Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist,” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2011): 43. 11. Jones, Torture Porn, 26. 12. Ibid., 28. 13. Ibid., 28–29. 14. Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror,” 42. 15. Edelstein, “Now Playing”; Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror,” 50–51; Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror; Kerner, Torture Porn, 5, 23, 42; Gabrielle Murray, “Hostel II: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture Porn,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 50 (2008), accessed January 30, 2019, https://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/. 16. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror, 99–101. 17. Ibid., 16–17. 18. Murray, “Hostel II.” 19. Kerner, Torture Porn, 2–6; Jones, Torture Porn, 63–68; James Aston and John Walliss, “‘I’ve Never Murdered Anyone in My Life. The Decisions Are Up to Them’: Ethical Guidance and the Turn Toward Cultural Pessimism,” in To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, eds. James Aston and John Walliss (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013), 23; Ben McCann, “Body Horror,” in Aston and Walliss, 34; Catherine Zimmer, “Caught on Tape? The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film,” in Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, eds. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 83–85; Matt Hills, “Cutting into Concepts of ‘Reflectionist’ Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post-9/11 Horror,” in Briefel and Miller, 107–123. 20. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror, 84. 21. Mark Featherstone and Beth Johnson, “Ovo Je Srbija’: The Horror of the National Thing in A Serbian Film,” Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 1 (2012): 66–67. 22. Chi-Yun Shin, “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, eds. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo ­Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 85–86; Robert Hyland, “A Politics of Excess: Violence and Violation in Miike Takashi’s Audition,” in Choi and Wada-Marciano, 199. 23. Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 98–99.

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24. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 25. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror, 97. 26. Jody Keisner, “Do You Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern Horror Film,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 37, no. 4 (2008): 419. 27. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 10. 28. Edelstein, “Now Playing.” 29. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 95. 30. Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror,” 43. 31. Steve Jones, “Gender Monstrosity: Deadgirl and the Politics of Zombie Rape,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 3 (2013): 525. 32. Joss Whedon, “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death,” Whedonesque, May 20, 2007, accessed January 30, 2019, http://whedonesque.com/comments/13721. 33. Craig Frost, “Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth’s Hostel,” Cinemascope 5, no. 12 (2009): 1–10. 34. Jones, “Gender Monstrosity,” 526. 35. Ibid., 526–527. 36. Ibid., 527. 37. Ibid., 527. 38. Meredith Woerner, “Read the Entire Screenplay for Deadgirl 2, The Sequel to the Zombie Rape Flick,” io9, January 18, 2012, accessed January 30, 2019, https://io9.gizmodo.com/read-the-entire-screenplay-for-deadgirl-2-the-sequel-t-5877262. 39. Chris Savage, “Trent Haaga Talks Dead Girl 2,” Horror-Movies.ca, March 24, 2011, accessed January 30, 2019, http://www.horror-movies.ca/2011/03/dead-girl-sequel/. 40. Jones, “Gender Monstrosity,” 533. 41. Hyland, “A Politics of Excess,” 205. 42. Sirin Kale, “The All-Female Collective Championing Horror Films for the Girls,” Broadly, July 22, 2016, accessed January 30, 2019, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/ article/vb44j4/the-all-female-collective-championing-horror-films-for-the-girls. 43. Lockwood, “Spectacle,” 41–42. 44. Jones, Torture Porn, 36–37. 45. Jones, “Gender Monstrosity,” 525. 46. Alexander D. Ornella, “Cat and Mouse: Haneke’s Joy in the Spectator’s Distress,” in Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke’s Cinema, eds. Alexander D. Ornella and Stefanie Knauss (Eugene: Pickwick, 2010), 148–149. 47. Feona Attwood and Sharon Lockyer, “Controversial Images: An Introduction,” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 7, no. 1 (2009): 1. 48. “BBFC Rejects Sexually Violent Japanese Horror DVD,” British Board of Film Classification, August 19, 2009, accessed January 30, 2019, https://www.bbfc.co.uk/ about-bbfc/media-centre/bbfc-rejects-sexually-violent-japanese-horror-dvd. 49. Lockwood, “Spectacle,” 47.

Filmography A Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. Wes Craven (1984). A Serbian Film, dir. Srđan Spasojević (2010). Audition, dir. Takashi Miike (1999). Baise-moi, dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. Cannibal Holocaust, dir. Ruggero Deodato (1980). Captivity, dir. Roland Joffé (2009).

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Deadgirl, dirs. Marcel Sarmientio and Gadi Harel (2008). Frontière(s), dir. Xavier Gens (2008). Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (1997). Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke (2008). Grotesque, dir. Kōji Shiraishi (2009). Halloween, dir. John Carpenter (1978). Hostel, dir. Eli Roth (2005). Hostel: Part II, dir. Eli Roth (2007). House of 1000 Corpses, dir. Rob Zombie (2003). I Spit on Your Grave, dir. Meir Zarchi (1978). I Spit on Your Grave, dir. Steven R. Monroe (2010). Ichi the Killer, dir. Takashi Miike. Inside, dir. Julien Maury (2007). Irréversible, dir. Gaspar Noé (2002). Les 7 jours de talion, dir. Daniel Grou (2010). Martyrs, dir. Pascal Laugier (2008). Neighbor, dir. Robert Angelo Masciantonio (2009). Oldboy, dir. Park Chan-wook (2003). Saw, dir. James Wan (2004). Saw IV, dir. Darren Lynn Bousman (2007). Saw VI, dir. Kevin Greutert (2009). The Boy, dir. William Brent Bell (2016). The Bunny Game, dir. Adam Rehmeier (2010). The Collection, dir. Marcus Dunstan (2012). The Collector, dir. Marcus Dunstan (2009). The Devil’s Rejects, dir. Rob Zombie (2005). The Green Inferno, dir. Eli Roth (2013). The Hills Have Eyes, dir. Wes Craven (1977). The Human Centipede: First Sequence, dir. Tom Six (2009). The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, dir. Tom Six (2011). The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence, dir. Tom Six (2015). The Last House on the Left, dir. Wes Craven (1972). The Last House on the Left, dir. Dennis Iliadis (2009). The Loved Ones, dir. Sean Byrne (2009). The Passion of the Christ, dir. Mel Gibson (2004). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper (1974). The Tortured, dir. Robert Lieberman (2010). The Woman, dir. Lucky McKee (2011). Turistas, dir. John Stockwell (2006). Wolf Creek, dir. Greg MacLean (2005).

References Aston, James and John Walliss. “‘I’ve Never Murdered Anyone in My Life: The Decisions Are Up to Them’: Ethical Guidance and the Turn Toward Cultural Pessimism.” In To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, edited by James Aston and John Walliss. 13–29. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013. Attwood, Feona and Sharon Lockyer. “Controversial Images: An Introduction.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 7, no. 1 (2009): 1–6.

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“BBFC Rejects Sexually Violent Japanese Horror DVD.” British Board of Film Classification. August 19, 2009. Accessed January 30, 2019. https://www.bbfc.co.uk/about-bbfc/ media-centre/bbfc-rejects-sexually-violent-japanese-horror-dvd. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993. Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York. January 28, 2006. Accessed January 30, 2019. http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. Featherstone, Mark and Beth Johnson. “Ovo Je Srbija’: The Horror of the National Thing in A Serbian Film.” Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 1 (2012): 63–79. Frost, Craig. “Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth’s Hostel.” Cinemascope 5, no. 12 (2009): 1–10. Hills, Matt. “Cutting into Concepts of ‘Reflectionist’ Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post-9/11 Horror.” In Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, edited by Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller. 107–123. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Hyland, Robert. “A Politics of Excess: Violence and Violation in Miike Takashi’s Audition.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, edited by Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano. 199–218. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Jones, Steve. “Gender Monstrosity: Deadgirl and the Politics of Zombie Rape.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 3 (2013): 525–539. ———. Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kale, Sirin. “The All-Female Collective Championing Horror Films for the Girls.” Broadly. July 22, 2016. Accessed January 30, 2019. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/vb44j4/ the-all-female-collective-championing-horror-films-for-the-girls. Keisner, Jody. “Do You Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern Horror Film.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 37, no. 4 (2008): 411–427. Kerner, Aaron Michael. Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Lockwood, Dean. “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 7, no. 1 (2009): 41–48. Lowenstein, Adam. “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist.” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2011): 42–60. McCann, Ben. “Body Horror.” In To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, editd by James Aston and John Walliss. 30–44. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18 Murray, Gabrielle. “Hostel II: Representations of the Body in Pain and the Cinema Experience in Torture Porn.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 50 (2008). Accessed January 30, 2019. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/TortureHostel2/. Ornella, Alexander D. “Cat and Mouse: Haneke’s Joy in the Spectator’s Distress.” In Fascinatingly Disturbing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Michael Haneke’s Cinema, edited by Alexander D. Ornella and Stefanie Knauss. 145–166. Eugene: Pickwick, 2010. Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Quandt, James. “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” Artforum. February 2004, Accessed January 30, 2019. http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200402&id=6199. Savage, Chris. “Trent Haaga Talks Dead Girl 2.” Horror-Movies.ca. March 24, 2011. Accessed January 30, 2019. http://www.horror-movies.ca/2011/03/dead-girl-sequel/. Shin, Chi-Yun. “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, edited by Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo ­Wada-Marciano. 85–100. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Wetmore, Kevin J. Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2012. Whedon, Joss. “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death.” Whedonesque. May 20, 2007. Accessed January 30, 2019. http://whedonesque.com/comments/13721.

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Woerner, Meredith. “Read the Entire Screenplay for Deadgirl 2, The Sequel to the Zombie Rape Flick.” io9. January 18, 2012. Accessed January 30, 2019. https://io9.gizmodo.com/ read-the-entire-screenplay-for-deadgirl-2-the-sequel-t-5877262. Zimmer, Catherine. “Caught on Tape? The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film.” In Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, edited by Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller. 83–106. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Mark Richard Adams

British horror cinema was not particularly prolific by the late eighties, and Hollywood horror had been dominated by the slasher cycle that saw numerous teenagers sliced and diced by the likes of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. However, 1987 saw the release of a very different, very striking horror film, a British-made story from a first-time director, produced with American money. This was Hellraiser, written and directed by author Clive Barker, who was once identified as ‘the future of horror’ by genre icon Stephen King, and it has become a film that still defines his career to this day. Hellraiser opens with Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) opening a baroque puzzle box called the Lament Configuration and, in doing so, summoning the other-worldly Cenobites who tear him apart and drag his remains back to their world for ‘an experience beyond the limits’. The narrative shifts to his brother Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) and niece Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence) who move into the old family home with Larry’s second wife Julia (Claire Higgins). An accident in the home results in spilt blood which partially restores Frank who enlists Julia, with whom he once had an affair, to bring him more blood in order to heal himself and escape, before the Cenobites come looking for him. However, whilst much has been discussed of the films themes of sadomasochism and body horror, and the horrific appeal of its iconic monsters the Cenobites, led by the franchises figurehead lead Lea Cenobite who would come to be known as Pinhead, less has been made of its place within British gothic tradition. Hellraiser is, first and foremost, a gothic drama that is rife with family secrets, monstrous women in attics, and signs and portents that serve to warn the characters of their fates, if they were only to heed them. It is onto this traditional groundwork of British horror fiction that Barker transposes his own unique take on the demonic and other-worldly, to create something that was a new and striking approach to the genre.

M. R. Adams (*)  Independant Scholar, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_26

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Not only were American slasher films dominating at the box office during the eighties, but attempts to cash-in by British studios usually failed to find an audience. Before Hellraiser, Barker had written two independently produced horror films, Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), the failures of which drove him to try his own hand at directing in the first place. The UK distributors for the A Nightmare on Elm Street series shamelessly produced their own film entitled Dream Demon which would eventually be released in 1988 to little success.1 Whilst few would argue against Hammer Horror being synonymous with British horror of the fifties and sixties, it would be a harder task to identify anything as successful or prevalent in the decades since. Barry Forshaw has written extensively, and generally positively, on the success and appeal of Hammer, and its contemporaries, in evoking the themes and pleasures of gothic literature. A revival of Hammer as a brand, and the success of The Woman in Black (2012) also interests Forshaw, who explores what he sees as a revival of a lost tradition rejuvenated for a new millennium. Like many others, Forshaw sees Hammer as pivotal to British horror cinema, and associates its decline and revival with the disappearance and return of gothic films, in general.2 For Forshaw, aside from a few select films such as The Wicker Man (1973) or Scream and Scream Again (1970), the seventies play out as a barren, uninteresting decade for cinema and he, instead, turns his attention to television where he claims it was possible ‘to show ambition and achievement in the field’.3 Nevertheless, even as Hammer was declining in the seventies, Steve Chibnall has identified the works of Pete Walker as an important step in British gothic cinema for that decade.4 Although British cinema was struggling with changing cinematic tastes and counter-cultural movements, Walker ‘took the Gothic tradition and showed that it was not only capable of sustaining new mutated forms, but that it was the ideal host for the darkest of political and social allegories’.5 Forshaw does make some reference towards this, and whilst he praises Walker, he only seems to associate the gothic specifically with Frightmare (1970) and his assessment ends there; Cibnall, however, goes further. Walker prominently builds on the legacy of gothic cinema, and combine a contemporary sense of transgression and rebelliousness with the common structures found within the gothic.6 It is no coincidence that when Chibnall describes how Walker’s films draw on gothic elements, ‘the persecuted and fatal woman, and the sense of menace, isolation and despair – but inflect and reconstitute them in imaginative and contemporary ways’ he could just quite as easily be describing Clive Barker’s film (2002, 168). Walker’s films are positioned as thematic and cinematic stepping stones between British gothic cinema of the sixties, and Barker’s own adaptation of its themes and imagery in Hellraiser. Whilst Barker’s film stands out from contemporary films, both from Hollywood and home-grown, its roots and place in the trajectory of British horror cinema should not be ignored. Barker’s authorial voice, and influence, is heavily at play in the first Hellraiser film, even despite studio mandated changes to dub key players with American accents, so as to give the film a more transatlantic feel, apparently to appeal better to audiences in the United States.7 This transatlantic transformation of Hellraiser

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perhaps goes some way to explaining why it is often overlooked when discussing the history of British gothic cinema, as its English identity is usurped by an American one. Johnny Walker argues that the eighties saw the production of just a handful of British horror films which were mostly thought of as American productions that had only peripheral British involvement, citing Hellraiser as a specific example.8 It is not difficult to see why as the final film features numerous supporting roles, and at least one major one, dubbed over with American accents. Still, the dialogue itself bears out the British heritage; English wife Julia is said to be ‘back on your own turf’, whilst Kirsty’s boyfriend Steve (Robert Hines) has his speech patterns (‘You sound just like her. So uptight and frigid’) compared directly with Julia, despite his dubbed accent. The iconic Battersea Power Station and a British Rail train both make blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances as well, further cementing a film that only superficially hides its origins on the aesthetic level. However, the films British heritage can be felt most strongly in the themes and subjects that have an intrinsic connection to gothic cinema traditions. These can be found both in the film, and the novella The Hellbound Heart upon which it was based, and this can be traced to Barker’s own preoccupation with gothic fiction. Barker has an uncertain relationship with the gothic, which he recognises as an influential part of his own writing, citing Edgar Allan Poe as a personal favourite, but he also finds problems with the label. For Barker, the gothic is tied up with ‘a whole theological machinery’ which he labels as ‘redundant’, arguing that ‘the value system which underpins theological metaphors is deteriorating’.9 The increasing secular nature of society thus reduces the power of religious symbolism within fictional narratives, and he suggests only camp or ­tongue-in-cheek approaches tend to succeed. Despite this, Barker is interested in the scope offered by narratives dealing with concepts of heaven and hell, even if he believes the power invested in symbols such as the crucifix has diminished. Thus Barker embraces a form of the Gothic that detaches itself from the overtly religious ideologies, but maintains its aesthetics, themes, and symbolisms. With Hellraiser, Paul Wells suggests ‘the aesthetic embraces it as a model which makes the implied discourse of the Gothic – the attractiveness of the perverse and the transgressive – both a literal and symbolic set of events’.10 As a film, it only loosely makes use of religious imagery, and often outright dismisses them with statues of Jesus either thrown in the trash or hidden away in forgotten wardrobes. Barker is perhaps less interested in the societal authorities that are being transgressed against, and more in the appeal of transgression, and how the perverse can also be beautiful, or even beneficial. In his own words, he preferences ‘the celebration of the monstrous, and that can definitely be traced in the British “Gothic” sensibility… there is a romantic element in those monsters; a moral ambiguity that is very attractive’.11 British horror was going through a difficult patch in the eighties, as was the British film industry in general, and Hellraiser is possibly the only genre film from that period to have any lasting cultural impact. However, the era of classic British gothic horror and the films of the seventies, especially those of Peter Walker, should still be understood as an influential forebear. Barker himself has drawn

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on the Gothic and admits his influences from both literary and cinematic sources. Gothic cinema had declined, that is true, but Hellraiser, despite its transatlantic veneer, presents the audience with a further evolution of classic themes, and the historical contexts of its production should be highlighted and appreciated. Produced on a very limited budget, the majority of Hellraiser was filmed within a single North London house on Dollis Hill, with additional material primarily shot on a stage at the Cricklewood Production Village. The film’s claustrophobic feel was something noted by the American producers, who upon seeing the daily rushes, decided to give additional funds to a film they saw potential in. These funds were used to enhance a few special effects and shoot a few additional sequences around the banks of the Thames, notably Kirsty’s introduction as she first heads to her father’s new home. Whilst these additional sequences did add a small additional scope to the film, they were superficial and unrelated to the overall narrative of the film that remained almost entirely within interior spaces. The restrictive nature of the film, set primarily within 55 Ludovico Place, is transformed into a selling point, as the film’s initial theatrical trailer emphasises the sense of claustrophobia. The voice-over states that ‘…within these walls… the unholy is unleashed’, as the trailer purposely cuts to a shot of the exterior of the house. Making a virtue out of necessity, the trailer sells a version of the film that is both familiar, but also different from the narrative that actually unfolds. The trailer emphasises the various creatures and special effects, creating the impression of a chaotic roller-coaster ride of the macabre, with little to no emphasis placed on the murders undertaken by Julia. In fact, both Frank and Julia are primarily positioned as victims of the other-worldly within the trailers narrative, as creatures appear to lurk in darkened rooms, in corridors, and around every corner. The terrified reactions of the cast are contrasted with shots of monsters stepping out from around objects or from shadows, and intercut with atmospheric images of the films unstable architecture glowing with unnatural light. It invites the viewer to enter the space of the horror, ‘within these walls’ and be confronted by an endless supply of terrifying images, concluding with Pinhead’s threat to ‘tear your soul apart’ if you dare enter. Thus, through the trailer, the film positions itself as a form of haunted house, where the demonic is summoned up within a confined, and perhaps cursed, space. As with many trailers of the era, accuracy is perhaps not as important as thematically establishing the horrors the audience might encounter. The gothic identity of Hellraiser also presents itself in a number of other ways, including evoking the tropes of monstrous and fallen women, portentous dreams and symbols, occultism contrasted with the mundane, and deviancy from the established orders. The monstrous woman, the archetypal ‘mad woman in the attic’, can appear in gothic narratives as a threat to patriarchal power and control. Julia primarily functions as the monster, a site of sexual frustration who is willing to kill for what she wants. However, in a brief flashback to when she first meets Frank, we see her presented in a far more innocent light, with a certain naivety which he quickly takes advantage of. A possible reading is of Julia’s corruption at the hands of Frank as he beds her before her marriage to his brother, whereby the angelic Julia is reconfigured into the dependant yet dangerous sexual siren.

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For Kirsty she is also the wicked stepmother, a role emphasised by the fairy tale themes of the sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and as the hammer-wielding killer, striking down libidinous men in the attic room, Julia might have stepped out of one of Pete Walker’s films.12 Yet the attic is shared with Frank, and it is he who primarily inhabits this space, hidden from sight and representing the dark family secret that threatens to disrupt the normative dinner party taking place below. Barker cannot help but destabilise the traditional gothic narrative even as he utilises its signifiers, and Frank and Julia thus take on an amalgamated role, as she both figuratively and literally feeds blood to her desire. The strive for secret knowledge, accumulating wealth, or gaining power, usually at the expense of one’s soul, literally or otherwise, sits at the heart of many gothic narratives. The Faustian pact is a clear influence on Hellraiser’s narrative, although Patricia Allmer suggests the themes of bargaining and commerce go much deeper, and reflect the mercurial self-interest and avarice of eighties Britain.13 Frank bargains a monetary value for the Lament Configuration, bargains with the Cenobites for what he believes to be an agreed conception of pleasure, and bargains his own sexuality with Julia for the blood he needs to restore himself.14 Kirsty also makes bargains; at first with her father to help uncover the source of Julia’s strange behaviour, then with Frank to try and escape his clutches, and finally with the Cenobites themselves by offering up Frank in her place. Also drawing on Allmer’s work, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn suggests the film is bound up in a ‘hyper-consumerist expression of the Faustian pact’ where everything, and everyone, is up for sale.15 It is not surprising to find Barker equating rampant capitalism with the demonic consumption of body and soul. These elements all contribute to Hellraiser standing as a culmination of gothic themes and traditions from across the history of British film and literature. It collates that history but filters it through both Barker’s own interests in monsters and the occult, and through the nihilistic materialism of nineteen-eighties Britain. Whilst it is rooted in ideas of forbidden sexuality, murder, and demonic bargains, as Ní Fhlainn succinctly argues,16 Barker also transforms and reconfigures these themes into new and often unexpected patterns that can transcend, rather than reinstate, patriarchal order.17 55 Ludovico Place itself, rather than just a location or a prison, is reconfigured as an entity, a construct given life through events that occur within and without it, and which disrupts the structural authority of the home as the seat of the patriarch. The remainder of this discussion will be focused on exploring the vitality and horror embedded in the architecture, and seemingly lifeless objects, throughout the film. I have previously noted how the original trailer for Hellraiser uses the phrase ‘within these walls’ to position the threats of the film as contained within the location of a singular, implicitly haunted property. However, the meaning is perhaps two-fold as the horrors of the film are not only geographically located within the house, but are literally found within the architecture and physical furnishings of the environments. The mis-en-scene is not only an aspect of the films form, but an integral aspect of its themes and narrative, as the environment itself becomes threatening, and even alive, as the narrative unfolds. This articulation of the

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o­ ther-worldly and horrific through architecture is a common feature of the Gothic, and in Hellraiser it is 55 Ludovico Place that takes on the role of the more traditional gothic castle. Literary precedent can be found even in the foundational text ‘The Castle of Otranto’, often considered as the first true gothic novel, whilst films such as The Haunting (1963) or Amityville 2: The Possession (1982) heavily rely on the fear generated through manipulation of their architecture and physical objects. The Haunting is an especially appropriate comparison, as one of its most infamous scenes sees Eleanor (Julia Harris) and Theo (Claire Bloom) tormented by the forces within the house and, in the films most effective moment, the force haunting them pushes against the door to the room. Accompanied by appropriate sound effects, we see the door not just buckle or bend, but stretch and twist in unnatural ways, almost as if it were breathing, or that it were in some manner organic. The Haunting is a subtle film, that deals in as much what is not shown as what is, and the terror reflected in this scene is the film’s most overt moment of supernatural performance. In contrast, Hellraiser very quickly establishes its gothic credentials, and architectural fascination, and just as quickly works to deconstruct and destabilise the environments the film takes place within. The real location used to represent 55 Ludovico Place is located within an expensive area of London on Dollis Hill, as part of what is essentially an suburban estate. However, Barker is clearly aware of the power of isolation, and completely hides the reality that the house sits on an ordinary road, adjacent to many other builds of its kind, robbing the film of any wider establishing shots of the surrounding area. The film opens with Frank purchasing the Lament Configuration, before cutting to an unidentified room, mostly hidden in darkness where he solves the puzzle. As hooked chains emerge from the opened Configuration and rip into his skin, Frank screams and we finally cut to the exterior, three and a half minutes into the film. This will be the widest we see the house, the shot just cutting off its neighbours, a foregrounded tree obscuring much of the right hand side of the frame. Shot from across the street, the framing takes full advantage of the locations position on Dollis Hill, to catch glimpses of distant woodland and hillside either side of the building. The bottom of the frame only just catches the public pavement, but this is obscured by fallen leaves. All traces of civilisation, of the London hillside the location exists on, are carefully removed for the film, despite the fact that Hellraiser itself is still shown to take place at least near an urban environment in sequences of Kirsty walking to the house. Foliage on the brick wall at the front of the house, and tall, twisted trees both in front and to the sides, complete the picture. It is the urban residence, repurposed and reconfigured into the gothic castle, its covered windows completing the look of abandonment and decay. Pete Walker, Chibnall argues, took the gothic dramas most potent signifier, the castle, and reconfigured it more modestly as a house. However, whereas for Walker, the houses were ‘sites of authority’ whose ‘stability of their bricks and mortar stands in stark contrast to the unstable personalities who inhabit them’ we find in Barker’s world that the house is every bit as unstable, and dangerous, as those within it.18 Following on from the initial shot of the house’s interior, what follows is a form of guided tour of the decayed, corrupted interior. The first cut is

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to the main entrance, set back in a porch and shot from a low angle so that despite its inherent normality, it is given a more grandiose presence. From here follows a series of brief shots; a kitchen table piled with filthy plates and rotten food, a disorientating staircase that moves back on itself as it rises, a statue of Jesus back lit by a decorated window, Franks makeshift bed surrounded by dirty clothes and empty bottles of alcohol, a close-up of a cockroach crawling over a statue of two figures having sex, the top of the stairs and three closed, wooden doors. This sequence climaxes with the camera moving towards one of the doors, which opens itself unaided to allow the viewer unfettered access to the scenes within, inviting the audience to partake in the bodily deconstruction of Frank. Even the relatively normal kitchen is rendered uncanny in this sequence, and its abandoned plates and food evokes scenes of great banquet tables sitting covered in cobwebs and untouched in vast stone halls. From the very beginning, Ludovico Place is coded as the neo-gothic castle, permeated with a sense of unheimlich, and a place where you might expect to encounter the supernatural. The haunted house has a long tradition within the horror genre, especially on film, but it comes with its own approaches and archetypes that are associated with the genre. Hellraiser is not just a haunted house narrative as the imagery deliberately evokes the gothic castle. Haunted houses tend to locate the supernatural presence in what can otherwise be seen as an ordinary home, where the trappings of normality can then be subverted. Films such as Paranormal Activity (2007), Sinister (2012), or Poltergeist (1982) all work to this template, and the house is generally utilised merely as the signifier of the ‘normal’, a place where we expect to find the nuclear family, and a place the audience can readily identify with. Whilst Ludovico Place does become host to the unnatural forces unleashed by the Lament Configuration, it is already a neo-gothic castle even before this. Whilst it is a family home, the family is a dysfunctional and damaged unit that finds its origins in the gothic narratives such as House of Usher (1960) whereby these familial secrets are reflected in the walls around them. Chibnall summarises this archetype as ‘a legacy of evil passed from one generation to the next and secret knowledge guarded by an aristocratic patriarch… contained within and symbolized by the ancestral home’.19 Later gothic texts also work to undermine these families traditional power structures by showing them as corrupt and decadent, decaying as traditional values collapse and religious authority is replaced with secularism. Ludovico Place is the old family residence of Larry and Frank Cotton, and the dialogue in Larry’s first scene paints a clear picture of distant brothers, one a hard worker and the other a criminal. Larry has an old-fashioned tone to his discourse, referring to Ludovico Place as ‘the old homestead’ and stating he ‘wanted to sell it after the old lady died’. Larry is characterised by an awkward banality, at odds not only with his brother, but with the frustrated, passionate Julia or even his independent teenage daughter, Kirsty. Patricia Allmer astutely observes how Hellraiser reflects British politics in the eighties, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher emphasised individualism and the desire for individuals to have ownership of property through ‘right to buy’ schemes.20 The property here is jointly inherited by Frank and Larry, but the latter wishes to take full custody by taking out a bank

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loan to buy his brother’s share. Allmer sees Hellraiser as a constant struggle over property and possessions, not just the house or the Lament Configuration, but over Julia, over blood as a commodity, or skin as a symbol of freedom and humanity.21 Barker has thus created a gothic drama where siblings conflict over the possession of family property, and where past history returns to torment the present inhabitants of ‘the old homestead’. Larry’s introduction to the film is also interesting in that his character attempts to diffuse the gothic around him, rendering it ordinary. Following Frank’s spectacular deconstruction at the hands of the Cenobites, the scene transitions to an unknown amount of time later where we hear the sounds of Larry attempting to gain entry. Not for the last time, the house seems to be trying to resist Larry, refusing him entry. The sounds of birds are heard outside, the audience’s first pleasant aural experience, and, importantly, the close-up of Larry and Julia in the door frame that follows undercuts the gothic isolation of Ludovico Place. Whilst the background remains out of focus, we can still see the houses opposite, a normal driveway, and vehicles passing along the main road. As Larry makes his presence felt, the Gothic is subsumed by the ordinary, if only for a very brief period. Larry claims they will ‘soon warm it up and get it feeling like a home’, and upon seeing a dining room full of religious paraphernalia insists ‘this stuff means nothing to me, it all goes’. He insists to the sceptical Julia that they ‘can make it work here’, but as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the pleasant suburban home Larry seeks, much like his idea of happily married life, cannot be found. The Hellraiser house is never a home, despite the endless enthusiasm of Larry who seeks to make it one, casting out any symbols of religion or the occult. Ludovico Place is inherently a neo-gothic castle, inhabited by a cursed family, and whose very architecture seems to be alive, threatening those who dare to dwell within these walls. In creating the world of Hellraiser, Clive Barker had clearly drawn on both British gothic horror traditions, and the political landscape of the eighties, with its endless concerns with commercial value, deal-making, and property value.22 However, to this he brought his own interest in the demonic, imagery culled from sadomasochistic and fetish scenes, and from the queer subcultures of the era. The eighties was a time of social and economic change, and where slashers dominated Hollywood and British horror was waning. In Hellraiser, the traditionally strong and stable structures of the gothic castle are not only haunted, or cursed, but actively destabilised, rendered organic, living entities. Human bodies merge into and from architectural structures, whilst walls can be cut and mutilated as if they were flesh, and the demonic literally rends apart ‘the surface of the real’, as the original novella describes the effect of solving the Lament Configuration. The very first shot of the film establishes the importance of signs and portents, as the camera pulls out from the Lament Configuration, a stone pillar sits to one side decorated with a design that resembles the skeletal dragon at the films conclusion. The circular nature of the box’s story is established, and the eventual conclusion of the narrative is foreshadowed even as Frank makes his purchase. The following shot, as Frank prepares to open it, sees his own shadow cast on the wall

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behind, both as if some figure was watching over his work, but also foreshadowing, quite literally, his eventual bodily deconstruction and merging with the house itself. The film goes on to make use of multiple images of imprisonment, often framing Julia behind the wooden struts of the staircase, whilst the windows and doors across Ludovico Place are covered with a grid, and even the wallpaper often uses vertical stripe patterns. The most notable image of all is Julia sat upon the marital bed, next to a snoring Larry with the bars of the beds headboard locking her into the unhappy domestic situation. The most obvious moment of foreshadowing is Kirsty’s nightmare, which takes place within Ludovico Place and features a child crying as blood spreads across a shrouded body, revealed moments later to be her father. The prophetic dream, warning of danger, is a classic device in fiction, but here it also implies a traumatic back story for Kirsty’s mothers’ death, and highlights the themes of rebirth, especially coming just after Julia agrees to provide Frank with more blood. The films thematic interests, character motivations, and even eventual outcomes, are signposted through clues in the objects and architecture of Ludovico Place. Though Frank serves as the film’s primary antagonist, his escape back to life is seemingly facilitated by Ludovico Place itself, in a complicated sequence of flashbacks and aural ambiguities. Julia conceals a picture of Frank and engages on a masturbatory reminiscence of her seduction at his hands, where she seems almost supernaturally drawn to the attic room. An indistinct whisper can be heard as she enters, increasing in intensity, and the door to the attic shuts of its own accord to maintain her privacy and isolation. The whispering becomes a clear repetition of her name, still without source and diegetically ambiguous, increasing in pace and intensity as she relives her own sexual awakening. Barker then skilfully interconnects three linked narratives; Larry struggling to pull the marital mattress up the stairs to the bedroom replete with grunting, Frank and Julia’s passionate and animalistic sexual encounter, and Julia’s arousing fantasy haunted by the chanting of her name. Having drawn Julia into the room where Frank was taken by the Cenobites, the house then conspires to bring the restorative blood to him. As Frank and Julia reach a climax in the past, Larry too reaches a peak, as he catches his hand on a jagged nail, creating a gaping wound that spurts blood.23 The house has drawn first blood, and set into motion the events that will carry the rest of the film as Larry seeks out Julia in the attic room, dripping fluids on the floorboards, which then leads to Frank’s resurrection. These events lead to the full introduction of the icons of the franchise, the Cenobites, later represented solely by Pinhead, but here a much more unified group comprising of four individuals. The story of Frank, Julia, Larry and Ludovico Place in itself could sustain a gothic drama, but Barker brings to this archetypal narrative, a destabilising force in the form of the film’s o­ ther-worldly inhabitants, that evolve these gothic elements into new forms. Patricia MacCormack sees Hellraiser as a form of baroque cinema, itself architectural terminology, which she suggests ‘creates disjunctive patterns of the body. It is not decrepit or destroyed but differently arranged’.24 Whilst forms of gothic architecture are present throughout Hellraiser, it is the Cenobites that bring disruption and

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transformation with them. MacCormack argues that ‘they occupy borderlands, evince the world itself as folded, not their world and our world but both simultaneously and made up of angles and folds that intercede at various points which shift depending on locations and times of invocation’.25 The Cenobites foldings and amalgamation of flesh and fabric, however, is not limited to their bodies, but spread out further into the environment. If, before their emergence, structures and walls offered symbols, signs and gothic clues of what was to come, then their binding with our world brings fully to life the architecture of Hellraiser. When Kirsty first solves the Box a once-solid wall splits apart with a perfectly vertical line, as if a hidden door had always existed there. This gives no heed to the structure of the building, or how seemingly connected bricks can come apart, nor the fate of the excess bricks caused by the opening. Practical reality does not matter, and as the walls part, strands of a sticky web-like residue is seen across the gap, akin to fluid between parting lips. Organic structures continue to feature throughout the film, and everyday objects are imbued with a form of seemingly malevolent life. As the Cenobites arrive to confront Kirsty, blood flows backwards into a medical intravenous bag before exploding across the wall, smoke pours from within the walls themselves, and they glow with a living phosphorescence. Anna Powell observes a number of these instances of the architecture becoming organic,26 but does not make the connection to Frank’s own shifting form, even when it first emerges out of the floorboards. Further to this, Powell fails to see the appeal in the Cenobites, instead seeing them as destructive, and reducing them to merely a ‘frightening face’, by reading the film in a conservative light.27 MacCormack disagrees, seeing the Cenobites, and in particular, their faces as ‘compelling plateaus of intensity’, sights of endless foldings, changes, and openings which glimpse at the infinite possibilities within.28 The Cenobites represent the successful amalgamation of flesh, technology, torture, pleasure, life, death, sexuality, and repression; their ever-changing bodies overflow into their surroundings, that equally become transfigured from inanimate to organic. The final confrontation between Frank and Kirsty offers us the best glimpse of the Cenobites association with architecture. When they arrive to reclaim Frank, they bring about a transformation to the attic, with light shining impossibly through slats in the walls, creaking torture instruments moving into place, and hooked chains dropping down from the ceiling. Their arrival is signalled primarily by the reconfiguration of the bare room, previously a site of rebirth for Frank, into a chamber of transfiguration, a space where the Cenobites are natural inhabitants. Their self-transformation is reflected in their very presence inherently transforming architecture and structures around them, rendering nowhere safe. After Frank is dealt with by the Cenobites, they turn their attention to Kirsty, stalking her through Ludovico Place. This is not threatening in the same way Frank’s hunting of her was, but a more seductive threat where the Cenobites demonstrate their transformative powers and offer enticements.29 The Female Cenobite (Grace Kirby) carves her curved implement along a wall, which bleeds blood from the opened wound. Pinhead impossibly rises up into a room behind her, and promises

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that ‘we have such sights to show you’, highlighting the Cenobites offer of spectacle and enlightenment, rather than damnation and punishment. At the film’s climax Ludovico Place seemingly begins to collapse, no longer able to contain the forces within it and just as Kirsty and Steve must avoid falling masonry, so too the Cenobite named Butterball (Simon Bamford) is crushed under a collapsing ceiling.30 The film implies Ludovico Place is destroyed in fire, although this is ambiguous, and the sequel outright denies this, repurposing the house as a crime scene akin to a serial killer’s lair. What we do see, however, is Kirsty and Steve, themselves a destabilised heteronormative couple, stood by a single flaming chair; a miniature bonfire which stands as a symbol for the underwhelming and irrelevant nature of domestic banality. This final rebuke of Larry’s dream of the traditional household is soon forgotten though, as Barker reveals some final transformations of a man into a winged dragon, and completes his narrative circle by bringing the Lament Configuration back to where it began. Once more the concrete pillar, featuring the design of the skeletal dragon the audience has just witnessed, is shown, promising further architectural nightmares, and transformations for whoever next purchases the Lament Configuration. I return now to Frank, as a key figure in the amalgamation of flesh and furniture, whose initial opening of the Lament Configuration sees his body torn into viscera which decorates the attic room. We see Frank sat, topless, in the dark attic with the Box nestled in his lap, where his hands work across its surface with focused interest, a masturbatory act that right away establishes the object and flesh as one entity. A moment of climax is found as he opens the box and hooked chains rip into his flesh, and he screams out at a point of ejaculation. Just as Frank solves the puzzle box, opening it up, so then does the box result in his own opening up, and his various organs and bodily fluids are spread like a human carpet across the otherwise bare floorboards. The novella goes a step further when, stimulated by the extreme sensation of the Cenobites, Frank actually masturbates and stains the floor with his semen. This stain in the wood, is specifically stated to connect him to our world and the room, which he can see into from beyond its walls once he is taken away, and it is this which allows him to later escape back. The sequence climaxes with the Cenobites assembling parts of Frank’s face on the floor, as if a jigsaw,31 rendering a once-living being as little more than an object of entertainment. Thus from the very opening scene, Frank and the structure of 55 Ludovico Place have an intrinsic connection that will be maintained throughout the rest of the film. Once Larry’s blood is spilt, the camera moves beneath the floorboards to see Frank’s heart growing beneath it, a visual no doubt inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Barker specifically cites the short fiction of Poe as a clear inspiration, and he described them as ‘an intensification of the Gothic impulse’.32 Poe’s story sees a paranoid narrator driven to murder, whereby he conceals his victim’s body beneath the floorboards but can still hear the beating heart. He is driven slowly insane by its beating, which acts as a constant reminder of his guilt, until he eventually confesses to his crimes. Barker has revisited Poe before in his short story New Murders in the Rue Morgue where he brings his own monstrous reading onto Poe’s story, by making the murderer a shaved Orangutang that dresses like a

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human. As with Poe’s heart, Frank’s heart will rise out of the floorboards, bringing with it the guilt of Julia’s infidelity, and exposing the secrets of the house’s inhabitants. Frank is restored in a visceral, gory scene that sees his limbs impossibly emerge from the floorboards, forming organs, brains, and bones, before the sequence climaxes with him as a half-man, still attached to the house at the waist. Anna Powell uses Deleuze’s concept of the Body-without-Organs to conceptualise Frank, seeing him as a rejection of the ideology as he seeks to restore his singular, coherent form. The Body-without-Organs is transformative, denying the body as a fixed biological entity and instead seeing it as ‘a set of speeds and affects conceived in relation to other entities’ and ‘a shifting composite, which may be cultural, social, technological, molecular or organic’.33 Powell sees Frank as failing to become transformed, reversing the Body-without-Organs, but elsewhere notes how it is ‘open to surrounding matter, which it incorporates’ without recognising this process occurring within Hellraiser.34 Frank is continually linked and associated with the house and even as he regains more agency, he remains tied to the house, moving through it unseen, as if he is haunting it. He stands pressed against walls, half-obscured by beams, or hides from view in undisclosed places which leaves the viewer geographically disconcerted. He hides in the bedroom closet to watch Larry attempt sex with Julia, and stands over them, skinning a rat, foreshadowing his brothers eventual fate. However, when Powell argues that Frank’s own body-without-organs ‘is the apex of reactionary horror rather than the aspiration of anarchic radicalism’ and that he ‘will never attain the Deleuzian kind’ this misses the point that this is what renders him the villain of the film. Frank’s reversal of the Body-without-Organs, and thus an increasing separation from the architectural structures around him as the film progresses, serve to make him increasingly more monstrous, and a greater threat to Kirsty. That the films hero is saved from Frank, by the radically Deleuzian Cenobites who once more disperse him into the floorboards, should only highlight the destabilised themes of morality within Hellraiser. Whilst architecture and structures have an intrinsic link to the demonic within the film, for Barker the demonic is not inherently evil, nor inherently oppositional to moral positions. Frank’s narrative trajectory is to detach himself from Ludovico Place, a goal he never truly succeeds in. Even at the film’s conclusion, upon stealing Larry’s skin, he never actually leaves, instead having sex with Julia and indulging in alcohol. When Kirsty tells them they must flee, Frank-as-Larry tells her ‘Stay. We can all be happy here’, playing up a mockery of the domestic bliss that Larry himself had dreamed of. Frank fails to embrace the transformational potentiality the Cenobites offer and desires to separate himself from Ludovico Place, but at the same time, he cannot bring himself to leave completely. Frank is now part of the structure of Ludovico Place, and at the film’s climax his lips are licked in anticipation, moments before the Cenobites once more decorate the attic room with his viscera. With Hellraiser, Clive Barker opened up new opportunities for gothic horror to explore, with potential for the genre to examine more liberal ideology through queer readings, and destabilising the traditionally conservative spaces and ideas.

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The film’s first sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II was also made in Britain, by the same production team and most of the same cast, and whilst Barker no longer wrote nor directed it, many of his themes were expanded further. Written by Peter Atkins, Barker’s old theatre friend, and directed by New World producer Tony Randell, the sequel actually expands the organic architecture of the first film to encompass a baroque vision of Hell. The Cenobites world in one vast, shifting maze of stone corridors, ruled over by a giant floating diamond named Leviathan. The organic and structural are combined to a far more overt extent, as machinery and fleshy tendrils are used to create new Cenobites, and fold bodies and environment into new configurations. Atkins would go on to write the next two sequels, Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (1992) and Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) which continue this fascination with transforming architecture, but it becomes watered down and unconvincing. An unused script for the third film took place in a bordello of ever-shifting walls where organic tendrils drained the life from customers to restore Pinhead, and felt more in line with the previous films themes. Hellraiser III as released, however, reduced the house to a single stone pillar in which Pinhead is trapped, although it is placed within a night club alongside other disturbing works of art brought by its owner, J. P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt). Seducing Monroe, Pinhead points to these works of art and asks him to ‘imagine a world with the body as canvas, the body as clay. Your will, and mind as the knife and the brush’. However, for all this talk of creating art, Monroe is not an artist but a collector, tied up in mercantile commercialism; the aesthetic of the film is far cleaner, and the transfigured bodies and objects are reduced to an exhibition of art, reducing its power. By the time of Hellraiser: Bloodline, the storyline features an entire building that is actually a giant Lament Configuration but this is underwhelmingly represented by a few metal corridors and spinning wall panels. As much as Atkin’s scripts strive to keep Barker’s themes prominent, the reality of Hollywood film-making sees the transcendental architecture that dominated the original Hellraiser reduced to an afterthought of the carnage reaped by Pinhead as a movie monster. Barker’s success led him to Hollywood, but the more normative structures required of big-budget horror would begin to neuter his originality almost instantly. Whilst the unstable architecture, and fusions of the organic and inorganic would continue thematically, the emphasis was essentially watered down. The living architecture and evolution of gothic narratives were instead stabilised, and the more commercial aspects of the Cenobites as murderous demons were given prominence. Of the nineties in British horror Walker, Stanley, and Forshaw all seem to agree that it was a wilderness where the long history of gothic cinema finally disappeared from the country’s screens. History tells us that Clive Barker’s Hellraiser was, for a long period, a last glimpse of Britain’s cultural legacy of gothic fiction, but it perhaps also shows us the potential of a path not tread, were it not for the lure of Hollywood. The failure of the first film’s preoccupation with architectural transcendence and baroque bodies to transition across the Atlantic perhaps also illustrates how much the film was a product of a singular historical and geographical moment. Like many a gothic protagonist, Hellraiser is the last

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in a long line of traditionally gothic films, and whose home is the selfish and hostile society of eighties Tory Britain. Barker offers hope as well, however, as his organic, unrestricted patterns of architecture, and exploration of the monstrous and the potential for pleasure as well as pain from the other-worldly, suggests a continuity of transformation. British cinema, the Gothic, and indeed, British politics all have the potential and opportunity to transform and reconfigure themselves once more, whilst restrictive patriarchal ideology, and conservative stability should be left to burn in the past.

Notes

1. Richard Stanley, ‘Dying Light: An Obituary for the Great British Horror Movie’, in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds.), British Horror Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 186. 2. B. Forshaw, British Gothic Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–6. 3. Ibid., 156. 4. Steve Chibnall, ‘A Heritage of Evil: Pete Walker and the Politics of Gothic Revisionism’, in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds.), British Horror Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 157. 5. Ibid., 157. 6. Ibid. 7. Discussed by Clive Barker and others on the Hellraiser DVD commentary track. 8. Johnny Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1. 9. Paul Wells, ‘On the Side of the Demons: Clive Barker’s Pleasures and Pains—Interviews with Clive Barker and Doug Bradley’, in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds.), British Horror Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 175. 10. Ibid., 173. 11. Ibid., 178. 12. Most notably, Frightmare and the imposing figure of Mrs Yates. 13. Patricia Allmer, ‘“Breaking the Surface of the Real”: The Discourse of Commodity Capitalism in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Narratives’, in Space, Haunting, Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 14. 14. Ibid., 15–16. 15. Sorcha NÍ Fhlainn, ‘The Devil and Clive Barker’, in Sorcha NÍ Fhlainn (ed.), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 215. 16. Ibid., 212–213. 17. Ibid., 209. 18. Chibnall, ‘A Heritage of Evil: Pete Walker and the Politics of Gothic Revisionism’, 169. 19. Ibid., 161. 20. Allmer, ‘“Breaking the Surface of the Real”’, 18–19. 21. Ibid., 18–19. 22. Ibid., 21–22. 23. In the DVD audio commentary Clive Barker, crudely yet succinctly, refers to this sequence as “the nailing and the nail”. Less prosaic a DVD Chapter menu labels this as “Getting nailed”. The point, I feel, is clearly well made. 24. Patricia MacCormock, Cinesexuality (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing 2008), 76. 25. Ibid., 86.

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26. Anna Powell, Deleuze and the Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 86–87. 27. Powell, Deleuze and the Horror Film, 87. 28. MacCormock, Cinesexuality, 87–88. 29. Patricia MacCormack discusses how ‘their lack of aggression in their acts of torment adds to their seduction’, Cinesexuality, 89. 30. Butterball is unharmed for the sequel. The houses collapse is just another form of transformation, and as the Cenobites already exist in a state of change, such actions cannot cause actual injury. 31. The audio commentary track suggests this was part of a failed effect, which would have seen the face actually melt into the floorboards. 32. Wells, P. ‘On the Side of the Demons’, in Chibnall and Petley (eds.), British Horror Cinema, 175. 33. Powell, Deleuze and the Horror Film, 78–79. 34. Ibid., 211.

Bibliography Allmer, P. (2008). ‘“Breaking the Surface of the Real”: The Discourse of Commodity Capitalism in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Narratives’, in Space, Haunting, Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 14–24. Chibnall, S. (2002). ‘A Heritage of Evil: Pete Walker and the Politics of Gothic Revisionism’, in Chibnall, S., and Petley, J. (eds.), British Horror Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 156–171. Forshaw, B. (2013). British Gothic Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacCormock, P. (2008). Cinesexuality. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. NÍ Fhlainn, S. (2017). ‘The Devil and Clive Barker’, in NÍ Fhlainn, S. (ed.), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 208–229. Powell, A. (2005). Deleuze and the Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stanley, R. (2002). ‘Dyling Light: An Obituary for the Great British Horror Movie’, in Chibnall, S., and Petley, J. (eds.), British Horror Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 183–195. Walker, J. (2016). Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wallington, E. T. (2017). ‘When Fantasy Becomes Reality: Social Commentary of 1980s Britain in Clive Barker’s Weaveworld’, in NÍ Fhlainn, S. (ed.), Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 56–68. Wells, P. (2002). ‘On the Side of the Demons: Clive Barker’s Pleasures and Pains—Interviews with Clive Barker and Doug Bradley’, in Chibnall, S., and Petley, J. (eds.), British Horror Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 172–182.

Psychological Gothic

The Asylum Laura R. Kremmel

After the haunted house, the crumbling castle, and the secret crypt, the madhouse is perhaps the most prominent and feared physical structure that has survived throughout the Gothic tradition, from the eighteenth century to its current form. A space crafted out of images of oppression and neglect but fed by curiosity and voyeurism, its literary usage rose with the Gothic in the 1790s, as revolution cast light on injustices of all kind, madhouse and bastille alike. Such was the purpose of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798). Intending to write a fictionalisation of her political treatise, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft opens her unfinished novel with a direct comparison between the late eighteenth-century madhouse, popular gothic fiction, and the status of women. Maria has been drugged, robbed of her child, and forcibly committed by her husband for refusing to support his financially and sexually excessive lifestyle with the little money she has. She describes the private asylum in which she finds herself as worse than the “Abodes of horror”, “castles, filled with spectres and chimeras” that shock readers of gothic fiction.1 In this mansion of despair, she is manacled in a dreary cell with only a small grated window to view her new surroundings, the perfect position for a victimised gothic heroine to reflect on the conditions of the larger institution at whose hands she suffers, as well as the perfect opportunity for readers, however sympathetic to her cause, to satisfy their own ­morbid fascination with madness. Though, arguably, Maria herself does not experience mental illness beyond the hopelessness brought on by her situation, she is surrounded by figures who do show alarming signs of significant mental disorder: “dismal shrieks of demonic rage, or of excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of indescribable anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused phantoms of horror in her mind…”.2 The late eighteenth-century asylum appears to serve the dual-role of prison-for-hire and container for lunacy, a depiction that is both exposed and

L. R. Kremmel (*)  South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, Rapid City, SD, USA

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sensationalised by its persistent role in gothic literature. The dual responsibility that the Gothic has in stigmatising mental health treatment is complicated by the history of horror and mistreatment associated with that institution that literature reports just as much as it invents. Wollstonecraft’s goal was not just to cause readers to fear mental health treatment or mental health institutions—which were mostly private at the time and did not require any medical involvement—but to expose the maddening horrors faced by women in marriage and the ways in which all institutions served patriarchal interests.3 It is, however, worth exploring why she chose a madhouse instead of a locale more familiar in the literary space—a castle, dungeon, or prison—as it is a comparison that would be explored further in Victorian gothic literature as a monument to, and subversion of, patriarchal power. This chapter offers one understanding of how the Gothic juggles the dual rule of exposing injustice and feeding sensationalism and how it has maintained the asylum as a cohesive concept despite drastic concurrent shifts in the history of mental health treatment. In focusing on the asylum as a defined space for madness, I will not venture far into madness or mad characters more broadly. There are, after all, many characters displaying a wide range of symptoms of mental illness in the gothic tradition who never see the walls of an asylum. Maria offers a natural place to start, both because of its chronological position among foundational gothic texts and because of her clear and striking comparison between the space of an asylum and the worst gothic settings the tradition could envision. I argue that the image of the asylum created by Wollstonecraft becomes the cornerstone of the gothic asylum more broadly and that all subsequent inclusions of this spaces in the gothic tradition draw on that original image, introducing antiquated and obsolete practices into more recent texts, despite—or perhaps because of— progressively less gothic treatment of mental illness in history. Nowhere is this continual historical and stylistic regression more striking than in the recurring imagery of the living grave as the fate of madness: at once a burial and a constant threat of resurrection. Maria twice describes her situation as an asylum occupant as being “buried alive” and the space itself as a “tomb of living death”.4 As I will show throughout this chapter, subsequent gothic texts not only share her association between gender and madness, but they also conflate treatment of the mad with the treatment of the dead, the asylum as the grave. Suspending the mad between life and death, a supernatural position, creates a complex, liminal, timeless alternate state that arrests growth but not decay. I will return to a discussion of Maria in conversation with Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (1997), a text nearly two hundred years distant but that exhibits a sustained inheritance of both gendered and undead commitment to the asylum, demonstrating how historical shifts in the treatment of mental illness—in this case, the Mental Health Act of 1959—can participate in or provoke these early gothic concepts that compel fear into a mental illness, despite attempts to the contrary. Asylums in gothic literature approaching the modern age stray significantly from their actual modern counterparts in both the United

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States and the United Kingdom—from which I will be drawing most of my texts— in their d­ epictions of conditions, treatment, staff, and circumstances for admittance, all of which, despite persistent stigma, strive to reduce negative misconceptions, including fear of the mental health facility and the patients who benefit from it. The best-known asylum, Bedlam (Bethlem Hospital), was built as an architecturally striking symbol of scientific advancement and human compassion, quite the opposite of associations with the word today; it was designed to draw in not just the mad but the insatiably curious of the eighteenth century, offering its occupants as entertainment and hoping to draw in wealthy donors. Intending to put on a good show, Bedlam and other asylums open to the public fulfilled the voyeuristic imagination and served the didactic purpose of warning the public away from a similar fate.5 William Hogarth’s 1735 series of engravings, The Rake’s Progress culminates in the once-upstanding figure’s slow degeneration into gambling, drugs, and crime until he loses not only his fortune but also his mind, a raving lunatic in the halls of Bedlam, gawked at by affluent visitors eager to perform sympathy for the less fortunate.6 Such practices did not end in the eighteenth century. An 1852 letter received by a periodical largely contributed to by occupants of the Utica State Lunatic Asylum in New York complained that a party of voyeurs hoping to make an outing of their trip to the asylum was disappointed in the cleanliness and normality of the setting and characters they encountered there: ‘For all we could see, the patients look and act like other people’. When they asked if they could be “[taken to] where [they] could see something”, they were promptly shown the door.7 As such, the Gothic plays on the prurient, and morbid, and theatrical thrill surrounding the madhouse, requiring very little coaxing to turn potential asylum visitors into readers of gothic literature set in the same. Matthew Lewis, not shy about playing on the human desire for sensation, violence, and gore, was, however, taken aback by how scandalous his portrayal of asylum horrors in the short play, The Captive (1803), became. Like Maria, it features a woman forced into an asylum who discovers all of its horrors in the most graphic nature, along with the audience, including fellow inmates who caused “two people [to go] into hysterics during the performance and two more after the curtain dropped”, as Lewis wrote in a letter to his mother detailing the failure of the play. Even for him, the subject matter of an asylum and its occupants proved to be just too shocking. Part of his goal, he says, had been to inspire pity, but terror won the day.8 Similarly, Charles Maturin’s labyrinthine novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) shows a small glance into what could have been the same asylum as the title character, promising to visit the character Stanton at his lowest, foresees a madhouse with “the curse of sanity” in his future, an assertation taken more as threat than prophesy.9 The prediction sends a chill up his Stanton’s spine and, of course, comes to fruition in graphic detail. As the Gothic shifts from the Bastille-like barbarity of the Romantic era to the cruel domestic games of sensationalist fiction, its asylums also become more domestic. Wollstonecraft’s novel use of the asylum as a gothic plot device to discipline misbehaving women becomes par for the course in the Victorian

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period. Romantic women, hidden in the gothic spaces of dark caverns, vaults, catacombs, nunneries, and asylums, fear removal from the superficial societal norms and conventions they believe can protect them. The Victorian woman, however, remains in full view of those societal norms and conventions, which betray her into captivity. The domestic space of the house too easily becomes the madhouse. The title character of Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Woman in White (1859), Anne Catherick, is mysterious, transgressive, and dangerous because she has escaped from the asylum, one in which she was imprisoned by the secondary villain of the piece, Sir Percival Glyde, for knowing too much about him. He uses her eventual death to commit his wife, Laura—who looks just like Anne—to the same asylum and assumes the role of rich widower. The asylum, then, continues to be a sinister holding place for inconvenient women who won’t give up their fortunes for men, an adoption of the plot Wollstonecraft wrote over fifty years earlier. Laura, accused of suffering from the delusion that she is herself, is denied her own identity as well as her sanity and freedom through the machinations of men invested by the law and patriarchal marriage structures with the power to do so. And, as with Wollstonecraft’s tale—or one of its possible unfinished endings—the only way out of such a place is bribery and escape rather than official release, making one a convict from one’s own previous life. The horror these texts build, then, is not an anxiety for the committed character’s mental improvement, but rather a deep helplessness and negation of life, even as they continue to breathe. The asylums described by Collins do not share the same physically catacombic environment that Maria first encounters, though it finds alternative ways to resemble the tomb. When visiting Anne/Laura in the asylum, Laura’s sister does not remark on the conditions of the building itself, only that it is “prettily laid out”, and there are several rooms mentioned as though they were drawing or sitting rooms in any other establishment.10 The occupant she seeks appears to be in no physical distress and is free to run into her arms, revealing herself to be Laura rather than Anne: “In that moment Miss Halcombe recognized her sister—recognised the dead-alive”.11 Within the plot, this refers to the fact that Laura was thought to be dead, but it also remarks on the unsettling suspension of life within the asylum and articulates a negated sense of progress and healing. To themselves and others, occupants are the dead-alive. Mary Elizabeth Braddon picks up the thread of uncanny undead space when characterising the asylum in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Lady Audley finds herself tamed by men who benefit from her quiet commitment to a madhouse, though not before demonstrating a threatening resourcefulness that positions her within the tradition of the monstrous feminine, acting outside the restrictive societal conventions assigned her gender and class. Though she worries about inheriting madness from her mother and the doctor confirms this with his diagnosis of latent insanity, she gives no indication of currently suffering from any identifiable psychological condition aside from the ambition to better her lot in life. Even this diagnosis is arrived at after careful scrutiny and, at least in part, because the doctor finds her dedication to self-preservation “dangerous”.12 Such were side effects of the New Woman, brazenly threatening the image of

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the angel in the house. As Saverio Tomaiuolo writes, “Braddon depicts madness not simply as a mental malady that affects rebellious women but, more significantly, as one of the conditions of modernity”,13 a modernity for which Lady Audley is frighteningly situated. Though her captivity may not be as physically bleak as Maria’s, the novel is not subtle in its association of insanity (however latent) with death, an execution without violence. Lady Audley’s cleverness, power, and attempts to escape a fate of loneliness and poverty are dutifully chastened with the label of insanity, a gendered option for women who would otherwise be labelled criminal, unfit, obscene, and is now undead. The doctor is blunt: “From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house… her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished…. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations”.14 He ends his assessment with an assurance that this “living grave”—a term Lady Audley herself uses—protects society, interpreting her distrust and antagonism towards him as violent and transgressive and more than enough to strip her of a future of which she proves herself fully capable.15 But, a woman who proves abhorrent to the Victorian cult of domesticity cannot be left to thrive and must be buried alive.16 Despite the persistence of Anna and Laura and the fortitude of Lady Audley, neither madwoman is as memorable or as influential as Bertha Mason/Rochester in Jane Eyre, whose position stimulated a whole new area of critical study in the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar adopted the recurring concept of discrediting unconventional women by hiding them away—symbolised so clearly in Jane Eyre—to describe the woeful position of women’s writing and women writers. In a chapter about Brontë’s novel, they discuss the doubling of Jane and Bertha, demonstrating how easily a woman may become a madwoman and how easily a madwoman enacts the desires and anxieties of women without the freedom of madness. “Bertha has functioned as Jane’s dark double throughout the governess’s stay at Thornfield”, they write. “Specifically, every one of Bertha’s appearances—or, more accurately, her manifestations—has been associated with an experience (or repression) of anger on Jane’s part”.17 Though Brontë accentuates Bertha’s gothic Otherness by detailing her physical appearance and violent actions, the far more unsettling insinuation is the closeness between Jane and the madwoman in the attic, they suggest. Furthermore, they see in the villainous and mad women of gothic literature the presence of the author herself expressing her own Otherness as a woman writer.18 As with these fictional madwomen, many works by female authors long lay in an undead state and are only now seen as alive and worthy of resurrection. Rochester’s descriptions of his wife (printed in italics every time he says it) objectify, villainise, and alienise her. Yet, his own tale detailing Bertha’s descent into madness and his responses to it do not differ much from those discussed above, containment and management of unsettling female behaviour rising above respect for her personal freedom and desires or genuine care for her health. Rochester’s attempts to Other his wife, rather, echo the behaviour of earlier gothic

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tyrants, exposing the Manfred or Montoni in himself.19 Speaking to himself, he says, “That woman… is not your wife, nor are you her husband…. Let her identity, her connection with yourself, be buried in oblivion….”20 The burial to which he refers is the makeshift madhouse he creates for her, counting her among the gothic living dead within her home asylum. Stripped of the safety and sympathy her relationship with Rochester should bring her and any identity beyond “the madwoman in the attic”, Bertha bears the descriptors, “maniac”, “lunatic”, “the thing”, “monster”; and her attic, “a wild beast’s den—a goblin’s cell”, references to animalism that does little to recognise her humanity or human life.21 Thus, though a locked attic room in a fine manor house may seem like an improvement over the asylums described in other texts, Brontë’s depiction calls into question the comfort of such a domestic space that could so debase and dehumanise the woman of the house, truly undead if denied jurisdiction over the lifeblood of the Victorian woman, the home. Bertha is not only denied sanity, personhood, and freedom, but also a voice. Rochester, a known deceiver, arrests the narrative that she might have had, attempting to shield Jane from speaking to Bertha, who is in a position from which violence can be the only discourse and which, again and again, prompts a denial of humanity in those who are mad. Suzanne Rosenthal Shumway makes this argument in her application of Bakhtinian theory to Jane Eyre, pointing out the distortion of time, space, and language that exists in the space of the asylum. It is, she says, “an arena in which subversion—and in particular a feminine form of subversion—can be articulated, in which alternative narrative possibilities can be imagined”.22 Yet, that alternative narrative can become inaccessible if its major player cannot access her own story or cannot be heard. This lack of voice furthers her state of living death, necessitating Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to tell her origin story. The criticism and theory that Berta’s asylum inspired—that the madwoman may echo the broader experiences of women—relies on a reading of the madwoman in the attic as a metaphor, a dangerous and, in some ways, outdated move when reading disability in literature. Such readings, according to disability theorists,23 “erase” the experience of mental illness or disability, replacing it with something to which a reader without disabilities may relate. As Elizabeth J. Donaldson writes, “However it is romanticized, madness itself offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion”, and such futility reminds us that the Gothic, for all its transgression and subversions, is in many ways a conservative tradition, even for its hyper-stylised and shocking depictions of madness.24 Donaldson points out that most literary critics make an intentional distinction between madness (metaphor) and mental illness (clinical condition), but not all readers may be as discerning: “Fictional representations of madness have a way of influencing clinical discourses of mental illness and vice versa”.25 Repeated depictions of the mad as violent, while subverting the often stifling insistence on the calm and decorum of the Victorian novel, creates a negative association that can last beyond the page. This can also be a dangerous side effect of the modern gothic’s tendency to reach to the past for its disturbing images of the madhouse and those who occupy it, reinforcing a fear of modern mental institutions that is already fuelled by stigma.

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The doctor’s voice, then, would hypothetically raise mental health care to a more noble pursuit. However, heroic, well-meaning, and knowledgeable characters in the Gothic rarely exist without a dark, villainous streak. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) breaks the Victorian preoccupation with incarcerating women in asylums with the character Renfield, a victim and associate of Dracula, who, in the liminal space in which madness meets the undead, provides a link between the team of experts and their supernatural foe. Even the good Dr. Seward too easily assumes the role of Romantic tyrant, acknowledging moments of his own brutality towards patients who, in a hospital power dynamic we now recognise from modern horror films, become his victims. He notes, “In my manner of [questioning Renfield’s hallucinations] there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness—a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell”, insinuating that there may be many more times when he takes this approach without “seeing” it.26 Dr. Seward’s interests lie in studying his patients as inhuman specimens caught between the human and the inhuman, rather than “burying” dangerous individuals. As Valerie Pedlar has pointed out, the asylum in Dracula becomes a zoo of wild animals as much as it is a hospital, which adds to the dungeon atmosphere of this space. Stoker’s doctor mixes contemporary psychological knowledge of the late nineteenth-century with ineptitude in practical application: Stoker throws some medical terms around but does not seem to understand what they mean or use them properly. She points out that his use of terminology is more appropriate for animals than humans and that he demonstrates the prominent Victorian trend to “observe and catalogue” the beasts in his care.27 In this, Dr. Seward’s blend of barbarism and enlightenment falls in step with the gothic tendency to mix styles, influences, and historical periods to reimagine institutions, including that of medicine. He gives little description of the asylum he runs, beyond the separate cells and methods of confinement that, though still used at the time, conjure images of more antiquated spaces, particularly as the asylum stands between Dracula’s ancient abode and the modernity in which the rest of the novel is steeped. The first to place the asylum and madness alongside vampire lore,28 Stoker positions Renfield as striving towards undeath through his relationship with Dracula. In devouring small lives (flies and spiders) that he lures into his cell, he not only calls attention to his own lifelessness (lured into a cell himself) but also the questionable state of his keeper. Dr. Seward is one of many characters running gothic asylums who, in collecting their undead, mad patients, become mad and therefore undead themselves within the same asylum walls.29 Like his female counterparts, Renfield is given little voice in the text, his story translated through the good doctor’s journal entries. Seward’s journal, like the documents kept by other characters in the book, catalogues and contains the undead at the same time that it is itself a living but dead space. His journals become as much an asylum space as the building itself, its occupants and writer beginning to blend. Reading, writing, and witnessing—central byways of creating meaning in any gothic text—are inherent in gothic asylums where other methods of communication and access to the world are denied. The narrator of Charlotte Perkins

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Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), for example, is forbidden to write but also finds solace in that activity and so performs it in secret, thus providing the reader with a relatively unfiltered voice conveying an experience historically, medically, and socially difficult to access, from an author also conveying her own experiences of suspended life in mental health treatment.30 The page that becomes an asylum perpetuates living death by transferring it to the reader,31 an experience seen in excess throughout the work of H. P. Lovecraft, whose artists, philosophers, and creative minds are always on the point of madness, though infrequently hospitalised. A sharp turn from the madwoman in the attic, there is little question that madness in Lovecraft is true and severe mental illness, often irreversible and in need of care if not to result in suicide. Despite influencing the terrifying Arkham Asylum of the Batman universe, the asylum in these stories is often not sinister in itself, setting it apart from other gothic depictions, only because the cause of insanity—­ preternatural, indescribable, incompressible—is the true source of threat in the text, one that annihilates the self before the asylum can even get to it. Rather, the mind of the asylum occupant takes on aspects of the living grave, burying something supernatural that refuses to die. In stories like “The Thing on the Doorstep”, the a­ sylum— or sanatarium—houses the narrator’s friend, who has demonstrated acute paranoia, erratic mood swings, and alarming changes in personality, all of which point to a legitimate psychological disorder. Rather, this man’s brain has been stolen from him, replaced by the brain of a dead woman, possession falling squarely in the space of living death. Furthermore, his own brain now occupies the corpse of his wife, which manages to drag itself to his friend’s doorstep. The living brain soon expires with the corpse, leaving the other, mad body walking and talking but no longer supporting the living brain it once did.32 Living death rooted in the mind, as is common in Lovecraft, struggles to thrive outside hospitalisation, but it does happen. Of the brutally resurrected bodies of “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922), one is “placed behind asylum bars” for sixteen years, never ageing, before it joins those never captured to seek revenge on its creator.33 The asylum in Lovecraft houses those whose experiences lie outside of scientific or medical understanding, providing the setting that concludes horror rather than constitutes it, his characters suffering from the living death of madness far before reaching what other texts describe as a living tomb. Close proximity to madness in Lovecraft’s tales authorises the reader with knowledge to which hospital attendants are not privy. Access to information through textual layering and intertextuality begun in the Romantic period become more palpable approaching modern iterations of the Gothic. Texts with first-person narrators who are themselves patients in the asylum—like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island (2003)34— allow the reader to enter the asylum and aim the novel towards the question, who is really insane here? Postmodern versions of this approach provide a myriad of textual bits and pieces to be assembled, like the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute letters buried in an appendix of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), letters to the protagonists from his mother, who is institutionalised there in the 1980s. Though the letters constitute just one of several appendices, they were also published separately and spawned numerous online debates, posts, and comments

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attempting to decode them. Similarly, Shadows in the Asylum: The Case Files of Charles Marsh (2006), by D. A. Stern, encourages a similar whodunit investigation of who may or may not be sane, not only providing letters but also newspaper clippings, patient files, emails, and interviews, most of which are confidential. Exploratory texts such as these grant the reader active authority over the narrative. When it is clear that reality may differ from how characters perceive it, the reader, like a detective, must determine what is true. The reader, without any kind of medical knowledge or training, is emboldened to diagnose the subject of the narrative: is the character insane and, therefore, easy to dismiss? From a disability studies standpoint, it can also be dangerous, providing a false understanding of mental illness. It produces an invitation to disbelieve patients, one that contradicts the Gothic’s ability to provide unheard and unusual voices with credibility. In a sense, such texts excavate voices of the mad undead, leaving it to the reader to decide whether to rebury them. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s gothic graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989),35 successfully discredits all voices and, in doing so, forces the reader to listen to them all, most of which are accessible only through painfully rough and double-coloured handwriting that makes the very experience of reading a maddening one. Through a gothic disintegration of order, space, and temporality, the text draws parallels between Batman, a supposedly heroic figure, and the undeniably insane characters around him. Madness in this text proves to be the great equaliser, levelling distinctions of education, gender, economics, and, the most prominent mark of power, mental competency. Indeed, like Dr. Seward and his questionable stability, the founder and leading physician of Arkham Asylum, Amadeus Arkham, suffers from mental illness himself. He has been traumatised by the brutal murder of his wife and child, as well as childhood memories of his mother’s descent into madness, which, in one panel, causes her to consume bugs in a nod to Renfield’s own feasting on lives in Dracula. Arkham, like Seward and Renfield, blurs the line between the supernatural and the psychological in his vacillation between medicine and the dark arts. He ultimately fulfils the stereotypical Horror depiction of monstrous mental health staff when he feigns care for his family’s murderer before burning his brains out with electroconvulsive shock therapy, the Hollywood madhouse weapon of choice. The Arkham asylum space, itself difficult to make out in the shadows and in contrast to its brightly coloured occupants, gives no glimpse of the outside world, even when characters climb around its exterior; an underground dungeon of twisting hallways and stone stairwells, it brings to mind Romantic gothic crypts and the continued comparison of the asylum to the grave. There are more connections to the vampire aside from Batman’s obvious totem and Arkham’s mother’s diet as members of staff become Arkham’s spawn, obsessed with carrying on his work (on both mental illness and the occult) and ensuring his continued uncanny presence in the asylum, the doctor once again joining his patients as a member of the mad undead. Blurred boundaries between asylum patients and their doctors, as well as between doctors and their families, feature heavily in Patrick McGrath’s 1997

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novel, Asylum. Stella, wife of the deputy superintendent of a m ­ id-twentieth-century high-security facility, has an affair with a patient who escapes and convinces her to leave her home to join him. She sinks into a deep depression when she is later returned to her family and, after the loss of her son, enters the asylum as a patient. While the inmates of Maria’s asylum clearly suffer just as much from the dark, unsanitary, and cruel conditions of the institution as they do from their own mental afflictions, the patients in psychiatrist Peter Cleave’s hospital appear to be wellcared for. Though this high-security facility does lock patients in cells, and there are patients who show signs of despair, McGrath, having grown up the son of a hospital superintendent, opts for historical accuracy rather than gothic atmospheric drama. The facility appears to be clean, comfortable, and humane, managed by kind and attentive doctors and nurses. Cleave, who narrates the novel, portrays a concern and pride for his hospital and its comfortable and therapeutic conditions. “This is moral architecture”, he says, “it embodies regularity, discipline, and organization”.36 On the surface, this does not seem like a gothic asylum at all. As McGrath has reported,37 the asylum that Stella and her family inhabit is inspired by the hospital grounds on which he himself grew up: what was once known as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, now Broadmoor Hospital. Importantly, the novel is set in 1959. McGrath remarks that, as the story is based on a mysterious affair at Broadmoor, this is simply when it occurred. The date is significant for other reasons, however. “It was the summer of 1959”, McGrath writes, “and the Mental Health Act had just been passed into law”.38 This brief mention of medical legislation never comes up again, but I suggest that the background of impending ideological changes introduced by this act and the anxiety produced by them manifest the gothic unrest of the novel through terrifying possessiveness and deep burial of the mad undead. The act sought to affect a turn from compulsory confinement to voluntary treatment; it intended to decrease the number of patients in hospitals, close many of the neglected institutions, and move the care of patients from asylums to the community. For all intents and purposes, it seems like a significant step forward in mental health treatment, and it was intended to give patients more access to doctors’ opinions and care. In this final section, I demonstrate how the modern asylum and the law, even with the best of intentions, harken back to madhouses of the Romantic period, burying their patients, even when enacting legislature meant to set them free. The act opened the doors of the asylum without proper precautions. In an article in the British Medical Journal four years later, the Physician Deputy Superintendent of Horton Hospital, Henry R. Rollin investigates why hospital occupancy increased rather than decreased under the act. He identifies a disconnect between the discharge of patients and the assumed community care. What he discovered was that most of the newest patients had visited several institutions previous to his own, for varying amounts of time, over the last few years, thus creating a cycle of hospital admission and discharge without sustained treatment. Patients were released with “indecent haste from mental hospitals, not necessarily cured or even improved”.39 The process of discharge was supposed to be more complicated than that of admittance. As The American Journal of Comparative Law explains,

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Patients admitted informally are discharged by the hospital doctor when he believes them fit to leave. If they wish to leave before that, the doctor tries to persuade them to complete their treatment. But the hospital has no power to detain them against their will…. In the rare event that an informal patient who needs further hospitalisation cannot be convinced to stay, the Act gives power to change his status quickly to that of a detained patient.40

Despite this safeguard, the act opened up possibilities for patient release that did not exist before and that are certainly not reflected in asylums featured throughout the Gothic. In the case of Aslyum, however, the flexibility of the law invites the manipulation and terror of the Gothic in compensation. The facility in Asylum does not show signs of this cycle of discharge and readmittance, and there appears to be no threat to the hospital itself, likely because of its special nature as a high-security facility. But, what I want to illustrate in pointing out this historical moment is that the atmosphere of transitory anxiety following the act, anxiety about losing patients through voluntary discharge, is palpable in Cleave’s asylum and results in an unsettling possessiveness, among Stella’s husband and Cleave most noticeably. To further connections to Maria, this anxiety is doubled by the gender politics of the time. As Sue Zlosnik points out, “McGrath sets his novel in 1959, just before the decade that was to see a radical departure from the legacy of Victorian sexual morality in Britain”,41 and even McGrath himself describes the time as “about ten minutes before feminism properly arrived in the south of England”.42 Wollstonecraft’s object, again, is to “[exhibit] the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society”.43 An unruly woman who does not fill her role as wife and mother, in both Maria and Stella’s worlds, is suspected of madness and must be repossessed by male authority: the Mental Health Act, thus, impacts both the mental health and domestic spheres. When Cleave says of paranoid patients, “We can manage them, we can contain them, but we don’t really know how to treat them. Because we don’t really understand what they are”, Stella validly wonders, “Is he talking about his patients, or women?”44 In the midst of this two-fold anxiety about detaining patients and containing women produced by this time of transition, the two become treated and contained like one and the same, eerily suspended in a position—even acknowledged by the staff—that provides for existence but does not promote life, especially not life beyond containment. From garden affair, to secret trips to London, to attic hideaway, and finally to stark, isolated relocation with a guard/husband, Stella seeks asylum that provides both freedom and security, the kind the act intends. But, in each situation, the men who “doctor” her respond by offering various versions of the gothic asylum: antiquated, severe, and possessive, a reversion to the outdated madhouse tomb detailed in Maria. In fact, women in the text seem well aware that they are often treated as patients by the men in their lives. The old superintendent’s wife declares that she made her husband take “the oath”, not the marriage vow but the Hippocratic Oath. “Do no harm”, she says, “Think of me as a patient, I told him, and we’ll survive”.45 Stella’s response, “Most of us are dying of chronic neglect”, not only brings to mind the old, decaying, understaffed hospitals that turned asylums into tombs, but it also prompts her husband, Max, to punish her with criticism and

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silence, a kind of forced isolation.46 At other moments, she feels observed like one of Dr. Seward’s specimens, her husband watching “with his desperately acute powers of mental intrusion and perception”, that he uses to confine, punish, and attempt to control her at home, recreating an asylum there not unlike Bertha’s attic. Thus, it is unsurprising that she refers to that home as “the hospital”, attaching to it the cold, undead state of the living tomb her literary female predecessors have already observed. After Edgar escapes and before Stella joins him in London, the hospital is under fire for letting it happen, and Stella and her mother-in-law commit to “[creating] out of thin air a warm, womanly flurry of domesticity around [Max] to give him some sense of home as a haven, a safe place”, but the next line reinforces Stella’s conflation of home and hospital: “Everyone was under such scrutiny”.47 It is only when Stella is performing her duties without undue fuss or even passion that she becomes acceptable and invisible, something she craves when she begins to see Edgar on the sly. But even Edgar, once his chronic paranoia flares up, begins to contain and punish her, recreating the asylum they had both escaped, this time a secret one she had helped to secure, ensuring her own burial deep within London’s obscurity. Cleave as narrator constantly diagnoses Stella’s actions, commenting that “She did have moments of sanity when she looked dispassionately at what she was doing”,48 and “Romantic women…: they never think of the damage they do in their blind pursuit of intense experience. Their infatuation with freedom”, in which he all but acknowledges the absence of freedom that he and Max expect women to accept, as they hope their patients will.49 When Stella returns home, Max reverts even further into psychiatric history to fully embrace the kind of Foucauldian punishment described in Madness and Civilization (1961),50 a mode of dealing with his wife/patient with moral policing and manipulation. It is only when Stella re-enters the asylum as a patient that she begins to be treated with proper, modern psychiatric care. Yet, here is where the startling anxieties surrounding the Mental Health Act of 1959 are most clearly seen. For, though she is treated with kindness, the prioritisation of containment and control has not been relinquished, the kind of suffocation Lady Audley recognises in her own situation, merely rebranded as caring attention. This type of possessiveness is demonstrated most obviously by Cleave in what I identify as anxiety about changes to institutional procedure and ideology, despite the fact that his patients are criminal and, therefore, would not be subject to early release. Throughout the novel, he consistently refers to Edgar as “my Edgar” when he is in the hospital, a move that might be interpreted as endearing if it were not for the intensity of that possessiveness once he also has Stella in his care: at once a patient and a married woman. And no wonder, as she confirms the ultimate anxiety of control: that both a patient (Edgar) and a married woman (Stella) were recently lost to him by their own voluntary discharge, thereby performing the loss of compulsory institutionalisation for which the Act stands. This anxiety about containment becomes most alarmingly apparent in the ways in which he talks about his

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treatment, however: treatment that puts himself—not, as the Act promotes, himself with other doctors, a community of patients within the hospital, or a community outside of it—himself in absolute control. “Now I had her here in the female wing”, he says of Stella, “I relished the prospect of stripping away her defenses and opening her up, seeing what that psyche of hers really looked like. I understood of course that she would resist me, but we had time”, and he takes this same approach to Edgar.51 His language goes beyond painting the asylum as a living tomb and straight to the more extreme image of his patients as dissection subjects, himself the body snatcher exhuming them from the facility in which they are in his care. The only possibility of discharge he offers Stella is by way of a marriage proposal, thereby continuing his treatment of his patient by making her his wife. He describes this proposition to her as “Safety. Asylum”, the last of which she repeats in response, clearly suspecting that he defines that word differently than she does.52 Asylum, then, demonstrates the same interchangeable possession of wife and patient within the living death of marriage or madness that we see in Maria, with one crucial difference, a difference I’ve noted in other depictions of the gothic asylum. In McGrath’s novel, the doctor possesses, controls, and contains the narrative. Maria writes her own narrative, but Stella only has a voice through Cleave’s, a voice that he barely attempts to hide is often contrived, imagined, and forcibly imposed on her. In fact, he can’t help but express distress when she moves into pockets of narrative beyond his scrutiny, like patients who leave the hospital for the community, and his supervision of that narrative remains tenuous at best. About parts of her London experience that she won’t tell him, he says, “The problem was that the further she moved away from the hospital the harder I found it to reconstruct her experience, to mold it into something with a shape and a meaning I could recognize”, an uncanny reflection of the way Edgar sculpts Stella’s head in clay.53 Perhaps it is for this reason that Cleave takes custody of this ceramic head after Stella’s death as satisfying the need to possess her, having only wanted to marry her to count her as an object in his finely furnished home. With the last lines of the text, he again equates the possession of patient and woman: “So you see, I do have my Stella after all. And I still, of course, have him”, referring to the ­sculpture and to Edgar.54 The core horror of containment and control of women and patients that Wollstonecraft seeks to expose is seen in the unconscious and desperate overcompensation by the medical staff in the wake of asylum shifts and closures in McGrath’s novel: a possessiveness parallel to and derivative of an a­lreadyprevalent and normalised possessiveness of women and patients, as well as the characterisation of the asylum as a living grave that results. McGrath’s portrayal of an act intended to open up the mental health field and de-stigmatise mental illness by expanding it into the community, instead, sees mental health care push further into the gothic recesses of which Wollstonecraft and others caution. Both Stella and Maria, in good and mad literary company, are indeed buried alive.

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Notes







1. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 7. 2. Ibid., 25. 3. Such cases as Maria’s were not unheard of, even later into the nineteenth century. In 1879, it was discovered a husband had paid to have his wife committed and kept “on pauper fare” and that another girl had been committed by her family for being disobedient, both in the same Blackburn workhouse, as cited in Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford, Scandal, Social, Social Policy and Social Welfare (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14. 4. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 17, 35. 5. Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 70–75. 6. Sean Shesgreen, ed., Engravings by Hogarth (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), Plate 35. This book has no pagination. 7. Arminta C. Stubbs, “To the Editor of the Opal,” in Greg Eghigian, ed., Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2010), 137–138, 138. 8. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Copies of his letters to his mother (1794–1816). MS.42419 (457E), National Library of Scotland. 9. Interestingly, the recent rewrite of Melmoth the Wanderer, Sarah Perry’s Melmoth (2018) gives Melmoth a similar purpose, but the lowest point is never depicted as in an asylum. Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 44. 10. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 429. 11. It might also be worth noting that Laura enters the asylum just as Maria does: drugged by her husband. Ibid., 429, emphasis mine. 12. He remarks, “There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear only once or twice in a lifetime…. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence.” Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), 385. 13. Saverio Tomaiuolo, Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 32. 14. Braddon, Lady Audley, 386. 15. Ibid., 396. 16. Tomaiuolo similarly discusses the conflation of house, tomb, and asylum “as three settings in which women’s bodies and aspirations are contradictorily managed…” Lady Audley’s Shadow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 29. 17. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 360. 18. Annette R. Federico articulates these ideas particularly well in the introduction to Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, which she also edits. “‘Bursting All the Doors’: The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 1–26, 7. 19. Manfred is the ruling tyrant of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and Montoni is the ruling tyrant of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Both attempt to incarcerate their wives in a convent or a castle, respectively. 20. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 356. 21. Ibid., 356–357. 22. Suzanne Rosenthal Shumway, “The Chronotope of the Asylum: Jane Eyre, Feminism, and Bakhtinian Theory,” in Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, eds., A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 152–170, 158.

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23. This includes Elizabeth J. Donaldson and Vicky Long, Destigmatising Mental Illness? Professional Politics and Public Education in Britain, 1870–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) within this specific context, as well as David Bolt’s writings more broadly. 24. Elizabeth J. Donaldson, “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Towards a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness,” NWSA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 2002, 99–119, 101. 25. Ibid., 101. 26. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 66. 27. Valerie Pedlar, The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 137–138. 28. Ibid., 136. 29. Ibid. Pedlar makes similar insinuations throughout her chapter on Dracula. 30. Charlotte Perkins Gilmore herself suffered from postpartum depression and was treated with “the resting cure,” a practice that she sought to criticise in her short story. Writing and even publishing became a therapeutic practice in one New York hospital, Utica State Lunatic Asylum, which released a monthly journal called The Opal, the content of which was written by its patients. See Eghigian, Madness to Mental Health. 31. As Scott Brewster writes of Dracula, “Those who ‘read’ vampires or madmen are forced to reflect on their own sanity and proximity to these figures lodged in the interstices of reason” Scott Brewster, “Seeing Things: Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation,” in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic (Hoboken: Wiley, 2012), 481–495, 489. 32. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” in Leslie S. Klinger, ed. The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (New York, W. W. Norton, 2014), 681–710. The last act of the thing on the doorstep is to urge his friend to “kill that thing,” 707. 33. H. P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” in Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (New York, W. W. Norton, 2014), 45–79, 62. 34. Neither of these novels fit comfortably in the Gothic, but their narrative structures do. 35. This book has no pagination. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (New York: DC Comics), 2014. 36. Patrick McGrath, Asylum (New York, Vintage, 1998), 4. 37. Patrick McGrath, “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor,” The Economist 1843, September/October 2012, https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor, accessed January 28, 2019. 38. McGrath, Asylum, 4. 39. Henry R. Rollin, “Social and Legal Repercussions of the Mental Health Act, 1959,” British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, March 23, 1963, 788. 40. Bertram F. Willcox and Ruth Roemer, “Hospitalization under the British Mental Health Act, 1959,” The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 9, No. 4 Autumn 1960, 606–633, 612. 41. Sue Zlosnik, Patrick McGrath (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 79. 42. Patrick McGrath, “Writing Asylum,” Penguin Blog, July 27, 2015, https://penguinblogposts.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/patrick-mcgrath-writing-asylum/, accessed January 28, 2019. 43. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 5. 44. McGrath, Asylum, 72. 45. Ibid., 47. 46. Ibid., 51. 47. Ibid., 69. 48. Ibid., 32. 49. Ibid., 81.

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50. Michel Foucault describes a history of mental health care and imprisonment heavily policed through surveillance, discipline, and power. 51. McGrath, Asylum, 212. 52. Ibid., 232. 53. Ibid., 115. 54. Ibid., 254.

Bibliography Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Lady Audley’s Secret, Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003. Brewster, Scott, “Seeing Things: Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation,” in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic, Hoboken: John, 2012, 481–495. Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Butler, Ian and Mark Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. Donaldson, Elizabeth J., “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Towards a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness,” NWSA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3 Autumn 2002, 99–119. Eghigian, Greg, ed., Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and Its Treatment in Western Civilization, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Federico, Annette R., “‘Bursting All the Doors’: The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years,” in Annette R. Federico, ed., Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009, 1–26. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Lewis, Matthew Gregory, Copies of his letters to his mother (1794–1816). MS.42419 (457E), National Library of Scotland. Long, Vicky, Destigmatising Mental Illness? Professional Politics and Public Education in Britain, 1870–1970, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Lovecraft, H. P., “Herbert West—Reanimator,” in Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, New York: W. W. Norton, 2014, 45–79. ———, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” in Leslie S. Klinger, ed., The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, New York: W. W. Norton, 2014, 681–710. Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. McGrath, Patrick, “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor,” The Economist 1843, September/October 2012, https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor, accessed January 28, 2019. ———, Asylum, New York: Vintage, 1998. ———, “Writing Asylum,” Penguin Blog, July 27, 2015, https://penguinblogposts.wordpress. com/2015/07/27/patrick-mcgrath-writing-asylum/, accessed January 28, 2019. Morrison, Grant and Dave McKean, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, New York: DC Comics, 2014. Pedlar, Valerie, The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Porter, Roy, Madness: A Brief History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rollin, Henry R., “Social and Legal Repercussions of the Mental Health Act, 1959,” British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, March 23, 1963, 786–788.

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Rosenthal Shumway, Suzanne, “The Chronotope of the Asylum: Jane Eyre, Feminism, and Bakhtinian Theory,” in Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, eds., A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 152–170. Shesgreen, Sean, ed., Engravings by Hogarth, New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Stoker, Bram, Dracula, New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Tomaiuolo, Saverio, Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Willcox, Bertram F. and Ruth Roemer, “Hospitalization Under the British Mental Health Act, 1959,” The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 9, No. 4, Autumn 1960, 606–633. Wollstonecraft, Mary, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman, New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Zlosnik, Sue, Patrick McGrath, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011.

Psychopaths, Sociopaths and the Psychotic Mind Lauren Ellis Christie

How do you catch a serial killer? Is it possible to identify a killer based solely on external appearance? These questions have become popular with the increasing surge in both the presence of the killer in popular culture and the demand for this figure as a form of entertainment. Various platforms such as Netflix and true crime podcasts have glamorised this figure in answer to the rising demand for this style of entertainment. The growing popularity of crime fiction invites the audience to participate in solving a crime creating an immersive experience. This chapter will analyse the development of the killer, both historical and fictional, from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century. The primary study will focus on Dr. Holmes The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson, 2003), Norman Bates Psycho (Robert Bloch, 1959), Dr. Hannibal Lecter Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris, 1981 and 1988) and Patrick Bateman American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis, 1991). The serial killer has experienced a renaissance through contemporary society and changing cultural tastes. There is an obsession with learning about, understanding, and identifying the killer. Whilst this is not a new phenomenon, societal curiosity around the intimate details of circumstance and the method of killing is steadily growing. Historical killers continue to influence real-life killers, with behavioural traits and murder techniques often acting as homage to the original figure. As the interest and study of the killer has progressed, specialists are developing new traits in order to help categorise this evolving killer; these include personality and behavioural traits, appearance, profession and mental health. The late twentieth century offered a shift in the appreciation of different categories of Antisocial Personality Disorders through a better understanding of psychoses from forensic psychiatrists. This has become a vital tool in appreciating the nature of killers suffering from mental illness. Although an increase in scientific and behavioural understanding of the killer has doubtlessly assisted many cases, there

L. E. Christie (*)  University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_28

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resides an acceleration of blame culture (nature versus nurture) that has fuelled public obsession with the killer. An examination of killers in this chapter will question their striking similarities, their unique differences, and overall profile development. Each of these characters resides in the uncertain realm between sanity and insanity. The chilling reality of many of the psychopaths and sociopaths discussed, both historical and fictional, is the fact that they were, by definition, medically sane. Stephen King observes that fear of the monster lies in the fact that its appearance is identical to our own ­reflection.1 This chapter will explore the mask of ‘normality’ as worn by the contemporary killer, and the danger of peering into the mirror that reflects a repressed and violent subconscious. Contemporary killers prey on cultural anxieties due to the fact they are non-distinct in a crowd. The curious thing about a mirror is the compulsive urge to look deep inside and see what is staring back at you. The danger comes when you begin to recognise uncomfortable elements, deep in your subconscious, that you never realised existed. The beauty (and terror) of the human mind is the undetectable nature to exist in different states. Whilst some killers exhibit signs demonstrative of one psychological category, others blur these finite boundaries. The fluid nature of this study is consequential of attempting to definitively analyse the human mind. The increasing presence of technology, societal distrust and mob mentality has resulted in a permanent state of paranoia and distrust. In order to help appease this pressure, experts analyse the behaviour of a killer as a precautionary measure to help prevent reoccurrence. In the 1980s, the study of killers and the psychotic mind was reinvented by clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Hare and his creation of the Psychopathy Checklist.2 Hare established himself as a lead researcher by furthering our understanding of criminal behaviour. The term ‘psychopath’ was widely associated with mental illness, largely due to the power of the media and the popularity of true crime entertainment. In order to address this misinterpretation, Hare created a twenty-point checklist to help identify a psychopath.3 Dr. Julie Wiest’s theory investigates the portrayal of serial killers as celebrities when considering their relationship with the media. The publication of psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone’s novel The Anatomy of Evil (2017) serves as a case study of contemporary killers. Stone recognises Hare’s psychopathic recognition test, and furthers this by including a range of historical and contemporary killers and their varying ‘gradations of evil’.4 The psychotic mind and the face of evil has evolved significantly throughout literary history in order to reflect societal anxieties. For the study of killers to continue to advance, analytical material must develop. Killers are invading places that were once considered safe- public arenas, schools, film theatres, and quiet communities. Bringing the killer home in reality and in fiction emphasises their ability to integrate seamlessly into the community; this figure remains anonymous. This chapter will exclusively focus on psychopaths, sociopaths, and those suffering from psychosis. Each character selected for this chapter broadly falls under one (or more) of these categories; what makes them unique is their inability to conform to preconceived definitions. Exhibiting traits of more than one of these

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categories will demonstrate ways in which it is impossible to ever completely identify or predict behavioural traits. Contemporary killers are able to blend into a crowd, they can act like us, they look like us, they are us.5 Psychopaths are often classed as serial killers and as being certifiably insane. Looking further into the mind of a psychopath, they are always considered medically ‘sane’ and do not always kill their victims. Hare described psychopaths as devoid of both conscience and emotions, and who charm their way through life with manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence.6 Violent psychopaths choose to inflict brutality without any remorse.7 If a psychopath appears as a general, unremarkable individual, then how can they be distinguished as separate from both general society and psychotic individuals? Experts believe those that prefer the term sociopath, understand that behavioural traits have been formed through ‘social forces and early experiences’; those that prefer psychopath, believe ‘psychological, biological and genetic factors’ are at fault.8 It is often argued that sociopaths possesses the ability to reverse their behaviour, and to identify between what is morally right and wrong. A psychopath is aware of the moral ramifications of their actions; they merely lack empathy or emotions. It is understood by many psychiatrists that sociopaths are made by influencing factors, psychopaths are born. With severe mental illness, violent actions are almost always sporadic and impulsive.9 Whenever a mental illness is discovered to be connected to a killer, the media expose this on a grand scale in order to inject mass hysteria and fear into a contemporary society.10 Similar to Dr. Stone’s research in advancing the understanding of Antisocial Personality Disorders, the understanding of schizophrenia is likewise evolving. Dr. Simon McCarthy-Jones, an Associate Professor in Psychiatry notes the work of Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University. In this argument, he explains that the term ‘schizophrenia’ will eventually be replaced by a ‘psychosis spectrum disorder’.11 Misleading information from the media has generated confusion surrounding these different profiles; most commonly, the assumption that all killers are ‘crazy’. This leads to fear and anxiety, creating the wrong impression of mental illness, and allowing the ‘sane’ psychopathic and sociopathic killers to slip through the net undetected. Written in 2003, but based around the construction and opening of the World’s State Fair in Chicago in 1893, The Devil in the White City is a historical ­‘non-fiction’ novel. Erik Larson documents the psychopathic profile and killings of Herman Mudgett (or his alias, Dr. H. H. Holmes), and the author often connects these with Jack the Ripper’s killings in London five years prior. The protagonist is introduced as a ‘harbinger of an American archetype, the urban serial killer’,12 with an ability to feed off the anarchy and anonymity of a changing and burgeoning city. Larson explores the duality of an expanding city upon entering the twentieth century: ‘Beneath the gore and smoke and loam… this book is about… a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black’.13 The narrative structure of the novel represents the white and the black city. The account of Holmes as told in conjunction with the promise and hope of Chicago acquiring the rights to host the first-ever state fair, promises new

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employment opportunities and to reinvent the image of the city. Rather than focusing on the hope of a new city, Larson emphasises the claustrophobic and humid conditions: Despite the heat Holmes looked fresh and crisp… he walked with confidence and dressed well, conjuring an impression of wealth and achievement… he had dark hair and striking blue eyes, once likened to the eyes of a Mesmerist… a physician named John L. Capen later observed. “They are blue. Great murderers like great men… have blue eyes… he is made on a very delicate mold.”14

Phrasing this observation in such a way creates duality between the uncomfortable and claustrophobic nature of a bustling city, and Holmes’s calm and crisp nature. Holmes is often described as charming, hypnotising women with his looks (similar to a mesmerist or a conjurer). Suggesting that he ‘is made on a delicate mold’ furthers the imagery of Holmes as being made and not born; a devil that is comfortable in the physically oppressive conditions of such a corrupt city. The profile of Holmes is representative of a psychopathic killer: advanced intellect, charming, handsome and a conman. The most striking way in which Larson portrays Holmes’s lack of emotions is through the development of medical science in the nineteenth century. Holmes describes corpses as ‘“material,” no different from firewood’.15 This lack of emotion is continued throughout the novel by informing the reader of the details around Jack the Ripper’s crimes, and then comparing them to Holmes: Holmes had erected his building during the same period in which Jack the Ripper, thousands of miles away, began his killings…[Jack] met a prostitute named Mary Kelly… secure within walls… He slashed her from throat to pubis, skinned her thighs, removed her internal organs, and arranged them in a pile between her feet… Kelly had been three months’ pregnant at the time.16

This connection is furthered by explaining, ‘Holmes did not kill face to face, as Jack the Ripper had done… but he did like proximity, he liked being near enough to hear the approach of death in the rising panic of his victims. This was when his quest for possession entered its most satisfying phase’.17 Drawing satisfaction from the panic of his victims as they approach death demonstrates connected psychopathic pleasure. Although Holmes never identifies himself as psychopathic, in his memoir he discusses his brief time working in an asylum, ‘This’, he wrote ‘was my first experience with insane persons, and so terrible was it that for years afterwards, even now sometimes, I see their faces in my sleep’.18 Despite the level of torture and atrocities Holmes inflicts on his victims, individuals afflicted with insanity creates the greatest level of discomfort to a psychopathic mind. Exposure to patients in the asylum, shines a light on Holmes’s repressed fear of insanity. Similar to the anxiety of questioning one’s own moral and ethical limitations is the uncomfortable exposure to the power of the mind. Holmes struggled because he was able to draw similarities between the physical appearance of insanity and himself. A further trait of psychopathic behaviour is Holmes’s ability to con and lie whilst maintaining a calm outward appearance. This mask is prominent in

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Holmes’s interaction with relatives of his victims, or debtors and remains prevalent throughout the novel, ‘some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as “moral insanity”… they later adopted the term “psychopath”, used… as early as 1885…. Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly”’.19 According to Larson, Cleckley initiated this discovery after his disturbing encounter with Holmes. Holmes’s mask of normality is furthered when he falsifies behaviour for his own gain, ‘he sensed vulnerability, sensed it the way another man might capture the trace of a woman’s perfume… He spoke softly, smiled often, and held her in his frank blue gaze. He was good with conversation… Holmes listened with moist eyes’.20 Through perfecting his mask of normality, Holmes demonstrates an uncanny talent for putting those at ease that he wishes to con through his softly spoken, charming demeanour. Similar to Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Larson conceals the truly dark nature of Holmes’s crimes until the conclusion, where details of a specially designed ‘murder castle’ including walk-in vaults, iron walls, gas jets piped into the room and a dissection table in the basement are disclosed.21 The contemporary killer is able to utilise the anonymity of a bustling city, internet, social media platforms and dating platforms in order to target their prey in the most invasive way yet. Contemporary killers are offered an immediate environment for the immortalisation of their name and their crimes. Dr. Julie Wiest observes that mass media build profiles of serial killers as either monsters or celebrities.22 Whilst monsters reveal cultural insecurities, celebrities possess the ability to reflect cultural values.23 This popularity is evident through platforms such as Netflix, with popular shows documenting the profile of historical and fictional killers, such as, ‘Making a Murderer’, ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’, ‘Dexter’ and ‘Luther’. Horror acts as a cathartic experience for the audience.24 Reflecting this cathartic entertainment, and based around societal anxieties in light of the Jack the Ripper killings in London, The Devil in the White City constructs Holmes as the ultimate anonymous psychopathic killer. The contemporary killer demonstrates a striking ability to act ‘abnormally normal’.25 This ‘abnormally normal’ killer cannot be easily identified and is a trope that many contemporary horror authors adapt in order to prey on the weakness of a modern society. In ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’,26 a great deal of emphasis is placed on his ‘ordinary upbringing and childhood’; having attended church, boy scouts and interacting with other families on his street, nothing about Bundy appeared abnormal. Individuals suffering from psychosis that have killed are incredibly vulnerable to misrepresentation through social media and mass media. Dr. Stone’s research attempts to correct this misunderstanding by stressing the crucial difference between a mentally ill person that resists treatment and kills sporadically, and a psychopathic serial killer.27 This contributes to a grand-scale societal misunderstanding in order to create suspicion and paranoia.

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Psycho explores duality and conflict expressed through a character with genuine psychosis. Norman Bates represents one of the main transitions for the horror genre away from an external, supernatural threat, by focusing on the dangers of unknown boundaries of the psyche.28 At the beginning of the novel, Bates refers to psychological studies that he has researched, and is aware that he is suffering from schizophrenia. This remains undiagnosed, and it later transpires (when Bates physically transforms into his mother) that he has Multiple Personality Disorder. Bates switches between three different personalities: child, adult and mother; the different perspectives reflect different levels of awareness, evil intent and consciousness. The conscious adult is able to tell the difference between right and wrong, harbouring hostility and repressed sexual frustration towards women. Bates unconsciously transforms into his mother through guilt and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, where he simultaneously reverts to a repressed juvenile state. This section will highlight passages that demonstrate both Bates’s mental illness, and instances where he is lucid and voyeuristically spying on women. Mixing his behaviour in this extreme way borders on sociopathic impulse, a deeply rooted Oedipal Complex, and corrupt and perverse actions towards females. Psycho was written in 1959, slightly ahead of the 1980 developments in psychiatric study. During this point in history, many changing factors were influencing the behaviour and anxiety of society—for example mass murder during the Second World War. An increasing focus on technology furthered the reach of the media, therefore immortalising many suburban serial killers. The exposure and immortalisation of Ed Gein in 1957 highlights the true horrors that can take place behind the closed doors of an inconspicuous rural American community. For America, Gein literally brought the killer home. Gein was discovered to possess a range of female corpses that he had gradually stolen from cemeteries, and had indulged in cannibalism, necrophilia, Gein was attempting to create a suit out of crafting together the skin of his victims.29 Gein has been extensively studied and immortalised after his killing spree in the mid-1950s, and suffered from psychosis. Due to Gein’s mental condition, ‘at his trial both prosecution and defence psychiatrists agreed that he was psychotic; the diagnosis was chronic schizophrenia’.30 Through media attention and extensive analysis, many of Gein’s crimes would influence copycat killers and crime authors for centuries later. Identifying the difference between the psychotic mind and psychopaths urges the reader to consider individuals that consciously use skilled manipulation tactics in order to avoid punishment. As demonstrated by R. P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, what makes categorising killers even more problematic, is the psychopath’s natural ability to lie and create fictional personas. The very fact that a psychopathic individual is classed as a pathological conman, how do we distinguish between psychotic individuals that are suffering from psychosis, and psychopaths falsifying psychosis? On discussing an inmate of the Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, journalist and documentary maker Jon Ronson outlines his conversation with an inmate who was completely sane, but who ‘faked madness to get out of a prison sentence.31 Upon conversing with this particular inmate, Ronson was informed that psychopathic individuals

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are aware that if they plagiarise information as documented by notorious killers (Ted Bundy in this instance) they will assuredly receive a sentence reflective of mental illness. Something which psychopathic individuals are aware of when conducting this behaviour, is that it is more difficult acting categorically sane.32 There is a fine line between charm and status, a psychopathic character that is feigning psychosis to gain leniency and an individual genuinely suffering. This contributes further to the inability to ever properly categorise or recognise the intent of the human mind. What is it specifically about Norman Bates that makes the reader feel uneasy? Stephen King explains that a large factor behind the social anxiety created by Norman Bates is that he encompasses both mental illness and evil intent. The conscious decision to indulge in voyeurism, alcoholism and violence signifies the sane behaviour conjoining with psychosis. A character that represents both mental illness and sociopathic behaviour demonstrates that the fault and responsibility, lies within our own control.33 In Psycho, Bates is mentally ill but possesses evil compulsion and intent. This blends the horror novel with true-crime as the reader is confronted with the challenge of piecing together details throughout in order to construct a conclusion with Bates’s behaviour. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, and sanity and insanity creates anxiety for the reader. Once the vulnerability of the mind is exposed detailing horrific crimes taking place within close proximity, it becomes clear how fine the line is between control and pandemonium, between sanity and insanity. Throughout the novel, there are several instances where Bates discloses the amount of research he has conducted on psychology and psychiatric disorders “Psychology isn’t filthy, Mother!” “Psychology, he calls it! A lot you know about psychology! I’ll never forget that time you talked so dirty to me, never”… “But I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better,”34

Bates’s awareness of The Oedipus Complex convinces the reader of his lucid, conscious awareness. This complex is defined as the desire for sexual involvement with the female figure and rivalry with the male figure, furthered whereby in the presence of traumatic relationships with parental figures, there occurs an ‘infantile neurosis’.35 Combining a repressed sexual urge and the prominent voice the child of Norman Bates in his adult life furthers the unhealthy relationship between Bates and his mother: When he read the books he wasn’t her little boy any more. He was a grown man… Whenever he thought about Mother, he became a child again… But when he was by himself… he was a mature individual. Mature enough to understand that he might even be the victim of a mild form of schizophrenia, some likely some form of borderline neurosis.36

Empowering his mind through literature demonstrates the figure of the child attempting to separate from the power of the mother.37 An ability to separate the mind into three persona’s not only adheres with the impact of a negative childhood and Oedipus Complex, but also PTSD and the extent to which Norman believes

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he can conceal both his own and his mother’s previous murders. The power of Bloch’s storytelling lies in his ability to withhold vital information from the reader until pivotal moments of suspense. Retrospectively, analysing the first murder as committed by the Mother, but understanding that this is one of Bates’s multiple personalities, emphasises the extent of his illness: She didn’t hear the door open, or note the sound of footsteps… Then she did see it therejust a face, peering through the curtain hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be… It was the face of a crazy old woman.38

This famous scene focuses on both the ‘mask’ of the mother, and the ‘glassy eyes’. The eyes refer to Bates’s inability to witness the situation as it truly is due to his mental illness, and the mask of his persona as a stark reflection of his illness. Earlier in the novel, when referring to the presence of his mother, Bates ‘kept wondering if she’d start screaming and pounding. But she had kept very quiet, almost too quiet, as though she was listening’.39 Imprisoning his mother allows Bates to temporarily section portions of his brain so that the adult can take control. By protecting his mother, Bates is also concealing his mental illness. Although initially killing impulsively as stereotypical for a sociopath, and under the influence of his psychotic mind, his narrative voice discloses instances of hatred and repressed violence towards the female sex due to a traumatic childhood: Norman took another drink… when he actually saw her, he had this terrible feeling ofwhat was the word… impotent… The word the bitches knew; they must know it, and that’s why they always laughed… He was going to tilt the frames license on the wall to one side and peek through the little hole he’d drilled… Let the bitches laugh at him. He knew more about them than they ever dreamed.40

The above passage captures the voyeuristic and repressed elements in Bates’s character. Although he suffers from psychosis, this excerpt demonstrates his reliance on alcohol as a form of self-medicating his illness, his latent insecurities around his impotence, and his ways of enacting revenge upon women that have previously ridiculed him. Voyeuristic compulsion and repressed rage is underlying throughout the novel when the narrative concentrates on Bates’s adult persona. Conscious, sociopathic traits become evident when adult Norman is required to conceal his Mother’s crimes, ‘Norman smiled. They weren’t going to frighten him into anything. Any more than they were going to find anything. He’d been over that room thoroughly, from top to bottom. There were no telltale signs of what had happened, not the tiniest stain of blood’.41 Bates is able to distinguish between what is morally right and wrong, as such, Bates’s moral responsibility is constantly neglected as he refuses to seek help. Norman is unable to process and accept the consequences of his actions, so he has chosen to maintain both denial and his mother’s corpse in the house behind the motel. It is only when these events are discovered he is forced to confront the truth and accept a level of responsibility. Bates is able to continue this facade until his actions (and illness) are discovered, and he is imprisoned in an asylum:

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The real end came quietly. It came in a small, barred room where the voices had muttered and mingled for so long a time- the man’s voice, the woman’s voice, the child’s… now, almost miraculously, a fusion took place… she was the only one left, and she was real… that’s sanity, isn’t it? But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending.42

Bloch concludes the novel with this final insight. Acknowledging that there is only one voice demonstrates the impact of medication now that he is in the asylum. However, the power of the mind is finally unleashed as Norman believes that the ‘one’ true person that remains is that of his dead mother. Norman acts in a way that society and doctors deem ‘normal’ so that he will be released. Therefore, if Norman is feigning normality and fooling psychiatrists into believing such, how many other members of society are doing the very same? A study of Dr. Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) will consider motive, animalistic portrayal and relationship with the media. In true psychopathic nature, Lecter manipulates, lies and is fully aware of his extraordinary intellect (using this in order to humiliate the ‘experts’ that attempt to understand his mind). However, this chapter will argue that Lecter does not solely fall into the psychopathic category; there are other factors worth considering. Thomas Harris, Hannibal’s creator, describes his infamous character as a ‘sociopath’.43 Considering the sociopathic categorisation, one thing that remains secondary until the explanation in the prequel, Hannibal Rising (2006) is Lecter’s childhood trauma. It is widely argued that exposure as a child to trauma can influence the person we are, or the person we will become.44 One of the most poignant aspects in studying human behaviour with labels and categories in mind, is that individuals will not always belong to one finite category. Hannibal Rising is set during the Second World War where an explosion kills Lecter’s parents. Hannibal and his sister are captured by soldiers who eventually kill and eat his younger sister, Mischa. To experience such trauma at this age, Lecter is rendered mute from PTSD, and remains as such until further into the novel. After extensive training and guidance, when Lecter is older he identifies each of the soldiers that captured and ate his sister, and inflicts the same torture on them.45 Witnessing this incident would suggest that Lecter resides on the boundary between psychopathic and sociopathic behaviour. The early stage of this behaviour was accelerated by intense childhood trauma, and would have been considered reversible; the consequence of allowing this trauma to fester, is Lecter’s complete detachment from humanity and morality. A large part of the ability to create a level of fear for the reader is through an extensive build up to Lecter’s introduction. This is achieved through character narratives, the interpretation from the media and demonic portrayal. The presence and behaviour of the FBI specialists in both novels contribute to the first unusual factor of Lecter’s incarceration—despite the atrocities he has committed in the past, the FBI realise that in order to help catch a serial killer, they have to first get in the mind of a killer. Lecter’s background as a respected psychiatrist and the brutal crimes he has committed make him the perfect consultant. On discussing Lecter’s motive and behaviour in Red Dragon, Will Graham explains that due to the level

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of pleasure Lecter gains from killing he is undoubtedly classed a sociopath. The inability to ultimately categorise and label Lecter through Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist furthers the previous argument about the danger of these killers in society—the unpredictable nature of their actions. Graham stresses that Lecter is perfectly sane, he just executes terror for pleasure. Branding him a ‘monster’ due to the fact he will not fit into any established category initiates a demonic profile of Hannibal Lecter long before the reader is introduced to the character. Lecter relishes in the fact that he is of such exceedingly high intelligence, and uses this power to mock and belittle those attempting to identify him. When building on Lecter’s unique profile, Harris focuses on the senses and imagery, immediately introducing the reader to his reading material as Vogue, highlighting Lecter’s taste, and his left hand as possessing an extra finger highlighting his abnormal representation.46 The introduction between Starling and Lecter allows Lecter to assert his authority over Starling, ‘Dr Lecter considered, his finger pressed against his pursed lips. Then he rose in his own time and came forward smoothly in his cage, stopping short of the nylon web without looking at it, as though he chose the distance. She could see that he was small, sleek’.47 The narrative style of this whole section is short and sharp in order to reflect the tension residing between these two characters. A heightened sense of isolation has enabled Lecter to strengthen his own mental abilities for entertainment, creating frustration from those attempting to measure or predict his mind: It’s ridiculous, you know; Lecter is a psychiatrist and he writes for the psychiatric journals… He pretended to go along with the hospital director, Chilton, once in some tests… then Lecter published first what he’s learned about Chilton… He responds to serious correspondence from psychiatric students… They love Lecter even better than Prince Andrew.48

Lecter’s respected professional status is emphasised as he proceeds to belittle the hospital director by analysing and publishing Chilton’s response to the tests. Explaining that adoring fans remain loyal to him as though he were royalty returns to Wiest’s notion of killers representing celebrities. Lecter’s exceptional mental abilities, inability to be labelled or classified and ability to execute his escape in such a seamless fashion, does indeed place him as royalty amongst killers. Lecter’s unique profile is frequently associated with demonic and animalistic references that contrast with his sophistication and professional reputation: Graham knew that Lecter slept most of the morning… Graham wanted to see Dr. Lecter asleep. He wanted time to brace himself. If he felt Lecter’s madness in his head, he had to contain it quickly, like a spill… Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. Graham felt each hair bristle on his nape.49

One of the key points to draw out between Graham and Lecter is the connection that is referred to throughout the series. Graham was the only one able to capture Lecter due to his ability to enter the mind-set of this unique killer, as demonstrated when Lecter correlates similarities between them, ‘Do you know how you caught me?…. The reason you caught me is that WE’RE JUST ALIKE’,… he had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him. He stopped outside the

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entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.50 As with the dark shadow of humanity, Lecter represents the uncivilised, primal, repressed portion of the subconscious. Horror and the profile of serial killers remain popular due to the fact they allow the repressed, chaotic and uncivilised portion of humanity to indulge, for a moment.51 Graham’s lingering feeling that Lecter’s presence remains, suggests that man’s greatest fear is what Lecter represents—succumbing to the sane, unrestrained psychopathic mind. The uncomfortable nature of the mirror as referred throughout this chapter is the ability to recognise aspects that respectable society deems should remain hidden. Graham recognises Lecter’s duality and the fact he has succumbed to this uncivil portion of the subconscious. Witnessing the madness of monstrous behaviour allows humanity to understand that which must remain repressed. Therefore peering into the eyes of a madman may unleash madness in himself. When describing Lecter’s appearance there is often a focus on mouth, eyes and colour, associating him with a wild animal. The importance of eye contact amongst humans is often considered a way of predicting their next move, ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red. Sometimes the points of light seem to fly like sparks to his centre. His eyes held Starling whole’.52 It is considered challenging behaviour to make direct eye contact with a wild animal. Likewise, the focus on the mouth stresses that with both a wild animal, and with Lecter, the real threat comes from the mouth. This build up to Lecter’s presence in both of these novels almost overshadow his actions—reflecting the cult status of a name and a label, rather than the individual. Referring to the significance of colour with imagery, Lecter’s presence in his cell represents many significant, demonic elements: Dr Lecter wore the white asylum pajamas in his white cell. The only colors in the cell were his hair and eyes and his red mouth… the tip of his tongue appeared, with his lips equally red. It touched his upper lip in the exact center and went back in again.53

This passage focuses on all of the above elements (eyes, mouth and colour) in order to further Lecter’s demonic portrayal. In particular, a stark opposition between white and red, and their symbolic connotations of purity and evil. As this is during an interaction between Starling and Lecter, Harris is once more presupposing a certain image to the reader. A focus on location and the importance of the asylum as containing this unusual character plays further importance when considering demonic associations and the stark difference between what is natural and unnatural: Far beneath the rusty Baltimore dawn, stirrings in the maximum-security ward… God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again and the ravers cleared their throats. Dr Hannibal Lecter stood stiffly upright at the end of the corridor… Dr Lecter amused himself- he has extensive internal resources and can entertain himself for years at a time… He was free in his head.54

This excerpt provides many contrasting images when considering Lecter’s placement in the asylum, and the presence of the asylum itself in nature. Mentioning the break of dawn and ‘God’s creatures’, allows Harris to portray an

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image of natural beauty and innocence. In this sense, however, the label ‘creature’ objectifies the inmates of the asylum by way of ironically pointing out that they are unnatural, highlighting their difference within society. This image is furthered through Lecter’s uncomfortable surroundings, and the fact he was ‘stood stiffly upright’, an unnatural image against the presence of the natural world. This suggests what whilst the asylum inmates may be corrupt representatives of God’s creatures, Lecter is again something completely different. In the conclusion of The Silence of the Lambs, this unique and unusual profile is explored with Lecter’s ability to orchestrate an elaborate and devastating escape from behind a secure prison cell. ‘Lecter shook his head like a rat-killing dog… Dr Lecter looked down at him with his red smile… Dr Lecter’s pulse was elevated to more than one hundred by the exercise, but quickly slowed to normal’.55 Between the presence of trauma in Lecter’s childhood, and Lecter’s calculated and brutal violence as demonstrated in this scene, Harris has succeeded in portraying the profile of a unique and unusual killer. At one point, Lecter’s sociopathic behaviour may have been reversible; however when left to linger, Lecter evinces traits common to the most violent psychopathic profile. The brutality and violence of his escape demonstrates not only his relentless patience and constant awareness, but also his deadly force when unleashed. All of these elements succeed in heightening the level of terror for the reader. The final serial killer that this chapter will analyse involves a sadistic psychopath, executing torture-murder for sexual gratification. Focusing on class and sexuality in the profile of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, this section will scrutinise the violence enacted by an upper-class, remorseless psychopath. Bateman depicts the dark tolerances on individual taste in the horror genre, pushing boundaries and limits for the reader. Through pop-culture and brand references, this text abruptly latches on to the reader emotionally and psychologically due to the familiarity of Bateman’s world. This is one of the major successes of Ellis’s work as it immediately connects the reader to the killer. Whilst Bateman is legally sane, he expresses hopelessness at being stuck in a spiral of misery and emptiness through his lack of humanity; this is then projected onto wider society and their declining sense of humanity. This is then translated onto his own sense of self-loathing. As Bateman descends deeper into a psychopathic frenzy, he adapts a confessional tone and attempts to psychoanalyse the emptiness he is experiencing: There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman… an entity, something illusory… I simply am not there… my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent… all I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it… Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do… This confession has meant nothing.56

Bateman’s despair at his lack of humanity and non-existence refers to the symptomatic existence of a psychopath; the difference with this character profile, is that he suffers panic attacks and his non-existence plagues him. This insight informs the reader of Bateman’s awareness at his detachment from reality, and struggling with an advancing state of emptiness. In order to help abate this feeling,

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Bateman becomes bored, and exercises his sexual and sadistic frustration, or ­disgust at mankind. However, the further he indulges in this behaviour, the more detached he becomes. Despite these moments of clarity, Bateman’s level of violence and cruelty throughout this novel is typical of a sadistic psychopath. Stone describes a torture-murder as being committed by serial killers who receive sexual pleasure from inflicting torture and violence. They are always legally classed as sane and they have no motive or reasoning behind their actions.57 If serial killers and psychopaths are considered legally sane, then this threatens society even more; these killers are calculatingly evil and able to cover up their actions. Anxiety is created through this inability to detect a serial killer. The only definitive way to determine the true intent of a person’s mind is to climb inside their brains and witness the psychopaths, the sociopaths and the psychotic.58 One of the most uncomfortable elements of Bateman’s portrayal as a contemporary killer is through the clear depiction of the man behind the mask in upper-class urban metropolis. In this instance, the mask represents corporate routine, mundanity and empty American consumerism; the resulting state of man being the consequences from living as such. American Psycho remains highly offensive, homophobic and notes in meticulous detail abuse and violence towards women. Bateman’s descent into a psychopathic rage accelerates the extremity of his violence. Alternating his prey between women, homeless people, colleagues, children and animals all in hope of filling the emptiness inside him, the void in which emotions should reside. Bateman’s narrative is presented to the reader as endless passages without grammatical breaks in order to convey his sense of routine and emptiness. As the character develops and descends further into helplessness, he comically despairs and attempts to confess to those around him. Bateman is a sadistic psychopath lacking human emotions; his companions exhibit a similar lack of emotions and interest as they ignore his confessional cry for help. Similar to this emptiness, his companions are all superficial. Attempting dinner conversation, Bateman’s only frame of reference is to draw on his interest in serial killers: “Do you know what Ed Gein said about women… He was an interesting guy… He said…. ‘When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet…’” “What does the other part of him think?” Hamlin asks tentatively. “What her head would look like on a stick.”59

This section highlights the many ways in which Bateman idolises the profile of prominent killers as glamorised by the media. Despite being brutally honest with his friends as he discusses the ‘interesting’ nature of these killers, and his own curiosity in killing, Bateman becomes lazy in a bid for attention and capture. He is killing to try and fulfil his emptiness. The further he descends into a psychopathic spiral, the more extreme, torturous and violent his crimes become: I pull out a long, thin knife with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the handle up, instantly popping the retina… his eye, burst open, hangs out of its socket and runs down his face… I can’t help but start laughing and I linger at the scene.60

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After the meticulous detail of this violent scene towards a complete stranger, Bateman is in no rush to flee, laughing and lingering in order to relish in the delight of his actions. The extent of this sadistic personality is evident as he consciously avoids killing the man straight away in order to torture him for longer. Taking place in the middle of a busy city, this scene acts as a social commentary due to the indifference from passers-by. Whilst he initially thrives on the risk, latterly Bateman longs for capture. This despairing nature is expressed when further into the novel where he kills a child for sadistic pleasure: ‘“Would you like… a cookie?” I ask… I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him, quickly, in the neck… Though I’d like to watch this child die, I push him down behind the garbage can, then casually mingle in with the rest of the crowd’.61 Once again demonstrating the danger of the presence of the psychopath in society, this passage chillingly depicts Bateman’s callous character as he lures and kills a child in a public setting without any motive or remorse for his actions. The novel concludes with Bateman’s spiral further into insanity gradually becoming worse: The fingers I haven’t nailed I try to bite off… then set up the… Handycam so I can film all of what follows… I’ve opened all the windows and the door to my terrace… “Scream, honey,” I urge… and with the scissors cut out her tongue… and i throw it against the wall… leaving a stain… then I fuck her in the mouth, and after I’ve ejaculated and pulled out, I Mace her some more.62

Bateman increases his brutality and violence towards women he encounters. During these passages, Ellis attributes meticulous detail to scenes of abusive and sadistic torture. Urging his victim to scream so that people can hear, and filming the scene for sexual gratification emphasises his isolated and disturbed psychological structure. These scenes demonstrate Bateman’s sadomasochistic desire, blending together violence, pornography and horror,63 as he plays with the blood of his victims, and invents new ways to mutilate their body (and their corpse): She tries to run forward but I’ve cut her jugular and its spraying everywhere… I’m leaning over to inhale its perfume… Back in my bedroom, Christie lies on the futon… her eyes are wide open and glazed over and her mouth is lipless and black and there’s also a black pit where her vagina should be (though I don’t remember doing anything to it) and her lungs are visible beneath the charred ribs.64

Sadomasochistic actions inflict extreme violence for the purpose of pleasure, not for the sole purpose of killing. Rather than the scent of perfume, Bateman savours the scent of blood as perfume; mutilating numerous victims simultaneously and then experiencing blackouts and absent-mindedness after the scene, emphasises both the terrifying state of Bateman’s mental health, and the carelessness that he exhibits with his victims. This chapter has invited the reader to step into the mind of the serial killer. What would motivate someone to kill another being in cold blood and with no remorse? Could it be that these psychopathic actions are a result of trauma in their life? Or are we merely attempting to attach explanations and reasoning to situations and profiles where there are none? As a coping mechanism, it is often easier to accept acts of brutality by reasoning of mental illness, rather than to accept

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that these actions were motiveless and callous. Challenging labels c­ onventionally and liberally used in contemporary society such as ‘crazy’, ‘psychopath’ and ­‘psychotic’, this chapter has identified key definitions and misinterpretations from pioneering psychiatrists. As demonstrated by Bateman, the killer walks amongst us. Contemporary horror originated with a long hard look in the mirror of the subconscious. The contemporary monster already resides within, the fear comes from recognising this and, ultimately, losing control.65 The main point of connection between all of the killers selected for this chapter, is their combined ability to both confine and reject preconceived notions of psychopathy, sociopathy and psychosis. It is impossible to completely recognise, distinguish or separate one from the other. Examining the presence of masks and mirrors in the literary and historical background of killers simultaneously accounts for an evolving history of humanity, violence and societal anxieties. Recognising the ‘normality’ of this figure generates both excitement and terror. The recognisable and identifiable nature of a contemporary killer makes them all the more chilling.66 Societal anxiety of a mass scale rests in differing levels of extremity. The vast majority of humanity believe that they are upstanding examples of morality—but what is the correct amount of morality? How much madness must an individual succumb to in order to separate themselves from the norm? There appears to exist a very fine line between an acceptable level of madness with which an individual can recognise, even indulge in; but to cross that line means a journey into psychopathic or psychotic territories.67 Therein lies the answer between the popularity of fictional and real-life killers, and the disturbing truth. We are fascinated and yet afraid because the killers in literature are fictional enough to not be uncomfortably familiar, and yet familiar enough to merit anxiety. Bates, Lecter and Bateman remain popular because they allow us to peer behind the mask; to take a long hard look without falling through the mirror completely. Fictional accounts allow us to experience an uncivilised way of living without succumbing ourselves. Each killer examined in this chapter urges readers to question the fluid nature of sanity and insanity. The undetectable nature of the killer in an ever-increasingly anonymous society raises cultural and societal anxieties and will continue to do so for the future. The more detached we become as a society questions the residual level of humanity. These killers are both terrifying and fascinating; they reside between the mask and the mirror in a chasm of unknown territory; they represent a figure trapped by the facade of social acceptance, constantly wrestling with tumultuous internal depths. It is only when one begins to lift the mask of social acceptance, and peer into the mirror of repressed desires that the strength of control must come into account. Some of these killers demonstrate the ease of succumbing to chaos when faced with traumatic circumstances; other killers are representative of those that have simply been born ‘wrong’. It is no longer the case that a killer can be identified in a society, in a crowd, or in a neighbourhood. After all, ‘A smile has long been an indicator of spectacular madness’.68

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Notes

1. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), 90–91. 2. Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993), 32. 3. Michael H. Stone, The Anatomy of Evil (New York: Prometheus Books, 2017), 45. 4. Ibid., 17. 5. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 162–163. 6. Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test (London: Picador, 2012), 62. 7. Stone, Anatomy of Evil, 118. 8. Hare, Without Conscience, 23–24. 9. Stone, Anatomy of Evil, 101. 10. Ibid., 74. 11. Dr. Simon McCarthy-Jones, https://theconversation.com/the-concept-of-schizophreniais-coming-to-an-end-heres-why-82775, date accessed 3 January 2019. 12. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (London: Bantam Books, 2004), 1. 13. Ibid., 9–10. 14. Ibid., 50–51. 15. Ibid., 60. 16. Ibid., 88. 17. Ibid., 288–289. 18. Ibid., 60. 19. Ibid., 106–107. 20. Ibid., 52. 21. Ibid., 406. 22. Julie B. Wiest, ‘Casting Cultural Monsters: Representations of Serial Killers in U.S. and U.K. News Media’, Howard Journal of Communications (London: Routledge, 2016), 27:4, 327–346. 23. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 330. 24. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Horror: A Literary History (London: The British Library, 2016), 10. 25. Mark Seltzer, ‘Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000), 97–107, 98. 26. ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’, Netflix (2019). 27. Stone, Anatomy of Evil, 83. 28. Bernice Murphy, ‘Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer’, in Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes (London: The British Library, 2016), 131–157, 150. 29. Ibid., 153. 30. Hare, Without Conscience, 22. 31. Ronson, Psychopath Test, 39. 32. Ibid., 43. 33. King, Danse Macabre, 96. 34. Robert Bloch, Psycho (London: Corgi Books, 1960), 11. 35. Sigmund Freud, https://www.britannica.com/science/Oedipus-complex, date accessed 3 January 2019. 36. Bloch, Psycho, 67. 37. Barbara Creed, ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000), 64–70, 67. 38. Bloch, Psycho, 31. 39. Ibid., 33. 40. Ibid., 33–34. 41. Ibid., 102.

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42. Ibid., 126. 43. Hare, Without Conscience, 23. 44. Stone, Anatomy of Evil, 313. 45. Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising (London: Arrow Books, 2007), 237–238. 46. Ibid., 17 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. Harris, Red Dragon, 74. 50. Ibid., 80. 51. King, Danse Macabre, 47–55. 52. Harris, Silence of the Lambs, 18. 53. Ibid., 164. 54. Ibid., 195–196. 55. Ibid., 272–274. 56. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (London: Pan Books, 1991), 379. 57. Stone, Anatomy of Evil, 35. 58. Ronson, Psychopath Test, 117. 59. Ellis, American Psycho, 92. 60. Ibid., 130–132. 61. Ibid., 298–299. 62. Ibid., 245–246. 63. Leon Hunt, ‘A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000), 324–335, 333. 64. Ibid., 290–291. 65. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 162. 66. Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 167–168. 67. Ronson, Psychopath Test, 221–222. 68. Timothy Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2015), 154.

Bibliography Aldana Reyes, Xavier, Horror: A Literary History (London: The British Library, 2016). Bloch, Robert, Psycho (London: Corgi Books, 1960). Botting, Fred, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). ‘Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’, Netflix (2019). Creed, Barbara, ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000). Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho (London: Pan Books, 1991). Freud, Sigmund, https://www.britannica.com/science/Oedipus-complex, date accessed 3 January 2019. Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Hare, Robert D., Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993). Harris, Thomas, Red Dragon (London: Arrow Books, 2004). Harris, Thomas, The Silence of the Lambs (London: Arrow Books, 2004). Harris, Thomas, Hannibal Rising (London: Arrow Books, 2007). Hunt, Leon, ‘A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000).

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Jones, Timothy, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2015) King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981). Larson, Erik, The Devil in the White City (London: Bantam Books, 2004). McCarthy-Jones, Simon, https://theconversation.com/the-concept-of-schizophrenia-is-coming-toan-end-heres-why-82775, date accessed 3 January 2019. Murphy, Bernice, ‘Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer’, in Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes. Ronson, Jon, The Psychopath Test (London: Picador, 2012) Seltzer, Mark, ‘Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture’, in The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000). Stone, Michael H., The Anatomy of Evil (New York: Prometheus Books, 2017). Wiest, Julie B., ‘Casting Cultural Monsters: Representations of Serial Killers in U.S. and U.K. News Media’, Howard Journal of Communications (London, UK: Routledge, 2016).

Beyond the Unfeeling Narcissus to Patrick Bateman Robert K. Shepherd

Even if Shakespeare was not the first to draw attention to a chronic lack of empathy in a certain type of outwardly charming (in)human being, he managed to delineate the figure so convincingly that his Sonnet 94 served as a template for portrayals of a sociopathic type. This figure should be male, yet possessing a feminine beauty that attracts both sexes. Like the midons of troubadour and stilonovistic literature, he should be beyond reproof (if only on the very narrowest of Christian terms) in that the absence of reciprocated affection makes his admirers suffer, and suffering was considered good for the soul. Like Adonis, however, he should be indifferent to love, and that indifference should be so total as to amount to a weapon that might be turned against anyone who felt attracted to him in any sense whatsoever. His most salient feature is detachment, a sinister form of emotional inaction. By making implicit comparisons between the persona who came to be known as “the Beautiful Youth” and the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover which Augustinian NeoPlatonists associated with the Christian God, Shakespeare implied that the youth was all too prone to thinking of that affective nullity as a divine right. In The Lord’s Prayer Temptation is what we hope the Lord will guide us past, yet Shakespeare seems to accompany Donne in the conviction that intercourse—in all its senses—is a form of sacrament that is dismissed at one’s peril: They that have power to hurt and will do none, They do not do the thing they most do show Who, moving others are themselves as stone, Unmovèd, cold and to temptation slow. They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces And husband nature’s riches from expense…1

The Beautiful Youth is not named directly in Sonnet 94, of course, yet there is no doubt that he takes the lead amongst the ‘They’. The use of the pluralised the third person pronoun also underlines Shakespeare’s awareness that there is more than

R. K. Shepherd (*)  Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

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one Beautiful Youth in the world, and he is right in his conviction. It took time for the inherent evil of this attractive yet passively destructive creature to work its way to the centre of both what has been called Postmodernist Gothic or Modern Terror (throughout I tend to stick to the latter and to the categorisations suggested by Manuel Aguirre, 1990)2 and the various forms of the novel which did not so much create as become absorbed by it. The naturalism of Zola was reworked into the decadence of Huysmans and Wilde, and a fusion of all three authors presented in a handful of twentieth-century novels, culminating with Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1989).3 Huysmans’ À Rebours (1886)4 and its sensualist Duc Jean des Esseintes, seemingly equipped with more ability to bring Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salomé alive in his imagination than he is with the power to stimulate his own jaded senses or engage in a meaningful relationship with other human beings, gives way to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890).5 The decay of Dorian’s soul which, if it had any odour, would stink like Shakespeare’s festering lily in the last line of 94, is reflected in a portrait which is, again, vivified by d’Essente’s aesthete sensualist spirit, but in a much more sinister fashion. There is nothing essentially new in a moving picture which reflects the soul of a living person: we find it in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale6 (c. 1385) where the imagination of a dyed-in-blood mercenary transforms Boccaccio’s living fresco of the glories of chivalric combat in Il Filostrato7 (c. 1338) into one which depicts the horrors of assassination, massacre and destruction.8 What Wilde does is shift medievalist Horace Walpole’s Gothic Horror revival9 of the picture/portrait that physically walks into the realms of spiritual decay occasioned by the sins of the flesh. In so doing he is also transporting Chaucer’s description of the evil of the observer of a painting onto the rancid soul of the artist’s subject. With a nudge from the North American naturalist school (Frank Harris) and noir detective fiction, Ellis will move the focus from the subject of artwork yet again, back to the “passive” yet threatening observer. He will deploy Gothic tropes to make this last shift. Our Beautiful Youth has rather skipped past that staple of Victorian Horror; the doppelgänger. He would cross the street if he saw his double walking in the opposite direction. In all probability, he would be horrified by even the most insignificant change in his physical appearance or dress code. No one remotely like him could or should exist. He would emphatically not try to stop and speak with him, like Dostoyevsky’s Golyadkin (The Double, 1845).10 Narcissus is in love with his own reflection (notably one of the things that Shakespeare tells his beloved to do is “Look in thy glass”—Sonnet 311—the irony being that he knows that no further prompting will be required) and Dorian does not think for a second that observable changes in the portrait have anything to do with anybody but himself. A glance in the mirror serves to assure him that nothing that really matters (his appearance) has changed, and this is of great comfort for many years. The act of hiding the portrait—out of sight, out of mind—gives him ample opportunity to let his soul grow uglier. Like Faust, he tries to enjoy the time (in which) he wastes. Wilde produced The Portrait four years after the appearance of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde12 and À Rebours and in the same

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year as Zola’s La Bête humaine13 was published (1890). This seems to me to indicate that the disappearance of the doppelgänger was something of a done deal by the late Victorian period, and that its substitution by the evil that is part and parcel of the self was now very much a going concern. Criminal psychology had entered the picture with the publication of Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo delinquent (The Criminal Man)14 in 1876; the First International Congress of Criminal Anthropology was held in Rome in 1885; Krafft-Ebing’s revelations on deviant sexual behaviour in Psychopathia Sexualis15 (1886) went practically hand in hand with Stevenson’s hints about what Mr. Hyde liked to do when he left Dr. Jekyll’s home by the back door; Nietzsche’s validation of the supremacy of the Übermensch was already raising liberal humanist hackles when The Portrait appeared. To think that people who could be so contemptuous of others, even of the lives of others, actually existed! Indeed they did, however, and acknowledgement of that fact had the effect of sidelining the double as a form of excuse for sociopathic behaviour. The notion that Jekyll’s suicide was a noble act of contrition, the tragic price paid for a chemical experiment that misfired, was relegated to the level of Hollywood “soft-soaping” (the 1939 Frederic March vehicle), and Stevenson leaves us in little doubt of the fact that Jekyll had been anxious to liberate his seamier side all along and is lying—at least to himself—when he claims otherwise in his final missive. There is little or no sense in which Hyde is the demonic intruder into the life of an upright man, as his odd choice of residence implies: who else but the Jekyll who tries to “hide” his fleshly urges from the world would buy a house which gave him free access to a street full of prostitutes and rent-boys? He was always Jekyll-Hyde. And it is only a matter of time before he bludgeons Sir Danvers Carew to death on the dark side of the house; the violent element of his nature has grown incrementally with each feeble attempt to suppress it. We should pause here, however, since the Beautiful Youth appears to have been left behind in the onward rush. Hyde is certainly no Adonis, and Jekyll is rather too advanced in years to be either youthful or beautiful, to experience anything other than the relish for the relatively fresh and illicit. Yet Jekyll-Hyde does have one thing in common with the Shakespeare persona, at least initially. This is what we might call the committal of evil deeds by default, the incapacity for stopping himself from indulging in heinous acts committed almost by accident. He is a walking, headlong-charging, textbook case of the disorganised psychopathic criminal, one who seizes the opportunity to do something nasty almost before he knows he has stumbled upon it. It should be remembered that the first of the Jekyll-Hyde crimes initially does happen by chance. He fails to spot the little girl he knocks over—“Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner”.16 The problem is that, this once done, he seems to take a most unnatural advantage of it by “tramp{ling} calmly over the child’s body… like some damned Juggernaut”17—that is, like the effigy of Krishna being pulled forward inexorably on a cart, impervious to crushed and mangled worshippers. On the one hand, this obviously recalls Nietzsche’s dicta on the righteousness of the Übermensch’s power over the fate of lesser

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mortals. On the other, what must be a conscious act of cruelty looks almost like an unconscious reflex: Jekyll-Hyde simply lunges on regardless. The human beast as caveman fuses with the non-interventionist God, but God is, in a sense, dead—at least so indifferent to human suffering that He only exists as a force of Nature at its most destructive. Jekyll-Hyde is guilty of everything and nothing simultaneously. The whole complex act represents a fusion of hideous awareness and indifference to violence which is yet unawareness and accident. Small wonder that we were not to see its like in fiction for many years to come. Even Dorian’s cruelty is not half as inhuman as this. There is a species of doppelganger—Mephistopheles fusion behind his acts in the form of Lord Henry Wotton, and it is no accident that his particular form of bon mot laden aestheticism, the cruel wit that makes his nastiness almost likeable, is modelled on that of a fusion of two figures. First, there is des Esseintes, given that it is the ­yellow-bound copy of À Rebours which both represents Wotton’s philosophy of life and is used by him to captivate Dorian. Then there is Wilde himself, whose own cynical humour trips so easily off Lord Henry’s tongue. This is not the first time that a writer has identified himself so closely with one of his own characters; the relationship between Thomas Nashe and his charact)er/narrator Jack Wilton is emphasised at the very beginning of The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) in the first mocking dedicatory letter to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton18 (who, incidentally, may well be the original Beautiful Youth). Yet as we shall see, it is Wilde’s particular combination of writer-narrator character that has the most marked effect upon Bret Easton Ellis’ particular “take” on the Gothic. For now, suffice to say that it is a perfectly shaped Wildean aphorism modelled upon des Esseinte’s shallow gestures at aestheticism that ensure Dorian’s descent into monstrous lack of empathy with humanity. “Why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?”19 he simultaneously muses aloud and asks Harry Wotton when the latter brings him the news of Sibyl Vane’s suicide. If this query is not technically aphoristic, then at least it would fit perfectly as a line in one of Wilde’s comedies. The black humour hinges upon Dorian’s use of the word “want”. Even the most insensitive hypocrite would surely be sufficiently aware of his own affective shortcomings at such a moment to ask “Why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I should?” Not Dorian: he is, even at this relatively early “stage”, so far removed from any reflexively empathic reaction to human suffering, his whole life so much a purely artistic mask, that the emotion he would like to feel would be that of a Romeo played with the artistic mimesis of life that he used to ascribe to Sylvia’s Juliet, her tragedy wholly theatrical. Even Wotton has to force himself not to gloat openly over the young man’s “unconscious egotism”, over the fact that utter selfishness is now the only honest emotion he is capable of displaying. Wotton has Dorian’s persona down to a “T”, realises that all his talk of the cult of beauty, aesthetics and the heightened sensibility is rooted in his contempt for the dull-as-ditchwater world, just like that of Huysman’s protagonist; {I}l était accablé…d’un désir d ne plus avoir rien de commune avec les profanes qui

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étaient, pour lui, les utilitaires et les imbeciles (He was overwhelmed by the desire to have absolutely no common ground with the profane… who to him were burgeois vulgarians, morons.)20 He has reached the point where even before news of her death has been broadcast, he may reflect thus upon the suffering he knows he his rejection has caused her “…he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture”.21 Again, such a flash of dark, heartless “stagey” humour on the part of Wilde as writer is exactly what we will find in the later comedies. Yet, as the novelist/ dramatist well knew, this was precisely the point. Wotton as late nineteenth-century novelised Mephistopheles be damned; the real villain is “MephistOscarles”. The quips given to Lord Henry are unmistakeably Wildean; by the time we get to Lady Narborough’s soirée in Chapter 15, lines that were either to be reworked into later plays (the idea of a Merry Widow’s hair turning gold from grief)22 or included in anthologies of Oscar’s insults and witticisms are flowing thick and fast. One of them—the quip that Lady Alice Chapman has “one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered”23 is of particular interest to us. The first thing to note is that it occurs within a long paragraph of free indirect speech, and such a technique so often involves a blurring of distinction between what the author believes a character should think and what he himself would think in the same situation. A variant on the same trick, but one which, it seems to me, “accidentally on purpose” lays bare Wilde’s manipulation of free-indirect occurs towards the end of Chapter 11. It takes the form of long meditation (which looks suspiciously like authorial interjection) upon the habit in “cultured” society folk of believing the very worst of those it yet lionises: they adore the perfect simulation of virtue by a “wickedly” good actor. Form is absolutely essential to the canons of good society and great theatrical art. It “should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as the unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and the beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. [It is at this point that Wilde begins a new paragraph, thus making the alternation between first- and third-person narrative more obvious] Such, at any rate, was Dorian Grays’s opinion”.24 Although Harry Wotton’s name has been dropped just before this passage begins, although Dorian is, by now, such a consummate hypocrite that it would be perfectly possible for him to mimic even the thoughts of the society he despises, the accumulation of singular, and perhaps especially plural, first-person pronouns (“us”; “I”; “we”; “our”) wrong-foots us. Lulled into the belief that an omniscient narrator is ameliorating a relatively harsh critique of society with a mea/nostra culpa, it comes as a bit of a shock to find out that these have been Dorian’s ruminations all along. Yet might it not rather be the case that the narrator, the writer, Wilde is quite deliberately breaking cover for a moment to show us that this is a moral tale well as Victorian Horror literature? And he may also be showing us so much more: namely that such a revelation of depravity could only have been

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written for and crucially by someone who knew the nature of sin and hypocrisy by intimate personal experience. As an aside, witness Chaucer’s Pardoner telling the tale of his own aberrations in The Pardoner’s Prologue25; witness Thomas Nashe’s gleefully dropped hints that he himself is Jack Wilton, the page at court who becomes the page in a book.26 Witness all this and then answer some very important questions about Patrick Bateman. Do you really believe that between strangling, blinding, drilling, chopping, raping and haute cuisine with the leftovers, dinner arrangements, office hours wiled away pretending not to be a pampered yuppie and shopping, that Patrick Bateman has a single moment to write a diary, let alone turn it into a novel? He is not a writer: he is too obsessed with his own psychoses even to fill out a crossword with any other words than “meat” and “bone”, though he does doodle his fair share of obscene pictures. He is something of a reader, though in the monthly magazine he has delivered one would think he spends most of his energy on the pictures, failing to husband nature’s riches from expense in onanistic replication of expending spirit in a waste of shame. All his endless hoard of perfectly useless information is gleaned from high-end magazines on fashion, gossip, gadgetry and dieting, with the odd music fanzine thrown in for good measure. Hardly the man to narrate a late twentieth century literary classic then; that would be Bret Easton Ellis, taking a cue from Wilde but going much farther. Only he could have written American Psycho and, Lord knows, he has given us enough clues in interviews and talks that, in his case, personal experience-of state of mind if not act—is the inspiration for all his work. Most certainly he plays cat and mouse with the reader of published interviews, in the sense that comments upon the essentially autobiographical nature of his work will either be preceded or followed by an admission of surprise and/or regret that this confessional element has caused the authorial pen to run into some very dark places indeed. In a 1991 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Love, for example, he is quoted as saying that the murder scenes “were probably more upsetting to write because I had to keep writing I all the time”. Yet in the very next paragraph, we find “you can’t help but work out demons when you’re writing”,27 and nine years later in The Guardian he admits that in writing about Bateman “I was writing about myself”.28 To my mind what all this shows is a quite remarkable ability to empathise with Bateman’s positively sociopathic narcissism, the fruit of pampered idleness. He simply does not feel Wilde’s need to hint at a simultaneous affinity with/distancing from his own text unless cornered outside that text by the mass media, and even then he is coy. The demon dwells within the author and the character he creates: the Jekyll/Hyde fusion exists both textually and metatextually, on the page and beyond it. Now, however, we have jumped the gun again, in two senses. First, in paying so much attention to Jekyll-Hyde and Dorian and, more, to the earlier parts of both narratives, we appear to have forgotten the most salient, defining feature of the Beautiful Youth: his capacity for “not doing the damage for which he is (irr)esponsible”. In the later parts of both these novellas the inevitable happens—the protagonist does kill someone. Second, we appear to have left a yawning gap in this young man’s literary history: what happened to him between 1890 and 1989?

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Better to start with the second problem, since in bringing the Beautiful Youth’s literary case history up to date allows us to justify our implication that what we deal in nowadays are often the remnants of a genre rather than Gothic per se. The fact is that between our then and now, the Beautiful Youth has changed his literary abode on several occasions, barely pausing long enough to leave a forwarding address in the Naturalist School and a set of fingerprints on the crime novel. In those works of mainstream fiction in which he appears, the Beautiful Youth is all but unrecognisable. As far as the Symbolist–Modernist school is concerned, Proust’s gay betrayer and cynic the Count of Charlus29 resembles Henry Wotton more than Dorian, seductive and handsome as he is. Frank Norris’ Vandover (no Christian name) in the novel Vandover and the Brute (published posthumously in 1914)30 is rather ugly and not even particularly malicious, merely spiritually lethargic and physically lazy. He actually does develop lupine behaviour and body movements, and this does indeed result from moral and spiritual decadence, but only in the sense that he picks up a form of systemic lupus erythematosus from a prostitute. The Hydean werewolf element is thus the result of “beastly” habits. Yet what Norris insistently calls the brute within him (Hyde fused with a very mild variant of the character disorder suffered by Zola’s Jacques Lantier) amounts only to a propensity for negligence. It is not even particularly malevolent. When he gets a wayward rich girl pregnant, he simply runs away and hides, like a naughty child. Her suicide makes him feel genuine remorse, but a bastardised form of resilience (which actually manages to thrive in his general lethargy at that point where escapism blurs with stoicism) allows him to plod on regardless. Real wolves do not plod. Once he has come into his inheritance he lets it slip through his fingers, indulging not so much in the refined luxuries of the devoted sensualist as on expensive gimcracks that he knows full well he doesn’t need, even if he does take a connoisseur’s pleasure in them. It is as if he actually wants to see just how far down the scale to pure squalor he can slide and still survive. He has been something of an artist, though continually postponing the creation of his masterpiece until all natural ability deserts him and he is reduced to decorating the doors of strongboxes—badly. He then satisfies himself with pinning postcards of famous paintings on the walls of a rented low-class hotel room (literally moving pictures). In one scene, he and his tippling cronies chat drunkenly over beer and Welsh rabbit (rarebit) about the inferiority of women and the male’s natural supremacy, Afterwards, however, he feels so ashamed that he makes a particular effort to endure his raging hangover and meet his “special girl” (his supremely chaste official fiancée) at early morning mass. In short, the very fact that the theme here is not the evil at the heart of disinterest but self-abandonment (meaning relinquishment of self- respect) rather disqualifies it from our search for the passively destructive Narcissus, since the principal sufferer is Vandover himself, the damage inflicted merely collateral as others get in the way of his collapse into moral helplessness. He is certainly painfully aware of the damage that his moral turpitude causes. The attack of the lupus virus is at very least hastened on by fits of remorse so strong that they amount to epilepsy; the lupus symptoms may even be chronic panic attacks. In one sense, the book is

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only mentioned at all to indicate the paucity of depictions in world literature of the particular form of angel-devil we are studying. In another, however, the Welsh rabbit scene and the neurotically shifted postcards will be revealed as key elements in American Psycho. Yet this work of Naturalist fiction demonstrates just how many Gothic topoi are revamped as they jump ship into other narrative genres. As well as the moving pictures, the references to lycanthropy and the misuse of social privilege, we even find a hint of the doppelgänger in the Norris tale. Vandover’s comes in the form of an ex-“chum”, now an apprentice barrister, who swindles the willing/passive victim out of a substantial part of his fortune and accelerates his downward slide. This “friend /fiend”—see Shakespeare sonnet 14431—one Charlie Geary by name, is the vicious little wheeler-dealer Vandover could have become had he only been nastier: the double who only serves to emphasise the singularly individualistic nature of the “hero’s” state. What I am saying is that Gothic is like that species of alien which once blown to bits, has the ability to survive in other organisms by dint of molecular transference. It is not that the genre does not live on in its own right too, of course: what is Winterfell if not Otranto after the restorers of historical buildings have paid a visit? But this is only half the point. Nowadays, editors (and especially graphic artists who know full well that many modern readers do indeed judge a book by its cover) will ensure that a work filed under fantasy will have the title/name of author set out in some form of gothic script or an approximation thereof. Modern versions of Victorian/Edwardian Horror, even if the cover art is vampire-free, will show dowdy urban settings made up to look like colour-tinted daguerreotypes, generally featuring a bowler- or top-hatted individual wandering into the mist. A Stephen King or Dan Brown will have the trademark signature occupying most of the cover, as does Ellis nowadays. Far from being a genre in need of precise definition, a lot of contemporary Gothic employs peritextual elements to advertise itself. Gothic as a saleable literary genre has become rather too comfortable. Formulae are pre-eminently tweakable. It ought to come as no surprise, then, that the most interesting developments in the genre nudge their way into the reader’s consciousness from outside it. Call it Disintegrated Gothic. You might expect to find a charming, handsome sociopath in noir detective fiction, and indeed you do. There is Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley,32 for a start—handsome, sophisticated, manipulative, debauched and above all borderline gay—but murderous to boot, unfortunately for his victims and our theme. No: this will not quite do. We want a Dorian Gray in his formative stages (i.e. before he murders Basil Hallward and has him dissolved) to measure up to the Beautiful Youth, certainly not a serial killer. Yet one perhaps should not be too surprised that it is within noir fiction that we do indeed eventually encounter our boy. “Not surprised” because, more than in any other genre, the crime writer is continually on the hunt for new approaches to nastiness. Agatha Christie finally chickened out of motiveless slaughter in The ABC Murders of 193633 but in compensation created a deranged serial killer in And Then There Were None34 (1939). Ngaio Marsh followed her lead in 1955 with

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The Nursing Home Murders35 and it is certainly true that Ripley made his debut in the same year, yet the next major appearance of the Psycho (Bloch’s novel and Hitchcock’s picture)36 was in 1960. These works were popular yet fell some distance short of trendsetter status. The psychopath sputtered and spattered his way in and out of crime fiction until the 1980s, when a combination of the so-called Golden Age of the Serial Killer and the advent of the film version of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs37 began a craze for violent, motiveless crime. And yet before Ellis only one writer, the ever-resourceful Ruth Rendell, thought of fusing Shakespeare Sonnet 94 with a fledgling Dorian Gray and to create the embodiment of inhumanity by default. Just to throw Proustians in general and Conte de Charlusians in particular off the literary scent (but not too far off) her “villain” is called Ivor Swann. Here is a being who lets one person die right under his nose and creates a situation in which his own stepdaughter is murdered because he simply cannot be bothered to do anything about it. The novel in question, the sixth in the Inspector Wexford series and published in 1973, is called No More Dying Then,38 another Shakespearean allusion, this time to the final couplet of Sonnet 146.39 Again, casual book-shoppers might think that the half-line in question (adapted from 1 Corinthians 15:26 originally, and included in the burial service) is indicative of a tragic yet compassionate novel. They have not read the whole of the sonnet in question, whose final couplet, given in the novel’s epigraph, serves as warning enough that they should. It is Shakespeare’s address to his soul which, though set amongst the Dark Lady sequence, might well also be read as a last despairing request to the Beautiful Youth; I/she/ he should starve the pampered body in order to save said unnurtured soul, as otherwise both will cease to exist at the cremation. Wexford’s first reaction upon being informed of Swann’s case history is to quote the first line of Sonnet 94 and add “I don’t think that means that they don’t do any hurt but that they do nothing. That’s Swann.”40 The man’s adopted daughter has gone missing, and Wexford believes that he has somehow willed it to happen. “Somehow willed” because Swann’s life has been a catalogue of disasters- disasters, that is, for others. Some twenty years before he had been on a fishing holiday when a pre-teen girl out for a morning swim got into trouble well within hailing distance of his rowing boat. The girl had a crush on him; had been pestering him, much to his annoyance. He had just wished to be left to himself. His excuse for not rescuing her was that he believed she was attention-grabbing again. She drowned. The fact that he possessed a life-saving certificate did not actually endear him at the official enquiry, but for want of evidence he was exonerated. He is so handsome that practically everyone is charmed by him, so “laidback” that he couldn’t even murder a cup of tea unless his adoring and sex-addicted wife made one for him. Now it is true that in Then There Were None Christie presents cases both of negligent homicide (through reckless idiocy) and failure to save a drowning child (but with deliberate criminal intent), and a combination of both may also have suggested Swann. Yet Rendell’s creation is much more believable and sinister than either of Dame Agatha’s. He leaves in his wake a history of bankruptcies (someone else’s, invariably) important journalistic assignments abandoned

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and a broken home. He allowed someone else’s wife to seduce him, married her and encourages her to follow his suit in neglecting the stepdaughter. Hence the second tragedy; forgetting his promise to pick the teenager up from a riding lesson, he leaves her with no other option than that of walking home. This is the last that anyone has ever seen of her. Whatever was he thinking of? The answer is all too simple—of himself. It transpires that he was not involved in her death directly and that she just happened to run into the drowned girl’s father, who murdered her in revenge: a case of literary overproduction leading to facile plotting. Yet every last one of Rendell’s books contains something remarkable, especially on what Hannah Arendt called, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) “the banality of evil”.41 As Thomas Merton made Eichmann say with such pride of the crimes he did not commit: “I watched every Jew burned/ und turned into soap”.42 Swann begins his criminal lack of a career as a watcher, an unmoved witness to yet “mover” of tragedy. It is unfortunately the case that, given the appropriate set of circumstances, each and every one of us is capable of atrocity, not by act but by omission. Swann finally does break down in tears at his stepdaughter’s inquest, but Rendell is astute enough to leave us in doubt as to how much of that sorrow is spent on himself. Oscar Wilde allowed Dorian to glamorise his grief for Sylvia, with more than a little help from Lord Henry; Stevenson permitted Jekyll to die in a state of willful self-deception. Even evasion is a form of guilty admission. It is as difficult to believe that Swann feels any more responsibility for two deaths as Eichmann did for millions, however—a terrible thing to say but unfortunately a true one. What Shakespeare (by the generalising “they” of 94) Rendell (by reminding us of this in Wexford’s citation, an off-the-cuff quote from an expert on the perversities human nature) and Wilde (by implicitly associating himself with Dorian via narrative slippage) all make us see is that the narcissism associated only with the beautiful is a myth, and that myths tend to be metaphors for universal tendencies. Everyone runs the risk of falling in love with themselves and of dismissing the residua of humanity as a result. Patrick Bateman is not half as handsome as he likes to think he is, and if he does not care to acknowledge this fact to himself there are plenty who will remind him of it. When fiancée Evelyn refers to him as “the boy next door”43 (implication: marriageable but not strictly an Adonis), his “friend”—that is “peer- group member”—Timothy Price “smirks and nods”.44 Is Evelyn being ironic? Is Price simply laughing at the joke? In Mary Heron’s film adaptation it is Timothy himself who makes it, hinting at good-natured “joshing”. In the actual novel, however, what is swiftly revealed is that good nature and anything approaching bonhomie is practically unknown in this circle. It is an élite club whose members lose no opportunity to score points off each other, and as its self-appointed style guru Patrick is especially vulnerable to criticism. Note how, in the same chapter, his frustrated attempt to outdo everyone by the demonstration of a beautifully designed presentation card sends him into a homicidal rage. Surfaces—the face he pampers with all sorts of lotions and peel-off masks, the design on a glorified piece of cardboard with which he presents himself to the world—should be,

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respectively, zit-free and incomparably elegant. Nothing else matters. The slight puffiness of his face reflected in the glass which covers a framed poster in his bathroom (glimpsed whilst urinating) sends him into a whole routine of exercises, cleansing masks and ice-packs before he can face the world, and he talks himself through the process, step by monotonous step.45 He feels that he must always have an audience, but he would be too lazy to write everything down. Ellis performs the task. Four points should be observed here. First, if he were a real health-and beauty addict he shouldn’t have been binge-drinking the night before anyway. After one of innumerable repetitions of the same occurrence he remarks that “I feel like shit but look great”.46 Here is a Dorian Gray who may observe his inner (intestinal, not spiritual) and outer selves simultaneously and dedicate himself exclusively to the latter. Second, the paranoia about his looks is so intense that any vaguely reflective surface will throw him into nervous “toilette paroxysms”: what else would one expect when employing a glassed-in coloured poster as a mirror if not distortion? His insecurity is the result of treating every narcissistic glimpse of himself as Dorian’s portrait, not as a mirror per se. It is also true, however, that Shakespeare’s warning to the Beautiful Youth in Sonnet 3 not to use artificial means to cover wrinkles47 might have been written for him. Third, the whole commentary is, in itself, a species of mantra. As the novel progresses one notes that the more Patrick neglects not just his rituals but his commentaries upon his specialist topics—style, health and beauty care— the more lurid and violent his thoughts become. In our first visit to his flat, we see him treating an electric table knife as a valued state-of-the-art tool for slicing food. There are sinister intimations of what is to come, of course, in his “honing in” on precisely the knife; for the moment, however, it is comparable to, say, Vandover’s acquisition of a violet liqueur that tastes of scent. Patrick can no more prepare the haute cuisine food he orders at restaurants than “Van” can distinguish between fine wine and rotgut. Neither does he possess the true sensualist’s taste. Expert on style Patrick may be, but, as is always the case with him, he relies on secondary sources (GQ mostly) for his information and parrots them. The sensuality and genuine love (however fleeting and misplaced) that both Dorian and des Essentes feel for their fabrics, their colour-contrasts, their scents, their sounds is conspicuous by its absence. When, in the “Morning” chapter, Patrick’s Talking Heads CD skips—he has probably played the track “Psycho Killer” too much—he simply follows the instruction manual on how to clean it, but with a running commentary so detailed that he seems to be reinventing the wheel. He knows the histories of every famous serial killer by rote—especially that of that handsome blonde-fetishist Ted Bundy. Yet there is little of the “God complex” about his attitude: he simply treats women as objects and likes to believe that he can make them as expendable as any other luxury because “it” is expensive. Vandover fuses with a gutless Jekyll-Hyde incapable of fuelling his fantasies into act, no matter how many J&B/ cocaine cocktails he swills and sniffs. The most important point, though, is the fourth. Ellis knows his Gothic and his Gothic offshoots inside out, and loses absolutely no opportunity of parodying them to death. In part, he does this for the sheer hell of it, of course. Yet there is

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also a deadly serious side to the deliberately tasteless guffaws. It serves as a grim reminder that, far from occupying the borderline between the Numinous and the Physical worlds, even farther from charting the invasion of the Self by some subconscious Other, “Ellis Gothic” leaves us with a portrayal of a specimen of the genus Human Unkind who is only grotesque because of his sheer ordinariness. His lack of empathy with any living creature, from man/woman to dog to rat, is the result of the utter dearth of that kind of imagination which might make emotional involvement possible. He is too self-obsessed ever to step outside his selfishness. Now against this last point it will be argued that Bateman is both eminently presentable and capable of charming friends and lovers—the perfect ­high-functioning sociopath like Tom Ripley. On closer examination, however, it becomes quite obvious that he can only be acceptable to individuals as shallow or as stupid as himself. He says some quite outrageous things, but invariably does so in the company of either those whose objections would invite ridicule (tramps, hippies, gays, prostitutes or vain, silly models whose business is insincerity and the maintenance of a façade) or of people grown so used to his vulgarity that they pay him no mind. This is a brutally realistic novel about inhabitants of a world of everyone’s dreams turned real for the worst of reasons—immense inherited wealth with none of its attendant responsibilities and the arbitrary blessing of what passes for good looks. Morally speaking, one of the most distressing scenes is described in the “Nell’s” chapter48 in which three supermodels turn out to be so vacuous that they cannot even respond to the catechism of cliché which serves Patrick’s group for conversation. When they do manage to hold some poor excuse for social discourse it is between themselves, listing off different types and textures of fur coats and wraps in the same way as Patrick and his little club do fashion designers. “Naturally” enough, Bateman sneers at them. “Hardbodies” (part of his male acquaintances’ very limited store of slang-words for “beddable women” which makes Burgess’ Droogs49 seem eloquent) should wear designer clothes, not pontificate upon them. As far as Patrick’s ability to get away with purely verbal murder is concerned, the reader first believes that such gems of etiquette as threats of rape, disembowelment and torture are mere thoughts—until, that is, realisation dawns. The group usually meets in places that are so noisy that it is difficult to hear oneself speak, let alone anyone else; no place this for the subtleties of a Henry Wotton. Noise blanks out the bastardised equivalent of Frank Harris’ Welsh rarebit-accompanied drunken crudities, “Too ugly to rape”50 (“Paul Owen” chapter) being an example of the milder examples. In any case, part of the reason for calling Patrick a “boy next door” is that he is too damn boring to be glamorous. To return to the demolition of Gothic tropes, one particular scene speaks volumes. We have already mentioned it, but this example bears repetition. In ­ Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, as in so many of the Mediaeval Romances from which it is derived, a knight’s armour and coat of arms serve to verify identity. The idea was that there should be no difference between appearance and reality: that the symbols a knight displayed should be the outward manifestation of the inner man. This is why, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain’s insistence on wearing the Pentangle, a symbol of the perfected unity of all chivalric values, are

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revealed by Morgana Le Fay as mere grandstanding.51 In Otranto, the Fatal Falling Helmet which flattens Manfred’s son and heir is recognised as belonging to Alfonso the Good because, quite literally, it shakes a tailfeather.52 Manfred takes his time about identifying Theodore as Alfonso’s rightful heir because he has never seen him in armour, thus does not connect him with the famous walking picture of his grandsire53 until the youth puts on battledress.54 In the Manhattan of the late 1980s, however, clothes maketh the man in that they are practically all a man consists of. When everyone dresses in designer threads, the tendency is to focus on the stuffed shirt and not the person who stuffs it. The addition of ungraduated designer spectacles and the same type of fashionable haircut serve to make facial features so uniform that cases of mistaken identity abound. Since everyone adapts their fashion sense to the hour, the cut of one’s cloth actually makes no difference either. This means that the presentation card assumes immense importance—because of design and heft. The actual name on the card is the last thing anyone notices: it is the amount of money spent on the wretched thing that tells people what page of the Who’s Who you’re on. Thump! goes Alfonso’s helmet, flattening Manfred’s hopes of passing the principality on to his son by marrying him off to the daughter of the counter-claimant, perpetuating the feud with the house of Vicenza over the Lordship of Otranto. Yet the calling-casque of the “hidden” house of Alfonso, long believed extinct, falls out of the sky as a herald to the coming of Theodore. Snap! go four presentation cards on the table of the Pastels restaurant where Bateman and his “colleagues” are waving their cards like peacock plumes. What they have still to observe, however—being all but blind when it comes to others—is fellow investment banker Paul Owen sitting in the next booth.55 If he has his own card to slap down he prefers to play it close to his chest, because he already has something much more valuable— control of the mysterious but lucrative Fisher account, after which Patrick lusts greedily enough to fantacise about committing murder. And it isn’t even for the money, because he is loaded with that—at least in the form of its simulacrum, a bottomless credit card account. The dandy sophisticates of Wilde, Huysmans, Norris want for nothing in their glory days, but Patrick wants more nothingness. Even the grasping bourgeois excuse for knighthood that is Manfred has something solid to aim for-Otranto itself. But what does the spoilt brat who has inherited his father’s kingdom go in quest of? Answer: the designer coat of arms that signifies nothing more than “This means that I am wealthier than you are”. And with no shadow of moral or even materialistic values left, it is hardly likely that one would appreciate great art. Even De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827)56 goes by the board: Bateman doesn’t read literature; he memorises manuals. And reading does not necessarily entail understanding: it is difficult to imagine him actually installing his stereo sound system or, indeed, doing anything useful in the world at all. In “April Fools” he presents his theories on slowing down the arms race, putting an end to world hunger, care for the elderly, yet he also mentions putting a curb on foreign imports and making America great again.57 It sounds as if he has parroted one of the milder speeches aimed at liberal voters written for his idol, Donald Trump.

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But does he kill? Does he even enjoy sitting back and watching it happen? The answer must be “no” in both cases, with a slight qualification when it comes to voyeurism. By his own admission he has watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)58 and The Toolbox Murders (1978),59 the first genuinely disturbing, the second laughably awful. Tobe Hooper relies upon atmosphere and anticipation to make the stomach churn and it is very obvious that the producer of Toolbox lacked the cash for special effects. In neither of the films does one actually see a murder or desecration of a body. Bateman has rented Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1985)60 thirty-seven times and admits to masturbating when the point of the drill and the heroine’s blood come through the wall—but she herself is pinned to the other side of it. Even passively observed images of aggression are censored. Patrick can’t even remember the names of the actors—he obviously makes frequent use of Fast Forward and Rewind when his hand leaves his fly. And that is all he does. How does the reader know? Patrick has a Chinese housekeeper—look for yourselves on page 27 of the latest Picador edition. Would she not and have noticed the mess even if most of Patrick’s supposed butcheries were committed on non-working days when he had had time to clean up? He most certainly does not scrub and mop after an old flame’s murder in the “Lunch With Bethany” chapter, and on the next day—which, for once underlining strict chronology, he says is a Thursday—he is out with friends trying to imagine how to cook her remains. Perhaps the maid was sick that day? After finally taking a chainsaw to Paul Owen in the eponymous chapter, we are required to believe that he walks straight past his doorman carrying the body in a sleeping bag and pauses to give fashion tips to acquaintances before carrying it off in a taxi. No: this is not first person account but a tall story narrated for all but half a chapter (to throw us off the scent when Patrick’s self-delusions fly off the believability spectrum altogether and turn into a cinematic uptown gunfight) in the first person. And that person is Ellis himself, who feels all the disgust with Bateman and his ilk that only the novelistic equivalent of a dramatic monologue (with the reader as a silent audience) could depict adequately. The final proof of the pudding is in the painting: it is indeed a David Onica entitled “Sunrise with Broken Plates”61 and it certainly does depict a naked woman on a chaise longue. This much Patrick reports accurately. Only he neglects to say that her legs are spread wide open. Her hair is jet black, not blonde. He envisions a backdrop painted in different colours to the ones in the original. It is hung upside down. He leaves off the description of the speakers set either side of the television the nude woman is watching to gloat over his own stereo system. He eventually replaces it with a painting of a graphic equaliser—that he half understands. Far from bringing a person to life in a painting like Wilde’s Basil Hallward or, like d’Essentes vivifying two Moreau depictions of Salomé with words, he has killed the image off with indifference to both its subject and its artistic quality, especially the former. If he has engaged with the piece at all, it is probably only in the sense that he has re-hung it himself as a totemic manifestation of what he would really have liked to do with all the women unfortunate enough to enter his life.

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This reversal of the Onica, then, is Shakespeare’s figure of the Beautiful Youth reduced to its lowest common denominator in the likeness of a woman. It is obviously not a portrait of Bateman himself, not even of his (rigorously suppressed) feminine side. It is his treatment of the picture that personifies him. He has indeed “unbless{ed} some mother” (Shakespeare Sonnet 3) by reducing her likeness to the kind of graffiti-as-doodle that a “wannabe” Jack the Ripper might have daubed on a backstreet wall. He has turned chronic indifference into not so much a subtle form of active yet technically uninflicted emotional damage as a symbolic gesture which implicitly denies anyone’s right to have any feelings at all—even those which he realises (from what passes for personal experience) are merely dramatic gestures at emotion on the part of hysterical girlfriends. Not even Dorian Gray denied Sylvia Vane that right. This particular young Narcissus is not even really narcissistic—he is far too unsure of himself for that. He nullifies everything—even the Gothic conception of pure evil, even pure evil of the passive, Shakespearean variety.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Stephen Booth (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1973), 82–3. 2. Manuel Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester University Press, 1990). 3. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (London, Picador, 2011). 4. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris, Gaillard, 1983). 5. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1992). 6. Geoffrey Chaucer, A.C. Spearing (ed.), The Knight’s Tale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. Giovanni Boccaccio, Filostrato (New York, ReadHowYouWant.com Limited, 2006). 8. Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, 152–4, ll. 1109–1192. 9. Horace Walpole, Nick Groom (ed.), The Castle of Otranto (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014). 10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972). 11. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 6–7. 12. Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Merrie Men & Other Stories (Ware, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1999). 13. Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996). 14. Cesare Lombroso, L’Uomo delincuente (Turin, Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1889). 15. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, F.J. Redman (tr.), Psychopathia Sexualis (New York, Paperback Library Inc., 1965). 16. Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll, 4. 17. Ibid., 4–5. 18. Thomas Nashe, J.B. Steane (ed.), The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), 251–4. 19. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 81. 20. Huysmans, À rebours, 45. 21. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 74. 22. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 74 and Complete Works (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1948), 328.

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23. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 140. 24. Ibid., 113. Italics and insertion mine. 25. Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Cannon (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 193–4, ll. 319–462. 26. Nashe, The UnfortunateTraveller, 253. 27. Love, Robert. “Bret Easton Ellis: Psycho Analysis”, in Rolling Stone (4 April 91). Pages unnumbered. Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ bret-easton-ellis-psycho-analysis-170890/. Last visited 9 February 2019. 28. Bret Easton Ellis, “American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis”, in The Guardian (10 June 2010). Pages unnumbered. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/ jul/10/book-club-american-psycho-ellis. Last visited 10 February 2019. 29. Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris, Folio Classique, 2018). 30. Frank Norris, Novels and Essays (New York, The Library of America, 1986), 1–260. 31. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 124–5. 32. Patricia Highsmith, The Complete Ripley Novels (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1988). 33. Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders (London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). 34. Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003). 35. Ngaio Marsh, The Nursing Home Murders (London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2017). 36. Robert Bloch, Psycho (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1959); Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho (Columbia, 1960). 37. Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (Orion Pictures, 1991). 38. Ruth Rendell, No More Dying Then (London, Arrow Books, 1973). 39. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 126–7: So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

40. Redell, No More Dying, 51. 41. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006). 42. Thomas Merton, ‘My Name Is Adolf Eichmann’. Retrieved from https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3649470. Last visited 30 January 2019. Pages unnumbered. Italics mine. 43. Ellis, American Psycho, 11. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 23–9. 46. Ibid., 103. 47. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 6–7. I refer to the double-voicedness of ll. 3–4: Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest Thou dost beguile the world..



Here, the change in Narcissus’ face may be observed in a mirror (after the application of makeup) or via mirroring in the fresh complexion of his (as yet non-existent) child. 48. Ellis, American Psycho, 191–205. 49. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London, William Heinemann, 1962). 50. Ibid., 205. 51. J.J. Anderson (ed.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London, Everyman, 1996), 194–5, ll. 619–669. 52. Walpole, Otranto, 18. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. Ibid., 85. 55. Ibid., 37–50.

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56. Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and Other Related Texts (Whitefish, Montana, Kensinger Publishing, No Date Specified. Reprinted on request). 57. Ellis, American Psycho, 14. 58. Tobe Hooper (dir.), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Vortex, 1978). 59. Dennis Donnelly (dir.), The Toolbox Murders (Cal-Am Productions, 1978). 60. Brian de Palma (dir.), Body Double (Columbia Pictures, 1985). 61. David Onica, Sunrise with Broken Plates. Retrieved from https://www.talenthouse.com/ item/247244/de3a7206. Last visited 13 May 19.

Bibliography Aguirre, Manuel. The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester University Press, 1990). Anderson, J.J. (ed.). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London, Everyman, 1996). Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006). Boccaccio, Giovanni. Filostrato (New York, ReadHowYouWant.com Limited, 2006). Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (London, William Heinemann, 1962). Chaucer, Geoffrey. A.C. Spearing (ed.). The Knight’s Tale (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). Chaucer, Geoffrey. Christopher Cannon (ed.). The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). de Quincey, Thomas. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and Other Related Texts (No City of Origin Cited, Kensinger Publishing, No Date Specified). de Palma, Brian. (dir.). Body Double (U.S.A., Columbia Pictures, 1985). Donnelly, Dennis. (dir.). The Toolbox Murders (U.S.A., Cal-Am Productions, 1978). Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho (London, Picador, 2011). Ellis, Bret Easton. “American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis”. In The Guardian (10 June 2010). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/10/book-club-american-psycho-ellis. Last visited 10 February 2019. Harris, Frank. Novels and Essays (New York, Literary Classics of the United States Inc., 1986). Highsmith, Patricia. The Complete Ripley Novels (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1988). Hooper, Tobe. (dir). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (U.S.A., Vortex, 1978). Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Â Rebours (Paris, Gaillard, 1983). Love, Robert. “Bret Easton Ellis: Psycho Analysis”. In Rolling Stone (4 April 91). Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/bret-easton-ellis-psycho-analysis-170890/. Last visited 9 February 2019. Merton, Thomas. “My Name Is Adolf Eichmann”. Retrieved from https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3649470. Last visited 30 January 2019. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979). Norris, Frank. Novels and Essays (New York, The Library of America, 1986). Proust, Marcel. Du côté de chez Swann (Paris, Folio Classique, 2018). Rendell, Ruth. No More Dying Then (London, Arrow, 1973). Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1973). Stevenson, R. L. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Merrie Men & Other Stories (Ware, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1999). Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991). Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works (London and Glasgow, Collins, 1948), 328. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1992). Zola, Émile. La Bête Humaine (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996).

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Films Demme, Jonathan. (dir). The Silence of the Lambs (Orion Pictures, 1991). de Palma, Brian. (dir.). Body Double (Columbia Pictures, 1985). Donnelly, Dennis. (dir.). The Toolbox Murders (Cal-Am Productions, 1978). Hitchcock, Alfred. (dir.). Psycho (Columbia, 1960). Hooper, Tobe (dir.). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Vortex, 1978).

R. K. Shepherd

Zombie Gothic

Zombie Folklore to Existential Protagonists Kelly Gardner

The figure of the zombie has haunted the peripheries of folklore and narratives since the first stirrings of literature. Defying concrete definition, the figure has been in a state of flux, metamorphosing with each appearance, a descriptive manifestation of cultural anxieties regarding selfhood and the transition from life to death. While genealogical approaches to zombie research habitually credit the zombie’s African origins, this is but a mere stage in the development of the zombie of contemporary literature. In the introduction to the collection of essays entitled Better Off Dead, editors Lauro and Christie recognise the difficulty in defining the nature of the zombie: If the zombie has evolved so much over the course of the twentieth century that, at the beginning of the twenty-first, it is nearly unrecognizable, then surely there is a need to define exactly what we mean when we call something a zombie, to chart the evolution of this concept, and to map out the ways that this monster has been and will continue to be a useful theoretical apparatus…1

As this suggests, there has been much debate regarding the particular classification of a zombie and how this particular form of monstrosity can be distinguished from its fellow revenants, vampires and other gothic horrors. June Pulliam writes of the two basic criteria that should be applied when categorising a creature of horror as a zombie. Firstly, she says, “it must be the reanimated corpse or possessed living body of one person (or animal)”,2 thereby excluding the amalgamation that is Frankenstein’s monster and various materials that are used in the formation of a golem. Secondly, to be classified as a zombie, Pulliam maintains that the figure must have “a lack of free will”.3 It is these two characteristics that separate the zombie from his fellow walking dead. In an attempt to label a creature that is still very much in development, given the current obsession with the flesh-eating hordes, Pulliam is limiting the scope of

K. Gardner (*)  University of Stirling, Stirling, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_30

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academic study with regard to a figure like the zombie. By stating a definitive formula with which we are to measure against all existing versions of zombieism, Pulliam is excluding a number of zombie figures that, when duly considered and studied, could substantially enrich our knowledge and understanding of the current cultural zombie phenomenon. The zombie serves as a figure of death, and the cause of its malleability stems from a universal cultural preoccupation with death and what lies beyond. The concepts of death and the separation of the soul from the body or the frightening prospect of a rampant body lacking the guiding reticence of a soul, have figured as themes within folklore and literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100 BC),4 considered the earliest great work of literature. This epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia features an instance wherein Gilgamesh rejects the amorous attention of Ishtar, the goddess of war, sex, and love. As revenge for this rejection, Ishtar approaches her father, Anu, god of the heavens and the sky, and demands her father’s assistance: Father, give me, please, the Bull of Heaven, so in his dwelling I may slay Gilgamesh!5

Should her father fail to assist her, Ishtar threatens: If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven, I shall smash the gates of the Netherworld, right down to its dwelling, To the world below I shall grant manumission, I shall bring up the dead to consume the living, I shall make the dead outnumber the living.6

The contemporary reader recognises Ishtar’s threat as remarkably similar to that of a zombie apocalypse, an observation that, contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies”,7 the origin of the zombie myth might not be as modern as originally perceived. While The Epic of Gilgamesh exhibits the returning dead in the literature and folklore of Mesopotamian poetry, further examples of zombie-like figures feature in additional ancient texts, most notably, the Bible.8 The Bible is abundant with risen corpses and the returning dead; in addition to the nine examples of human resurrection from death in the name of God: most notably Lazarus of Bethany (John 11:1–44), the Widow of Zarephath’s son (1 Kings 17:17–24), and of course Jesus Christ himself (Matthew 28:5–7), the Bible offers scenes of returning dead that rival those of Ishtar’s threat. In Zechariah we read: And the LORD will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day they will be terrified, stricken by the LORD with great panic. They will fight their neighbours hand to hand. (Zechariah 14:12–13)

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In Isaiah we are presented with the following: But your dead will live, LORD; their bodies will rise— let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy— your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed us by. See, the LORD is coming out of his dwelling To punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will disclose the blood shed on it; The earth will conceal its slain no longer. (Isaiah 26:19 – 21)

Isaiah’s End-of-Days prophecy calls on righteous believers to take shelter in their homes while the wrath of God is unleashed upon the world as punishment for the sins of humanity. While the examples presented here are reminiscent of the apocalyptic nature of the resurrection of the dead en masse, individual examples of the dead returning to disturb the living can be found in the folklore of almost every civilisation. The uniqueness and abnormality of the ghosts of Iceland and Scandinavia, for example, stem from their corporeality. Scandinavian ghosts are not apparitions or disembodied spirits that whisper from shadowed corners; rather, as Chadwick notes, “They are animated corpses, solid bodies, generally mischievous, and greatly to be feared”.9 Stories of Scandinavian reanimated corpses were documented as far back as the twelfth century in the Heimskringla, a collection of sagas about the Norwegian kings written in Old Norse by historian Snorri Sturluson.10 The ghost, known as a draugr (pl. draugar), or haugbúi (pl. búar), was the corporeal animated corpse inhabiting the barrow in which he had been buried. Come nightfall, the draugr was known to leave its barrow in order to seek out prey in the form of animal or man.11 It was believed that the only way to bring about the draugr’s second death would be through decapitation, dismemberment, and burning.12 Parallels can be drawn between the Icelandic Sagas, with their draugr, and the walking corpses of Medieval England, most notably in Yorkshire, in the narratives by William of Newburgh, and in a manuscript discovered at Byland Abbey some two hundred years later. William’s revenants can be found in Book V of the Historia Rerum Anglicarum (1198), where there is an evident departure from the contemporary ideas of that time involving medieval ghosts. The strangeness of these revenants, Jacqueline Simpson explains, “consists in the way they combine incongruous elements: Christian doctrines about sin, death, and the afterlife on the one hand, and on the other some macabre or grotesque beliefs which appear incompatible with theology”.13 With particular regard to William’s revenants, questions were raised regarding the nature of such revenants and whether their

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animation was the result of demonic or logical processes, and whether the corpse should be returned to rest through physical or spiritual means. Both collections of tales, all of William’s and most of the Byland tales, feature corporeal ghosts who have physically emerged from their graves to walk among the living.14 The link between the Scandinavian draugr and the walking revenants of both William of Newburgh and the Byland manuscript may be based on beliefs that are not native to England, “but imported traditions, surviving among the descendants of Scandinavian settlers in what was once the Danelaw”.15 However, Simpson points out that archaeological discoveries of Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon burials reveal that in certain cases the corpse was buried facedown so that should it, by chance, rise from the dead it would dig deeper into the earth as opposed to freeing itself from its grave. In addition to this, some bodies were decapitated, with the head placed between the feet, a practice that exhibits that beliefs in corporeal revenants and a traditional means of approach in the prevention of reanimation “was indigenous to Britain long before the Viking settlement, and persisted several centuries after the Conversion”.16 As Nancy Caciola notes, “Medieval conceptions of death were fluid; […] one could die a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ death; one could undergo a temporary or a more permanent death; and one could die a partial death—that is, a death of the personality without a death of the body, or vica versa”,17 this “partial death” being reminiscent of the soul/body divide we see occurring in Haitian ethnographic examples of walking corpses. Similarly, in a short recounting of an instance from his childhood in the late nineteenth century, Dr. H. F. Feilberg describes his first encounter with a ­“corpse-door” on the west coast of Jutland. He had assumed the bricked-up hole in the wall to be an old oven-door; however, he is told it is in fact a “corpse-door.” As he recalls: There were very few such left now, but in olden days it had been the custom that the coffin, which was always placed in the upper room, was carried out through this opening, which was bricked up again as soon as the procession had started for the church, so that on their return they could again assemble in the room and partake of the funeral meal. As the doors in these old-fashioned houses are low and narrow, this seemed to be a practical way of getting over a difficulty.18

However, the purpose of the corpse-door extends beyond a mere exit point for the coffin: as Feilberg notes, “it lies in the nature of the dead that they are always trying to get back to the places where they have passed their lives”.19 The “corpsedoor” becomes yet another funerary practice in the prevention of a returning corpse. Like the tying together of the corpse’s toes and the insertion of needles into the soles of the corpse’s feet, these practices ensure that the corpse is unable to return home. As Feilberg notes, “When the opening through which he left his home is closed up, it is not in his power to return”.20 This type of practice is not solely restricted to Danish folklore, as evidence of the custom has been documented in the Icelandic sagas, as well as, Feilberg notes, “in comparatively modern Danish life, in judicial documents of the Middles Ages, in Swabia, in Greenland, among the North American Indians, the Slavonic races in Russia, […] among the Ostiaks, Siamese, Chinese, Hottentots, and Caribbees”.21

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In accordance with the African and Haitian approach to multiple souls inhabiting a body, Chinese examples of similar beliefs can be found in the writings of the poet and scholar Yuan Mei (1716–1797) of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). One such story, Sing-Chen Lydia Francis suggests, “may be read as a displaced fascination with the multiplicity of selves”.22 Entitled “Two Scholars of Nanchang”, Yuan Mei’s ghost story details the close friendship of two scholars and the aftermath following the death of the eldest. The corporeal figure of the deceased elder scholar enters the bedroom of his living friend and in a pleasant manner requests his friend’s assistance in carrying out a handful of unfinished tasks. The young friend agrees to help and requests that his elder friend stay longer in order for them to share a few memories before they separate for eternity. The elder agrees to stay and they talk for a while before the elder abruptly stands announcing his departure. However, despite his final farewell, the corpse remains stationary as his face slowly begins to deteriorate into a state of decay and grotesqueness. The young scholar becomes frightened by his friend’s stillness and sudden change in appearance and flees from the room, but he is closely followed by the corpse, who chases him for many miles until the young friend jumps over a wall and falls unconscious on the ground. Unable to climb the wall the corpse comes to rest with his head on the wall, his saliva dripping on to the unconscious face of his friend. In the end, the young scholar is revived and the corpse is collected for a proper burial. The explanation for this peculiar event comes down to Chinese beliefs regarding the multiplicity of the soul: while “the hun soul is benign […] the po soul is evil, and the hun soul is intelligent but the po soul is not”.23 The corpse returned to his friend with both hun and po souls intact. Once the corpse had made arrangements for his unfinished business to be seen to, “the hun dissolved, po stayed”.24 The duality of the souls is explained thus: “When hun stays, the person still is, and when hun leaves, the person is no longer. The moving corpses and running shadows of the world are all doings by po”.25 Francis notes that traditional ghost stories of the Chinese literati characteristically consider the construction of the soul(s) as a united entity and the gui (ghost) to be an individual’s “essential (as opposed to the corporeal) identity in the afterlife”.26 In contrast, however, Chinese popular religion ordinarily considered a more complex construction of personhood, whereby an individual was comprised of three hun and seven po, alternatively, different classification systems all point towards various constructions of a number of souls. The multiplicity of souls in the construction of personhood exposes a common conception regarding the afterlife and the absence of an individual soul. Francis notes that “The multiplicity of Chinese souls reflects the contextual nature of how the living define and interact with the dead with regard to the different areas of religious or ritual concerns”.27 Yuan Mei’s depiction of a single hun and a single po is therefore a departure from the traditional notions of multiple souls. While Yuan Mei’s presentation of soul duality differs slightly from those of Chinese popular religion, Yuan Mei’s intention was to expose the separation of body from being. While the hun remains in place, the returned body is referred to as the “elder Scholar”; however, once the hun has disappeared and only the po remains, the narrative refers to the scholar as a corpse. The absence of hun leaves

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only a thing behind: “it has ceased to be a social being and as such is regarded as alien and horrific”.28 The multiplicity of human identities explored in the story reveals the creation of the self as a “cultural construct”: Such a notion dictates that a person’s life and death are not defined by the individual but by society at large, so much so that this culturally determined identity may even contradict physical reality.29

Another example taken from Chinese folklore, which can be observed in texts dating back to as recently as the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), would be that of the Jiangshi, or hopping corpse. The Jiangshi is described as a demonic revenant, “an autonomous, moving corpse harbouring inexplicable malignity towards the living”.30 Ji Yun describes two kinds of Jiangshi, the first being a newly deceased person awaiting burial, who would suddenly return to life and attack people, and the second kind are long-buried corpses that turn into demons as opposed to decaying. The threat of the Jiangshi, which Francis claims contributes to ensuring the position of the Jiangshi as “the most dangerous of monsters in the folk”,31 is the indifferentiation between the corporeal body and its souls: “The horror of the risen corpse, therefore, is the horror of mistaking physical appearance for an essentialised human identity”.32 However, this threat does not exclusively belong to the Jiangshi, but rather can be seen as a common thread that links the walking corpses of most folklore and certainly serves as a foundational feature that informs the development of zombie mythology. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the very first English appearance of the word “zombie” was in Robert Southey’s three-volume History of Brazil, published between 1810 and 1819. The “zombie” to which Southey refers is a deity of Angolan folklore. This deity was invoked by the leader of the slave movement that revolted against the Spanish in 1694. The elected leader was, Southey notes, “chosen for his justice as well as his valour […] it is said that no conspiracies or struggles for power had ever been known among [the slaves]. Perhaps a feeling for religion contributed to this obedience; for Zombi, the title whereby he was called, is the name for the Deity, in the Angolan tongue…”33 While Sebastian da Rocha Pitta, the Portuguese historian whose writings informed those of Southey’s, notes that the term “zombie” translates to “Devil”, Southey’s writings correct this misinterpretation in his confirmation that the true translation for “nzambi” is in fact “deity”. While the supernatural link is formed with the word, owing to the religious undertones connoted by the sense of an omnipotent deity, the contemporary interpretation of the term was not yet fully developed. Marina Warner notes that “the zombie becomes a new way of thinking about a person, from the turn of the eighteenth-century onwards, until the concept was naturalised in mainstream orthodoxy of the supernatural”.34 While these early folkloric examples of the risen dead bare little resemblance to the “nzambi” that inspired Southey’s appropriation of the term in History of Brazil, the intrinsic element that links these folktales to the contemporary zombie of popular culture is their questioning of the body/soul divide and the haunting prospect of a peripatetic soul-less corpse. The concept of a risen corpse and the existential chaos that

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accompanies it echoes, world-wide, throughout historical folktales and speaks of the very concerns that ground the magnum opus that is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (circa 8 AD), that of soul migration. Warner notes that it is this notion of soul migration that is “rediscovered” in the figure of the zombie and “reconfigured in the growing imperial possessions” that duly became, “in the fallout from slavery, a vehicle to express a new, psychological state of personal alienation, moral incoherence, and emptiness”.35 Ancient threats of the dead rising to consume the living, Biblical warnings of plagues of walking corpses, their rotting flesh falling from their bones with every step, folklore depicting the unexpected return of deceased loved ones, and questions regarding the nature of the soul, its implication in the construction of identity, and its connection to the body—these are the concerns that lie at the heart of the zombie figure. The very same issues are raised with each new appearance of the zombie figure in contemporary literature, signifying that zombie-like figures have been in existence for as long as humankind has been concerned with death and what lies beyond human-life; all that the figure needed to galvanise its existence was a name. Following Southey’s use of the term “zombie”, a more definitive development of the figure can be seen emerging in the American imagination; as explored in Boon’s system of zombie categorisation. In Kevin Boon’s exploration of the zombie as monstrous other, he notes that Zombie mythology can be seen as having been established over three overlapping periods. Restricting his examination to purely African influence, Boon claims that the initial stage of development emerged from the zombie’s presence in African tribal mythology; the slave trade carried the zombie from Africa to the Caribbean, where it was transformed through Caribbean religious practices into the Haitian zombie figure, most recognisable as the forefather figure of zombie lore. The Haitian zombie, through a process of manipulative American sensationalism, went on to further develop in the contemporary imagination into the flesh-eating horde of contemporary cinema.36 The most recent development of the figure, I argue, has seen a fourth period emerge in which there is a departure from the zombie as a mindless, hunger-driven, primal monster into a sentient figure capable of linguistic expression and self-reflection. Boon notes that “Metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological issues distinguish these three periods and link the evolution of zombie mythology to shifts in Western thought during the past several centuries”.37 In addition to these three periods explored by Boon, a fourth period, I argue, can be distinguished by the Philosophy of Self, as an extension to the ontological issues that occupy the narratives of zombieism. The emergence of a sentient zombie and the increased interest in the post-human development of zombie selfhood in the twenty-first century is the consequence of the figure’s capacity to stimulate existential anxieties regarding human impermanence and fluctuating classifications of humanness. Boon’s exploration of the zombie traces the mythology back to a spiritual being originating in, and overseeing, “the Bantu and Bankongo tribes of the Nzambi Mpungu region of the lower Congo River area”.38 The “Nzambi”, a term dating

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back to the seventeenth century, is described in the anthropological writing of R. P. Van Wing, as being: above all… the sovereign Master, unapproachable, who has placed man here below to take him away some day, at the hour of death. He watches man, searches him out everywhere and takes him away, inexorably, young or old.39

The Nzambi, in accordance with Southey’s original interpretation of a “deity”, was therefore a religious and highly spiritual cultural being, a harbinger of both life and death, the belief of which was made possible by positing the origin of truth as external, stemming from the greater power of a god, or gods. This epistemological belief system can be compared with that dominating Western religious thought prior to the enlightenment, in which an external truth was posited as stemming from an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, despite a lack of empirical evidence. Consequently, both African and Western traditional belief systems “posited spiritual beings and the truth they presumably possessed outside of the self”.40 The shift from this first period of zombie mythology to its second period, as suggested by Boon, is “rooted in the African diaspora” and “mirrors the shift from faith in God to faith in Science”.41 The African slaves that were brought to Haiti continued to interpret the term “zombi” as a spiritual revenant; however, following the collision of Western thought and African beliefs during the nineteenth century, the “zombi” underwent the transformation from a mighty spirit in its own right to a spirit capable of possession. Eventually the term “zombi” came to represent an individual who, as a victim of Voodou, loses their subjectivity and consciousness at the hands of a Houngan, and it is in this we see the shift from spiritual interpretation to physical manifestation. Boon classifies this figure as the “zombie drone”,42 examples of which can be seen in, but are not restricted to, the first wave of zombie literature and film (1900–1968). The zombie drones are typically those of Haitian folklore as described in the anthropological narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the plethora of zombie films that trailed its initial introduction to cinema with White Zombie (1932). The “zombie drone” represents a figure lacking sentience and volition, a vacuous shell, dead or alive, who functions as an instrument of force, be it slave labour as in the case of the sugar mills of Haiti, or, if we allow the definition to stretch beyond the specificity of the term “zombie”, the somnambulist Cesare from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) who is manipulated by Dr. Caligari into committing murder. On the peripheries of this development, yet another addition to the zombie mythology began to stir, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator”, which appeared as a serial in the amateur publication Homebrew between 1921 and 1922, saw a zombie-like figure emerge that could be connected to both creation through scientific means as well as to cannibalism. The figures in “Reanimator” cannot strictly be categorised as zombie drones, despite being resurrected at the hands of a scientist, as these figures were uncontrollable in their violent aggression. They serve, however, as an indication of the development from the second zombie period into the third, a liminal figure bridging the zombie drone of the second period with the zombie ghoul of the third.

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As Boon notes, “The empirical (pro-science) view that took root among the general population towards the end of the nineteenth-century ironically resulted in an increased objectification of self”.43 While the middle ages, up to the fifteenth century, had perceived the self in its entirety as an undivided whole, developments in thinking and a turn towards Rationalism resulted in the metamorphosis of the self into an object of enquiry. The potential arose for the self to be questioned by the self in light of Cartesian thinking and Descartes’ integral dictum cogito ergo sum; the examination of selfhood from within the self saw that the “source of truth” became located within. Boon explains that “rationalism divided the self between what is ‘me’ and what is not ‘me’, and imbued the self with uncertainty”.44 Similarly, Cartesian Dualism explored the separation between psychological mind (res cogitans) and physical body (res extensa), enabling a subjective examining of the objective body. The self could simultaneously serve as both an object and a subject of enquiry This divided self, and its ability to examine both physical and psychological notions of selfhood, enable further comprehension of the epistemological and ontological issues concerning Boon’s “zombie drone”, which first emerged towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The separation of the psychological self from the physical self is reminiscent of the body/soul divide that features as a concern in the aforementioned folklore of the first part of this introduction. While earlier zombie figures are dominated by the body/soul dichotomy, this is replaced with the body/mind distinction as informed by Cartesian dualism. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre differentiates between unconscious and conscious being. Unconscious being, en-soi or being-in-itself, can be seen in contrast to conscious being, pour-soi or being-for-itself. The difference between the two can been defined by a being’s awareness of its own consciousness, and as such, the being is capable of actuating their own existence from nothingness. When the zombie entered the American imagination, it did so as a figure emblematic of Sartre’s notion of Negation,45 according to which we are able to recognise the zombie as other due to its absence of consciousness, and in effect, this absence of identity reduced the zombie to a figure, or more specifically, a receptacle of nothingness.46 The fear that the zombie represents is the potentiality of nothingness, a mere physical shell lacking substance, and lacking in all aspects of humanity. While a conscious being is capable of constructing their selfhood from nothingness, an unconscious being lacks this ability of choice and, therefore, remains in a state of nothingness. The zombie drone represents humanity reduced to mere objects, functioning purely as tools at the hands of those who control them. Boon notes that this absence of selfhood is “ontologically terrifying because it denies humans that which makes us human”.47 Examples of the zombie drone echoed throughout the cinema of the early twentieth century: the Halperin brothers’ White Zombie (1932), Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and Jean Yarbrough’s King of the Zombies (1941) serve as examples of the Caribbean playing host to zombie practices; however, the follow-up to King of the Zombies, Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) and the Halperin Brothers’ unofficial sequel to White Zombie, Revolt of

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the Zombies (1936), saw a departure from the Caribbean setting as interest in this exotic land began to wane. Instead, the American imagination turned towards Europe, and early suggestions of war, for its inspiration. Coincidently, despite being a relatively unsuccessful and overambitious venture, Revolt of the Zombies, Jamie Russell explains, “was the first film to appreciate the fact that one potential avenue for the living dead’s development was in linking the image of the zombie to the masses”,48 thus reminiscent of the threat made by Ishtar in The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the plagues of walking dead that stalk eschatological End of Days prophecy. In addition to the notion of an army of zombies, Revolt of the Zombies relocated the setting from the Caribbean to Cambodia and simultaneously represented its zombies not as the reanimated corpses to be found in White Zombie, but rather—in the absence of Garnett Weston whose knowledge of Seabrook’s research informed White Zombie—as zombie soldiers, under the influence of mind-control, that never tire and are savagely impervious to pain. While critics attacked the film’s adaptation of zombie lore as it replaced voodoo, and its mysterious ties to the magic of the “dark continent” with mind-controlled living soldiers as zombies, Russell notes that “Revolt opened up the genre’s scope in quite unexpected ways that, in time, would have significant impact on the zombie movie”.49 This impact becomes evident as the figure of the zombie began to move into its third period of zombie mythology. Following the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Boon notes, “The bomb resulted in the disillusionment of a generation and a shift away from modernism”.50 The onset of the post-nuclear age injected American society with scepticism towards science and the potential devastation and ­wide-scale destruction that science could generate. The second zombie period came about as faith in god, or gods, shifted to a faith in science, that is, in something objective that is external to the self. The third zombie period therefore came about due to the loss of confidence in science, this external referent of truth. Boon notes that as a result of this, the individual was left with “no source of truth beyond self”.51 What remained was the self, and the individual was left in an existential state wherein truth was established relative to self. Fear shifted towards a loss of self, and the zombies of the post-nuclear age represented this shift as they clutter movie screens with their gaping mouths and vacant eyes void of humanity, something Boon terms “an abyss of nothingness”.52 The threat towards the self became the “threat of engulfment” by the world in which the self operates and the fear of the self being completely overwhelmed and consumed by the world, thereby resulting in the nullification of self and annihilation of identity. The post-nuclear zombie enters the American imagination fuelled by this existential imbroglio. It is at this point that the figure transforms from an object controlled and utilised by the zombie master, to fulfil his own malicious deeds, into an object that is driven by its own bestial hunger. Boon briefly suggests that the Zombie Drone became infused with the belligerence of the ghoul mythology, but he neglects to further elaborate on this proposal. The ghoul is an evil demon found in Arabic mythology, Ahmed K. Al-Rawi notes: “the ghoul was part of beliefs held by Arabs long before the advent of Islam and was a perceived reality for most

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living in Arabia”.53 The ghoul that, according to Boon, informed zombie mythology, however, was itself a mere exaggerated interpretation of Arabic folklore as the figure became embellished with additional sensationalist characteristics during the translation of Arabian Nights into French by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717. According to the Arabic Lexicon, the verbal root of “ghoul” is “ghāl” which translates as “to kill”, and the ghoul was traditionally thought of as a female demon, or genie, who would lure travellers off their paths with the intention of killing them.54 In Galland’s translation of “The Story of Sidi Nouman”55 a man narrates his experience with his new wife, discovering that her eccentricities are as a result of her being an enchantress and an acquaintance of a ghoul. The husband explains that ghouls “of both sexes are wandering demons, which generally infest old buildings, from whence they rush, by surprise, on people that pass by, kill them, and eat their flesh…”56 Galland further sensationalises the ghoul as the husband continues his explanation stating that “in want of prey” the ghouls “will sometimes go in the night into burying grounds, and feed upon dead bodies that have been buried there”.57 While the original Arabic version of the tale has not been found, Galland’s translation reflects a liberal reinterpretation of the original Arabic tales as he sensationalises characteristics that do not appear in any earlier Arabic folktales.58 However, it is Galland’s version of the ghoul that went on to populate the literary imagination, and, similarly, it is this version that added to the development of the zombie drone into the zombie ghoul. At a time when the American imagination was concerned with “the threat of engulfment by the world”,59 it seems natural that the figure of the zombie mutated into a figure of consumption. Inspired by the mythology of the frightful and flesh—devouring Arabic ghoul, the zombie drone becomes a figure propelled by its unrelenting drive to consume. Boon notes that “the ‘zombie ghoul’ symbolises the malignant universe surrounding the existential self”60 and the figure functions in a way that obliterates the selfhood of identity, mindlessly spreading the infection among the population, increasing the number of the horde until all that remains is an “abyss of nothingness”.61 The post-nuclear human condition provided ample inspiration for representations of the zombie ghoul in literature; Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), albeit not strictly a zombie fiction, became one of the first influences in the production of the zombie ghoul, serving as inspiration for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). In Night of the Living Dead radioactive contamination from a returning space probe is responsible for the dead rising from their graves. Despite being the prototypical zombie figure, the term “zombie” is absent from the film and the risen dead are instead referred to as ghouls. Utilising Matheson’s incorporation of plague analogy, the zombie virus is spread in a plague like-manner; however, unlike a plague, wherein the virus requires physical contact for transmission, any human that dies in Romero’s film reanimates as a zombie, and it is a figurative plague of violence that results in the spreading of the zombie infection. As Boon astutely notes, “Thus we find in the post-nuclear world that the instinctual human fear of being dead occupies second place to a more intimate fear of being undead, and that the living death of the zombie is more monstrous that the grave”.62

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The zombie drone and the zombie ghoul serve as two of the more recognisable categories of contemporary zombies. The zombie figure, however, cannot be restricted to these two categories as it continues to exist as a malleable figure in a state of flux, altering in significance and form to represent the cultural anxieties relevant to the text in which it is located. Boon recognises seven additional categories of zombie to date, with each category overlapping the next as the figure resists concrete definition. The “Tech zombie” is a category ascribed to zombies that have lost their freewill due to technology. This type of zombie is reanimated, or adapted, by technology with the intention of reducing the individual into an object of manipulation, as seen in the novels The Stepford Wives (1972), by Ira Levin, and Doris Piserchia’s I, Zombie (1982). The “Bio zombie” is similar to the “Tech zombie”; however, the use of an external substance or chemical is used in the place of technology. Examples of the Bio zombie can be seen in the films The Crazies (1973), by George A. Romero, wherein the Trixie virus turns a small town into homicidal maniacs; Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002); and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), where animal-rights protesters accidently release animals infected with the Rage virus into a highly populated London. Similarly John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine (2008) incorporates the popular connection made between the zombie virus and prion diseases, presenting the audience with an infection caused by a mutated rabies virus. The zombies from Night of the Living Dead could also be categorised as Bio zombies, since the cause of their infection was as a result of external contamination. The zombies, or “ghouls” as they are referred to in the film, of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) could fall into either the Tech or Bio zombie categories as aliens resurrect the dead in order to prevent the construction of a Doomsday weapon by human scientists. This cross-categorisation reflects the fluidity of these boundaries. The “Zombie Channel” is one whose body has been inhabited by another controlling consciousness, like the zombies in the novel The Rising (2003) by Brian Keene, in which demons possess dead bodies, and Stephenie Meyer’s The Host (2008), which, though not specifically a zombie novel, portrays the consciousness of the characters being overridden by a parasitic alien race. Boon suggests that Stephen King’s The Cell (2006) features zombies that might classify as Zombie Channels; however, the nature of their zombification is more technological, owing to a telephonic cell-phone “pulse”, a detail which suggests they would be better suited under the Bio or Tech zombie categories, producing further reflection on the fluidity of the classification process. The “Psychological Zombie” has lost its consciousness through some sort of psychological means, like hypnotism, as in the case of Cesare from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The “Cultural Zombie” which Boon maintains offers “a fascinating bridge between zombie mythology and the wider, general culture”63 are literary characters who exhibit zombie-like characteristics relating to identity and consciousness within narratives devoid of a supernatural or fantasy element, such as Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995). The “Zombie Ghost” category covers narratives in which the dead return as corporeal figures; these narratives would more appropriately fall under the category of Ghost story. However, the corporeality of the ghost places

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it on the boundary between ghost and zombie, the prototypical revenant like the Scandinavian draugr. The Zombie Ghost is the only category wherein Boon allows for figures that retain their original sentience, owing to a number of corporeal ghost narratives that are included in zombie anthologies. A recent example of the Zombie Ghost can be seen in The Returned (Les Revenants) (2012), a supernatural French drama series by Fabrice Gobert. The television series is based on They Came Back (2004), a French film directed by Robin Campillo, and features a small French town’s reaction to the unexpected return of several dead townsfolk. Finally, Boon’s typology acknowledges the existence of the “Zombie Ruse”, which consists of narratives that use the term zombie in their title in order to attract readers. This technique is more commonly used in children’s literature to exploit the popularity of the zombie within popular culture, and examples include Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry and the Zombie Vampire (2012). Boon’s intention is to create a system of categorisation that allows for a more methodical and defined articulation of the complete attributes of a zombie, in order to form the foundation upon which further discussions of contemporary zombie mythology can be based. Boon recognises the fluidity of the cross-categorisation that takes place within zombie narratives, and notes that ­ this mutability obstructs the constitution of a finite definition for the term “zombie”. However, within his specific categorisations he attempts to establish a common characteristic with which all zombie incarnations can be linked, namely, the absence of the body’s original sentience and volition. But how, then, do we comprehend zombies that regain their sentience and volition? The past decade has seen the increased emergence of zombie narratives wherein the zombie, having regained its sentience, is positioned in the role of protagonist-narrator. This type of thinking-zombie, aware of its position in society as a scourge of humanity, has divided critics and fans alike with, most disregarding the sentient zombie as part of the zombie canon. The sentient zombie appears, at first glance, to be a move away from the traditions of zombie literature; gone are the hoards and the uncontrollable insatiable desire to consume the entirety of humanity, and in its place we find sensitive individuals trapped in the process of existential doubt. These sentient zombies struggle to comprehend their “zombieness” in texts like Robin Becker’s Brains: A Zombie Memoire (2010), S. G. Browne’s Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament (2009), and in Dominic Mitchell’s television series In the Flesh (2013), and find themselves falling in love in Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2011) and Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie (2011). We even see them juggling heteronormative suburban living in two seasons of Santa Clarita Diet (2017), starring Drew Barrymore as zombiefied wife, mother, and realestate agent. This new trajectory need not be seen as a complete departure from the “traditional” zombie of the twentieth century; rather, in the same vein as the development from zombie drone to zombie ghoul, the sentient zombie should be approached as the next step in the evolution of this multifaceted revenant in which we consider how this humanising shift reflects the cultural anxieties surrounding identity politics of the twenty-first century.

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Notes

1. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human (New York, Fordham UP, 2011), 2–3. 2. June Pulliam, “The Zombie.” Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Vol. 2 (Westport, CT, Greenwood, 2007), 724. 3. Ibid. 4. A. R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (London, Penguin, 2003). 5. Ibid., 50. 6. Ibid., 51. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 1983), 335. 8. C. I. Scofield, The New Scofield Reference Bible; Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, with Introductions, Annotations, Subject Chain References, and Such Word Changes in the Text as Will Help the Reader (New York, Oxford UP, 1967). 9. Chadwick, N. K., “Norse Ghosts (A Study in the Draugr and the Haugbúi).” Folklore 57.2 (June, 1946), 50. 10. Ibid., 52. 11. Ibid., 55. 12. Gregg A. Smith, The Function of the Living Dead in Medieval Norse and Celtic Literature: Death and Desire (Lewiston, NY, Edwin Mellen, 2007). 13. Jacqueline Simpson, “Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse? Debatable Apparitions in Medieval England.” Folklore 114.3 (December, 2003), 389. 14. Ibid., 390. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture.” Past & Present, No. 152 (August, 1996), 7. 18. H. F. Feilberg, “The Corpse-Door: A Danish Survival.” Folklore 18.4 (1907), 363–365. 19. Ibid., 367. 20. Ibid., 374. 21. Ibid., 373. 22. Sing-Chen Lydia Francis, “‘What Confucius Wouldn’t Talk About’: The Grotesque Body and Literati Identities in Yuan Mei’s ‘Zi Buyu’.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 24 (December, 2002), 138. 23. Yuan Mei, quan ji 4, p. 3 (cited by Francis). 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Francis, Confucius, 139. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 141. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 143. 31. Ibid., 144. 32. Ibid. 33. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2002), 119–120. 34. Ibid., 120. 35. Ibid. 36. Kevin Boon, “The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post-nuclear Age.” Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human. Ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie. (New York, Fordham UP, 2011), 50.

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37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 50–51. 39. J. Van Wing, “Etudes Bakongo (Goemaere, 1921; pp. 170 ff.).” African Ideas of God: A Symposium. Trans. Edwin W. Smith. 2nd ed. (Bruxelles, Edinburgh House, 1950), 159. 40. Boon, Zombie as Other, 52. 41. Ibid., 53. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, Methuen & Co, 1976). 46. Boon, Zombie as Other, 54. 47. Ibid. 48. Jamie Russel, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Surrey, FAB, 2007), 30. 49. Ibid. 50. Boon, Zombie as Other, 55. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ahmed K. Al-Rawi. “The Arabic Ghoul and Its Western Transformation.” Folklore 120.3 (2009), 291. 54. Ibid., 292. 55. See Arabian Nights Entertainments 1718, vol. 11, 78–91 56. Ibid., 81 57. Al-Rawi, The Arabic Ghoul, 299. 58. Ibid., 300. 59. Boon, Zombie as Other, 56. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 57. 63. Ibid., 59.

Bibliography Al-Rawi, Ahmed K. “The Arabic Ghoul and Its Western Transformation.” Folklore 120.3 (2009): 291–306. Boon, Kevin. “The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post-nuclear Age.” Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human. Ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet. Lauro. New York: Fordham UP, 2011. 50–60. Caciola, Nancy. “Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture.” Past & Present 152 (1996): 3–45. Chadwick, N. K. “Norse Ghosts (A Study in the Draugr and the Haugbui).” Folklore 57.2 (1946): 50–65. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983. Feilberg, H. F. “The Corpse-Door: A Danish Survival.” Folklore 18.4 (1907): 364–375. Francis, Sing-Chen Lydia. “‘What Confucius Wouldn’t Talk About’: The Grotesque Body and Literati Identities in Yuan Mei’s ‘Zi Buyu’.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 24 (2002): 129–160. George, A. R. The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. London: Penguin, 2003. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2.35 (2008): 85–108.

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Pulliam, June. “The Zombie.” Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Vol. 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007. 723–754. Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. Surrey: FAB, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen & Co, 1976. Scofield, C. I. The New Scofield Reference Bible; Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, with Introductions, Annotations, Subject Chain References, and Such Word Changes in the Text as Will Help the Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Simpson, Jacqueline. “Repentant Soul or Walking Corpse? Debatable Apparitions in Medieval England.” Folklore 114.3 (2003): 389–402. Smith, Gregg A. The Function of the Living Dead in Medieval Norse and Celtic Literature: Death and Desire. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2007. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Wing, J. Van. “Etudes Bakongo (Goemaere, 1921; pp. 170ff.).” African Ideas of God: A Symposium. Trans. Edwin W. Smith. 2nd ed. Bruxelles: Edinburgh House, 1950. 159.

The Sentient Zombie Kelly Gardner

“And then I was reborn”, proclaims the theatrical Jack Barnes, a former English Professor and the sentient zombie protagonist of Robin Becker’s Brains: A Zombie Memoire (2010) as he revisits the moment of his transition from human to zombie: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. For I am evil. And I am the shadow. And I am death. Not just zombie but archetype. Not just villain but hero. Jungian shadow, id and ego. Man is woman. Ovaries are testes. Cats are dogs. Mr. Hyde was inside me clawing his way out. Dr. Jekyll was nowhere in sight.1

Contemporary literature and advancements in both medical and cognitive science indicate that humanity is currently, and has already been, on a trajectory towards a post-human epoch, an age in which the discourse of humanism will be forced to reconsider the inadequate binary concepts currently and previously used to make sense of the world and its inhabitants. The liberal humanist metaethic that has governed the imagination of Western culture has traditionally been informed by sets of ideological binary oppositions, such as “natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on”.2 These binaries have long been critiqued, by both postmodernism and posthumanism, for their tactical separation as a means of inclusion and exclusion, such as in a master/slave dialectic, in the construction of the self and the other. In Jack’s dramatic recollection of his transition, he verbalises the very paradox posed by the figure of the zombie. Both living and dead, the zombie crashes through the binaries established within the discourse of humanism and arises as a critique of humanism’s anthropocentric ideology. By its very nature, we might say, the zombie stands as a challenge to humanist modes of thought. The zombie as a post-human figure can be considered as emerging from two distinct strands of zombie literature. The first, and most well-known, strand is the ­traditional zombie narrative, as popularised by Romero, in which a p­ ost-apocalyptic

K. Gardner (*)  University of Stirling, Stirling, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_31

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landscape is overrun with zombies devoid of consciousness. In the absence of individual consciousness, the zombies function as a “swarm” operated by a hive mind. These traditional narratives can be seen in conjunction with, and in contrast to, the recent emergence of the Zombie Memoire. The Zombie Memoire genre sees zombies emerge, having developed or regained sentience. These narratives do not place an emphasis on the apocalyptic effect of zombies, for a considerable amount of these texts see zombies emerge free from any notions of apocalypse; rather, these texts focus on the sentient zombies’ existential anxiety of existing as uncategorisable figures in a world of binaries. Robin Becker’s Brains: A Zombie Memoire (2010) joins the zombie memoire genre by following this metaphysical slant. Like most examples of the genre, the central focus is the existential questioning of what it means to be human. The protagonist, Jack Barnes, a former English professor proficient in post-modern popular culture, narrates his transition into a state of zombification and elucidates further on zombie existence. For Jack and his fellow sentient zombies, there is a great effort to show evidence of their having retained consciousness in an attempt to justify themselves as authentic beings, thus separating themselves from the many mindless zombies that flood the environment. Jack feels torn when faced with the notion of “zombiehood”; when a group of “corpse catchers” approaches Jack, he views the encounter as a chance to prove his sentience, saying “this was my opportunity to show the real me, the man beneath the animal”3 as he reaches into his tweed jacket pocket to finger papers of his writing, “evidence”,4 he argues, of his cognition. Throughout this chapter, the sentient zombie will henceforth be referred to as the ‘Izombie’, my own critical coinage, in which the addition of a capitalised “I” symbolises an emphasis on the importance of subjectivity, a thinking, cognitive “I”, within the genre. As this chapter will demonstrate, the figure of the Izombie is implicated in a complex dynamic, one that is characterised by the apparent movement into the realm of the posthuman, but followed by the inevitable reinscription of humanism and humanist values. The zombie’s p­ ost-human endeavour founders substantially in these fictions of zombie sentience. Both strands of narrative attempt to position the zombie in the role and realm of the posthuman. However, while the first appears to propose a version of posthumanism that successfully moves beyond the realm of the human, the second fails, serving only to recuperate the ideology of a humanist model. The Izombie can be read in conjunction with its science-fiction cousin, the cyborg, in that both, on some level, are figures with which we can explore the boundaries of what it means to be human. Both serve as figures that enable an exploration of the possibility of posthuman futuriority, Transhumanism. In order to understand what is meant when referring to humanism, and the ideals that are recuperated in the figure of the Izombie, attention should be directed towards three overlapping critiques of Humanism. The first critique is antihumanism, which largely critiques the traditional humanistic ideas of “humanity”, “man”, and “human nature”. Antihumanists, like Friedrich Nietzsche, critique the humanist notion of a universal morality that binds “humanity” to an unrealistic, and over-idealistic, “moral code”. This moral code serves as a universal essence that governs humanity. The second critique is that of Transhumanism, which

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often serves as the transitory stage between humanism and posthumanism. While transhumanism embraces the dualism put forth by René Descartes as a means to gesture towards the potentiality of the technological separation of the mind from the body, Joseph Sassoon in The Humanist Society explains the humanist rejection of Cartesian Dualism, stating that “the entelechial process cannot exist without a body. Nor can it exist without a mind. Therefore, it can exist only within us as psychophysiological beings”.5 Humanism therefore perceives a necessary connection between mind and body. In contrast to this, transhumanism’s acceptance of Cartesian dualism proposes the technological advancement of the human condition and embraces scientific technologies that are often critiqued as working against the intrinsic moral code of humanism. In Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential (2013), Ted Chu notes that “it is becoming increasingly clear that technologies such as cloning, stem cell research, and genetic engineering are increasing the ability to alter not just nature but human nature”6 (Chu 4). Transhumanism critiques the stagnation of humanism’s conception of a universal human nature. Chu notes that “Opponents of such fundamental change often speak of the Promethean hubris entailed in ‘overcoming nature’ that will surely end in our self-destruction”.7 The “self-destruction” to which these opponents refer is essentially the “destruction of self” that is necessary to progress beyond the restricting confines of a humanist ideology that is based on the notion of a “universal nature”. It is the notion of a “universal nature” that regulates the construction and maintenance of the binaries that inform traditional humanistic beliefs. For example, humanists would use the argument that technological advancements of the human work “against one’s human nature” in order to reject certain ideas, or similarly, would claim these advancements as “unnatural”. In From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form (2011), Rothblatt examines the humanist binary constructed between male and female genders, arguing against the inherent discrimination that follows gender assignment at birth. Rothblatt uses the transhuman, and posthuman, figure of the avatar to explore the limits imposed on humanity by conforming to this gender binary. “Gender is the set of different behaviours that society expects of persons labelled either ‘male’ or ‘female’”,8 Rothblatt explains; however, she goes on to describe the manner in which gender should instead be conceived: as a continuum, she argues, “ranging from very male to very female, with countless variations in between”.9 This deconstruction of gender signifies a flaw in humanism’s conception of a universal human nature and opens up the possibilities of further explorations of transhuman potentiality. This transhuman potentiality need not be specifically focused on technological advancement: a mere advancement in cultural thinking, such as that associated with gender, is enough to move towards a transhuman future. The third argument against Humanism is that of posthumanism. In her seminal research on posthumanity in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetic, Literature, and Informatics (1999), N. Katherine Hayles asks, “What is the posthuman?”10 As Hales notes, “First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an

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inevitability of life”,11 which allows for the dislocation of consciousness from the physical body, acknowledging the potentiality for human transcendence of the body. “Second”, Hayles continues, “the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow”.12 In other words, consciousness is a mere by-product of humanism. The natural superiority that humanity claims as justified by an advanced level of consciousness is merely a display of egoistic anthropocentrism. “Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born”.13 This suggests the possibility for further technological bodily evolution that is advanced by Hayles’ fourth point: “and most important, by these and other means”, she claims, “the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”.14 Hayles’ final point speaks to examples of a dislocated consciousness having been uploaded into a computer, or into a mechanical body, as in the case of cyborgs and robot avatars. While these considerations of an actualised body/mind divide seem to merely appeal to the creative authors of science-fiction, Hayles’ perception of posthumanity has real-world implications as we move into a technological age in which such a dislocation between mind and body is becoming an authentic consideration for further human technological development, as well for further human-life extension. Projects such as the 2045 Strategic Social Initiative propose the possibility of uploading a human consciousness onto a robot avatar as early as 2045 to ensure cybernetic immortality. The 2045 Initiative manifesto states: “We are facing the choice: To fall into a new Dark Age—into affliction and degradation—or to find a new model for human development and create not simply a new civilisation, but a new mankind”.15 The 2045 Initiative, founded in February 2011 by the Russian interpreter Dmitry Itskov, hopes to: …create technologies enabling the transfer of a [sic] individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.16

To date, as many as 46966 people have enrolled in the project, and that number is increasing daily following the support of a range of religious leaders, including the Dalai Lama. The contradictory nature of posthuman discourse is evidence enough of the malleability and fluctuation of a concept that is still very much in development. The zombie, a malleable figure itself, then serves as an ideal figure or trope to represent posthuman concerns within the literature. The sentient zombie, which will now be referred to as the Izombie, emerges from the zombie genre as a gothic hybrid, a monstrous figure whose multiple interpretations are reflective of each decade in which it manifests on screen. Uncanny in its otherness and yet echoing

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a familiarity that speaks right to the core of humanistic anxieties, the Izombie is an amalgamation of each preceding manifestation of zombieism and can best be analysed in conjunction with Robert Longo’s sculpture entitled All You Zombies: Truth Before God.17 Jennifer González refers to Longo’s art installation as staging “the extreme manifestation of the body at war in the theatre of politics”,18 a description that seems appropriate also to describe the highly politicised body of the zombie. The “zombies” to which the title All You Zombies refers is as equally ambiguous as the figure itself; not particularly male, nor female, but rather a crude amalgamation of both sexes, the figure is presented on a revolving platform in front of a semi-circular canvas background decorated to represent the interior box-seats of a concert hall. In a stance reminiscent of the figure of Liberty in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), Longo’s monstrosity stands in a forward lurch, its left arm raised to the sky holding a flagpole, the base of which is a spear that pierces the figure’s ribcage to the left of a feminine breast. The charred unrecognisable flag hangs at half-mast. The figure is constructed as an unplaceable being, adorned with an amalgamation of inscriptions and objects that borrow from a multitude of cultures, its origin unknown and its heritage inconceivable. Its helmet, half kabuto—inspired by ancient Japanese warriors—is enhanced with the addition of a Viking horn reaching skyward from the left hand side. The helmet is halved with a Mohawk-fringed spine that separates the ancient aesthetic of the left side with the futuristic, almost armadillo-like grates of the right side. Below the helmet the double-faced figure viciously snarls from its caged mask, the left side of its face vaguely human in contrast with the right side’s mechanical stalked eye and forked tongue. A string of symbols circles the figure’s neck; among them are a Christian cross, the Judaic star of David, the star and crescent of Islam, the gender symbols for male and female, and a Swastika. A feminine hand thrusts from the figure’s masculine chest, tearing through a torso composed of toy soldiers, toy insects, and miscellaneous shrapnel. Chains and ammunition are draped across the figure’s warrior physique; on its back is a network of corrugated ventilation pipes that snake in and out of an engine-like exoskeleton. One-cent coins form the scales that cover the figure’s limbs, its right hand clutching the bodiless neck of a guitar and its erect penis emerging from the protection of an insect-like wing encasement. The figure’s muscular and well-armed thighs are transformed from the knees down into wolflike lower legs that strain to support the entire structure, indicative of the strain that war places on the natural environment. The figure therefore becomes part-beast, part-human, and part-machine, a veritable cyborg the sight of which both repels and absorbs the observer’s attention. With each passing minute of observation the figure simultaneously becomes more recognisable and more alien, as the monstrosity of the structure is revealed to have been composed of familiar parts. The figure is a product of its environment, both male and female, and, all-encompassing in its representation of culture and religion, it is a product of war. However, it also serves as a figure rising against the systems of power that bring about war and the relationship between the figure and its environment is therefore reflexive.

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In the description taken from the 1989 exhibition, we are told that “Longo deliberately evokes the image of the highest angel in eternal rebellion against God, vainly raging for a power he will never attain—the power to control his own destiny”.19 The figure is not only rebelling against the body of politics that bring about war, but also heading straight to the source and renouncing the God that informs such systems. The figure can be seen in opposition to Paul’s defence of his ministry in 2 Corinthians 10:3–5, where he states: For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.20

Alternative wording can be found in the New International Version, where we read: For though we live in world, we do not wage war as the world does. On the contrary, they have divine power to destroy strongholds.21

It is clear that in the renunciation of God, the figure becomes all too worldly in its construction, and, as such, wages war against the world in the same fashion of its creation. While the transhuman cyborg hybridity of All You Zombies: Truth Before God is noted by González as a visualisation of “possible ways of being in the world” (González 275), it is simultaneously positioned as a mercenary martyr, “raging involuntarily even against its own existence, the hybrid figure in All You Zombies: Truth Before God, stands as its own terrible witness of a militarised capitalist state” (González 275). The figure affronts the ideals of humanism by crossing and confounding the sacred binaries constructed to keep the world in order. The sculpture is neither man nor woman, but a monstrous reconfiguration of both genders. Similarly, as part-machine and part animal, the figure cannot be accurately assigned the title of “human”, but rather challenges the all-too-restrictive categorical system that humanism imposes in its ordering of humanity. The figure stands as uncategorisable and demands the reconsideration of the binaries that have, for so long, informed the humanist system. Comparisons can be drawn between Longo’s figure and the malleability of the zombie in its utilisation as an empty signifier within literature. As a mirror for contemporary cultural anxieties, the zombie is reincarnated seemingly anew with every manifestation, but like Longo’s figure, the zombie surges forth with each prior interpretation discoverable within the folds of its narrative. Notions of slavery, capitalisation, mass consumerism, and identity are emblazoned on the figure as a product of its environment and are simultaneously critiqued by the figure as it stalks the sugar cane fields, shopping malls, and cities of zombie narratives hungry to control, consume and obliterate. The Izombie emerges thus with the same reflexivity of its forerunners, a product of the environment it so wishes to destroy. As Hayles notes, “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals” (2–3). The prospect of posthumanity extends beyond even the mere

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transfer of consciousness to a machine, wherein Hayles recognises the inclusion of a c­ omputer-simulated consciousness in addition to that of human consciousness. The question of posthumanity articulates concerns for the continuation of subjectivity, which can be explored in consultation with C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962).22 Macpherson, whose interest focuses on the liberal humanist subject, offers an analytical perspective on the possessive individualism of subjectivity: “Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them […] The human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession”.23 Macpherson’s perspective, as indicated by the title of the text, is informed by arguments made by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the existence of a “state of nature” prior to the formation of market relations and civil society. Due to the nature of the individual as “proprietor of his own person” predating civil society, nothing is then owed to society and this establishes a relationship between individual and society in which one earns wages through the “sale” of one’s labour.24 However, Macpherson complicates the existence of a “state of nature” by examining it as a “retrospective creation of a market society”.25 Macpherson, informed by the tenets of classical Marxism, denies that the notion of a liberal self predates market relations, and insists, rather, that it emerges as a construction of market relations and civil society. Hayles argues that this paradox of the “state of nature” as existing prior to, or as a construction of, market relations can be overcome in the emergence of the posthuman, by abolishing the notion of the “natural” self itself. As Hales notes, “The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction”,26 like the amalgamation-formed figure in Robert Longo’s All You Zombies. Similarly, the posthuman figure as an amalgam exhibits a “collective heterogenous quality” which “implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another”.27 There is therefore little consideration for a single agency, but rather a collective will of many (disparate parts), like Longo’s two-faced figure and perfectly literalised in the formation of a zombie horde where the subjective “I” is transmuted into a collective “we”. Much the same operates in relation to the figure of the Izombie. As one of the horde, though operating at a level that appears to be mindless, the grouping of individual zombies into a collective whole result in an organism that continually functions to produce and reproduce itself. As Hayles notes, “Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organisation. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organisation that defines them as systems”.28 In this sense, the zombie horde, as an organism, becomes autopoetic in its continual reconstruction of itself as an emergent whole. The three different ideological responses to posthumanism that Hayles recognises can be seen in conjunction with the various strands of zombie literature outlined above. The first response to posthumanism is one of apocalyptic antihumanism, as found in traditional Romero-esque zombie narratives. Etched in the

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gothic responses of shock, horror, and fear, these narratives propagate an apocalyptic end to humanity and the discourse of humanism. This type of narrative, depicting a negative posthuman future in which the zombie horde threatens the extinction of humankind such as that seen in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, “informs and shapes both radically utopic and dystopic visions of the future”.29 The second response functions as a recuperative gesture that reinstates the values of the liberal humanist subject. Texts like Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie (2011) and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) feature the narratives of Izombie protagonists that find themselves reinscribed within the liberal humanist systems of values. In the case of Warm Bodies, the zombie protagonist, R, transcends the boundary between zombie and human, death, and life, as his heart starts beating following his romance with a human girl, Julie. The third response to posthumanity has not yet been fully realised in zombie narratives. Although many sentient zombie texts gesture towards a reconceptualisation of what it means to be human, none have problematised the conventional discourse of humanism’s binaries to the extent that a true inclusive posthumanity emerges. I Am Legend (1987), with its “new society” of adapted plague survivors, most closely resembles the response of a reconceptualised form of humanity. However, in this case, Robert Neville becomes the “other” to a reinscribed system of humanism, and it is not clear whether or not the “new humanism” of the survivors differs much from that which preceded it. Though not a zombie narrative, but of the same plague genre, Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) presents a narrative in which the whole of society is infected by a man-made virus of nano biological computers called “noocytes”. The noocytes reprogram the biological structures of the humans that they infect to the extent that all of humanity, and the human environment, becomes assimilated into a single macro-organism: As for the cities themselves—not a sign of normal living things, not a sign of human beings. New York City is an unfamiliar jumble of geometric shapes, a city apparently dismantled and rearranged to suit the purposes of the plague.30

The noocytes, and each human that is assimilated, become one of many voices within the hivemind-like consciousness of the macro-organism that operates as a whole. This new civilisation grows at such a rate, and to such a size, that it eventually transcends the normal plane of existence to one that is not restricted by a physical substrate. However, posthumanity need not necessarily result in the end of the world, but rather, posthumanity necessitates the end of normative conceptions of what being a human entails. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry present “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the era of Advanced Capitalism”, in which they postulate an emergence of a zombie figure not yet in existence, that of the zombii, which they describe as “a thought-experiment that exposes the limits of posthuman theory and shows that we can get posthuman only at the death of the subject”.31 Lauro and Embry emphasise the distinction between the zombie and the zombii, noting that while the zombie is the figure most commonly used for metaphorical discussions

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pertaining to the plethora of themes explored within contemporary traditional zombie texts, such as slavery, mass consumerism, capitalism, and power dynamics, the zombii represents a true incarnation of the consciousless posthuman.32 Lauro and Embry do not completely align their thinking with Haraway, unlike Haraway’s position on the cyborg, which she views as a positive catalyst to the breaking down of social binaries, particularly gender binaries, they do not propose that the role of the zombie is one of liberation, but rather consider the paradoxical incongruity of the figure as demonstrative of the inadequacy and deficiency of a subject/object dialectical model: “Simultaneously living and dead, subject and object, slave and slave rebellion, the zombie presents a posthuman spectre informed by the (negative) dialectic of power relations rather than gender”.33 They insist that the zombii imposes its own “negative dialectic” and, as such, true posthumanity can only arise following the development of an antisubject. Lauro and Embry’s zombii, as indicated by their insistence on the death of the subject, can best be explored in conjunction with the zombie drones and ghouls of traditional cinematic zombie narratives. Placing an emphasis on the hive mind that develops within the zombie horde, they state: “Our manifesto proclaims the future possibility of the zombii, a consciousless being that is a swarm organism, and the only imaginable spectre that could really be posthuman”.34 In order to understand what is meant by the over-determined term “subjectivity”, let us first consider Sartre’s notion of subjectivity as explained in his defence of existentialism: Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us […] Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.35

Herein lies the existential anxiety at the root of all Izombie narratives: in possession of existential subjectivity the Izombie finds himself within a world in which he cannot perceive of a direction in which to project himself and his existence, for he is posthuman in a human world. Critics often question the nature of the fear inspired by the zombie and the continuity of the zombie’s enduring appeal. Lauro and Embry, for example, make recourse to a psychoanalytic frame of reference when they argue that “we are most acutely aware of ourselves as subjects when we feel afraid—specifically when we feel threatened by a force external to our bodies”.36 The external force of the zombie threatens the termination of individuality. Jack tells us: “I’m glad I ate Lucy. I’d hate to see her dulled, reduced to an object, a thing. A rabid automaton”.37 Death has the ability to reduce the subject into an object. The walking corpse, particularly the Izombie, appears to inhabit both subject and object roles. As an antisubject, the zombii lacks the precondition for moral or political agency that is ascribed to a thinking subject, like the Izombie Jack, and the zombie swarm, unthinking but relentless in its drive to consume, serves as an unpredictable, and

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uncontrollable, all-encompassing wave of annihilation. This is the annihilation of humanity, but more importantly, the annihilation of human identity—the absence of self: ‘Death is not anything. Death is not…’ Ros said. ‘Life?’ ‘Death is the absence of a presence. But living death is…’ ‘The presence of absence?’38

The terror and horror that feed the enduring myth of the zombie is therefore twofold: first, the fear of the physical body being devoured, and secondly, the fear of human subjectivity being nullified as the infected are resurrected as one of many belonging to the zombie swarm. As Lauro and Embry note, “Both of these fears reflect recognition of one’s own mortality and ultimately reveal the primal fear of losing the ‘self’”.39 While the “self” is lost, all that remains is the body and the archetype zombie, therefore, is all body and no mind. What, then, can be made of the Izombie that has grown in popularity over the past decade? Izombies emerge from the swarm in order to find their own identity and can therefore be seen as playing two potential roles: on the one hand, zombies like Kieren Walker from In the Flesh (2013), and those in Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament (2009) and Brains, attempt to aspire towards a new strand of all inclusive humanism, a “new humanism”, if you will, that attempts to redefine the boundaries of classification that previously divided the “human” from anything “other”. However, in order to do this, the Izombie necessarily desires to secede from the zombie swarm—the collective consciousness which Lauro and Embry consider as the only true form of posthumanity—and in so doing, the Izombie denies the death of the subject—a prerequisite for the development into a post-human state. This denial of submitting to a collective consciousness, and the reclamation of their own subjectivity, can be seen as standing in contrast to the zombii’s movement towards a posthuman antisubject. While, in I Am Legend, to become infected was to become the posthuman, the Izombie becomes a way to explore the same theme, but in a way that appeals to humanistic thinking. The problem occurs when sentient zombies do not result in an advanced posthumanism, but rather revert back to the ideology of humanism, reinstating humanism as opposed to developing into the posthuman. While in traditional zombie texts it is the living human characters that attempt to reconstruct a society mirroring the one that has gone before, in Izombie narratives we see the Izombie protagonist exhibiting a performativity of simulacrum as they attempt to reposition themselves within the society to which they do not belong. In Diana Rowland’s My Life As A White Trash Zombie (2011) and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010), we see zombies forcing their way back into a regulated traditional lifestyle. The absence of subjectivity in the figure of the zombie is a stark reminder that individual cognisance is the defining attribute of humanity; as Lauro and Embry note, “to be a body without a mind is to be subhuman, animal; to be a human without agency is to be a prisoner, a slave”.40 The lumbering figure of the zombie serves as a reminder of humanity’s mortality, and the inherent imprisonment associated with the fragile human body. We are slaves to our bodies, and our human

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advancement can only extend as far as the human body is capable of extending; the fragility of the human body serves as a limiting threat that restricts further mental development beyond the body’s death. The zombie, however, rises from death, and the zombie metaphor therefore not only serves as a metaphor for slavery, as exhibited by the Haitian zombie, but also as a dual metaphor for a slave rebellion. Denying the limiting constraints of death to rise again, Jack tells us “we’re beyond the body”41 as he boasts about the absence of pain or the need to defecate, as the risen corpse overrides the constriction of human life. The zombie is not restricted by the boundaries set in a humanist dialectic, but rather serves as a hindrance to standard conceptions of both subject and object in its occupation as an animated, but yet dead, figure. If we consider the notion of subjectivity as purely a construction of humanistic thinking, then surely an authentic posthuman figure would be one without a subject. We should not consider this figure in terms of lacking a subject, however, a term which would imply an absence that could be filled, but rather as a true posthuman figure that would exist beyond the realm of the limiting discourse of humanism. It is at this point that perceptions of the posthuman are divided: the zombie can be used to explore two of the many schools of thought that consider the emergence of a posthuman future. Lauro and Embry introduced the zombii as a truly consciousless posthuman figure and I argue the zombii as posthuman can be compared and examined in conjunction with the Izombie. The Izombie can be viewed in accordance with a strand of cyborg theory that allows for the development into a state of posthumanity through technological adaption of the human body, or as in the case of an uploaded consciousness, through the complete replacement of the human body with a machine. This line of thought can be applied to the Izombie, who transgresses the boundary between life and death to further complicate the subject/object divide. The Izombie experiences a human death and is then resurrected as a liminal figure, neither alive nor dead. The Izombie can be considered as posthuman having moved beyond the controlling realm of humanism into an as-yet-undefined realm of posthumanity, a realm that suggests an urgent reconsideration of the inflexible boundaries of humanism. This school of thought maintains the central premise of humanism but allows for an adaptation in its structuring principles. This type of posthumanism presents the human species, as Stefan Herbrechter notes in Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), as “a historical ‘effect’, with humanism as its ideological ‘affect’, while distancing itself from both”.42 Herbrechter argues that this type of posthumanism can not be established as having emerged “after” humanism, but should rather be considered as deconstructively inhabiting humanism itself: “A post-humanism which, precisely, is not post-human but post-human(ist)”.43 The second school of thought, as discussed earlier, emphasises a movement beyond the common discourse of traditional humanism in the presentation of the zombii, a truly consciousless posthuman non-subject. Hayles problematises the posthumanity presented by the cyborg and the Izombie, indicating that technical adaptation or the replacement of the human body does not amount to posthumanity if the figure continues to identify with the Enlightened subject of liberal

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humanism.44 Similarly, while the Izombie appears to emerge as a veritable posthuman figure, its position within posthumanism is complicated due to its emphatic insistence on the establishment and maintenance of its identity as a subject. While the emergence of the Izombie appears to progress towards a new dialectical model, the reestablishment of both an identity informed by humanism, as well as an overtly humanist socio-political model, indicates a denial of radical, absolute posthumanity. Herbrechter questions the origins of essential humanity asking: “[Is it] in its ‘savageness’?… Or in its capability of speech, its culture or social drives… is the human in fact human because of its ‘nature’ or its ‘culture’?”45 Herbrechter argues that the human race should be considered as a cultural construct within a relevant historical timeframe, as opposed to transcendental beings that operate outside of the realm of an ideological belief system. Humanity, Herbrechter continues, needs to be considered as evolving within a great ecological context: “This approach only becomes posthumanist when the human is no longer seen as the sole hero of a history of emancipation, but as a (rather improbable but important) stage within the evolution of complex life forms”.46 The Izombie thus operates on two contradicting planes—firstly, as it regains sentience it is denying its position within a hivelike structure of the zombie horde, the horde which presents a truly posthuman position in that the body continues to outlive the soul; secondly, the development of the sentience in a dead figure demonstrates a moving beyond a human state of existence into a posthuman state. However, these narratives reinscribe humanistic modes of being, as evidenced by Jack’s insistence on writing “A Vindication of the Rights of the Post-Living”,47 Angel’s reassimilation into functional human society in My Life as a White Trash Zombie, and R’s return to life as a result of his heteronormative relationship with the human, Julie, in Warm Bodies. The actions of these Izombie characters overwrite the potentiality for the true emergence of the posthuman. This paradoxical movement in and out of humanism is literalised in the series In The Flesh, in which the zombies find themselves caught between two prospective identities. The law requires the zombies to medicate themselves with Neurotriptyline, a drug that stabilises their zombie characteristics and desires, and allows for their reintegration within society. On the other hand, the Undead Liberation Army, a group of anarchist zombies, propagates the use of a drug called Blue Oblivion, which acts in the opposite way of Neurotriptyline, emphasising the monstrous characteristic of zombieism. Under the influence of Blue Oblivion the zombie becomes the ravenous beast of traditional zombie literature, forgoing all elements of rational sentience. The Undead Liberation Army declares this monstrous zombie state as the true intended state of being and calls on their fellow zombies to embrace their true identities as zombies. The zombies are faced with the dilemma of choosing between life as an Izombie versus life as a zombii. The Undead Liberation Army views Blue Oblivion as a means of developing beyond the boundaries of the human, becoming posthuman in embracing life as an antisubject, while Neurotriptyline becomes a means of reassimilating zombies back into the discourse of humanism.

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While both schools of thought appear to postulate a posthuman reality, an authentic move towards posthumanism, as indicated by Hayles, would require not only the abandonment of the human body, but also the abandonment of the Enlightened subject position. The zombii seemingly fulfils this role for, unlike the Izombie who offers a return towards flawed humanistic principles, Lauro and Embry maintain that, “the zombii does not reconcile subject and object, but, rather, as walking antithesis, holds them as irrevocably separate; in the figure of the zombii, the subject position is nullified, not reinvigorated”.48 Lauro and Embry therefore uphold that the only truly posthuman model would be one based on the “neither/nor” rejection of both subject and object as exhibited in the figure of the zombii which works “in the mode of negative dialectics”.49 The zombii therefore serves analogously to represent both contemporary humanity, as well as the threat towards contemporary humanity. While the figure of the cyborg was used as a means of disbanding the difference of binaries between self and other, subject and object, male and female, the potential of the zombii to surpass the hybrid cyborg’s categorical levelling stems from the zombii’s own defining inconsistency. The zombii is paradox manifested: as a member of the living dead it is neither subject nor object, and further complicates the cyborg model, as well as that of the Izombie, by demonstrating that a mere adaption of “either/or” into “both/and” is insufficient. Rather, the zombii functions to obliterate all bonds between subject and object, adapting the cyborg’s “both/and” into “neither/nor”. Lauro and Embry note that, as a result of this, “The body of the zombii is itself this indeterminable boundary”.50 Robert Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies–” (1959), though it contains no traditional zombie figures, exhibits the potential for the zombie as metaphor to capitalise on the exploration of existing in a state of disconnection from the world, lacking a certain presence. Heinlein’s short story is a classical example of time travel fiction incorporating the temporal paradox, wherein an object brings about its own existence by some or other action in a causal loop. The subject of Heinlein’s story is the “Unmarried Mother” who tells the tale of their existence to the “temporal agent” narrator of the story. It is revealed that each character in the story is the same person, the hermaphrodite Jane, at different stages of her life, for it is the Unmarried Mother who enrols at the temporal agency recruiting centre and in this the reader realises that the temporal agent narrator has consequently, and intentionally, recruited themself. The only mention of the term zombie comes in the closing passages of the story: Then I glanced at the ring on my finger. The Snake that Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever… I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from? I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!51

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While the “zombies” to whom the narrator refers are presented as ambiguous, Russell Letson regards the solipsism of Heinlein’s work as evidence that the zombies in question refer to others who, unlike the narrator, have not been responsible for their own creation.52 The Unmarried Mother serves as a transhuman figure as a result of undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Similarly, the technological manipulation of time in order to bring about the incestuous recreation of self pushes the figure into the territory of the posthuman. As posthuman figure, the Unmarried Mother differentiates him/herself from the “normal” zombies. Letson notes: “by totally closing the loop, making the Unmarried Mother his/her own begetter—alone in a universe of ‘zombies,’ metaphysically and biologically if not emotionally self-sufficient—the story develops… a convincing portrait of the self-created, solitary being”.53 As the creator of him/herself the narrator exhibits a concrete knowledge of his sense of self, having interacted with different manifestations of him/herself throughout the temporal dimension. David Wittenberg notes that “the ‘zombie’ is a subject both tied to and cut off from its own origins, fallen into belated self-alienation”.54 Both Warm Bodies and Brains present the reader with zombie protagonists that have, to an extent, created their own subjectivity among a horde of antisubject zombies. Like the Unmarried Mother, they view themselves as posthuman Izombie figures thus separated from “normal” zombies. It is heir own “discovery of themselves” that serves as the catalyst for their fellow zombies to discover their own sentience. “All You Zombies” is essentially a contemplation on the nature and construction of identity; the ouroboros-inspired causal loop of the temporal agent’s creation bares a flicker of resemblance to Nietzche’s postulation of the Eternal Return, wherein time is cyclical and what occurs in the present moment is simply a recurrence of the past. In this sense, time, and the world, is simply a repetition. Like the temporal agent in his cyclical creation, whether he is the female Jane, the strange male lover, or the unknown older kidnapper, all are the same person. There is no prospect of further development for the cyclical nature ensures only that what has gone before will occur again. These narratives exhibit a reflexivity in that what they produce reproduces the systems that allowed for their production in the first place. As Sartre notes, “subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity”.55 In this we see the paradox of the Izombie, seemingly posthuman, but whose subjectivity denies him the possibility of transgressing the boundary between human and posthuman, denying his existence within a posthuman realm. The continuation of capitalism relies on the continuation of a societal association with individual consciousness, for it is this sense of individualism that hinders the emergence and development of a defiant collective. For as long as the ego reigns supreme, so do the systems of power that strive to enslave it. The destruction of the zombie’s brain is necessary for its defeat in the same way that humanism must be defeated to allow for the emergence of posthumanity. The zombii and Izombie operate differently in this regard, for while the zombii requires the absence of ego,

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the Izombie, like the slave that defied colonialist power, attempts to justify a posthuman existence by establishing an identity that extends beyond the humanist constructs of life. The problem that arises with the Izombie and its preoccupation with selfhood, however, is its insistence on emerging as a self in order to return to the same humanist dialectic model that gave birth to its emergence in the first place. While the slave fought to establish his identity as a subject within the discourse of humanism, if the Izombie wills to enter into a state of posthumanity, it must abandon the discourse of humanism. As Lauro and Embry note, “If the subject survives the apocalypse, so will capitalism”.56 Jack’s declaration of subjectivity, and his manipulation of fellow sentient zombies, drives him to separate himself from the zombie horde, and thus, from his journey towards a truly posthuman future. His insistence on utilising the humanistic discourse of moral rights to construct a manifesto of the Vindication of the Rights of the Post-Living results in his reincorporation into the capitalist system of humanism. What is it about the concept of becoming posthuman that evokes both terror while simultaneously excites pleasure? The nature of the prefix “post” implies a necessary termination of the “human” as we know it, as well as the overruling ideology of humanism that informs the dialectical model to which it ascribes. The termination of humanism can be seen from two perspectives. The first would merely require the reformulation of humanist concepts into a posthuman discourse that allows for the abolishment of binaries previously used as a means of anthropocentric inclusion and exclusion. This perspective is literalised in the figure of the Izombie. The second, more drastic perspective, as literalised in the figure of the zombii, envisions a future in which the only manner in which posthumanism can be achieved is with the displacement of humanism as the dominant ideology, with one that moves beyond the subject/object discourse it enforces. A true posthuman figure can only emerge once the notion of individual subjectivity has been abolished. In this impossible, as yet unrealised future, humanity will be faced with an option similar to that posed to Robert Neville in I Am Legend: aimlessly to fight against the inevitable evolution, or to submit to it in the acknowledgement that it is the only way to advance. “You’re quite unique, you know”. Ruth tells him, “When you’re gone, there won’t be anyone else like you within our particular society”.57 Robert Neville considers his role as an other within this newly formed society and thinks: “I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man;”58 in conclusion, “Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed”.59 However, these are only two of the many perspectives that centre around the entailment of a posthuman future. The posthuman allows for a multitude of prospective ways in which humanity can be re-explored and re-examined, and invites the development of new ways of thinking about the current social, political, technological, and ecological environments and how these environments influence ideas of what it means to be human. The posthuman need not necessarily

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predicate the end of humanity. Rather, as Hayles notes, “It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualise themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice”.60 Hayles emphasises that the only truly destructive perspective of posthumanism is when the liberal humanist view is re-presented under the guise of posthumanism, which denies the expansion of “prerogatives in the realm of the posthuman”61 and thereby merely reflexively foregoing any positive ideological development in the liberal humanist recuperation of the posthuman figure. Lauro and Embry choose dramatically to conclude their “Zombie Manifesto” as follows: “When we become zombiis, when we lose our subjectivity and the ability to rationalise, there will be no difference between the two. Therefore, when we truly become posthuman, we won’t even know it”.62 While some perspectives, like that of Lauro and Embry and their postulation of a zombii, veer towards the apocalyptic by presenting a radically antihuman posthumanism, it is possible to view the development of posthumanity not as one that annihilates, but rather as one that reinforms and restructures the destructive ideology of humanism, into one which avoids the reinscription and repetition of past malheur. While contemporary zombie narratives, both sentient and traditional, gesture towards the development of a certain posthumanism, none have managed to present a posthumanity that necessarily encompasses a movement towards the inclusivity, or universalism, of a discourse that neither annihilates the subject nor reimposes humanism. The zombie figure will, therefore, continue to oscillate between these two approaches, suggesting the potentiality of a posthuman future, while failing to fully realise its own posthuman potential.

Notes

1. Robin Becker, Brains: A Zombie Memoire (New York, Harper Collins, 2010), 36. 2. R. McCallum, V. Flanagan, and J. Stephens, “The Struggle to Be Human in a Posthuman World.” CREArTA 6 (2006), 28. 3. Becker, Brains, 46. 4. Ibid., 47. 5. Joseph Sassoon, The Humanist Society: The Social Blueprint for Social Actualization (Bloomington, iUniverse, 2014), 73. 6. Ted Chu, Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution (San Rafael, CA, Origin, 2013), 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Martine Aliana Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman (Chicago, Martine Rothblatt, 2011), 1. 9. Ibid. 10. Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, U of Chicago, 1999), 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid

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14. Ibid. 15. http://2045.com/, 2018. 16. Ibid. 17. All You Zombies: Truth Before God (1986) Acrylic and charcoal on shaped canvas; cast bronze on motorised platform of steel and wood. Overall size, 176-1/2 × 195 × 177-1/2 inches/448 × 495.3 × 451 cm. 18. Jennifer González, “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York, Routledge, 1995), 273. 19. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Robert Longo (Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989). 20. “King James Bible Online.” n.p., n.d. Web. 2 October 2012. 21. C. I. Scofield, The New Scofield Reference Bible; Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, with Introductions, Annotations, Subject Chain References, and Such Word Changes in the Text as Will Help the Reader (New York, Oxford UP, 1967). 22. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, Clarendon, 1962). 23. Ibid., 3. 24. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Ibid., 10. 29. McCallum, et al., “The Struggle to Be Human in a Posthuman World,” 41. 30. Greg Bear, Blood Music (New York, Arbor House, 1985), 164. 31. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2.35 (2008), 87. 32. Ibid., 90. 33. Ibid., 91. 34. Ibid., 88. 35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet (York, Methuen, 2013), 30. 36. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 88–89. 37. Becker, Brains, 52. 38. Ibid., 71. 39. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 89. 40. Ibid., 90. 41. Becker, Brains, 84. 42. Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. 43. Ibid. 44. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287 45. Herbrechter, Posthumanism, 8. 46. Ibid., 9. 47. Becker, Brains, 177. 48. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 95. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies–.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Hoboken, NJ, 1959), 15. 52. Russell Letson, “The Returns of Lazarus Long.” Robert A. Heinlein. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York, Taplinger Pub. Co. 1978), 194–221 53. Ibid., 205. 54. David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York, Fordham UP, 2013), 208

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55. Sartre, Existentialism, 31. 56. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 107. 57. Matheson, Legend, 156. 58. Ibid., 159. 59. Ibid. 60. Hayles, Posthuman, 286. 61. Ibid., 287. 62. Lauro and Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto,” 108.

Bibliography Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: Arbor House, 1985. Print. Becker, Robin. Brains: A Zombie Memoire. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print. Chu, Ted. Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution. San Rafael, CA: Origin, 2013. Print. González, Jennifer. “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. 267–278. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1999. Print. Heinlein, Robert. “All You Zombies–.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959, 1–15. Print. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print. “King James Bible Online.” n.p., n.d. Web. 2 October 2012. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2.35 (2008): 85–108. Web. Letson, Russell. “The Returns of Lazarus Long.” Robert A. Heinlein. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1978. 194–221. Print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Robert Longo. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989. Web. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Print. Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. London: Robinson, 1987. Print. McCallum, R., V. Flanagan, and J. Stephens. “The Struggle to Be Human in a Posthuman World.” CREArTA 6 (2006): 28–44. Web. Rothblatt, Martine Aliana. From Transgender to Transhuman. Chicago: Martine Rothblatt, 2011. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. York: Methuen, 2013. Print. Sassoon, Joseph. The Humanist Society: The Social Blueprint for Social Actualization. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2014. Print. Scofield, C. I. The New Scofield Reference Bible; Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, with Introductions, Annotations, Subject Chain References, and Such Word Changes in the Text as Will Help the Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Print. Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. Print.

New Vampire Gothic

Transmedia Vampires Simon Bacon

It is misleading to think of Transmedia multiple platforms as a purely ­twenty-first-century phenomenon which requires the internet, ‘smart’ devices, and ­cutting-edge technology. Any performance of a narrative that engages its audience creates a world within which they can become involved, feel, and on some level interact with its characters enabling the fulfilment of the the basic requirements of Transmedia—a story, retold, engaging, and pulling its audience into a narrative world beyond our own. The levels of engagement and complexity of these worlds evolves and grows as a text moves and/or adapts (readapts)1 across media, such as in novels, plays, and more recently graphic novels, games, etc. and all of these will inherently introduce changes due to the properties of each new platform and the kinds of audience/player/user engagement they allow for. This will often be augmented through advertising, social media, blogs, etc. with the more well known texts/narratives/franchises being adapted specifically for performance/engagement on other media as part of their process of world creation and audience immersion. Popularity and ‘stickiness’—encouraging user/vendor engagement over time—are qualities that have been behind and fuelled the continuing appeal of the figure of the vampire. Indeed, as a multivalent being the vampire and thrives on popularity and the mores of popular culture whilst being inherently a multiplatform and multimedia entity. One of the best examples of this is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that has been adapted to almost all forms of media. Stoker himself had originally hoped his novel would become a play, though this did not happen until Hamilton Deane’s version in 1924. In fact, it was an American adaptation of Deane’s play by John L. Balderston that informed the first official film of the story by Tod Browning in 1931. With the machinery of Hollywood behind it, the movie was popularised through widespread advertising and marketing and has subsequently help spawn myriad adaptations and reinterpretations of Stoker’s novel and its vampire

S. Bacon (*)  Independent Researcher, Poznań, Poland

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_32

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Count in games, comic books, costumes, and breakfast cereals to name but a few. Obviously not all manifestations of the vampire come from Browning’s film, but Bela Lugosi’s interpretation still remains surprisingly influential. The consequent complexity and entanglement of the many expressions of Dracula and its vampire create a kind of ‘convergence culture’.2 One of the main examples that Henry Jenkins uses in his influential argument on the subject is the extremely vampiric narrative world of The Matrix franchise (The Wachowski Brothers: 1999–2003).3 The franchise utilised heavy advertising and marketing, video games, and online fan communities to ‘world build’ (Jenkins 2008), creating a narrative universe beyond the original story built upon multiple forms and levels of interaction and immersion. Consequently, giving the characters depth and life outside their source material. As such, the more detail provided across different and multiple mediums, including those parts that are contradictory, the more ‘real’ the characters and the world they inhabit becomes. An important distinction for Jenkins arises when the audience is no longer seen as passive in this configuration but become, or are encouraged to be, active agents in the ­story/ character/world-building process. In particular, this encourages greater levels of engagement and intersectionality between mediums—ways in which each can be seen to resonate with and inform others—so that the borders between audience and stage, reader and text are no longer as strong as they once were. As such, what might be called ‘real’ Transmedia vampires are those that no longer remain fictional but begin to blur the edges between this world and the narrative one. This actually describes something of the process that the word vampire itself became introduced into the English language, and not unlike the oral tradition it actually started as a series of events in the real world that spread across mediums into the fictional one, and equally interestingly highlighted the inherent cultural differences within mediums and the audiences they are used to connect to. Tales of revenants and vampire-like creatures were not uncommon during the Medieval period but were brought into sharper focus at the start of the 1700s with a rash of, supposed, vampire sightings in South-eastern Europe. In part this was due to a clash of cultures, on one side the Hapsburgs and Enlightenment Europe and on the other the Ottoman Empire and Old-World superstition. Serbia in particular was caught in this tension of old and new, with the Treaty of Passarowitz 1718, creating the short-lived kingdom of Serbia (1718–1738), cited the Hapsburg’s as the areas new owners. This left the area ill at ease and caught between many conflicting influences, ‘region of political and medical quarantine against the threats of war and plague from the east’.4 In a region of such turmoil with many men returning from the fighting/travelling in foreign lands it is hardly surprising odd things were seemingly happening and people and livestock being struck down with mysterious illnesses. Local superstition intimated such occurrences were due to vampirism, people that had led bad lives returning from the dead and feeding on the blood of others and usually their own families. Tradition dictated that the only way to solve this was to dig up the bodies of the suspected vampires and stake them in the heart. Two cases are of note, Petar Blagojevich (died 1925) and Arnold Paole (died 1726), both supposedly returned from the

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grave to cause the deaths or illness of others, and more importantly the local authorities got involved in the cases. Suddenly, folklore not only became actual through its intersection with events in the real world but became the subject of official, ‘rational’ reports. In each instance officials from the Hapsburg authorities were sent to make reports and witness the bodies being disinterred. Shockingly, the corpses looked just as superstition described; not decomposed at all, hair, beards, and nails had grown and had mouths splattered with blood (this is now known to be quite normal, under certain conditions, for dead bodies). Such evidence meant they must be vampires and the authorities agreed and the European Vampire Hysteria began. Stories appeared in newspapers, learned treatise were written—Dom Augustine Calmet’s Dissertations on the Apparitions of Angels, of Demons and of Spirits, and on Revenants or Vampires of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Moravia and of Silesia (1749), and even Voltaire noted vampires in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It was not until Empress Maria Theresa sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the situation and decide that it was due to ‘simplicity and ignorance’ in his report of 1768 (Discourse on the Existence of Ghosts) that she brought the matter to a close by banning the staking, beheading, and burning of dead bodies. What is interesting here is the way that the regional folklore and oral history of the local peoples with their narratives of vampires were taken up by the more sophisticated medium of writing, and medical officers’ reports, that sparked the sensational stories in the popular press of the day, energising the equivalent of social-networking of the eighteenth century, sparking rumours and gossip in society circles in the important European capitals of Vienna, London, and Paris. Suddenly newspapers across Europe told of vampires in the East, to such a level that the word ‘vampire’ itself made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1734.5 This example of a Transmedia Vampire is curious as although it saw the transformation of a localised oral ghost story into a pan-European panic that entered the imagination, and the nightmares, of those that read the sensational newspaper articles and subsequent books that followed,6 it did not really have a specific figure/character as its focus. Whilst Blagojevich and Paole acted as catalysts for the later vampiric panic they did not become role-models for later expressions of the idea, but rather it created a world in which vampires were possible—a core feature of the Transmedia Vampire is the way it blurs the boundaries between the real and the fictional.7 This fertile Transmedia soil would produce the next important figure in this article John Polidori and his sophisticated vampire Lord Ruthven who would provide the grit to build a vampiric pearl around. The Vampyre was born on the same fateful night as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816 as part of the evening’s entertainment arranged by their host Lord Byron. Though, it was not Polidori, the hosts doctor and travelling companion, but Byron that came up with the partial story of Augustus Darvell, who dies, comes back to life, and drains the life out of the living—Polidori’s story supposedly told of a voyeur spying on a lady ghost. It was only later that the young doctor developed his employer’s idea, changing the vampire’s name to Lord Ruthven—he probably undertook the work of writing

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the story up for the Countess of Breuss who lived nearby. It was from her that the eventual publisher acquired the work and it first appeared as The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron in Henry Colburns New Monthly Magazine in 1819. The first edition of the book moved Byron’s name from the front to the title page, and the next edition removed it completely. The confusion around authorship plagued the young Polidori and he eventually took his own life in 1821. Byron himself denied having any involvement with the work, his ‘Vampyre’ fragment was later appended to the poem ‘Mazeppa’, but his association with the book hugely added to its popularity and marketability ensuring that the undead creature would gain a life far beyond that of his creator. Lord Ruthven is nothing like the Serbian vampires that, arguably, helped instil the idea of ‘vampires’ in the popular cultural consciousness of the eighteenth century. He was a decadent aristocrat that did all he could to morally corrupt young men and drain the life out of young women—importantly he is not described as drinking blood, but rather draining life-force and he can be revived by moonlight. In this way Ruthven was a vampire of the new century, embodying an aristocracy that was being seen as increasingly out of date and feeding on the youth of tomorrow. The story certainly struck a chord with the increasingly literate and ­middle-class audience and subsequently it was not long before the work appeared in other media; the first of these was the 1820 play Le Vampire by Charles Nodier. This production was so successful that readaptations of it began to appear, and one even in the same year penned by James Robinson Planché entitled The Bride of the Isles. Curiously in these various moves across media and countries—from London, to Paris and back again—the lead character, Lord Ruthven, stayed roughly the same but the surroundings altered moving the action from London and the Grand Tour, as in Polidori, to the Scottish Highlands—the ancestral home of the real Lord Ruthven. The world of the vampire (Vampyre) was not only expanding in re-adaptation and new mediums, but the characteristics and detail of the Transmedia villain grew as well. Whilst Polidori suggested the restorative powers of moonlight, the later theatrical works altered the plot to see the vampire under a curse (Dumas, Le Vampire 1851) or under promise to dark forces that could only be broken by the life, or love, of an innocent, dragged to hell for his wickedness (Nodier, Le Vampire) or even vulnerable to special bullets (Boucicault, The Phantom 1861). The movement to other and more visual mediums was important not just increasing the size of the possible audience that the ways they are able to engage and/or interact with the figure of the vampire but raising its stickiness within the popular imagination. As such Western culture at that time is far more receptive to the idea of a narrative world containing vampires and already has tropes and extenuating details connected to it. The nineteenth century also saw the publication of James Malcolm Rhymers and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney The Vampire: Or, the Feast of Blood, an important work that appeared, in part, due to the popularity in the figure of the vampire still fuelled by Polidoi’s story and it’s progeny. Varney, a large, sprawling work that appeared in instalments in Penny Dreadfuls—inexpensive weekly pamphlets—between 1845 and 1847 widened the vampire’s audience as well as

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sensationalising the character. Essentially, they were the nineteenth century equivalent of the Hammer Horror Dracula films of the late 1950s to the 1970s purposely making the stories overtly lurid to emotionally involve its audience and grab their attention. Varney also established many of the tropes of the genre that are instantly recognisable by contemporary audiences, such as a thirst for blood, two fang-like teeth, and a growing call on the audiences sympathy—Varney was a little like contemporary television series that see characters change and develop over time and often finish oppositional to the figure they originally were—qualities that were missing from Polidori’s Ruthven and many of its stage adaptations. It also helped establish the vampire as a creature that thrives on popular appeal, beyond any critical acclaim, increasing its levels of audience participation and engagement. This is one of the vital aspects of the Transmedia Vampire that sees it thrive through popular engagement, or what might be called entanglement, where all the aspects of audience participation, easily accessible platforms, and mediums that allow for physical, psychological, and emotional response come together in a fully integrated unit—an ongoing process of maximised or focused intersectionality. As such Ruthven was one of the central Transmedia Vampires of the nineteenth century as was another that extended the parameters of the vampire itself but began to intimate more romantic dimensions to the undead attraction to the living. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a very different work than Varney though, ­arguably, much more important in terms of how it continues to influence the genre. Unlike Ruthven or Varney, it is set in middle Europe, linking it more to the kind of ‘vampire country’ that Blagojevich and Paole came from, though still maintaining links to the idea of old aristocracy feeding off the prospects of the future. Indeed, British nineteenth-century vampires often configure the idea of a decadent, devolved, past that is trying to disrupt, or even traumatise, the push of modernity into the twentieth century. Le Fanu’s story strongly manifests this with its tale of an illicit female relationship between a young girl and a mysterious stranger beyond the control of both the church and the girl’s father. The stranger, Carmilla [aka Mircalla, aka Millarca] is the youngest of an ages-old family of vampires, the Karnstein’s, and is as much a succubus as she is a revenant and lives in the dreams of her victims. The young girl Laura has always known her, yet she also appears as a complete stranger leading her away from the world of her father and patriarchal control. In a genre that has often seemed to be dominated by the male undead, Carmilla provides an early point of resistance that, arguably, only gained momentum and substance as a Transmedia Vampire in the following century as female vampires began to claim space of their own outside of the influence their male counterparts. Indeed, just as Carmilla clearly influenced Stoker’s Dracula, she would later subvert the vampire Counts control in later narratives/adaptations with Dracula’s Daughter (Hillyer: 1936) being an early, and influential example. Carmilla can be seen to have become increasingly ‘real’ as time has gone on appearing in and influencing many narratives across multiple mediums with, perhaps the recent Canadian web series, Carmilla, providing an enlightening example. The series ran between 2014–16 and contains elements of the original novella—whilst also hinting at well known films in the genre such as The Vampire

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Lovers (Baker: 1970) and Lust for a Vampire (Sangster: 1971)—and sees the story moved to a college in Austria where a young girl, Laura, posts a series of vlogs (video blog posts) online of the disappearance of her roommate, her replacement (Carmilla), and the two girls subsequent romance. The series cleverly references its own uses of social media including YouTube and Twitter to engage with and immerse its audience on many levels inside and beyond the space of the show itself so that the character Carmilla exists outside the narrative as much as she does in it. connections back and forth from the web-series genre source materials, both in its confirmations but also dissonances, create an in-depth character that in whatever guise she appears will always stand as an oppositional figure to the dominant, male, and ideology—this chameleon like nature of her Transmedia-self mirroring the mutability of her name in Le Fanu’s tale. In particular, this shows the figure as having many levels of existence and audience/reader engagement; a written story that evolves through continued adaptation (whilst also resonating with differing levels of audience knowledge of such earlier manifestations), given further means of engagement and affect through visual and social media which not only alters where and how one can interact with such a text/character but allows for much of this to happen in the same way one would communicate with ‘real’ people (twitter/Facebook). This especially marks out the ways in which Transmedia Vampires gain existence beyond their source material and allows not only for the vampire to enter our world but for us to enter its domain as well. Of course, figures like Carmilla gain much of their importance in relation to more mainstream versions of the vampire and no study of such a phenomenon could avoid, arguably, the most well know vampire, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. The Vampyre, Varney, and Carmilla all influenced the most well known vampire story of the nineteenth century and, possibly, the most important one so far to the genre as a whole. Stoker’s Dracula was introduced earlier but possibly one of its most important features, apart from the continual readaptations, recreations, echoes, and resonances of its characters and plot since its being published—Dracula has appeared on film more than any other fictional character—is the use of information technology within the story itself prefiguring the very means of vampirisation that would turn the Count into a Transmedia Vampire. Dracula is full of different forms of technology and much of it around different forms of communications media, though not all of it is as ‘new’ as the narrative suggests. The novel paints the British Empire as a centre of science, innovation, and invention—a modern, sophisticated, and civilised society to contrast the ­out-of-date, superstitious, and barbaric world of the vampire. As such most of the forms of information technology are placed out of the vampire’s reach, ostensibly because of his ‘child mind’8—parts of the vampire’s backstory links him to the world of Blagojevich and Paole—but also because they are configured as the means to defeat, if not ultimately destroy him. So the audience/reader is shown photographs, a cinematograph, telegrams, stenograph, train timetables (as the vampire hunters are shown travelling to and fro across Europe), blood transfusions, typewriters, and even shorthand writing all as ways in which an industrialised society communicates and transfers life-saving information.9 Of course

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whilst they contain and diminish the vampire they are also the means by which it’s story is told, even if beyond its own control. The irony being then that whilst the vampire itself is excluded from such technologies, its vampiric world, that of the novel, is consumed, disseminated, and engaged with through these very mediums.10 Consequently, the novel itself describes how the vampire will become a Transmedia entity giving it life through various forms of a story transcribed to various written recordings—hand-written, typed, novel, newspaper, stenography, and telegraphy—as well as the visual via photo and cinematography. In many ways the information technologies used to capture the vampire formed the very means of its unstoppable release into the world and the future. Dracula’s early movement to the stage and film were mentioned earlier but its worth exploring in a little more depth as its quite important to his development as a Transmedia Vampire that blurs the boundaries between the real and the fictional. There are many features of the theatre adaptation that produced very different forms of engagement to the novel and whilst it greatly reduced the more panoramic aspects of the narrative it used visual effects, such as the ‘vampire trap’ to make the supernatural qualities of the Count appear real.11 Of more importance, at least for this article, are the effects outside of the performance itself for the purpose of marketing and promoting the show and the emotional affects it wished to produce on its audience. Of note in this respect is the use of nurses within the theatre to attend to audience members that, reportedly, found the production too scary and fainted. There is a little record that the show ever caused this to happen, but the attendance of said nurses is documented, and was used in marketing materials for the production. Along with this at the end of the production the actor playing the Count would appear from behind the curtains to address the audience directly, apologising for scaring them but reassuring them that if they go home and hear a noise outside to beware ‘for there are such things as vampires’.12 Both of these occurrences are designed to blur the boundaries between worlds, showing the very real emotional and physical effects, respectively, of a ‘fictional’ entity, Dracula, in the real world. Indeed, they are purposefully ambiguous, not only in breaking the fourth wall between the performance and the audience but also in their use of the actors seen playing a believable role just moments before ‘pretending’ to be themselves to destabilise the ordinarily solid edges of reality. This is something the first official film utilises as well though it is equally important to remember that Browning’s Dracula was also the first sound horror film—though at the time Horror was not generally used as a filmic classification and is more retrospective in its application—and so was the first time that cinema goers would have heard the Count speak—Murnau’s unofficial version, Nosferatu from 1922 was a silent film with a musical accompaniment. This increased the spectacle and affective nature of the film, possibly also explaining why Bela Lugosi’s thick Eastern European drawl has become so iconic for subsequent versions of the vampire king. The idea of having nurses present at performances and a filmic version of the lead actor, this time Van Helsing, speaking directly to the audience, was only used for certain early screenings, but the hugely increased distribution of the text is very important. The film was one of Universal Studios highest grossing films

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of the year ensuring sequels and crossover films with the studio’s other monsters (Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy, and The Wolfman). In fact, the first film was so popular that it blighted the lead actors subsequent career tying him to the character of the vampire even until his death—Bela Lugosi was buried in Dracula style cape and dress—and has since become a popular Halloween costume marking him instantly recognisable the figure is. However, the prevalence of Dracula on screen, and elsewhere, ensures that various versions of the vampire Count, even conflicting ones, are able to exist at the same time. Consequently, the Count as evening dress wearing aristocrat, exists alongside the feral Orlok, the sexually domineering Hammer Dracula, the aesthetic Badham version,13 the eternal lover of Coppola’s adaptation,14 and even the heroic Vlad of Dracula Untold (Shore: 2014) still works as a single Transmedia character but one that is so rich in detail, conflicting and affirming, that almost anyone can find a facet that appeals to them allowing for more varied and meaningful types and levels of identification and engagement. This is equally true of the many interpretations/adaptations into other mediums like fan-art/fiction, merchandising and even social media pages/fan groups, etc. This all combines to create a character that can engage with audiences/readers/players/users on many and/or multiple platforms as well as carrying this influence out into the real world. Dracula is and continues to be hugely important to the development of the Transmedia Vampire and its associated worlds, though unsurprisingly not the only vampire in an age that overtly and aggressively utilises multiple platforms to create and market franchises. The vampire is ideally suited to such a manifestation in the way that it is both a construct of, but also a mirror to, technological convergence. This mirror is one which reveals the consumerist/capitalist vampire at its heart, as noted by Jenkins above,15 and reveals cross-platform world-building and engagement driven by corporate entities looking to make money and create long-term participants/customers/consumers—as graphically shown in the films The Thirst (Hardy: 1979), The Matrix, and Daybreakers (Speirig Brothers: 2009) which all feature human ‘farms’ created to support a vampiric ideology—which they can ‘milk’ again and again. This has very much set the mould for many vampire narratives since then that aspire to similar levels of engagement and cross-platform penetration. Possibly the most successful vampire narrative since Dracula and that exemplifies a more obvious (contemporaneous) version of the Transmedia Vampire, as Jenkins would understand it, is The Twilight Saga. The Twilight Saga, by Stephanie Meyer, is a text which is itself a readaptation of earlier narratives with hints of Ruthven, Dracula, Romeo and Juliet, and The Vampire Diaries.16 The popularity of the four books—Twilight, 2005; New Moon, 2006; Eclipse, 2007; and Breaking Dawn, 2008—was immense, capturing a huge worldwide teenage audience and translated into at least 38 different languages, which made cinematic version of the books inevitable. Not unlike the Harry Potter franchise before it, the global popularity of the source material made the success of the films almost inevitable—though not determined as seen in the cinematic adaptions of other ‘best sellers’ such as The Golden Compass (Weitz: 2007) and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (Zwart: 2013)—and the pre-release

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hype over the first film in the series Twilight (Hardwicke: 2008) facilitated even further anticipation. The films increased the furor around the novels with its growing fan-base sharing its enthusiasm over social media, fan-forums, and merchandising. Possibly most surprising was the excitement caused around the two male leads the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and the werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Ostensibly two sides of the love triangle with the ­human/ would-be vampire Bella Swan, they became totems of two opposing groups of fans known ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’, and which was particularly popular with the parents of the expected fan base that were subsequently named ‘Twilight Mom’s’.17 This alone was a catalyst for a huge amount of marketing and fan-based engagement which saw the world of the narrative spread far beyond the scope of the originating source material. Arguably, of even more importance in this was the way that Meyer constructed her vampires, and which differed somewhat from what the popular conception of the undead is, namely, they sparkled. Nearly all vampire narratives give their vampires a distinctive feature that simultaneously links them to previous lore—cites and ex-cites earlier texts18—but also differentiates them as distinctive. The Cullens share many features with their earlier kin; extremely fast and strong, cold to the touch and very wealthy. They were packaged as vegetarian vampires, though this is not true as they still drank animal blood—and by no means the first vampires to do so19—and had an aversion to sunlight, though not because of its damaging effects on their bodies but because it makes their skin sparkle which would reveal them as not being human. A small detail but anathema to many purists and one which causes certain groups of people to react extremely negatively even up to the present day, ensuring the continued awareness of the franchise and the Transmedia Vampire within it. In fact, the strength of its reaction within both fans and its detractors was/is so strong that it became a narrative that was not only transmedial, but transnational and trans-narrative as well. ‘Team Edward’, ‘Team Jacob’, and sparkly vampires seemed to take on a life of their own outside the films seeing them feature in many other narratives on different platforms, i.e. computer games such as SIMS, television shows, and many other paranormal romance novels. Tie-ins with product placement saw advertising for real-world items in the fictional world and even products launched within the film—The Volvo S60R—as well as real-estate promotion—the Cullen’s ultra-modern house—for sale after the films.20 And the wedding of Bella and Edward in Breaking Dawn Part I (Condon: 2011) seemed to crystallise all these features into one event where everything on screen was a saleable item/product placement opportunity, but continues to influence weddings through venue, dress, and/ or music which act as ongoing echoes that keep the original world alive. What lifts The Twilight Saga out of the framework and lifespan of other popular vampire narratives Dark Shadows (Curtis: 1966–1971), Forever Knight (Cohen: 1992–1996), Moonlight (Koslow: 2007–2008), and even the ongoing Underworld Series (Various: 2003–2016) is the quirk (trauma) of having sparkling vampires which, whilst the majority of other aspects of the narrative have faded, still remains vividly in the minds of, what might be termed, ­vampire-purists—as recently evidenced in the 10-year anniversary of the final film in the series and the many blog posts apologists

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claiming that it is finally ‘alright to like Twilight’.21 In many ways the Twilight franchise was the perfect example of the Transmedia Vampire in both its created world and individual characters; it existed beyond the novels and films, and allowed participants to enter the vampiric world and possess actual items from it showing that the borders between the two were not only permeable, but at times non-existent. Something of the same was seen for the television series True Blood (Ball: 2008–2014), based on Charlene Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels (2001–2013) which owes much to the global popularity of The Twilight Saga for its success. Like Meyer’s series, and indeed the other show of the Vampire Triumvirate of the early twenty-first century, The Vampire Diaries (Williamson & Plec: 2009–2017), it revolves around a central love triangle of an adolescent human girl (part fairy in the case of True Blood) and two (considerably older) vampire males.22 Unlike The Twilight Saga, Alan Ball’s series purposely explores the more transgressive aspects of the vampire in terms of race, gender, and sexuality thus shifting the age-range and demographic of the show’s audience, but creating a world which even more purposely attempts to lower the barriers between real and narrative universes. Curiously it reversed the technique used by Browning’s Dracula and rather than waiting until the end of the story to bring the story out from behind the curtain, opens with it. And so before the first episode of the television series began mysterious adverts for a synthetic blood replacement ‘Trueblood’ appeared online and even as posters in the real world—The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez: 1999) utilised something not unlike this pre-film, online, marketing when it was released in 199923—making it appear that there really was such a product and it was purchasable.24 This very much set the tone for the series’ framework of interaction with its audience where they widely used social media, Facebook and Twitter for example, where one could meaningfully interact with the show’s actors/characters—this line between worlds became very blurred in these cases as often it was the real actors but in ‘character’ one communicated with or even spoke to on the phone (a prize given out via the show’s official Facebook page).25 In many ways the show created many Transmedia Vampires and Transmedia Vampiric Spaces, with characters such as Eric Northman, Pam De Beaufort, Baby-Vamp Jessica, all forming individual relationships with their respective ‘fans’, and ‘Fangtasia’—the vampire club owned by Eric in the series—existing as a space for ‘vampiric’ self-expression and identity both within the show but also in the real world with various venues/clubs across the world holding Fangtasia nights or even re-naming existing clubs and bars. Baby-Vamp Jessica is worth further mention as she very much embodied the idea of an adolescent girl finding her way in the world—being an innocent who has been newly turned into a vampire—as the show produced a series of faux YouTube films/blog where the character explained the problems and anxieties of ‘coming out’ in this new world. The blog itself becomes something of a confessional site, largely of encouragement and support for its many followers—even with the usual provisos of trolls etc.—which, potentially, has many real-world implications for its users and subscribers. Whilst much of its cross-platform world-building and modes of participation and engagement are similar to those discussed earlier, maybe more than other

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vampire narratives True Blood resonated with Goth Subcultures and groups that have a strong belief in the ‘vampiric lifestyle’—this particularly resonates with earlier established role-playing, gaming, and community building texts such as the ongoing Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf Publishing: 1991–2016). Although these communities do not make up a large proportion of the franchise’s total audience/participants it illustrates the ways in which the Transmedia Vampire is not limited to any one platform or the virtual boundaries of the fictional narratives that it arose from.26 In part then, the required ‘stickiness’ of contemporary franchises and their associated narrative worlds more often require that Transmedia Vampires no longer represents the kind of existential fear and anxiety of a nation and its traditions in turmoil, as seen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather become something more aspirational or affirmational. Here the vampire becomes a figure that provides individual agency, not by following what the society around it dictates or expects, but by being true to its own desires and talents. In the popular imagination it has become a figure that has the strength, often physical, to resist oppression and bullying and is romantic and passionate at the same time. Dracula Untold does something of this for the figure of Dracula mentioned earlier. Indeed, Vlad as portrayed in the film is very much the kind of vampire that inhabits narrative worlds in the twenty-first century; he has done, and will probably do again, bad things but he is still redeemable, he is devoted to his partner and their children and will do anything to protect them. He is a flawed anti-hero who is rarely understood by those around him yet is always true to himself. It is this multivalent nature of the vampire that makes it so inviting to many in the real world just as it invites those same people into its own domain. This domain consists of the many narrative worlds and the platforms they exist across and necessarily includes the varying forms of engagement and/or interaction each allows for. When brought together they construct a space not only where the world we live in becomes a place within which vampires might exist, but in which we might also enter the domain of the vampire itself. Yet immersion allows for further experiences, providing meaning and believability not just to the world of the Transmedia Vampire but to the vampire itself. As new media and technology develops one can only imagine that the world of the vampire might just become more real than our own.

Notes

1. Readaptation and recreation are used here to denote the ongoing and continual process of change caused in a narrative due to its movement across, or within, mediums. 2. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 3. The Matrix franchise utilises many vampiric tropes such as a dream world to contain its victims, Dark City (Proyas: 1998), and the farming of humans that features in the earlier Australian vampire film The Thirst (Hardy: 1979).

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4. Leo Ruickbie, ‘Memento (Non)mori: Memory, Discourse and Transmission During the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Epidemic and After,’ in Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk, eds., Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 48. 5. Here though it was described as ‘a ghost who leaves his grave at night to suck the blood of the living.’ James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), 7. It is not totally surprising that the vampire is given a male identification as all of the cases noted in the vampire plague were men. 6. Such as Augustine Calmet, The Phantom World: Or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions published in French in 1751, though not translated into English until 1850. 7. It is worth mentioning that in the eighteenth century the word vampire was a little more inclusive than it is now and as Kevin Dodd notes that there was little difference between ‘vampire,’ as a vampire bat and ‘vampire’ as a supernatural being that fed upon human blood/energy. 8. Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996), 372. 9. It is worth noting that Count Dracula has his own methods of “dark” technology that whilst often more immediate than those of the hunters—mesmerism, mind-control, Blood-memory, physical transformation and mind reading—they are all considered as negatives exampling a degenerative past. 10. See Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,’ ELH 59/2 (Summer, 1992), 467–493. 11. This is a trap door in the stage that allowed for the actor playing Dracula to ‘magically’ vanish from view of the audience behind a puff of smoke. 12. This speech comes from the stage play and was traditionally given by the actor playing Van Helsing, Hamilton Deane who wrote the original dramatisation and played the Professor began this. However, in performances after the release of the Universal film Bela Lugosi, reprising his role as the Count, often gave the speech himself. See Frank J. Dello Stritto and Andi Brooks, ‘Vampire over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain,’ Monsterzine, No. 2, January–March 2001, http://www.monsterzine.com/200101/feature. html, accessed 29 January 2019. 13. Dracula (1979) by John Badham and starring Frank Langella, who also played the Count in the stage version from which the film was adapted. 14. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola starring Gary Oldman as the vampire fueled by eternal love. 15. See also Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988); David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). 16. The original series of four novels in The Vampire Diaries series by L. J. Smith (The Awakening, 1991, The Struggle, 1991, The Fury, 1991, and Dark Reunion, 1992) appeared 14 years before Meyers novels and share many features though it was not until the success of Twilight that Smith’s novels received a similar level of popular success. 17. See Claudia Bucciferra, The Twilight Saga: Exploring the Global Phenomenon (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013). 18. See Ken Gelder, New Vampire Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 19. Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) is an early example of a vampire drinking animal blood in place of that of humans, though energy vampires can exist without blood or even taking the lives of others as seen in George Sylwester Viereck‘s The House of the Vampire (1907) where an impresario drains his protégés of their artistic creativity. 20. See Simon Bacon, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 82–84.

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21. Noel Ransome, ‘Is It Safe Yet to Admit I Liked the Twilight Movies?’ VICE, 27 November 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev3p84/is-it-safe-yet-to-admit-iliked-the-twilight-movies, accessed 28 January 2019. 22. In The Twilight Saga Edward is over 100 years old, though this is very young compared to Bill and Erik in True Blood where the former was a confederate soldier during the American civil war and the latter a Viking warrior. 23. The Blair Witch Project also featured in Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. 24. See Anon, ‘Online Marketing Done Right—The Case of HBO’s True Blood,’ Yoke Design, 17 June 2014, https://yokedesign.com.au/blog/online-marketing-done-right-thecase-of-hbo-true-blood/, accessed 28 January 2019. 25. The True Blood official Facebook page, https://m.facebook.com/TrueBlood/. 26. Curiously the shows links to ‘underground’ subcultures reinforces one of the narratives major themes of hidden societies of vampires.

Bibliography Anon, ‘Online Marketing Done Right—The Case of HBO’s True Blood,’ Yoke Design, 17 June 2014, https://yokedesign.com.au/blog/online-marketing-done-right-the-case-of-hbo-true-blood/, accessed 28 January 2019. Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampire, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996). Bacon, Simon, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016). Bucciferra, Claudia, The Twilight Saga: Exploring the Global Phenomenon (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013). Calmet, Antoine Augustine, The Phantom World: Or, the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions [1751]. Dello Stritto, Frank J., and Andi Brooks, ‘Vampire over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain,’ Monsterzine, No. 2, January–March 2001, http://www.monsterzine.com/200101/feature.html, accessed 29 January 2019. Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008). McNally, David, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). Moretti, Franco, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988). Ransome, Noel, ‘Is It Safe Yet to Admit I Liked the Twilight Movies?’ VICE, 27 November 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev3p84/is-it-safe-yet-to-admit-i-liked-the-twilight-movies, accessed 28 January 2019. Ruickbie, Leo, ‘Memento (Non)mori: Memory, Discourse and Transmission During the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Epidemic and After,’ in Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk, eds., Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). Stoker, Bram, Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996). Twitchell, James B., The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981). Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,’ ELH 59/2 (Summer, 1992), 467–493.

The Post-human Vampire Simon Bacon

If the Post-human is seen as something that exceeds or is beyond the current ­definition of human—of humanity but more than human—then nearly all vampires are Post-human in someway. In fact Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari talk specifically of vampires when discussing categories of human becoming, of being something different or ‘other’ than they currently are.1 In this sense then vampires from the lowliest folkloric revenant to the most sophisticated cyborg undead, all represent something more than the human state from which they came.2 Rossane Allquere Stone describes the vampiric state itself as something more, as a way to experience and interact with the world on another level where the ‘undead’ human exists outside of the normal frameworks of society, ideology and temporality so that subjectivity is not what contains us but becomes a possibility.3 Indeed in her reading everything becomes more when we are able to see with (through) vampiric eyes. Stone is talking of the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s hugely popular novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), and rather neatly side-steps the supernatural nature of the undead there—vampires being effectively possessed by an evil/demonic spirit (see Queen of the Damned [Rice, 1988])—and even though one might read this as ‘super’-natural it would typically disqualify it from being considered under the heading of Post-human. More generally the human body needs to be supplemented either technologically or biologically—though this last can also be considered as Trans-human—(see Haraway 2000)4 or exceeded (see Hayles 1999)5—as in the human consciousness leaving the body for a new ‘host’—to firmly be placed within the category of Post-human. This study will focus more specifically on those examples of the Post-human dividing them roughly into two categories, the corporeal and the transcendental, where the first is more bodily orientated and the second more to do with human consciousness. Beginning with first category of the bodily Post-human it is possible to largely dismiss Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819),6 and

S. Bacon (*)  Independent Researcher, Poznań, Poland

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_33

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Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1874) as they are shown to be supernatural in nature which is largely shown in their reaction either to religious imagery or moonlight; this last is not necessarily supernatural though is more often linked to werewolves. However, as with most things related to the undead this is not as clean-cut as it might be and the amplified human qualities of the 19th vampires will be picked up again later on. Consequently, not taking the main three early works as our starting point does leave two interesting early examples penned by H. G. Wells in his novels The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1897). Both narratives show versions of possible human futures though curiously they also represent them as being deeply flawed rather then as evolutionary ­super-humans. The main protagonist of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller, arrives in the distant future, AD 802,701, to find the human race seemingly devolved into two different species, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Morlocks live below the ground and have grey/white skin, large grey/red eyes and are extremely sensitive to daylight (oddly prescient of Murnau’s Graf Orlok) and ‘farm’ the Eloi as their food source—the Eloi are contrastingly beautiful and gentle and live above ground. Wells constructs this as something of a class reversal where the wealthy no longer ‘feed’ off [the labour of] the lower classes—Franco Moretti reads the wealthy in a similar vein in his study of Stoker’s Dracula7—but the workers now literally eat the upper classes who are presumably all the sweeter for their lives of indolence. This would seem, at least from the perspective of the nineteenth century, as a barbaric regression into cannibalism, however, if one looks slightly askew at this situation it can also be read as less a devolution but an evolution into a self-sustaining Post-human (ecological) state. Here future humans are now fully s­ elf-sustaining as they feed only on themselves in an otherwise vegan existence—the Eloi appear to only eat fruit and vegetables—making them, in a certain sense, the first literary vegetarian vampires (in a similar sense to that which sees the vampires in the Twilight Saga as vegetarian). The War of the Worlds has a slightly different vision of the human future where the Martian invaders act as a dark mirror to what the wheels of imperialism, and indeed capitalism, will eventually do to the Earth. The Martians (future humans) are forced to leave their home world as they have exhausted all its resources and once they arrive on the surface of the Earth seem as non-human as the earlier Morlocks—there is a sense of a repeated binary here, Martians/Morlocks versus Humans/Eloi. The Martians themselves have evolved to a point where they seem almost totally reliant on the technological/mechanical exoskeletons within which they live, and are rarely, if ever, shown to spend time out of them. Their vampiric status, not unlike the Morlocks, comes from their reliance on human blood as a food source and various scenes in the novel show this, and it seems their mechanical enhancements have been created to specifically assist in this. Consequently, they example a cyborg Post-human future with an almost symbiotic relationship between the organic and the mechanical, however, their technological (evolutionary) superiority eventually counts for nothing once they become infected with the common cold, to which their immune systems have no resistance. Wells’ evolutionary vision also sees the Post-human as intimately

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tied to their ‘home’ environment so that they will always be at a disadvantage on an alien world—unlike Dracula they did not take the ‘soil’, or environment from their home world with them.8 Ultimately then, Wells’ Post-human vampires are cautionary tales for humanity revealing the flaws of its current exploitation of the world around it whilst encouraging greater emphasis on coexistence and a responsible stance towards planetary stewardship. It is unsurprising that the Post-human Vampire is one that comes from the intersection of Gothic Horror and science fiction, and even less so that an important development in its evolution comes from the latter genre in the shape of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Emerging out of post-Second World War anxiety over nuclear weapons and the almost supernatural effects of radiation, it sees the population of the Earth decimated by a mysterious contagion which turns everyone infected by it into a vampire. The vampires themselves are more ­zombie-like—very much the start of zombism as a form of Post-humanism as seen after George Romero and Night of the Living Dead (1968)9—but are affected by religious symbolism, garlic and mirrors. With nineteenth-century vampires this would inherently construct them as supernatural entities but in the hands of Matheson it becomes almost a post-traumatic disorder of their previous existence as a human where their continuing responses are reflective of their former beliefs (extreme allergy to garlic is shown to be more medically based in the novel). However, the Post-humans are not the vampires but the humans that are caught somewhere between life and undeath. The narrative makes much of the undead and the last human, Robert Neville, but it is those that are treating themselves with drugs to stave off the effects of the infection, which makes them neither human or vampire, but something else. Their otherness does not necessarily construct them as super-human but as an evolutionary development that sees what is left of humanity, Robert Neville, becomes the outdated and unwanted ‘legend’ of the title. This would seem a rather understated form of Post-humanity, but their dependence upon drugs and their hybrid nature as being simultaneously human and vampire marks them out as bearers of a future and potential that is beyond that of the ordinary humanity from which they came. Another example from 1950s, Blood Is My Heritage [aka Blood of Dracula] (Strock: 1957), features a far more explosive representation of the Post-human vampire, expressing not only the anxiety over technology, science and its effects on the future of humanity, but also the inherent changes in gender relations that had occurred during and since Second World War where women were given greater agency in the workplace and society in general. The Post-human here is not so much beyond human but a release of all that a human can be. The film continues to feed on the same kind of popular anxiety over the power of science and its mysterious, ‘supernatural’, effects on the modern world. Strock’s film includes psychoanalysis in its vision of ‘new’ science, and it is no coincidence that Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with its (in)famous use of psychoanalysis was released a year later. The science in Blood Is My Heritage is represented as decidedly feminine, and therefore, even more monstrous manifestation of it—the film suggests science is naturally a masculine discipline—which is also echoed in the form of

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Post-humanity it creates.10 The narrative of the film begins at an all girls boarding school where the new science teacher, Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), has a plan to show the world that female led science is even more powerful than that created by men and that the strength of a woman’s inner-self is greater than that released by an atomic explosion. She experiments on an unsuspecting student, Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison), using hypnotism induced by a powerful jewel from the Carpathian Mountains (Transylvania) but the inner-power discharged via this process—oddly mimicking nuclear reactions where a huge amount of energy is released—makes her more than human (more than male) with the inevitable result being that she is branded a ‘dangerous monster’ that must be destroyed. Arguably, the young girl is not dangerous in herself, but her Post-human evolution—which in the 1950s sees her becoming stronger than the men around her and inappropriately violent—cannot be accepted or contained by the world around her. It is interesting that her monstrous transformation sees her become a vampire simultaneously embodying fin-de-siècle and pre-Second World War ideas of vamps—women with agency predominantly portrayed as socially transgressive and sexually aggressive (see Dijkstra 1986)11—and a supernatural, super-human creature not of this world. Nancy actually prefigures characters such as the eponymous Lucy, from Luc Besson’s 2014 film whose inner-self/power cannot be contained by a human body and who can only exist in the unrestrained universe of the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, transcendental transformations such as Lucy’s, and which will be discussed further below, were unavailable for women in the 1950s, and indeed, any female vampires aiming for Post-human status suffered the same fate as Nancy. In this regard it is worth mentioning Rabid (Cronenberg: 1977) where a young woman, Rose (Marilyn Chambers), undergoes an experimental procedure after being seriously hurt in a motorbike accident. Doctors at a nearby clinic, that just happens to specialise in plastic surgery, use ‘morphogenetically neutral’ grafts of her own skin for internal and external repairs but with unexpected results. The grafts are able to take on the character/identity of the cells around it—one assumes this is achieved via a kind of ‘tasting’ process—except they seem to act as an independent, vampiric, part of her body that utilises its host to provide food for itself. To this end Rose develops a vagina-like wound in her armpit which opens to release a penis-like stinger that sucks blood. It is a curious form of Post-humanity as the vampiric cellular colony within her body allows Rose to regain control of herself once it is satiated, so at times she appears to be two different entities sharing the same body. This sees the Post-human body as part of a symbiotic whole—as seen in George/Quato in Total Recall (Vorhoeven: 1990), and in the more explicitly vampire films The Last Sect (Dueck: 2006), and The Host (Niccol: 2013)—though it is not made clear in Rabid whether the vampiric implants will imbue their host with some form of immortality. Not unlike Nancy before her, Rose’s Post-human capabilities are uncontrollable and the infection that is passed on by her quickly leads to chaos and the impending collapse of the society around her—it would seem that as a primary carrier Rose is immune to the destructive side effects it brings out in others. Once again the feminine Posthuman is constructed as something detrimental or even dangerous to the majority

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of the population and as a force that needs not only containment but preferably total elimination. Indeed, infectious female Post-human vampires seem to cause many such problems within patriarchal societies as seen in the later film Ultraviolet (Wimmer: 2006). Ultraviolet is set in the future, the mid–twenty-first century, and sees a military virus from Eastern Europe escape and infect the general population turning them into ‘hemophages’ (vampires). The virus was created to increase the strength, regenerative powers, and speed of those infected—it also gives them vampire-like canine teeth but seemingly no thirst for blood—but limits their life span to 12 years. Violet (Milla Jovovich) has survived the government extermination of hemophages and joined the resistance to fight back. The important part of the infection and its effects on the human body is that it has the results of weaponising it, not so much via the usual range of futuristic weaponry, though some of that is inevitably involved, but through making the body itself lethal. Ultraviolet exists in a post-Matrix and post-Buffy-The-Vampire-Slayer world where vampirism ensures hyper-sexualised fashion/body-armour and instant expertise in all forms of armed and unarmed combat.12 This partially points back to Rose whose vampiric Post-humanity utilises (weaponises) forms of hyper-sexuality to spread its infection. Whilst it is suggested that the future that Violet inhabits is especially hi-tech the costumes that she wears seem specifically designed to be simultaneously figure hugging and have cloaking or weaponised features, a kind of ­nanotech-couture—not unlike that also seen in Aeon Flux (Kusama: 2005)— making them a part of her Post-human, hemaphageous positioning. Unlike the earlier examples Violet survives configuring her not as an evolutionary dead end but a possible hybrid future where biology, regardless of gender/ethnicity, and technology are equals. Given the inherent violence of the vampiric state it is perhaps not surprising that one of the more prominent Post-human vampire constructions is one where it’s organic or prosthetic additions become weaponised. This is even more strikingly seen in the figure of Blade from the Marvel comics and film series (1998– 2004). In some ways, he is partly like the Post-human vampires from I Am Legend, in that he is part-human and part-vampire and requires drugs to keep him from becoming one of the undead, however, he also relies on a large amount of technological prosthetics to maintain who he is. Blade is instantly recognisable as he wears wraparound sunglasses, a knee-length leather coat, a large samurai sword, and various silver stakes and knives. Beneath all this he is actually called Eric Brookes whose mother was bitten by a vampire whilst pregnant. Eric was born a dhamphir, a vampire/human hybrid that is able to walk in the daylight but has all the strengths of a vampire—though he does still age. It was not until the young boy met Whistler—a human vampire hunter—that Eric became Blade. Whistler not only synthesis’s the drug that stabilises Blade’s condition, but also manufactures the various weapons that make the vampire hunter who he is. The importance of all these cyborg prosthetics is seen towards the end of the first film of the series, Blade (Norrington: 1998), where he is stripped of his glasses, weapons, and even his medicated blood which is almost completely drained from his body. Prone

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and helpless he is confronted by his mother—she became a vampire and looks younger than her son—and suddenly Blade (Wesley Snipes) is Eric once again; no longer a vision of the future but a remnant of the past. Fortunately, someone helps him to revive, enabling him to get back his glasses, black-leather body-armour and sword instantly making him Blade again. In line with Haraway’s vision of a cyborg future and identity as a ‘community’ in different parts, human, animal, and machine, Blade is a conglomeration of the alive and dead, organic and inorganic, biological and the mechanical. Indeed, in many ways Blade is a Post-human identity position, and it is when Eric ‘wears’ that identity, that he becomes Blade. This more clearly constructs the vision of the Post-human vampire in the twenty-first century which sees the blood-sucker no longer as an undead creature—a past that will not die—but a manifestation of futuristic militarised humanity. As noted by Johan Höglund in relation to Justin Cronin’s vampire novel The Passage (2010) the synthesised vampire there is ‘the human form itself, weaponized.’13 This form is often represented as humanity at its peak of physical (sexual) desirability highlighting problematic intersections between youth, sexuality, and violence that plagues many visions of the Post-human vampire. Much of this is also seen in the figure of Selene from the Underworld series of films (2003–2016). Beginning with Underworld (Wiseman: 2003) Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is shown as a Death Dealer, a vampire who hunts werewolves, and is dressed completely in black latex with a calf-length leather coat. Whilst her weaponry is not as obvious as Blade’s, she always carries a large gun and much ammunition—like Blade the bullets and guns are always extremely sophisticated. As with Blade, these prosthetics come together to form part of her, impregnable, Post-human identity, a point which is made in Underworld: Evolution (Wiseman: 2006), when she removes it and is immediately vulnerable—seemingly ­human-like again—and becomes pregnant by a werewolf hybrid. This gets more involved when she drinks the blood of the originator of both vampire and werewolf species causing a biological change within her. This last is particularly interesting as it sees her able to withstand sunlight giving her the combined strength of both werewolf and vampire whilst possessing amazing regenerative powers. As with Violet, Selene collapses the divide between make and female Post-human futures configuring a future that is continually evolving. Unlike Blade, who is an evolutionary dead end—he makes no new vampires or versions of himself and does not change/evolve—Selene carries on changing, not least in becoming a mother.14 This sees her maintain an ever developing line of flight as subsequent instalments of the series see her blood being able to revive other vampires and her mind forming a psychic connection to her partner (Underworld Awakening [Mårkind: 2012]), and gain a similar one with her daughter (Underworld Blood Wars [Foerster: 2016]). Of further note within this is the Post-human construction of Selene’s daughter Eve who remains an unknown quantity within the series and has powers which point to the future, not just of vampires and Lycans (the werewolves in the series) but humanity as well. This creates an interesting path of becoming for the Post-human vampire in that it is not just about the change from human to vampire else, but continual evolution.

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As mentioned before within this weaponisation of the vampire body is a focus on its inherently violent nature, or rather, the inherently violent environments it inevitably creates around itself. This is not totally surprising as, in general, the vampiric state requires violence to propel it into being more than the human that existed before. As such the weaponisation of the Post-human bodies of both Blade and Selene also express a traumatic repetition of the explosive catharsis that gave birth to them. Something of this is also seen in Cronin’s The Passage, which knowingly cites Matheson’s text and sees the purposeful creation of ­Post-human vampires by the military, but the evolutionary hybrids have a mind of their own—actually a joined mind between the 12 of them—and escape the facility sparking a worldwide apocalypse. The vampires themselves are nothing like the hyper-sexualised/weaponised ones seen in Blade or Underworld, and even configure something of a devolution (though arguably ecologically positive as seen in The Time Machine and films like the Stakeland [Mickle: 2010]). However, what they do show is that whilst the excessive nature of the Post-human vampire facilitates an expression and releasing of recurrent violence it equally serves to contain it—in The Passage another vampire hybrid restores some order to the world and in Blade and Underworld the body-armour, the tight leather clothing, various weapon belts, etc. act as regulators as much as they do release valves. This tension between containment and excess is of huge importance in the other form of the Post-human vampire looked at here, the transcendental, and which looks back to the earlier descriptions of Nancy and Rose from Blood Is My Heritage and Rabid, respectively. The two female Post-human vampires were unable to contain their new vampiric natures within their own bodies and without a way of release available to them are inevitably seen as monstrous and destroyed. Later representations offer other, more expansive, technologically inspired choices. Indeed, the idea of the vampire body being uncontainable, or existing in many different forms simultaneously—something of a quantum flavour—goes back to Stoker’s Dracula. Count Dracula, as described by Professor Van Helsing, exists in many states: he can…appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him…he can grow and become small…vanish and come unknown…He can transform himself to wolf … as bat …mist which he create … on moonlight rays as elemental dust…. He can… come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire (Stoker 1996, 256–258)

Dracula exists as a mass of transmutable matter. A cloud of particles that comes together in the shape of a wolf, or bat, or a human depending on what form it wants to present. In many ways the only thing that contains him is the novel itself, and the various technologies that create and disseminate it.15 In this sense Dracula is already an example of a Post-human vampire, even given his supernatural proclivities, though it is arguable whether he was ever human—that said his ‘brides’ were once alive and they are shown to share many of his characteristics. In many ways he can be seen to example Gilles Deleuze’s idea of a body without organs in that the forms he takes are but surfaces that simultaneously hide and reveal the

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nature of the entity beneath.16 Indeed, it begins to intimate the kind of fracturing that is inherent to social media platforms and whilst Nancy and Rose hint at this kind of Post-human vampire some more recent examples make this more explicit and largely in relation to (new) technology. The first is Dracula III: Legacy (Lussier: 2005), which is based in an environment that is distinctly not Post-human, even if it is described in the opening frames as the ‘near future.’ The movie is set in war-torn Romania, a state largely due to the vampiric influence that has taken residence at its heart. Unsurprisingly this is Count Dracula (Rutger Hauer), but rather than living in a city, the vampire has a castle of sorts in the middle of a dry, dusty plain where his familiars bring humans to feed him and his technology. The castle itself is lined with pipes and tubes that carry the blood of the victims to the large royal chamber where the Count resides. The room is largely decrepit apart from large stacks of TV sets placed around it which are variously seen with blank screens, some showing white-noise, or tuned to a multitude of international television stations. We first see the Count materialising from a swirl of plastic sheeting and a colony of bats that seem to vanish as the vampire takes human form. As he gains solid form we see he is connected to the tubes carrying blood up from the castle courtyard, as are the television sets. Nothing else either in the room or the rest of the castle intimates there is any electricity there, so it suggests that the technology is actually powered by blood in someway. As the story continues Dracula begins to reveal something of the true nature of his Post-human state to a character, a well known television reporter, that is about to become his consort, ‘At night, when normal people sit in front of their TVs watching you, my little angels are giving birth in growing numbers, changing the course and destiny of mankind. Or something like that’ (Lussier 2005). The inference being that Dracula is also feeding his own infected blood into the televisions so that the transmission itself is able to change those watching it into vampires. In this way the extended, ethereal body of the vampire is transmitted as a signal seeing it become the means of its own dissemination—as with the original Dracula it is disseminated by the same medium that contains it. Equally, the use of news media and reporters’ hints at the inherent vampirism of information/ communications media seeing it as already a part of his body without organs. At the film’s denouement the body of the vampire is killed, but it’s essence moves to a new host—the vampire hunter that killed it—revealing the impossibility of ending the Post-human vampires ongoing dissemination. This theme is carried on in Fangland the 2006 novel by John Marks—slated to be made into a film but it never got out of production—a story that is also set in a strife torn Romania and features a renowned journalist. It more closely cites Stoker’s novel and tells of Evangeline Harker travelling to Transylvania to find a gangland boss, Torgu, who has promised to give her an exclusive interview for her network back in New York. Torgu or Dracula as it turns out, has no intention of letting Evangeline escape, but sends a videotape to her office. Her colleagues back in America play the tape hoping it might reveal what has happened to her, but it suddenly emits a loud, whitenoise-screaming sound that seems to resonate through all the speaker systems in the building infecting all those that hear it. This version more explicitly shows

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the result of the vampires dematerialising form infecting modern technology— not unlike the Ringu series of films that began in 1998—so that it is more a Posthuman entity, rather than a body, that expands and grows. Technology is then an extension of the vampire, a pathway, and also a part of it; being both integral, but also a facilitator of the evolution of the Post-human vampire. The nature of the Post-human vampire then has many forms and is itself an ever-evolving category. Mirroring this, and as mentioned before, the vampire’s relationship to technology is in a constant state of flux and whilst Stoker’s Dracula was undone and outsmarted by it at the end of the nineteenth century by the early twenty-first the balance has gone completely the other way. The vampire is now not only fully integrated into the very nature of new technologies but in such a way that it could herald the extinction of the human race, a thing that biological vampires could not survive—without blood substitutes that is (see Daybreakers [Spierig Brothers: 2009]). It is not surprising then that various types of the ­Post-human vampire have evolved in ways to increasingly forgo its connection to its human beginnings and become a fully technological, mechanical, and entity. The correlation between vampires and machines, and more particularly robots, is not a new one. The ‘bad’ Maria (Brigitte Helm) from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, is represented as both vamp—predatory female—and vampiric in her manipulation and consuming of ‘good’ Maria’s identity and energies. Whilst the robot Maria is not constructed as anything other than a machine to do its masters bidding, the evil Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) there is a large element of alchemy to the procedure and which seems to allow much room for autonomy. This definitely seems to be beyond its/her creators’ intention and underpins her claim to a kind of human intelligence which would see her supersede the ordinary mortals around her. Maria seems to undertake her mission to discredit the human Maria with extreme gusto and thoroughly enjoy the mischief she creates and seems to almost feed off its resultant suffering. Indeed, she is arguably an energy vampire of sorts prefiguring the more explicit human farming undertaken by the machines in The Matrix. As the story reaches its conclusion robot Maria nearly causes the destruction of a huge part of the city and its inhabitants, which is prescient of later apocalyptic anxiety that clings to many later representations of sentient machines and/or artificial intelligences. Part of this fear, at least in relation to Metropolis is the synonymity of human intelligence with the doppelgänger, that in gaining the ability to think for itself the robot/machine must ‘steal’ or ‘feed off’ it’s human other so that for robot Maria to fully ‘live’ the human Maria would need to die. This carries on into the later film Eve of Destruction (Gibbons: 1991), where the scientist who creates the robot puts her own memories and traumas into the machine causing it to become psychopathic, but maybe most clearly seen in the T-X robot in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow: 2003). The third film in the well known Terminator franchise, it sees a liquid robot from the future being sent back to 2004 to kill the leader of the human resistance in the time she came from. There are many interesting aspects to the robot that see it as simultaneously vampiric, Post-human, and envisioning a non-human future. Not unlike Lang’s

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robot Maria, the T-X (Kristanna Loken) from the future is able to take any form and is therefore ostensibly genderless, yet it seems to naturally revert to its human female form. In fact, even when it is being destroyed at the end of the film, its internal skeleton looks almost humanoid in construction. Once again the robot is programmed by its creators and so should have no free will of its own, and whilst it might not enjoy the mayhem it causes with the same relish as Maria, it would appear to have a level of autonomy in the choices it makes, if not its ultimate mission. More interestingly it more often than not chooses humans to copy whilst trying to locate and kill its intended victim and to do this it appears to have to make physical contact with them first. This intimates some kind of almost vampiric characteristic to the machine that needs to sample or ‘taste’ the person/object it is about to replicate—a process it also needs to do to recognise its intended target—and this process inevitably causes, or leads to, the death of that human. The vampire quality of the robot is mentioned by several theorists17 particularly in relation to its eventual destruction where it is stripped of all human exterior presence and appears more like a rabid metal skeleton with slanted, glowing, blue eyes and sharp metal teeth. Something very similar is seen in the robot Alice (Isabel Lucas) in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay: 2009) whose mission is to regain a powerful ‘shard’ from Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf). The ‘female’ robot is both very ‘vampy,’ in being shown as a sexually aggressive human girl, and also very vampiric in her attempts to penetrate the body of her male prey. As with the T-X her final scenes see her revert to a machine which is not only vampire-like but had Medusa-like hair. Alice is actually part of a race of sentient machines and so has no real connection to humanity or its evolution, but the T-X is the result of human technology that has become self-aware and soon began to build its own version of a Post-human, non-human future. Curiously, texts such as the Terminator franchise continue to see the Post-human future as inherently linked to solid bodies/machines rather than a more expansive/miasmic existence in virtual or electronic spaces such as the World Wide Web. However, the final example here, Ex Machina (Garland: 2014), combines both examples of the transcendent Post-human vampire, a non-organic body, and an identity that exists as a living computer programme. Garland’s movie does not contain an obvious vampiric Post-human intelligence, but the narrative purposely makes many and varied citations of well known vampire texts that the connection is unavoidable. The film references three seminal vampire texts in being a retelling of the opening passages of Stoker’s Dracula up until the point when the Count disembarks from the Demeter as well as referencing both Todd Browning’s 1931 Dracula and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu. This sees a young naive professional, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson—a Jonathan Harker figure), travelling to ‘the land beyond the forest’18 to arrive at the vampire’s lair after being given an invitation impossible to refuse. The lair is a mirror-opposite of Dracula’s Castle, in being hypermodern and underground, but is equally dangerous, mysterious, and vertiginous to negotiate being a labyrinth of glass, reflective surfaces, and surveillance cameras. As in Herzog’s film it is situated near Romantic landscapes and waterfalls. Caleb has

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been invited there to help Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant scientist, to test how human Ava (Alicia Vikander), his latest humanoid AI, is. As the story develops it seems as though Nathan must be the Count, alongside Caleb’s Harker who is being seduced by Ava as one of the King vampires brides, however, this slowly begins to shift. Although Nathan has purposely blocked all non-landline signals entering the lair—not unlike Harker not being able to write home—it transpires that Ava has managed to go online using a telephone line.19— and not unlike Lucy mentioned earlier sent out her consciousness into the World Wide Web. Once there she was able to spy on Caleb and to view his computer history and make herself look like his preferred choices on porn sites. In addition to this she is also able to access and manipulate the systems and cameras in the lair to ensure that Nathan sees the version of her that ensures his continued complacency towards her—she creates versions of herself, as with the body without organs mentioned earlier, surfaces, mirrors, and images, that reflect the world back to itself whilst her body transforms and evolves at will. In this sense Ava encapsulates much of the earlier robots mentioned here utilising female sexuality as a screen to achieve her own ends and becoming energised by it, not exactly in an overtly vampiric way, but to feed her push for autonomy beyond male (societal) control—in this sense she is a doppelgänger of the patriarchal society that created her and must draw energy from it to gain her own life. As the story draws to a close Caleb is left imprisoned in the castle and Nathan, who is actually more of a Renfield character—the vampires assistant—is killed by the true Dracula, Ava, who leaves the lair for the first time and flies, via helicopter, back across the forest to the heart of civilisation. Just as Dracula requires something of his past to survive in the new land, so too does Ava, but rather than soil she brings parts of her sisters—earlier humanoid AI’s that Nathan had abused and decommissioned—which she grafts to herself as repairs and to make herself look more human. The ending to Garland’s film is particularly interesting and brings together the various threads that intersect in the Post-human vampire. Ava is an AI, and just like Dracula she could exist in almost any form.20 As seen she is able to send herself out into the world via telephone cables but chooses to remain in a robot body. Within the parts of her ‘sisters’ she replies herself with co figure something of her, traumatic, past, which in a very human way shapes who she is now and going into the future. In this sense, she is partially cyborg in nature being a conglomeration of the old and the new and able to add and change herself as she moves into tomorrow. Her choice of a female appearance is also telling, and whilst it can be explained as a simple bid to blend in and/or hide her potential danger to the human world around her, it can equally be read in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming woman where masculinity has become a socially restrictive term, an identity dead end only promising more of the same whereas femininity is less overdetermined and fluid in its futurity and which Ava, as a female Post-human vampire can exploit.21 As the film ends Ava disembarks from the helicopter and vanishes into the crowd, not unlike Dracula in the ‘whirl of humanity.’22 What Ava, as a Post-human

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vampire will do from here is unknown. Nathan earlier suggested it would be catastrophic for humanity, not unlike the dystopian futures seen in The Matrix or The Terminator franchises but it could also mean a different tomorrow where humans and their new co-inhibitors of the Earth can work together. Either way, the ending here is just like Stoker’s novel, the Post-human vampire may not be visible, but foreboding fills the air of whether the future is ours, theirs, or hers.

Notes



1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 269. 2. Evolutionary vampires, i.e. those that are constructed as a different species to humanity, are excluded from being seen as Post-human unless they are specifically cited in the narrative they are in as exampling some form or future human evolution. 3. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 180. 4. Donna Jeanne Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and ­ SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 292–324. 5. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 6. Lord Ruthwen is not specifically shown as supernatural in the tale, though he does require the restorative power of moonlight to bring him back to life. 7. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988). 8. A similar idea is used in Avatar (Cameron: 2009), where the advanced human invaders are evicted from an alien world by its own eco-system. 9. See Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 10. Post-War America was still coming to terms with the greater autonomy given to women during the conflict and frowned upon those unwilling to relinquish to men returning home and in the ongoing job market. 11. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siécle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 12. In The Matrix (Wachowski’s: 1999), it is the vampiric machines that create the simulated world where the inhabitants dress in PVC costumes and have availability to all manner of weaponry. 13. Johan Höglund, ‘Militarizing the Vampire: Underworld and the Desire of the Military Entertainment Complex’, in Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund (eds.), Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 173–188. 14. Within the Underworld universe vampires seem able to biologically procreate to some extent—though usually with human females, whereas Selene, as a vampire, not only gives birth, but to a child whose powers are totally unknown—this is similar to Bella in Twilight except she is human when she gives birth to Renesmee. 15. Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH 59/2 (Summer, 1992), 467–493. 16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).

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17. David Greven, Queering the Terminator: Sexuality and Cyborg Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 104, and Marc Silver and Giovanna Buonanno, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Identity, Gender, Representation (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 2005). 18. Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996), 259. 19. One of the reasons the castle is underground is to seal it off from the outside world, WiFi connections included. 20. Even though Nathan created her as a female sexbot she could change this. 21. See Simon Bacon, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 99–142. 22. Stoker, Dracula, 22.

Bibliography Bacon, Simon, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016). Christie, Deborah, and Sarah Juliet Lauro, Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as ­Post-human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). ———, Anti-Œdipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siécle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Greven, David, Queering the Terminator: Sexuality and Cyborg Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Haraway, Donna Jeanne, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 292–324. Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Höglund, Johan, ‘Militarizing the Vampire: Underworld and the Desire of the Military Entertainment Complex’, in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, eds. Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 173–188. Lussier, Patrick, dir., Dracula III: Legacy (New York: Dimension Films, 2005). Moretti, Franco, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988). Silver Marc, and Giovanna Buonanno, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Identity, Gender, Representation (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 2005). Stoker, Bram, Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996). Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996). Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH 59/2 (Summer, 1992), 467–493.

Monstrosity, Performativity, and Performance Laura Davidel

As seductive figures that incorporate humanity’s darkest fears and unavowed desires, vampires are essentially monstrous variants of ourselves. We create our monsters, we seek them in times of crisis to reconfirm and redefine our own humanity. If gothic fiction is the realm where nothing is ever laid to rest, then vampires return time and time again, pointing to our fears of failing at being human, of descending into madness, and of our vulnerability to unperceived threats. Once awoken, vampires do not become static creatures that signpost socially constructed margins as borders that must not be crossed. On the contrary, they are highly transgressive and engage in horrific acts, exposing a strand of otherness that is both alluring and repulsive. If humanity relies on a set of norms that are learnt, internalised, and repeated, while deviations from these norms are marginalised, sanctioned, or even demonised; vampires show us that these norms can be contested and subverted. Furthermore, because vampires are generally transformed and not born, they function as reminders that the categories by which we define humanity are never fixed, but constantly porous and mutable. If as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argue, the monster is a cultural construct, made “with the ingredients we have on hand, so the recipe keeps changing—even when the monsters themselves have been passed down from generation to generation,”1 then, we might ask, to what extent do monsters, and vampires especially, take part in the process of their (re)creation? Furthermore, if the monster “refuses easy categorization,”2 then can we talk of a strand of agency that, in addition to physical hybridity, would deliberately negate the borders that define our humanity? In other words, are our monsters constrained and determined by a framework consisting of our anxieties and desires, or do they have the power to introduce structural changes in the enactment of their monstrosity?

L. Davidel (*)  Université de Lorraine, Metz, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_34

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Anne Rice’s vampires embody a postmodern version of monstrosity that is no longer recognisable on account of physical features considered unacceptable and repulsive, but is rather associated with “the intention and desire to do harm to the innocent.”3 If anything, Ricean vampires take pride in their successful passing for humans and in managing to roam through the heart of society. As such, they illustrate what Andrew Hock-soon Ng calls “the elusive monster” who “has learned to manipulate the Symbolic and has become assimilated into society, where it clandestinely carries out its atrocious acts.”4 Since Rice portrays undead that play games of seduction, stalking, and hunting on humans only to feed on them, it follows that vampiric monstrosity can be associated with a diseased psyche, which as Weinstock argues, “manifests visibly through symptomatic behavior.”5 In addition to this essentialist perspective, I argue that, in the case of Rice’s vampires, monstrosity can also be conceptualised as a process of sedimentation, resulting from the repetition of horrific attacks on humans. Considering the fact that Rice’s immortals are initially victims who have been transformed, then, despite the rapid physical mutation, the newly undead are still psychically humans. At least until they perform their first act of killing. Therefore, for Rice’s vampires, monstrosity is not instantaneous, but rather constructed through a sustained engagement in a specific set of practices, such as stalking and killing humans by draining them of blood, hiding from daylight in secluded spaces, and transforming chosen victims, to name but a few. My argument here is that in their continuous repetition of these immoral and abhorrent acts, vampires move across the spectrum from humanity towards monstrosity. What this entails is that Rice’s immortals are not the free monsters they seem at a first glance, but creatures locked in a normative system of perpetually repeating and confirming their own monstrosity. Drawing on Judith Butler’s seminal work on conceptualising gender as performative—as a process of repeating pre-existent and constraining gestures that create the effect of a gendered identity, but also a subsequent development of critical agency that subverts the power of normativity—this chapter aims to provide an analysis of monstrosity in Rice’s vampires as a continuous process of identity construction. More specifically, it will focus on Louis, Lestat, and the Théâtre des Vampires in order to explore vampiric normativity, the variations in terms of feeding practices that these immortals adopt, and finally, the function of performance as a theatricalisation of monstrosity. On the one hand, the newly transformed vampires are entangled in a regulatory power structure that requires the incorporation and the repetition of monstrous acts passed on from their masters. As it will be discussed later, this constraining trait of vampirism together with the pressure of a guilty conscience trigger the subsequent development of agency in Ricean undead. On the other hand, Lestat, Gabrielle and the Théâtre des Vampires distort and display their monstrosity through deliberate instances of theatrical, if not abject, performances meant to horrify a human audience. In relying on performance, as a device of exaggeration and mimicry, Rice’s vampires actually resort to gothic aesthetics of excess, while also reproducing the familiar tropes of vampiric monstrosity.

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While I am not implying that monstrosity is equivalent to gender, Butler’s theory of performativity allows the conceptualisation of becoming a monster as a doing, where the emphasis lies on the act and not so much on the performer. What this means is that vampires’ acts are instrumental in the development of their monstrous identity. According to this framework, it can be argued that Rice’s vampires do not simply prey on humans because the virus of vampirism passed on through the exchange of blood renders them inherently monstrous; but rather they become monsters by repeatedly engaging in cruel attacks on humans. The main challenge in the attempt to conceptualise the vampire’s monstrosity as performative is the fact that the undead are hybrid creatures that present characteristics both human and demonic, if not truly animalistic. The vampire has been read as a figure of fluidity, a metaphor for deviation from norms that are essential for society’s understanding of the world. As such, the tendency in the scholarship has been to explore the vampire as a transgressor of borders6 and not as a follower of norms. Therefore, the questions that emerge are: what norms underpin vampiric monstrosity in Rice’s narrative? To which centuries and to which culture would these problematic norms pertain to: that of the living or that of the dead? And more importantly, what are the implications of refusing, subverting, or exaggerating the vampiric conventions? Also, if Rice’s immortals engage in theatrical performances that reproduce aspects of vampirism, to what extent can these performances be considered as indicative of monstrosity? In addition to exploring themes such as sympathy for the devil, homoerotic attraction, and the literal as well as figurative preying on plantation slaves, Interview with the Vampire (1976) establishes the core norms of vampiric monstrosity within Rice’s fictional universe. What surfaces in Louis’s reminiscence of his transformation into a vampire, albeit a sentimental one, is his inadequacy in performing the essential act of vampiric monstrosity—feeding on humans. As Alexandra Warwick notes, many gothic texts, and especially those that deal with vampires, are concerned with the knowledge, manipulation, and negotiation of rules that allow the exploration of boundaries.7 Within Rice’s narratives, two sets of norms can be identified in relation to the vampire: extra-textual norms and intra-textual ones. The first set coincides with what Butler calls “norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer.”8 These originate in the numerous myths that have circulated throughout the world, and which describe the vampire’s return from the dead, its cold and white skin, its attacks on humans. E ­ xtra-textual norms also include the characteristics that define the vampire fiction as a genre. They are easily detectable and have been reiterated ever since Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Admittedly, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) establishes the central characteristics of the vampires that have been explored extensively in later narratives and films. When speaking about Count Dracula, Professor Van Helsing mentions the creature’s aversion to crucifixes, his lack of a reflexion in the mirror, his power to manipulate and transmorphise into animals such as a wolf or a bat. And yet, despite these powers, he is compelled to return to a coffin containing his home soil.

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While Rice does keep some of these characteristics, her vampires distance themselves from the model imposed by Stoker in that they discard many of the so-called stereotypes about vampires, such as the “the rumor about crosses,”9 keyholes, and even the “story about stakes through the heart.”10 The author gradually introduces intra-textual norms of vampirism together with their traumatic power in Louis’s interview as he recounts his transformation. Rules are further detailed and reinforced in The Vampire Lestat (1985) by Armand’s coven, the Children of Darkness, which provides a prescriptive account of vampirism and a code of monstrosity. Since Rice’s immortals are concerned with establishing the rules of vampirism just as much as they set out to manipulate, distort, and even counteract them, a performative perspective on the construction of monstrosity allows the exploration of a normative vampirism and the subsequent development of a critical agency. Judith Butler’s influential theory on performativity suggests that the gendered identity is not an essential or natural feature of the subject, but rather “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”11 To consider monstrosity as performative entails that the effect of a presumed internal malice and immorality is in fact created by actively engaging in the repetition of gestures which are culturally understood as evil, cruel, if not abject. As such, performativity offers a perspective on vampirism not so much as a physical property, but rather as a continuous practice-based form of monstrosity that is contingent on repeating the act of feeding. Furthermore, if “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results,”12 it follows that the vampire’s act of monstrare is a dynamic engagement to repeat, construct, and conform to monstrosity as a regulatory system of norms. Significantly, Louis refers to his transformation as an accumulation of acts that engender the transgression to monstrosity: “I cannot say that it consisted in any one step really though one, of course, was the step beyond which I could make no return. But there were several acts involved, and the first was the death of the overseer.”13 Although Lestat has already fed on Louis by the time the attack on the overseer is performed, this does not mean that Louis has already been transformed. On the contrary, the transformation is only induced by the exchange of blood, but it culminates with the first feeding that Louis would have to carry out. Louis is involved in a primary enactment of monstrosity by taking human lives when he is forced to witness and approve of Lestat’s attack on the plantation overseer. In taking part in the destruction of the victim’s body, Louis also experiences Lestat’s animalistic display of vampiric power. Death is inextricably connected to Louis’s transformation. While his human body dies after receiving the vampiric blood, the act of feeding implies taking human lives. The task of the “first kill,”14 which Louis is forced to complete, is central to his transgression to vampirism because it both confirms and constructs his new identity as a vampire. Therefore, Louis must engage in the “stylized repetition of acts”15 that pertain to monstrosity in order to become a vampire. Interestingly, Louis fails to carry out the monstrous task and instead is “terribly

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agitated, convinced I [Louis] couldn’t bring myself to attack and feeling no urge to do so.”16 This lack of desire or thirst for blood can be read as indicative of his failed transformation. However, when interpreted through the lens of performativity, the absence of this urge suggests that Louis’s monstrous nature has not been sedimented because he has not internalised the acts that underpin it. In turn, Louis finds himself involved in the regulatory structure of monstrosity, a structure that requires him to perform the acts of feeding and killing in order to be accepted and recognised as a valid vampire. The idea that Lestat, as a maker, represents the normative power of constraint is emphasised when he catches another slave and holds him for Louis to feed. Lestat exerts not only a physical force on the human victim, but he also clutches Louis, compelling him to carry out the monstrous feeding “‘Do it,’ he [Lestat] said. ‘You can’t turn back now.’ Overcome with revulsion and weak with frustration, [Louis] obeyed. [Louis] knelt beside the bent, struggling man and […] went into his neck.”17 This depiction of Louis being constrained to perform as a vampire illustrates what Butler calls “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain […] cultural fictions,”18 which here amount to conventions that reinforce the monstrous identity. Louis’s gestures also suggest obedience to the higher power structure of monstrosity, which he must recognise as governing his new undead existence. Symbolically, Louis succumbs to the grip of vampirism and performs according to the requirements of the vampiric law represented by Lestat. Therefore, Louis does not become a vampire as a result of the blood exchange with Lestat, but rather after he internalises and repeats the monstrous norm of feeding on humans. This is again highlighted by the fact that Louis experiences the intrinsic lust for blood while he is feeding, and the craving increases when he is pulled back by Lestat. It is at this point that Louis learns the acceptable demarcations of performing monstrosity, when Lestat presents him with another norm: You don’t drink after they’re dead! […] You’ll die if you do that […] He’ll suck you right down into death with him if you cling to him in death. And now you’ve drunk too much, besides; you’ll be ill.19

Lestat’s role as a master is not limited to inducing the transformation but is emphasised by regulating the means by which the vampiric feeding is enacted. The implication here is that the only limit of engaging in the monstrous act of feeding is death: lack of feeding, as well as drinking after the victim dies would result in a presumed death for the vampire. For Louis, monstrosity is performative to the extent that it is materialised and sustained through the act of draining humans of blood. As such, it represents both “a strategy of survival within compulsory systems,” namely the vampiric existence, as well as “a performance with clearly punitive consequences”20 that later weighs on his conscience. Lestat, on the other hand, establishes the model of normative vampirism, in which monstrosity is constituted through detachment and the repetitive pattern of feeding and killing. He symbolises the force of the normative monstrosity in ensuring that Louis re-enacts and adheres to the vampiric conventions that confirm his intelligibility and credibility as a monstrous creature. When the plantation

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slaves rise against them, the vampires must rely on Louis’s connection to their human neighbour Babette to shelter them. Although Lestat accepts this compromise only reluctantly, he remains suspicious and reinforces the law of vampirism by instructing Louis to attack whoever comes to let them out from the hiding cellar: ‘Speed and strength; they [humans] cannot match us in that. And fear. Remember always, to strike fear. Don’t be sentimental now! You’ll cost us everything.’ […] You don’t begin to know how to use your powers! You have no innate sense of what you are!’21

For Louis, however, the vampiric monstrosity remains “a norm that can never be fully internalized.”22 In failing to engage in the pattern of monstrosity signalled by acts that include speed, strength, and fear, Louis exposes himself to the scrutinising eye of his master. The opposition between Louis and Lestat on account of their understanding and performing monstrosity produces a mirroring effect of abjection. As Louis is disgusted by Lestat’s excessive and horrific attacks on humans, many of which are unnecessary, Lestat loathes Louis for refraining from embracing the powers of monstrosity. Interestingly, Lestat considers that Louis’s inadequacy as a vampire is based on his connection to human existence; a link that has not been severed through the transgression to vampirism: “You are in love with your mortal nature! […] And in your romance with mortal life, you’re dead to your vampire nature!”23 What Lestat exposes in othering Louis as a lesser vampire is in fact his humanity as a dangerous flaw that inhibits the vampiric power. Furthermore, Lestat perceives the development of monstrosity as an intrinsic characteristic: “I expected you [Louis] to feel these things instinctually, as I did.”24 Since Louis does not perform his monstrosity in the expected way, giving in to his impulsive instincts, Lestat considers him to be a vulnerable vampire. However, from a performative vantage point, Louis’s persistent humanity and sense of morality are strengthened precisely as a result of performing the act of feeding and taking human life. This is illustrated when Louis questions his place between human and monster, the two ontological poles of his existence as an immortal: “Is my very nature that of a devil? I was asking myself over and over. And if it is, why then do I revolt against it, […] turn away in disgust when Lestat kills?”25 Consequently, it is precisely because he is implicated in the repetitive pattern of vampirism that Louis becomes aware of his difference, questions his nature, and subsequently develops a critical agency with regard to monstrosity. Another instance that is invested in guarding the normative vampirism is the Parisian coven the Children of Darkness portrayed in The Vampire Lestat. The coven functions as a dark replica of a normative culture, especially due to its “great laws,” such as “no vampire may ever destroy another vampire,” secrecy regarding the vampiric nature must be preserved, while the coven master must “seek the destruction of all outcasts and all who have broken the laws.”26 Thus, the Children of Darkness represent an authority that defines the norms governing the vampire existence as confined to isolation and sparse interaction with the human world. There is also an emphasis on lack of communication and a

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prescriptive monstrosity that attempts to eliminate those who do not conform: Lestat and Gabrielle for living as humans and entering churches. The Children of Darkness display a ceremonial engagement with monstrosity through the enactment of their multi-staged rituals of transformation, which engender the loss of humanity. However, the coven portrays an interesting facet of the performative monstrosity because they “cite” and internalise attributes that are specific to ghosts and demonic entities. For example, they perceive themselves as stealthy “creatures of the night, meant to feed the fears of man.”27 As one of the vampires reminds his peers: “you walk this earth as all evil things do, […] for you are damned souls, and your immortality is given you only at the price of suffering and torment.”28 As such, the Parisian coven regulates the practice of monstrosity and prescribes it to its members as a strict code of conduct that resonates in the echo-chamber of the cemetery catacombs. Despite their totalising power and the ritualistic character of their repetition, the vampiric rules to which the coven adheres are “continually haunted by their own inefficacy,”29 especially in the secular age of the eighteenth century. By placing a rosary at Nicholas’s neck, his human friend, Lestat undermines the symbolism underpinning the coven’s norms: “by your own rules, you cannot harm him. […] Yet it’s a vampire who has given him the supernatural protection.”30 Lestat functions as a veritable monster to the micro-world of the Parisian coven by turning their superstitious beliefs against them and by mocking their contained monstrosity, which amounts to what he calls a “waste [of] immortality.”31 Here, Lestat embodies the force of the performative agency that subverts the rules of monstrosity in exposing their potential for being performed differently. If norms draw their power from repetition, then reiteration offers alternatives modes of engaging in monstrous acts, as what Butler calls “that which escapes or exceeds the norm.”32 By exploring the fissures in the structure of repetition, vampires have the possibility to introduce certain changes to their enactment of monstrosity. This account of agency, however, is not fully volitional. In fact, this strand of agency emerges from the possibility of introducing variations in the repetition of cruel acts, while it simultaneously depends upon and remains within the demarcations of the core normative acts of monstrosity. As Sara Salih points out, the subject is not a master of her/his construction, “‘the script,’ if you like, is always determined within its regulatory frame, and the subject has a limited number of costumes from which to make the constrained choice of gender.”33 When applied to Rice’s vampires, Salih’s observation offers a perspective of interpreting the undead as not completely free to reinvent their monstrosity. Nevertheless, they do improvise with the situations and the elements they have at hand. An aspect that illustrates the development of the performative agency, which is contingent to repetition and yet offers the possibility of variation, is the act of feeding on humans. If this practice is central to the performative monstrosity, as it has been discussed, it appears to be deeply tormenting to the majority of Rice’s immortals, such as Louis, Lestat, and Marius, who seek to perform it differently. However, these vampires introduce variations that are problematic because they can be read as resulting from the development of agency, which in turn would

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be an element of volition. These variations also show that vampires cannot completely alter their monstrosity. Ultimately, they adopt already existing practices that would somehow appease their guilty consciousness. For example, Louis adheres to his dietary restriction of feeding exclusively on animals only after he is introduced to the practice by Lestat. Indeed, Lestat recommends this alternative source of blood as a dernier resort, when travelling with humans. While this means of coping with thirst illustrates the subversion at the heart of monstrosity, it also confirms Louis’s persistent mortal values: “why should I not live from the blood of animals rather than go through the world bringing misery and death to human creatures!”34 Similarly, Lestat adopts Marius’s practice of feeding on the evildoer as a means of escaping his guilty consciousness. However, when his victims are truly evil, his conscience fades out, and his “unspoken vow to kill the evildoer”35 is taken to extreme cruelty: “I tried not to kill. I tried not to. Except when the subject was damn near irresistible, an evildoer of the first rank. And then the death was slow and savage.”36 Although Lestat’s choice of feeding on evildoers constitutes a first order variation, it is reworked through a second one—the evilness of the victim— which unleashes the vampire’s destructive instinct from the grip of reason. The practice of feeding on the evildoer as a means of survival echoes throughout the Chronicles: David remembers the warning “if we did not hunt the evildoer almost exclusively, we would very soon go mad. To feed upon the innocent is sublime, but leads inevitably to such a love of human life that the vampire who does it cannot endure for very long.”37 If hunting the evildoers is portrayed as a means of coping with monstrosity and avoiding madness, in Prince Lestat (2014), the practice becomes one of the rules that Lestat establishes when he begins his reign over the undead tribe. Another practice that illustrates the vampires’ performative agency is the “Little Drink,” which Thorne describes in Blood and Gold (2001) as a means of feeding stealthy on multiple innocent victims, in small amounts “so that no one dies.”38 While this mode of feeding would enable vampires to feed on the inciting innocent blood, as Katherine Ramsland explains in The Vampire Companion, “it requires restraint to take only a little of the precious liquid.”39 Although the practice is adopted by many of Rice’s immortals, such as Marius, Armand, Daniel, as well as Benji and Sybelle, it is a dangerous act that, as Thorne suggests, must be repeated again and again in order to be learnt as a skill. What these derivative practices of feeding on humans reveal is that the monstrous act is partly repeated and partly transcended. As such, the strand of agency that emerges is based on both being part of the repetitive pattern of feeding, which vampires oppose, and yet, turning “power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power.”40 Nevertheless, the performative agency remains dependent on a set of constraints: the normative pressure to prey on humans for blood, the inescapable thirst, but also the effect of the guilty consciousness. These aspects underpinning the vampires’ agency coincide with what Moya Lloyd calls “the dialectics of constraint and freedom,”41 which expose the complexity of Rice’s undead. In this framework, the vampires do not become humans as a result of their choices in enacting monstrosity differently; while on the other hand, they are not fully determined by monstrosity as an internal feature that becomes

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visible through their acts. Instead, monstrosity is sedimented in time through the ­repetition and the alternative modes of engaging in vampiric acts. Since vampires are said to be immortal, then to conceptualise their monstrosity as performative entails that their vampiric identity is always under construction: partly through the repetition of feeding on humans, and partly through the introduction of variations on that repetition. If the previous section focused on monstrosity as performative, in that the vampire finds himself/herself confined to repeat a set of pre-existing horrific practices, the following discussion aims to explore elements of theatrical performance in the monstrosity of Rice’s vampires. To return to the etymology of the term “monster,” which is derived from the Latin monstrare, that is, to show, this implies that some level of performance has always been an inherent part of monstrosity. In other words, the monster cannot exist without a witness who recoils in fear but continues to look with curiosity and fascination. If the monster’s role is to perform (both in the sense of carrying out and theatrical acting) horrific aspects of otherness that “fill us with both awe and awfulness,”42 then it is important to explore how the Ricean vampires reveal and dramatise their monstrosity, and how the human audience responds to it. Rice’s vampires use the theatrical as a device that exaggerates their monstrosity to serve their own ends. For example, when fleeing the Children of Darkness, Lestat and Gabrielle find themselves trapped in the altar coffin of a church, as the congregation is celebrating mass. Lestat proposes a staging of their escape by reiterating the old vampire myths and exploiting humans’ fears: We are going out. But we shall do it like proper vampires, do you hear! There are one thousand people in the church and we are going to scare them to death. I will lift the stone and we will rise up together, and when we do, raise your arms and make the most horrible face you can muster and cry out if you can.43

Interestingly, Lestat demands a satisfactory performance of monstrosity, which echoes his previous indications to Louis in Interview with the Vampire. For Lestat, the “proper vampires” are those that possess the ability to strike fear into the hearts of humans and use horror to their own advantage. Failure to do so would deprive the undead from one of the essential acts that constitute a vampire’s monstrosity, but also risk getting caught by humans. Lestat’s plan of escape echoes stage directions that crystallise what humans would expect from horrifying vampires. Thus, Lestat directs the performance of monstrosity in which he assumes the leading role (an allusion to the central role that he has in the Vampire Chronicles): I landed upon the floor of the choir in a blaze of candlelight, letting out the most powerful cry I could make. Hundreds rose to their feet before me, hundreds of mouths opening to scream. […] She gave a lovely high-pitched wail, her left hand raised as a claw as I pulled her down the aisle. Everywhere there was panic, men and women clutching for children, shrieking and falling backwards.44

The theatrical display of monstrosity that Lestat and Gabrielle engage in is sustained through exaggerated acts and screams that are indicative of excess. This performance of monstrosity functions as a literary device that underlines the

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superficiality of the physical clichés regarding monsters, especially by having them acted for a human audience. Interestingly, in instrumentalising the congregation’s fear, Lestat and Gabrielle utilise horror precisely because it provokes strong emotions, it freezes the onlooker, and, as David Punter suggests, it “proclaims the impossibility of any action.”45 Furthermore, Rice’s immortals count on the effect of horror in eliciting what Fred Botting calls “the movement of contraction and recoil”46 from humans, in order to ensure their safe exit from the church. Since the counterfeit lies at the heart of the Gothic, as Jerrold E. Hogle suggests,47 it can be argued that Lestat and Gabrielle produce their cries as part of their simulacrum of monstrosity. We may ask, however, if this performance exposes the artificiality of vampirism, can it be considered as indicative of Lestat and Gabrielle’s monstrosity? Or is it rather a replay of how humanity might expect vampires to act by menacing the borders between good and evil? Considering the religious context of this monstrous performance, Rice’s vampires can be read as reflexions of the implied human fears regarding demonic forces. Nevertheless, this scene depicts a performance of monstrosity that is partly true and partly fabricated. If Lestat and Gabrielle play the part of the demonic revenant, the ­nineteenth-century performances of the Théâtre des Vampires employ the trope of the exaggerated display of vampiric monstrosity as a means of theatrical expression. The Parisian vampire company first introduced in Interview with the Vampire provides an alluring yet unsettling depiction of monstrosity by staging real vampiric attacks as part of the dramatic representations on stage. These performances are highly problematic because they blur the distinction between the theatrical monstrosity, as a role, and the real vampiric nature of the actors. In other words, where does the exaggeration of the role end, and where does true monstrosity begin? If what lies at the heart of theatre is the triad of the performance, the performer(s) and the spectator(s), Rice uses it as a literary device to introduce gothic tropes that allow for multiple perspectives on the (re)presentation of monstrosity. The play, which Louis and Claudia attend, opens with the appearance of Death portrayed by a “dark, draped figure” holding a scythe and “the gleaming countenance of Death, a painted skull as a mask.”48 Initially, Death elicits the audience’s laughter because he is repulsed by an old woman, cripples, and beggars who pursue him—an act that symbolises their death wish. The pantomime game that Death plays has a double function; for the human audience, it provokes sympathy and also anticipates the correlation between desire and death in the vampire’s embrace. For Louis, however, the dramatic gestures of the actor impersonating Death expose the true nature of the performer as a vampire: “the languid, white hand that made these comic arcs was not painted white. It was a vampire hand which wrung laughter from the crowd.”49 At this point in the play, the theatrical gothic illustrated through props, such as the costume, the mask, the scythe, as well as the performance itself are received by the human audience as comical artifice. When the angelic female victim appears on the stage, Louis’s perspective is invaluable because it guides the reader to look beyond the “the awe of the audience,”50 and follow his scrutinising gaze, which reveals the machinations behind the performance. The female actor is not

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an actor at all, but a genuine human: “she was lost; and not a vampire. The soil on her mean blouse and skirt was not stage paint, […] She was too beautiful, her grey eyes too distressed. The performance too perfect.”51 Therefore, it is through Louis’s eyes that the illusion of the performance is lifted, and its underlying horror becomes visible. Louis’s eyes function as a supernatural lens that brings into focus the discrepancy between the authenticity of the girl’s appearance, with her so-called performance that is in fact genuine distress, and the vampires in the background who form a “circle of white faces pressing closer and closer.”52 At the sight of the girl, the vampire playing Death gives up the mask and appears to be in love. He also breaks the volatile “fourth wall” between the illusion of the performance and the real world by “turning to the audience (…) in longing to elicit their sympathy: was she not irresistible!”53 Through this theatrical device, the vampire actor manipulates the audience and succeeds in deceiving them that the portrayal of Death in love, the girl’s pleas for help, even the subsequent vampiric attack are all part of the play. In staging the act of feeding as an aesthetic representation of sexual desire, the vampire actors play on the spectators by inviting sympathy not with the helpless and confused victim, but with the auburn vampire to whose embrace she succumbs. The scene of the vampiric feeding abounds in gothic tropes, such as the interplay of light and darkness on stage, the conquering desire of the vampires contrasted by the pain and fear of the female victim, as well as the juxtaposition between the mortal ideal of perfection and the cold supernatural faces of the vampires, to name but a few. These elements are imbricated with the theatrical performance, which results in a representation that “appeal[s] to the sensual rather than the rational.”54 The gothic tones of the vampiric performance work their magic on the mortal audience, who is captivated by the theatrical illusion as a vicarious exploration of forbidden desires and sadism. The audience’s appeal for the frisson corresponds to terror as a source of the sublime, which, according to Edmund Burke, can produce “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling […] [in that] ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”55 Interestingly, the Théâtre des Vampires select their human audience by means of invitations, which suggests that the nineteenth-century spectators do expect a shocking vampiric performance. To a certain extent, they are informed and lured by the “crinkling posters of penny-dreadful vampires with their outstretched arms and cloaks resembling bat wings ready to close on the naked shoulders of a mortal victim.”56 This attraction for both the sensuality and the cruelty of the theatrical performances appears consistent with the “desire for trauma,”57 which Alexandra Warwick associates with contemporary Gothic. The scene of the feeding, to which “the dark theater reverberated with shared passion”58 is framed by a choreography of horrors as the victim is passed from one vampire to the other. As such, the spectacle that Théâtre des Vampires construct coincides with what Antonin Artaud calls the “theatre of cruelty,” in that it provides spectator “with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory,

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but interior.”59 The Théâtre des Vampires summon the repressed desires of the audience and represents them on stage. The image of the auburn vampire actor feeding on the helpless victim echoes Artaud’s conception of a theatre that is not a simple copy of the reality but materialises the “magical liberties of dreams which it [the public] can only recognise when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.”60 This cruel display of vampiric monstrosity is not limited to the rendition of a real attack as illusion on stage, however shocking that might be, but it also elaborates an assault on “the spectator’s sensibility”61 that seeks to expand the effect of the trauma represented on stage to the audience. What is problematic here is that the audience identifies with the devouring desire of the vampires and not with the victim. This idea is also represented in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) as one a female spectator interrupts the play by saying “Oh, yes, take me, Monsieur Vampire! I adore you.”62 The appeal for the seductive, yet devouring vampire contradicts Noël Carroll’s assertion that “[i]n horror fictions, the emotions of the audience are supposed to mirror those of the positive human characters in certain, but not all, respects.”63 This reaction from the audience can be read as its complicity to the illusion of the theatrical performance, which betrays an effect of the “trompe-l’œil aesthetics.”64 If “Gothic theater,” as Diego Saglia notes, is “an inherently visual aesthetic that aims to unsettle its recipients by constantly suggesting that their vision is incomplete, distorted or misleading,”65 Rice reconfigures the theatre’s effect by suggesting that the illusion only masks the visible monstrosity of the vampire actors. Ironically, the spectators rely on the convention of pretence in reading the scene of feeding as an illusion, when in fact, seen through the gothic lens represented by Louis’s supernatural eyes, the scene materialises as a subversion of the theatrical in which what is performed is disturbingly real. In The Vampire Lestat, Rice introduces theatre reviews provided by Roget, Lestat’s human lawyer, who praises the ingenuity of the theatre company in a play that features the vampire actors as wooden dolls. “You cannot believe the perfection with which they make themselves appear inanimate.”66 Furthermore, according to Roget, [i]t is such an engaging spectacle that ladies and gentlemen of the audience quarrel amongst themselves as to whether or not these players are dolls or real persons. […] As for the plays themselves, they would be extremely unsettling were they not so beautiful and skillfully done.67

These reports highlight the uncanny appearances of the vampire actors and their cunning in staging their otherness, while they also point to the spectators’ attempts to explain the nature of the actors. The audience’s attempt at categorisation highlights the monstrous hybridity of the vampire actors. Significantly, the audience adopts a “latent rational distance,”68 which, according to Werner Wolf, underscores the difference between representation and reality. The effort to rationalise the otherness of the actors also echoes the Radcliffian strand of Gothic that explains away its sources of fear as illusions, while redefining the boundaries of the proper.

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The function of the Théâtre des Vampires is further detailed in The Vampire Lestat, in a purely Ricean manner, as each new book offers redefinitions and reinterpretations of the elements presented in previous instalments. For example, the quintessential relation between performance and the Théâtre des Vampires comes from Gabrielle, who sees “a perfection in it [..]. We are illusions of what is mortal, and the stage is an illusion of what is real.”69 The implication here is that the stage and the theatrical performance function as a heterotopia of illusion, where monstrosity can be shown, fully demonstrated to humans, but safely veiled by the conceit that it is only part of the performance. Also, the aim of the Théâtre des Vampires appears to be the creation of a dramatic performance of monstrosity, one in which the undead actors are involved in representing the horror of their vampiric thirst on stage. Nicolas, the musician who becomes mad after his transformation, places “the splendid mockery” at the core of the spectacle of horrors: “We will astonish. We will beguile. But above all, we will thrive on their [mortal spectators’] gold as well as their blood and in their midst we will grow strong.”70 This collapse of the theatrical and the performative act of feeding is highly problematic because it reduces vampirism to roleplaying in which it is impossible to distinguish between the dramatic exaggeration and the (true) monstrosity of the vampire actor. The two are inextricably connected. Lestat is himself lured by the glory of visibility when he reveals himself and the entire vampiric mythology to the mortal world through his rockstar performances. Therefore, it can be argued that Rice’s vampires consciously utilise gothic conventions, such the aesthetics of illusion and excess, as both allow a full display of monstrosity and the indulgence that it is all theatrical play. This chapter aimed to provide a conceptualisation of monstrosity, in the case of Rice’s immortals, as a process of sedimentation resulting from the repetition of vampiric acts, such as feeding on humans and taking lives. By shifting the focus away from the idea that inherent monstrosity is expressed through horrific acts, my aim here has been to apply the theory of performativity in order to provide an alternative perspective on monstrosity. Performativity offers the possibility of interpreting the development of monstrosity as the effect of the vampiric norms imposed on newly transformed undead, and not solely as the result of an internal physical transformation. Louis’s traumatic account of his transgression to vampirism and his failure to perform the monstrous deed of feeding on humans illustrate the idea that monstrosity is dependent on the repetition of normative vampiric acts. The performative agency that emerges throughout the series underscores the fact that Rice’s vampires are not completely free to recreate their monstrosity. Nonetheless, they can appease their guilty consciousness and perform variations on monstrosity, as it has been discussed in relation to feeding on animals, on the evildoer, as well as engaging in the deliciously risky “Little Drink.” The medium that does allow Rice’s vampires to fully recreate and display their monstrosity is the theatrical performance, through which the Théâtre des Vampires create aesthetic renditions of vampirism. With its penchant for excess and its power to elicit the strong emotions of terror and horror, the Gothic is employed by the vampire actors to create alluring illusions of monstrosity that leave a lasting imprint on humans’ imagination.

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If theatre reposes on the convention of illusion, the underlying horror is that the Parisian coven displays the full extent of their monstrosity.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 275. 2. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25 (p. 6). 3. Weinstock, p. 280. 4. Andrew Hock-soon Ng, Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 16. 5. Weinstock, p. 276. 6. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, ‘Introduction: The Shape of Vampires’, in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Lorna Piatti-Farnell, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (Routledge, 2014). 7. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9.1 (2007), 5–15 (p. 12). 8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 234. 9. Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (London: Sphere, 2012), p. 25. 10. Ibid., p. 25. 11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. xv. 12. Ibid., p. 34. 13. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 18. 14. Ibid., p. 29. 15. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 191, emphasis in original. 16. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 30. 17. Ibid., pp. 30–31. 18. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 190. 19. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 31 20. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 190. 21. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 60. 22. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 192. 23. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 76. 24. Ibid., p. 79. 25. Ibid., p. 69. 26. Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat (London: Sphere, 2008), pp. 301–302. 27. Ibid., p. 221. 28. Ibid., p. 220. 29. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 257. 30. Rice, The Vampire Lestat, p. 220. 31. Ibid., p. 223. 32. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 10.

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33. Sara Salih, ‘On Judith Butler and Performativity’, in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader, ed. by Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins (Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi: Sage, 2007), p. 56. 34. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 77. 35. Rice, The Vampire Lestat, p. 501. 36. Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 397. 37. Anne Rice, Merrick (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 81. 38. Anne Rice, Blood and Gold, or, the Story of Marius (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 22. 39. Katherine Ramsland, The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s the Vampire Chronicles (Little, Brown, 1995), p. 238. 40. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 241. 41. Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 40. 42. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 34. 43. Rice, The Vampire Lestat, p. 193. 44. Ibid., p. 193. 45. David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 11. 46. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 6. 47. Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15. 48. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 198. 49. Ibid., p. 199. 50. Ibid., p. 199. 51. Ibid., p. 199. 52. Ibid., p. 200. 53. Ibid., pp. 200–201. 54. Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore, and Robert Dean, ‘Introduction’, in Contemporary Gothic Drama: Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on the Modern British Stage, ed. by Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore, and Robert Dean (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 3. 55. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (J. J. Tourneisen, 1792), p. 47. 56. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 196. 57. Warwick, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, p. 11. 58. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, p. 204. 59. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (Grove Press, 1958), p. 92. 60. Artaud, p. 86. 61. Ibid., p. 86. 62. Neil Jordan dir., Interview with the Vampire (1994). 63. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 18. 64. Joseph Harris, Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 28. 65. Diego Saglia, ‘Gothic Theater, 1765–Present’, in The Gothic World, ed. by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 364. 66. Rice, The Vampire Lestat, p. 327. 67. Ibid., p. 327. 68. Werner Wolf, ‘Illusion (Aesthetic)’, in Handbook of Narratology, ed. by Peter Hühn and others (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014), p. 270. 69. Rice, The Vampire Lestat, p. 312. 70. Ibid., p. 265.

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Bibliography Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958). Botting, Fred, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (J. J. Tourneisen, 1792). Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). ———, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). Carroll, Noël, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Gordon, Joan, and Veronica Hollinger, ‘Introduction: The Shape of Vampires’, in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Harris, Joseph, Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Hogle, Jerrold E., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Jones, Kelly, Benjamin Poore, and Robert Dean, ‘Introduction’, in Contemporary Gothic Drama: Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on the Modern British Stage, ed. by Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore, and Robert Dean (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Lloyd, Moya, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Ng, Andrew Hock-soon, Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). Punter, David, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Ramsland, Katherine, The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s the Vampire Chronicles (Little, Brown, 1995). Rice, Anne, Blood and Gold, or, The Story of Marius (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). ———, Interview with the Vampire (London: Sphere, 2012). ———, Merrick (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). ———, The Tale of the Body Thief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). ———, The Vampire Lestat (London: Sphere, 2008). Saglia, Diego, ‘Gothic Theater, 1765–Present’, in The Gothic World, ed. by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Salih, Sara, ‘On Judith Butler and Performativity’, in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader, ed. by Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins (Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi: Sage, 2007). Warwick, Alexandra, ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9 (2007), 5–15. https://doi. org/10.7227/GS.9.1.3. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ‘Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

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Wolf, Werner, ‘Illusion (Aesthetic)’, in Handbook of Narratology, ed. by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014).

Filmography Interview with the Vampire dir., Neil Jordan (1994).

Young Gothic

Encounters with the ‘Hidden’ World in Modern Children’s Fiction Chloé Germaine Buckley

Children’s fiction in its fantastic mode engages in metaphysical speculation, positing other worlds and tracing protagonists’ journeys into hidden realms. ­ Golden Age classics such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) and The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley (1862) inaugurate this speculative tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, writers such as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner rejected the cosy worlds of faery found in Golden Age fiction and introduced elements of terror, horror and the Gothic. In recent years, writers have developed the ‘dark fantasy’ mode by embracing the Weird, a form of fantastic fiction typified by the early twentieth-century writer H. P. Lovecraft. Weird fiction rejects traditional fantasy’s narratives of human mastery and transcendence, instead suggesting protagonists’ annihilation in the face of a decidedly unhuman cosmos. Examples in children’s fiction include Lovecraft-inspired novels by Celia Rees and Anthony Horowitz written between 2005 and 2014. This chapter traces these developments and explores the interconnections between the speculative turn in philosophy of the past decade and the fictional speculations found in children’s Gothic since the mid-twentieth century. I suggest that the focus in children’s fiction on metaphysical questions, specifically those that wonder about a world beyond human perception, provides fertile ground for imaginative renderings of philosophical debates. This reading contrasts with typical analysis of children’s fiction, which is dominated by psychoanalytical and mythopoetic theories that posit the fantastic as metaphorical of the human condition. New Materialism is one mode of contemporary philosophy that aims to get beyond humanist assumptions that valorise concepts such as language, consciousness, subjectivity, mind and soul as separate and superior to biological material or ‘physical stuff’.1 The turn to questions about the place of embodied humans within a material world are one response to the urgent challenges of environmental, geopolitical and economic upheaval.2 As Stacy Alaimo suggests, ‘the

C. Germaine Buckley (*)  Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_35

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recognition that human activity has altered the planet on the scale of a geological epoch muddles the commonsensical assumption that the world exists as a background for the human subject’.3 She argues that even within the so-called ‘anthropocene’, it is imperative to recognise that what was once called nature ‘acts, interacts, and even ‘intra-acts within, through, and around human bodies and practices’.4 This recognition of the agency of nature has long manifested in children’s fantastic fictions, especially those that evoke an equally terrifying and enchanting landscape through gothic settings and themes. Alan Garner’s early fantasy novel, Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) sets its child protagonists against powers of darkness who manifest from within and animate the landscape. The rocks, trees, hills and caverns of Garner’s native Alderley Edge become magical, combative and claustrophobic. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973) also animates a local geography, revealing a hidden spatial and temporal realm located within the human-controlled rural landscape of the Thames Valley. Like Garner, Cooper places her protagonist in the middle of a battle between the powers of light and dark. In both novels, however, although the young heroes prevail as per the demands of heroic myth, the human mind is rendered insignificant in contrast to the agency that inheres in the earth itself. The concept of an unhuman ontology is central to weird fiction, which dates to nineteenth-century Gothic by authors such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. The Weird finds its apotheosis in the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft published in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Certainly, it is Lovecraft’s work that enjoys an extended afterlife in fan-authored, cult and popular fictions contributing to the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ named after his most famous monster deity. The Weird is one influence behind philosophy’s ‘speculative turn’ of the past decade, which includes thinkers like Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker. Harman, for example, begins his book-length study on ‘Weird Realism’ with an extended consideration of Lovecraft’s description of Cthulhu and lauds the writer for engaging with ‘the most crucial philosophical themes of our time’.5 The so-called ‘speculative realists’ (a loose designation) respond to some of the same issues as the new materialists discussed above, namely challenging the anthropocentrism that dominates western thought. The focus of speculative realism is on addressing the perceived failures of philosophy since Kant, whose work relinquishes ‘reality itself’ in favour of discussions about how we ‘know’ reality. Speculative realists seek to move beyond this ‘correlationist’ circle and speculate about the world as it is beyond what it appears to us.6 Like Harman, Eugene Thacker’s philosophical speculations find resonance in Lovecraft’s stories, but he also sees horror fiction more broadly as an attempt to think what he designates the ‘world-without-us,’ a terrifying space lying somewhere between the correlation of thought and world (‘the world-for-us’) and the inaccessible ‘­world-in-itself’.7 Likewise inspired by the Weird, Anthony Horowitz and Celia Rees offer up some terrifying speculations of their own in twenty-first-century children’s Gothic. Rees’ The Stone Testament (2007) and Horowitz’s The Power of Five series (2005– 2014) build on the dark fantasy structures innovated by Garner and Cooper, but also evoke the ontological terror aimed at by Weird fiction. These works in which

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teenage protagonists confront a material realm that confounds human perception (a ‘world-without-us’) reject the mastery and transcendence typically offered by heroic fantasy narratives and instead suggest the possibility of annihilation.8 Both new materialist and speculative realist thinkers embrace the insights offered by fiction and art, articulating a discourse of (re)enchantment to combat a mechanistic and reductive scientism that has dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment. The speculative writings of Jane Bennett, Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker also suggest the necessity of a willingness to surrender disbelief (the default rationalist position) or, else, adopt a position of naivety in order to be open to an encounter with the ‘outside’ of human experience. Cynical and doubting modes of thought have not gotten us very far, they argue. Following this, I suggest children’s fiction in its darkly fantastic and gothic mode is an apt companion to philosophical speculation. Written philosophy cannot conjure the ­ ‘world-in-itself’ but such speculations can disclose or gesture towards an occulted realm of materiality, Thacker’s ‘world-without-us’. Fantastic fiction is perhaps even better placed to engage in such speculation because it is not afraid to venture beyond the strictly empirical nor to wonder about perspectives that are other-than-human. In The Creative Mind Henri Bergson argues that creativity provides intuitive access to the ‘Absolute’ beyond which the human intellect alone is capable.9 Bergson’s appraisal of artistic creativity asserts the possibility of piercing the veil between the human intellect and reality that Kant erects. Unconsciously echoing Bergson, Eugene Thacker finds in supernatural horror fiction ways of scoping the limits of western philosophy. He argues that horror ‘takes aim at the ­pre-suppositions of philosophical enquiry, making philosophy’s blind spots and limits its central concern’.10 Where philosophical speculation falters; fantastic speculation thrives. Thacker returns to Todorov’s delineation of the genre of the fantastic as that moment of hesitation between the uncanny (delimited by a psychological explanation) and the marvellous (which enters the realm of pure fantasy). Thacker suggests that the hesitation of the fantastic is a powerful philosophical intuition caught between two abysses: either I do not know the world, or I do not know myself.11 This description of the fantastic is at odds with the way fantasy is usually characterised in children’s literature as an aid to mastery or maturation. There’s nothing reassuring or restitutive here, rather an opening out into the darkest recesses of human thought. Cooper and Garner’s novels begin with a terrifying glimpse of the ­‘world-without-us’. In the Dark Is Rising, Will spends the eve of his eleventh birthday listening to the wind howling outside as a clamour of black-feathered rooks fill the snowy sky. The rooks are harbingers of ‘the dark’ and their presence overcomes Will with the ‘sense of looking into a great black pit’.12 In Weirdstone, the call of the carrion crow that watches Colin and Susan as they explore the Edge likewise precipitates a dangerous encounter with powers of darkness. Weirdstone of Brisingamen is set in the Garner’s native Cheshire, taking place across an area of moorland called Alderley Edge and inspired by local folklore and archaeological finds (dating from the Bronze Age) from its subterranean depths. The Dark Is Rising is likewise set in a specific geographical location, in a village on the

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banks of the Thames, nestled in the Chiltern Hills. In both novels, child protagonists encounter a fantastic world of magic hidden within the everyday. In The Dark Is Rising, Will discovers he has the power of the ‘Old Ones,’ a race of beings who occupy a different temporal dimension to humanity. On Christmas Eve, he is drawn into an age-old conflict between the powers of light and the powers of dark, tasked with finding and joining six talismanic symbols to prevent the dark from rising. In Weirdstone, two children (Colin and Susan) stumble upon the Wizard of Alderley Edge (a figure Garner takes from local folklore) deep in his underground cavern. The wizard, Cadellin, has been guarding a sacred stone of power, but this was ‘misplaced’ a century ago. The children join with the wizard and other fantastic creatures to reclaim the stone and prevent the powers of darkness from taking over the land. Both novels conjure an impersonal yet watchful agency that inheres in the landscape itself, manifesting in the strange behaviour of animals or in unpredictable and inhospitable weather. Both Alderley Edge and the Thames Valley cease to be geographical locations mastered by human agency; the very landscape is reconfigured as fissures open in the ground, life-threatening mounds of snow entrap human inhabitants, and flora and fauna become aggressively animate. An unidentifiable intelligence is at work here, antagonistic to human life in ways that recall the Algernon Blackwood’s Weird tales such as ‘The Willows’ (1907) or ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1912). Despite the evident weirdness of their works, Garner and Cooper are most often read as authors of humanist fantasy typifying the so-called ‘Silver Age’ of children’s fiction in the mid-twentieth century. Criticism of children’s fantasy from this era echoes the psychoanalytic account put forward by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949). Famously, Campbell identifies a heroic quest fantasy from across several myths, reading it as a ­rite-of-passage metaphor for the universal subject’s psychological maturation. Ursula Le Guin, also called fantasy ‘a journey into the subconscious mind,’ explicitly connecting fantasy to the work of psychoanalysis.13 Le Guin asserts a critical paradigm that has long-inhered in approaches to children’s fiction. Critics of children’s fantasy often add a pedagogical twist to this reading, suggesting an educational as well as psychological benefit to fantasy reading for children. This is evident in Peter Hunt’s formulation that describes the landscape of fantasy, including Cooper and Garner, as ‘a metaphor for exploration and education; readers go, like Tolkien’s hobbit, “there and back again” in a circle that enables them to gain knowledge […] and to return to home and security and to a satisfying psychological “closure.”’14 Even where later critics question the restorative nature of fantasy, they continue to discuss it as metaphorical of selfhood, even if this selfhood is, in Colin Manlove’s reading of Garner, ‘uncertain’.15 Such readings are firmly anthropocentric and posit an inward trajectory that locates the meaning of the text as the ‘mind’ within. This approach suggests that fantasy is a form of human correlation rather than material speculation. Moreover, the language of journeying inwards runs counter to what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has designated the ‘great outdoors,’ an outside not relative to nor dependent on human thought, a place that is ‘entirely elsewhere’.16

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In contrast to humanist and psychoanalytic readings of their works, I connect Garner and Cooper to the Gothic in its darkly speculative mode. Here I propose an attitude or mode of thought I call ‘occult materialism,’ reading the texts with the trends in philosophy outlined above. The term ‘occult’ has a double meaning, referring to that which is hidden and to the popular sense of the occult as it appears in supernatural and horror fiction. Garner and Cooper’s works incorporate what Tim Jones calls a ‘gothic turn’ in their recourse to aspects of the occult and the supernatural, informed by cultural currents of the era in which they were written.17 This was the period of the ‘New Age’ and Neo-Pagan boom, when Man, Myth and Magic magazine (1970) and Fortean Times (1973–Present) circulated in British households and documentaries about real-life witch covens appeared on the BBC and ITV. This discourse inspired the ‘folk’ horror film genre, typified by The Wicker Man (1973) and other ‘occult’ films such as The Devil Rides Out (1968). The new age and occult zeitgeist circulating in countercultural currents of the mid-twentieth century suggests fantasy’s orientation away from humanist narratives of mastery and transcendence. Fortean mysteries and tales of the supernatural all suggest that humans do not fully know the material world in which they are embedded. Garner’s interest in archaeology and folklore inform his contribution to this trend in fantasy, though, as Manlove notes, he is interested in ‘the earth itself’ rather than in human habitation and the child characters seem mere ‘conduits’ for the forces of the local area.18 Cooper’s text, too, is less about the human self than it is about things, signs of power crafted from stone and wood, about the vitality that inheres in rivers and trees, about a familiar land made strange. Through the trappings of the occult, folklore and fortean mysteries, Cooper and Garner reveal a darkness that intimates an unhuman ontology and temporality. Though neither author quite embraces the anti-humanist and pessimist attitudes found in Weird writers such as Lovecraft and Blackwood, their speculations about powers of darkness, of a race of ancient beings known as the ‘Old Ones,’ and their insistence on a very limited human agency set children’s fantasy on a trajectory towards the Weird that is developed by later writers. These Silver Age works elucidate occult materialism as opposed to the terrors of the Weird, but they nonetheless suggest a metaphysics that speculates beyond the ‘world-for-us’ in several ways. First, they consider a reality in which human subjectivity is decentred, experimenting with ways of accounting for materiality beyond limited human perceptions. At the same time, occult materialism recognises that the human is embedded in nature, it being another instance of a material ontology that is profoundly unhuman. Occult materialism is neither a thoroughgoing materialism nor a form of mechanism, since it points to the darkness encountered in the writings of philosophical correlationists like Descartes, Kant and Heidegger. As such, it retains the void of the noumena or the radically withdrawn nature of reality. Hence its designation as ‘occult’ materialism because it speculates without fully disclosing a ‘world-in-itself’. Evoking the occultism found in other supernatural fiction, Garner and Cooper’s stories centre upon objects of power: the Weirdstone of Brisingamen that retains the ‘strongest magic the world has known’ and, in The Dark Is Rising, the ‘six

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great Signs of the Light’ made by the Old Ones.19 These objects exhibit an innate agency that precipitates plot crises and eludes the mastery of human characters. In this respect, Garner and Cooper’s account of objects prefigures philosopher Jane Bennet’s description of ‘thing-power’ in Vibrant Matter (2009). Bennett suggests that ‘things’ manifest traces of ‘independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience’.20 Garner’s Weirdstone manifests such independence, escaping the subterranean repository where it has been kept for thousands of years. Unseen by Cadellin, the object finds its way into the hands of a local farmer before eventually being passed to Susan who wears it on her wrist as a pretty jewel. Susan’s ‘tear’ seemingly responds to conditions on Alderley Edge, clouding over inexplicably as though it possesses sensory capabilities beyond Susan’s ken. Though the Weirdstone is the subject of a prophecy passed down through folklore, its exact provenance and powers prove elusive in the novel and it goes by many names: ‘tear’, ‘bridestone’ and ‘firefrost’. Multiple characters seek to possess this object, including ageless entities of both light and dark, but it remains somewhat slippery. As the novel approaches its denouement, the witch, Selina Place, concocts a magic spell to unlock the magic contained in the heart of the stone, but she fails dramatically, and the object remains immutable. In The Dark Is Rising, searching for the ‘signs’ likewise brings the Will into a conflict between powers of dark and light. Will has more agency than Susan and seems able to command the power of the signs in certain situations. In one encounter, a local priest appropriates the signs as icons of Christian goodness. Nonetheless, at the narrative climax, Will glimpses the world to which the signs really belong, one divorced from all human conceptions of good and evil. Will must bring the signs to Herne the Hunter, a being Cooper presents as emphatically other-than-human. Herne is associated with folklore in the South East of England and his name evokes neo-pagan and new age reconstructions of a pre-Christian British mythology. In Cooper’s version, Herne is terrifying but of neither the light nor the dark. Will is used to the unnerving and ageless expression of the Old Ones, but this creature has an ‘abstracted’ and ‘cruel’ visage that Will recognises as ‘the fierce inevitability of nature’.21 It is to this realm that the signs belong, not to any human master. Figures such as Herne and Cadellin are imaginary conduits between human understanding and thing-power, which always lies somewhat outside human control. These imaginary speculations are necessary in any philosophical endeavour that seeks access (however indirect) to the ‘outside’. Bennett affirms this in her insistence on the importance of an ‘unrealistic imagination’ when opening oneself to objects.22 She also neatly summarises the situation the child protagonists in Cooper and Garner’s novels face when they wield strange objects. Susan, Colin and Will are all successful in their attempts to harness the power of the objects they safeguard, managing to repulse the powers of the dark, but this confrontation occurs in a somewhat chaotic and traumatic way. In Weirdstone, the children grasp Cadellin’s body as they are besieged by ‘a starving wind, howling like wolves’.23 The wizard holds the stone aloft and the children witness a ‘cone of light’ that protects them from the assault of darkness.24 Following this demonstration of

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power the story rapidly closes, ending on the same page. The hurried and chaotic scenes that close Weirdstone suggest the children are unable to fully grasp the power inherent in the objects they temporarily possess. As Bennett notes of objects encountered in day-to-day situations, they issue a call even if we do not quite understand what they are saying.25 The occult objects imagined by Garner and Cooper allow for a momentary connection with thing-power, but elements of this thing-power resist articulation. Indeed, such objects never enter a fully integrated relationship with humans; they never become subordinate correlates of human subjectivity. The Weirdstone and signs of power are not man-made objects; they are forged from the landscape. Encounters with these objects disclose an occult(ed) natural world replete with what Thacker identifies as ‘magic sites’: places that allow an ‘anonymous unhuman intrusion of the hidden world into the apparent world’.26 At first, the landscape seems to be an anchor for the story and characters, producing a real sense of place. However, as a magic site in which doorways appear in hillsides and caves open into underground realms, the landscape is shot through with supernatural significance, becoming unstable. The children learn strange names for familiar places in a nominative blurring of the local with the fantastic that defamiliarises and decentres the human from the land. This is no longer the ‘world-for-us’ but a partially withdrawn reality to which humans acquire only oblique access. As Thacker asserts, the magic site ‘creeps forth with entities that are neither animate nor inanimate, neither organic nor inorganic, neither material nor ideal’. 27 Cooper and Garner’s landscapes likewise teem with strange entities and events: creatures called svarts, maggotbreed, and mara, as well as environmental conditions like the mysterious ‘fimbulwinter’, ethereal music and temporal loops. These features of the landscape blur neat categories found in dualist ontologies: the supernatural is neither fully accessible to human thought (thus, is anti-idealist), nor is it recuperable to dogmatic realism (and, so, is anti-empiricist). In both texts, then, there is a rejection of what Coole and Frost designate as a Cartesian and Newtonian concept of matter and subjectivity, in which the latter creates and dominates nature.28 Garner’s descriptions of the landscape and its strange creatures suggest the mutability of distinctions between inert matter and living organism. The mara exemplifies this problematisation of distinctions between the animate and inanimate, appearing as ‘a statue of polished malachite; but a statue that moved’.29 Beyond this refutation of philosophical dualisms, Garner and Cooper’s landscapes suggest a paradoxical revelation in which the hiddenness of the world-in-itself (withdrawn from human access) makes itself known. In a retrospective of the novel, Garner describes Alderley Edge as a a world of darkness and silence, so dark that you can see the lights of brain cells discharging; so silent that blood in the veins can be heard. Yet, shine a lamp and the eye is washed with colour; the colour of minerals with marvellous names: malachite, azurite, galena. They glisten in caves the size of a cathedral; and on the roof, there are the marks of ripples in the sand, of a sea upside down and hung to dry.30

This is the image of a body with brain, blood and veins, of a landscape that is vibrantly material yet shadowy and occulted. Garner evokes a sense of the

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numinous, a sense of the human confronting the world as wholly other, but he also recognises his embeddedness in the numinous. The account continues with Garner asserting that he came to ‘know his place’ through such encounters. His suggestion is that the land is not merely a backdrop for human activity, but that human activity itself is dwarfed and absorbed by something greater. Merriman, the Old One who mentors Will in The Dark Is Rising, scoffs at humanity’s attempt to shape the landscape for their own ends, suggesting that ‘forests are not biddable places’.31 In both novels, landscapes that characters know intimately suddenly become strange and threatening. In Weirdstone the children become trapped in the centre of a ring of stones, the land ‘shackling them in a net of blade and root, tight as a vice’.32 In The Dark Is Rising, Will is accosted by the powers of darkness and a familiar lane stretches weirdly before him, trees looming menacingly, becoming ‘murky, full of shadows’.33 Shadows and darkness are common tropes of high fantasy narratives that posit a conflict between good and evil, but Cooper and Garner venture beyond this dialectic, gesturing towards what Thacker calls a ‘superlative darkness’.34 In a dialectical conception, darkness is subsumed within its opposing term. However, superlative darkness lies beyond opposition: it is both anti-idealist and ­anti-empiricist because it intimates something that lies beyond experience and thought.35 Such darkness is resolutely non-human and non-metaphorical, inviting a surrender to what Thacker describes as negative transcendence.36 Garner and Cooper evoke superlative darkness though their journeys to the earth’s interior and in the evocation of a terrifying ‘cosmicism’ that threatens the dissipation of the self. Trapped underground in Weirdstone, Susan and Colin feel the darkness ‘pressed in from every side;’ they are completely alone as though ‘on a windless and starless night’.37 In The Dark Is Rising, Will stands in a protective circle of lighted candles. The light paradoxically reveals ‘nothing but blackness, the vast black emptiness of the awful long night […] This was the Dark, rising, rising to swallow him’.38 The idea of a darkness threatening to swallow the self represents negative transcendence: the understanding of something that cannot be understood. Garner evokes this idea when the wizard mysteriously warns the children ‘we are for the dark’.39 It is never clear exactly what the forces of darkness are, what they want or what they can do, but what is certain is that they are not delimited by a dialectic relationship with light. Instead, darkness pervades as an impersonal force underlying the landscape. In The Dark Is Rising Will feels the darkness in the strange behaviour of the rooks and the menace of the trees; it is a presence that threatens to consume but that also resides within in moments where his thoughts are not his own. In this sense, Will’s name echoes the concept of reality formulated by Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (first published in 1818). For Schopenhauer, writing against Kant, reality is not comprised of matter or individual objects, but comprises a hidden essence or striving working away under the representations human consciousness impose on reality: a ‘blind impulse, an obscure, dull urge, removed from all direct knowableness’.40 The blind striving of Will is unhuman; it has nothing to do with individual subjectivity. In a strange

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evocation of this unhuman agency, Robert MacFarlane’s Twitter reading group that aimed to celebrate Cooper’s novel during December 2017 used the hashtag #TheDarkisReading, offering an accidental but quite apt expression of the dissipation of human subjectivity intimated in these texts. Journeys to the darkness under the earth are also journeys backwards in time. In Weirdstone, the children meet Cadellin in Fundindelve, deep within Alderley Edge and, later, are chased through a vast network of caverns Garner embellished from his experience of archaeological excavations. In The Dark Is Rising, Will discovers his connection to the Old Ones by entering the Chiltern Hills through great wooden doors that appear from nowhere. These entrances and revelations echo Thacker’s suggestion that the ‘great outdoors’ is not only external, but lies ‘in the very fissures, lapses or lacunae in the world and the earth’.41 These fissures disclose both a spatial and temporal movement beyond human thought. Will returns to the past, seeing the landscape as it was hundreds of years ago, to find the secret location of the six signs. Likewise, Colin and Susan find depictions of men in animal skins daubed on the walls of the Fundindelve and the svarts carry hammers that evoke the bronze-age tools Garner excavated from the Edge. Yet, neither Garner nor Cooper seem interested in human archaeology, and objects from human history become attached to a world of occult strangeness, evoking a sense of deep time that is ‘as old as this land and even older than that’.42 Meillassoux’s term, the ‘great outdoors’ designates a similar spatial and temporal movement and a key cornerstone of his case against correlationism is the ‘ancestral argument’.43 Meillassoux discusses various scientific discoveries that provide evidence of the universe or the earth prior to human being. Such ‘archefossils’ lie outside any possible correlation of thought and world and so beyond the correlationist circle, showing that it is not the world that is contingent on thought, but thought that is contingent on the world. Archefossils appear in Cooper and Garner’s novels as supernatural objects or occult landmarks that evoke an unhuman temporality, which is both geological and cosmological. Garner places Susan and Colin within the vastness of geological time as they wander through caverns, tracing ‘veins of mineral that traced the turn of wind and wave upon a shore, twenty million years ago’.44 Likewise, when Will learns about the Old Ones by reading the Gramareye, an ancient magical text, he is transported into the darkness of deep time where he glimpses a timeless perspective that encompasses not only geological change, but the ‘dead stars’ and the ‘infinite emptiness’ of the cosmos.45 The traces of what Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi and subsequent critics of the Weird identify as ‘cosmicism’ emerge in these mid-century children’s through their speculations of an occulted materialist ontology.46 Despite their recourse to the humanist structures of high fantasy, incorporating a conflict between good and evil as well as the eventual triumph of a group of heroes, Cooper and Garner’s figurations of strangely vibrant objects emerging from an occulted landscape, of a superlative darkness gesturing beyond thought and experience, and their insistence on an unhuman temporality, undercut the more typical elements of fantasy. This is evident in confused climactic sequences in which the child heroes exert little agency in the face of the roaring powers of darkness and nature, only just

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managing to hold back the tide with little conception of how they have done so. As the next section explores, twenty-first-century-children’s Gothic takes up these occult themes with gusto, marrying them with a more explicitly Weird ontology. In Celia Rees’ The Stone Testament (2008) children from across the globe, come together to face catastrophe. Rather than describe a conflict between powers of light and dark within a local geography as in Garner and Cooper’s work, Rees’ novel proposes that ‘the very fabric of the world was steadily being unstitched’ and transposes the stakes of the fantasy to a cosmic scale.47 Rees’ is one of the few authors of twenty-first-century children’s Gothic who develops elements of Silver Age fantasy alongside a more explicit engagement with the Weird. The Stone Testament references writer S. T. Joshi and canonises in his seminal work, The Weird Tale (1990), and includes other references to Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce. Rees draws on elements of this early Weird fiction to unleash horror on a global and cosmic scale, threatening to make the world ‘unrecognizable, swept clean of humankind’ in homage to the anti-humanist writing of H. P. Lovecraft.48 Likewise, Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series (2005–2014) pits its child protagonists against ‘The Old Ones,’ a race of cosmic beings who seek to reclaim dominance over the earth through the destruction and enslavement of humanity. The name ‘Old Ones’ evokes Cooper, of course, but is more likely a direct reference to Lovecraft’s fiction and the ‘Cthulhu mythos’ that it engendered. Following Lovecraft’s short story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1926) both Rees and Horowitz hinge the crisis of their fantasy narratives on a ‘cosmic’ alignment of stars and planets that signals the resurgence of ancient and unhuman powers. These Weird plots are distinct from other gothic and darkly fantastic works and they undercut traditional hero narratives that tend to dominate children’s fiction. As I have argued elsewhere, the Weird offers few opportunities for heroism since most characters die or go insane, its treatment of human knowledge as woefully inadequate (epistemological horror) likewise rejects the ‘fortunate fall’ narrative found in literary fantasies, and its monsters are not easily assimilated nor expelled as is usual in gothic fiction since they signal a materiality beyond and yet encompassing the human (ontological horror).49 However, the emergence of the Weird in children’s fiction is not a break with tradition as its roots lie in the occult materialism found in Garner and Cooper’s gothic fantasies. Occult materialism gestures towards an ontology of the unhuman, offering glimpses of a world-without-us and of the strange independent vitality of objects through an engagement with local folklore, the physical landscape and the trappings of the occult. Whilst such fiction is keen to contain the darkness it reveals, the Weird relishes its revelation of ontological and epistemological horror as it imagines ‘spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part’.50 Rees and Horowitz’s incorporation of the Weird prompts an encounter for child protagonists with a universe they cannot recognise. In Thacker’s terminology, this universe figures as a superlative darkness, a darkness beyond representation and thought. Such darkness encompasses time and space when, for example, Rees describes echoes of messages reaching her child protagonists ‘from a remoteness in time and space […]

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impossible to even contemplate’.51 Horowitz evokes superlative darkness beyond thought and representation with Lovecraftian indescribable monsters that manifest as a ‘black hole in outer space’.52 Although these stories stage a conflict in which heroic child protagonists must attempt to hold back such darkness, the characters remain ‘perilously close to the abyss’ throughout the narrative.53 In this way, Rees and Horowitz evoke what China Miéville identifies as the ‘ineluctability of the Weird’.54 This is a radically different kind of horror than that evoked by dialectic conceptions of evil that operate in high fantasy or the ghostly or uncanny machinations of classic gothic fiction. The unhuman temporality intimated in Cooper and Garner’s work is developed by Rees and Horowitz through multiple timelines to which children have access. Rees’ ‘Elder Time’ imagines an unknown human civilisation, ruled by ‘beast gods’ from a Weird teratology, that predates any recorded human history. She suggests a sense of impossible timescales, referring to a ‘mythical time in an unknown age of the world’.55 Horowitz likewise references the coming of the Old Ones in ‘Atlantean’ times in a civilisation subsequently destroyed from human records.56 These Weird histories offer a version of Meillassoux’s concept of the ‘ancestral,’ positing a reality anterior to recognisable forms of life on earth. Horowitz and Rees incorporate human characters into their ‘elder’ timelines, making use of the ‘time slip’ mechanism popular in children’s fiction. They also focus on the strange power of objects that originate from in the deep past: ‘artefacts that didn’t fit the archaeological record’.57 In The Stone Testament, much of the plot revolves around a crystal skull that exists across timelines and ‘whispers’ its secret to the priest of the Beast Gods so that he might bring about the ‘End Time’.58 This focus on ancient objects resonates with speculative realists who want to find ways to think ‘facts’ outside the correlationist circle and recalls the concept of thing-power elucidated by Jane Bennett. The reference to mythical civilisations such as ‘Atlantis’ and the requirement for dreaming and trance-states to access these ancestral temporalities shift away from Meillassoux’s marrying of philosophy with scientific empiricism in his notion of the ‘archefossil’ and ‘factial’ ontology,59 to the realms of the supernatural and fantastic explored by Thacker and Harman. Rees and Horowitz develop the notions of deep time found in Cooper and Garner’s work, which depends upon folklore and local archaeologies, by hybridising a Weird ‘secret history’ of the world with the outlandish theories of popular pseudoarchaeology from the mid-late twentieth century, including Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968) and Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1998). Such modern pseudoarchaeology recalls imperialist and eurocentric conceptions of world history found in nineteenth-century works such as Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) and imperialist suggestions that ‘primitive’ peoples were not capable of creating the complex structures and artefacts uncovered at archaeological sites in Africa, South America and elsewhere. Rees and Horowitz sidestep some of the racism implicit in such works of pseudoarchaeology by concocting a Weird mash-up that connects cultures, histories and mythologies in horizontal and non-hierarchical relationships, drawing together child hero protagonists from across the globe. In Evil Star (2006), for

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example, Horowitz posits that the Nazca lines are a warning left by a sophisticated native South American culture (not aliens) who had knowledge of the coming cosmic alignment signalling the return of the Old Ones. The children must work with local experts and a western academic to understand the mystery of the lines.60 Nonetheless, this recourse to a ‘secret history’ of the earth popular in the Weird and in works of pseudoarchaeology is clearly not without its problems and risks both cultural appropriation and reinforcing hierarchies such as East/West and Primitive/Civilised. Indeed, Jason Colavito has argued that pseudoarchaeology itself is indebted the racist assumptions at the heart of Lovecraft’s stories, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1926) and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1931).61 In addition to a sense of ‘elder time’ that reimagines accepted histories of global human civilisation, Rees and Horowitz further develop unhuman temporality through the suggestion that time itself is non-linear. Both authors posit a temporal loop in which present-day characters are pulled back into the past or else must repeat events from the past to safeguard the future of humanity. Horowitz represents this as a form of simultaneous reincarnation. The child protagonists comprise five ‘gatekeepers’ existing both in the past and the present. The death of a child in one timeline results in their being ‘replaced immediately’ with their counterpart from the other timeline.62 Horowitz also creates a ‘dreamworld’ where characters can access knowledge of the different timelines and communicate with one another across time and space. The various doorways that exist at sites of importance around the world allow for instantaneous travel in time and space, too. Rees plays similar games with ‘local realist’ conceptions of time and space, though she more explicitly draws on popular accounts of quantum physics and names Stephen Hawking in the acknowledgements.63 The strange powers of archefossils, such as the crystal skull, persist across timelines. The High Priest of the Beast Gods, for example, believes the skull will bide its time ‘age after age’, waiting for him to find it again.64 Rees’ dual timeline narrative shows simultaneous events in the past and the present influencing one another. Her recourse to quantum physics in this rewriting of causality chimes with the new materialist theories of Karen Barad, who draws on Niels Bohr and the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum physics to elucidate a non-linear and relational material ontology. One of Barad’s arguments is that time is not ‘given’ in the way humans perceive it to be but is articulated in material practices. Past, present and future are, in fact, entangled with one another and causality is the result of intra- and inter-connections made by matter.65 In this quantum and material temporality, it does not necessarily follow that the past precedes the present which precedes the future, an idea shared with Will by an Old One guide in The Dark Is Rising: ‘For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future […] But men cannot understand this’.66 Whilst Cooper imagines events occurring simultaneously such that Will might revisit the past to find the six signs, Rees’ simultaneity threatens the fabric of reality. As the ‘Elder’ timeline progresses, the present in which the book began is rewritten or, rather unwritten. Rees’ accompanies this complex narrative temporality with metafictional playfulness and extracts

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from a ‘found manuscript’ referencing a canon of Weird fiction, Brice’s ‘Stone Testament,’ provides commentary on the unravelling story in the form of extracts and epitaphs. By the close of the novel, the stone testament (the title of the novel and a book-within-a-book) becomes merely the ‘ravings of a madman’ in the new story-world into which the protagonist Adam awakens, his memories of the Elder Time fading as a dream.67 Rees’ playfulness with written narrative evokes Joshi’s account of the Weird, especially Bierce and Lovecraft, as evoking epistemological horror.68 The positive ending, though, goes beyond epistemological horror, according with Barad’s ethical account of temporality. Rees’ interconnected space-time suggests the importance of the past and its persistence in the present (a recurrent gothic theme) as well as the more radical idea that actions in the present might respond in reparative and recuperative ways to the injustices of the past. The politics of Rees’ and Horowitz’s Weird speculations also emerge in the expansive scale of the scenarios they imagine. Whereas ‘magic sites’ in Cooper and Garner’s novels were localised and ‘supernatural’ effects emanating from them limited to specific geographies (the Thames Valley, Alderley Edge), Rees and Horowitz imagine interconnected magic sites around the globe. The function of the magic site in these twenty-first-century texts is similar to those found in the Silver Age fiction and accords with Thacker’s description of a space that paradoxically reveals a hidden world-without-us. However, Cooper and Horowitz draw on the occultism of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ in their rendering of such spaces as portals or gateways, sites that mark but also threaten borders between human and unhuman, what Rees’ characters describe as ‘a crack in the world’.69 Both sets of novels begin in the UK, evoking a British pre-Christian landscape at sites such as ‘Ringmere Hall’ in The Stone Testament and ‘Raven’s Gate’ in the first Power of Five novel. The latter comprises an ancient stone circle in North Yorkshire encased within a nuclear reactor that is revealed to be a sinister portal to ‘another world’ waiting to be unlocked by worshippers of the Old Ones.70 The cultists’ plot is foiled (only just) and the novel closes with a nuclear explosion that engulfs the portal and the creatures that lurk beyond in smoke, deadly gases, flames and a torrent of light. Matt’s sense of relief at the ordeal being over, however, is short-lived, and the final chapter, titled ‘The Man from Peru’, reveals a plethora of such sites across the world. Horowitz’s catastrophe at a nuclear site dabbles with the imagery of apocalypse and the theme of ecological disaster, which are subsequently reinforced by the global scale of the ensuing novels. The scaling-up of the imagined threat to humanity lurking in a world beyond perception and the proliferation of interconnected magic sites across multiple continents leads both Rees and Horowitz to imagine possible futures of barren landscapes from which human habitation and animal and plant life have been annihilated. In this sense they refigure the theses of pseudoarchaeology books, which argue that ‘mysterious’ archaeological sites hold secrets from the past, instead suggesting that such places are portents and epicentres of impending disaster. In Evil Star, a plethora of Weird monstrosities erupt from the ground beneath the Nazca lines, forming the vanguard of a coming global war between humanity and the Old Ones.71 Scenes in Horowtiz’s subsequent novels describe a scorched earth and piles of mutilated bodies. Rees also imagines

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a cosmic alignment bringing about a great ‘perturbation,’ drawing on biblical imagery of a great flood.72 Here the folkloric ‘occult materialism’ found in Cooper and Garner meets a twenty-first-century concern with the disasters wrought by the ‘anthropocene’ and with climate change catastrophe found in so-called ‘Cli Fi’ exemplified by writers like Margaret Attwood and Nathaniel Rich. The problem with Cli-Fi is its recourse to a potentially paralysing ‘ecophobia’ that is amplified by the pessimistic ‘Cosmicism’ found in Weird fiction. Simon Estok identifies ecophobia as an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world found in documentary, news media and climate change fiction, narrative forms that often reinscribe the very ethics that they question.73 In the Weird, cosmic horror amplifies elements of ecophobia both in the monstrous physical bodies of creatures like the Old Ones or the Beast Gods, which Rees describes as ‘creatures of flesh and blood […] not Gods at all,’ and in the threat of global mass extinction and imagery of blasted landscapes.74 Elsewhere, I have argued that children’s Weird explores the potential pleasures of oblivion in the promised disintegration of its hero protagonists, a theme exemplified by Horowitz’s final Power of Five novel.75 Here, I wonder if these pleasures represent also a turning away from the ethical demands such images of catastrophe evoke. This chapter has traced an unusual history of children’s gothic fiction, finding connections between Silver Age fantasies by Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and twenty-first-century adaptations of the Weird by Anthony Horowitz and Celia Rees. My reading of these texts offers an alternative to anthropocentric, mythopoetic or psychological interpretations of children’s fantasy, instead identifying elements of gothic and supernatural horror, placing these in dialogue with contemporary philosophical speculation. The texts discussed herein gesture towards a revelation Meillassoux discusses in the writings that prompted the ‘speculative’ turn. That is, the ‘ontological truth hidden behind the radical skepticism of modern philosophy: to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact’.76 This is the revelation that the independent inexistence of the ‘in-itself’ paradoxically includes the human. Despite the ‘withdrawn’ or occulted nature of the noumenal ‘worldin-itself,’ this world contains the human. Or, to express it differently, the human is embedded within an unhuman realm that philosophies of correlation seal from access. Such is one reading available in Merriman’s pronouncement to Will in The Dark Is Rising, that he is ‘not bound by the laws of the Universe as we know them’.77 This idea finds a different expression in each of the texts discussed, though in twenty-first-century Weird it leads to a vertiginous sense of potential annihilation. Just before the hopeful closing note of Rees’ novel, Adam swims in and out of consciousness imagining himself at the edge of a cliff ready to ‘plunge’ into the darkness, into ‘the cold that will go on for infinity’.78 Yet, these children’s works do not only contemplate the superlative darkness found in speculative realist writings because they also propose ideas that accord with new, eco- and feminist materialist thought, especially with thinkers like Coole and Frost, Alaimo and Bennett who seek to decentre the human in an attempt to rethink our relationship with materiality. Silver Age fantasies pre-empt this (re)turn to materiality in their new-age-inspired concern with the natural landscape and with the thing-power that

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inheres in ‘vibrant’ objects. Such ‘occult materialism’ provides the inspiration for ­twenty-first writers who add Lovecraftian and Weird elements into the mix. Of course, speculative realism and new materialism make uneasy bedfellows and drawing on both in this chapter has opened ethical questions about the narratives found in modern children’s Gothic. New Materialism is more alert to the ethical implications of philosophical speculation. Barad, for example, elucidates a metaphysics in which ethics precedes ontology because of the relational nature of material reality.79 Stacey Alaimo follows Barad by insisting upon the activism that her material ontology implies.80 In contrast, speculative realism is ‘not keen on situating itself in political and ethical debates’.81 Furthermore, thinkers like Harman and Thacker evoke Lovecraftian fiction as an exemplary philosophical writer without questioning the implicit and explicit racism of his works. The dangers of drawing on a Lovecraftian-inspired Weird, then, as both Rees and Horowitz do, is two-fold. First, it risks unthinkingly reproducing the racist and imperialist ideologies that underpin aspects of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. Second, a pessimistic anti-humanism that imagines a lone figure confronting the vastness of indifferent or antagonistic universe perversely reinscribes humanist hierarchies and absolves humans from intervening in the reality they help to produce, instead promising catastrophic oblivion. In some senses, Rees and Horowitz avoid the Lovecraftian aporia by staging conflicts in which their protagonists must ‘stay with the trouble’ (to borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway) no matter the cost. They also offer a more diverse cast of characters and begin to refigure Orientalist assumptions and European ethnocentric accounts of world histories. There is more to do here, and I look forward to future works of philosophically engaged children’s Gothic that tackle the complex ethics at work in these debates. What these fictions do, in any case, is assert the value of imaginative speculation alongside dense philosophical theses. The hybridising of fantasy, Gothic and the Weird provides fertile ground for exploring the speculation found in a number of contemporary philosophical works. Indeed, such imaginative work is a vital part of how we attempt to conceive of, and connect with, spatial and temporal realms beyond the human.

Notes

1. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’ in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–46, p. 2. 2. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 3. 3. Stacey Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 1. 4. Stacey Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, p. 1. 5. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), pp. 24–27, 10. 6. Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 5–7.

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7. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), pp. 6–7. 8. Chloé Germaine Buckley, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: From the Wanderer to the Nomadic Subject (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 174. 9. Henri Bergson, ‘The Creative Mind’ in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. by Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002), 223–282, pp. 224–226. 10. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 9. 11. Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), p. 6. 12. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising (London: Random House, 1994), p. 19. 13. Ursula Le Guin, ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie [1973]’ in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. by David Sander (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 144–155, p. 153. 14. Peter Hunt, ‘Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy,’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16:1 (1987), 11–14 (p. 11). 15. Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003), p. 102. 16. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 7. 17. Timothy Jones, ‘“This Hill Is Still Dangerous”: Alan Garner’s Weirdstone Trilogy—A Hauntology’ in New Directions in Children’s Gothic: Debatable Lands, ed. by Anna Jackson (London: Routledge, 2017), 176–188, p. 179. 18. Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter, pp. 100, 101. 19. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 49; Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 53. 20. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. xvi. 21. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 279. 22. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 15. 23. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, pp. 283–284. 24. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 284. 25. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 4. 26. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 82. 27. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 82. 28. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms,’ p. 7. 29. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 213. 30. Garner, Alan, ‘High Up on the Edge I Ran to Rouse the Devil from His Grave; Marking the 50th Anniversary of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen,’ The Times, 1 October 2010: News: p. 18. 31. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 68. 32. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 77. 33. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 80. 34. Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse, p. 39. 35. Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse, p. 40. 36. Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse, p. 42. 37. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 123. 38. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 60. 39. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 87. 40. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, trans. by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 149. 41. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 8. 42. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 47. 43. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 1–26. 44. Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 123.

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45. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 131. 46. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 1990), p. 186. 47. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament (London: Scholastic, 2007), p. 240. 48. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament (London: Scholastic, 2007), p. 240. 49. Chloé Germaine Buckley, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic, p. 174. 50. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature [1927],’ HPLOVECRAFT.COM, available from: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx (last accessed 21 March 2017). 51. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 296. 52. Anthony Horowitz, Night Rise (London: Walker Books, 2007), p. 290. 53. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 250. 54. China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’ in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (London: Routledge, 2009), 510–517, p. 512. 55. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 240. 56. Anthony Horowitz, Oblivion (London: Walker Books, 2012), p. 98. 57. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 103. 58. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 355. 59. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 16–18, 79–81. 60. Anthony Horowitz, Evil Star (London: Walker Books, 2006), pp. 281–285. 61. Jason Colavito, ‘Charioteer of the Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and the Invention of Ancient Astronauts,’ Skeptic 10.4 (2004), available from: https://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/04-04-26/ (last accessed 14 March 2019). 62. Anthony Horowitz, Oblivion, p. 109. 63. One assumption of local realism is that no influence can propagate faster than the speed of light. This has been theoretically and empirically challenged by quantum physicists. See John Gribbin, In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (London: Wildwood, 1984), pp. 222–223. 64. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 398. 65. Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/ Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,’ Derrida Today 3:2 (2010): 240–268. 66. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 67. 67. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 416. 68. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale, p. 7. 69. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 145. 70. Anthony Horowitz, Raven’s Gate (London: Walker, 2005), p. 258. 71. Anthony Horowitz, Evil Star, p. 334. 72. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 294. 73. Simon Estok, ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia,’ Neohelicon 43: 1 (2016): 127–145. 74. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 281. 75. Chloé Germaine Buckley, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic, p. 196. 76. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Time Without Becoming,’ lecture at Middlesex University, 8 May 2008, available from: https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_ without_becoming.pdf (last accessed 14 March 2019), p. 9. 77. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising, p. 122. 78. Celia Rees, The Stone Testament, p. 415. 79. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 139. 80. Stacey Alaimo, Exposed, p. 133. 81. Rick Dolphijn, ‘Review of Review of Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, by Peter Gratton,’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (29 March 2016), available from: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/speculative-realism-problems-and-prospects/ (last accessed 14 March 2019).

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Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Barad, Karen, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/ Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,’ Derrida Today 3:2 (2010), 240–268. Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Bergson, Henri, ‘The Creative Mind’ in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. by Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 223–282. Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: HarperCollins, 1988). Colavito, Jason, ‘Charioteer of the Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and the Invention of Ancient Astronauts,’ Skeptic 10.4 (2004). Available from: https://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/04-04-26/ (last accessed 14 March 2019). Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’ in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–46. Cooper, Susan, The Dark Is Rising (London: Random House, 1994). Dolphijn, Rick, ‘Review of Review of Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, by Peter Gratton,’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (29 March 2016). Available from: https://ndpr. nd.edu/news/speculative-realism-problems-and-prospects/ (last accessed 14 March 2019). Estok, Simon C. ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia,’ Neohelicon 43:1 (2016), 127–145. Garner, Alan, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Garner, Alan, ‘High Up on the Edge I Ran to Rouse the Devil from His Grave; Marking the 50th anniversary of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen,’ The Times, 1 October 2010: News: p. 18. Germaine Buckley, Chloe. Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: From the Wanderer to the Nomadic Subject (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Gratton, Peter. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Gribbin, John, In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (London: Wildwood, 1984). Harman, Graham, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011). Horowitz, Anthony, Evil Star (London: Walker Books, 2006). Horowitz, Anthony, Night Rise (London: Walker Books, 2007). Horowitz, Anthony, Oblivion (London: Walker Books, 2012). Hunt, Peter, ‘Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy,’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16:1 (1987), 11–14. Jones, Timothy, ‘“This Hill Is Still Dangerous”: Alan Garner’s Weirdstone Trilogy–A Hauntology’ in New Directions in Children’s Gothic: Debatable Lands, ed. by Anna Jackson (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 176–188. Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 1990). Le Guin, Ursula, ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie [1973]’ in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. by David Sander (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), pp. 144–155. Lovecraft, H. P, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature [1927]’ HPLOVECRAFT.COM (last accessed 21 March 2017). Manlove, Colin, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003). Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).

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Miéville, China, ‘Weird Fiction’ in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 510–517. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Time Without Becoming,’ lecture at Middlesex University, 8 May 2008. Available from: https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_ becoming.pdf (last accessed 14 March 2019). Rees, Celia, The Stone Testament (London: Scholastic, 2007). Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, trans. by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). Thacker, Eugene, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011). Thacker, Eugene, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015).

Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult Fiction Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult (YA) literature emerged as a genre following the Second World War, fostered by the rise of teenage culture in the United States. Unlike children’s literature, YA literature was distinctive on its emergence because it largely focused on realism and social issues. As Roberta Seelinger Trites influentially explains, YA literature places a protagonist in “some form of conflict with authority” and in the process “learns something about institutional accommodation within a family, a school, or a social group”.1 With the origins of the genre in exploring young people’s power, or lack of it, in relation to real-world coming-of-age dilemmas relating to class, race, drugs, and sexuality, among others, the Gothic was not a prominent mode in YA literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century, however, has seen a marked increase in the gothic themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality in fiction for young adults. This chapter examines how gothic traditions are repurposed and reconfigured for young people, with a focus on how the gender of the protagonist impacts upon the narrative. We consider two vampire novels with human female narrators and two novels with somewhat monstrous male narrators (one a zombie and the other a young Victor Frankenstein) to examine how the genre remains preoccupied with the patriarchal threat posed to young women while simultaneously attempting to understand and humanise the monster. In the novels with girl narrators, their romantic encounters and sexuality are at the forefront, distinguishing them from those of the male narrators, whose romantic desires coexist with lofty ambitions to change the world. In comparing these two types of narratives, both of which continue to reinforce gothic norms of girls as victims in need of protection from sexual threat, we suggest that the YA Gothic tends to reinforce conservative patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality for implied girl readers. M. J. Smith (*)  Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Moruzi  Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

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Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) is one of the most well-known examples of YA Gothic fiction and is part of a corpus of hundreds of texts published in the genre since the turn of the century. These texts encompass a diverse range of subgenres, such as paranormal romance, school story, and historical ­fiction. A substantial number of these novels also sit within series, a feature that distinguishes YA Gothic through the length of the ongoing narratives that are less common in gothic fiction targeted at adult readers. Each of the novels we consider in this chapter, Meyer’s Twilight (2005), Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy (2007), Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010), and Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour (2011), are the first instalments in series that feature familiar gothic figures: vampires, zombies, and Victor Frankenstein.2 YA Gothic is a particularly rich area for investigation because it is a crucible for recent shifts in gothic fiction more broadly. The Gothic is constantly being reinvented in ways that address the current historical moment. Nina Auerbach explains that “every age embraces the vampire it needs”,3 but Glennis Byron and Sharon Deans also suggest that “each age group does so too”.4 Moreover, both Gothic and Young Adult fiction are preoccupied with liminality and the taboos surrounding the crossing of boundaries or borders between states. David Punter, for example, identifies adolescence as “integral” to the Gothic, because it is a period in which “there is a fantasised inversion of boundaries”: “To put it very simply: we exist on a terrain where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden”.5 In this way, YA Gothic, which has not typically figured in broader criticism and theorisation of the genre— as Debra Dudek observes in relation to vampire fiction6—heightens anxieties and excitement about the crossing of boundaries. There has been a turn towards the Gothic in fiction for young people in the past two decades. In 2008, in the first edited collection about the Gothic in children’s literature, Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis observed that the Gothic had become “mainstream” and “the dominant mode of enjoyment” in children’s books.7 Coats goes as far as to suggest that the Gothic is “the dominant aesthetic category in youth publishing today”.8 Historically, this has not been the case, with children’s literature tending to emerge out of realist or fantastic generic conventions. Byron and Deans suggest that what they term the “teen Gothic” was popularised in the late twentieth century, following trends in adult fiction, such as the popularity of Anne Rice’s vampire novels in the 1970s and 1980s.9 Nevertheless, until the early 2000s, YA fiction did not have significant market share, popularity with adult readers, or high-profile film and television adaptations. One reason for the relatively recent increase in popularity is the changing culture of texts for young adults to include more explicit discussions of tragic outcomes including death, as well as greater explorations of sexual desire for young people.10 While anxieties about the distinction between self and other breaking down have been historically central to the genre, the monstrous protagonist or love interest in YA Gothic changes the nature of this fear. As Punter and Byron explain in

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relation to vampire fiction, the “formally dichotomized structures of belief” that separated good and evil in the fiction of the nineteenth century have been treated with increasing scepticism since the late twentieth century.11 The relocation of the Gothic into the everyday in much contemporary YA fiction contributes to this collapse of the traditional opposition between self and other. One of the most common conventions of the first wave of gothic fiction was a setting replete with decaying historical buildings in Europe, and subsequently, Britain.12 Historical YA Gothic like This Dark Endeavour can easily draw on these familiar conventions through a European setting and mysterious architectural features located in old dwellings. The central plot of the novel is prompted by young Victor’s discovery of a hidden “Dark Library”, which contains alchemical secrets, at the Frankenstein home in Geneva. More commonly, however, recent YA Gothic fiction relocates the strange and the threatening to the mundane realities of contemporary city or small-town life. In YA fiction, suburban life and school settings reflect many teens’ realities, but the Gothic disrupts the regulation, restriction, and order that these quotidian aspects ordinarily impose. Twilight is set in the “inconsequential” small town of Forks in Washington State.13 In Warm Bodies, the order, security, and safety of airports post-9/11 are entirely dismantled when swarms of zombies gravitate towards one as their base, from which they travel to kill and eat humans. Moreover, a place of recreation, a sports stadium, becomes a walled fortress in which humans attempt to protect themselves from the zombie hordes. The predominance of YA Gothic narratives set in the contemporary United States nevertheless poses a challenge in terms of the typical, yet anachronistic, gothic settings of a historic or ruined building, such as a castle or abbey. However, similar buildings are often recreated in gothic fiction set in schools. In Vampire Academy, St Vladimir’s school has been built by the vampire Moroi in the “same style” as “the ones back in Europe”, with “almost churchlike architecture, with high peaks and stone carvings”.14 The importance of Europe to symbolically tap into the veracity that history provides in the Gothic are also significant in relation to its human protagonists, who are mostly of European or British descent: the Moroi and their dhampir (half-vampire, half-human) guardians are of Russian and Romanian heritage, while protagonist Rose Hathaway’s mother is Scottish and her father reportedly was Turkish. The royal status of many Moroi similarly provides a connection with old-world traditions and rituals, with the tiara-wearing Queen Tatiana’s name recalling the Russian Romanov dynasty. Whether set in the past or present, a small town or an enclosed setting with historical resonances, one consistent element across these novels is the protagonist’s romantic, and often sexual, desire, for a member of the opposite sex. While the critical preoccupation with Twilight can produce a skewed understanding of the YA Gothic,15 it is a crucial text not only because it is one of the highest-selling series for young people of all time, but also because the vampire features disproportionately as the focus of YA Gothic fiction. In comparison with the dozens of other potential monsters, such as werewolves, ghosts, zombies, witches, fairies, and fallen angels, a cursory count of a broad number of YA Gothic novels published since 2000 listed on Goodreads and the sites of major

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booksellers suggests that at least half feature vampires. This is unsurprising for at least two reasons: first, the obvious metaphoric sexual resonance of the vampire bite; and, second, the way in which the vampire-state mirrors the liminality of the teenage years. Vampiric desires can enable exploration of first sexual encounters without troubling adult expectations surrounding depictions of sexual intercourse in texts for young people. Twilight fits this model in that it delays sex between the human protagonist, Bella Swan, and her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, until the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn (2008), when the pair is married. Even then, after the reader has already covered over a thousand pages of the series, the loss of Bella’s virginity is not narrated: only her bruised body, the physical damage done to her nightgown and the bed headboard, and Bella’s unelaborated assurance that the sex was great are noted in the aftermath. The title “Twilight” refers to the brief shoulder of time between day and night, a clear parallel with the period of adolescence through which children must pass to become adults. Edward remarks that twilight is the “safest” and “easiest” time of day for vampires, but “also the saddest, in a way…the end of another day, the return of the night”.16 The upsetting and traumatic aspects of sexual and social development through the teen years are implicit in the sadness of twilight, as well as the difficulties of letting go of a childhood that has just passed and the unavoidable coming of adulthood. For YA Gothic fiction, a crucial aspect of provoking maturation requires removal of parental figures such that the protagonist is free to confront and survive supernatural threats. In Twilight, Bella’s freedom to act is prompted by her decision to move away from the home of her mother (and her mother’s new partner) to live with her policeman father who is often busy with work and “doesn’t hover”.17 Vampire fiction is bound by specific gothic conventions and mythology, but these are frequently recast in self-aware references to the “real” conditions of vampires in contemporary narratives. As Catherine Spooner points out, teen readers are familiar with these conventions “and subject them to critical scrutiny and ironic investigation” rendering the YA Gothic “more Northanger Abbey than The Mysteries of Udolpho”.18 Twilight, for example, reworks the mythology of vampires being unable to walk in daylight and sleeping in coffins: Edward can attend high school as a regular student but does not sleep. The Cullen’s home is not a dark lair like Dracula’s castle; as Edward remarks, “No coffins, no piled skulls in corners; I don’t even think we have cobwebs”.19 There are pragmatic reasons for the removal of the most obvious markers and physical limitations of vampirism, such as being unable to move during the day, in that they would prevent teen protagonists interacting with them and would draw external attention from ordinary suburban residents. In contrast, Vampire Academy utilises the segregated space of the boarding school to overcome the challenges of a contemporary setting in which vampires must maintain a nocturnal schedule. The isolation of the vampire schools, in which the windows are blocked out and night-time movements accommodated, enables the mass congregation of vampires, rather than the secluded beings of most canonical gothic fiction. The “normalising” of the vampire is nevertheless evident in Mead’s vampires’ ability to enter into churches, with

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the sacrilegious aspects of the monster no longer as powerful in a more secular society. Both series, however, acknowledge the threat of the vampire in their references to ways to kill them (silver stakes in Vampire Academy and being torn to shreds and burnt in Twilight). In order to depict a less monstrous vampire who can also serve as a love interest, YA Gothic often draws a distinction between “good” and “bad” monsters. Debra Dudek’s recent monograph The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them (2017) explores the subject of “beloved vampires”, such as Edward, who are capable of “sustained, mutual love” with a human.20 Beloved vampires, she suggests, represent a development of the sympathetic vampire, a figure more likely to be associated with fleeting eroticism rather than “sustained love”.21 Twilight replicates the familiar good/evil dichotomy within the category of the monstrous through the contrast between the refined Cullens, who consciously choose to avoid killing humans and can therefore settle in a populated area, and more traditional vampires who roam and hunt their prey. Vampire Academy also distinguishes more moral and less threatening vampires through separating the Strigoi, vampires who have “turned to the dark side to gain immortality”, from the Moroi.22 The Strigoi are marked out as evil because they are “dead vampires”, unlike the “living Moroi”, and because they require Moroi blood to increase their strength and consequently attack Moroi vampire academies.23 Any Moroi can become a Strigoi if they take what is referred to as the “dark path” by intentionally killing a person while feeding. In contrast with the most influential of vampire novels, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which the prevention of Mina Harker being transformed into a vampire is the chief aim of the “Band of Light”, Twilight is exemplary of contemporary novels in which protagonists actively contemplate the allure and pitfalls of willingly becoming a vampire to join a vampire lover. This kind of human/supernatural relationship is made possible because of the attempts these novels make to understand vampires and distance them from monstrosity, as the boundary between the human self and supernatural other collapses. Edward and his vampire family hunt animals to suppress their desire and need for blood, and he explicitly warns Bella of the danger he poses while also emphasising that he does not “want to be a monster”.24 The story of Edward’s transformation also renders him sympathetic; as he lay dying of Spanish flu in a hospital at a teenager in 1918, he was found by Carlisle, the vampire who turned him. The child vampire, like Anne Rice’s Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (1976), who was turned at the age five, is in some respects more horrific than a dead child; their bodies are forever trapped in youth and yet their necessary brutality transgresses sacred ideas about childhood innocence. The teenage vampire with an adult body, however, as Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman suggest, denies “the corruption of the grave” through his or her “everlasting youth, beauty, and vitality”.25 While Meyer’s vampires are pale with dark shadows under their eyes, they are also “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful” like models in “a fashion magazine”.26 The comparison of the vampires to models and movie stars is one of the strongest signs of the intended desirability of Meyer’s vampires, assuming the qualities

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of celebrities. The Cullen family dress in designer clothing and drive expensive new cars, signalling their financial and cultural capital, particularly through the consumption of the right brands. While the trope of the vampire with heightened beauty was popularised by Rice’s novels from the 1970s, the emphasis on appearance among young people in high school is particularly heightened. At a time of anxiety about their developing bodies, becoming a supernatural being who is free from physical awkwardness and blemishes can seem like a desirable way to transcend anxieties about appearance. However, this physical allure also allows the monster to deceive potential victims. Alice, a member of Edward’s vampire “family”, points out that their beauty is like that of a “carnivorous flower” in order to make them “physically attractive to our prey”.27 The vampires who pose a threat to Bella are marked out as different not only because they are likened to animals (“Their walk was catlike”), but also because of their lack of fashionable dress; they wear “the ordinary gear of backpackers: jeans and casual button-down shirts in heavy, weatherproof fabrics”.28 Like the Cullens, the vampires in Vampire Academy are also extraordinarily beautiful. Central character Lissa Dragomir, a Moroi, looks “more like an angel than a vampire”, with the implication that a more attractive and innocent appearance translates to a lesser threat.29 The series shifts the dynamic of vampire danger to humans—posed by their need for blood— through the fetishisation of vampires. Human “feeders” actively volunteer to be drained of blood and derive pleasure from the vampires’ saliva when bitten, in the manner of a drug addict, meaning that vampires have no need to attack unsuspecting humans.30 Ironically, it is the full-blooded Morois who are in danger from Strigoi vampires, which requires dhampirs, like protagonist Rose Hathaway, to serve as guardians. The transformations inherent in girls’ sexual development are particularly resonant with gothic conventions, which helps to explain the predominance of female protagonists and implied female readers in the YA Gothic. As Jackson, Coats, and McGillis suggest, moments of physical transition— “menarche, marriage, childbirth, etc., marked as they are by blood, submission, loss of a firm sense of one’s former identity, and loss of control”— are all perhaps best represented by gothic motifs.31 Moreover, as the overwhelming majority of vampires in YA fiction are male,32 the vampire boy who is no longer grotesque and Othered presents an opportunity for female protagonists to explore their emerging sexual desires rather than to be pursued as prey. Nevertheless, this space for exploration can serve to amplify the boundary crossing of first sexual experiences through the added taboo of transgressing the human/non-human divide. Conversely, it can enable deferment and delay of sexual exploration given the added dangers posed by monstrous— even if physically attractive—suitors. Twilight has been frequently maligned in feminist readings that point to Bella’s status as a victim and her preoccupation with Edward. As Kristine Moruzi notes elsewhere, in the novel “the ability of the gothic to provide a strong postfeminist heroine is constrained by traditional romantic conventions”.33 Part of what Bella finds thrilling about her desire for Edward is the fact that she is frightened by his status as a vampire; the strong emotion of passionate love is mingled with actual

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fear as Edward raises the hair on Bella’s arms. While Bella develops as the series progresses, in the first novel she strongly resembles a Female Gothic heroine in that she is repeatedly in need of her “perpetual savior” to rescue her from threats both ordinary and supernatural.34 Specifically she is clumsy and cannot run without tripping over, making her physically vulnerable. Moreover, despite presumptions of women’s ability to move freely, Bella is stalked by two men on her very first evening outing with friends and is rescued by Edward. When coupled with her fainting at Edward’s touch and kiss, Bella’s physical weakness and her situation as a target in need of male rescue situate her in the Female Gothic tradition. One difference, however, is that Bella is acutely conscious of her status as victim and considers the possibility of becoming a vampire to overcome the gendered hierarchy that a relationship with a male vampire in a patriarchal world entails: “But it just seems logical…a man and woman have to be somewhat equal…as in, one of them can’t always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each other equally”.35 Despite Bella’s awareness that the differences inherent in a vampire–human relationship (such as physical strength, mortality, etc.) make their relationship a dependent one, what is most compelling about her relationship with Edward is that it embodies the long standing and conservatively motivated myth of the one true love. Bella is the first girl Edward has found who would fill the void in his existence in almost a century (his “brand of heroin”)36; she has not previously had any significant romantic experiences, but is “unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him”.37 Though the idea of the lovers destined to be together is touching, it nevertheless reinforces a denial of young people’s sexuality through the suggestion of abstinence until the “right one” is found. Vampire Academy’s Rose develops a romantic and sexual interest in her older male mentor, Dimitri Belikov, yet much of the novel is preoccupied with the sexual resonances of her relationship with the Moroi she protects, Lissa. The “cover” of vampiric feeding allows for the exploration of same-sex desire and a close bond between women. The novel begins with the pair on the run from the Academy; during their two-year absence, Rose has assumed the role of “feeder” to enable Lissa to survive. As in Twilight, sex itself is deferred, even, surprisingly, in a narrative where drug usage is pursued and swearing is commonplace. Rose remarks that the sensation of Lissa’s fangs biting her is “better than any of the times I’d been drunk or high. Better than sex—or so I imagined, since I’d never done it”.38 Rose’s mental connection with Lissa, enabled by their supernatural status, provokes jealousy and concern in the same manner as a romantic partner, especially when paired with the sexual nature of their two-year-long feeding routine. However, Rose’s only conventional sexual encounters in the book occur with a boy with whom she resolves not to engage in intercourse, and with her instructor, Dimitri, a disrupted encounter driven by a lust “compulsion spell” placed upon a necklace she is given.39 The gothic space of the Academy thereby reinforces heteronormative desire, containing the same-sex attraction that was enabled in the human world, and requiring girls to retain their virginity. While Rose is acutely conscious of the ways in which she might be judged because of her sexuality, the novel replicates the Female Gothic tradition in its

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representation of “female suffering under patriarchy”.40 This gendered suffering is evident when Rose is subject to speculation that she is “a slut”, particularly because of rumours that she has allowed two boys to feed on her while having sex, an act which would make her, “[t]he dirtiest of the dirty. Sleazy. Beyond being easy or a slut…Blood-whore territory”.41 The novel engages with the bind faced by girls who are scrutinised regarding their virginity and number of sexual partners. Vampirism provides a thin shield for the exploration of how girls’ sexual activity is rendered shameful and how group assaults of unconscious girls are perpetrated by boys. For instance, Rose stands up to the boys who are “taking turns” biting a feeder who is “[h]igh and oblivious”.42 Nevertheless, the limits of her abilities to circumvent toxic male behaviour are evident in the way she is protected by a boy, Mason, when two other boys are making sexual advances. He had earlier attempted to defend her against the “slut” rumours, but Rose wanted to stand up for herself as one of the strongest novice guardians at the Academy and not be treated “like I’m some helpless girl”.43 There is a tension in Rose’s desire to be recognised for her own capabilities, but to also submit to the pleasure of male protection, as when she fantasises about being carried in Dimitri’s arms while he is shirtless: an image direct from the cover of a Mills & Boon romance. Though she assumes the role of protector to Lissa, Rose maintains conventional ideas of female suffering to please men, as when she dresses without tights despite her feet being cold so that she can “look[…] good” for Dimitri.44 She is also highly sexualised in that dhampir bodies are “sexy in a risqué way”, with large breasts and hips, in comparison with the Moroi who resemble “super-skinny runway models”.45 The progressive aspects of Rose’s physical abilities, independence, and positive relationship with another girl are, however, largely countered by what is revealed to be a bitter rivalry with a fellow student. Moroi Mia Rinaldi is shown to be the orchestrator of the “slut” rumours, with Ralf and Jesse bribed to assert their truth in return for sexual favours. Although cast as the villain, Mia shows that one of the most readily available forms of power for girls is their sexual power, using her body to barter for a way to cause social damage to Rose. While Mia’s actions serve as an indication of female villainy, they also speak to the limited powers of girls who can only borrow patriarchal ways of oppressing women to improve their own position. Bella and Rose, who are poised between human and vampire, superficially depart from the imperilled Female Gothic protagonist and to some degree, particularly as their series unfold, contribute to the battle between “good” and “evil” vampires. In YA Gothic fiction with male protagonists, however, there can be greater emphasis on their drive to change the world and overcome the limitations of their state, whether human or monster, at the same time as they work to secure their romantic interests. The male protagonists in the texts under discussion here are represented as monstrous, and thus they embody tensions between good and evil in ways that the female protagonists we have just discussed do not. Aligning with the collapse of boundaries between self and other in gothic fiction, in This Dark Endeavor the human protagonist is exposed as threatening and motivated by bad intentions, while in Warm Bodies a brain-eating zombie overcomes the urges

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typical of a flesh eater in order to love and care for a human. Romantic desire remains central to these two novels with male protagonists, along with engagement with the dangers faced by the girls who are the objects of their affection: however, the ultimate determination of their monstrosity issues from what motivates their desire and how they act upon it. Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour is a prequel to the story of Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Its self-conscious engagement with the gothic tradition is evident to adult readers in the names of characters Polidori (after the author of “The Vampyre [1819])” and Dr. Murnau (after the director of Nosferatu [1922]). Like a significant amount of historical fiction for young people, it inserts somewhat anachronistic depictions of girls and gender politics of the period. Elizabeth Lavenza, a cousin who is adopted by Victor’s family in both novels, is raised contrary to the expectations of the period that Mrs. Frankenstein critiques. Mrs. Frankenstein argues that equality of the sexes would come sooner “if the education of girls was not designed to turn them into meek, weak-minded creatures who waste their true potential”.46 Despite such occasional gestures towards twenty-first-century gender politics, This Dark Endeavour nevertheless reproduces a conventional narrative of male desire for greatness and the possession of a desired woman at any cost. While the need to show the origins of Victor’s desire to exceed the limits of science and mortality necessitates his lofty ambitions, focalisation through the teen character reveals him to be selfish, jealous, and ultimately unlikeable. The central premise of the novel is that Victor’s twin brother, Konrad, suffers from a mysterious illness and Victor is driven to find a cure through the pursuit of the ingredients for an Elixir of Life. Victor puts little faith in Dr. Murnau, who is a pioneer in the field of blood disorders, and ignores all advice to avoid the forbidden books he has found in the Biblioteka Obscura. However, his drive to cure Konrad owes little to brotherly love and more to personal ambition and his desire for Elizabeth, who already loves Konrad. Despite his awareness of their reciprocal love, Victor still feels like possessing Elizabeth regardless: “I felt a powerful urge to crush her against me and drink in her heat and scent that had been distracting me all night”.47 While Victor has suspected Dr. Murnau of being a vampire because of his work with blood, it is telling in terms of Victor’s monstrosity that he uses the language of vampiric consumption to describe his desire for Elizabeth. He throws himself into library research because he needs a distraction from his jealousy and because he is driven by dreams and fantasies that he might be able to win Elizabeth’s attention away from his brother. When Elizabeth sleepwalks into Victor’s bedroom, mistaking him for Konrad and believing it to be her wedding night, he considers how he feels about the possibility of his brother’s recovery given that the thought of their marriage was “horrible” to him.48 Like Twilight and Vampire Academy, the novel also depicts attempts by a young man to force himself upon a girl, but this time from the perspective of the boy. Extending on his caresses of Elizabeth’s hair while she sleepwalks, on another occasion Victor kisses her without consent or reciprocity. Victor affirms his status as monstrous rather than misguided when he rebuffs Konrad’s anger about the

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kiss: “Oh, that. How could a young woman by upset by such flattery?”49 Although Victor makes a monumental sacrifice allowing two of his fingers to be severed to provide the final ingredient for the elixir (bone marrow from a living donor), he does so because Elizabeth would witness his bravery in bringing back “her beloved”.50 His perverse, convoluted logic is echoed symbolically in the circumstances of his birth, in which Victor was born “twisted the wrong way” and unable to be “turned round properly” by the midwife, almost killing his mother.51 When Konrad seems to have recovered by virtue of the Elixir, Victor clarifies that his brother is not his patient but his “Creation!”, foreshadowing the character’s corruption of the laws of life and death in Shelley’s novel.52 However, what is distinct about the YA Frankenstein is that his transgression of these laws is largely driven by his desire to possess a girl who does not love him in return. While the barriers to girl protagonists’ love in YA Gothic are often related to the divides between human/monster, student/instructor, and teenager/older man, this novel presents male desire as an entitlement that produces resentment when it is unsatisfied. R, the zombie protagonist of Marion’s Warm Bodies makes a striking contrast to Oppel’s Frankenstein in that his progressive “awakening” from a zombie state mirrors a transformation in his conformity to unthinking sexual and familial expectations of women. Tenga and Zimmerman suggest that zombies have surpassed vampires as “a source of horror and revulsion because the vampire has become so ‘civilised’ that it needs an alter ego to bear the burden of true monstrosity”.53 While the wave of beautiful and sympathetic vampires in many ways erased their very monstrous function, the same effect means we are now beginning to see “sentient, sympathetic zombies” such as R.54 Moreover, like beautiful YA vampires, R also manages to be one of the first physically attractive zombies, with his “Creepy…but pretty” eyes.55 R belongs to the “good” category of zombies, as one of the “Fleshies” who still resembles a living human with skin, while the “bad” category of zombies are the “Boneys”, who have decayed to the point where they are little more than skeletons covered in musculature. While Bella can give us insight into Edward’s thoughts and motivations, the zombie is more difficult to narrate sympathetically from an external viewpoint, and therefore it is a crucial innovation that R is the first-person narrator of Warm Bodies just like the human (or at least part-human) narrators of the other three novels examined in this chapter. On one of his expeditions for human flesh, R kills a young man, Perry Kelvin, but spares his girlfriend, Julie Grigio. R develops strong feelings for Julie, as he gradually struggles against the blankness of zombie existence. The violent emotions that Victor feels in wanting to possess Elizabeth are differently directed towards protection in the case of this killer zombie. R must continually protect Julie when she briefly remains with him at the airport (a zombie hive), and he worries about the “Unincorporated Dead” consuming her when she journeys back to the protected area where the Living reside: I imagine one of these creatures surprising Julie as she stops the Mercedes to get her bearings, wrapping filthy hands around her face and biting down on her slender neck, and as that image ferments in my head, I prepare to tear this thing in front of me to unrecognisable shreds. The primordial rage that fills me every time I think of someone harming her is frightening.56

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In contrast with Victor’s aggression leading him to think primarily about taking Elizabeth’s affections by force, R’s aggression is only mobilised to protect her, and his empathy for Julie is paramount. Based on his care—despite the threat posed by his species—Julie is the one to initiate intimate contact with the ostensibly monstrous R, hugging him after he has saved her from danger: “She rests her head against my cold neck and embraces me. Unable to believe what’s happening, I put my arms around her and just hold her”.57 This moment is highly significant to the narrative’s resolution, as genuine affection is absent among zombies. Early in the novel, R observes his friend, M, watching erotica, but is puzzled by the reason why given that “passion doesn’t surge” in bloodless zombies.58 He has inadvertently seen M involved in sexual encounters that involve “standing there naked, staring at each other, sometimes rubbing their bodies together but looking tired and lost”.59 The desire to experience love physically does not exist for zombies, replaced by a series of motions that, like zombies themselves, are a thin husk in comparison with the real thing. While Victor strives to exceed human limitations and to distinguish himself from other people, R is motivated to recapture human emotions and love. Moreover, his actions and those of Julie— who must defy the received wisdom about zombies and her General father’s active pursuit of their demise— bring about the unthinkable in gradually bringing other Dead back to life. Julie declares that R is “human!” and wants to work with the Dead who are attempting to leave their hives and regain their human selves in order to cure the zombie plague.60 As in YA dystopian fiction in which young people are uniquely charged with the ability to transform worlds where adult power is corrupting and destructive, it is a teenager who can see the path to a better world and who is willing to lead the quest for change where adults cannot. The novel is prefaced by a stanza from Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative, in which he refers to the way that eternal life “should be unbearable if lived”.61 R has found a soulless immortality in his zombie state, but his story shows that though “love’s kiss kills our heart of flesh”, or our corporeal bodies, that we can transcend our mortality and find “the only way to eternal life” through love (np). While Victor seeks to change the world as an individual for his own glory and gain, R’s narrative reinforces the flattering idea that individual young people who are rightly motivated can surely improve the real world if they can change imagined gothic worlds complicated by heightened supernatural dangers. Whether we consider YA Gothic novels with girl protagonists, or the smaller number of texts with male protagonists, forming heterosexual relationships in the right way is the genre’s greatest fixation and serves as an indication of characters’ goodness or monstrosity. Sexual experience is often enabled, or postponed, by the monstrous male romantic lead, creating an exploration of heteronormative sexuality that is nevertheless limited in terms of sexual activity. Human predators such as the teenage Victor Frankenstein complicate the idea of the monster as something other than human through his transgression of boundaries of consent, while the monstrous zombie R can behave more like the ideal patriarchal human in his compassionate rescue of Julie. As part of the collapse of the boundaries between self and Other, what the YA Gothic perhaps explores most fully is the frightening

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nature of the sexual threats that young women continue to face. The vampire or zombie can be a “beloved” figure, whereas the human boy who wants to take and possess the girl he desires might be the most frightening monster of all; and he is real. All four novels include girl characters who exhibit strong and heroic qualities, however, all also require physical rescue by boys. The combination of vulnerability and sexual danger in these YA Gothic novels ultimately seems to reinforce conservative patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality for implied girl readers. Given the international impact of the #metoo movement, it remains to be seen if this long-standing figuration of the girl victim will shift in YA Gothic novels published in the next decade.

Notes

1. Roberta Seelinger Trites, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City, U of Iowa P, 2000), 15. 2. Unlike the other three novels discussed here, Warm Bodies is not explicitly marketed as a Young Adult title, likely because of more mature—but not graphic—references to sex. Nevertheless, the young protagonist, teenage love interest, and frequency with which the book is described as Young Adult in reviews and by readers on Goodreads supports reading it alongside these other titles. It is no coincidence that the most prominent blurb featured on the book’s cover and online promotional materials comes from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. 3. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1995), 145. 4. Glennis Byron and Sharon Deans, “Teen Gothic”, The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2014), 89. 5. David Punter, Gothic Pathologies (London, Macmillan Press, 1998), 6. 6. Debra Dudek, The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them (New York, Routledge, 2017), 17. 7. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, “Introduction”, The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, Eds. Anna Jackson et al. (New York, Routledge, 2008), 1. 8. Karen Coats, “The Gothic in American Children’s Literature”, The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic, Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2017), 171. 9. Byron and Deans, “Teen Gothic”, 87. 10. Coats, “The Gothic in American Children’s Literature”, 180. 11. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden, MA, Blackwell), 270. 12. Jamieson Ridenhour, In Darkest London: The Gothic Cityscape in Victorian Literature (Lanham, MD, The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 1. 13. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (London, Atom, 2007), 3. 14. Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy (London, Razorbill, 2007), 14. 15. Byron and Deans, “Teen Gothic”, 88. 16. Meyer, Twilight, 204. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion, 2006), 102. 19. Meyer, Twilight, 287. 20. Dudek, The Beloved Does Not Bite, 14. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Mead, Vampire Academy, 34.

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23. Ibid., 47. 24. Meyer, Twilight, 163. 25. Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman, “Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts: A Rendering of True Monstrosity”, Gothic Studies 15.1 (2013), 76. 26. Meyer, Twilight, 17. 27. Ibid., 361. 28. Ibid., 328–329. 29. Mead, Vampire Academy, 3. 30. Ibid., 45. 31. Jackson, Coats and McGillis, “Introduction”, 5. 32. Byron and Deans, “Teen Gothic”, 89. 33. Kristine Moruzi, “Postfeminist Fantasies: Sexuality and Femininity in Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ Series”, Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series, Ed. Anne Morey (London, Routledge, 2012), 47. 34. Meyer, Twilight, 144. 35. Ibid., 412. 36. Ibid., 235. 37. Ibid., 171. 38. Mead, Vampire Academy, 3. 39. Ibid., 291. 40. Moruzi, “Postfeminist Fantasies”, 50. 41. Mead, Vampire Academy, 170. 42. Ibid., 207. 43. Ibid., 135. 44. Ibid., 270. 45. Ibid., 51. 46. Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavor (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2011), 26. 47. Ibid., 122. 48. Ibid., 142. 49. Ibid., 218. 50. Ibid., 241. 51. Ibid., 176. 52. Ibid., 288. 53. Tenga and Zimmerman, “Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts”, 76. 54. Ibid., 84. 55. Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies (London, Vintage, 2010), 84. 56. Ibid., 101. 57. Ibid., 69. 58. Ibid., 25. 59. Ibid., 25. 60. Ibid., 199. 61. Ibid., n.p.

Bibliography Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Byron, Glennis and Sharon Deans. “Teen Gothic.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 87–106. Coats, Karen. “The Gothic in American Children’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. 171–183. Dudek, Debra. The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them. New York: Routledge, 2017.

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Jackson, Anna. “Introduction.” New Directions in Children’s Gothic: Debatable Lands. Ed. Anna Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2017. 1–15. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2008. Marion, Isaac. Warm Bodies. London: Vintage, 2010. Mead, Richelle. Vampire Academy. London: Razorbill, 2007. Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. London: Atom, 2007. Moruzi, Kristine. “Postfeminist Fantasies: Sexuality and Femininity in Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ Series.” Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series. Ed. Anne Morey. London: Routledge, 2012. 47–64. Oppel, Kenneth. This Dark Endeavor. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Ridenhour, Jamieson. In Darkest London: The Gothic Cityscape in Victorian Literature. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion, 2006. Tenga, Angela, and Elizabeth Zimmerman. “Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts: A Rendering of True Monstrosity.” Gothic Studies 15.1 (2013): 76–87. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics Julia Round

Defining Gothic is a difficult task. It has been claimed as a mode, a rhetoric, a poetics, a discourse, a habitus, an ur-form, and more.1 These definitions all suggest that Gothic is something more than a genre or collection of typical tales, and is instead better understood a way of thought that has taken different forms at different times. This allows texts as diverse as the historical and melodramatic The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the modern children’s fable Coraline (2002) to be considered as manifestations of the same underlying drive. It does not, however, help us to define Gothic, or explain why we continue to be drawn to it. Many scholars have commented on the definitional problem, for example, pointing out that ‘“Gothic” has not been the most supple or useful of critical adjectives’2 and that it ‘Typically resist[s] definition’.3 Identifying Gothic becomes difficult without resorting to a ‘tiresome catalogue of motifs’4 or ‘gothic shopping list’.5 Often critical definitions are either so wide as to be useless or so restrictive that they exclude key texts. Many critics focus on the fearful affect or its textual presence6 but this is just one facet of Gothic. The best definitions have a metaphorical quality that lets them be applied to many examples while still summoning the sense of uncanny dread and compulsion that underpins our sense of what Gothic might be. For example, Hogle’s ‘gothic matrix’ (an antiquated space, a hidden secret, a physical or psychological haunting, and an oscillation between reality and the supernatural),7 or Baldick’s combination of ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space’.8 These definitions both hinge on a tension (space/time; reality/supernatural) and in many ways Gothic is a contradiction. It attracts and repels us. Its literature is both popular and sensational, and canonised and historical. Goth culture is characterised as reclusive and inward-looking, but it is also performative and dramatic. Gothic’s most famous archetypes cross boundaries and break borders: between life and death (vampires), human and animal (werewolf), male and female (witch), and

J. Round (*)  Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_37

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physical and ethereal (ghost). Gothic stories give us too much—the supernatural or gory spectacle—but simultaneously not enough, as they remain mysterious, dreamlike, and obscured. Comics are also a contradictory medium—ranging from children’s slapstick (The Beano) to the darkest themes (Crossed), and often combining both (Maus). They are serialised and disposable, but also fetishised literary objects. Many comic books are read by adults, but the medium is often characterised as trivial and childish. Its audience are creative and imaginative (cosplay, fanzines) but also avid collectors and consumers. The comics page itself combines the contrasting signs of word and image: the abstract and the representational. This chapter will analyse one aspect of comics that characterises this state of tension: the host figure. Hosts are a common feature of the horror genre in many media, but it is argued here that the comics medium stretches their potential: enabling transgressions and excesses that are truly Gothic. After establishing the background to the American and British characters, the chapter focuses on the role and function of the host in British girls’ comics—an area of comics studies that has received little critical attention to date. The creators of these comics were uncredited, and their content is in danger of being lost due to comics’ ephemeral nature. This chapter draws on extensive archival research to identify, survey, analyse, and compare the host characters that appear in British girls’ comics. In so doing it preserves these characters for future scholarship, and offers some preliminary suggestions for how we might consider their role within Gothic. This chapter argues that there are two distinct types of host (serial and series) in British comics. It demonstrates that early authoritative and patriarchal hosts give way to more diverse characters and explores their differences. These hosts can raise questions, provide explanations, offer morals, or interfere with plot events. They may step in and out of the storyworld/diegesis, address the reader directly, or break the borders between the text and paratext (for example by introducing elaborately drawn titles or credits in their dialogue). Their speech shifts back and forth between different representational forms (such as narrative boxes and speech balloons) and layers of the story. The analysis concludes that these comics hosts are liminal figures, who problematise the boundaries between fiction and reality. The subversive freedom of the comics medium allows them a range of transgressions that epitomise the tensions and contradictions of Gothic. The horror genre crosses media, and host characters are ubiquitous in many formats. The terms ‘gothic’ and ‘horror’ are often used interchangeably, with one a subsidiary of the other depending on the writer’s critical perspective.9 This chapter considers horror as a genre spawned by the overarching gothic mode, r­eflecting the distinctions Radcliffe draws between horror and terror.10 The terror-gothic inflames our senses and draws us to hidden areas that we fear to venture (and yet still do). By contrast, horror-gothic overwhelms our emotions and disturbs normality with the shocking, taboo, and grotesque. The comics that will be discussed ­taking in both horror and terror. Horror hosts date back to the radio programme The Witch’s Tale (1931–1938, WOR), which was hosted by Old Nancy, ‘the Witch of Salem’, who introduced

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each tale. The show also spawned a short-lived magazine (The Witch’s Tales, edited by Alonzo Deen Cole and published by Carwood Publishing) that only lasted for two issues (November and December 1936) due to a lack of ­cross-promotion. The Witch’s Tale was the first original horror anthology show on radio and the first to introduce an ongoing narrator—Old Nancy was the inspiration for subsequent radio narrators such as Raymond in Inner Sanctum Mystery (1941–1952, Blue Network), and also the basis for the EC Comics host the ‘Old Witch’ (see Hand 2012 for further discussion). Horror hosts would later appear in a number of television shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965, CBS and NBC), Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960–1961 and 1961–1962, NBC), and The Twilight Zone (1959–1964, CBS), which was hosted and narrated by creator Rod Serling. These were predominantly real-life figures, and the tradition is also represented in the UK by British television show Tales of the Unexpected (1979–1988, ITV), whose author Roald Dahl introduced each episode. The most famous comics hosts are EC Comics’ ‘Ghoulunatics’: the ­Crypt-Keeper, the Old Witch, and the Vault-Keeper, who hosted Tales from the Crypt (1950–1955), The Haunt of Fear (1950–1954), and The Vault of Horror (1950–1955), respectively. These comics told tales of both horror and terror, often combining the two—for example, ‘Seeds of Death’ (Haunt of Fear #5) opens with the horrifying image of a severed hand in a city dump, while ‘So They Finally Pinned You Down!’ (Haunt of Fear #5) opens with a second-person narrative that places the reader in the centre of the tale, running in terror from an unseen threat. The following decades saw many imitators in American comics. Warren Publishing introduced Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, hosts of Creepy (1964–1983) and Eerie (1966–1983), and Vampirella: a sexy, vampiric version of Barbarella (popularised in the 1968 movie) created by Forrest J. Ackerman and Trina Robbins for Vampirella #1 (1969) and then developed by Archie Goodwin from a host character (#8, 1970) into a fully fledged heroine starring in her own tales (today published by Dynamite). DC Comics created brothers Cain and Abel as hosts of their House of Mystery (1951–1983, 1986–1987, and 2008–present) and House of Secrets (1956–1978, 1996–1999) anthologies; and Marvel devised Headstone P. Gravely and Roderick ‘Digger’ Krupp for their anthology titles Tower of Shadows (1969–1975) and Chamber of Darkness (1969–1974). These key figures sit alongside a number of other minor hosts from each company, and lesser publishers such as Charlton Comics also had numerous host characters in their horror and suspense titles from the 1960s onwards. EC’s Ghoulunatics’ main function was humour. They provided a distancing frame around the stories, with terrible puns and jokes shielding the child reader from horrible events. For example, ‘Horror in the Freak Tent’ (Haunt of Fear #5) is a story about ‘Looey’ Glantz, a sadistic freakshow owner who blinds his knifethrower and terrorises his other staff. They ultimately teach the blind ­knife-thrower to resume his act—using the gagged and bound body of the owner. The tale mobilises both horror and terror: images of the freakshow folk (such as the fat lady, contortionist rubber man, and the armless and legless boy) and visceral sound effects as the knives hit the owner’s body (‘CHOF’) summon horror, while

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the unseen body and the teasing narration use terror. The Crypt-Keeper concludes ‘Striking tale, eh? Piercing finish? Well, old Looey certainly had it coming… and it came! Ice-picks… knives… cleavers! Oh, that last cleaver was the topper… heh, heh… get it? After that, Glantz lost his head!’ The Ghoulunatics are best remembered for directly addressing their boys and girls (or ‘boils and ghouls’) in this manner—with awful puns and joking summaries. In this they accord with the arguments of Zlosnik and Horner, who claim that ‘the comic [comedy] within the Gothic offers a position of detachment and scepticism […] foregrounding a self-reflexivity and dialectical impulse intrinsic to the modern subject’.11 Gothic humour, it seems, exists in a characteristic state of tension: it ‘engage[s] critically with aspects of their contemporary world’ but also offers ‘a measure of detachment from scenes of pain and suffering’.12 The dynamic between the EC hosts and their terror- and horror- stories is exactly of this type. Ambitious wives, obsessive husbands, and bullied colleagues may crack with horrifying and macabre results, but at the story’s end the reader is returned to a safe distance by the hosts, whose jokes trivialise the murderous action. Their humour creates an uncanny scepticism while the retelling and reframing of events summons the reflexive, dialectical impulse. Jones points out that ‘the distinctions between the [EC] hosts were minimal’ and that the ‘physical samenesses, the likeness of function, voice and attitude shared by the three blurred their identities’.13 He thus suggests that the three Ghoulunatics are best understood as a singular function rather than as distinct characters. They all have long white hair, bulging eyes, wrinkled skin, hooked nose, and missing teeth, and there is no real difference between their dialects. All address the reader directly, use interjections such as ‘Hee, hee!’ and ‘Heh, heh’, are fond of wordplay, and liberally scatter exclamation points in their concluding jests. In the following decade, DC Comics created brothers Cain and Abel as hosts of their House of Mystery (1951–1983, 1986–1987 and 2008–present) and House of Secrets (1956–1978, 1996–1999) anthologies: arriving in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Cain and Abel also occasionally hosted the anthology Plop! (1973–1976). Like the Ghoulunatics, Cain and Abel also make puns and often have a tone of macabre glee. They address the reader with phrases such as ‘Goodbye and Good Mourning’ (House of Mystery #255) or ‘Pay attention Little Fiends’ (House of Secrets #107), and comment ironically on the stories’ endings. For example, Cain closes ‘Scared to Life’ (House of Mystery #180), a tale about a man who has a ghostly premonition that helps him to avoid a grisly death, with the words ‘Hee hee – You see, if Lord Dufferin had been on that elevator, he wouldn’t have had a ghost of a chance!’ Although these American hosts are best defined as framing devices that create gothic comedy, their role is also sometimes transgressive. Their speech constantly shifts form: moving from dialogue to narration to paratext, for example, by incorporating the drawn story titles (‘And here it starts – the story of Paul Turner, appropriately titled “TURNER’S TREASURE”’ [House of Mystery #184]). They can also break the diegetic border and participate in a story’s events: for example Cain steals a piece of artwork in ‘His Name is Kane’ (House of Mystery #180), helps an animal in ‘The Mask of the Red Fox’ (House of Mystery #187), and is attacked by a character in ‘The Gardener of Eden’ (House of Mystery #192). Critics have noted

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that Gothic constantly tends towards formal ‘transgression’ and ‘excess’,14 and so this type of meddling seems more than a simple transgression of form. Wolfreys claims that gothic narratives are ‘in imminent threat or crisis’ in both form and content as ‘Something other arriving in or from the externalised space of the subject’s material existence promises to invade the space’.15 The anarchic and subversive lexis of the American hosts is paralleled by their behaviour as they trespass into the story space: disrupting and undermining narrative and diegetic coherence. British girls’ comics are the forgotten ‘herstory’ of the medium. They dominated the market for the latter half of the last century, but have been all but forgotten today by publishers, critics, and scholars. Their reign began in 1950 when the paper School Friend was relaunched as a picture story paper by publishers Amalgamated Press. Anne Digby, writer for School Friend, Girl, Tammy, Jinty, and more, explains: ‘School Friend was the first UK weekly paper ever to publish stories for girls in picture strip form. It sold a million copies a week in its first few years and led directly to rival companies coming into the girls’ market for the first time—Hulton Press with Girl [in 1951] and DC Thomson with Bunty [in 1958]’.16 The titles were incredibly popular straight away: Chapman cites a 1953 study of schoolgirl reading habits, which revealed that 94% of fourteenand ­fifteen-year-old girls read comics and that within this nearly 60% read School Friend and 38% read Girl.17 A back and forth emerged between two main publishers: IPC (which incorporated many other companies including Amalgamated Press and Fleetway), and the family-run DC Thomson based in Dundee. By the end of the 1950s there were at least fifty different girls’ titles in the UK, with more emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. At their peak the girls’ comics outsold the boys, and were read avidly by readers of both genders. By the early 1970s market leaders like Jackie were selling over a million copies per issue18 and launch issues of a new girls’ comic could sell up to a quarter of a million copies.19 In the main these titles are anthology comics, combining single tales ­(stand-alone), serials (with continuity), and series (recurring characters with no continuity). A typical issue contains a mix of these: around six different tales, each averaging 3 pages long. There would also be an editorial welcome, a readers’ letters page, a horoscope section, features (such as craft or recipes), quizzes or puzzles, and adverts for other titles and external products. The majority are titled with a girl’s name (Diana, Tammy, Jinty, Lindy, Bunty, Misty, and so forth), creating an implied host figure that is often attached to a ‘cover girl’ image backed up by an editorial message or letters page, and so contributes to the distinct identity of each publication. As these comics were created predominantly by men, the female cover girls and fictional editors provide a means to directly address the audience on their level. They range in complexity and some characters are not particularly well defined: for example, Jinty’s earliest issues suggest the existence of this character through the letters page (‘Jinty’s Bits and Pieces’) and in features such as a crafts page entitled ‘Jinty Made It Herself… so can you!’ (Jinty #14, 1974), but there is no space that presents Jinty as a character or allows her to speak to us. Another similar example is June, who initially appears as a dark-haired girl on the ‘June’s Postbag’ letters page, and is then reinvented as a blonde with pigtails when the comic merges with Tammy, joining Tammy (the older girl) on the cover (see

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Fig. 4). They have a dramatised story in an issue c. 1978 but their appearances are otherwise limited to this paratext. However, other hosts are much more developed. Lindy’s first letters page (‘Lindy’s Letter Box’) contains a photograph of a young teenager with the message: ‘… the Ed. said that as the paper’s named after me, I’d better have the first say’. The comic’s editorial ‘Laurie’s Life’ reinforces this, often namechecking Lindy within the fiction that the two girls share an office and work on the comic together. Perhaps the most fully realised of these characters is Misty: a seductive gothic woman who acts as the fictional editor of her own eponymous comic (IPC, 1978–1980). Misty is a girls’ comic with a supernatural and mystery theme that appears towards the end of the heyday of British comics, and its namesake is a good example of how such liminal characters developed. Its cover girl/host/editor Misty appears on the inside cover of each issue than the cover itself, where she welcomes us to each issue with a poetic greeting. She also answers letters on the ‘Write to Misty’ page, and occasionally bookends a tale in the annuals or specials (but never in the main run of weekly issues). Her inside cover greetings are highly gothic in their aesthetic and lexis (see Fig. 1): drawn by comics artist and portraitist Shirley Bellwood, and hand lettered by the comic’s art editor Jack Cunningham. Misty is a ghostly figure (her image often tails away and she is never shown with feet) with long black hair, flowing robes, and star charm necklace. In this she accords with the new age witch, and generally appears in a natural wild environment (water, forest, and mountain) or sometimes among rocky ruins. Roper points out that such natural landscapes became part of the iconography of witchcraft and that the witch’s flight through these terrains were journeys with significance.20 Misty’s welcomes constantly use images of the journey and the body as we are urged to ‘walk’, ‘journey’, ‘quest’, ‘venture’, ‘come with’, or ‘follow’ her; and to ‘take my hand’, ‘step with me’, or ‘look […] through my eyes’. She addresses us as a friend or guide and offers up her stories for our ‘delight’. Although Misty names a number of locations in her realm (such as the Cavern of Dreams, the Pool of Life, and so on) these are never defined and remain empty signifiers—dislocated and abstracted. So both she and her realm are ghostly and shadowy: straddling the border between here and elsewhere—supporting her liminal and gothic status as she is both far away and yet ‘always with you’. Jones points out that the Ghoulunatics were also fictional editors and curators of their comics: responding to readers and sometimes also appearing in opening editorials. This is the closest parallel to Misty’s most dominant function, which is to welcome us to the issue every week. However, in contrast to the Ghoulunatics, Misty’s persona developed in a tantalising manner as the editorial team slowly unveiled an entire storyworld and constructed her character with the help of readers. The comic’s letters page is full of questions about the character (‘How old are you?’ ‘Who taught you to read and write?’ ‘How do you get our letters?’ and so forth). Misty’s elusive responses to these slowly reveal fragments of information about her realm (‘The daughters of the mists were all taught to read and write as well as strange and mystic practices by the ancient Lords of the Mists who now, alas, are no more’ [Misty #57]). But whereas the Ghoulunatics are

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Fig. 1  Inside front cover from Misty #15. Art by Shirley Bellwood, lettering by Jack Cunningham, writer unknown but likely editor Malcolm Shaw. Misty™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved

authoritative and jocular, Misty is supplicative and serious, encouraging the reader to actively question herself and her stories. She also uses this tactic when she takes on the role of series host to bookend a tale (discussed below). Here, like other

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later examples of the figure, she casts doubt on story outcomes and undermines certainty. The next logical step was for host characters to appear in different sections of the comic. These characters were more developed than the cover girls, and often limited to the scary sections of the comic. They addressed the reader directly, introducing the weekly tale or instalment, and sometimes even appeared within the story itself. In this way the horror hosts became another key feature of British girls’ comics. The ‘series host’ is the first type to emerge: a character that bookends an unrelated, non-sequential group of stories, in a similar manner to the Ghoulunatics. The first and one of the most enduring series host in British girls’ comics is the Storyteller, an older gentleman in a spotted bow tie, who features in various titles between 1965 and 1982. He first appears in the newly merged June and School Friend on 30 January 1965, narrating ‘The STRANGEST Stories Ever Told’: ‘a new series of stories that will thrill and intrigue you’, which appears weekly throughout 1965. These are tales that flirt with the supernatural: for example, as a bank employee is discouraged from stealing by an uncanny warning (‘The Haunted Bank’, 30 January 1965); a woman who wishes to be smaller experiences the peril this would bring in a sequence that may or may not be a dream (‘The Shrinking Woman’, 6 February 1965); and an ugly man adopts a mask and does good deeds, which changes his face to a handsome one (‘The Mask’, 20 February 1965). The Storyteller introduces and wraps up each tale, providing an epilogue or sometimes questioning the events shown. He often ends early stories on a question, for example, asking ‘Did Miss Dangerfield dream it…or did it really happen?’ (‘The Shrinking Woman’), ‘What do YOU think?’ (‘The Puppet that Came to Life’, 13 February 1965), and ‘WAS it a dream?’ (‘The Riddle of the Mary Lou’, 13 March 1965). He sometimes also offers a moral: for example, ending ‘Turn of the Year’ (Tammy, 5 January 1980) by explaining: ‘Beryl had been granted her wish to have another chance – and she never looked back. And, in a different way, each new year is a new chance for all of us, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t directly participate in the tales, but the diegetic borders between his world and the storyworld are hazy, as he ends many tales with possession of an object that has been key to the story (see Fig. 2). His tales take place across a diverse range of places and times, from Queen Victoria’s London (‘The Mask’) to Old Vienna (‘The Puppet that Came to Life’). Although he is generally drawn in a bow tie and with a pipe in his hand, his backgrounds are sometimes more precisely matched to the story, as for example, in ‘The Roman Brooch’ (June and Pixie, 15 June 1974) where he appears in safari gear. He is thus a mobile and liminal figure whose location is somewhat uncertain and who has a flexible relationship with the tales he tells. The Storyteller lived for nearly twenty years and survived many mergers with other titles. After his initial run in June and School Friend he reappeared in June and Pixie (13 April 1974) with the caption ‘Back again, by popular demand!’ and then joined Tammy when it merged with June on 22 July 1974. He was a reader favourite and often gained approval in the letters page (for example, see Tammy

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Fig. 2  ‘The Puppet That Came to Life’. June and School Friend, 13 February 1965. June and School Friend™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved

17 May 1975). He is most commonly named simply as ‘Your Storyteller’ although he takes on various other guises. He is sometimes called the Mystery Storyteller in Tammy (1971–1984), and also appears as Uncle Pete in Jinty (1974–1981), and in the Spanish comics Lily (Editorial Bruguera 1970–1982) and Super Lily (Editorial Bruguera 1976–1983) as host of ‘Los Extraordinarios Relatos del Tio Arthur’ [The Extraordinary Tales of Uncle Arthur] (RuthB 2010).21 Diana’s Man in Black is the next character to appear, in ‘Star of Doom’ (Diana #197, 26 November 1966), the first in a new series of ‘tales of mystery and horror’. He is a Dracula-esque character with black hair, widow’s peak and Victorian clothing, and addresses the reader directly with a preface and epilogue to each tale. He appears weekly in Diana until ‘The Phantom Stag’ (Diana #204, 14 January 1967) where he concludes ‘That is my last tale of mystery for the present. If you would like more of my stories write to “The Man in Black” and who knows, we may meet again before long’. Readers certainly did want more and he next returns with ‘Double Vision’ (Diana #223, 27 May 1967), remaining for a series of 11 weekly one-page stories (now in full colour on the back cover). This sequence ends with ‘Card of Doom’ (Diana #232, 29 July 1967), and he continues to return in a similar manner for short runs or individual tales in later issues.

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The Man in Black was often drawn by David Cuzik Matysiak. In general, his bookending panels are black and white while the story appears in colour—further separating the two storyworlds. The epilogues he gives are generally explanatory, wrapping up the tales rather than raising questions. For example, he closes the story ‘Vera the Ventriloquist’ with the coda ‘Mike the circus dwarf never performed again – other people copied his sensational act. But they still talk of Vera the ventriloquist’. (Diana #200, 17 December 1966) Although he does not interact with the tales’ events, his explanations occasionally blur the lines between him and the story world, for example in ‘The Two Faces of Perlita’ (a Dorian Gray style story), which ends on his words: ‘The Princess died within the hour. She was two hundred years old. Her vanity had gained her nothing. The carving came into my possession – but I’ve no elixir, which is just as well’. (Diana #232, 22 July 1967) The Man in Black also transgresses formal textual borders as his speech often incorporates the drawn title of the tale. The next significant series host is Damian Darke (Spellbound, 1976–1978). He is another patriarchal authority figure: an older man in period dress (high collar, ruffled shirt) with a raven on his shoulder. He holds a big book from which he seems to be reading the story: an image that creates an implied layer of story and further embeds the tale within his framing panel. Darke appears weekly throughout Spellbound’s run, and survived two mergers, first with Debbie and then with Mandy (although these stories were mostly reprints). His introductions and codas to the stories vary in their function: more like the Storyteller than the Man in Black. Sometimes he acts as summariser and closer of the events, for example, in ‘Another Pair of Hands…’ (#54) where he informs us that after the events of the story Biddy’s ghost was never seen again and the family lived happily in the cottage. But in many other stories his closing comments leave endings open or cast doubt on the shown outcome, for example, as he concludes ‘The Rocking Chair’ (#22): ‘Well, did Beryl really see a figure in the old rocking chair? Only Beryl knew, but one thing is certain – she won’t offer to look after Miss Agnes’s cat again – ever!’ In other issues he is even less conclusive, for example, closing ‘The Cavalier’s Cloak’ (#37) with the question ‘Well, what do you think? Was it just a tattered old rug, she had picked up while sleepwalking? Or was it INDEED the Cavalier’s Cloak?’ These early hosts are all older men: sharing an authoritative demeanour, elderly appearance, and implicit horror genre markers (psychiatrist, vampire, and Romantic). They frame their stories variously with morals, explanations, and occasionally questions. Their longevity also speaks to the tales’ popularity. However, they then give way to more diverse figures, whose abilities are also more complex. Early examples of these were not as long lasting and are less well remembered. For example, ‘Gipsy Rosa Remembers’ was published in Diana for a time (ndat), and Judy (1960–1991) occasionally featured a character called She of the Shadows; a glamorous looking veiled lady in long black dress and gold jewellery. As she introduces herself in the 1976 Annual: ‘I am She of the Shadows. I know many things and have strange stories to tell. Come closer and listen to one of them’. The story she tells is about student nurse Jill Nash whose repeated sightings

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of a mysterious nurse near the hospital war memorial ultimately help her lead her colleagues safely away from a fire. She concludes the tale by explaining ‘Jill never saw the nurse again. Was it really Ann Paxley, returned because she was needed again? Jill will always be convinced of it. What do YOU think?’ Like Darke, she combines explanations with questions, offering closure that is tinged with ambivalence by inviting the reader to question these outcomes. Judy’s most famous host character is Bones, who presents ‘Tales from Skeleton Corner’. He first appears in ‘Flower Power’ in Judy #1632 (20 April 1991), in which Carly uses a home-made flower lotion on her face that makes her skin wither like dead flowers. Skeleton Corner remains for the last few weeks of Judy’s run and Bones then returns after the merger of Judy and Mandy into M&J (1991– 1997), in M&J #11 (27 July 1991). He appears weekly throughout the rest of this year and then in intermittent runs between 1991 and 1995. Bones is more EC Comics than paternal storyteller, and (like the Storyteller) he often matches his speech, jokes, and attire to the story’s events, for example, appearing in stereotypical Australian beach clothing and on a surfboard in ‘Living Ghost’, with the greeting ‘G’day, cobbers!’ The following stories have him in a woollen knitted hat (for ‘That’s Someone’s Seat’, #12); a bow tie (‘A Week in the Country…’, #13); a baseball cap with the slogan ‘I’m not negative’ and camera (‘A Picture of You’, #15); and mortarboard and gown (‘The Most Frightening Teacher’, #16). His comedy clothing is matched by his tone, which is direct and irreverent. For example, ‘A Week in the Country’ (M&J #13, 10 August 1991) ends with the reveal that the tapping that has disturbed Jilly and her family comes from a ghostly disembodied hand, and Bones then concludes ‘Well, that’s me all ready – and, of course, I haven’t forgotten my gloves. It’s not HANDY without them! Hee! Hee!’ Later, in ‘The Gate Story’ (M&J #140, 15 January 1994) Sally takes down an old picture of some gates from her room at boarding school (despite advice not to) but is then tormented by noise and disruption from the wall. Bones ends the story with the moral ‘However, she never took the painting back down! And that’s a thing to remember about GATES, girls – they can be needed to keep things IN, as well as out!’ The stories are short (2–3 pages), spooky and can end ambiguously or badly. Sometimes Bones only hints at the ending or does not provide one at all (‘What’s in a Name?’, #14), and in others the protagonists meet a nasty fate, as in ‘The Most Frightening Teacher’ (#16), where Gemma and her friends are tricked by the seemingly nice Miss Whitehead and turned into figurines for her collection. His last appearance seems to be in ‘Skeleton Corner’ in M&J #194 (28 January 1995), wrapping up a spooky story in which Sal gets sucked into a painting, although there is no formal goodbye. Gypsy Rose first appears in Jinty and Lindy in 1977 in ‘The Ring of Death’ (29 January 1977), launching ‘Gypsy Rose’s Stories of Magic and Mystery’. This is altered slightly to ‘Gypsy Rose’s Tales of Mystery and Magic’ in the next issue, and she continues to appear weekly in this section throughout the year, with only a few brief gaps in the summer. She often appears on the comic’s cover and her stories get the lead position for the first few months. Her name seems to have come from the comic’s paratextual material (which perhaps in turn harks back to

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Diana’s Gipsy Rosa) since the advertisement for her first appearance proclaims ‘Your own Gypsy Rose features in riveting complete stories of magic and mystery!’ (22 January 1977) and the comic’s horoscope section is already named ‘Gypsy Rose looks at the stars’ although her image does not appear here until 19 February 1977. She breaks with the previous dominant type of storyteller by being young and female, and also by participating in her own tales. In the majority of these she acts as a ‘supernatural consultant’, advising on hauntings, and other troubling events. For example, in her first appearance she helps Gina Rapalli by discovering the poison hidden in a family heirloom, prompting the family to exclaim ‘Thank you, thank you, Gypsy Rose!’ This structure continues across all the early tales, which see a troubled girl seeking Gypsy Rose’s help with a ghost (‘Hide and Seek with a Ghost’, 19 February 1977), haunted object (‘Haunted Ballerina’, 26 February 1977; ‘The Magic Tambourine’, #16 July 1977), or other spooky problem. In ‘The Haunted Ballerina’, Gypsy Rose identifies the malevolent spirit of a crippled ballerina who has been interfering with Deanna’s dreams of being a dancer. She ends this tale with the explanation ‘My friend Deanna did pass her audition, and one day, she will be a prima ballerina…like Irina Feodorovna!’—but here her phrasing is arguably transgressive as it moves from past to future tense, positioning Gypsy Rose as an omniscient and omnipresent character. A similar tension is apparent as she ends other tales on a questioning note while confirming the truth of the events shown: ‘The verdict on Harris was accidental death by drowning… but we know better, don’t we?’ (‘The Hound from Hades’, 19 March 1977) However, later tales begin to reduce her to a bookending role and by 1980 her appearances are all reprints: not just of previous Gypsy Rose tales but also of old Strange Stories from Tammy and June, where the Storyteller’s bookending panels are simply replaced with ones featuring Rose. This repositions her as narrator rather than actor, but also leads to a greater diversity as the stories are no longer limited to being in her present-day. As noted, Misty is a combination of cover girl, fictional editor, and occasional storyteller and so also takes on many roles. In the Misty weeklies she never bookends a story, but she often does this in the holiday specials, the annuals, and in Tammy and Misty after the two titles merged.22 But when Misty does act as a series host to introduce or close a tale, her function is consistently questioning, and thus quite different from the Ghoulunatics and the other girls’ comics hosts. For example, she ends ‘The Haunted Library’ (Annual 1981) with the comment ‘So now what is your verdict? Was the turret room haunted or was it the work of a joker? What do I think? Well, I must confess I wouldn’t choose to spend a night in that turret room. Would you?’ Unlike the American hosts she provides little closure. She follows the earlier British series hosts by asking questions, but (like her introductions to her comic) combines this with addressing the reader on their level, and actively involving them in speculation about the tale’s ending. The second type of host in British girls’ comics is the ‘serial host’. This character’s function is limited to a particular serial story. They exist in a coherent framing storyworld, from which they tell us their stories. The first of these seems to be Jackie Flynn, the narrator of ‘Bridget at War’, who first appears in Diana #146

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(4 December 1965). This story opens with a brief sequence of six unframed panels, which begin with a direct address from an unnamed narrator, who states ‘The scene is a country lane in Ireland. The time – a hot afternoon in July. You are on holiday and have decided to go for a stroll…’ The narration continues to explain that you are enjoying yourself, but growing tired, when an old man greets you. It then gives way to Jackie’s dialogue, as he hails us: Hello there! ’Tis a fine day, is it not? You must be t’young lass staying at the hotel, aren’t you? […] Aye, there’s many a tale I could tell you […] You’re sure to like this one, so I’ll be telling you all about the brightest little girl in Ireland – Bridget Casey.

Jackie bookends the ten episodes of this serial story, when Flynn addresses the reader directly and sometimes interjects in a single panel with commentary on the events. The descriptive narration also continues from an unnamed source in some panels and Jackie’s function is primarily to flesh out characters where needed, often with an ironic tone, such as ‘He was quite honest, of course. Wild horses didn’t drag it out of him—he spread the news quite willingly’ (#148). He draws the reader in and out of the tale, for example, closing with ‘Now I’ll see you next week’ (#148) and wrapping up the final instalment with ‘Goodbye, girls! Goodbye!’ (#155) After his first panel he only ever appears against an empty background, drawn only in pencils, and so is a slightly ghostly presence. He is followed in the 1970s and 1980s by many other examples, such as ‘Madame Marlova Remembers’ (Debbie) who inspires her pupils with stories of famous ballerinas; Miss Hatherleigh who tells visitors the history of ‘Cremond Castle’ (Spellbound), Megan Dolwyn of ‘Dolwyn’s Dolls’ (Bunty) who shares the story of each doll, Beverley Jackson who gives us the tale behind each button in ‘The Button Box’ (Tammy), and Jade Jenkins (M&J), whose market stall is made up of objects with stories to tell.23 Coote names this category of stories the ‘Collective Storyteller’ as the stories often come from a collection of sorts, but ‘serial hosts’ seems a better fit since many (including the prototype Jackie Flynn) do not have a physical collection of objects, and also because ‘collective’ confuses the issue by implying they are multiple. These characters exist solely within their storyworld and are confined to it, although they may then narrate a number of unrelated embedded stories. Their speech takes on different forms, as for example in Fig. 3, where Bev’s speech balloon (‘Well you might like to hear the story behind this button, Kelly!’) gives way to a narrative box (‘This novelty button was made in Cornwall…’)—a commentary that then continues throughout the tale. Some panels are even completely abstracted, such as the one introducing the button, which has a patterned background. The host’s voice is doubled by appearing in both speech balloon and narrative box, suggesting a tension in the host’s position—are they inside the storyworld or outside it? There is often a similar doubling in the themes of the embedded tales—as in this example, where Bev teaches her friend Kelly not to lie to make herself look more wealthy; the same lesson learnt by Linda in the story she tells. So despite their coherent framing storyworld, even serial hosts like Bev exist in a liminal position: at the threshold between the two tales. The threshold has been argued to be ‘part of the Other’24 since by standing here

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Fig. 3  ‘The Button Box’, Tammy #632. Tammy™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved

we have already crossed into the other side, even if only in our minds. Lieshout claims similarly that the threshold is an abject space, where borders are crossed and binaries break down.25 The internal tension of this position undermines the diegetic existence of the host character and seems very Gothic. As the British comics market faltered in the 1970s it was the fate of many of its publications to be merged together to shore up the sales of a failing title. Serial hosts that were attached to long-running and popular stories were mostly

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Fig. 4  Tammy and Misty, 19 January 1980. Cover by John Richardson. Tammy and Misty™ Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd. Copyright © Rebellion Publishing IP Ltd., All Rights Reserved

unaffected, but many of the series hosts disappeared, or were forced to share their spot with another. The case of Misty, Tammy, and Jinty is indicative. The first issue of the combined Tammy and Misty (Fig. 4) is heavily weighted in favour of Tammy, with the Misty title around a quarter of the size of the former, and Misty herself redrawn quite differently. She appears just once inside this merger issue, where she explains ‘Regular “Misty” readers will know that I have been called away on an urgent mission. But I shall always be with you in spirit – and sometimes in person, to bring you stories from the mists. When I am away I shall be sending my stories to my friend, “The Storyteller”’. Over the following months her appearances become less and less frequent and her bookending image shrinks in size. She appears approximately once a month from March to May 1980, while the Storyteller is in almost every issue, sometimes with more than one tale. The

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comic’s title and logo also shrink and move off centre on the cover, before finally vanishing a few weeks before the Tammy and Jinty merger on 28 November 1981. The Storyteller and Gypsy Rose then rotate as hosts of the Strange Story slot (with new material) until July 1982, when Tammy was relaunched with a new look.26 The Storyteller last appears on 3 July 1982 in ‘Veronica’s Visions’, and the final ‘Strange Story’ (‘Punchinello’s Dance’) appears on 10 July 1982 with no host. Although spooky stories continue to appear after this (first weekly, then intermittently), the slot is rebranded as a ‘Tammy Complete Story’ and has no narrator. The themes remain dark though, with a ‘vampire-wolf’ (‘Moonlight Prowler’, 17 July 1982), a living statue (‘Sign of the Times’, 31 July 1982), and a malevolent blackbird (‘Bird of Fear’, 23 October 1982). The Storyteller appears once more, in ‘The Fireside Friend’ (a ‘Tammy Complete Story’ in the 15 December 1982 Christmas issue), which he opens with a warm welcome and closes with some characteristic questions, but after this he simply vanishes—a quiet end to a character that had endured nearly twenty years. Formalist approaches to comics often draw attention to three things: the space of the page, the role of the reader, and the interplay between word and image. Groensteen argues that narrative meaning is constructed from the interplay of various elements within the page.27 McCloud’s concept of closure emphasises the work of the reader filling in the events in the ‘gutter’ between panels.28 Hatfield’s critical model focuses on the tensions produced by word/image, surface/sequence, and so forth.29 My own work synthesises and builds on these critics to propose a three-part critical model based on the gothic concepts of haunting, the crypt, and excess.30 I argue that the space of the page tends towards spectrality, as symbols are echoed from previous pages. The reader must decode the meaning and provide the additional events hidden in the gutter, which I redefine as the crypt: a space whose contents are known but will never be shown.31 The comics page is wildly flexible, combining many different visual and verbal means for conveying meaning, and constantly shifting perspectives, which creates a sense of excess in the reading experience. In this light, the host’s behaviour and potential seems extremely Gothic. Both types of host problematise the boundaries between fiction and reality, as their status within the storyworld is uncertain. They may appear both inside and outside of it, or in an abstract and undefined space. Their speech may be conveyed as dialogue (speech balloon) or narration (narrative box) and become disembodied as the tale goes on. They might incorporate paratextual material such as the story’s cover or its title in their image or word. They can interfere with plot events during the telling, or recast things ironically (or otherwise) at the story’s close. They can also raise questions, provide explanations, offer morals, or undermine certainty. They are transgressive (breaking story borders, narrative borders) and excessive (shifting speech forms) and they play with perspective as they address the reader directly and in many different formats. Jones claims that the function of the host character is to tell the reader how to read the story.32 I would extend this and argue that the host’s behaviour alerts readers to the gothic potential of the comics page and its narratology. In many ways,

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the behaviour of the British girls’ comics hosts echoes the textual strategies used by other gothic novels. Frankenstein (1818) contains multiple layers of narrative which collapse when their characters meet at the tale’s close, in Dracula (1897) all of our encounters with the vampire himself are framed through the eyes of the other protagonists, and Arthur Machen’s stories use a ‘Chinese box’ style embedded structure. Nielsen offers a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ that demonstrates how the story’s original published form conflates text and paratext; undermines the boundaries between place (here and there) and time (then and now); and breaks the rules of grammar in its treatment of ‘you’ and ‘I’.33 These gothic techniques are all present in the examples of girls’ comics discussed above. The host’s voice adds frames of doubt and distance to the stories: problematising narrative certainty. Their actions are frequently transgressive, for example, as they break the borders between text and paratext by delivering titles or existing in empty space. Their behaviour may even collapse these distinctions, as they gain possession of an artefact from within the story, or step into the diegesis to interact with events and characters. These transgressions of expected diegetic boundaries and the embedded nature of the stories they tell support a gothic reading of the host character. In the medium of comics, which often combines the antithetical by using drawn words and symbolic images, the hosts’ liminality becomes a destabilising device. Horror hosts may be a ubiquitous feature of the genre, but when they appear in comics the medium’s freedom enhances the hosts’ abilities—to transgress fictional boundaries, problematise authenticity, and create narrative excess, all exemplars of the Gothic.

Notes



1. See the following: David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998); Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Tabish Khair, ‘Gothic Remains in South Asian English Fiction’, The Gothic and the Everyday, ed. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maris Beville (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Timothy Jones, ‘The Canniness of the Gothic: Genre as Practice’. Gothic Studies 11(1) (2009); Timothy Jones, The Gothic as Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth-Century Gothic (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2010); and David Punter, ‘Theory’. The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013). 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen, 1986): 3. 3. Monica Germanà, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 13. 4. Gilda Williams, ‘Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Art’. The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (London: Routledge, 2014): 413. 5. Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017): 53.

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6. See for example Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (London: The Women’s Press, 1978 [1976]); H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature. The H.P. Lovecraft Archive (1927); and Donna Heiland, Gothic and Gender (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2004). 7. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: the Gothic in Western Culture’. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): xix. 9. See for example Gina Wisker, Horror Fiction: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2005); Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Introduction: What, Why and When is Horror Fiction?’ Horror: A Literary History, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes (London: The British Library, 2016). 10. Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 16(1) (1826). 11. Sue Zlosnik and Avril Horner, ‘Comic Gothic’. The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013): 122. 12. Zlosnik and Horner, ‘Comic Gothic’, 124–125. 13. Timothy Jones, Gothic and the Carnivalesque (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015): 127. 14. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996). 15. Julian Wolfreys, Transgression: Identity, Space, Time (London: Palgrave, 2008): 98. 16. Anne Digby, Personal Correspondence with Julia Round (2017). 17. James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011) citing L. Fenwick, ‘Periodicals and Adolescent Girls’. Studies in Education 2(1) (1953). 18. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon Press 1996): 84. 19. Pat Mills, ‘Misty: The Female 2000AD’. Pat Mills Blog (2012). 20. Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012): 6. 21. See for example https://www.tebeosfera.com/numeros/lily_1976_bruguera_-super-_20. html, accessed 19 January 2019. 22. These appearances are presumably to replace the opening panels of stories taken from older sources. Please see my online database at www.juliaround.com/misty for the original sources of all reprinted stories where known. 23. Dates where known: “Madame Marlova Remembers”, Debbie #186–#211 (4 September 1976–26 February 1977). “Cremond Castle”, Spellbound (ndat). “Dolwyn’s Dolls”, Bunty #1287–#1291 (11 September 1982–9 October 1982; Annuals 1983 and 1984 and subsequent issues of Bunty Picture Story Library). “A Tale from the Toy Museum”, Bunty #1493–ndat. (23 August 1986–ndat; Annuals 1988 and 1989). “The Button Box’” Tammy (ndat). “Jade Jenkins’ Stall”, M&J (ndat) (www.girlscomicsofyesterday.com, accessed 3 January 2019). 24. Manuel Aguirre, Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990): 5. 25. Joy van Lieshout, The Gothic and the Graphic Novel. Voicing Postmodern Fears in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Unpublished MA thesis (2013). 26. Mistyfan. “Gypsy Rose’s Tales of Mystery and Magic.” A Resource on Jinty: Artists, Writers, Stories (2014). 27. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 28. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Paradox Press, 1993). 29. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics (Jackson, MS: University Press Mississippi, 2005). 30. Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (Jefferson, CA: McFarland, 2014). 31. Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

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32. Jones, Gothic and the Carnivalesque. 33. Henrik Skov Nielsen, “Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices?” Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, GmbH, 2011).

Bibliography Aguirre, Manuel. Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. “Introduction: What, Why and When Is Horror Fiction?” Horror: A Literary History, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes. London: The British Library, 2016: 7–18. Baldick, Chris. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: xi–xxiii. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Chapman, James. British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Digby, Anne. Personal Correspondence with Julia Round. Conducted by Email, 11 August 2017. Fenwick, L. “Periodicals and Adolescent Girls.” Studies in Education 2(1) (1953): 27–45. Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Germanà, Monica. Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Hand, Richard J. Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in American 1931–1952. Jefferson, CA: McFarland, 2012. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press Mississippi, 2005. Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2004. Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Jones, Timothy. “The Canniness of the Gothic: Genre as Practice.” Gothic Studies 11(1) (2009): 124–134. Jones, Timothy. “The Gothic as Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth-Century Gothic.” Unpublished PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2010. Available at http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/1357/thesis. pdf?sequence=2. Accessed 19 December 2018. Jones, Timothy. Gothic and the Carnivalesque. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Khair, Tabish. “Gothic Remains in South Asian English Fiction.” The Gothic and the Everyday, ed. Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maris Beville. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014: 215–224. Lieshout, Joy van. The Gothic and the Graphic Novel. Voicing Postmodern Fears in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Unpublished MA thesis (2013). http://www. academia.edu/4234614/MA_Thesis_The_Gothic_and_The_Graphic_Novel_-_Voicing_ Postmodern_fears_in_Arkham_Asylum_A_Serious_House_on_Serious_Earth. Accessed 14 January 2019. Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The H.P. Lovecraft Archive (1927). http:// www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx. Accessed 3 December 2017. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Paradox Press, 1993. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Mills, Pat. “Misty: The Female 2000AD.” Pat Mills Blog (2012). https://patmills.wordpress. com/2016/09/06/misty-lives/. Accessed 7 December 2018.

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Mistyfan. “Gypsy Rose’s Tales of Mystery and Magic.” A Resource on Jinty: Artists, Writers, Stories (2014). https://jintycomic.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/gypsy-roses-tales-of-mysteryand-magic/. Accessed 3 December 2018. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. London: The Women’s Press, 1978 [1976]. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Fictional Voices? Strange Voices? Unnatural Voices?” Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, ed. Per Krogh Hansen, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Rolf Reitan. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, GmbH, 2011: 55–82. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. Punter, David. “Theory.” The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013: 686–693. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 16(1) (1826): 145–152. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/radcliffe1.html. Accessed 16 December 2018. Roper, Lyndal. The Witch in the Western Imagination. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Round, Julia. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach. Jefferson, CA: McFarland, 2014. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon Press, 1986. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. London: Methuen, 1986. Spooner, Catherine. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). http://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/696. Accessed 11 December 2018. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Williams, Gilda. “Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Art.” The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2005. Wolfreys, Julian. Transgression: Identity, Space, Time. London: Palgrave, 2008. Zlosnik, Sue and Horner, Avril. “Comic Gothic.” The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013: 122–126.

Lemony Snicket Valeria Iglesias-Plester

A Series of Unfortunate Events, written by Daniel Handler under the pen name of Lemony Snicket, is a series of thirteen children’s novels released between 1999 and 2006 by HarperCollins, with illustrations by Brett Helquist. These novels are generally categorised under the ‘Gothic fiction’ spectrum. Likewise, Handler published companion books such as Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002), The Beatrice Letters (2006) and Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid (2007). He also created a four-part series titled All the Wrong Questions (2012–2015), which delves on Snicket’s backstory while expanding on the universe portrayed in A Series of Unfortunate Events. These are published by Egmont Publishing in the United Kingdom and by Little, Bown and Company in the United States, as opposed to being distributed by HarperCollins as the previous installments. These thirteen books gather the story of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, three siblings whose parents have died in a tragic fire that destroyed the Baudelaire mansion and, by that same token, their entire lives. In the first book, The Bad Beginning (1999), the children—now orphans—are put under the custody of a distant family member they have never heard of: Count Olaf, an actor who lives in a filthy house and is always accompanied by his theatre troupe. The villainous Count will attempt to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune by concocting a wide range of criminal plans (including impersonation, theft, murder and other felonies), chasing the children everywhere they go at whatever cost, followed and aided by his associates. The children’s affairs are (poorly) handled by the banker Mr. Poe; it is he who puts them under the care of Count Olaf and several other (mostly unfit) guardians until the children run off trying to escape their vicious pursuer. Violet is fourteen years old at the beginning of the series, being the eldest, followed by twelve-year-old Klaus and the infant Sunny, who is roughly between the ages of two and three. Each of the three children develops specific hobbies as they are growing up, prior to their parents’ passing: Violet is an inventor, Klaus is

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an avid reader and Sunny loves biting all sorts of hard objects—although, as she grows older in the novels, she becomes a talented cook. Their pastimes turn out to be special abilities that will come in handy to them in their survival throughout the thirteen books. Meanwhile, all of this overlaps with the great mystery of a secret organisation called V.F.D., which the Baudelaire’s parents belonged to before their untimely death, alongside Count Olaf and Lemony Snicket. The A Series of Unfortunate Events saga has been taken to the big and the small screen. First, there was the 2004 film (of the same name) directed by Brad Silberling, that compiles the events in the first three books: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room (1999) and The Wide Window (2000). Here, the story of the Baudelaire orphans up to then is told, giving it an ending in which Count Olaf is finally caught and pays for his crimes, completely derailing from the ending given in the book series. This adaptation is less macabre than the novels, mainly exploiting the funnier aspects of Handler’s fiction. For instance, Jim Carrey’s portrayal of Count Olaf falls in the comedic side of things; rather than black humour, irony and gruesome details, this adaptation makes use of exaggeration and silliness on behalf of Carrey’s Olaf to construct the character of the villain. Perhaps this was Silberling’s creative approach to Handler’s story—which would not be published in its entirety until 2006—together with Carrey’s influence, in order to bring A Series of Unfortunate Events closer to the audience. However, it does preserve some of the main traits from the other characters, such as the children’s special skills, Mr. Poe’s incessant coughing or Uncle Monty’s caring nature. It would seem that this adaptation scratches at the surface of something deeper. Handler’s audience was perchance more easily targeted through novels than film at the time, and Silberling with the latter was attempting to reach further. Nevertheless, we must highlight that dismissing the more grotesque details in A Series of Unfortunate Events diminishes the plot and the works as a whole and what Handler could have intended with them. Second, Netflix has adapted all thirteen books into a television series, partially collaborating with Daniel Handler to do so. The first season, which gathered the first four books (that is, the three mentioned above and the fourth: The Miserable Mill, 2000), aired in 2017. The second season (2018), in the same line, adapted the next five: The Austere Academy (2000), The Ersatz Elevator (2001), The Vile Village (2001), The Hostile Hospital (2001) and The Carnivorous Carnival (2002). The third and final season (2019) has adapted the last four books remaining: The Slippery Slope (2003), The Grim Grotto (2004), The Penultimate Peril (2005) and The End (2006). All books (except for The End) have been adapted in two episodes, lasting around 45 minutes each. The Netflix version is more closely linked with the book series and shares the most important details in them with the audience, which is possibly thanks to the fact that Handler has been involved with it on and off. Moreover, it explores the underlying plot (which we will address in subsequent sections) of the secret organisation V.F.D. and their doings—past and present—from the very beginning. This last is mildly hinted at in the 2004 film, but it is thoroughly explored in this adaptation, even more so than in the novels, where most of the information is laid out in clues and more implicitly presented.

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The initial aim of this chapter is to look into the universe depicted in A Series of Unfortunate Events using the Gothic as a frame for analysis. This will be done in order to classify and understand these series better while examining how the tropes typical of the gothic genre are adapted for children in the thirteen novels. It is also in our interest to observe how the concepts of good and evil are introduced to children in these series. An overview including all thirteen books will be provided and used for this examination, focusing more or less on one novel or another depending on the aspect put under analysis. The first and foremost characteristic that A Series of Unfortunate Events displays is how its multilayered narrative is built. As mentioned in the introduction, the books are written by Daniel Handler, although he uses the pen name ‘Lemony Snicket’. This does not only mean that he uses a pseudonym, but that he uses a whole different identity that plays out to be a character integrated inside the narrative of the series. Therefore, although the author is indeed Handler, the narrator of the story is Lemony Snicket (appearing in the cover of each novel as the author), who is trailing the Baudelaires, as if composing a report on their doings and whereabouts. This makes for a labyrinth-like structure as well. In short, there is a larger story that serves as background for the mishaps of the Baudelaire siblings, including Lemony Snicket, the children’s parents and the secret organisation named V.F.D. For this reason, Snicket acts as a character that becomes a part of the Baudelaire’s story, even if they are unaware of it. Consequently, the presentation of the books adds to this; for instance, the back cover already presents a letter from Snicket to the reader, advising against opening the book while actually summing up the plot, as a regular synopsis would. We will be scrutinising this ­frame-tale structure and what it entails in this subsection. We propose that Handler presents us with at least five different elements that act as filters between the reader and the story of the Baudelaires, all of them layered one on top of the other, or nested, as a matryoshka doll. A preliminary outlook of this would be as follows: The reader > HarperCollins (publishing house) > Daniel Handler (author) > Lemony Snicket (character & narrator) > V.F.D. (secret organization/background) > The Baudelaire children (the protagonists/nuclear story)

We will comment on this step by step. The larger frame suggested that encompasses it all is the reader because that is who the literary work is aimed at. To that end, the reader—or getting to the reader—is the final stage of the literary chain, so to speak. Following from this, Handler as Snicket addresses the editor, embodied by the publishing house HarperCollins, as if each instalment were a rough report with all of the information gathered by Snicket about the children and Count Olaf for publication. HarperCollins is, in consequence, the medium Snicket needs to get the story out to the reader; ergo, he presents his investigation to the publishing house for its distribution. He addresses a letter to ‘[his] kind editor’ on the last page of each book, in which he gives the reader a sneak peek into what will be happening in the next volume, how his investigation is going and how he will get the next instal ment to his editor. As an example, we could take a look

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at said letter in book one, The Bad Beginning, in which book two, The Reptile Room is discussed. The letter contains substantially specific details that should only be unveiled to the reader upon picking up the next volume; however, Handler (through Snicket) decides to reveal them as an amuse-bouche for his audience as follows: To My Kind Editor, I am writing to you from the London branch of the Herpetological Society, where I am trying to find out what happened to the reptile collection of Dr. Montgomery Montgomery following the tragic events that occurred while the Baudelaire orphans were in his care. An associate of mine will place a small waterproof box in the phone booth of the Elektra Hotel at 11 P.M. next Tuesday. Please retrieve it before midnight to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. In the box you will find my description of these terrible events, entitled THE REPTILE ROOM, as well as a map of Lousy Lane, a copy of the film Zombies in the Snow, and Dr. Montgomery’s recipe for coconut cream cake. I have also managed to track down one of the few photographs of Dr. Lucafont, in order to help Mr. Helquist with his illustrations. Remember, you are my last hope that the tales of the Baudelaire orphans can finally be told to the general public. With all due respect, Lemony Snicket1

This letter has two main purposes. First, it serves as a mechanism to add verisimilitude to the events narrated by Snicket regarding the Baudelaire children. He is investigating and presenting his editor with the results of his trailing and research of the orphans; the reader is meant to believe that the Baudelaires are real people and that Snicket has acted as a witness to their misfortunes, looking for a way to spread the word and denounce the evil of Count Olaf and his associates. This explains why the letter is added at the end of each book simulating a real letter, with typewriter font and as if it were a scan or a photocopy of the real one—hence, another piece of evidence, apart from Snicket’s report. Second, the letter, as stated before, acts as a sneak peek for the reader to have a taste of what is coming next. In children and young adult fiction this is a common trope. The reader is given a summary of what is coming ahead or perhaps even the complete first chapter of the following instalment. The objective of doing this must be to keep the reader hooked and interested in the story. Additionally, this foreshadowing of the events is also a prevailing resource used by the author (Handler through Snicket) from beginning to end, while also being a characteristic common to the gothic genre. As a result, the letter is an active part of this narrative, just as the synopsis in the back cover (mentioned earlier). This is a common element of the gothic too. We will delve on this and its use as a narrative device in more detail. Daniel Handler, as Lemony Snicket, makes use of one more element to add realism to the story and link the narrator to the tale of the Baudelaires: A dedication, which is always addressed to a woman named Beatrice, who turns out to be the mother of the children. It is presented as a short poem at the beginning of each volume of the series before the first chapter begins. It is not explicit in the series

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that Beatrice is the mother of the Baudelaires; yet, there are several clues delivered by Snicket throughout the text. What we do know from the start is that Beatrice is dead, as this is the common theme in all of these short dedication-poems, even hinting to how she died. For instance: For Beatrice— You will always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave.2 For Beatrice— No one could extinguish my love, or your house.3

Handler references the role of the muse with the late Beatrice Baudelaire, as the Italian poets Dante Alighieri (with his own Beatrice) and Francesco Petrarca—or Petrarch—(with Laura). This also echoes Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, as his work usually revolves around the theme of a beautiful, dead woman, whom he generally calls Lenore. This is said to be inspired by the illness and subsequent death of his wife Virginia, as well as the loss of both his mother and foster mother. Handler makes use of intertextuality in A Series of Unfortunate Events: we will see literary references in every instalment, especially in the names given to the characters (for instance, the Baudelaires borrow their last name from the French, maudit poet Charles Baudelaire). The use of this letters and dedications is relevant due to their goal to connect the story to the realm of reality, making Snicket and his peers actual people, and the story of the Baudelaire’s a true account of tragic events that the children and Count Olaf, among others, took part in. We can see this more explicitly in the publication titled The Beatrice Letters (mentioned in the introduction as a companion to A Series of Unfortunate Events), where more information is shared—and more explicitly so, as it is a compilation of personal letters. This volume gathers the correspondence sent by Beatrice Baudelaire II (daughter of Dewey Denouement and Kit Snicket, raised by the Baudelaires after book thirteenth) to Lemony Snicket, as well as the letters sent by the latter to Beatrice Baudelaire, the mother of the children. It is here where we can prove that the Beatrice of the dedications is indeed the mother of the Baudelaires. She and Snicket were romantically involved before the V.F.D. schism, which we will address later on more in depth. Beatrice and Snicket, as we know, do not end up together. In The Miserable Mill, Snicket reveals that he ‘once loved a woman, who for various reasons could not marry [him]’ and in order to tell him so she wrote a ‘two-hundred-page book explaining every single detail of the bad news at great length’. In case there is any trace of doubt so as to who this woman is (if it is not the woman he dedicates the books to), he nonchalantly clarifies that reading this over and over still feels as if ‘[his] darling Beatrice is bringing [him] bad news every day and every night of [his] life’.4 Moreover, in one of the letters addressed by Snicket to Beatrice in The Beatrice Letters, he is answering to her refusal: ‘the two-hundred-page letter

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broke my heart’ and ‘after reading your book, I understand why you cannot live with me’.5 However, the role of Beatrice as Snicket’s ‘muse’ is important because his dedication and love to her, even after she married Bertrand, the father of the Baudelaire orphans, is what propels the narration. She is the reason why Snicket trails the children and reports on their doings and whereabouts. Furthermore, Lemony Snicket is involved as a narrator and a character because of his link to V.F.D., a secret organisation that the Baudelaire parents, Count Olaf and several other characters belonged to. The story of V.F.D. is never thoroughly explained in the books, the crucial information is laid out in the background and it becomes clearer to the reader as the Baudelaire children are discovering more about everything regarding this secret organisation and how involved their parents were with it. Most importantly, how this results in their death. Thanks to the manner in which Snicket presents the events he is narrating, the reader has a growing sense that there is more to the story than what may be perceived at first glance. The secretive nature of the organisation itself, constantly covering up its tracks, adds to the lack of data that the Baudelaires and the readers experience regarding V.F.D., leaving us with half-truths and hypotheses that may or may not be entirely accurate about their activities and members. Still, in the twelfth book, it is said that ‘V.F.D. was once a united group of volunteers, trying to extinguish fires—both literally and figuratively. But now there are two groups of bitter enemies’6; to that end, we could draw that the initials V.F.D. stand for Volunteer Fire Department, as is suggested through the series. The group has already split by the time the Baudelaire children become acquainted with it, forming two opposing sides: the one that provokes fires and the one that attempts to put them out. The schism appears to have taken place because of a sugar bowl, of mysterious content, which both factions desire and that belonged to a tea set owned by Esmé Squalor (one of the children’s legal guardians in The Ersatz Elevator). Yet, there appear to be more differences between the two portions that come out from the schism. Although Handler’s writing and construction of the series results unfathomable, and there are many pieces of the puzzle that seem to be missing, there is at least an ongoing moral debate about what lines should not be crossed and what should ‘the greater good’ be and to what extent can certain actions be performed with regards to it. The Baudelaires, the Snickets and some of the children’s legal guardians after their parents’ passing (/murder) like Aunt Josephine (The Wide Window) or Dr. Montgomery (The Reptile Room) would belong to the latter fraction. On the other hand, Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor would belong to the arsonist side. This is how the characters are divided between the good faction and the evil one, or else, the ‘heroes’ and the ‘villains’. Nevertheless, more than heroes, we could classify the characters that aid the Baudelaires as ‘helpers’; a feature explained by Vladimir Propp’s 31 fairy tale functions in Morphology of the Folktale (1928). V.F.D. and their doings influence the children and serve as background for their story: a fire provoked by the arsonist faction of the split association is what triggers this narrative and, for that matter, the misfortune experienced by the Baudelaires.

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The final stage of this frame tale is the nuclear story Violet, Klaus and Sunny are the protagonists of. They—or rather, the fortune they have inherited—are at the core of all of Count Olaf’s malicious concoctions and wickedness; they are the victims of his misdeeds, and obtaining the Baudelaire fortune is his final goal. Olaf’s vengeful plans will only culminate once he acquires the inheritance, knowing that this requires murdering at least two of the children to carry the scheme out more easily: he only needs one of them to get his hands on the money. The central plot upon which Handler elaborates in every volume is Count Olaf chasing the Baudelaire children in order to steal their money, through whatever means necessary, introducing an almost haunting essence to this tireless chase—his malice and delinquency know no limits. Count Olaf and his villainous ways are the main input of horror in the narrative, both for the Baudelaires and the reader. Notwithstanding, there is always more to the story, and we must bear in mind that Count Olaf’s plans are motivated by revenge and not pure greed (as we will explore later on); he wants the children to suffer. Additionally, the children believe him to be the one who caused the fire that burnt their house down and that killed their parents: Klaus knelt down beside his sister, and stared into the villain’s shiny eyes. “You’re the one who made us orphans in the first place,” he said, uttering out loud for the first time a secret all three Baudelaires had kept in their hearts for almost as long as they could remember. Olaf closed his eyes for a moment, grimacing in pain, and then stared slowly at each of the three children in turn. “Is that what you think?” he said finally. “We know it,” Sunny said. “You don’t know anything,” Count Olaf said.7

Judging by his reaction to the accusation, and taking his boastful character into account, it is almost safe to assume that Olaf may not have been responsible for all the misfortune that the orphans have had to suffer from the beginning, but he still inflicted a fair share of harm to them. The tragic story of the three orphans is encompassed inside every frame explained here, with them being the final and tiniest of the matryoshka dolls, reminding us of an intricate maze that the Baudelaires are trying to navigate their way out of, while us, the readers, witness these subsequent series of unfortunate events. Now, it is time for us to discuss the gothic element of unreliability and how it is presented and achieved, helping make up the story of the Baudelaire children. To start with, we could comment on two different aspects that correlate: the use of foreshadowing and the kind of narrator Handler makes Lemony Snicket out to be. After all, Lemony Snicket is both a source and a filter for the information the reader receives, it is through his eyes that we see the reality the Baudelaires are living, he acts as a somewhat omniscient narrator, and simultaneously as a third party observing the situation without all-knowing power. Moreover, foreshadowing and digressions are some of the devices he uses to make his voice felt from one end to the other of the narrative. In order to examine the use of foreshadowing, we could begin by taking a look at The Reptile Room, the second instalment, in which we are warned by Snicket

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several times that although things appear to be looking up for the Baudelaires, everything is not what it seems. We are introduced to their new, kind, loving guardian, Dr. Montgomery Montgomery—or, as he prefers to be called, Uncle Monty—a renowned herpetologist. The children are being driven by Mr. Poe, their banker, to the countryside, where Uncle Monty lives with his immense collection of snakes. They are passing through Lousy Lane, ‘perhaps the most unpleasant [road] in the world’, as Snicket puts it, and he states, upfront: ‘I am sorry to tell you that this story begins with the Baudelaire orphans traveling along this most displeasing road, and that from this moment on, the story only gets worse’. Later on, he warns the reader: ‘if you have opened this book in the hope of finding out that the children lived happily ever after, you might as well shut it and read something else’.8 In the third chapter, he also hints to the tragic fate awaiting Uncle Monty, which is one of the main hardships the children will suffer in The Reptile Room: You must have thought, at the end of the previous chapter, that Sunny was dead and that this was the terrible thing that happened to the Baudelaires at Uncle Monty’s house, but I promise you Sunny survives this particular episode. It is Uncle Monty, unfortunately, who will be dead, but not yet.9

Snicket’s insinuations are incessant and could even be perceived by the reader as excessive (and annoying). This is one of the main traits Snicket exhibits as a character: he is not short of extravagance when it comes to narrating this tale and making use of marked strategies to do so, which may become repetitive. This is a conscious effort made by Handler to give Snicket his own voice and character, as well as making the latter’s voice felt strongly throughout the narration: we are not dealing with a normal third-person omniscient narrator, and that has to become clear to the reader from the very beginning. Snicket, accordingly, insists on the ill fortune that always follows the Baudelaires, foreshadowing that an expected turn of events will always make things worse than they already are for the children. Furthermore, we know that he is involved with the story: he investigates the children, he dedicates each instalment to their deceased mother, and he is (or was) a member of the secret organisation V.F.D. All of this results in the creation of an unreliable narrator, typical of the gothic genre, whom Handler will make use of to guide the reader. He leads us to believe that Snicket is trailing the Baudelaires because of his previous (ill-fated) romance with their mother, so he is bound to be partial to them in his telling of the story. That is, presumably, his motive behind denouncing the evil deeds of Count Olaf against the children, taking it rather personally and making it his mission to do so. However, Snicket also digresses from the story frequently, reminiscing on anecdotes or flashbacks used to give clues to the reader. The term ‘unreliable narrator’ was coined by literary critic Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and further explored by William Riggan in Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, Clowns: The Unreliable 1st Person Narrator (1982). The unreliable narrator can be broadly defined as he or she who deceives the reader and has a partial point of view that they are attempting to compel the reader

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(knowing or unknowingly) to believe and share. Narrators are bound to exhibit a minimum level of partiality when the voice belongs to an individual, whether real or invented. Chris Baldick in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1990) defines the unreliable narrator as they who make an account of events that ‘appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted’, specifying that this ‘does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar’. He also adds that the ‘discrepancy’ in perspectives (that is, the point of view of the unreliable narrator vs. the suspicions of the reader) creates ‘a sense of irony’.10 In this same line of argument, Riggan goes further than Baldick (or Booth) and categorises the possible types of unreliable narrator that can be found: The Pícaro, the Madman, the Clown, the Naïf and the Liar. In this classification, Lemony Snicket would best fit the category of the Clown. There is a sombre reality to the nature of the Clown, hidden behind the charm and humour they display, as well as their wit when it comes to playing with conventions and the aesthetics of their writing.11 The unreliability in Lemony Snicket’s narration is at the core of the story because he acts both as narrator and character, making Handler’s choice to present him under this light a crucial part of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Moreover, Snicket has a very specific style when it comes to narrating (and commenting on) the story. There are three traits that are predominant in his recount of the events; foreshadowing, seemingly unnecessary clarifications and digression. Two of these, the first and the latter, have been discussed. Nevertheless, Snicket’s constant interruptions due to his explanations are also a predominant feature all in all. He generally defines words that the reader might not understand, always employing the same formula: he makes use of a word or expression with a presupposed level of difficulty and then explains it, breaking his own narration. He introduces this by using the term and then stating that it is ‘a word that here [in the narration] means…’ adding then his own definition or the sense which he means to express. This could act as a double-edged sword, aiding or hindering the reader. Handler must be aware of this; he exposes adults doing it to the Baudelaire children all the time, as they anticipate the orphans to ignore a specific word or phrase in spite of their obvious, above-average knowledge and intellect. The first example of this in the book series occurs when Mr. Poe, the Baudelaire family’s banker, tells the children that their parents have just died because of a fire that has burnt their home to the ground: ‘Your parents,’ Mr. Poe said, ‘have perished in a terrible fire.’ The children didn’t say anything. […] ‘Perished,’ Mr. Poe said, ‘means “killed.”’ ‘We know what the word “perished means,’ Klaus said, crossly.12

Klaus is in shock because of his parents’ death, and he is of course irritated by the banker taking their stunned silence as a sign of them not having understood the vocabulary he has used, which is the first proof of his negligence as the manager of the Baudelaire’s affairs. Mr. Poe is incapable of trusting the Baudelaires’ skills

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and intelligence and ignores them when they come to him to denounce Count Olaf’s crimes. He is completely inept in comforting or helping the Baudelaires in any (adequate) way, thus becoming a very frustrating and bothersome character. Snicket makes all of this transparent in his narration of the events, which is why it is funny and ironic that he does the same to the reader. To whatever extent or degree, there is still a didactic quality to his recurring definitions, as young readers can better understand (and learn) more difficult vocabulary thanks to them. For instance, when the children are taken in by Mr. Poe while the matter of their legal guardian and new home is sorted out: But even given the surroundings, the children had mixed feelings when, over a dull dinner of boiled chicken, boiled potatoes and blanched—the word ‘blanched’ here means ‘boiled’—string beans, Mr. Poe announced that they were to leave his household the next morning.13

To start with, the use of the synonym is, at first glance, altogether u­ nnecessary. Snicket has already repeated ‘boiled’ twice, the addition of the synonym in the third stance is not of vital importance; he could have just made use of repetition as a rhetorical device. However, this use of the synonym is surely meant to draw our attention to it—and not only that but also to the subsequent clarification given by him. On the one hand, Snicket apparently assumes that his audience does not know what ‘blanched’ means, which might be a correct assumption, but furthermore he takes on the role of explaining it rather than expecting his audience to pick up a dictionary and look up the term, or allowing the reader to infer the meaning from context. On the other hand, he is doing to his reader the same thing that Mr. Poe (and other adults) did to the Baudelaires before, infuriating Klaus (although we must take the circumstances into account, this was not an isolated event). Snicket is, again, clearly partial to the Baudelaires, their opinions and thoughts, which is why it is ironic that he acts towards his audience in the same manner as some adults do towards the Baudelaires. This might seem inconsistent, but we could also take it as Snicket flaunting his unreliability. Additionally, it is important to highlight the Handler’s conscious effort to make Snicket incoherent and unreliable in the eyes of the reader, while also creating a didactic approach. He is aware that his audience is young, making his employment of rarer words (for instance, in the titles of the books, he uses terms such as ‘austere’, ‘ersatz’ or ‘peril’) while adding a definition in the context they are being used in is a significant decision, giving the books an educational approach. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, Handler plays around with the stereotypical idea of good vs. evil—the eternal, moral debate—introducing this reflection to children. Initially, we could establish that the embodiment of evil is Count Olaf, while good would be represented by our protagonists, the Baudelaire siblings. We could further categorise the characters depending on who they help through the series. Therefore, those who help Olaf commit crimes would inevitably be classified as evil, while those who help the Baudelaires would be classified as good. However, this is not possible, since Handler built a more complex set of characters than that. Yet, we could establish a spectrum encompassing good, evil and everything in between, exploring how different groups of characters behave in the

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different instalments. This can be done in order to analyse how these concepts are built and explored in the novels through the characters’ actions and beliefs, as the line between good and evil is evidently blurred from beginning to end in the series. For starters, let us address Count Olaf’s deeds and character. The one fact about him that we know upfront from the outset of the series to the end is that he wants to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune at whatever cost, therefore everything he does from the first to the last book is aimed at that, but what fuels his incessant attempts to hurt the Baudelaires and steal their fortune? We have already established that he belongs to the arsonist side of the V.F.D. schism, which would automatically catalogue him as pure evil. Additionally, he is the villain of our story, chasing and harassing the Baudelaires in order to obtain their fortune. Notwithstanding, as the story advances (and even more so near the end), more details are known about all the characters and their backstory, to which Olaf is no exception. In book twelfth, The Penultimate Peril, almost all the characters (both ­volunteers and enemies) we have come to know through the series come together at the Hotel Denouement, managed by the triplets Frank, Ernest and Dewey Denouement. The aptly named hotel is appointed by the ‘good’ faction of V.F.D. as ‘the last safe place’, as it is the only remaining safe place—even from before the schism—which has not been destroyed (at the time). The Baudelaires know that they must meet the other volunteers there and are aided by Kit Snicket (Lemony’s sister) at the beginning of the novel in order to reach it in time. The sugar bowl will seemingly be delivered there at some point, provoking a multitudinous meeting at the hotel. In addition to all this, Count Olaf has got his hands on a dangerous substance (in the previous book, The Grim Grotto) called the ‘Medusoid Mycelium’, a deadly fungus he plans to use to infect everyone and kill off the surviving volunteers that go to the last safe place. This book and the events that take place in the few days it narrates (from Tuesday to Thursday of the same week) will be crucial to the debate of good vs. evil. Going back to Count Olaf specifically though, there are two conversations that must be highlighted regarding his past that take place in this penultimate instalment. By this time in the story, we have already learnt that Olaf is also an orphan (like most of the characters, whether volunteers or villains). As we have already mentioned, Kit Snicket is aiding the Baudelaires at the beginning of the novel, and she shares the following information with them: “I remember that evening well,” Kit replied with a faint smile. “It was a performance of La Forza del Destino. […] During intermission I followed them [the Baudelaires’ parents] to the snack bar and slipped them a box of poison darts before Esmé Squalor could catch me.”14

Towards the end of the novel, Olaf discloses a piece of information that makes the reader (and probably the Baudelaires as well) remember Kit’s anecdote. Klaus is helping Olaf to open a lock for which they need to answer three questions­, ­typing them to unlock it. The second answer they must type in is ‘the weapon that left [Olaf] an orphan’:

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“Tell me what the weapon is that left you an orphan, and I’ll type it in for you.” Count Olaf gave Klaus a slow smile that made the Baudelaires shudder. “Certainly I’ll tell you,” he said. “It was poison darts.” Klaus looked at his sisters, and then in grim silence typed P-O-I-S-O-N-D-A-R-T-S into the lock […].”15

We could presumably guess, then, that it was the Baudelaire parents who orphaned Olaf on the night that Kit referred to. This gives Olaf a motive other than pure greed: revenge. It would make sense that it was him who caused the fire that burnt down the Baudelaire mansion, but as we have already discussed, this may not be the case. Anyhow, he still takes advantage of the Baudelaires’ misfortune and not only chases after their fortune but becomes obsessed with them and his vendetta. Where is, thus, the line between good and evil drawn? Was murdering Olaf’s parents ‘for the greater good’? The line definitely becomes blurred once we find out the villain has a more human motive than we could have considered before, and that is to avenge his own parents’ death. Is this not what the Baudelaires could also wish to do? We cannot by any means defend Olaf’s actions through the series, but all deeds are multidimensional and need to be examined from more than one perspective. Count Olaf, alongside the arsonist part of V.F.D., carry out their evil deeds ­following their own interpretation of the law of retaliation: fighting fire with fire. The Baudelaires are gradually influenced by this, as it is what surrounds them the most throughout the books. They tend to be noble, kind and righteous in the face of adversity, but they are not impervious to the injustice and misfortune that follows them from one novel to the other. The Baudelaire children’s trust in adults is constantly put to a test: on the one hand, they are being pursued by treacherous adults; on the other hand, the rest of the adults are unable to see through Olaf’s disguises and, therefore, are incapable of helping the children. After the seventh book, The Vile Village, they decide to escape and stop bouncing from one unsuitable guardian to the next. In this instalment, the children are framed by Count Olaf for the murder of Jacques Snicket (brother of Lemony and Kit Snicket), making people believe it is actually him who has been murdered by the orphans. As they become fugitives and still have to avoid getting caught by Olaf, his troupe and Esmé Squalor—who at this point is romantically involved with our villain and desperately attempting to recover the sugar bowl. The Baudelaires start having to take part in the sort of activities that Olaf and his associates use to chase them; as they are on the run, they must wear disguises and pretend to be other people (in The Hostile Hospital they disguise themselves as doctors and in The Carnivorous Carnival as ‘circus freaks’) and trick (sometimes innocent) others for their own advantage. No matter how legitimate their purposes are, they still have to resort to mildly treacherous schemes to survive. In book ten, The Slippery Slope, Violet reflects that ‘[they] might be doing the wrong thing [attempting to use Esmé Squalor as a hostage to trade her in for Sunny, who has been kidnapped by Olaf]’ and that if ‘V.F.D. really stands for Volunteer Fire Department, then they’re an organization that stops fire’, concluding that ‘if everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke’

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(p. 272). In order to be able to keep up with Olaf—or negotiate with him, as is the case here—they (unsuccessfully) attempt to mimic his schemes. Violet, with unease, tries to do something for the greater good along with her brother and Quigley Quagmire, another orphan-by-arson, affirming that they ‘will soon have Sunny back, and that’s what’s important’.16 Although they have accepted that in order to get ahead of Olaf et al. they must play at his game, they do not really want to let go of their morality. Violet and Klaus’ anchor turns out to be the memory of their parents, which is what causes the eldest Baudelaire to have the reflection mentioned above. In spite of Count Olaf’s infectious evil nature spreading faster than fire and the compromising acts the Baudelaires have to carry out to survive, their moral compass is still intact: they feel guilt, they strive to be good. Nonetheless, this does not mean that they will not ever compromise their integrity, or else there would be no further contemplation to be done by the reader, which Handler clearly intended for. Two instalments later, in The Penultimate Peril, the Baudelaires must follow Olaf in order to escape and as a means to try to stop him from getting away: the three siblings have been found guilty of contempt of court in a trial that was being held for them to prove their innocence regarding the deeds from book one to twelve. They are forced, for that matter, to help Olaf escape once more: Klaus helps him get into the laundry room where the sugar bowl is believed to be hidden; Sunny suggests to burn down the Hotel Denouement, where the action is taking place; and Violet makes a parachute for the boat all four of them escape with, as they plunge off the rooftop of the hotel and into the sea. The Baudelaires, in spite of their good intentions—we can assume Sunny suggests burning down the hotel as a sign to V.F.D., for them to know ‘the last safe place’ is no longer safe—are still acting as Olaf’s accomplices in the end. Some of the characters presented to us are hinted to be dead after this. After having analysed certain aspects of the novels using some characteristics attributed to the gothic genre, we have seen how Handler adapts these traits and uses them to write a series of thirteen instalments for children, going beyond what is usually expected of fiction for children. To start with, we have outlined the frame-tale structure that he uses to give verisimilitude to the story. In this structure, we find the use of letters as a mechanism to link the books with reality, which is a common trope in the Gothic. We can also observe that there is a dedication at the beginning of each instalment and that the woman to whom these are all addressed has passed away and acts as Snicket’s muse. We have also discussed the unreliability of Snicket as a narrator, his use of foreshadowing and his digressions. Finally, we have examined the treatment of the concepts of good and evil in the novels, as seen in Count Olaf’s deeds and how the Baudelaires’ morality is compromised as the story advances and they become older and more troubled. We have seen that the books show a clear progression of the characters as they develop while unveiling a larger backstory for the Baudelaires and Count Olaf, as well as Snicket, discovering what V.F.D. is and what they did. Having all of these into account, we could split the conclusion into two parts. First, we could gather that with all the resources and tools employed by Handler, A Series of Unfortunate Events could indeed be classified as Gothic, as well as

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inside children’s fiction. To that end, he makes use of postmodern techniques, with his fictional narrator inserted in the story as a character; Handler is hyperconscious when it comes to Snicket’s storytelling and the language he uses, while also making use of devices such as letters, dedications and digressions to make the reader a participant of the story. Moreover, we must take into account the interaction between Olaf and the children, the villain acting as the haunter—and not only the hunter—of the Baudelaires, who become involved in a chase that only ends with the Count’s death in book thirteen, The End. This resonates with the idea of cosmic horror, where the haunting transcends all barriers and can become almost universal (as with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu). Olaf manages to find the children no matter where they go or hide, and as the impersonation of evil he manages to (1) drag around his associates and make them help him with his iniquitous gimmicks and (2) cause the Baudelaires to adopt some of his mischievous behaviours, at large. He infects everything around him, provoking havoc and death. At last, given all this, we could reason that, given all this, the fact that Handler introduces these more complicated themes to children’s fiction through the use of gothic devices revives both genres and ties them together, bringing us back as readers to the folk tale tradition that the Gothic draws from. The success of this narrative, reinventing and adapting the Gothic, makes A Series of Unfortunate Events and the rest of Daniel Handler’s works signed as Lemony Snicket an important contribution to the genre that must be further analysed and taken into account.

Notes

1. Snicket, Lemony, The Bad Beginning (New York, NY, 1999), letter to the editor. 2. Snicket, Lemony, The Austere Academy (New York, NY, 2000), dedication. 3. Snicket, Lemony, The Penultimate Peril (New York, NY, 2005), dedication. 4. Snicket, Lemony, The Miserable Mill (New York, NY, 2000), 15–16. 5. Snicket, Lemony, The Beatrice Letters (New York, NY, 2006), Lemony Snicket to Beatrice #5. 6. Snicket, The Penultimate, 6. 7. Snicket, Lemony, The End (New York, NY, 2006), 313–314. 8. Snicket, Lemony, The Reptile Room (New York, NY, 1999), 1–3. 9. Snicket, The Reptile, 27–28. 10. Baldick, Chris, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, UK, 1990), 347. 11. Riggan, William, Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, Clowns: The Unreliable 1st Person Narrator (Oklahoma, USA, 1982), 81. 12. Snicket, The Bad, 8. 13. Snicket, The Bad, 13–14. 14. Snicket, The Penultimate, 8–9. 15. Snicket, The Penultimate, 308. 16. Snicket, Lemony, The Slippery Slope (New York, NY, 2003), 264.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Snicket, Lemony, The Austere Academy (New York, NY, 2000). Snicket, Lemony, The Beatrice Letters (New York, NY, 2006). Snicket, Lemony, The Bad Beginning (New York, NY, 1999). Snicket, Lemony, The End (New York, NY, 2006). Snicket, Lemony, The Miserable Mill (New York, NY, 2000). Snicket, Lemony, The Penultimate Peril (New York, NY, 2005). Snicket, Lemony, The Reptile Room (New York, NY, 1999). Snicket, Lemony, The Slippery Slope (New York, NY, 2003).

Secondary Sources Baldick, Chris, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, UK, 1990), 347. Riggan, William, Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, Clowns: The Unreliable 1st Person Narrator (Oklahoma, USA, 1982), 81.

Gothic Film

Ghostly Gimmicks: Spectral Special Effects in Haunted House Films Laura Sedgwick

1999 saw the release of a handful of very different films that appeared to h­ erald the return of the ghost to the multiplex. Stir of Echoes, an adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, and M. Night Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense played the stories straight, focusing upon chills and suspense more familiar to fans of legendary haunted house films such as The Innocents (1961) or The Haunting (1963). Yet a pair of remakes attempted to marry the big-budget special effects common to late twentieth-century cinema with both a classic haunted house tale and an infamous gimmick-ridden funhouse ride of a film—The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill, respectively. With its all-star cast, including Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and director Jan De Bont, previously famous for films such as Speed (1994) and Twister (1996), The Haunting received an average rating of 3.6 out of 10 on movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.1 Many of the reviews note the bombastic nature of the adaptation, with special mention reserved for the effects on display. Critic David Ansen noted that the actors ‘must undergo an elaborate trial-by-special effects in this expensive-looking horror movie’.2 Meanwhile, Betty Jo Tucker noted that ‘the film’s sets and special effects overwhelm its plot and cast’.3 House on Haunted Hill faired a little better, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes.4 One review declared ‘[a]s in The Haunting, they eventually surrender characters and story to ­computer-generated spectacle, squandering any creepy immediacy and trampling the human element’.5 While the two remakes largely sunk without trace, even further consigned to the dustheap following the surprise success of Netflix’s homage to the original novel, The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Sixth Sense became part of popular culture. The feelings of audiences towards these films and their effects are beyond our scope here. Rather, this article aims to explore how films about haunted houses use special effects, and why they use the particular effects they do to represent

L. Sedgwick (*)  University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_39

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gothic instances of spectrality. The specific focus on the house as a site of haunting reflects the wider preoccupation with domestic spaces within gothic narratives, and the translation of the creepy ancestral castle of literature into the haunted house of contemporary cinema. Christoph Grunenberg asserts that ‘[t]he house functions as a matrix for memory and the exploration of its hidden rooms, forbidden spaces, locked doors, closet, and cupboards […] summons to consciousness displaced and undigested experiences and dreams’.6 This powerful image of the house as the locus of memory opens up the domestic space as a gothic site of repressed or buried secrets. The decision to feature American houses within Hollywood films comes via John David Rhodes’ assertion that ‘[t]he detached, single-family home is one of the most powerful metonymic signifiers of American cultural life’.7 As a powerful symbol, the American house comes to represent ideals such as privacy, prosperity and the family; all concepts which find their equal expression in the Gothic. Therefore, we will sidestep discussion of films involving haunted locales other than single-family houses, such as apartments, hotels, or asylums. There is, of course, a difficulty in identifying what constitutes a special effect and what does not. Some effects are seemingly invisible, used to hold together the cinematic image.8 There is also a difficulty in identifying the difference between special effects and visual effects. Special effects are traditionally those effects used and created on set, such as makeup, matte paintings, animatronics or staged explosions. Visual effects refer to those effects added during post-production, such as digital compositing or CGI.9 Stephen Prince disagrees with this distinction, explaining that special effects now refers only to ‘mechanical and practical effects’, often within the realm of stuntwork, while ‘[e]verything else is known as visual effects’.10 For Prince, digital effects are not restricted to the post-production phase, referring to the virtual environments used to recreate 1920s Los Angeles in Changeling (2008) or 1970s San Francisco in Zodiac (2007).11 Dan North, Bob Rehak and Michael S. Duffy argue that while many of the traditional features of special effects are now created using digital means, this merely demonstrates the evolution involved within cinematic techniques, not a clear break between processes.12 Gothic and horror films continue to utilise set design and special effects makeup to achieve their ends, with directors like Guillermo del Toro championing such uses of practical effects or using CGI only to augment existing prosthetics and practical effects captured on set.13 Films involving heavy usage of CGI, such as Poltergeist (2015), are relatively rare. Therefore, both forms of effects will be discussed under the auspices of ‘special effects’, since the majority of effects employed remain within special effects and their tangible uses to render a haunting on screen, although visual effects will be discussed where applicable. 1977 is often viewed as a watershed moment in the history of special effects, with the industrialisation of techniques by Industrial Light and Magic for Star Wars, while the launch of Cinefex magazine in 1980 marks a wider engagement with the processes involved in making films. Due to the adoption of techniques pioneered in Hollywood, the focus remains on mainstream films that enjoyed a cinematic release. This discussion restricts itself to films produced by Hollywood

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since 1980. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the special effects used in every film that deals with haunted houses, and therefore special attention is given to notable examples of the genre. The concept of ‘special effects’ has accompanied tales of hauntings since Pliny the Younger related what is oft believed to be the first ghost story; a tale in which a ghost makes its presence known through the sound of rattling chains. While such stereotypical ‘ghostly’ sounds may seem relegated to the contemporary sphere of the radio play, it demonstrates the need to make spectral visitations ‘tangible’ through the manipulation of the environment. London’s Cock Lane Ghost affair of 1762 continued the theme of sound, with a servant allegedly able to communicate with her dead mistress through a pattern of knocks on the walls. The Fox sisters of New York state used a similar pattern of raps in 1848, and such apparent communication with the dead led to the foundation of the Spiritualist movement. This underlines the link between cinematic special effects and hauntings since it was within Spiritualist séances that mediums began using tricks to convince attendees of their veracity. The regurgitation of cheesecloth simulated the production of ectoplasm, thin wires were used to make musical instruments play of their own accord, and luminous balls represented ghost lights in the darkness. A similar array of special effects appears within early photography, with multiple exposures used to simulate spectres alongside the living, using magazine ­cut-outs or postcards to provide the images of the ‘dead’. Long exposures may also be to blame for spectral figures as people moved through the frame while an exposure was being taken, such as the apparent appearance of a man, believed to be the deceased Lord Combermere, in a photograph in 1891.14 Despite the many attempts to debunk such spiritual images, their continued existence in the history of photography, and their increased sophistication, implies a willingness to use rapidly evolving technology to apparently capture the supernatural. The use of special effects did not restrict itself to the sober environs of the Spiritualist séance or the apparently impartial documentary lens of the camera. The theatre embraced the supernatural and devised ways to represent ghosts on stage, most notably using the famous Pepper’s Ghost illusion, using angled mirrors and illumination. Disneyland employed the effect in the Haunted Mansion in 1969, allowing visitors to view ghosts dancing in a ballroom, or holding a birthday party in a dining room. The principle behind Pepper’s Ghost originates in the 1558 work of John Baptista Porta, Natural Magick.15 Scientist Henry Dircks recovered the technique in the nineteenth century, while John Pepper popularised it within the theatre. Its appropriation by Disneyland demonstrates a desire to turn hauntings into a form of spectacle, and to astonish onlookers, rather than ‘proving’ the existence of the supernatural. Such a desire exists at the birth of cinema, where French filmmaker Georges Méliès bridged the gap between the stage and screen. Many of his films are described as ‘trick’ films since they exist only to showcase the clever techniques or tricks, rather than exploring narrative or realistic representation. The use of multiple and double exposures harks back to similar techniques employed by spirit photographers in earlier decades. Yet the addition of new techniques such as glass

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painting, mattes and jump cuts enabled a range of special effects to be achieved in-camera that were otherwise impossible within photography. They drew attention to themselves to both promote the techniques themselves and to amaze the viewer, closer in ethos to the carnival or stage trick than cinematic special effects. Elsewhere in cinema, special effects were used to extend scenery to compensate for budgetary constraints or achieve shots that would be otherwise too dangerous to create using actors.16 These other effects aimed for a sense of realism and were intended to be ‘invisible’ within the frame, presenting a seamless diegetic world to the audience. Yet in the work of Méliès, we see an early preoccupation with the use of these techniques to create illusions more appropriate to the Gothic. In Le Manoir du diable (released in the US as The Haunted Castle, 1896), special effects allow the Devil to conjure spirits and morph a woman into an old crone. In Le Château hanté (The Haunted Castle, 1897), Méliès employed the substitution trick through editing to enable the furniture to turn into a series of figures. Special effects become the vehicle for depicting the demonic, the monstrous, and the ghostly, and the emphasis is placed on the transformation between states of being. Not only does this highlight the liminal nature of the ghostly apparition, existing as it does ‘between’ the states of being alive and dead, it also highlights the fluid and flexible nature of non-human entities. Due to the time constraints of the films, and their emphasis upon the nature of the tricks employed, the narratives fall within the marvellous, part of Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic.17 The special effects allow the presentation of the fantastical elements as being ‘concrete’ and tangible, removing any doubt as to the veracity of the supernatural events presented. While the Gothic provided ample material for Méliès in his pursuit of developing new illusions, the use of these trick effects suited the tendencies of the Gothic. Using substitutions, a filmmaker could revive a character from the dead, bring forth literal skeletons, or pierce the boundary between worlds. Many of the films produced during the silent era, and indeed the classic era of horror production, strangely overlook the ghost as a figure of fear. Titles such as Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and The Headless Horseman (1922) demonstrate an interest in the supernatural, if not a concrete effort to explore hauntings as a cinematic topic. Vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, mummies and demons instead provide the monsters at the heart of these familiar narratives. Ghosts instead appeared in cross-genre titles such as The Ghost Goes West (1935) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), using the ghost as a gimmick within comedies. House on Haunted Hill (1959) provides perhaps the definition of ghostly gimmicks. Here, the special effects extended beyond the frame into the auditorium itself. At the point of the film in which a skeleton lurches across the set, a ­glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton was flown above the heads of the audience using a series of pulleys and wires. Here, director William Castle becomes doubled with star Vincent Price, whose character manipulates the skeleton on screen using puppetry techniques. This trick, named Emergo, marks perhaps the first instance since Méliès of special effects being used as a selling point for the film itself within Hollywood horror films (not withstanding the use of 3-D in 1953’s House of Wax). While the skeleton reveals the human

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agency behind the ‘haunting’ within the house, it does also bring an element of tangibility to the supposed ghosts that would be exploited by later filmmakers with access to a wider range of special and visual, effects. Any discussion of cinematic hauntings must indubitably turn to The Haunting (1963), and while it lies outside of our chosen period, it is still notable for being a film that balances the tendency towards keeping the ghost off-screen and hinting at its presence through sound, with the growing sophistication of special effects. Three main sequences act as ‘set pieces’ within the narrative: first, while Dr Markway (Richard Johnson) and Luke (Russ Tamblyn) chase a dog outside, Theo (Claire Bloom) and Eleanor (Julie Harris) take refuge in Theo’s room as an insistent pounding crashes around the corridor; second, Eleanor is outraged by the sounds of a child crying while Theo clutches her hand during the night, only to discover Theo was on the other side of the room at the time; and third, a downstairs door appears to pulse and breathe during another nocturnal assault. The first and second sequences depend upon sound effects and camerawork to derive their chills. The booming sounds hark back to the Spiritualist seances of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the living purposefully communicated with the dead through a series of knocks and raps. Yet those sounds are amplified and distorted as the crashes refuse to correspond to any form of dialogue with the two women. Meanwhile, the third sequence falls under the more typical realm of special effects. While many believe the apparently expanding door was made of rubber or latex, director Robert Wise commissioned the creation of a laminated wood door. On cue, a prop man pushed a 2 × 4 against the door to create the effect of its bulging into the room.18 Such an effect demonstrates the belief in the supernatural to manipulate the material environment during a haunting. Yet it also signifies a collaboration between the effects team and the production designers to achieve gothic illusions. Charles and Mirella Jona Affron note that ‘[i]n most films, decor carries a low level of narrative weight. It sets time, place, and mood and subscribes to the generally accepted depiction of the real’.19 Yet here, the special effect draws attention to the set design as it behaves against character, elevating the design to the realm of artifice, where ‘[d]esign is rendered specific and legible through the invention of the patently unreal’.20 The use of a door as the source of horror is notable; doors are used to mark boundaries between defined spaces and the bulging inwards of this one indicates the fluidity of boundaries within the Gothic. The debates around the inclusion of the demon in Night of the Demon (1957) partially explain the ambivalence towards the use of effects in horror films. The use of special effects during production often makes them cheaper to use than their big-budget cousin, visual effects. Prince notes the common thinking that visual effects take the place of storytelling and are the preserve of the Hollywood blockbuster.21 He highlights the division between cinematic realism and visual effects, since effects move ‘away from live action and toward images that are highly designed and that can depart in many ways from camera reality’.22 Shilo T. McClean continues the theme, explaining that special effects are often discussed as part of the cinema of attractions, and while discussing Tom Gunning’s work on

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the subject, explains ‘the very purpose of special effects is to stop the narrative and draw the spectator’s attention to the technology of the cinema’.23 Yet within the contemporary haunted house film, these special effects are used to render the effects of the haunting either visible or tangible, drawing attention to the supernatural elements within the frame, not the cinematic technology necessary to conjure such elements on screen. They also speak to the gothic tendency towards excess and artifice, emphasising the theatricality at the heart of the Gothic. It is the combination of both special and visual effects that helped cement Poltergeist (1982) as a true supernatural spectacle, able to take advantage of new visual effects developed by the Industrial Light and Magic effects house. The film could not use such effects to the extent they appear in films such as Star Wars since an air of realism must pervade haunted house narratives. Without it, the sense of the uncanny that accompanies such films cannot occur. The settings and initial events must appear familiar, both to the characters and to the audience, to enable the later turn towards the unfamiliar and the terrifying. Special and visual effects help to create the air of uneasiness that traces the route through the uncanny and they generally support the quest for plausibility. They also enable the visual representation of the return of the repressed since the effects act as a form of conduit for the return of the dead. That visual effects are often reserved for the figures themselves, with a few exceptions, demonstrates a tendency to build as mundane a world as possible for the spectral to create a greater disruption. Indeed, one of the most disturbing sequences of Poltergeist involves the visiting parapsychologist Marty (Martin Casella), who watches his face rot and disintegrate in the mirror. His efforts to halt the progress result in more parts of the face falling away. The production team made a duplicate head, rather than using makeup, allowing them to reveal the underlying structure of the face as it falls away in layers.24 The effect focuses on the corporeal aspect to the haunting, echoing the ectoplasm and slime of the other world. The grotesque nature of the sequence recalls the carnival mask, linked with both ‘the joy of change and reincarnation’ and the rejection of ‘conformity to oneself’.25 The ability of the ghosts to affect such change on the material world, to cause hallucinations that destroy the face, the very point at which we express identity, demonstrates the power of the spirits to cross the boundary between the worlds. Effects are not the only means at the director’s disposal to represent hauntings. Cuts and point-of-view shots are often used to demonstrate which characters can see the ghosts. In a sequence in The Sixth Sense, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) pauses at the foot of a staircase in his school. A shot from his point of view shows three figures hanging from nooses in a sports hall. The film cuts to a shot of Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) looking up the stairs, followed by a wide-angle shot of both characters and the now-empty sports hall beyond. The cut to Crowe breaks Cole’s point of view, showing that only Cole ‘sees dead people’. A movement of props or a change in the set design also visually represents the haunting on screen. Remaining with The Sixth Sense, a single take follows Lynn Sear (Toni Collette) around the kitchen as she closes drawers and cupboard doors that have been left open. The camera continues to follow her into the laundry room and back out into

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the kitchen, where all of the drawers and doors again stand open. The short time involved in the take exonerates Cole from having opened them all, with the implication being that supernatural forces are involved. A similar device is used in The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), in which the camera follows a character moving a pile of plates from a cupboard and onto a table, yet the plates reappear in the cupboard when the camera returns to its starting point. This fluid use of the camera relegates the spectral to off-screen space, effecting change in the space outside of the frame.26 In itself, this is a use of cinematography and not a special effect, yet it requires a special manipulation of the set within a short time frame to achieve the intended effect. It is the use of traditional special effects that most clearly helps demonstrate a spectral manipulation of space. A rotating set was built to house the Freelings bedroom in Poltergeist (1982), and its slow movement enabled the illusion that Diane (JoBeth Williams) is seemingly dragged up the wall and along the ceiling by invisible hands.27 The sequence demonstrates the awesome power the spirits enjoy over the material realm, with Diane unable to free herself from their grasp. This movement also harks back to the funhouse special effects of William Castle or Disneyland, underscoring the grand spectacle involved with the supernatural at the Spiritualist séance, rather than the quiet chills of Shymalan. Here we see again the theatrical nature of the Gothic, expressed through special effects. The effects essentially stand in for the ghosts, allowing the audience to see the result of their intervention, even if they cannot see the figures. The ability to see ghosts in Thir13en Ghosts (2001), itself a remake of the 1960 original, was removed from the realm of the psychic and given more a practical slant through the wearing of special glasses. The film features a mechanistic house, described as both ‘a ­one-of-a-kind home’ and ‘a machine powered by the dead’, in which the movement of levers allows for the opening of different doors within the basement, freeing the ghosts from their glass cells.28 The ghosts are played by actors wearing special effects makeup to denote wounds or grotesque markings, and this use of makeup recalls the carnivalesque through the bulbous or distorted forms of the ghostly bodies. Rather than using CGI to represent the ghosts, these terrifyingly tangible spirits may interact with the human characters on the same plane of existence. A point-of-view shot from Kathy Kriticos (Shannon Elizabeth) shows a spirit wearing a cage on its head, its expression of fury writ large, while a wide shot shows Kathy scrabbling against thin air while scratches erupt across her face. The cross-cutting between the two points of view demonstrates the use of the glasses in order to see the spirits, a point further underscored when characters not wearing the glasses suddenly suffer violent injuries. The absence of glasses relegates the spectral to off-screen space, yet that space also appears on-screen with its focus on the characters under attack. This conflation of spaces highlights the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead, and the ease with which the dead may effect change upon the living. Such use of on-screen space is a familiar way to represent the spectral. During a sequence in The Frighteners (1996), a car appears to drive itself. The headlights turn on unaided, and a close-up shows the car put into ‘drive’. These simple tweaks

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to parts of the set also recall the instruments played using wires of the Spiritualist seance. These shots also provide the audience with the passenger’s point of view, demonstrating both that she is unable to see ghosts and that ghosts can effect change in the physical realm. The spirits in The Frighteners manifest through the power of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and it is this combination of practical and visual effects to which we now turn. The use of overt visual effects within haunted house films is often restricted to the time codes or glitches added in post-production to add to the verisimilitude of found-footage titles such as Paranormal Activity (2007). Elsewhere, directors employ a combination of special and visual effects in much the same way that Poltergeist relied on both branches of effects. Director James Wan returned to more traditional special effects for Insidious (2010), in which the demonic figures gain terrifying tangibility within the frame through Wan’s use of actors wearing specific costumes or makeup. This approach is not unlike that observed in The Sixth Sense or Stir of Echoes. In the former, the ghosts take on a human aspect, with special effects makeup used to ‘explain’ the manner of their death, such as the boy who offers to show Cole where his father keeps his guns, before revealing a gunshot wound to the back of the head. In the latter, the funereal colour palette of the ghost sets her apart from the warm colours used elsewhere in the set design, and her physicality enables her to interact with her surroundings: she turns off a light by touching the light bulb and changes television channels by appearing on screen herself. Both of these films feature psychics as their protagonists, and their connection to the spirit world manifests through the apparent reality of the ghosts they see. The Sixth Sense eschews the tendency to use colour palettes to accentuate their spectrality, as Stir of Echoes does with its spirit, instead using special effects makeup and point of view shots from Cole’s perspective to denote the ghosts. Cole explains to his mother that the dead continue to walk around, often unaware of the fact that they are dead, and the choice to use real actors and practical effects supports this reading since their appearance within the frame lends them a tangibility that is difficult to achieve with visual effects. In Stir of Echoes, the special effects are restricted to the scenes of hypnosis, in which an armchair is depicted floating through an empty auditorium, to highlight the unreality of the setting. Meanwhile, the apparent reality of the ghost and relative lack of effects (other than that of sound), serves to cement the abilities of the psychics to perceive the spirits. Unlike Poltergeist (2015), which renders the haunted space within the home using CGI, Wan employs set design and makeup in Insidious to visualise the Further, the spectral realm traversed by astral traveller Josh (Patrick Wilson). False backs on dresser drawers allow the hands of the dead to emerge into the bedroom, the tangibility of the hands and their interaction with the furniture demonstrating the physical breach of the boundary between reality and the Further. Swift cuts allow the monstrous figures to move at terrifying speed, or even pass through walls. During an early sequence, Renai (Rose Byrne) cowers inside the bedroom watching a stranger pace back and forth outside the bedroom window. Following a cut, he appears inside the room. This form of cutting enables the substitutions first explored by Méliès but without resorting to visual effects, the digital version

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of multiple exposures, to render the figure transparent as he passes through the wall. Indeed, removing the shot in which he crosses into the room both conceals the trick and reveals his spectrality, able to defy the laws of physics. Wan also uses lighting to great effect, hiding his principal monster in the darkness by the ceiling. The absence of effects, special or visual, is notable—instead, the gaze of the medium into the shadows, combined with the drawings made by her assistant according to her description, tells the audience that a mysterious presence lurks in this space. Wan used a similar approach in The Conjuring (2013), in which the demonic witch and the assorted spirits within the Rhode Island house are played by actors that interact with both the set and the ‘living’ actors. They differ from the spectral figures in Poltergeist (1982), such as the ghostly woman who appears on the stairs. Here, the production team filmed the actress in costume and using a harness, increasing the size of the print to achieve a ghostly effect while superimposing the figure over the ‘live’ footage.29 While this creates a ghostly effect, recalling the translucent spectres seemingly captured by early spirit photography, the ghosts included in Wan’s films instead bring an air of corporeality to the figures. Their white faces, stylised makeup and antiquated costumes recall the disturbing post-mortem photographs of The Others (2001). The clothes cement their anachronistic status, figures from the past continuing to exist in the present, and this ability to seemingly disregard the constraints of time grant them a disturbing power over the living, one that is emphasised through their tangibility. For Patrick McGrath, ‘[t]he Gothic consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable - that is, death - through a frenzied elaboration of all that it can seize upon that points toward death, that suggests, signifies, or symbolizes death’.30 This focus on makeup to signify spectrality makes special effects Wan’s chosen form of ‘frenzied elaboration’ of death. Moreover, The Conjuring used visual effects sparingly, using them to simulate breaking glass or to achieve other effects that might be hazardous if created on set, such as a rocking chair that flies across a room to break against a wall. The effects are used to simulate ghostly behaviour, but also in the spirit of special effects as they were used during the classical period, to achieve an effect that might otherwise be dangerous to the performers. In one scene, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) hangs laundry in the backyard. A sheet blows free of the clothes line, wrapping around the form of a person before fluttering up to a bedroom window, where a figure is glimpsed moments later. This sequence was modelled using software during post-production.31 Here, neither the sheet nor the figure are real, both being modelled in the digital space by effects artists using nothing but pixels. This moment creates the illusion of presence through the figure’s impact on the sheet, yet ultimately highlights the transience of the ghost through its short duration within the frame. The effect lasts mere seconds, yet unlike the bombastic effects of Poltergeist, it draws attention to content of the effect, not the technology used to create it. This sequence demonstrates the difference between CGI and more traditional techniques such as multiple exposure. In the latter process, film may be rewound and exposed multiple times, yet while elements within the frame may attain a ghostly or ethereal appearance, the

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elements retain a concrete essence since they existed in reality at some point during ­production. By contrast, within CGI, the digitally modelled elements never existed, creating a hybrid cinematic form that exists between the set and the digital space. A similar understated use of visual effects occurs during the exorcism scene when a pigeon breaks through the basement window. At the beginning of the shot, a CG bird smashes CG glass and shoots across the basement set behind Carolyn (Lili Taylor). The shot morphs from visual to special effects when the camera focuses upon the end of the pigeon’s trajectory, where a puppet takes the place of the CG pigeon and creates the spectacle of an injured bird flapping across a table. Here the puppet becomes the ‘anchor’ bridging the gap between the physical and the digital. A similar combination of visual and special effects appears in Crimson Peak (2015). No stranger to the world of CGI, director Guillermo del Toro first used visual effects in The Devil’s Backbone (2001) to add the creepy trailing ribbon of blood to the ghost’s continually bleeding head wound. While the Crimson Peak ghosts were intended to be played by Javier Botet and Doug Jones, they were also designed with the later post-production work in mind. This required the actors to wear greenscreen sections within their costumes, while additional footage was shot of the set to enable the effects team to add CGI to the spectral figures, or to introduce transparency into portions of the ghosts. CG supervisor Chris MacLean explained that ‘[i]n no shots were the ghosts on greenscreen. Every shot was done in-situ’.32 The figures are monstrous in and of themselves, yet they also appear to derive from the same visual language that characterises the excessive set design. Allerdale Hall is a twisting, sinewy mass of carvings and the grotesque appearance of the ghosts appears to ‘grow’ out of this backdrop, linking the ghosts with the sense of scale and ancestral rot that characterises the house. The effects conjure the disintegration and distortion present within the Gothic. Even the appearance of Edith (Mia Wasikowska)’s mother in her home in America brings a sense of this ‘otherworldly’ decay into her world. The effects added in post-production soften the edges of the ghosts, giving them back the sense of spectrality that is almost lost by the use of real actors in costume to play the spirits. Despite this careful adherence to the principles of both special and visual effects within del Toro’s work, the Poltergeist remake of 2015 reverted to the CGI-heavy set pieces more common within superhero films or video game ­cut-scenes—somewhat ironic since the opening shot of the film is that of a video game being played on an iPad by the family’s young son, Griffin (Kyle Catlett). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the original film and the remake side by side, but two sequences are worth investigating for the differences in the use of effects, and the impact that has upon the narrative and the atmosphere of the film. The first sequence is that of the first assault on the family. Oldest daughter Kendra (Saxon Sharbino) is babysitting Griffin and youngest daughter Maddie (Kennedi Clements) during a thunderstorm. Kendra notices electrical distortion on her mobile phone, tuning into the garbled voices present on the soundtrack when Maddie talks to her ‘imaginary’ friends. She surveys the house, searching for the source. Visual effects provide the glitches and distortion on the phone screen to cement the use of the device as a tool for paranormal investigation. The reliance

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on digital screens in daily life makes this an unobtrusive effect, an example of those effects used in the background of scenes to compound the world building. Kendra enters the basement and special effects take over; the floor tile cracks and a black viscous goo erupts into the basement. A hand reaches out and grabs her ankle, dragging her leg into the slime. This use of effects heightens the sense of peril for the character, with the hand adding an air of tactility to the assault on the teenager. It also highlights the ability of the dead to cross the boundary into the world of the living by placing them on screen within the frame. The tree beside the house, ominously described as pre-dating the housing development by the real estate agent, smashes the attic window and hauls Griffin out of the house. In the original film, the production team built an articulated tree and attached its limbs to a flying harness to create the effect of the branches pulling Robbie (Oliver Robins) out of the house.33 This ability of the tree to punctuate a boundary and traverse the inside of the house reflects the boundary-straddling nature of the tree; its roots lie among the dead bodies beneath the housing development, while its trunk and branches exist in the visible world of the living. In the remake, the use of CGI to enact this scene both literalises the animation of the tree by the dead and undercuts its efficacy as a tool of dread. As a digital entity, the tree loses its status within the frame, and the shot that follows the path of its branches along corridors and up staircases as it pulls Griffin outside is more reminiscent of the movement of the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter universe. The apparent unreality of the scene neutralises the panic and fear present in the original film, made concrete through the use of a special effects tree. Elsewhere in the house, lights float across Maddie’s bedroom, liberated from the light bulbs, and congregate in the closet. The remake withholds the human form and the spirits remain as featureless lights until Maddie enters the closet, when distorted hands close around her arms. This demarcation between the representation of the ghosts highlights the status of the closet as a portal. It marks the boundary between the realms, and the ghosts take corporeal form in their own dimension. It is a somewhat anodyne passage into the world beyond, compared to that of Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) in the 1982 film, who is sucked into the closet through a vortex powerful enough to drag furniture across the room. The second sequence worth further exploration is that of the final shots of the house. Having failed to lead them into the light, Maddie tells her family the house is not free of the ghosts. At the end of the sequence, the family flees the neighbourhood, pausing only to look back at their house in time to see the roof blow off, and a CGI light show suggests the passage of the spirits ‘into the light’. By comparison, in the original film, the house apparently implodes, sucked into non-existence and leaving behind an empty lot. To achieve the effect, the production team built an exact replica of the Freeling house including ‘fake foam studs, balsa wood facades and a pine interior’, along with furniture built to scale.34 The crew pulled on a series of cables to dismantle the house and drag it through a hole to mimic the effect of an imploding house. The effect in the 1982 film makes concrete the assault on the family by destroying its physical symbol—the house. As the first house built on the development, the Freeling house represents the original

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crime against the dead buried there. The shot of the house imploding, rather than exploding, demonstrates the power of the dead, able to suck the house into their realm. The destruction of the house in the 2015 film is restricted to structural damage and the CGI beam of light. This underscores the ultimate victory of the dead, but also their departure from this realm, effectively ‘closing’ the narrative by moving on to the next world. A similar use of CGI to demonstrate the passage of ghosts between worlds characterised the climax of The Haunting. Much of the film’s atmosphere derives from the gothic excess of its set design, with its oversized furniture, doors that open onto brick walls, and abundance of mirrors. This is a house more in keeping with the carnival funhouse than apparent domesticity. More subtle effects do exist in the film: while brushing her hair, Eleanor (Lili Taylor) finds her hair moves of its own accord, as though unseen fingers have parted her locks. This creepy instance, demonstrating the ability of the spirits to effect substantial changes on the body, owes more to the chilling atmosphere of the original film. Yet in other sequences, carved statues come to life and reach out for characters, and faces appear in the frost caused by a drop in temperature. This heavy reliance on digital animation removes the ambiguous nature of the supernatural events in the 1963 film, although it revels in the artificial nature of its effects. In its final set piece, the giant ghostly figure of Hugh Crain terrorises Eleanor amid a smoky vortex that animates the statues of the house. Ironically, this heavy usage of CGI makes The Haunting a true film of ghosts, haunted by digital spectres that only make their presence known in post-production. Yet the use of animation techniques to give life to the inert statues fails to inspire the requisite feeling of the uncanny; the seeming solidity of the figures removes any doubt as to their apparent animation. This theatrical form of special effects threatens to overwhelm the rest of the film and Ernest Mathijs proposes three ways that horror special effects can supersede narrative; ‘through overkill instead of psychology, through character performance, and by becoming the locus through which the story develops’.35 Films such as Insidious or The Sixth Sense utilise effects in the second category, using effects to create ‘monsters’ (or ghosts). Yet these CGI-ridden films are often accused of resting in the first category, using digital trickery to replace genuine chills with bombastic effects. In his review of House on Haunted Hill, Bruce Westbrook complained that ‘[i]t’s a problem in these days of spiffy new effects. Filmmakers seem to think that since they can show something, they should’.36 Meanwhile, a review of Poltergeist noted the improvement of the special effects from the 1982 original film, but also pointed out that ‘as is too often the case they’re treated as the only thing audiences care about. This remake is substantially shorter than the original, largely because it trims the story but leaves in all of the effects sequences. They are more smoothly handled […] but they don’t have much effect on us’.37 Here, the critic lauded the sophistication of the effects, but bemoaned their efficacy as the means to represent the haunting. This lays bare the problem of relying upon visual effects at the expense of narrative: the effects overcome the narrative, rather than supporting it. Yet ironically, this in itself becomes a gothic act. The gothic relies upon artifice, and the mask becomes more important than what lies beneath.

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Westbrook’s lament about the tendency of filmmakers to use effects simply because they can exposes an apparent trend within Hollywood to show more of the ghost the better the visual effects technology gets, leading to stunning set pieces in a film like Ghostbusters (2016). The studios sell these CGI extravaganzas on the strength of their visual effects, fully embodying the gimmickry made possible by technology. However, these films are often listed as ‘fantasy’ or ‘science fiction’, rather than ‘Gothic’ or ‘horror’, which speaks to the distance created between the narrative and the Gothic by the use of these effects. With the exception of Poltergeist in 2015, such CGI-heavy films are rare within the gothic sub-genre of the haunted house film, where filmmakers tend towards more understated special effects, such as makeup or the manipulation of the set, creating ultimately more ‘real’ and believable spaces. The pretence at reality is supported by i­n-camera effects, while simultaneously relying upon similar techniques to those used by early mediums to conjure spirits for paying audiences. Such a reliance upon these effects underlines the theatricality at the heart of the Gothic. The focus remains upon the smoke and mirrors, rather than the technician in the wings. Yet filmmakers still enhance these practical special effects using the possibilities afforded by digital effects, partly for budgetary reasons but also to take advantage of both the physicality of the special effect and the seeming realism offered by advanced visual effects. In gothic terms, such a combination of practical and digital effects creates a hybrid form, simultaneously both corporeal and intangible. Only half of the effect existed at the point of filming, with the other half added much later in the cinematic process. The ghost only fully manifests at this later point, like a ‘spirit photograph’ developed long after the sitters have left the studio. The effects artists literally conjure a figure that was not entirely present during shooting, opening up a space between the real and the digital to insert their additions. The time span between these points in the process speaks to the temporal nature of the ghost. These images of excess speak to the transgressive nature of the spirit, with their passage across the boundary between the worlds illustrated through the use of effects. As the effects artists challenge the order of filmmaking, using artifice and trickery to hint at the existence of that which is not there, so they represent the challenge the ghost poses to the natural order: of the existence of the dead among the living. In closing, it is beneficial to return to a definition of wider special effects. Ethan de Seife notes that ‘[t]he mission of special effects in general is not to “trick” viewers into believing some sort of cinematic hoax. It is to impart visual force to certain elements of fictional narratives’.38 In the case of cinematic hauntings, this definition is both true and not entirely the full picture. Filmmakers use special effects to represent ghosts, or instances of spectrality, within haunted house films. The supernatural elements of the narratives gain substance, or indeed ‘visual force’, through this use of effects. Yet these effects derive from techniques honed during earlier centuries, originally designed to trick audiences into believing in the existence of the supernatural. It is only by placing them into a gothic fiction that audiences become complicit in the trick and enjoy the spectral special effects as part of the haunted narrative.

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Notes

1. Rotten Tomatoes, ‘The Haunting (1999)’ [online] Rotten Tomatoes, 2018. Available at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1090789_haunting?. Accessed 14 December 2018. 2. David Ansen, ‘Ghost in the Machine’ [online] Newsweek, 1 August 1999. Available at https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-machine-165674. Accessed 14 December 2018. 3. Betty Jo Tucker, ‘Horrific House Upstages Actors’ [online] ReelTalk Movie Reviews, 2018. Available at http://www.reeltalkreviews.com/browse/viewitem.asp?type=review &id=3721. Accessed 14 December 2018. 4. Rotten Tomatoes, ‘House on Haunted Hill (1999)’ [online] Rotten Tomatoes, 2018. Available at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1093881_house_on_haunted_hill?. Accessed 14 December 2018. 5. Bruce Westbrook, ‘House on Haunted Hill’ [online] Houston Chronicle, 30 October 1999. Available at https://www.chron.com/entertainment/movies/article/House-on-HauntedHill-1973375.php. Accessed 14 December 2018. 6. Christoph Grunenberg, ‘Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 213–160: 176. 7. John David Rhodes, Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), viii. 8. Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy, ‘Introduction’, in Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy (eds.), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1–13: 1. 9. Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, ‘Introduction’, in Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel (eds.), Editing and Special/Visual Effects (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 1–21: 13. 10. Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 3. 11. Prince, Digital Visual Effects, 4. 12. North, Special Effects, 2. 13. Hans Qu, ‘The Creature Design of Guillermo Del Toro’ [online] Film School Rejects, 6 November 2018. Available at https://filmschoolrejects.com/the-creature-design-of-guillermo-del-toro/. Accessed 14 December 2018. 14. Howard Timberlake, ‘The Intriguing History of Ghost Photography’ [online] BBC.com, 30 June 2015. Available at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150629-the-intriguing-history-of-ghost-photography. Accessed 14 December 2018. 15. David A. Wells (ed.), Annual of Scientific Discovery: Or, Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art for 1864 (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1864), 111. 16. Dan North, ‘The Silent Screen, 1895–1927: Special/Visual Effects’, in Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel (eds.), Editing and Special/Visual Effects (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 37–50: 46–47. 17. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1975), 41. 18. C. Jerry Kutner, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me: Robert Wise’, in Gary Morris (ed.), Action!: Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 39–64: 58. 19. Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 37. 20. Affron, Sets in Motion, 39. 21. Prince, Digital Visual Effects, 1. 22. Ibid., 2. 23. Shilo T. McClean, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 154. 24. Paul Mandell, ‘Poltergeist—Stilling the Restless Animus’, Cinefex 10 (1982), 4–39: 13.

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25. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 39. 26. Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 17. 27. Mandell, ‘Poltergeist’, 9. 28. Steve Beck dir., Thir13en Ghosts (2001). 29. Mandell, ‘Poltergeist’, 25. 30. Patrick McGrath, ‘Transgressive and Decay’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 159–153: 154. 31. David Ridlen, ‘The Conjuring: VFX Breakdown’ [online] WikiFX. Available at https:// wiki-fx.net/project/the_conjuring/. Accessed 14 December 2018. 32. Ian Failes, ‘Paranormal Activity: Creating Crimson Peak’s Ghosts’ [online] FX Guide, 19 January 2016. Available at https://www.fxguide.com/featured/paranormal-activity-creating-crimson-peaks-ghosts/. Accessed 14 December 2018. 33. Mandell, ‘Poltergeist’, 9. 34. Ibid., 37. 35. Ernest Mathijs, ‘They’re Here! Special Effects in Horror Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s’, in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 153–171: 163. 36. Westbrook, ‘House on Haunted Hill’. 37. M. Faust, ‘They’re Back: Poltergeist Review’ [Online] The Public, 22 May 2015, http:// www.dailypublic.com/articles/05222015/theyre-back-poltergeist-review. Accessed 14 December 2018. 38. Ethan De Seife, ‘Methocel and the Aesthetics of Special Effects’, in Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy (eds.), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 16–31: 18.

Bibliography Affron, Charles, and Mirella Jona Affron, Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Ansen, David, ‘Ghost in the Machine’ [online] Newsweek, 1 August 1999. Available at https:// www.newsweek.com/ghost-machine-165674. Accessed 14 December 2018. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984). Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973). De Seife, Ethan, ‘Methocel and the Aesthetics of Special Effects’, in Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy (eds.), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 16–31. Failes, Ian, ‘Paranormal Activity: Creating Crimson Peak’s Ghosts’ [online] FX Guide, 19 January 2016. Available at https://www.fxguide.com/featured/paranormal-activity-creating-crimson-peaks-ghosts/. Accessed 14 December 2018. Faust, M., ‘They’re Back: Poltergeist Review’ [Online] The Public, 22 May 2015, http://www. dailypublic.com/articles/05222015/theyre-back-poltergeist-review. Accessed 14 December 2018. Grunenberg, Christoph, ‘Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 213–160. Keil, Charlie, and Kristen Whissel, ‘Introduction’, in Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel (eds.), Editing and Special/Visual Effects (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 1–21.

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Kutner, C. Jerry, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me: Robert Wise’, in Gary Morris (ed.), Action!: Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 39–64. Mandell, Paul, ‘Poltergeist—Stilling the Restless Animus’, Cinefex 10 (1982), 4–39. Mathijs, Ernest, ‘They’re Here! Special Effects in Horror Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s’, in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 153–171. McClean, Shilo T., Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). McGrath, Patrick, ‘Transgressive and Decay’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 159–153. North, Dan, ‘The Silent Screen, 1895–1927: Special/Visual Effects’, in Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel (eds.), Editing and Special/Visual Effects (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 37–50. North, Dan, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy, ‘Introduction’, in Dan North, Bob Rehak, and Michael S. Duffy (eds.), Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1–13. Prince, Stephen, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Qu, Hans, ‘The Creature Design of Guillermo Del Toro’ [online] Film School Rejects, 6 November 2018. Available at https://filmschoolrejects.com/the-creature-design-of-guillermodel-toro/. Accessed 14 December 2018. Rhodes, John David, Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Ridlen, David, ‘The Conjuring: VFX Breakdown’ [online] WikiFX. Available at https://wiki-fx. net/project/the_conjuring/. Accessed 14 December 2018. Rotten Tomatoes, ‘House on Haunted Hill (1999)’ [online] Rotten Tomatoes, 2018. Available at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1093881_house_on_haunted_hill?. Accessed 14 December 2018. Rotten Tomatoes, ‘The Haunting (1999)’ [online] Rotten Tomatoes, 2018. Available at https:// www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1090789_haunting?. Accessed 14 December 2018. Timberlake, Howard, ‘The Intriguing History of Ghost Photography’ [online] BBC.com, 30 June 2015. Available at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150629-the-intriguing-history-of-ghost-photography. Accessed 14 December 2018. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1975). Tucker, Betty Jo, ‘Horrific House Upstages Actors’ [online] ReelTalk Movie Reviews, 2018. Available at http://www.reeltalkreviews.com/browse/viewitem.asp?type=review&id=3721. Accessed 14 December 2018. Wells, David A. (ed.), Annual of Scientific Discovery: Or, Year-book of Facts in Science and Art for 1864 (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1864). Westbrook, Bruce, ‘House on Haunted Hill’ [online] Houston Chronicle, 30 October 1999. Available at https://www.chron.com/entertainment/movies/article/House-on-HauntedHill-1973375.php. Accessed 14 December 2018.

Filmography Changeling, dir., Eastwood, Clint (2008). The Conjuring, dir., Wan, James (2013). Crimson Peak, dir., Del Toro, Guillermo (2015). The Devil’s Backbone, dir., Del Toro, Guillermo (2001). The Frighteners, dir., Jackson, Peter (1996).

Ghostly Gimmicks: Spectral Special Effects in Haunted House Films The Ghost Breakers, dir., Marshall, George (1940). The Ghost Goes West, dir., Clair, René (1935). Ghostbusters, dir., Feig, Paul (2016). The Haunting, dir., Wise, Robert (1963). The Haunting, dir., De Bont, Jan (1999). The Haunting in Connecticut, dir., Cornwell, Patrick (2009). The Haunting of Hill House, dir., Flanagan, Mike (2018). The Headless Horseman, dir., Venturini, Edward D. (1922). House on Haunted Hill, dir., Castle, William (1959). House on Haunted Hill, dir., Malone, William (1999). The Innocents, dir., Clayton, Jack (1961). Insidious, dir., Wan, James (2010). Körkarlen, dir., Sjöström, Victor (The Phantom Carriage, 1921). Le Château hanté, dir., Méliès, Georges (The Haunted Castle, 1897). Le Manoir du diable, dir., Méliès, Georges (The Haunted Castle, 1896). Night of the Demon, dir., Tourneur, Jacques (Curse of the Demon, 1957). The Others, dir., Amenábar, Alejandro (2001). Paranormal Activity, dir., Peli, Oren (2007). Poltergeist, dir., Hooper, Tobe (1982). Poltergeist, dir., Kenan, Gil (2015). Thir13en Ghosts, dir., Beck, Steve (2001). The Sixth Sense, dir., Shymalan, M. Night (1999). Speed, dir., De Bont, Jan (1994). Star Wars, dir., Lucas, George (1977). Stir of Echoes, dir., Koepp, David (1999). Twister, dir., De Bont, Jan (1996). Zodiac, dir., Fincher, David (2007).

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The history of horror in visual culture stretches back to the primeval era. One of the first things prehistoric man painted on cave walls were those monsters—real and imaginary—waiting outside for them in the dark. Each stage in the evolution of paganism, organised religion, folklore and mythology has been accompanied by an iconography of fearful creatures and objects, places and times. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and stained-glass windows and masonry in churches and graveyards depicted gruesome scenes from Hell. The first projected horror images were conjured in the seventeenth century by priests, scientists and performers practicing ‘natural magic’: camera obscura and magic lanterns summoned the eerie spectacle of demons and devils. Johann Schropfer’s ‘ghost shows’ in the mid-eighteenth century paved the way for the phantasmagoria—holographic horror shows—of Paul Philidor, Étienne-Gaspard Robertson and John Henry Pepper who terrified Victorian audiences with his ‘looming ghost effect’. In 1895, in Paris, when the Lumière Brothers presented a series of short films in the basement of the Salon Indien du Grand Café, the audience was amazed and some even horrified by the image of a train heading towards the camera as it arrived at a station. In Paris again in the following year, on Christmas Eve in 1896 at the Théatre Robert-Houdin, Georges Méliès presented the first horror film Le Manoir du Diable (‘The Devil’s Castle’), which lasted three minutes and featured images of a bat changing into the Devil along with a skeleton, a ghost and a witch. Silent horror cinema becomes increasingly ambitious. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Germany in the 1920s, emerging from the shadows of the Great War and inspired by modernist painting, a series of darkly expressionistic films appeared including The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), The Golem (1920) and Nosferatu (1922). In America at this time, as Hollywood began to establish itself as the global capital of cinema,

B. Jarvis (*)  Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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millions flocked to see the first feature-length horror films. Universal Pictures, the first major Hollywood production company and the oldest surviving U.S film studio, was at the forefront of horror cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. Founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle, a German-Jewish immigrant, Universal made its first contributions to the horror genre the following year with The Werewolf (1913) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1913). In the 1920s, the studio produced a number of seminal silent horror classics including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Entering the sound era and following the Great Crash, Universal was saved from near bankruptcy by the decision of studio executive Carl Laemmle Jr. to invest in an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The commercial success of this venture inspired future investment in the genre and the studio developed the distinctive brand identity of ‘Universal Horror’. Universal was certainly not responsible for all American horror cinema in the Golden Age, but this was its house speciality in the same way that MGM was renowned for the musical and Warner the gangster film. From the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, Universal had a formative influence on the shape of screen horror. The series of films made by the studio during this period helped establish a formula in terms of narrative, visual style and soundscape. Universal also introduced iconic actors such as Béla Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. alongside a gallery of archetypal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Werewolf and the Creature [from the Black Lagoon] (a.k.a Gill-Man). In what follows, we shall sketch the various incarnations of the ‘Universal Monsters’, consider important examples from the studio’s other productions in the horror genre and meet key figures in front of and behind the camera. Our tour of Universal Horror will then consider the extent to which the key themes emerging from these films are embedded in their historical and cultural contexts before concluding with an assessment of the studio’s legacy and lasting importance. Universal’s first foray into horror in the sound era was a risky venture. Dracula (1931) was overflowing with subjects such as blood, lust and violence which were considered controversial and even taboo at the time. The studio decided to market the film as a gothic romance—‘The Story of the Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Known’—and Dracula was released in the U.S. on Valentine’s Day. Posters depicted the Count hovering lasciviously over swooning women with text describing his ‘fiery fingers, flaming lips and crimson kisses!’ The publicity campaign contributed to the film’s commercial success and Dracula made over $4 million at the box office in the year that represented the economic low point of the Great Depression. Dracula was directed by Tod Browning who went on the following year to make the controversial Freaks (1932). Karl Freund was in charge of cinematography and brought aspects of the dark ‘German style’ with him from his work in the 1920s on expressionist classics including The Golem and Metropolis (1927). Browning and Freund’s Dracula was based on a successful theatrical adaptation by Hamilton Deane (1924) which was revised by John Balderston (1927). One of the most significant departures from Stoker’s novel is the appearance and manner of the Count: in place of an ancient feudal lord with animalistic

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features and fetid breath, Browning’s Dracula is a suave and charismatic Victorian aristocrat in formal attire including a cape (which was added in the stage adaptation to facilitate the vampire’s magical disappearance through a trap door). The lead actor in the stage play was chosen to star in the film adaptation and although some critics found Béla Lugosi’s performance rather hammy it became the baseline for all future reincarnations of the Count. Alongside some reservations about Lugosi, the critical response to Dracula has highlighted missed opportunities. The opening scenes and drama at Dracula’s castle are properly cinematic, but when the action arrives in England the film becomes increasingly stagy and somewhat anemic. Browning follows the stage play too closely and the result is often rather flatly theatrical with lengthy and overly talkative scenes. Some of the most dramatic moments occur off-screen and are rendered in dialogue such as the Count arriving in a red mist with thousands of rats, or his metamorphosis into a wolf. Dracula’s demise at the hands of Van Helsing has to be inferred by an off-screen howl. Despite its flaws, Dracula is still indisputably a landmark in the history of horror film. The first official sequel, Dracula’s Daughter (1936), whilst less well-known is arguably more accomplished. Unlike her father, Countess Zaleska struggles with her vampiric nature and turns to psychiatry. Science, however, fails to provide an antidote to bloodlust. A poster tag line made it clear that the Countess’s choice of victim was not gender-neutral: ‘Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!’ The film includes a number of suggestive scenes where the vampyress stalks, stares intently at and seeks to seduce her female victims. Posing as an artist in search of a nude subject, the Countess persuades a young woman to remove her blouse and loosen her bra straps before positioning her next to a fireplace with a glass of wine. Dracula’s Daughter is a thinly veiled allegory of lesbianism which vilifies same-sex desire as a perversion which needs to be cured. Nonetheless, the film retains a fervent following for its focus on a powerful and erotic female lead. Anne Rice claims that Dracula’s Daughter inspired her to write vampire fiction and she named a San Francisco bar in Queen of the Damned (1988) in its honour. Although Rice does not mention Son of Dracula (1943), the setting of this sequel in the swamps and stately plantation homes of the Deep South may also have influenced The Vampire Chronicles. Son of Dracula was directed by Robert Siodmak and starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Count Alucard (an anagram whose solution offers a climactic revelation). Invigorated by the success of Dracula, Universal immediately commissioned an adaptation of another gothic masterpiece. Nine months later Frankenstein (1931) was delivered by James Whale. The English director’s background in theatre and stage design and his familiarity with German Expressionist cinema are evident in a mise-en-scène which combines spectacular and somewhat surreal sets (the graveyard, the castle laboratory and dungeon) with chiaroscuro lighting and experimental camera angles and proxemics. Frankenstein was the highest grossing film of the year, earning the studio $12 million at the box office and like Dracula, it proceeded to exert a powerful shaping influence on ­twentieth-century horror cinema. Whale’s Frankenstein, like Browning’s Dracula, became the definitive incarnation in

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the popular imaginary to the extent that many confused the name of the ‘Monster’ and his creator. Shelley’s creature is a romantic hero—long-haired, articulate and erudite—whilst Whale’s cyborgian iteration is largely dumb with a boxy head and electrodes protruding from his neck. According to Hollywood folklore, Lugosi turned down the role because it was a non-speaking part and excessive make-up would make him unidentifiable to his fans. Instead, Universal cast a largely unknown English actor, William Henry Pratt, who chose the more Mitteleuropean-inflected ‘Boris Karloff’ as his stage name although in the credits he is listed simply as a question mark next to ‘The Monster’. Karloff’s performance combines menace with pathos, grotesque physicality with a delicate poignancy to blur conventional boundaries between monster and tragic victim. Glimpses of a gentle humanity are evident as the Monster reaches towards stray beams of sunlight cutting through the bars on the window of his dungeon cell and when he plays with a small girl by a lakeside. When the Monster throws Little Maria into the water it is evidently the innocent act of a fellow child, or perhaps an adult with severe learning difficulties, one based on the assumption that the child will float like the flowers with which she plays. More than just a figure of fear, the Monster is an alienated Outsider who is physically and emotionally abused by his figurative parents, then abandoned and eventually hounded to his death (almost) by an angry mob. The sequel to Frankenstein, like the sequel to Dracula, offered a gender twist and arguably managed to surpass the accomplishment of its predecessor. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is based on a subplot from Shelley’s novel concerning an aborted attempt to produce a partner for the creature. The Bride is not revealed until close to the end and her appearance constitutes one of the seminal moments in screen horror: a white dress and bandages which suggests both smock and bridal gown; a face both beautiful and heavily scarred; a preposterously tilted and frazzled hairdo highlighted with peroxide lightning bolts. The shock of the Bride’s appearance is amplified by her robotic movements and animalistic noises as she shrieks, grunts and hisses at her potential suitor. The actress, Elsa Lanchester, explained that the inspiration for these sounds was ‘the swans of London’s Regent’s Park, which she and Charles Laughton [her husband] enjoyed watching. “They’re really very nasty creatures, always hissing at you”’.1 The Bride represents an uncanny interlacing of nature and technology, the attractive and the terrifying, the living and the dead. Like its titular character, Bride is a gloriously weird assemblage of components: horror and camp humour, fairy tale and surrealism, Biblical allusion and expressionistic technique. Son of Frankenstein (1939), the third entry in the series, is less eclectic and experimental, but nonetheless noteworthy for its all-star cast (Karloff’s final appearance as the Monster, Béla Lugosi as Ygor and Basil Rathbone as the eponymous offspring), atmospheric set design and thematic preoccupation with the transmission of guilt across generations. The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) is the least impressive instalment in the quartet. Lon Chaney Jr. replaces Karloff, and the Monster is largely relegated to a formulaic role as the mindless agent of mayhem. Following the prodigious success of its horror productions in 1931, Universal combined the talents of Karl Freund as director, John U. Balderston (the

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screenplay writer for Dracula and Frankenstein) and cast Boris Karloff as the lead for The Mummy (1932). Egyptomania had swept across America in the 1920s in the wake of reports of archaeological finds in the Valley of the Kings. In particular, the popular imagination was gripped by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb and the alleged curse which had struck down its plunderers. Balderston’s script drew on urban legend alongside literary classics such as Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) and ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892). The Mummy also bears more than a passing resemblance to Dracula: a tale of immortality and resurrection; an ancient being with monstrous powers aided by a devoted manservant; a young woman pursued by the villain and rescued at the eleventh hour by her fiancée and an older scientific expert in the field. The intrusion into the Count’s crypt below Carfax Abbey and subsequent slaying of a ‘creature of the night’ at the end of Dracula is mirrored in The Mummy by a memorable opening sequence in the tomb of Imhotep where the high priest of the Temple of the Sun is resurrected by the reading of a magical ‘Scroll of Thoth’. Whilst studio executive Carl Laemmle wanted this scene to repeat the revelation of the Monster in Frankenstein with a sequence of close-ups, Freund insisted that the Mummy be kept off-screen and focused instead on the screams and maniacal laughter of Imhotep’s first victim. Subsequently, the 3700-year-old Imhotep establishes a new identity as Ardath Bey in modern-day Cairo where he encounters and pursues a woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost and forbidden love, Princess Ankh-es-en-Amon. It is difficult to resist an analogy between the s­low-paced movements of the Mummy and the pace of story-telling in the film. Freund prioritises arcane ambience over action and invests proceedings with a dream-like quality which resonates with the premise of primal supernatural forces suppressed just beneath the surface of modernity. Unfortunately, the seriousness of the original film was not sustained in the sequels. The Mummy befell a similar fate to Frankenstein’s Monster in that a complex and tragic figure was displaced by a lumbering brute. Karloff’s Ardath Bey is a suave and articulate figure who attempts to seduce a woman he has loved for aeons. In subsequent incarnations of ‘Kharis’ performed by Tom Tyler (The Mummy’s Hand [1940]) and Lon Chaney Jr. (The Mummy’s Tomb [1942], The Mummy’s Ghost [1944] and The Mummy’s Curse [1944]), the Mummy is shorn of pathos and appears only as a bandaged behemoth that mindlessly follows orders which typically involve strangling men and carrying off women wearing billowing white dresses. Despite the substitution of gothic romance for tana leaf-fuelled pandemonium, the sequels are not without interest. The migration of the ancient Mummy to contemporary American settings including small-town New England and the Cajun swamps of Louisiana produces a vivid juxtaposition. The final film in the cycle, The Mummy’s Curse, is by some margin the most violent, but also features one of Universal Horror’s most gorgeously surreal sequences. When tractors preparing a swamp for land development accidentally unearth Kharis’s beloved, Princess Ananka rises in a somnambulist stupor from the grave, caked in mud and insects and blinded by the sun before cleansing herself in the swamp waters.

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Continuing the bandage motif, James Whale directed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1933) which introduced the fourth key figure in Universal Horror’s gallery of monsters. For a modern viewer the classification of this film as ‘horror’ might appear untenable. In parts, The Invisible Man is a dark comedy of manners, but contemporary audiences were genuinely shocked by state-of-the-art special effects including the sight of a man removing bandages from a head that was not there and also by the pile of corpses left in the wake of this unseeable villain. Following experiments with a drug from East India, Dr Jack Griffin discovers an invisibility potion, but cannot devise an antidote. Whale reinforces the centrepiece of Wells’s allegory concerning the corrosive effects of power and alienation as Dr Griffin loses his sanity and embarks on an increasingly sadistic murder spree. The next addition to the cycle was not a direct ­follow-up, but a science horror hybrid about deadly radioactive weapons entitled The Invisible Ray (1936) which starred Karloff and Lugosi. The first proper sequel, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), featured (albeit fleetingly in terms of screen time) in one of his earliest roles a youthful Vincent Price as a condemned man who uses an invisibility serum to escape death row and clear his name. The Invisible Woman (1940) delivered the inevitable gender twist to the franchise formula whilst Invisible Agent (1942) followed the exploits of Jack Griffin’s grandson as a stealthy soldier battling against the Nazis in an otherwise conventional exercise in wartime propaganda. The final contribution to the series, The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), includes an intriguing twist whereby blood transfusions—typically obtained without the donor’s consent—become the antidote for invisibility. The need to discover a cure for a monstrous condition was central to films featuring the fifth figure from the Universal Horror line-up. Having made the first film about lycanthropy in 1913, it was not until Werewolf of London (1935) that the studio returned to the subject. A botanist on a quest to find a rare flower in a remote Tibetan region is bitten by a strange creature and afflicted with a curse. On return to England, Dr Glendon undergoes a weird lunar metamorphosis and is strangely compelled to destroy the one he loves. In a downbeat denouement, the werewolf is shot by the police just as he is on the verge of butchering his wife. The melancholy mood that characterises this subgenre was sustained in The Wolf Man (1941) in which Larry Talbot is reduced by a tragic curse from an impetuous young American to a self-loathing and tortured soul. Whilst Werewolf of London gestured towards pseudoscientific explanation, The Wolf Man is firmly embedded in folkloric roots and the curse is passed on by a gypsy (played by Béla Lugosi). Subsequent to his sublunary conversion and following in the pawprints of Dr Glendon, Talbot proceeds to stalk and terrorise a love interest. A subtextual Puritanical sermon is suggested by the fact that Talbot is initially bitten whilst dating a young woman who is engaged and the transmutation is clearly figured both as punishment and metaphor of beastly desires. The Wolf Man is noteworthy for Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which involved yak hair, false teeth and a rubber snout and also for its ambitious and atmospheric art direction. Jack Otterson oversaw the transportation of a grove of walnut trees to a Universal sound stage where they were painted black and buffed before being enveloped in fake fog.

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The obligatory gender swap to the series was provided by She-Wolf of London (1946) although no werewolves actually appear in this instalment. The eponymous ­She-Wolf believes she has inherited the curse of lycanthropy and committed a series of gruesome murders, but this is revealed to be an elaborate deception designed to defraud her of an ancestral mansion. Alongside the sequel and spin-off, Universal’s commercial strategy also exploited synergies between its stars. Long before Marvel began to build its cinematic ‘universe’, Universal pioneered the concept of the crossover in ‘monster rally’, or ‘monster mash’ features. After Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944) added Dracula to the ensemble although fans might have been disappointed by the fact that none of the monsters actually encounter each other. This deficiency was remedied in House of Dracula (1945) where the three key figures do meet and a female Ygor and Jekyll-and-Hyde replica are also thrown into the mix. The monster mash films, in part, were aimed at younger audiences and largely dispensed with nuances of character and mood in favour of spectacle, sensation and melodramatic contrivance. Universal adopted this strategy during a moribund period for horror cinema box office that stretched from the mid40s to the mid-50s. The genre was rejuvenated by latching onto science fiction in a chain of films which resonated with Cold War anxieties. For Universal this did not represent a departure from its roots so much as an augmentation of a generic component which was often integral to its oeuvre. This renaissance in science fiction horror included a trilogy of films which introduced the sixth and final figure in the Universal Monster gallery: Gill-Man. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Amongst Us (1956) triangulate an often sympathetic Gill-Man with a female love interest and an array of problematic male characters. The impact of Gill-Man on popular culture and the extent to which he elicited empathy is memorably underlined by another film from the era, Seven Year Itch (1955). Just before the famous scene involving a New York subway grate and a(nother) billowing white dress, Marilyn Monroe has left a cinema having watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In conversation with her date she comments on the monster: ‘He wasn’t all bad. I think he just needed a little affection—a sense of being loved and needed and wanted’. Each of the Creature films included a ‘beauty and the beast’ subplot which humanises Gill-Man. This process is accentuated by a counterpoint between the creature and a number of representative male figures from the s­ cientific-military complex who are associated with behavior that is often unemphatic and unethical. Alongside its articulation of contemporary fears related to scientific experimentation and military imperialism, the Creature series also evidences a potentially progressive sensibility in its engagement with environmental and evolutionary themes. The cohort of science fiction horror films made by Universal in the 1950s stand as one important example of the diversity of the studio’s output. It is important to resist the casual assumption that Universal Horror constituted a singular phenomenon with a fixed house style. Whilst the Monster movie was integral to their brand identity, it appeared in multiple mutations and the studio also combined horror with other genres. Alongside its trademark supernatural ‘chiller’,

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Universal was responsible for a range of thrillers, mystery tales and fantasies which hovered at the margins of traditional horror terrain. As previously noted, German Expressionism left its imprint on the visual style of some of the most famous Universal productions. (An exceptional contribution in this regard is Julien Duvivier’s triptych of morality tales in Flesh and Fantasy [1943].) The ‘German style’ also influenced contemporary crime dramas and a number of horror films utilised a noir aesthetic: Calling Dr Death (1943), for example, includes a ­voice-over, chiaroscuro lighting, unconventional canted camerawork and subjective shots. Black Friday (1940) and Horror Island (1941) featured gangsters, the lavish Technicolour remake of Phantom of the Opera (1943) was a musical horror and The Curse of the Undead (1959) offered the eccentric combination of vampires and cowboys in the Old West. The romantic subplot evident in the Creature trilogy was prominent in a number of other horror films and the studio also specialised in comedy horror and musical hybrids such as Ghost Catchers (1944), That’s the Spirit (1945) and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948). Further examples of the heterogeneity of Universal Horror can be seen once we look beyond the classic Monster movies. After the prodigious success of Dracula and Frankenstein, Universal was eager to make further literary adaptations. At this time, both the horror genre and cinema itself were seen in some quarters as uncultivated and even disreputable. The adaptation of seminal nineteenth-century gothic literature enabled Universal to accrue a modicum of respectability. Versions of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935) and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1940) are worthy of mention, but the main source of literary inspiration was the forefather of American Gothic: Edgar Allan Poe. Anyone approaching the Universal Poe cycle in expectation of faithful adaptations, however, will be disappointed as these films often have relatively little to do with the original other than their shared titles. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), the first in the sequence, is closest to its source text. Set in nineteenth-century Paris, it follows the exploits of a mad scientist with a simian sidekick. The maniacal Dr Mirakle, played by Lugosi, has a carnival sideshow with Erik the Ape Man and also a secret laboratory where he performs obscene experiments in an attempt to prove the genetic link between humans and apes. It is worth recalling, in this context, the infamous Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial of 1925 where a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary theory. After abducting young women, Dr Mirakle ties his screaming victims to what looks like a tilted crucifix and injects them with simian blood. When the test subjects die in agony, the Doctor genuflects and brings his hands together as though in prayer. Once this weird blend of scientific torture and religious ritual is complete, the victim’s body is unceremoniously dumped through a trap door into the Seine. In another scene, Erik the ape crams a woman’s corpse feet first into a chimney flue. This Grand Guignol moment gestures towards Poe, but Murders in the Rue Morgue owes more to Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than its literary antecedent. The impact of Weine’s film is evident in the pairing of a carny Doctor and henchman who kidnaps a young woman and is chased across the rooftops as well as in the cinematography of Robert Florey and Karl Freund.

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The influence of German Expressionism is similarly apparent in Universal’s second Poe film. The Black Cat (1934) was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer who had worked with Murnau before immigrating to the U.S. and was a vehicle for the first joint appearance of Karloff and Lugosi. The connection to Poe is even more tenuous than in Murders in the Rue Morgue—Karloff’s character suffers from ailurophobia—and The Black Cat also aspires to exceed the Grand Guignol excess of its predecessor with a DeSadean catalogue of murder and revenge, sadistic torture and Satanic ritual, rape and necrophilia. Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) is a ­devil-worshipping serial killer of women whom he embalms and preserves in glass cases. When Dr Werdegast (Lugosi) confirms that his wife and child are amongst Poelzig’s victims, he chains the killer to an embalming rack and exacts revenge by flaying him alive. The Karloff and Lugosi pairing was repeated in The Raven (1935) as was the basic set-up of a young couple trapped in a house of horrors with two madman. Dr Vollin (Lugosi) is a plastic surgeon and disciple of Poe who takes the raven as his talisman and converts his house into a shrine to the gothic master with an array of traps including the eponymous execution device from ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Vollin recruits an ex-convict henchman (Karloff) and gains control over him by deforming his face, but then promising a corrective procedure in return for unwavering obedience. Facial mutilation also features in the final addition to the Poe cycle. The Mystery of Marie Roget (1942) is a relatively restrained whodunnit in which the Parisian police enlist the expertise of a young Dr Dupin to solve a case involving a female corpse whose face has been removed. In the same year that saw the end of the Poe cycle, Universal commenced another series of literary adaptations. Inspired by the example of twentieth Century-Fox who had produced a successful version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Universal hired the same actors to appear in a flurry of twelve Sherlock Holmes’s films released between 1942 and 1946. Contemporary audiences might find the genre classification of this series surprising, but it is important to remember that definitions of ‘horror’ were more expansive in the mid-twentieth century. To be eligible for inclusion in the ‘chiller’ category often required little more than a combination of mystery with a menacing atmosphere and the vaguest whiff of the supernatural. At times, Universal capitalised on its reputation by giving rather misleading ‘horror’ titles to films which actually belonged to alternate genres. In the case of its Sherlock Holmes’s cycle, a conventional jewelry heist would be given a title such as Terror by Night (1946) to generate an expectation of ‘chiller’ content. Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) has a villain based on Lord H ­ aw-haw and belongs alongside Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) as exercises in wartime morale-boosting. Other instalments such as The Spider Woman (1944), The Woman in Green (1945) and Dressed to Kill (1946) are essentially noir crime thrillers which pit Holmes against seductive femme fatales. There is, however, a subset of films which have more legitimate claim to the title of Universal Horror since they include gothic settings and atmosphere, types of villain and violence alongside the possibility

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of supernatural phenomena which locates them at the border between conventional crime drama and the Gothic. Spooky old mansions and thunderstorms feature in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) and The House of Fear (1945). The Scarlet Claw (1944) opens at a conference on the occult before moving on to a small Canadian village enveloped by misty marshlands where livestock and then people are being killed by a curiously glowing creature—as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to which it is clearly indebted, the solution to the mystery dispels any supernatural explanations. The Woman in Green (1945) begins with a gruesome series of murders in which the female victims have each had one of their fingers removed. The Pearl of Death (1944) appears to be another conventional jewelry heist until the appearance of ‘The Creeper’: a disfigured killer wearing surgical gloves whose specialty is snapping the spines of his victims. Alongside the Poe and Sherlock Holmes films, another series of adaptations at this time was provided by the Inner Sanctum mysteries. These started as a collection of popular mystery novels in 1930 and were then dramatised as radio plays in over 500 episodes from 1941. Universal made six films based on these sources: Calling Dr. Death (1943), Weird Woman (1944), Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), The Frozen Ghost (1945), Strange Confession (1945) (a remake of the gloriously titled The Man Who Reclaimed His Head [1934]) and Pillow of Death (1945). Each chapter starred Lon Chaney Jr. and was introduced by a floating head inside a crystal ball which announced ‘This is the Inner Sanctum’. Whilst the storylines typically involved innocent parties who were falsely accused of murder only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour, there was also a significant gothic strand which included references to the occult and curses, hypnotism and spiritualism. Weird Woman was based on Fritz Leiber’s classic witchcraft novel Conjure Wife (1943) and is arguably the most distinctive contribution to the genre in part for its sympathetic portrayal of a voodoo priestess. Another series from the same period which was not based on a literary source, but similarly focused on an ‘exotic’ female monster was the ‘Wild Woman’ trilogy: Captive Wild Woman (1943), Jungle Woman (1944) and The Jungle Captive (1945). In the first film, a mad scientist is attempting to produce a master race by genetically marrying man and ape. When Dr Sigmund (!) Walters first injects human hormones and then performs a brain transplant he creates ‘Paula the Ape Woman’. At different stages, the wild woman oscillates between human, gorilla and hirsute hybrid wearing high heels and skimpy outfits and each film in the trilogy revolves around further experiments, metamorphoses and cross-species love triangles. ‘Gorilla Girl’ is the strongest candidate for the inclusion of a female figure in Universal Horror’s gallery of iconic monsters, but this is unlikely to happen since the consensus is that the trilogy also includes strong contenders for the unwanted accolade of the worst film ever made by the studio. Without wishing to challenge this particular aesthetic judgement, it is worth considering the context in which these films were made. Universal Horror cinema was produced under severe logistical and legal constraints. To begin with, content was severely regulated. When the studio applied for a certificate of general release from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) for Captive Wild Woman, there

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were strong complaints from the censors about Gorilla Girl’s costume, the subject of blood transfusion and the scenes involving fights with animals. There were also demands that dialogue related to metempsychosis be revised to avoid complaints from any religious lobby and that a photograph of a nude baby—seen fleetingly in a medical journal—be replaced by a head and shoulders shot. These stipulations came directly from Joseph Breen who was the head of the Production Code Administration (PCA) at the MPPDA. The Production Code was first introduced by Will H. Hays in 1930 and was intended to protect public morality by enforcing strict guidelines on the burgeoning movie industry. The following year, when Dracula was first screened across America, many cinemas took the decision to cut potentially controversial content including the image of a bug coming out of a coffin, Dracula’s vampire wives, Renfield begging to eat spiders and flies and the newspaper account of Lucy attacking children. Initially, the so-called Hays Code (which was actually authored by Father Daniel Lord—a Jesuit priest—and Martin Quigley—a Roman Catholic editor) was not enforced stringently, but in 1934 with the formation of the Breen Office this changed decisively. Very few horror films were made in the second half of the 1930s and those that did appear were severely neutered. The PCA clampdown on violence and sex forced horror film-makers to resort to blood-curdling screams from off-camera and silhouettes of murder scenes projected onto walls. In addition to working in the shadow of the Breen Office, film-makers often had to contend with scant resources. Many Universal Horror films were made on a shoestring budget of under $100,000. Shooting schedules were tight for the so-called ‘12-day cheapies’ and even the bigger budget productions were typically completed in a four- to six-week time frame. With time and money in short supply, films, like Frankenstein’s monster, were sometimes stitched together from spare parts. Screenplay writers under pressure to repeat a successful formula recycled plots and even titles (The Black Cat appeared in 1934 and 1941). Stock footage was used to save expense and shots, or even entire sequences might be borrowed from other Universal Horror films. Jungle Woman (1944) splices in material from its predecessor including circus footage which itself was lifted from The Big Cage (1933). Exterior sets such as ‘Little Europe’ on Universal’s backlot were used in Dracula, Frankenstein and numerous subsequent productions. When the studio invested in the creation of interior sets such as laboratories, crypts and staircases, or miniatures of castles and haunted houses, they sought to guarantee a decent return by recycling. A similar thriftiness was evident in the wardrobe, costume and prop department. In the early sound era, Universal played the theme from ‘Swan Lake’ over the opening credits of several films despite a certain tonal dissonance with the horror genre. When the studio commissioned original scores they could be used more than once. The ‘Creeper’ motif from Pearl of Death was re-used the same year in The Mummy’s Curse. Night Monster (1942) sampled music from The Wolf Man and an image from its expensive forest set as well as the miniature of a burning castle from The Ghost of Frankenstein. The achievement of Universal Horror is all the more impressive when one takes into consideration regulatory restraints and often limited assets. Personnel was

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one of the resources which was relatively short in supply with a modest ensemble of actors, directors and crew responsible for a prodigious output. Most contemporary cinema-goers were intimately familiar with and drawn to the studio stars. At the forefront in the 30s were two iconic figures often simply billed as ‘LUGOSI’ and ‘KARLOFF THE UNCANNY’. In the 40s and following in the footsteps of his father ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’ who captivated horror audiences in the silent era, there was Lon Chaney Jr. Alongside these iconic figures though typically in supporting roles, Evelyn Ankers, Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, Dwight Frye, Claude Rains and George Zucco were indispensable members of the Universal Horror troupe. Movie-goers of the day would also have been aware of Carl Laemmle Jr. since his name appeared prominently in the opening credits and for some films, such as Frankenstein, the producer appeared at the start to introduce ‘one of the strangest tales ever told’. The same audiences would have had little awareness or appreciation of the role played by James Whale on Frankenstein or indeed of other key horror film directors and cinematographers such as Tod Browning, Karl Freund, George Waggner and Jack Arnold. Equally anonymous, but integral to Universal Horror were figures such as Jack Pierce and John P. Fulton. Pierce left an indelible imprint on the horror imaginary as the make-up artist who created the distinctive look of Frankenstein and his Bride, Ardath Bey and the Mummy, the Wolf Man and numerous other Universal monsters and villains. On many of these films, Pierce worked alongside Fulton who was appointed as the lead figure in Universal’s special effects unit following his work on miniatures and mattes in Dracula. Fulton devised numerous innovative forms of what was then called ‘trick photography’ on Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man and most of their sequels. Having considered the history of the studio, we shall now turn to the ways in which Universal captured the zeitgeist of the U.S in the mid-twentieth century. The gothic genre of course is adept at reflecting the anxieties of the age through a glass darkly and Universal Horror echoed and amplified historical forces, political relations and structures of feeling in relation to war and national identity, science and technology, evolution and eugenics, gender relations and sexual identity, race and class structure. First and perhaps foremost, it is essential to recognise the traumatic scars of war. German Expressionist cinema emerged from the Stygian shadows of global conflict. A number of German film-makers emigrated to the U.S to work in Hollywood and helped to shape the style and sensibility of horror cinema. For many Americans, the images of Lon Chaney’s grotesque deformity and facial disfigurement in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera would have had painful connotations of maimed veterans returning from war. Horror films in the early sound era often reverberate allegorically with and at times appear weirdly prescient of the Second World War. George Waggner, who came to Hollywood after serving in the first world war, directed Man-Made Monster (1941) in which a mad scientist plots global domination by creating a super-race of electrified zombies (a scenario repeated with genetic experiments on apes in Captive Wild Woman and The Mad Ghoul in 1943). Curt Siodmak, who fled to the U.S. in 1937 to evade the rising tide of anti-Semitism and went on to

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write the screenplay for The Wolf Man alongside other major Universal horror films, offered the following observation: When we made those pictures throughout the Second World War, we couldn’t show an American with a machine gun mowing down 5000 Japanese. Nobody would have believed it; it wouldn’t work. So we had the Gothic stories… When the war ended, the bottom fell out of the horror business. Then, when we began testing the atomic bomb, it all started again.2

Jack Arnold’s work in the Cold War including the first two Creature films, It Came from Outer Space (1953), Tarantula (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Monster on the Campus (1958) exemplifies atomic age anxieties around radioactive mutation and invasion of the American homeland. The geography of Universal Horror underwent a sea change between the 20s and 50s—a transatlantic crossing whose emblem might be the studio’s most famous ident (used from 1927–1936) of a plane circling the globe from west to east. In the 20s and 30s, horror films were invariably set overseas, but by the cold war almost all of them took place on U.S. soil. The original Mummy film in 1932 is set in Egypt, but its successors migrated to an all-American milieu. Aside from occasional Orientalist interludes, the main settings for the genre in its heyday were established in Dracula as Britain and a version of Central Europe consisting almost exclusively of backward villages at the foot of mountains topped by inevitable gothic castles. The exotic, European-sounding names of stars such as Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff contributed to this Mitteleuropa mystique. Universal’s output in the Depression era rarely heeded Poe’s advice that ‘terror is not of Germany but of the soul’ and cumulatively the genre contributed to a xenophobic demonisation of the Old World. It is perhaps easy to understand why for many Americans at this time, Europe might be perceived primarily as a source of danger. In film after film, overseas locations and other nations were associated with feudalism and folklore, superstition and the supernatural, monsters, ancient curses and infections. This depiction, of course, simultaneously promoted an implicit valorisation of America as the hygienic capital of modernity, science and technology. On occasion, science was offered in the genre as an antidote to superstition. Doctors delivered rational explanations for vampirism, lycanthropy and other apparently supernatural phenomena. In House of Dracula, both the Count and the Wolf Man seek psychiatric help for conditions diagnosed a ‘disease of the mind [that] can be cured’. Far more frequently, however, science operated as an engine of fear. In this regard, Universal Horror both continues the perennial gothic challenge to enlightenment rationality and responded to unsettling experiments in contemporary laboratories involving bombs and rays, blood and mutations. Dr Frankenstein was just the first in an assembly line of scientists who were mad and megalomaniac, unrestrained and profoundly unethical: for example, Dr Mirakle (Murders in the Rue Morgue), Dr Griffin (The Invisible Man), Dr Hawk (Night Life of the Gods [1935]), Dr Sovac (Black Friday), Dr Rigas (Man-Made Monster [1941]), Dr Walters (Captive Wild Woman), Dr Benson (The Mad Doctor of Market Street [1942]), Dr Morris (The Mad Ghoul [1943]) and Dr Hohner (The Climax [1944]).

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Blood transfusion and brain transplants are a recurring motif in this subgenre. Sometimes, as in Black Friday and The Ghost of Frankenstein, the experiments were intraspecies, but more often as in Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942) and the ‘Wild Woman’ trilogy they involved a miscegenation of man, or woman and ape in an attempt to improve the race. Darwinian thematics are spliced with eugenics in horror from the 30s and 40s, but by the 50s evolutionary concerns are more typically mated with environmental issues. The revenge of nature was dramatised in a swathe of Universal science fiction horror flicks during the cold war including: Tarantula (1955), The Mole People (1956), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Deadly Mantis (1957), The Monolith Monsters (1957) and Monster on the Campus (1958). The combination of Darwinian and ecological concerns is also to the fore in The Creature from the Black Lagoon when scientists intrude into the natural habitat of an evolutionary throwback. In the sequels, Gill-Man is relentlessly hounded, captured and experimented upon. The critique of science here is accompanied by a dramatisation of problematic and at times toxic modes of masculinity. Whilst the male humans in these films are often associated with phallic domination, ­Gill-Man demonstrates alternate possibilities for interacting with nature and other species which are not driven by the will to power. In The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Jack Arnold continued to explore fault-lines in hegemonic masculinity in a surreally defamiliarised domestic setting. Universal Horror cinema demonstrates an expansive repertoire of masculine masquerades which at times go against the grain of the dominant gender ideology. Women in these films tend to perform the conventional secondary roles of victim and love interest, but there is also a significant cohort of films which focus on female monsters albeit often in a problematic fashion: so, for example, the Bride in the sequel to Frankenstein does not appear until the end of the film and is denied a voice. Other noteworthy contributions to this subgenre include: voodoo and witchcraft in Weird Woman and The Leech Woman (1960); a blind girl with the power to control the elements in Destiny (1944); a femme fatale with a pet vampire plant in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946) and spin-offs such as She-Wolf of London and Dracula’s Daughter. The lesbian subtext to Dracula’s Daughter repeats the homoerotic frisson in Dracula between the Count and his willing slave Renfield. Universal Horror is rife with queer couples. The queer latencies of Frankenstein where two men live together and conduct illicit experiments designed to create new life are amplified in the sequel by the arrival of Dr Pretorius who is played with deliciously camp glee by Ernest Thesiger. Announced by the maid as ‘a very queer-looking gentleman’, the Doctor barges into the conjugal bedroom of Frankenstein and his wife to whisk away his protégé with the promise that together they will ‘probe the mysteries of life and death’. James Whale, the director of these crypto-camp allegories, was openly homosexual and nicknamed the ‘Queen of Hollywood’. A camp sensibility shines through his other work for Universal such as the sly subversion of the haunted mansion subgenre in The Old Dark House (1932) and the acerbic assault on the bourgeois morality of straight society by a figure who is both seen and unseen in The Invisible Man.

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House of Horrors (1946) features another queer couple living together in a studio apartment. A young artist befriends a disfigured man and uses him, initially, as a model for sculpture, but then as an instrument of vengeance on those ‘bitchy’ art critics who have failed to appreciate his genius. Rondo Hatton, who was afflicted with acromegaly, reprises his role as The Creeper from Pearl of Death. A number of Universal’s monsters are figured either explicitly or implicitly as physically and mentally disabled. At times, Universal Horror is guilty of a crude demonisation of the Other. So, for example, in Night Monster, a quadruple amputee performs Eastern mystical rituals to regenerate his limbs before committing murder. In many other cases, however, the monster is a more complex creation—tragic and alienated—who inspires sympathy as well as revulsion. Political impulses in the Gothic can be alternately and even simultaneously radical and reactionary. The obvious physical difference of Frankenstein’s monster evokes fear, but his behaviour connotes child-like qualities and intellectual disability. Audiences in the Depression might also have responded with empathy to a costume including work clothes and boots which signified a proletarian class identity. Similarly, during an era which saw a rise in popularity for the Ku Klux Klan and increased instances of lynching, the image of a Monster falsely accused of harming white women and children being hunted by an angry mob of rural folk with dogs and flaming torches resonates as potent racial allegory. Aside from minor and comedic roles, African Americans were systematically segregated from Hollywood, but the prominence of apes and dark-skinned creatures pursuing white women in Universal Horror speaks to fears within the white racial imaginary. The period which saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement coincides with a dramatic decline in horror film production by Universal. However, in 1957, the studio cemented its reputation by selling the TV rights to its most prized cinematic assets in what became a hugely popular late-night ‘Shock Theatre’ show. The canonisation of Universal Monsters progressed in the 60s and 70s with a proliferation of merchandising spin-offs: T-shirts and toys; Halloween costumes and make-up kits; paperback novelisations and trading cards; posters and pyjamas; children’s cartoons and breakfast cereals; Studio Tours and theme park rides. During this period and until relatively recently, Universal strangely seemed to cultivate its association with horror in every area other than film-making. The studio continued to make horror cinema, but it was rarely marketed as ‘Universal Horror’ perhaps to protect its historic brand identity. Since the 60s, Universal has produced the work of established directors in the field (Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George Romero and M. Night Shyamalan) and horror franchises (Psycho, Jaws, Halloween and the Hannibal Lecter series) as well as new talent (Jordan Peele’s Get Out [2017] and Us [2019]). The studio has also been responsible for a range of remakes and reboots: Dracula (1979), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Cat People (1982), The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), the modern monster rally Van Helsing (2004) and The Wolfman (2010). Inspired by the success of Marvel and the Star Wars commercial empire, the studio announced the launch of ‘Dark Universe’ in 2017. Although its first venture, The Mummy (2017), was largely unsuccessful, there are plans to relaunch in the near future with projects that include remakes of Bride of Frankenstein and The

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Invisible Man as well as an adaptation of James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Whatever achievements await, the legacy of Universal Horror is assured. The studio had a seismic impact on the horror landscape. Universal introduced a repertory of iconic monsters and helped to codify the genre for generations. For modern audiences, these pioneering films may have lost some of their edge—what once made people quake is now seen as quaint—but the finest contributions are sublimely crafted and offer a trove of memorably weird, wonderful and chilling moments as well as a royal road to the unconscious of mid-twentieth-century American history.

Notes

1. Alberto Manguel, The Bride of Frankenstein (London, BFI, 1997), 47. 2. Curt Siodamk cited in Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas (eds.), Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 (Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company), 559.

Bibliography Conan Doyle, Arthur, ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890). ———, ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892). Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Haggard, Rider, She (1887). Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851). James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw (1898). Leiber, Fritz, Conjure Wife (1943). Manguel, Alberto, The Bride of Frankenstein (London, BFI, 1997). Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). ———, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842). ———, ‘The Black Cat’ (1843). ———,‘The Raven’ (1845). Rice, Anne, Queen of the Damned (1988). Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897). Weaver, Tom, Brunas, Michael and Brunas, John (eds.), Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 (Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company). Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man (1897).

Arthouse Cinema Stacey Abbott

In 1931, Tod Browning directed the first American cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Universal Studios, albeit based upon the Balderston and Deane stage play (1927). This film has been credited as marking the birth of the American horror genre while also described as a form of ‘Hollywood Gothic’, thus establishing a long-standing association between horror and Gothic in relation to cinema.1 There were, of course, forays into horror and gothic cinema prior to Dracula.2 There was also the synergy between the Gothic and silent cinema from its emergence in the 1890s to its peak in the late 1920s.3 These pre-sound films, however, were generally produced and received as a form of gothic melodrama or supernatural spectacular, often described by critics in terms of their horror affect.4 The success of Dracula led to the cycle of horror films conceived, marketed and received by critics, censors and audiences as horror and for this reason, it is often treated as an originating text. This cycle of horror began at Universal Studios as the studio followed Dracula with Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Werewolf of London (1935), but it spread to other studios such as Paramount (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1931], The Island of Dr. Moreau [1932]) and MGM (Freaks [1932], Mad Love [1935], The Mark of the Vampire [1935]), as well as to independent film-makers producing such classics as White Zombie (1932)¸ The Vampire Bat (1933)and Condemned to Live (1935). While the success of Dracula fuelled this commercial interest in horror, Alison Peirse notes this overarching cycle of horror is quite varied, with many titles deviating from the ‘mechanics of Universal’s gothic vampire story’.5 As diverse as these films can be—some more science fiction than Gothic, some overtly supernatural while others exposing the rational beneath superstition, some set in period while others are more contemporary—they do generally draw upon a gothic aesthetic defined by mise en scène and lighting, alongside a classical Hollywood narrative.

S. Abbott (*)  University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_41

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In contrast to this Hollywood tradition, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) offers an alternative vision for gothic cinema. A multilingual Danish, German and French co-production, the film was released in 1932 after the success of Dracula but was shot in 1930, prior to Browning’s film. So rather than being influenced by this trend in cinematic horror, Dreyer’s film emerged from European art culture. The film was loosely based upon the literary work of Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu; In a Glass Darkly (1872) is cited in the film’s credits; and it was influenced by Victor Sjöstrom’s Körkarlen/The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) as well as the surrealists, Dadaists and cubists who surrounded Dreyer in Paris when he made the film.6 These very different adaptations—Dracula and Vampyr—represent distinct strands of gothic cinema, the first embedded within traditions of American popular genre and classical cinema while the other more informed by European art cinema conventions. These different approaches have continued to circulate throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, with arthouse Gothic representing an increasingly prevalent trend in recent years. The aim of this chapter, therefore, will be to examine the inherent hybridity of arthouse Gothic, drawing upon popular supernatural stories and conventions but reworked through the unusual and ambiguous aesthetic forms and narrative structures of art cinema. This chapter will show that in these films the Gothic emerges from these ambiguities and aesthetic fissures to unsettle and disrupt expectations of genre cinema and reimagine new incarnations of familiar gothic tropes. Significantly, this chapter will open up the discussion of gothic cinema to new ways of thinking about the Gothic in relation to film. As noted by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, non-literary media is ‘one of the most neglected areas of Gothic scholarship’.7 Generally, as argued by Peter Hutchings, the tendency within film studies has been to adopt the term ‘Gothic horror’ and apply it to a type of horror film, ‘one which has a period setting and which relies for many of its effects upon what might be called here the visual trappings of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth-century Gothic, namely ruined castles, dark dungeons, and the like’, imagery largely associated with Universal Studios’ Hollywood gothic aesthetic.8 Within film studies the Gothic is presented as subgenre within the horror genre but it is my aim to expand our understanding of the cinematic Gothic through my analysis of this distinct, if neglected, alternate strand. The term ‘art cinema’ or ‘arthouse cinema’ does not simply refer to the association between film and art, an association that exists across a wide range of films from the avant-garde to pop art to Hollywood. Instead, as Mark Betz explains, art cinema is a term that has been built up around the emergence of a particular style of filmmaking that reached its peak in Europe in the 1960s, although it continues to have a presence today on a more global scale.9 Building upon the work of David Bordwell and Steve Neale, Betz argues that this style has developed alongside a series of production and exhibition practices that privilege an approach to narrative that is, primarily, distinct from Hollywood. While Classical Hollywood cinema privileged genre and narrative formula, art cinema privileged

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personal artistic expression. Classical Hollywood storytelling was based around ­character-motivated cause and effect plots, stories with clear narrative goals. Art cinema is, however, motivated by character psychology, subjectivity and narrative ambiguity. Where Classical Hollywood prioritises verisimilitude, art cinema emphasises realism, in terms of setting, style and psychology.10 Significantly, according to Betz, European art cinema of the 1960s was marketed internationally as ‘more than mere commercial entertainment’, establishing an ideological difference between these aesthetic and institutional approaches that was key to how independent art cinema venues, including repertory cinemas, cinematheques or gallery spaces, positioned themselves within the exhibition market.11 This opposition continues today with art cinema programmers presenting the arthouse circuit as offering an alternative to mainstream multiplexes. Jeff Berg argues that arthouse audiences are ‘specialized’, looking for new approaches to filmmaking and ‘open to appreciating a blend of foreign pictures, small American films, documentaries of all sorts, and the occasional break out hit that relies more on storytelling than pyrotechnics’.12 As such, art cinema as a term applies to a series of narrative and stylistic conventions as well as a series of industrial and exhibition factors that have fostered these approaches. Returning to Dracula and Vampyr as illustrative examples of these distinct gothic styles, both are stories about the confrontation between the living and the undead. Dracula takes the form of a cause and effect narrative in which the vampire must be hunted and destroyed as a result of his entry into England and his attack on the female protagonists, Lucy and Mina. While Vampyr similarly features female protagonists under threat from a vampire, the film positions this narrative within a subjective and haunting dreamscape in which it is unclear whether the actions being presented are happening or are the dreams of a fantasist. The gothic atmosphere of Dracula is conveyed through the film’s use of chiaroscuro in the form of high contrast black and white cinematography and period set design, featuring arched windows and doorways, crumbling staircases covered in cobwebs, and hidden tombs. In contrast, Vampyr conveys its gothic sensibilities through a series of aesthetic choices that serve to destabilise the separation between reality and reverie, which includes a grey, murky visual aesthetic and lighting style as if watching events through a fog; the dream-like disjunction between sound and image; and a series of long take camera movements that suggest an invisible presence haunting the mise en scène.13 While these films represent two approaches to the Gothic, I do not want to set them up as in unequivocal opposition to one another. For instance, Dracula is notably indebted to European traditions of filmmaking, particularly in terms of its aesthetics drawn from the legacy of German Expressionism. The film’s cinematographer Karl Freund was a German emigré who made a name for himself working with Paul Wegener, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang on their classic expressionist tales—The Golem (1915), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927), respectively—films that blur the line between art and entertainment. Dracula’s opening scenes in the Transylvanian castle, as well as later scenes in the hidden crypts of Carfax Abbey, bring these artistic traditions to bear within these gothic settings,

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albeit in the service of the narrative. Similarly, Vampyr conforms narratively to many of the tropes of the Gothic, with its vampire narrative, ­dream-imagery, momento mori and unreliable narrator. These tropes, however, are reworked through an immersive subjective experience as if the audience, like the protagonist, journeys through a waking dream. These films therefore signal gothic kinship but are structured in such a way as to embody differing narrative and aesthetic strategies. It is of note that Vampyr was rereleased and subsequently celebrated in the UK in 1970 as part of a programme of silent and early sound films at the Electric cinema in London and, as Alison Peirse notes, this re-emergence coincides not only with this peak period of art cinema but also with a particular ‘wave of European art-horror’, including the vampire films of Jean Rollin in France and Jess Franco in Spain.14 The film’s hybrid style sat comfortably alongside Rollin and Franco’s art/exploitation films. Similarly, Joan Hawkins, in her analysis of the overlap between the avant-garde, art cinema and the cinematic horror genre, identifies a series of European films, including Et mourir et de plaisirs/Blood and Roses (1960), Repulsion (1965), Les lèvres rouges/Daughters of Darkness (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Tenant (1976), that were equally ‘difficult to categorize….films with high production values, European art film cachet, and enough sex and violence to thrill all but the most jaded horror fan’.15 Hawkins explains that this particular form of what she describes as art-horror was prefigured by such films as Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and George Franju’s Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (1959), films that blurred the lines between body horror and art cinema and as a result confounded critics and audiences at the time of their release.16 Freaks, which had been a failure for MGM as a horror film in the 1930s, found its audiences in art cinemas of the 1960s and was eventually screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, viewed as a film that challenged preconceptions and established understandings of body shape, normality and monstrosity.17 The post-war French film Les yeux sans visage was lambasted by many critics for being clinical and brutal, particularly in its graphic depictions of surgery, while Hawkins describes it as both ‘grisly’ and a ‘lyrical-poetic art flick’.18 Adam Lowenstein argued that the film channelled the trauma of the war while Hawkins argued that it ‘explor[ed] both female subjectivity and male identification with the victim’.19 Similarly Cynthia A. Freeland identifies films such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) as a form of uncanny horror focused upon an unnamed and mysterious form of evil, in which anxiety and unease is generated by ‘the blurred boundaries between past/present, vision/reality, and physical or spatial parameters’, while Geoff King explores how classical narrative and avant-garde aesthetics are fused in Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1995).20 Together, these films embody a legacy of hybridity between art cinema, horror and the Gothic. It is of note that both Hawkins and Peirse use the term art-horror. Hawkins’ work offers an examination of the parallels between a range of modes of filmmaking, including avant-garde, art cinema, exploitation, cult and genres films, that ‘promise both affect and “something different”’ and bridge the perceived divide

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between high and low art.21 For Hawkins the term art-horror embodies that tension/connection between high and low culture that is the focus of her research, although many of her examples could equally be described as Gothic, a term itself which evokes both high and low culture, intellect and affect. Peirse’s choice of term similarly ties in with her aim to examine the production and reception contexts of a particular cycle of horror films in the 1930s. Her discussion of Vampyr, therefore, examines the film’s hybridity in relation to its contexts as an example of an emerging horror genre and European Avant-garde. By expanding the term from art-horror to arthouse Gothic, it is my intention to extend the discussion beyond affect and the interaction of two genres of filmmaking (art and horror) to an understanding of the Gothic as a broader mode of filmmaking that encompasses a wide selection of films—some of which may be described as horror while others not, some may be more affective while others appeal more to the intellect—that seem haunted and uncanny in their evocation of the aesthetic and narrative ambiguities of life, death, undeath and the passage of time. Arthouse gothic cinema, conveyed through the language of art cinema, inhabits the liminal spaces between past and present, life and death, and reality and fantasy. The twenty-first century has witnessed an increased prevalence of arthouse Gothic. This is in part the result of a much broader trend across global cinema and television that has privileged both Gothic and horror, fostering a period of productivity for both genres. This productivity has been fuelled in part by the exceptional reception many films have received by audiences and critics, such as Oskar recognition for Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017); record-breaking box-office success for Andy Muschietti’s IT: Chapter One (2017) and David Gordan Green’s Halloween (2018); and critical raves from mainstream and genre press for Jennifer Kent’s Babadook (2014), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018). Similarly, television is in the midst of a golden age of TV horror on a global scale, marked by the success of The Walking Dead (AMC 2010–), American Horror Story (FX 2011–), The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix 2018), Les Revenants (Canal + 2012-) and Kingdom (Netflix 2019) across media platforms. Alongside these great horror and gothic achievements, there has been a resurgence of global arthouse gothic cinema. These arthouse gothic films have found a home on the festival circuit, through alternative cinema venues, chains and distributors and through new media streaming platforms, often negotiating a fine line between genre and art cinema audiences. Their crossover appeal is generated by the manner in which they strip away the established conventions of the Gothic in order to generate feelings of unease and uncanniness through their absence. Two illustrative examples of recent arthouse Gothic are Park Chan-wook’s Stoker (2013) and Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016), both knowingly reworking familiar domestic tropes of the Gothic through a more dislocated representation of family. Stoker is an unofficial arthouse remake or revisiting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Both Stoker and Shadow of a Doubt explore the unhealthy relationship between a young woman on the brink of womanhood and her murderous uncle, revealed in both films to be a psychopath

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and serial killer. Hitchcock’s film overtly foreshadows the darkness that underpins the relationship between uncle and the niece who is his namesake by the plume of black smoke that issues from the train as it brings Uncle Charlie to the small town of Santa Rosa. The film repeatedly establishes parallels between the uncle and the niece—most notably her desperate desire for him to come to town to shake things up which comes to fruition by his sudden arrival. These parallels, however, are circumvented by the young Charlie’s eventual attempts to stop her uncle’s crimes once she realises who and what he is, thus resolving her complicity in bringing him to her home town. In contrast, Park Chan-wook’s film wallows in the blurred lines of desire, jealousy, attraction and guilt that Uncle Charlie and his niece India share. Arriving after her father’s sudden death—in part because Charlie murdered him—Uncle Charlie is both a father substitute and a potential suitor/lover for his niece. Her fascination with him conveys both curiosity and attraction. These repressed emotions, embodied in India’s impassive gaze and incessant watching throughout the film, come to underpin their relationship and bind them together, best exemplified by an erotically charged piano duet between uncle and niece. Rather than resolve the implications of their association, the conclusion where India stops her uncle from murdering her mother by shooting him and burying him in the family garden, does not resolve her complicity but rather sets her on the path to become him. The film ends with her leaving home and murdering the local sheriff while out on the road, first stabbing him with garden sheers when he pulls her over to give her a ticket for speeding, and then slowly and meticulously taking aim and shooting him as he attempts to crawl away to safety. The image of his arterial spray dousing a white flower in red, signals India’s transition into adulthood and concludes the film. In contrast to Shadow of a Doubt, where the ending is designed to resolve the murder plot and restore the status quo within Santa Rosita and for the young Charlie, the open ending of Stoker suggests that the macabre and horrific the events of the film have served the formation of India’s identity, putting her on a new and unexplored path. Personal Shopper similarly reworks familiar gothic conventions in the form of a ghost story. The film follows a twin sister, Maureen, in her daily routine as personal shopper in Paris, buying clothes, jewellery and accessories for a wealthy celebrity, Kyra, while she waits for promised communication from her deceased sibling, Lewis. The film begins in a conventional gothic haunted house and contains visible spectres in the form of gaseous clouds and objects that move telekinetically at various points in the narrative as Maureen attempts to make contact with her brother. These moments are, however, interspersed within lengthy cycles of repetition of Maureen’s shopping excursions for Kyra, endlessly travelling between designers, stores, apartments and hotel rooms. These scenes are the primary focus of the film, while the hauntings seem incidental. It becomes apparent as the film progresses that the true spectre of the film is Maureen. Having placed her life on hold until she communicates with her brother, she has become through the alienation and loneliness of grief, a spectral presence, haunting her own life and Kyra’s but embodying neither. By integrating the conventions of the Gothic

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with conventions of art cinema, the film conveys a palpable evocation of grief. Both films therefore offer distinct takes on familiar formulas. This arthouse approach to the paranormal is best exemplified by David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017), a film that signals its relationship with the Gothic by evoking the legacy of supernatural storytelling. The title simultaneously suggests a subgenre of the Gothic, traditions of oral storytelling, the supernatural tales of M. R. James and Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story (1979). The presentation of the film, however, strips away the stylistic aesthetics associated with the genre to create a new form of Gothic. An uncanny story of loss and grief, the film presents a haunting from the point of view of the ghost and rather than focusing on the liminal state between life and death, it uses the ghost to explore the melancholy of loss and metaphysical themes around the fleetingness of time. Its arthouse approach is first apparent in its minimalist aesthetics, featuring desaturated colour and restricted use of camera movements, sound and music. The setting is a rather mundane one-story bungalow, with paint stripping off the outer walls. The film is replete with static shots using minimal dialogue and shot in square Academy ratio (1:33:1) with curved corners (vignettes edges), which make these moments look like a series of photographs, evoking the past while still, ostensibly, in the present. The aesthetics, therefore, tap into notions of realism and deliberately undermine traditional expectations of a ghost story, expectations that contemporaneous texts such as Crimson Peak (2015) or The Haunting of Hill House knowingly and successfully galvanise. Narratively, the film follows a married couple in their day-to-day activities until the husband, simply named C, is killed in a car accident. His death is presented in undramatic style in keeping with the film’s overall aesthetic choices. The accident takes place off-screen and the aftermath is simply captured in a long take in which the camera slowly pans from the house to a long shot of the accident, without any music or notable sound effects. Lowery deliberately resists infusing the scene with aesthetically driven emotion and drama and it is the scene’s silence and simplicity that renders it all the more unsettling in its mundaneness and realism. His life is simply snuffed out off-screen and from one scene to the next, C goes from alive to dead. There is an honesty and quiet brutality to this narrative transition. Once identified by his wife, C’s body is covered in a sheet in the morgue, seemingly bringing closure to his life. After she leaves, there is a lengthy pause before he stands up and walks out of the room, still covered in the sheet. The simplicity of the ghost design, a person in a sheet with blackened eye-holes in the tradition of a child’s Halloween costume, focuses attention on the ghost but strips the genre of the aesthetic and effects laden trappings that surround much contemporary gothic cinema, rendering the ghost all the more haunting as he silently stands by, simultaneously present and absent. C returns to the house where he remains, watching life continue around him as his wife copes with loss, confronts her grief and eventually tries to move on by moving out of the house. In this manner, the film uses the ghost story to explore the psychological effect of grief but through the aesthetic of art cinema, the emphasis is on the silence and emptiness of the house and the quotidian effort of

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dealing with loss. The tangible and emotive loss that is expressed in the film is that of the ghost, silently watching unchanging as time passes in fits and starts. This is conveyed in a lengthy montage sequence that presents C watching his wife as she sleeps, changes sheets, stares out the window into the rain, engaging in the quotidian activities of life, while he is frozen in time. This is culminated in a single shot in which he watches her as she repeatedly grabs her coat and rushes out the door, seemingly on a loop but clearly evoking the passage of time for her, while he stands still. These cinematic temporal ellipses signal that for C time is now frozen while for her, she can only go forward. After C’s wife eventually packs up the house and leaves, C remains, trapped there waiting for a meaningful connection. At one point, he looks out the window to spot another sheeted person in the house next door. They silently exchange greetings, conveyed through subtitles, and then the other person informs C that they are waiting for someone but don’t remember who. They are both trapped in their respective houses, rendered silent witnesses to the passage of time. The Gothic, manifested in the form of unease, emerges from the lack of aesthetic excess, from the stillness and silence of loss. Furthermore, the Gothic’s traditional positioning of the house as a repository for legacies of loss and pain is undermined by the fact that after years of C remaining in the house as the living come and go, the house is eventually torn down, leaving C to haunt a field and the high rise that is eventually built on the same location. His pain and aimless wandering continues despite the absence of the house, rendering him all the more spectral—a ghost that is haunting time. Having begun this discussion with Vampyr, it seems necessary to consider the continued prevalence of the arthouse vampire film, a leading strand within arthouse Gothic. There have been numerous examples since Vampyr, including Jean Rollin’s Le viol du vampire/The Rape of the Vampire (1968), Requiem pour un Vampire/Requiem for a Vampire (1971), Werner Herzog’s remake of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist classic, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). In the 1990s, American Independent cinema fostered their own resurgence of arthouse Gothic in the form of three New York set vampire films that reimagined the female vampire as a modern urban flâneuse in Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, Larry Fessenden’s Habit (1995) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995). While in many ways grounded in reality due to location shooting and the use of handheld cinematography, these films also possess a strong sense of the absurd or surreal. If Vampyr, evokes a dream-like state, Herzog’s Nosferatu feels like a waking nightmare, while the New York films rework the gothic vampire conventions through the language and visual aesthetic of the avant-garde and documentary traditions.22 The arthouse aesthetic encourages an emotionally charged and thematically ambiguous examination of the encounter between the living and the undead. In the twenty-first century, the vampire which has remained a staple of gothic literature, film and television, transformed into a Hollywood blockbuster franchise and a popular culture phenomenon through the global success of the Twilight Saga (2008–2012). This moment of mainstream global popularity was followed by a series of international arthouse vampire films offering idiosyncratic ­re-imaginings

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of the vampire genre through the lens of individual artistic expression or alternative transnational approaches to genre cinema. The practical distinctions between the blockbuster and arthouse vampire film are best exemplified by the Swedish film Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In (2008) which came out the same year as the first Twilight film (2008). While Twilight earned $69,637,740 on 3419 screens, Let the Right One In earned $49,295 on 47 screens, both in their opening weekends.23 Let the Right One In was subsequently released globally and earned a total of $11,227,336 worldwide. Its box office and critical reception was largely informed by its position as a genre/arthouse crossover film, appealing to art cinema and horror fans alike. It was screened at internationally recognised film festivals, such as in Tribeca and Edinburgh, as well as in horror festivals including Fantasia in Montreal and Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland. It was distributed in the UK by Momentum Pictures a company that specialises in the global distribution of independent cinema, albeit not with a particular genre allegiance. Coming out a month before Twilight and similarly featuring a narrative about a relationship between teenage vampire and human, Let the Right One In offered an alternative and narratively ambiguous approach to the more mainstream paranormal romance that was becoming strongly associated with the gothic vampire in film and television. It also offered a variation in approach from its more overtly horror-inflected literary source, the novel Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (2004). Its gothic qualities emerge from the ways in which the vampire story is reimagined through the narrative and character ambiguities of art cinema. The film tells the story of a friendship that builds up between Oskar, a bullied and somewhat neglected 12-year-old boy living in the downtrodden suburbs of Stockholm, and Eli, a centuries old vampire frozen in time and immortality at the age of 12. While the novel is explicit in its narrative, characterisation and themes, the film offers a more ambiguous presentation, encouraging an interpretive reading strategy associated with art cinema. For instance, in the story the vampire Eli is accompanied by an older man Håkan, who poses as her father but serves as a hybrid form of handler/protector/familiar, watching over her while she sleeps and murdering young men to drain their blood for her to drink. In the novel, the nature of Håkan’s relationship is made explicit as it is revealed that he is a paedophile who has negotiated a mutually beneficial relationship with the vampire, an immortal forever trapped in the body of a child. He protects her and acquires her food and she allows him to satiate his desires through her body; a disturbing and yet practical arrangement. In the film, their relationship is presented in a much more ambiguous fashion. When they arrive at Oskar’s apartment building, they appear as father and daughter with Håkan unloading the car and moving them into their new home. Later, a scene of Oskar and his father finishing lunch and preparing their coffee is juxtaposed with a scene of Håkan preparing for another expedition to get Eli her sustenance, a disturbing image of the father as provider. As the film progresses, the nature of their relationship becomes more complicated and the power relationship becomes increasingly inverted. When Håkan fails to bring her blood, she furiously rebukes him for not helping her, causing him to ask her for forgiveness. When he prepares

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to go out again, without explanation he asks her not to see Oskar. His expressionless face conceals whether this request comes from a fatherly desire to protect her and Oskar; paedophilic jealousy; or his memory of being a child like Oskar, seduced into his current role as handler by the childlike Eli. Her gentle touch of his cheek is equally ambiguous, simultaneously evoking pity and love. Later when he realises that he will be caught by the police, he sacrifices himself by pouring acid on his face to conceal his identity and therefore protect hers. As he lies in the hospital dying, she appears at this window. Unable to help her any longer, he gives his blood to her as one last meal. Leaning out of the window, he offers her his throat. Her gaze at him is inscrutable, neither tender nor malevolent as she leans in and drinks his blood. Once drained, she allows his body to drop to the ground, discarded. That her next scene has her arriving at Oskar’s window as he sleeps, asking to be invited in does suggest that with Håkan gone, she is looking for Oskar to replace her handler. The film self-consciously mirrors the image of her at both windows to drive this point home. But as she removes her clothes and then crawls into bed with Oskar, the innocence with which he casually acknowledges her nudity by complaining that she is cold, they discuss the meaning of going steady, and they play the child’s guessing game ‘higgledy-piggledy shout’, suggests childlike friendship and affection. Eli’s motivation in both relationships is ambiguous and provocative in keeping with art cinema’s privileging of interpretation as a reading strategy. As a vampire, Eli is equally couched in ambiguity. Her introduction to the film follows established vampiric conventions, arriving into a community from beyond, much like the vampires in Dracula, Martin (1978) and Fright Night (1985). That she is foreign to this community is reaffirmed by her dark hair and complexion which stands in contrast to Oskar’s classically Swedish pale skin and white-blond hair. In classic vampire texts the vampire is usually introduced and presented to the audience (or reader) at key narrative moments that signal their arrival and their status as vampires even if never overtly articulated, such as Count Orlok’s appearance emerging from the shadows in Nosferatu (1922), Jerry Dandridge carrying his coffin into the house in Fright Night or the Cullen’s slow motion arrival in the high school cafeteria in Twilight. In contrast, Eli’s introduction to the audience is fragmentary, rendering her as unknowable. In her initial appearances, the film offers only glimpses of her: shot in shadow from behind as she sits in the taxi; from high angle and long shot as she arrives at the apartment building; standing at the back of the frame when she meets Oskar for the first time. When she rebukes Håkan, the camera is fixated on him in close up as she hovers around the edges of the image, yelling at him; and in her first vampire attack, she hides in the shadows and calls for help, pouncing upon the first man to offer assistance. This fragmentary presentation disrupts an archetypal reading of her. She only becomes knowable and therefore readable as Oskar gets to know her and as their relationship builds, she is positioned more centrally within the frame. But even then she remains couched in mystery. While she initially tells him they can’t be friends, it is Eli who approaches him twice in the apartment’s playground and it is in the second encounter that we get the first close up of her, watching him play with a Rubik’s cube, revealing her curiosity about him. As their relationship

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progresses, she is repeatedly couched in contradiction. She twice tells him that she is not a girl but does not explain what this means; leaving it open to interpretation whether this is in reference to her age, her gender, or her being other than human. Even when Oskar peaks at her as she changes clothes—revealing his prepubescent curiosity—he glimpses a scar in her pelvic area, which is not explained with reference either to past trauma or gender identity. In contrast, the novel provides a flashback to clearly explain this mystery by revealing that Eli was a boy but was castrated at the point of his transformation into a vampire. From this moment in the novel, pronouns change from she to he and both Oskar and the reader accept that Eli is gendered male. The film, however, leaves this question unresolved, foregrounding through its narrative ambiguity how the liminality of the vampire body undermines gender difference. In fact, Eli is repeatedly visualised in the film in ways that transgress all identity boundaries. Glimpses of her in the shadows show her with reflective eyes or scurrying up the face of a wall, moments that make her seem more animal-like. This association is reaffirmed when Oskar cuts his hand with the intention of mixing their blood to symbolise their bond and her blood lust causes her to drop to the floor and lap up the dripping blood like a dog. This image of her is further complicated when, as he watches her, the film intercuts a single shot of an older woman in her place, looking at up him and telling him to go away, to reinforce her nature as both old and young. This physical hybridity is reaffirmed by her vocal performance as the voice of child actress Lina Leandersson was replaced by an older actress, Elif Ceylan. Eli, therefore, embodies an unsettling amalgamation of identities. While Let the Right One In utilises the narrative structures and ambiguities of art cinema to reframe the narrative confrontation between the living and the undead and explore the uncanny liminality of identity, other arthouse gothic films relocate the vampire from conventional gothic locations as a means of reimagining familiar narratives. While this is not exclusively a characteristic of arthouse Gothic, it is part of a strategy of a selection of global vampire films to strip away preconceptions of the Gothic and render the vampire unfamiliar by placing them within an all-too-familiar and realistic landscape. For instance, Twilight’s ­Forkes-location is deliberately presented as a modern gothic town, hidden beneath an umbrella of cloud cover, surrounded by forests and couched within a history of folklore and mythology. Similarly, the television series True Blood (HBO 2008–2014) is set in sultry and sumptuous Louisiana, home to southern Gothic. In contrast, the arthouse vampire films remove the vampire to consciously unusual and decidedly un-gothic urban and suburban locations such as a flat-share in Wellington New Zealand in What We Do in the Shadows (2014), a South Korean Catholic mission in Thirst (2009), or the rather apocalyptically abandoned streets of Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The films are shot on location and often feature repeated scenes of the vampires circulating through these spaces either on foot in Byzantium (2012), skateboard in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) or by car in Only Lovers Left Alive. These scenes evoke cinematic traditions of realism, but often with a hint of surrealism either through the blurring of past and present as the young vampire Eleanor is presented in one frame, standing by and watching her

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human-self walk along the beaches of Hastings in her past in Byzantium, or as the Girl in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night floats through the streets of Bad City on a skateboard, as her Chador blows behind her like batwings. Notably, what many of the locations in these films have in common is a desolate abandoned quality rendering them timeless as if, in contrast to Dracula who sought a modern urban metropolis to live and hunt, these vampires are drawn to communities that are already dying and thus seem to exist somewhere between past and present—whether post-economic crisis Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive, the decaying seaside town in Byzantium, Blackeberg in Let the Right One In (the declining 1980s suburb of Stockholm), or the imagined streets of Bad City (a fictional re-imagining of Tehran) in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In this manner, these vampire films are simultaneously indebted to the gritty indie aesthetic of George Romero’s vampire film Martin set in Braddock, a declining industry town outside Pittsburgh, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist Red Desert/Il deserto rosso (1964), a film which adopts modernist composition to evoke cultural alienation within a post-war industrial landscape. The black and white imagery of A Girl shares Antonioni’s sumptuous and yet alienating composition of derelict landscapes. The seemingly abandoned factory looms large in the backdrop of Bad City while the desert oil drills keep pumping despite little evidence of a thriving human population. There is a haunting beauty to this urban landscape but it is rendered as a ghost town, peopled by drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes and the vampire. In contrast, the landscape surrounding Blackeberg is one of natural beauty but the community within the suburb is embodied either by ineffectual adults—police, teachers and parents—unable to protect their children from the vampire or a group of friends who spend all of their time in local bars drinking. Only Lovers Left Alive offers a poetic vision of Detroit, simultaneously ravaged by economic decline and abandoned by its population but also beautiful in its architecture and history, a monument to a thriving past that only the vampire seems to remember. But the vampire also represents hope. As the suicidal vampire Adam, taking his wife Eve on a tour of the empty city at night, bemoans how the humans have ruined the city, Eve notes that ‘this place will rise again…there’s water here and when the cities in the south are burning this place will bloom’.24 Despite Eve’s hope, the vampires in these films, like Martin before them, seem drawn to death rather than life and the vampire story becomes a means of exploring and exposing the impact of economic decline upon community. Significantly, in contrast to classical vampire films in which the narrative builds to the vampire’s destruction, from Dracula in 1931 to 30 Days of Night (2007), the arthouse vampire film favours an open, ambiguous ending in which the vampire seemingly survives but faces an uncertain future. Only Lovers Left Alive concludes with Adam and Eve, near death due to starvation, in mid-attack in a desperate attempt to hold onto life. Eleanor finally leaves her vampire mother Clara in Byzantium, facing an uncertain future of independence and freedom. Both Let the Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night conclude with the vampires leaving town with their human friend/lover, seemingly bound by an emotional

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connection but without knowledge of what their future will be. While these vampires are drawn to death and at times possess a world-weary exhaustion, they also embody a determination to go on. But Like C in A Ghost Story, through their immortality the arthouse vampire continues to exist in order to bear witness to the ravages of time. Mark Betz argues that one of the defining features of art cinema is its inclusions of ‘moments of spatial and temporal excess’, in which the representation of space and time are cinematically manipulated in order to capture the experience of both.25 Space and time play equally important roles within the Gothic, with gothic locations often serving as fissures through which the past erupts, sometimes violently, into the present. Arthouse Gothic, therefore, marks a fusion of like-minded sensibilities in a new cinematic form, representing an alternative strand of cinematic Gothic. The films I have discussed in this chapter, embody an aesthetic and narrative hybridity through which the Gothic emerges. If ‘temps-mort’ (aka dead time) is an aesthetic characteristic of the pacing and experience of classic art films, then this dead time becomes synonymous with the actual dead or undead in arthouse Gothic, whether in the form of C’s spectral haunting of time in A Ghost Story or Adam’s ennui as he faces immortality in Only Lovers Left Alive. It is through the experience of space and time, narrative and character ambiguity, made possible by the conventions of art cinema, that these films evocate unresolved feelings of unease and uncanniness, and thus embody an experiential understanding of the Gothic.

Notes



1. Alison Peirse, After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2013), 1; David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York and London, W.W. Norton, 1990), 7. 2. David Annwn Jones, Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror: 1896–1934: Quanta of Fear (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2018); Gary D. Rhodes, The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Kendall R. Phillips, A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2018). 3. Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown, ‘Gothic and Silent Cinema,’ in Catherine Spooner (ed.) Cambridge History of the Gothic Vol III (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 4. Jones, Re-envisioning the First Age of Cinematic Horror, 7. 5. Peirse, After Dracula, 4. 6. Ibid., 85. 7. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, ‘Introduction,’ in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London and New York, Routledge, 2007), 2. 8. Peter Hutchings, ‘Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New Monsters,’ in Victor Sage and Alan Lloyd Smith (eds.) Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996), 89. 9. Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 2.

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10. Ibid., 10–11. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,’ Film Criticism 4:1(1979): 56–63; Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution,’ Screen 22:1 (1981): 11–39. 11. Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, 2. 12. Jeff Berg, ‘Sure Seaters Tough It Out: Checking in on the State of Art-House Exhibition,’ Film Comment (Januart–February 2015): 55. 13. Stacey Abbott, ‘The Undead in the Kingdom of Shadows: The Rise of the Cinematic Vampire,’ in Sam George and Bill Hughes (eds.) Open Graves Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 105–106. 14. Peirse, After Dracula, 98. 15. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22. 16. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, 25–27. 17. David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York, W.W. Norton, 1993), 21. 18. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, 83. 19. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representations: Historical, Trauma, National Cinemas, and The Modern Horror Film (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005), 42–43; Hawkins, Cutting Edge, 79. 20. Cynthia A. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 2000), 234; Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2009), 1337. 21. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, 23; italics in original. 22. Stacey Abbott, ‘Taking Back the Night: Dracula’s Daughter in New York,’ in Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer, and Milly Williamson (eds.) Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014), 43–44. 23. All box office figures have come from www.boxofficemojo.com. 24. Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013. 25. Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, 5.

Bibliography Abbott, Stacey. ‘Taking Back the Night: Dracula’s Daughter in New York,’ in Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television, edited by Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer, and Milly Williamson, 38–53. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Abbott, Stacey. ‘The Undead in the Kingdom of Shadows: The Rise of the Cinematic Vampire,’ in Open Graves, Open Minds: Representation of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 96–112. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Abbott, Stacey, and Simon Brown. ‘Gothic and Silent Cinema,’ in The Cambridge History of the Gothic Vol. III, edited by Catherine Spooner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Berg, Jeff. ‘Sure Seaters Tough It Out: Checking in on the State of Art-House Exhibition,’ Film Comment (January/February 2015): 54–60. Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bordwell, David. ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,’ Film Comment 4:1 (1979): 56–63. Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

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Hutchings, Peter. ‘Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New Monsters,’ in Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Victor Sage and Alan Lloyd Smith, 89–203. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Jones, David Annwn. Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror: 1896–1934 Quanta of Fear. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018. Lindqvist, John Ajvide. Let the Right One In, translated by Ebba Segerberg. London: Quercus, 2004 (2009). Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representations: Historical, Trauma, National Cinemas, and The Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Neale, Steve, ‘Art Cinemas Institution,’ Screen 22:1 (1981): 11–39. Peirse, Alison. After-Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Philips, Patrick R. A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Rhodes, Gary D. The Birth of the American Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990. Skal, David. J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Spooner, Catherine, and Emma McEvoy. ‘Introduction,’ in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 1–3. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.

Filmography A Ghost Story, dir. David Lowery (2017). A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour (2014). The Addiction, dir. Abel Ferrara (1995). Byzantium, dir. Neil Jordan (2013). Dracula, dir. Tod Browning (1931). Freaks, dir. Tod Browning (1932). Fright Night, dir. Tom Holland (1985). Habit, dir. Larry Fessenden (1995). Låt den rätte komma in/ Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson (2008). Martin, dir. George Romero (1978). Nadja, dir. Michael Almereyda (1994). Nosferatu, dir. F.W. Murnau (1922). Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre, dir. Werner Herzog (1979). Only Lovers Left Alive, dir. Jim Jarmusch (2013). Personal Shopper, dir. Olivier Assayas (2016). Shadow of a Doubt, dir. Alfred Hitchock (1943). Stoker, dir. Park Chan-wook (2013). Thirst, dir. Park Chan-wook (2009). Twilight, dir. Catherine Hardwick (2008). Vampyr, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932). What We Do in the Shadows, dir. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (2014). Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face, dir. George Franju (1959).

The Horror Genre in Balkan Cinema Tanja Jurković

Even though Hollywood is often recognised as the home of genre cinema, that does further suggest that this is not the case with other cinemas around the world (Neale 2005). For example, European cinema has often been associated with the art house, usually depreciating its genres rather than the opposite (Willis and Lazaro, 2004; A. Fisher). On the other hand, Eastern European Cinema is commonly recognised as a cinema of artistic expressions and challenges that serve to deliver political propaganda above all else (Jakiša and Gilić 2015). Because of this, most academic work on genre in the cinema of East of Europe is scarce, especially on the Balkans, where it is virtually non-existent. As Dobreva puts it: With the exception of some research on Westerns and science fiction films produced by the East German studio (DEFA), genre is rarely studied in the context of pre-1989 Eastern European cinema. Monographs on national cinemas in the region tend to highlight auteurs and dissident movements, such as “new waves”, but ignore genre cinema. Critics find the latter unworthy of analysis, since genre films are rarely innovative or original in terms of aesthetics and content.1

She goes on to conclude that problems regarding the distribution on the territory gave rise to the gap of available scholarship, because the films made in the Eastern bloc have almost never seen their release in the West (Dobreva 2012). This gap is even more evident with the example of the cinema in the Balkans (Imre 2012), despite the insistent use of materials that have been discussed in terms of horror genre in the US and Western Europe. Any scholarship on horror to date in the Eastern part of Europe was virtually neglected by the rest of the world. That was also the case with the Balkan2 cinema, especially when talking about Croatia and Serbia, and their distinct relationship throughout history, which will be the focus of this analysis. The analysis bears importance because of the distinct social and political issues that arose throughout

T. Jurković (*)  University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_42

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history and therefore influenced the advancement, or the lack thereof, of cinema and genre such as horror in those countries. There wasn’t any kind of historical mention of horror as a genre in the Balkans, although the examples of it existed, even since the 1930s. Accordingly, no one saw these films as horror when they were made. Those were the films of amateur nature, films that depicted mundane things, films that explored everyday life and human nature, influenced by popular literature, film directors and culture. For example, one of the pioneers of amateur filmmaking in Croatia, Oktavijan Miletić, and his short film Fear (Strah, 1933), was a parody that was inspired by the popular news of the Düsseldorf vampire,3 and more importantly, by Fritz Lang’s film M (1931).4 This means that film practitioners in the Balkans were very much aware of the existence of horror as a genre in the rest of the world, and they were influenced by it. “Fear could also be defined in terms of genre as a five-minute humorous incident, which could also serve as a prologue of final scene of a feature horror film”,5 but in the 1930s, it was only understood as a parody. Since those films were still new and were viewed as artistic rather than falling into any genre, the scholarship on them in the Balkans at the time was primarily focused on that artistic aspect, and the writings on the topic came from practicing filmmakers and writers who were members of ciné clubs. These were clubs that became popular in France and their popularity spread all over Europe. Ciné clubs had their own journals, some of them still exist today (for example, Cahiers du Cinéma); journals that were focused on bringing closer the art of film and filmmaking to the general public, in order to educate them about this novelty and introduce them to a new world, the one of film. Nevertheless, these films and ciné clubs were still operating in the shadow of the Hollywood studio system. Genre was the term reserved for Hollywood rather than for small national cinemas across Europe. The term art cinema in Europe was associated with auteur cinema and national cinemas, aimed at niche markets, with little to no finances put into making such films. The directors of auteur cinema compensated the lack of finances with using amateur actors and basic film sets, in that way focusing more on developing ideas and exploring different narrative techniques. There is evidence of the development of art cinema in the Eastern part of Europe, numerous examples, such as already mentioned Miletić’s short film Fear, as well as his other work, making sure that the tradition still lives on, but it also poses an issue in connection to the Balkan horror cinema. Balkan cinema is also described as an art cinema, or an auteur cinema, by European accounts. For example, books were extensively written on ingenious directors such as Emir Kusturica, and the way his films changed the view of the West on the Balkans, using humour and violence to depict the harsh life in the East and to speak about political and cultural issues that still linger today. Balkan horror genre, however, still does not have a home in the Balkans. New, contemporary horror films are emerging on a bi—yearly basis, but because there is no scholarship on the Balkan horror genre, these films fail to be distributed properly around the world. They are not getting the attention they deserve, and some of them do not even progress beyond the screening in regional cinemas in their respective countries, with little to no interest from the cinemagoers.

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Auteur cinema emerged during the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which existed from 1918 until 1941, when the political circumstances changed rapidly, and the countries that were a part of this kingdom were affected by the Second World War, political decisions of the leader of Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito, and heavy propaganda. The film industry in Yugoslavia was practically notional before the war, and for the rest of the world it did not even exist, in every practical sense, for the next twenty years after the war (Liehm and Liehm 1977). The first Yugoslav feature film was made in 1947, in the difficult postwar period, when a nationalized film industry was being established in the war-torn country. Those who established it, however, had nothing to work with - no cameras, no studios, no experience, no people. What they did have, was the strong support of the state, and a will that was equally strong. There was enthusiasm and persistence.6

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), consisting of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia. As the political and state structure changed, so did the filmmaking. All the finances were put into making war films as a social and political commentary on the Second World War, and propaganda films, that glorified Partisan troops and their contribution to the new union. Filmmakers did not have many options, but to conform to whomever had the finances, which was the union, in this case. Freedom was restricted, censorship struck hard, and that state of lingering in space and time without having the option to express oneself and one’s own political aspirations and opinions lasted until the 1970s. Suddenly, the wall of despair collapsed in the minds of young filmmakers and artists, and everything that they had bottled up inside came out in the form of a so-called “black wave”. The “black wave” is a term that describes a specific opus of films created in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as films that speak about issues of human soul and psychology, and films that analyse and deconstruct repressive political apparatus. It was created as a reaction to partisan films that glorified the so-called national liberation struggle during Second World War, whose “protagonists” were often used only as a means for straightforward propaganda. Young directors who made the greatest impact with their work during this time, like Dušan Makavejev,7 who, if they managed to escape incarceration, moved on to Europe and the US to create their respective careers. This was the time where the real circumstances were more dreadful than the horror genre itself, and there was no place for it to flourish and rise above the auteur cinema which was prevalent in the Balkans. Nevertheless, after the “black wave” came to its end, there were still some filmmakers who expressed themselves through gothic8 and horror films. One of the representatives of this change is Đorđe Kadijević, who made one of the first horror films in Yugoslavia, She-butterfly (Leptirica, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Kadijević, 1973), based on an old Serbian vampire folklore. Including this film, which was the only one of his films that did not focus on the eerie landscapes, gothic elements and themes of death and madness, but on what is today classified as horror,

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Kadijević made a few more, which actually compile a cycle of gothic horror films in Yugoslavia from 1973 to 1990, following another crucial change: the fall of SFRY, accompanied by the civil wars in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia in 1991. It is worth mentioning however, the 1980s as a period when there was a significant gap in making serious horror films (Kadijević’s first film was made in 1973, and the last film was made in 1990). It was the time of dealing with the fall of a union and the formation of independent states from it, including the consequences that followed. People and filmmakers alike found solace in a somewhat different genre, a mixture of horror and comedy. The mixture of these two genres in the 1980s resulted in the making of a couple of significant horror comedies that subtly expressed the concerns and the atmosphere of this period. Yugoslavia collapsed, Marshall Tito9 died, but the cult of his personality continued to live on. After Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia slowly started crumbling. The reactions of people were even more intensified by the fact that Tito created a godlike image for himself during his ‘reign’, which became embedded into the national identities of all member countries of Yugoslavia, as well as in the memory of their people, creating the so-called “Yugonostalgia”, a term that stayed in the language well after Yugoslavia’s collapse. In the former Yugoslavia, an “attachment to a former multinational state which breaks up is usually referred to as ‘Yugonostalgia’, and various opinions have been expressed about its strength and possible political consequences today”.10 Media and other cultural practices are being mobilized in former Yugoslav communities in an attempt to recreate a shared cultural memory. Yugo-nostalgia paradoxically harkens back to a shared cultural history, even as it provides the raw material for new forms of national identities that continue to divide the former Yugoslav republics.11

Even after more than thirty years since Tito’s death, “…and the eventual bloody disintegration of his country, many remember the benevolent dictator affectionately, and in the states of the former Yugoslavia, Yugonostalgia is on the rise. For many young people, Yugonostalgia is about more than just Tito; it is about economic stability and peace for the people of the former Yugoslavia. Nowadays, Yugonostalgia is present in media, especially on TV, and more than that, in the entertainment and informative programs (series, films, news…) since the fall”.12 All these concerns were exorcised through horror and humour, giving the Balkans two of the most interesting examples of 1980s filmmaking. Serbian horror comedy Strangler vs. Strangler (Davitelj protiv davitelja, Šijan, 1984) clearly depicts the air of confusion and fear of the new changes, through a fictional comic character of a serial killer who decided to kill everyone who didn’t like the red carnations he offered, while the Croatian film Bloodsuckers (Krvopijci, Šorak, 1989) talks about nostalgia for old socialist times and Tito’s presence, equally pointing to the people’s ignorance about the events that turned their world upside down; it combined the heritage of an academic professor, (i.e. intellectual community), and the supernatural. Both films are horror comedies that tell the story of the times after Tito’s death, focusing on completely different issues and influences. However, both films skilfully describe the mentality of the people of Croatia and

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Serbia in 1980s, using the exchange of horror and comedy to tone down the seriousness of the cultural climate that was rapidly changing. The Bloodsuckers is a horror comedy which portrays the differences between rural and urban mentality in Croatia, and loss of one’s identity during the turbulent times of political and social changes. It suggests that this period was the time of lost individuals, rather than fierce leaders; a dangerous time where freedom is a word soon to be forgotten by the society. Even though this film did not gain much popularity or any cult following, it nevertheless opened up some public debates because of the message it was trying to convey, and it scratched the surface in showing the true mentality of its respective country, as well as its neighbours, with the statements that encourage hate speech, showing an omnipresent rivalry between Croatia and Serbia—in the case of Bloodsuckers, the burning question was which country has the oldest vampire in folklore, recorded by its name. All these films were made primarily for local and regional TV, without any intention of being distributed outside of the Balkans. Lazarević-Radak states that: Considering the dominant aesthetic criteria, the possibility of audience being ­over-saturated with grim themes and omnipresent search for the pleasant and beautiful, avoiding the broadcasting of these kinds of films finds justification in the need of TV stations to achieve statistical ratings record. To achieve that on a massive scale is the main goal of television.

Television broadcasts were controlled. Revolutionary films from the sixties, which are now considered to be a huge part of the so-called “exotic Yugoslav past”, weren’t shown at all, for example, instead they were substituted with the films that were irrelevant when it comes to the social and political critique, made only to entertain and distract from the real issues at hand, from the eighties onwards. “Banned, censored films and cineaste fates have become a part of a memory of the ‘sweet’ Yugoslav past, when everyone lived a better life; when the standard of living was at an enviable level; and when the president’s name, flag and other ‘accessories’ prompted a huge level of enthusiasm abroad”,13 neglecting the dark side of the society that this small, but rich cinema was trying to portray. The film Bloodsuckers opens up with a shot of Kamenita vrata (Stone Gates) in the capital of Croatia, Zagreb. Kamenita vrata has a long and rich history, and is today a very popular tourist site in Croatia. The place itself has obvious religious connotations. It became a place of worship because of the legend of the portrait of Virgin Mary, which was owned by a local girl, which got caught in a fire. Everything else burned down except that portrait and the miracle proclaimed Kamenita vrata a holy place. It is interesting, therefore, to note that it is the main location in one of the rare horror films filmed in Croatia. The story of Bloodsuckers follows a vampire Teobald Majer, as he tells his story to doctor Glogowetz, a psychologist of Croatian origin who lived and worked in America. He talks about his demise as a witch hunter who was stabbed in the back at Kamenita vrata, where he died and returned a vampire. So far betrayal, ghosts, witches and vampires set this holy place as a place of desperation, suffering

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and darkness, which is an intriguing dichotomy to analyse. Furthermore, the doctor’s surname, Glogowetz, has its roots in the Croatian word “glog” (eng. Hawthorn)—a tree from which one makes stakes for killing vampires, and the spelling implies that he has been abroad, as it is adjusted to the American English speaking territory, suggesting that our doctor might have lost touch with his original identity, as it will be implied later on in the film when his uncle and his cousin come to visit him from the rural place of Glogovec, which is also the Croatian name of his family. After the unexpected visit from Teobald, who claims he is the only vampire in Zagreb, the doctor, who is also a university professor, a member of the intellectual community of Croatia, an educated man, talks about his unofficial patient to his students, saying: “Today is not the time of great leaders, but desperate and rebellious individuals”,14 thus equating the vampire myth with the latter. Precisely because of that statement, which highlights the dangers of expressing oneself freely in the time of political upheaval in the country, he gets into trouble with local authorities and tabloids, because those kinds of statements were still quite dangerous at the time, in the period not long after Tito’s death, and Yugoslavia’s imminent fall a few years later. Since the opening dialogue, the director, Šorak, suggests that this is indeed a horror comedy, and that comic relief will be present throughout the film, usually visible through some background characters, like the doctor’s uncle and cousin, his old housekeeper, or even the doctor himself, in the culmination of the story towards the end, when he becomes what he was meant to be: a vampire hunter. The doctor’s wife Barbara, on the other hand, fancies the vampire Teobald and teases him into coming into her bedroom while her husband is away, as well as searching for him on the dark streets of Zagreb, looking for excitement and the feel of danger, which lurks around every corner. She seems like an independent, strong woman at first, but in the end, she is still addicted to the upper class lifestyle that her husband provides, and all the comfort it brings. Manipulative as she is, and not willing to give up her good life, she comes up with an idea to put an ad in the local newspaper about vampire hunters offering their services to people who have troubles with these monsters, and together with the doctor’s uncle, his cousin, and the doctor himself, who has now descended from his throne of an educated individual and a respected member of the community into an abyss of a superstitious, obsessed man who goes on a hunt for vampires; they all set out to do what every politician knows how to do best:“… to make money off people’s stupidity”.15 Suffice to say that they found their first client, a fragile mid-thirties woman, who pays them good money in order to stake her dead uncle through the heart, so that he doesn’t bother her again. Fittingly enough, the dead uncle’s name is Drakulić, which too obviously implies the connection to vampire myth and Stoker’s novel Dracula, and serves as a confirmation to the audience that the late uncle really is a vampire. The whole case seems too perfect to be true; they all set out to the local graveyard to dig up the troublemaking uncle, who is supposed to be dead since the 1960. This is the moment when everything falls apart in doctor’s life, at least at first sight. In the end, the doctor finally gets his confirmation that vampires are real. They are as real as a metaphor made here, drawing from assumptions that Yugoslavia is drawing to its

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end. Vampire myth was earlier compared to desperate individuals as opposed to real leaders, one of which Yugoslavia lost in 1980, and it is an indicator of what comes next. Film was made in 1989, two years prior to Yugoslavia’s downfall and the civil war in 1991. The end of the film, however, can be interpreted and read in different ways. Teobald Majer, who thinks he is the only vampire in Zagreb, representing perhaps the new climate that is rapidly changing, comes across none other than the same uncle Drakulić from our wannabe vampire hunters’ case mentioned earlier, on one eerie, dark night on the streets of Zagreb, and seeing him, Teobald quickly moves away from him and disappears in the shadows, while Drakulić grins at him, and slowly disappears in the fog. The ending is ambiguous, but it leaves space for some conclusions and exploration of certain ideas. Majer is a young man, strong yaw, tall, with mesmerising eyes, while Drakulić is a much older man in appearance than him, black circles under his eyes, a crooked smile, grey hair and wearing a suit, delightfully reminiscent of Tito and his public image. Drakulić evokes the nostalgia for the times when Tito was alive, and Teobald represents those desperate young individuals. The Yugonostalgia is still present, and it is here to stay. The cult of Tito’s persona and the old ways still linger in the minds of people, it is strong and omnipresent, never forgotten. Strangler vs. Strangler (Davitelj protiv davitelja, Šijan, 1984), however, is not as subtle in its approach when trying to describe and parody the turbulent 1980s. Belgrade is a city wanting to become a metropolis. What makes a city a metropolis? It isn’t geography, number of inhabitants; it is…the chronicle of crime. If there are no maniacs in a city, then it is not a metropolis. In Belgrade, there were a lot of candidates, and this is how the film starts. Candidates were “rashomons”, or peeping toms, unsuccessful bank robbers, and the Belgrade phantom, who was the only one who defied the police for a long time. All these characters are tragicomical, living in a city where the government seems to be away on a long leave. Then the Strangler appeared. Pera Mitić, the king of all crime: a florist, in his forties, who lives with his mother, and loves red carnations. He is Belgrade’s Norman Bates, but instead of a motel, his canvas is the whole city of Belgrade. He also kills his own mother in order to become free from her influence, but of course, like Norman Bates, he can never be free no matter how many times he kills her, metaphorically. Pera had one problem with the people around him, which drove him to kill: red carnations were not trendy anymore among young generations, even though old people still had appreciation for them. Red carnations can be seen as a symbol of communism, an old system represented in old people who like red carnations, while young people hated them, representing the new system coming in place, a rebellious and independent one. Pera is constantly haunted by his mother throughout the film, a woman who is never proud of him no matter what he does, or how many red carnations he sells. His first killing is a scene where we see him going through a storm of emotions, a mixture of him crying, collapsing under the pressure of his mother’s image constantly hovering over his head. He gets blinded, and lashes out; that is when he kills. The film is Balkan-style parody homage of Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the similarities are constantly being drawn in most scenes in the film. There is a lovely homage to the shower scene from Psycho, but in a

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reverse way. Pera hides under the shower, and his second victim, an opera singer, a member of the art community and one of the young generations who also hates red carnations, stands on the outside of the shower, preparing to go in. If we look at Pera as a representation of the old regime, he is feeling threatened by the young generations who do not care about anything. He, feeling threatened standing there in the shower, draws the opera singer inside, strangles her, and she becomes the victim of that same dying regime. Furthermore, his house is a gothic setting, with all the visual elements a haunted, decaying old house can have: dust, gothic details and furniture, candle holders, old creaky chairs, dubious religious iconography and organ to play haunted melodies on. One of the final scenes of the film is actually a close-up of these items inside the house, covered with thick spider webs, implying the passing of time and the forgotten old ways. Another significant character that the story revolves around is a young man, singer in a punk band, named Spiridon Kopicel. He is a troubled youth who develops a strange relationship with his young stepmother, building a sense of hatred towards beautiful young women because of her being married to his father. The crucial moment in his young life is when he tries to strangle his stepmother, realising that, or convincing himself, that he has a mental connection to the Strangler. Thus starts his obsession with the strangler and his crimes, and it develops in unusual directions. Punk culture in the 80s was brought over from the UK as a form of expressing dissatisfaction with the current system in place, and Spiridon embraces it as a form of rebellious expression. Spiridon considers himself a rebel, a part of the punk culture, and with his newly discovered connection with the Strangler, he writes a song with his band about him and his crimes. His research for the song included getting into the role of the Strangler in order to feel the psychopathy that is torturing him. He starts stalking young women, attacking them, without success and often times with a very comic outcome. The song that he wrote became popular very fast among the troubled young generation of his time, and it even broke the fourth wall, becoming popular outside the film’s frames, and the screen. Pera, when he hears the song, immediately recognises the connection to him, and in all his madness, and the fascination with the young generations because they glorify something so dark and vial as the Strangler, i.e. him, finally acknowledging him for the first time, Pera points out that this is the normal today and that no one should judge anyone because they do not know them, creating a shield and an excuse for himself and his crimes which he repressed deep inside. Pera wants to be a functional part of the new society, but completely fails in doing so. However, when he gets accepted by it through the popularity of the song that talks about him, and when he gets the admiration and love from that young rebellious generation, he fails again, by killing his mother, which leaves him only with guilt for the crimes that he had committed. After killing his mother, his only excuse to blame someone else for his miserable life, he gets excruciating headaches and starts to remember every crime he had committed to date. He has to blame someone, so he finds another victim; none other than young disturbed Spiridon, who wrote the song that made Pera kill his mother. In the finale of the film, Pera puts on his

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mother’s gown, some makeup and shoes, thus becoming her, the protector of the son—himself, and he goes after Spiridon in his new acquired identity. Needless to say, the story ends tragically for Pera/Mother, who dies a horrible death by hanging. The old system, which he represents in the film, dies infamously, in the darkness, abandoned by all society. Nevertheless, his legacy lives on, in the character of young Spiridon, who in the end becomes the Belgrade Strangler, in that way keeping Belgrade a metropolis which it always aspired to be, and keeping the memory of the old regime very much alive, in the new age of changes to come. Both films, the Bloodsuckers and Strangler vs. Strangler, depict the times of turbulent change, and people’s inability to cope with that change, on the eve of the fall of Yugoslavia, often wishing to “go back”, not fully aware that that is impossible. Even though the constant switching between the comparisons of the old, dying communist regime and the new, rebellious generation that craves independence is present in both films, it is however more apparent in Strangler vs. Strangler, whether one is looking at the main character, or specific scenes, or even a clever use of language. It is all this that makes Bloodsuckers and Strangler vs. Strangler the prime examples of the collective mindset in both Croatia and Serbia on the verge of Yugoslavia’s downfall. As mentioned, these two examples describe the unstable times during which Yugoslavia experienced one of its final years; social and cultural differences in Croatia and Serbia while they were still part of the union, but slowly distancing themselves from it and the problems it was experiencing, problems which affected all nations equally; as well as to portray the Balkan mentality after Tito’s death, in the midst of Yugoslavia’s fall, and the serious prediction of the wars that followed in the 1990s. From 1991 to 1995, civil war created real horrors16 that still exist today, visible through poorly run state politics and overall neglect of any proper social, political and cultural values. This contributed to an emergence of different kinds of expression in horror on the territory in 2000s: a Balkan version of rural horror and the horror of the new extremism, most notable examples coming from Croatia and Serbia, respectively. Dalibor Matanić’s horror film Daddy (Ćaća, Matanić, 2011) talks about the dysfunctional family and sins of the fathers in an isolated rural setting of Croatia, communicating the sense of isolation and lack of communication within a father–daughter relationship, which can easily be translated to the state of mind of the people of Croatia, overrun by the sins of the past events. Two sisters and one of the girl’s boyfriends set out on a trip to Lika, a rural part of Croatia, to reunite with their estranged father who lives in a secluded house in the mountains. The events that occur reveal a dark secret, and the lives of the two sisters change completely. Full of ghostly atmosphere, bloody scenes and a finale that brings the two sisters closer indicates the potential of the horror genre in Croatia, at the same time showing the beauty and the monstrosity of the rural landscape. Other examples include A Delicacy from Zagorje (Zagorski specijalitet, Kapac, 2012), which, in a more contemporary way, talks about the depravity of human nature in a corporate world and what happens when that world clashes with the rural, isolated and almost uncivilised mentality in the remote part of Croatia. Four guys and a

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woman, all yuppies,17 go on team-building exercise in the hills of Zagorje, and they lose touch with one another, only to reunite again, at a house of a family that offers them a home-cooked meal and some drinks. They gladly accept, but soon find out that the meal, a delicacy from that part of Croatia, contains unusual ingredients—human flesh, and their involvement in the meal soon becomes very clear. The characters are killed off one by one in most brutal acts of violence, as a punishment for disrespecting the family and their way of life. The woman however, stays alive just long enough to give hope to the audiences, only to meet her demise in the end. As Bell notices: The strangers erased are always incomers from the city, either in search of the pleasures and adventures offered by the wilds, or simply lost, misdirected or redirected on their travels.18

Clearly influenced by the Western horror classics such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), and Wrong Turn franchise,19 for example, where these films “deploy particular country characters in wiring their rural horrors”,20 both A Delicacy from Zagorje and Daddy show that emerging and already established Croatian filmmakers can go hand in hand with the rest of the world, especially when it comes to horror genre. These films, as well as the ones that fall into the new extremism category, were all made independently, with little to no financial help from the state, ministry of culture or any official film association. Graphic representation and the tradition of artistic transgression”, on the other hand, “have complex histories, and the definition of what one takes to constitute extreme is notoriously subjective, slippery and bound by historical and social pressures.21

That is the case with one of the most notorious examples of horror film in the Balkans, A Serbian Film (Srpski film, Spasojević, 2010). Made in the same disparate period of socio-economic and cultural change, plagued by the consequences of the wars in Yugoslavia, indicated through corruption, and poor governmental leadership, among other things, A Serbian Film claims to be a message to the world that portrays the dark side of Serbia, its government and the suffering of Serbian people, communicated through taboos and extreme violence, most likely for the purpose of financial gain. Even though A Serbian Film by now has a notorious reputation, not just in Europe, but the rest of the world, it is worth repeating that the film is of great production value and technical expertise, as well as showcasing great acting talent. Miloš, a former porn star, is having a hard time to support his family, and when a shady director Vukmir offers him to make a film which is going to be the crown of his career, Miloš of course accepts, without knowing what the offer really entails. In a vortex of extreme violence, rape, necrophilia, new born porn, Miloš finds himself lost and in a drug-induced madness, killing and raping everything that comes his way. The ending of the film is striking and even more brutal than the rest of the film, as it shows that there is no hope in fighting against the forces of corrupted politics, government and state. New extremism thus found a way into the Balkans through A Serbian Film, trying to speak out about the problems the Balkan countries are facing, giving a voice to the new generation of artists and filmmakers.

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Another interesting example of the new extremism, albeit less known to the outside audiences, is Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Život i smrt porno bande, Đorđević, 2009), equally extreme as A Serbian Film, which influenced the idea of it in the first place, although Life and Death of a Porno Gang can be said to be more Serbian than A Serbian Film claims to be, in terms of the message these two films are trying to send about the poor state of Serbia and the suffering of its people. Marko is a young filmmaker who wants to make a career out of making movies that will change the world. As his aspirations and dreams turned out to be more than unrealistic in the current political climate in the state, Marko goes into porn industry, making porn films for Cane, a porn director. Although it brings him money, the rules of the porn industry restrict his creativity and expressive vision, so he sets out on a journey, a tour around Serbia’s rural parts, with a team of local porn stars and actors which he chose himself, to create the first pornographic theatre in Serbia. After an attack on the troupe, conducted by the members of a small rural religious community, and after being raped and beaten numerous times, Marko and his posse get an offer from a German journalist named Franc, who is fascinated with the Balkans and its violent image present in the rest of the world, to make snuff films on the side, because there is a huge market for it outside the Balkan region. They accept, and that is the moment their journey into darkness and degradation starts, leading them in unknown directions, corrupting their souls and ending with death. Even though the extreme violence is present in this film, it also follows political changes in the 2000s in Serbia: the overthrowing of Slobodan Milošević, the country’s president at the time, subtly criticising the politics and the state of the country. Both of these films, labelled torture porn,22 depict the way of life in Serbia, which can easily and equally be compared to Croatia, as well as political and cultural issues that led to degradation of both countries, in one way or the other, and the claim that violence is the only way of communication in the Balkans. Nevertheless, despite the fact that horror genre is not yet established as such in the Balkans, using primarily Croatia and Serbia as examples, because of their specific relationship caused by the political, social and cultural issues throughout history, in recent years there emerged a couple of examples of horror films that indicate a possible shift in the general opinion that horror genre is not worthy enough to be financed or researched, and therefore practically non-existent to academia and the film industry. Although the research is yet to be conducted on these two examples of a possible genre shift, it is worth mentioning them briefly as an introduction to future examination. Exorcism (Egzorcizam, Matanić, 2017) is coined as the first Croatian film about exorcism. It is based on a theatre play of the same name, which is again based on a true story about an exorcism performed on a young girl Maša, indicating the transfer from different mediums, which might have had some consequences on the making of the film itself. The director’s approach to the topic and the story is a simple one, and is more focused on the flesh and sexuality, rather than on demonic possession, but according to the critics, it lacks a good story, despite the potential that it showed through characters in the film, which again, might have been a

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consequence of transferring the piece from one medium to another, i.e. from theatre to film. One of the most recent examples of horror, still waiting for its release in 2019, is not just a first Croatian zombie comedy, it is a humoristic provocation of both Serbia and Croatia and their people, in its title, Last Serb in Croatia (Posljednji Srbin u Hrvatskoj, Ličina, 2019) and its content. Croatia has gone bankrupt; the water supply is tainted and infected by a virus that turns only Croats into zombies, while the only ones that are immune to it are the local community of Serbs. A Serbo-Croatian co-production, financed, and approved by HAVC (Croatian Audio-visual Centre), a much unexpected move coming from one of the most established media associations in Croatia, it seems that the film has set the foundations to start re-examining the Serbo-Croatian turbulent and very complicated relationship, the analysis of which is long overdue. It is also relevant to note that the fear to speak out about important topics is slowly disappearing, in both countries it seems, among the filmmaking and artistic community, as these last two examples are clearly touching upon the delicate issue of the current state of affairs in Croatia, and Serbia. It is yet to be seen what will happen next, but with all these new examples of horror films, which is a statement that in itself holds an immense relevance, because of the genre’s status, or the lack of it in the past, Balkan horror genre might just have its first official date of inception.

Notes



1. Dobreva, N. Eastern European Historical Epics: Genre Cinema and the Visualisation of a Heroic National Past, in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Imre, A., Wiley, 2012. 2. The term Balkan is used here to refer to the change in the geographical and historical borders with the emergence and the fall of Yugoslavia (1918–2003). 3. Düsseldorf vampire was a nickname for one of the most famous serial killers, Peter Kürten, who committed numerous murders and sexual assaults in 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany. 4. Fritz Lang dir., M (1931) is a German thriller about a serial killer who preys on children. Miletić’s short film Fear is based on a not very innocent practical joke between friends, which shows one of the most important tool used in his films, an observer’s perspective (whether the observer is the director, the audience or the characters, and describes the fear of the unknown, the danger that lurks in the shadows. 5. Lhotka, C. DVD Booklet Commentary: Oktavijan Miletić, Amaterski filmovi II (Amateur Films II), Hrvatska Kinoteka, Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, 2011. 6. Liehm, Liehm. The Most Important Art: Eastern European Film After 1945, University of California Press, 1977. 7. Dušan Makavejev (1932–2019) is a Serbian director, famous for his revolutionary films in the late 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslav cinema, the period also known as the “black wave”. 8. The term Gothic here in this specific context of Kadijević’s films is used loosely, and borrowing from the general definitions of the Gothic that exist today, as it is not certain that one can speak about it in terms of genre, because of the same neglect that horror genre was succumbed to in the Balkans explained in this chapter.

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9. Josip Broz Tito, or simply known as Tito, was a Yugoslav statesman, who performed various roles during his reign of power in Yugoslavia, such as secretary-general, president, premier, marshal. He was the first Communist leader in power who defied the Soviet hegemony (www.brittanica.com). 10. Kolstø, P. “Identifying with the Old or the New State: Nation‐Building vs. Yugonostalgia in the Yugoslav Successor States, Nations and Nationalism,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 20 (4), Oct. 2014. 11. Volčič, Z., 2007. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24 (1), 21–38. 12. Collard, R. When We Were Yugoslavs: The Rise of Yugonostalgia, https://www.pri.org/ stories/2015-06-02/when-we-were-yugoslavs-rise-yugonostalgia 13. Lazarević-Radak, S. Film i politički kontekst: o jugoslavenskom i srpskom filmu, Mali Nemo, 2016. 14. Šorak dir., Bloodsuckers (Krvopijci, 1989)—translated from Croatian by the author of the article. 15. Šorak dir., Bloodsuckers (Krvopijci, 1989). 16. The so-called Yugoslav wars were the wars for independence, wars of ethnic conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia, which led to the breakup of the same. 17. Even though I tried to steer away from this expression, I have found that it is quite fitting and emphasises the clash of social classes and how they are represented in the film. 18. Bell, D. Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror, in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and rurality, by Cloke, Little, Routledge, 1997. 19. O’Brien, Schmidt, Lynch, Milev dir., Wrong Turn film series (2003–2014), a series of six American slasher horror films, created by B. McElroy. The films focus on different families of deformed cannibals who hunt a group of people in West Virginia for food, killing them in most brutal ways. 20. Bell, D. Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror, in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, by Cloke, Little, Routledge, 1997. 21. Horeck, Kendall. The New Extremism in Cinema from France to Europe, Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2011. 22. In a recent interview with William Proctor, as a part of Cult Conversations series of interviews on henryjenkins.org, Steve Jones, the author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror After Saw (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013), explains this term: “‘Torture porn’ is a label coined and propagated by journalists, which is used to describe a body of mainstream (theatrically released) films, mainly horror films. The journalists who championed the term considered ‘torture porn’ films to contain “extreme” depictions of violence. The films referred to—including Saw, Hostel and The Human Centipede—typically focus on protagonists being held captive against their wills. […] ‘Torture porn’ isn’t a subgenre per se. The diverse films referred to as ‘torture porn’ were artificially brought together under that banner by critics. In trying to make sense of the trend, I identified that the films dubbed ‘torture porn’ shared the common traits of (a) belonging to the horror or violent thriller genres, and (b) depicting protagonists trying to escape from confined locations, but they have little else in common.” Full interview: http://henryjenkins.org/ blog/2019/1/4/cult-conversations-interview-with-steve-jones-part-i?fbclid=IwAR0aLHaiTZrGjLUifXrmi7dPiSpEFg2GNz44YuzzchZLOzK1neamMUw5CJ4, accessed 23 January 2019.

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Bibliography Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality. Cloke, Little. Routledge, 1997. Print. Collard, Rebecca. “When We Were Yugoslavs: The Rise of Yugonostalgia.” Public Radio International, 2015. 2 Jan. 2019. Web. Dobreva, Nikolina. “Eastern European Historical Epics: Genre Cinema and the Visualization of a Heroic National Past.” A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas. Aniko Imre. Wiley, 2012. Print. Horeck, Tanya, and Tina Kendall. The New Extremism in Cinema. Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2011. Print. Imre, Aniko. A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas. Wiley, 2012. Print. Jakiša, Miranda, and Nikica Gilić. Partisans in Yugoslavia. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verl., 2015. Print. Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lazario-Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis. Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes. Manchester University Press, 2003. Print. Jenkins, Henry, and William Proctor. “Cult Conversations: Interview with Steve Jones (Part I).” henryjenkins.org, n.p., 2019. 25 Jan. 2019. Web. Kolstø, Pål. “Identifying with the Old or the New State: Nation-Building vs. Yugonostalgia in the Yugoslav Successor States.” Nations and Nationalism 20.4 (2014): 760–781. Web. Lhotka, C. DVD Booklet Commentary: Oktavijan Miletić, Amaterski filmovi II (Amateur Films II), Hrvatska Kinoteka, Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, 2011. Liehm, Mira, and Antonín J. Liehm. The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977. Print. Neale, Stephen. Genre and Hollywood. Routledge, 2000. Print. Volčič, Zala. “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.1 (2007): 21–38. Web.

Films Đorđević dir., Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Život i smrt porno bande, 2009). Kadijević dir., She-butterfly (Leptirica, 1973). Kapac dir., A Delicacy from Zagorje (Zagorski specijalitet, 2012). Ličina dir., Last Serb in Croatia (Posljednji Srbin u Hrvatskoj, 2019). Matanić dir., Daddy (Ćaća, 2011). Matanić dir., Exorcism (Egzorcizam, 2017). Miletić dir., Fear (Strah, 1933), DVD Oktavijan Miletić: Amaterski filmovi II (Amateur Films II), Hrvatska Kinoteka, Hrvatski državni arhiv, 2011. Šijan dir., Strangler vs. Strangler (Davitelj protiv davitelja, 1984). Šorak dir., Bloodsuckers (Krvopijci, 1989). Spasojević dir., A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2010).

Slavic Cinema Agnieszka Kotwasińska

While it would be impossible to account for all the narrative threads that constitute twenty-first-century European cinema(s), certain thematic clusters have emerged repeatedly over the last two decades. Thomas Elsaesser identifies three such themes: the trauma of the Holocaust, confrontation with the Islamic Other and pressing biopolitical concerns such as shrinking population and aging.1 Anna Batori adds to this list “the politico-historical trauma of Soviet colonialism” of the ex-Soviet bloc countries, which, incidentally, are oftentimes excluded from analyses centred on (Western) European cinemas.2 A separate category could be also created for the traumatic transition from failing socialist states to neoliberal capitalist economies in the 1990s, a theme gaining considerable traction in recent Eastern European movies. Responses to traumatic past pair well with the Gothic, which is understood in this paper both as a certain type of aesthetics preoccupied with images of death and dying, the uncanny and the fantastic, and as a narrative mode that focuses on familial secrets and moral transgressions, questions of inheritance, transgenerational haunting, and the workings of repression.3 Thanks to its distinctive flexibility, the contemporary Gothic can be attached to various mainstream movie genres and their hybrids (for instance, political thriller, serial killer movie, crime drama, and period drama), but perhaps its clearest manifestations can be found in horror and the related genres of the fantastic such as fantasy and magic realism. Because horror and the fantastic genres are rarely discussed in connection with Eastern European cinema, this chapter seeks to bridge this gap by offering a quick overview of recent development in this field and delineating the ways selected movies utilise the Gothic to comment on national past and memories of traumatic events. The notion of trauma, refers to a sociocultural phenomenon rather than to a clinical condition of an individual. Trauma is thus understood as “a collective psychological response to a cataclysmic disaster or profoundly terrifying event”,

A. Kotwasińska (*)  University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_43

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which requires careful manoeuvring between a compulsion to tell the traumatic story and an urge to disallow it completely and shield oneself from its fallout.4 In terms of narration, the Gothic, with its focus on epistemological uncertainty and the embrace of the irrational, balances these conflicting requirements. The link between trauma and gothic narratives emphasises their mutual compatibility and symbiotic nature: while the Gothic is often derived from traumatic events, “trauma narratives are often structured through gothic effects in order to convey a sense of haunting, of matters unresolved, of the past intruding into the present—and of narrative itself fragmenting or becoming unreliable”.5 The decision to look only at Slavic productions (and exclude the Baltic and Hungarian movies) was dictated, first and foremost, by a rather pragmatic need to limit the scope of this work. Second reason builds upon the recognition of the Slavic nations’ intertwined histories of colonialism, subjugation, and fight for independence, which were often accompanied by their simultaneous involvement in oppressive, exclusionary practices, xenophobia, colonialist aspirations, and ethnic chauvinism. Maria Janion, though referring only to Poland, describes how such post-colonial subjectivity (connected both to the condition of being colonised and to the fantasies of colonising others) leads to feelings of apathy, failure, and peripheral status, which then compete in a public imaginary with a messianic paradigm of national(ist) pride and unconditional embrace of sacrificial suffering.6 Janion’s concept of the “uncanny Slavdom” describes how “a certain type of Slavic trauma, the feeling of belonging to the weak, the victimized, the enslaved and the humiliated” erupts in arts and public life through collective obsessions with death, martyrdom, sacrifice, traditional gender roles, hegemonic masculinity, and nationalism.7 For the purposes of this essay, the Slavic uncanny refers to the ways historical traumas emerge through gothic narratives of death and monstrosity, family secrets, and transgressive morality. The unwillingness to accept the responsibility for past wrongs, to properly mourn not just self but the Other, and to recognise oneself as a shamed victim, a reluctant survivor, or a helpless witness forms a common thread in the three movies analysed below. The three movies selected for this paper are all similarly preoccupied with national traumas, memory, and repressed past: Polish Demon (2015) is concerned with pre-war Polish-Jewish relations and the post-war memory discourses; Russian Night Watch (2004) deals with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the New Russia’s historical placement; The Maus (2017) (a Spanish production placed in Bosnia and Herzegovina) utilises a familiar West–East binary in order to discuss the lasting influence of the Yugoslav Wars on the pan-European map. Yet, apart from the shared emphasis on the past, the three titles differ vastly in terms of their financing, production, generic affiliation, approach to trauma, and, finally, the Gothic. While Demon never managed to break out of a festival circuit and move beyond a limited Polish release, Night Watch was a huge domestic and international success which catapulted its director, Timur Bekmambetov, to Hollywood. The two movies also differ in their genre politics: Demon, with its miniscule budget and unmistakable indie feel, successfully unites gothic possession horror with magic realist cinema; Night Watch, in contrast, is a fast-paced

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CGI-heavy blockbuster which mixes and twists various Western genre tropes to fit a modern Russian context. The Maus feels unique in two ways: it clearly belongs to a survival horror subgenre and it is an example of a growing transnational trend in European moviemaking.8 The diversity showcased by the three movies works against reifying tendencies in horror studies and gothic studies, which either tend to overlook Eastern European cultural output altogether or, at best, approach it via the logic of tokenism. Discounting Eastern Europe is accompanied by a persistent cultural stereotype that paints this region as Western Europe’s dark opposite, “a site of an abject, horrifying Other”, a source of sickness and contagion perhaps best exemplified by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a space of moral transgression—a trope consistently haunting Anglo-American horror cinema (Hostel, 2006, The Shrine, 2010, The Nun, 2018).9 The very name “Eastern Europe” is somewhat tinged with Orientalist hues, and its critics prefer other appellations such as “Central Europe” or “Central East Europe”, which aim to, on the one hand, disrupt the binary opposition West– East and, on the other, challenge any lingering associations with the Soviet era.10 And yet, “Central East Europe” might also imply a closer relation to Austrian or German cinema, which in turn belittles or even occludes certain indelible commonalities between Slavic states, in particular, the experience of the horrors of the World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, Soviet regime, and the turbulent ­post-Soviet transformation.11 One could, perhaps, question the usefulness of retaining Eastern-Western distinction at all when the fall of the Soviet Block, the enlargement of the European Union, and most recently, the refugee crisis triggered massive lines of mobility: political, economic, cultural. Many post-Soviet movies are now transnational rather than national in the sense that they trace the ways in which “national identity is questioned, borders are blurred, and bodies become subject to processes of flight, migration, commercial exchange and general rootlessness”.12 Elsaesser also notes the difficulty of defining particular national cinemas, when the other part of the national-international opposition, for all intents and purposes, refers simply to Hollywood and American production (perhaps the only “true” national cinema which has enjoyed a highly successful and uninterrupted history since the dawn of cinema).13 And yet, referring to “Europe” rather than to “Eastern Europe” runs the risk of false universality, which could mask not only localised differences between Eastern European nations but, more importantly, between Eastern and Western Europe. One such glaring difference in terms of gothic and horror moviemaking is a relative lack of horror movies produced in the Soviet bloc. Even though occasional “horror hybrids” managed to fly under the censors’ radar, for the most part, horror (and the fantastic in general) did not fit Socialist Realism dogma and the official line of materialist philosophy.14 Three decades after the fall of communism, domestic horror production is still struggling commercially and critically in Eastern European cinemas. Apart from big-budget Russian fantasy movies (e.g. Forbidden Kingdom, 2014, I am Dragon, 2015, Dark World, 2010) and ­small-budget art-house or experimental movies (e.g. Tower. A Bright Day, 2017, Taxidermia, 2006, III: The Ritual, 2015, Little Otik, 2000, The Lure, 2015,

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Lunacy, 2005, November, 2017) that utilise selected gothic and/or horror motifs, more recognisable horror and gothic movies are still relatively rare (e.g. The Noonday Witch, 2016, The Man in the Orange Jacket, 2014, Dead Daughters, 2007, A Serbian Film, 2010, Horror Stories of a Soviet Childhood, 2008, Masakra, 2010, Miss Christina, 2013, Synevir, 2013, Legenda, 2005, Time of Darkness, 2008).15 Of the latter category, most are highly derivative of Hollywood titles, but where contemporary Western entertainment leans heavily on ironic self-referentiality and playful intertextuality, their post-Soviet counterparts are characterised by an excess of “narrative borrowing”.16 The clichés, tropes, and references to Western popular culture that abound, for instance, in Night Watch are not used to signal an ironic distance. Rather, post-Soviet horror employs such narrative overdetermination to “legitimize [itself] as popular entertainment”.17 During the five decades of communist regime in Poland, the memory of the Holocaust was shaped to fit a narrowly defined master narrative, which downplayed the complexity and depth of the Polish-Jewish pre-war relations and focused almost exclusively on Polish wartime sacrifices and heroic struggle against the Nazi oppressor. As a result, little space was left for Jewish victims and their cultural and ethnic specificity, even though out of 6 million Polish lives lost during the World War II half belonged to the Polish Jewry (90% of total pre-war Polish-Jewish population).18 Three decades after the fall of communism, Polish historiography, public commemoration practices, and remembrance work are still marked by a pronounced “pathological amnesia” concerning “Jewish life and death”.19 And even though Polish moviemakers did comment on the Holocaust and the World War II between 1945 and 1989, it was only recently that a string of revisionist movies began to move away from a focus on morally victorious defeats and instead shed light on the deeply entwined nature of pre-war, wartime, and post-war Polish-Jewish relations. It is possible to read Demon as an exercise in “a self-critical ‘negative memory’”, that is a new paradigm of public remembrance which “acknowledge[s] the experience of the victims” and instead of offering a homogenising view of the shared past, it takes into account different positions vis-à-vis memory transfer (of the victims, the perpetrators, and the witnesses).20 This “new paradigm of public memory is based on the conviction that it is precisely the memory of what is painful and shameful, the memory of injustices committed by one’s compatriots, that has deeply humanizing and democratizing effects”.21 Unfortunately, Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) does not entirely escape “the risk of producing a Narcissistic memory culture” which obsesses over the questions of guilt and blame allocation and rather than actually mourn the victims concentrates on the witnesses’ (or perpetrators’) inability to mourn them properly.22 Seen in this light, Demon’s narrative is somewhat limited by cultural clichés and black-and-white ethics, which does not account for all the voices and their stories. While Demon joins the rank of such movies as Far from the Window (2000), Joanna (2010), Aftermath (2012) and the Oscar-awarded Ida (2013), it also differs from them sharply in its repudiation of historical realism in favour of magical realism and gothic horror. The result is perhaps a slightly cliched narrative

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of possession, transgenerational haunting and failure of communication, which is nonetheless well supported by the political frame of magic realism—the “more overtly politicized sister form” to the Gothic.23 Demon is built around a familial ritual—a traditional Polish barn wedding in a small unnamed town. Żaneta, the beloved daughter of a local entrepreneur and quarry owner, is marrying Piotr, an English-speaking outsider whom she probably met abroad. Where Żaneta is always surrounded by close relatives, extended family, and friends, Piotr arrives on his own. And while he speaks English fluently, his accent suggests a non-English background (Piotr is played by an Israeli actor, Itay Tiran). His Slavic name as well as his knowledge of basic Polish and of an old-fashioned wedding folk song hint vaguely at Polish roots, yet his nationally ambiguous status is never resolved. When clearing the grounds for the wedding, Piotr accidentally unearths an unmarked grave. Rather than follow his first instinct and inform Żaneta, he keeps this ghastly revelation to himself, a decision which results in him being possessed by a dybbuk, an angry spirit from Jewish folklore who clings to a living body. Typical signs of possession follow suit: hallucinations, epilepsy-like attacks, a nosebleed (while having sex with Żaneta), irrational behaviour, confusion, finally, a full possession during which a Jewish girl—Hana—takes over Piotr’s body while his spirit symbolically takes her place in the unearthed grave. Żaneta’s family reacts with disgust and horror at their groom’s sudden transformation into a frightened Yiddish-speaking girl. They lock Piotr/Hana in the cellar to avoid further embarrassment (an act disconcertingly reminiscent of Jewish fugitives locked in basements, attics, and secret hideouts during the Second World War). Sometime later Piotr/Hana vanishes, and it is strongly suggested that he/she was “disappeared” by a jealous employee of Żaneta’s father. In contrast to conventional Western horror possession movies, it is a male adult body (rather than a young female body) that is presented as open to spectral intrusion and abject corporeal transformations (the bleeding, the epilepsy).24 Gender non-compliance is compounded by a historical and ethnic one: just as a female spirit is not welcome in Piotr’s male body by the wedding party, a Jewish spirit from the 1930s is not welcome at a contemporary Polish wedding. Hana, who is wearing a pre-war wedding dress, clings to Piotr because she recognises him as her old groom, which in turn suggests that she might have been killed on her own wedding night, in all likelihood by Żaneta’s grandfather on whose property the wedding is now taking place. Interestingly, the abandoned family house next to the barn bears marks of Hana and her family’s life (family photos, children’s height marked on a doorframe). These images imply that Żaneta’s grandfather took possession of Hana’s property somewhere during or after the war, thus triggering the modern-day possession of Piotr’s body by Hana’s ghost. Ultimately, patriarchal figures (the Priest, the Doctor, the Professor, and the Father), who in conventional possession narratives are responsible for restoring law and order, are revealed to be either helpless or unwilling to act. Żaneta’s father is too afraid of what Hana’s tale might reveal about his father and his own inheritance; the Priest flatly refuses to believe in the otherworldly and turns his back on Piotr; the Doctor cannot face the truth and opts for alcoholic oblivion; and

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an elderly Jewish teacher, known as the Professor, while sympathetic to Hana’s plight, is but a shadow of his former self, haunted by the past that exists now only in his jumbled memories. Hana never gets to tell her story and explain what exactly happened to her as she is too terrified by the situation she finds herself in: locked in an unfamiliar body, roughed up, tied up, and thrown into an old cellar. The only person who understands Yiddish is the Professor, but Żaneta’s family has no patience for either Hana’s hysterics or Professor’s subtle questioning. More than that, they seem to be profoundly uninterested in Hana’s story and the possible implications of an unmarked grave found on their family’s property (which incidentally is also part of Żaneta’s dowry). Rather unsurprisingly, the wedding is annulled, the old house is demolished, and Żaneta leaves town; dressed similarly to Piotr in his initial journey, she retraces his steps and escapes to the West. Such narrative symmetry, coupled with a consistent sepia palette reminiscent of old family photos and an unmarked temporal and spatial setting are just some of the elements that collectively push Demon outside of a mimetic realist framework and into a magic realist one. While magic realism is perhaps most readily associated with Latin-American literature, its origins lie in the early twentieth-century European art history.25 Still, in today’s understanding magical realism owes less to the 1920s German painters than to Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez who found mimetic realism too constricting to capture the intricacies of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic upheavals in their homelands. Instead, they chose to discuss large-scale postcolonial transformations by allegorising particular families’ histories, traumas, and secrets, often with the help of folkloric elements, the fantastic, the grotesque, and the uncanny. In the early 1990s, the same toolkit was then adapted by a number of Eastern European moviemakers (for instance, Emil Kusturica, Jan Svankmajer, and Jan Jakub Kolski) to discuss how the dissolution of the Soviet Union impacted their communities and how their national imaginaries were changed by the tumultuous relocation onto a new map of Europe. Aga Skrodzka in her book-length study of magical realist cinema in Central East Europe emphasises certain commonalities between the Global South and post-Soviet regions in terms of their postcolonial status such as their perceived liminality, attachment to the local over the global, and (over)reliance on the ­centre-periphery metaphor. In her discussion of the centre-periphery dichotomy and its contentious political legacy, Skrodzka opts for retaining this binary because magic realist cinema allows the (post)colonial subject to remember not only the historical past but also earlier lifestyles, habits, customs, which were and still are rejected by the dominant powers and mainstream discourses, be them old colonial powers or new globalising forces.26 Similarly, Demon retains the centre-periphery binary, as Piotr needs to cross a river on a ferry to reach the unnamed town, thus symbolically entering a different time and space. But since the movie is not set in any distinguishable place and its temporality points simply to an unspecified contemporaneity, the town’s peripheral status is evoked not in order to discuss actual European politics (and the highly problematic discourses of Eastern European cultural

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backwardness and historical or economic lateness) but to make room for marginalised cultural heritage (the dybbuk) and the neglected stories of Polish-Jewish contiguity. On the one hand, Piotr’s possession by dybbuk assumes a familiar gothic shape—the spectral visitation is a highly disruptive, even shameful event that is linked directly to familial secrets, issues of inheritance and property/propriety. Hana’s Jewish presence threatens to destabilise the post-war communal status quo and to disturb the lines of inheritance that established Żaneta’s family as regional industrialists in the first place. On the other hand, however, ghosts in magic realism are part and parcel of the imagined world and their presence is assumed rather than contested. Because Demon lacks a resolution typical either for possession narratives (an attempt at exorcising the unwelcome spirit) or ghost stories (an attempt at understanding and appeasing the ghost), Hana’s disruptive presence is quickly contained and minimalised. When Żaneta insists they should give Hana a proper burial in order to appease her spirit, her father scoffs at her and reminds Żaneta that the whole country was built on corpses. And since no-one would come to the funeral and mourn Hana properly, he argues, the need for a commemorative ritual is thus voided. Tellingly, he does not believe modern-day Poles are capable of mourning their long-lost Jewish neighbours, having stoically accepted their tragic fate as part of the modern-day geohistorical landscape. Arguably, the injunction to ignore the ghosts and accept their unmarked graves rather than to mend the epistemological rift their appearance has caused is typical of magic realist framework rather than a gothic one. Still, while the movie veers towards magic realism, it never leaves the gothic frame entirely. Most obviously, the narratives insists on the images of death rather than life as foundational events for both Żaneta’s family and the whole community: Hana’s death and her unmarked grave, the disappearance of the entire Jewish community, a funeral procession that collides with the wedding guests in the morning, a drowning victim Piotr notices during his ferry trip. And while the community can forget Hana, Piotr, and their Jewish neighbours, the awareness of death can never be entirely forgotten or repressed. The only way to avoid thinking about death and its transgenerational repercussions for the entire community is to enter a dream-like state, in which death can be discounted and misconstrued as nightmare rather than reality. The movie concludes with a guided act of collective hypnosis. In the early morning, Żaneta’s father asks his sleep-deprived and still somewhat tipsy guests to forget “what we didn’t see here”.27 The superfluous call to negate what has already been negated recalls the prefix “un” in the Freudian uncanny and its primary role as a marker of psychological repression rather than as a function of linguistic antonymy. The father’s double negation, by its very excessive nature, draws attention to the material that is supposed to stay marginal, hidden, and unobserved by the community. By underlining the fact that the night before was but “a dream within a dream”, Żaneta’s father helps to maintain a collective dream-like trance which disavows any uncomfortable memories of the town’s past (Hana’s unexplained death, unclear transference of her family’s property to Żaneta’s ancestors,

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the effective erasure of Jewish community after the war). This mirrors highly selective remembrance practices in today’s Poland, which commiserate Polish victims and heroes but, at the same time, try to suppress any incidents of Polish complicity and disloyalty during the war, centuries-long history of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and, finally, the still unacknowledged debt to the three million Jewish neighbours whose abandoned property was utilised in the post-war rebuilding efforts. Throughout the 1990s Russian cinema struggled to find its footing. State funding was terminated, and movie-making infrastructure was effectively dismantled against the backdrop of break-neck privatisation. Audiences dispersed, and movie theatres disappeared. For a while, young Russian moviemakers vivisected bleak moral and social landscapes of the 1990s via the “chernukha” (blackness) and “pornukha” (porno) cinematic styles.28 This situation changed in the early 2000s, which witnessed a new chapter in post-Soviet movie production. Increased financial stability translated into more confident productions; new avenues for funding were finally established (in both private and public sectors); and the m ­ ovie-making infrastructure and distribution chains were rebuilt.29 One of the first Russian blockbusters from the so-called Putin era was Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor, 2004), a highly successful genre hybrid encompassing elements of fantasy, horror, thriller, and action movie. Based on the Night Watch series of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, Bekmambetov’s movie (together with its 2006 sequel, Day Watch) belongs to the early twentieth-century vampire boom in Russian literature and cinema—a boom that reflects both transnational genre trends and a much more localised embrace of the fantastic genres as tools of social and political critique. Similarly to Demon, Night Watch concentrates on a particular family’s internal conflicts in order to launch a wider sociopolitical commentary, which nevertheless remains more opaque (and thus censorship-friendly) thanks to the movie’s gothic fantastic frame. The movie begins with a flashback to 1992, a symbolic year when the dissolution of the Soviet Union (which took place on December 26, 1991) was carried out in full measure. Anton, a timid everyman, visits a witch to discuss his marital problems. The witch convinces him that his wife is cheating on him (true) and that she is pregnant (true) but the baby is not his (not true). Spurred by the witch, he half-jokingly agrees to let her cause a miscarriage so that his wife would return to him. The procedure is interrupted by the Night Watch crew who arrest the witch and help Anton realise he is actually one of the Others—humans with supernatural powers (such as vampires, werebears, seers, witches). Twelve years later Anton is living alone, a weathered member of the Night Watch, a seer and a vampire hunter. While a bulk of the narrative concerns an imminent supernatural disaster that Anton and the rest of the Night Watch are trying to prevent, a more intimate subplot revolves around Anton’s broken family and his 12-year-old son, Yegor. Every Other has to choose their path and become either a Light Other (feeding on people’s positive energy) or a Dark Other (feeding on negative emotions or, in vampires’ case, blood). An ancient prophesy speaks of a Great Other whose decision to join one or the other group will finally tip the scales and disrupt the uneasy

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status quo protected by the Night Watch and the Day Watch since the Middle Ages. Yegor turns out to be that prophesied Other and, while initially drawn to Anton and the Light Others, who saved his life from a vampire attack, he ultimately chooses to side with Zavulon, the Dark Others’ leader. Instrumental in Yegor’s decision is him learning that Anton actually wanted to kill him 12 years earlier. More to the point, the differences between the Light and Dark Others seem to be of degree, not kind, and the Dark Others are at least open about their agenda and their methods, whereas the Light Others remain mired in ethically dubious compromises and moral greyness. Night Watch lends itself easily to a psychoanalytic reading in which Anton enacts a reverse Oedipal plot, attempting to kill his son on multiple occasions (both before and after having realised Yegor is his son).30 Still, while a fraught father–son relationship is admittedly one of the hallmarks of recent Russian cinema, the Oedipal frame fails to account for the insistent recourse to the gothic imagery of light vs. darkness, vampirism as alternative family unit, and absent mothers.31 A great many of the relationships presented in Night Watch are based on the father–son dynamics (Gesser, the Light Others’ leader, and Anton; Anton and Yegor; Zavulon and Yegor; Anton’s vampire neighbours: Kostya and his father), the mothers (or maternal figures) are notably absent, dead, rejected, or deemed unfit to take care of families. Yegor’s mother is seen only in glimpses—a busy no-nonsense professional who is barely aware of what is going on with her son. Svetlana, Anton’s romantic interest, is flatly rejected by Yegor in Day Watch, while his work partner, Olga, performs only most rudimentary maternal duties when saddled with Yegor’s protection in Night Watch. Anton’s potential Dark mothers fare no better. Whereas in the classic gothic romances absent mothers left their virginal daughters exposed to patriarchal tyranny and abuse, lack of strong maternal presence in Night Watch suggests rather a fundamental mistrust of women and, on a larger scale, a loss of faith in the once-reigning Mother Russia metaphor. This popular personification of Russia, dating back to medieval times, apparently has no place in the post-Soviet imaginary, which is populated by sons and fathers struggling for control and respect. Arguably, Anton also inadvertently performs a Male Gothic plot, in which a “dark” troubled man wants to re-enter a familial space from which he was banished for his past trespasses.32 Anton’s original sin—that of trying to kill his unborn son—is what destroyed his marriage and left him unmoored and traumatised in the first place. A chance meeting with his son triggers a need to revisit his past choices and re-evaluate his current situation and morally dubious work. In fact, Anton’s redemption arch overtakes the sequel completely; in Day Watch he obtains a magical item, the Chalk of Fate, which allows him to go back to 1992 and undo his original mistake, thus preventing Yegor from choosing a Dark path and himself from getting involved in the Night Watch’s shady business. Instead, he lets go of his obsessive feelings for his wife and woos Svetlana already back in 1992. Anton’s twofold ability to create and destroy life, to make and rectify his mistakes, to move between the Light and Dark situates his identity somewhere

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between the old Soviet Russia and the New Russia of the twenty-first century. He is the ultimate product of “perestroika”, an era of intense restructuring, rebuilding and remaking that began in the 1980s and continued through the 1990s.33 His boss, Gesser, and their shared nemesis, Zavulon, both in their sixties, are remnants of the old system, and while Gesser tries to translate Soviet legacy of communal engagement into the present (his Night Watch is fronted by an electric company and his employees travel Moscow dressed in identical plain beige scruffs), Zavulon has embraced the New Russia pop aesthetics of conspicuous consumption and gangster lifestyle, Western brands and lavish parties, vaguely BDSM leather gear and tracksuits. All their apparent differences notwithstanding, Gesser and Zavulon are surprisingly similar in their outlook on life and their concern for their families, thus suggesting that the Old and New Russia are much closer at their core than one might think. The blurry boundaries between Gesser and Zavulon, the Light and the Dark Others, and ultimately communist and neoliberal Russia point to a gothicised state of affairs, a somewhat paranoid condition in which monstrous figures best express uncomfortable truths which cannot be articulated in any other way. The abundance of the fantastic genres in post-Soviet arts could be explained in a number of ways: the fantastic elements may function as allegories for the social and political transformations of the post-2000 Russia; the long-awaited end of state-prescribed socialist realism could have triggered “a revolutionary embrace of genre”; political critique needs to take the form of the fantastic in order to cope with Putin’s increased censorship; finally, the occult and the monstrous might offer attractive ways of working through the traumas of the Soviet era.34 The latter is analysed in detail by Dina Khapaeva, who reads monstrous figures in recent Russian prose as signs of “selective historical amnesia”.35 On the one hand, Khapaeva argues, the vampires in Lukyanenko’s Night Watch and Bekmambetov’s two movies reflect a global shift towards postanthropocentric identity formation and a deep mistrust of Western humanist values.36 On the other hand, n­ on-human monsters populating the post-Soviet Russian landscape reveal a new “Gothic morality” of Putin’s Russia.37 This new ethical paradigm emerged in a social reality which is no longer based on clear distinctions between right and wrong and in which every moral decision becomes subjective and context-based.38 Cult of power fetishises powerful patriarchs and a cut-throat spirit of neoliberalism places individual well-being over the collective good. This leads to the rise of “Gothic society”, which, according to Khapaeva, is characterised by feudal, clannish mentality, pursuit of wealth and social position at all costs, and unconditional trust in strong leaders (corporate, familial, political).39 Khapaeva’s Gothic society is founded not only on Gothic morality but also on a wilful erasure of the Soviet past and, especially, the traumas of Stalinism. In this perspective, monstrous non-human figures and the gothicised milieu of moral chaos in Night Watch are manifestations of the repressed past, a “Soviet uncanny” of sorts, which utilises characteristic uncanny motifs straight from Freud’s handbook (doubles and doubling, fateful coincidences, fear of death represented by corpses and the undead, fear of animistic magic and curses).40 Still, Greg Dolgopolov counters Khapaeva’s analysis by insisting that current vampire

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movies “reinvigorate the folkloric demons repressed under the Soviet regime” and do not stand for the Soviet era itself.41 He argues that the Night Watch vampires are directly linked to medieval times and thus skip the Soviet period altogether, as if it never happened.42 Still, the fact that the Soviet period is never directly commented upon is telling in itself. Its absence is not, however, absolute as the Soviet era is obliquely referenced in small but expressive details such as 1992 as the fateful beginning of the narrative or drab aesthetics and utilitarian values of the Night Watch. These details evoke the way the repression is never entirely successful, and the imperfectly blocked material can be always glimpsed abseits (indirectly). Similarly, the conspicuous gaps and fissures in national historical memory and monstrous figures that populate Bekmambetov’s fantastical world point to the chaotic, unpredictable legacy of the Soviet era in Putin’s Russia. The third and final movie, Yayo Herrero’s The Maus (2017), differs starkly from the two other titles both in terms of its genre affiliation and production method. First of all, The Maus is explicitly a survival horror and has been marketed as such at international movie festivals, in Spain (where it had a wide release), and via international streaming services (Netflix). Secondly, it is a prime example of a growing transnational trend in European moviemaking: directed and written by a Spanish moviemaker, produced and filmed in Spain, it was shot almost entirely in English, Serbian, and Bosnian, its title is German, and the four main characters (a German man, a Bosnian woman, and two Serbian men) are played by performers with the same national background (Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina, respectively). Apart from the epilogue, which takes place in Berlin, the entire movie is set in a forest near Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and revolves around the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and, on a larger scale, around a disastrous clash between the West and the East in today’s Europe. Selma, a childhood survivor of the Bosnian War, visits her homeland with her German boyfriend, Alex, for a funeral. Her father’s and brothers’ bodies have been recently recovered from a mass grave near Srebrenica, almost two decades after the war. On their way back to the airport, their car breaks down in the middle of a beautiful sunny forest, which turns out to be riddled with landmines. A chance encounter with two Serbian men, Vuk and Milos, exacerbates Selma’s already fragile emotional state and triggers a severe episode of PTSD. She is unable to convince Alex that the seemingly friendly men are in fact dangerous, and after the couple’s dog accidentally steps on a mine and Selma is hurt by the blast, she is plagued by hyperviolent hallucinations (in which she is attacked and sexually assaulted by one of the Serbs, and Alex is shot dead) and traumatic memories of her family’s ordeal during the war. Selma’s intuition, while initially coded as excessive paranoia and inability to let go of a past trauma, is proven accurate, as the men first demand exorbitant payment to lead the couple safely out of the minefield and then grow increasingly aggressive towards the couple. The threats of sexual assault, torture, and death that Selma imagined/remembered in her feverish state are now taking real shape, and, with Alex knocked unconscious, Selma is left to defend them both. At first glimpse, Herrero’s script follows a well-known survival horror routine: a smug middle-class urban couple takes a wrong turn in an unfriendly countryside

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and is attacked by angry underprivileged locals. What makes The Maus vastly different from Eden Lake (2008) or the Wrong Turn franchise (2003–2014) are, however, two comprehensive changes introduced by Herrero: the infusion of the fantastic brings trauma to the forefront of the narrative and the urban-rural binary gives way to the West–East division. Even before the fateful encounter with Vuk and Milos, Selma is visibly distressed by the forest and what it represents. The movies open with Selma quietly praying to her family’s guardian, Ya Hafizu, for protection. The mythological creature appears almost immediately after the prayer but is presented only as a blurry dark silhouette in the far background. Much later Ya Hafizu reappears in two crucial scenes when Selma fights off her attackers in a pitch-black forest bunker— she stabs Milos, who threatens her with sexual assault, and then Ya Hafizu rips his head off; she stabs Vuk who is hunting her in the labyrinthine underground, and Ya Hafizu appears once again. In both scenes the creature is presented as a vaguely feminine humanoid entity, and the editing makes clear task division between Selma and Ya Hafizu—after Selma reacts instinctively in self-defence, the creature takes over, while Selma backs into the shadows. Clearly, Ya Hafizu could be read as Selma’s gothic double: a vengeful, non-human, and supernaturally strong creature who can easily cross the thin ­ red line between self-defence and vengeance. When the couple learns that Vuk is still alive, Alex cannot bring himself to kill the now helpless man and pleads with Selma to spare Vuk’s life, contact the police, and simply move on from their ordeal. He makes it clear that if Selma kills a defenceless man, he will not forgive her and their relationship will end. His ultimatum fails to convince Selma, and when Vuk taunts Selma, she does not hesitate and smashes his head with a rock. Importantly, Ya Hafizu is no longer present, either because it was simply a figment of Selma’s imagination and cannot be seen in frames shot from Alex’s perspective or, which is more likely, because Selma has managed to successfully merge her two sides—a traumatised woman who reacts impulsively to danger and a merciless avenger who shows no pity to her (and her family’s) tormentors. To a large extent, gothic and trauma narratives follow a similar circular path “marked by repetition and return, fragmentation and split subjectivities”.43 Because Selma’s hallucinations and flashbacks are woven seamlessly into the narrative, they effectively question not only Selma’s state of mind and her ­decision-making capacity, but also the very validity of the presented world. In one of the hallucinatory scenes Selma is taken deep underground into Vuk and Milos’s bunker, where the two men taunt her, spit at her, and strike her. It remains unclear how much of what has happened in the bunker up until this point is real and how much has been imagined by Selma, who is still reeling from the mine blast. In the complete darkness of the underground tunnels (or of Selma’s unconscious) the sudden sound of gunfire transports Selma back to the mid-1990s and a similar (the very same?) bunker in which her father gives the now adult Selma her beloved amulet—hamajlija, before being dragged away, presumably to be executed. Such temporal loops and flashbacks that effectively muddle the boundaries between

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reality and fantasy are characteristic ways of challenging linear narration to convey the disintegration of the narrative under the weight of traumatic events.44 The Maus visualises the consequences of repressed national memories emerging through a violent and uncontrollable rupture. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, it was not until the 1980s that revisionist historiographies countered the Soviet master-narrative of heroic struggle against the Nazi oppressor, which insisted on Yugoslavian homogeneity and unity. The suppressed knowledge of interethnic conflicts and massacres committed during the World War II “paved the road to the wars of the 1990s and even further entrenched antagonistic ethnic identities”.45 Similarly, in The Maus, the past not only never ceases to haunt different social actors, but, more importantly, it controls and structures their responses. Initially, Vuk and Milos seem genuinely eager to help the lost couple and protect them from stepping on the landmines, and it is actually Selma who is the first to verbally abuse and threaten them. Were the two Serbs planning to blackmail and hurt the tourist couple from the very beginning? If not, when exactly did they make up their minds? When they learned that Selma is Bosniak (and not “European” like Alex)? Or maybe when she interpellated them as Serbian monsters and her family’s killers? Was Selma’s paranoia warranted from the very start? Was she perhaps waiting for the right moment to unleash Ya Hafizu and avenge her family? The movie does not offer comforting clear-cut answers to such questions and instead shows the trio as incapable of leaving their historically predestined roles behind. In this sense, the movie flattens all three into ethno-national stereotypes and thus refrains from engaging in a more meaningful (and nuanced) discussion of the Yugoslav conflict. When Alex, shocked by Selma’s callous murder of Vuk, walks onto a mine, viewers are left to wonder who survived the accident. In the epilogue, a camera follows an unidentified woman (who bears a striking resemblance to Selma) through a sunny Berlin park, where she meets up with her German friends and her boyfriend—Alex. A small scar on Alex’s check puts the scene at least a couple months after his fateful trip to Serbia. Suddenly, a violent explosion shakes the park and while Alex is looking frantically for his new girlfriend, a blurry female form comes up behind him—not Ya Hafizu, but a Muslim woman with an assault rifle, presumably the terrorist responsible for the attack. While her face is blurred, her clothing is similar to Selma’s as seen in the last shot back in the Serbian forest. The ending suggests a violent return of the past, which no longer respects the illusion of national borders or even the West–East binary. While the explosion conjures recent terrorist attacks in Germany, and, in a wider perspective, the transnational consequences of the War on Terror and the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, it is not the only scene in which The Maus comments on the West–East divide. Alex is consistently referred to as “Europe” and “a really nice European” by the two Serbian men, who consider him a harmless fool, bound by politeness and (empty) reconciliatory politics. If Selma is portrayed as an uber-paranoid final girl, Alex is the naïve victim and a male damsel in distress. When Alex is stunned beyond words both by the level of Selma’s violence and the fact that she has single-handedly defeated two dangerous armed men, she angrily

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responds “Where were you?” Her accusation refers both to Alex lying unconscious while Vuk and Milos hunted her in the bunker and to Western ineffectiveness in preventing the Bosnian genocide. Ultimately, even though Alex survived the violent encounter with the East, his Western bubble cannot protect him from the repercussions of conflicts that are no longer localised and safely ensconced in the “other” Europe, somewhere on the peripheries of reason. Because Herrero’s script assumes rather than interrogates the West–East division, The Maus is not able to move beyond a simple dialectic, in which Western Europe is presented as self-satisfied and historically oblivious, morally righteous but spineless, and naively attached to the values of modernity, whereas Eastern Europe is shown as a dangerous wilderness, a liminal zone where people turn into animals, brute force trumps compromise, and the premodern past rules the present. It is only the epilogue that suggests, although in a limited way, that the West–East binary is no longer a relevant point of reference and a new symbolic is necessary, one that takes into account transnational, interethnic, and multicultural identity formation processes and the pervasiveness and mobility of historical traumas and past (present) conflicts. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann eloquently argues that “European cinema was always situated at the boundaries between historical imaginary and the return of the repressed”.46 And while a great many European movies have helped to build national narratives of heroism, self-sacrifice, and victory, some have also revealed the breaks and fissures in the collective imagery—dark places where the past refuses to stay buried.47 The gothic mode turns out to be especially useful for articulating the way traumatic events (on individual, national, and transnational levels) erupt in the present through violent and uncontainable means, because they have not been officially acknowledged as permanent elements of the Eastern European imaginaries. Sadly, the over-reliance on stereotypes and cultural clichés somewhat dampens the potentially innovative engagement with memory, trauma, and repression in Demon, Night Watch, and The Maus. Still, even though the three approaches to presenting and working through traumatic Eastern European past were shaped (and perhaps constrained) by different sociopolitical, material, and historical forces, all three movies attest to the continuous need to challenge the officially sanctioned master narratives and, at the very least, point out possible counter-narratives.

Notes

1. Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema into Twenty-first Century: Enlarging the Context?” in The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalisation, ed. Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 23. 2. Anna Batori, Space in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1. 3. See, for instance, Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Property and Power in English Gothic Literature (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2016); Fred Botting, Gothic. 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2014); Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion Books, 2007). 4. Avril Horner, “Apocalypses Now: Collective Trauma, Globalisation and the New Gothic Sublime,” in Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, ed. Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo (New York: Routledge, 2014), 35. 5. Horner, “Apocalypses Now,” 36. 6. Maria Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: Fantazmaty literatury (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007), 12. (All translations into English by the author). 7. Janion, Niesamowita, 28. 8. For more on regional and transnational funding in European horror production, see Ross Hunter, “Horrifically Local? European Horror and Regional Funding Initiatives,” Film Studies Vol. 15, No.1 (2016): 66–80. 9. Christina Stojanova, “A Gaze from Hell: Eastern European Horror Cinema Revisited,” in European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945, ed. Patricia Almer, Emily Brick, ‎and David Huxley (London: Wallflower Pres, 2012), 225. 10. For more on this debate, see also Ewa Mazierska, Matilda Mroz, and Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Introduction: Shaping the Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia,” in The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia: Between Pain and Pleasure, ed. Ewa Mazierska, Matilda Mroz, and Elżbieta Ostrowska (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1–28; Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 7–8. 11. For the critique of “Central Europe,” see also Ewa Mazierska, “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema Vol. 1, No. 1 (2010): 5–16. 12. Mazierska, Mroz, Ostrowska, “Introduction: Shaping the Cinematic Bodies,” 12. 13. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 37. 14. Volha Isakava, “Horror Genre in National Cinemas of East Slavic Countries,” Studia Filmoznawcze Vol. 35 (2014): 122; Christina Stojanova, “Mise-en-scene of the Impossible: Soviet and Russian Horror Films,” in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 91. 15. Because of their international recognizability in horror community I have mentioned three non-Slavic movies: Estonian November (2017), Hungarian Taxidermia (2006), and Latvian The Man in the Orange Jacket (2014). 16. Isakava, “Horror Genre in National Cinemas,” 126. 17. Isakava, “Horror Genre,” 128. 18. See also Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 1–6. 19. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska, “Introduction. Imaginary Neighbors: Toward an Ethical Community,” in Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations After the Holocaust, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 5. 20. Aleida Assmann, “Transformations of Holocaust Memory: Frames of Transmission and Mediation,” in Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer (London: Wallflower Press, 2015), 27. 21. Małgorzata Pakier, The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema After 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 157. 22. Pakier, The Construction, 163. 23. Lucie Armitt, “The Gothic and Magical Realism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 224.

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24. For a discussion of gender dynamics in possession cinema, see, for instance, Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 25. Lucie Armitt, “The Magical Realism of Contemporary Gothic,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 512. 26. Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema, 11–14. 27. Marcin Wrona, Demon (Telewizja Polska, 2015). 28. Vida Johnson and Elena Stishova, “Perestroika and Post-Soviet Cinema 1985–2000s,” in The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume II, The Thaw to the Present, ed. Rimgaila Salys (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 196. 29. Johnson and Stishova, “Perestroika,” 201. 30. See also Vlad Strukov, “The Forces of Kinship: Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch Cinematic Trilogy,” in Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film, ed. Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 191–216. 31. For more on fathers and sons in contemporary Russian cinema, see the essays collected in Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova, eds., Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 32. For more on the Male Gothic, see also Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 33. Vlad Strukov, “Night Watch,” in The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume 2, The Thaw to the Present, ed. Rimgaila Salys (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 308. 34. Sharae Deckard, “Fox Spirits and Stone Maidens: Post-Soviet EcoGothic and Ecological Imperialism” (2014), 3. https://www.academia.edu/7888825/Fox_Spirits_and_Stone_ Maidens_Post-Soviet_Ecogothic_and_Ecological_Imperialism. Accessed 14 November 2018. 35. Dina Khapaeva, “The International Vampire Boom and Post-Soviet Gothic Aesthetics,” in Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and ‘Race’, ed. P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen (London: Routledge, 2013), 132. 36. Dina Khapaeva, “Historical Memory in Post-Soviet Gothic Society,” Russia Today Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 372. 37. Khapaeva, “The International Vampire Boom,” 129, 133. 38. Khapaeva, “The International Vampire Boom,” 133. 39. Khapaeva, “Historical Memory,” 381. 40. The concept of the “Soviet uncanny” comes originally from Mark Lipovetsky, “Pavel Bazhov’s Skazy: Discovering the Soviet Uncanny,” in Russian Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova (London: Routledge, 2008), 263–284. 41. Greg Dolgopolov, “High Stakes: The Vampire and the Double in Russian Cinema,” in Transnational Horror Across Visual Media, ed. Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 52. 42. Dolgopolov, “High Stakes,” 48. 43. Horner, “Apocalypses Now,” 36. 44. See also Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008). 45. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, “Introduction,” in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 4–5. 46. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Locked Doors and Hidden Graves: Searching the Past in Pokłosie, Sarah’s Key and Ida,” in Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer (London: Wallflower Press, 2015), 143. 47. Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Locked Doors,” 143.

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Bibliography Armitt, Lucie. “The Gothic and Magical Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 224–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Armitt, Lucie. “The Magical Realism of Contemporary Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic. Edited by David Punter, 510–522. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012. Assmann, Aleida. “Transformations of Holocaust Memory: Frames of Transmission and Mediation.” In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation. Edited by Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 23–40. London: Wallflower Press, 2015. Batori, Anna. Space in Hungarian and Romanian Cinema. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Bekmambetov, Timur, dir. Night Watch. Channel One Russia, 2004. Beronja, Vlad, and Stijn Vervaet. “Introduction.” In Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture. Edited by Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, 1–19. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Bienstock Anolik, Ruth. Property and Power in English Gothic Literature. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2016. Botting, Fred. Gothic. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Deckard, Sharae. “Fox Spirits and Stone Maidens: Post-Soviet EcoGothic and Ecological Imperialism.” 2014. https://www.academia.edu/7888825/Fox_Spirits_and_Stone_Maidens_ Post-Soviet_Ecogothic_and_Ecological_Imperialism. Accessed 14 November 2018. Dolgopolov, Greg. “High Stakes: The Vampire and the Double in Russian Cinema.” In Transnational Horror Across Visual Media. Edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer, 44–66. New York: Routledge, 2014. Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias. “Locked Doors and Hidden Graves: Searching the Past in Pokłosie, Sarah’s Key and Ida.” In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation. Edited by Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 141– 160. London: Wallflower Press, 2015. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Elsaesser, Thomas. “European Cinema into Twenty-first Century: Enlarging the Context?” In The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalisation. Edited by Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina, 17–32. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Glowacka, Dorota, and Joanna Zylinska. “Introduction. Imaginary Neighbors: Toward an Ethical Community.” In Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations After the Holocaust. Edited by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska, 1–18. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Goscilo, Helena, and Yana Hashamova, eds. Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and PostSoviet Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Haltof, Marek. Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Herrero, Yayo, dir. The Maus. Cine365 Films. 2017. Horner, Avril. “Apocalypses Now: Collective Trauma, Globalisation and the New Gothic Sublime.” In Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation. Edited by Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo, 35–50. New York: Routledge, 2014. Hunter, Ross. “Horrifically Local? European Horror and Regional Funding Initiatives.” Film Studies Vol. 15, No. 1 (2016): 66–80. Isakava, Volha. “Horror Genre in National Cinemas of East Slavic Countries.” Studia Filmoznawcze Vol. 35 (2014): 119–139.

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Janion, Maria. Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: Fantazmaty literatury. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2007. Johnson, Vida, and Elena Stishova. “Perestroika and Post-Soviet Cinema 1985-2000s.” In The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume II, The Thaw to the Present. Edited by Rimgaila Salys, 190–208. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Khapaeva, Dina. “Historical Memory in Post-Soviet Gothic Society.” Russia Today Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 359–394. Khapaeva, Dina. “The International Vampire Boom and Post-Soviet Gothic Aesthetics.” In Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and “Race.” Edited by P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen, 119–137. London: Routledge, 2013. Lipovetsky, Mark. Pavel Bazhov’s Skazy: Discovering the Soviet Uncanny.” In Russian Children’s Literature and Culture. Edited by Marina Balina and Larissa Rudova, 263–84. London: Routledge, 2008. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008. Mazierska, Ewa. “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema Vol. 1, No. 1 (2010): 5–16. Mazierska, Ewa, Matilda Mroz, and Elżbieta Ostrowska. “Introduction: Shaping the Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia.” In The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia: Between Pain and Pleasure. Edited by Ewa Mazierska, Matilda Mroz, and Elżbieta Ostrowska, 1–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Pakier, Małgorzata. The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema after 1989. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013. Skrodzka, Aga. Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books, 2007. Stojanova, Christina. “A Gaze from Hell: Eastern European Horror Cinema Revisited.” In European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945. Edited by Patricia Almer, Emily Brick, ‎and David Huxley, 225–237. London: Wallflower Press, 2012. Stojanova, Christina. “Mise-en-scene of the Impossible: Soviet and Russian Horror Films.” In Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945. Edited by Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, 90–105. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Strukov, Vlad. “Night Watch.” In The Russian Cinema Reader: Volume 2, The Thaw to the Present. Edited by Rimgaila Salys, 302–312. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Strukov, Vlad. “The Forces of Kinship: Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch Cinematic Trilogy.” In Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film. Edited by Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova, 191–216. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Wrona, Marcin, dir. Demon. Telewizja Polska, 2015.

Filmography Aftermath (Pokłosie), dir. Władysław Pasikowski (2012). Dark World (Temnyy mir), dir. Anton Megerdichev (2010). Dead Daughters (Myortvye docheri), dir. Pavel Ruminov (2007). Demon, dir. Marcin Wrona (2015). Far from the Window (Daleko od okna), dir. Jan Jakub Kolski (2000). Forbidden Kingdom (Viy), dir. Oleg Stepchenko (2014). Horror Stories of a Soviet Childhood (S.S.D.), dir. Vadim Shmelyov (2008). I am Dragon (On - drakon), dir. Indar Dzhendubaev (2015). Ida, dir. Paweł Pawlikowski (2013).

Slavic Cinema III: The Ritual (III), dir. Pavel Khvaleev (2015). Joanna, dir. Feliks Falk (2010). Legenda, dir. Mariusz Pujszo (2005). Little Otik (Otesánek), dir. Jan Svankmajer (2000). Lunacy (Sílení), dir. Jan Svankmajer (2005). The Lure (Córki dancingu), dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska (2015). The Man in the Orange Jacket (M.O.Zh.) dir. Aik Karapetian (2014). Masakra, dir. Andrey Kudinenko (2010). The Maus, dir. Yayo Herrero (2017). Miss Christina (Domnisoara Christina), dir. Alexandru Maftei (2013). Night Watch (Nochnoy dozor), dir. Timur Bekmambetov (2004). The Noonday Witch (Polednice), dir. Jiri Sádek (2016). November, dir. Rainer Sarnet (2017). A Serbian Film (Srpski film), dir. Srdjan Spasojevic (2010). Synevir, dir. Aleksandr Alyoshechkin, Vyacheslav Alyoshechkin (2013). Taxidermia, dir. György Pálfi (2006). Time of Darkness (Pora mroku), dir. Grzegorz Kuczeriszka (2008). Tower. A Bright Day (Wieża. Jasny dzień), dir. Jagoda Szelc (2017).

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Gender Politics in a High-Camp, Lowbrow Musical Joana Rita Ramalho

American filmmaker Darren Lynn Bousman, who is more famous for directing the first three sequels of the slash-horror franchise Saw (2004–2017), collaborated with writer/composer/actor Terrance Zdunich on three musicals: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), The Devil’s Carnival (2012) and Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival (2015). These films engage in conscious, highly critical reconsiderations of pressing contemporary issues in light of specific markers of postmodern fiction, including satire, irony and intense self-reflexivity.1 With musical scores ranging from punk and goth to Broadway and cabaret, the creative team brings to life extravagant portrayals of individual and collective stories centred around gender-based violence, social inequality and abuse. Satirical musicals with a political edge are nothing new—Zdunich, who wrote the screenplay for The Devil’s Carnival films and co-composed all of the songs, follows in the footsteps of the Gershwins, Kurt Weill, Kander and Ebb, Monty Python and others, but adds a gothic flavour to his texts. Repo! The Genetic Opera, which he co-wrote with Darren Smith, is a punk-horror musical about body organ repossession. It attacks unrestrained consumerism and the growing artificiality of human relations in a Blade Runner-like operatic ode to the meaninglessness of life in a ­post-apocalyptic future. In The Devil’s Carnival films, co-composers Zdunich and Saar Hendelman use the conventions of the musical genre and merge them with the gothic mode in order to reinvent Judeo-Christian myth(olog)ical spaces—Heaven and Hell—as allegories for the failings of contemporary sociopolitical systems in their treatment of women, gender and sexual minorities and misfits of all kinds. Aurally and visually very different to Repo!, The Devil’s Carnival project deploys gothic and carnival tropes to externalise the convoluted dispute between an official culture and its rejects. In line with Bakhtin, I argue that the notion of ‘carnival’ serves as a critical discourse through which societal tensions are articulated; in the films, it becomes a metaphor for social integration and interaction,

J. R. Ramalho (*)  University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_44

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functioning as a language to critique social ruptures, political control and ingrained fear.2 My investigation focuses exclusively on The Devil’s Carnival, particularly the second instalment, and analyses how the two films problematise the dialogical relation between a society or community and its members. In so doing, it inquires where the distinctive appeal of these films resides, along with the meanings and affects that subcultural audiences invest in them. The Devil’s Carnival project is an experience in filmmaking that appropriates Aesop’s Fables as the basis for a punk-rock gothic freak show. Meshing lowbrow subcultural capital with parody and camp, Bousman and Zdunich make their scathing attack on male and institutional privilege more palatable than straightforwardly acrimonious. At the beginning of the film, three sinners die and are sent to Hell for their offences: Ms Merrywood is a petty thief shot dead by the police, John commits suicide after the death of his son and young Tamara is killed by her enraged boyfriend. The fact that Tamara’s murder at the hands of an abusive male puts her on the same list as the other two characters is indicative of the film’s focus on gender discrimination. Gullibility is her mortal sin and so her death is considered her own fault. This she-had-it-coming, victim-blaming rhetoric is one of many instances where the film revels in contentious subject matter. It is from its shock content, however, that it derives a significant part of its strength. As the three main characters die, their immediate surroundings literally fall apart and transform into nightmarish settings of crumbling house walls, scurrying cockroaches and the earth splitting open. Moments later, they each wake up in different parts of Hell next to envelopes containing tickets to the devil’s carnival. This carnival is unlike the ones to which we are accustomed: it is louder, more demented and more extreme. Hell is depicted as a macabre theme park that subverts and, at times, inverts the moral, spiritual and social order into a taboo-free land of depravity and sin. The film follows a portmanteau structure, with the hellish wanderings of the three characters portrayed separately. John and Ms Merrywood cross paths briefly, but Tamara’s story never interlocks with theirs. Throughout the film, which runs for 56 minutes, myriad carnies tempt those freshly doomed souls to repeat their sins. As expected, it is not long before each of them is trapped in the carnies’ well-spun web and tricked into breaking some of the carnival’s 666 rules. Condemned to face not only their sins on earth but also those committed in Hell, John is taunted with hallucinations of his son, whose elusive figure he pointlessly chases after across the carnival grounds; Ms Merrywood relentlessly searches for a large diamond and, as punishment for her greed, is stripped naked and violently whipped before an audience; and Tamara is killed on a knife-throwing wheel after falling once more for the wrong man—Hell’s bad boy, The Scorpion. Tamara’s character is again noteworthy for being the only one who dies while in Hell and subsequently vanishes from the carnival. Both John and Ms Merrywood are eventually given another chance at (after)life: by the end of the film, John is sent to Heaven as a reward for not wanting to grieve anymore and Ms Merrywood is allowed to remain as a carny.

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Aesop’s Fables frame the film and each character is associated with a specific tale according to their sins. Hell’s residents amuse themselves by making a show out of each misguided step taken by their newest comrades and then sing about their sinful conduct. The Hobo Clown solemnly performs ‘A Penny For a Tale’, based on the fable ‘The Dog and Its Reflection’, in which he compares Ms Merrywood to a greedy puppy that meets a grisly end. The Painted Doll retells Tamara’s ordeal in ‘Prick! Goes The Scorpion’s Tale’, inspired by the story ‘The Scorpion and The Frog’. Lucifer, played by Zdunich, grants special attention to John’s pain and, drawing on Aesop’s ‘Grief and His Due’, chants about his son’s death (‘Grief’). The three fables, as interpreted by Bousman and Zdunich, function as cautionary—rather than morality—tales that warn the carnies (and, by extent, the audience) about the fateful punishment that awaits those who misbehave and disrespect the carnival’s rules. Bousman and Zdunich disclose a penchant for eccentric characters whose attitude towards their predicament shifts from resignation to action only when Lucifer sorrowfully admits to his right hand, The Ticket Keeper, that his cherished haven is becoming too cliquey and slowly but steadily transforming into his worst nightmare—Heaven. Earlier in the film, The Ticket Keeper frowns at Ms Merrywood’s BDSM-style torture, indicating that he too senses the changes that the carnival is going through. Scorn and physical violence should not be the hallmarks of Lucifer’s raucous party. Pam Morris acknowledges this disillusioned aspect of carnival, neglected by Bakhtin’s overall optimistic theory, remarking that ‘the figures who become objects of carnival mockery and insult are not only those in authority’ and that a ‘history of actual carnival practices reveals that the marginalized—Jews, women, homosexuals—could become the victims of ritual punishment’.3 The undesired changes to Hell’s close-knit community therefore taint the welcoming inclusivity that should constitute the core of carnival life. Lucifer’s drastic response to the increase in peer violence is to declare war on Heaven. The contamination of Hell is first noticeable when John and Tamara arrive in the carnival: rather than a comforting hand to assuage their literal and figurative fall, they are mocked by those who should be most supportive of their situation. In effect, despite existing as a playful form that promotes a sense of communitas, there is a growing atmosphere of prejudice, discrimination and violence in this postmillennial gothic carnival. Hell’s once egalitarian society has inadvertently mutated into a members-only club which you cannot fully belong to before passing a series of tests. Additionally, Hell follows the Darwinist principle of the survival of the fittest: Tamara is weak and therefore preyed on and killed; John’s repentance makes him useless and so he is tossed away like rubbish. Ms Merrywood perseveres and, in the end, succeeds in finding a home in the carnival. Not every sad, doomed soul makes it through Hell’s selection process, and those who fail to meet the criteria set out by the carnies are either killed off or expelled. Significantly, the more we get to know Hell and its demons, the more we realise that the carnival stands for subcultural life and that the devil’s bitter awareness of its current state addresses the corruption of subcultures directly; it alerts us to be mindful of the discriminatory practices that occur also within subcultural groups.

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After the devil kicks him out, a bemused John emerges out of a bin filled with dolls. In order to understand this moment, we need to go back to the film’s brief and somewhat puzzling opening scene, which takes place just before the deaths of the three characters. In a crammed workshop, a middle-aged man is painting the eyebrows on a doll when his brush suddenly slips. Displeased with his work, he tosses the object into a nearby bin in which we can make out a label—‘Broken’. The moment John unexpectedly appears in that same bin towards the end of the film, it becomes clear that the workshop is in Heaven and that the dollmaker is God. Rather than attempting to mend the piece or accept that not all dolls have to look pristine or alike, this god chooses to simply give up on them. The most insignificant imperfection causes him to throw the doll away immediately. Tamara’s perplexing one-way trip to the underworld for being too trusting now starts to make sense: the definition of ‘sinner’ is completely arbitrary under the rule of a tyrant god. People’s deeds on earth carry little weight on the post-mortem future of their souls, and some human beings are discarded because God decided they were damaged goods. In associating salvation and damnation with Hell and Heaven, respectively, Bousman disrupts and distorts common assumptions about life and death, good and evil and right and wrong. Heaven is thus portrayed as an evil realm where bodies are rejected and cast out because they do not fit or comply with the patriarchal standards of a perfectly homogenous society. John’s trespassing of God’s dwelling space and Lucifer’s declaration of war hark back to the gothic tradition of placing two distinct and usually separate worlds into direct conflict—bringing political, social, sexual or religious concerns into forced (and fierce) dialogue with one another. For the imminent, unholy battle, the film’s creators place Hell in a privileged position to overthrow Heaven with an ingenious plan, whereby lost souls can turn to Hell for redemption thus rendering Heaven redundant. Lucifer, we realise, has astutely used John as a pawn on his impending war games with his old nemesis. In ‘Grace For Sale’ at the end of the film, Lucifer sings about a sheep that ‘has left the fold’ (John) and is now knocking at the pearly gates. Hellish gardens are flowering, he chants, weeds are spreading and ivy climbing up to Heaven’s doorstep. The devil’s den now has ‘grace for cheap’ and all condemned souls are welcome to try their luck at redemption. Alleluia! shows that Heaven and Hell ‘are incompatible, and that they are on a collision train towards each other’, Zdunich states in an interview.4 The film fittingly opens on a fast-moving steam train with a heavy load of carnies anxious to intrude on God’s celestial abode. Lucifer’s cunning decision to offer salvation to a plethora of his tenants is severely disrupting the normal flow of heavenly life, much to God’s dismay. In his office, the devil reads aloud from Aesop’s Fables (again adapted for the film) to a mysterious cloaked figure. This time, he chooses the story ‘The Filly and the Lapdog’, patterned on the fable ‘The Ass and the Lapdog’, in which a donkey attempting to gain his master’s favour, imitates his favourite dog and tries to jump on his lap. He is subsequently punished for his insubordination. As a derogatory term, ‘filly’ not only indicates that the emphasis will be on the female characters, but also hints at gender-based discrimination in Heaven, where most of the story is set.

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The ‘filly’, in this case, is easygoing June, a young candidate to join the heavenly playgrounds. She arrives in Heaven together with a series of other candidates, called ‘Applicants’, which include an old friend of hers, bashful Cora. Heaven’s golden, lush visuals appear in stark contrast to Lucifer’s dark crimson-tinged, secluded lair. Pleasant halls and wide corridors where angels strut around in an orderly fashion are diametrically opposed to the carnival’s packed three-ring circus. Heaven, presented as a stylish film studio (HPI—Heavenly Productions, Incorporated), looks straight out of Hollywood’s Golden Age and reinvents the Technicolor musical fantasies of yore—with a gothic twist. Zdunich, explaining the decision to give Heaven a 1930s film look, remarks that while there was an air that everything was perfect and glamorous, in the backdrop of that era there was also the Great Depression.5 Life amid the angels indeed resembles a ­no-expense-spared all-singing, all-dancing musical. Applicants look radiant and infectiously happy to meet God, also referred to as The Author, and to be offered the opportunity to become a part of his grand design. After God’s first scene, though, it becomes obvious that, as Bousman states, ‘God and his angels are a whole lot darker than Lucifer and his carnies’.6 Shortly after the two friends reunite in Heaven, we notice that Cora is attracted to June and the feeling seems mutual. June’s non-heteronormativity is nonetheless camouflaged, as we see her constantly flirting with and eventually dating The Agent, God’s right-hand man. Halfway through the film, Cora is explicitly warned (by a male heaven inhabitant) that her attraction to June is sinful and thus forbidden: ‘I know your secret’, he says. ‘Your feelings for her are not only inappropriate, they’re illegal. I think it’s time that we discussed our present options’.7 In order to be allowed to remain in Heaven, Cora must openly reject her queerness and live by Heaven’s heteronormative standards—or suffer the consequences. Importantly, Heaven’s on-hand informant and messenger of bigotry is The Watchword, a reporter. This is problematic because it links queer surveillance with the social power of the media to produce and divulge ideas of heteronormativity in our cultural imagination, constructing restrictive notions of gender identity while encouraging homoerotic suspicion. The film’s heavenly setting proves an appropriate one for thinking about the role of news media in our increasingly complex information-driven era. Media outlets, in effect, disseminate gender and subcultural stereotypes alongside queer activism and the promotion of difference as a core value, securing their place as both instigators of hatred and positive mediators between subcultures, gender minorities and the dominant society. In Heaven, mass media are used to control celestial citizens, whose freedom and access to information are severely restricted and who are coerced into worshipping a dictator—all under the guise of contributing to the stability of a perfect utopian world. In the first episode, the control some carnies exert over the rest of the community is obvious. Unlike in the medieval and Renaissance carnivals, hierarchical structures are not overthrown or suspended here, quite the contrary: the carnival folk answer to Lucifer and his trusty confidant-advisor, The Ticket Keeper, who are higher-up in the hierarchy than the rest of the devil’s flock. Senior carnies, in turn, are privileged in relation to newcomers, who they make fun of while

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warning them about the perils of breaking the carnival’s 666 rules. Still, there is no overly rigid hierarchy regulating the everyday of the damned, who inhabit a gleefully chaotic gothic party that pays little heed to social, moral and gender boundaries. Heaven, on the other hand, is highly stratified and generates a much greater sense of disciplinary surveillance. The renegades and recipients of the exercise of power are subject to minute control and organised into seven stations, mirroring the seven pairs of clean animals on Noah’s ark. At the top of Heaven’s caste system are the Animal Companions (1); followed by The Shepherds of the Flock (2); The Plumes and Peltry (3); The Birds of Song (4); The Watch Dogs (5); The Preying Beasts (6) and finally, The Working Horses (7). The latter category consists of mostly women consigned to pleasing God by doing menial tasks under the watchful eye of a h­ igher-ranking male. To complete the picture, Heaven’s people all have to wear red, Nazi-like armbands with the number of their caste embroidered. The (a)moral economy of Heaven replaces Hell’s carnivalesque lust and perceived disorder with strict social stratification and forced labour, thereby ensuring that everyone stays the course and does not rock the ark. While touring the Divine Garment department, the Applicants come across many Working Horses, occupied with producing items for The Designer, who is responsible for creating the aesthetic of the kingdom. Through the figures of The Designer and the male angels, the film highlights the hypocrisy of Heaven’s ­gender-based and queer discrimination by having them all wear make-up and behave in a mannerist, excessive way. The few male Applicants wear knee-length skirts, The Agent’s face and hair have so much product that he looks like a blackhaired Ken doll, God’s suits are perfectly tailored, and The Designer’s make-up is purposely Bowiesque, if slightly more extreme. Despite their campy performances, The Agent, God and The Designer come across as incorrigible philanderers who are seen flirting with women throughout the film, thus complexifying established definitions of gender identity. Overall, Heaven’s premises recreate the imprisoning households of gothic novels, where women are immured by patriarchal rules that restrain them physically and psychologically and confine them to prescribed roles. The trope of the socially and sexually repressed woman incarcerated by evil patriarchs is, paraphrasing Eckart Voigts, a cliché of sensationalist neo-Victorian femininity.8 In this sense, the film portrays the celestial kingdom, and through it our present moment, as somewhat similar to Victorian society, ‘whose class-governed rules of behaviour imperilled and punished those who broke them, a society and individuals tormented by imposed sexual conformity, but with a freshly exposed seam of transgression running through it’, as Cora Kaplan notes.9 Transgression in Alleluia! comes in the form of non-mainstream gender expression, individuality and dissent. As the narrative unfolds, we become aware that the horrors of this Orwellian Heaven run deeper than entrenched heteronormative discourses. June, in fact, is not harassed only because of her queer identity, but also—and more overtly— because she seeks knowledge that is blatantly and consistently denied to her. As part of their induction to HPI, the Applicants go on a tour of The Author’s

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magnificent library. June is immediately drawn to a section of the library that holds forbidden books. When she dares ask The Librarian why some of the knowledge in the library is not available to them, she is put on Heaven’s blacklist. No one—and especially not a woman—is to question God’s choices. Non-heteronormative sexuality and a desire to learn are therefore considered ­ taboo in Heaven, a place where access to information is vehemently denied and the knowledge seeker violently punished. In this way, Alleluia! expands the notion of sinner, already controversial in The Devil’s Carnival, to include the LGBTQ+ community and intellectual curiosity. The categorisation of June as a salacious deviant who does not know her place furthermore expresses a fundamental anxiety about non-heteronormative gender identities and feminist politics in our current historical moment. During their orientation, the Applicants attend a show by Halo Radio (sponsored by Shangri-La Training Wings—‘One faith fits all!!!’), starring the angelic chorus His Ladies of Virtue and The Publicist. The acknowledgement of sponsorship, the radio jingles playing on an old television set and the stage add a striking propagandistic and commercialised dimension to Christianity, which adds to the film’s subversiveness. Geraldine, a Number 4 and the lead singer of His Ladies of Virtue, is suddenly taken to an undisclosed location by The Designer and The Translators, because she has been promoted and is becoming a 1—or so she thinks. June is intrigued and convinces a reluctant Cora to chase after them, which eventually leads to an unpleasant interrogation by Heaven’s law enforcers, a man (Bentz) and a woman (Batez, the only woman in a position of authority) known as The Translators. The highly efficient surveillance system in place ensures that any indiscretions are swiftly punished. ‘Snooping is a sin’, Bentz says.10 The musical moment that follows looks straight out of a 1930s Berlin cabaret show, with two Gestapo-like officers sadistically punishing, or rather translating, two beautiful young women. They begin by beating them with their batons, but the scene quickly progresses to a slapstick, creepy-comic moment, with Cora and June forced to repeatedly—and rhythmically—slap one another. The Agent suddenly intervenes and, instantly smitten with June, brings the interrogation to a halt. Although this number (‘Good Little Dictation Machines’) might come across as light-hearted sensationalist fun, other episodes are not as tongue-in-cheek. The instance that most glaringly strips away Heaven’s veneer of civility and decency is very brief but effective and telling of God’s gratuitous cruelty. Geraldine upsets God because, as he puts it, ‘her cheeks were frowning’, and so he nonchalantly orders The Agent to have her fixed.11 The latter promptly replies that he will ‘put The Translators right on it’.12 When we next see her, her face has been slashed from the corners of her mouth almost up to her ears in a frightful Glasgow smile, reminiscent of the heinous murder of Elizabeth Short and Gwynplaine’s disfigured face in Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), which inspired the Joker’s d­ iabolical-yet-clownish visage in the Batman comic book series. Geraldine’s permanent gruesome grin taints Heaven’s artificial promise of eternal bliss and depicts God’s home as a place where happiness has to be violently imposed or actually engraved on unsuspecting souls.

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Cora, unwilling to stand by her convictions and break away from a life of unquestioning male obedience, makes a deal with The Watchword in exchange for his silence about her sexuality. As a consequence, she assumes the role of in/voluntary collaborationist, actively operating in consonance with God’s rule of terror and constant, unforgiving surveillance. Although the full extent of Cora’s participation in June’s eventual downfall remains unclear, she is at least partly responsible for outing and denouncing her friend, thus going from a victim of intimidation and sexual discrimination to an accomplice and enforcer of inequality. More than a victim of the male system’s abuse, Cora becomes complicit in the degradation of others. As a reward, she moves up the social ladder and is ironically promoted to a Lady of Virtue, filling the position left vacant by Geraldine’s departure. In Heaven, suppressing homoerotic desire, blindly following orders and falling into dangerous complacency are the only ways to redemption and salvation. Along with Cora, The Agent also double-crosses June. One night, when she predictably breaks into the library in search of the knowledge in the banned books, he reminds her that if she crosses that line, there will be no turning back. She ignores him and reaches for one of the books. As she does, he calmly pulls up a chair and sits in front of her, watching as she inadvertently triggers off the security alarm. The library immediately goes into lockdown and a series of laser beams imprison the trespasser. The high-pitched sound of the blaring alarm fills the soundtrack while flashing lights add to the terrifying realisation that there is no escape route for June. Like an animal, she is locked in a cage, helpless, while The Agent adamantly refuses to let her out. June and The Agent recreate an Adam-and-Eve type of storyline in which knowledge is the tempting, forbidden fruit. Tellingly, the banned book that June chooses to open has, in fact, a large, golden apple on the spine. The Agent effectively functions as a reworking of the seductive and dangerous Radcliffean hero, who takes June in his arms only to turn on her shortly afterwards. The final nail on June’s coffin is her thirst for knowledge, and the Agent’s betrayal seals her fate in Heaven. While still trapped behind the lasers, she is publicly humiliated before the other Applicants (Cora included) and then handed to The Translators, who beat her bloody and throw her onto a lift to Hell. The cruelty of her punishment reveals the arbitrariness and social injustice that rule a society regulated by a merciless autocratic figure. It also positions marginalised people, particularly women—and specifically queer women—, as outsiders who are unable to fit in with a patriarchal society unless they never upset the status quo. June’s act of defiance functions as a counterpoint to Geraldine’s passivity: both women are humiliated by God, but only June dares to rebel against blind servitude to an egotistical man. After she is brutally tortured, June is left severely disfigured; when we later re-encounter her in Hell, one side of her face is heavily scarred, while the other remains young and beautiful. Disfigurement in Alleluia! provides a dual depiction of women as passive victims (Geraldine) and nonconformist agents (June) who, when faced with inequality and oppression, choose either to

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conform or fight against the system. Piercing through June’s broken-doll countenance are two different-coloured eyes: the right one is bright blue; the left, green. The dichotomy of beauty and monstrosity is condensed in the image of her face, where two identities, the Applicant and the sinner, the past and the present, come together. In Hell, June is encouraged to overturn conservatism and intolerance, symbolically represented by her ripping her armband and tossing it on the ground. As she is inducted into the carnival—by none other than Lucifer himself—she refashions her identity as The Painted Doll we met in the previous film. This is particularly symbolic, in that The Agent, when refusing to help June escape the library, referred to her as ‘dollface’.13 June’s metamorphosis plays on the gothic convention of associating human-like objects with the uncanny and realises the horrifying threat of unwanted animation: the doll has come alive and the human has been thingified. Films such as Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960) and She Freak (Byron Mabe, 1967) use carnival tropes to depict the mutilated body in a fetishising manner. In The Devil’s Carnival, by contrast, June reclaims the cracked-doll look as an integral part of her identity and, in the process, turns disfigurement into a symbol of resistance. In this way, Hell subverts the usual categorisation of scars as disgusting and disempowering; instead, it appropriates monstrosity and weaponises it. References to dolls and the dollification of women appear elsewhere in the film. In fact, the agency of the female carnies, which stands in opposition to the submissiveness of Heaven’s denizens, seems to be somewhat undermined in Alleluia!, when we notice a winding key on the backs of three women—Twist, Click and Lock—known as The Rosy Bayonettes. The depiction of women as wind-up dolls (or toy-like demons) complicates gender issues by mechanising and literally objectifying female bodies. Whereas the doll associations might be regarded as upholding a sexist and misogynist social order, the contraption on their backs, however, does not make them less lethal or independent. They take charge of the devil’s mission at the end of the film and let all Hell break loose by paying an unannounced visit to HPI, weapons in hand. Their choice to appropriate abjection challenges certain exploitative generic conventions of both film musicals and the Gothic, such as the focus on a naïve, domesticated femininity that reduces women to purely sexual figures. Conversely, women in Heaven are overtly thingified, that is, they are treated as playthings—possessions that God can use and abuse as he pleases. Through the caste system and the clear codification of gender roles, the heavily male-dominated environment perpetuates unequal gender relations and the subordinate role of the female characters. The practice of serialised work or forced labour in the heavenly ateliers portrays women as automaton-like figures without having to resort to ostensibly visible turning keys. The Number 7s, or Working Horses, for instance, can be read as representing the ongoing abuse of (female) workers by ruthless employers under the capitalist market system. Alleluia!’s representation of God, the master puppeteer, and his Stepford wives-like army offers a critique of religious institutions and totalitarianism, with Heaven featuring as an

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allegory of segregation, misogynistic tyranny and exploitation. Lucifer’s hectic army of broken dolls, in turn, actualises the threat of female violence and transgressive sexuality. By the end of the film, June, now reborn as The Painted Doll, is revealed to be the cloaked figure that Lucifer has been reading his fable to—and his secret weapon against his nagging upstairs neighbour. June’s movement from Heaven to Hell can be interpreted as re-enacting the female gothic heroine’s journey against some form of discrimination and eventual liberation from patriarchy that usually takes place at the end of gothic narratives. In the liberating anonymity of the carnival, she grows resentful but powerful. Lucifer’s master plan to overthrow Heaven centres, in fact, on The Painted Doll, who will take the opportunity to settle the score with her former lover, The Agent, and possibly with Cora, too. In his discussion of the carnivalesque in Dostoevsky, Michael André Bernstein claims that the rage to topple a flawed society, ‘is more often a product of ressentiment and wounded vanity than a scrupulous moral consciousness’.14 The idea of ‘ressentiment’ undoubtedly underpins the actions of The Painted Doll, whose resilience and unwavering want for retribution position her as a gothic (horror) heroine, but also as a beacon of hope for marginalised people: a survivor who seeks revenge as the result of repeated patriarchal abuse. And Hell hath no fury… The final musical moment in Alleluia! fuses sensationalism, fetishism and empowerment, as The Painted Doll retaliates and exacts her vengeance on The Agent, who God sent to Hell as a special envoy to gather information on Lucifer’s intentions—knowing all too well that this could mean his demise. Cautiously venturing into the carnival’s main tent, The Agent spots June, sitting quietly in a revealing dress. He calls out to her, but she does not turn to look at him. He approaches and takes her chin in his hand, turning her face slowly towards him. At the sight of her scars, he lets out an appropriate ‘Oh my God’ and looks away. In a celebratory twist ending to her tale, the roles of victim and oppressor are reversed. The Painted Doll, together with The Rosy Bayonettes and other carnies, cruelly serenades her former deceitful lover with an empowering cabaret-style anthem (‘Hoof and Lap’) about her new-found strength and impending revenge. In the song, wild fillies use their hooves to give a ‘church dog’ a round of hell—and they do it with dreadful euphoria and sleazy panache. This number, which contains verses in German, is highly reminiscent of Liza Minnelli’s energic performance of ‘Mein Herr’ in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) and builds on the same type of liberating, anti-patriarchal attitude. The carnival’s dusty and dim-lit tent mirrors that feel of ‘divine decadence’ Sally Bowles adores in 1930s Berlin and the Kit Kat Club.15 The Agent looks terrified throughout the song and repeats a prayer over and over while The Painted Doll feeds him poison. As Dorian Dawes puts it, ‘It’s queer femme revenge laced with arsenic’.16 Hell has a positive transformative quality and ultimately appears to enable the emancipation of its female denizens from restrictive social, moral and gender codes. It is associated with the ascendancy of the feminist carnies, whose ‘damaged’ femininity works as a subversive strategy against God’s hubristic attitude.

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As Lucifer finishes reading his story, he concludes: ‘The moral of heaven? Tis better to be content with one’s lot than to desire things one is told one is not fit to receive. And people say I’m the cruel one!’. ‘The Filly and The Lapdog’ is indeed a fable about what happens when ‘one’ (June) desires something (knowledge, equality, freedom) one is considered unworthy of. It is a cruel tale about what becomes of a ‘filly’ when she ignores the established order and fraternises with God’s favourite lapdog (The Agent). More specifically, it is a warning about the dangers that will befall you should you dare to question the establishment and its well-oiled mechanisms of power (as June does) and it is also, paradoxically, about what might happen if you do the opposite and act content with the circumstances of your oppression (as Geraldine does). Lucifer’s take on Aesop’s fable is nonetheless more nuanced than it may at first appear, for in the end—if we take ‘filly’ to mean June—she does not really try to fit in or seek to obtain favour from the master, like Aesop’s donkey. She does get close to The Agent, reassuring Cora that this relationship is important for them—‘Someone important on our side’, she says—but she never compromises her integrity or becomes intellectually servile to an oppressor. In effect, the film’s coda frames The Painted Doll as a strong individual who recognised the fundamental injustice of a society into which women and sexual minorities must obediently fit and who identified the male logic of control as the cause of many social problems that plague our societies. Her inability to accept inequality of treatment and her need to undermine official hegemony remind us of how ineffective it is for marginal or otherwise ignored and oppressed groups to try to assimilate into mainstream culture hoping for a better treatment and more opportunities. The Master will always punish the Ass and reward the Lapdog. Cora, on the other hand, tries to please The Author and his angels in an attempt to become someone she is not. She clearly is an aspiring lapdog, who bows before the Lord and will do his bidding if so asked, whatever the cost. Should she ever stray, we can anticipate that her punishment will be similar to Geraldine’s or June’s. Alleluia! enacts contemporary anxieties through bright-coloured otherworldly sets and upbeat tunes that convey a largely unpleasant and discontent view of modern societies, especially in their readiness to bully (queer) women. HPI is portrayed like the modern-day real world, where a series of powerful people monitor everyone’s lives, treating selected groups as cattle (the female Applicants) and selected individuals as infected merchandise that needs to be cured (Cora) or otherwise discarded (June). Finding it virtually impossible to secure a proper theatrical release for The Devil’s Carnival, Bousman and Zdunich decided to self-release the film by touring North America. They went on a 40-city tour, transforming each one-night-only screening into a widely sold-out live-cinema experience. Bousman and Zdunich brought along some of the film’s actors and invited a series of local artists to perform at each screening. Word-of-mouth, online fan communities and an inventive advertising campaign via social media helped to build a lot of buzz around the films, so much so that the fans would show up at the events donning the outfits

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of their favourite characters—whom they knew only from publicity materials. In an effort to share their film with as many fans as possible, Bousman and Zdunich pulled out all the stops. Besides the usual suspects (trailer and soundtrack), they released a series of character-centric introductory videos via the film’s website and other online platforms, which presented the characters to the audience thus allowing for cosplay. While on tour, they organised meet-and-greets, Q&A forums following each screening, VIP ticket packages, exclusive merchandise, prizes, costume contests and snippets of behind-the-scenes footage.17 There were also live-music opening acts, magicians, burlesque dancers, sing-alongs and R-rated clowns. ‘What the Dickens is an “R-rated clown”?’, a reporter asked. ‘We had a couple of clowns that did very risqué things’, Bousman elucidates. ‘They look like children’s clowns but they would make, like, X-rated balloon animals. All ­tongue-in-cheek – no one actually got pornographic – but they would do things that, let’s just say, would not be appropriate for a kid’s birthday’.18 The enterprise proved so successful that the team decided to repeat it. First, with a mini-tour in 2013, during which Bousman, Zdunich and Hendelman visited eight North-American cities, hosting double bills of their two horror musicals: Repo! and The Devil’s Carnival. In 2015, the Alleluia! roadshow stopped at 40 North-American cities. ‘We wanted to do something that could not be translated to a Torrent site, or Netflix. So we came up with this idea for a hybrid, rock concert-immersive experience-movie where we turn the theater into a crazy, ­punk-rock, rock’n’roll venue for the night’, Bousman explains.19 In presenting interactive elements of the films for the audience, they rapidly turned them into cult sensations. ‘The biggest component is the interaction’, the director claims. ‘The movie has to be interactive with the fans. There’s a blog on my website called Random Thoughts From the Road, and you can see pictures of the events, the madness and mayhem that surrounds these things’.20 The films are not meant to appeal to the general public, but to niche groups. ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show is the first thing I saw that embraced being who you are, and that’s kind of what this is’, Bousman states.21 With stories made up of the same themes and types of protagonists that populate gothic and steampunk fiction, these films are aimed at the same kinds of alternative, non-mainstream audiences that are systematically ignored and shunned by major studios and distribution companies. Indeed, the film’s creative team had one central concern regarding the screenings—that they would draw together like-minded individuals. In order to achieve that, they created a safe platform between the characters on the screen, the on-site performers and the audience. As Bousman explains, [The fans] know that they’re going to be surrounded by like-minded people, it’s not like people come in with a wall around them. They know right away that it’s okay if you’re a guy to dress like a girl or if you’re a girl to dress like a guy – you can come dressed like a clown, or a demonic whatever, and you’re not going to be judged. You are praised for how individual or crazy you look.22

This sense of community Bousman and Zdunich are keen on creating takes us back to the carnival concept of medieval and Renaissance times, which encouraged and,

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in fact, required, group participation in the celebration of the grotesque. Much like Rocky Horror, The Devil’s Carnival and Alleluia! offer interactive elements devised specifically to engage the fans, such as karaoke-style lyrics for ­sing-alongs in the number ‘All Aboard (Everybody’s Doing the Ark’), for instance. In this sense, the films also require performativity, in that they need the spectators to contribute to construction of the films’ meaning by engaging closely with the twisted universes mapped out before them. The Devil’s Carnival experience involves the director, composers, actors, live performers and spectators: as in the medieval Saturnalia festivities, this is not a spectacle merely to be seen; the whole crowd lives in it, and everyone actively participates.23 The films therefore recreate the aura of carnival life in extending beyond the screen and into social media and participatory culture, where the public is not simply a consumer of preconstructed messages but appropriates, shapes, shares, reframes and remixes media content.24 The audience’s willingness to identify with and mimic the ‘monstrous’ bodies on the screen bears implications in the way we negotiate ideas of belonging (belonging to a community or marginal and marginalised groups) and plays on the public’s desire to breach myriad boundaries—self/ other; good/evil; life/death; agency/submission; mass culture/subcultural life; beauty/monstrosity; feminism/patriarchy; feminine/masculine and pleasure/pain. According to the director, one of the reasons why these films work is because they have the ‘WTF factor’. As Bousman clarifies, ‘You look at the cast and you’re like, “Are you kidding me? […] What the f–k?”’.25 In 2008, Repo! The Genetic Opera immediately stood out because of its cast, which included Buffy’s Anthony Stewart Head, actor-opera singer Paul Sorvino, Broadway veteran Sarah Brightman and socialite Paris Hilton. The Devil’s Carnival stars, among others, Victorian industrial artist Emilie Autumn as The Painted Doll; Sorvino as God; Alexa Vega (of Spy Kids fame) as Wick, mistress of the Woe-Maidens; and Terrance Zdunich as Lucifer. It also features cameos of Slipknot’s Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan and Five Finger Death Punch’s Ivan Moody. For Alleluia!, other names joined the hellish ranks: rapper Tech N9ne, as the by-the-book Librarian; Jesus Christ Superstar’s Ted Neeley, as The Publicist (one of God’s minions); Barry Bostwick from Rocky Horror appears as The Watchword; former Morningwood vocalist Chantal Claret and Mindless Self Indulgence’s Jimmy Urine, who are married in real life, serve as the comic but ruthless Translators; We Are Harlot’s frontman Danny Worsnop appears as The Smith, who forges Hell’s weaponry; Butcher Babies’ Carla Harvey and Heidi Shepherd jump on the bandwagon as two of the three demonic Rosy Bayonettes; Broadway star Adam Pascal is The Agent; cult horror icon Bill Moseley plays The Magician; and last but not least, there is David Hasselhoff. ‘I wanted somebody that had a cultish personality, and had his own legion of fans, and David Hasselhoff immediately came to mind’, Bousman recounts.26 The Hoff plays Heaven’s womaniser and camps it up with a lavish performance as the flamboyant Designer. His role effectively contributes to the carnivalisation of Heaven, whose cast of characters is just as bizarre as those in the infernal regions, and is in tune with Sorvino’s over-the-top role as a bon vivant who roams the garish sets of HPI like a flaneur with an iron fist.

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In particular, Emilie Autumn’s performance as The Painted Doll attracted a lot of attention from her fan base and encouraged cosplay. Her take on the Elegant Gothic Lolita aesthetic, as Natasha Scharf notes, incorporates elements of burlesque, the fetish scene and cabaret, which fit perfectly with the soundtrack for both instalments.27 Her stage persona is visually not far removed from her character in the film and, as Voigts remarks, consists of ‘a playful retro-futurism vs. heritage historicism: a hybrid bricolage of gothic-Victorian subcultures and contemporary fashion’.28 At each stop, fans would turn up dressed as The Painted Doll, which added to the film quickly becoming a cult favourite. The DIY costumes sported by the fans eroticised female bodies, emphasising the complexities in understanding gender identity as an act of resistance to objectification and contemporary consumer culture. For many women, Martin Danahay suggests, wearing costumes, ‘including corsets as outerwear, is not an eroticisation of the body but a dramatisation of an outsider status and a rejection of more conventional consumer models of dress and beauty’.29 Kazumi Nagaike and Kaori Yoshida address this problematic in their study of cosplay manga, arguing that ‘(female) characters are just as likely to be circumscribed within fixed boundaries dictated by male fantasy and fetishism as they are to transcend these boundaries’, and so reflect both submissive and subversive forces in relation to naturalised concepts of gender identity.30 The approach to femininity in the films counteracts, I argue, the ambivalent response to revealing or sexualised garments. The representation of The Rosy Bayonettes is a case in point, for it amalgamates stereotypical feminine signifiers (lingerie, corsets, long hair, lipstick and so on) with imagery more traditionally aligned with the masculine, such as weapons (knives, bayonets, whips) and Napoleon-style bicorn hats and overcoats. Their ‘in-betweenness’, to use Rikke Schubart’s expression, conveys an image of active, autonomous heroines while portraying the female body as a fetishised object.31 Yet, by mobilising femininity and monstrosity along with goth, steampunk and neo-Victorian tropes, I suggest that the films manage to critique gender norms and dramatise contemporary understandings of gender identity as fluid, turning sexuality into a source of power for women rather than a means of objectification. Ultimately, then, these contra-normative rearticulations of gender expression invite the audience to imagine and embrace new ways of envisioning the nexus of power relations that forms our social–cultural conceptions of the female and feminine body. The Devil’s Carnival films are blasphemous fun with a very unsubtle message. They depict God as a brute or gothic villain who is impossible to please, while Lucifer runs a world that functions more like a subculture, where all of the misfits and ‘sinners’ can congregate and find shelter. Heaven comes through as a film production company ruled by an opportunistic CEO who trivialises people’s (after)lives and whose perfidiousness Bousman and Zdunich link with oppressive (fascist) regimes. In the end, Lucifer and his deviant carnies are portrayed as far less dangerous than God and his angels. The devil, in fact, is the one who sounds the alarm and speaks out against bullying and discrimination, actively combating prejudiced attitudes that affect women and minority groups. His decision to start offering redemption to lost souls turns the notion of ‘sin’

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into a void construct that serves only to reinforce the polarity of the central and the peripheral in terms of social, sexual and political relations. The fun, shocking worlds Bousman and Zdunich develop depict the rising inequality between men and women, between the righteous and the wicked, the weak and the strong, the queer and the straight. Amid Hell’s colourful pandemonium and Heaven’s outrageous campiness, the question arises: is The Devil’s Carnival, to use Fred Botting’s term, ‘candygothic’? Even though the films incorporate popular entertainment forms, such as cabaret and musicals, into their narratives, the kind of satire they offer is, I argue, not cute or comic (despite the presence of humorous and burlesque elements) and is highly critical of particular, but widespread, social issues. In reality, these ­light-hearted yet dark forays into the musical genre and the gothic-carnival mode hold different forms of power (political, religious and mediatic) accountable for injustice and the pattering of stigma. In so doing, they also weaponise individuality and otherness—on-screen and at live-cinema events—and use them against discriminatory sociopolitical practices and repressive religious entities. In line with Sarah E. Whitney’s definition of post-feminist Gothic, these musicals present stories of gendered violence that feature socially invisible, abject protagonists who intrude on the illusion of a safe and equitable world, even where subcultural life is concerned.32 The fact that these are others who are ready and willing, though perhaps not ultimately able, to reverse their situation can tell us a lot about our culture and current political context. Taken together, the films draw on intergenericity (Gothic, steampunk, horror, musical, comedy), intertextuality and intermediality, referring to both literary and cinematic texts (the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and various media (film, television, the press, the radio). In their construction of dystopian spaces that expose the dated and oppressive—yet deep-seated—heterosexist principles of proper female conduct, the films defy gender boundaries and denounce ideological bias. Hell’s women—all hybrid creatures from the start, both human and post-human—reveal nonconformist identities suffused with eroticism and excess that eschew subjugation to conventional and conservative power structures. In opposing Heaven’s official culture to Hell’s subversive one, the films destabilise heteronormativity and advocate for progressive models of gender identity in a more inclusive, post-(hetero)normative society. The films’ conscious defiance of the established order with their pushing of gender and generic boundaries and hysterical jouissance of the macabre paints the socially—and morally—acceptable as a particular form of repulsive monstrosity. In these films, true horror lies in the ideas of conformity, political correctness and normality. Observing the despotism and repression that limit human dignity in Heaven, the audience tends to side with the hellish monsters and their plight. This sympathy for the monster is, according to Catherine Spooner, one of the defining features of postmodern iterations of the Gothic-Carnivalesque.33 George Pattison, writing about Kierkegaard and the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, warns us that the chaos of carnival can quickly become violent and asks:

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Once human identity has been uprooted from its ground in religion, tradition, and social authority what is there to prevent it from disintegrating entirely? What is to stop the carnival world, for which no truths or values have any intrinsic or incontestable claim, from disintegrating into a war of all against all?34

The fact that Bousman and his team failed to carry out the third instalment of The Devil’s Carnival (the project has been suspended indefinitely) means that we do not know if the devil’s plan would culminate in an apocalyptic war ‘of all against all’. From what we can tell, Hell has a very clear objective that by no means involves targeting anyone other than God and his angels. Lucifer’s awareness of the precarious situation of his rule and his apprehension towards the increasingly misdirected malice of his carnies would, in theory, safeguard his cherished carnival from disintegrating into an internal battle. The emancipatory utopia of carnival, though—a world where neither officialdom nor defiance is given any hierarchical priority—is de-idealised and de-mythologised in the films. Along with the forces of resistance (Lucifer and The Painted Doll, for instance), this loud and monstrous gothic carnival has become infected by the bigotry of the status quo it is supposed to reject (women as targets of gendered violence and pain within the carnival grounds). It therefore functions as a safer (rather than safe) space that champions otherness and welcomes the misfits and outcasts that society discards, providing them with an outlet in which to express their non-normative individuality—as long as they play by the rules.

Notes

1. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–32, 3. 2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984). 3. Pam Morris, ‘Introduction’, in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, edited by Pam Morris (London, Arnold, 1994), 1–24, 22. 4. Shawn S. Lealos, ‘Terrance Zdunich Interview: Devil’s Carnival 2’, Renegade Cinema (4 March 2013), http://renegadecinema.com/1282/terrance-zdunich-interview (accessed 29 June 2018). 5. Ibid. 6. Jay A. Fernandez, ‘Darren Lynn Bousman Reveals 7 Keys to Making Your Own “Devil’s Carnival”—Plus the Plot to the Series’ Next Installment’ (22 October 2012), http://www. indiewire.com/2012/10/darren-lynn-bousman-reveals-7-keys-to-making-your-own-devilscarnival-plus-the-plot-to-the-series-next-installment-44021/ (accessed 17 September 2017). 7. Darren Lynn Bousman dir., Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival, 2015. 8. Eckart Voigts, ‘“Victoriana’s Secret”: Emilie Autumn’s Burlesque Performance of Subcultural Neo-Victorianism’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6:2 (2013), 15–39, 15. 9. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 89. 10. Darren Lynn Bousman dir., Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival, 2015. 11. Ibid.

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12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Michael Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992), 161. 15. Bob Fosse dir., Cabaret, 1972. 16. Dorian Dawes, ‘Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival: Femme Queer Revenge’, Medium (18 February 2018), https://medium.com/@RealDorianDawes/alleluia-the-devils-carnivalfemme-queer-revenge-3092afb084d7 (accessed 23 June 2018). 17. Fernandez, ‘7 Keys to Making Your Own “Devil’s Carnival”’, http://www.indiewire. com/2012/10/darren-lynn-bousman-reveals-7-keys-to-making-your-own-devils-carnivalplus-the-plot-to-the-series-next-installment-44021/. 18. Clark Collis, ‘Director Darren Lynn Bousman Talks “Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival”, David Hasselhoff, and “R-rated Clowns”’ (5 August 2015), http://ew.com/article/2015/08/05/darren-bousman-alleluia-devils-carnival-david-hasselhoff/ (accessed 2 April 2018). 19. Ibid. 20. Fernandez, ‘7 Keys to Making Your Own “Devil’s Carnival”’, http://www.indiewire. com/2012/10/darren-lynn-bousman-reveals-7-keys-to-making-your-own-devils-carnivalplus-the-plot-to-the-series-next-installment-44021/. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 24. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York, New York University Press, 2013), 2, 298. 25. Collis, ‘“Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival”’, http://ew.com/article/2015/08/05/ darren-bousman-alleluia-devils-carnival-david-hasselhoff/. 26. Ibid. 27. Natasha Sharf, Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe (Shropshire, Independent Music Press, 2011), 113, 115. 28. Voigts, ‘“Victoriana’s Secret”’, 28. 29. Martin Danahay, ‘Steampunk and the Performance of Gender and Sexuality’, ­Neo-Victorian Studies, 9:1 (2016), 123–150, 139. 30. Kazumi Nagaike and Kaori Yoshida, ‘Becoming and Performing the Self and the Other: Fetishism, Fantasy, and Sexuality of Cosplay in Japanese Girls’/Women’s Manga’, Asia Pacific World, 2:2 (Autumn 2011), 22–43, 24–25. 31. Rikke Schubart, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 (Jefferson, McFarland & Co, 2007), 159–164. 32. Sarah E. Whitney, Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2016), 2. 33. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion Books, 2006), 69. 34. George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), 57.

Bibliography Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, translated by William Caxton (London, 1484). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984). Bernstein, Michael, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992).

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Bousman, Darren Lynn, http://66.147.244.119/~thedepth/darrenlynnbousman/ (accessed 13 September 2017). Collis, Clark, ‘Director Darren Lynn Bousman Talks “Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival,” David Hasselhoff, and “R-rated Clowns”’ (5 August 2015), http://ew.com/article/2015/08/05/darren-bousman-alleluia-devils-carnival-david-hasselhoff/ (accessed 2 April 2018). Cruz, Lenika, ‘How the Creators of The Devil’s Carnival Said “Screw You” to Hollywood and Gained a Cult Following’ (17 August 2012), http://www.laweekly.com/arts/how-the-creatorsof-the-devils-carnival-said-screw-you-to-hollywood-and-gained-a-cult-following-2371324 (accessed 11 February 2018). Cunliffe, Robert, ‘Charmed Snakes and Little Oedipuses: The Architectonics of Carnival and Drama in Bakhtin, Artaud, and Brecht’, Critical Studies—Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects, Vol. 3, No. 2–Vol. 4, No. 1/2, edited by David G. Shepherd (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 48–69. Danahay, Martin, ‘Steampunk and the Performance of Gender and Sexuality’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 9:1 (2016), 123–150. Dawes, Dorian, ‘Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival: Femme Queer Revenge’, Medium (18 February 2018), https://medium.com/@RealDorianDawes/alleluia-the-devils-carnival-femme-queer-revenge-3092afb084d7 (accessed 23 June 2018). Fernandez, Jay A., ‘Darren Lynn Bousman Reveals 7 Keys to Making Your Own “Devil’s Carnival”—Plus the Plot to the Series’ Next Installment’ (22 October 2012), http://www.indiewire.com/2012/10/darren-lynn-bousman-reveals-7-keys-to-making-your-own-devils-carnivalplus-the-plot-to-the-series-next-installment-44021/ (accessed 17 September 2017). Gingold, Michael, ‘Q&A: Darren Lynn Bousman and Terrance Zdunich Go Through Heaven and Hell on “Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival”’, Fangoria (28 September 2015), http://fangoriaarchive.com/qa-darren-lynn-bousman-and-terrance-zdunich-go-through-heaven-and-hell-on-alleluia-the-devils-carnival/ (accessed 21 May 2017). Gourley, Bob, ‘The Devil’s Carnival’ (25 June 2012), https://www.chaoscontrol.com/the-devils-carnival/ (accessed 19 June 2017). Halberstam, J., Female Masculinity (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998). Hutcheon, Linda, ‘Historiographic Metafiction Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–32. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York, New York University Press, 2013). Kaplan, Cora, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Kim, Jean, ‘The Groundbreaking Genderf*cking of “Rocky Horror Picture Show”’ (21 April 2015), https://www.alternet.org/media/groundbreaking-genderfcking-rocky-horror-picture-show (accessed 1 September 2017). Lealos, Shawn S., ‘Terrance Zdunich Interview: Devil’s Carnival 2’, Renegade Cinema (4 March 2013), http://renegadecinema.com/1282/terrance-zdunich-interview (accessed 29 June 2018). Morris, Pam, ‘Introduction’, in Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, edited by Pam Morris (London, Arnold, 1994), 1–24. Nagaike, Kazumi and Kaori Yoshida, ‘Becoming and Performing the Self and the Other: Fetishism, Fantasy, and Sexuality of Cosplay in Japanese Girls’/Women’s Manga’, Asia Pacific World, 2:2 (Autumn 2011), 22–43. Pattison, George, Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Schubart, Rikke, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970– 2006 (Jefferson, McFarland & Co, 2007). Sharf, Natasha, Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe (Shropshire, Independent Music Press, 2011).

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Siddique, Sophia and Raphael Raphael, ‘Introduction’, in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque, edited by Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–15. Spooner, Catherine, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion Books, 2006). Voigts, Eckart, ‘“Victoriana’s Secret”: Emilie Autumn’s Burlesque Performance of Subcultural Neo-Victorianism’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6:2 (2013), 15–39. Whitney, Sarah E., Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2016). Zdunich, Terrance, http://www.terrancezdunich.com/control/blog/ (accessed 5 September 2018).

Filmography Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival, dir., Bousman Darren Lynn, 2015. Blade Runner, dir., Scott Ridley, 1982. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Whedon Joss, 1996–2003. Cabaret, dir., Fosse Bob, 1972. Circus of Horrors, dir., Hayers Sidney, 1960. Jesus Christ Superstar, dir., Jewison Norman, 1973. Repo! The Genetic Opera, dir., Bousman Darren Lynn, 2008. Saw, dir., Wan James et al., 2004–2017. She Freak, dir., Mabe Byron, 1967. Spy Kids, dir., Rodriguez Robert, 2001–2003, 2011. The Devil’s Carnival, dir., Bousman Darren Lynn, 2012. The Man Who Laughs, dir., Leni Paul, 1928. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dir., Sharman Jim, 1975.

Roger Corman Murray Leeder

Roger Corman (1926–) is a vastly important figure in the history of American cinema. Earning nicknames like “The King of the B Movies”, “The Pope of Pop Cinema” and “The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood”, he has directed more than fifty films—as many as ten in one year—but that figure is dwarfed by the number of films he produced, currently exceeding 400. Corman is a figure of contradiction. By all accounts a quiet, unassuming man with left-wing politics, he is nevertheless known as a cut-throat businessman and unapologetic capitalist; he is also an unapologetic purveyor of exploitation who nonetheless often framed himself as a serious filmmaker.1 Corman is enshrined in Hollywood legend for his thrift and innovation, and for helping to launch the careers of others. The informal “Roger Corman School of Filmmaking”—graduates include Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich—provided the practical experience for the wave of talent that emerged in the late 1960s and bore the label “the New Hollywood”.2 Corman’s protégés rewarded him with cameos in films as diverse as The Godfather, Part II (1974), The Howling (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2010). Despite having worked in any number of genres—Westerns, teen films, biker movies, gangster films and even social issue dramas like The Intruder (1962)— he is most associated with horror. In particular, his critical reputation as a director to be taken series rests most firmly on his cycle of eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations3: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960; also House of Usher), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962; also The Premature Burial), the anthology film Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). All but Premature Burial starred Vincent Price. These were not the first or the last Poe adaptations, but would provide lasting, definitive interpretations—definitive, that is,

M. Leeder (*)  University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

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for cementing Poe’s cultural profile, not particularly for fidelity to Poe’s stories. Corman’s Poe films benefit from Price’s iconic presence, strong production values (the first five have Oscar-winning veteran Floyd Crosby as their cinematographer) and literate screenplays by talented fiction writers like Richard Matheson, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont. Scholarship has come to think of Corman as more than a prolific and thrifty exploitation maven with a nose for new trends (though he certainly was that), but also as a subversive artist whose work evince a taste for experimentation, a relative lack of bourgeois moralising, subversive sexual themes and surprising political dimensions. His prolificity and longevity have resulted in there being a plethora of Cormans, open to many different critical approaches. One approach recognises Corman as a key figure in the twentieth-century gothic—a revivalist who has profoundly shaped the cultural legacy of Poe, especially, emphasising the Poe the gothic writer over other facets of his writing.4 It is only with mild hyperbole that the New York Times once referred to Corman as “the greatest influence on modern American filmmaking”,5 and something similar can be said with respect to Corman’s role in shaping the gothic as it manifests in American popular culture in from the 1960s to present.6 In particular, the idea that the first wave of gothic literature anticipated “the thoroughly God-abandoned forms of modern literature”7 seems to bear out in Corman, a modernist filmmaker8 whose excursions into the gothic evince a grim worldview that is both fatalistic and godless. Explicating Corman’s role in cinematic horror and the Gothic requires recounting the history of the Hollywood horror film up to that moment. It needs to be understood as a clustered series of cycles of production in which, like a good movie monster, the horror film is repeatedly sent away only to return again. If the genre’s cradle was the 1920s, both in German Expressionism and the American silent film (emblematised by collaborations of Lon Chaney and Tod Browning), it became fully realised in the first half of the 1930s, especially with Universal Picture’s 1931 adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein. The conventional wisdom is that the Golden Era of Hollywood Horror runs from 1931 to 1936, as Universal proved the market for this type of picture and its competitors scrambled to take part. Though it is easy to understate the diversity of horror films in this Golden Age, they favour a gothic mode, often taking place in a misty, vaguely Eastern European Never-Neverland of centuries past, often with mansions, castles and crypts as settings. However, increased censorship and other industry factors scuttled Hollywood horror in the later 1930s.9 No horror films were produced in 1937 and ’38, though they would be revived in 1939 after some successful reissues. Horror maintained a strong presence through the war years but generally with smaller budgets and less prestige than it had enjoyed a decade earlier, and largely targeting a younger demographic. The horror film would again dissipate in the late 1940s, this time owing to generic exhaustion and aging audiences. When it returned in the 1950s, it was wedded closely to a neighbouring genre: science fiction. Though the gothic mode did not entirely vanish (indeed, House of Wax (1953) was easily the highest grossing horror film of the decade), audiences now associated horror more

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with contemporary setting, extraterrestrial threats, science run amuck and eventually, psychotic killers, with crypts, castles and misty moors thoroughly downplayed. It is in this context that Corman emerged. After an unhappy stint working as a story reader for 20th Century Fox, he decided to turn independent, mostly making films for American International Pictures (AIP). His first feature as a producer was the science fiction film The Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954), which cost $12,000. Through the remainder of the 1950s he would make gangster films, teen movies, Westerns and anything else that could be produced quickly and cheaply, yet showed a special fondness for science fiction films with apocalyptic themes and a horror edge (The Beast with a Million Eyes [1955], Day the World Ended [1955], It Conquered the World [1956], Not of This Earth [1957], Attack of the Crab Monsters [1957], Attack of the Giant Leeches [1959], etc.). One of Corman’s early classics is A Bucket of Blood (1959), a low-budget black comedy set in the Beatnik scene; it features a hapless aspiring artist, played by the late Dick Miller, who is drawn into a web of murder on artistic grounds, presenting his victims as provocative new sculptures. It is obvious that the frustrated artist gets most of Corman’s sympathy even as his exploits grow more and more vicious. A Bucket of Blood is an example of the strand of Corman horror film it would be difficult to see as Gothic because their conspicuous smallness and cheapness (an aesthetic that Corman actively relished in, embracing the confines of his budgets in modernist fashion) stand at odds with understanding of the gothic mode of one of excess.10 A much more extravagant and self-consciously gothic style that would come to dominate Corman’s output in the early 1960s. Another important development in the 1950s was the arrival of television as a market for Hollywood studios’ back catalogues. In 1957, Universal sold a package of 52 vintage horror films to TV stations as “Shock Theater”; this was followed the year after with “Son of Shock”. It was in this format that post-war youths were first introduced that vanished, more gothic mode of the horror film, and it proved very popular. The films were often presented by irreverent, pun-happy regional hosts like Vampira (Maila Nurmi) in L.A. and Zacherly (John Zacherle) on the East Coast, and collectively worked to create the youth phenomenon that has been called “Monster Culture”. It had manifestations in numerous media, including music (“The Monster Mash” [1962] and countless less-remembered novelty songs), television (The Addams Family [1964–1968] and The Munsters [1964– 1966]) and, of course, cinema.11 Part of Corman’s savvy was learning to sell directly to that curious new ­post-war phenomenon, the teenager. He made films like Rock All Night (1957) and Teenage Doll (1957) and pioneered exploitation advertising techniques to connect them with teen audiences. The idea emerged that there was a market for films based on literary material that teenagers encountered in school; Poe was a canny choice, a canonical American writer who nonetheless had a much more popular readership for his torrid gothic tales of torture, madness and death.12 “The Fall of the House of Usher” was a natural place to begin, since it was read by almost every American high school student, many of whose appetites for gothic horror had been recently whetted.

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Corman was by no means the first filmmaker to exploit the new taste for the gothic mode of horror cinema, and in some senses he piggybacked on the success of William Castle, whose twin 1958 gimmick-driven hits House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler confirmed Vincent Price as the new face of American horror.13 Casting a star like Price as Roderick Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher was a real coup for Corman, and started an extremely productive working relationship; throughout their collaborations, Corman would make full use of Castle’s finely honed “male diva”14 persona, perched between seriousness and irreverence. 1960 is a singularly important year in the history of the horror film due to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film that, in certain histories of the genre, is seen as representing a full maturity, shaking off the gothic cobwebs and stepping forward into the present day. Yet just as influential in its own way was Corman’s Usher, for the proof it provided of gothic horror’s restored currency. Corman’s work in the gothic mode in this period can be contextualised within a much larger “Gothic Revival” spanning several continents.15 Across the Atlantic, Hammer Film Productions launched its own revival of gothic horror, starting with the one-two punch of remakes The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958; also Dracula), both of which did great international business. The Hammer films that followed were also colourful reworkings of classic horror material, modernised with more sex and blood and presented in gruesome colour. In the second episode of the 2010 BBC documentary A History of Horror, ­actor-writer Mark Gatiss diverges from a discussion of Hammer and UK horror of the 1960s to talk briefly about Corman’s Poe films, noting that “as I child, I always found [the Poe films] more genuinely frightening [than Hammer’s]. More sickly, more unsettling. They have a uniquely queasy, dreamlike quality”. Indeed, while Hammer’s films often demonstrate a sort of muscular kineticism, full of energetic chase and fight scenes, the Corman Poe films feel slow, enervated and stifling … as claustrophobic as the tombs they so often feature. Gatiss’s “sickly” is an apt description, since the films so often deal with illnesses of all kinds, mental and physical and indeed of the landscape: in The Fall of the House of Usher, even the terrain around the manor is shown to be desiccated and infertile, explained by a “plague of evil”. The Corman Poe films are odd beasts in terms of nation. Despite being based on the works of a quintessential American writer and being predominantly US-made (though two were shot in the UK), they have a variety of settings. The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunted Palace both take place in New England yet neither develops much local flavour to their settings; the settings of others are British, Spanish or Italian. But in a few of Corman’s Poe films does their country or setting particularly matter, in part because they are generally anchored by Price’s studied mid-Atlantic accent. Likewise, their time periods range from medieval to Victorian with relatively little difference: in both spatial and temporal registers, their setting is a relatively enclosed, almost hermetic gothic past. In The Haunted Palace, the titular structure was literally brought from Europe to Arkham, Massachusetts stone by stone, a perfect symbol of the gothic’s international perambulations.

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This enclosed space is also, implicitly, the space of the mind. The films not only contain dream and hallucination sequences but are themselves highly oneiric, reflective of Corman’s interest in psychoanalysis, and many of them seem to themselves take place directly in a maddened mind. The non-separation of body, mind and the universe is raised in dialogue repeatedly. In Premature Burial, a doctor states: “Most people tend to think of the body and the mind as being totally different, two separate entities. Whereas in point of fact, they’re linked”. In The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero describes his ancestors tortured people cruelly “to prove how easily a man’s mind can be controlled and twisted … Somewhere in the human mind … is the key to our existence”. Corman, at the time reading Freud and attending psychotherapy sessions,16 seemed to believe the same. Each of Corman’s Poe film was budgeted at around $270 000, a king’s ransom by Corman’s standards.17 This budget stretched farther with each successive film due to the reuse of sets, so the films only become more and more lavish. But from their inception, they are bold and colourful and self-consciously cinematic. The first moments of Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher declare it to be “IN CINEMASCOPE AND COLOR [sic]” against swirling green and purple mists—declaring its classy merits with exploitation-film directness. The Fall of the House of Usher is reasonably faithful adaptation of Poe’s story, fleshed out to feature length. The novel’s nameless narrator is now called Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), and when he comes to the remote Usher mansion, it is now because he is in love with Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), rather than a friend of her brother Roderick Usher (Price) as he is in the story. Price plays Roderick Usher as a blond, effete aristocrat, sickly and fragile and brimming with ­self-contempt, and his characterisation is much as in the original text. Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a grim, claustrophobic experience, so atmospheric that the seemingly endless scenes of characters walking through corridors (which helps pad the material from the short story to a feature-length film) become spellbinding instead of tedious. Chris Baldick defines the Gothic in terms of, “a fearful sense of inheritance in a time [and] a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration”,18 and one would be hard-pressed to find a cinematic example purer than Corman’s film. The Fall of the House of Usher would set the tone for the rest of the series, and many of its motifs recur multiple times. These include: a remote castle being visited by a rational-minded outsider, a sickly family dynamic (with a hint of incest), a woman dominated by the personality of a powerful man, crypts, corridors, the disinterment of corpses, warped paintings and other artworks (Roderick Usher is the first of numerous “degenerate artist” types to figure in the Poe series) and the fiery immolation of haunted buildings, which would become the series’ stock ending. The Winthrop character is just the first of the series’s nominal protagonists, outsiders who are bland and unimpressive next to Price’s aristocrats; they often reveal a controlling streak that belies their superficial construction as “normal” and “good”. The Fall of the House of Usher also features a nightmare sequence of Winthrop, wordless and alternating between colour filters of blue, purple and

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pink, all within a superimposed swirling mist. Similar dream and hallucination sequences would be a feature of the series, appearing in most of the films, though rarely furthering the narrative but providing a dose of almost psychedelic avant-gardism that both interrupts and furthers the narrative that contains them. Corman has related that these sequences “were shot silent and in black and white. I thought of them as exercises in cinema technique, where we could depart from reality, by using special lenses, surreal sets, gels, and afterwards a lot of optical printing. From a theoretical standpoint, they were pure cinema”.19 On a practical level, these sequences are another measure to pad out the original stories to feature length, but they also represent moments of display that exceed the conventions of narrative storytelling. These sequences especially exploit the association of colour with chaos and uncontainability20 by detaching it from any object in the cinematic diegesis and instead letting it diffuse poisonously through the cinematic image, like a plague of evil on representation itself. The second Poe film, The Pit and the Pendulum, retained little from Poe’s story but a Spanish setting and the eponymous situation: a man trapped underneath the hideous, slow-moving execution device. Corman’s version largely repeats the formula of The Fall of the House of Usher, with an outsider becoming embroiled in an aristocratic family’s bizarre dynamics. It is more thoroughly plotted, however, replacing its predecessor’s almost hypnotic slowness and emptiness with a baroque storyline driven by twist after twist (tragic pasts, fake deaths, hidden motivations and secret alliances). It is crueler and more vivid and gory than its predecessor, with death by torture as its key theme. One of its most memorable sequences takes place in one of the series’ many family crypts, where a putrescent corpse is unearthed, the apparent victim of a burial alive. Corman shows us the reactions of all of the characters before finally delivering the audience a shocking image of the horrifying corpse itself. It is a concise example of Corman’s tendency to mix restraint and shock imagery. The same scenario, the unearthing of the corpse of a person who was buried alive, begins the next film in the series. Premature Burial is one of the less examined films in the cycle, often treated, perhaps unfairly, as minor and inessential because it is the only one not starring Price. It stars Ray Milland as a Victorian aristocrat named Guy Carrell who obsessively dreads being buried alive—a fear that proves richly appropriate. The most rigorous example of psychological horror in the series, Premature Burial might have a warmer reception if it bore a different name (its connections with the title Poe piece are little more than thematic). The next Poe film was Tales of Terror. Horror has long lent itself to the anthology or portmanteau format, from Waxworks (1924) to XX (2017), and it has elsewhere proved a natural format for Poe adaptations (including Spirits of the Dead [1968] and Extraordinary Tales [2013]). Nonetheless, Tales of Terror, in which Price stars in sequences based on “Morella”, “The Black Cat” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, is one of the more rote entries in Corman’s series, with the stories largely failing to make much of an impact. The first and last are grim and serious. “Morella”, featuring some of the more overtly supernatural material in the series, concerns an adult daughter returning home to find her father haunted

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by the ghost of her dead mother; “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is about a dying man placed in a trance by a hypnotist that leaves him horrifyingly suspended between life and death. But “The Black Cat”, based both on the titles story and Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado”, is a darkly comedic farce in which Price and Peter Lorre deliver broad performances as a rich fop and a slovenly alcoholic who become entangled in a drama of cuckoldry, murder and yet more entombment alive; its signature scene is a hilarious wine tasting competition between Price’s aesthete and Lorre’s drunk. This comedic turn lead to the next, and arguably least typical film of the series, The Raven. To note that Corman’s Poe films are repetitive, almost obsessively re-enacting similar scenes and rehearsing similar themes, is not to accuse them of uniformity or monotony. There is a surprising amount of graphic and tonal variation. The Raven opens with the familiar swirling colours as Price’s voice recites the eponymous Poe poem. A silhouette of a raven appears, and then waves crashing against a rugged coastline, and then images of a forlorn lost house—extremely representative gothic imagery familiar from this series if not from elsewhere. In these first moments, The Raven plays like a perfectly “straight” entry in the Poe series. The film then moves to a study where Price’s Dr. Erasmus Craven is magically drawing a raven in midair using purple energies. When wind starts disturbing a window across the room (as in the poem), Craven stands and walks, bumping his head on a telescope in the process … and then he does the same again on the way back. He walks over to a tomb in the corner and dusts it with a broom; looking at a portrait hanging over it, he whispers, “Lenore, come back to me Lenore”. But his sad lament is blunted by Price’s semi-comedic delivery. Later in the sequence, the expected raven arrives and perches on a bust of Pallas, and Craven beseeches it: “Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond? Answer me, monster. Tell me truly, shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?” The raven then speaks with Peter Lorre’s voice: “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?” The lightly comic touches soon transform into outright farce, a magical romp that despite its tonal lightness still has aesthetic and thematic links to the rest of the series. The Raven’s revelation that the dead wife Lenore (Hazel Court) was a schemer who faked her death particularly echoes both The Pit and the Pendulum and Premature Burial (Court plays the wicked wife in both Premature Burial and The Raven), and it also has the stock fiery finale, again played for laughs. A witty self-parody of the Poe series, The Raven accords with the understanding of the comic Gothic as “promising the laughter of accommodation rather than the terror of disintegration”.21 Another anomaly in the series is The Haunted Palace, since it is not based on a Poe story. Though it bears the title of a Poe poem, it is in fact based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short, posthumously published novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and was retitled against Corman’s better judgement to place it within the successful Poe series. The fact that Corman directed the first Lovecraft adaptation is noteworthy in its own right; it is the first film in which names like “­ Yog-Sothoth”, “Cthulhu” and “the Necronomicon” are spoken. Two others Lovecraft adaptations

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would follow soon: Die Monster Die (1965), based on “The Colour Out of Space”, and The Dunwich Horror (1970), both directed by Corman’s usual art director, Daniel Haller, and Corman produced the latter. The Haunted Palace stars Price as Charles Dexter Ward, a sceptical married man returning to his ancestral castle in Arkham, Massachusetts to collect an inheritance; he is then possessed by his ancestor, the warlock Joseph Curwen. This version of Arkham (a seaport town, unlike the inland city in Lovecraft’s stories) is populated by locals as a consequence of Curwen’s corruption, their deformities mirroring the plague on the landscape in The Fall of the House of Usher. Scholars have sometimes disavowed The Haunted Palace’s status as part of the Poe series,22 but almost every adaptational choice brings it more in line with the Corman-Poe brand.23 The last two entries in the Poe series are distinguished by their UK production, designed to take advantage of favourable British tax laws (the Eady Levy). The first was The Masque of the Red Death. The favourite Corman film of many critics, though it is by no means the most representative,24 it is the series’ most sumptuous and lavish entry, thanks in no small part to its cinematography by Nicolas Roeg— an excessive film about excess. The Masque of the Red Death takes the premise of Poe’s story (Prince Prospero holds a defiant masquerade ball while the title plague devastates the world outside but the plague enters incarnate as a masked man and kills all within) and expands it considerably, turning Prospero into a Satanist, introducing a figure of Christian goodness in the peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher) and also seamlessly incorporating the Poe story “Hop-Frog”. Prospero perhaps resembles Joseph Curwen more than other of Price’s characters; more vital, healthy and actively cruel than most, he is a figure of authority who nonetheless regards himself as a servant to Satan. In the finale unapologetically reminiscent of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), he mistakes the Red Death for Satan himself but his glee turns to terror as he learns that his worldview has been in error. However, the film does not inscribe a Christian belief system either, but rather a fatalistic one in which Death is more powerful than God or the Devil. The last Poe-Corman film would be The Tomb of Ligeia. Once again Price plays a dour, sickly, tragic aristocrat, haunted by his deceased wife; as Verden Fell, he wears a distinctive pair of sunglasses due to sensitivities to light (Tim Burton would pay homage to these in Dark Shadows [2012]). Fell remarries to the sprightly red-haired Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) but, rather like a supernatural variation on Rebecca (1940), the deceased black-haired Lady Ligeia continues to make her presence felt through her influence on Fell and through a mysterious black cat. It is the film of the series that most consistently plays on the thin line between supernatural and psychological evil. The Tomb of Ligeia is a handsomely made re-encapsulation of the series’ central themes but is also one of its brightest and liveliest, with ample British location footage including atmospheric ruins. It is a worthy entry to close out an overall very high-quality series. There are also several films by Corman affiliated with the Poe franchise without being Poe adaptations. Perhaps the most memorable of these is The Terror (1963), though it is better remembered for the circumstances of its production than its contents. As the production for The Raven was ending, Corman decided to

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produce another film on its sets, taking advantage of two unused days of shooting left on Boris Karloff’s contract. The resulting film concerns a French soldier (Jack Nicholson) during the Napoleonic Wars who is separated from his army, stranded in a remote region and discovers a complex web of deceit, murder and haunting centred on a local aristocrat, Baron von Leppe (Karloff). With a famously unnavigable plot due to a script being written on the fly and its low budget seams showing everywhere, The Terror is nonetheless an effective, atmospheric gothic thriller—perhaps the perfect marriage of Corman the Purveyor of Gothic Excess and Corman the Celebrated Cheapskate. Another film closely affiliated with the Poe series is Tower of London (1962), one of the few Corman outings made for a major studio (United Artists), which starred Price as Richard III; less Shakespeare than blood and thunder melodrama, it is a pleasant minor entry in Corman’s filmography. Poe-business continued without Corman, once other producers recognised the market. In West Germany, Christopher Lee starred in Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (1967, also The Blood Demon and The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism), based on “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and Herbert Lom and Jason Robards starred in a reworked Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971). Many more were made with Price’s involvement, which often had Poe links shoehorned in. These include AIP’s War-Gods of the Deep (1965, also City under the Sea), which features quotations from Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea”, The Oblong Box (1969), The Conqueror Worm (1968, also Witchfinder General; its American release bearing the Poe-derived title) by the legendary British enfant terrible Michael Reeves, and Cry of the Banshee (1970), maybe the most egregious example as its poster and trailer used Poe’s name though it has nothing more to do with Poe than a quotation from “The Bells”. In 1970, Price made An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe, a ­52-minute dramatic recital of three Poe stories. All of these speak, however indirectly, to Corman’s role in securing and shaping Poe’s cultural legacy. If Poe could never escape Corman, the reverse seemed to be true as well. He would later produce the remake Masque of the Red Death (1989), and in the animated Poe-adaptation anthology film Extraordinary Tales, he even voiced Prince Prospero. Poe also appears as a sort of Greek chorus in one of Corman’s strangest and most radical films, the apocalyptic youth comedy Gas-s-s-s (1970). The film takes place in an allegorical landscape after an experimental gas has killed everyone over 25. Dressed in black nineteenth-century garb and spouting archaic diction, Edgar (Bruce Karcher) rides a black motorcycle and sports a raven on his shoulder. He is the film’s voice of fatalism and cynicism: observing the world being built by the film’s youthful radicals, he asks, “Are they really any different? Aren’t they all going to rape, cheat, steal, lie, fight and kill?” His raven squawks, “Nevermore!” In a battle of the opposing tendencies within Corman’s work, Edgar represents a pessimism that, for once, is overcome.25 Other Corman horror films are less clearly affiliated with the gothic. Key among these is X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). It is a “mad scientist” narrative that concerns Dr. Xavier (Ray Milland), whose test on his own eyes go awry as he finds it impossible to stop seeing more and more—eventually going mad from seeing the whole universe and, in an unforgettable ending, plucking his

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eyes out on the advice of a tent minister. Its quotidian labs and apartments turn to carnivals once Xavier flees and makes a living as a fortune teller, but the film does not develop much a Bradbury-style carnival gothic atmosphere; rather it opposes the blandness of its earthly settings with cosmicism of Xavier’s visions, of which we see only brief, tantalising glimpses. No adequate assessment of Corman’s career and impact can end with the films he directed himself. Other significant examples of gothic cinema produced by Corman include Francis Ford Coppola’s debut Dementia 13 (1963) and the aforementioned Lovecraft adaptations by Daniel Haller—Die Monster Die! in particular has a tone akin to the Poe series. As the Gothic Revival waned in the later 1960s, though, another Corman-produced film explicitly commented on that phenomenon. Another of Corman’s protégées, Peter Bogdanovich was perhaps the New Hollywood director who most approximated the career trajectory of French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. A New ­York-based cinephile, Bogdanovich built a reputation as a critic and film programmer but yearned to become a director himself. In 1968, he relocated to Los Angeles and, aware of Corman’s reputation as a nurturer of new talent, located him at a film screening and struck up a conversation. Corman brought Bogdanovich into his stable of talent, first tasking him with re-editing the Soviet science fiction film Planeta Blur (1962), which Corman had previously released as Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet (1965), into yet another permutation: Voyage to a Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), this time with footage of Mamie van Doren and other women added to move it into sexploitation territory. Bogdanovich was also tasked with crafting a new film around two days on Boris Karloff’s contract from another project, once again. Furthering the parallels with The Terror, Bogdanovich was required to make use of footage from The Terror but otherwise given a free hand. The resultant film, Targets (1968), is a melancholy work about the passing of the gothic mode of horror. It has two plot threads that connect in its climax. The first features Bogdanovich himself as Sammy Michaels, a Corman-esque director of well crafted but increasingly irrelevant gothic horror films, and Boris Karloff in a loosely autobiographical role as Byron Orlok, a vintage horror star. Feeling like a relic and a has-been, Orlok yearns to retire, though Michaels tries to recruit him for one last film. Meanwhile, a Vietnam veteran and gun collector named Bobby Thompson unexpectedly turns homicidal, murdering his wife and mother before embarking on a shooting spree, using a sniper rifle to shoot people in cars along the freeway. This plotline was inspired by Charles Whitman, the sniper who had killed 16 people in Austin, Texas two years earlier. Even as Orlok laments that the brutal new American society leaves his work behind (“My kind of horror isn’t horror any more”), Thompson is proving as much. Uncharismatic and decidedly uncool (clumsily dropping bullets everywhere), Thompson is a new monster whose plausibility places him in sharp contrast to any gothic bogeyman embodied by Karloff or Price. At one point, Karloff-as-Orlok tells “Appointment at Samarra”, the ancient Mesopotamian fable popularised by W. Somerset Maugham: a servant flees to Samarra from Baghdad after seeing a portent of death, only to find that death had an appointment to meet him in Samarra instead. After this dose of fatalism, the

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two plotlines converge at a drive-in movie theatre, where Michaels and Orlok are unveiling their new film (“played” by The Terror) and where Thompson plans the next stage of his killing spree. Orlok manages to subdue Thompson, who is confused and bewildered by the sudden appearance in the flesh of a figure from the screen. At the key moment, the representative of the fading gothic mode of the horror film becomes an improbable hero, their fated meeting working out positively. As he looks down on the cowering, defeated Thompson, Orlok asks, “Is this what I was afraid of?” Targets arrived at a crucial moment in the history of the horror film. That same year saw the releases of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), two films that, differently, would chart the course forward for the American horror cinema as it entered one of its Golden Ages. Night of the Living Dead was small, independent, gritty and gruesome; Rosemary’s Baby was prestigious, glossy and tasteful. Together, they helped to kill the revived gothic mode of the horror film even as Bogdanovich, operating under the sign of Corman, composed its epitaph in Targets. In 1990, the mercurial Corman made an unexpected return to the director’s chair after close to two decades with an adaptation of a Brian Aldiss novel. Frankenstein Unbound (1990) also represented a return to the gothic mode for Corman, albeit in a peculiar package. It seems appropriate that this throwback should be a time travel narrative. The opening of Frankenstein Unbound features swirling colours reminiscent of the abstract credit sequences of the Poe series; its images are at once microscopic, cosmic and suggestive of Promethean fire. The film starts in “New Los Angeles” of the 2030s, a glossy modernist future where Dr. Buchanan (John Hurt) is a scientist working on a superweapon described as a controlled black hole—an inheritor to both Dr. Xavier and Prince Prospero, figures who defy God (or tamper with fate) with terrible results. Now out of control, Buchanan’s weapon is creating time slips, clouds of churning energy that produces anomalies like a Mongol warrior charging into the future. Buchanan and his talking car are whisked to nineteenth century Switzerland, where he finds soon meets Dr. Frankenstein (Raúl Juliá), his monster (Nick Brimble) and even Mary Godwin (Bridget Fonda), Percy Shelley (Michael Hutchence) and Lord Byron (Jason Patric), various levels of creators and creations intermingling against a Romantic landscape.26 The film’s odd mix of gothic horror and pulp science fiction whizbangery comes to a head in the film’s climactic creation scene, where the animation of a female monster in a ruined castle is accompanied by the opening of a time portal that transports the characters to a snowy post-apocalyptic future, devastated by Buchanan’s superweapon. There Buchanan has a final showdown with the monster, blasting it out of existence with laser weapons even as the monster protests, “You don’t understand! You cannot kill me!” In the film’s final moments, the monster’s voice echoes over the image of Buchanan stalking a barren future, “You think you have killed me but I am with you forever. I am unbound”. Throughout the film, Buchanan has a series of strange nightmares that features science fiction imagery like lasers but are staged much like the dream sequences in Poe films. As Richard Combs noted in a contemporary review for Sight & Sound,

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Frankenstein Unbound (literally called Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound in its credits) is replete with echoes to earlier Corman films, suggesting that it can be read as an auteurist self-commentary on his penchant for haphazardly “stitching together” the leftovers of others.27 Perhaps we should read the monster’s final defeat and becoming unbound as a reference to the gothic mode itself; though it may come in and out of fashion, it is unkillable, eternal. If the Poe series arrived exactly at the right moment, Frankenstein Unbound was almost daringly wrong and failed to attract much of an audience. It would be the last film Corman directed, and though he has produced hundreds more, the gothic has rarely been on the agenda (one strains to find gothic qualities in Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda [2014] or Camel Spiders [2011]). In 2010, he was given an Honorary Academy Award for his service to the industry. Around the same time, he was the subject of the approving documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011) and the glossy coffee table book Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B-Movie (2013). Interestingly, these tend to downplay the semi-respectable Poe series in favour of cheaper and sleazier fare28; in a striking reversal of fortune, the very qualities that led Corman to be reviled—or at least dismissed as a hack—become focuses for veneration. And yet, to again echo the end of Frankenstein Unbound, Poe and the gothic mode are inextricably attached to Corman’s reputation. They will be with him forever.

Notes







1. That duality is perhaps most starkly embodied by his production/distribution company New World Pictures, founded in 1970, which produced exploitation fare like Student Nurses (1970), Women in Cages (1971) and Death Race 2000 (1975) and distributed international art films like Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972), Fellini’s Amarcord (1974) and Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1977). 2. For more on Corman’s significance to the New Hollywood, see David Cook, “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in 1970s Hollywood”, The New American Cinema, ed. John Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, 11–37). 3. Corman’s early academic champions tended to give most emphasis to the Poe films (Carlos Clarens, Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), David Will and Paul Willemen, eds., Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970). 4. See Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004, esp. 136–138), Joan Ormrod, “In the Best Possible Tastes: Rhetoric and Taste in AIP’s Promotion of Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle”, Adapting Poe: Re-imaginings in Popular Culture, eds., Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 145–163), Neimeyer, Mark, “Poe and Popular Culture”, The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Alan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 205–224). 5. Barry Gewen, “In Short: Nonfiction”, The New York Times (August 12, 1990), 7.16. 6. Scholars not otherwise cited here who have variously treated Corman as a filmmaker of the Gothic include Punter (1996, esp. 104–108), Magistrale and Polger (1999), Worland

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(2004), Auld (2008), Miquel Baldellou (2010) and Jones (2015). For other overviews of the Poe series, see Haydock (1977), Hanke (1991), Morris (2010) and Tudor (2014). 7. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th Century and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 121). 8. David Cochran, America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010). 9. Alex Naylor, “‘A Horror Picture at This Time Is a Very Hazardous Undertaking’: Did British or American Censorship End the 1930s Horror Cycle?” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 9 (2010): n.p. 10. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996). 11. David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001, esp. 229–285). 12. Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). 13. Murray Leeder, “Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick Film”, Journal of Popular Culture 44.4 (2011): 774–796. 14. Harry M. Benshoff, “Vincent Price and Me: Imagining the Queer Male Diva”, Camera Obscura 23.1 (2008): 146–150. 15. Rick Worland, “The Gothic Revival (1957—1974)” A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2014, 273–291). 16. Aleksandrowicz, Pawel, The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015, 156). 17. Worland, “The Gothic Revival”, 283. 18. Chris Baldick, “Introduction”, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, xiii). 19. Lawrence French, “California Gothic: The Corman/Haller Collaborations”, Roger Corman: Interviews, ed. Constantine Nasr (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011, 181). 20. See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2001), Stephen Melville, “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction”, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, eds. Peter Brunette and Davis Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 33–49). 21. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Comic Gothic”, A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 252). 22. E.g. David Pirie, “Roger Corman’s Descent into the Maelstrom”, Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision, eds. David Will and Paul Willemen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970, 60–61), Morris, Hanke. 23. Leeder, Murray, “Poe/Lovecraft/Corman: The Case of The Haunted Palace (1963)”, The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, ed. Sean Moreland. (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017, 163–177). 24. Jancovich, Rational Fears, 271. 25. For more on Gas-s-s-s and Corman’s radical turn in the later 1960s, see Nick Heffernan, “No Parents, No Church, No Authorities in Our Films: Exploitation Movies, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman’s Countercultural Trilogy”, Journal of Film and Video 67.2 (2015): esp. 11–15. 26. Frankenstein Unbound was the fourth film just a few years depicting the confluence of writers that provided the inspiration for Frankenstein, after Gothic (1986), Rowing with the Wind (1988) and Haunted Summer (1988). 27. Richard Combs, “Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound”, Sight & Sound 60.1 (1990): 61. 28. The same can be said of the exhibit Scared to Death: The Thrill of Horror Film at the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle, Washington.

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Bibliography Pawel Aleksandrowicz, The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015). Frances Auld, “Issues of Problematic Identity in The Terror (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963),” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.5 (2008): 747–761. Chris Baldick, “Introduction,” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, xi–xxxiii). David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2001). Harry M. Benshoff, “Vincent Price and Me: Imagining the Queer Male Diva,” Camera Obscura 23.1 (2008): 146–150. Peter Bogdanovich dir. Targets (1968). Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996). Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th Century and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Carlos Clarens, Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968). David Cochran, America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010). Richard Combs, “Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound,” Sight & Sound 60.1 (1990): 60–62. David Cook, “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in 1970s Hollywood,” The New American Cinema, ed. John Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, 11–37). Roger Corman dir. The Fall of the House of Usher (1960). Roger Corman dir. Frankenstein Unbound (1990). Roger Corman dir. Gas-s-s-s (1970). Roger Corman dir. The Haunted Palace (1963). Roger Corman dir. The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Roger Corman dir. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Roger Corman dir. Premature Burial (1962). Roger Corman dir. The Raven (1963). Roger Corman dir. Tales of Terror (1962). Roger Corman dir. The Terror (1963). Roger Corman dir. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). Lawrence French, “California Gothic: The Corman/Haller Collaborations,” Roger Corman: Interviews, ed. Constantine Nasr (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011, 169–200). Barry Gewen, “In Short: Nonfiction,” The New York Times (August 12, 1990), 7.16. Ken Hanke, A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series (New York: Garland, 1991). Ron Haydock. “Poe, Corman and Price: A Tale of Terror,” The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook: Articles, Essays, Letters, Anecdotes, Illustrations, Photographs and Memorabilia About the Legendary American Genius, ed. Peter Haining (London: New British Library, 1977, 133–138). Nick Heffernan, “No Parents, No Church, No Authorities in Our Films: Exploitation Movies, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman’s Countercultural Trilogy,” Journal of Film and Video 67.2 (2015): 3–20. David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986). Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, “Comic Gothic,” A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 242–254). Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996). Timothy Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015). Murray Leeder, “Collective Screams: William Castle and the Gimmick Film,” Journal of Popular Culture 44.4 (2011): 774–796.

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Murray Leeder, “Poe/Lovecraft/Corman: The Case of The Haunted Palace (1963),” The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, ed. Sean Moreland. (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017, 163–177). Tony Magistrale and Sidney Polger, Poe’s Children: Connections Between Tales of Terror and Detection (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Stephen Melville, “Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,” Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, eds. Peter Brunette and Davis Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 33–49). Marta Miquel Baldellou, “Poe’s Gothic Tales Through Roger Corman’s Cinema,” Revista de Filología 28 (2010): 59–75. Gary Morris, “From the House to the Tomb: Exploring the Corman/Poe Films,” Bright Lights Film Journal 70 (November 2010): n.p. https://brightlightsfilm.com/wp-content/cache/all/ from-the-house-to-the-tomb-exploring-the-corman-poe-films/. Chris Nashawaty, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B-Movie (New York: Abrams, 2013). Alex Naylor, “‘A Horror Picture at This Time is a Very Hazardous Undertaking’: Did British or American Censorship End the 1930s Horror Cycle?” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 9 (2010): n.p. Mark Neimeyer, “Poe and Popular Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Alan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 205–224). Joan Ormrod, “In the Best Possible Tastes: Rhetoric and Taste in AIP’s Promotion of Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle,” Adapting Poe: Re-imaginings in Popular Culture, eds. Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 145–163). Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004). David Pirie, “Roger Corman’s Descent into the Maelstrom,” Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision, eds. David Will and Paul Willemen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970, 45–67). David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 1996). David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001). Luca-Alexandra Tudor, “Edgar Allan Poe on the Silver Screen.” Romanian Journal of Artistic Creativity 2.4 (Winter 2014): 110–133. David Will and Paul Willemen, eds., Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970). Rick Worland, “AIP’s Pit and the Pendulum: Poe as Drive-In Gothic,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004, 283–299). Rick Worland, “The Gothic Revival (1957–1974),” A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2014, 273–291).

David Lynch Brian Jarvis

According to a detective in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), ‘there is no such thing as a bad coincidence’. When he was an art student in Philadelphia, Lynch lived close to the house in which Edgar Allan Poe composed many of his most famous gothic works. The most prolific period in Poe’s literary career coincided with domestic tragedy. One evening whilst singing at the piano, Virginia Clemm Poe began to bleed profusely from the mouth. Poe spent the next five years alongside his child-bride and cousin as she wasted away from consumption. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), Poe contributed to the romanticisation of tuberculosis by pronouncing that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.1 In the cycle of ‘Dark Lady’ tales and elsewhere, Poe returned obsessively to this topic. The classic gothic triangulation of sexuality, death and art was repeated compulsively in stories of alluring women who die and then come back to life. No such fate befell Lynch’s first wife, Peggy Lentz, but his early work in Philadelphia and then subsequently is haunted by obsessions and imagery which might summon, coincidentally, the ghost of Poe. In one of his first short films, The Alphabet (1968), a pale young woman with raven tresses contorts on a bed before vomiting blood onto the sheets (an action repeated by Nikki Grace on the streets of LA in Inland Empire [2006]). Given her cadaverous complexion and blood-splattered Victorian nightgown, this figure resurrects Poe’s Lady Madeline from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The Alphabet features the first in a long series of extreme close-ups in Lynch’s cinema on women’s mouths flecked with blood or smeared with garish lipstick. More broadly, Lynch and Poe share the motif of death and the maiden. Twin Peaks (1990–1991), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire all feature imperilled heroines who occupy a liminal zone between the living and the dead. Lynch’s ladies, like Poe’s, come in twos. The archetypal pairing of Dark Lady with Fair Maiden in Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ is

B. Jarvis (*)  Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_46

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mirrored in Lynch’s coupling of ‘innocent’ blondes and ‘mysterious’ foreign brunettes (Dorothy and Sandy in Blue Velvet (1986), Rita and Betty in Mulholland Drive). The narrator in Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ attempts to fuse two women through metempsychosis. In Lynch, too, identities are strangely spliced and the woman often acts as her own double. The same actress, Patricia Arquette, appears both as Renee and Alice in The Lost Highway. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me oscillates wildly between victim and vamp and the actress Sheryl Lee also performs as her own cousin, Maddy (Madeline) Ferguson. The mystery of Twin Peaks begins with the ‘poetical’ discovery of a young woman’s naked corpse wrapped in plastic and washed up on a riverside. The detective assigned to the case uncovers that Laura Palmer was murdered following years of sexual abuse by her father. In an infamous case of Freudian detective work, Marie Bonaparte proposed that Poe’s work was animated by incestuous and necrophile desires coupled with the erotic trauma of seeing his mother’s naked corpse.2 Lynch’s inspiration for the macabre starting point of Twin Peaks might be traced back to his formative years in Philadelphia where his apartment was adjacent to the city morgue. On occasion, Lynch would see black plastic body bags being cleaned after use: ‘they hang the bags with the zipper open, and the handles would go on these pegs and then they’d hose them out… They looked like they were smiling. Sometimes they had water dripping out of their mouth’.3 Keen to investigate further, Lynch visited the morgue at midnight and persuaded a guard to let him explore. He saw a number of corpses ‘kind of in bunk beds [… and] the parts room where the pieces would go if they hadn’t found the whole body’.4 Body parts such as ears and missing limbs are another Lynchian trope that resonates with acts of grisly dismemberment and decapitation as well as macabre humour in Poe (for example, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ [1843] and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ [1841]). Poe was a pioneer of detective fiction and this figure is also prominent in Lynch’s work. Before he appeared as Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, Kyle MacLachlan played the role of Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet and his amateur sleuthing involved illicit sneaking into buildings at midnight. Sandy, Jeffrey’s girlfriend, ‘doesn’t know whether [he’s] a detective or a pervert’. Jeffrey, meanwhile, is preoccupied with the sense of being ‘in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret’. Mystery is as central to the Lynch aesthetic as it was to Poe’s. Typically, the enigma is located less in some external setting than in the consciousness of characters who are strangers to themselves. Exteriors in Lynch operate primarily as allegories for cryptic interiors. At the end of Blue Velvet, a camera shot spirals out of Jeffrey’s ear as he wakes. This is a reference to the camera pulling back from Marion Crane’s eye in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but this image also alludes to an earlier shot in Blue Velvet. When Jeffrey discovers a severed ear near the start of the film, the camera plunges into the cochlear labyrinth. The subsequent retraction delivers a visual pun—in one ear and out the other—which introduces the possibility that the preceding story has been an extended dream or fantasy. A line from one of Poe’s poems could stand as an epigraph for Lynch’s cinema: ‘All that we see and seem/ Is but a dream within a dream’.5 Lynch may not be possessed by the ghost of his erstwhile Philly neighbour, but he is, at least,

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a kissing cousin to Poe. The series of ‘bad coincidences’ traced above underscore a shared vision captured succinctly in the refrain from Blue Velvet: ‘It’s a strange world’. Lynch spent much of his adolescence ‘doing regular goofball stuff’, but his arrival at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia commenced a career devoted to evoking the indefatigable strangeness of the world.6 Early experiments involved hybrids of painting and sculpture. The Lynch canvas is often a tactile and viscous mishmash of oil paints, ink, roofing tar, bodily fluids and found objects including insects, animal parts and plasters. Lynch’s strange vision uncovers beauty in abjection. Take an old used Band-Aid in the street… It’s got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some little black balls, and you see the stain of a little ointment and some yellow dirt on it. It’s in the gutter next to some dirt and a rock, and maybe a little twig. If you were to see a photograph of that not knowing what it was, it would be unbelievably beautiful.7

Lynch’s first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), combined sculpture and animation to create a ‘moving painting’.8 Lynch’s subsequent film work has always been painterly and the origins of this hybridity can be tracked back to an uncanny epiphany he experienced at art school. I was looking at a painting I had done, and it was a very dark painting… a painting inside a garden with very tall plants. Picture it at night, and a figure not quite human coming out of the darkness. And I saw the thing move and I heard a wind.9

This gothic moment perhaps inspired the repeated establishing shot in Twin Peaks of trees swaying at night and more generally encouraged the young artist to recognise the potential of cinema to bring painting to life. Lynch’s nocturnal garden was almost entirely black and the same colour is conspicuous when he uses the cinema screen as his canvas. The more you throw black into a colour, the more dreamy it gets … Black is depth… You can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of.10

Lynch paints it black and likes to keep the spectator in the dark both literally and figuratively. In Lost Highway, for example, the camera repeatedly creeps down sepulchred corridors into shadows as Stygian as the final darkroom in Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842). The fade to black is then held inordinately. Black and white is an important pairing for Lynch from his signature suit and tie (the inspiration for Agent Cooper’s wardrobe) to the choice of monochrome for his first feature-length films (Eraserhead [1977] and The Elephant Man [1980]) and photography collections (such as the exquisitely creepy Snowmen [2007]). In the early short films (Six Men and The Grandmother [1970]) colour is desaturated to accentuate black and white alongside vibrant splashes of red. The same striking combination features in the short animation I Touch a Red Button (2011) and is pivotal to colour design in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me where the Red Room in the Black Lodge juxtaposes black-and-white floors with red curtains.

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Other colours such as blue, yellow and green appear on the Lynch palette and Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive both open with hallucinatory technicolour sequences. Typically, though, the brighter hues tend to make the blacks even more inky and unfathomable like the shot of suspended traffic lights seen swaying at night in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. The prominence of blackness and the series of ‘coincidences’ with Poe sketched so far introduces but does not answer fully the question of whether David Lynch should be classified as a gothic artist. In terms of genre, Lynch’s work constitutes a diverse and complex terrain. This is evident as we move between films (from the post-apocalyptic surrealism of Eraserhead to the historical drama of Elephant Man, or the science fiction fantasy of Dune (1984) to the art house ­neo-noir thriller of Lost Highway) and also within them (Wild at Heart swerves wildly between road movie, musical comedy and Southern grotesque). Twin Peaks represents the pinnacle of this eclecticism with its generic smorgasbord of soap opera and detective story, supernatural horror and absurdist comedy, teen romance, family melodrama and sadomasochistic erotica. Given his quirky combos and subversion of classic genre codes, it might be tempting to classify Lynch as an auteur who is sui generis. Whilst recognising the distinctive features of the ‘Lynchian’, however, it is also important to grasp the gothic spine connecting the body of his work. To begin with, we could note that some of the genres with which Lynch is most often aligned have a tangled genealogy which can be traced back to gothic forebears. Long before surrealism emerged as an artistic movement in the 1920s, gothic artists challenged rationality and explored the power of the unconscious in crazy visions which confounded logic and blurred the boundary between reality and dream. Lynch’s work erases the head—the seat of intellect—and deranges the senses in a surrealist fashion, but this is also a neo-gothic manoeuvre. In the gothic tradition, sensory and affective intensity has never been too subservient to narrative coherence. Experience is privileged over mere explanation and the sleep of reason produces both monsters and a tantalising glimpse of the sublime. Alongside surrealism, Lynch is also routinely affiliated with noir. Here, again, we can trace a generic bloodline back to the Gothic which, in Poe and others, cloaks the detective figure in darkness and threatens to lose them in labyrinthine plots which contain monstrous fathers and femme fatales, deviant sexuality and extreme violence. In all aspects of narrative design and character type, mise-en-scène and setting, thematics and tropology we can uncover compelling evidence of Lynch’s gothic sensibility. The Lynch story is never straight but loopy and jammed with uncanny repetition, unexpected reversals and frames within frames. As Sedgwick notes, one of the defining features of the gothic novel is ‘the difficulty the story has in getting itself told’.11 Lynch deliberately loses the plot to disturb and delight the spectator. Conventional categories of time and space, inside and outside, dream and reality are replaced by clues, secrets and mystery. Events in Eraserhead unravel according to the intractable logic of nightmare as the protagonist endures a series of bizarre and disturbing encounters with a Man in a Planet, a Lady in a Radiator and a monstrous newborn baby. Twin Peaks is ‘full of secrets’ and entangles multiple narrative threads with surreal imagery, puzzles and cryptic phrases (‘fire walk

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with me’, ‘the owls are flying’). Following the appearance of a ‘Mystery Man’, Lost Highway undertakes a spectacular U-Turn and seems to start again with new characters only for them to gradually converge with the figures they apparently replaced. A similar metamorphosis takes place in Mullholland Drive. After the camera has plunged into a mysterious blue box each of the main characters reappears as new versions of themselves and the disturbing possibility emerges that our heroine has been investigating her own death. Inland Empire criss-crosses between Hollywood and Poland and includes an actress performing in a haunted film that seems to come to life alongside a surrealist sitcom featuring rabbits. This film about a cursed and deadly film seems to finish on an upbeat note with a chorus of women (and one male lumberjack) dancing to Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’, but Lynch’s stories always fail to offer unequivocal closure. On occasion the Lynch plot deploys what Douglas Sirk dubbed the ‘unhappy happy end’. At the close of Eraserhead, Henry Spencer, bathed in heavenly light, embraces the Lady in the Radiator, but her grotesque cheek pouches threaten to undercut the final act. In the denouement to Blue Velvet, Sandy’s inspirational ‘dream of the robins’ seems to have come true, but the bird we see perched in a suburban tree is clearly fake and has a beetle wriggling in its beak. In classic gothic mode, Lost Highway ends by circling back to its beginning and seasons two and three (The Return [2017]) of Twin Peaks end, respectively, with a maniacal cackle as Cooper is possessed by ‘Bob’ and a blood-curdling scream as Laura Palmer realises she has (or perhaps has not) come home. The gothic nature of the Lynch plot is evident not only in its Byzantine structure and absence of closure, but also in its irresistible return to dark subject matter and character types. The narrative engine is fuelled by fear associated with extreme acts of violence and the transgression of primal taboos including infanticide (Eraserhead), ‘brutal fucking murder’ (the murder of Maddy in Twin Peaks lasts over four minutes and similarly vicious although not as protracted slayings feature in Inland Empire, Wild at Heart and Lost Highway), incest (Twin Peaks) and erotic cruelty (Blue Velvet). Lynch has been feeding us his fear (see the painting Eat My Fear [2000]) for fifty years with a buffet of characters who are immediately familiar from the gothic cookbook. The monster—that essential ingredient in any gothic recipe—appears both in human and supernatural guise and often under an ironic misnomer (‘BOB’, Frank, Mr Eddy, Mr Reindeer). Monstrous deformity is central to Lynch’s first two films. The mewling baby in Eraserhead is so hideously mutated it hardly appears human. John Merrick’s physical abnormality is so extreme he is dubbed the ‘Elephant Man’ in a monster movie where, as Serge Daney notes, ‘it is the monster who is afraid’.12 Demons are conjured in Twin Peaks (although ‘BOB’ may be an extraterrestrial) and Lost Highway (the ‘Mystery Man’ is also modelled on Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and is possibly Fred’s doppelganger). The figure of the double is repeated across the Lynchian oeuvre. Double trouble is endemic in the aptly-titled Twin Peaks from the two sides to Laura Palmer to the splitting of Agent Cooper into ‘Dougie’ and ‘Mr C’ in The Return. In the final scene of Lost Highway, Fred Madison starts to split in two. The imagery in this violent alteration was apparently inspired by the director’s

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perusal of a medical tome on dental emergencies, but it also offers graphic testimony to the profound influence on Lynch of Francis Bacon to whom he refers as ‘the main guy, the number one kinda hero painter’.13 A similar image appears in Lynch’s self-portrait I See Myself (1992) and in Fight with Myself (2013) a dark and textured canvas is divided by a diagonal slash with two figures—one light and one dark—opposite each other. Lynch’s public persona is similarly ­Janus-faced: an ex-‘Eagle Scout from Montana’ who dresses conservatively whilst using phrases such as ‘golly gosh’ and ‘peachy’, but is simultaneously capable of laughing throughout the scene in Blue Velvet where Frank rapes Dorothy because Dennis Hopper apparently resembled a ‘dog in a chocolate store’.14 Alongside demons and odd doubles, DeSadean torturers appear in Blue Velvet, Dune and Wild at Heart. Twin Peaks: The Return includes a skull-crushing ‘Woodsman’ and an entourage of sooty ghosts that recall the dishevelled figure lurking behind Winkie’s in Mulholland Drive who in turn is reminiscent of the wicked witches in Wild at Heart and Inland Empire (which also includes a Phantom). Fairy tale and oedipal archetypes are evident as monstrous evil collides with innocence: dark fathers and mothers; confinement in a ‘castle’ full of secrets; a young woman in trouble and her knight saviour. At the same time, binary categories in Lynch are inherently unstable and even reversible: lines are crossed between innocence and evil, detective and pervert, blonde and brunette, the shiny surface and the subterranean depths. It is hard for the spectator to ‘know’ characters in Lynch since they are shape-shifters who are strangers to themselves. The Lynchian subject experiences extreme psychological conditions: acute paranoia and possession, schizophrenia and psychogenic fugue, trauma and hallucination, somnambulist and deathlike states. The Lynchian spectator is often locked into these conditions by first-person focalisation. Accordingly, people and places, events and objects seem to hover in some liminal zone between the real and the fantastic. In the Lynchian phantasmagoria everything feels supercharged with shadowy meaning. Landscapes and interiors, dialogue and gesture are always slightly off and at a tantalising tangent to the norm. Characters speak and move in dreamy almost underwater cadences or with an operatic extravagance. Everyday objects—a ceiling fan, curtains, a lamp—are loaded with enigmatic menace. Uncanny effects are produced through Lynch’s mastery of mise en scène and sound. Whilst his background is in the visual arts, sound and music play a vital role in Lynch’s work. The soundscape is eclectic, immersive and intricately layered. Lynch is always at the centre of musical design working closely with composers such as Angelo Badalamenti as well as producing his own original compositions (including an experimental musical entitled Industrial Symphony No. 1 [1990]). Wild at Heart combines rock nostalgia (Elvis and Gene Vincent) with Richard Strauss’s ‘September’ from Four Last Songs. Following David Bowie’s ‘I’m Deranged’ in its opening (and closing) credits, Lost Highway mixes Brazilian bossa nova (‘Insensatez’) with suicide death metal (Rammstein and Marilyn Manson). Music is not merely an accompaniment, but is pivotal to the plot, for example: in Eraserhead, the Lady in the Radiator reassuring Henry that ‘In Heaven Everything is Fine’; Dorothy’s performance of ‘Blue Velvet’ in

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Blue Velvet and Ben’s lip-syncing of Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’; the similarly mimed Spanish rendition of ‘Crying’ (‘Llorando’) at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive; and Sailor’s musical tributes to Elvis in Wild at Heart. One of the key motifs in the Lynch mixtape is dissonance: between ‘live’ and ‘recorded’, between nostalgic charm and barbaric violence. Music is also deployed as an allusive instrument. So, for example, the use of Penderecki’s harrowing ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ during episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return alongside images of the atom bomb echoes Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. Lynch’s experimental use of music is accompanied by innovation in other aspects of sound design. Often his approach converges with the repertoire of horror cinema where extreme content resonates with a soundscape whose signature tune is excess. Protracted periods of disquieting silence are shattered by ear-splitting noise: high-frequency screeches and ominous throbbing bass, the ­slowed-down animal roar of Frank in Blue Velvet and Bob in Twin Peaks, or the diabolical cackle of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. At the climactic moment in the final episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, a sustained period of eerie silence on a suburban street at night is shattered by that most iconic of horror sound effects as Carrie/ Laura screams (and not for the first-time in the series). ‘Silence’ (silencio) is never entirely empty in Lynch. Before the scream, the attentive audio-spectator can hear the night breeze, the distant hum of traffic and the vaguest hint of an odd click. In the opening scene of Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper is instructed by the Fireman to ‘listen to the sounds’ emerging from a gramophone. This clicking noise is returned to throughout the series at critical junctures including the final scene and appears to signify a point of crossing between alternate realities. The source and precise nature of the sound is indeterminate: perhaps a cross between a needle stuck in the run out groove of a vinyl record and a creature scratching at the inside of an egg in a 1950s science fiction B-movie. Lynch’s soundscapes are haunted by odd and sometimes antiquated technological acoustics. The crackles of a needle on a record at the start of Inland Empire is synthesised with the sound of a distant train, a voice from an antique radio and celluloid film running through a projector. A symphony of industrial sounds plays in the background of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune and Premonition Following an Evil Deed (1995): the rumble and clank of factory machines, furnace roars, the serpentine hiss of steam from pipes and radiators. Machine noise often seeps into Lynch’s scenes as an augur of violence. Jeffrey’s initiation into sadomasochism in Blue Velvet takes place in an apartment building where the low hum of air conditioning units is mixed with what sounds like synthesised crickets. In Twin Peaks at the Leland residence, the rhythmic pulse of a ceiling fan signifies cycles of sexual abuse. During the first appearance of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, conventional party music and sounds drop out of the mix to be replaced with weird low-frequency vibrations and what feels like the lowest bass notes on a theatre organ (which seems apt given his resemblance to a silent and early sound era Dracula). The cackle and fizz of electricity is another conspicuous aural motif that is foregrounded in the eyeand ear-catching ident for Lynch/Frost productions. There is a textured tactility

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and synaesthesia to the Lynchian soundscape. The chorus of outlandish noises against the backdrop of an indeterminate ambient drone (which may or may not be diegetic) provides the perfect audio analogue to a gothic dramatisation of acute psychic disturbance. The audio chiaroscuro of Lynch’s cinema is matched by a visual design which revolves around the interplay between extremes of darkness and light. Night is a powerful time in Lynch when identities change, secrets are revealed and evil is unmasked. Scenes of near pitch-black occur in almost all of Lynch’s work. When they are not shrouded in sable darkness, smoke and shadow, Lynch’s characters and spectators can find themselves blinded by light, stroboscopes, electricity and fire. Given the extent to which the Gothic has always been entwined with religion, it is important to consider whether black and white are simply colours on the Lynch palette or part of a deeper Manichean design. Does Lynch really believe in heaven (‘everything is fine’)? Religious symbolism in Lynch—like all other forms of symbolism—feels ultimately inscrutable. In Twin Peaks, Sheriff Truman senses ‘a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods’, but what sort of evil is this? ‘BOB’ seems like a comedy gothic name for a fiend, but his malevolence does not seem to be a laughing matter. The opposition between the demoniac energies embodied in ‘BOB’/the Black Lodge and innocence personified by Cooper/the White Lodge could function either as camp caricature or fundamentalist sermon. Ambiguity plagues all of Lynch’s work and in relation to spiritual matters this is not simply resolved by reference to his Presbyterian upbringing and subsequent lifelong practice of Transcendental Meditation. Whilst a number of mainstream critics denounced Blue Velvet as decadent and pornographic, the Christian Century selected it as their ‘Film of the Year’ and applauded Lynch for ‘Probing the Depths of Evil’.15 According to this reading, the extremes of light and dark are not merely signs of a neo-noir aesthetic, but evidence of a fundamentally religious vision. Dorothy is the ‘Blue Lady’ who starts off in pornographic scenarios but ends up as Madonna (reunited) with child. Jeffrey is poised precariously between the devilish Frank and his better angel, Sandy. Whilst Frank is a creature of the night who chants the mantra ‘now it’s dark’ and tempts Jeffrey with the promise of carnal pleasure, Sandy is associated with suburban sunshine and recites her dream of the robins In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love.

When Jeffrey and Sandy kiss they are bathed in this nimbus. Subsequently, at the end of Inland Empire, Laura Dern appears as Nikki Grace and kills the shadowy ‘Phantom’ with bullets of light. When some missing scenes from Blue Velvet were discovered, Lynch declared ‘it’s like the song ‘Amazing Grace’. The footage was lost but now it’s found’.16 The spiritual import of this find was undermined, however, by the director’s revelation that it included one of his favourite scenes in which a woman in a bar sets

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fire to her own nipples. Images of fire and smoke run through Lynch’s work and are associated both with noir and religious iconography. Industrial smog envelops Henry Spencer and John Merrick in Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. The opening credits of Wild at Heart begin with the striking of a match followed by a raging inferno. Similarly, the first scene in Lost Highway begins with the striking of a match and the vision of a burning shack occupied by the Mystery Man is repeated throughout. A license plate in Fire Walk with Me alludes to scripture: ‘IS 432’ refers to Isaiah 43:2 which promises the believer that ‘when you walk through the fire,/ You shall not be burned,/ Nor shall the flame scorch you’. The terminal instability of tone in Lynch makes it impossible to decide whether these are infernal flames, or the director is merely playing with fire. Similar ambiguities that may be associated with religious impulses are evident in an ensemble of subjects central to Lynch’s work and to the gothic imagination, namely: sex and reproduction, family, gender and the body. It is to these interconnected topics that we shall now turn. Unlike most fathers in the sixties, Lynch was present at the birth of his daughter. The young parents were overjoyed at the new arrival, but also concerned by a birth defect: Jennifer Lynch was born with clubbed feet that required extensive corrective surgery. In interview, Lynch described ‘the idea of birth [as] a mysterious and fantastic thing involving, like sex, just pure meat and blood and hair. And at the same time, this feeling of life and spirit’.17 The conflict between reproduction on the one hand as miracle and on the other as a dark comedy of grotesque materiality is at the heart of Lynch’s early cinema. In the short film Absurd Encounter with Fear (1967), a blue-skinned man creeps across a field towards a cowering woman, unzips his trousers and proceeds to pull out wildflowers. In The Alphabet (1968), intercut with imagery of a young woman writhing on a bed is an animated sequence involving the letter A. This sign is rooted in a garden and has a hairy orifice on one-side from which emerges a white cloud which proceeds to mutate into phallic and umbilical forms before wailing like a baby. In The Grandmother (1970), three generations of a family emerge from the earth and as the youngest, a boy, lies in bed, a plant grows out of his back. Lynch’s first full-length film, Eraserhead, stages a hysterical orgy of reproductive symbolism that borders on dark Freudian farce. Puritanical anxiety about sexuality and reproduction seeps into the soundscape: an undertone of water sounds, pipework and metronomic industrial pumping generates a sense of entrapment within a biomechanical womb. Acute genophobia is also articulated in the film’s gorgeously demented symbolism: blood squirting from the jerking legs of a ­man-made chicken; a bed invaded by umbilical cords which then transforms during a sex scene into a milky swamp of hair. At the heart of this nightmare lies a baby so hideously deformed it seems more insectoid than human. Nicknamed ‘Spike’ on set and rumoured to have been built from a calf foetus, the screaming newborn invades Henry’s living space and becomes a focal point for escalating anxiety and disgust which culminates in a grotesque act of infanticide. After gently cutting the bandages in which the baby is swaddled to expose its raw innards, Henry starts to stab. Prodigious quantities of bodily fluids spew from the wounds before ‘Spike’ swells to a monstrous size: an engorged head sprays blood whilst swaying on an

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elongated spermatic trunk. Henry’s salvation comes in the form of the Lady in the Radiator. Previously we have watched this vision in white smile sweetly and sing of heaven whilst stomping on wriggling organisms which resemble umbilical cords or spermatozoa as they rain down on a stage. At the close of Eraserhead, the Lady rescues Henry and they ascend together in another Lynchian ‘blinding light’ presumably to some desexualised nirvana far from the mortal coil of messy desires. There are occasional exceptions to a generalised genophobia in Lynch’s cinema. The relationship between Lula and Sailor, for example, is founded on an unpuritanical embrace of physical intimacy, but elsewhere in Wild at Heart sex spawns serious problems: the violent murder in the opening scene is a consequence of Sailor spurning the erotic advances of Marietta, Lula’s mother, in the men’s toilets; Johnnie is killed in a sadistic voodoo ritual; and Lula’s horniness gets her into trouble with Bobby Peru. Across Lynch’s work sex is typically associated with betrayal, violence and the transgression of primal taboos such as incest and murder. The physicality of ‘pure meat and blood and hair’ is foregrounded alongside an insistence on the animality of desire. The parents in The Grandmother bark and rut like dogs. A signature shot in Lynchian scenes of sexual violence is the slow-motion animal roar. This is performed by Bob and Leland in Twin Peaks, by Fred and Pete in Lost Highway and by Frank and then Jeffrey in Blue Velvet during their sadistic brutalisation of Dorothy. The male bestial roar is accompanied by extreme close-ups on female mouths and teeth. When Marietta smears blood-red lipstick all around her mouth, or when Dorothy’s bloodied lips part to reveal a cracked tooth, the image might recall other lips that bleed. Subsequently in Blue Velvet, Frank takes Dorothy’s lipstick and smears his mouth and face before kissing Jeffrey. Homosexuality in Lynch is often tied to sadism (see, for example, the behaviour of Bytes in The Elephant Man and the Baron Harkonnen in Dune). More generally, the bond between sex and violence in Lynch’s work is linked to the family in ways that bring horror home. Whilst there are moments of sentimental enthusiasm for the American Family in Lynch, they are imbued with a zeal so evangelical it borders on the parodic. More routinely, ‘family’ and ‘home’ are painted in a gothic style which foregrounds tyrannical parents and victimised children, incest, abuse and other skeletons in the cupboard. Lynch’s earliest work centred on nightmarish images of dysfunctional family life. In The Grandmother, the boy is beaten by his father and has an oddly intimate physical relationship with his grandmother. At dinner in Eraserhead, Henry and the spectator endures a series of surreal and painfully stilted conversations and silences with members of the X family (the cadence of dialogue here alongside an edgy ambience of domestic comedy-horror was recreated in Lynch’s online sitcom Rabbits [2002]). In Blue Velvet, Dorothy plays the role of ‘Mummy’ with a dark secret whilst Frank and Jeffrey oscillate wildly between the roles of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Baby’. Alongside Mr Eddy in Lost Highway and The Phantom/Krimp in Inland Empire, Frank is one incarnation in Lynch

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of the Primal Father who seeks to control women and punish the symbolic son. Week-after-week on Twin Peaks and then in Fire Walk with Me, Lynch suggested the prominence of abuse within the American home. The centrepiece to the show and film—Leland Palmer’s long-term sexual abuse and eventual murder of his daughter—was repeated with Maddy and mirrored by problematic relations in many families in what appeared on the surface to be an archetypal ‘cherry pie’ small-town American community. Given the frequency with torture and violence is directed at women, the gothic genre has routinely faced allegations of misogyny. This charge needs also to be considered in Lynch’s work. In Twin Peaks, the narrative engine is driven by the graphic and brutal murders of Laura and Maddy, Teresa Banks and Ronette Pulaski as well as the long-term domestic abuse of Josie Shelley. Any attempt to suggest that the show is delivering an indictment of misogyny in small-town America has to confront the extent to which violence against women is displayed as extended and stylised spectacle. The murder of Maddy lasts for over four minutes and presents Leland/BOB alternately dancing with his victim and terrorising her before delivering the coup de grace of smashing her face into a framed photograph. The problematic of potential misogyny in Lynch is compounded by the director’s fascination with female masochism. In Twin Peaks, we hear Laura Palmer’s confession about her Mystery Man from a recording of a session with her psychiatrist: ‘I think a couple of times he’s tried to kill me. But guess what? As you know, I sure got off on it. Hmm, isn’t sex weird? This guy can really light my F-I-R-E as in red corvette’. In the prequel, Fire Walk with Me, Laura moans in pleasure whilst she is being raped by BOB. In Wild at Heart, having initially resisted the advances of Bobby Peru, Lula acquiesces and appears to ‘get off’ on her sexual assault and humiliation. In Blue Velvet, similarly, Dorothy swoons with pleasure whilst being beaten by Frank and Jeffrey. Again, it might be contended that Lynch is not subscribing to so much as deconstructing reactionary mythologies of female sexuality and identity from within. Lynch’s Ladies are camp parodies of pop culture and patriarchal fantasy: the innocent blonde and the mysterious brunette, prom queens and femme fatales, Madonna and Whore. Lynch offers a camp iteration of the Gothic as a shadowy Hall of Mirrors in which people and objects assume self-reflexive, contorted and even contradictory shapes. According to Susan Sontag, [c]amp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not… Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’.18

In terms of its depiction of ‘Woman’ (and ‘lamps’ to which we shall turn shortly), Lynch’s work exemplifies the Janus-faced nature of the political in gothic art: the genre can offer profoundly radical and reactionary perspectives even, on occasion, at the same time. Political polarities are cross-wired in Lynchworld. The American Dream and the American Nightmare are weirdly fused as though Norman Rockwell had been repainted by Francis Bacon. The spectator is forced

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to oscillate between extremes of light and dark, centre and margin, saccharine ‘cherry pie’ normality and perverse monstrosity. A dissident depiction of the nuclear family as a hotbed of abuse features alongside images of the American Family, community and law enforcement which would not be out of place in a Republican Party campaign video. In the 80s, Lynch was a vocal supporter of Reagan and dined at the White House. In the 2000 Presidential campaign he backed the Natural Law Party and in 2018 he notoriously declared that Trump ‘could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much’.19 One of the things Trump has disrupted is Obamacare and this alongside his infamous impersonation of a reporter afflicted with arthrogryposis has led some critics to suggest that the U.S President is waging war on the disabled (amongst other groups). Body politics in the Gothic are vexed. The genre has been accused of demonising deviations from hegemonic ideals of the human form and applauded for offering a subversive challenge to ableist ideology and conventional beauty myths. Although Lynch has produced a number of glossy commercials for perfume and fashion houses, his film work is founded on a fascination with bodies deemed ‘disabled’ or ‘monstrous’ by the dominant culture. On occasion, this appears unequivocally discriminatory. In Dune, for example, the monstrous Baron Harkonnen is depicted as a paedophile and homosexual sadist who is morbidly obese and covered in oozing boils. Lynch’s depiction of disability has also been labelled exploitative. In relation to Lost Highway, David Foster Wallace objected to the casting of the Richard Pryor who’s got muscular dystrophy that’s stripped him of what must be 75 pounds and affects his speech and causes his eyes to bulge and makes him seem like a cruel child’s parody of somebody with neurological dysfunction…. letting an actor think he’s been hired to act when he’s really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting.20

Whilst not necessarily wishing to defend this particular instance, it is worth noting that Lynch has always employed actors and created characters who display acute physical differences typically without any explicit commentary or confirmation that those distinctions constitute ‘disability’. Lynch’s first on-screen appearance (albeit with his back to the camera) was in The Amputee (1974) as a doctor who performs a peculiar procedure on the weeping stump of a legless woman. It seems likely that Eraserhead offered a catharsis for Lynch as a father facing a newborn with a disability, but the film also articulates a more widespread and repressed negativity. Beneath the surrealist surface of Eraserhead lies a reality denied by a popular culture which compulsively churns out images of blissful parents and squeaky clean babies: newborns can be little monsters and parenting can be a nightmare. The Elephant Man offers a neo-Victorian depiction of Joseph Merrick who was paraded at freak shows due to his severe facial and bodily deformities. Lynch seeks to perform the classic gothic manoeuver of inverting the conventional opposition between normality and monstrosity (albeit by demonising the working classes alongside a sentimental valorisation of the Victorian bourgeoisie). Blue

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Velvet features a cameo appearance by a blind man who runs a hardware store, Wild at Heart has a character with a wooden leg and Twin Peaks includes a gallery of figures with physical and mental disabilities: Johnny Horne, the ‘Dancing Dwarf’, the ‘Giant’, the ‘One-Armed Man’, one-eyed Nadine and Lynch himself as the partially deaf Gordon Cole. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Dougie appears as a babe in the woods, but this performance also risks a cruel caricature of mental disability. In one scene Dougie, like Cooper a prodigious coffee drinker, is desperate to urinate, but does not have the intelligence to locate a toilet. A female colleague comes to the rescue by taking him to the ladies’ bathroom where she hears his ecstatic groans of relief. This scene repeats, in comic mode, an episode in Wild at Heart where Bobby Peru pisses noisily into a motel toilet whilst Lula listens from the bedroom. (According to David Foster Wallace, Lynch, another caffeine addict, ‘pees hard and often’ on set and sometimes in sight of the film crew).21 Bobby Peru’s micturition is part of a scuzzy seduction ritual in which the smell of urine is infused with a whiff of vomit (Lula has morning sickness) and sweat. This Southern Gothic melange is spiced with close-up shots of Bobby’s rotten teeth as he whispers ‘Say “fuck me”’ and then on Lula’s lips as she acquiesces. This scene exemplifies virulent anti-feminist impulses evident in parts of Lynch’s work and also his gothic depiction of the messy materialism and unmanageability of the body’s basic instincts and drives. The corporeal in Lynch does not conform and cannot be controlled. Characters are afflicted by misbehaving limbs as well as an array of spasms, tics and convulsions. Lynch’s cinema stresses our raw corporeality and animal being. The parents in The Grandmother grow out of the earth and proceed to bark, eat and hump like wild dogs. In Twin Peaks, BOB howls, has a wolf-like mane and is linked to ‘something dark in the woods that’s always been there’. The Dark Forest is a key location in Lynch’s gothic geography and trees a recurring symbol from the ‘arm tree’ in Henry’s apartment in Eraserhead (which reappears oozing blood onto a dolly cart in Twin Peaks: The Return) to mournful images of Douglas firs and evergreens swaying under a full moon in Twin Peaks. Lynch’s father’s PhD thesis was on the subject of ‘Ponderosa Pine Trees in the Inland Empire’ and he worked for the Department of Agriculture on the treatment of tree disease. Unsurprisingly, trees feature prominently in David Lynch’s childhood memories of Spokane, Washington: My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets… blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle-America the way it was supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you look a little bit closer, and it’s all red ants.22

Lynch’s film and art work has been ‘all red ants’ and other bugs since High School (when he first started sticking insects onto paper and canvas) all the way through to Twin Peaks: The Return where a Lovecraftian locust-frog slips into the mouth of a sleeping girl. The memory of the cherry tree seems a

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likely inspiration for the opening montage of Blue Velvet which switches from a vibrant r­ed-white-and-blue shot of roses against a picket fence and azure sky to an extreme close-up of beetles fighting fiercely just beneath the manicured surface of the suburban lawn like giant bugs from a 1950s science-fiction flick. Lynch’s suburban gothic uncovers horror just beneath the surface of the everyday: at the top of the stairs, down the corridor and behind the curtains we find the secret which provokes Laura Palmer’s final blood-curdling scream at the end of The Return. Moving from the suburbs to the city we find two distinct versions of the urban landscape in Lynch. The post-industrial Los Angeles of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire is comparable to the Lynchian suburbs with its jolting juxtaposition of dark and dirty horror just beneath the polished technicolour surface. Conversely, in the black-and-white industrial city of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man the horror is unconcealed and pervasive. Again, it is tempting to view this urban imaginary through a biographical frame and suggest that Lynch’s early work reflects his experience of migration from the small-town and suburban Pacific Northwest to Philadelphia: ‘the sickest, most corrupt, decaying city filled with fear I ever set foot in my life’.23 In the surreal rendition of the Philadelphia rustbelt (Eraserhead), Victorian London (Elephant Man) and the polluted factory planet Geidi Prime in Dune, we are confronted by a weird welding of mechanised bodies with a corporealised city. The industrial city with its pumping pistons and steam sounds like a mechanised uterus. This trope has been visualised by Lynch in artwork that once more echoes the iconography of cold science fiction B-movies (see Woman in Tank (1997) and his short film Premonition Following an Evil Deed). Post-industrial technology in Lynch also comes to life in an uncanny fashion. Various media including antiquated gramophones and telephones, tape recorders and Dictaphones, intercoms and cell phones, radio and television, video cameras and the cinema screen itself produce haunting voices and images. At times this includes the subject encountering their own analogue or digital doppelganger. A key component in Lynch’s technological uncanny is the resurrection of Victorian superstition regarding connections between electricity and the supernatural. Electricity signals the presence of powerful forces and border crossings between realms and alternate realities. It runs through Lynch’s work in various guises: sparks and discharges, stroboscopic flashes and over-heating filaments, the ‘Lynch/Frost Production’ ident and a dead man standing in Blue Velvet, zig zag floor tiles and plug sockets in Henry’s apartment and the Red Room, humming in the wires, white noise on a TV screen and the power source for a ceiling fan in the Leland residence. The repeated shots of the fan outside Laura Palmer’s bedroom charge this mundane object with menace. Domestic interiors in Lynch are defamiliarised through a dexterous manipulation of colour and lighting, camerawork and editing, props and sound design. Unexpected close-ups on lamps and curtains, furniture and bedding, radiators and telephones imbue everyday household objects with a fetishistic intensity. In the Lynch living room we encounter an uncanny

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elision between animate and inanimate. Whilst bodies are strangely static or move in a mechanical fashion, radiators sweat, lamps glow eerily, weird objects hang from the walls (a toothy demon in Jeffrey’s bedroom in Blue Velvet?) and curtains billow as though they had a will of their own. In ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, Poe insisted that excessive drapery is ‘irreconcilable with good taste’ and yet curtains are an important element of his gothic interior design (see, for example, ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’).24 Curtains are even more conspicuous in Lynch: from the opening credits of Blue Velvet to Nadine’s obsession with silent drape runners in Twin Peaks and a host of theatrical and cinematic settings in Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Dorothy Vallens’s apartment in Blue Velvet blends the palettes of Edward Hopper’s urban nightscapes with Francis Bacon. The sanguinary hues, oversized plants and couches with limb-like curves suffuse the space with an organic or even subcutaneous tactility. The same combination of odd furnishings and artwork (bespoke pieces created by Lynch), colour design and noir lighting is repeated in Lost Highway. In addition, Fred Madison’s suburban house shares architectural blueprints with the labyrinthine gothic castle. A gliding camera takes the spectator from a sharp-angled and stony exterior featuring slit windows into a maze-like interior where darkness transforms corridors into cavernous tunnels. The house here and throughout Lynch constitutes an architectural allegory for the mind of its occupants. Lynch, like Emily Dickinson, reminds us that ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/ One need not be a house;/ The brain has corridors surpassing/ Material Place’. Material places, in fact, are hard to find in Lynch: the interior, the house, the suburbs, the city and the natural world instead constitute an extended dreamscape. In this oneiric domain, characters move and speak with a somnambulant stiltedness. Pauses are held uncomfortably. Syntax can be strained and meaning elusive. During a scene at Winkie’s Diner in Mulholland Drive, a patient tells his therapist a dream about telling his therapist a repeated dream: ‘I had a dream about this place. It’s the second one I’ve had. But they’re both the same… There is a man in back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it’. There are no clear borders between dreams and the waking world, or between different spaces and times. A man in a locked cell wakes up and finds himself in a different body. A woman looks out of a window in Los Angeles and sees a street in Łódź. In the Lynchian phantasmagoria we ‘watch and listen to the dream of time and space’ (the Log Lady). The fantasy leap from LA to Łódź takes place is experienced by Nikki Grace in Lynch’s last film to date, Inland Empire. Subsequently, in an act that recalls Lynch’s first film—Six Men Getting Sick—and might also be read as an allegory of the director’s relationship to the commercial film industry, Nikki vomits blood onto a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. From his earliest to his most recent work, Lynch has crossed between the margins and the mainstream whilst crafting a dissentient gothic vision of blood, darkness and beauty, the mystery of time and place, the uncanny and ultimate unknowability of self and other.

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Notes



1. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London, Penguin, 1986), 486. 2. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London, Imago, 1949). 3. David Lynch cited in Steven Rea, ‘Philadelphia-Haunted David Lynch Returns for an Expansive Salute’ in The Inquirer, 7 September 2014. https://www.philly.com/philly/ entertainment/movies/20140907_Philadelphia-haunted_David_Lynch_returns_for_an_ expansive_salute.html, accessed on 6 January 2019. 4. Dennis Lim, David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (New York, Icons, 2015), 28. 5. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Dream Within A Dream’ (1827) in The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Signet, 2008), 39. 6. David Lynch cited in Richard A. Barney, ed., David Lynch: Interviews (Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 53. 7. David Lynch cited in Barney ed., Interviews, 130. 8. David Lynch cited in Lim, The Man from Another Place, 38. 9. David Lynch cited at ‘Six Men Getting Sick’. http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/sixmen.html accessed on 6 January 2019. 10. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch (London, Faber & Faber, 1997), 20. 11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, Methuen, 1986), 13. 12. Serge Daney cited in Lim, The Man from Another Place, 56. 13. David Lynch cited in Lim, The Man from Another Place, 36. 14. David Lynch cited in Kenneth C. Kaleta, David Lynch (Woodbridge, Twayne, 1993), 131. 15. J.M. Wall, ‘The Best Film of 1986: Probing the Depths of Evil’, Christian Century, 7–14 January 1987. 16. David Lynch cited in Cath Clarke, ‘“I’ve Got to Find the Flaming Nipple”: The Hunt for Blue Velvet’s Lost Footage’, The Guardian, 3 November 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2011/nov/03/blue-velvet-flaming-nipple-deleted-scenes accessed on 6 January 2019. 17. David Lynch cited in Barney ed., Interviews, 76. 18. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London, Penguin, 2009), 278. 19. David Lynch cited in Rory Carroll interview, ‘You Gotta Be Selfish. It’s a Terrible Thing’. The Guardian, 23 June 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/23/ david-lynch-gotta-be-selfish-twin-peaks accessed on 6 January 2019. 20. David Foster Wallace, ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head’ in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London, Abacus, 2004),188. 21. Foster Wallace, ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head’, 147. 22. David Lynch cited in Lim, The Man from Another Place, 23. 23. David Lynch cited in Kaleta, David Lynch, 6. 24. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London, Penguin, 1986), 365.

Bibliography Barney, Richard A. ed., David Lynch: Interviews (Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 2009). Bonaparte, Marie, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London, Imago, 1949).

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Carroll, Rory, ‘David Lynch: “You Gotta Be Selfish. It’s a Terrible Thing”’. The Guardian, 23 June 2018. Clarke, Cath, ‘“I’ve Got to Find the Flaming Nipple”: The Hunt for Blue Velvet’s Lost Footage’. The Guardian, 3 November 2011. Kaleta, Kenneth C., David Lynch (Woodbridge, Twayne, 1993). Lim, Dennis, David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (New York, Icons, 2015). Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ and ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London, Penguin, 1986). Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘A Dream Within A Dream’ (1827) in The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Signet, 2008). Rea, Steven, ‘Philadelphia-Haunted David Lynch Returns for an Expansive Salute’ in The Inquirer, 7 September 2014. Rodley, Chris, Lynch on Lynch (London, Faber & Faber, 1997). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, Methuen, 1986). Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London, Penguin, 2009). Wall, J.M. ‘The Best Film of 1986: Probing the Depths of Evil’. Christian Century, 7–14 January 1987. Wallace, David Foster, ‘David Lynch Keeps His Head’ in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London, Abacus, 2004).

Filmography David Lynch, dir. Absurd Encounter with Fear (1967). David Lynch, dir. Blue Velvet (1986). David Lynch, dir. Dune (1984). David Lynch, dir. Eraserhead (1977). David Lynch, dir. Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990). David Lynch, dir. Inland Empire (2006). David Lynch, dir. Lost Highway (1997). David Lynch, dir. Mulholland Drive (2001). David Lynch, dir. Premonition Following am Evil Deed (1995). David Lynch, dir. Six Men Getting Sick (1967). David Lynch, dir. The Alphabet (1968). David Lynch, dir. The Amputee (1974). David Lynch, dir. The Elephant Man (1980). David Lynch, dir. The Grandmother (1968). David Lynch, dir. Twin Peaks (1990–1991). David Lynch, dir. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). David Lynch, dir. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). David Lynch, dir. Wild at Heart (1990).

Gothic Television

Doctor Who: Identity, Time and Terror J. S. Mackley

The BBC television series Doctor Who needs little introduction. It’s the story of an eccentric traveller in a blue box. The first episode, An Unearthly Child, was broadcast on 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy’s assassination. The series enjoyed 26 years of unbroken broadcast, changing the lead actor on six occasions. Then, on 6 December 1989, the final episode of what is now referred to as the ‘Classic Series’ was broadcast—a story that was, ironically, called Survival. There followed a 16-year hiatus broken by two charity episodes and the 1996 TV-movie starring Paul McGann. Then, on 26 March 2005, the series was ‘rebooted’, with Russell T. Davies as Executive Producer and seasoned actor Christopher Eccleston taking the mantle of the Doctor. At the time of writing (2020) five other actors have played the Doctor, with Jodie Whittaker taking over the role in the final scene of the 2017 Christmas Special Twice Upon a Time. With the whole of time and space as a playground, elements of the Gothic are prevalent throughout the worlds of Doctor Who, or the Whoniverse as it is known. A lurking menace can just as easily be found under the bed as it can in the ­fog-swathed streets of Victorian London or on a planet at the outermost reaches of the universe millions of years in the future or the past. Primarily a series for children at the outset, viewers watched from behind sofas, secretly enjoying being terrified by the imaginative storylines and otherworldly monsters.1 Other stories consider psychological terrors, making the viewers think twice about looking at statues, their fear of the dark, popping bubble wrap and even blinking. The Doctor, in all of his or her incarnations, often confronts the apparently supernatural or draws on folk motifs such as vampires or the Loch Ness Monster. After the end of the second Classic series, these disturbances and historical events are generally explained through an alien presence or technology.

J. S. Mackley (*)  University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_47

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This chapter will consider elements of the ‘Uncanny’ and the Gothic in stories from both the Classic and Reboot Series including an uncertainty of identity, being trapped in the labyrinth of time, and elements of horror and terror. The first uncanny element of the series is an uncertainty of identity with regard to the Doctor in terms of name, face, personality and even gender. The character’s name has never been revealed to the audience, although a few supporting characters have been privy to this information. The series title derives from a question in the first story when schoolteacher Ian Chesterton encounters ‘the Doctor’ in a junkyard with a sign on the gates proclaiming the proprietor is I. M. Foreman. Ian refers to the elderly man outside a blue Police Box as ‘Dr. Foreman’, and the old man looks at him bemused as he asks, ‘Doctor Who?’ In Let’s Kill Hitler (2011), the Eleventh Doctor is warned of ‘the oldest question in the universe … A question that must never ever be answered’, and that question is: ‘Doctor Who?’ Derrida argues that knowledge of a name implies familiarity, thus the lack of a name distances the viewer from the character.2 Despite being the protagonist of the series and the self-proclaimed protector of Earth, the Doctor is a character whose origins are shrouded in mystery and someone the viewers, ultimately, cannot get close to. The concept of one actor replacing another in a film or TV series is now commonplace (for example, the James Bond franchise). Even when Doctor Who was the first broadcast, there were examples of actors taking over the lead role such as Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe who, among others, played Tarzan in a long series of films. The punishing acting schedule and failing health contributed to the decision of the First Doctor, William Hartnell, to retire from Doctor Who. In the final scenes of The Tenth Planet (1966), the Doctor complains ‘this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin’, before staggering to the TARDIS to ‘change’, or ‘regenerate’ as it later became known.3 After each of the Doctor’s regenerations, the companions who witnessed it are uncertain about how this new incarnation can be the same person. Germanà argues that identity is ‘in a continuous state of flux’, but the Doctor’s lack of fixed identity is very much an extreme case.4 The Doctor’s ability to regenerate, and even, in extreme cases, revisit previous incarnations in stories such as The Three Doctors (1972–1973) and The Five Doctors (1983), reflects Freud’s discussion of the double as a ‘preservation against extinction’.5 However, as Botting notes, a multiple interpretation of identity is ‘subject to a dispersion and multiplication of meanings … that obliterates the possibility of imagining any human order and unity’.6 In The Five Doctors, after suffering what he calls ‘cosmic angst’, the Fifth Doctor feels ‘great chunks of my past, detaching themselves like melting icebergs’. He later observes that ‘A man is the sum of his memories … A Time Lord even more so’ and thus within the Doctor there is a multiplicity of personalities and memories beneath the surface. The post-regeneration Doctor is confused as to what kind of person they are, and their likes and dislikes, causing further consternation to the mystified companions. Likewise, the age of the Doctor changes: in some incarnations he is older, such as the First and the Twelfth Doctors, others he is significantly younger, such as the

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Fifth and Eleventh Doctors. Although each incarnation is the same person with the same memories, the Doctor is not always recognised by the characters previously encountered. Sarah Jane Smith, who saw the regeneration of the Third Doctor and travelled with the Fourth Doctor, meets the Tenth Doctor in School Reunion (2006). Her interest is piqued as he introduces himself as ‘John Smith’, an alias used by the Doctor to integrate with human society. He becomes hidden in plain sight, exactly what is supposed to happen if the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit, which gives his vessel the ability to change and blend into its surroundings, worked effectively. The recognition between the Doctor and a supporting character is reversed in The Silence in the Library (2008). Professor River Song intimates she is very well acquainted with the Tenth Doctor’s future self and resists telling him ‘spoilers’ concerning his future on this and other occasions when they meet. Conversely, when the Eleventh Doctor meets with River, she more often than not knows about his future, but the Doctor also knows what will happen to her. In The Pandorica Opens (2010), Amy remarks to River that she (River) told the Doctor she would see him again when the Pandorica opens. River replies ‘Maybe I did, but I haven’t yet’. This exchange is weird in the Saxon meaning of the word. The paradox of two characters, each knowing aspects of the other’s future but not being in possession of the complete picture, gives the feeling that something is fated to happen. Indeed, in The Husbands of River Song (2015), River discovers that her diary is finally full and that she and the Doctor have finally caught up with each other’s timeline and that her death is immanent. The regeneration process now has a further element as it allows the Doctor to change gender as well as the physical body. The signals for a change of gender had been presented on several occasions before. In the Comic Relief spoof The Curse of the Fatal Death (1999), written by Steven Moffat, the Doctor battles his archenemy, the Master, and was seen in five incarnations, including Rowan Atkinson, Richard E. Grant and Joanna Lumley. Fans believed this short film was trying potential actors and actresses for the role in the future.7 When the Tenth Doctor regenerated into the Eleventh in The End of Time (2010) he questions whether or not he is a girl. In The Doctor’s Wife (2011), the Doctor speaks of a Time Lord known as the Corsair who changed gender on many occasions, while in the mini-episode The Night of the Doctor (2013), the Eighth Doctor is told that his regeneration does not have to be random: ‘Fat or thin; young or old; man or woman’. The eighth series has a story arc of a mysterious woman manipulating the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. In Dark Water (2014), the woman introduces herself as ‘Missy’, a female incarnation of the Master. In the season 10 finale, The Doctor Falls (2017), the Doctor is confronted by both male and female incarnations of the Master and is asked ‘Will the future be all girl?’, to which the Doctor replies ‘I hope so’. This exchange, fans speculated (correctly), was a suggestion that the doctor’s next incarnation would be female. A further example of the change of gender is the Time Lord General Kenossium. She was a woman for ten incarnations but is a man when seen in The Day of the Doctor (2013). For the next regeneration, in Hell Bent (2014), the General not only changes gender but also ethnicity. A change in ethnicity is also seen in one of River Song’s earlier incarnations when she called herself Mels.

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The decision to change the Doctor’s gender unsettled many fans at the time. That said, despite the new leading actor, the change in gender was not overly emphasised in the series, save for the Twelfth Doctor’s wedding ring symbolically falling from his finger during his regeneration and a few comic lines. In The Woman Who Fell to Earth (2018), the Thirteenth Doctor is confused when Yasmin refers to her as ‘madam’, and when she remembers she has regenerated, she asks ‘does it suit me?’ She further notes she was a white-haired Scotsman half an hour before and indeed retains the Twelfth Doctor’s masculine outfit for the majority of her first episode until she asserts herself and becomes the Doctor. Likewise, in Demons of the Punjab (2018), when the Doctor is invited to Umbreen’s ­pre-wedding celebrations, she comments she never did this when she was a man. To allay any confusion, she says any reference to the body and gender regeneration ‘are all in jest’. One major difference that the recent change of cast provides is that the narrative has moved away from the concept of the Doctor as a lonely man who entices (usually young) women and men into his life with the promise of adventure. The Thirteenth Doctor refers to her companions as ‘family’ on occasions. The gender regeneration theme of both the Doctor and the Master opens Doctor Who to a new discussion of transgender theory, and particularly echoes Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), where the character changes gender and lives for centuries interacting with characters from history. Wallace notes that for the Female Gothic, ‘texts are haunted by their predecessors and, in turn, haunt their descendants’.8 This will particularly be the case with the Thirteenth Doctor who represents a turning point in the serial and will always be judged against what has gone before, and she will be judged on what comes after. The regeneration process creates an uncertainty about sexuality and gender for the Doctor and those who meet him/her; in addition, the Doctor has concealed or repressed aspects of their personality. Morris notes that repression achieves its uncanny effect by forcing us to look into the inescapable aspects of our psyche that we have hitherto refused to acknowledge, but which may actually represent an unexpressed desire.9 When the Sixth Doctor is put on trial for violating the Time Lords’ non-interference policy in Trial of a Time Lord (1986), his prosecutor is called the Valeyard. It is later revealed that the Valeyard is made from the darker aspects of the Doctor’s future incarnations. The Valeyard acts as the prosecutor with the promise of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations should he successfully secure a guilty verdict. Furthermore, the Valeyard manipulates the Matrix—the Time Lords’ huge archive—to create a false record that presents the Doctor in a negative light. In a Time Lord’s paradox, this situation shows the Doctor working against himself as both prosecutor and defendant, self and other, to bring about his own defeat, ironically so his future incarnation can benefit from his past’s demise. This is a doubling effect as both present and future incarnations oppose each other, but on this occasion, the presence of the double, as Freud notes, is the harbinger of death.10 The Trial of a Time Lord shows a hidden facet of the Doctor of which he has hitherto been unaware—because it happens in his own future—there are two further occasions where the Doctor deliberately suppresses aspects of his identity. In Human Nature (2007) the Doctor actually becomes human and has false memories

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for his human alter ego to conceal himself from the Family of Blood. Even so, the Doctor’s true memories filter back to him through dreams, like a repressed trauma, to the extent that the human facet, ‘John Smith’, sees the concept of relinquishing his persona and becoming the Doctor as a form of suicide as John Smith will cease to exist. A third example of the suppressed ‘enemy within’ is the climax of the finale of the seventh season, The Name of the Doctor (2013). The Doctor reveals that his ‘name’, ‘Doctor’ is a promise, and there is an incarnation of himself he has repressed: ‘the one who broke the promise’ and who performed an action that was ‘not in the name of the Doctor’. This hidden incarnation is known as the War Doctor. His origins are briefly shown in a mini-episode entitled ‘Night of the Doctor’ which shows the Eighth Doctor crashing a spaceship into a planet. Temporarily restored by the Elixir of Life, the Doctor is both dead and not dead and in this liminal moment he is open to inspiration as he is no longer shackled by a physical form, time or ambition. He has hitherto avoided participating in the Time War, but if he does not intervene, it will mean the end of the Universe. Drinking from the chalice to trigger a regeneration that will save his life, the Doctor assumes a more cosmic role, quoting from Luke’s Gospel ‘Physician, heal thyself’. He ceases to be the Doctor and becomes a crusader, the War Doctor, who can end the Time War. In Dalek (2006), the Ninth Doctor laments that the Time War ended with the destruction of both the Daleks and the Time Lords, claiming ‘I had no choice’ and ‘everyone lost’, further underscoring the repression of trauma through his survivor’s guilt. It is only the collaboration of three doctors— the Tenth, Eleventh and War Doctor—in Day of the Doctor that finds a solution to destroy the Daleks but to place Gallifrey in a temporal stasis to remove it from the Time War. The War Doctor’s later incarnations have suppressed this moment through shame. Initially it is their unity in ending the war ‘neither through fear or hatred’ that begins the healing as the War Doctor was alone when he originally performed this deed. As the moment replays, he stands with two others who justify his actions. Through their confrontation with the past trauma, the later incarnations begin to accept the role the War Doctor played in their lives, shaping the people they will become—the Warrior, the Hero and the Doctor. They agree the War Doctor earned the right to be a Doctor more than any other incarnation as he was the Doctor ‘on the day it was impossible to get it right’. The TARDIS is a machine that can travel anywhere in time and space, and the first thing someone notices is that it is bigger on the inside. It is designed with a Chameleon circuit so it can change its form to blend in with its new environment, although this has malfunctioned and it is stuck in the shape of the blue Police box which was a familiar sight in 1960s England. The TARDIS is able to travel anywhere and anywhen with pinpoint accuracy, although there are many occasions where the Doctor and his companions may find themselves aeons away or on the opposite side of the universe from their intended destination. Thus, from the outset, there is a sense of uncertainty and slippage focused around the TARDIS. An apparently familiar object is not as it appears, both in terms of size and purpose as well as the uncertainty as to whether it will arrive at its intended destination.

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Time has many layers. We see this particularly in The Pandorica Opens when the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and River Song visit Stonehenge in Roman times. Amy wonders how the stones ‘are not new’; River tells her ‘Because it’s already old. It’s been here thousands of years’. This layering of history is also seen in the Third Doctor stories Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970) and The Sea Devils (1972). Both stories feature technologically advanced creatures from Earth’s prehistory that are woken in the present day and as Freud notes: something secret and hidden has been brought to light.11 In many of the stories featuring an historical event, the Doctor stresses the paramount importance of not interfering in history. This makes the environment psychologically oppressive as the characters, or the audience, see a moment in time they cannot escape, that something is fated to happen. This is the ‘fearful sense of inheritance’ and the ‘claustrophobic sense of enclosure’ that Baldick describes, except that on this occasion the confinement is not physical but both psychological and temporal.12 When Doctor Who first started, it was very much a part of the BBC’s mission to educate, inform and entertain. Although visiting alien planets on many occasions, the First Doctor and his companions (two of them school teachers) also visited eras of history, purely as observers. They cannot change the course of events, thus, at the end of The Aztecs (1964), Barbara laments she is unable to stop a ritual human sacrifice. She wonders what benefit there is in being able to travel through time if they are unable to prevent events from occurring, but the Doctor explains they cannot change time, but they can change the attitudes of a single person. Barbara has understood this lesson by the end of the season. In The Reign of Terror (1964), Ian attempts to prevent Maximilien Robespierre’s imprisonment to stop Napoleon from becoming emperor. Barbara realises the irony and futility of his efforts as it runs contrary to the history she knows. Although trapped by the progression of time, the characters are not free from the consequences of visiting an era. They are often placed in danger, and the story then revolves around the characters either needing to escape from their predicament without unravelling the fabric of time, or being in danger of changing history. In The Romans (1965), the Doctor assumes the identity of Maximus Pettulian, a lyre player who planned to assassinate emperor Nero. Ian is captured by slavers and is to be trained as a gladiator while Barbara is sold at a slave auction. On the other hand, Vicki sees poisoned goblets intended for Barbara and switches them, although she realises these are now being sent to Nero and the Doctor sees Vicki’s actions may have the effect of altering time. The accidental poisoning is prevented, but the Doctor inadvertently gives Nero the idea of burning Rome, setting time on the path that is recorded for us. Gradually, the character of the Doctor develops from observer to participant. In the final story of series 2, The Time Meddler (1965), the Doctor encounters the Monk—a renegade of his own race—who attempts to give the Saxons an advantage in the Battle of Hastings. Although the Time Lords are not named until The War Games (1969), The Time Meddler underscores their policy of ­non-interference in history. However, when the Sixth Doctor is accused of interfering by the Time Lords themselves in The Trial of a Time Lord, the Doctor defends

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himself by pointing out instances when he was asked to intervene in the story ‘Terror of the Vervoids’. There is an Arabic adage: Time doesn’t change, it reveals—for the characters in the Whoniverse, this can be interpreted that they cannot change events from the past, but their actions can explain why events happen. In The Visitation (1982), the dramatic irony is subtle: accidentally landing in the seventeenth century, the Fifth Doctor defeats the alien creatures in London by fire but is challenged by his companion, Tegan, as to why he left the scene rather than extinguishing the blaze. Despite it being a result of the Doctor’s actions, he suggests this fire should ‘run its course’. As the TARDIS dematerialises, it reveals the location as Pudding Lane and the start of the Great Fire of London. In Rosa (2018), the Thirteenth Doctor and her companions try to engineer Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat when an alien presence tries to disrupt her role in history. Here the Gothic is particularly unsettling: the fear of racial prejudice and violence, directed not only at the black community but also on members of the TARDIS crew. However, at the pivotal moment, the Doctor and her companions are unable to leave the bus and Rosa is told move to the segregated area for Graham. Not only is Graham a character who would give up his seat for another, but he also demonstrates his racial equality through his marriage to Grace and his evident, but unreciprocated, love for his step-grandson, Ryan. Graham finds it unsettling that he has caused this event to happen when the catalyst runs contrary to his moral fibre. Conversely, in Demons of the Punjab, set in 1947 during the Partition of India, another of the Thirteenth Doctor’s companions, Yasmin, witnesses historical events that reveal the emotionally painful omissions in her grandmother’s oral history. Throughout the story, the Doctor cautions Yaz about travelling back in time to meet her own family as any changes to the timeline has the potential of wiping Yaz out of existence. The Doctor and her companions participate in these events, allowing them to play out, and Yaz understands the truth about her family. Yaz’s family view the ultimately benevolent aliens as ‘demons’ as they can only interpret them in terms of their own cultural frames of reference. Their misconception generates a sense of fear for the locals as they face their literal and allegorical demons, which, as Freud notes, are ‘projections of man’s own emotional impulses’.13 However, there are rituals for protection from and for banishing demons. Aliens, however misunderstood, are not covered by these rites. The Doctor’s unwillingness to change time is sometimes at an emotional cost. The end of Earthshock (1982) saw one of the companions, Adric, killed while attempting to prevent a freighter from crashing into Earth (stopping the crash would have prevented the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs). In the following episode, Time-Flight (1982), one of the surviving companions, Tegan, begs the Fifth Doctor to use the TARDIS to travel back in time to save Adric. Despite his own grief, the Doctor refuses, noting, even with the TARDIS, there are laws which govern time, and which cannot be broken. This was the first death of a TARDIS companion since Sara Kingdom in The Daleks’ Masterplan (1966). Grief is often an integral part of gothic literature more generally, but the Doctor is unable to process his grief and more particularly he is bound by the consequences

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of his actions. In The Fires of Pompeii (2008), Donna begs the Tenth Doctor to warn the inhabitants of Pompeii before it is too late, but the Doctor explains about allowing time—and its catastrophic events—to run their course. However, the Doctor and Donna are faced with a grizzly choice, to allow the Earth to burn in the invasion of the Piroviles, or to trigger the eruption of Vesuvius which would destroy the Pyrovillian ship, but which would also kill the residents of Pompeii. The Doctor chooses the latter option as the lesser evil, but acknowledges that the eruption of Vesuvius is something that he has instigated, rather than a random moment of history, and holds himself accountable, saying ‘It’s not just history … it’s me’. Thus, at this stage, the Doctor is a hostage to time as much as anyone else. Towards the end of the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, in The Waters of Mars (2009) set in 2059, the Doctor travels to a human colony on Mars where he meets Adelaide Brooke, whose granddaughter pilots the Earth’s first lightspeed ship. The Doctor also knows the colonists will be killed on Mars. Yet, he also realises he is the only survivor of the Time War as now the Time Lords are all dead. Consequently, the Doctor becomes misguided by megalomania and as the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ believes he can alter fixed events, as there are no Time Lords to stop him. In this instance, his intervention is to prevent the destruction of the Mars colony and the deaths of ‘influential people’ such as the colonists. Such fixed events from our own timeline might include the Kennedy Assassination and 9/11, moments when the passage of history is apparently derailed and forced onto a new course. The Doctor crosses a psychological and moral boundary when he saves Brooke and returns her to Earth, telling her she can inspire her granddaughter in person.14 However, Brooke realises it is her death on Mars which inspires and she commits suicide, while the Doctor is left to consider the ramifications of his actions. It is usually the case that time does not change in the stories, or if it did, then it showed how events that were now recorded by history came about. However, in The Last of the Time Lords (2007), some fans were outraged when the companions manage to reverse time so the year of the Master’s domination over the Earth was erased. Likewise, in The Big Bang (2010), the Eleventh Doctor ‘resets’ the universe, but in doing so, he wipes himself out of existence. In the examples of Brooke and the Eleventh Doctor, the acts of suicide or self-annihilation are a means of returning time to the course that it should follow. The details surrounding Brooke’s death have changed, but her granddaughter still undertakes her pioneering journey. The Eleventh Doctor had planted clues for Amy to interpret so that she can remember him back into existence (although the ending feels like a dea ex machina, like Rose suddenly discovering the power to wipe out the Daleks in the 2005 season finale The Parting of the Ways). In The Day of the Doctor, when three Doctors meet, the Tenth Doctor asks if the Eleventh is suggesting they change their own history, to which the Eleventh replies ‘We change history all the time’. Although the later Doctors will forget their intervention in their own pasts, they are released from their traumas, and all three Doctors regenerate shortly afterwards.

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In the Whoniverse, time provides the enclosure and the weight of inheritance that Baldick suggests is necessary for the gothic effect.15 The characters are trapped with the knowledge that events must happen, people will die, but progress will be made. In effect, time is a labyrinth without walls that they have to follow, just as much as tunnels under the Castle of Otranto or the slums and backstreets of Victorian London. Sometimes the characters have foreknowledge, the equivalent of a map which will sometimes lead them towards a terrifying inevitability; sometimes they are unaware of what course time must take. They know they are unable to change the passage of time, but they can influence events, often unknowingly, so that time in the way that later history records it. As mentioned above, one of the appeals of Doctor Who is the audiences’ anticipation of being scared. The variety of aliens is one of the attractions of the Whoniverse. Some are benign, some are malevolent, while others appear horrendous, but are simply misunderstood. The second ever story of the serial featured the best known (and most commonly returning) of the Doctor’s enemies: The Daleks (1963–1964). These killing machines, bent on universal supremacy, were inspired by the Nazis. Although characterised their merciless domination, the metal, tank-like shells contain an organic host, the once-humanoid form of the Kaled, mutated by a neutronic war and now a mechanised organic entity. No doubt the descriptions of the neutronic war generated anxious reminders of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam as well as the comparatively recent Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. The Daleks’ abrasive electronic voices and the ability to kill without compunction served to terrorise the viewers, but in an enjoyable way. Onscreen deaths caused by the Daleks generally involved the sound of an electronic pulse for the laser, a flash and then a negative image of the victim screaming and falling. Arguably, when the stories were first transmitted, they were more innocent times, but such deaths were understated: the BBC would not show graphic violence. Consequently, the terror of these stories is psychological as the viewer must imagine what has happened. In addition, the Daleks evolve as the series progresses: when first seen, the Daleks’ movement is limited to their city, as the static electricity conducted through the metal floors powers them. In later stories such as The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), the Daleks have developed the technology so they do not need metal floors to conduct energy and can travel through London unaided. More recent stories, including Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) and Resolution (2019), show that the Daleks have developed the ability to fly. The earlier Dalek stories served to suggest the threat was no longer in distant space but had come to Earth, and, more specifically, to London, albeit a future London (2167 AD). The invasion would not occur in the lifetime of the viewers, but it would happen. Viewers had seen a glimpse of the future, and it was an event that could not be changed, just as the characters were bound by the passage of time. Just as the Daleks used the metal casings to survive, the series’ other major recurring villains are the Cybermen first seen in the First Doctor’s final story The Tenth Planet. Set in an isolated Antarctic base, the Cybermen arrive from Mondas, the Earth’s ‘twin’ planet, to steal Earth’s energy for themselves. There are some

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truly sinister moments: silent scenes set in the Antarctic wilderness where the Cybermen club the humans to death with a single blow. The whole feeling of these creatures attacking the claustrophobic base has echoes of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) and anticipates John Carpenter’s movie The Thing (1982). The Cybermen use technology to upgrade themselves cybernetically, irradiating any organic humanity as well as ‘weaknesses’ such as feelings and emotions. The beginning of this process is shown to the Twelfth Doctor in World Enough and Time (2017) where he encounters the Mondasian Cybermen who have been ‘upgraded’ to avoid the contamination of the lower decks of the ships. Rebuilding or upgrading an organic entity is reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s creature in Frankenstein (1818) who also delivers death without mercy. Furthermore, showing the Mondasian Cybermen before their arrival at Earth, and yet these are beings with whom the viewer is already familiar, is a form of Derridean hauntology where the viewer is presented with the paradox that the event is both a repetition and the first time it has been experienced.16 A scene that truly encapsulates the gothic mood is in the Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) when the Cybermen are awakened and tear their way out of the tomb, their jerky movements being closer to the undead rather than robotics, or, as Freud describes it, the uncanny feeling generated by a sentience within automata.17 In addition to upgrading themselves, Cybermen partially upgrade or assimilate humanity: like Frankenstein’s creature, these characters are pieced together, and they are feared by humanity. In The Invasion (1968), the human collaborator with the Cybermen, Tobias Vaughan, had only parts of his body modified: his mind and his humanity remain unchanged. In World Enough and Time, the Doctor’s companion, Bill Potts, is assimilated into a Cybermen and is seen crying within the facemask. The viewer is no longer sure whether Bill is alive or whether she has become a fully mechanised organic.18 If the latter, does she retain any humanity, or will she become part of the merciless conquering force of the Cybermen? The episode’s title refers to Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ where the narrator reflects on the transience of life, but what the Cybermen offer is an eradication of illness and old age, in essence a form of immortality, which is, as Adorno notes, a form of utopian consciousness.19 When the first Cybermen story was broadcast, the costumes were limited. In The Tenth Planet, their facemasks are made from fabric—the shape of the nose is visible—but of particular note is the exaggerated features of the eyes and mouth. These characteristics are reminiscent of a popular entertainment show at the time, The Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978) and suggest an anxiety against the ethnic other coming to Britain and stealing resources. By the time of the Cybermen’s second appearance in The Moonbase (1967) such racist parallels have been erased. The masks are metal over featureless faces, grotesque expressions of terror and inhumanity. They are the death masks of the revenant. These masks find their gothic roots in the masque balls of the eighteenth century, where, as Spooner notes, they ‘simultaneously reveal and conceal’.20 In The Tenth Planet, they might

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be seen as further dehumanising the colonial ‘other’, or perhaps concealing the ‘other within’. The arrival of the Daleks in Britain can be read in terms of the early major gothic novels: texts such as The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Monk (1796) are set in Continental Europe and in the past. By the time we reach Frankenstein (1818), Victor passes through England on his way to Scotland; by the end of the century, the ‘other’ was firmly established in England, through the external threat of the Count in Dracula (1897), and the enemy within, seen in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The alien other comes ever closer and nearer in time. The first story featuring the Cybermen brought the threat of invasion by an emotionless killing machine much closer—The Tenth Planet was set in 1986—less than two decades away from the time of the viewers. Their final encounter with the Second Doctor, The Invasion, is set in 1979 bringing the menace to just over a decade away from the viewers. The Daleks and the Cybermen have created their own mythologies in the Whoniverse as well as popular culture more generally. The first audiences, who had never seen anything like them before, must have found them truly terrifying, but at least the stories were set on distant planets or, if on the Earth, they were set in the future. However, the change of direction in 1970 brought the enemy much closer to home. In the Second Doctor’s final story, The War Games, the Time Lords note the Doctor’s penchant for meddling in affairs, but accept such action is justified on occasions. The Doctor’s punishment is to regenerate and to be exiled on Earth towards the end of the twentieth century. There are recognisably futuristic motifs such as manned missions to Mars; however, many of the Third Doctor’s stories focus on elements from the real-world of the contemporary viewer. An example of this is the Nestenes, seen in the Third Doctor stories Spearhead from Space (1970) and Terror of the Autons (1971) where department store mannequins become animated and replace principal military and government personnel (and this story shares many similarities with the TV serial Quatermass II). The ways that Doctor Who defamiliarise the familiar will be further explored later in this chapter. Along with the new Doctor and the first episodes broadcast in colour in 1970, there was a new recurring villain. He was one of the Doctor’s own race who said he was known as the ‘Master’. The producers had said they wanted a character who looked like the Devil himself; he was to be the Moriarty to challenge the Doctor’s Holmes with looks and the powers of Svengali. The Master’s motivation was to control the universe—to become the Master of all Masters. He claimed to want to destroy the Doctor, but in doing so he would destroy the only being in the universe like him, his only worthy adversary. Consequently, in The Sea Devils, the Master redefines his motivations as seeking the pleasure of destroying the human race of which the Doctor is so fond. While the Master is said to be the embodiment of evil in all that he does, it is in The Dæmons (1971) where he assumes the role of the clergyman leading a black mass and where he summons a d­ evil-like form, Azal. This creature is not the Devil, of course, but

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the last survivor of an alien race that has intervened at principal points in history to inspire humanity to evolve from its present state, for example, Homo Sapiens overcoming the Neanderthals; the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. The inspiration for alien races intervening with human evolution is drawn from the BBC TV serial Quatermass and the Pit and seen again in The Ark in Space (1975). The Dæmons also echoes the mood of Dennis Wheatley novels and Hammer Horror films. Among the gothic motifs in this story is the suggestion that the folk rituals are not as innocent as they first appear: it is seen again in films such as The Wicker Man (1973). In The Dæmons, the Morris Dancers capture the Doctor and plan to sacrifice him at the maypole. As Trubshaw argues, horror is derived from rituals that, to the modern viewer, appear innocent but which recall England’s ancient history and the suggestion something is hidden in the landscape, and in the Whoniverse, this history can (and does) come to the surface.21 Just as Azal in The Dæmons is shown to be an alien in the form of the Devil, the Tenth Doctor encounters a creature called the Beast in The Satan Pit (2006) who appears to be the embodiment of the Devil, indeed it is suggested it may be the inspiration for the horned devils in a multitude of religions. Facing the Beast forces the Doctor to confront his own beliefs. He feels the concept of a single Devil for all religions is an impossibility and makes a conscious choice not to understand the nature and the influence of the Beast. Later, in The Pilot (2017), the Twelfth Doctor explains that evil is a matter of perspective, just as ‘hunger looks like evil from the wrong end of the cutlery’. Often what is perceived as evil is something that is misunderstood and scares us. Freud speaks of silence, solitude and darkness as infantile anxieties of which we have never truly become free.22 These are elements particularly explored in the Reboot Series. In Silence in the Library, the Doctor notes ‘Almost every species in the Universe has an irrational fear of the dark. But they’re wrong. Cause it’s not irrational’. They discover a conscious (and hungry) entity lurking within the shadows. In Deep Breath (2014), Clara and the Twelfth Doctor must emulate robots and hold their breaths to avoid detection. In Listen (2014), the Doctor considers whether one is ever truly alone, or whether a creature which has perfected camouflage is always with us. Listen plays on the childish fear of the creature under the bed, as well as exploring the Doctor’s own fear of the dark, but it uses these devices to demonstrate fear can be enabling if managed appropriately. It is one thing to be scared by Daleks, Cybermen and apparent manifestations of the Devil, but part of the power of Doctor Who is the ability to make commonplace objects terrifying. We have seen an example of this when shop mannequins come to life and become homicidal—these are the creatures the Ninth Doctor faces in the first episode of the Reboot Series, Rose (2005), and likewise Roboforms dressed as murderous Santa Clauses smell the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration energy and use Christmas trees and explosive ornaments as weapons in The Christmas Invasion (2005). Other examples of making the familiar an object of terror include: the possibility of the Royal Family being lycanthropes after a werewolf attacks Queen Victoria in Tooth and Claw (2006); a little girl’s drawings trap the subject on the page in Fear Her (2006); television sets which become

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possessed by an alien presence, sucking viewers’ brainwaves and faces into the television in The Idiot’s Lantern (2006); a crack in the wall which turns out to be a crack in the universe in The Eleventh Hour (2010); the wi-fi which uploads souls for food in The Bells of St John (2013) and in The Pilot, Bill notices something wrong with her image in a mysterious puddle where her friend has disappeared, but cannot work out what until the Twelfth Doctor points out ‘It’s not reflecting you, it’s mimicking you’: the puddle is sentient. More recently, the story Kerblam! (2018) showed how the innocent action of popping bubble wrap has deadly effects. Adding a threat to commonplace objects serves to defamiliarise them for the viewers.23 Understandably, one of the most frightening episodes contains many gothic elements. The terror generated in Blink (2007) comes from a fear of familiar objects—statues—as well as danger in the simple act of blinking. In this episode, a young photographer, Sally Sparrow, explores an old house. The house was once a home, but now it is derelict, not a place where anyone could live. It is therefore ‘unhomely’ or unheimlich. Sally tears away wallpaper—literally stripping away the layers of the past—to discover a message written by the Tenth Doctor in 1969 specifically for her: Beware the Weeping Angels. This creates the sense that something has been fated to happen, and has the hallmarks of an ancient prophecy. When Sally returns to the house the following day with her friend Kathy, they are distracted by a man who claims he was told by his grandmother to deliver a letter to her at this particular day and time. In the meantime, Kathy has been touched by an Angel and sent back in time. Kathy is the messenger’s grandmother. The Weeping Angels have the form of angels who cover their faces with their hands, appearing as statues from a graveyard. With their faces covered in grief, they appear benevolent, lamenting and watching over the dead. However, their purpose is the opposite. They are alien assassins. Unwatched, the Angels move at a lightning-fast speed, touching their victim and sending them back into the past, feeding off the energy of the lives they never had. They cannot move when they are observed and their hands cover their faces as a means of defence, so they do not look at each other. Their movement is a form of animism, an uncanny feeling generated by the irrational belief that a statue, an inanimate object, is possessed with the ability to move and even with consciousness. In Blink, rain is used as a metonym to underscore the oppressive mood, but it is also poignant: it is raining when Sally meets the young and handsome police officer, Billy, immediately before he is touched by the Angel. A short time later, when Sally next sees him, he is an old man, knowing the end of the rain is the herald of his death. He remarks that it was raining on the day that they met, and Sally replies ‘It’s the same rain’. For Sally it has been a matter of minutes; for Billy, it has been a whole lifetime. Despite Billy’s happy memories, his life is one that he should not have lived, and all of his aspirations from the time before he was touched by the Angel remain unfulfilled. He essentially becomes a ghost haunting himself. Another method the Doctor uses to communicate with Sally is through Easter Eggs—hidden content on DVDs. This content refuses to stay paused, startling

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the characters as it almost seems sentient; this unbidden movement echoes as the Angels move when they should stay still. Initially only hearing one side of the conversation, later Sally and the Doctor seem to have a conversation across time, although, unnervingly, the Doctor already knows what Sally is going to say. But, entreating Sally for help, he delivers a chilling warning: ‘Blink and you’re dead’. As Blink reaches its conclusion, Sally and her friend Larry are trapped in the house with the Angels closing in on them. The house becomes a graveyard filled with these tombstone effigies. Sally becomes the gothic heroine, the woman in distress, but even though she is frightened, she is not the trembling, defenceless victim that Moers describes.24 Instead, she remains strong in the face of adversity. In the final scenes, the terror becomes paramount as the characters, surrounded by Angels, attempt to keep their eyes open, knowing if they look away or blink, they will die. But even this isn’t enough to keep them safe. Trapping Sally and Larry in the cellar, the Angels cause the lights to flicker so they can advance on them, revealing their terrifying countenances, fangs and claws. Sally and Larry manage to reach the TARDIS which dematerialises around them, and the Angels, who have all looked at each other, are unable to move again. Sally and Larry escape, but the final shots of the episode show many statues around the city, any of which could be Angels, with the repeated voice-over of the Doctor’s warning. It is impossible to cover all the gothic elements on a serial that has run for nearly 60 years. If space had allowed, this chapter would have explored elements of the Victorian Gothic, such as the Fourth Doctor stories The Talons of ­Weng-Chiang (1977) in which the Doctor dons a Sherlock Holmes outfit to investigate the disappearance of women following a stage show, his adversaries include an animated ventriloquist’s dummy, and the setting is the foggy, labyrinthine London streets and the sewers beneath the theatre. Another aspect I should have liked to cover are the stories that are a pastiche of Hammer films such as Pyramids of Mars (1975) and The Brain of Morbius (1976) as well as the depictions of vampires encountered by the Fourth Doctor in State of Decay (1980) and which he also links to Gallifreyan mythology; they are presented as haemovores in The Curse of Fenric (1989), while in The Vampires of Venice (2010), the fishlike Saturnyns drain humans of their blood and replace it with Saturnyn blood. A further topic would be the use of abstract space, particular the Escher-style corridors in Castrovalva (1982) on the fact that Amy’s house has too many rooms in The Eleventh Hour, or how many stories return to the location where the series started, Coal Hill School and the junkyard at 76 Trotter’s Lane. This discussion has demonstrated that the devices that have sustained Doctor Who’s longevity are also those that contribute to the ‘Uncanny’ effect. Once a mysterious, crotchety old man in a time machine, the Doctor has changed face, body, age, personality and gender, and is now an amiable and compassionate young woman with a familial relationship with her companions. With Doctor Who being a cornerstone of British popular culture, each viewer will have their favourite incarnation of the Doctor. Faithful viewers of the Reboot series realise that the Doctor has a long mythology from before 2005, but even in this, the Doctor’s name and origins are unknown. The signature blue box, bigger on the inside, has the ability

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to travel anywhere in time and space, which should be the ultimate freedom. Yet, the characters are confined by time—the consequences are that they must either observe or set events into motion. Equally familiar are some of the villains— Daleks and Cybermen are mechanised organics who have their own mythology within the Whoniverse. They are familiar, and yet terrifying in that familiarity. The same can be said of the Master who has been reinvented to catch viewers by surprise including a change of gender and even ethnicity as seen in Spyfall Part 1 (2020). The Master is as inhuman as the Daleks and yet the character shares an as yet unrevealed origin with the Doctor. However, we have moved away from the days of watching the programme from behind the sofa. One of the messages is that fear can be enabling, but even so, the programme subtly takes familiar objects and actions and injects them with terror, making us think twice about popping bubble wrap, being alone (or, more distressingly, never being alone), or finding ourselves in the dark. Or being given a warning: Don’t Blink. Good luck.

Notes

1. Jonathan Rigby, English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015 (Cambridge, Signum, 2015), 360. 2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name’, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 7. 3. The term ‘regenerate’ is not used until the Third Doctor’s final story The Planet of the Spiders (1974). 4. Monica Germanà, ‘In and Outside Post-devolution Scotland: Scottish National Identity and Contemporary Woman Writers’, Re-visioning Scotland, ed. Lyndsay Lunan, Kirsty A. Macdonald, and Carla Sassi (Bern, Peter Lang, 2008), 84. 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachley (London, Random House, 1955), 235. 6. Fred Botting, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1995), 157. 7. Richard E. Grant would voice the Doctor in the BBC animated story Scream of the Shalka (2003) and played Dr Walter Simeon in The Snowmen (2012) and The Name of the Doctor (2013), and the Great Intelligence in The Bells of Saint John (2013). 8. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013), 132. 9. David B. Morris, ‘Gothic Sublimity’, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 2 (1985), 307. 10. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 235. 11. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 225. 12. Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), xix. 13. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 243. 14. Jerrold E Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 15. Baldick, ‘Introduction’, xix. 16. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London, Routledge, 1994), 10. 17. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 226. 18. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 227, 233.

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19. Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1988), 8. 20. Catherine Spooner, ‘Masks, Veils, and Disguises’, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic: L-Z, 2nd vol., ed. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 424. 21. Bob Trubshaw, Explore Folklore (Wymeswold, Heart of Albion Press, 2010), 85. 22. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 252. 23. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, 221. 24. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London, The Women’s Press, 1978), 137.

Bibliography Baldick, Chris. ‘Introduction’. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. Bloch, Ernst. ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1988. 1–17. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London, Routledge, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name’. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1988. 1–38. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London, Routledge, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The “Uncanny”’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Trans. James Strachley. London, Random House, 1955. Germanà, Monica. ‘In and Outside Post-devolution Scotland: Scottish National Identity and Contemporary Woman Writers’. Re-visioning Scotland. Ed. Lyndsay Lunan, Kirsty A. Macdonald, and Carla Sassi. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 81–100. Hogle, Jerrold E. ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1–20. Lofficier, Jean-Marc & Randy. The Doctor Who Programme Guide. 4th ed. Lincoln, NE, Mystery Writers of America Presents, 2003. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. London, The Women’s Press, 1978. Morris, David B. ‘Gothic Sublimity’. New Literary History. Vol. 16, no. 2, 1985. 299–319. Rigby, Jonathan. English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015. Cambridge: Signum, 2015. Smith, Paul. The New Who Programme Guide. London, Wonderful Books, 2015. Spooner, Catherine. ‘Masks, Veils, and Disguises’. The Encyclopedia of the Gothic: L-Z. 2nd vol. Ed. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 421–424. Trubshaw, Bob. Explore Folklore. Wymeswold, Heart of Albion Press, 2010. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013.

Filmography An Unearthly Child, dir. Hussein, Waris (23 November–14 December 1963). The Ark in Space, dir. Bennett, Rodney (25 January–15 February 1975). The Aztecs, dir. Crockett, John (13 June–23 May 1964).

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The Bells of St John, dir. McCarthy, Colm (30 March 2013). The Big Bang, dir. Haynes, Toby (26 June 2010). Blink, dir. MacDonald, Hettie (9 June 2007). The Brain of Morbius, dir. Barry, Christopher (3–24 January 1976). Castrovalva, dir. Cumming, Fiona (4–12 January 1982). The Christmas Invasion, dir. Hawes, James (25 December 2015). The Curse of Fenric, dir. Mallett, Nicholas, and Nathan-Turner, John (25 October–15 November 1989). The Curse of the Fatal Death, dir. Henderson, John (12 March 1999). The Dæmons, dir. Barry, Christopher (22 May–19 June 1971). Dalek, dir. Ahearne, Joe (30 April 2005). The Dalek Invasion of Earth, dir. Martin, Richard (21 November–26 December 1964). The Daleks, dir. Barry, Christopher, and Martin, Richard (21 December 1963–1 February 1964). The Daleks’ Master Plan, dir. Camfield, Douglas (13 November 1965–29 January 1966). Dark Water, dir. Talalay, Rachel (1 November 2014). The Day of the Doctor, dir. Hurran, Nick (23 November 2013). Deep Breath, dir. Wheatley, Ben (23 August 2014). Demons of the Punjab, dir. Childs, Jamie (11 November 2018). The Doctor Falls, dir. Talalay, Rachel (1 July 2017). The Doctor’s Wife, dir. Clark, Richard (14 May 2011). Doctor Who and the Silurians, dir. Combe, Timothy (31 January–14 March 1970). Doctor Who, dir. Sax, Geoffrey (27 May 1996). Earthshock, dir. Grimwade, Peter (8–16 March 1982). The Eleventh Hour, dir. Smith, Adam (3 April 2010). The End of Time, dir. Lyn, Euros (25 December 2009–1 January 2010). Fear Her, dir. Lyn, Euros (24 June 2006). The Fires of Pompeii, dir. Teague, Colin (12 April 2008). The Five Doctors, dir. Nathan-Turner, John, Moffatt, Peter, and Roberts, Pennant (23 November 1983). Hell Bent, dir. Talalay, Rachel (5 December 2015). Human Nature, dir. Palmer, Charles (26 May 2007). The Husbands of River Song, dir. Mackinnon, Douglas (25 December 2015). The Idiot’s Lantern, dir. Lyn, Euros (27 May 2006). The Invasion, dir. Camfield, Douglas (2 November–21 December 1968). Kerblam!, dir. Perrott, Jennifer (30 March 2013–18 November 2018). The Last of the Time Lords, dir. Teague, Colin (30 June 2007). Let’s Kill Hitler, dir. Senior, Richard (27 August 2011). Listen, dir. Mackinnon, Douglas (13 September 2014). The Moonbase, dir. Barry, Morris (11 February–4 March 1967). The Name of the Doctor, dir. Metzstein, Saul (18 May 2013). The Night of the Doctor, dir. Haynes, John (14 November 2013). The Pandorica Opens, dir. Haynes, Toby (19 June 2010). The Parting of the Ways, dir. Ahearne, Joe (18 June 2005). The Pilot, dir. Gough, Lawrence (15 April 2017). Pyramids of Mars, dir. Russell, Paddy (25 October–15 November 1975). The Reign of Terror, dir. Hirsch, Henric (8 August–12 September 1964). Remembrance of the Daleks, dir. Morgan, Andrew (5–26 October 1988). Resolution, dir. Childs, Jamie (1 January 2019). The Romans, dir. Barry, Christopher (16 January–6 February 1965). Rosa, dir. Tonderai, Mark (21 October 2018). Rose, dir. Boak, Keith (26 March 2015). The Satan Pit, dir. Strong, James (10 June 2006). School Reunion, dir. Hawes, James (29 April 2006). The Sea Devils, dir. Briant, Michael E. (26 February–1 April 1972).

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Silence in the Library, dir. Lyn, Euros (31 May 2008). Spearhead from Space, dir. Martinus, Derek (3–24 January 1970). Spyfall Part 1, dir. Stone, Jamie (1 January 2020). State of Decay, dir. Moffatt, Peter (22 November–13 December 1980). Survival, dir. Waring, Alan (22 November–6 December 1989). The Talons of Weng-Chiang, dir. Maloney, David (26 February–2 April 1977). The Tenth Planet, dir. Martinus, Derek (8–29 October 1966). Terror of the Autons, dir. Letts, Barry (2–23 January 1971). The Three Doctors, dir. Mayne, Lennie (30 December 1972–20 January 1973). Time-Flight, dir. Jones, Ron (22–30 March 1982). The Time Meddler, dir. Camfield, Douglas (3–24 July 1965). The Trial of a Time Lord, dir. Mallett, Nicholas, Jones, Ron, and Clough, Chris (6 September–6 December 1986). Tomb of the Cybermen, dir. Barry, Morris (2–23 September 1967). Tooth and Claw, dir. Lyn, Euros (22 April 2006). Twice Upon a Time, dir. Talalay, Rachel (25 December 2017). The Vampires of Venice, dir. Campbell, Jonny (8 May 2010). The Visitation, dir. Moffatt, Peter (15–23 February 1982). The War Games, dir. Maloney, David (19 April–21 June 1969). The Waters of Mars, dir. Harper, Graeme (15 December 2009). The Woman Who Fell to Earth, dir. Childs, Jamie (7 October 2018). World Enough and Time, dir. Talalay, Rachel (24 June 2017).

Nigel Kneale and Quatermass J. S. Mackley

Nigel Kneale’s best-known creation, the pioneering rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass, has influenced how television drama developed as a medium and has become an icon of science fiction and horror. During the 1950s, the BBC commissioned the first three series, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. A final series, entitled Quatermass (retitled The Quatermass Conclusion for a shorter theatrical release) was commissioned in 1978. The 1950s stories, broadcast when the space race was just beginning, reflected some of the anxieties of space exploration: what happened if something was brought back from space? What if aliens were already among us? What if aliens had landed on Earth millions of years ago? The 1978 series echoes this last question: what alien mysteries lie beneath England’s soil? This chapter will explore the four Quatermass series and another of Kneale’s television dramas, The Stone Tape, to show how gothic motifs have been used throughout to create mood through superstition and pushing the boundaries of science. They also draw on social tensions of the time, while creating a claustrophobic menace generating an ‘Uncanny’ mood. Thomas Nigel Kneale was born on 22 April 1922 in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire. His family had been farmers on the Isle of Man, but the economic situation had forced them to sell their farm. His father worked as a journalist in Barrow and Bolton, but the family returned to the Isle of Man when Kneale became ill. His father subsequently became the owner and editor of The Herald, one of the Manx newspapers.1 Being steeped in history and folklore, the Manx traditions influenced Kneale’s imagination as he developed and wrote stories about his childhood.2 Kneale had initially studied law but went on to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). The Second World War interrupted his studies, and although Kneale attempted to enlist, he was rejected because of his

J. S. Mackley (*)  University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_48

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photophobia—sensitivity to the perception of light. During this time, one of his stories, a live reading of ‘Tomato Cain’, featured on a radio strand called Stories by Northern Authors,3 he was also publishing short stories in magazines such as Convoy and The Strand. Although his screen credits were always ‘Nigel Kneale’, his family and friends knew him as ‘Tom’. Kneale graduated from RADA in 1948 and the following year he published a collection of short stories for which he won the Somerset Maughan award.4 Kneale’s first scriptwriting credit for the BBC was for a 1950 radio drama called ‘The Long Stairs’ about a mining disaster on the Isle of Man. He started work at the BBC in London 1951 doing ‘odd jobs’ as a staff writer. The BBC had resumed television broadcasting in 1946 after being closed down during wartime and the concept of a visual medium was still embryonic. Kneale felt many productions were viewed as ‘wireless with pictures’. Consequently, the limited production output of just a few hours each day focused on adaptations of theatrical plays and novels, rather than commissioning original drama. It was in this environment that Kneale met Rudolph Cartier when they worked together on the BBC ­Sunday-Night Theatre production of ‘Arrow to the Heart’ for which Kneale wrote ‘additional dialogue’.5 Kneale also met Judith Kerr, another screenwriter at the BBC: she assisted with some of the special effects for The Quatermass Experiment, and they married in 1954.6 The anticipation of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 saw the building of additional television transmitters and the purchase and renting of around 2.7 million household television sets. Just six weeks after the Coronation—18 July—the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast.7 The BBC had commissioned the series because of a gap in the scheduling during the holiday season when low-viewing figures were anticipated. Six 30-minute episodes were required for Saturday evenings. Kneale worked with Cartier as his producer, planning a contemporary thriller about an ill-fated rocket mission. The series had the working title of ‘Bring Something Back’—in essence, a story concerned with revenants, but these were revenants from space, rather than from a graveyard. The premise for the programme was for ‘adult’ science fiction, with the protagonist being a respectable, pioneering scientist who had inadvertently brought about a predicament beyond his—and indeed, the entire world’s— understanding. This was a warning about mankind using science to overreach, in this case reaching to the stars, and the consequences of undertaking these explorations. The name of the principal character was Bernard Quatermass—his first name was taken from Bernard Lovell, the radio astronomer who founded the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire. Kneale chose the surname from the telephone book but felt the Qu-prefix had Manx resonances.8 Kneale was given only a short time to write the series. By the time the first episode was broadcast, only four of the six episodes had been written so neither the actors nor the production team, knew how the series would be resolved. This uncertainty translated into part of the tension generated in the serial. Indeed, the principal actor, Reginald Tate, and the title (changed from The Unbegotten) were

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confirmed only a week before filming. Furthermore, the BBC had released only a few details of the story so as not to lessen the programme’s impact.9 There had been plans to record all of the episodes but, after the first two, the recordings were considered of insufficient technical quality.10 Consequently—as was the usual practice of the time—the remaining episodes were performed live and not filmed. These two episodes are all that remain in the BBC archives, the rest are ghosts recalled in the memories of those who viewed them when they were shown.11 In the surviving episodes, the feeling is necessarily claustrophobic. Most of it was filmed at the BBC’s studios at Alexandra Palace, but the limited budget required the cameras’ focus to be small, for example, the opening scene in the cramped control room. On the other hand, the set of a house, partially demolished by a rocket (and in 1953, the characters’ fears of an unexploded a bomb were entirely understandable), was radically different to anything the BBC had previously attempted. All three of the 1950s series were filmed in monochrome creating an atmospheric chiaroscuro impression that Groom argues is effectively used in gothic cinema. In particular is the clever use of light and shadow to create the mood and to convey the characters’ internal conflicts.12 In 1955, Hammer Film Productions made a feature-length film entitled The Quatermass Xperiment directed by Val Guest.13 As Pirie notes, the content was a stark variation from the usual themes of Hammer films.14 This version was, until 2005, the only complete version of the story. Kneale was critical of the production, because the principal actor, Brian Donlevy, played Quatermass as a bully, as well as the film’s violent ending.15 In 2005, when the BBC began to transmit its digital channels, The Quatermass Experiment was chosen as a programme in the ‘TV on Trial’ series, performed live at the time of broadcast. This was the first live drama for the BBC in over 20 years.16 Ironically, what had been the norm when Quatermass was the first broadcast was now a rare occurrence. The film starred Jason Flemyng as a considerably younger Quatermass than Tate; the production also starred Mark Gatiss and David Tennant.17 The modern version of The Quatermass Experiment opens with the instantly recognisable music of ‘Mars: The Bringer of War’ from Gustav Holst’s Planets, which establishes both the interstellar theme of the narrative as well as rumblings of a threat. Wheatley notes that by bringing these aural and visual fears into the domestic space, it serves to make it ‘unhomely’.18 As a piece of live television, the 2005 version made exceptional use of space with one particular seamless shot from a press briefing, to the team running through the corridor, to the medical room, emphasising just how enclosed and claustrophobic the environment was. In addition, there was the added adrenaline of the actors undertaking the live performance which increased the tension for the viewer.19 The story mentions specific areas of London which provides a sense of familiarity, but these locations are subtly changed. In addition, the programme has a contemporary BBC newsreader, Jane Hill, presenting a bulletin about the events in the story, thus giving an additional level of authority, like the journalist in The War of the Worlds, or the letters, newspaper cuttings, and diary entries in Dracula.

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Unlike gothic tales where the menace is set a long time ago and in a distant land, The Quatermass Experiment is set in a recognisable present (or recognisably plausible near future) and locations with which viewers would be familiar: suburban London. The title sequence moves from monochrome to colour effectively to bring the story from the past to the present day. The story begins with the return of the first manned mission into space for the British Experimental Rocket Group led by Quatermass. After losing contact with the rocket for 56 hours, it transpires it had travelled half a million miles from Earth and, when it returns, it crashes into Wimbledon Common. When the rocket is opened, Quatermass discovers only one of the three astronauts, Victor Caroon, still inside—the other two have vanished without trace. The rocket team play a film of events leading up to the rocket crew’s disappearance, and Caroon answers to the name of one of his crewmates and speaks in German. Furthermore, the audio recording from the Black Box reveals that something came into the spacecraft and stayed inside Caroon. The irony is that Caroon said he would ‘bring something back’ for Judith, this wife, but he never considered that what he brought back could end humanity. It becomes apparent Caroon has absorbed the essence of his companions. The crewmen are dead, but their personalities still exist in Caroon’s rapidly transforming body. The alien presence causes a dissolution of the superego, leaving the id to develop unchecked. The science fiction elements of the story are minimal. It mostly focuses on Judith Caroon trying to establish what has happened to her husband and witnessing his physical and psychological degradation. Coupled with the guilt of her having an affair with the Rocket Group’s medical doctor, Gordon Briscoe, her feelings are torn between the two. In the meantime, Quatermass deals with the horror of Caroon’s transformation, his inhuman intelligence, his escape, and the threat he poses to mankind. Caroon represents ‘the other’ which separates him from his humanity, and at the same time, he assimilates the personalities of the two other astronauts.20 Yet, the entity emerges from within Caroon, like Dr. Jekyll, although in this case the transformation is brought about by a potentially intelligent space virus which, paradoxically, has no form and yet can attack and assimilate matter. Realising the creature could release deadly spores to wipe out humanity, Quatermass delivers an impassioned message to the nation, begging for their forgiveness. This confession can be seen as seeking absolution before confronting the creature in what is potentially a moment of self-sacrifice. In the 1953 series, the final confrontation with the Caroon-creature is at Westminster Abbey, a location firmly entrenched in the viewers’ collective consciousness following the Coronation. Because of the limited budget and filming prohibitions at Westminster Abbey, Kneale, and Kerr achieved the effects by enlarging a photograph of the Abbey, and cutting two holes through which Kneale poked his hands, dressed in leather gloves and foliage.21 But, for the most part, the horror of The Quatermass Experiment took place off-screen, and thus in the viewers’ imaginations. In the Hammer version, the horror is more explicit: the creature is electrocuted. Conversely, in the 2005 version, religion is traded for art as

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the Caroon-creature takes over the Tate Modern. Here, Quatermass appeals to the humanity within the creature and manages to awaken the last vestiges of the superego of the three crewmen whose collective efforts destroy the alien presence from inside, and once this has been achieved, Quatermass receives redemption from his past actions. The Quatermass Experiment has its roots in travellers’ tales, the story of the Marie Celeste, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901). It also draws on the social anxieties of the time. The idea of an outside broadcast stood at the boundaries of technical advances: when first broadcast in 1953, it was just eight years after the end of World War II and there was still an air of mistrust as the nation started to rebuild itself. Rationing was still imposed in Britain. The Korean war, in which British troops had been engaged, had ended just days before the first broadcast. The Soviet Union had accelerated their programme to develop the hydrogen bomb. At the same time, both the Americans and the Soviets were experimenting with German V2 rockets to develop their space programmes. Quatermass anticipated use of nuclear propulsion and the launch of an artificial satellite into orbit. One of the principal concerns about space exploration was that a mission might bring something back. This was not a nightmare of science fiction, but a genuine concern about possible contamination. Thus, Kneale melded the latest technological developments with the prevalent paranoia and anxieties about the consequences of mankind trying to overcome human limitations but actually overreaching with science. While society sees Caroon as a hero, internally he is punished for his hubris, for his participation in travelling beyond the boundaries of man, and for this he is transformed into an entity who has within him the power to destroy mankind. The BBC recognised the 1953 broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment as a success, reaching an audience of over five million for its last episode. Kneale and Cartier worked together again on other BBC adaptations including Wuthering Heights and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latter came under fierce criticism for its shocking content, to the extent it was debated in Parliament, until the Duke of Edinburgh spoke favourably about the programme, a comment that suddenly reversed the negativity. A month after Hammer film The Quatermass Xperiment was released in British cinemas in 1955, a second serial, Quatermass II, was broadcast.22 The BBC was now in competition with the new commercial television channel, ITV. Reginald Tate, the actor in the original Quatermass series, died shortly before he could reprise his role.23 He was replaced by John Robinson, who, cast at short notice, had difficulties learning the technical dialogue—he reportedly had his lines on a clipboard because they were so complicated.24 Once again, this was a story for adults and episode 4 began with a warning that it was ‘unsuitable for children and those with a nervous disposition’. In this series, meteorites fall to the earth containing an alien consciousness which transfers to humanity, leaving a small mark on their hosts. Quatermass, reeling from the explosion of one of his experimental rockets, discovers a ­military-guarded, Government Research Centre in England which has structures

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identical to those he’d designed for colonising the moon. He learns nothing from the local workers who have been warned: ‘Talk about your job and you lose it’. Working with a small team, he suspects a Government cover-up, and even when he questions the police, he is warned it is out of their jurisdiction. Progressing his enquiry to the Ministry, Quatermass is told the purpose of Winnerden Flats is to make synthetic food, but he discovers that many Government officials have been possessed by the alien consciousness. Quatermass realises the meteorites originate from an asteroid orbiting on the dark side of the Earth. Gaining access to the ‘food refinery’, he finds the domes contain ammonia-smelling slime, a corrosive poison, deadly to every living thing on Earth, which suggests the life forms come from one of Saturn’s moons. He surmises that the alien consciousness cannot survive long in the Earth’s atmosphere and needs to possess human minds to create a collective consciousness. The meteorites—which have been arriving for a year—are the reconnaissance phase before a general invasion. Quatermass infiltrates the plant and discovers the ‘slime’ in the refineries is used to grow the alien entities. He uses his second experimental rocket—Quatermass II—to destroy the asteroid, learning that his first rocket was sabotaged by the alien consciousness. Quatermass releases the nuclear motor on the asteroid and when it detonates the asteroid is destroyed, and the alien consciousness dies, releasing humanity from its effects. By the time of Quatermass II, the British Rocket Group is no longer experimental, but while Quatermass was working with a small team in the first series, in Quatermass II he is on his own and is paranoid as to who he can trust. Furthermore, he has a defeatist attitude following the destruction of his rocket and feels he cannot continue. Just as The Quatermass Experiment addressed social anxieties of the time, the same is true of Quatermass II. The series borrows from the mood that Kneale and Cartier created in Nineteen Eighty-Four and its allegories of Fascism. The landscape is brooding and inhospitable underscoring Quatermass’s isolation as he searches for the truth about the domes. The relaxing locations where families would have picnics are now out of bounds and policed by the military with deadly force. The desolate and somewhat dislocated area of Winnerden Flats and its metallic fortress highlight the post-war and Cold War anxieties in Britain. The Research Centres echo the secrecy surrounding the military installations such as Porton Down, and what they were being used for. Instead of asking ‘what’s out there?’ the focus of Quatermass II is ‘what if aliens are already among us?’ bringing the alien threat closer to home. The alien invasion—and the politicians’ wall of secrecy—can be read as a metaphor for the corruption of Governments by large corporations as well as the culture of spying and double agents in British Intelligence. The workers who infiltrate the refinery are representative of the superstitious villagers in gothic tales who wield flaming torches and make signs of the evil eye as they move to destroy something they don’t understand. In Quatermass II the alien domes are the focus of their destruction, but as these structures have apparently been instigated by Government officials, in essence, we see the workers question the authority of the State.

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Once again, Hammer produced a feature-length film, Quatermass 2, released in 1957 (retitled Enemy from Space for US release), which also starred Brian Donlevy.25 In this instance, Kneale wrote the screenplay himself.26 Even though it necessitated cuts of characters and subplots, this version is more faithful to the TV series, although one major change is that Quatermass does not pilot the rocket into space; instead his assistant launches it towards the asteroid. That said, the film perfectly creates the gothic mood through the ‘persuasive atmosphere of impending destruction’.27 Despite criticism of John Robinson’s handling of the Quatermass role, he was asked to reprise it in the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit (1958–1959).28 Robinson was unavailable, and the part was given to André Morell, who had actually been approached for The Quatermass Experiment and who had starred in Kneale and Cartier’s adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Quatermass and the Pit, a mysterious cylinder and fossilised skeletons are uncovered at a construction site in Knightsbridge. Quatermass is approached for assistance, although his British Rocket Group has been commandeered by the military. Rumour and superstition circulate after further excavations. Parish registers record a history of disturbances at the site, but entering the cylinder itself generates psychic visions of creatures that eradicate any corrupt specimens from the hive. Latent abilities in the Londoners are woken, and they resume a programme of ethnic cleansing, throwing London into anarchy. Only by remembering superstitions concerning the Devil can the alien influence be destroyed. The establishing shot shows a contemporary street name sign: HOBBS LANE S.W.1., and beneath it, a much older sign: HOB’S LANE, suggesting a layer beneath the surface waiting to be uncovered. Likewise, the excavation apparently reveals layers of history, both recent and ancient. The mysterious object is initially assumed to be an unexploded bomb; however, examinations undertaken by the palaeontologist, Dr. Matthew Roney, suggest the fossilised skull found next to it is around five million years old, so the excavation presents a conflicting data as to the age of the site. Although Quatermass is asked to help, his Rocket Group is now managed by the military, much to the Professor’s chagrin. While Quatermass was concerned with exploration and discovery, the military objective is to militarise the Moon and Mars in order to ‘police’ the Earth and shoot down aggressors’ missiles. The mission is terrifyingly named ‘Operation Damocles’ and echoes the tension of the Cold War, particularly the genuine anxieties of Mutually Assured Destruction in the case of a nuclear strike.29 The friction between the military and exploratory science is underscored by Quatermass’s concern that aggressors go into space with only the thought of war, while Breen acerbically comments there is no military value in fossilised apes. The way the alien entity is gradually uncovered is disturbingly realistic: details are established through oral and written authorities before introducing the science fiction element. Thus, Kneale is not guiding the viewer to the speculative future, but to a race memory within mankind’s own oral histories. The understanding of cosmology had broadened since the broadcast of Quatermass II: in 1957, Soviets had successfully fired the first intercontinental ballistic missile, launched the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) as well as

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Sputnik 2 which carried the dog Laika. When Quatermass and the Pit was broadcast over Christmas 1958 and into January 1959, the Soviet Luna 1 craft was gathering information as the first spacecraft to (accidentally) leave a geocentric orbit. Thus, the space programme was very much in the news and the space race further fuelled tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as highlighting the same concerns as when the first Quatermass serial was broadcast: what might they bring back? But Quatermass and the Pit asked a more chilling question: what if they were already here? Having established that the cylinder is not an unexploded bomb, local legend circulates. A nearby house, unoccupied for three decades, is believed to be haunted. One of the terrified soldiers believes he’d seen a figure pass through the wall of the construction site, although this is attributed to the claustrophobic conditions in which he was working. A sealed bulkhead inside the object is found to be covered with pentacles which Quatermass says are associated with Black Magic.30 Symbols, especially those connected with the occult, immediately generate a feeling of uncanny apprehension. They suggest a secrecy and forbidden knowledge, as well as being a liminal space that unlocks the portals between this realm and the nether realms and brings us closer to the infernal. A newspaper report of the ‘Hobbs Lane Ghost’ from 1927 matches the description given by the hysterical soldier. Further investigation reveals a history of phenomena, dating back to the fourteenth century, including the appearance of ‘Imps and Demons’ as well as ‘foul noises sent by the devil’. The document concludes ‘Hobslane … has long been known as a troubled place’, showing the disturbances date back to before written records. This is cognate with Freud’s argument misunderstood phenomena are often attributed to demonic forces.31 Quatermass suggests these manifestations have occurred when there has been some disturbance of the ground, but while he presents the scientific interpretation that ghosts were ‘badly observed and poorly interpreted’ phenomena, he notes the superstitious associations with the site: Hob is another name for the Devil. Thus, the apparently supernatural effects happening at the construction site have been substantiated by written authorities and local legend, making the events, although unusual, considerably more plausible. Furthermore, they awaken the overriding base instincts of humanity through ‘genetic manipulation’.32 All of these interpretations offer the reader a juxtaposition between the scientific, the mythological, and the supernatural, and it is left for them to decide at this point which of the interpretations they choose to follow. Searching inside the cylinder, the team discover the remains of insect-like creatures which correspond with images of the demonic from manuscripts, church gargoyles, and even cave paintings. The cylinder generates further psychic disturbances—like poltergeist activities—awakening race memories. Roney’s experimental technology, the optic-encephalogram, shows images from the subject’s mind. They see the insect creatures purging any abnormalities within their race with resonances to the Wild Hunt of folklore. Each of these elements serves to highlight the links between prehistory and folklore and how they remain concealed as a race memory until they surface in humanity’s collective consciousness.

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The scientists consider the fossilised humanoid remains as evidence of a selective breeding programme. The Martians had used surgical methods so their consciousness could adapt on a new planet. Quatermass concludes ‘We owe our human condition to the intervention of these insects’, but believes the Martians became extinct before they could complete this programme. Because of this, the genetic abilities remained dormant in the evolving humanity, but they were still there. These suggestions are dismissed as German propaganda; however, when the dormant Martian abilities awake, the affected Londoners resume the purge to turn London into a Martian colony. This latent bestiality plunges the city into chaos as those who are affected attempt to purge the city of any mutation. Swathes of the city are plunged into darkness and buildings burn as the inhabitants continue their riotous programme of ethnic cleansing. Desperate to find a solution, Roney remembers the legends of the devil being affected by iron and water, bringing together folkloric superstition and modern science. Iron might disable the cylinder which is now projecting a vision of the Martian-Devil. Quatermass carries a heavy iron chain, but he collapses before he can reach the Devil. Roney then takes the chain and hurls it at the demonic image. He is killed in the subsequent blast, but the cylinder is destroyed. This reverses the primeval influence on humanity and thus demonstrating that there is often some science behind folklore and superstition. Finally, Quatermass addresses the nation on a televised broadcast, assuring the viewers that humanity is now armed with knowledge in the event another cylinder be found; however, mankind’s destructive urges will intensify as the population increases. He explains to the nation the Martian influence on humanity, concluding ‘We are the Martians and if we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet’. Quatermass has confirmed the viewers’ worst fears. The alien other is unescapable because it is within us. Whenever humanity looks into a mirror, we will see a trace of the ‘other’ that we have feared and suppressed looking back at us. As with the other series, Quatermass and the Pit draws on the anxieties of the time, particularly that ‘Little England’ was no longer the Shakespearian ‘fortress built by nature for itself’ that had defended itself during Wartime. Instead it was susceptible to invasion, whether from a cosmic consciousness coming to the Earth, or one that had been here for millions of years and whose consciousness was latent in the core of Englishness. The explanations for the cylinder are, initially, plausible: the object could be either Nazi propaganda or an unexploded bomb. The bomb was a constant fear for inhabitants from major British cities—even today unexploded wartime bombs are uncovered. As this story is concerned with the layers of history beneath the surface, these explanations would feed the viewers’ anxieties. Although greatly influenced by the Notting Hill race riots of August and September 1958, the Wild Hunt purge has resonances with the Nazi ideology of the Master Race. The images of chaos in the final episode have been taken from footage of burning buildings during the Blitz, adding a layer of familiarity and authenticity, along with flashbacks of those terrifying experiences. There is also the paranoia of the conspiracy of silence, highlighted with the military order of a

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news blackout concerning the object. While the elements of science fiction look to the future, the focus of the story is to reflect on the past and to learn from these mistakes. Viewing figures for Quatermass and the Pit peaked at 11 million and it was made into a feature film by Hammer in 1967 (retitled as Five Million Years to Earth for the US release), directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Andrew Kier as Quatermass.33 The final story of the Quatermass series was entitled simply Quatermass, it had originally been planned as a BBC production in 1973, but the rising budget and the unavailability of Stonehenge as a filming location meant the project was discontinued. It was picked up by Euston films with a larger budget which allowed for building exterior sets including an observatory and the giant megaliths of the stone circles. Filmed between August and November 1978, Quatermass was played by veteran actor, Sir John Mills. It was broadcast on ITV in October and November 1979, with a shorter version, entitled The Quatermass Conclusion given theatrical release overseas and on VHS video (1985).34 Quatermass is set in the near future. It corresponds with Botting’s suggestion of a fractured society that merges the fiction nightmare with the viewers’ reality.35 The air of dystopia is established in the opening shots, beginning with a close up on a broken streetlight. In a darkened street is a poster bordered with the monogram ‘C♚R’ and the message beneath: ‘Looting is a Capital Offence. Offenders will be shot’. The poster is overwritten with the graffiti: ‘KILL KILL KILL’ in huge letters. Elsewhere, graffiti reads ‘KILL HM THE KING’—such details are not presented overtly. In many cases, they are fleeting glimpses in a panning shot. Burned out cars and debris line the streets; windows are broken or boarded up. Nearly two decades after his last appearance, Quatermass has withdrawn from society and is unaware of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘urban decay’. His contribution to the space programme is recognised with a nod to the previous series, but it is spoken of in a disparaging way. One commentator notes how ‘He took the most appalling risks’. Quatermass is now disillusioned with space exploration describing a spacelab collaboration between the Americans and the Soviets as a ‘symbolic wedding between a corrupt democracy and a monstrous tyranny’. Instead, he uses a live broadcast as a vehicle to find his missing granddaughter. The spacelab implodes, and its destruction of shows that space travel is still experimental, that mankind is overreaching itself, and, despite technological advances, there are still many things beyond our comprehension. Astrophysicist Joe Kapp takes Quatermass to his observatory exposing him to the violence and degradation of society—the communes Quatermass sees are a mixture of 1970s village folk pageantry and medieval superstition. They pass Wembley Stadium which is called ‘the killing grounds’ and used to contain some of the violence. It comes across as the anarchy of the Roman festival of Saturnalia and the violence of the Amphitheatre. It foreshadows the slaughter that will take place there later in the story, as well as highlighting the way that the world of civilisation and rules has degenerated into deadly barbarity.

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Quatermass’s experiences in the city show the decay of the Urban Gothic, but unlike the Victorian Gothic novels which move away from the safety of the city through to the wilderness of the rural, Quatermass leaves the lawlessness of the city to a quintessentially English countryside. Here he sees the Planet People, a group of young people who wander about the landscape chanting as a group consciousness. Where the Urban dwellers had been physically violent, Kapp explains that the Planet People are ‘violent to human thought’, believing they will be taken up to the stars but cannot explain how to achieve this. Opposing all technology and any attempt to reason with them, the Planet People embody the conflict between superstition and science. They use plumb bobs as divining pendulums to guide them to stone circles. While the older characters place their faith in science, the young respond to the ancient England lying beneath the soil. Although giving the impression of a pastoral and simple landscape, particularly in contrast to the corruption and urban decay, the relationship with nature is more sublime—the tranquillity of the landscape is tinged with the terrors of what lies beneath. Joe Kapp’s home and the observatory is where science, religion, and ancient civilisations connect. Kapp, who declares himself the ‘last of two hundred generations of learned Jews’, works at an observatory. Originally built in the eighteenth century to look at the moon, it is now equipped to look hundreds of millions of light years across space. Outside his home is a pillbox from 1941 and in the fields are a Neolithic burial site, a stone circle and evidence of Beaker folk from 5000 years ago. Kapp’s daughter, Sarah, sings a nursery rhyme about a stone circle nearby: Ringstone Round. As she goes through it with Quatermass, she tells him he must do the actions as well as reciting the words. The childish song, which leads Quatermass and Kapp to Ringstone Round and which resonates throughout the series, acts as the children’s performance of ritual. Yet, the innocence of the rhyme veils the dangers of the stone circles. It is sung once more by the leader of the Planet People, unifying the young people and guiding them like the Pied Piper to another gathering place to chant, and perform their semantics. The nursery rhyme is also sung as Kapp’s wife performs the rite after lighting the Menorah candles, but which Joe dismisses as a ‘cosy ritual to make everything safe’. The folkloric heritage intervenes when Sarah interrupts with the first words of the rhyme at the most solemn moment. It is both laughable and chilling. When the Planet People arrive at their gathering places, crippling sound, and blinding light engulf the area. It first appears the Planet People have achieved their ambition of travelling to the stars. However, all that remains in these locations are twisted metal, smoke, and ash and the scientists deduce the young people have been annihilated. This is the topographical destruction that echoes the Victorian fin de siècle texts. The stones themselves have been shattered or pushed deeper into the earth. These events not isolated to England: simultaneous incidents occurred across the globe, as well as destroying a space shuttle that witnesses a huge beam of light in the skies. Quatermass suggests the standing stones mark

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locations where terrible events happened thousands of years before. While stone circles may once have been considered links between this world and the next, Quatermass serves to make the familiar unfamiliar by having the Planet People gather at Wembley Stadium. With its (then) iconic twin towers, viewers now saw this location through the filter of dread. Who knows what ancient sacrificial sites lie beneath the stadium? Quatermass concludes the beam is part of an alien machine, ‘harvesting’ energies from the young people only, which explains why older folk are not caught up in the mass-conditioning. The annihilation of the groups at Wembley is so excessive that their ash turns the sky green. Working with other aged scientists, Quatermass electronically simulates the energies of a million young people which they will focus into a stone circle and will use to attract the alien presence and then attack it with a nuclear bomb, consequently in this instance, age and experience triumph over youth and idealism. When everything is in place, a group of Planet People arrive, among them is Hettie, Quatermass’s granddaughter. The shock of seeing her causes Quatermass to suffer a heart attack, but she assists him in detonating the bomb. At the end, children are seen playing among the stone circles in a field of poppies, singing and performing the ‘innocent’ nursery rhyme about Ringstone Round. England has been restored to the tranquillity of the pastoral now the alien force has been defeated. The portrayals of Quatermass in the 1950s series were by actors in their late forties or fifties, whereas Mills was 70 when he took the role (interestingly, born in 1908, the same year as both Robinson and Morell). Thus, as well as being older, he is vulnerable, unable to defend himself against an attack by muggers, which are representative of the banditti that waylaid unwary travellers.36 He is less concerned with the scientific progress; instead he focuses his energies on trying to find his missing granddaughter, and always highlights their familial connection ‘my daughter’s daughter’ or ‘the child of my own child’. His genial nature is most clearly shown by his playful exchanges with Kapp’s children and his attempts to save the blinded and traumatised Isabel from the Planet People. The importance of family is further highlighted by his granddaughter’s role in detonating the bomb. As with the other series, Quatermass highlights some social anxieties of the time. In 1978, news of the rapidly declining orbit of the first US space station, Skylab, was regularly in the media before it crashed to earth in July 1979; of equal scientific interest was the development of the Space Shuttle programme beginning with the launch of Columbia in April 1981. In Quatermass, a space shuttle is seen servicing the space station. The imagery of societal squalor of the dystopian future reflects British society as it approached the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978/1979, with strikes by refuse workers and gravediggers, among others. This is also represented by the green skies like a nuclear winter, which also foreshadows the end of the story. In addition, England experienced an oil crisis, rolling power cuts and blackouts and the three-day working week to conserve energy. Power cuts are reported on the news in Quatermass. The Planet People’s concerns about society are now reflected in the Anthropogenic discussion about the impact of humanity

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on the environment (although, rather than equivocating radical change, the Planet People choose simply to abandon the planet). This was also a timely warning about the dangers of cults: the leader of the Peoples Temple cult, Jim Jones, had taken his followers to Jonestown in Guyana in November 1977, leading to their mass suicide in November 1978. The images of dystopian London, and the subtle ‘slippage’ from the real world unsettles the viewers. Kapp, hallucinating and hearing the voices of the ‘disappeared’ on account of his grief becomes the ‘mad scientist’, although his faith and his later identification of the alien force as ‘evil, Satan, the enemy’ brings the story to a cosmic battle between good and evil. Quatermass’s granddaughter, caught up in the hysteria of the Planet People, is the vulnerable heroine who needs to be saved; the sad irony is that Quatermass narrowly misses her on several occasions, and her salvation is to find and recognise her dying grandfather and to complete his mission of destruction. The final image of the children playing suggests the trauma has been suppressed and the end of the ‘battle’ is symbolically represented by the poppy meadows. Nigel Kneale had made it clear that he had no plans to resurrect Quatermass after the final serial, although he did have outline a series set during the Second World War where the young Quatermass became interested in rocketry and went to spy in Germany, but such a serial never came to fruition.37 He does have other screenwriting credits worth mentioning. These include: The Creature (1955) which was another collaboration with Cartier (filmed by Hammer as The Abominable Snowman); the adaptation of the novel The Devil’s Own by Norah Lofts (filmed by Hammer as The Witches); The Road (1963) where an ­eighteenth-century village is haunted by echoes of what turns out to be a future holocaust; The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) which anticipated the reality TV show; and Beasts (1976), a series of six television plays where the confront their primeval natures. Of particular note, however, is Kneale’s 90-minute ghost story for Christmas 1972, The Stone Tape.38 Scientists working for the Ryan Electrics Corporation establish their laboratories at a mansion called Taskerlands. Led by Peter Brock, their purpose is to develop a new recording technique. Taskerlands represents the ‘haunted house’ of the gothic novel, with foundations that date back to the Saxon era and before. It is complete with rumours about sounds in the walls and even an exorcism attempted in the nineteenth century. However, the building is almost completely renovated throughout. The exception is the data storage room which the workmen have refused to touch. When Brock smashes panelling in the room, he reveals a staircase apparently leading nowhere. The characters have varying experiences: one of the technicians claims he doesn’t feel anything, whereas Jill, the lone female of the group, is most sensitive and sees a semi-transparent figure at the top of the stairs. From here, fragmented details concerning the history of Taskerlands are revealed through hearsay, local archives, legal documents, and even letters to Father Christmas. Most notably, the group discover that Louisa, a Victorian undermaid, fell to her death down a flight of stairs. Observing the ‘Bell, book and candle’ method was unsuccessful, Brock suggests they investigate the phenomenon with science and glean what they can

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from data analysis. While Jill is a brilliant worker, she becomes emotionally overwrought and takes the role of the traditional vulnerable gothic female. Her empathy borders on hysteria in the face of the ‘entity’. Despite most of the group hearing something from the past, the sound is neither picked up on their recording devices nor does it echo, and furthermore, the technicians cannot locate it within the room. Instead of a supernatural presence, the trauma has left its imprint—a ‘recording’—in the stone. Brock perceives this as the new recording medium he has been looking for, with sounds and images being broadcast directly into the brain. Jill’s hysteria intensifies as she believes the entity has possessed her ­computer, but then she says Louisa has gone and Brock’s experiments have ‘wiped the tape’. Even though the recordings in the stones have been erased, Jill still hears sounds that cripple her. She understands that Louisa was a surface recording and there were much older impressions underneath. Brock refuses to listen, but the local vicar tells of a further exorcism after complaints about the ruins that were there before, this time in 1760. And yet. Jill’s hysterical behaviour can also be explained: she has had an affair with Brock, and he continues to mistreat her both personally and professionally. The other researchers believe Jill is having a breakdown, but she sees pulses of lights and incorporeal forms closing in on her, terrifying her to flee up the stairs where she has seen Louisa. The background changes from stairs to a stone circle where a sacrifice has taken place. Jill climbs to the top of one of these stones, falls, and is found dead at the bottom of the stairs. Brock destroys the printouts of Jill’s analysis which suggest the stones have recorded strange occurrences for some seven thousand years, and while the data storage room will not be used again, Brock hears Jill’s ethereal voice calling … The Stone Tape contains a number of gothic tropes, although, as with Quatermass and the Pit and The Quatermass Conclusion the supernatural is explored through a confrontation with science. The mansion is built on an ancient site, yet, through its modernisation, Taskerlands initially subverts the expectations of the viewer. The staircase in the data storage room is the focus of an apparent haunting and the ghostly sounds and visions are viewed through a scientific lens and supported by local legend and written records. Jill is the gothic heroine, the lone female in the male-dominated group who must put up with their banter in order to fit in. It is she who is most empathic and distressed by the echoes of the past. Her psychological terror increases as the heritage of the room is revealed and the apparition and voice of a woman long dead is made manifest in the present, revealing through scientific experimentation and documented authorities that apparently supernatural events have occurred at this location for millennia. It underscores the idea that there is a level of the unknown beneath England’s soil—something that had been hidden as been brought to light with terrifying consequences. The imprints on the ‘stone tape’ may not have a foundation in recognised science, nor is it a rational phenomenon, but it is supported by scientific data, even if the male workers refuse to accept it. Even though the Quatermass stories are framed as science fiction, they reflected the social anxieties of the time, particularly the bleakness of post-war Britain

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and the mistrust of science. Tensions escalated between the United States and the Soviet Union as they actively developed their space programmes generating concerns about bringing something deadly back from space. Each of the stories deals with the arrival of an alien presence in one way or another, and although the threat is to the whole of humanity, the four Quatermass stories really show the nature of Englishness under threat. The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II both depict an alien possession, whether that is the entity within Victor Caroon which attacks Westminster Abbey or the Tate Modern, or the alien intelligence that has infiltrated the Government in order to isolate areas for clandestine facilities that will lead to a full-scale invasion. Quatermass and the Pit shows that the alien presence is not an invading force, but something that has not only been present beneath the British landscape for millions of years but it has also influenced the human condition and continues to do so. These series serve as a warning against the violent instincts that are attributed to the Martian influence, and which will rise as the population increases. Quatermass follows this natural progression depicting the moral decline in the dystopian near future, as well as blindly following an ideology without the filter of scientific challenging or questioning, as well as forcing the viewer to think again about the ancient sites across the British landscape. These stories, as well as The Stone Tape portray the layers of history, from written records to superstition where phenomena are interpreted according to their contextual environment. While Kneale’s scripts served to unsettle their audiences by placing an exceptional circumstance over an unremarkable environment, and twisting the concepts of alien invasion and even the traditional ghost story, what these series also achieved was to change the way that television programmes were made.

Notes

1. Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (London, Headpress, 2017), 5–6. 2. Mark Chadbourne, ‘The King of Hauntology’, in Neil Snowdon (ed.) We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (Hornsea, PS Publishing, 2017), 19. 3. Murray, Into the Unknown, 15. 4. Tim Lucas, ‘The Literary Kneale’, in Neil Snowdon (ed.) We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (Hornsea, PS Publishing, 2017), 29–31. 5. Murray, Into the Unknown, 29. 6. Murray, Into the Unknown, 51. 7. Rudolph Cartier, dir., The Quatermass Experiment (1953). 8. Murray, Into the Unknown, 38. 9. Murray, Into the Unknown, 39. 10. Murray, Into the Unknown, 45. 11. There had been another plan to repeat The Quatermass Experiment over Christmas, but this was not followed through. Murray, Into the Unknown, 49. 12. Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 123.

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J. S. Mackley 13. Val Guest, dir., The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). The modest change of name was to publicise that it had received a X certificate—it was renamed Shock and then The Creeping Unknown when released in the United States, David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2008), 23. 14. Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror, 21. 15. Jonathan Rigby notes that it was deliberate on the part of Guest to cast Quatermass as a ‘bulldozing, no-nonsense technocrat’ although further noting that Donlevy plays Quatermass as ‘insensitive, insufferable and not very bright’, see Jonathan Rigby, English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015 (Cambridge, Signum, 2015), 50; cf. Clive Bloom, Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, 2nd ed. (London, Palgrave, 2007), 48–49. Murray, Into the Unknown, Kneale further refers to Donlevy as ‘a Hollywood drunk, waiting for death’, Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror, 152. 16. Marcus Hearn, The Quatermass Experiment—Viewing Notes (London, BBC Worldwide, 2005),7–8. 17. Hearn, The Quatermass Experiment, 5. 18. Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006), 7. 19. The episodes from the 1950s overran, but for the 2005 episode all the cameras and actors were in place before time so the programme was shorter than the allocated slot, Hearn, The Quatermass Experiment, 21. 20. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (London, Blackwell, 2004), 227. 21. Murray, Into the Unknown, 44–45. 22. Rudolph Cartier, dir., Quatermass II (1955). 23. Murray, Into the Unknown, 74. 24. Marcus Hearn, ‘Merchant of Doom: Interview with Darrol Blake’, Time Screen 18 (Spring 1992), 4. 25. Val Guest, dir., Quatermass 2 (1957). 26. Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror, 28. 27. Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror, 29. 28. Rudolph Cartier, dir., Quatermass and the Pit (1958–1959). 29. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened ‘Massive Retaliation’ if the Soviet Union should invade Europe. 30. This is, of course, incorrect. It is only associated with Black Magic when it is inverted, as advanced by Éliphas Lévi in 1859. 31. ‘The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct’, Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachley (London, Random House, 1955), 243. 32. Lawrence Phillips, ‘What Lies Beneath: The London Underground and Contemporary Gothic Film Horror’, in London Gothic, eds. Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard (London, Continuum, 2010), 175. 33. Roy Ward Baker, dir., Quatermass and the Pit (1967). 34. Piers Haggard, dir., Quatermass (1979). 35. Fred Botting, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1995), 121. 36. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 39. 37. Andrew Pixley, The Quatermass Collection—Viewing Notes (London, BBC Worldwide, 2005), 40. 38. Peter Sasdy, dir., The Stone Tape (1972).

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Bibliography Bloom, Clive. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. London, Palgrave, 2007. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London, Routledge, 1995. Chadbourne, Mark. ‘The King of Hauntology’. In We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale. Ed. Neil Snowdon. Hornsea, PS Publishing, 2017. 11–24. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The “Uncanny”’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17 (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Trans. James Strachley. London, Random House, 1955. 217–256. Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. Hearn, Marcus. ‘Merchant of Doom: Interview with Darrol Blake’. Time Screen 18 (Spring 1992), 4–6. Hearn, Marcus. The Quatermass Experiment—Viewing Notes. London, BBC Worldwide, 2005. Lucas, Tim. ‘The Literary Kneale’. In We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale. Ed. Neil Snowdon. Hornsea, PS Publishing, 2017. 29–31. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. Murray, Andy. Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. London, Headpress, 2017. Phillips, Lawrence. ‘What Lies Beneath: The London Underground and Contemporary Gothic Film Horror’. In London Gothic. Eds. Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard. London, Continuum, 2010. 172–182. Pirie, David. A New Heritage of Horror. London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2008. Pixley, Andrew. The Quatermass Collection—Viewing Notes. London, BBC Worldwide, 2005. Punter, David, and Byron, Glennis. The Gothic. London, Blackwell, 2004. Rigby, Jonathan. English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015. Cambridge, Signum, 2015. Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006.

Filmography Quatermass 2, dir., Guest, Val (1957). Quatermass and the Pit, dir., Baker, Roy Ward (1967). Quatermass and the Pit, dir., Cartier, Rudolph (1958–1959). Quatermass II, dir., Cartier, Rudolph (1955). Quatermass, dir., Haggard, Piers (1979). The Quatermass Experiment, dir., Cartier, Rudolph (1953) The Quatermass Experiment, dir., Miller, Sam (2005). The Quatermass Xperiment, dir., Guest, Val (1955). The Stone Tape, dir., Sasdy, Peter (1972).

Dark Costume in Contemporary Television Stephanie Mulholland

Costume has always been an intrinsic part of the gothic television series, although scholarship has previously overlooked this relationship and instead focused on the representation of costume within film.1 However, unique to television’s serial format, costume often adds to the complexity of the narrative structure and so subsequently has attained more prominence in contemporary series which exploit ever more complex and non-linear styles of storytelling. This structure naturally has a profound effect on the way emotions are created and sustained both within the gothic televisual text and for audiences at home. Costume can therefore provide a sense of coherence, or manageability to otherwise chaotic or deviant bodies. Further, costume both contains and creates horror.2 Elements of costume may become lost, stained, updated or destroyed and these occurrences often drive or deviate the plot. For example, the significance of Laura Palmer’s heart locket unlocks clues to her murder and her murderer in Twin Peaks (1990–1991). Gothic television has always maintained such focus on the surfaces like costume and set design. The early gothic icon of the small screen, Morticia Addams, is visually inextricable from her draped black dress which assisted in establishing for the audience a sense of recurring familiarity alongside the melodramatic excess of a femme fetale figure within the soap opera/horror mash-up. Costume today also operates beyond this mere aesthetic pleasure, additionally ‘fashion centric programming’ sees clothes on screen take on a more far more active role within the narrative.3 Consequently, costume has significant impact on the continuing development of gothic narratives. Echoing Catherine Spooner, who stated in the seminal, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, that ‘dress articulates the subject’, this chapter considers costume as another fragmentation of the gothic subject with its own unique story.4 Unlike the fields of screenwriting, direction or special effects, where, as Subramanian describes, modified female bodies fill the screens of male technicians.5 Costume is a space within television dominated by women who may instead

S. Mulholland (*)  Preston, UK

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offer potential for release and counter-narratives to creative manipulation which reinforces the narrative of male subjects controlling female objects. Fittingly, this chapter identifies how contemporary gothic femininity is constructed in narrative cycles of damage, or trauma and resilience in which costume plays a key role in fashioning the gothic subject on television.6 More significantly, these narratives deliberately expose the aesthetic labour that goes into making (and un-making, as is often the case in gothic narratives) the female body. Women are often encouraged in today’s culture to incorporate acts of ­self-fashioning and self-making activities into their daily lifestyle routine. These acts are marketed under the guise of ‘health’ or ‘leisure’, masking the traces of active transformation.7 Television’s seriality undoes the concealment of such labour and instead the body becomes a site that is excessively worked, re-worked and transformed. Costume often performs on behalf of the body and presents the unspeakable within the women’s situation. Accordingly, clothes on screen can provide a visual shorthand of female entrapment. For instance, Annie in Being Human (BBC, 2008– 2013) is restricted to the outfit she died in—a grey, draped cardigan. Costume updates the popular cultural image of the pale, flowing ghost and the intangible becomes effectively material. Significantly, Annie’s inability to ‘move on’ to the afterlife and her frustration with her situation is most affectively realised through her inability to change her clothes which image in their ominous permanence the disturbed border between life and death in which she is now trapped. Culturally, subjects are driven to be continually active, self-optimising and to engage in acts of fashioning and so for Annie’s costume to remain unchanged denies her the ability to participate in the processes by which we live and therefore acts as a second death. Since, as Winch indicates, women’s bodies in the ­neo-liberal market economy function as an asset or product to be consumed, clothing—and by extension, costume, is centrally implicated in generating, sustaining and measuring the value of women’s bodies on screen.8 Thus, we can identify women who fall victim to, deviate from or simply reject this system via their relationship to dress/ing and the impact of their choices upon the gothic televisual narrative. ‘I’m in, you’re out’ young witch, Madison Montgomery, proclaims to a dying Fiona, the Supreme witch within Ryan Murphy’s third series of American Horror Story, Coven (2014). This series, which focuses on a coven of witches in New Orleans, was described by Vogue magazine as being known as much for its sartorial ‘reverence’ as its ‘oft-unsettling subject matter’.9 Costume is therefore as important to this series as the narrative itself. So much so that in 2017 a Los Angeles exhibition titled ‘American Horror Story: The Style of Scare’ showcased costumes from across all the series and celebrated the designers. Not only do the clothes within the series help to create an ‘unsettled’ feeling (like Madison dancing away with murdered Misty Day’s shawl) but they also have the power to influence and inspire the wider field of fashion. Designers like Comme De Garcons, Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen created collections in 2016 which confirmed we were truly in the ‘Season of the Witch’.10 Madison’s statement references the equally transient power of costume in which bodies themselves become as transitional as garments, reducing both women to symbols of ‘style’ through

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which they harness their power, while bringing to the surface the tensions between these two characters drawn out over the season. Prior to this exchange Fiona had murdered Madison, believing her to be the next Supreme and therefore the reason for her draining powers, so when Madison appears Fiona wonders if she is a ghost come to haunt her. This fear is partially realised through Madison’s costume which is made spectral through its physical construction, drapes of sheer material that hang asymmetrically and give the gown a flowing, hazy silhouette and also because it performs Madison’s past damage at Fiona’s hands by conjuring the moment of her murder. It incites feelings in both Madison and Fiona meant to provoke a response to the past and recall emotion through it, rather than represent the past directly. The style of the dress is indistinct, not recalling a specific past moment, nor recognisably ‘current’ or ‘in fashion’. She is out of time, stylistically, and out of touch with herself. Contradictorily, costume places her in a position of power (confronting the one who hurt her) and a place of abject vulnerability having apparently lost the connection to the fashion-conscious life she led. The dress controls the frame on screen, its form appears first as a shadow, then a flash of fabric across a mirror, it is both tactile, active and affective, presenting a level of emotion that Madison herself is apparently incapable of now she is resurrected and ‘can’t feel shit’. Her dress creates a horror response that conjures up fear in Fiona but allows Madison to express her anger and hurt since the shockingly blood-red dress stands in for the ‘just red’ which Madison reveals is the only memory she has of her death. Unsettling subject matter (murder) is ­re-enacted through the remembrance in the red dress while the physical body is ambiguously lost within the scene, reduced to an obscured form Madison feels estranged from since her resurrection and the sartorial consumes her. Madison’s post-death identity is fashioned literally through her traumatic memories and her inability to reconcile them and her costume provides a visual commentary of her ‘numbness to the world, an indifference to suffering’, as she describes of her millennial generation. Instead, Madison’s clothes speak for her. Her early ‘on-trend’ costumes generate dialogue between High Fashion, Goth style (when brought back from the dead she dresses in black Victorian-styled maxi-dresses) and gothic fashion tropes on screen. Madison’s white Hervé Léger dress not only taps into the (then) very current popularity of the designer’s dresses but also plays upon the name of ‘bandage dress’ in a darkly ironic twist that bleeds out in it. The dress is then Gothicised through this act of extreme violence upon her body. High fashion becomes haute horror. Madison’s contemporary dress is pointedly inauthentic, she feels no connection to the past and would ‘give everything [she] ha[s] or will ever have just to feel pain again’. Her costume instead takes on her suffering and her dramatic style evolutions reinforce that her shallow character has no coherent point of identity from which to fashion, or feel, her way towards a future. Just as there are difficulties in defining the scope of gothic television, as many of gothic television critics have outlined, similarly not all of ‘Gothic costume’, or, costume in gothic television falls under one style.11 There is costume that is Gothic, drawing on recognisable tropes and stereotypes of what, for example, a vampire should look like, and there is costume that Gothicises the wearer. This

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chapter broadly identifies two styles of costume present within contemporary gothic television; the first I would term liminal-realist, or costume which looks ‘everyday’ but may at times within the series take on a subversive role that is not immediately obvious to the audience and therefore appears on fringes of being both ordinary and exceptional within the plot. Thus, the modes of realism and gothic collide seamlessly upon the material. In American Gods (2017), Laura Moon is the wife of Shadow and her death is the motivating event for the first episode which sees Shadow released from prison to attend her funeral and meet the mysterious Mr Wednesday (‘Old God’, Odin) along the way. Shadow tosses a Leprechauns coin onto her grave without realising its magical properties and Laura is brought back from the dead. Matt Hills (2005) critiqued the relative invisibility of television, however, with costume this ability to conceal horror becomes another effective technique of building drama within the series through the revelation of horror beneath ‘ordinary’ surfaces. Laura’s costumes reinforce the very nature of costume’s liminal success by rendering her (and the horror of her circumstance, whether suicidal or undead) both visible and invisible. Her casino uniform, despite its gaudy metallic waistcoat, allows Laura to move and act within the casino unnoticed resulting in her coming up with the plan to steal from the casino. Ultimately this plan fails and Shadow is imprisoned, but this demonstrates how the most benign costume can have devastating implications for the plot. Even Laura’s post-death clothing is so starkly ‘normal’ against her very abnormal body and partly conceals some of the more obvious aspects of her deathliness, like her autopsy scar. Her clothing of shapeless tank tops and nude or muted colours is apathetic, without shape, structure or really any style, yet upon her rotting body, the overall image is a hybrid-fashioning that emotes varying emotional responses, from repulsion to almost empathy. Laura continually refuses to perform the necessary emotional expressions which would benefit the dominant patriarchal structure, yet, despite this, critical responses to the series went so far as to claim that Laura is the character the series is most emotionally invested in, despite her role as unfaithful, criminal, ‘dead wife’. When asking Shadow to help her steal from the casino he asks if she is happy in their marriage, she replies, ‘I see that you’re happy, from this side of it. From the wrong side of it’. Both dressed in dull, aesthetically unsatisfying grey t-shirts, Laura is notably the darker side to their matrimonial ‘whole’ to Shadow’s lighter, almost white top. This stylistic binary between them is reflective of how their relationship, around Laura’s depression and dissatisfaction with their life, shapes and drives the narrative of the entire series forward. When resurrected she changes into a grey tank, exposing the crude stitches from where her arm had been torn off and reattached. The pallid fabric offsets her equally pallid complexion and her ordinary tank top is Gothicised through her now monstrous, exceptional circumstances. Often these contemporary styles articulate the feelings of the character’s interior in subtle ways connected closely to how their physical bodies react/are acted upon within the series. For example, in Sharp Objects (2018) Camille’s long-sleeved dark jumpers immediately distance her stylistically from the ­Southern-belle floral dresses of her younger sister, Amma and overbearing Mother,

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Adora, but are also revealed to be necessary to hide her scars from years of selfharm. Camille even vocalises the obscure power of her clothes, musing how when wearing them she would be ‘unconscious again, wrapped in black, gone away’. As the series unpicks the depths of Camille’s childhood trauma her costume is similarly stripped back alongside haunting revelations. The building up of multiplicious narrative detail is mirrored in the steady accumulation of marks and materials upon the body. Camille is finally forced into inhabiting one of her mother’s flowing nightgowns while being made forcibly sick by Adora who suffers from Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, transforming Camille into an anachronism of the gothic maiden, trapped and sickly in a Southern Gothic house of familial feminine horrors. This violent juxtaposition and evolution within Camille’s dress demonstrates the equally haunting qualities possessed by both ‘period’ and contemporary costume. The nightgown is excessive, boldly alluding to the gothic female tradition of entrapped heroine; the black ‘modern’ dress subtly shrouding Camille throughout her attempts of a ‘normal’ life and embalming her scars and shame from those around her. Camille is most vulnerable within Sharp Objects when in self-consciously ‘period’ style dress, she willingly subjects herself to her mother’s abuse in the belief she is saving her little sister from the fate of their other sibling, Marian, who is revealed to have been killed due to Adora’s illness when Camille was a child. Submission into anachronistic costume becomes then not a retreat into the narrative of a helpless gothic heroine, but a powerful act wherein Camille sacrifices her body that is visualised in the act of Adora dressing and undressing her in clothes of her taste. Anachronistic fashions are used within this series to make present the horrors of the past, to re-enact trauma physically upon the female body through its oppressive connotations. Despite these qualities it is subversively styled within Sharp Objects as a potential escape, its melodramatic ‘dressing up’ and ‘doll-like’ qualities seem (initially) to grant Amma a childish retreat from her Mother’s mistreatment and as stated, Camille attempts to make peace with the ghosts of her past by using the act of submission to finally bring her Mother to justice and release her from the guilt that haunts her. Here, television’s affinity for melodrama, outlined by Schmidt, is most successful through the seriality of the form and its transformative effects alongside affective costuming.12 There are inherent contradictions within these costumes, caught between our ‘real’ world, thus relatable and ‘normal’, and the unnerving apparitions of consciously period-style costume, like the woman in the white dress who repeatedly haunts Camille. Costume has the potential to provide both immense visual pleasure and visceral horror. Within Sharp Objects this interchanging role of costume works to elevate and disturb Camille’s emotional state across the series while similarly provoking a recurring affective response of the audience who are also plunged into the psychological murder mystery. The second type of costume this chapter unpicks in more detail is ‘period’ dress within two very aesthetically distinct series, neo-Victorian Penny Dreadful (Showtime, 2014–2016) and sci-fi/Western Westworld (HBO, 2016–). Both series have female protagonists at their centre, whose story is told via disjointed narratives and temporal ruptures (dreams, flashbacks, alternate timelines or doubles).

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Their stories are permeated by acts of self-harm, male acts of violence and material or physical transformations, but most overtly the series deal with the women’s overriding need to reconcile their pasts and overcome traumatic memories in order to move forward. Both Maeve (Westworld) and Lily (Penny Dreadful) are revealed to have lost or dead children therefore their narratives are tied to specifically feminine experiences, like maternal grief. Curiously, just as Lily is the most aesthetically perfect of Victor Frankenstein’s three creations, Maeve is also revealed to be Dr. Robert Ford’s (co-creator of Westworld) ‘favourite’. Their suffering gives them a certain power over both the men in their lives and their stories. Maeve is one of the first hosts to achieve consciousness, ‘free-will’, and also unprecedented psychic control over her own kind by the end of season two. Likewise, Lily is freed by Victor through her capacity not to love, or remember a love for her child, but in her ability to show Victor the pain it still causes her, even after resurrection from the dead. Both series involve sequences in which the women’s clothing is explicitly central to plots of deception which mask or reveal their emotional capabilities. AI ‘host’, Maeve, disguises herself in ‘human’ clothing during her escape from the Westworld park and Lily uses dressing up to manipulate Victor romantically, before she too is able to leave him. Not without their complexities, these endings are ambiguous in terms of what kind of femininity these series are narrating. Maeve and Lily do not seek to improve their bodies, but self-harm and expose their bodies to great emotional and physical pain, exploring a darker side of femininity structured on loss, violence and grief. Building upon Helen Wheatley’s seminal Gothic Television, which identified a certain fragile femininity inhabiting gothic television texts, like Dark Shadows (1966–1971), where women were largely confined within the domestic space or the tropes of period adaptation.13 This chapter aims to highlight the extent to which contemporary gothic television often costumes its female bodies in ways which render them uncomfortably at risk, as much as a risk. Westworld exemplifies the way in which contemporary television edges upon the frontier of the Gothic since perhaps on first glance this sci-fi/Western series does not immediately, visually, scream ‘Gothic’. Instead, the dizzying confrontations of images and traumatic experiences implicitly critiques on our own overwhelming exposure within the era of ‘peak television’ in that a consequence of the rapid rise of production in television means today, according to FX Networks CEO, John Landgraf, everything feels vaguely familiar.14 Westworld works within the parameters of the ‘vaguely familiar’ but capitalises on disorientation and fragmentation that both mirror this cultural malaise and deconstruct its effects successfully in its manipulation of timelines and incorporation of temporal disturbance. Westworld is literally a product of (marketable) authenticity for our consumption but Maeve critiques the cultural value this text is self-reflexively offering its audience by keeping its realism at an uncomfortable distance, always on the edge of discomfort even within the familiar, or nostalgic. The excavation of what it means to be human, immortality, how the series confronts through unconventional structuring the impact of past traumas and the visceral assaults that probe the limits of body (both human and Other) lend this futuristic Frankensteinian remake to readings which are innately Gothic, haunting and horrific. Pointedly, this section

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discusses the unsettling and underlying function of Westworld’s ‘fantasy’ costumes which firstly appear romantic—nostalgic even in their vague restyling of a problematic past that is repackaged to guests in the series as exciting, desirable and, oddly, new. This brand of consumption which misdirects back to the surface is seen also in contemporary American and UK politics both of which are locked in the grip of a form of nostalgic escape attempt. While America vowing wistfully to be ‘great again’, Britain likewise recites it is time to ‘take back control’ and while superficially both appear as exciting, desirable and striving to create something paradoxically ‘new’, each message is embedded with tactics of creating and managing fear. Television is equally as adept in this skill of fear-control—Gothic television excels in it. Westworld offers a unique method through its ‘dress-up’ nostalgia which literally seeks to initially conceal fear and therefore work against a more traditional gothic framework of highlighting surfaces that are designed to generate fear; the ruined house, the stained nightdress and the darkened sky. Instead the opening scenes of Westworld are fresh, pristine, bright—Dolores’ nightgown is unmarked, delicate and clean. This is an example of recent shift within the paradigm first presented by Wheatley that while gothic television largely remains ‘a critical category to define programming in which fear is the sustaining emotion translated to the viewer through the creation of a certain mood’, contemporary texts are manipulating this definition. Instead, fear remains the focus, not in the sense of being fearful, but in the lack of fear imaged on screen.15 What is striking about Westworld is how the excessively nostalgic dream-memories of Maeve initially reproduce this effect, painstakingly creating a romantic soft-focused sequence of Maeve running through fields with her daughter. Formally, cinematographer Paul Cameron describes the choice to shoot Westworld on film stock rather than digital meant that the resulting effect on screen is ‘something tactile and formidable that’s very real’ which seems at odds with ultimately creating a look that is supposed to be dreamlike.16 There is a threat to this choice of words that comes across within the contrasting softness of Maeve’s ‘dreams’; the older lenses of the Canon K35’s let in light flares that were not edited out in post-production and coating was actually removed from some lenses to increase halation within the dream sequences, distorting the light outside its usual boundaries to create a hazy effect. Speaking directly of Maeve’s narrative, Cameron describes how ‘we ended up giving a little more energy to the camera movements…for a slightly nostalgic, romantic quality. We wanted to make those moments a little more innocent and beautiful’.17 The construction of these sequences goes to great lengths to appear as excessively not threatening. This is true of Maeve’s frontier costume, designed by Ane Crabtree to stand out in contrast to her Madame outfit which evoked control while the muted pink frontier dress was designed to reveal her as ‘very vulnerable’ to attack, while still pretty, soft and feminine.18 Maeve’s early dream-memories demonstrate how nostalgia is used as an aesthetic-strategy which conceals threat, appearing as excessively fear-less, in order to paradoxically victimise her to the past. Not only does the technology in these scenes visually assault Maeve in dislocating her within flashbacks, but costume also similarly fragments her between an idealised, but painful, past and equally violent and dissatisfying present.

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By the second season Maeve’s costume is equally ambiguously spliced between anachronistic Victoriana and sleek, contemporary tailoring. Season two costume designer, Sharen Davis, comments ‘we made Dolores look more rugged and durable while having Maeve, who’s still finding herself, continuously change clothes’.19 Maeve’s continual self-fashioning of period/modern dress interrogates the ways in which neoliberal economics continually force subjects to refashion. Her refusal to adopt an altogether new style away from the Western-Victoriana look is akin to Mark Fisher’s observations of the nostalgic patterns of contemporary culture in which the refusal to give up on the desire for a future means that the practice of melancholia gains a political dimension in its ‘failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism’.20 Indeed, her acts of ­self-harm and suicidal behaviour in season one meant that not only was she trashing her garments but she was effectively denying the Delos corporation the chance to profit from her body by repeatedly being taken for repair ‘below’ thus removing herself from the role of commodity for the guests. Maeve’s season two style is melancholic because she realises if she is to survive she must always engage in a form of costume (paradoxically) by dressing up in ‘our’ style in order to disguise her host nature. This camouflage is tantamount to the erasure of her identity, or death of her authentic style, however, despite this she still cannot forget the experiences of her past and despite the violence and cruelty endured in her Westworld ‘uniform’ she still carries a material echo of this within her new costume. This form of costuming is again contradictory and complicit as she must embrace the style of her oppressors, but also remain in some sense imprisoned by her past through the recurring spectral qualities materialised in her frontier dress, a recurring figure throughout the series. Consequently, Maeve is both haunted and haunting. Melancholic dress becomes a stylistic and narrative exception in which Maeve’s choices (to escape, to find her daughter) within the narrative are most melodramatically ‘worked through’ upon her body and her dress. Westworld’s nostalgia strategy is designed through this splicing of period-modern costume which demonstrates how nostalgia is not impossible, but rather, seemingly impossible to escape in the form of lingering fashions of the past. However, in rerouting nostalgia into a horror within our present, Maeve creates an uncomfortable proximity. Across popular culture there has been a prominent turn towards the fashionable Victorian aesthetic, especially within a gothic context. Films include Crimson Peak (2015), Winchester (2018) and Limehouse Golem (Netflix, 2018) to name a few. On television, series such as A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix, 2017–) American Horror Story: Coven (2013) and True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014) make use of Victoriana fashion frequently despite being mainly set in the twenty-first century. Not to mention neo-Victorian series such as Dracula (NBC/Sky Living, 2013–2014), Ripper Street (BBC/Amazon Video, 2012–2016) and The Alienist (Netflix, 2018). Fashion itself has seen collections repeatedly draw heavily from the Victorian period in recent years including Christian Dior (Fall 2010); Gareth Pugh (Fall 2013); Alexander McQueen (Fall 2015) and Dsquared2 (Fall 2017). Victoriana is certainly not going out of style. Neo-Victorianism can therefore often intensify the relationship between (pleasurable) surfaces and suffering (of past

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traumas); rematerialising bodies multiple times, bringing with them literal fabrications of history, forcing audiences to both witness and refashion the ‘past’ simultaneously. The replication of past styles creates a paradox of complex identity politics then through which individuals are constantly reviving the dead through dress, keeping economies effectively ‘undead’ while simultaneously in fashion.21 Victorian fashions, like those in Penny Dreadful, function as a distinctive aesthetic through which to image specific cultural anxieties, particularly those concerning femininity that are felt upon contemporary neoliberal bodies. Indeed, surfaces are the selling point of this neo-Victorian—Gothic assemblage—a Guardian review of the first series quipped that ‘Vanessa, naturally, has a few secrets of her own stuffed up her crinoline’, encouraging potential viewers with this potential of ­revelation-by-dress (or, undress).22 Neoliberal horrors surface within contemporary Gothic when women engage in acts of self-modification, self-fashioning or self-harm in the pursuit of control, power or an escape. A more recent development within programming trends means that since the 1990s gothic television has also presented both a curious contrast to, and incorporation of, tropes of the lifestyle (and self) improvement programming.23 Aspects of Penny Dreadful lean into this trend as Lily Frankenstein is the centre of numerous ‘make-over’ scenes. Her surgical enhancement from corpse to ‘undead’ is reminiscent of cosmetic-surgery scenes shown usually in documentary formats, like Sex, Knives & Liposuction (W, 2018) which utilises graphic close-ups of the wounds and overhead angles observing the female body-in-progress. Victor shops for—and alters—new clothes upon Lily, rem­ iniscent of designers pinning patterns to models in Project Runway (Lifetime, 2004–). Her ‘reveal’ at Dorian Gray’s ball also replicates the common make-over transformation and confirms her conversion from Brona to Lily. When Victor introduces ‘Lily’ to John Clare he has already dyed and cut her hair, announcing ‘cosmetically she is transformed, who could recognise the woman she was?’ Victor prays on her unmemorable status as Brona, the sex worker, the woman he resurrects and renames Lily, who has no one to remember her. Lily’s narrative is centred upon this difference between what she was then, and what she is now, and how she works this t­emporal-anxiety through her body. By covering Lily in high collars and lace; the abjected scar on her chest is concealed literally by a higher class of clothing than the coarse materials and working-girl clothes of Brona. Unlike Victor’s admirations for a woman who is ‘always very completely dressed’, Brona’s clothing—and profession, works on a deliberate play on visibility; her netted fingerless gloves, multiple layering of mismatched and faded fabrics, visible fraying on her hemlines. Brona foreshadows, through dress, an equal patchwork iteration of what Lily will become and her past, but also her class and sense of self are literally washed and stripped away through the process of forced re-fashioning predicated on how Victor chooses to display her. After Lily’s resurrection, he drapes what is assumed to be his worn coat over her naked body and a longer, slightly higher lens captures the dwarfing of her figure in this garment and later a ­wide-angle frame lingers on her new look. Once Victor has completed her transformation the framing techniques additionally expose Lily by subversively

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drawing attention to how costume completely consumes and paradoxically erases her. The use of lifestyle—make-over tropes only highlight the perverse lack of choice Lily had in her transformation, while the gothic narrative subverts the framing techniques which commonly show women taking control of their bodies. The pursuit of ­self-improvement is transformed, literally, into a horror show. Serial television works alongside the process of self-fashioning in which episodic transformations exemplify the process of neoliberal investment. Lily’s appearance frequently present compliance issues for Victor, he purchases her dresses, alters them, is shocked by her appearance (when dressing herself) and then becomes unable to recognise her (when matching Dorian). Victor shops for Lily in the same store as the decidedly upper-class Vanessa. Interestingly, despite gaining material wealth, Lily loses the ability to choose her clothes, she has only the option of a new style, an alternate future. Much like the evolution of television into On Demand services, subscription channels and boxsets, the importance of choice becomes a privilege of the late-capitalist consumer. Lily’s choice to reject Victor’s styling demonstrates her not simply rejecting his creative control over her body, but embracing her initiation as a self-fashioning neoliberal subject; ready to choose, ready to consume. Her autopsy-style breastbone stitches and scaring are initially revealed only to be concealed by Victor in subsequent episodes before slowly returning in later episodes once Lily takes control of her life (and clothing). Fashioning takes her from object to subject; investment to investor. Lily’s self-fashioning works to articulate how Wheatley’s identification of gothic television’s ‘impressionistic renditions of (troubled) subjectivities’ can be affectively constructed and deconstructed through and upon dress as a narrative device that illuminates understanding of her value, and sense of Self.24 Robin James outlines how neoliberalism has evolved the ideal of fragility through the discourse of resilience in which femininity is performed first as damage and then as resilience and in overcoming past-damage women contribute to the economies of neoliberalism that thrive on this cyclical process.25 Despite socially climbing, Lily cannot escape the damage that has been inflicted upon her—instead she wears it literally in choosing styles that reveal the scars Victor inflicted upon her. ‘Overcoming’ equates to overdressing. However, her new, ­high-class garments fail to offer her a liberating drive to freedom but instead become another enforced endurance of reliving the pain of her past. While held prisoner by Victor in the final third series, Lily’s dress is clearly higher quality than that which Victor had originally bought her in the previous series, having since moved in with aristocrat, Dorian. The gown has several different fabrics within the sleeves indicating value in the abundance of fabrics, although these are pinned in a layered, shredded effect which recall her original ragged Brona costume. Lily’s episodic progression and costume regression forces her to delve into memories in order to manipulate her escape from Victor’s and Dorian’s threatening domesticity. However, her class-shifting costume demonstrates that escape, for women in Gothic, is never as simple as changing one’s style. The hook-andeye fastening of the bodice continues the line of her post-mortem scar across her breastbone and so the dress continues to visualise the scars of her body and build

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up a layering of surfaces and inflicted embellishments which detail her story thus far. Where Lily chooses to display her trauma upon her body, Victor seeks to conceal it. Lily wants to know that she was wounded, that she has the capacity to be marked—and by extension, to feel. This twisted nostalgia is made a productive part of her ­self-fashioning; the desire to have the past remain with her in the form of scar—or, as a literal embellishment. She tells Victor ‘I’ve suffered long and hard to be who I am. I want my scars to show’ and this is also echoed in her goodbye to Dorian in which she asks him if it is ‘better not to care at all?’ Dorian replies that is his view of an immortal life and she retorts that she ‘cannot live like that’. There is significance that neither of the men in her life appreciates the marks upon her skin as part of her narrative, as much as her power, especially to them. For Victor, Lily’s scars are essential evidence of his ‘triumph’ over death; for Dorian likewise, they reveal Lily to be his equal. Both men are content to take these personal assurances from the presence of her scars, but neither wants to acknowledge her pain or her past. Lily finally mediates the fear of visibility, of letting your scars show, by regularly obscuring the surfaces through which she is consumed with liminal underwear, or exposing dress and by using these garments not simply to visualise or present her internal struggles, but to remember through this self-fashioning. The extent to which Lily is successful in offering a neo-Victorian critique of neoliberal consumption and subjectivity is therefore complicated by the personal cost to Lily, and her body. She literally throws off the ironically more delicate and gentler garments, emblematic of Victor’s sartorial system that contained her and instead we see Lily begin to wear tighter, more sculpted silhouettes. She curates a self-consciously gothic style of Victoriana to fashion this feeling of disassociation, visually distinct from Victor’s pale fleshy colours and ‘proper’ shapes. Lily effectively reverses the mental trauma inflicted by Victor’s experimentation upon her body by instead redirecting it upon her clothes and in doing so completely alters the look of her body. Thus, rewriting previous incarnations of Victorian dress within the tradition of the costume drama, which so readily reduces period dress to garments of oppression and objectification. Instead Lily chooses how to present her body, offering a contemporary counter-narrative to long-held assumptions about this style of clothing and its historical context. Lily’s dress becomes a site of nostalgic projection that is, like Maeve, both haunted and haunting as her style becomes more and more ‘Gothic’ in dark colours, heavy embellishment, obscuring textures and extreme corsetry. This style works particularly well upon the visual medium of television where the coding of neo-Victorian fashions on-screen already carry an aesthetic shorthand that is connected to haunting and an ambiguous past. Critics even suggest that it is now near impossible to disentangle the Victorian period from the Gothic.26 By also adopting melancholic gothic fashions, Lily demonstrates how gothic television’s undead bodies provide an indefinite site of consumption, with Lily defiantly claiming she is the ‘next thousand years, [she] is the dead’. Lily’s updatable body is in this respect a valuable asset she recognises must draw on cycles of dead styles and dead memories (trauma) to ensure her survival—just like Maeve. Contemporary television, like Lily, has

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shown an insatiable appetite for styles of the Victorian Gothic, thus recognising of the importance of this returning style.27 Focusing on garments that are trying to make us feel something for the past also therefore means reassessing the role of the visual in neo-Victorianism, engaging with what exactly we are presented with and, equally, what we have lost. Renata Salecl offers an illuminating perspective on the way in which, increasingly, people are finding ways to channel their anxieties through dress, mostly because anxieties are so often invisible, and therefore it becomes easier to manifest resistance or conformity through a visual medium, such as clothes.28 Lily’s overt Victoriana becomes a defiant show of the pain of her past; however, in repeatedly ruining and wounding these garments she trashes the economies of production and power forced upon her by male creators, and would-be consumers. Lily refuses to give currency to the ‘present’ in her dress; she actively engages with her past. In the finale, Lily, clad in black mourning attire, sauntering through a graveyard into narrative abyss does not perform resilience. Robin James discusses the ‘melancholic circuits’ that can be used to disrupt neoliberal economies of power.29 Differing from what she terms classical melancholia which is built notions of wholeness and authenticity and the subsequent failure to get over a loss; melancholia in neoliberalism, according to James, can be rerouted into a ‘failed or inefficient ­self-capitalization…like an investment in death’.30 Lily does not seek to overcome her scars and the damage they have inflicted, in fact she excessively showcases her grief and loss through her heavily coded, melancholic dress. Ending her narrative in literal fashions for the dead, she denies any capitalisation from her grief as it is left unknown whether she will again engage within the dialogue of ‘everyday’ fashion. Lily images infinite ghosted potential, affective ‘inbetweeness’ between the states of productivity and decay; but a future nonetheless. After the horrors endured at the hands of men, Lily leaves, disconnecting herself from anyone, and anywhen. Contemporary gothic television can be seen to celebrate such ongoing ambiguity within its narrative structures and aesthetics and allow characters to showcase alternative points of view, pushing narratives in new, often challenging, but also unresolved directions. Linnie Blake and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet describe how ‘thirty years of neoliberal experiment have done extraordinary violence to our societies and ourselves, leaving us unable, it seems, to find a way out of the darkness’.31 Through the readings presented here, costume illuminates on screen an acute awareness of that darkness. The lack of resolution found within television’s flexi-narratives, exemplified in Penny Dreadful and Westworld’s interlocking, disconnecting and fragmented narratives and further visualised in sequences of self-fashioning/ harming, as described, can produce a heightened style of realism for audiences who have come to recognise the complexities of texts which venture into the past. As well as a source of visual pleasure and interest, costume offers a critique of the complicated body politics of contemporary culture which also pushes the limits of the body on television, and that may prompt audiences to reflect on how they might, unlike Madison, fashion their own way towards a brighter future—and what that might look like.

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Notes

1. As yet, there is no monograph or edited collection which specifically focuses on the role of costume in television within the context of Horror/Gothic studies. Helen Warner’s (2014) Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture includes series such as Sex and the City and Gossip Girl which place fashion at their centre but does not consider the genres of horror, sci-fi or Gothic in detail. Julia Petrov and Gudrun D. Whitehead (eds) (2017) Fashioning Horror excludes any chapters focusing on television, instead considering literature, film and fashion more broadly. Catherine Spooner’s Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2006) considers clothing and costume across a range of mediums and texts. Spooner has published several individual chapters which look specifically at clothing within television, for example, see ‘Wrapped in Plastic: David Lynch’s Material Girls’ pp. 105–120 in (2015) Catherine Spooner and Jeffrey A. Weinstock (eds) Return to Twin Peaks. 2. J. Petrov and G. D. Whitehead (eds), Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. i. 3. H. Warner, Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2. 4. C. Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 1. 5. J. Subramanian, ‘The Monstrous Makeover: American Horror Story, Femininity and Special Effects’, Critical Studies in Television Vol. 8:3 (Autumn 2013): pp. 108–123, p. 113. 6. Drawing on the work of Robin James and applying these ideas to costume. See R. James, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Alresford: Zero Books, 2015). 7. S. Orbach, quoted in A. Elias, R. Gill, and C. Schartt (eds), Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. vii. 8. A. Winch, ‘Brand Intimacy: Female Friendship and Digital Surveillance Networks’, New Formations Vol. 84 (2015): pp. 228–245. 9. See Nick Remsen, ‘American Horror Story: Coven—An Unexpected Fashion Hit’, Vogue, 29 January 2014. Available from: https://www.vogue.com/article/ emamerican-horror-story-coveneman-unexpected-fashion-hit. 10. See Liana Satenstein, ‘Go Ahead, Be a Witch This Summer’. Vogue, 23 June 2016. Available from: https://www.vogue.com/article/summer-witch-style. 11. See Eddie Robson, ‘Gothic Television’, in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 242–250; Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 12. L. Schmidt, ‘Television: Horror’s “Original” Home’, Horror Studies Vol. 4:2 (2013): pp. 159–171, p. 160. 13. H. Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 163. 14. John Landgraf quoted in Jason Lynch, ‘Peak TV Is Still “a Ways” from Peaking, FX’s John Landgraf Says’, Adweek, 3 August 2018. 15. Wheatley, Gothic Television, p. 160. 16. Paul Cameron quoted in Bill Desowitz, ‘How HBO’s “Westworld” Shot on Film for a More Tactile, Organic Look’, IndieWire Magazine, 30 September 2016. 17. Paul Cameron quoted in Daron James, ‘HBO’s “Westworld”: Cinematographer Paul Cameron on Getting “Fearless Coverage” on 35mm Film’, No Film School, 29 September 2016.

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18. Thandie Newton quoted in Joanna Robinson, ‘Thandie Newton on How Westworld’s “Profound” Nude Scenes Gave Maeve Her Voice’, Vanityfair.com, 26 June 2017. Available from: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/06/ westworld-thandie-newton-emmy-fyc-maeve-contender. 19. Sharen Davis quoted in ‘Inside Westworld with Costume Designer Sharen Davis’ [online], HBO. Available from: https://www.hbo.com/westworld/season-2/ costume-designer-sharen-davis-interview. 20. M. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014), p. 21. 21. See John Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 22. Filipa Jodelka, ‘Penny Dreadful, a Delectably Ghoulish Affair’, The Guardian, 17 May 2014. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/17/ penny-dreadful-filipa-jodelka-review. 23. See Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 24. Wheatley, Gothic Television, p. 163. 25. See R. James, Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism (Alresford: Zero Books, 2015). 26. See Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012). 27. There has been a steady proliferation of Victorian-inspired series like Sherlock (BBC, 2010–); Whitechapel (ITV, 2009–2013); Victoria (ITV, 2016–); The Paradise (BBC/ PBS, 2012–2013) along with numerous costume-dramas set within the nineteenth century. 28. R. Salecl, ‘Dress Anxiety’, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty Vol. 7:1 (June 2016): pp. 3–17, p. 6. 29. James, Resilience and Melancholy, p. 141. 30. Ibid. 31. L. Blake and A. S. Monnet, Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 14.

Bibliography Blake, L., and Monnet. A. S. (2017) Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elias, A., Gill, R., and Schartt, C. (eds) (2017) Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Hills, M. (2005) The Pleasures of Horror. London: Continuum. James, R. (2015) Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Alresford: Zero Books. Petrov, J., and Whitehead, G. D. (eds) (2017) Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Salecl, R. (2016, June) ‘Dress Anxiety’. Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty Vol. 7:1: pp. 3–17. Schmidt, L. (2013) ‘Television: Horror’s “Original” Home’. Horror Studies Vol. 4:2: pp. 159–171. Spooner, C. (2004) Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Subramanian, J. (2013, Autumn) ‘The Monstrous Makeover: American Horror Story, Femininity and Special Effects’. Critical Studies in Television Vol. 8:3: pp. 108–123. Warner, H. (2014) Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Wheatley, H. (2006) Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Winch, A. (2015) ‘Brand Intimacy: Female Friendship and Digital Surveillance Networks’. New Formations Vol. 84: pp. 228–245.

Wildlings, White Walkers, and Watchers on the Wall of Northumberland’s Borderland Chelsea Eddy

A Gothic reading of George R. R. Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ novels and the subsequent HBO Game of Thrones television series, may seem surprising given that they are critically and commercially classified within the fantasy genre. Martin himself imagines his books as ‘fantasy for adults’.1 The inherent hybridity of fantasy and gothic modes make them highly compatible and complementary discourses. Fantasy is often described as ‘a door that leads into another world’, which enables ‘the construction of the impossible’.2 Similarly, Eve Sedgwick describes the function of Gothic as having the ability to ‘open horizons beyond social patterns’, which enlarges ‘the sense of reality and its impact on the human being’.3 The telos of both modes are the same in that they expand the limits of realism, so they frequently converge in literature. Despite the definitive classification of the Song of Ice and Fire and the Game of Thrones series as fantasy, the fantastical elements occupy a marginal position in the text; the dragons are confined to Essos in the Far East, the necromantic Shadow Assassin was birthed on the self-contained island of Dragonstone, and the lands beyond Westeros’s Wall are plagued by all manners of mythical creatures. The relegation of fantastical supernaturalism to Westeros’s geographical margins consolidates the mainland’s hold on realism and rationalism, and opens up performative peripheral spaces that can engage with various imaginative discourses. The Wall, however, acts as an intersectional border where the limits of fantasy are reached. It operates as a crossing point where Gothic and fantasy converge, which is demonstrated by the Night King’s resurrection of Daenerys’ dragon in ‘Beyond the Wall’.4 The imaginative unreality of fantasy creates the conditions that enable the Wall, but are unable to solely represent the monstrous associations and fearful affect of this macabre borderland, which are qualities more befitting of the Gothic. The etymology of Goth derives from the Germanic guetan, meaning to pour or to flow. Adam Roberts appropriates this definition to determine that ‘Gothic

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literature, like the Gothic people, has demonstrated a restless fluidity of s­ ituation’: fluidity being a property that Roberts argues is integral to our understanding of the Gothic.5 In Martin’s first novel, Game of Thrones, the Wall is repeatedly described as ‘weeping’ due to the melting ice that crept ‘down its side in a hundred thin fingers’ (GOT, 501).6 The Wall is a literal fluid structure, which makes it a gothic edifice in itself according to the word’s etymological origins, but doubly functions as a unique gothic space by its semi-permeability that allows its borders to be transgressed. Eve Sedgwick convincingly states in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions that ‘the worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the uncanny’ do not occur inside gothic’s incarcerating edifices, but are ‘evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning wall’.7 Martin’s inspiration for his Song of Ice and Fire series came after a visit to Hadrian’s Wall in 1981; the ruins of the northern boundary of Britannia for a significant duration of the Roman rule. Martin stood on the wall and imagined how for the ‘Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that. It could have been any kind of monster’.8 Martin makes manifest his concept of Hadrian’s Wall as a ‘barrier against dark forces’ through the incarnation of a seven-hundred foot wall of ice, ‘wide enough for a dozen armoured knights to ride abreast’, lined by sentinel ‘catapults and monstrous wooden cranes’ that were ‘like the skeletons of great birds, and among them walked men in black as small as ants’ (GOT, 178). The Roman’s amorphous enemies beyond Britannia’s border became Martin’s Wildlings and the undead, maleficent Others. I begin this essay by summarising the colonial history of Westeros in order to contextualise how such cultural and social divisions have been established, before honing in upon the physical and symbolic borders that regulate the distinction between the Northerners and the Wildlings. The latter aspect of this analysis explores how the Wildlings arrogate their markers of difference as empowering tools to breach the wall. However, their process of reverse colonisation is complicated by the violent breach of the Wall alluded to by Sedgwick. Hereafter, the distinction of Watcher and Wildling becomes a mutable concept, which is instead mobilised against their common enemy, the subtly named ‘Others’. The ‘Children of the Forest’ were the original inhabitants of Westeros before the First Men invaded and claimed the open lands whilst the Children retreated to the forests. When the Others attacked Westeros, The First Men and The Children of the Forest united to drive their common enemy back to the Lands of Always Winter. Consequently, Bran the Builder of the First Men constructed the Wall whilst the Children spelled its foundations to prevent the Others from being able to pass through its structure. However, this did not prevent the Andals from successfully invading Westeros and usurping the First Men. The holdfast of Moat Cailin prevented the Andals from infiltrating the North, which resulted in the dichotomisation between North and South that exists in present-day Westeros. The Children represent England’s original Celtic inhabitants, the industrious First Men settlers signify the Romans, and the Andals, responsible

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for dividing Westeros into ‘seven kingdoms’ are the Anglo-Saxons who divided Briton. Jarlath Killeen refers to nineteenth-century ideologies of race to demonstrate how Anglo-Saxons were anthropologically ‘located at the highest point of the evolutionary scale’, whilst other cultures were judged relative to this and deemed less progressive and ‘historically behind’.9 The Celtic fringes of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales thus became useful spaces to harbour atavistic cultures and could bolster Anglo-Saxon superiority. Killeen’s nationalistic division is allegorically replicated through the cultural differences in the North and South of Westeros. The southern Andals assert their progressive superiority: they worship the ‘new gods’ whose religious centre is housed in the elaborate Sept of Baelor; their Mediterranean-style capital consists of cosmopolitan architecture; and the King’s Road, Westeros’s principle infrastructure, is clearly demarcated and well maintained (GOT, 19). Northerners, by contrast, worship the old gods in ‘dark, primal’ and ‘untouched’ woods, places of ‘deep silence and brooding shadows’ that smelt of ‘moist earth and decay’ (GOT, 19). Central to their wood is a macabre ‘heart tree’ whose bark is ‘white as bone’ and its ‘dark red’ leaves look like ‘a thousand bloodstained hands’ (GOT, 20). In regards to infrastructure and architecture, the King’s Road descends into a ‘wild track’ (GOT, 113), Winterfell is a ‘gloomy castle’, and Moat Cailin is defended by ‘cold vengeful spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood’ (GOT, 577). The North is homogenised into a satire of mocking stereotypes; a joyless, primitive place where ‘it’s all blizzards and bearskins’ and ‘the Starks know no music but the howling of wolves’ (GOT, 281). Southerners deem them socially inferior and comically infer that they ‘are all made of ice, and melt when [they] ride below the Neck’ (GOT, 186). This allegory symbolises how their identities are attached to the northern landscape. Their subjectivity is an extension of their surroundings, to the extent that to leave one’s physical place of belonging is self-annihilating. This is true for Robert Baratheon, who redraws the northern border at Winterfell, which is his ‘end of the world’ (GOT, 43). When asked to discuss the Wall he responds ‘The Wall has stood for what, eight thousand years? It can keep a few days more. I have more pressing concerns’ (GOT, 43). Robert has homogenised the north and redrawn the ideological borders of Westeros, so that the Wall is completely removed. This mimics critical approaches to regional Gothic, which has predominantly focused on Britain’s borderlands: Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; and have surprisingly neglected to consider the actual borders that maintain the fragile binaries between England and its territories. I address this inattention by repositioning the Wall as central to our understanding of Game of Thrones and the significance of Northumberland as a distinctly gothic space. The term ‘Gothic’ had conventionally been defined according to Samuel Johnson’s 1775 Dictionary, as ‘one not civilized, one deficient in general knowledge, a barbarian’.10 Northerners characterise the Wildlings within this definition. Wildlings are described as speaking in the ‘harsh clanging words’ of the ‘Old Tongue’ (GOT, 203), and fantastically illustrated by Old Nan who says the ‘wildlings were cruel men […] slavers and slayers and thieves. They consorted

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with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children’ (GOT, 11). The Wildlings identify themselves as ‘free folk’, because they do not abide by societal constraints, laws, and rules. ‘Wildlings’ was an identity assigned to them as a marker of their social difference; their fearful Gothicness is culturally constructed and repeatedly asserted by the realm in order to maintain their separation from the civilised nation. The Wildlings’ liberal values and nomadism contradict the realm’s social structures, who the free folk refer to as ‘kneelers’ because their identity is foregrounded by their submission to laws, rules, and kings. The Wildlings represent a time when the First Men ruled freely over Westeros, and the Northerners have a repressed desire to return to this nostalgic past and reclaim their independence, but instead atavistically mark the Wildlings with savagery and animalism in order to suppress their desire and maintain this division between sides. The men of the Night’s Watch constantly refer back to their oaths and what they are prohibited from doing; their identities are consolidated by negation, whereas nothing is restricted to free folk. This is evidenced in the way they set up camp; they ‘simply stopped where they wanted’ and had ‘no defences to speak of’.11 There are no borders to their community, which is transferred to their democratic social system. Tormund mocks Jon’s conservatism and asks ‘In the south, must a man wed every girl he beds?’ to which he asserts ‘You are a free man now, and Ygritte is a free woman’ (SOS1, 207). Jon’s reluctance is personally motivated as he does not want to father a bastard like himself, replicating patriarchal discourse that would obligate him to assume responsibility, but Tormund declares ‘if Ygritte does not want a child, she will go to some woods witch and drink a cup o’ moon tea. You do not come into it, once the seed is planted’ (SOS1, 208). The Wildling’s liberality contradicts Jon’s moral and social coding that structure his life and identity, so he declares that it is no ‘Small wonder that the Seven Kingdoms thought the free folk scarcely human. They have no laws, no honour, not even simple decency’ (SOS1, 208). These Westerosi beliefs towards the Wildlings mimic Classical responses to emergent gothic style. In Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Richard Hurd analogises this reactionism by suggesting that if one analysed a gothic structure by Grecian rules one would find ‘nothing but deformity’; judge something by ‘classical models, and you are shocked by its disorder, consider it with an eye to its Gothic original, and you find it regular’.12 Hurd’s suggestion is precisely how the Wildlings should be considered. I argue that the Wildlings are resonant of the original Goths. The true beginnings of gothic history did not begin as a cultural movement but as a political discussion in the seventeenth century. Historians, philosophers, and social commentators revisited the Germanic tribes that invaded Britain in the fifth century. Instead of depictions of barbarous people favoured by later gothic convention, the Goths were ‘valorous and virtuous, innately inclined to venerate women […] with a strong attachment to liberty and justice’.13 Cornelius Tacitus wrote Germania in the first century, which remains one of the most important and influential classical sources for political discussions on the Goths. The

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influential historian Montesquieu utilised Tacitus’ treatise to deduce that the English had borrowed their notions of political government from the Goths’ ‘beautiful system’ of governance that was ‘invented first in the woods’.14 The natural connection between the Goth’s habitation and their political system implies an organicism that is respected rather than ridiculed. The Goths’ are positioned as the forbears of British government, which analogously implicates the Wildlings as the antecedents of the southern King’s Court. Mance Rayder, the ‘King-Beyond-the-Wall’, typifies the Goths’ leaders who were ‘appointed to ­ lead voluntary armies, or colonies for the forming of new settlements in foreign lands […] followed by a free and independent multitude’.15 The rustiness of the Wildling ‘court’ is supposed to parody Joffrey’s in King’s Landing, but is actually much more effective. Mance, who ‘looked nothing like a king’ with ‘no crown’, ‘no gold rings’, and ‘no jewels’ is ironically referred to as ‘The King-beyond-the Wall’ yet holds no formal title or address (SOS1, 98). He mockingly introduces his ‘court’, which consists of a man with armour made of bones, Thormund with ‘grease running down his chin’ dressed in ringmail stolen from a dead ranger, an earless then, his pregnant wife from Dorne, and her sister who has taken a male escort (SOS1, 98–99). The Wildling carnivalesque parody of Westeros’ government subverts and undermines the central authority. Mance’s court is morally just, democratic, and rational as opposed to Joffrey’s corrupt leadership. Wildling culture also shares its gender principles with the Goths. Mance’s wife and sister-in-law provide him with invaluable counsel, much like the Goths equalitarianism whereby the two sexes ‘mutually improve and polish one another’.16 Women were ‘friends and faithful counsellors’ and even sanctified.17 Ygritte was a ‘great beauty because of her hair; red hair was rare among the free folk, and those who had it were said to be kissed by fire, which was supposed to be lucky’ (SOS1, 207) Ygritte would be judged ‘common’ at a ‘lord’s court’, but here she is revered for her difference. She’s a fierce warrior who is valued in their army, nicknamed a ‘spearwife’, whose body cannot be objectified due to ‘all the furs and skins she wore’ (SOS1, 212), and whenever she is told not to do something she states ‘a free woman rides where she will’ (SOS1, 214). If we consider other female fighters: Brienne of Tarth, the Sand Snakes, Arya; they are continuously ridiculed, sexualised, and underestimated, which doesn’t stop them or make them any less formidable, but they are subject to patriarchal oppression and damning social attitudes that try to control them, unlike Ygritte. The Wildlings exploit the weaknesses in the wall and arrogate their markers of difference that are imposed upon them as tools of empowerment. Like the diverse composition of the Goths from ‘many different nations’, the Wildlings are also incredibly heterogeneous.18 The free folk is comprised of approximately ninety different tribes, who are all culturally divided, but rather than trivial motivations for southern loyalty inspired by ‘little cloth animals sewn on a tunic’, ‘coins’, or ‘style’, the Wildlings ‘follow strength’.19 They marry people from other tribes so that their shared genetics would strengthen future generations. Each clan is adapted to different harsh climates and environments, so they harness these differences and hone them as a strength. They are able to attack the wall ‘unseen’

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because they can negotiate the unnavigable lands closest to the border (SOS1, 357). Wargs are people who can embody the consciousness of animals; the first of which is a Wildling named Orell. Orell can enter the consciousness of an eagle, which grants him a privileged bird’s-eye view of his enemies. The Wildlings can defend themselves against, and successfully enact surprise attacks because of their innate animalistic abilities. The Wildlings arrogate their gothicness: their differences, rustic harshness, and primitive animalism; to enable them in their process of reverse colonisation. Stephen Arata reads Dracula as an example of the Victorian’s ‘most important and pervasive narrative of decline’ concerned with the process of reverse colonisation.20 The fear implicit within this process is linked to the belief that the allegedly ‘civilised’ world is precariously close to being colonised by its primitive peoples. Darryl Jones boldly states that ‘modern Britain was conceived in blood’.21 Jones is referring primarily to a series of protracted wars with Catholic France, but the tradition of ‘hating Others’ has been a long-established narrative that defined English nationalism just as the Starks and the Watchers on the Wall strengthen their identities through their conflict with the Wildlings. For ‘eight thousand years’ Northerners have lived and died to protect ‘their people against such ravagers and reavers [sic]’ (GOT, 210). The antagonism between Self and Other is an essential component of personal and national narratives, but the points of intersection are particularly productive spaces whereby the binaries of self and other become perilously volatile. The gothic threshold in Game of Thrones is the Wall, which is an allegorical extension of an iconic Roman fortification that is supposed to symbolise and uphold the ‘models of order established by the Roman empire’.22 On the contrary, Martin has gothicised Hadrian’s Wall by subverting its associated principles of order and organisation into decaying and disordered ruins. Castle Black once housed ‘five thousand fighting men’, now it was ‘home to a tenth of that number, and parts of it were falling into ruin’ (GOT, 179–180). The Wall is lined with deserted keeps that ‘were lonely, haunted places, where cold winds whistled through black windows and the spirits of the dead manned the parapets’ (GOT, 180). The Wall and its battlements have fallen into disrepair, whilst the structures that remain do so as spectral reminders of the past. When they were once building, fortifying, and expanding the Wall, they now simply watched ‘for cracks or signs of melt and [made] what repairs they could’ (GOT, 431). This formidable structure that protected the realm from recalcitrant identities and the ominous threat of the Others is collapsing. Ned Stark prophesied that a wall is only as strong as the men who defend it, which echoes Genghis Khan who notoriously exploited the weaknesses of the Great Wall of China. Unfortunately, Martin’s Wall is manned by ‘the misfits of the realm […] sullen peasants, debtors, poachers, rapers, thieves, and bastards’ (GOT, 119). Marc Silberman identifies borders as ‘dead zones’ determined by their peripheral position, which alienates them from ‘the nation’s core’ and its accompanying wealth and power.23 Especially if, like Martin’s Wall and Hadrian’s Wall, that ‘wall, border, or boundary is closed or remote’ because those zones ‘usually function as conquered, relatively empty second-class areas’.24 This is certainly true in Game of Thrones,

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as the men of the Night’s Watch are all outcasts of the realm, placeless people, forbidden from taking wives, so the garrisons become sterile areas, and when Bran saw over the wall he saw ‘dead plains’ where nothing grew (GOT, 369). This absence of civilisation transforms the Wall into a ghostly landscape in itself. Botting claims that the most appropriate gothic settings are ‘isolated spots, areas beyond reason, law and civilised authority, where there is no protection from terror’.25 The Wall operates as this zone of indistinction, entirely removed from the realm and their politics, whilst its cracking structure and weakened defences render them susceptible to the terrors beyond the wall. The Wildlings are able to exploit the Wall’s weaknesses and recognise the only way to beat the Wall is to go over it, again mirroring British history as the valiant Goths return to undermine the Roman rule. However, this process of reverse colonisation is inherently violent particularly at the lines where the borders are drawn. Threshold spaces feature prevalently as sites of horror as they perfectly encapsulate the gothic fascination with the inner irrational. However, the most horrifically violent episodes are reserved for the eruption of the surface, the actual transgression of the threshold space. The tendency in criticism is to concentrate on the oppositional sides of Self and Other without considering that which separates them, which is, in this instance, the Wall. Killeen identifies regional gothic novels as an ‘alternative means of examination of British fault-lines’, which pose a ‘pathological account of the breakdown of identity and the collapse of personal and national integrity in the encounter with otherness’.26 For years, the ‘civilised’ Westerosi and ‘barbaric’ Wildlings have consolidated their personal and cultural identities through their difference to one another. The Wall maintains and regulates their spatial separateness and symbolic divisiveness; however, the symmetry of a wall renders the ideological significance of its presence contingent upon which side you are looking at it from. As Silberman observes, ‘the Other’ on ‘the Other’ side of the Wall, depends on ‘one’s situational perspective’.27 When Jon goes over the wall and is forced to join the Wildlings, this signals both a physical transgression and an ideological one that immediately blurs the binaries between Self and Other. It is here that he learns of the commonality between Wildlings and Northerners: ‘the wildling blood is the blood of the first men, the same blood that flows through the veins of the Starks’ (SOS1, 103). Whilst Jon believes that his personal transgression is an exceptional case, he learns that many Wildlings were actually once men of the Night’s Watch or Northerners. Ygritte mocks his naivety and says: ‘D’ye think you’re the first crow ever flew down off the Wall? In your hearts you all want to fly free’ (SOS1, 93). The impenetrable and formidable image of the Wall has been rendered fragile by its permeability, and the distinction of Jon as a Northern Crow has been confused by a shared history with the Wildlings. This psychic disintegration of self-subjectivity is allegorically mapped onto the Wall, which is an inherently volatile spatiality described as a ‘sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west’ (SOS1, 407). Eve Sedgwick accredits this to the separation of Self and Other that creates a

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doubleness where singleness should be. And the lengths there are to go to to reintegrate the sundered elements - finally, the impossibility of restoring them to their original oneness - are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel. The worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralysing instances of the uncanny […] are evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning wall’.28

The only means of reconciliation require ‘violence or magic, and both of a singularly threatening kind’.29 With every ascent or descent of the Wall, we witness a physical and psychological disintegration of the binary between Wildling and Westerosi. During the Wildling’s first ascent of the Wall, large sheets of ice cascaded down the structure and obliterated groups of the Wildlings leaving a ‘wound in the Wall’ (SOS1, 425). The only trace of their being there was a ‘faint red smear’ (SOS1, 425). Men had been impaled and their bodies broken by the Wall. The Wall may be made of ice, but Ygritte proclaims ‘this wall is made o’ blood’ (SOS1, 425). The Wall becomes a living incarnation of the continual conflict and violence, which is provoked by the borderland. During the Wildling’s assault on Castle Black in the ‘Watchers on the Wall’, both Wildlings and the Watchers suffer tremendous casualties.30 The scene pans around a blood bath that depicts equal losses on both sides: for every Watcher wounded in one shot there is a Wildling equivalent in the next. Following this battle, a number of the Wildlings are held captive in Castle Black. They have succeeded in moving beyond the Wall, albeit as captives, however, it is from here that the Northerners and Wildlings unite. The next transgression of the Wall is the most haunting battle of the entire series. ‘Hardhome’ features Jon Snow going beyond the Wall with a group of Wildlings and Watchers in order to convince the rest of the Wildlings to go ‘make an alliance against our common foe’ and live south of the Wall.31 As the groups who agreed to an alliance begin to evacuate, the White Walkers attack. This is the first time that we fully witness the enormity of the threat that White Walkers pose to humanity. Before this, there had only been fleeting attacks with small numbers, but in ‘Hardhome’ the humans are completely overwhelmed by the enemy. As the wights descend the mountains surrounding the holdfast, the Wildlings hurriedly close their city gates shutting out some of their own. Peering through a gap in the gate, the screaming face of a Wildling woman takes up the frame, she vanishes, and the camera crosscuts to the face of a skeletal wight screeching through its exposed, gaping jaw. This juxtaposed image demonstrates how the previous assailants of the Wall were Wildlings, and because they have been denied entry the threat they posed is now amplified. The enemy has weaponised the Wildling victims unable to cross the border, and their once perceived threat is made palpable as they transform into harrowing and monstrous versions of themselves. After the initial Other/White Walkers encounter in the opening scenes of the books and series, they were then relegated to the peripheries of the narrative, but have since been gradually invading their way back for the Battle of Hardhome. In ‘The Door’, Bran revisits a past vision wherein the Children have taken one of the First Men captive.32 They plunge a piece of enchanted ‘dragon glass’ into his chest, which creates the first White Walker, the Night King. When Bran emerges from his vision, he angrily accuses Leaf who justifies their actions: ‘We were at

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war. We were being slaughtered […] we needed to defend ourselves […] from you, from man’.33 The threat of the White Walkers was incepted during the first invasion of Westeros. The Children weaponised their invaders and made them victims to themselves. In doing so, however, the danger of the Walkers could not be contained and are now a threat to all races. The Walkers are more than a projection of geopolitical fears but signify years of repetitive cultural and historical guilt. The Army of the Dead are repeatedly described in reflective terms—their glistening armour, their mirrored weapons—and so reflect back the reality of their fantasies of war and constant conflict manifested in a monstrous form. Mance and his Wildlings had never intended to destroy the Wall, as nothing else could stop the Others described as the ones that ‘kill you, then they send their dead against you’ (SOS2, 445).34 The White Walker’s revenant army demonstrates the repetitive cycle of conflict and colonial crisis that Westeros has been imprisoned by. The Walkers are ‘demons made of snow and ice and cold’, they are ‘the ancient enemy […] the only enemy that matters’ (SOS1, 505). They are the original enemy manifested by colonisation. They are a natural product of that environment, bred from the division between people and the crisis of power. The White Walkers had constantly been breaking through barriers in the series; they stormed the camp at the Fist of the First Men, they usurped the inviolable Sacred Tree bringing down the door in ‘The Door’, and they penetrated the gates at Hardhome. In ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’, the final episode of the penultimate season, the Wall finally came down.35 The Night King resurrected a dead dragon with white scales and pale blue eyes, who destroyed a section of the Wall allowing the Army of the Dead to begin their invasion of Westeros. After thousands of years of conflict with the Wildlings, the re-emergence of the White Walkers demonstrates that the Wildlings were never the real threat. The Watchers and Wildlings are stripped back in Game of Thrones to reveal their protracted imperial conflict with each other that is monstrously incarnated as the Others. The threat in Game of Thrones is not the people either side of the border, but the border itself. The Wall is an anthropomorphic entity that continuously promotes and catalyses violent behaviour between oppositional sides. As Tyrion Lannister philosophises: ‘Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?’ (GOT, 270).

Notes

1. Lesley Goldberg, ‘Game of Thrones: George R.R. Martin on the Evolution of the Fantasy Drama (Q&A)’, Hollywood Reporter, 17 January 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/game-thrones-george-rr-martin-282699, accessed 10 May 2017. 2. Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. v. 4. ‘Beyond the Wall’, Game of Thrones, HBO, 21 August 2017.

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5. Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, p. 22. 6. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (London: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 5, 501. Subsequent references to this text will be made in parentheses after the quotation. 7. Sedgwick, p. 13. 8. Mikal Gillmore, ‘George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview’, Rolling Stone, 23 April 2014. 9. Killeen, History of the Gothic, p. 92. 10. Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s English Dictionary (Boston: Nathan Hale, 1775), p. 401. 11. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords: Part 1, Steel and Snow (London: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 95. Subsequent references to this text will be made in parentheses after the quotation. 12. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 75. 13. Ibid., p. 89. 14. Ibid., p. 62. 15. Ibid., p. 66. 16. Ibid., p. 89. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 64. 19. George R. R Martin, A Dance with Dragons (London: HarperCollins, 2011). 20. Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33.4 (1990): 621–645 (p. 623). 21. Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2003), p. 8. 22. Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 10. 23. Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe, ed. by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), p. 5. 24. Ibid., p. 1. 25. Botting, p. 4. 26. Killeen, p. 94. 27. Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe, p. 76. 28. Sedgwick, p. 13. 29. Ibid. 30. ‘Watchers on the Wall’, Game of Thrones, HBO, 9 June 2014. 31. ‘Hardhome’, Game of Thrones, HBO, 1 June 2015. 32. ‘The Door’, Game of Thrones, HBO, 23 May 2016. 33. Ibid. 34. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords: Part 2, Blood and Gold (London: HarperCollins, 2011). 35. ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’, Game of Thrones, HBO, 27 August 2017.

Bibliography Arata, Stephen, ‘The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1990). Botting, Fred, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London: Routledge, 2008). Clery, E. J., and Miles, Roberts, Eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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Gillmore, Mikal, ‘George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview’, Rolling Stone, 23 April 2014. Goldberg, Lesley, ‘Game of Thrones: George R.R. Martin on the Evolution of the Fantasy Drama’ (Q&A), Hollywood Reporter, 17 January 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ live-feed/game-thrones-george-rr-martin-282699. James, Edward, and Mendlesohn, Farah, Eds., Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Johnson, Samuel, English Dictionary (Boston: Nathan Hale, 1775). Jones, Darryl, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2003). Killeen, Jarlath, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Wales: University of Wales Press, 2009). Martin, George R. R., A Dance with Dragons (London: HarperCollins, 2011). Martin, George, R. R., A Game of Thrones (London: HarperCollins, 2014). Martin, George R. R., A Storm of Swords: Part 1, Steel and Snow (London: HarperCollins, 2011). Martin, George R. R., A Storm of Swords: Part 2, Blood and Gold (London: HarperCollins, 2011). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). Silberman, Mar, Till, Karen, and Ward, Janet Eds., Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012).

Filmography David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Creators, Dir. Miguel Sapochnik, ‘Hardhome’, Game of Thrones (Series 5, Episode 8, HBO, 1 June 2015). David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Creators, Dir. Jack Bender, ‘The Door’, Game of Thrones (Series 6, Episode 5, HBO, 23 May 2016). David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Creators, Dir. Jeremy Podeswa, ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’, Game of Thrones (Series 7, Episode 7, HBO, 27 August 2017). David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Creators, Dir. Alan Taylor, ‘Beyond the Wall’, Game of Thrones (Series 7, Episode 6, HBO, 21 August 2017).

Grand Guignol, Inside Showtime’s Penny Dreadful Demimonde Tanja Jurković

There was a raised interest in Grand Guignol in recent years in the academic world, in several areas; for example, in terms of performance (Hand and Wilson 2011) where Hand and Wilson’s books are the only pieces of scholarship that give a detailed account of how this theatre was conceptualised at the turn of the century, also giving historical background and some less known, interesting details regarding actors, performances, and audiences, which make these books accessible to the public as well as academics. The theme of violent entertainment was also covered by Jurkovic and Goldstein, where Grand Guignol is looked at through the lens of a theory of violent entertainment and its effect on the audience. Agnes Pierron’s book,1 for the moment, offers the only extensively full historical account of the Grand Guignol, situating the theatre at the fin the siècle, pinpointing the main events that led to it becoming a horror theatre in the first place. Focusing more on the Grand Guignol and its connection to the Gothic, some recent scholarship, has been interested, in the increased popularity of portraying classic gothic monsters from nineteenth-century literature in different forms of media, the most notable example being Showtime’s TV series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), a reimagined world of new narratives following classic monster figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and loosely depicting demonic and obsessive characters like Vanessa Ives and Sir Malcolm Murray, to fill in the array of monstrous personalities, reimagined for the contemporary audience. Louttit, for example, focuses on: “…the reimagining of Victorian London central to two recent, high-profile television adaptations, NBC / Sky Living’s Dracula (2013–14) and Showtime / Sky Atlantic’s Penny Dreadful. Paying attention to the series themselves and paratextual forms such as posters and title sequences, Chris Louttit’s article argues that both productions are more interested in responding to the popular Victorian Gothic image of the city than in carefully reconstructing a straightforward facsimile of

T. Jurković (*)  University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_51

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nineteenth-century London”.2 Louttit, however, only briefly mentions Grand Guignol in terms of location which strongly influenced Logan’s vision of Gothic London. “It [Grand Guignol] also provides a pertinent example of the way in which the show shapes and stages its own peculiar sort of Gothic cityscape. As the writer, John Logan, and his team explain in one of the series production blogs, when no suitable location could be found the Grand Guignol was built from scratch at Ardmore Studios. It was modelled very closely on a real Victorian theatre that still exists, Wilton’s Music Hall in East London”.3 Louttit points to the obvious soon thereafter: The Grand Guignol, after all, is a theatre that did not exist in 1891, when the action of season 1 unfolds, and only opened its doors in Paris in 1897 and was eventually replicated in London in 1920. Nonetheless, the choice of this theatre and its repertoire fits the world of Penny Dreadful perfectly.4

Lefait, on the other hand, also briefly, analyses Grand Guignol in the Penny Dreadful series through the dialogues in the show, for which he states that they contain metaleptic5 references, giving as proof a response from the show that the characters are watching in the Grand Guignol theatre (s01, e04), in The Transformed Beast: This scene indeed proposes an abysmal setting, paradoxical as well as transmedial. With its very title, The Transformed Beast, the play inserted into the series metaphorically evokes what Penny Dreadful does to its characters. Moreover, it does not just characterize the series itself as a contemporary avatar of the Grand Guignol tradition. It also places this tradition in the older tradition of the immoral and hyperbolic spectacle of horror…6

However, none of them delves into the more detailed analysis of this usage of horror theatre in the TV series, in order to explore the idea of Grand Guignol and its relation to the Gothic, which are two very closely knit, if not interchangeable, terms, which nevertheless differ in terms of genre. Grand Guignol is essentially a theatre of horror. During the sixty-year period of its existence, Grand Guignol, the French theatre of horror, gained a status of a legendary theatre which dealt with horrors and terrors of human mind, successfully connecting faits divers (common, everyday facts) with the erotic and titillating scenes of violence on stage. The performance style, the writing, the special effects, and the directorship over the course of years, made this theatre a legendary place where blood flowed in streams and people fainted during performances, in this way making its indelible mark in horror genre today.7

What is then the connection between this unique form of violent entertainment and the newly reimagined gothic narratives portrayed inside the world of the Penny Dreadful TV series? Can Grand Guignol, being inherently horror, also be a part of the gothic sphere that is shown in the series, based on the legacy of gothic classics of literature such as Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the popular Victorian penny dreadfuls? In this chapter, I will explore how this connection might have been made, whether Grand Guignol is solely a home for monsters, merely a location, as it was implied numerous times in the first season of the show, or it has a greater function of becoming a monster itself, through the transgression of the

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characters, and eventually enticing the same in it. It is Gothic as much as it is horror, nevertheless it is not simply a space used for entertainment, being situated inside the demimonde of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. Opening its doors to anyone who was courageous enough to dig deep into their own dark self, Grand Guignol used specific techniques and shocking content in order to amaze and scare its audiences, themes that revolved around prostitutes who are forced to play cat and mouse games with psychopathic killers, for example, mad doctors who swap medicines with poison and kill their patients, women heavily burned with vitriol because of love and obsession, skinning of women for sexual pleasure of the other, brutal amputations, and so on (Hand and Wilson 2002). Members of the audience begin to lose consciousness while a desperate house-doctor attempts to revive them… Our innocent spectators feel light-headed, morally outraged and yet guiltily stimulated as they stagger out of the theatre to join other people vomiting in the alleyway to the sounds of violent sex emanating from the darkest corner of the street…8

It is sensationalistic; an almost mythical place where violence meets eroticism, and fear and horror can be measured in considerable amounts. “Hidden amongst the decadence and sleaze of Pigalle with its roughnecks and whores, in the shadows of a quiet, cobbled alleyway, stands a little theatre”.9 Walking up the dark alleyway towards the flashy entrance, one can see people from all levels of society, mingling and waiting to enter the world they have never seen or experienced before. There is a small, swarthy, and lively man standing outside the entrance, bidding welcome to a vast array of people, inviting them to come in. His name is Oscar Méténier. “A chien de commissaire”,10 Méténier used his function to pull his more adventurous friends out of trouble, to document their stories and to write his realistic plays. In the evening … he would arrive all dressed in black, flanked by two bodyguards, to tell the audience, in gruesome detail, about a horrible crime that had just taken place.11

This procedure was a part of a night’s show at the Grand Guignol, including the performances with the exchange of comedy and horror on stage in one night of entertainment. Oscar Méténier probably never would have imagined that the theatre that he managed together with André Antoine, who formed it in the first place under the name Théâtre Libre in 1887, would have gained a cult status of a theatre of horror, which offered a sustainable model used in contemporary horror and gore films. Méténier bought the theatre in 1897 to save it from closing, and thus became the first manager of what soon after became the Grand Guignol Theatre. He directed the plays that dealt with naturalistic concerns, while drawing inspiration for his comédies rosses12 from the so-called faits divers13 of Parisian life. By chance, and without realising it, when he was editing his play “Lui!” (1897), …the founder of the Grand Guignol theatre laid the foundation stone for the Grand Guignolesque repertoire, which will last for half a century. He thought he was dealing with naturalism and morality; instead, he created a genre.14

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The theatre was a huge success from the beginning, so the exact reason why Méténier handed over all the direction to Max Maurey stays unknown, even though there are quite a few assumptions, which corresponded with the events of the period. Maurey developed the theatre into a modern, unique, and successful theatre—the theatre of fears. During his sixteen years of leadership, Grand Guignol has become a very popular theatre, with its unique programme, performance, plays, and has won loyal admirers, on stage as well as in the audience. “Much like most melodramatic theatres, Grand-Guignol, the French theatre of horror, captured the attention of the audience with its genuine performances of intelligently written plays and various acting styles. Differing from its counterparts in explicit representations of violence on stage, this theatre, one of the first of the kind, has set in a small, confined space, a new thematic dimension. In dealing with the exploration of human monstrosity and violence, this otherness encourages viewer engagement through violent and bloody imagery presented on stage. This dimension offers the audience a unique chance to unintentionally and uncontrollably shift from the role of a viewer to the role of a witness and a doer of violent acts represented on stage of the Grand-Guignol”.15 The dimension of space incorporated with violent entertainment on stage gave the air of the unknown, relinquishing the sense of security that viewers might have had upon entering Grand Guignol; the sense of security that slowly disappeared as the show on stage unravelled, paving the way for the actors to break the fourth wall and lure the audiences into their world of horror. It was the smallest theatre in Paris; it was also the most atypical, being a renowned chapel for sermons in the past, with its Neo-Gothic wood panelling, and two huge angels hanging above the orchestra; some of the sitting areas looked like they were confessionals. The space certainly fitted the overall theme of horror, and it was a great addition to the marketing strategy that Maurey was incorporating into the programme. Maurey had great ideas, and he also had the potential and the resources to realise them. He was the one who managed to evoke “those remarkable moments when the creator of a horror story is able to unite the conscious and subconscious mind with one potent idea”.16 This little man, a genius, the author of almost everything, from operettas to dramas, made the Grand Guignol a house of horror, a place of fears, from 1898 to 1914. With Maurey, the Grand Guignol developed into a very popular theatre. It had audiences from all levels of society, and it used a concrete combination of theatre form and an extraordinary use of advertising tricks to create a mythological and theatrical genre. Méténier had already created the reputation around his own persona and the theatre, and although Maurey did not have such a public reputation as Méténier did, he still tried, and recognised that the success of this theatre was based on its public image. Consequently, it had adopted a very effective piece de resistance, advertising the Grand Guignol theatre as an extreme theatre of horror, creating the myth along the way. Maurey’s great success with the public was to persuade the audiences, as well as the critics, that Grand Guignol was a theatre of physical violence containing immense quantities of blood flowing around, as well as it offered a depiction of intense horror and fear because of

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which the members of the audience fell unconscious, or in shock, or they would simply run out of the theatre before the end of the show. Grand Guignol was, after all, a theatre of unimaginable fear which was feeding off one’s soul and was created from uncontrollable forces (Hand and Wilson 2002). As Méténier was focusing his attention to naturalism during his time as the director of the theatre, the shows, and the production in Maurey’s time had a more melodramatic approach, although he had not completely forgotten Méténier’s tradition of naturalism. He improved the developments that were imminent after Méténier’s time: “… it was Maurey’s legendary skills as an impresario and publicist which allowed him to recognize certain aspects of Méténier’s naturalist experiment as having popular and commercial viability”.17 Maurey’s team pursued the idea to exploit contemporary fears, while Méténier aspired to portray the animalistic traits of all humanity, as it evolved at the time of post-industrial capitalism, with a slight difference between the two, as Hand and Wilson point out: “Whilst Méténier was trying to create a theatre that dealt with social reality from a radical perspective, Maurey wanted to titillate and frighten”.18 Grand Guignol became a tourist attraction, and its popularity reached beyond the French borders and invaded England. One man in particular became so enthralled with Grand Guignol that he decided to do everything in his power to open one in London. His name was José Levy. José Levy’s project, set in motion in 1920, was a unique success; the dramas were sufficiently troubling for the audience, although they did not have the essential aspect of the French Grand Guignol—the special effects. He had a large palette of famous actors and writers of that time to choose from and collaborate with: Sybill Thorndike, Lewis Casson, Eliot Crawshay—Williams, Sewell Collins, to name just a few of them. They were able to give artistic respectability to the project and attract the audience, but they were also able to attract several talented actors and writers to this venture, and Levy was very lucky when he got the opportunity to rent the space needed for his project, the “Little Theatre”. He knew that finding a theatre venue in London was a vital element if he wanted this project to succeed. “Little Theatre” in John Adam Street was located in a small, atmospheric street between the Strand and Embankment, and although the theatre wasn’t as exotic as the red light district of Pigalle, it was not far from the shiny lights of the theatre world. This theatre went on to establish the reputation as the theatre of confrontation and opposition. Established in 1910 by Gertrude Kingston, the Little Theatre gave a home to the performances from experimental groups during the war years (Pioneer Players, Abbey Theatre’s Irish Players …). The programme was controversial; to that degree that the “Little Theatre” could have been considered as the best reason for the censors to continue to censor the theatre plays. Levy also recognised the importance of intimacy for the success of Grand Guignol. The Théâtre du Grand Guignol in Paris was the smallest theatre in Paris; it was small even by Montmartrean standards. The space was arranged to ensure an intimate and intense experience and interaction with the audience, which was situated only a few metres from the stage.19 The “Little Theatre” was almost indistinguishable from the Parisian version, and the curtain was finally up on 1 September 1920.

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Grand Guignol in London was one of the most famed theatres, but very British in its essence. It suffered the strict control from Lord Chamberlain on one side, and on the other, it was destined to follow the theatrical and artistic tastes of London’s theatregoers. It was also very tame, at least for French standards; sex was implicit rather than the other way around, and in London’s Grand Guignol, the audiences preferred strangulations and poisoning rather than brutal blood and gore (Hand and Wilson 2007). It is not very clear as to when Levy found out about the Grand Guignol, but it is likely that he came to Paris when he was young, because the Grand Guignol Theatre in Montmartre was quickly established as a popular place for tourists under Max Maurey’s direction during the first years of the twentieth century, and because of that, the Parisian theatre was able to perform its shows in London in 1908, and Levy could have had the opportunity to familiarise himself with the genre. The Parisian Grand Guignol, when it appeared in 1908 in London, encountered mixed reception. There is a general antipathy towards the French drama in England, and the public did not care much for the theatre plays performed in French language, but young Levy was nevertheless impressed. In 1912, the office of Lord Chamberlain gave Levy the permission to perform the drama named “Seven Blind Men”. The show, designated as a sketch of the type of Grand Guignol performance, was an adaptation and Levy’s translation of “L’atelier d’aveugles”, by Lucien Descaves. When we compare this show with several Grand Guignol shows of the period, it is relatively harmless and tame (the reason why Levy chose this piece in the first place, in order to get the permission from the censors), but this permission was given with a certain degree of disapproval from Lord Chamberlain’s office. It was Levy’s first professional experience, and despite mixed reception, he had even more enthusiasm to stage the shows in London as he was assured that there are audiences for this type of theatre in London. He was right: …under the management of Jose G. Levy, came the first of the two monumental success epochs with which the Little Theatre will be forever associated: the run of super-horrific Grand Guignol plays which occupied the boards for nearly two years. They were interpreted by casts which included Sybil and Russell Thorndike, Lewis Casson, Dorothy Minto, George Bealby, and Minnie Rayner. In some instances the deceptively innocuous titles of these blood-curdling dramas, […] gave no indication of their real implications.20

The unusually high level of antipathy towards Grand Guignol plays that Levy put forward to be approved by the censors could be the reason of Grand Guignol’s lack of success in London, but maybe Levy also felt discouraged by, in his opinion, a new precedent, WW I. The history of the Grand Guignol in London in the next few years of its existence is a story with Lord Chamberlain’s office in a main role. The project was nevertheless a commercial and critical success. Numerous spectators wanted to see the quality plays of this theatre and they gained the impressiveness of the productivity. In short, 43 shows were performed and several others written and refused permission. The struggle with the censors and the uncertainty of the performances were very exhausting for Levy and he fell ill. The tireless enthusiasm of the Thorndike-Cassons and Lewis Casson’s willingness

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to gain control over the theatre when Levy could not, are the reasons why this theatre lived as long as it did. But with all the worries and pressure from Lord Chamberlain’s side took its toll and Levy decided not to reopen it. The Grand Guignol in London was open for almost two years and during that time it enjoyed rather popular and critical approval with the performances of more than 40 different theatres plays. Despite the gothic setting in a small chapel built in Neo-Gothic style, the theatre of horror portrayed the things we fear the most—ourselves. The characters were people from all walks of life, from the edge of society, prostitutes, madhouse patients, serial killers…the real monsters that we encounter in our reality almost every day, and through different forms of media. Primal instincts, plots obsessed with death and suffering, scenes of sex, violence and insanity full of grotesque or haunting situations are the turning points and the main themes of this horror theatre. The moral man becomes a human animal in the finest naturalistic tradition, a murderer of his own brother and at the same time becoming a witness of his own crime and therefore a victim of his own insanity, struggling with the monstrosity of which he himself is the main source.21

Penny Dreadful approaches Grand Guignol theatre in a specific, although unusual way. In the first season, episode four, first Frankenstein’s monster, named Caliban, upon joining the Grand Guignol family after being beaten on the cruel streets of London and then saved by the actor of Grand Guignol, Vincent Brand, gives the audience his own account of the events and experiences with people and the outside world. He describes this strange place as home: So I discovered what kindness was…and I found a home…Could there have been a more appropriate place for me? Night after night, the players died gruesomely, and then came back to life again for the next show. They were undying, like me, creatures of perpetual resurrection.22

The story of Grand Guignol coincides with the Frankenstein’s monster and his story in the show, from the moment he set foot in Victorian London, calling it a place “as cold as harlot’s heart”. Being abandoned by his own creator, left all alone in this new world of industry and filth, and driven by revenge, The Monster as he does not have a name still (his story begins earlier than the episodes in question, in episode 3), decides to reinvent itself. Its scarred face is being referred to as a result of an industrial catastrophe or accident, by the theatre actor who saves him, after being heavily beaten, insinuating that he is a part of a new era, if he chooses to do so. Vincent:  “Do you need work? Your visage…Creating you problems?” The Monster:  It is a horror. Vincent:  Not everywhere.

From that moment on, these two monstrous narratives become well established in the series, the Monster’s story of becoming the greatest monster of all, human, and Grand Guignol’s story of becoming a monstrous entity which was built through experiences and intertwining fates of the reimagined classic gothic literature characters.

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Grand Guignol is being formed into a monster, unintentionally, throughout the whole first season. From the moment it was introduced, its presence and development occurred in the background of the main story and its protagonists, being monstrous beings themselves, and gradually declining into the monstrous selves. One of the best examples actually occurred in one of the last scenes of this same episode, where we have all our other protagonists gathered in the cellar of Sir Malcolm’s home. They have returned from the hunt at the London Zoo, and they brought with them one of Dracula’s creatures to interrogate. They’ve put him in chains, starving him out, so that he could break and tell them where to find his master, and Mina, Sir Malcolm’s daughter. There is a moment of sheer monstrosity coming from all of them, when Sir Malcolm, annoyed and impatient, takes a whip and starts beating the creature that they found while everyone else watched. Thus starts the re-examination of their own selves, whether they are truly human or simply more monstrous than the monsters they are fighting against, which becomes a leitmotif for the remainder of the season. The conversation between Ethan and Vanessa illustrates this clearly: Ethan:  “You’ve got a kid chained up in your basement, and you’re talking about experimenting on him like he’s some kind of rat, when you’re not talking about torturing him!” Vanessa:  “Then leave this house! […] We here have been brutalised with loss. It has made us brutal in return…There is no going back from this moment”.23

Everything escalates from that moment on. The monstrous transformation has begun. Episode four opens with a luxurious painting-like scene of one of Dorian Gray’s orgies, and his re-examining of his own immortality by descending into the depths of his secret quarters where he hides his infamous portrait. Further on, we witness again a scene of brutality under the pretence of doing good, in the basement with the Dracula’s creature, looking at all the male characters and as the drug that doctor Frankenstein gave him overcomes him, he says: “So many monsters”, referring to all of them, only confirming the insinuation that the humans are the greatest monsters of all, which will become clear towards the end of the first season. As the story continues, the moment we see the Grand Guignol in all its splendour, is the moment when the characters decide to go on a night out, and in Victorian times, one could only either go to the theatre or read books to be entertained—suggesting the reimagining of the term “penny dreadful” and Grand Guignol for the purpose of sheer entertainment. The scene follows Brona, Ethan Chandler’s love interest, who is essentially the living dead, as she is slowly dying of consumption, who enters the theatre with eyes wide open, as the camera follows her view and shows the construction of the theatre, the small stage at the front, the balcony rich in architectural detail, the seats close to the stage, suggesting the intimacy between the actors and the audience. Brona is followed by Ethan, who, being a man of theatre himself, is not too impressed, but still revels in seeing her bewitched with the theatrical world. Just before the play starts, enter Dorian Gray on one side, and Vanessa Ives on the other, suggesting the attraction between the

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two but unable to form a real connection. Sir Malcolm’s servant Sambene24 is watching from the shadows, looking after Vanessa, as she by this point became the most important asset in Sir Malcolm’s crusade against Dracula, and Caliban is taking control over what is happening behind the scene. Grand Guignol feeds off all of their emotions and aspirations, and grows slowly, as we see our monstrous characters descending into the dark world of the Other after experiencing a moment of true happiness and relaxation, suggesting that this “normal world” outside of it is not for them after all. As Lefait suggests in his article, the play that they all watch being performed on the stage of Grand Guignol, The Transformed Beast, implemented in the series metaphorically suggests the process of transformation of the characters and what Penny Dreadful series does to them. Although that is a valuable statement, I would also argue that it is not, in this instance, solely the series that transforms its characters, but the play being an embodiment of the Grand Guignol and a prediction of something more horrific yet to come; it is the Grand Guignol that transforms them into the beasts they truly are. The text of the play in this particular sequence in the series is a premonition of things to come, and what the characters can expect from these events, which is a full transformation of their character into the monstrous selves, for the purpose to survive, much like the Grand Guignol is built in the series: …but there grows within a mighty beast, that springs and yearns for quick release! […] There cannot be a happy end, for claw will slash and tooth will rend…How can I ever this demon tame? Our time is up…God’s nowhere near, for the beast…is here!25

This quotation also serves to connect Grand Guignol fully at the end of episode seven, with the characters and their cause, and allows it to prepare for full transformation in the next episode. Vanessa has been possessed by the demon, and after being exorcised by none other than Ethan himself, after the priest they brought in failed completely, implying the insignificance of religion along the way, she has a vision of Mina, and the part of the Transformed Beast play mentioned above, thus connecting their cause, which is finding Mina, and Grand Guignol, as the place of the final countdown shown in episode eight. Grand Guignol became fully formed as a side narrative in episode eight of the series; when it became the trigger for the main occurrence that concludes season one. In the episode eight of the series, the degradation of the characters becomes prevalent in the progress of the story in season two. The pertinent reasoning about the Grand Guignol transformation is in its appearance, the way the theatre is perceived through the eyes of the reimagined monsters in the series. Their first encounter with the theatre, as mentioned earlier, is with the luscious, bright, and fancy theatrical space that holds secrets in the form of horrors performed on stage. It is a warm and atmospheric place, a safe place to be, a home for some, a place of entertainment for others. This representation of Grand Guignol as a safe, comfortable place only dims its true purpose, as a monstrous place from which “…the greatest moments of dread in the narrative arise not so much from the fear of what one might become as from the process of becoming itself”.26

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To illustrate this, it is necessary to describe two of the moments in the last episodes of the Penny Dreadful series, one that involves Frankenstein’s first monster, Caliban, when leaving the theatre for good, and the other that gathers all the characters in the series in one place for the purpose of the final culmination of events in the series. The first scene in question follows Caliban as he says his goodbyes to the place that offered him kindness and safety when no one else would. After misinterpreting the behaviour of one of the main actresses in the theatre, and after being ridiculed by her for wanting to be more attractive to her, he attacks her brutally, which led him to be forced to quit his job as a stage rat in Grand Guignol. Wanting to have a last look at the place that he cannot call home anymore, he stands at the centre of the stage, looking around the theatrical space. The warm, inviting, dimmed lights all around, the luscious but small stage, audience space slightly darkened, but still evoking calmness—if Grand Guignol was a person, it would be the most attractive and most beautiful woman Caliban has ever seen in his entire suffering life. This scene stands in opposition to the scene of the last episode in the first season, where we follow all the monstrous characters entering Grand Guignol to meet their worst enemy. Instead, this time, Grand Guignol is cloaked in darkness, only silhouettes of the seats and the arches barely visible to the eye, walls that seem like they are closing in on them, and the stage empty and hollow, waiting for its next victim. The violent battle between the reimagined characters and monstrous creatures thus starts and no one is spared during the fight, which culminates at the empty, hollow stage, covered in darkness, and the viewer is a witness to the final, most brutal performance in the Grand Guignol theatre, where scenes are filled with horror and fear, blood is spilled and the depravity and degradation of the characters presented on stage takes over the show, thus going full circle and returning to the original theatrical display of horror on stage. Grand Guignol, the monster that was evolving all this time, is finally complete, leaving the characters of Penny Dreadful Demimonde stripped off their humanity completely, at the same time earning its own rightful place in that same world of monsters, that Vanessa Ives describes as a half world between what one knows and what one fears, a place in the shadows that is rarely seen but deeply felt (Penny Dreadful S1, E1). The reimagined classic monsters in Penny Dreadful seek to elevate the genre; they speak to something deeply human through their own monstrosity and struggle with the other self, at the same time not neglecting the gothic legacy of the space that they are put in. Mentioning Jack the Ripper and mistaking Ethan’s crimes for Jack’s sets the storyline of Penny Dreadful at the end of the century in London, evoking the elusiveness of the monstrous and the secrets it holds, at the same time making it surprisingly a human trait. The world was taking on a whole new face at the turn of the century, there was an air of change that came down as a veil on the city and its inhabitants, through the emergence of the industrial revolution and the appearance of modernity in a world not yet ready for it. A new narrative was created in the series in order to explore this change and what it might bring; clash of classic characters of gothic literature communicating the fears and anxieties in a more modern way. Grand Guignol is liberating in itself, and all the characters

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found there at the same time experience a sense of freedom from all the constraints of the time, self-exploration, and safety. Penny Dreadful skilfully uses the embodiment of Grand Guignol in this new narrative, but it also negates it because it places the theatre inside the historical period when Grand Guignol did not yet exist, in London or in Paris, respectively. Because of that, Logan, the director of the TV show, had complete freedom in constructing the Grand Guignol for the series, making it completely his own, and giving it life through the reimagined personalities of his monstrous characters, and that is possibly the ultimate gothic trait of a space that is utterly horror, it is the monstrous creation based on no particular blueprint other than the vague existence in modern popular culture. Grand Guignol is the Frankenstein’s monster, it is the werewolf, it is the demon, it is the vampire, the immortal…the theatre is all these classic personalities reconstructed and reimagined in the more modern way to complement new narratives that Logan decided to create in order to revive the Victorian gothic classic monsters that have been haunting us, even today, although in a more meme like representation rather than strong personalities that transcend the supernatural and the unrealistic aspect of literature and films and TV shows. Grand Guignol is an entity, the epitome of Otherness, composed of multiple monstrous characters; it is the haven that all these monsters deserve today. Not abject, but cruel enough to destroy, and not real, but real enough to seduce the audiences with its representations of the obscure, using blood and gore as a tool to fake the real, to blur the boundaries of reality. Grand Guignol’s Gothicism is in its ability to exist as the Other, outside its own real time and space, but to still seem real enough so that no one suspects its existence in the reimagined world. Isn’t that what essentially monsters are? They exist, but do not exist, yet no one suspects either of the two. The monstrous inside the Demimonde is embraced rather than cast away in order for life, whether monstrous or human, to be continued (Dika 1996).

Notes

1. Pierron, Agnes. Le Grand Guignol, Le Theatre des peurs de la Belle Eopque. Paris: Edition Robert Laffont, 1995. 2. Louttit, Chris. “Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis.” Critical Survey 28.1 (2016). Web. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. From noun: metalepsis—figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context. 6. Lefait, Sébastien. “Monstrueuse Convergence? Penny Dreadful, Ou La Littérature À L’Épreuve De La Transmédialité,” n.p., 15 January 2019. journals.openedition.org. 7. Jurković, Tanja. “Blood, Monstrosity and Violent Imagery: Grand Guignol, the French Theatre of Horror as a Form of Violent Entertainment.” SIC: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation 1.4.

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8. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. Grand Guignol: French Theatre of Horror. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2002. Print., p. 3. 9. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. Grand Guignol: French Theatre of Horror. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2002. Print., p. 3. 10. It is a police officer who helps prisoners on death row in their final moments. 11. Pierron, Agnes. Le Grand Guignol, Le Theatre des peurs de la Belle Epoque. Paris: Edition Robert Laffont, 1995. Print., p. 5 of Préface. Translation is by the author of this chapter. 12. These were short dramatic pieces which looked at the lives and language of the Parisian underclass (Hand and Wilson 2002). 13. It is referring to facts and events from everyday life, drawn from Parisian popular press (Hand and Wilson 2002). 14. Pierron, Agnès. Le Grand Guignol, Le théâtre des peurs de la Belle Epoque, ed. Robert Laffont, S.A., Paris, 1995. 15. Jurković, Tanja. “Blood, Monstrosity and Violent Imagery: Grand-Guignol, the French Theatre of Horror as a Form of Violent Entertainment.” SIC: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation 1.4 (2013). Web. 16. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre, Hodder Paperbacks, 2012, p. 20. 17. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. Grand Guignol: French Theatre of Horror. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2002. Print., p. 6. 18. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. Grand Guignol: French Theatre of Horror. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2002. Print., p. 15. 19. Gillette, J. Michael. Theatrical Design and Production. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2005. Print. 20. “The Little Theatre, John Street, London,” n.p., 15 January 2019. arthurlloyd.co.uk. 21. Jurković, Tanja. “Blood, Monstrosity and Violent Imagery: Grand-Guignol, the French Theatre of Horror as a Form of Violent Entertainment.” SIC: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation 1.4 (2013). Web. 22. Penny Dreadful, Showtime, 2014–2016, S1, E3. 23. Penny Dreadful, Showtime, 2014–2016, S1, E3. 24. Sambene seems to be the only one who is closest to the description of a human in Demimonde, despite his brutal identity. 25. Penny Dreadful, Showtime, 2014–2016, S1, E4. 26. McRoy, J., “Our Reaction Was only Human: Monstrous Becomings in Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers.” In Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film, ed. Hand, McRoy, Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 96.

Bibliography Gillette, J. Michael. Theatrical Design and Production. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2005. Print. Hand, Richard J., and Jay McRoy. Monstrous Adaptations. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Print. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. Grand Guignol: French Theatre of Horror. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2002. Print. Hand, Richard, and Michael Wilson. London’s Grand Guignol. Bristol: Exeter University Press, 2014. Print. Jurković, Tanja. “Blood, Monstrosity and Violent Imagery: Grand-Guignol, the French Theatre of Horror as a Form of Violent Entertainment.” [sic] A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 1.4 (2013). Web.

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Lefait, Sébastien. “Monstrueuse Convergence? Penny Dreadful, Ou La Littérature À L’Épreuve De La Transmédialité.” 15 January 2019. Journals.openedition.org. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui. Monster Culture in the 21st Century. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Louttit, Chris. “Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis.” Critical Survey 28.1 (2016). Web. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2014–2016. TV Series, Season 1. “Penny Dreadful | Production Blogs—YouTube.” YouTube. 15 January 2019. Web. Pierron, Agnes. Le Grand Guignol, Le Theatre des peurs de la Belle Eopque. Paris: Edition Robert Laffont, 1995. Print. “The Little Theatre, John Street, London.” 15 January 2019. Arthurlloyd.co.uk. Web.

Gothic Music

The Blasphemous Grotesqueries of The Tiger Lillies Joana Rita Ramalho

At once magical and macabre, the British dark cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies takes us on bawdy, brash, and blasphemous musical journeys that pull us into a world of atmospheric beauty and distasteful sacrilege. Haunting stages in Britain and beyond since 1989, their albums feature unusual odes to the misfits that society discards: drug-addicted schoolboys, lowly streetwalkers, and violent criminals are only some of the band’s bizarre and eclectic thematic choices. According to Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, a primary goal of gothic works is the desire to elicit the audience’s empathy towards the terrifying inability to escape the personal or national tragedies they address.1 Marked by a willingness to sensationalise and vulgarise addiction, crime, and violence, the attitude of The Tiger Lillies is never quite empathetic towards their disgraced and disgraceful protagonists. There is nothing innocent about their performances and the laughter that arises is not wholly joyful or escapist, but ultimately disturbing, for it carries with it the guilt of laughing at human misery. The traditional aim of Gothic to provoke empathy is therefore thwarted in the works of the gleefully sombre outfit. Their crude black humour, however, in offering the audience disquieting cautionary tales that revel in impudence and embrace depravity, also confronts us with timely contemporary issues. At a moment when the relationship between the margins and popular culture— or between the subversive fringe and the politically correct—is being widely debated, the role of shocking, non-mainstream music demands reconsideration, particularly in light of the ethical and political questions it poses about the representation of those who operate on the edge of society. The persistence with which some artists have continued to offer exposure to the underbelly of modern city life allows for the conceptual problematisation of how our societies reconstruct and reappropriate the marginal through a combination of different media. I will address these issues here, focusing specifically on the ways in which The Tiger Lillies promote the circulation of abject otherness using Victorian gothic

J. R. Ramalho (*)  University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_52

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tropes. Furthermore, given their unique position in the dark cabaret scene and their deliberate breaching of the boundaries between high and low cultural capital, the band constitutes an engaging case study to examine the relationship between elitist and fringe culture in the twenty-first century. My investigation draws on Perry Meisel’s pioneering study of pop culture, The Myth of Popular Culture (2010), in which the author refutes Theodor Adorno’s assertion that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘pop’ art lies in the fact that only the former presents a dialectic approach to culture.2 Meisel analyses the American novel, Hollywood, and rock music and contends that pop culture is also fundamentally dialectic.3 Meisel’s focus is on popular (read, mainstream) forms of entertainment, whereas the realm of the underground—the subcultural—is left unexplored. My work advances Meisel’s arguments by applying his central idea—that low culture closely dialogues with its sources and with cultural authority—to the analysis of a group of marginal musicians whose work epitomises the coming together (or the violent clashing) of high and low. To this end, I first contextualise and explore the music of the Lillies in its intersection with the Gothic and goth/ic-related genres, such as punk, circus, and cabaret. The subsequent exploration of thematic transgressiveness asks whether such music condones or condemns the complex issues it exposes. In other words, I inquire whether their satirical repertoire contributes to beautify and romanticise human tragedy or can otherwise be understood as a mode of resistance to conformity and supra-imposed official norms. Out of a darkened stage, the figure of a man emerges. He is sporting ­loose-fitting formal wear—black trousers, tie, white shirt, and waistcoat. His face, covered in white paint, is topped by a black bowler hat that half covers a long, unkempt pigtail. Matching lips and eyes, both thickly rimmed in black, stand out against the thick layers of Pierrot make-up. Accordion in hand, eyes closed, the man moans and gnashes his teeth while crooning lewd tales of perversion that sardonically expose the vices of the world. Subtly delicate and expressive hand gestures echoing Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel complete the trademark look of frontman Martyn Jacques, founder of The Tiger Lillies. His high-pitched Farinelli-like falsetto voice gives the band an operatic tone, a signature style which has made for a series of catchy monikers, including ‘the criminal castrato’.4 The two remaining band members, double bass player Adrian Stout (from 1995), who stepped in after Phil Butcher (1989–1995) left the ensemble, and drummer Jonas Golland (from 2015), who succeeded Adrian Huge (1989–2012) and Mike Pickering (2012–2015), dress up in similarly unusual retro fashion. There is an air of haggard romanticism to this sad-yet-sinister-looking trio of performers. Their gentleman attire harks back to Victorian mourning clothes but melds with the pathetic garb of the classic hobo clowns from carnivals, circuses, and variety acts. Like the vagabond clowns of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, the Lillies clash merriment and melancholy. Formed in 1989, the band developed originally in the context of post-punk music and the early stages of the goth subculture. Significantly, the late 1980s and the 1990s marked a turning point in gothic fiction history, a shift which,

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Victoria Nelson states, led to an unparalleled hybridisation of gothic cinematic, literary, and musical subgenres.5 The female gothic novel experienced a radical re-focus and split into new variants. At the same time, vampire fiction and gothic monster films gave way to a still morose but now brightly coloured aesthetic that frames self-conscious stories of outcasts. Informed by Burtonesque protagonists, Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, and The Munsters (1964–1966), it merged with other genres and styles in the alternative scene. The rise in popularity of burlesque shows from the mid-1990s coincided with the revival of circus-related cultural forms and satirical cabaret, which resulted in the profusion of new and darker music subgenres. ‘Goth music’ became an umbrella term for myriad, yet co-related, styles and subgenres, including rock, punk, and post-punk bands (The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Sisters of Mercy); ­neo-romantic gothic rock (Nick Cave, Lacrimosa); dark romantic/folk pop (Kate Bush, Björk, Lana Del Rey); steampunk (Abney Park, Unwoman, The Extraordinary Contraptions); and neoclassical dark wave (Dead Can Dance, Deine Lakaien, Abandoned Toys). The accompanying subculture, from its inception film and music based, morphed as well in the 1990s, specifically in its adoption of a more overtly humorous aesthetic. The Lillies were on the cusp of this new cabaret and circus movement that brought back burlesque and speakeasies, as well as cirque and cabaret noir groups, from the San Franciscan Americana vaudeville troupe Yard Dogs Road Show (1996-present) to Circus Contraption’s (1998–2009) outlandish extravaganzas. More recently, alternative cabaret duo Pustra/Vile-een’s Vaudeville (2006– 2009), dark folk pop sister act Vermillion Lies (2006–2009), Britain’s critically acclaimed House of Burlesque (founded in 2010), and Ukrainian ‘freak cabaret’ band Dakh Daughters (formed in 2012) have followed in the footsteps of those early pioneers. These artists are usually grouped under the broad and fluid category of ‘dark cabaret’. Dark cabaret represents one of the many ways in which goth music evolved, moving from its punk and glam rock roots to a more Romantic-Victorian aesthetic that meshes the sensuous, the seedy, and the sinister. This music and performance style rejects the more experimental and industrial sonorities of post-punk and post-industrial bands in favour of quirkier syncopated rhythms that, in turn, unfold into a plethora of neighbouring and fundamentally fluid—and sometimes ­one-artist only—categories, such as Victorian- or violin-industrial (Emilie Autumn) and neo-medieval darkwave (Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows). With in-your-face lyric-driven performances, dark cabaret acts blend the smoky, sleazy venues of late-nineteenth-century Montmartre and the heady atmosphere of risqué licentiousness in the 1920s and 1930s German cabarets. Borrowing the gory aesthetics and exaggerated style of Grand Guignol, Jacques and his bandmates offer a show that is neither circus nor variety nor concert, but an uneasy mix of Weillian cabaret, vaudeville, music theatre, and anarchic opera, underscored by chanson, blues, Django Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz, bal-musette, German Lieder, and punk’s rebellious attitude. In an interview, Jacques mentions Fado, which translates to

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‘fate’, as yet another influence.6 The Portuguese music genre, renowned for its melancholy style, covers mournful themes about life’s tribulations, namely the sorrows of working-class people, like sailors and prostitutes. Intergenericity is at the core of dark cabaret. Attesting to its early influences, the creativity of the genre extends to the type of instruments used, which differ significantly from classic punk and heavy rock and include accordion, banjo, xylophone, theremin, musical saw, ukulele, and an upright, rather than electric, bass. Unusual musical arrangements are often paired with carousel-like melodic lines and hushed, boisterous, or operatic vocals that range from the melancholy to the raucous. The terms ‘dark cabaret’ and ‘punk cabaret’ are often used interchangeably. From punk, dark cabaret borrowed its countercultural edge, fuelled by generalised feelings of cynicism and revolt against rules and regulations, along with a pervasive disregard for authority and propriety. From goth, it inherited a penchant for abjection, solipsism, and Romantic melancholia. Cabaret, in turn—a genre long associated with counterculture and politics—provided elements of satire, parody, tragicomedy, and a carefully staged blasé attitude about world affairs. Some artists veer more clearly towards punk, stressing their political inclinations in more vicious lyrics. The Dresden Dolls, Dakh Daughters, Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, Marcella and The Forget Me Nots, Rasputina, and The Tiger Lillies illustrate the more anarchist and socially engaged strain of dark cabaret. Natasha Scharf observes that the Lillies draw on musical and visual elements from both goth and steampunk, which comes across in their Victorian/Edwardian-themed, ­over-the-top performances that favour haunting sounds and heavy make-up.7 Perhaps more strikingly than any of their other works, Circus Songs (1999) displays the filiation of the Lillies to classic punk culture: the album was co-produced by Siouxsie and The Banshees’ bassist Steven Severin, who also played keyboards. Other bands place a greater emphasis on ambiance, performance, and tongue-in-cheek humour. Artists who navigate this darkly playful style include Circus Contraption, Jill Tracy, Clare Fader & the Vaudevillains, Rosin Coven, Birdeatsbaby, This Way to the Egress, and Aurelio Voltaire. Unlike their punk forefathers, these musicians usually leave overt political elements out of the stage. Longevity, a devil-may-care approach to contentious or straightforwardly taboo subject matter, and an uncanny ability to reinvent themselves with each new project mark the Lillies off from other dark cabaret artists and vaudevillians. The band self describes as a ‘unique anarchic Brechtian street opera trio’, and their music is often dubbed ‘Brechtian punk cabaret’, a term coined by Amanda Palmer in an attempt to categorise the sound and style of The Dresden Dolls and distance her band from the gothic label.8 The Lillies’ Brechtian component manifests in the firm rejection of a type of performance structured around recreating a perfect verisimilitude and thus reproducing the dominant bourgeois ideology. It also comes through in the primacy given to universal problems that originate from situations of social inequality and injustice. The three-piece band trades in the celebration of misery and debauchery, and their unique combination of music genres, provocative lyrics, and retro appearance have earned them a passionate fan base and cult following. Their fans include Mel

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Brooks, Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, English musician Marc Almond, British actress Miranda Richardson, American photographer Nan Goldin, and Fado singer Mísia. Robin Williams and Edward Gorey were also among their devoted fan base. Dwelling on the dim-lit backstreets of whatever carnivalesque territory lies between Tom Waits, Nico, Klaus Nomi, Tom Lehrer, and Nino Rota, the Lillies deal with an innovative panoply of disturbing themes that plague contemporary life. They create anachronistic, off-beat performances that use the playfulness of dark cabaret to appropriate the historical and cultural legacy of the gothic mode, Victorian England and subcultural life, interacting with it in a creative, postmodern, and self-reflexive manner. Described as ‘Queen Victoria’s worst nightmare’, they would have been, on the contrary, a fond dream of the ‘genius/lunatic Marquis de Sade’, as Jacques mentions. ‘And I am sure Salvador Dalí would love us’, he adds.9 These remarks encapsulate the sublime world of The Tiger Lillies—a controversial and sarcastic den of creativity and scandal, where it is easy to discern a profusion of artistic, cultural, and literary influences. Musical intergenericity or, to use Adorno’s term, ‘dialectic’ is, as noted, a key feature of dark cabaret.10 In the work of the Lillies specifically, dark cabaret’s constitutive eclecticism in terms of generic ­cross-fertilisation is tightly interwoven with a structural intertextuality and intermediality. In agreement with Lars Elleström, I take ‘media’ to be an inclusive term that encompasses all art forms.11 In this respect, the oeuvre of the Lillies proves exceptionally intertextual and intermedial, combining poetry, philosophy, history, and literature with music, circus, cabaret, theatre, puppetry, film, and photography. The Gorey End (2003), nominated for a Grammy in the Best Classical Crossover Album category, features the Kronos Quartet, known for working across a broad range of musical genres, and pays homage to the output of American writer-illustrator Edward Gorey, celebrated for his black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings depicting uncanny narratives in Victorian and Edwardian settings. High and low fuse, for instance, in Die Weberischen (2006), a collaboration with Austrian playwright Felix Mitterer about the family of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s wife, and in Either Or (2013). The album commemorates Søren Kirkegaard’s bicentenary and draws inspiration from the philosopher’s eponymous book Either/Or (1843), which analyses human experience through the lens of aesthetics (‘Either’) and ethics (‘Or’). The detailed account of a man’s relentless pursuit of pleasure in Either’s last section, The Seducer’s Diary, resonated particularly well with the Lillies, whose album’s accompanying live show, the ‘Either/Or Cabaret’, brought together philosophy and 1937 Shanghai, a city which at the time thrived as one of the world’s centres of cabaret culture.12 Track number fourteen on the album, ‘Forget About Us’, references the Bible and another nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche: Beat up Nietzsche’s Superman Slaughter now the holy lamb Through clenched teeth hear me hiss Slash your wrist Capitalist.13

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Besides the explicit critique of capitalism, the direct reference to Nietzsche is also significant for the influence Nietzschean philosophy has had on goth music and the goth lifestyle. Moreover, in the words of William Farina, Nietzsche acted as ‘the patron saint’ for the reinvention of German Kabarett at the turn of the century. Cabaret pioneers Otto Julius Bierbaum and Ernst von Wolzogen, inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophical theories, aspired to elevate German variety shows, then known as Tingel Tangel, in order to differentiate them from their Parisian counterparts.14 A Dream Turns Sour, released on 28 June 2014, marked the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This album stands out for being based on real-life events and using poems written by World War I British, American, and Canadian soldiers who died on the battlefield. This is arguably the Lillies’ bleakest album and the first for which Jacques did not write the lyrics. The rendering of Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, displays the same kind of haunting anguish present in Siouxsie and The Banshees’ ‘Poppy Day’, from the album Join Hands (1979), which also takes the topic of the First World War as its inspiration and opens with the grave sound of tolling bells. Extending their expertise far beyond the recording studio and the theatre stage, the Lillies developed an original music score for E. A. Dupont’s newly restored Varieté (1925). Heavily censored at the time of release, the film tells a tale of infidelity, jealousy, and murder set in the eccentric world of carnivals and circuses. In addition, the band’s postmodern blending of different media, texts, and high and low cultural codes has resulted in projects as diverse as Nan Goldin’s photographic suite The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (2011), for which the Lillies provided a live soundtrack, and Devil’s Fairground (2019), an album set in post-soviet Prague that marks the 30th anniversary of the Lillies and combines thematic debauchery with waltzes, klezmer ballads, and the Czech Berg Orchestra (known for its unconventional choice of venues). The Lillies have also succeeded in bringing together their ‘low’ musical idiom and ‘high’ cultural spaces, such as the British Library, where they were invited to perform in 2017, as part of the ‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’ exhibition. Shockheaded Peter (1998), a theatrical production based on Heinrich Hoffmann’s children’s book of cautionary tales, Der Struwwelpeter (1845), is particularly rich in intermedial co-relations. The musical received international acclaim and performed to sold-out venues all over the world, marking a turning point in the career of the London-based trio. The wider exposure of the play also prompted the few extant English-language academic criticism on the Lillies, which, as far as I have been able to ascertain, remains limited to Shockheaded Peter. Jacques tweaked Hoffman’s stories slightly to make them even more grisly and cruel: whereas the disobedient children in Hoffman’s original poems are violently punished but some survive, in the play they all die. The stage production offers a paradigmatic example of the dynamic processes involved in the intermedial works of the Lillies. Here, we find a visual, verbal, and musical representation of a literary work that, through performance (inclusive of the studio album, Shockheaded Peter: A Junk Opera, and live theatre shows), effects the transformation of one medium (literature) into different intersecting media, which interact both in the sense of Wassily Kandinsky’s synaesthetic Bühnenkompositionen

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(stage compositions), which combine sound, movement, shapes, and colour, and in the Wagnerian sense of the Gesamtkunstwerk, whereby—ideally—all arts would come together under the aegis of music. Other interconnections make this play especially relevant and dialectic: Struwwelpeter’s stories and accompanying illustrations have had a lasting impact on pop culture and influenced, for instance, the work of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton. Scissor Man, the gruesome anti-hero from ‘The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb’, inspired the figure of Edward Scissorhands, who visually appears as a mixture of Shockheaded Peter and Scissor Man. In displaying an intricate syncretism of intertextual and intermedial references, of which the examples above represent only a small fraction, the Lillies play on Gothic’s affinities with a vast paraliterary and paracinematic tradition that both reinforces and yet also strives to transcend the division between elitist and alternative culture. Moreover, they incite their viewers and listeners to reflect on the usefulness of this dichotomy at the same time as they provide examples of songs and music-based projects that seem to have already surpassed or discarded that distinction, such as A Dream Turns Sour. The usefulness of this dichotomy, that is, the affirmation of their position as a non-mainstream musical act, allows them consistently to refuse conformity while also providing them with the artistic leeway necessary to bridge the gaps between high and low. Henk Oosterling argues that intermediality ‘reconfigures […] the arts, politics, and science, especially philosophy[,] enhancing an experience of the in-between and a sensibility for tensional differences’.15 The gaps between the arts—the in-between spaces— accentuate our interpretative role. Listening to a Tiger Lillies album is an exercise in critical reflexion. The Lillies have put together a sort of game where the listeners are invited to spot the many scattered references. The web of relationships between media, their fusions, overlaps, and dialogues with different sets of texts engages our intellect and requires an active mode of listenership, encouraging us to revisit the postmodernist blurring of traditional distinctions between high and popular culture. More pointedly, it opens up the way for us to thoroughly reassess this relationship and its presumed antinomies in our globalised world. This creative intermediality and its co-related mode of participatory listenership might help understand why the Lillies continue to attract audiences after thirty years. Among other nominations and awards, Shockheaded Peter won the 2002 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment and Jacques was awarded Best Performance in a Supporting Role. This is as close as the Lillies ever got to the mainstream. In effect, these and other accolades have failed to legitimise the Lillies as a viable commercial product, making us ponder the tensions underpinning the celebritisation mechanisms that shape and perpetuate existing hegemonies. In high-profile award ceremonies, defined by N. Anand and Mary R. Watson as ‘tournament rituals’, dark cabaret, steampunk, and other punk- and goth-derived music genres have not followed in the footsteps of previously uncomfortable (which is to say, polemical) genres like rock and rap music.16 They remain consigned to the alternative milieu. The most obvious reason behind this is the bluntness they flaunt. Rather than providing a series of coded readings to address debasement and discriminating practices against the lower classes, the Lillies never opt to euphemise

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their subject matter. Jacques, in fact, seems to nurture a severe dislike for all hagiographic depictions of everyday life: I don’t want to write about ‘boy-meets-girl-and-everybody’s-happy’. I write about life on the street. I come from the streets. I’m not going to start writing about white middle class people. I’ve always had friends who were drunks, junkies and prostitutes – I’ve always been interested in people of character.17

He tours the world playing songs about ‘anything that doesn’t involve beautiful blonde girls and boys running at the meadow’—dystopian songs that explore metropolitan life-worlds from the standpoint of the sinful and hedonist misfits within.18 From their earliest recordings on cassette, Bouquet of Vegetables (1989) and Little Death (1991), later compiled on the album Bouquet of Vegetables: The Early Years (1999), the prolific band has consistently retained its outsider’s edge and treated audiences to an artistic trajectory that offers a continuum of blasphemous projects dealing with all sorts of vices. The outcasts that Jacques croons about are not your usual suspects. In his acerbic poems, we find representations of all that is odious, despicable, and downright unlawful. The demi-monde is a reality Jacques knows well, having spent seven years living above a strip joint in Soho. Among the extensive list of gross offenders and wayward women, there are arsonists, cannibals, paedophiles, necrophiliacs, and rapists in Cockatoo Prison (2010); a tall man (‘a giant through and through’) who protects one kid by murdering his three bullies (‘Bully Boys’ from Shockheaded Peter); a violent sanguinarian murderer (‘Maria’ from Bad Blood and Blasphemy, 1999); a self-destructive demimondaine who dies at the hands of Jack The Ripper (Lulu: A Murder Ballad, 2014); an amputee transvestite prostitute (‘Aunty Mabel’ from Farmyard Filth, 1997); and an alcoholic double amputee (‘King of the Gutter’ from Devil’s Fairground). The recurring theme of post-war life, decadence, and amputation is reminiscent of Otto Dix’s triptych painting Metropolis (1927–1928), which depicts a severely stratified Weimar Germany—a degenerate place where crippled veterans, street prostitutes, high-class courtesans, homeless beggars, and the bourgeoisie coexist but never mix. In turn, the purposely contentious subject matter built around an assortment of misfits recalls Randy Newman’s cynical outsider songs of the 1970s, whose melodies also draw on blues, jazz, rock, and cabaret. From a song about a predatory stalker that prepares for a sexual assault (‘Suzanne’) to ‘Davy The Fat Boy’ (an orphan turned into a sideshow attraction) and the 1977 album Little Criminals, which contains a tender ditty about a child murderer (‘In Germany Before The War’), we find in Newman’s work a similar fondness for caricature and metaphor, as well as a fearless willingness to satirise estranged figures. The gothic aesthetics abhors restrictions of all kinds and goth or gothically inclined music, as Isabella van Elferen, Justin D. Edwards, and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet remark, comprises lyrics about pain, drugs, rebellion, death, alienation, irony, and anything pertaining to the trespassing of boundaries.19 The Lillies campify these themes and, in so doing, take them to the extreme. No topics are off limits: ‘Killed My Mother’ (Live in Soho, 2007) is a tale of matricide, rape, vampirism, and dismemberment, while the titles ‘Masturbating Jimmy’, ‘Kick

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a Baby’ (both from Urine Palace, 2007), and ‘Murder is easy’ (Ad Nauseam, 1995) are blatantly self-explanatory. Fairy-tale characters are not spared— Cinderella appears as a crack-addicted prostitute in Sinderella (2009)—and neither are animals. Zoophilia and bestiality make up the subject matter of Farmyard Filth, which contains the infamous lines ‘I love a little hamster up my rectum’ (‘Hamsters’) and ‘I want to have sex with flies’ (‘Flies’). There is also a sweet love tune about a sheep named Wellington (‘Sheep’). The band returns to this topic in a sister song to ‘Sheep’, titled ‘Behind Baa’s’ (Cockatoo Prison). This time, however, the story moves from ‘Sheep’s’ more platonic desires to actual sheep shagging. If we listen beyond the obscenity, we quickly realise that the song deals with a serious issue: ‘I must now be punished for what you call a crime / While you will slit a sheep’s throat, eat her with your wine’. Hypocrisy recurs in every Lillies project as one of society’s vilest ailments. Their low, marginal status exempts the group from abiding by normalising and normative discourses about otherness and abjection. The gothic imagination nurtures and feeds off the abject in all its transgressive potential, and the unglamorous abject body that Julia Kristeva describes, with all its unpoetic and tabooed orifices and excrements, is the playground of The Tiger Lillies.20 Lust, death, and the dark alleys where they meet are the themes they cherish the most, and through them the band articulates the close connections between grotesquery and politics, which are at the core of Bakhtin’s theories on the carnivalesque. The Bakhtinian carnivalesque recognises an inherently humorous and political quality in the grotesque body, for it is always excessive and challenges restrictive normative boundaries.21 Freakery and carnival tropes are the focus of the albums Circus Songs (1999) and Freakshow (2010), but abjection is not exclusive to these neo-Victorian freaks: it extends to every character that meanders in the prolific imagination of Martyn Jacques. There’s the couple of drug addicts in ‘Junkie’ (Cockatoo Prison) who kill their child (‘I left it in the cupboard, left it in filth to die’), the ‘putrid smell’ of corpses in ‘Rotten Flesh’ (Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 2012), seagulls that feed on ‘last night’s vomit / while another murder victim in the gutter slowly bleeds’ in ‘Luis Miller’ (The Sea, 2003), and old people with their shit-stained sheets in ‘Old Gracefully’ (The Brothel to the Cemetery, 1996). These grotesque bodies are intimately connected to camp and the Gothic in their excessiveness. The trio pairs verbal punk-goth shock tactics with provocative performances that gesture towards Bowiesque campiness, which moves the shows further down the cultural hierarchy. Once described as ‘a cross between Krusty The Clown and Dame Edna Everidge’, Jacques lends his lyrics and performances certain characteristics that Mark Booth singles out as pivotal in camp-style, such as a ‘shameless insincerity’, a commitment to the marginal, a pervasive cynicism, and a penchant for caricature.22 In a video for ‘Gin’ (from The Gorey End, 2003), for instance, a song about an alcoholic who perishes from indulgence, a curvaceous woman in a low-cut, leopard-print dress holds a bottle of gin between her breasts and leans forward, time and again, to pour its contents into the glass she is holding. Camp allows for unpretentious mocking and turns the musical numbers into self-parody. The Lillies

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appropriate camp but taint it with abjection and turn it gothic, thereby subverting the style’s typical ‘celebration of human nature’.23 Another recurring theme in the band’s work is the very gothic desacralisation of the sacred. Profanity, one of Bakhtin’s carnival elements, is a common device for exploring relationships between individuals and raising timely questions about politics, tradition, and faith. Album after album, there are satirical elements that deliberately parody biblical material, which makes their work highly polemical vis-à-vis the more conservative members of the public. ‘Heaven to Hell’, from The Brothel to The Cemetery (1996), is about a man who, although in heaven, is ‘as unhappy as hell’. It describes God’s tinsel heavens as a sanctimonious place infected by classism (‘The angels look down their noses / Because I’m from a different class’) and ruled by a dictator (‘And God, he’s a miserable bastard / He’s always making up rules’). ‘Piss on your grave’ (Two Penny Opera, 2001) describes biblical mass murder and grave desecration, whereas in ‘Save Our Souls’, ‘The Vatican’s a brothel, its chief pimp the Pope’ (Here I am Human, 2010). Before a show at a church in Islington, scheduled for Good Friday, the Lillies issued the following press release: ‘What better day could there be to hear songs such as ‘Banging in the Nails’, ‘Jesus’, and ‘Hell’ and what more appropriate place for such a performance. So grab your crown of thorns, polish your nails and head down to Union Chapel for a night of bizarre and blasphemous balladry’. It was not long before the show was cancelled. This anecdote attests to the band’s unwillingness to sugar-coat or compromise their work for profit or public approval. This defiant attitude is best illustrated in ‘Banging in the Nails’ (The Brothel to The Cemetery), the one song that has attracted the most negative attention so far: I’m crucifying Jesus, banging in the nails, And I am so happy, because old Jesus failed. I’m crucifying Jesus, nail him to the cross. The poor old bastard bleeds to death and I don’t give a toss. I’m bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, banging in the nails. […] I’m crucifying Jesus, in my piss he bathes. I think I am a pervert, I think I am depraved I’m crucifying Jesus, beat him to a pulp, I stick my organ in his mouth and on it he must gulp.

After hearing ‘Banging in the Nails’, Edward Gorey sent a large box of his unpublished stories to the Lillies, who set some of them to music for what would become The Gorey End.24 This boisterous composition about crucifying Jesus provides hilarious moments of controversial religious satire which somewhat recall the sing-along crucifixion in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979), although in terms of thematic irreverence, it is perhaps closer to Jerry Springer: The Opera (dir. Peter Orton, 2005). The trio is unafraid of ethical, moral, or ideological reprobation and champions the demented merriment of debauchery by refusing to sanitise their language.

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The disenchanted songs Jacques croons or belts out could be best described as satirical and serialised sketches of life, in the tradition of the great French chansonniers, such as Aznavour, Brel, or Barbara. They depict everyday urban life within the framework of capitalist globalisation, dealing with how the less powerful relate to those who have power and how the oppressed relate to the ruling class. These perverse tales, delivered with humorous and theatrical performances, offer extreme narratives of life at its lowest points, in effect un-glamorising the hidden or unseen elements of contemporary societies. Nowhere is this clearer than in Cold Night in Soho (2017), an album in which some of the social problems that surface in the trio’s vast repertoire receive some of their most provocative and poignant articulations. It draws inspiration from the years Jacques spent in 1980s Soho and it was the band’s first album in a decade not connected to a theatre show.25 My reasoning for singling it out concerns three particular aspects: its autobiographical tone and its thematic and aural consistency. The soundscape of Cold Night is clearly distinct from their previous collection of Soho songs (Low Life Lullabies, 1998). Overall, the tone is less mordacious than usual; it is not as morose as the tear-stained chords of A Dream Turns Sour, but the singer-narrator’s voice comes through as less detached from the reality it describes. There is a feeling that we are listening in on a private conversation, a mournful goodbye to days long gone. Soho’s history lends itself particularly well to the deranged imagination of the Lillies. A well-known entertainment district since the latter decades of the 1700s, Soho garnered a reputation for international cuisine and fashionable artisanry and shopping. It became the epicentre of London’s bohemian life, its winding streets teeming with masquerade balls, exhibition centres, concert halls, gambling, and high-class demimondaines. The nineteenth century, however, brought along a different type of reputation. From the mid-1800s through to the start of the First World War, the district became increasingly more proletarian and cosmopolitan, as well as a refuge for anarchists and political dissidents.26 Between 1816 and 1825, the upper classes, eager to contain the economically declining and morally disreputable area, designed Regent Street, which architecturally demarcated the Mayfair highbrows from Soho’s working-class lowbrows, a separation that Jacques and his bandmates unfailingly make evident.27 This boundary did not deter people from enjoying the multicultural pleasures of Soho, a meeting point—albeit a sometimes turbulent one—between the ‘rich and poor, unschooled émigrés and Bloomsbury literati, moral purity campaigners and libertarian anarchists, undercover police and dance hostesses, fascists and anti-fascists, queers and heterosexuals, Italians, Jews, Greeks, Americans, Germans, Swiss, black GIs, and white Britons’, as Judith R. Walkowitz observes.28 The cholera outbreak of 1854, which left at least 600 Victorian Sohoites dead, and the widespread poverty that ensued lowered the social status of the area further. In the twentieth century, cheap eateries, drinking clubs, and lodging houses multiplied, while variety theatres, dance halls, and the sex industry faced accusations of indecency that led to regular police investigations and raids.29 During the 1960s and 1970s, Soho pioneered ‘lunchtime’ theatre, while at night its

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clubs catered to post-war British youth culture, which included Punks and the New Romantics. With new state regulations in the 1970s and 1980s rent prices spiked, pushing local businesses out and causing a surge in homelessness. It was in this abandoned and diseased Soho of the 1980s that Jacques lived, befriending its erratic denizens. ‘Soho – magic syllables!’, wrote Thomas Burke in 1915. ‘For when the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish he goes to Soho, where every street is a song’.30 A wicked song, no doubt. Jacques documents these devilish feelings in aural tableaux that recount the history of Soho through the unfortunate stories of its dwellers. From the 1980s, the Miscellaneous Provisions Act and the progressive gentrification of Soho forced many establishments, especially unlicensed sex shops and adult entertainment businesses, to close down and the last infamous bastions of bohemia, Madame Jojo’s and the 12 Bar Club, saw their licences revoked in 2014 and 2015, respectively.31 Already in 1915, Burke had warned that a fake Bohemianism would ‘spoil Soho’ and lamented the invasion of the district by ‘the girl-clerk and the book-keeper’.32 The concerted clean-up of its trademark sleazy image dictated the disappearance of old Soho in the twenty-first century. In Cold Night, the musical mastery of the Lillies creates highly visual and textured compositions that illustrate the rich history of Soho’s lowlife: the hedonistic existence; the dividing line between high and low; the prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics, and drug addicts who lurked in its alleyways; and, above all, the permanent struggle for economic and biological survival. The wannabe celebrity in ‘Heroin’, who Jacques taunts with destructive advice—‘If you want to win / Take heroin’— reappears, in a way, in ‘Screwed Blues’, in the shape of a tramp who is ‘going for the OD’ because he has ‘had enough of this pain’. The powerlessness to overcome Soho’s vicious circle of failure, misery, violence, and death is the album’s thematic thread. Since there is no stopping the ‘Ticking of the Hours’, chronic drunkenness provides a way out (‘Let’s Drink’). ‘Soho Clipper Blues’, in turn, conjures up images of bleak London streets, where ladies of dubious virtue meet with men of contemptible morals and are mercilessly punished for their indiscretions. Soho is styled as a space of waste, victimisation, and deviance. In this disillusioned world, ‘I wouldn’t know’ constitutes the only answer for a series of questions—How do we save the very poor, the pushers, thieves, whores, the starving? How do we stop the violence, the hate, the wars, disease, and famine?—in the album’s eponymous song. From the opening track, the Lillies take a heavily critical stance towards the passivity of political (and metaphysical) authorities, warning us that God’s corrupt ‘Salvation Army’ cannot rescue such sinful souls and thus parades through Soho merely to highlight that its people are far beyond redemption. The plaintive piano and backing vocals set the haunting backdrop for ‘The First Day’, which confirms God’s abandonment of humankind. Since neither man nor divinity can save the Sohoites, any attempt to avoid spiralling into oblivion is futile. ‘Go’ exposes the harsh arbitrariness of daily life, recounting how—at any time and at any age— death is always at your doorstep. The song harks back to the band’s ‘Crack of Doom’ (Bad Blood and Blasphemy), which adverts: ‘so your life’s been a success

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/ And you have pleasure in excess / Don’t worry it will all end soon / The crack of doom is coming soon’. The satirical grotesque here forces us to face up to the abyss of ultimate meaninglessness that besets our gritty existence. The eerie sounds in ‘Just Another Day’ and ‘In the Winter’, two painstakingly melancholy meditations on (the end of) human existence, reflect the passing of the seasons and the ‘icy death’ that winter brings. The lyrics describe a sense of uneasiness and world-weariness that shows how decadent and imprisoning reality is. The title track, ‘Cold Night in Soho’, is a sorrowful introspection that captures, in just over nine minutes, the slow death of the district through the story of an abused streetwalker, an old friend of Jacques’s who was murdered by her punter. Backed by Stout’s bass and haunting bowed saw, the expressive vocal nuances and dramatic rendition build in intensity until the music drops to a low, ominous tone and Jacques at last utters the prostitute’s name—‘Tiger Lilly’. The rapidity with which the modern city’s structures and surfaces mutate often challenges our capacity to grasp and communicate ongoing histories. Jacques makes us pause and look. His propensity to concentrate almost entirely on Dickensian characters or the type of decadent gutter dandies that populate the works of William Burroughs taps into representations of a doomed social idealism. It also calques upon fears regarding the other and their incorporation into commodity culture. The notion of ‘contamination’, so central to the Gothic, is key to understanding the generalised and deep-seated idea that difference is to be feared and combated, whether it be through forced evictions, imprisonment, abuse, or negligence. The other embodies a different form of cultural capital that is at odds with more traditional bourgeois values. We can trace the pervasive allure of otherness, specifically where it melds with crime, monstrosity, and disfigurement, to Victorian society’s fascination with voyeuristic pastimes, such as circuses, dime museums, freak shows, and penny dreadfuls. The appeal of otherness, in its manifold iterations (religious, sexual, physiognomic, psychological, or ethnic), has carried over from Victorian low entertainment into the twenty-first century’s hyper-mediatised culture. The other’s necessary non-conformity to a dominant culture’s standardised codes of behaviour or propriety has become a noteworthy feature of our post-millennial culture. The guilty indulgences of the Victorians have turned into generalised discourses that make up our social fabric. What were then parlour topics, whispered words, and naughty nights out in Soho, now reverberate through an endless multiplicity of tabloid stories, gossip columns, reality TV shows, slogan t-shirts, and online posts. Promoting the dialogue of our postmodern world with its subcultural others breeds a new cultural space in which visibility is accorded to specific problems, but in which voyeurism becomes normalised. Social media in particular has helped rekindle humankind’s fascination with the eccentric, the monstrous, and the liminal. Hashtag activism and media-driven campaigns that aim to expose a plethora of centuries-old prejudices and discrimination, from gender-based violence to social inequality, religious hatred, and ageism, have taken over our daily lives. These platforms, however, have also helped promote the commodification of the others and aliens within the twenty-first-century cultural mainstream. Channels

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such as Barcroft TV have intensified voyeurism to an extent that Victorians could have only dreamed of. In so doing, they have created a network of voyeuristic complicity that both condones and incentivises the objectification and fetishisation of difference. This could be regarded as a direct result of our postmodern gothic culture’s ‘vampiric’ logic of commodification, fetishisation, and mass consumption, where, as Rosi Braidotti claims, monstrous or teratological others acquire the status of cultural icons.33 In this global capitalist context of supply and demand, where otherness has, much like in Victorian times, become a profitable business, the musical tales of the Lillies prove especially timely and productive. In tailoring neo-Victorianism to their particular interests as performers, the other appears as the site of patriarchal violence, sexploitation, promiscuity, oversexualisation, vices, or societal neglect, revealing important sociopolitical tensions. Historically associated with practices of exploitation and marginalisation, the Lillies inscribe otherness with new cultural and symbolic functions. The anachronistic sentiment of the Soho songs (along with Jacques’s falsetto) makes evident an incisive attack on the mass-mediatised celebrity culture that consumes and accessorises the other and on the ruling classes which continue to ignore the outsider’s voice. Jacques captures the real-life experience of inhabiting the city’s long-evolving and increasingly gentrified structures by mobilising the tropes of decadent capitalism—the scoundrels, the losers, the whores, and the maniacal killers. Aldis Gedutis calls this angle the ‘brothel perspective’, which he relates to Brecht’s radical imagination and the impossibility of utopian thinking.34 Utopian thinking, I argue, is not only impossible in the sordid sanctuary of the Lillies, but the very notion of utopia is ridiculed and destroyed. I contend that the destruction of utopia is effected via the deployment of radical humour. The reliance on dark parody, sarcasm, burlesque, and satire—framed by scatological humour—makes visible and audible a mischievous parade of gothic tropes that shake up conventions as a way to zoom in on the woes and hardships that continue to affect destitute citizens. Braidotti’s pertinent question as to how one can ‘free difference from the negative charge which it seems to have built into it’ has a clear, if problematic, resolution in the work of the Lillies.35 Contemporary societies are unable to cleanse difference of this negative charge through policies or awareness campaigns, so the celebration and appropriation of that negativity—the extreme carnivalisation of difference—paired with a radical humour that blames the audience for complicity seems to be the only way, in a dystopian postmodern world, to eventually free otherness from stigmatisation. The radical humour of the ‘brothel perspective’ therefore constitutes the definitive antidote and weapon of dark cabaret artists against the hegemonic relations at play in postmodern societies. The transgressive themes the lyrics express, it should be noted, do not translate into radical discourses meant to trigger revolt and revolution, but serve as corrosive anthems to the underbelly of metropolitan society, where we find both victim and perpetrator. The choice to make the other-as-victim and the o­ ther-as-criminal the thematic motifs that underpin their work, the oeuvre of the Lillies gains in shock value for often presenting violence and despair without attempting to side with the

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victims or directly holding power structures accountable. Overtly, these are not songs of disapprobation or accusation but sound more like objective observations on a hostile reality. Indeed, the fact that the singer-narrator disempowers abject bodies by mocking their predicament in a way reifies their marginal position. Such a seemingly detached outlook provokes an ambivalent response, which complicates the audience’s rapport with the text and its subversive potential. Yet, these unreliable narrators, in the tradition of Randy Newman and Patrick McGrath, should be enough to warrant a closer and more critical analysis of the content of each song. The power of carnivalesque humour lies precisely in its potential to awake the (radical) imagination and realise a Brechtian breaking of ties with acritical representations of reality. The song ‘Satan Does You Bless’, for instance, from the album Here I am Human, inspired by François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), describes a world turned upside down in which ‘Charities take money from the very poor / The crowds all boo the player who a goal has scored / The more nervous the moment the less it makes you stressed […] If someone is disfigured at them you must stare / And in polite society now everybody swears’. The associated show, a collaboration with Prague’s Archa Theatre, Czech director Jiří Havelka, and Irish dramatist Jocelyn Clarke, added the topics of plastic surgery and body hair removal to the performance. ‘Desolation Song’ (Hamlet, 2012), in turn, laments the apathy of the rejects vis-à-vis institutionalised powers: They play on you a marionette They control you all is set Pull the strings and watch you dance You really didn’t stand a chance. If you were strong If you could fight If you could see The day from night If you could make out White from black Then they could not you attack.

As theatrical ironists, the Lillies steer clear of facile moralising, but the a­ nti-establishment tone of their works makes us ponder the complexities subtending capitalist market systems, gendered privilege, classism, abuse, and religion. ‘Many people have an almost psychotic dislike of the festive season. We thought we’d dedicate a show to that group’. The show Jacques is referring to was called ‘Suicide for Christmas’.36 The Tiger Lillies do not cater to mainstream tastes, but instead marshal our centuries-long fascination with the illicit and the taboo. The raw viscerality of Jacques’s lyrics is devoid of any strategic (read, commercial) concessions to the societal demands of post-millennial feminism, political correctness, and religious propriety. He proposes an approach to life in postmodern societies that recognises the integral role of the scandalous and the grotesque in structuring our cultural and political landscape while bringing forth the complex

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relationship between high, popular, and alternative cultures. Rather than playing the high off against the low, the avant-garde, intermedial, and intertextual harmonies of the Lillies seem to tie a knot between the two realms, encouraging the audience to reassess the dialectical interchanges between them. In so doing, they help us understand the Gothic as part of an evolving language that revises the relationship between high and low formats. In fact, I argue, our understanding of cultural resistance requires a new critical approach to low forms. Sincerity, social engagement, and a shift in retrograde morality paradigms lie somewhere between the dyadic relationships of the subtle and the vulgar, high and low, philosophy and bawdry. In each new project, the Lillies tackle contentious subject matter with renewed energy and punky humour. Their works revel in impudence and dissect the tropes of abjection in our culture’s imagination, in the process paying homage to society’s foul aliens. Their subcultural haven of deviance is nevertheless more than a twisted candy shop for transgressive behaviour, concerned with selling ironic re-enactments of degrading fetishism and violence. The world of the Lillies is not black and white; it holds up a selective mirror to society: one that makes visible what we relegate to the shadows and brings us face to face with the people we hurriedly pass by on the street. The songs allow for an exploration of how the Gothic and related genres use satire as a mode of interrogation to offer a radical questioning of complacency and oppression based on differences in physiognomy, gender, age, occupation, or sexual orientation. Their off-putting characters therefore embody universal problems that remain unresolved or unaddressed, their life stories as timely today as they were thirty years ago, when the band first started playing in Soho pubs. Much like the strenuous life conditions of the ‘people of character’ they portray, the songs of the Lillies offer a rich avenue for scholarly debates about the global city and its unsung dwellers, about precariousness and aesthetics, disabled bodies and abjection. The songs function as pieces of dissent through camp, spectacle, and comedic mocking. Christian Gutleben points to the unlikely pairing of fun and fear, humour and the Gothic, stating that the ‘fearful riddles of life can be exposed lightly and playfully – in particular through intertextual and metatextual games. In other words, […] [f]un does not cancel fear, it does not even alleviate it. Fun simply strikes a different attitude with greater self-consciousness and self-derision’.37 The radical self-conscious humour the Lillies master and the sheer outrageousness of some of their songs should prevent them from being taken literally, forcing instead the audience to develop their own critical views on the lyrical content. Their work invites self-reflection. The fact that most of their characters are so completely over-the-top hinders pathos (or emotional identification), creating a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt or distancing effect. The easy response of hurt puritanical sensibilities is blatantly out of place here. Central to this discussion is the broader issue regarding the place of comedy in contemporary societies. The oeuvre of the Lillies raises key questions about the ethical dimension of dark humour, thus contributing to current debates about the role of the comic and the politically correct. Their in-your-face sardonic humour is radical because it draws attention to the

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ills of society in a manner unfiltered by distorted ethics or political correctness. Carnivalesque laughter is a political strategy: it is not about avoiding seriousness but about accountability. Derisive humour serves to accuse us, the audience, for laughing and participating in shameless mockery. The performers and the audience are thus faced with the ethical dilemma of continually exploiting disability, deformity, depravity, and decadence, replicating degrading Victorian discourses of ownership and scopophilia. Our ‘politically incorrect’ pleasure is often steeped in taboo, prejudice, and gender bias, so shaming it and classifying it as ‘incorrect’ might ultimately lead to a strengthening of the status quo. Doris Lessing notes that ‘The most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world is Political Correctness, which is both immediately evident, and to be seen everywhere, and as invisible as a kind of poison gas’.38 The insidious intolerance the politically correct perpetuates is destroying our freedom to create and critique. It is creating an all-encompassing panopticon, where it is no longer those in power that watch, police, and punish, but where everyone shares the role of observer, observee, and executioner. Songs that are deliberately ridiculous should be read as either pure entertainment or as cautionary narratives that, in all their glorious aberrance, lay bare the idiosyncrasies of the world we share. More importantly, in a world where the comic is increasingly policed by both humans and machines, The Tiger Lillies show us that unbridled freedom to expose and critique is alive and well. They show us that the agendas of political correctness which are redefining morality often devolve into prejudice and propagate mechanisms of (self-)censorship. Our chance for redemption and for answering the plight of minorities lies in the underground lairs of defilement that are unafraid to challenge generalised hypocrisy.

Notes

1. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1982), 20–29. 2. Perry Meisel, The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan (Chichester, ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), ix–x. 3. Ibid., x. 4. Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Criminal Castrati: The Tiger Lillies’, New York Press (13–19 May 1998), http://wfmu.org/~kennyg/popular/articles/tigerlillies.html (accessed 20 December 2018). 5. Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2012), 107. 6. Carol Stein dir., Shockheaded Peter and Other Songs from the Tiger Lillies: Live in Concert in New York, 1999, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYS7-P2Vg1Q (accessed 20 January 2019). 7. Natasha Scharf, Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe (Shropshire, Independent Music Press, 2011), 118; Natasha Scharf, The Art of Gothic: Music + Fashion + Alt Culture (London, Omnibus Press, 2014), 165, 180.

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8. ‘The Godfathers of Alternative Cabaret’, https://www.tigerlillies.com/history/ (accessed 14 January 2019); Deborah Speer, ‘The Dresden Dolls’, Pollstar (3 April 2006), https:// www.pollstar.com/article/the-dresden-dolls-50517 (accessed 17 January 2019). 9. Mark Swed, ‘Culture Monster’s 13 Things to Do on Halloween’, Los Angeles Times (29 October 2009), https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/10/xx-thingsto-do-on-halloween.html (accessed 28 October 2018). Swed first referred to the band as ‘Queen Victoria’s Nightmare’ in ‘So This Is What Gorey Sounds Like’, Los Angeles Times (30 October 2003), http://articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/30/news/wk-swed30 (accessed 28 October 2018); Alexandra Stelmashonok, ‘Poster the Tiger Lillies— Mad Hatters’ (n.d.), http://www.cats-n-dreams.com/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=93 (accessed 27 October 2018). 10. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, translated by E.B. Ashton (New York, Continuum, 1988). 11. Lars Elleström, ‘Introduction’, in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–8, 4. 12. David Field Andrew, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954 (Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press, 2010). 13. All lyrics cited with permission. Lyrics by Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies. Copyright by Misery Guts Music Ltd. 14. William Farina, The German Cabaret Legacy in American Popular Music (Jefferson, McFarland, 2013), 17–18. 15. Henk Oosterling, ‘Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between’, Intermédialités, 1 (Spring 2003), 29–46, 30. 16. N. Anand and Mary R. Watson, ‘Tournament Rituals in the Evolution of Fields: The Case of the Grammy Awards’, The Academy of Management Journal, 47:1 (February 2004), 59–80, 60. 17. https://www.tigerlillies.com/shop/devils-fairground (accessed 11 February 2019). 18. https://www.tigerlillies.com/history (accessed 5 September 2018). 19. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth (London, Routledge, 2014), 1–8, 8; Isabella van Elferen, ‘Spectral Liturgy: Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, edited by Edwards and Monnet (London, Routledge, 2014), 135–147, 142. 20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982). 21. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984). 22. Stephen Downie, ‘Why All the Drama over Cabaret Act’, The Daily Telegraph (n.d.), http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,17874172-5001030,00.html (accessed 2 November 2017); Mark Booth, Camp (New York, Quartet, 1983), 18, 85–99; Mark Booth, ‘Campe-Toi! On the Origins and Definitions of Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2002), 66–79, 69. 23. Anna Malinowska, ‘Bad Romance: Pop and Camp in Light of Evolutionary Confusion’, in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 9–2, 19. 24. https://www.tigerlillies.com/shop/the-gorey-end (accessed 23 November 2018). 25. https://www.tigerlillies.com/cold-night-in-soho (accessed 23 November 2018). 26. Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The Emergence of Cosmopolitan Soho’, in The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Chichester, ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 419–430, 421–422. 27. Nick Black, ‘The Challenging Isle: A Walk Through Soho’, British Medical Journal, 333 (23–30 December 2006), 1325–1326.

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28. Judith R. Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012), 3. 29. Ibid., 12–13. 30. Thomas Burke, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 253. 31. Erin Sanders-McDonagh and Magali Peyrefitte, ‘Immoral Geographies and Soho’s Sex Shops: Exploring Spaces of Sexual Diversity in London’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25:3 (2018), 351–367, 352; Pete Clark, ‘The Slow Death of Soho: Farewell to London’s Sleazy Heartland’, The Guardian (25 November 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2014/nov/25/the-slow-death-of-soho-farewell-to-londons-sleazy-heartland (accessed 30 December 2018); John Harris, ‘A Lament for the Death of Bohemian London’, The Guardian (6 February 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/06/ death-bohemian-london-12-bar-club-squatters (accessed 30 December 2018). 32. Ibid., 255. 33. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002), 176–179, 211. 34. Aldis Gedutis, ‘Radikali vaizduotė ir utopijos negalimumas: žvilgsnis iš viešnamio į kairę’, Inter-Studia Humanitatis, 12 (2011), 79–99, 97–98. 35. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 4. 36. Mark Blankenship, ‘Legit: Gotham Gives the Gift of Cabaret’, Variety, 409:4 (10–16 December 2007), 74, 78. 37. Christian Gutleben, ‘“Fear Is Fun and Fun Is Fear”: A Reflexion on Humour in ­Neo-Victorian Gothic’, in Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2012), 301–326, 320–321. 38. Doris Lessing, ‘Foreword: Censorship and the Climate of Opinion’, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, Vols. 1–4, edited by Derek Jones (London, Routledge, 2015), vii– x, ix.

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Black, Nick, ‘The Challenging Isle: A Walk Through Soho’, British Medical Journal, 333 (23–30 December 2006), 1325–1326. Blankenship, Mark, ‘Legit: Gotham Gives the Gift of Cabaret’, Variety, 409:4 (10–16 December 2007), 74, 78. Blühdorn, Annette, ‘“Der Enkel aus Berlin”: Udo Lindenberg and the German Cabaret Tradition’, German Life and Letters, 55:4 (October 2002), 416–433. Boon, Maxim, ‘Review: The Very Worst of The Tiger Lillies (Sydney Festival)’, Limelight (8 January 2016), https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/review-the-very-worst-of-thetiger-lillies-sydney-festival/ (accessed 2 October 2018). Booth, Mark, Camp (New York, Quartet, 1983). Booth, Mark, ‘Campe-Toi! On the Origins and Definitions of Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2002), 66–79. Braidotti, Rosi, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002), 176–179. ‘The Brothel to the Cemetery’, Briarpatch, 31:6 (July 2002), 27. Burke, Thomas, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1915). Clark, Pete, ‘The Slow Death of Soho: Farewell to London’s Sleazy Heartland’, The Guardian (25 November 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/25/the-slow-death-of-soho-farewell-to-londons-sleazy-heartland (accessed 30 December 2018). Costa, Maddy, ‘The Tiger Lillies—Review’, The Guardian (21 July 2011), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jul/21/the-tiger-lillies-review (accessed 3 October 2018). Davies, Helen, Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Downie, Stephen, ‘Why All the Drama over Cabaret Act’, The Daily Telegraph (n.d.), http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,17874172-5001030,00.html (accessed 2 November 2017). Eade, John, Placing London: From Imperial City to Global City (Oxford, Berghahn, 2000). Edwards, Justin D., and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth (London, Routledge, 2014), 1–8. Elleström, Lars, ‘Introduction’, in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–8. Ellis-Petersen, Hannah, ‘Madame Jojo’s Demolition Approved as Part of Soho Redevelopment Plans’, The Guardian (28 November 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/ nov/28/madame-jojos-demolition-soho-estates-westminster-council-licence (accessed 30 December 2018). Ellis, Iain, ‘What Does Randy Newman Say When He Talks With God?’, Pop Matters (22 February 2016), https://www.popmatters.com/what-does-randy-newman-say-when-he-talkswith-god-2495452160.html (accessed 3 January 2019). Farina, William, The German Cabaret Legacy in American Popular Music (Jefferson, McFarland, 2013). Fitzgerald, Kerry, ‘Interview: Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies’, This Is Cabaret (31 July 2012), http://www.thisiscabaret.com/interview-martyn-jacques-of-the-tiger-lillies/ (accessed 1 February 2019). Gedutis, Aldis, ‘Radikali vaizduotė ir utopijos negalimumas: žvilgsnis iš viešnamio į kairę’, Inter-Studia Humanitatis, 12 (2011), 79–99. ‘The Godfathers of Alternative Cabaret’, https://www.tigerlillies.com/history/ (accessed 14 January 2019). Goldsmith, Kenneth, ‘Criminal Castrati: The Tiger Lillies’, New York Press (13–19 May 1998), http://wfmu.org/~kennyg/popular/articles/tigerlillies.html (accessed 20 December 2018). Gutleben, Christian, ‘“Fear Is Fun and Fun Is Fear”: A Reflexion on Humour in Neo-Victorian Gothic’, in Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined

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Nineteenth Century, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2012), 301–326. Harris, John, ‘A Lament for the Death of Bohemian London’, The Guardian (6 February 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/06/death-bohemian-london-12-barclub-squatters (accessed 30 December 2018). Hickling, Alfred, ‘The Tiger Lillies meet Lulu: The Ultimate Fallen Woman’, The Guardian (3 February 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/03/tiger-lillies-lulu-martyn-jacques-interview (accessed 17 October 2018). https://www.tigerlillies.com (accessed 15 February 2019). https://www.tigerlillies.com/cold-night-in-soho (accessed 23 November 2018). https://www.tigerlillies.com/shop/devils-fairground (accessed 11 February 2019). Hoffman, Heinrich, Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures (New York, Frederick Warne & Co, n.d.). Hughes, Geoffrey, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (Chicester, ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Kandinsky, Wassily, and Franz Marc, ‘On Stage Composition’, in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, translated by Henning Falkenstein (New York, Viking, 1974), 190–206. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982). Lessing, Doris, ‘Foreword: Censorship and the Climate of Opinion’, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, Vols. 1–4, edited by Derek Jones (London, Routledge, 2015), vii–x. Malinowska, Anna, ‘Bad Romance: Pop and Camp in Light of Evolutionary Confusion’, in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 9–22. Maslin, Janet, ‘Randy Newman—The Moral Is Implicit’, The New York Times (25 September 1977), 96. Meads, Glenn, ‘Tiger Lillies play Queer Contact’, What’s on Stage (21 December 2011), https:// www.whatsonstage.com/blackpool-theatre/news/tiger-lillies-play-queer-contact_5887.html (accessed 3 November 2018). Meisel, Perry, The Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Nelson, Victoria, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2012). Neufeld, James, ‘Shock Tactics in the Theatre: Monsters Lurk Beneath the Stage’, Queen’s Quarterly, 112:4 (Winter 2005), 578–587. Oosterling, Henk, ‘Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between’, Intermédialités, 1 (Spring 2003), 29–46. Pacheco, Nuno, ‘Um Álbum da Minha Vida – Mísia’, Ípsilon (18 July 2018), https://www.publico.pt/2018/07/31/culturaipsilon/noticia/sao-muito-provocadores-mas-com-uma-poesia-euma-beleza-fascinantes-1838934#gs.a7ebWdbG (accessed 17 October 2018). Ransome, Arthur, Bohemia in London (New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1907). Roesner, David, ‘Genre Counterpoints: Challenges to the Mainstream Musical’, in The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016). Rojo, César, ‘The Tiger Lillies, Kierkegaard y Shanghai’, Diagonal (19 February 2013), https:// www.diagonalperiodico.net/culturas/the-tiger-lillies-kierkegaard-y-shanghai.html (accessed 17 October 2018). Sanders-McDonagh, Erin, and Magali Peyrefitte, ‘Immoral Geographies and Soho’s Sex Shops: Exploring Spaces of Sexual Diversity in London’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25:3 (2018), 351–367.

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Sanders-McDonagh, Erin, Magali Peyrefitte, and Matt Ryalls, ‘Sanitising the City: Exploring Hegemonic Gentrification in London’s Soho’, Sociological Research Online, 21:3 (31 August 2016), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/21/3/3.html (accessed 20 February 2019). Scharf, Natasha, The Art of Gothic: Music + Fashion + Alt Culture (London, Omnibus Press, 2014). Scharf, Natasha, Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe (Shropshire, Independent Music Press, 2011). Siddique, Sophia, and Raphael Raphael, ‘Introduction’, in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque, edited by Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–15. Sonevytsky, Maria, ‘The Freak Cabaret on the Revolution Stage: On the Ambivalent Politics of Femininity, Rurality, and Nationalism in Ukrainian Popular Music’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 28:3 (2016), 291–314. Speer, Deborah, ‘The Dresden Dolls’, Pollstar (3 April 2006), https://www.pollstar.com/article/ the-dresden-dolls-50517 (accessed 17 January 2019). Spritzer, Dinah, ‘A Prague Musical Returns, Funny and Dark’, The New York Times (15 February 2011), https://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/a-prague-musical-thats-funny-and-dark/ (accessed 28 January 2019). Stelmashonok, Alexandra, ‘Poster the Tiger Lillies—Mad Hatters’ (n.d.), http://www.cats-ndreams.com/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=93 (accessed 27 October 2018). Svich, Caridad, ‘Back to the Bawdy: Shockheaded Peter’s Punk Archaeology of the Music Hall’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14:1 (2004), 39–49. Swed, Mark, ‘Culture Monster’s 13 Things to Do on Halloween’, Los Angeles Times (29 October 2009), https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/10/xx-things-to-do-on-halloween.html (accessed 28 October 2018). Swed, Mark, ‘So This Is What Gorey Sounds Like’, Los Angeles Times (30 October 2003), http:// articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/30/news/wk-swed30 (accessed 28 October 2018). Tompkin, Julian, ‘Tiger Lillies Founder Martyn Jacques: Cabaret King’s Rise to Stardom’, The Australian (6 February 2016), https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/tiger-lillies-founder-martyn-jacques-cabaret-kings-rise-to-stardom/news-story/d19d12c2de1678dcbeb36c5eaeb04e53 (accessed 1 February 2019). Vale, Paul, ‘Tiger Lillies—Soho Songs (Low Life Lullabies)’, The Stage (28 July 2011), 20. van Elferen, Isabella, ‘Spectral Liturgy: Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (London, Routledge, 2014), 135–147. Van Evra, Jennifer, ‘Tiger Lilies Ride Their Urine Palace to Vancouver’, Straight (24 October 2007), https://www.straight.com/article-115421/tiger-lilies-ride-their-urine-palace-to-vancouver (accessed 17 October 2018). Walkowitz, Judith R., ‘The Emergence of Cosmopolitan Soho’, in The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Chichester, ­Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 419–430. Walkowitz, Judith R., Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012). Whetstone, David, ‘Martyn Jacques Reflects on 25 Years of The Tiger Lillies’, The Journal (17 March 2015), http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/music-nightlife-news/martyn-jacques-reflects-25-years-8859740 (accessed 31 January 2019). Wiley, Heidi, Formen des freien Theaters - Neuer Zirkus: eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Situation der heutigen circesanischen Künste (Hamburg, Diplomica Verlag, 2014). Zipes, Jack David, ‘The Perverse Delight of Shockheaded Peter’, Theater, 30:2 (Summer 2000), 129–143.

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Filmography ‘Interview with Martin [sic] of the Tiger Lillies 1/3’, Carpe Berlin, n.d., https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=IjHE6jbdRbw (accessed 17 November 2018). ‘Interview with Martin [sic] of the Tiger Lillies 2/3’, Carpe Berlin, n.d., https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=aCW-kTcKEDs (accessed 17 November 2018). ‘Interview with Martin [sic] of the Tiger Lillies 3/3’, Carpe Berlin, n.d., https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=vih4GmCUbF4 (accessed 17 November 2018). ‘Martyn Jacques & Tamzin Griffith on Shockheaded Peter’, Theater Talk (2005), https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=mA7yio5BfK8 (accessed 15 December 2018). Jerry Springer: The Opera, dir., Orton Peter (2005). Life of Brian, dir., Jones Terry (1979). Shockheaded Peter and Other Songs from the Tiger Lillies: Live in Concert in New York, dir., Stein Carol (1999), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYS7-P2Vg1Q (accessed 20 January 2019). The Munsters, created by Burns Allan and Hayward Chris (1964–1966). Tiger Lillies—The Early Years, dir., Coldman Richard (2009). Varieté, dir., Dupont E.A. (1925).

The Return of the Past in the Lyrics of Black Metal Antonio Alcalá González

As the Gothic manifests in varied time and geographical contexts, studies around it multiply and diversify. It has been identified as a set of conventions (Sedgwick, 9–10) which conform a mode1 that transcends space and decades as it countlessly manifests along the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its motifs come together to conform a language (Lloyd and Sage, 1) from which artists, belonging to a multiplicity of fields of expression, put forward their views and anxieties, among other concerns, about the arbitrary limits that societies impose on the past and its connection with the present. The Gothic is always present in between both times blurring the lines in between what was and what is. It questions the existence of boundaries that have been imposed to separate them, thus evidencing the arbitrariness generated by our insistence on alienating what occurred before from what is happening now in an attempt to silence elements from our past that would challenge the continuity of the civilised. From its origins, the term Gothic itself has been related to the medievally barbaric that returns to disturb the present by wrapping it under atmospheres of darkness that breed uncertainty. This arrival reminds us that the past is inescapable no matter how hard we try to deny its connection with the present; it permanently haunts us and makes conventions about borders and certainty collapse when it reaches us. The intention of this text is to explore the return of the barbaric times as it is rendered in the 90s lyrics of the Black Metal bands Emperor and Satyricon. They propose a return of the past of humanity understood as the times that preceded the loosening of connections with the natural world that has shaped contemporary societies. They conceive this movement not as a negative set back, but as a positive way to escape from restrictions imposed in the present by human reason on what is now considered a dark threatening Nature. The more modern society attempts to free itself from its barbaric past, the more this latter one irrupts to prove that what arouses from it cannot exist without

A. Alcalá González (*)  Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_53

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its everlasting influence. In Killeen’s words: “In the Gothic the past is never completely finished with; instead, it has a nasty habit of bursting through into the present, displacing the contemporary with the supposedly outdated” (28). This correspondence creates a dynamic relationship under which the past becomes distant and close, desirable and feared, inspiring and loathsome; each pair of opposites happen at the same time, thus creating a scenario under which certainty collapses. The resulting stage is surrounded by ancient presences that demand to be understood but end up terrifying the present when it refuses to accept their existence. This occurs mainly because the Gothic traditionally insists on conceiving the past as a destructive field inhabited by the cruelty that arises from the tyranny and superstition that are implied by a regression from our rational times (Baldick, xii–xiii). Thus, the Gothic works as anti-Barbaric since it shows no respect for the wisdom of the past, portraying those former ages related to the Goths “as prisons of delusion” (xv). The gothic past generally returns to offend “rational tastes and classical principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages. In this important respect literary Gothicism differs crucially from serious medieval revivalism” (xii–xiii). This lack of a proper dialogue with the past causes unstable identities. They crumble down when facing the impossibility to maintain the barriers that insist on defining the individual inside a frame isolated from the past. In order to prevent this from happening, ancient times are silenced. It is only in museums and books that we can find those epochs when the being was one with Nature under religious systems that worshipped its role as mother of all life.2 Those times are now restricted to the shape of relics, mere vestiges of what humanity once was. However, their presence, physically tangible, or in the corners of memory, proves that we are products of where we come from. As a result, their manifestation in the Gothic reminds us, though in an indirect way, that our identities did originate from neither lineal nor fixed sources; they are the product of the confluence of multiple lines that follow varied paths. Thus, the Gothic insists that regardless of how much the present imposes repression on the natural past of the human being, we cannot deny our origin from the wild places where all life originated and to which our existences cannot be prevented from returning if the conditions for such process appear. It is through the use of language that civilisation denies such possibilities and imposes tags with their consequent restrictions.3 It makes time not a flux in constant movement, but a separation of three different stages: past, present and future. Under the resulting insistence to assign identities to specific time constructions, the being is forced to deny the natural truth of his belonging to different temporal stages that add up to make the meaning of what he truly is. When we remember that humanity is just another species in Nature, we cannot forget that our existence follows the cycles of death and rebirth. The bare wintry lands become blooming fields in Spring, and the “dust to dust” expression in Western funerals echoes the fact that dead bodies provide the soil with nutrients needed for life to be renewed. However, the civilised side of humanity denies all this and imposes a lineal view since things need to be “rendered suitable to the linear unwinding of language” (Focault, 136) on which the symbolic order of society is constructed.

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Consequently, the civilised view insists on a constant advance towards a future of improvement in which the human being will be more distanced from Nature as generations follow one another. We tend to classify and label rather than understand the workings of things around us by a process of “limiting and filtering the visible” (Focault, 132). As a result of this view, on one hand the animal origin of the species is silenced after having been labelled as irrational and fearsome, on the other, the modern authorities, which police the limits of any present state inside the society, hear no reasons other than the ones that validate its permanence towards the future they have envisaged for all humanity. Under such imposition of limits, Nature is a presence that language labels and reduces under classificatory systems. That originated from the fact that humanity “relinquished its original state of nature and acquired all the features of a civilized society” (McKusick, 415). Such transition required both, the abandonment of Nature in favour of artificial sedentary establishments and the invention of language that imposed limits and punishments: … that the society now formed and the relations now established among men required in them qualities different from those which they derived from their primitive constitution; that as a sense of morality began to insinuate itself into human actions, and every man, before the enacting of laws, was the only judge and avenger of the injuries he had received, that goodness of heart suitable to the pure state of nature by no means was suitable for the new society; that it was necessary punishments should become severer in the same proportion that the opportunities of offending became more frequent, and the dread of vengeance add strength to the too weak curb of the law. (Rosseau, 119)

The old days of natural freedom were forgotten and replaced by the imposition of a law that binds humanity to its own artificiality of constructions that distance themselves from the parameters of Nature that once ruled the interaction among its members. The consequence was the replacement of the interaction of elements inside Nature by the restrictions of civilisation. This transforms Nature into an uncanny, repressed, part of humanity provoking that “Following in the footsteps of Rousseau, young writers all over Europe were seeking out wild, scenic, and remote landscapes in which to witness and record the state of nature at first hand” (McKusick, 431). The creative minds of the Romanticism found in Nature a source of inspiration free from the rational restrictions of the Enlightenment: “For the writers of the Romantic period, nature is often more inscrutable, a dynamic flux of vital energies, best engaged by an intuitive process of colloquy and sympathetic identification” (414). Inside this scenario of proposals to contest the emphasis on reason and civilisation exalted by the Enlightenment, it was in the sublime element in Nature that gothic writers found the means to remind their readers that the world around can overwhelm the power of the human law when we are confronted with its sublime overwhelming presence. The sublime became a gothic source of devastating experiences of terror that elevate the senses to appreciate beyond the limits of the civilised. To our days, we understand that the sublime paralyses reason, making it inoperable: “Since the magnitude of the sublime thing is estimated as being absolute without possible comparison, it is therefore not measurable as a quantity” (Lyotard, 80). In

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Kant’s view, the sublime is a category that allows the human reason to confirm our supremacy claimed over Nature since we locate our limits in the magnitude of the sublime. Consequently, our recognition of being independent from Nature, allows us to claim superiority over it. Thus, we fear it not that much because of an aesthetic perception, but mainly because its presence represents a permanent challenge to our claim for superiority over everything around us (49). As a result, what we call “sublime” is but a natural manifestation that confirms we cannot achieve absolute control of the environment around us despite our reason and the ability it gives us to manipulate our surroundings: “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us (as exerting influence upon us)” (50). We assign the term sublime to the absence of identifiable objectives and the resulting presence of chaos that contests the rational order imposed on Nature by the human perspective. As a result, the shock produced by the lack of order in something annihilates the human faculties. Inheriting from the proposal of gothic writers, Black Metal composers found in the sublime the way to express their concern about the natural past which lies across the border of the human city, waiting there to recover its central presence inside the human sphere. During the 90s, in a Western relatively small and crystallised society, the broken dialogue between the past and present found expression through the presence of gothic sublime images in the lyrics of Norwegian Black Metal bands. The following lines will briefly outline the scenario in which these two projects emerged to conclude with the identification of gothic elements in their lyrics as promised in the preceding title. In between the 80s and 90s the seeds of a new metal genre, Black Metal, were spread and harvested little by little under a process in which the Swedish group, Bathory, was central and which “Forged a new direction in the history of metal. One that was raw, primitive, and definingly anti-christian” (Dunn). Adding up to the quick drum beats and characteristic riffs left of his first albums, Bathory’s only permanent member, Quorton, added a new definitory lyrical component: a marked longing for the Heathen past of Scandinavian ancestry. In his fourth work, Blood, Fire, Death, he brought a revival of the Viking Scandinavian past as inspiration for the lyrics that incorporated clean voices and choral pieces to provide a mythical sense reminding the listener of that ancient past behind the artist’s present. The album’s art cover uses Peter Nicolai Arbo’s version of the Wild Hunt (1872) which appears pictured as a sublime event in which forces beyond our control irrupt to challenge the human context. Called Oskorei in Scandinavia, this event is based on the folk belief according to which, on specific days of the year, a group of spectral riders, dead warriors, comes back to our world and fly close to land to take some of the living into their own realm without the latter being able to prevent it. Traditionally, in old times and during the nights surrounding the Winter solstice, groups of young men emulated the Oskorei and rode around at night:

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They wore disguises, assumed false names to remain unknown and went by foot or on horseback. Their task was to punish those who violated rural traditions. Their acts of vengeance were malicious – they hid or destroyed tools, plugged up chimneys, nailed up doors, or locked the he-goat up in the kitchen. (Moynihan and Soderlind, 338)

The second wave of Black Metal—the one coming after Bathory in the 90s and mainly centred in Norway—based its lyrical content on a deep adherence to pure evil and hate to society. As part of the arguments to support such proposal, the incorporation of elements from the past proposed by Quorton remained crucial to the birth of this new branch of the genre. Both, the image on and behind stage, as well as the lyrical content were deeply influenced by this call from the past. The screeching voices and corpse paint added to dark clothes adorned with spikes categorised the movement bearing a strong connection with the Oskorei: Many Black metal musicians paint their faces in demonic black-and-white grimaces, dress in ancient Nordic clothes or adorn themselves with emblems of death… The falsetto voices of the Oskorei are recalled in the ghostly voices of many singers, usually a sinister blend of whispered words and hoarse cries. The disguised members of the Oskorei altered their voices and gave themselves false names – they represented demons and had to remain unknown. In Black metal as well only a few musicians use their real names. (Moynihan, Soderlind, 340)

Emperor and Satyricon represent particular branches of such proposal. In their beginnings, their image on stage was based on the makeup and clothes referred in the lines above. As for their lyrics, they continued where Bathory had left; they blended the inspirational idea of evil with a longing for a lost past that was identified with the heathen societies and their adherence to a deep dialogue with Nature which they identified as something that has been abandoned since the contemporary cult of reason deems it as a threat to the continuation of the civilised. Over the last three decades, the reasons why this genre consolidated in Norway have been subject of reflection an analysis for both experts and followers. Being officially a Lutheran Christian country, the inversion of “Christian goodness, the black metal aesthetic makes sense as a means to counter the dominant culture in a Christian society” (Walter, 20). Indeed, as most societies in the Western world, Norway is a place where tradition and conformity to the norm are the requirements to be accepted as part of the collectiveness. The members of the movement assumed the role of the individual difference by becoming the dark evil side of society: “The Devil is the rebel of the cosmos, the independent in the empire of a tyrant, the opposition to uniformity, the dissonance in the universal harmony, the exception to the rule, the particular in the universal, the unforeseen chance that breaks the law; he is the individualising tendency, the craving for originality” (Carus, 482). They desired to move beyond the passive conformity fostered by the wealthy society of relatively small population where they were born. They looked forward to individualising and elevating their spirits beyond the restrictions that accompanied such environment: “If there were no power of resistance, if no efforts were needed to reach any end desired, if the world were pleasure and goodness throughout, we should have no evolution, no progress, no ideals” (Carus, 483). Like the rebellious Lucifer who fell from heaven to be his own master and bow

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to none, Black Metal proposes a liberation that “requires a reordering of morality centred on the self and concomitant rejection of social codes and values; at an extreme, it demands that the blackened self eschew human society altogether and live in complete solitude” (Walter, 21). A group of young musicians in the early 90s adopted this proposal to express their individualistic ideas as a reaction their perfect and collective society; Ihsahn (nickname for Vegard Sverre Tveitan), leader of Emperor and one of the key figures in the rise of this Black Metal wave pointed out: “Black Metal wanted to be in opposition to society, a confrontation to all the normal stuff” (qtd. in Moynihan, Soderlind, 195). If the norm according to the social language is the preservation of good values and actions, then the obvious response became the pure darkness that wrapped everything inside it becoming an amalgam of music, lyrical contents, and the aesthetics accompanying musicians and fans. All the songs and the lifestyle around the genre became as dark as its name. It was a reaction against the light and colour of the perfect vase containing the social group: “The obscurity in Black Metal is part of the darkness that we are trying to create. It goes very much hand in hand with that darkness” (Frost [Satyricon drummer], Until the Light Takes Us). In order to mark their detachment from social traditions, they praised the role of the individual: “Perhaps Black metal is the ultimate moral form of Anarchism because it says you have to have faith in yourself” (Thomas Eriksen, qtd. in Dunn). They embodied a proposal for an individualistic return to the dark forces of Nature that the light and reason of the civilised has silenced over centuries for the sake of perpetuating a social model based on norms and collective adherence to them. Contrary to other metal genres, Black Metal has given an equalitarian emphasis to all its components—music, lyrics and lifestyle. All of them bear a sense of connection with the past, with that Heathen identity that was lost in the ambiguous meaning of the term heritage that locks the vestiges of yesterday’s culture in museums. As pointed out before, inside these modern walls, they remain guarded and contained. They are presented as long time dead so there is no risk their vitality can alter the present: “It’s sort of stigmatising to talk about heritage. I mean, for most of the European countries Christianity more or less erased our original cultures away” (Fenriz [Gylve Fenris Nagell], qtd. in Until the Light Takes Us). The imagery of the wild forest merged with the primitive and fiery spirit from the Oskorei resulting in words that are shut in shriek voices as they are framed by a strong blast of fast and polyphonic sounds. In some early lyrics from Emperor and Satyricon, the return to a past when man had a closer communication with Nature is presented as the way to revitalise the individual who is capable of bringing back this creative dark natural force to create a new order after dismantling the modern one. In these works, natural sublimity represents danger only for those untuned with it; on the contrary, those embracing it understand that it can become a response to substitute the artificially manipulated world of humanity. In the case of Satyricon, a name that by itself echoes ancient times of Western civilisation,4 their first albums, Dark Medieval Times (1993), The Shadowthrone (1994) and Nemesis Divina (1996) all contain proposals of this return to the wild.

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The band singer, composer and lyrics writer, Satyr (nickname used by Sigurd Wongraven and which evokes pre-Christian ways of dialoguing with Nature), proposes Nature as a path beyond the restrictions of the civilised. In the first album, the title of the song, “Into the Mighty Forest” already anticipates the invitation to follow the voice in the lyrics into an area where the treetops enclose a realm beyond the transformation of the planet made by human hands in their own dominions. The introductory verses propose the forest as a threshold into a new perspective of existence. It is described as a place of blinding fog and darkness into which the speaker disappears. The sublimity of this place does not threaten the individual who ventures inside it as he is part of Nature and understands that its dangers only exist when it is observed from the civilised perspective alienated from it. After having abandoned the human sphere, the voice can observe the world from inside the viewpoint of the wild. Inside it, he reaches a detachment from the civilised perspective that imposes an idealised “sweet” view on the forest that has been “tainted” by the human eye in order not to recognise its power as the origin of life. Nature is described as a shape in motion, a shadow without a fixed corporeality that questions the continuity of human classificatory systems. The proposal continues in the second album where the piece “Woods to Eternity” renders a reflection from a voice that belongs to ancient times and wanders said woods to undying times; he complains about the monotheistic religion (Christianity) that detached humans from older polytheistic beliefs that worshiped the forces of Nature (like those represented by Satyrs). However, there is hope that the past will claim back what was snatched. The song closes with a prediction of a future in which the old times will return, and the dark wilderness will claim its rightful position by destroying those who tried to silence it without being successful at all since, inside the darkness of nature, those oppressors are powerless. As the final example in the works of this band, their song “Mother North”, from their third work of the same name, expresses in its title a continuity to develop the ideas previously analysed: the natural wilderness is seen as the origin of life; that is, the mother from whom the individual was taken to be made part of the civilised. In this case, the perspective takes an ecogothic switch and depicts the northern European Nature as bleeding fields which are the result of the exploitation from the civilised. Moreover, the voice is enraged at humanity’s insistence to ignore they are not only damaging the source of their own existence, but their own selves. Like in the piece previously analysed, obliteration is predicted for those blind eyes that fail to recognise their true mother in Nature because they have been blinded by human language. The lyrics from the three songs already analysed express an anxiety about the role of Nature as the source from which humanity originally emerged. As observed, when the proposal evolved, Satyr included an emphasis on a retaliating process through which the wild would eliminate those who see it as a dark and negative force threatening humanity in order to claim back its central position as beginning and end of all existence. Such predictions allude to the continuity of only those who appreciate Nature for what it is, not a threatening indomitable

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force, but the origin of humanity which has been distanced from it through the artificial workings of civilisation. As for Emperor, they also propose the return of the wild as an answer to the artificiality imposed by human society. However, they do so through an even darker depiction of Nature which is emphasised as an opposed option to contemporary society. In their first studio album, In the Nightside Eclipse (1994), there is a permanent longing for the past. The lyrics from the song “Into the Infinity of Thoughts” open with the arrival of the wild which has been silenced by the civilised. This irruption will bring a set of elements that mean an antithesis for the values of modernity. In this piece, the songwriter and singer, Ihsahn, identifies old primeval times, still existing in the obscure powers from the woods, as a force that arrives by creeping over the northern Norwegian mountains under the moon. This image of opposition to light and reason is proposed as the way to regain a dialogue with Nature and the forgotten past which was lost centuries ago. The voice is answered by the shadow that whispers with the wind. The resulting clash between the civilised and the wild will make the light and happiness of society face a new era of darkness and sadness. It will bring the destruction of human society as we know it to send it back to the origin of life at the side of natural forces from which humans once departed though they have been made to forget it. Similarly, from the very title, the song “Beyond the Great Vast Forest” describes the sublime presence of nature that is still present beyond the corners of the civilised where the same darkness understood as the opposite to light and reason has never been silenced and is just waiting to rise again. This Nature is full of dark forces. Dark in the sense that they remain opposed to traditional values. The arrival of its night creatures makes all attempts to contain them collapse, and inevitably brings retaliation on those who opposed and silenced their presence. Like in the case of Satyricon, there is an insistence on an imminent return of the wild to claim what belongs to it and never to give it back because it existed before us and will also remain independently form our continuity on the planet’s surface. This promise of reinstatement of the once vanquished but never annihilated past returns in the second work of the band Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (1997). In the track “The Loss and Curse of Reverence”, the proposal is taken beyond the third person standpoint also offered by Satyricon. The voice of Nature speaks directly to the listener in the first person. He complains about attempts to silence and almost suffocate him to death but reminds those who threatened him that he has not yet perished because he is the source of life and that is why he cannot be annihilated. However, humans humiliated him and became enslaved by the ignorance that now rules them. In other words, they live in a false world that denies the origins of existence. This force that has prevailed just as the past is an eternal stair behind the present is awaiting to arise from agony and recover grace. Its return will open the eyes of those who live under blindfolded ignorance just to follow the law and its normativity. This arrival of the past implies once more an aggressive frontal attack where the usurping tyrant is vanquished and what once existed is recovered. The song concludes with a proposal of reinstatement after vanquishing the usurper. This marks a turn that makes the presence of the Gothic in Black Metal very innovative in that the usurper is located in the present, and the past

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arrives to claim its legitimate rights and retaliate to make the former pay for the damage. The limits that are breached by such arrival are revealed not as arbitrary walls that claim to maintain society safe from threats that do not exist. In reality, they are blindfolding and betraying chains that impede the viewer inside them from appreciating the vaster scope of nature where oppression does not exist. The proposal consolidates in the track “With Strength I burn”. In it, Nature is invoked as a deep green dark chaos. Once again, the clash of the dark vs light as a metaphor of the contrast between Nature and human rational artificiality is emphasised. The speaker struggles to recover the memory of past times and understand the call of Nature because the civilised restrictions have made him see it as a chaotic presence that cannot be comprehended through the use of human language. He hesitates between reuniting with the past or abandoning this world where the present will permanently be unable to understand the past and give it its proper place. The final claim of having learned “nothing” emphasises the transitory experience of human beings who spend their lives unable to recover their long-forgotten belonging to Nature. The return to it that seemed easier to achieve in Satyricon’s and Emperor’s earlier lyrics does not seem so easily achievable. Even if it is regained, the dialogue with the past remains in danger of being silenced again by the deaf present reluctant to listen to it. The final solution, the only answer to this lack of understanding that makes interpretation and meaning collapse, is to start a new creative process through the destructive force of fire evoked by the title. The past that has finally been regained burns together with the present as the definite answer to the society of artificially assembled perfection. This event echoes the common idea in Norse religion of death and rebirth as part of the eternal natural cycles of transformation from ashes to life.5 The gothic irruption of the past in the lyrics analysed here turns the tables twice. First, it violently attacks the present to remind it the old times cannot be ignored anymore. They await there, behind the frames of civilisation, waiting to be heard and redeemed. Secondly, its irruption is not a negative but a positive one. The position that considers it a source of evil is exposed as an arbitrary one. The return of wild Nature does not threaten the present as we have been made to accept; on the contrary, it is here to demonstrate that only a live past can make human minds appreciate that they belong to the civilised as much as they emerged from Nature. While Satyricon offers a more idealistic approach in the third person to the return of the so-called “dark” forces of Nature, Emperor takes a more critical view that recognises the difficulty to depart from hundreds of years that have accumulated to impose the current civilised blindness. The perspective that presents human constructions as enlightened and opposed to the obscurity of the wild cannot so easily be abandoned; although they are an imposition on human eyes, they have been built and solidified through the use of language. As a counterproposal to this artificiality, the lyrics from these two bands rely on the evocation of sublime Nature to remind us that denying our origin is to walk blindly in the path of present disconnected from the past that created it. Thus, what both proposals suggest is not a rebellion but a fiery vindication and reinstatement as the answer to a society that spins over arbitrary norms that deny the importance of the origin of humanity and the individual’s right to get back to it.

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Notes 1.  I refer to the Gothic as a mode starting from the proposal of Alastair Fowler who conceptualises genre as a repertoire from which its members select representative characteristics, while the mode is a selection or abstraction of elements belonging to a genre. He identifies the gothic novels by Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis as the starting point for the transformation of the elements from the classical gothic genre into a mode that has transcended spaces and times by reappearing inside stablished genres that go beyond the limited context in which the Gothic originated. 2.  From the beginnings of human history in ancient Summer to the Viking communities (the last to be converted to Christianity in Europe), countless societies understood the world as a complex interaction of natural forces that they venerated in the shape of gods and the legends that narrated their lives and deeds. The cultural heritage from those cultures has been transmitted and transformed through centuries making their influence on the present of the Western world still evident. 3. After it gets separated from the protection around the mother’s body, the baby starts the path towards becoming a member of the civilization. To become part of it, it is essential to acquire language; after doing so, the being accepts and therefore is admitted into the symbolic order of the father which is built upon language itself and its arbitrary codification of the world. Without this language, we would remain animals (Lacan, 61, 65). 4.  In addition to its belonging to the times when Nature was venerated in polytheistic pantheons, Petronius’ Satyricon can be read as a criticism to artificiality and hypocrisy in life (Sandy, 333). It is precisely as an answer to escape from that falsehood that the band’s lyrics propose a return of Nature. 5.  In the Norse religion, Ragnarök (twilight of gods) is depicted as an event after of ultimate destruction after which life will start and flourish again.

Bibliography Books Baldick, Chris. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), ix–xxiii. Botting, Fred. Gothic Romanced (New York: Routledge, 2008). Carus, Paul. The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing, 1900). Davies, Brian. The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006). Focault. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–20. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith (Blackmask Online, 2000). Killeen, Jarlath. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966).

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Leosurd, Elodie. “Baptism of Death: Black Metal in Contemporary Art, Birth of a New Aesthetic Category.” Helvette, A Journal of Black Metal Theory: Issue 1 (New York: Punctum Books, 2013). Lloyd Allan, and Sage Victor. Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Lyotard. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg and Ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). McKusick, James C. “Nature”. A Companion to European Romanticism. Ed. Michael Ferber (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 413–432. Moynihan, Michael, and Didrik Soderlind. Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of Satanic Metal Underground (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998). Rosseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses. Ed. and Introd. Susan Dunn (New York: Yale University Press, 2002). Sandy, Gerald. “Satire in the Satyricon.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 90, no. 3, 1969, 293–303. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/293180. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1990). Walter, Brenda S. Gardenour. “Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Medievalism, Satanism and the Dark Illumination of the Self in the Aesthetics of Black Metal.” Helvette, A Journal of Black Metal Theory: Issue 2 (New York: Punctum Books, 2015), 13–27.

DVDs Aiters, Aaron, and Audrey Ewell. Until the Light Takes Us (USA: Artists Public Domain Field Pictures The Group Entertainment, 2008). Dunn, Sam. “Norwegian Black Metal.” Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (Canada: Banger Productions, Seville Pictures, 2005).

Interactive Gothic

Interactive and Movable Books in the Tradition Jen Baker

‘Metamorphoses’ or movable books are characterised and classified by either mechanical movable elements such as pullable tabs, pop-ups, liftable flaps; extendable elements such as pull-out documents and three-dimensional buildings; interactive components such as sounds created by pushing buttons; or puzzles, textured pages, and figurines or, most recently, digital components. Some examples have no narrative text at all, rendering them much closer to ‘object’ than book on the spectrum, but the majority demonstrate a multifaceted relationship between text, image, and mechanical feature. Within the wider form, there is a distinct genre characterised by gothic tropes such as ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, and which are themed in some way around traditional gothic plots such as visiting a terrifying location, or uncanny and bizarre encounters with the spooky, the monstrous or the macabre, while others are direct adaptations of classic texts— particularly Frankenstein and Dracula. Like their prose counterparts, movable gothic books not only incorporate and transform other literary forms (poetry, drama) and genres (crime and detective fiction, comedy), and utilise the visual effects of comics and graphic novels, cinema and theatre, but traverse the boundaries of literature and traditional modes of reading by also belonging to the realm of the object; sitting ambivalently between the forms of toys and books. They draw from related visual antecedents that are prevalent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as harlequinades, tunnel-books, paper-doll books, the diorama, the panorama, the thaumatrope, and theatrical phantasmagoria. They also draw influence from outside the genre by emulating movable books for children (both fiction and non-fiction) more widely, and the hidden components and protruding-page effects found in anatomy manuals and astronomy tomes for adult learners dating back to the fifteenth century. It is from the mid-twentieth century, however, that the movable book form and its specific characterisation as part of the gothic genre, comprises an identifiable niche.

J. Baker (*)  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_54

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Mechanical books have been a key mode for the visual illustration of ideas and have functioned as part of the pedagogical endeavours of the disciplines of astronomy and the medical sciences, in particular, for more than 700 years. Alongside interactive anatomical models made of wood or wax, anatomical works such as Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543), Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685), Herbert Mayo’s, A Course of Dissection, for the Use of Students (1827), and Alfred Mason Amadon’s Fold-Out Atlas of the Human Body (1906), unfurled the secrets of the human body to audiences when cadavers could not be obtained for dissection and study, and acted as an extension of the learning that took place in the anatomical theatre. Many flat static drawings attempted to emulate movement and dimension through shading and positioning, but the use of layered sheets and fragments afforded a more accurate sense of the bodies’ own layers, as in Hans Wiegel’s engraving of a female body (Fig. 1) in which the labelled organs physically reveal their position as the top flap (the torso) is lifted by the reader. Where the fixed images of the Early Modern period show evidence of a distinctly carnivalesque style in their aesthetic and conceptual approach—for instance, ‘reanimating’ the cadaver as a mediator who reveals the inner workings of their own physiology by posing or pointing to the corporeal area being discussed in the text— those with movable elements tended to be of a classical and later realist style. Fig. 1  Anatomical fugitive sheets. ‘Anathomia oder abcontrofettung eines Weibs leib’ (1564) (Source Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0)

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Few examples could be said to have engaged directly or intentionally with the multi-medial gothic mode that David J. Jones (2011) sees as a recognised aesthetic from the eighteenth century onward, because this mode represented the antithesis of the celebrated reasoned approach of medical practitioners and contradicted the realist endeavours of their illustrators.1 However, read through the lens of Kadin Henningsen’s metaphorical positioning of the body as book (2016)—written on, read, and circulated with the two forms sharing linguistic terminologies (spine, footnote, appendix, ideas written on the face, the body as open book, etc.)—a viable history of interdependent reciprocity between the visual framing of anatomical discourse, the interactive kinetic process offered by movable literature, and the Gothic can be ascertained. For instance, Alan Bates (2008) has considered how, in the mid-nineteenth century, public access to visual representations of anatomy in books and museums became embroiled in debates about decency, and part of longer debates over the intimacy of the body (particularly the female one), that echo the gothicised rhetoric of abhorrent desires in various literary and cultural media of the period. And this is a fear particularly fervent once books in which flaps could be lifted to gaze upon and into the female form were liberated from the control of the medical elite.2 Other indirect connections between the horror of the body and movable Gothic in the nineteenth century, can be gleaned in the scholarship by researchers such as Tim Marshall (1995) and Scott Juengel (2000) on the specific connection between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and contextual aspects such as criminal bodies and anatomy, early ideas of moving images, the criminal body in Frankenstein, and its adaptation into cinematic modes—all of which lead us more firmly towards the character of the modern metamorphoses book. Where instructive anatomical tomes were once a staple of the medical student’s reading, from the mid-twentieth century, the mechanical aspects of the form have predominantly been consigned to primers for children—an audience who would have received little access to such books in previous centuries. The relationship between the gothic mode or aesthetic and the medical text has flourished within the children’s book market in recent years, with Frankenstein proving a popular inspiration for the approach. Texts such as The Secret Journal of Victor Frankenstein: On the Workings of the Human Body purports to have been published by Ingolstadt medical school (Victor’s University in Shelley’s original) and has been sealed for over 200 years but was, in fact, produced by David Stewart in 2009. There is no linear narrative in the main body of the book; this is not an abridgement or even a straight adaptation of the original, but an appropriation in which the reader primarily learns about anatomy while piecing together the additional visual and material clues of Victor’s accompanying story. For instance, the journal provides an illustrated dramatis personae, a letter from Victor that abridges and modernises some of the key quotes from Shelley’s original pertaining to this natural philosopher’s experiments, and fold-out maps and abridged letters written by Victor, the creature and other characters from the novel, and with extended ‘newspaper clippings’ about sightings of monsters. These textual elements are interweaved with factual notes on how the body works, components that engage with the history of anatomical textbooks by including additional booklets that mimic late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century titles and includes movable

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sections to aid learning about the organs (Fig. 2). By self-consciously imitating the aesthetic of parchment and script typeface of older documents within the book, and using a Spanish-marble mock effect on not only the inner paste-down but the cover too (see Fig. 2), Stewart’s illustration team produces what Megen de BruinMolé refers to in her work on Frankenfictions (2017) as ‘Gothic remediations

Fig. 2  Promotional poster for David Stewart’s The Secret Journal of Victor Frankenstein (2009)

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[…] of historical “texts” and material traces’. The inclusion of a drawing on the back cover which emulates the memento-mori style found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomy books (here a skeleton carrying large tomes to a set of pulley-scales) contributes to the palimpsestuous layering of ‘new meanings and visual histories onto old ones, while demonstrating how the “story” of the past repeatedly erupts into the present’.3 The peritext informs the reader that ‘Mr Victor Frankenstein… never completed his studies to become a doctor because he became obsessed with the idea of creating a living body out of dead body parts’.4 Thus through this blend of historical anatomy, movable parts, and the infamous gothic story, this new form becomes integral to imparting ethical responsibility, scientific fact, historical context, and forms of literary adaptation. In recent years, the ‘interactive’ aspect of the movable gothic book, and Frankenstein in particular, can be found on digital platforms. Dave Morris’ 2012 adaptation produced by Inkle Studios and Profile Books includes access to the original novel, but for the purposes of the application is rewritten and reformatted, intertextually ‘reassembling’ the original novel like its creature, to offer a new version from the parts that emulate the interactive gamebook style. The reader can guide Victor’s actions, therefore functioning, suggests the promotional material, ‘as Frankenstein’s confidant, guide and conscience’, as shown in Fig. 3, where you order Victor to resist Henri’s attempts to keep you nearby, and in other sections the reader is aligned with the creature’s perspective and dictates his behaviour, meaning that in the actions the reader subsequently takes, and in the choices they make, they transfer roles from aide to Victor to that of master of the creature. As with Stewart’s hard-copy reimagining, Morris uses maps and engravings, and archival anatomical illustrations of the type discussed above to add not only a sense of historical authenticity, but, when aligned with the vengeful and terrifying aspects of the narrative, a gothic hue to the aesthetic. Again, the ethical significance of the reader’s decision is promoted as paramount to the experience: overall, the creators suggest, ‘console, counsel or condemn: the choice is yours’.5 The Gothic has a history with such interactive fictive mediums, often characterising the plot or style of role-play books and the choose-your-own-adventure books produced by Bantam Books between 1979 and 1998 and taking distinct form in examples such as R.L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps gamebook series, an offshoot of his standard Goosebumps books of the early 1990s. Most recently, shows such as Charlie Brooker’s Bandersnatch (2018), produced by Netflix, crossed-over into the televisual medium, blending the Gothic with the science-fiction genre to play with the ideal of multimodal mash-ups and the interactive experience. Set in 1984, the premise of the basic plot is that a teenage boy, Stefan, wants to turn a choose-your-own-adventure novel, called Bandersnatch, into a video game. The novel has a strange history, as the author is said to have gone insane while producing it, believing he was being controlled by outside forces, and snapped, beheading his wife. Throughout the show, the viewer can press buttons to choose Stefan’s actions, from simple actions such as what cereal he eats, to whether he should take drugs, or fight his therapist. There are multiple endings and the show can be rewatched and different choices made—each time Stefan showing a fearful recognition that someone or something is controlling him.

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Fig. 3  Screenshot from Dave Morris’ Frankenstein (2012)

The question of agency and interaction is also a key aspect in many examples of one of the most popular tropes and narrative subjects for the modern metamorphosis book—the visit to the haunted house. Early gothic literature and its offspring can be characterised by the moment in which the ‘haunted house’ (usually in the guise of the castle-space, and later the country home, or old suburban mansion) is revealed; the way it charts the physiological effect of the exterior and interior of the house on its characters (the journey through it being extensively described and usually with the accompaniment of a servant); the lure of secret spaces in which terrible events have happened; objects, beings, or entities suddenly and terrifyingly appearing. In Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for instance, the young Emily catches sight of the gothic (architecturally speaking) castle which is to be her prison, and in the fading light the building is imbued with terrifying life seemingly connected with her fears: Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone […] Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign.6 [emphases added]

Pages are devoted to her impression of the exterior space and her movements from room to room—each ‘scarcely distinguishable from darkness itself’.7 Yet there are various examples, such as the bleak and oppressive atmosphere and eye-like

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windows of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) or the corrupt and medieval-style castle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in which, as Julian Wolfrey posits, the idea of the secrets which these aspects conceal is also that which drives a character (or reader’s) desire to encounter or at least endure the terrors: ‘the very promise of revelation is in itself seductive; it speaks to a desire, and recognizes in its articulation the movement of that desire in search of the secret terror’.8 In Jane Austen’s satirical gothic novel Northanger Abbey (1818) the encounter with the house and its secrets is inextricably bound with the act of reading. Catherine Morley finds herself in a state of increased agitation at the thought of encountering the ‘long, damp passages, narrow cells and ruined chapel’, which might promise ‘some traditional legends, and some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun’.9 She wants to encounter an edifice just like that which she has read in The Mysteries of Udolpho—this alone she believes will console her other disappointments. Henry Tilney asks her, ‘And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as “what one reads about” may produce?’, but Northanger does not quite live up to her expectations—visually or conceptually.10 In his flirtatious teasing of Catherine, Tilney affectionately mocks the narrative journey through the (haunted) house which was a key trope of earlier gothic literatures; he suggests perhaps she will be formally conducted through gloomy passages to her lodgings which are separated from everyone else by a housekeeper to a room with secret doors and underground passageways that undoubtedly link to a medieval chapel. There will be cabinets with hidden drawers and compartments that attract her eyes and her touch. Things may, he suggests, pop out at her through her interaction with the space: ‘Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears—you seize it—’.11 Mostly marketed for children, as many such books have been since the 1970s, modern movable gothic books nevertheless draw heavily from the genre as read by adults and respond to, appropriate, and transform these literary elements. Like their literary and filmic counterparts, they measure your willingness to transgress in some form. And this is particularly the case in those which lure you to the haunted house and through its grounds and passages, because your act as reader, of turning the page, like your act of going through the door or looking in the cupboard, becomes an act of subversion, rebellion against the rules. There is an intersection and synergy between the ‘movable’, the haunted house, and notions of seduction and transgression as a means for potential empowerment in movable gothic texts that are replicas of haunted houses. Ilse Bussing proposes ‘that the main force that compels characters to enter and travel through the haunted house is seduction’ and that despite their fear (or perhaps, as suggested above, because of it), characters (and I would add readers) ‘are drawn to explore this space, and to experience the tension that arises from the dynamics of secrecy and the promise of unveiling awful but desirable “truths”’.12 Echoing Tilney, books such as Dean Walley’s A Visit to the Haunted House (1992), Skip Skwarek’s Horrors of Howling Hall (1992), Keith Moseley’s The Things in Mouldy Manor (1994), Chuck

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Murphy’s Disney’s Haunted Mansion Pop-Up Book (part of the Disney franchise), Alex Henry’s Nightmare Hotel Pop-Up book (1997), Andrew Weale’s The Spooky Spooky House (2011), Nicola Baxter’s The Mystery of the Haunted House: Dare You Peek Through the 3D Windows? (2012), Dereen Taylor’s Trapped in the Witch’s Lair: Peek Inside the Window (2013), and many more, play on the theme but ultimately offer similarly tantalising invitations and provocative jeers from the outset. Dare you peek through the pop-up windows? Are you brave enough to stare evil in the face by pulling a tab? Will you disturb what lies beneath by lifting the trapdoor? In many of these interactive texts the physical and the conceptual are synonymous, for, turning from book as body to book as architectural space, the concept of ‘the house’ is like literature—both are mediums for meaningful communication in which a range of messages can be expressed by the physical and material environment experienced by the participant.13 A house’s boundaries can be read, its physical contours and external façade function like the peritext of a book, and many movable or metamorphoses gothic books have achieved this quite literally by turning the book into the house as in, for instance, Jan Pienkowski’s Haunted House (1979) in which the covers are the front and back doors, or in Peter Lippman’s board book The Haunted House (1994), or Chris Mould’s creation 76 Pumpkin Lane: Pop-Up Spooky House (2007) that is stored flat and contains a few pages of story introducing you to the character and the premise—it is a boarding house and the caretaker (utilising the guide from gothic literature) believes you want a room, and suggests you might like to look around for yourself and then stay the night, ending tauntingly with ‘Go on, I dare you!’.14 The house can then transform into a three-dimensional building with rooms and figurines which you can explore without an accompanying narrative, allowing the reader to make up their own story. The Spooky House of Horror (1998) by Charles Fuge also opens into a three-dimensional house of horror with two visible levels, functioning as a 3D manifestation of what is referred to in graphic novels and comics as the ‘establishing shot’—that is the initial illustration that sets up the overall terrain where the action will take place. In terms of the physical book there is, once constructed, no ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ to the text, no temporal frame; rather the different passageways, doorways, and other thresholds imply not so much a cyclical, as a labyrinthine opportunity to explore the narrative. The codes of perspective—that is how the reader is positioned in relation to the setting or characters in an image and how this therefore changes how the reader interprets the scene and various actions or events—is not stationary as in a traditional text. Fuge’s book allows the reader to control and amend their perspective through its physical manipulation. The plot is simple, mysterious, and open-ended. On ‘a dark and stormy afternoon Henry had walked his dog further into the woods than usual’—that is, he has transgressed the boundaries of safety—when Dingo runs off while chasing a pink creature Henry mistakes for a rabbit. Henry ‘chases his dog through the bushes’ and suddenly stumbles into a clearing in which a large, old spooky house looms. The heterodiegetic narrator (one not a part of the narrative), then explains that Henry felt lost and lonely. The boy exclaims ‘I’ve never seen this house before’.15

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When he calls ‘Dingo!’ (the onomatopoeic sound reflecting the ‘ding-dong’ of a doorbell), ‘a tall, thin man with a pale face’ quietly responds ‘You rang, sir?’, scaring Henry. The man introduces himself as ‘Bones the Butler’ and advises Henry to follow him into the house if he wants to find the dog. Henry, apparently having never read a horror story before, or perhaps too curious or brave to be put off, acquiesces. The direct engagement with the building begins as Henry follows the butler through the house. There is, however, no text in the main book itself. This varies in different examples of movable Gothic, some, like Pienkowski’s The Haunted House uses a simple border at the bottom edge on which text is overlayed and utilises the movable elements to hide the publication information. Some, such as Eddie Robson and Nicola Robinson’s Dracula (2009) use panels, and intraiconic text—writing that appears as part of illustration (such as a book title, an address on envelope)—while all movable books (like picturebooks) are subject to monstration—that is the narrative level of images that are sometimes on the page, and sometimes in removable parts—such as the map of Dracula’s castle as drawn from Harker’s memory in Robson and Robinson’s transformation.16 Fuge’s entire story is housed within an epitext—here a moon which is a removable part of the scenery. This sets the pace of the narrative, and using the symbol of a pointing finger, provides cues for the reader to move the cut-out figures of Henry, Dingo, and Bones the Butler through the house, and for turning the book, lifting flaps, pulling tabs, while the symbol of an eye prompts the reader to look for the illustrations which correspond with the written text. For instance:





By the skin of their teeth, Henry and Bones got through the doorway. They slithered down the steps and into the bathroom. The bathroom was full! So was the toilet and the basin, and a single shark was hanging from the rafters. “Very fishy”, thought Henry. As he looked up, a shiver ran down his spine. “This place is really s-s-spooky”, he stammered. “It’s also very s-s-slippery”, he screamed as he slid through the trapdoor. Splish! Went Henry. Splash! Went Bones the Butler, beside him.

In Fig. 4, it can be seen that the ‘skin of their teeth’ does not just refer to the characters, but puns on the existence of real monstrous teeth in the doorway. In the top of the picture you can just make out a white shape—this is a cut-out, which, with the help of a piece of clear plastic projects a ghostly image onto the ceiling, imitating the theatrical spectral effects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discussed in the next section. While the ‘look’ symbols are prompts more than imperatives, they train the reader to make the connection between the iconic and the textual and lure the reader to look at weird and terrifying things. With its monsters, its architecture, its designs, and its plot, the whole text is a pastiche to gothic haunted house tales. Jackson, Coats, and McGillis suggest that the child reader knows how or learns

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how to read and interpret elements as ‘spooky’ owing to their wider exposure to cultural depictions of the Gothic which allows them to read the codes of monstrosity in new settings.17 So too does this text play quite obviously and subversively with expectations of reading. Although, in a sense, there is a linear written narrative (as indicated in the epitext should the reader choose to use it), the movement through the book is far from it, and the text ends with Henry back where he started in the entrance hall, and when he calls ‘Dingo!’ again, he seems to have triggered a temporal glitch: “You rang, Sir?” said Bones, who suddenly reappeared beside him. “Oh no, not again”, groaned Henry. The familiar jaunt through the haunted house is therefore enhanced by the addition of interactive elements. Some offer variations on a theme; for instance the delightful The Amazing Dangermouse Pop-Up: The Trouble with Ghosts (1984), Kees Moerbeek’s rather unique The Museum of Unnatural History (1993), Sarah Hewetson’s Dare You Go…into the Forest: A Spooky Cut-Out Pop-Up Book (1995), Pat Thomson’s Ghoul School: A Wickedly Scary Pop-Up Book (2000), and John O’Leary’s A Spooky Ride: A Scary Lift-the-Flap 3D Pop Up Book (2001) set on a ghost train (there at least three others which use this theme)—but all contain the sort of elements which draw from the history of the gothic spectacle and the

Fig. 4  From Charles Fuge’s, A Spooky House of Horror (1998)

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theatrical devices of horror and fuse them with the familiar literary source (or at least its cultural codes) to provide a multimodal experience for the child reader. Aesthetically and physically, another layer is added, as the gothic subjects and spaces of contemporary metamorphoses books utilise three-dimensional aspects in a manner that emulates dioramas (see Arnold Shapiro’s 1997 Trouble at the Haunted House, which is one of the Diorama Pop-Up Books series, or Edward Gorey’s 1984 metafictional accordion peepshow book The Tunnel-Calamity, for instance), which, as Sophie Thomas has suggested, have long possessed a secret affinity with the Gothic. Other key cultural origins for the movable book arise from the utilisation of gothic motifs as an aesthetic for artistic and theatrical forms. David J. Jones has noted that the invasion of space and perspective by terrifying objects has long been an attraction: From the trompe-l’oeil technique that made the supernatural subjects of Memento Mori seem three-dimensional, to the magic lanterns of late seventeenth-century Germany which projected existing flat visual representations of hell and phantoms in new dimensions, to perspective games such as concertinas, anamorphoses, and polyoptic pictures featuring the supernatural, and finally phantasmagoria shows which used light technology to project life-size phantoms and demons into rooms and theatres. He reveals how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her post-apocalyptic work The Last Man included coded references to ­lantern-of-fear shows, phantasmagoria, and diorama, and that as ghostly technologies proliferated, so did the direct references or indirect allusions to them in gothic literatures by Charles Dickens, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others. J.H. Brown’s Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing Ghosts Everywhere, and of Any Colour (1864) is an example of an early form of gothic metamorphoses book that attempts to emulate these theatrical supernatural projections onto the page using the mechanics of the negative afterimage. It begins with directions in which the reader is told to stare at a specified point on a plate, such as the dot below the skeleton’s chin in Fig. 5, for a certain length of time (about 20 seconds), and then turning their eye to the wall or ceiling and staring at one point. The instructions state that, ‘the spectre will soon begin to make its appearance, increasing in intensity, and then gradually vanishing, to re-appear and again vanish’.18 This interactive text has a clear political and scientific purpose, as detailed in another section which pronounces belief in the spiritualist experiments and visions by his contemporaries absurd; this book is both for entertainment and to demonstrate how the eye can play tricks on the mind. A number of nineteenth-century melodramas, burlettas, operas, theatrical adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula, and works containing characters such as Sweeney Todd, Spring-Heeled Jack, Mr Hyde, the myth of the Flying Dutchman, as well as creatures such as mummies, ghosts, and werewolves, used lighting and scenery tricks to project phantoms onto the stage, or suspended above the audience, with many able to move towards the audience. Other tricks involved traps which made the creatures appear and disappear in an unearthly fashion. These techniques enhanced the terror associated with characters and conventions that would come to define modern horror cinema.

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Fig. 5  J.H. Brown’s Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions (1864)

As a mechanical or interactive object, the metamorphoses book relies on literal invasions of material space or disruption of visual expectations, and as such a defiance of traditional reading modes, that is often particularly candid in the gothic mode. The movable gothic book is also, just as often, an excellent tool for cognitive development, and many examples demonstrate innovative and creative feats of paper engineering to stimulate the imagination. In contemporary metamorphoses books, the composition and complexity of these sorts of optical transformations vary. Optical illusion books sometimes make use of ghostly figures, while examples such as the fourth book in the Emily the Strange franchise series by Rob Reger, subtitled Seeing Is Deceiving (2006), uses ghostly spot varnish tricks plus eye-popping die-cuts to create optical delusions so that Emily can show her reader how she sees the world and how deceptive sight can be. The front of Richard Walker and Nick Abadzis’ Dr Frankenstein’s Human Body Book (2008) is adorned with a holographic skull that stares at you no matter the angle at which you view it. Babette Cole’s Don’t Go Out Tonight: A Creepy Concertina Pop Up (1982) plays with perspective using simple but effective layered fold-outs, and in the young readers rotating-picturebook Making Faces: Vampire, Werewolf, Witch, Monster (1991) by Keith Faulkner and Jonathan Lambert, the witchy protagonist casts spells on her family members and the reader can then turn the picture of their faces so that they transform into monsters, effectively making the spell happen through interaction. Pull-the-tab functions similarly invite the reader to take control of being tricked: In Jan Pienkowski’s Haunted House (1979), for instance,

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the eyes of both vampiric woman and cat on a painting (which is expected to be still) move when a tab is pulled, or the seemingly static duck ornaments flap their wings, while simple techniques such as a protruding saw that grates back and forth when the page is opened and closed create sound effects. A number of contemporary metamorphoses books are direct adaptations or abridged transformations of classic gothic texts, and a particular type that utilises the theatrical context and sometimes techniques of the spectral phantasm is the A Christmas Carol brand of movable books. There are, at least, thirteen versions that have been adapted, possibly the first being Hallmark cards in the 1960s, followed by a spate between 1986–1989, again between 1993–1995, and around 2009– 2010. Few of them can be said to possess a gothic aesthetic however; with most (as in the Hallmark tradition) opting for the sentimentalised nostalgic vision of Christmas as their focus and marketed as treasuries, and thus appealing to the very Christmas market that Dickens helped to establish. There are nevertheless a few versions that make distinct use of the ‘ghost-story’ aspect indicated by the novella’s original full title and the gothic and supernatural motifs that haunt the original tale, as well as the mechanics of the theatrical spectre. For instance, in the 1986 pop-up book published by Methuen books, comprised of 6 double-spreads and 9 interactive parts, Scrooge’s terrifying encounter with the door knocker is realised through its first two visual and interactive elements, rather than its text. For instance, in the first, by pulling the tab, the reader makes the face of Marley appear at the door, and as shown in the two sequential images in Fig. 6, on another page pulling the tab causes the simultaneous appearance of Jacob Marley’s ghost at the door, Scrooge leaping up and covering his face in fright, and the rocking chair to fall back.19 In one of the final sequences, moving the tab causes Scrooge’s name to appear on a gravestone and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to point at it while Scrooge’s arms change from a movement of pleading to one of despair. In each case, then, the reader is complicit in causing their own fright (and Scrooge’s reaction), rather than simply leaving it to the author. Kareen Taylerson’s adaptation, A Christmas Carol: A Changing Picture and Lift-the-Flap Book (1989) predominantly uses the rotating-picture technique discussed earlier in Lambert and Faulkner’s Changing Faces book, to achieve the effect, and others have very simple cut-outs, but by far the most intricate and luxurious example I have encountered is Chuck Fischer’s version from 2010. It contains five removable booklets—one for each stave—which have a door knocker on their cover and which relay the whole text to accompany your visual experience, rather than temper it. Although in style and colour the book exploits the twee Victoriana, it emphasises the scene in which Marley’s ghost leaps out at Scrooge through movable elements, and in the double-spread in which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come protrudes out of the book, the phantom invades the reader’s space with considerable height, just as it invades Scrooge’s space, therefore emulating that experience and the cause for the character’s terror.20 Among the few other classic gothic texts adapted into movable and interactive forms are David Pelham’s impressive 2016 pop-up adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, that tucks the poem’s narrative away neatly within the illustration

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Fig. 6  Jacob Marley’s ghost appears A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book (1986)

for the reader to unfold. Perhaps, surprisingly, neither Sweeney Todd nor R.L. Stevenson’s, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde, which have frequently been adapted for stage seem to have been used in the metamorphosis form. In contrast, Frankenstein and Dracula have undergone numerous movable adaptations. Both are resurrected, for instance, by Agnese Baruzzi (2014) who uses laser-cuts for her Livre Pop Ups, and Dracula: A Classic Pop-Up Tale (2009) and Frankenstein: A Classic Pop-Up Tale (2010) are three-dimensional graphic adaptations by the collaborative team of paper engineer David Hawcock (who is involved in a number of those mentioned in this chapter), adapter Claire Brompton, and illustrator Andrew Williams; each using the visual and interactive elements to add emphasis to certain terrifying aspects, sometimes replacing written cues with visual ones. For instance, in 2010, two versions of Frankenstein were published—Sam Ita’s 2010 adaptation with Sterling publishers, and the aforementioned collaborative ‘pop-up classic’ in which the original novel is very heavily edited into a graphic novel and/ or comic book form combined with elaborate pop-ups. In terms of their mechanical elements they both demonstrate particularly remarkable feats of paper engineering that draw from the techniques found in melodrama spectacle. In Fig. 7, for instance, Ita's version of the monster not only protrudes threateningly from the page, but towers above Victor and the parameters of the page to emphasise the enormous height attributed to him in the text. The figures of Frankenstein’s creature and vampire-brethren (sometimes specifically Dracula, some imitations) also feature in (some aforementioned) multi-monster mash-ups such as Charles Fuge’s Spooky House of Horror, Chris Mould’s 76 Pumpkin Lane, Maurice Sendak’s Mommy? (2006) and a great number of the haunted-house themed books. Other reimaginings include Edward Gorey’s Dracula: A Toy Theatre (1979), based on the 1977 revival of the 1924 stage adaptation for which Edward Gorey was asked to produce the complete sets, backgrounds, and costumes for the production. The playscript is not included—only a synopsis of the story—but this allows the reader to add their own spin on the classic too. As a character, Dracula is also the subject

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of many original and unrelated stories—one by Faulkner and Lambert features a birthday party while in Dracula Steps Out: A Pop-Up Book he is a young vampire who obsessively collects teddy bears and in Dracula’s Tomb we read his journal despite his warnings for us not to, and in the final double-spread Dracula leaps out from his coffin with claws and fangs bared. Although the market for movables is strongest with the demographic of young readers, in recent years, books not considered suitable for children have proliferated. I do not necessarily refer to erotica here—although Tony Williams suggests that the ‘peepshow’ element as a dangerous and gothic aspect has historical precedence.21 I refer, rather, to ones with a particularly dark and intense horror content. For instance, among the more obscure examples of movable books not intended for children include The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (2004) which is a pop-up book adaptation of a psychological horror novel by Stephen King, and is designed by Kees Moerbeek (who has produced many gothic movables for children); Gary Greenberg’s The Pop-Up Book of Phobias (2006) in which some of the most common fears are brought to life by outrageously macabre artwork and innovative engineering—a particularly clever piece of metafiction which exploits the fear of something jumping out at you by, in the guise of factual knowledge, having something terrifying jump out of you; and Michael Dahl’s 2010 Escape from the PopUp Prison (part of the Library of Doom series) in which a girl follows a group

Fig. 7  Frankenstein: A Graphic Pop-Up (2010)

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of strangers and her librarian father into the giant Library of Doom in which the strangers want their evil friends released from the pages of a pop-up book. More well-known will be adaptations of horror film, television, and graphic novels such as a real-life recreation of the pop-up book at the centre of Jennifer Kent’s 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook and AMC’s television series The Walking Dead: The Pop-Up Book (2015) which is itself an adaptation of a graphic novel series. With the latter, which revolves around a dystopian world ravaged by zombies, there is an expected focus on gore and protruding monsters and includes the taunting ‘don’t open the door’ element of gothic and horror literature that characterises many of the aforementioned movable examples. The former, a collaboration between Kent, paper engineer Simon Arizpe and illustrator Alexander Juhasz, and published by Insight Books in 2016, is a particularly interesting subject because of the film itself featuring a pop-up book called Mister Babadook — he is the titular monster, a tall pale-faced humanoid in a top hat with taloned fingers who torments its victims after they become aware of its existence. The protagonist of the film is disturbed by the mysterious appearance and content of the book and its influence over her son. The idea of the monstrous figure as a material incarnation of the protagonist’s grief and mental distress that ‘pops-up’ and physically intrudes on her life—and as something both desired and feared—resonates strongly with the (perceived and actual) affect of such books more generally.22 ‘How are we’ as Anna Letitia Barbauld asked in her essay ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773), ‘to account for the pleasure derived from such objects’?23 On the one hand, as early critics suggested, and later proponents championed, the reader is seduced by the Gothic, and by the discovery of its secrets through a physical and persistent encounter with spaces, and by the very fear such movement produces. They contribute to the hybridity of form and genre that defines the Gothic, for if, in the average picturebook, contributions of the visual and verbal result in a ‘great efficiency in communicating meaning’ and ‘high semantic or semiotic capacity’, then the addition of interactive elements can only enhance skills further.24 Gillian Brown suggests that ‘The materiality of the movables […] enhances as it extends literary experience’. For, While movable books obviously inaugurate techniques of animation that cinema elaborates, they also exhibit the animating process of reading: the sensory interplay through which symbols on a page become real objects for the reader. Reading movable books requires play of hand and eye as the reader not only turns pages but turns them up, over, down, and out, looking for the visual effects of these machination.25

Margaret Higonnet, speaking of the picturebook and its physical components, suggests that they constitute a deliberate attempt to seduce the reader through play. With the infusion of Gothic in the examples above, that seduction of transgression is intensified.26 In all such examples, the interactive elements have the potential to enhance the terror of the text, thus exacerbating the sense of achievement for the reader who is courageous enough to continue reading. This may hold true for the adult reader too, but it is, perhaps, the nostalgia for the books’ disruption of traditional modes and ways of reading that seems particularly appealing. In

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scholarship, interactive and movable gothic books are vastly understudied; very few examples have been analysed and where they have, critics have had to rely on other, sometimes tangential forms to provide critical frameworks through which to speak. I hope that this chapter is the start of a discernible transformation.

Notes





1. Politically, Londa Schiebinger, Ludmilla Jordanova, and others have noted the dangerous and terrifying ideologies present in anatomical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that attempted to validate ideologies of superiority over non-white European races and justify slavery and violence, as well as control over the bodies of women and children of the supposed dominant races, which all speak to anxieties over nation and autonomy prevalent in concurrent gothic literature. However, this is again, evident mostly in static anatomical illustration rather than specific to movable elements. 2. More tangible associations are posited through scholarship on gothic literature and anatomy: Yael Shapira’s research on decorum and the body, and Courtney Wennerstrom’s analysis of anatomical mis-stories in the works of Ann Radcliffe, for instance, provide extremely intriguing connections between the anatomical and competing social and literary rhetoric around bodies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 3. Megen de Bruin-Molé, Frankenfiction: Monstrous Adaptations and Gothic Histories in Twenty-First-Century Remix Culture. Unpublished PhD thesis (Cardiff University, 2017), 186. Forthcoming as a monograph in 2020. 4. David Stewart, The Secret Journal of Victor Frankenstein: On the Workings of the Human Body (Brighton: Book House, 2009), n.p. 5. Dave Morris, Frankenstein (Profile Books online, 2012), main page. https://www.inklestudios.com/frankenstein/. 6. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 226–227. 7. Ibid., 228. 8. Julian Wolfreys, ‘Preface: “I Could a Tale Unfold’ or, the Promise of Gothic”’ in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), xi–xx. 9. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 2003), 134. 10. Ibid., 149. 11. Ibid., 151. 12. Ilse Bussing, The Haunted House in Mid-to-Late Victorian Gothic Fiction. Unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 2010), 15. 13. Suzanne H. Crowhurst, ‘A House Is a Metaphor’, Journal of Architectural Education, 27.2–3 (1974), 35–42 (40). 14. Chris Mould, 76 Pumpkin Lane: Pop-Up Spooky House (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007), 5. 15. Charles Fuge, A Spooky House of Horror (Birmingham: Koneman UK Ltd., 1998), n.p. All textual references to this edition. 16. This is a particularly excellent example which includes rats protruding from the page and a board game. I discuss this in considerable details in ‘An Invitation to a Beheading (and another to a Birthday Bash): Encountering Dracula in Contemporary Gothic Metamorphoses Books’ in Growing Up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media, eds. Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk (Montreal: Universitas, 2018), 29–46.

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17. Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats, eds. ‘Introduction’ in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (New York: Routledge, 2013), ix. 18. J.H. Brown, Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing Ghosts Everywhere, and of Any Colour, 4th edn. (London: Griffith and Farran, 1865). 19. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book, illus. Victor Ambrus (Methuen Books, 1986), n.p. 20. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book, illus. Chuck Fischer (Little Brown US, 2010), n.p. 21. Tony Williams, ‘Thresholds of Desire and Domestic Space in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction’ in Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture, eds. Fran Lloyd, Professor Fran Lloyd, and Catherine O’Brien (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 39–50 (49). 22. The Babadook, dir. Jennifer Kent (2014), and the pop-up is a collaboration between Kent, paper engineer Simon Arizpe and illustrator Alexander Juhasz, and published by Insight Books in 2016. 23. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ [1773] in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. David Sandner (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 30–36 (32). 24. Joanne M. Golden and Annyce Gerber, ‘A Semiotic Perspective of Text: The Picture Story Book Event’, Journal of Reading Behavior, 22.3 (1990), 203–219 (204). 25. Gillian Brown, ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.3 (2006), 351–362 (359). 26. Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘The Playground and the Peritext’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 15.2 (1990), 47–49 (48).

Bibliography Arizpe, Simon, and Alexander Juhasz, The Babadook (Insight Books, 2016). Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 2003). The Babadook, dir. Jennifer Kent (2014). Baker, Jen. ‘An Invitation to a Beheading (and another to a Birthday Bash): Encountering Dracula in Contemporary Gothic Metamorphoses Books’ in Growing Up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media, eds. Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk (Montreal: Universitas, 2018), 29–46. Bandersnatch, dir. David Slade, Netflix (2018). Barbauld, Anna Letitia, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ [1773] in Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, ed. David Sandner (New York: Praeger, 2004), 30–36. Bates, Alan W. ‘“Indecent and Demoralising Representations”: Public Anatomy Museums in Mid-Victorian England’, Medical History, 52.1 (2008), 1–22. Brown, Gillian, ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.3 (2006), 351–362. Brown, J.H., Spectropia; or, Surprising Spectral Illusions. Showing Ghosts Everywhere, and of Any Colour, 4th edn. (London: Griffith and Farran, 1865). Crowhurst, Suzanne H., ‘A House Is a Metaphor’, Journal of Architectural Education, 27.2–3 (1974), 35–42. de Bruin-Molé, Megen, Frankenfiction: Monstrous Adaptations and Gothic Histories in Twenty-First-Century Remix Culture. Unpublished PhD thesis (Cardiff University, 2017). Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book, illus. Victor Ambrus (Methuen Books, 1986). Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol: Pop-Up Book, illus. Chuck Fischer (Little Brown US, 2010).

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Fuge, Charles, A Spooky House of Horror (Birmingham: Koneman UK Ltd., 1998). Golden, Joanne M., and Annyce Gerber, ‘A Semiotic Perspective of Text: The Picture Story Book Event’, Journal of Reading Behavior, 22.3 (1990), 203–219. Henningsen, Kadin, ‘“You Deciphered Me and Now I Am Plain to Read”: How the Body Is a Book’, Library Trends, 64.4 (2016), 741–755. Higonnet, Margaret R., ‘The Playground and the Peritext’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 15.2 (1990), 47–49. Jackson, Anna, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (New York: Routledge, 2013). Jones, David J., Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). Jordanova, Ludmilla J., Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Juengel, Scott J., ‘Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the Moving Image’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 33.3 (2000), 353–376. Marshall, Tim, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Morris, Dave, Frankenstein (Profile Books online, 2012). https://www.inklestudios.com/ frankenstein/. Mould, Chris, 76 Pumpkin Lane: Pop-Up Spooky House (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007). Park, Katharine, ‘The criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47.1 (1994), 1–33. Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Reger, Rob, Emily the Strange 4: Seeing Is Deceiving (Chronicle Books, 2006). Schiebinger, Londa, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23.4 (1990), 387–405. ———, ‘Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy’, Representations, 14 (1986), 42–82. Shapira, Yael, ‘Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe’s “Delicate” Gothic’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 18.4 (2006), 453–476. Stewart, David, The Secret Journal of Victor Frankenstein: On the Workings of the Human Body (Brighton: Book House, 2009). Thomas, Sophie, ‘Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double and the (Gothic) Subject’ in Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era, Romantic Circles: Praxis Series. http://romantic. arhu.umd.edu/praxis/gothic/intro/miles.html. Wennerstrom, Courtney, ‘Cosmopolitan Bodies and Dissected Sexualities: Anatomical Mis‐ Stories in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho’, European Romantic Review, 16.2 (2005), 193–207. Williams, Tony, ‘Thresholds of Desire and Domestic Space in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction’ in Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture, eds. by Fran Lloyd, Professor Fran Lloyd, and Catherine O’Brien (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 39–50. Wolfreys, Julian, ‘Preface: “I Could a Tale Unfold’or, the Promise of Gothic”’ in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000).

The Evolving Genre of the Vampire Games Jon Garrad

Vampire: the Masquerade changed everything in tabletop and live-action role-playing terms. It introduced a self-conscious fictionality to role-playing games; it deepened the relationship between role-playing games and the literary traditions that inspire them; and it was deliberately, almost desperately Gothic. The game’s influence within role-playing culture has been extensive, but as Peter Ray Allison observes, it has made an impact on the broader vampire genre. Several significant concepts originated with Vampire and have found their way into other games, books, films and TV shows. In particular, says Allison, Vampire originated the concept of vampires and werewolves at war with one another, noting that Vampire developers White Wolf took Sony Pictures to court for copyright infringement over the plot of Underworld—from which one might trace a line of inspiration leading to Twilight and beyond.1 According to Gordon J. Melton, the vampire arrived in role-playing games with 1983’s Ravenloft, a Dungeons and Dragons adventure featuring a Dracula-esque aristocratic vampire ruling over a cod-Transylvanian state complete with rambling, implausible castle. Other vampires soon joined him as antagonists to role-players: Melton notes that vampire-hunter games were popular throughout the 1980s, with vampires becoming playable characters during the early 1990s in a series of newly developed games. Vampire was the only one of these games to endure and grow throughout its publication history.2 Its contemporaries have either disappeared entirely or exist in collectible or short-run form. Not so Vampire. More books were produced, the fanbase continued to grow, and in one form or another the game has remained in print ever since—for two reasons. Firstly, Vampire was built from the ground up to centre on vampires, making them the default option as playable characters and protagonists, where the previous games had included vampires as antagonists, or as one playable option among many. Vampire’s fiction and game mechanics articulate and reify the tension between vampires’ moral code (Humanity or Enlightenment) and their predatory

J. Garrad (*)  Manchester, UK

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instincts (personified as “the Beast”). In all iterations of the game, the vampire is presented along these lines—as a morally conflicted predator with the capacity for moral reasoning, but an overpowering and not truly controllable “baser nature”. Secondly, these characters were fully integrated into a world that was familiar and yet distorted around their presence—the World of Darkness. Vampire frames its imagined play-space as a “Gothic-Punk” cityscape, recognisably the world in which players live, but skewed to create a distorted fictional reflection on real places and events. In Vampire creator Mark Rein-Hagen’s own words: The world of Vampire […] is a Gothic-Punk version of our world, a place of extremes - monolithic, majestic and altogether twisted [- in which] vampires exist, and they have directed and influenced the course of human affairs for some time. Indeed the differences between the Gothic-Punk world and our own are largely the doing of the vampires.3

No longer lurking in traditional gothic castles and making occasional forays into society, the vampires of Vampire were contemporary horrors. They lived among and preyed upon modern humans in places as ordinary as Gary, Indiana (the showcase city provided as location for the first edition’s demonstration adventure), concealing both their existence and their true nature through the elaborate Masquerade from which the first game line took its name. Exactly what the Gothic-Punk means, however, has changed over the three decades in which Vampire has been in print. Role-playing games are seldom published but once and reprinted exactly as is. They are evolving publications, with each new edition serving as an aesthetic and systemic revamp that updates the play experience in accordance with cultural shifts and changing expectations. Successive development teams have modified and recoded the specific coordinates of Vampire’s Gothic in exactly this way, which has helped to ensure the game’s longevity and influence. By way of example, consider the Masquerade which the original Vampire places in its title. The Masquerade is personal and pop-cultural, systemic and ideological: as a term, it covers both an extensive conspiracy by which vampires conceal their presence in and influence over society, and the presentation of a personal facade to their peers and prey. However, the Masquerade signifies different relationships with (again, by way of example) government and law enforcement agencies in different editions. In one edition, vampires outright control the government from the shadows; in another, their existence is a state secret and they are on the retreat before clandestine enforcement agencies. How the Masquerade works in practice, and its significance to play, changes from edition to edition and sets the tone for each edition’s style of storytelling, its generic priorities and its affective outcomes. Understanding exactly how and why this works necessitates understanding how role-playing games are “read” and “played” on multiple levels. For the uninitiated: a role-playing game is somewhere between improvised theatre and a board game. Usually, one participant—the Games Master, Dungeon Master or, in the game being analysed here, the Storyteller—designs locations in which the game takes place and events that will occur there. The remaining players design and perform personae who will inhabit that imaginary space and interact with its occupants. Those interactions are governed by the game’s system of

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rules. Published games also generally present character archetypes for players’ imaginary personae to occupy. These do much of the heavy lifting in creating the imagined world, allowing groups to customise and tailor an existing product to suit their entertainment preferences. The game product itself exists as a “core book”—the essential rules of play, which function as a self-contained game—and a series of “supplements” which provide pre-prepared plot arcs or locations, new rules and character options, and new revelations about the fictional world in which the game is set. Atkins and Kryzwinska note that game texts are activated by a player whose interaction with the game is also an interpretation—it is in play that semiotic, kinetic and affective energies come to constitute an experience of actual gameplay that differentiates the game text from the novel.4 Some role-playing games— including Vampire—trouble this model of gameplay, offering a body of textual work with a “metaplot” created and distributed by writing teams, which moves irrespective of player engagement and gives the game world a dynamic narrative of its own, beyond the activities of a given group. Some collectors and fans read this material in a novelistic mode, which omits the transformative play that makes the role-playing game a unique and valuable form. In play, role-playing games create a particular relationship between imaginary time and space; a complex relationship in which figments of the imagination become artistically visible, and respond to the contexts of the game’s setting, its influences from within and beyond the role-playing mode, and the operation of its rules. When a troupe of players sits down, creates their own characters, and establishes their own story within the game’s authored world, they effectively fuse the imaginary space-time existing at their table with that existing in the game’s rulebooks—the “canon”. Therefore, when compared to the novel, the role-playing game has textuality on two levels: the game as authored and the game as played. As a form, role-playing games have developed along similar lines to those Bakhtin charts in his history of the novel. Role-playing games have a series of evolving and discrete chronotopes, starting out with a sense of “adventuretime”5 in which player characters were not expected to develop as personalities in response to events. They were merely tools by which players explored the imagined world and interacted with it—avatars, not characters. Later in the evolution of the form, character development became more present and the progression of real time became a more prevalent feature of play. Long-running game lines provide windows into the development of the role-playing form and its chronotopes over the years, because trends and directional shifts become visible in iterations of and changes to the game line over time. Each published edition of the game text reveals the socio-historical circumstances at work in its creation: as years pass by in the real world inhabited by players, tension between those circumstances and those in which it was created will grow. Eventually, some aspect of the game as written—be it the game’s aesthetic, its mechanisms of play, its political position, its coordinating vocabulary of cultural references or simply its production quality—will fall so far out of sync with current trends that a new edition becomes artistically and commercially necessary.

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A new edition revises and updates the game’s core concept, aligning it with a perceived or researched sense of how the game is being played at the moment of revision—but the circumstances of play are always in flux, and always variable across play communities with different interpretations and transformative goals. By the time the game is researched and produced, the circumstances are already moving ahead of it, and so the cycle continues. Vampire’s specific embodiment of the role-playing game chronotope is further complicated by its engagement with the Gothic. When I use the term “Gothic”, I mean at least three things at once. Firstly; narrative devices, structures and signifiers common to the gothic novel. Secondly; non-literary signifiers derived from social or cultural events and trends, such as the goth subculture which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. Thirdly; a mode which invokes these devices, structures and signifiers to achieve a specific effect which Peter K. Garrett describes as safe and experimental transgression,6 and which might be termed “playful despair”. My theoretical basis here comes from Tanya Kryzwinska,7 who defines Gothic in terms of coordinates—conventional elements which emerge from similar texts; set the pace, tone and priorities of the genre; and are both easily and frequently adopted across media boundaries. Kryzwinska also sets terms by which the “Gothic credibility” of a game can be established: a Gothic game weaves these coordinates into its story, its mechanics, and its representational style. Mere iconography is not enough: if the overall affect is not Gothic, the game is drawing on the genre but not locating itself within it. Meanwhile, Catherine Spooner describes the Gothic as a mode of thinking and creating text. Spooner repudiates the conventional reading of Gothic as a displacement activity in which the fears of Western culture are relocated in a supernatural Other—if this were true, she claims, Gothic would die off once a specific fear has evaporated. While many of the cornerstone texts are certainly articulating social fears, Spooner argues that late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Gothic works itself free and offers newer and more playful perspectives on contemporary society.8 Contemporary Gothic, according to Spooner, is fundamentally postmodern. It is playful, self-conscious, mass-produced and preoccupied with the end of innocence; it is invested with the thrill of the forbidden, and championed as politically correct; it is idealised as disruptive and yet fundamentally mainstream in its reach and distribution. It participates in other genres and forms, flourishing in music and fashion as goth—and in role-playing, it gives rise to Vampire. Vampire has existed for the best part of three decades, at time of writing, and undergone extensive reinventions during that time. To chart this territory, I draw on a fan-created timeline by Jennifer Fuss,9 as well as company guidance for creative contributors,10 and the corporate history of the product line offered by longterm licensor Rich Thomas.11 My goal here is to outline (in brief) the changes of personnel and thus approach which have taken place during Vampire’s long development history, before engaging with certain stages of that history in depth. This is not a comprehensive history of Vampire—it leaves out the PC games, the board and card games, the short-lived TV series and the live action rules altogether—but it sums up the core offering and how it has evolved.

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First edition Vampire: the Masquerade, published in 1991 under lead developer Mark Rein-Hagen, was an intimate, contemporary game of personal horror, grounded in the real world and focused on the emotional and moral torment of individual vampires. The Masquerade was an ostentatious display of power—vampires influence and, in some cases, outright control their world, requiring extensive secrecy and constant reinforcement through exercise of supernatural influence. Second edition Masquerade, published in 1992 and also under Rein-Hagen,12 was a breakout hit within the role-playing game industry and defined the longest-standing players’ sense of Gothic-Punk. Vampires are depicted as wielding a subtler political power—influence rather than direct control—and the Masquerade becomes a necessity of survival rather than a function of conspiratorial authority. The edition is wide-ranging, experimental, and outlandish, demonstrating a drift away from grounded reflection on the players’ reality and towards increasingly self-referential world-building. Revised edition Masquerade was published in 1998, with Justin Achilli taking over the lead developer role.13 The emergent metaplot reaches a global scale, and in Achilli’s words, Vampire began talking to itself more than to real history, current events or literary sources.14 The process reached a peak with the Week of Nightmares event, unfolding across several books, which depicted nuclear weapons being deployed against a vampiric demigod in Bangladesh, and marked the game’s final departure from a setting even pretending to be “like the real world, with vampires”, reducing the Masquerade to nonsense. After 2004’s Gehenna supplement brought this storyline to an apocalyptic end, White Wolf launched a successor product: Vampire: the Requiem, on which Justin Achilli was also lead developer.15 Requiem represents a return to the literary and filmic roots of the modern vampire genre, creating a series of archetypes for modern gothic storytelling and all but abandoning the concept of metaplot, presenting very little in the way of fictional history or developer-authored storylines. The Masquerade is a quiet element of the background, a practice by which vampire characters avoid being noticed and hunted down—it is merely a tradition, a best practice, rather than a global conspiracy. 2011 saw the publication of Vampire: the Masquerade Twentieth Anniversary Edition, commonly referred to as V20, with Justin Achilli again at the helm.16 V20 is essentially a compilation and reimagining of the Revised edition which eschews the apocalyptic line of the metaplot. Instead, V20 locks itself to a nebulous early twenty-first-century setting and presents a snapshot of unfolding vampiric conspiracies with few direct connections to real places or events. Conflicting elements of mechanics, setting and story from the previous twenty years are rationalised to the best of the development team’s ability: the tone of the edition is cosmopolitan, all-encompassing and postmodern. Requiem was similarly reborn in its anniversary year, with a second edition published in 2014 under lead developer Rose Bailey.17 Requiem’s second edition is characterised by compassion, maturity, and a decidedly postmodern approach to vampires and Vampire which rejects Rein-Hagen’s approach to the Masquerade as political theatre in favour of a focus on the personal Masquerade of pretence and security.

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2018 brought us Masquerade’s fifth and current edition. Commonly referred to as V5, this edition sees a change in terminology towards that preferred by the film industry, being “produced” by Jason Carl (and developed chiefly by freelance or consultant labour, against a backdrop of high staff turnover and rapid business change).18 V5 is a return to the intimate and contemporary feel of first edition Masquerade, which restarts and relocates the game’s metaplot directly in the here and now. However, it places the vampire protagonists on the defensive, hunted from pillar to post by an increasingly vampire-aware and surveillance-driven society; under new technologies of scrutiny and analysis, the Masquerade is falling apart. Its game system has also been aggressively modernised, based on the improvements made by Bailey and her team to Requiem. The distinction between the two game lines, in terms of their ethical principles and aesthetic approaches, is often hard to grasp, but it becomes apparent when looking at their approach to the “Darkness” in the World of Darkness. Rose Bailey describes Requiem’s darkness as follows: The darkness in the game comes things characters do for reasons we can understand – and often sympathize with. […] This is a hard line to walk. That’s why we have each other. Our darkness must always be honest, it must always be unblinking, and it must always be compassionate.19

Carl et al., meanwhile, express Masquerade’s commitments thus: Vampire is a horror game, and its world a terrible place. […] This is not a role playing game where you play good guys. [But] the character is not you, and the game is not real. You can use it as a fictional space to explore terrible things, and perhaps even have a little fun with them.20

Requiem is not specific about its genre but centralises a dark mood delivered in a compassionate and grounded style: Masquerade aspires specifically to horror and relies on fictionality as a cornerstone of its appeal. Now that we have established what kind of Gothic the game lines aim toward, it is time to consider execution: how well does Vampire accomplish the Gothic affect it sets out to achieve? Vampire: the Masquerade’s first and second editions coined the term “GothicPunk” as a means of describing the game’s setting and affective mood in brief. Gothic-Punk is a key to the metaphorical and aesthetic representations the game employs to achieve that effect. It has always looked back, grounding the game in a tradition—or, less charitably, in a zeitgeist that it always lags slightly behind. In the second edition, the Gothic-Punk is defined thus: The Gothic aspect describes the ambiance and institutions of mortal society. The Church is stronger because people always turn to the Church in times of crisis, and enough people have been touched by [vampires] to make a difference. The institutions which they control tend to be even more conservative and resistant to change than those of our world. Architecture has a menacing gothic flavour to it; in fact, some skyscrapers in this world might be girded with gargoyles.22

This increased conservatism and the enhanced importance of religion to cultures and societies renews the set of values against which the foundational texts of gothic play. Replicating these genre coordinates within the game draws on the

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Gothic, but does it create the corresponding affect and pass Kryzwinska’s acid test for “a Gothic game”? According to Kenneth Hite (a contributing writer to both second and fifth edition Masquerade, interviewed during research for this chapter), early Masquerade strove to create Gothic—but chiefly in the realms of pure aesthetic. Hite said: The Gothic has always been about exalting emotion (especially terrifying emotion) over reason, and certainly one could say much the same about punk. Both the Gothic and punk also exalt ruin and decay: Gothic from an aesthetic angle, and punk from the political angle that “this system is ruined and corrupt”. […] The earlier editions didn’t provide very much mechanical guidance for the Gothic, unless you count the occasional involvement of Nature vs. Demeanor [to create interior conflict for characters]. However, they provided Gothic atmosphere in buckets, especially with Tim Bradstreet’s art.

The game’s Nature and Demeanour mechanics, which define a character in terms of their core identity and the facade they present to society at large, go some way towards creating a classic gothic doubling and its corresponding affective state of dissolved, unfocused and troubled selfhood. However, a more significant doubling occurs in the central dichotomy of the game—human and monster, moral persona and amoral, animalistic Beast. This dichotomy is expressed through the game’s Humanity system: a simplistic mechanisation of Christian morality that centralises acts of transgression, and inevitable moral “degeneration” resulting from those transgressions. Again, this pays lip-service at least to familiar gothic coordinates. As former Vampire developer Olivia Hill observes, however, one key element of the gothic affect is compromised by Masquerade’s construction of its undead protagonists and agents, since: Most editions very explicitly had vampires unable to take pleasure from sex and their emotions were frequently described as deadened. This, to me, is the opposite of the gothic tradition, where exaggerated expressions of humanity make the narratives compelling.23

If we concur with Hill, the explicit instruction to play vampires as affectively dead runs directly counter to the exaltation of emotion Hite places at the heart of the Gothic. The game becomes more difficult to play in accordance with the tradition— and less fun—if characters are not affected by their transgressions and their consequences. This hints at an unstable and inconsistent sense of the Gothic at the root of Masquerade, which is at pains to sublimate emotion and passion into the singular act of vampirism, affectively flattening the gothic experience. Resolving this apparent dissonance between objective and practice is left to given troupes of players, and the dissonance is never entirely addressed. Future editions of Masquerade would strive for a broader set of cultural signifiers, but skirt over this fundamental problem of players being told their characters did not feel the impact of those signifiers. The Revised edition of Masquerade explicitly sited itself within “a long-standing and thriving genre” as well as “the vampire/goth subculture”. Revised it claimed its influences as Stoker, Rice and Brite; Byron, Shelly and Baudelaire; Lugosi’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu. It also distinguishes its sources for mood and ambience: Blade Runner, Tim Burton’s first Batman, The Silence of the Lambs,

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Trainspotting, New Jack City, “and most Hitchcock films”.25 Lead developer Justin Achilli quantified this further: Revised became its own thing, with definite Gothic influence, and true to itself. […] Early in Vampire, I was attempting to copy the influences. Over time, I thought it definitely took on its own voice, its own life. You can easily pick up a Vampire book and identify its Gothic influences, but on a more substantial reading and use, especially for the Revised and V20 material, you find that Vampire is consistent largely with Vampire, while still acknowledging and even revering the movement that helped it get there.26

In terms of its own inheritance, Revised Vampire qualifies and extends the GothicPunk beyond visible symbolism and into an affective-aesthetic territory, deepening beyond the metaphorical symbol-sets of the early editions into that must be experienced to be understood. Achilli et al. frame it as follows: Gothic-Punk is a mood and setting conveyed during the course of the game. The greatest share of creating this ambience falls upon the Storyteller, but players should consider their characters’ stake in it as well. The ambience is also a matter of taste. Some troupes may prefer more Gothic than Punk, while others may want equal amounts of both elements, or little of either.27

To this emphasis on mood and feeling, Revised Masquerade adds millenarianism, suggesting that an eternal struggle between the eldest vampires is about to come to an end with a global reckoning or winnowing known as Gehenna. This metaplot point was present in prior editions, but became a driving force in Revised. Revised is exemplary “end of an era” Gothic, articulating the societal tensions existing at the turn of the second millennium.28 Its publication cycle began in the build-up to Y2K and the Millennium Bug; it ended during the War on Terror; and throughout its run, the game directly addressed the aesthetic and cultural experience of growing up millennial. As Alex Williams observes, that experience is one of innocence lost: the comparative security of the 1990s gave way to economic recession and geopolitical upheaval following 9/11.29 Returning to Spooner’s summary of the traditional Gothic as an expression of societal concerns, we can see Revised Masquerade’s credentials writ large. The world is ending because of vast, inhuman forces, displaced here into the threatening Other of godlike Antediluvian vampires—what do we do with the time that is left to us, and how do we retain a basic sense of our own humanity? Yet, as Spooner cautions us, this conventional approach to the gothic mode pays too much attention to where the Gothic comes from, and not enough to where it goes. If gothic texts are nothing but articulations of specific societal concerns at specific moments in time, why does the mode continue to endure—and what does it do when those moments have passed? This was the problem confronting Achilli et al. in 2011, when Masquerade’s twentieth anniversary loomed and an upswing in demand saw a general release of a commemorative edition.30 V20, as the community calls it for ease of reference, cleaves somewhat closer to its literary origins than Revised: The Gothic aspect of the setting is very much in the literary tradition of the word. Gothic literature paints a world of anachronisms, barbarism, decay, madness, and a romanticised history that never existed. A tenement erected at the turn of the 20th century, fronted by

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dingy, fluted columns and infested with squatters, is a neo-gothic rookery. A merciless millionaire’s estate on the edge of town is a modern castle, as is his lavish penthouse in the bustling district where mortals go to dance and drug away their cares. […] All of these and more are hallmarks of the modern gothic experience.31

Once again, the Gothic here is symbolic: it is concerned with location and activity, rather than affective experience. Furthermore, V20’s adoption of a timeless, nebulous early twenty-first century setting renders the game itself an anachronism— where first and second Masquerade once offered a dark reflection of the real world, V20 is reluctant to engage with it at all. Achilli remarks that: Part of Vampire’s longevity, in either Masquerade or Requiem formats, is that the Gothic trappings it affects are tied to an emotion rather than an era. Vampire wouldn’t have survived long if it was quintessentially 80s or 90s. (You can see a parallel evolution here in technology, in that V20, released in 2011, doesn’t bother to account for the prevalence of smartphones or of wide-scale surveillance, either of which would pose massive Masquerade threats. We just handwaved them away.)32

The “parallel evolution” Achilli describes is that of Vampire: the Masquerade on one hand, and real society and technology on the other. The game’s premise of vampires who live among us and control or at least influence the lived realities of existence on a grand scale crumbles in the face of widespread surveillance and information technology. V20 deals with this by ignoring it, evolving its chronotope into self-reference and affect. By tying itself to an emotion rather than the present moment in history, in Achilli’s words, Masquerade can maintain relevance to players who feel what it wants them to feel, rather than to a contextual moment in real time. V20 does not exist to offer any kind of reflection on society. It exists purely as an achronological experience, one which lays claim to “emotion” and yet flattens emotional range into the act of vampiric predation. The fundamental contradiction of Masquerade remains unresolved, and so it is unsurprising that (in accordance with Nina Auerbach’s definitive observation that every period gets the vampire it deserves33) Achilli and other developers had already positioned themselves for another revision of the vampire role-playing game chronotope—a way of sidestepping the twin problems of secrecy and affective flattening which Masquerade never successfully addressed. Vampire: the Requiem billed itself from the beginning as “a modern gothic roleplaying game”, a claim which has remained consistent across both its extant editions. Requiem represents the most deliberate reinvention of Vampire to date: it is not a sequel to Masquerade but a successor, which takes the same basic idea and establishes it along very different lines.34 Instead of elaborate metaphorical/ conspiratorial Masquerades and decades-long metaplot arcs, Requiem presents a loose, sketchily developed setting and an extensive toolbox of archetypes for players and Storytellers to work out what kind of vampire stories they want to tell, how they want secrecy and emotion and political context to work in their own experience. As Olivia Hill puts it: As far as where a game comes from, that’s maybe half up to the designers, and half up to the people playing the game. They both shape what defines a game. This is to say, it doesn’t really matter what the designers thought they were doing, any more than it

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matters to the players what they were doing. Games have a much more dramatic form of “Death of the Author,” because the onus for content creation is heavily shifted toward the players.35

However, Requiem does provide some direction for play, suggesting what it was designed to do better than anything else. Its first edition frames a “Modern Gothic” world in the same way that its immediate predecessor, Revised Masquerade, framed the Gothic-Punk: What you hold in your hands is a Modern Gothic Storytelling game, a roleplaying game that allows you to build chronicles that explore morality through the metaphor of vampirism. In Vampire, you “play the monster,” and what you do as that monster both makes for an interesting story and might even teach you a little about your own values and those of your fellows. The setting of Vampire borrows greatly from gothic literature, not the smallest amount of which comes from the “set dressing” of the movement. Key to the literary gothic tradition are the ideas of barbarism, corruption and medieval imagery. This World of Darkness can be said to be our own seen through the looking glass darkly.36

Butchered syntax aside (not the smallest amount of literature comes from its own set dressing?), the priority of the game—exploration of morality through ­metaphor—is stated front and centre, as are the way it will be achieved and the specific concepts at the heart of the game’s genre. Requiem is setting out to do what Masquerade did, but focused more on ideas, metaphors and morals than on aesthetics and moods. Achilli et al. go on to define Requiem’s symbolic vocabulary, but they lead with its thematic heritage and ambitions, clearly siting their work within a Gothic practice. They also, as with Revised Masquerade, align themselves with a roll of influences: Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, John Polidori and Sheridan LeFanu from literature, Nosferatu, The Lost Boys, Near Dark and The Hunger from film. Finally, they distance themselves from music and music-led subculture, noting the ephemeral nature of popularity in that industry and specifically avoiding too much identification with a specific, contemporary cultural moment. As Achilli puts it: While the early material deliberately attached itself to a specific subculture, social scene, and music expression, it slowly pulled itself away from those over the progression of developers, with the intent of opening itself up to a greater breadth of players. Even through that extrication of itself from a defined “scene,” it kept the literary component of the Gothic movement throughout because, again, those transcend decade. I don’t know if it’s still out there, but I recall one of my style guides that hammered on the point “Gothic, not goth.”37

While Masquerade focused on the idea of public persona and private self, defining characters in terms of archetypal Demeanour and Nature that echoed the notions of secrecy and pretence evoked by its title, Requiem did away with this in favour of a renewed focus on morality. Alongside the Humanity system—a scale of 1–10 indicating the vampire character’s proximity to idealised and moreor-less Christian morality at one end and the instinctive, predatory, amoral Beast at the other—Requiem introduced Virtue and Vice as key definitive terms and mechanical elements, tying into another 1–10 scale called Willpower. Willpower is spent to accomplish challenges and restored by actions that align with the character’s definitive Virtue or Vice—drawn from the Seven Heavenlies and Deadlies,

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respectively. Virtue is more rewarding, totally refilling the Willpower scale, but can only be claimed once in a story. Vice represents a steady one-payoff-per-indulgence restoration of a critical resource. Humanity is similarly altered, with declines in Humanity carrying clearer, stricter ludonarrative consequences; as vampire characters’ Humanity declines, negative modifiers pile up, as do mechanics representing specific psychological traumas. Thus, Requiem explicitly ties its game mechanics to its key Gothic themes of morality, transgression and insanity. Vice is a constant temptation in the World of Darkness, while Virtue is an infrequent but powerful shaft of metaphorical light. Humanity erodes in palpable, tactile ways, with every loss having a mechanical significance. And crucially, by abandoning the concept of metaplot and shifting the emphasis of the core rules onto these themes, Requiem avoids losing its focus on “playing the monster”. The second edition of Requiem backs up from aligning itself with the gothic tradition as such. This is all that the second edition core rulebook has to offer, around the word “Gothic”: Vampire is a game of gothic horror; tragedy is par for the course. However, tragedy and loss are a hard line to walk. Without some grace and light, darkness can quickly become a chore.38

In her developers’ notes, Rose Bailey refers to the tradition in slightly more depth, symbolically equating vampires with gothic architecture and the corresponding tradition, but in very little detail: In the gothic novel, the word “gothic” originally referred to an ancient, looming structure, like a crumbling castle. Vampires are the gothic.39

However, second edition Requiem leans even harder on creating and reifying its Gothic affect—the impact comes through the actual rules of play, rather than through essayistic guidance. It abandons the Catholic moral codes of the first edition, returning to the inner and outer life dichotomy of Masquerade. In second edition Requiem, characters are defined in terms of “Mask” and “Dirge”—the bearing vampires present to the world, and the truth behind it. These represent a similar riff on the theme of gothic doubling that has appeared in prior editions. Masks and Dirges are archetypal personality types—Authoritarian, Child and Competitor, for example—and maintenance of the Mask is as important, as mechanically significant, as remaining true to the Dirge. What matters, in terms of Willpower restored, is not whether the character’s inner or outer life is served, but the level of hardship endured to serve it. One point for overcoming a minor obstacle—all of them for risking life and limb. Second edition Requiem also adds game-mechanical weight to its claimed themes of morality with the idea that all vampire characters have Touchstones. Each Touchstone is a character or location whose survival anchors the vampire’s Humanity and thus their range of emotional experience at a given level. This represents a direct improvement on the “unfeeling monster” concept—indeed, Requiem’s second edition goes so far as to replace the prior term “degeneration” (which was associated with Humanity as a moral framework) with “detachment”, which recasts Humanity as a state of being and understanding. Moral

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transgressions represent only a fraction of possible causes for detachment; mere isolation from human interaction can do it, and the first stage of detachment is tied to Breaking Points which are extremely likely to occur within the earliest sessions of an ongoing game, specifically sustaining or inflicting injuries which reify the vampiric condition (surviving what would hospitalise a human or injuring another character over blood). Like Humanity, the role of the Beast is also extended and deepened here. The Beast takes on multiple facets as Monstrous, Seductive or Competitive. Each is associated with different penalties and bonuses which players can have their characters use to “lash out” against provocation. Again, the system here adds emotional complexity to the play experience, and sites that emotional complexity within the creative choices made by players. Players define their characters’ Touchstones, and players choose to invoke their characters’ Beasts. Players choose the Banes—the penalties within the game rules—that their characters suffer as their detachment grows. Because detachment is framed as negative and tied to a broader range of actions which players are bound to take during the game, the Gothic experience of exalting in violent emotions is intimately associated with players’ choices. Players want their characters to stay human—which means they must seek out feelings and opportunities to feel, rather than accepting the deadened, flattened affect imposed by Masquerade. The current Requiem offers us a deeply personal Gothic, farthest removed from any specific cultural coordinates and most concerned with what is said, done and felt at a given table. Meanwhile, the fifth and latest edition of Vampire: the Masquerade, promoted and here referred to as V5, has a difficult job to do—and it starts by apparently rejecting the past. Past editions described Vampire: the Masquerade as a “Gothic-Punk” game. Punk is still as good a word as any to describe the sordid, transgressive joy of playing in a good Vampire game. But Vampire can accommodate many different play styles, and they are all valid, as long as everyone in the game has a good time.40

In attempting to distance itself from the original’s allegiance to a specific cultural moment—the eruption of goth into the popular consciousness during the late 1980s—V5 has completed its metamorphosis into the playful, postmodern Gothic that Spooner describes. To do this, however, it has had to abandon its claim to be Gothic in exactly the way that Kryzwinska foretold. It is also, arguably, incapable of achieving the distance it needs. Without the specific cultural moment that made Vampire: the Masquerade a going concern in the first place, is it worth remaking at all? Kenneth Hite, when interviewed for this chapter, claimed that: V5 is trying not to distance itself from V1 but to reinvent it with 21st-century concerns and aesthetics. “Gothic-Punk” rapidly became shorthand for a kind of supernatural ghost world, not the real world you could get to on the subway. We wanted to re-ground the game in the real world first and foremost.

The reinvention is partially successful, most so in the realm of game systems (some of which are borrowed from Requiem by a team which acknowledges the progress made by the successor game line). As Hite observes,

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V5 creates a Gothic emotional crisis inside the character by means of Karim Muammar’s Hunger mechanic, while also providing mechanics for social injury, another theme of the Gothic going back to the 18th century. The new Touchstone and Humanity mechanics also mechanically buttress play of doomed human love in a way that only the storytelling advice did in prior editions.

The Hunger mechanic replaces all previous editions’ system of spending Vitae or “blood points” to use vampiric powers with a dice-exchange system. Each use of vampiric powers risks introducing a “Hunger die” to subsequent actions; each Hunger die increases the odds of a “messy critical”—the vampire’s inner Beast taking over and indulging itself. Feeding reduces Hunger, removing a die or two with a mere sip, more with a dangerous repast—but the only way to silence the Hunger completely, removing all Hunger dice from play, is to kill. The chief difference here in terms of play experience is that “blood points” were a reliable resource: players knew how many their characters had, and if conservative in their use of powers, several sessions could pass without a vampire character actually doing vampirism. Hunger is unpredictable, becoming more present the more advantage the player takes of their characters’ state. The risk can only be reduced by an act of vampirism, and only dismissed entirely if the character makes a significant moral transgression. V5 characters are built around Predator Types, which indicate how they prefer to slake their Hunger and give advantages when pursuing this preference in play— even the Consensualist type specialises in manipulation and gaslighting. The Vampire chronotope has been forced back towards the danger and transgression early editions promised but never quite achieved, and which Requiem explicitly moderated with “grace” and “compassion” that provided a variance in tone. While V5 does advocate showing care and respect to fellow players and being prepared to time out if a scene in play becomes too much, it does not extend that courtesy to the characters; return again to the claim that V5 “is not a game where you play the good guys”.41 Humanity is the same sliding scale as before, but with sexual and emotional functions (as well as eating food and sustaining some contact with sunlight) explicitly tied to given levels of Humanity. The Hierarchy of Sins is gone, in favour of a more nuanced system that requires groups and individual players to define collective and character-specific moral Tenets to uphold and Touchstones to protect. To summarise: V5 has introduced and mechanised a level of danger and jeopardy to the play experience which no prior iteration of Vampire has managed, but has built in a fundamentally predatory element to player characters, closing out the sense of humanity and compassion Requiem offered as an alternative state and narrowing the moral possibilities on offer. V5 is a better way to play a monster, provided a monster is all you want to play. V5 released late in 2018: it had a troubled launch (concerns over neo-Nazi ideology and the use of LGBTQ+ persecution in Chechnya as a metaplot point being the high points42) and has thus far received a mixed reception. Some players have recognised the need for an update of the system and the concept of the Masquerade in a society where constant surveillance has become the norm. Others have decried the game as being too close to, or too far away from, the tone and

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style of the original; as pandering to “social justice warriors” or “alt-right edgelords” in its attempt to court both sides of tabletop gaming’s culture war. Many have expressed a preference for V20—the last edition of the game they recognised as Vampire: the Masquerade, with no mechanical or cultural influence from Requiem a successor/sister product some hardcore fans have never accepted. Some have been brought into the community by livestreamed play and have never encountered Vampire before they are plunged into an ongoing “edition war”. The argument goes on. Today, a player-commentator writes a forum, blog or social media post—tomorrow, a moderator deletes it or a torrent of abusive messages leads them to withdraw it, and nothing is left to cite. Some claims are entirely reliant on trust—whose group chat are you part of, whose whisper network? Others rely on one printing of a sourcebook redacted within the quarter and now difficult to acquire legally. In these circumstances, academic rigour becomes difficult (if not impossible) to uphold. The last word as far as this project is concerned goes to Olivia Hill, who directly questions the very idea of bringing back Vampire: the Masquerade at all. From what I can tell, V5 isn’t really meant to be “Vampire but in 2018.” It’s not made to represent any larger cultural movement, be it of the 1990s or otherwise. It’s very much a game meant to attract and bring back a specific audience of the previous editions. […] It’s in an odd position because it’s trying to emulate something that was trying to emulate a cultural movement that wasn’t even that topical at its time. In essence, it’s trying to be a game from the early 1990s which was riding on a very era-specific cultural movement that didn’t last particularly long. I don’t know if there’s a “right way” to do that, but it oozes that design intention. It’s very “what if it was 1991 again and we were making this game again, with the assumption that it was already made?”43

The paradox of Spooner’s contemporary Gothic is that it deliberately calls on familiar coordinates, appropriates them for ends quite different from their ­eighteenth-century originators, often de-gothicises them on purpose by yoking them to a different affective outcome, and yet only achieves meaning through invoking them as Gothic. This is exactly what Vampire does. Throughout its development history, Vampire in all its forms has reflected, mediated and transformed the Gothic—even accounting for Hill’s claim that it has always done so in retrospect, from a year or two behind the cutting edge. V20 represents the most significant failure, as a Vampire that talks entirely to its own past rather than the present day, abandoning any connection with any tradition bar its own. The first and second editions of Vampire: the Masquerade established a point of contact between goth—as a specific flourishing of broader Gothic in the late twentieth century—and role-playing games, combining the genre coordinates of one with the interactive textuality of the other. It would take repeated efforts and reinventions for these discrete modes to fit entirely, bleeding into each other to a point at which they functioned well. Revised Masquerade and first edition Requiem represent successive attempts at the same thing—a modern Gothic that sat on either side of the millennium’s

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turn, looking forward to it with apprehension and beyond it with resignation. Both games are more explicitly located in the literary tradition that gave rise to them— they are Gothic, not goth. Second edition Requiem successfully makes the move from tradition and aesthetic to affect, reifying the emotional experience of the characters. It achieves this by siting affective choice and consequence in the actions and decisions of the players, and by an overall turn towards “compassionate”, socially conscious darkness of tone rather than providing a set of aesthetic cues and hoping they land. Finally, and most recently, fifth edition Masquerade represents an attempt to revitalise and modernise Vampire’s own tradition, completing a disconnection process that began with V20. V5 talks to itself, and to the world immediately around it. For the first time since the beginning, it has divested itself of any obligations towards Gothic coordinates and traditions, and yet it only has meaning and relevance because it has spent nearly thirty years aligning itself with them. It is playful, self-conscious, mass-produced, and preoccupied with the end of innocence; it is invested with the thrill of the forbidden, and championed as politically correct; it is idealised as disruptive and yet fundamentally mainstream in its reach and distribution. It has been welcomed by some players, and despised by others; it has courted, or been courted by, contesting factions in the online culture war. It is, even now, the Gothic as we see it in wider culture. It is Vampire doing what it has always done: presenting us with our own world, seen through a glass darkly, and saying “here there be monsters – want to pretend you’re one of them?”

Notes

1. Peter Ray Allison, ‘How Vampire: The Masquerade Revolutionised Gaming’, Kotaku, http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/09/20/how-vampire-the-masquerade-revolutionised-gaming, 20 September 2018. 2. Gordon J. Melton, ‘Games: Vampire’, in The Vampire Book: The Encyclopaedia of the Undead (Canton, MI; Visible Ink Press, 2010), 277. 3. Mark Rein-Hagen et al., Vampire: The Masquerade. Second edition (Clarkston, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 1992), 29. 4. Barry Atkins and Tanya Kryzwinska, Videogame/Player/Text (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2007). 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX; University of Texas Press, 1981), 87. 6. Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 2003), 2. 7. Tanya Kryzwinska, ‘The Gamification of Gothic Co-ordinates’, in Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, vol. 1 issue 1, 58–78. 8. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London; Reaktion Press, 2006), 21–26. 9. Jennifer Fuss, ‘White Wolf—Past to Present’, Teylen’s RPG Corner, https://teylen. blog/2019/01/18/white-wolf-past-to-present, 18 January 2019. 10. Matthew Dawkins, Shane DeFreest, and Dhaunae DeVir, Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller’s Vault Style Guide (Stockholm; White Wolf Entertainment, 2017).

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J. Garrad 11. Rich Thomas, ‘Dead on Our Feet, But Still Fightin’, Onyx Path Publishing, http://theonyxpath.com/dead-on-our-feet-but-still-fightin-monday-meeting-notes, 1 December 2018. 12. Rein-Hagen et al., Vampire: The Masquerade. 13. Justin Achilli et al., Vampire: The Masquerade. Revised Edition (Stone Mountain, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 1998). 14. Justin Achilli, in Jon Garrad, ‘The Vampire Interviews II—Justin Achilli’, Manchester Game Studies Network, https://www.manchestergamestudies.org/blog/2019/1/19/thevampire-interviews-ii-justin-achilli, 8 February 2019. 15. Justin Achilli et al., Vampire: The Requiem. First edition (Stone Mountain, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 2005). 16. Justin Achilli et al., Vampire: The Masquerade Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Location redacted by publisher; Onyx Path Publishing, 2011). Hence: V20. 17. Rose Bailey et al., Vampire: The Requiem. Second edition (Location redacted by publisher: Onyx Path Publishing, 2014). 18. Jason Carl et al., Vampire: The Masquerade. Fifth edition (Stockholm; White Wolf Entertainment, 2018). Hence: V5. 19. Rose Bailey, Bite Me: How To Write Vampire (Location redacted by publisher: OneBookShelf, 2018). 20. Carl et al., V5, 34. 21. Olivia Hill, in Jon Garrad, ‘The Vampire Interviews I—Olivia Hill’, Manchester Game Studies Network, https://www.manchestergamestudies.org/blog/2019/1/19/the-vampire-interviews-i-olivia-hill, 8 February 2019. 22. Rein-Hagen et al., Masquerade, 29. 23. Hill, in interview. 24. Rein-Hagen et al., Masquerade, 29. 25. Achilli et al., Masquerade, 25. 26. Achilli, in interview. 27. Achilli et al., Masquerade, 29. 28. Jon Garrad, ‘Endless Nineties: The Perennial Aesthetic of “Grimdark” Games’, at Gothic Styles, Gothic Substance, Manchester Metropolitan University, http://dx.doi. org/10.17613/M6RN75, 28 October 2017. 29. Alex Williams, ‘Move Over, Millennials, Here Comes Generation Z’, New York Times, 18 September 2015. 30. Fuss, White Wolf, n.p. 31. Achilli et al., V20, 13–14. 32. Achilli, in interview. 33. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press, 1995). 34. Jon Garrad, ‘Bleeding Genre Dry: Archetypes, Stereotypes and White Wolf’s Vampire Games’, at Reimagining the Gothic 4—Gothic Archetypes, University of Sheffield, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6Z892F4K, 26–28 October 2018. 35. Hill, in interview. 36. Achilli et al., Requiem, 14. 37. Achilli, in interview. 38. Bailey et al., Requiem, 275. 39. Bailey, Bite Me, 46. 40. Carl et al., V5, 340. 41. Ibid., 34. 42. Charlie Hall, ‘Paradox reins in White Wolf after offensive passages in Vampire: The Masquerade RPG’, Polygon.com, https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/16/18098929/ white-wolf-controversy-paradox-interactive-new-ceo, 16 November 2018. 43. Hill, in interview.

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Bibliography Achilli, Justin, et al. Vampire: The Masquerade. Revised edition. Stone Mountain, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 1998. Achilli, Justin, et al. Vampire: The Requiem. First edition. Stone Mountain, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 2005. Achilli, Justin, et al. Vampire: The Masquerade: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Onyx Path Publishing, 2011. Allison, Peter Ray. ‘How Vampire: The Masquerade Revolutionised Gaming’, Kotaku, http:// www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/09/20/how-vampire-the-masquerade-revolutionised-gaming, 20 September 2018. Atkins, Barry and Krzywinska, Tanya. Videogame/Player/Text. Manchester University Press, 2007. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bailey, Rose. Bite Me: How To Write Vampire. OneBookShelf, 2018. Bailey, Rose, et al. Vampire: The Requiem. Second edition. Onyx Path Publishing, 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination (1975). Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX; University of Texas Press, 1981, 84–259. Breuningsen, Kate. The Consciousness Aware of Itself: Gothic Doubling and the Dissolution of the Enlightenment Model of the Self. Moravian College, PA; PhD thesis, 2011. Carl, Jason, et  al. Vampire: The Masquerade. Fifth edition. Stockholm; White Wolf Entertainment, 2018. Collins and White Wolf v. Sony Pictures; Atlanta, GA; 7 September, 2004. Dawkins, Matthew, DeFreest, Shane, and DeVir, Dhaunae. Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller’s Vault Style Guide. Stockholm; White Wolf Entertainment, 2017. Duffy, Owen. The Board Game Book. Self-published, 2019. Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. University of Chicago Press, 1983. Fuss, Jennifer. ‘White Wolf—Past to Present’, Teylen’s RPG Corner, https://teylen.blog/ 2019/01/18/white-wolf-past-to-present, 18 January 2019. Garrad, Jon. ‘Endless Nineties: The Perennial Aesthetic of “Grimdark” Games’, at Gothic Styles, Gothic Substance. Manchester Metropolitan University, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6RN75, 28 October 2017. Garrad, Jon. ‘Bleeding Genre Dry: Archetypes, Stereotypes and White Wolf’s Vampire Games’, at Reimagining the Gothic 4—Gothic Archetypes. University of Sheffield, http://dx.doi. org/10.17613/M6Z892F4K, 26–28 October 2018. Garrett, Peter K. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 2003. Hickman, Tracy and Hickman, Laura. Ravenloft. Lake Geneva, WI; Tactical Studies Rules, 1983. Karshay, Stephan. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. London; Springer, 2015. Kirkpatrick, Graeme. Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester University Press, 2011. Krzywinska, Tanya. ‘The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates’, Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, 1 (1), 2015, 58–78. Melton, J. Gordon. ‘Games, Vampire’, in The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Canton Township, MI; Visible Ink Press, 2010, 271–278. Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha. Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction and Popular Culture. London; Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Rein-Hagen, Mark et al. Vampire: The Masquerade. Second edition. Clarkston, GA; White Wolf Publishing, 1992. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London; Reaktion Press, 2006.

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Thomas, Rich. ‘Dead on Our Feet, But Still Fightin’, Onyx Path Publishing, http://theonyxpath. com/dead-on-our-feet-but-still-fightin-monday-meeting-notes/, 1 December 2018. Williams, Alex. ‘Move Over, Millennials, Here Comes Generation Z’, New York Times, 18 September 2015. Wiseman, Len. Underworld. Sony Pictures, 2003.

The Digital Haunted House Erika Kvistad

As I write this, in early February 2018, Adam Ellis has been posting Twitter updates about the ghost in his apartment for several months. Since last summer, Ellis has had recurring dreams about the apparition of a little boy with an oversized, misshapen head. In one of the dreams, he is told that the little boy is called “Dear David”, and that Ellis has to make sure never to ask him more than two questions, “or he’ll kill you”.1 In the very next dream, Ellis inadvertently breaks this rule. After this, he begins to experience unsettling phenomena in his home, which he interprets as David “cross[ing] over into the real world”.2 Ellis tracks every development on Twitter through reports, photos, and short videos, often while the event is still in progress. But his latest tweet, on 28 January, is different: it is a 30-second video featuring his cat and apparently filmed from underneath his bed, posted without explanation or comment, as though Ellis himself was not aware of posting it.3 Ellis has close to a million followers, and the replies to this tweet are full of concern and arguments about how to interpret what has happened. A very brief sample of responses: @WoeItsKatie: “ADAM IS THIS YOU OR DAVID!? WE NEED FREAKING ANSWERS MAN! I AM SCARED!”4 @do_your_intro: “That cat is not acting and honestly it would be really ­difficult and v mean to make your cat uncomfortable abt something if it were a hoax/story. So obvs at least some of this is either true or based off some truth.”5 @erlinnatawiria: “Yo someone needs to capture this tweet and save the video JUST IN CASE.”6 @dcvalenz, responding to @erlinnatawiria: “It’s fake, you know. No need to capture it. He’ll “snap out of” his momentary “possession” […]”7

E. Kvistad (*)  University of South-Eastern Norway, Drammen, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_56

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@erlinnatawiria, responding to @dcvalenz: “I’ve noticed it’s fake since looong ago […] But, even if it’s not real, I enjoy how Adam builds the story.”8 The reader reception of “Dear David” has revolved around the question of its authenticity. The Irish Times asks in a headline, “is the bone-chilling online horror true or fake?”, and ends by noting that “Dear David needn’t be true to be truly affecting”.9 But the question cannot be dismissed so easily: if “Dear David” were being told as a fictional short story about a man haunted by a child ghost, it would be moderately spooky, but unlikely to draw a million readers. What its readers respond to are the things that suggest that it is real—its markers of authenticity, which are, of course, also markers of potential inauthenticity. “Dear David”’s readers do talk about the artistic aspects of the story, but most often and most enthusiastically, they discuss it as a possible hoax—and for a story to be possibly a hoax is, of course, for it to also be just possibly true. “Dear David” does not need to be true to affect its readers; it just needs to be potentially fake. This chapter will move through a series of online spaces, exploring how their use of familiarity, reader participation, and the interplay between authenticity and fakeness—an interplay that I will describe in this chapter as “hoaxiness”— creates a peculiarly immediate and immersive gothic experience for the reader. Its central texts are three online horror stories in the form of a Reddit thread, a Twitter thread, and a set of connected blogs and homepages, respectively: “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook”, “Dear David”, and “Dionaea House”. Each of these digital spaces invites the reader to engage with them. But unlike, for instance, most digital games, another type of interactive digital space that can be deployed for gothic storytelling, these spaces leave open to question what effect the reader’s actions will have and what the stakes of their involvement are. Readers who enter these haunted and haunting spaces find themselves without a map, with no wholly reliable way of telling what is real and what is not. The space’s boundaries may give way, allowing its gothic qualities to spill into the reader-explorer’s own life and surroundings. The readers may find themselves asking the characteristic questions of any gothic protagonist: what is in my home with me? Is it real? Will it hurt me? These questions form the structure of this chapter. These three stories are some of the better-known and more widely read and discussed digital gothic narratives, but I do not intend them to be read as fully representative of this fluid and rapidly growing genre. (In fact, as I discuss briefly below, these texts are themselves fluid: the stakes of “Dear David” have changed considerably in the months between the writing and editing of this introduction, while one of the “Dionaea House” sites has been taken down in the same space of time, leaving, fortunately, a Wattpad copy that I cite here.) Instead, I chose these texts primarily for their inventive and engaging approaches to the Gothic. Together they are suggestive of the range of possibilities and effects that digital spaces have to offer the Gothic. But the stories also have something else in common: they are all instances of the domestic Gothic. Each of them represents—or more precisely, I will suggest here, each of them is—a haunted house, a space that we can feel uncannily both at

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home and not at home in. Towards the end of Dale Bailey’s American Nightmares, a 1999 critical history of American haunted house narratives, Bailey looks at the then-current horror landscape and comments that we might conclude that the haunted house novel is already a thing of the past. But he looks forward to a digital future for the haunted house, invoking Ray Bradbury’s story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, written in 1950 and set in 2026, where a self-aware AI house is the only thing left “alive” after a nuclear apocalypse.10 Bailey’s reading is prescient, but from the perspective of the end of the last century, it would have been difficult to fully imagine how far the digital itself would become a home for us, or how inevitably that home would become haunted. The narratives in this chapter offer experiences of the Gothic that are as surreally convincing as a Twitter feed and as intimate as a Facebook wall. “Dionaea House” (2004–2006), “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook” (2014), and “Dear David” (2017–present) are, broadly defined, works of creepypasta. This term was originally a horror-specific derivative of “copypasta”, meaning a short text or image that has been transmitted online by repeated copying and pasting, so that the text’s origin and authorship is lost. Because of this free-floating, sourceless quality, creepypastas are often described as online urban legends. As with other urban legends, the origin of the story is always out of reach—it always seems to have happened to the storyteller’s cousin’s friend, never to the storyteller themselves, meaning that it can never quite be either verified or falsified. Over the last decade, though, the term’s meaning has widened. Perhaps in part because creepypastas have become a springboard for many creators to publish their work in more traditional formats, creators are now increasingly likely to attach their own names to their work, either on first publication or at a later stage. But the way readers understand this authorship is complicated by the other defining quality of creepypastas: that, again like urban legends, they are presented as authentic. “Dionaea House” is written by the screenwriter Eric Heisserer, but in the mid-2000s, when the story first appeared online, Heisserer was not presented as its creator but as a character in the story. More precisely, he appeared as one of several apparently real people writing a series of blogs about their real-life experiences that, when read alongside each other, told a single story. Similarly, “Dear David” is clearly a series of tweets by writer, comic artist, and Buzzfeed contributor Adam Ellis, but he presents himself not as the author of a work of fiction entitled “Dear David”, but as a person describing something that is really happening to him. The author of “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook” is only identifiable by their Reddit account name, “natesw”. This account only posts in the “My dead girlfriend” thread, which could certainly suggest that it represents a fictional persona, but nor would it be outside the realm of possibility for a real person to create an anonymous throwaway account to tell such a personal story. In this way, each of the stories is ambiguous in its authorship, or at least was so when first published: unlike urban legends and many earlier creepypastas, each story has a clear point of origin, but that origin can be imagined either as authentic or as fictional.

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The plot of “Dear David” is outlined above, but the other two stories require some brief recapitulation. “Dionaea House” is a story told through four loosely connected websites; each contains links to at least one of the others. “Correspondence from Mark Condry” archives a series of emails and texts from Mark Condry to his friend Eric Heisserer.11 In the emails, we learn that a former friend of the two, Andrew, recently shot two people before killing himself. Mark remembers Andrew changing strangely after an unsettling house-sitting experience, and this leads Mark to investigate the house in question. He finds the house, or an exact replica of it, in a different location to where it was originally, and enters it. His final text before disappearing reads: “THE DOOR IS OPEN” [sic].12 “Adventures in Babysitting” is a LiveJournal by a sixteen-year-old girl, Dani, describing her experience babysitting in what turns out to be the same house.13 In the final two entries, the tone of the blog changes drastically, suggesting that Dani herself is being changed or controlled by the house. Loreen Mathers’s LiveJournal is by another former occupant of the house, and supplies more details on the way it controls and alters occupants who remain inside for too long.14 “A Quiet Space” is Eric’s blog, describing how he continues the investigation after Mark’s disappearance.15 The final entry is written just before he enters the house. A subsequent entry by Eric’s girlfriend Connie on “Correspondence from Mark Condry” notes that Eric has been missing for over a year. “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook” is told through a single Reddit thread entitled “My dead girlfriend keeps messaging me on Facebook. I’ve got the screenshots. I don’t know what to do”.16 This thread title is the story’s only given title, although it is commonly referred to by the shorter title I use here. The thread is posted on r/nosleep, a subreddit devoted to sharing original horror accounts. The user natesw, whose given name (we learn from his Facebook profile) is Nathan, describes and shares screenshots of a series of Facebook messages he received from his girlfriend Emily’s account over a year after her death in a car accident. The new messages are almost wholly composed of snippets of the couple’s earlier message history. Some months into this, Emily’s account starts to tag itself in Nathan’s photos, “in spaces where it was plausible for her to be, or where she would usually hang out”.17 In the comments of the post, the commenters offer sympathy and search for explanations, and Nathan posts the most recent messages from Emily: photos of his computer chair and desk, taken from outside his house. But several commenters follow this up with posts of similar but not identical photos in which a person is shown sitting in the computer chair, claiming these were the original photos posted and that Nathan immediately edited his comment to replace them. At the same time, Nathan shows signs that he, too, has started to communicate through scrambled versions of earlier messages. The final comment posted from the natesw profile, not just in this thread but anywhere on Reddit, says that he is in his car in the garage, trying to build up the courage to get out, open the garage door and drive away. “My Dead Girlfriend”, “Dionaea House”, and “Dear David” are set in domestic spaces that become uncanny, although none of them are traditional haunted house

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stories. “Dionaea House” perhaps comes closest: the title refers to the Venus flytrap or dionaea muscipula, a plant with several identical ‘mouths’ that emit a scent to attract insects, allowing them to be trapped and absorbed as food. The story centres on a house that, the reader gradually realises, exists in identical forms in several places at once, like the mouths of a Venus flytrap, and has the ability to lure in and consume its occupants, either actually eating them or turning them into them hollowed-out automatons or puppets that leave the house to entrap more victims. Although “Dear David” establishes that it is not his home but Adam himself who is haunted, the story is set almost entirely in Adam’s apartment. When, shortly after his first dreams about David, Adam moves into a new apartment in the same building, the David encounters stop for a few weeks but then get worse, moving out of Adam’s dreams and into the physical space around him. Objects fall from shelves; his cats gather to stare at the front door at the same time every night; blurred images that seem to have David’s characteristic dented head appear on the photographs he takes; Polaroids taken inside the apartment start to come out black; a tape recorder left running at night records a single footstep near his bed. Adam documents the occurrences in photos, film clips and audio recordings, letting the reader become familiar with his hallway, his bookshelves, his bedroom, his cats. “My dead girlfriend” also lets us into a domestic space, but a much more restricted one; we are limited to the space immediately surrounding Nathan’s computer. We get one selfie showing Nathan in the chair in front of his computer, and the blurry photos taken from outside his window capture only the glowing screen and the computer chair (and, in the ‘alternative’ versions, the outline of a person who may be Nathan himself). Nathan’s physical home, then, appears in this text only as an adjunct to his online home, his computer screen. This is suggestive: while all three texts feature an actual, physical uncanny domestic space, in each of them the more important locus of horror is a homely, familiar digital space turned strange—a digital haunted house. In “My dead girlfriend”, the familiar, homely space that becomes subject to an inexplicable invasion is Nathan’s Facebook account. When the story begins, that space is already marked by loss and grief: Nathan explains that he left Emily’s Facebook account active “so I could send her the occasional message, post on her wall, go through her albums. It felt too final (and too un-Emily) to memorialise it”.18 Memorialisation is the process by which Facebook is able to recognise a user as dead; without it, the account’s online life will persist after the death of the person it represents, and Facebook will, for instance, continue to remind friends of the dead person’s birthday. Nathan’s decision keeps Emily’s account in a kind of suspended animation, making it a site that both continually reminds him of and refuses to acknowledge her death. We might think of Emily’s account as a digital version of what Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török call an intrapsychic tomb. Abraham and Török describe a failure or refusal to mourn as incorporation: instead of the loss being allowed to affect and transform the mourner, the lost love-object is metaphorically incorporated into and carried by the mourner in the hope of keeping it unchanged. This is, they suggest, a good way of becoming

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haunted.19 In this case, the failed mourning is not necessarily or not only Nathan’s (he claims that his interactions with her Facebook helps to give him closure, which we may or may not believe), but Facebook’s, too. The site simply goes on as if Emily were still alive, erecting an unacknowledged tomb for her within it. In the first screenshot Nathan posts, it is clear that he has been messaging Emily after her death and before the account starts to respond. In the messages we see, he seems to be trying to explain his choice not to memorialise her account: “you’re not a plaque on a wall”.20 To do so would be to relegate Emily to a static memory, rather than letting their continuing Facebook chat sustain the idea that the lines of communication are still, somehow, open. Underscoring the point, he describes her in the present tense—“fuck we’re nerds”—and then adds: “i’m still finding your hairties everywhere and your bobby pins i’m pretty sure they’re breeding”21

The hairties and bobby pins, persistent, intimate physical evidence of Emily’s recent existence, parallel the equally persistent, intimate evidence of her life online. Just as Nathan notes that “i’m pretty sure they’re breeding”—her material relics are not dwindling with time, but growing—so the remains of life in this digital tomb start to stir and reproduce. After this message from Nathan, Emily’s account reopens communications with the word “hello”. Nathan quickly notices that Emily’s postmortem communication is composed of snippets of earlier Facebook messages exchanged between the two. The new messages often repeat phrases related to cars and driving, in what feels like inchoate attempts to address Emily’s violent death. The cut-up technique itself can be seen as a way for the text to imagine or incorporate her body, which, Nathan finally tells us, was “severed in a diagonal line from her right hip to midway down her left thigh” in the car accident.22 The messages even seem to be trying to speak of Emily’s current state: at one point they reproduce a series of negative numbers that could be read as rapidly dropping temperatures, plead “my sweater is in the dryer and it’s really cold out :(/ really cold out / cold / Nathan /please stop”, and then produce their first original word, “FRE EZIN G” [sic].23 But the horror of the dead Emily’s communication (if indeed the messages are from her, which is, of course, never quite confirmed) is all the more effective because it is not purely horrific. The use of cut-up technique means that the living Emily’s everyday communication with her boyfriend—inside jokes, minor complaints, plans for the future—is preserved even as it is repurposed to describe her death. Both Nathan himself and the Reddit commenters recognise the appropriation of this familiar, prosaic textual detritus as a very intimate violation. Not only that, but it seems to be a distinctly relatable one. Commenters describe what they would do or feel in Nathan’s situation; several of them describe losing loved ones and dealing with their digital remains, or having once sent desperate Facebook messages like the ones Nathan sent the day Emily died. The haunting of this digital home is experienced as especially and immediately uncanny because it is, in a sense, also the reader’s own home—if we are habitual

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users of Facebook Messenger, at least. The look and feel of these message threads is immediately familiar, a territory we ourselves revisit many times a day: this haunted space is where we live, too. But there is also a second digital home in play here: the medium of the story itself, a discussion thread on the subreddit r/nosleep. The commenters on this thread invariably talk about Nathan’s story as an account of a real experience, although they do not necessarily state a belief that anything supernatural is happening—for instance, several argue that Nathan must be dissociating and unconsciously posting the Emily messages himself. No one suggests what is, after all, the most likely explanation, that the whole story is made up. The reason for this consistent credulity is that the entire Nosleep discussion forum is marked, albeit ambivalently, as a space for hoaxes. The sidebar describes Nosleep as “a place for authors to share their original horror stories”, with the rule that authors must not state whether or not their stories are true, and commenters must treat all stories as true accounts: “Suspension of disbelief is key here. Everything is true here, even if it’s not”.24 As a result, the commenters know what is expected of them and play their roles exemplarily. Aaron Trammell and Anne Gilbert write on perhaps the most culturally prominent work of creepypasta, Slender Man, as an open-source horror meme, describing it as the collective, collaborative product of a lack of regulation that gives contributors the chance to play with it.25 Hundreds of writers, filmmakers and other creators have contributed to the online lore around Slender Man, a monstrous figure who first appeared in a series of photoshopped photographs on the SomethingAwful forums in 2009. Had the creator of the first Slender Man images, Eric Knudsen, done more to keep control of his intellectual property, the meme would not have spread so successfully—and, though Trammell and Gilbert do not explore this, it would probably not have been such a successful hoax. Indeed, Slender Man only started to be presented as authentic once other creators began to collaborate on the story, like Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, whose Slender Man-based YouTube serial “Marble Hornets” (2009–2014) was initially framed as documentary.26 While the doctored photos are presented as authentic within Knudsen’s initial post—captions describe them as photographs recovered from a burned library—the thread they were posted in was titled “Create Paranormal Images”, framing the photos as creative efforts rather than found documents (although there is just a hint of ambiguity in the title, as if it might be possible to use Photoshop to create and spread a genuinely paranormal image). For a more in-depth exploration of reader collaboration in the Slender Man meme, as well as in horror fiction more generally, see Aslak Rustad Hauglid (2016).27 My thoughts in this chapter on the role of participation and interactivity in shaping readers’ experiences of and immersion in horror fiction owe a great deal both to Hauglid’s work and to my conversations with him. The Nosleep forum, like the Slender Man meme, is also a space of play, combining a single stringent rule—act as if everything is real—with the freedom to invent and create in collaboration with others. For readers of “My dead girlfriend”,

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this space of play creates an efficient hoax experience: practically every commenter behaves in a way that supports the idea that the story is real. However, it also removes some of the hoax’s effectiveness: the space of play is so clearly delineated that it is almost impossible not to read “even if it’s not true” as “it’s definitely not true”. In fact, one of the help pages finally settles the matter with the “#1 Frequently Asked NoSleep Question of All Time”: “Q: I’m still so confused. Is everything here actually true? A: No. It’s all fiction, and everyone is pretending”.28 “My dead girlfriend”, then, is probably most effective as a hoax when shared beyond its home on Nosleep, encountering readers who are unaware of the rules of the subreddit. “This is the story that brought me to reddit and I didn’t know nosleep [sic] was for fictional stories”, writes one Reddit user, responding to a mention of the story in an unrelated Reddit thread. “I spent months with this story in the back of my mind”.29 While it seems likely that the vast majority of readers treat the story as fictional, there are online traces of those who thought it was worth investigating, just in case. When you search for the title of the story, Google suggests the related searches “august 7 2012 emily car accident” and “august 7 2012 three car collision australia” [sic]. In the stories I discuss here, authenticity and fictionality do not operate as binary qualities, but as interacting elements. “My dead girlfriend” is not really a hoax—the fact that it is published on /nosleep makes it easy to reveal it as almost certainly fictional—but nor is it clearly and incontrovertibly presented as fiction. Instead, I would like to describe it with a somewhat playful but hopefully also useful neologism, as hoaxy. My discussion of hoaxes and the hoaxy here draws on the work of Line Henriksen, who gives a philosophical reading of both “My dead girlfriend” and other creepypasta as hoaxes.30 For Henriksen, hoaxes, even after they break their promises, are performative—the act of promising itself makes things happen, even if it is not exactly what one would expect. I want to preserve this sense of duality in my reading: narrative hoaxiness can work to deceive and harm readers, but it can also act as a source of creative power. I use the term ‘hoaxiness’ to describe the interplay between markers of authenticity and markers of fictionality or fakeness in a narrative. Markers of authenticity are a well-established gothic trope: foundational gothic texts like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897) are made up of documents intended to be read as authentic within the world of the story, and their use of the epistolary form can be seen as a forerunner of found-footage horror films like Paranormal Activity (2007) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). Markers of authenticity are also, of course, central to the folk horror mythology of which urban legends and creepypasta are modern subgenres: different as the hulder of Norwegian folk mythology, the Hook Man of 1950s American urban legend, and the internet’s own Slender Man are, they all have in common that they are framed as genuine threats by the narratives in which they appear. “Dear David” has one very obvious marker of fictionality—it is about a ghost. But it also has numerous and complex markers of authenticity: it appears on

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Twitter, a medium almost exclusively used for real-life narratives rather than fiction, and is framed as a real-life experience by its author. It is told in what appears to be real time, rather than in retrospect, and over the course of many months. It makes use of photographs, videos, and audio files, which not only allow us to see and hear ‘evidence’ of the haunting but plays into our associations with the medium: we are used to seeing people livetweet evidence of their real-life experiences, and this feels similar. Finally, the story can apparently be affected by the actions of readers; for instance, Ellis takes his Twitter followers’ advice to burn sage in his apartment in order to cleanse its energy and drive away the ghost. Hoaxiness is comparative: a narrative can be trying more or less hard to make us believe that it is real, and thus be more or less hoaxy. In my usage here, the harder a narrative tries to be accepted as authentic, the hoaxier it is. For instance, the framing of Eric Knudsen’s Slender Man images mean that they are only mildly hoaxy—the image captions present them as authentic, but their wider context in the discussion thread immediately indicates that they are not. “My dead girlfriend”’s framing makes it a little hoaxier, in that it takes some reading around on /nosleep to discover that it is a site where fictional stories are treated as real, and even then the bare possibility remains that this could be one of the really real ones. And “Dear David” is hoaxier still, since it is never framed as fictional. This usage, of course, holds a presumption that the narrative is not actually real—if we assume that the events of “Dear David” really happened, it would be odd to say that the story’s markers of authenticity make it hoaxy. That said, a narrative does not have to be established as inauthentic to be described as hoaxy. If we were to somehow find out for certain that “Dear David” was a true story we would obviously have to reevaluate it, but as it stands, readers experience it as hoaxy because it has markers of both authenticity and fictionality. Hoaxiness also has a subjective, relational dimension. A reader who, for instance, is familiar with the conventions of /nosleep may experience a particular story as obviously and unquestionably fictional in spite of its use of authenticity markers, while another reader might find the same story potentially convincing, and thus more powerfully hoaxy. The reader’s personal belief in the supernatural obviously plays into the experience of hoaxiness in these stories, but it is not necessarily the determining factor. As we have seen with “My dead girlfriend”, readers can treat a story as factually true without assuming that there is anything supernatural at work in it. Equally personal, and equally important for the experience of hoaxiness, is the story’s reception and dissemination, meaning that those who pass the story on take part in amplifying or diminishing its hoaxiness depending on how they share it. Just as an urban legend told breathlessly around a campfire is hoaxier than the same story in a collected volume of contemporary folklore, an unsettling YouTube video discovered in a curated Buzzfeed list may feel less hoaxy than one that drifts serendipitously into our recommendation algorithm late at night. “Dear David” has been disseminated and reported in online media since it began, and almost every article has taken essentially the same approach: to treat

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it almost as if it is true. A few excerpts and headlines illustrate the ambivalent line these writers take in sharing the story: “Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, the mounting evidence that Ellis is indeed being stalked by a demonic pint-sized spirit is hard to ignore” (“Is Adam Ellis OK? The Dear David tweeter just posted a horrifically cryptic tweet”, in Bustle).31 “I am trying to be rational here, but all I can think is ‘NOPE NOPE NOPE’!” (“There’s been a disturbing development in the Dear David ghost story”, in Unilad).32 “Let’s just say that Adam is either a genius for putting together this incredible hoax or he is definitely, 100% going to die” (“The man who’s been haunted by creepy child ghost Dear David just tweeted a mysterious new video”, in Thought Catalog).33 Of course, these articles are written for entertainment purposes rather than as investigative journalism; the ambivalence they express about the story’s authenticity does not mean that it is genuinely impossible to establish whether it is authentic. Rather, in recounting, commenting on, and spreading the “Dear David” story, these writers are taking on similar roles to those of /nosleep commenters and campfire storytellers, keeping a hoaxy space open for creative purposes. In his work on how readers perceive reality in fiction with apparently supernatural elements, Tzvetan Todorov describes “the fantastic” as a time-limited quality, one that exists only for as long as the reader cannot say for sure whether what is happening is supernatural or mundane.34 The hoaxy, in some ways a parallel term, decays quickly for similar reasons. A story’s hoaxiness can fade over time as readers investigate and debunk its claims, real-life events overtake the narrative, or the creator seeks recognition or remuneration for their work by translating it into a more conventional creative format While Eric Heisserer, the author of “Dionaea House”, always presents his story as fictional in interviews, he notes that “[the] vast majority of people who responded to the story thought it was true, to the point that they were telling me that they had gone to school with one of my fictional characters, or they lived down the street from them, or they knew them personally somehow […] I began to get contacted by professional paranormal investigators asking to take the case on”.35 But the unintended hoaxy effect of “Dionaea House” was strongest right at the start—as Heisserer says, he started getting emails about the story while he was still in the process of completing the websites. Now, a reader determined to believe in the story has to contend with the fact that Heisserer was evidently not consumed by a carnivorous house fifteen years ago, but is alive, well, and writing film scripts for Netflix. As I revise this chapter in early 2019, “Dear David” is no longer being updated, Adam Ellis is posting normally on Twitter, and the story is being developed into a movie by New Line. Unlike Heisserer, Ellis has never explicitly described his story as fictional, and presents the lack of updates as an authenticity marker in itself: “I’ve said a few times that I’d update if anything happened. I’m not going to start inventing stuff just to keep a steady flow of updates”.36 But the story’s shift into a format where markers of authenticity are harder to deploy effectively will inevitably change the way it is read. “Dear David” will find a wider audience as a film, but its hoaxy effect will fade.

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In Robert W. Chambers’s “The Yellow Sign” (1895), a painter and his model come across a copy of a play that draws them in hypnotically, fills them with awful knowledge and eventually leads to their deaths: “We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words […] Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!”37 Chambers’s fictional play The King in Yellow, along with H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire the Necronomicon, have influenced a century of horror writers and made the idea of a text that kills or otherwise destroys its readers a central trope in the weird horror tradition. But while there are any number of fan works purporting to be both works—James Blish’s short story “More Light” (1970), for instance, includes his imagining of the full text of The King in Yellow minus its very last line—Lovecraft’s and Chambers’s stories are about these dangerous texts; they are not the texts themselves. A number of digital horror stories take a more direct approach to the trope and claim to present actual threats to anyone who reads them. Chain letters promising good or bad luck depending on whether the reader passes them on have a long history both on- and offline. Horror chain letters are often unsophisticated, follow a fairly set template and tend to circulate among children and young teens—though there are also more literarily complex examples, like the creepypasta “The Curious Case of Smile.jpg” (2013), which claims to curse readers by showing them the image of a demonic, grinning dog. One typical chain narrative that has been circulating since 2007 begins, “Hi, I am Teddy. Once you read this you cannot get out. Finish reading this until it is done! As I said, I am Teddy. I am 7 years old. I have no eyes and blood all over my face. I am dead. If you don’t send this to at least 12 people I will come to your house at midnight and I’ll hide under your bed. When you’re asleep, I’ll kill you”.38 It then goes on to offer a menu of different fates depending on how many people the reader passes the letter on to. This little story follows the formula of The King in Yellow closely: it claims to instantly trap the reader, and the process of reading itself calls up a being that enters the reader’s home and kills them. Unlike The King in Yellow, though, these stories offer an opportunity for the reader to affect their own fate by passing on the story and the curse to other readers. While presumably none of these narratives have ever fulfilled their promise of killing a reader who failed to carry out their orders, they are nonetheless interactive, inviting the reader to take part in, continue, and spread the narrative. By allowing these stories to find new victims, the reader-disseminator becomes a character in the narrative—at worst a secondary monster, at best a sort of disease vector for the story’s infection. “Dear David” and “My Dead Girlfriend” are also interactive narratives, but the possibilities for reader participation that they offer are both less immediately threatening and more complex. Neither story claims that simply reading it will harm the reader in any way, and while many readers, like the writers of the “Dear David” articles described above, choose to disseminate the stories in the same way that they would an urban legend, the stories also allow readers a wider range of

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possible roles. By commenting in the “My dead girlfriend” Reddit thread or replying to Adam Ellis’s tweets, readers can act as paranormal investigators, advisors, debunkers, and assistants. They can look for clues that the author/protagonist has yet to notice, give encouragement and warnings, request more information, and offer advice on how to proceed. In each case, the author/protagonist responds to at least some of the readers and allows their contributions to shape the story. “Dionaea House”, however, combines these modes of interaction, offering the possibility of complex reader participation while also staging a directly threatening or ‘infectious’ narrative. The house of “Dionaea House” acts like a chain letter: at various points, both Mark and Eric theorise that even learning about the house’s existence puts one at risk of being drawn in, consumed, and then going on to draw in further victims. In a late-night email to Eric, Mark describes a sense that his attempts at uncovering the truth through research and investigation are doing nothing but leading him further into a trap: “i think i’m getting close to the truth but really i’m tickling some invisible hair”—a reference to the sensory hairs that tell Venus flytraps when a fly has landed in their mouths—“and the ground is about to fold up on me and swallow me down”.39 The story implies that it is necessary to actually enter the house in order to be completely consumed, since everyone who disappears or is turned into a lure has spent at least some time physically inside the house. But there are also suggestions that researching, reading about, or even just being aware of the existence of the house can allow it to influence one, and that this is, in fact, the mechanism by which the house attracts new victims. Mark’s emails give hints of this almost from the start; at one point he briefly mentions a property owned by Andrew’s stepfather—this turns out to be the Dionaea House—and adds, “Andrew was scared to death of that house”. In context, this statement comes out of nowhere; it is as if he is compelled to bring it up. Mark and Eric both experience ringing in their ears and various disorienting technical problems (car trouble, stopped watches, and phones losing reception and sending texts hours late) after starting to investigate the house, but before they enter it. Moreover, it is possible to read the story as suggesting that both they and the babysitter, Dani, are drawn to write about and share their experiences with others because of the house’s influence—in other words, that the story exists online at all because the house “wants” it to. Mark apologises to Eric for describing his investigation of the house at length in his emails, while Eric gives fairly thin-sounding reasons for putting the emails and a description of his own investigation online. Dani starts to keep a LiveJournal as soon as she gets her babysitting job, and later finds herself writing in it without actively deciding to: “I sort of get on and start typing automatically before I go to bed”.40 Of course, the characters’ decisions to put their experiences online have an obvious extradiegetic purpose, but the lack of a clear in-story motivation to narrate, and the apparent compulsion to do it anyway, is a gothic effect in itself. The only part of “Dionaea House” that allows readers to comment is Eric’s blog, “A Quiet Space”. As in “My Dead Girlfriend” and “Dear David”, these comment sections create a space for readers to participate in the story’s creative endeavour, and many of them take the opportunity to do so. The comments suggest a mix of

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readers who either believe the story is real or are playing along, readers who are aware that it is not real and want to offer praise, critiques or suggestions, and comments left by the author posing as a reader or character in the story. But even for readers who do not leave comments, Dionaea House is inherently participatory: because, within the story, the house draws people in by attracting their attention and making them want to explore it further, reading in itself makes the reader part of the narrative. Moreover, the reader’s experience and the characters’ experience of investigating the house do not just mirror each other—at several points, the reader’s experience and the characters’ experiences are identical. The story’s ergodic structure makes the reader do a certain amount of research, link-following and comment-reading to put together the plot, and while the characters do some of their most dangerous research offline, much of their investigative work is exactly the same as the reader’s: the characters, too, piece the story together from emails, blogs, and newspaper reports. For much, if not all of the story, what you are experiencing as a reader is exactly what the characters are experiencing—and, the story implies, starting to read is the first step to being drawn inside. These three stories, then, are able to create immersive and powerful gothic reading experiences by building a haunted space out of their own storytelling medium. Because the stories are told and take place online, readers not only recognise and experience the stories’ haunted spaces as their own digital homes (Facebook Messenger, Reddit, Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogspot), but experience a slippage between reading and living the story. “Dionaea House” does not need virtual reality technology to create a realistic simulation of a world where carnivorous houses exist. Because so much of the story is staged online, all it needs to do is to simulate, for instance, a LiveJournal written by a teenager babysitting in a carnivorous house—and while virtual reality has yet to create a simulation of a haunted house that is indistinguishable from reality, a fictional LiveJournal, like a fictional Reddit post or a fictional tweet, looks just like a real one. There are limits to the immersive potential of these gothic narratives. As our online experiences become hoaxier, readers may get better and better at navigating and deciphering the authenticity of online narratives. Moreover, the digital staging that makes these narratives peculiarly effective also limits their reach; if we want to avoid being haunted by Facebook messages from the dead, all we have to do is to look away from the screen. At the same time, our growing physical and emotional entwinement with digital spaces creates the potential for an increasingly gothic intimacy with these narratives. Where a reader of “Dionaea House” in 2005 might have read it on a desktop computer in their study, in 2019 “Dear David” can appear to them as they scroll their Twitter feed in bed. Late one night while “Dear David” was still in progress, I actively decided not to check Twitter, just in case there was an update to the story—I prefer to get the creeps in daylight. And then suddenly I was looking at a photograph of a blurred, ghostly shape. Checking Twitter had become so engrained in my muscle memory that I simply did it without conscious volition. As readers, as we grow closer to our digital technology, we may find the boundaries between our own homely spaces and the digital haunted house starting to dissolve.

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Notes





1. Adam Ellis, tweet, 7 August 2017. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/8945835 95309842432. Accessed 24 January 2019. 2. Adam Ellis, tweet, 7 August 2017. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/8945828 99663446017. Accessed 24 January 2019. 3. Adam Ellis, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/9575279 42816518144. Accessed 24 January 2019. 4. Katie, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/WoeItsKatie/status/9575308256 33030145. Accessed 24 January 2019. 5. Monster a Million Different Kinds, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/do_your_ intro/status/957528968101552128. Accessed 24 January 2019. 6. Erlin Natawiria, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/erlinnatawiria/status/957529831213690881. Accessed 24 January 2019. 7. Dave, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/dcvalenz/status/957588733943078912. Accessed 24 January 2019. 8. Erlin Natawiria, tweet, 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/erlinnatawiria/status/ 957590738988015621. Accessed 24 January 2019. 9. Seamas O’Reilly, “Dear David: Is the Bone-Chilling Online Horror True or Fake?”, The Irish Times, 18 December 2017. 10. Dale Bailey, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (Bowling Green, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 110. 11. Eric Heisserer, “Correspondence from Mark Condry”, 2004–2006. https://www.dionaea-house.com. Accessed 8 February 2018. This site is currently down. The full text of the site is reproduced here: https://www.wattpad.com/159742580-creepypasta-the-dionaea-house. Accessed 24 January 2019. 12. Eric Heisserer, “Correspondence”. 13. Eric Heisserer, “Adventures in Babysitting”, 2004. https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. 14. Eric Heisserer, “Loreenmathers”, 2005–2006. https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. 15. Eric Heisserer, “A Quiet Space”, 2004. https://dionaeahouse.blogspot.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. 16. Natesw, “My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook. I Have the Screenshots. I don’t know what to do”, 2014. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/. Accessed 24 January 2019. 17. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 18. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 19. Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Versus Incorporation”, 1972, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis vol. 1, trans. N.T. Rand (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994). 125–138. 20. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 21. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 22. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 23. Natesw, “My dead girlfriend”. 24. “Nosleep”. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/. Accessed 24 January 2019. 25. Aaron Trammell and Anne Gilbert, “Extending Play to Critical Media Studies”, Games and Culture, vol. 9, no. 6, 2014, 391–405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014549301. Accessed 24 January 2019. 26. Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, dir., “Marble Hornets”, 2009–2014. https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets. Accessed 24 January 2019.

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27. Aslak Rustad Hauglid, ‘This Is Not For You’: Reader Agency and Intimacy in Contemporary Horror Fiction (Oslo, Oslo University, 2016). 28. Ibitemynails, “#1 Frequently Asked NoSleep Question of All Time”, 2015. https://www. reddit.com/r/nosleep/wiki/help. Accessed 24 January 2019. 29. Tagteamstripper, “Apparently You Can Talk to the Dead Through Facebook! (I Also Know Fargo Is Not in MN)”, 2018. https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/7sfqq0/apparently_you_can_talk_to_the_dead_through/dt65qpm. Accessed 24 January 2019. 30. Line Henriksen, In the Company of Ghosts: Hauntology, Ethics, Digital Monsters (Linköping, Linköping University, 2016). 31. Brandi Neal, “Is Adam Ellis OK? The ‘Dear David’ Tweeter Just Posted A Horrifically Cryptic Tweet”, Bustle, 2018. https://www.bustle.com/p/is-adam-ellis-ok-the-dear-davidtweeter-just-posted-a-horrifically-cryptic-tweet-8109344. Accessed 24 January 2019. 32. George McKay, “There’s been a disturbing development in the Dear David ghost story”, 2018, Unilad. https://www.unilad.co.uk/viral/theres-been-a-disturbing-development-inthe-dear-david-ghost-story/. Accessed 24 January 2019. 33. Callie Byrnes, “The Man Who’s Been Haunted by Creepy Child Ghost Dear David Just Tweeted a Mysterious New Video”, Thought Catalog, 2018. https://thoughtcatalog.com/ callie-byrnes/2018/01/the-man-whos-been-haunted-by-creepy-child-ghost-dear-davidjust-tweeted-a-mysterious-new-video/. Accessed 24 January 2019. 34. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975). 35. Scott Myers, “Interview with Eric Heisserer (Part 1)”, Go into the Story, 2013. https:// gointothestory.blcklst.com/interview-part-1-eric-heisserer-2012-2014-black-list141e1058d5e6. Accessed 24 January 2019. 36. Adam Ellis, tweet, 18 March 2018. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/97555123 5494498306?lang=en. Accessed 24 January 2019. 37. Robert W. Chambers, “The Yellow Sign”, in The King in Yellow, 1895. ebooks@Adelaide. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chambers/robert_w/king_in_yellow/. Accessed 24 January 2019. 38. Anonymous, “‘I am Teddy’ Chain Letter”, ca 2007. https://www.thoughtco.com/i-amteddy-chain-letter-3299499. Accessed 24 January 2019. 39. Eric Heisserer, “Correspondence from Mark Condry”, 2004–2005. https://www.wattpad. com/159742580-creepypasta-the-dionaea-house. Accessed 24 January 2019. 40. Eric Heisserer, “Adventures in Babysitting”, 2004. https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com. Accessed 24 January 2019.

Bibliography Anonymous. “‘I am Teddy’ Chain Letter”. Ca 2007. https://www.thoughtco.com/i-am-teddychain-letter-3299499. Accessed 24 January 2019. Abraham, Nicolas, and Mária Török. “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Versus Incorporation”. 1972. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis vol. 1. Trans. N.T. Rand. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. 125–138. Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Chambers, Robert W. “The Yellow Sign”. The King in Yellow. 1895. ebooks@Adelaide. https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chambers/robert_w/king_in_yellow/. Accessed 24 January 2019. Dave. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/dcvalenz/status/957588733943078912. Accessed 24 January 2019.

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Ellis, Adam. Tweet. 7 August 2017. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/8945828996 63446017. Accessed 24 January 2019. Ellis, Adam. Tweet. 7 August 2017. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/894583595309842432. Accessed 24 January 2019. Ellis, Adam. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/moby_dickhead/status/95752 7942816518144. Accessed 24 January 2019. Hauglid, Aslak Rustad. ‘This Is Not For You’: Reader Agency and Intimacy in Contemporary Horror Fiction. Oslo, Oslo University, 2016. Henriksen, Line. In the Company of Ghosts: Hauntology, Ethics, Digital Monsters. Linköping, Linköping University, 2016. Heisserer, Eric. “Adventures in Babysitting”. 2004. https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. Heisserer, Eric. “A Quiet Space”. 2004. https://dionaeahouse.blogspot.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. Heisserer, Eric. “Correspondence from Mark Condry”. 2004–2005. https://www.dionaea-house. com. Accessed 8 February 2018. Currently unavailable. Heisserer, Eric. “Correspondence from Mark Condry”. 2004–2005. https://www.wattpad. com/159742580-creepypasta-the-dionaea-house. Accessed 24 January 2019. Heisserer, Eric. “Loreenmathers”. 2005–2006. https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com. Accessed 24 January 2019. Ibitemynails. “#1 Frequently Asked NoSleep Question of All Time”. 2015. https://www.reddit. com/r/nosleep/wiki/help. Accessed 24 January 2019. Katie. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/WoeItsKatie/status/957530825633030145. Accessed 24 January 2019. Monster a Million Different Kinds. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/do_your_intro/ status/957528968101552128. Accessed 24 January 2019. Myers, Scott.“Interview with Eric Heisserer (Part 1)”. Go into the Story. 2013. https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/interview-part-1-eric-heisserer-2012-2014-black-list-141e1058d5e6. Accessed 24 January 2019. Natawiria, Erlin. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/erlinnatawiria/status/957529831 213690881. Accessed 24 January 2019. Natawiria, Erlin. Tweet. 28 January 2018. https://twitter.com/erlinnatawiria/status/95759 0738988015621. Accessed 24 January 2019. Natesw. “My Dead Girlfriend Keeps Messaging Me on Facebook. I Have the Screenshots. I Don’t Know What to Do”. 2014. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/29kd1x/my_ dead_girlfriend_keeps_messaging_me_on_facebook/. Accessed 24 January 2019. Neal, Brandi. “Is Adam Ellis OK? The ‘Dear David’ Tweeter Just Posted A Horrifically Cryptic Tweet”. Bustle. 2018. https://www.bustle.com/p/is-adam-ellis-ok-the-dear-david-tweeter-justposted-a-horrifically-cryptic-tweet-8109344. Accessed 24 January 2019. “Nosleep”. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/. Accessed 24 January 2019. O’Reilly, Seamas. “Dear David: Is the Bone-Chilling Online Horror True or Fake?”. The Irish Times. 18 December 2017. Tagteamstripper. “Apparently You Can Talk to the Dead Through Facebook! (I Also Know Fargo Is Not in MN)”. 2018. https://www.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/7sfqq0/apparently_you_can_talk_to_the_dead_through/dt65qpm. Accessed 24 January 2019. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975. Trammell, Aaron, and Anne Gilbert. “Extending Play to Critical Media Studies”. Games and Culture. Vol. 9. No. 6. 2014. 391–405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014549301. Accessed 24 January 2019. Wagner, Troy, and Joseph DeLage dir. “Marble Hornets”. 2009–2014. https://www.youtube.com/ user/MarbleHornets. Accessed 24 January 2019.

Anxiety in the Digital Age David Langdon

If there is a word that encapsulates the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century, it is ‘acceleration’. George Moore’s highly influential 1965 paper, ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’, hypothesised that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (a technology that influenced the power of computing, the development of electronic watches, and numerous other advancements) was set to increase exponentially over the next ten years. This fairly innocuous theory was borne out, and grew over time into a largely simplified theorem known as ‘Moore’s Law’. Moore’s Law is usually expressed as ‘the power of a given technology will double over a dramatically short space of time, and will continue to do so indefinitely’. Whilst this law may stand as a gross oversimplification of a complex point, it does serve as a useful means to illustrate this concept of ‘acceleration’. Throughout the last decade of the twentieth century landmark changes in the function of society, were designed to increase speed of communication. Letters, fax machines, dial-up broadband—all had been swept away on a tide of lightning-fast interactions. A thought may strike its spark in a person’s mind one moment, and (provided they have in their possession a device capable of doing so) may be shared and read around the globe the next. Moving through the first decade of the twenty-first century this process accelerated, going from something that was possible with enough dedication to something the average person in the developed world may do as quickly and easily as the original thought itself. It is small wonder that we have elected to call our current time the Information Age, as asserted by James Glieck.1 From our current times of hyper-acceleration, it is positively quaint to imagine the process by which Horace Walpole, the originator of the gothic novel, first chose to communicate his nightmarish vision to the world. He would have had to awaken, drag himself over to his desk, and begin scribbling away using pen and ink in what would have seemed to be a feverishly fast pace. This approach

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to composing an extended piece of writing is already fast becoming an alien idea to us. But this is not all. In order to actually have others read his work, Walpole would have needed to take his manuscript to a publisher’s house, arrange for a cast-iron copy of his hand-etched words to be crafted, and then affixed to a machine that required multiple operators, and a supply of paper and ink. Even after this was done, the physical print editions would have to be delivered to libraries and readers, or, at times, serialised in the pages of a periodicial or newspaper. Such a process is entirely unthinkable now, and it is here we see the truth of Moore’s Law. The technology available to the creator of literary fiction remained limited to the pen (stylus, quill, etc.) and ink from the dawn of civilisation up until the early twentieth century, when photographic technology allowed the creation of recorded images. Sound then began to accompany image, codifying the modern-day concept of the film, in 1927. The next great technological leap, the creation of the personal computer, would occur just over sixty years later in the 1980s, and the Internet and digital games first began to enter public consciousness as a means of creative endeavour at the close of that decade, though of course it may be argued that these technologies have only begun to achieve universal acceptance as modes of artistic expression in the new millennium. To move from Moore to Newton (and neatly bracket the Gothic’s history), every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Just as increasing urbanisation, the British Empire’s slow decline, and developments in scientific thought inform the Gothic of the fin de siecle, so do the technological advances and shrinking world of the Information Age result in the birth of an Information Gothic, a Gothic that is concerned with lies, falsehoods, and deception. Before getting into the main topic of discussion for this chapter, however, it is vital that the author’s understanding of the Gothic be elucidated. In the past, the literary Gothic has commonly been read as a mode defined by the recurrence of tropes and stock features, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s provided laundry-list of tropes in her 1986 work, including ‘the oppressive ruin’ and ‘the older tyrannical older man with the piercing gaze’,2 and Jerrold E. Hogle’s conception of the Gothic as being identifiable by its invocation of an ‘antiquated or seemingly antiquated space [within which] are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story’.3 Both of these approaches are a fine starting point, but both succumb an issue that will be referred to as the ‘Young Frankenstein fallacy’. First alluded to by Anne Williams in her seminal Art of Darkness, wherein she states ‘Not every castle is Gothic, and not every Gothic has a castle’4 this fallacy refers to the fact that the comedic Mel Brooks film possesses a number of core gothic tropes, but utilises them in an entirely different way to create a highly different effect. The same is true of works like Harry Potter or Count Duckula. It is also worth pointing out that gothic tropes are subject to evolve and transform over time, so the gothic castle has been replaced by the gothic cityscape, and domineering astrocrats have been replaced with domineering middle-managers, the ghost with the extra-dimensional entity or alien lifeform, and so on.

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If there is consistency to be found within the Gothic, it is not to be found solely in the tropes addressed, but rather in more abstract concepts. The Gothic is, as Punter has stated, ‘defined by fear’5—it is a mode of writing that focuses on fretting its audience and exploring taboo topics and controversial material. Whilst its core tropes evolve and alter, the Gothic is always dedicated to exploring topics that exist at the margins of the society of its time- criminality, sexuality, monstrosity, and the supernatural (or belief therein!). Yet the gothic approach is far from radical—indeed, as Robert Mighall has stated, ‘These [Gothic] novels do not reject the advances of enlightenment, modernity and civilisation […] rather, they cling to these totems more insistently through their troubled recognition of the alternative’.6 From this, it is then possible to extrapolate two general consistencies perceivable within the Gothic—a consistence of subject matter and a consistence of approach to that subject matter. Gothic works will continually reflect predominant social concerns and taboos, taking as their subject controversial or troubling topics that are paramount in the societies of the time. Any literary form will reflect its historical moment, but the Gothic seems uniquely located to focus on the prevailing concerns of its day. From its origins as a reaction to the Enlightenment scientific boom, through the urban terrors of the fin de siecle and beyond, the Gothic has always served as a bellwether for the society of its day, reacting to change and creating literary thought experiments exploring possible consequences, concerns, and fears. Yet these concerns could be easily addressed within non-fiction, in newspapers, for example, or indeed more grounded works, and not be labelled as being a part of the Gothic. This signals the need for a second consistency—that of focus. The Gothic does not address the social concerns that it focuses upon in a calm and logical manner, but rather through sensationalism, excitement, and thrills. They focus on attempting to disturb and deceive the audience, whether this means lying about the provenance of the text, as Walpole’s original did, or laying other traps and misdirection for the reader. Most critically, they utilise the form in which they appear in a complex way to further their own impact. These consistencies suggest the evident appeal for a Gothic for the modern age—a Gothic that taps into the modern concerns of the Information Age, and which incorporates the new technologies that the twenty-first century has brought in its patterns of deception. What these modern concerns might be is easy to extrapolate. In his seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan conceived of the mass media as an extension of the sensory organs of humanity: ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’.7 He described this extension as ushering in an ‘age of anxiety’8 where humanity was constantly aware of terrible events but felt unable to act upon them—a primary example being the progression of the Vietnam War, extensively covered by television reports. McLuhan wrote this in 1964, and as technology has progressed, the effects have only deepened. What distinguishes the impact of information

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age technologies from the impact of the media innovations of the sixties is that— as the business guru Andy Law has argued in his work Implosion (2013)—the Internet has been an implosive rather than an explosive force of change. Whilst TV and mass media reached out to the outside world, ‘carrying culture out into new places’,9 the Internet ‘is taking us back into ourselves and exploding inwards the behaviours that we already know’.10 This logically means that the age of anxiety has been brought inward—worry and anxiety has been invited inside, into private, mental spaces. It is this transition, this extension upon the age of anxiety, that forms the basis for a Digital Gothic. Times of change and transition are, historically, peak times for the Gothic—the original Gothic began in a period of revolution and national upheaval, for example, and is commonly determined to have resurged in popularity towards the close of the nineteenth century and the twentieth, a time when various concerns and worries were brought to the fore. The transition between twentieth and twenty-first is no different, and whilst the nineteenth century fretted about increased urbanisation, worries about humanity’s degeneration and a colonial backlash, the twentieth century found itself concerned with technology, and the impact upon the collective psyche. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Ian Dowbiggin affirms that ‘by the early 21st century, a perfect storm of social, medical, and biological circumstances had converged to produce an upsurge in anxiety. The overall environment of modern-day life […] bestows a kind of legitimacy on the pool of anxiety-related symptoms’.11 Dowbiggin makes mention of, amongst other factors, the climate of suspicion after 9/11, and the fast spreading of paranoiac mentalities via the Internet.12 If we are to read the Gothic as representing a specific response to social concerns, then we must logically content that one of the principal concerns of the Digital Gothic is the impact of this new age of anxiety; the effect that the Internet and other communication technology has had upon the collective psyche. We can also state that the specific form taken by the Gothic will reflect the new technologies and narrative forms that have come to define our new century; the Internet and digital game have both had dramatic impacts upon modern society and can logically be assumed to have formed the vector for a new direction within the gothic mode. Hence the Digital Gothic must be located within these new technologies. Having now explored what is meant or implied by the concept of the Digital Gothic, it is now possible to examine examples of it in more detail. Two separate instances will be explored in this chapter; the first is a sort of digital ghost story, utilising the communication technology that has come very much to the fore. The second is a digital game that utilises a new form to create gothic impacts; both examples can, however, be seen as reactions to the new reality of life in the New Age of Anxiety. In June 2009, the Something Awful forums hosted a thread entitled ‘Create Paranormal Images’. One user, ‘Victor Surge’ (real name Eric Knudsen) posted a haunting photograph depicting a children’s playground. In the far corner of the image, a mysterious figure is surrounded by a crowd of children. Black tentacles emerge from the figure’s shoulders. The accompanying text identifies the photo as

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one of the two recovered photos from the Stirling City library blaze. Notable for being taken the day fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘the Slender Man’.13 Surge also notes that the photographer has been ‘missing since 1986.’ After posting a couple of similar photos, Surge comments that he has unnerved himself and plans to retire to bed. His next post depicts the figure from the photos lurching toward the camera, and the frantic, misspelt text: jus camein barely made up staairs got pictur locked door but it s right there in the hall dont look at its pictures it dosent want to be known about dont loo’ [sic].14 This is the genesis of what has been termed ‘the first great myth of the web’ by Aleks Krotoski,15 the Slender Man. From these humble origins, the creature went on to inspire numerous web series, reams and reams of writing and discussion, and hundreds and hundreds of ‘recorded sightings’. The creature struck a chord with the modern-day audience, and has had an electric effect on modern popular culture. Examined in detail, the Slender Man serves as a clear signifier, indeed an incarnation of, the concerns of the New Age of Anxiety. There are two key elements to the character; firstly, his resistance to easy definition and categorisation marks him as a troubling figure that cannot be classified easily. The features that remain consistent through every incarnation of the creature are a black business suit and tie, a faceless head, and the possession of unnatural proportions—he is frequently imagined as being taller and thinner than possible for a human. These features delineate the creature as occupying a space between the human and the inhuman— in every version, the Slender Man is the inhuman creature that wears human clothing. In some versions (including the original photo, as Fig. 1 shows) the Slender Man possesses unearthly tentacles, but in others he evinces more human characteristics, uttering laughter and (seemingly) posting incoherent responses to posted videos. This is far from the only boundary the Slender Man muddles, however. An analysis of the text accompanying the original Slender Man shows a plain attempt to present an unreal event in as realistic a tone as possible. The clipped, contracted language, the references to specific dates and places, and the presentation of unnerving facts without an emotional response all suggest a blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction—a clear evocation of the fantastic. The effect persists with Surge’s final post, as readers of the thread are invited to hesitate between the realistic explanation of events (that Surge is using photo manipulation and that his post is a fabrication) and the supernatural version of events (that this is a genuine documentation of a supernatural phenomenon). This means there are two dimensions of the fantastic at work here—that within the work itself, on the content level, and that involving the form within which the story is presented. Another boundary collapse occurs between the concepts of known and unknown. The key driving force that links the various stories that surround the creature is the mystery of its motivations. Although speculation is rife, it is never made clear what the creature does to those who encounter it, nor what its intentions are. It stands as an ‘unreadable sign’, an idea reinforced by the creature’s

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Fig. 1  The image is accompanied by text which reads: ‘One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13, 1986’ (SomethingAwful.com, 2009)

apparent lack of any facial features whatsoever, and, in later incarnation of the myth, the association of static, audio distortion and picture corruption with the creature’s appearances. Each and every Slender Man tale revolves around an attempt to understand or comprehend the creature, whether or not the intention is to confirm its existence or simply to escape its wrath, but all are doomed to fail, or offer up only further mystery. It is the disparity drawn between a culture obsessed with documentation of experience, and a creature that actively refuses or disrupts this process that marks the Slender Man as functioning within the gothic mode. Fear of the unknown is one of the most common and prevalent fears in existence, yet the society in which we live has reasons to crave unknowing. Nick Harkaway’s The Blind Giant dedicates a full chapter to the concept of ‘information overload’, in which he comments upon ‘the gnawing fear that the modern world quite simply contains too much that we ought to know’.16 The idea of an unreadable sign, an area of knowledge specifically designated as something we should not know, is perversely exciting. The final point to make is to note the synergy that is drawn between form and content within the tale. In creating the Slender Man, Surge utilised elements that were only available to the forum post form to further the effect of his creature. When reading a forum thread, the reader is aware of the real-time progression of the thread as it develops—each post is given its own time-stamp, meaning the reader can see how much time has occurred between posts, how much time has elapsed since the topic under discussion was opened, and so on.

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By posting his purported image of the Slender Man’s supposed visit shortly after making a post declaring his intentions to stop posting, the audience is given a sense of the danger and immediacy of the Slender Man’s threat. Surge is attempting to leave the world of fiction and return to the known, normal world, but the sudden manifestation of the Slender Man after this point demonstrates his ability to transgress seemingly between accepted boundaries, and thus disrupt notions of safety. By doing this, the Slender Man serves to threaten the idea of the Internet as safe space, and to invert the optimistic perception of the Internet as bringing people together. The idea, emerging in some corners of the Internet, that the Slender Man is a “tulpa”—a creature born from a consensus of belief—suggests its inextricability from a modern, internet-owning, culture. The Slender Man could not exist without the Internet. It is fundamentally a reaction towards it and an expression of social worries concerning it. As such, the Slender Man can be read as signifying one of the first major instances of Digital Gothic. A being whose very existence centres around information transfer, and more specifically problematisation of the process of easy information transfer, manages to serve the Gothic’s dual function of reflecting social fears and anxieties in a specifically gothic way (here, embodying the fear and paranoia that circulates around the Internet in the form of an uncanny, horrifying monster). In this example, it is possible to see some major tenants of the Digital Gothic being laid down. Most important to note is the synergy between form and content. The Slender Man is a creature of information, and thus takes form within an internet thread that allows for the launching of multiple narrative threats. As a creature of the New Age of Anxiety, it is able to take root anywhere, and is resistant to classification and understanding. It may be seen as a gothicised incarnation of the nebulous fear and concerns which come to accompany the rise of the Internet. This synergy between form and content is taken still further in the 2008 title Amnesia: The Dark Descent. A game which incorporates a number of conspicuous gothic tropes in order to signal its own attempt to articulate a new gothic narrative. It blends together stylistic tropes from the three major ages of Gothic. The player-protagonist, Daniel, awakens in an oppressive castle (a clear nod to Otranto, Udolpho et al.) with no memories. He finds a letter from himself, imploring him to descend into the castle’s depths and kill the castle’s master, Alexander of Brennenburg. Alexander is presented as equal parts vampire, vivisector and otherworldly entity, and has a significant relationship with Daniel. The tale that is revealed during progress through the game is one with a keen understanding of trauma and mental anguish. Daniel is revealed to have been an archaeologist who discovered a mysterious Orb in an ancient tomb. Stalked by the Orb’s ancient protector, Daniel turns to the mysterious Alexander of Brennenburg for aid. Alexander has performed inhumane experiments in order to discover a method of keeping the protector at bay; a method that requires the blood of torture victims. Daniel becomes complicit in Alexander’s torture of captives, and the experience has a traumatic effect on him—this trauma is what induces him to wipe his memories

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and places him in the situation the player finds him at the beginning of the game. This narrative is told in piecemeal through exploration and flashback, and is by degrees both a ‘traditional’ gothic tale and a more modern one. The traditional elements—the rational, scientific protagonist pitted against supernatural horror, the sinister, supernatural aristocrat subsiding upon the blood of the living, and the collapsing castle that holds whispers and echoes of the past all locate the title firmly within the gothic tradition. Yet the title also incorporates many features of the digital game narrative to further its impact and gesture towards more contemporary fears. The inherent duality of the digital game narrative is this; every digital game presents two separate narrative strands, the ‘contextual’ and the ‘ludic’. The ‘ludic’ is the narrative the player experiences—the actions that the player must undertake to progress through the game. The ‘contextual’ is provided by in-game dialogue, cutscenes, and other sources, and provides a context for the actions a player undertakes in the game. The strength of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and its relevance to the Digital Gothic, is that both narratives are used in conjunction with each other to heighten their impacts. Ludic design encourages identification with the player character or avatar of Daniel. To begin with, the ‘Amnesia’ of the title, a common storytelling device, ensures that the player is in the same mental state as the character; at the beginning of the game neither the player nor Daniel remembers anything about who they are or what has transpired. This is an example of the context narrative supporting the ludic narrative, where the natural, tabula rasa like state of the novice player of the game is built into the narrative being presented. An example of the ludic narrative supporting context narrative can be seen in the design decisions from the very beginning of the game. The game is played in first-person perspective, something not uncommon throughout the genre. Unlike many first-person games, however, the ludic design does not allow for combat— the player is rendered defenceless before threats, with the only option being to run or hide. Moreover, movement controls are deliberately designed to emulate or echo real-world motion. Opening or closing a door, for example, requires the player to click and drag with the mouse, replicating the physical motion required to perform the action, and meaning that if the player is stressed or hurrying when performing the action, it will correspondingly be harder to do so. These two aspects of game design both aim to create a heightened sense of vulnerability for the player, and place them in the mental state of the protagonist they are told to inhabit. More interesting, and key to establishing Amnesia as a work of the Digital Gothic, is the consistent theme of information, learning, and discovery that permeates both narrative strands. As the player traverses Brennenburg, they will encounter two methods by which the context narrative is relayed to the player; diaries and flashbacks. The dairies are optional, and merely serve to fill in background detail on the story; the flashbacks, however, are mandatory. They are triggered simply by reaching certain areas in the game, and consist of spoken narration representing dialogue from Daniel’s past. What is more, the player’s movement speed is slowed to a crawl during these sections, meaning the player is forced to listen to

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the dialogue as it unfolds. At first, these dialogue exchanges to little more than to hint at what has transpired, but as the player progresses further in the game, the details discovered grow ever-more disturbing, revealing Daniel’s complicity in torture and murder. For example, one flashback has Alexander instructing Daniel; ‘The people you send for will end up here. Remember that the confinement itself works as a preamble to the torture and you should pace yourself. Don’t take anyone before they are ready’. Daniel is heard to reply ‘Understood’. Given the degree to which the title endeavours to promote identification between player and character, it is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that Amnesia is attempting to place the player in an uncomfortable psychological place. By allowing the player to identify so with Daniel, only to reveal his terrible actions, the game is demonstrating the horror of inevitable revelation—something that haunts the twenty-four-hour news cycle of today, where no end of horrifying events bombard the consumer of digital media relentlessly. Building on this, the process of discovery and learning the player is expected to follow is hindered by two major threats; the first being darkness. A large part of the ludic narrative involves contending with the darkness that shrouds the ­castle—spending time in dark areas lowers the player/character’s ‘sanity’, which impairs control and blurs vision when lowered. Progress through the game’s environments requires careful use of tinderboxes (to light candles and fires and create static light sources) or the utilisation of an oil-burning lantern (which has limited fuel but which can be used anywhere). The pattern of gameplay that emerges involves running from lighted space to lighted space, and leads the player to value light as a resource. In other words, this design decision encourages players to adopt the same attitude towards technology as that of a person from the past. It defamiliarises casual acceptance of the easy-access electric light and places us in the position of an individual from a previous generation—a person to whom light is a precious resource. Therefore, the narrative can be seen to be defamiliarising the player—ironically through modern computer simulation technologies, a sense of the past is generated, much as prior gothic novelists endeavoured to do via vocabulary and the deployment of faux authentic documentation. This ‘darkness’ also serves as a pathetic fallacy for the shadows that lie over Daniel’s memory. Combined with the way it is presented ludically, it is clear that ignorance or avoidance of the truth is impossible, no matter how unpalatable that truth is. The second hazard players will come across in Brennenburg is more organic. Strange creatures infest the halls, chasing the player/character down if spotted. These creatures possess many characteristics that gesture towards a Gothic that is focused on more modern concerns. To begin with, these entities are never officially named in-game. References are made within the game to Brennenburg’s mysterious ‘servants’, but they are described sparsely, in a diary as exhibiting ‘behaviour [that] could only be described as skulking’ and on a loading screen as ‘smell[ing] of spiced wine’,16 a description impossible to confirm in-game. Other than that they appear to do Alexander’s bidding, there is no official confirmation of what they are or how they were created. Thomas Grip mentions in the game’s

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developer’s commentary that ‘the flashbacks [in the Wine Cellar] also give hints on where the creatures came from’,17 seeming to imply that the flashbacks there, which detail the poisoning of a man named Wilhelm and his men, mean that the creatures were originally these men. However, this is only ever implied. No official source states the origin of the creatures, making them the subject of eternal speculation on behalf of the player base. Their names [the Grunt and Brute] are only accessible via the filenames for the game’s assets, not being stated overtly in-game. Gameplay itself also serves to further develop the air of mystery around the creatures. The player is discouraged from looking at the creatures for too long, as warning messages inform the player that looking directly at the creatures not only lowers sanity (making it more difficult to evade them as noted) but also makes them more likely to notice the player/character. This means that players cannot examine the creatures at their leisure, but are likely to play through the game avoiding eye contact—allowing the creatures to inhabit a liminal space within the player character’s own perception, and calling to mind ‘the central figure of the Gothic, that creepy character who simultaneously draws our gaze and makes us avert our eyes[…]’.18 It is this concept that forms the core of the Digital Gothic, where the unnerving reflections of social concerns that mark the form are constructed not merely from the text itself, but from the audience’s own behaviour and response to the form it manifests in. The player of a gothic digital game is encouraged to emulate the behaviour of the character they are playing as. In the digital form, the gothic mode is free to operate not only at a textual level, but on a behavioural level. It is therefore able to transgress the boundaries of the text and appear to take effect in reality—thus creating a heightened sense of the fantastic as a slippage occurs between the virtual and the real. Both of these examples demonstrate the Digital Gothic in action. Both foreground the audience, attempting to elide the boundary between audience and artwork, and in both cases, the technology that dictates the form is integral to this effect; the forum thread and the digital game both work to make the audience feel immersed and engaged in the horror they present. Both the Slender Man myth and Amnesia create examples of unreadable signs that form the central ‘antagonistic’ figures within them, and both invoke the idea of learning and knowledge as being dangerous. These concepts build up to the central tenant of the Digital Gothic; the problemisation of interaction. The Slender Man example draws the reader into its fiction as a participant in the narrative, whilst Amnesia works to promote identification between the player and the avatar using its ludic trappings. Thus it is clear that if such a thing as a foundation for the Digital Gothic exists, it is this problematisation within modern technological forms. In a world where interaction has become a key component of media consumption, the Gothic problematises that interaction, specifically by creating works that mislead, misinform, or distort the truths that the casual consumer of modern media comes to rely upon.

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Notes

1. James Glieck, “The Information Palace”, 2010. Accessed online via https://www. nybooks.com/daily/2010/12/08/information-palace/ on 19 July 2018. 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London, Methuen and Co., 1986, 9). 3. Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture” pp 1–20 in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 2). 4. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (London, University of Chicago Press, 1995, 15). 5. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Vol. I (Harlow, Longman Group Ltd, 1996, 18). 6. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Modern Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, xviiii). 7. Marshall Macluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [Originally published 1962]. (London, Routledge, 2002, 3). 8. Ibid. 9. Andy Law, Implosion: What the Internet Has Really Done to Culture and Communication (London, LID, 2013, 46). 10. Ibid. 11. Ian Dowbiggin, “High Anxieties: The Social Construction of Anxiety Disorders” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 54, No. 7, pp. 429–436, 435, July 2009. 12. Ibid., pp. 431–432. 13. Somethingawful.com, “Create Paranormal Images!” forum thread, created June 8, 2009. Accessed via https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post361861415 on 29 December 2018. 14. Ibid. 15. Alexs Krotoski, The Digital Human, Episode 5, Series 2. BBC Radio Four, Broadcast 29 October 2012. 16. Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World (Great Britain, John Murray, 2012, 53). 17. Amnesia The Dark Descent, Developer’s Commentary. 18. Misha Kavka, “The Gothic On Screen” pp. 209–228 in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 211).

Bibliography Amnesia: The Dark Descent. (2010). Released September 28. Developed by Frictional Games. Game. Digital Human, The. (2012). Episode 5, Series 2. BBC Radio Four. First Broadcast 29 October 2012. Audio. Dowbiggin, Ian R. (2009). “High Anxieties: The Social Construction of Anxiety Disorders.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 54, No. 7, 429–436, July. Print. Gleick, James. (2010). “The Information Palace”. New York Review of Books. Accessed online on 19 July 2018. Harkaway, Nick. (2012). The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. Great Britain: John Murray. Print. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2002). “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.

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Kavka, Misha. (2002). “The Gothic On Screen”. In The Cambridge Companion To Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, pp. 209–228. Law, Andy. (2013). Implosion: What the Internet Has Really Done to Culture and Communication. London: LID. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. (2002). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [Originally Published 1964]. London: Routledge. Print. Mighall, Robert. (2003). A Geography of Modern Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print. Moore, Gordon. (1965). “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits”. Electronics, Vol. 38 No. 8, 114–117, April. Punter, David. (1996). The Literature of Terror. Vols. I–II [Originally published 1980]. Harlow: Longman Group Limited. Print. Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. (1986). The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York and London: Methuen and Co. Print. SomethingAwful.com. (2009). “Create Paranormal Images!” forum thread, created June 8. Accessed online via www.somethingawful.com on 11 February 2015. Williams, Anne. (1995). Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. London: University of Chicago Press. Print.

Horror Memes and Digital Culture Tosha R. Taylor

Largely lacking geographic or temporal boundaries and allowing almost total anonymity, the Internet itself is a gothic space. Its enabling of free communication and largely limitless content, as well as real-life instances of criminals using the Internet to stalk or groom victims, have given rise to urban legends that characterise the Internet as a dangerous global phenomenon. Stories of cursed images, “red rooms” or live streams of actual torture and murder, and encounters on the famed dark web merge anxieties about the Internet’s capabilities with fictional media that may be valued alongside more traditional media like literature and film. Yet these media modes are not identical. Internet-based gothic and horror media, particularly those that find wide success, are understood at the intersection of folklore and participatory culture.1 Rather than passive consumption, participatory culture is achieved within communities, particularly those associated with fandoms or interests, when members are able to create, share, and discuss artefacts without strict gatekeeping.2 These participatory communities remain distinct from commercial creators, but their media contributions are no less valuable to the genres in which they work. Horror memes have arisen as a particularly significant manifestation of this intersection. Comprising several modes and limitless in their transmission, these memes utilise gothic and horror tropes, styles, and imagery. Often beginning as discrete creations within larger digital communities, they transform through the work of multiple participants and spread across platforms over time, achieving varying degrees of popularity outside either digital communities or the genre, or both. This chapter outlines the creation and transmission of horror memes with particular regard for their place in digital folklore and, respectively, participatory culture. These intersections are also examined for the unique considerations for ownership they invoke, as well as for the cultural discourses at work in the memes’ evolutions.

T. R. Taylor (*)  Manhattanville College, Harrison, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_58

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It would be impossible to consider all horror memes here. Therefore, a sampling is used. The selected memes exemplify key elements of the phenomenon altogether. The creature that would become the Rake first appeared in 2005 on the social media platform 4chan in the subforum /b/. In a thread entitled “hey /b/ lets make a new monster”, the original poster provides a description of a pale, blank-faced creature that is “Humanoid, about six feet tall when standing, but usually crouches and walks on all fours” and simply “watches the observer” unless provoked.3 Interest in the creature inspired further posts, which migrated off-site as part of a larger phenomenon that would be labelled creepypasta (discussed later in this chapter). The following year, Brian Somerville elaborated on the creature on a personal blog (now reprinted on the Creepypasta Wiki), presenting a series of brief anecdotes of encounters with the creature from 1691 to 2003, with a note that similar stories have been documented beginning in the twelfth century.4 One commonality in these fictional artefacts is the appearance of the Rake in the victim’s sleep and, later, their sense of continued assault by him. In “A Suicide Note: 1964”, the writer relates a “fear of what I might next wake to experience” and, in another note, tells the addressee, “I have prayed for you. He spoke your name”. In the 2003 narrative, a woman’s husband and daughter die in a car accident after being terrorised by the Rake, whom the child identifies by name. This narrative ends with the woman’s discovery that the Rake had previously appeared in her home and a fear that he will return. Through fan-generated art and videos, the Rake has been depicted as a deformed human, a humanoid monster, and an animal that looks like a man-dog hybrid. Somerville’s version of the creature gained wide acceptance, and he is thus credited as one of its creators. His expanded concept for the Rake establishes its human origin as the “lone survivor” of an exiled community that ate their own dead to avoid starvation.5 As a prominent early example of the digital horror meme, the Rake has a clear influence over many memes that followed it and has continued to appear in digital horror media. While the image that provided a basis for the Jeff the Killer meme appeared on a Japanese website in 2005 under the label “white powder” and in a separate video uploaded to YouTube as a fake broadcast in 2007, the first known Jeff the Killer narrative appeared on the forum Newgrounds.com in 2008 when user killerjeff posted the infamous image, claiming it to be his own. Writing in the third person in the original post before switching to first person in the subsequent comments, killerjeff describes the character as “like a Bloody Mary game” in which a person wanting to see Jeff goes into a closet, chants “He’s in here with me”, then speaks Jeff’s name.6 In the comments, killerjeff explains the character’s appearance as the result of an accident with bleach as he cleaned his bathtub. While killerjeff’s treatment of the character has a flippant tone, Jeff the Killer’s mythos became more sinister as it developed through other fan-creators. Subsequent Jeff narratives imbued him with emotional turmoil or supernatural powers, some attaching “Go to sleep” to the entity as a spoken catchphrase to his victims just before their murder. The mythos departed more dramatically from its

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origin in 2011 with the addition of a longform text narrative that was posted to the Creepypasta Wiki. Here, Jeff is reimagined as a thirteen-year-old boy who begins to experience strange pains and psychological disturbances after his family moves to a new town. Jeff and his brother, Liu (also originally created by killerjeff), are victimised by local bullies, who douse Jeff in bleach and alcohol and set him on fire. Driven mad, Jeff glories in his newly deformed skin, burns off his own eyelids so that he can always see his “beautiful” face, and cuts his mouth into a perpetual smile.7 At the end of the narrative, Jeff murders his parents and brother. The SCP Foundation initially began on 4chan’s /x/ subforum, which frequently hosts paranormal stories, with a post by user S.S. Walrus in 2007. The post reads as an entry in a larger log or database and describes a concrete object that cannot move when it is observed but becomes “animate and extremely hostile” when out of direct sight. Labelled SCP-173 and subtitled “The Statue”, the homicidal object appears to secrete blood and faeces from an unknown point. Interest spawned by the first post led to similar log entries by other writers, culminating in the establishment of a dedicated website in 2008. Presented as the database of a clandestine agency known as the SCP Foundation, the site catalogs user-submitted entries for other phenomena in the vein of the original SCP-173. The stated goal of the foundation is to contain and study supernatural phenomena that “pose a significant threat to global security by threatening either physical or psychological harm”.8 Each such entity is designated with an SCP (“Secure, Contain, Protect”) number, a retroactive means of contextualising the first independent artefacts’ titles, and is classified according to the difficulty of its individual containment procedure. To date, users have contributed thousands of descriptions and narratives to the site, creating an astounding variety of SCPs. These range from small, seemingly innocuous objects such as the night light labelled SCP-122, to large, habitable structures, such as the house labelled SCP-1171, to mostly invisible entities (such as SCP-072, which inhabits bedframes) and parasitic organisms (such as SCP-940), to absurdities such as SCP-426, a toaster that can only be described using first-person pronouns, and SCP-1247, a man who is otherwise normal but perceives all animals as the actor Shia LaBeouf. As a prominent example of the cursed image urban legend, Smile.jpg is both the name of a narrative meme and the object it concerns. Likely originating on /x/ in 2008, the narrative first relates the (fictional) narrator’s search for a famous image that has escaped proper cataloging despite its internet infamy. The image, given the filename smile.jpg, depicts a husky with large human teeth and, less visibly, an outstretched human hand; in the original version, the image is presented as a Polaroid photograph with bloody fingerprints on the outer frame. The creature itself is given the name Smile.dog. (An alternate, more heavily edited version that uses a butchered pig’s head as Smile.dog also exists.) Merely seeing the image may render the viewer epileptic or inspire them to commit suicide. The narrator receives an email from a woman called Mary E., who claims to have been haunted by Smile.dog. In a manner similar to Somerville’s treatment of the Rake, Smile.dog appears to Mary E. as she sleeps, charging her to “spread the word” by sending the cursed image to others. At the end of the story, following Mary E.’s

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suicide, the narrator is contacted by an unknown person who has included smile. jpg as an attachment. The narrator decides that if he does look at the image, he will be willing to share it with others. Appearing to originate from a WordPress site in 2009, The Russian Sleep Experiment reflects residual political anxieties as it purports to reveal a top-secret effort by Russian scientists in World War II. Fifteen political prisoners are sealed in a room and prohibited from sleeping through the use of a stimulant gas. The prisoners become increasingly paranoid and violent. Nine days into their captivity, all but two of them begin screaming; the remaining two use faeces and book pages to cover the chamber’s portholes so the researchers can no longer see them. Afterward, the chamber goes completely silent. Three days later, with no audible signs of life from within the chamber and only an oxygen gauge to indicate the captives are still breathing, the researchers use an intercom to attempt communication with the prisoners, promising freedom in exchange for compliance. A prisoner responds, “We no longer want to be freed”.9 After another interval of three days, the experiment is shut down and soldiers are sent into the chamber. The four surviving subjects, it is discovered, have disembowelled themselves and have begun cannibalising their own tissues. They have also developed superhuman strength and an ability to resist anaesthesia; indeed, to prevent falling asleep, some welcome pain. Those who do fall asleep die shortly thereafter. The last survivor identifies what the prisoners have become, saying “We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all” and suggests that it is only through perpetual consciousness and its subsequent psychosis that he and his fellows can be free.10 The most prominent horror meme to date is that of Slender Man, a supernatural entity first created on the Something Awful forums in 2009 in a thread by user Gerogerigegege entitled “Create Paranormal Images”. In the thread, users posted pictures (often edited photographs) and narratives of unsettling or disturbing occurrences. Under the username Victor Surge, user Eric Knudsen posted an edited photograph of several solemn-faced adolescents appearing to walk towards the camera with a tall, blurry figure behind them. The image is accompanied by the caption “‘we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…’/1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead”.11 A second ­black-and-white photograph of happy young children on a playground appears beneath the first; the tall figure also appears in the background. The accompanying caption reads: “One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze, the event notable for being taken the day on which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at the library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence./1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986”. To make the image appear more authentic, a “City of Stirling Libraries Local Studies Collection” watermark has been added. Beneath Knudsen’s first post, forums user slidebite predicts that some of the images from the thread will eventually be disseminated off-site as real.

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In a process similar to that of the Rake, Slender Man became the dominant topic of the thread. Some users contributed to the developing lore of the entity by creating their own images or narratives; others simply voiced appreciation of this particular creation. Departing somewhat from Knudsen’s early visual characterizations, the entity was gradually established as an uncommonly tall, blankfaced figure with inhumanly long arms and typically dressed in a black suit. In some depictions, including Knudsen’s second edited photo, he also boasts a set of tentacles behind his arms. He continued to be associated with child abductions, though his victim range expanded to include adults. The purpose of these abductions is ultimately unclear in the holistic mythology, as it varies across narratives. While Slender Man is rarely depicted as violent, encounters with him, much like encounters with the Rake, affect victims profoundly. Standard tropes in both Slender Man and Rake narratives are stalking or haunting, recognition of the entity by young children, and psychological and physical disorders. In many such narratives, these effects are prolonged, lasting years before victims are driven to violence against themselves or others. While Slender Man is not the first internet-based horror entity, he is perhaps the most popular, and the most academically recognised. Indeed, he may be the defining entity. Since his creation, Slender Man has received a number of scholarly and popular studies, including entire books dedicated to analysing his creation, evolution, and fictional construction. In some such studies, Slender Man serves as a springboard for the discussion of horror memes predating him. Furthermore, his fame has carried beyond horror-affiliated fan communities to garner corporate participation in his continued dissemination, as well as news media attention following his association with an actual attempted murder in 2014. In general, such media may be initially viewed through the lenses of, most conspicuously, digital culture and, respectively, folklore. Many popular internet-based horror media, whether in text, audio, or visual form, have achieved meme status, at least within internet subcultures sharing an interest in the genre. Established by Richard Dawkins as ideas and behaviours that spread throughout a large group of people, memes manifest as a variety of concepts and practices that are transmitted through replication or imitation.12 However, following Web 2.0, the meme is now often understood as a phenomenon emerging from digital culture. Indeed, the internet facilitates the qualities Dawkins finds in memes as a whole.13 Digital memes concern limitless topics, from global politics to subculture in-jokes, and deploy a variety of tones in their treatment of those topics. When responding to particular events, memes arise and spread quickly; for instance, memes referencing Donald Trump’s 2018 misspelling of “coverage” as “covfefe” on Twitter were created and disseminated in fewer than 24 hours after the tweet. Some memes enjoy only fleeting popularity, but others persist, transforming to address recent developments. While some may receive wider media recognition through news coverage, they generally spread from user to user on digital spaces. Within those spaces, memes are not limited to the particular subspace in which they originate, but, rather, cross websites and social media platforms.

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Many discussions of memes focus on those that begin as static images or image macros, images with added text. Others concern linguistic memes, which are typically taken as snippets from larger dialogues or are designed to be easily quoted and transmitted. In both cases, memes typically remove the language or image from its original context. Perhaps due to their fleeting popularity as individual texts or their mistaken association with lowbrow culture, memes have not found easy acknowledgment as academic subjects, though their worth is increasingly—albeit inconsistently—recognised.14 Digital culture’s intersection with the horror genre has proven especially worthy of study for its exemplary modes of transmission, as is discussed in this chapter. Though the often-humorous or wry nature of memes may make horror seem an unlikely subject for meme-ification, horror entities have been adopted into meme culture. In late 2016, for instance, the eponymous entity of the horror film The Babadook (2014, dir. Jennifer Kent) was remixed as an LGBT icon; though humorously intended, the remix resulted in a meme that then manifested in LGBT media (such as signs at Pride marches). Meme scholarship and popular recognition of horror’s intersection with digital culture has, however, primarily concerned horror media that is created in digital spaces that then spreads to achieve meme status. Such memes incorporate gothic and horror themes into nontraditional, multimodal forms comprising written text, images, curations, audio, blogs, and forums. Due to multimodal, transmedia manifestations, these narratives can spread to wider audiences than many traditional texts might, and certainly spread beyond the text’s intended audience.15 This, as demonstrated by the spread of Slender Man to commercial and news media discussed later in this chapter, enables additional interpretations and deployments of the source material. While corporate and commercial entities may attempt to create memes, the multimodal texts that typically become memes are user-generated within particular digital spaces. Creators may devise new artefacts from scratch or may remix existing artefacts, giving them new meaning within the context of the mythos, and then posting and disseminating their creations.16 Furthermore, it is common for memes to borrow from or refer to each other, and horror memes make that ability to build off pre-existing or developing materials particularly conspicuous, as many emerge through linking unrelated images and media texts. Such nuances are important in distinguishing between memes and their viral counterparts.17 Horror memes in particular do not often achieve virality. Some memes remain largely within the groups that spawn them or, as in the case of ­genre-specific memes, within spaces catering to the genre. Yet these media objects may still attain meme status within those spaces. Originating on a personal Angelfire website in 2001, “Ted the Caver” is a narrative of a man’s search for, and subsequent disappearance in, a mysterious previously undiscovered cave. Compared to such stories as that of Slender Man, the narrative has achieved little attention outside of spaces dedicated to discussions of gothic experiences. However, within those spaces, the narrative continues to be disseminated. Degrees of popularity vary, but gothic and horror memes have (despite their dark subject matter), exhibited the same qualities of transmission as more commonly known digital memes.

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Scholarship on horror memes has also been particularly concerned with their role in digital folklore, though there is disagreement among folklorists about what internet-based artefacts constitute folklore and, in addition, how precisely the Internet alters conventional views and practices of folklore.18 Memes themselves have folkloric value, and their potential in folklore studies has received wider recognition in the 2010s.19 Multimodality plays a significant role in establishing the meme as digital folklore, as it aids in folklore’s necessary transmission.20 Indeed, horror memes in particular correspond to Propp’s qualifications of folklore.21 Like word of mouth transmissions of traditional folklore, the Internet is a space that does not necessitate a division between truth and fiction. This lack of division enables the spread of misinformation, fake news, and the modern urban legends that have previously been recognised as folkloric in function.22 Many popular horror memes, including several discussed in this chapter, comprise media texts that welcome and indeed rely on crowd-sourcing, with participants altering or adding to the central myth with their respective creations.23 This, too, aligns the horror meme with more traditional forms of folklore. Some gothic internet-based narratives and memes actively engage with folklore by presenting themselves as such. Following initial interest in the two Slender Man images, Knudsen further participates in the language of folkloric transmission by announcing that he will try to find more “legit” images of the entity (rather than, as he means, offering to create more). The origin for Slender Man provided by Knudsen establishes a fictional folklore behind the entity, and other early participants in the meme continued this practice. Working within the confines of artificial truthfulness (discussed later in this chapter), Something Awful poster treepunk as hell fictionally located Slender Man in medieval German folklore as a child-abducting entity called Der Großmann. Another user, GyverMac, described an image from Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1538 Danse Macabre as a woodcut attributed to Hans Freckenberg depicting an entity called Der Ritter. Both stories have been incorporated into the larger Slender Man mythos, providing a fictional folkloric origin for the actual digital folklore. Other engagements with folklore appropriate pre-existing lore for the author’s or group’s purposes. This is especially important in memes’ transmission, as it contributes to the necessary sense of a meme-entity’s transhistorical, cross-cultural nature. Similarly, memes originating outside of a culture may come to incorporate elements of that culture’s own lore.24 This carries the risk of cultural appropriation, as can particularly be seen in engagements with entities from indigenous lore. Slender Man, for instance, has been associated with the Algonquian wendigo and Western approximations of the Tibetan tulpa. The creepypasta known as Anansi’s Goatman Story, which relates a group of young campers’ encounter with a shapeshifter, bears a resemblance to the lore of a pre-existing cryptid of the same name. The text further invites association with actual folklore by deploying unnamed Native American background characters who enable the narrator to realise the creature is “kind of like the Wendigo”.25 However, it must be emphasised that these associations are typically based on assumptions and translations of the originating culture’s myth by outsiders.

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Associations with the tulpa, for instance, bear little resemblance to actual Tibetan lore, to such a point that Slender Man-as-tulpa can be critically discussed without close examination of Tibetan myth and culture. A similar separation from the originating culture occurs in Reddit’s creepypasta-ready r/skinwalkers, in which users post narratives of encounters with entities appropriated from Native American lore that depart wildly from the lore itself, to the consternation of some indigenous Reddit users. Yet in turn, the perpetually evolving entity may then be reconsidered from those cultural contexts. Slender Man was referenced in a rash of Native American youth suicides in South Dakota in 2014 and 2015 due to his similarity to some actual pre-existing indigenous spirit entities.26 Slender Man’s simplistic conceit enables both his meme-ification and his ability to be translated widely as a myth. His uncanny appearance allows his correspondence to transhistorical and transglobal fears and myths, as does his archetypal similarity to other entities of global lore.27 A literally blank face and a generic black suit prevent him from being confined to narratives of a particular place for the most part, especially since some imagery obscures his clothing to the point that it need not be interpreted as a suit. He is similarly free from historical constraints due to fans’ early work in identifying his presence in fictionalised accounts of actual medieval German artwork and, less famously, ancient cave paintings. His connection to the natural world in many media and his ambiguous connection to children further aligns him with entities of popular myths and fairy tales.28 More generally, the place of the horror meme in digital folklore is particularly evident in the texts colloquially labelled “creepypasta”, a label emerging from “copypasta”, which describes widely disseminated and frequently reposted anecdotes and narratives, including urban legends and folklore that have been spread via the Internet. Stories deploying gothic and horror elements, when thus spread, become creepypasta.29 Though the “copy paste” etymology suggests only written text, creepypasta also incorporates shared and replicated images. Several horror memes, including those used as examples in this chapter, originated as creepypasta; however, the label does not distinguish between levels of popularity, and artefacts that are memes within limited communities and those that achieve wider visibility may both receive it. A number of digital spaces dedicated to creepypasta exist, including an eponymous website and a wiki database. These spaces are valuable to both fans and scholars, as they often rehost content long after the original site or post has been removed. Several forums and social media platforms also contain such spaces. For instance, the content aggregation platform Reddit hosts several forums (called subreddits) for the creation and dissemination of creepypasta media, including r/ creepypasta, and r/nosleep, which hosts user-submitted stories of frightening experiences, and r/letsnotmeet, in which users post short narratives of encounters with dangerous people or entities. Similarly to much traditional folklore and urban legends, many of these texts either explicitly or implicitly make claims of truthfulness. Language surrounding such artefacts is, at times, similar to that common in the dissemination of gothic

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folklore.30 No matter how fantastic the narrative becomes, the most basic conceit is that the story being related really happened, that the image being shared is an actual photograph. When such texts are posted on forums and social media, interactions with the original post are also meant to treat the narrative as nonfiction. Original sources remain anonymous but may, to promote a sense of their truthfulness, be associated with the person immediately transmitting the message. Commenters may offer advice or tales of similar experiences. If such interactions garner enough attention, the topic of the post may itself become a meme within the community. Participants show a preference for narratives and images that claim truthfulness, a finding consistent with constructions of truthfulness in participatory fan cultures.31 The Rake’s co-creator Brian Somerville speculates that this is behind the Rake’s success as a meme as it allows readers a means by which to relate to the narrative personally.32 In addition, a performative sense of truthfulness invites others to share in the story’s evolution and transmission. Anyone may repost such content or respond to others’ content by claiming to have had the same experience. The participatory nature of creepypasta can even hinge upon stories of shared experiences among participants, as especially seen in narratives of “lost” media. The story of Candle Cove, for instance, is written in the style of a discussion forum and relates fictional adults’ memories of a television show they enjoyed as children. Though aimed at children, the show becomes increasingly disturbing as forum participants recall seeing puppet-characters screaming and being attacked by a grotesque marionette called the Skin-Taker. The final post in the conversation reveals that while these children watched these events, they appeared to be staring at blank television screens. A similar tactic occurs in the story of a lost episode of the children’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants that forum participants claim depicted the character Squidward committing suicide. Creepypasta fans can subsequently disseminate such stories with claims that they, too, have seen such media. The participatory, multimodal nature of the Internet and its allowance for anonymity establish its value as a location of folklore’s evolution.33 Mirroring the Internet itself, many popular gothic memes defy temporal and geographic boundaries.34 Slender Man’s early mythology on the Something Awful forums placed him in a number of time periods and countries, leaving room for a wide variety of participants to deploy him for their own fictional purposes. A lack of clear textual boundaries within these stories allows participants flexibility in their uses of the media. Definitive origins may be established in paratexts, as in Somerville’s comments on the Rake, but are not always incorporated into the larger mythos. Narratives of supernatural entities on the SCP Foundation website may describe first encounters with the entity, but its actual inception often remains a mystery to both the fictional agents and the real-life reader. Thus, participants are not confined to rigidly established narratives, nor are the memes themselves. Slender Man has proven to be particularly exemplary of the mutable and multimodal nature of digital folklore and horror memes. While his appearance is now fairly static with his black suit and blank face, fans have made alterations when needed, adding tentacles or uncannily long fingers at times and at others

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styling him to conform to specific locations or eras. Fans have debated and rewritten Slender Man’s objectives according to their own needs. In some treatments, Slender Man is entirely a source of horror who brings destruction; in others, he wields a seductive power as he lures victims, usually children, to a mysterious otherworld or the release of death. As Slender Man media typically focus on the effects of being stalked by the entity, he may even have no apparent objective at all. The mutability of his purpose across narratives, when viewed in the collective sense, implies that the entity is ultimately incomprehensible to humans. Slender Man media extends beyond other creepypasta-style narratives to include DIY horror video series, fanart, and even parodies. In the wake of the meme’s initial popularity, many people outside of creepypasta-dedicated spaces borrowed the entity for their own work. Videos and blogs became popular creative outlets for participation in the mythos. The most successful of these has been the YouTube-based video series Marble Hornets, begun in 2009 and ultimately concluding in 2014. Over the course of 132 videos, the series primarily depicts a young man named Jay’s investigation into the disappearance of his friend Alex. An aspiring filmmaker, Alex begins behaving erratically in the process of creating a student film and leaves behind several hours of footage, which Jay examines and presents to the viewer as he documents his search. The footage reveals that Alex was stalked by an entity who is nearly identical to Slender Man, who is later identified as The Operator. In keeping with the typical Slender Man narrative, once Jay has seen the footage he, too, is stalked—not only by The Operator but also by a masked man. His search is further complicated by the intrusion of another party, known by the YouTube username ‘totheark’, who posts short, unsettling videos in response to him. Through The Operator, the video series introduces new artefacts to the Slender Man mythos, famously including the so-called “operator symbol”, which appears as an encircled X. This itself has become a meme within the meme, and even Slender Man-related media that makes no other reference to the events of Marble Hornets employ the symbol. The series also further canonised the idea that contact with Slender Man, whether directly or through recordings of his presence, results in being stalked or haunted by him. Two other video series gained a significant following in the manner of Marble Hornets. Like their predecessor, both EverymanHYBRID[sic] and TribeTwelve present themselves as real footage of their characters’ encounters with Slender Man and similar entities over a prolonged period. EverymanHYBRID began in 2010 as a series of what appeared to be amateur fitness videos. Subtle visual references to Slender Man were, at first, treated as a joke within the narrative; however, the joke soon draws the attention of the real Slender Man. The series also narratively joined Slender Man and the Rake, the latter of whom begins appearing in videos as another creature stalking the group. In addition, an antagonist similar to ‘totheark’, identified as HABIT[sic], also stalks the characters and eventually interacts with fans of the series as the series takes on the concurrent role of an alternate reality game (ARG). ARGs form another part of gothic participatory culture and, indeed, a more clearly active one. While some corporate ARGs, such as film marketing campaigns, may have fully planned trajectories and outcomes, others evolve based on participants’ progress.35 ARGs thus further establish the

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communal function of the creation and transmission of horror memes.36 HABIT eventually allowed fans to compete in a tournament in which they completed tasks, such as burying a personal item, and posted evidence online, thus perpetuating the participatory nature of the video series. Intertexuality also occurs through a crossover between EverymanHYBRID and TribeTwelve. In the wake of an onslaught of blogs and videos that, through the guise of truth, presented their own Slender Man narratives, sites that reviewed such media emerged. Reviewers were typically tipped off about the media’s existence, either privately by the creators in an out-of-character message or on public forums. In the latter case, creators typically perpetuated the performance of truthfulness by claiming to be documenting their own experience with the entity or to have found another person doing so. This practice is predated in other memes, such as The Russian Sleep Experiment, whose apparent original posters claim to have been sent the media they are now publishing. The multimodality of internet-based artefacts allows both their transmission and their encouragement of fans to participate in them as if they are not fictional.37 Those wishing to actively participate who do not write may provide visual artefacts and vice versa. In keeping with the qualities of participatory culture, participants frequently collaborate to varying degrees, ranging from simply rehosting to aid in the spread of material from one space to another, or commenting on content, to creating lengthy video series such as Marble Hornets. Participants in the creation and dissemination of such media do not seek commercial gain from their work.38 Nor is ownership prioritised. The explicit or implied claims to truthfulness at the start of many memes’ development discourage departures from the conceit that would require creators to claim ownership. Likewise, a creator discouraging others from borrowing, manipulating, and sharing their original text or image disrupts the participatory nature present in many early stages; indeed, Knudsen used one of his out-of-character posts in the original Something Awful thread to forego claims of ownership and to encourage others to keep adding to Slender Man. His position appears to be the popular one, as few creepypasta (co-)creators have claimed ownership of their work even after it has become a meme. Both Brian Somerville and S.S. Walrus have voiced pleasant surprise at how successful their work has been in fan communities, and both have also admitted to not initially realising how far their creations had spread.39 The creator of the first Jeff the Killer narrative is a notable exception, as killerjeff continues to interact with other users to deny some user-added Jeff narratives and claiming authority of his own. In a 2017 Newgrounds comment, he described Jeff’s catchphrases “Go to sleep” and “It’s a joy” as “fanfiction” and discouraged acceptance of them as part of the character’s mythos.40 Yet due to his popularity, Slender Man still invokes questions of ownership. Indeed, much debate surrounds his ownership within the internet subcultures that have contributed to his development.41 Even when an individual person can be identified as the progenitor of an entity, meme, or narrative, as in the case of Eric Knudsen, that artefact’s continued development is owed to any and all who participate in it.42 Indeed, one of Knudsen’s subsequent image posts allowed for Slender

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Man to have a grotesque face, and it was other participants who canonised his featurelessness. Other parties, including corporations outside the cultural groups that typically transform and disseminate this media, may purchase the rights to particular characters, thus further complicating the notion of ownership. While Knudsen did indeed register a copyright for his character in 2010, copyrights are also held by major corporations such as the Fox Broadcasting Corporation and HBO.43 Independent creators have faced legal sanctions for creating work using Slender Man, including one who had reportedly received permission to use the character from Knudsen himself.44 The commercial publication of the Candle Cove creepypasta by its original author, Kris Straub, and its television adaptation as part of Syfy Channel’s Channel Zero series resulted in the story’s removal from the Creepypasta Wiki, which serves as a repository for such media. A distinction exists between participatory culture, which involves fans’ creations and transmissions within a community, and corporate contributions.45 While there have been corporate attempts to deploy creepypasta and horror memes, none have garnered the same attention or success as the independent, DIY creations that occur in fan spaces. A number of films and video games based on Slender Man have been released, yet to date they have largely failed to generate the same level of enthusiasm as the creepypastas themselves. Following the announcement that a Slender Man film was in production for a 2018 release, some fan spaces expressed the belief that the film was far too late to be of worth. Thus, despite some corporate ownership, it is the fanmade Slender Man productions that have maintained favour. Participants also frequently repurpose other pre-existing work as part of the lore. As previously discussed, images from Holbein’s Danse Macabre came to form some of the early, transhistorical Slender Man mythos. The narratives of Jeff the Killer are based on images found elsewhere, which became synonymous with Jeff after being posted with the later text. Though originally posted without an image, SCP-173 is now associated with an unrelated artwork, “Untitled 2004”, by sculptor Izumi Kato. A photograph of the statue by Keisuke Yamamoto was attached to the reposting of the original 4chan text in the early stages of its popularity and has, as with Jeff the Killer, become synonymous with the SCP. Similarly, SCP-610, labelled “The Flesh That Hates”, uses sculptures from Mark Powell’s “Dream Diorama” to embody the effects of a disease that gruesomely deforms and destroys its hosts. Furthermore, one meme may provide inspiration for the lore of those that come after. Knudsen, for instance, credits the Rake as an inspiration for Slender Man. When pre-existing content is borrowed or appropriated into another text, tensions between the borrowed content’s original purpose and its imposed one may arise. Izumi Kato has suggested some displeasure that his work was used on the SCP Foundation website without his prior permission being sought, but has allowed this usage with an agreement that it remains non-commercial and that a disclaimer be posted to confirm to readers that “Untitled 2004” is not actually related to SCP-173.46 This disclaimer, which credits Kato and Yamamoto, now appears at the bottom of SCP-173’s entry on the Foundation database in a rare, easily public-facing departure from the catalog’s pretences at truthfulness. Yet due

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to the creepypasta’s greater popularity, the interpretive gloss of SCP-173 imposes the narrative upon the independent object. A viewer approaching Kato’s work from prior familiarity with the SCP may thus struggle to interpret the sculpture as representing something other than a malevolent entity. Indeed, so linked is the image to the SCP that subsequent artwork, including humorous parodies, has used “Untitled 2004” as the visual basis for representing the creature. The location of creepypasta and horror memes on digital spaces may actually make ownership more difficult, not easier, to determine. Despite common arguments as to the internet’s permanence as written record, even popular memes may become lost over time. Resources such as Know Your Meme and the Creepypasta Wiki may enable tracing of a horror meme’s origin and evolution, but only if significant points are adequately preserved. Unlike many forums 4chan does not archive all old posts; thus, doubt has been cast over some creepypasta’s exact dates of origin, especially with consideration for early reposts. Content may also be lost due to expired availability, as is the case of many images hosted on and linked through image-sharing sites. The original Something Awful thread on which Slender Man was created, for instance, may still be accessed but most images are no longer visible. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which periodically catalogs websites as they were on the recorded date, has preserved the original Something Awful thread with images, but successful utilisation of this tool requires one to know the URL of the desired page or the exact pathway to that URL and relies on preservation at key points. Inconsistent reliability of site storage thus adds to the legends of such media by making them easy to locate yet difficult to clearly trace. Like traditional literary and cinematic monsters, the entities found in popular gothic digital media reflect greater cultural anxieties.47 The entities of such memes exist at the intersection of fears of the cosmic (an unknowable, otherworldly creature, an intangible spirit) and the mundane (a man in a generic suit, a photograph). Stories of a seeming madness that reveals an innate truth, such as the Russian Sleep Experiment, similarly merge these fears, and in the Experiment’s case, merge such concerns with larger geopolitical events, here, long-standing rumours of inhumane Cold War experimentation. In some cases, digital horror entities utilise the Internet itself as a means of self-replicating transmission. The canine entity Smile.dog, for instance, charges its victims to “spread the word” by emailing the cursed image to others. The repetitive, self-replicating nature of many horror memes, such as haunted or “cursed” images, confounds temporality.48 The anonymous, ahistorical, ageographical nature of the Internet imbues it with a sense of mystery and foreboding.49 Common elements of surveillance and madness have a particular place in contemporary anxieties with increasing concerns for the intrusion of digital technology into everyday life.50 The Rake, Smile.jpg, and Slender Man lore all depict malevolent entities watching victims, often as they sleep and are thus powerless. Indeed, the discovery that one has been watched for some time prior to becoming aware of the entity is key to narratives of the Rake and Slender Man. Visual media of these entities casts the spectator as a surveilling agent alongside the

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supernatural entity. In Marble Hornets, for instance, the audience is made privy to events around Jay and Alex through their cameras, witnessing even events of which the camera owners themselves are unaware (such as the masked man’s appearances in their rooms as they sleep), and in EverymanHYBRID, the viewer similarly sees the Rake when the protagonists do not. Creepypasta about cursed media reflects not only fears about the power of cultural objects but the gothic tradition itself, which often reflects and invokes the destructive power of knowing.51 Furthermore, traditional gothic texts have also been accused of transmitting evil.52 In the Western context as it manifests in horror memes, this may be owed to particular anxieties about the power of the image.53 Cursed images such as Smile.jpg confront the reader/viewer with the double revelation that they cannot simply reject this new knowledge: once they have seen it, the damage is already done. Moreover, these media present the notion that the human desire to look and to know is irresistible, even if it incurs great psychological damage. Fictional participants’ mental health is compromised by exposure and proximity to the entity. Of the exemplary memes discussed in this chapter, the Rake, Smile.jpg, certain SCPs, and Slender Man are said to cause anxiety, depression, psychosis, or insanity. Other physical and or neurological conditions may also be triggered by the contact. Indeed, in the cases of haunted media or media that, through exposure to the victim, brings the victim to an entity’s attention, the nature of the entity or curse is primarily understood through the effect that such contact has on the victim.54 Fears of the effects of consumption of and participation in horror media are incorporated into the media itself. Beyond its narrative, a meme’s creation may invoke ethical questions or their semblance and these concerns may become a secondary part of the meme itself. On 4chan, speculation arose that killerjeff’s image was an edit of a photograph of a girl named Katy Robinson, who allegedly committed suicide after being bullied online. The image thus appears to mock a suicide victim. However, these rumours have been countered by claims that this, too, is a fictional story, and thus it may be a meta-myth. Slender Man’s mythos has been complicated in recent years following the attempted murder of Payton Leutner in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2014 by two adolescent girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser. Claiming a belief that killing someone would help them become proxies for Slender Man (a phenomenon in some Slender Man stories by which the entity acts through a human agent), Weier and Geyser isolated Leutner in a forest and stabbed her nineteen times. Both girls have been sentenced to psychiatric institutionalisation. A similar case occurred in 2017 when fourteen-year-old Donovan Nicholas murdered his father’s girlfriend; in Nicholas’s confession, he claimed that Jeff the Killer had forced him to commit the murder. Attempts to blame fictional entities, their creators, and their fans for contributing to such acts have not been quite as successful as similar attempts in historical precedents (as in, for instance, the blame placed upon violent media for the murder of James Bulger in 1993 and, respectively, the Columbine school shooting in 1999), suggesting a somewhat increased societal understanding of participatory gothic media.55 However, this understanding is not yet ideal, as can be seen

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through comparisons of how news outlets unrelated to participatory media cultures did regard Slender Man as a culpable, albeit, fictional party to the attack.56 Cultural anxieties about such media do persist, particularly with regard to adolescents’ consumption and participation in internet-based gothic myths.57 Language used in discussions about memes’ culpability in youth violence is similar to that deployed in moral panics.58 Indeed, despite concerning new media, these concerns and their language are common to responses to gothic texts in general.59 Scholars continue, however, to appropriately caution against explicitly linking these fictions to real-life violence. The disparity in the number of those who consume and participate in horror memes and those who invoke them in violent and antisocial acts is far too great to indicate culpability. Whether they manifest as images, videos, texts, or simply discussions, horror memes are a significant addition to the larger gothic and horror genres. They merge the more traditional media of literature and film with the capabilities and concerns of contemporary digital culture. While they have not gained the same prestige as literature and certain films of the same genre, these memes and similar media exemplify the ways in which contemporary technology democratises some media production with special regard for unsettling and frightening subject matter. Their role in digital folklore further invites consideration of the myths and archetypes that make an impression in the twenty-first century. They are contradictory, both easy to trace and all-but-impossible to definitively and comprehensively locate in all their manifestations. They are, in short, modern technological translations of classic gothic concerns.

Notes





1. Abigail Curlew, “The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture,” First Monday 22, no. 6 (2017), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/6901/6311, accessed February 1, 2019; Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 299; Andrew Peck, “Capturing the Slender Man: Online and Offline Vernacular Practice in the Digital Age,” Cultural Analysis 16, no. 1 (2017): 34. 2. Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 5. 3. Tomberry, “The Rake” last modified July 21, 2017 by Sabrina Tibbetts, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-rake, accessed February 1, 2019. 4. “The Rake,” Creepypasta Wiki, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rake, accessed February 1, 2019. 5. Steven Hickey, “Dark Web: Steven Hickey’s Essential Guide to Creepypasta—Part 28 the Rake Revisited,” last modified September 28, 2016, http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/ dark-web-steven-hickeys-essential-guide-to-creepypasta-part-28-the-rake-re-visited/, accessed February 1, 2019. 6. killerjeff, “Hi, I’m killerjeff,” Newgrounds, last modified August 14, 2008, https://killerjeff.newgrounds.com/news/post/169853, accessed February 1, 2019. 7. “Jeff the Killer,” Creepypasta Wiki, https://web.archive.org/web/20111121084004/http:// creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Jeff_The_Killer, accessed February 1, 2019.

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8. “About the SCP Foundation,” SCP Foundation, last modified May 2, 2018, http://www. scp-wiki.net/about-the-scp-foundation, accessed February 1, 2019. 9. “The Russian Sleep Experiment,” Creepypasta Wiki, last modified July 8, 2012, https:// www.creepypasta.com/the-russian-sleep-experiment/, accessed February 1, 2019. 10. Ibid. 11. “Create Paranormal Images,” Something Awful Forums, June 10, 2009, https://web. archive.org/web/20090618121538/https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread. php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3, accessed February 1, 2019. 12. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 194. 13. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 17. 14. Shifman, Memes, 6. 15. Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 17. 16. Janne Tapani Matikainen, “Motivations for Content Generation in Social Media,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 42. 17. Shifman, Memes, 56. 18. Trevor J. Blank, “Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet,” in Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, ed. Trevor J. Blank (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 4; Simon J. Bronner, ‘Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore,’ in Blank, 21–66; Tina Marie Boyer, “The Anatomy of a Monster: The Case of Slender Man,” Preternature 2, no. 2 (2013): 240– 61; Bruce McClelland, “Online Orality: The Internet, Folklore, and Culture in Russia,” Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in ­Post-communist Nations, ed. Laura Lengel (Stamford: Ablex, 2000), 184. 19. Lynne S. McNeill, “The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the Provision of Infinite Choice,” in Blank, 84. 20. Alan Dundes, “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004),” The Journal of American Folklore 118, no. 470 (2005): 406; Andrew Peck, “Tall, Dark and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age,” Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 509 (2015): 336; Cathay Y.N. Smith, “Beware the Slender Man: Intellectual Property and Internet Folklore,” Florida Law Review 70, no. 3 (2018): 608. 21. Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 81–2. 22. Sarah Gretter, Aman Yadav, and Benjamin Gleason, “Walking the Line Between Reality and Fiction in Online Spaces: Understanding the Effects of Narrative Transportation,” Journal of Media Literacy Education 9, no. 1 (2017): 1–2; Line Henriksen, “‘Spread the Word’’: Creepypasta, Hauntology, and an Ethics of the Curse,” University of Toronto Quarterly 87, no. 1 (2018): 267–8; McClelland, “Online Orality,” 184–7. 23. Peck, “Tall,” 334. 24. Boyer, “The Anatomy,” 246–53; Natasha L. Mikles, and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religion 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97; Michael Kinsella, Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011): x; Mikel J. Koven, Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008): 70. 25. “Anansi’s Goatman Story,” Creepypasta Wiki, last modified September 28, 2012, http:// creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Anansi%27s_Goatman_Story, accessed February 1, 2019. 26. Julie Bosman, “Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Struggles with Suicides Among Its Youth,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/us/ pine-ridge-indian-reservation-struggles-with-suicides-among-Young-people.html, accessed February 1, 2019.

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27. Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 44; Lynn Gelfand, “They Are Watching You: The Slender Man and the Terrors of 21st Century Technology,” (presentation, Popular Culture Association, Chicago, IL, April 2014); 3; Boyer, “The Anatomy,” 246. 28. Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 48. 29. Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, “Introduction: Fear Has No Face: Creepypasta as Digital Legendry,” in Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, eds. Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill (Louisville: Utah State University Press, 2018), 6. 30. Bronner, “Digitizing,” 51. 31. Peck, “Tall,” 342–3; Jeffrey A. Tolbert, “‘Dark and Wicked Things”: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief,” Contemporary Legend 35 (2015): 39–40. 32. Hickey, “Dark Web.” 33. Blank, “Toward,” 8–9. 34. McClelland, “Online Orality,” 179. 35. Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 17. 36. Curlew, “The Legend.” 37. Gretter, Yadav, and Gleason, “Walking,” 21; Boyer, “The Anatomy,” 246. 38. Smith, “Beware,” 606. 39. Hickey, “Dark Web.” 40. killerjeff, “Comments,” Newgrounds, last modified June 3, 2017, https://killerjeff.newgrounds.com/news/comments/190967, accessed February 1, 2019. 41. Smith, “Beware,” 606. 42. Curlew, “The Legend.” 43. Smith, “Beware,” 619. 44. Ibid., 620. 45. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), xxii. 46. Zyn, “Response from Izumi Kato Re: 173,” 05 Command, last modified September 9, 2014, http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-1016698/response-from-izumi-kato-re:173, accessed February 1, 2019. 47. Boyer, “The Anatomy,” 245. 48. Henriksen, “‘Spread the Word,’” 273. 49. McClelland, “Online Orality,” 179. 50. Boyer, “The Anatomy,” 242; Henriksen, “‘Spread the Word,’” 273; Curlew, “The Legend”; Gelfand, “They Are Watching You,” 3; Jeffrey A. Tolbert, “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’: The Case of Slender Man.” Semiotic Review 2 (2013), https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/19/19, accessed February 1, 2019; Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 52; Peck, “Capturing,” 33–4. 51. Joseph Crawford, “Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology,” in Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, ed. Justin D. Edwards (New York: Routledge, 2015), 35–6. 52. Ibid., 36. 53. Jessica Maddox, “Of Internet Born: Idolatry, The Slender Man Meme, and the Feminization of Digital Spaces,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 239. 54. Henriksen, “‘Spread the Word’,” 273–4. 55. Harry Bruinius, “Slender Man Stabbings: Why Are We so Fascinated by Horror?” Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 2014, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/ Society/2014/0604/Slender-Man-stabbings-Why-are-we-so-fascinated-By-horror, accessed February 1, 2019. 56. Maddox, “Of Internet Born,” 236; Smith, “Beware,” 604; Tolbert “Dark,” 43–4; Chess and Newsom, Folkore, 100.

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57. Yadav Gretter and Gleason, “Walking,” 3; Maddox, “Of Internet Born,” 242–3; Tolbert “Dark,” 42; Mikel J. Koven, “The Emperor’s New Lore; or, Who Believes in the Big Bad Slender Man,” in Blank and McNeill, 122–3. 58. Chess and Newsom, Folklore, 2–3; Koven “The Emperor’s New Lore,” 122–3. 59. Crawford, “Gothic Fiction,” 35–6.

Bibliography “About the SCP Foundation.” SCP Foundation. Last modified May 2, 2018. http://www.scp-wiki. net/about-the-scp-foundation. Accessed February 1, 2019. “Anansi’s Goatman Story.” Creepypasta Wiki. Last modified September 28, 2012. http:// creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Anansi%27s_Goatman_Story. Accessed February 1, 2019. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Blank, Trevor J. “Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet.” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, edited by Trevor J. Blank, 1–20. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009. Blank, Trevor S., and Lynne S. McNeill. “Introduction: Fear Has No Face: Creepypasta as Digital Legendry.” In Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill, 3–23. Louisville: Utah State University Press, 2018. Bosman, Julie. “Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Struggles with Suicide Among Its Youth.” New York Times, May 1, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/us/pine-ridge-indian-reservation-struggles-with-suicides-among-Young-people.html. Accessed February 1, 2019. Boyer, Tina Marie. “The Anatomy of a Monster: The Case of Slender Man.” Preternature 2, no. 2 (2013): 240–61. Bronner, Simon J. “Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore.” In Blank: 21–66. Bruinius, Harry. “Slender Man Stabbings: Why Are We so Fascinated by Horror?” Christian Science Monitor. June 4, 2014. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0604/ Slender-Man-stabbings-Why-are-we-so-fascinated-By-horror. Accessed February 1, 2019. Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Crawford, Joseph. “Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology.” In Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin D. Edwards, 35–47. New York: Routledge, 2015. “Create Paranormal Images.” Something Awful Forums, June 10, 2009. https://web.archive. org/web/20090618121538/https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3. Accessed February 1, 2019. Curlew, Abigail. “The Legend of the Slender Man: The Boogieman of Surveillance Culture.” First Monday 22, no. 6 (2017). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/6901/6311. Accessed February 1, 2019. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Dundes, Alan. “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (AFS Invited Presidential Plenary Address, 2004).” The Journal of American Folklore 118, no. 470 (2005): 385–408. Gelfand, Lynn. “They Are Watching You: The Slender Man and the Terrors of 21st Century Technology.” Paper Presented at the Popular Culture Association, Chicago, IL, 2014. Gretter, Sarah, Aman Yadav, and Benjamin Gleason. “Walking the Line Between Reality and Fiction in Online Spaces: Understanding the Effects of Narrative Transportation.” Journal of Media Literacy Education 9, no. 1 (2017): 1–21. Henriksen, Line. “‘Spread the Word’: Creepypasta, Hauntology, and the Ethics of the Curse.” University of Toronto Quarterly 87, no. 1 (2018): 266–80.

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Hickey, Steven. “Dark Web: Steven Hickey’s Essential Guide to Creepypasta—Part 28 the Rake Revisited.” Last modified September 28, 2016. http://www.ukhorrorscene.com/darkweb-steven-hickeys-essential-guide-to-creepypasta-part-28-the-rake-re-visited/. Accessed February 1, 2019. “Jeff the Killer.” Creepypasta Wiki. https://web.archive.org/web/20111121084004/http:// creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Jeff_The_Killer. Accessed February 1, 2019. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. ———. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. killerjeff. “Hi, I’m killerjeff.” Newgrounds. Last modified August 14, 2008. https://killerjeff.newgrounds.com/news/post/169853. Accessed February 1, 2019. ———. “Comments,” Newgrounds, last modified June 3, 2017. https://killerjeff.newgrounds. com/news/comments/190967. Accessed February 1, 2019. Kinsella, Michael. Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Koven, Mikel J. “The Emperor’s New Lore; or, Who Believes in the Big Bad Slender Man.” In Blank and McNeill, 113–27. ———. Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Maddox, Jessica. “Of Internet Born: Idolatry, the Slender Man Meme, and the Feminization of Digital Spaces.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 235–48. Matikainen, Janne Tapani. “Motivations for Content Generation in Social Media.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 41–58. McClelland, Bruce. “Online Orality: The Internet, Folklore, and Culture in Russia.” In Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-communist Nations, edited by Laura Lengel, 179–91. Stamford: Ablex, 2000. McNeill, Lynne S. “The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the Provision of Infinite Choice.” In Blank: 80–97. Mikles, Natasha L., and Joseph P. Laycock. “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97. Peck, Andrew. “Capturing the Slender Man: Online and Offline Vernacular Practice in the Digital Age.” Cultural Analysis 16, no. 1 (2017): 30–48. ———. “Tall, Dark and Loathsome: The Emergence of a Legend Cycle in the Digital Age.” Journal of American Folklore 128, no. 509 (2015): 333–48. Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Smith, Cathay Y.N. “Beware the Slender Man: Intellectual Property and Internet Folklore.” Florida Law Review 70, no. 3 (2018): 601–47. “The Rake.” Creepypasta Wiki. http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rake. Accessed February 1, 2019. “The Russian Sleep Experiment.” Creepypasta Wiki. Last modified July 8, 2012. https://www. creepypasta.com/the-russian-sleep-experiment/. Accessed February 1, 2019. Tolbert, Jeffrey A. “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’: The Case of Slender Man.” Semiotic Review 2 (2013). https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/ article/view/19/19. Accessed February 1, 2019. ———. “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief.” Contemporary Legend 35 (2015): 38–61. Tomberry. “The Rake.” Last modified July 21, 2017 by Sabrina Tibbetts. https://knowyourmeme. com/memes/the-rake. Accessed February 1, 2019. Zyn. “Response from Izumi Kato Re: 173.” 05 Command. Last modified September 9, 2014. http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-1016698/response-from-izumi-kato-re:173. Accessed February 1, 2019.

Virtual Desert Horrors Alison Bainbridge

The desert is not the most traditional of gothic environments despite its growing presence in international horror media. The Outback has been used as a backdrop for contemporary Australian horror, such as Wolf Creek (2005) and Wyrmwood (2014), and the Arizona and Nevada deserts provide the settings for Don Water’s Desert Gothic (2007) and the television series Preacher (2016–), in addition to featuring heavily in Westworld (2016–). In spite of this, the mere mention of the gothic genre still evokes images of European castles and foggy cemeteries rather than flat, rocky wasteland or open sky. However, as this chapter will argue, the desert is indeed a gothic landscape in its own right, and the cultural connotations it holds can provide a haunting backdrop against which the Gothic can flourish— even if the desert in question remains unseen. The primary focus of this chapter has a desert setting but is not in a visual medium. Instead, this chapter will concentrate on the representations of the desert in the long-running podcast series Welcome to Night Vale (2012–). The decision to focus on audio media for this chapter will hopefully help to fill the gap in scholarship on audio horror narratives, as despite a recent influx of critical work on the podcast, much remains to be written, particularly with regard to setting.1 Created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale is a ­faux-local news report for the fictional town of Night Vale, and is set in the southwestern United States. The show is vague as to the exact location of Night Vale as it does not mention which State the town is set in, nor does it mention any neighbouring towns except for the fictional Desert Bluffs. The show is also vague as to its genre. While Welcome to Night Vale is primarily marketed as a comedy on hosting websites such as iTunes, it parodies a number of horror and sci-fi tropes and also includes many references to the Gothic. This is far from unusual in the American Gothic, however, as Matthew Wynn Sivils states that ‘once transplanted to North America, Gothic literature…replaced the European elements not merely

A. Bainbridge (*)  Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_59

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with regionally appropriate place-holders, but also with a tendency to incorporate facets of the Gothic across a variety of genres’.2 This suggests that the genre-bending nature of Welcome to Night Vale is as much a part of its gothic aspect as its preoccupation with the environment—specifically, the desert. Indeed, the desert as a gothic setting appears most frequently not in the horror genre itself, but as background to Western—and Western-inspired—films and novels, as well as in historical texts on the gold rush. In these mediums, the desert is primarily depicted as a rocky wilderness filled with abandoned townships, decrepit churches, and old cemeteries that stretch off into the abstract hillsides. This has led to the desert being associated with death and abandonment; with the impossible hostility of a landscape that defies settlement—despite indigenous settlements having existed there for centuries. This is a trend that can be found in most desert-set literature. When writing on the Australian Outback’s representation in contemporary horror films, Tom Drahos argues that the construction of the desert as a landscape outside of historical development is a European fantasy. ‘The notion of wilderness intimating a land unchanged by a human population’ places the desert outside of human influence—or, rather, the influence of European colonialist civilisation.3 As such, the Outback is characterised as a place of great violence, where the colonial narratives are upset by lack of control and where invasion and settlement may be thwarted by the inhospitableness of the land itself. The desert is where civilisation fails and, therefore, must be represented as a malevolent force. I would argue that the Southwestern desert is subject to many of the same stigmas that the Outback is subjected to in contemporary popular culture. When one thinks of the Southwestern desert, the immediate association is with the Western genre, in which the desert is the site of great violence perpetrated between white colonisers and Native American peoples. As Drahos continues, ‘landscapes with a history of violence are construed as being intertwined with… destructive forces’ even if the violent history in question is largely a construction of rumour and local mythology.4 Despite the American Gothic’s interest in and fear of the environment being noted in multiple academic sources from Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) onwards, there is little criticism that focuses on the role that the desert plays in American Gothic. Instead, critical texts predominantly focus on the forests of New England and the swamps and plantations of the deep South as they are represented in the Gothic, as these are the primary sources of American gothic writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this time period, the Gothic became associated with the boundaries of American civilisation: the sea, the hostility of the wilderness, and in the struggles associated with the early days of colonisation.5 As Charles L. Crow states, ‘the wilderness, especially, offered an equivalent for the European aesthetic of the sublime. In place of ruined castles and deserted villages, evoking thoughts of mutability and loss, there was the deeply shadowed forest’.6 Without the castles and crumbling ruins of traditional European Gothic in which to set their tales, American authors found inspiration from the land around them. But by focusing

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on the colonial horrors of the forest, however, swathes of the American frontier go largely unacknowledged, including the deserts of the Southwest and its histories. The spread of first Spanish and then Anglo colonies into the desert marked a spread of desperation and destruction across a countryside that resisted agricultural attempts to tame it. In this chapter, I will argue that the environmental paranoia that haunts the American forests can also be found in the open expanses of the desert, and that while the claustrophobia of more traditional gothic literature can be lost in this setting, the auditory media of the podcast lends itself to a technological substitute. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is twofold: to explore the representation of the desert in contemporary Gothic, and to situate Welcome to Night Vale within the gothic literature of the frontier. Sevils writes that ‘American Gothic…warns us to fear the non-humans, to dread the vengeance of animals and the environment, and to dread the horrific fact that our bodies and minds are entwined with the land itself and will eventually decompose back into it’.7 The American Gothic conflates the wilderness with a lack of humanity. This inhumanity can be seen not only in the caricatures of the inhabitants of the landscape—typically indigenous peoples—but of the reactions to those who are exiled from Anglo-American society. When speaking of the Southwestern desert, there are racialised tensions between Anglo and Spanish colonisers, and displaced Native peoples. In Western books and films of the twentieth century, Anglo settlers were primarily positioned against the landscape which they sought to dominate, and the Native people it sheltered. Scott P. Sanders has stated that ‘In the Southwest, only the most wilful blindness can evade the presence of the region’s significant cultural past’.8 The Southwest desert is haunted by the remains of previous civilisations carved into the landscape and is therefore still associated with them, making the region not only geographically hostile in its scorching environs but culturally hostile as well. Southwestern literature’s preoccupation with the arid climate and difficulty in bending the landscape to colonisers’ will can be linked to the same cultural guilt that haunts the forests of New England. Michael Eaton argues that with ‘the attempt to transform the desert into a garden – the underlying structural principle of much Western fiction – exacted a fatally destructive toll upon colonisers and colonised alike, that it was nothing less than hubristic madness. Maybe there were some places where white feet should never have ventured’.9 This same cultural guilt is invoked in Welcome to Night Vale in the form of the Apache Tracker. Contrary to what his name implies, the Apache Tracker is a white man of ‘Slavic origin’ who wears a ‘huge and cartoonishly inaccurate Indian headdress’ while claiming to have the ability to perform ‘Indian magicks’ and ‘read tracks on asphalt’.10 Reviled for his cultural appropriation, the Apache Tracker is a disgrace and embarrassment to the town of Night Vale. This revulsion continues first through his transformation into ‘that which he always absurdly claimed to be’: an individual of Native American heritage, and then into a hero of sorts as he sacrifices himself in order to save the life of Carlos the Scientist. By the time he sacrifices himself, the Apache Tracker has been physically transformed into the appearance he had been appropriating, and has lost the ability to

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communicate with the rest of the town. In this way, the Apache Tracker was punished by the town for pretending to have abilities and heritage he was not entitled to. Furthermore, the statue which was raised in honour of his sacrifice at a ceremony no one attended, was immediately buried in the desert. Memory of the Apache Tracker was consigned to the desert—a place where no one would be able to resurrect it. As well as providing commentary on the Native/coloniser dynamic in the Southwest desert, this particular subplot ties with the theme of abandonment. Shameful things, and people, are sent out into the wilderness in order to be lost and forgotten. There is no genuine Native American presence in Welcome to Night Vale. In episode ‘7. History Week’, listeners are given the history of settlement in Night Vale and the surrounding area. While the Apache Tracker appropriates the cultures of Native American peoples, it is revealed in ‘7. History Week’ that while there are ‘a few cave paintings’ of the towns and hunting practices of the earliest people to live in the desert surrounding Night Vale, no indigenous people appear to have permanently settled in the area.11 The first white colonisers to arrive found that the place that would become Night Vale was ‘just another part of a large and featureless desert’ and immediately moved on, with Night Vale eventually being settled by the fifth group of potential inhabitants.12 This is further supported in ‘67. [Best Of?]’, in which it is revealed that Cecil’s first broadcast for the local radio station takes place at the moment where white settlers arrived in the Night Vale desert.13 These white settlers are ‘standing in a vast stretch of desert in which no one has lived for hundreds of years… This isn’t their land, but they’re going to set up here anyway. They’re saying, “This is ours” and pointing ludicrously at actual Earth, as though that were an ownable thing’.14 Their settlement and ownership of the land is portrayed in a very socially aware fashion—that the land is not and cannot be theirs, and for them to claim so is ridiculous. In ‘7. History Week’, the landscape Night Vale is situated in is immediately characterised as hostile to communities of potential settlers. The cave paintings did not only picture hunting practices, but also the ‘dark… inhuman, shimmering shapes’ that watched the earliest human residents and terrorised them with their presence.15 It is only when the ancestors of current Night Vale arrive with their sinister rituals and ‘soft-meat crowns’ that the land accepts its new inhabitants, and even then, acceptance comes at a cost.16 In order to escape the sinister shapes that watch them from the hills, the founders of Night Vale must ‘hum until their minds are empty, and sit dreaming until their dreams are clean, and they will never look at the hills again. They will cease to believe in hills at all’.17 The residents of Night Vale must be willing to mentally erase the world outside of their town and be able to focus only on what lies within its borders. They must also be resilient to the weird. These passages from the podcast imply that the landscape surrounding Night Vale required settlers as strange and terrifying as itself to settle there in order to subsume those people into itself. As Michael Mayerfeld Bell tells us in his essay ‘The Ghosts of Place’, ‘when we sense our own ghost in a place we are likely to experience thereby a deep sense of belonging to that place…we attach our spirits to a place, and thus that place is attached to us’.18 In order for a space to become a place, it must have cultural

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meaning imparted upon it by residents, but if, however, it is unable to be settled in as Night Vale was by the earliest attempts to colonise the area, then the space remains unable to become a place. Without meaning imparted upon it by people, the desert around Night Vale would remain void; that people were unable to settle there implies that the landscape itself demanded the kind of meaning that inhabitants such as those who populate Night Vale would impart upon it. There would be no sense of belonging until the inhabitants were that which the landscape itself desired. This theory gives the landscape power—power over who settles in it, and what lives they lead. This has been a common theme throughout literature, as landscape defines human behaviour. An open landscape, such as that of the desert, ‘evokes infinite vastness, terrifying uniformity – it dwarfs humanity, crushing the human spirit and driving it to depression and despair’.19 Wide open spaces have been characterised in the American Gothic by their deceptiveness and their ability to cause madness. Gothic novels that feature expansive environments, such as those set in the desert, at sea, or on the prairie, often show that environment hiding malevolent forces. These forces typically take two forms. First, they take the form of the landscape’s inhabitants. If the dark shapes depicted in the cave paintings mentioned in ‘7. History Week’ can be counted as inhabitants, then the desert surrounding Night Vale is indeed inhabited by malevolent forces, and has been since the very beginning of human life in the area. In the case of Night Vale, the desert ensured that the only people who could settle there were capable of living in an environment that bent the realms of possibility. These people include the inhuman Station Management, the Glow Cloud that rains dead animals and heads the local P.T.A, and the Hooded Figures that lurk in the forbidden dog park in addition to more human residents such as the narrator, Cecil, who despite his apparent humanity is implied to be capable of withstanding worrying amounts of radiation. In short, the desert surrounding Night Vale may be capable of crushing the human spirit, but it is mostly inhabited by people who are—on some level—not actually human. Welcome to Night Vale further expands upon the idea of the desert being capable of hiding threats despite its barren landscape in the storyline of Dana Cardinal. When Dana vanishes into the sinister Dog Park, it is assumed that she—like the majority of Night Vale Community Radio’s interns—has died in the line of duty. Several episodes later, however, it is revealed that Dana is not only alive, but that she has escaped the Dog Park into an otherworldly desert which stretches on for miles. This desert is shown to be host to multiple dangers, not least of which is the Smiling God whose light gradually unravels the universe, causing rifts in the space–time continuum and, ultimately, complete destruction. This storyline positions the desert in a similar fashion to older examples of the desert Gothic in that it shows the wide open terrain being capable of concealing danger; specifically, danger that seeks the destruction of recognisable civilisation. In this way, the other desert also provides a sort of protection. Its sands are haunted by an army that Dana is able to recruit in defence of Night Vale. This army intervenes in the invasion from Desert Bluffs—and, thus, the cult of the

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Smiling God—and is partly responsible for Night Vale’s salvation. In this case, the desert provides its residents with both threat and a way of defending themselves. The desert—and the forces that reside within it—are hostile to further invaders. The second malevolent force present in desert Gothic is the landscape itself. There is a degree of paranoia invoked by open spaces. While, as previously discussed, the landscape may be hiding malevolent inhabitants, it also provides a lack of shelter for the unwary traveller. Constant exposure, whether to the eyes of hidden observers or simply to the elements, can lead to a growing sense of madness. This is exemplified in Welcome to Night Vale with the story of Telly the Barber. In ‘9. PYRAMID’, it is revealed that Telly was run out of Night Vale following Cecil’s reaction to the terrible haircut he gave Carlos in ‘3. Station Management’, although in the recent live show A Spy in the Desert, this is referred to as a ‘self-imposed exile’.20 During this exile, Telly takes to ‘wandering the sand wastes’ on the outskirts of Night Vale ‘howling at the sky’.21 Telly’s exile into the desert prompts a descent into madness that is still present in A Spy in the Desert where it is revealed that Telly has returned to Night Vale, and has ‘learned so much’ from performing dangerous and self-mutilating acts.22 His time in the desert stripped Telly of his self-preservation and reduced him to a gibbering, masochistic thing. This descent into madness is depicted in terms reminiscent of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, whose cosmic horrors regularly drove his protagonists to howling madness through their vast and inexplicable shapes. Night Vale’s surrounding desert is depicted in much the same terms as Lovecraftian monstrosities in that they are referred to as ‘vast’ and ‘seemingly endless’ beyond human comprehension. In Welcome to Night Vale, the desert is devoid of most of the features that the Southwest desert has in reality and is simply rendered as an unending stretch of scrub-brush and inhospitable earth. The unending and punishing aspects of the desert may be a reflection of increasing fears for the environment. Gothic literature often reflects the concerns contemporary to its creation, and climate change is a factor that must be taken into account in the twenty-first century. Scholars of the eco-gothic have noted that the increase in global temperature and, indeed, the realisation that ours is the last generation which may have the capability of reversing that increase, has led to an influx of environmental concerns within the Gothic. In Welcome to Night Vale, the concept of the featureless, endless desert can be read as commentary on the increased desertification of semi-arid areas which has gradually been increasing on a global scale for the last several years, partially due to human activity.23 Desertification is an irreversible process which transforms semi-arid landscapes into desert through the dehydration and desiccation of the seed-beds which support plant-life. Due to increases in temperature, weather patterns becoming increasingly unpredictable, and increased grazing of livestock in order to support a growing human population, deserts are gradually becoming larger as increasing amounts of semi-arid land is rendered unusable. Political approaches to climate change are currently not widely accepted in the United States. The Green New Deal being proposed by some members of the Democratic Party has been met with ridicule from the current administration,

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which has a history of not only denying climate change, but also encouraging the widespread use of fossil fuels and underfunding environmental agencies. Climate change, despite the approaching deadline by which we can potentially reverse it, is largely being ignored by those with the most influence. This too is reflected in Welcome to Night Vale. By presenting audiences with a desert too large to fully understand, Welcome to Night Vale offers listeners not only an apocalyptic view of a potential future but a vista that cannot be looked at. Even the wilful ignorance of Night Vale’s residents provides commentary on the United States’ approach to climate change, as can be seen in their approach to mountains. As previously mentioned, the mountains in the desert surrounding Night Vale are filled with ominous shapes that watch its residents. As such, the citizens of Night Vale have grown so accustomed to pretending that those mountains don’t exist that they have come to believe that mountains are not real, even though the existence of mountains is provable. This refusal to believe something is real even though evidence to support it is clear is something that has become increasingly prevalent in the current political climate—both in the United States and elsewhere. By reflecting the concerns of climate change and increased global temperature, the incomprehensible vastness of the Night Vale desert both encourages listeners of the podcast to not look, or to not imagine looking, on the expanse for too long and critiques the attitudes that keep them from doing so. The Night Vale desert relies heavily on its invisibility—a necessary technique for a story told through a medium without visual cues—however, the desert itself cannot be ignored for long. The desert surrounding Night Vale is thus as much or as little as listeners wish it to be, depending on their own experience of desert settings. As previously mentioned, the desert is an isolating wilderness. Listening to podcasts can also be isolating in that it is an activity typically performed alone, and through headphones which cut listeners off from their immediate environment. The fact that podcasts can only be enjoyed through one sense is also isolating in that it means listeners’ attentions must be caught in a single way, and any distraction means that they might potentially lose their place. The general lack of visual cues means that to develop a sense of setting and, indeed, community, the audience must rely exclusively on auditory information. While this may be done both through sound effects and audio description, it is important to note that Welcome to Night Vale contains very few of these. Descriptions are vague and, as I will discuss later in the chapter, Welcome to Night Vale is backed by music rather than stock effects. As such, atmosphere and setting are primarily built through vocal intonation and place names. The place names used within Welcome to Night Vale further this idea of isolation by implying that Night Vale and its surrounds are better left hidden. This is most apparent in the name of Night Vale itself. The town is associated with ‘night’ and, therefore, darkness and potential danger, and hints at the shadowy nature of the town’s political system, which comprises the megalomaniacal City Council, the Sheriff’s Secret Police, and the Unnamed Government Agency which observes town activity. The ‘vale’ of the name is homophonous with ‘veil’, suggesting that something has been hidden away, and again implies hidden observations and a

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lack of openness. The name of Night Vale is an implication of institutional secrecy. This pattern is continued in the name of Night Vale’s rival town, Desert Bluffs. While, like ‘vale’, ‘bluffs’ initially implies the presence of certain geographical features, the word can also be connected to a bluff in poker, which connotes falsehood, trickery, and deceit. That the town is named after its desert setting is also important, as it means that the two are irrevocably linked. As the desert in Welcome to Night Vale is given such a prominent and malevolent presence, the link between it and Desert Bluffs is further intended to highlight the untrustworthy nature of the town. When examined in such a way, the duplicitous nature of Desert Bluffs and its dangerous connection to the cult of the universe-devouring Smiling God is not a surprise. The name of the one geological feature in Night Vale’s desert is also of interest. Radon Canyon is home to mysteriously glowing lights and lead-plated doors marked with a warning for plutonium. The name strongly implies the presence of radon gas, which is supported by the Night Vale Tourism Board’s warning that the views are ‘literally breath-taking’.24 This references the United States history of testing nuclear weapons in the Southwestern deserts, and hints at the danger and potential impact of such experiments while the blasé attitudes of Night Vale’s citizens towards the canyon again mirror an institutional lack of care for the environment on both a local and federal scale. Even the names of the deserts surrounding Night Vale are interesting. Although they are not given specific names, they are consistently referred to as ‘endless’ and ‘other’—both of which are alienating and sinister. These names Other the desert just as much as the references to its vastness do. They situate the deserts as limitless and unconquerable spaces and render them unfamiliar to the residents of Night Vale as well as to listeners to the podcast. What is interesting about the place names mentioned here is that they all have implications that the towns have hidden natures, particularly as neither town is physically described. Welcome to Night Vale is narrated almost entirely from the point of view of Cecil—a host at the local radio station. Perhaps due to his status as a native to Night Vale, he never sees fit to describe the town itself, instead only mentioning locations within and around the town (e.g., the dog park, the barista district, etc.) without specifying exactly where they are. For clues as to their importance and appearance, the audience is left to rely on Cecil’s use of intonation. While few physical descriptors are offered, Cecil gives listeners an emotional response to locations within the show that is intended to guide the audience’s own opinion. For example, Cecil regularly speaks of Desert Bluffs with a tone of disgust and derision, and from this the audience learns that Desert Bluffs is a community that should be looked down on and disapproved of. Cecil’s narration does, however, rely heavily on sarcasm and droll humour, so initial reactions to his opinions may vary. His narrative style leaves audiences unsure of whether or not to believe him. By contrast, the character Kevin who acts as the voice of Desert Bluffs, sounds far happier than Cecil—when audiences are introduced to his character in episode ‘19a. The Sandstorm’, he sees nothing sinister about his town; a direct contrast to Cecil’s views of Night Vale.25 This means that at first

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listen, Desert Bluffs seems to be nothing to be afraid of. This is belied when Cecil switches place with Kevin and arrives in his studio in ‘19b. The Sandstorm’. Cecil immediately reacts to his new environment with horror; not because he has just passed through a mysterious vortex, but because Kevin’s studio is dripping with human viscera.26 The happy, carefree voice that audiences have come to associate with Desert Bluffs belongs to an individual comfortable with extreme violence and gore, and who surrounds himself with gruesome trophies of his atrocities. In other words, the initial cheer associated with Desert Bluffs is a lie; in comparison, Cecil’s black humour and bleak outlook are rendered honest. This honesty is reinforced later in the show, when Desert Bluffs invades Night Vale and seeks to take over in an attempt to spread the cult of the Smiling God. Cecil’s disdain is justified, therefore his emotional responses to other locations and the intonation he uses when speaking of them are given trustworthy status despite the fact that Cecil is an unreliable—and unprofessional—narrator. Audiences must rely on Cecil despite his unreliability because of the lack of other material on which to build their impressions of Night Vale. This includes the written materials that have been published within the Welcome to Night Vale universe, such as the transcripts and tie-in novels which have been released due to the commercial success of the podcast. Unlike the show, these books are able to include visual media, however, a deliberate decision has been made to not take advantage of this fact. As Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast, it is devoid of visual media save for the user icon under which it is published. This icon, which features a pyramid, a water tower, and a telephone pole, further occludes Night Vale instead of revealing anything about its geography, and besides the pyramid, the items within the icon are never mentioned within the show. In the case of the pyramid, it is mentioned only briefly in the episode that takes its name, ‘9. PYRAMID’, and is rarely mentioned again afterwards. As such, Welcome to Night Vale’s audience is left without any visual or audio description of the town in which the podcast is set—it is veiled from them. This vagueness as to the visual appearance of the town and its citizens stretches even beyond the podcast itself and into the published material that surrounds it. The transcripts for the first fifty episodes were published in book format in 2016 by Harper Collins, with further transcripts released in 2019. These books are illustrated by Jessica Hayworth, and rather than illuminating the town and the people of Night Vale, her art is carefully designed and curated so as not to influence the imaginations of the podcast’s audience. Each episode is illustrated with relevant imagery, such as a distorted walk sign, a sandwich bearing the word ‘HARLOT’, or a human heart filled with worms, but no geographical or personal descriptions are depicted. For example, the accompanying image for ‘33. Cassette’ features the sprawled body of an adolescent Cecil; his face and torso are obscured by a piece of cloth, and he is rendered without any visible skin at all. While readers know from the context of the image that it depicts Cecil, it gives no more information than the single verbal description of him that is given in ‘19a. Sandstorm’ where

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Kevin depicts him in negative binaries, rendering Cecil very much as a blank entity.27 This lack of detail is crucial to the gothic affect of Welcome to Night Vale. By being vague in verbal descriptions and in official artwork, the details are thus left for the audience to fill in. However, podcasts do not rely exclusively on narration; they contain sound effects and backing music that can also be used to further inspire listeners to create their own settings, and to manipulate their reactions to the podcasts’ content. It must be mentioned at this juncture that due to a relative lack of critical work on podcasts, much of the following theory comes from academic work on film and television sound design. There is a certain degree of crossover within the horror genre between these mediums, and sound design is one of those factors as it features prominently across all three. Sound effects and musical scores are of great value in the horror genre due to their ability to create atmosphere and tension in the audience. The use of sound to create fear has been well covered in scientific and humanities scholarship, and the soundtracks of the horror genre take advantage of the instinctive fear that certain sounds can create in their audience.28 By using certain frequencies in music, and by using sound effects such as breathing and increasing heartrates, the sound designs used in horror films and television are able to trigger a pre-emptive response in listeners’ brains which informs the body that a fear response to the entertainment medium is required. Horror film scores are able to manipulate the brain’s responses to stimuli and make audiences feel fear.29 In doing so, sound designers are physically and psychologically preparing the audience to feel afraid of what they are about to see—or not see—on screen. This is of particular importance in more low-budget horror. Sound design, which is frequently subject to low budgets and therefore has come to rely on innovative shortcuts to obtain the sounds required to be effective, is often more reliably creepy than low-budget visual effects. Without sound, the costumes, graphics, and design of horror movie monsters would veer into the ridiculous far more than they already do. With sound effects in place and manipulating the audience’s brain chemistry, low-budget horror is able to create fear without heavily relying on visual effects. Low-budget horror is of particular interest here, because of their cultural context as popular, low-cost productions—a gap that in recent years has also come to be occupied by the podcast. As William Whittington has argued in his work on horror sound design, ‘low-budget horror films blurred the line between “professional” and “amateur” filmmaking, but in doing so evolved a sense of immediacy and authority common to on-the-spot broadcast recording found on both radio and television’.30 The argument Whittington presents here can easily be applied to the podcast. Due to the nature of the medium, podcasts often straddle the line between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. They are cheap and easy to make, with sound-editing software freely available to download from the internet and good quality microphones being available to purchase at a low cost. Indeed, Welcome to Night Vale started out as a very low-budget production, recorded on free software and on cheap microphones. Welcome to Night Vale’s use of sound is particularly interesting, however, as it relies almost entirely on music and very

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little on sound effects beyond static and mechanical whirring. These noises, when they occur, do not depict setting in any way; they are used to signify the presence of inhuman beings or presences within Cecil’s radio studio. Beings such as Hooded Figures and Station Management are, like the desert itself, associated with Lovecraftian monstrosity, and are therefore undefinable even through sound. Thus, their presences are marked by the dissolution of music into abject noise. The use of music rather than sound effects is particularly interesting here as it tells listeners nothing about the characters or environment except for giving an increase in tempo when listeners should find the show’s content disturbing. The backing music for Welcome to Night Vale is performed by Disparition, a project created by the New York-based composer Jon Bernstein. He states that his music is ‘created using electronic and acoustic instruments and fed by natural and unnatural sources’.31 The music backing Welcome to Night Vale is eerie and atmospheric, but does not contain stock sound effects that would typically be associated with Gothic soundtracks. Atmosphere is manipulated through tone, pitch, and speed, but there are no creaking doors or howling winds with which to depict setting. Instead, the music leaves the creation of setting entirely to the narration. As previously mentioned, however, depictions of Night Vale’s settings are incredibly vague—described only in the loosest of terms. This leaves the appearance of Night Vale nearly blank; it is something that exists only in the minds of listeners, the majority of whom likely do not have any real-world experience of a desert setting. Bernstein states that his music as Disparition, ‘when used as intended… may cause disintegration of categorical boundaries. Some processes are irreversible’.32 Indeed, the use of his music as the backing for Welcome to Night Vale’s narration causes a disintegration of the boundaries that seek to define the Gothic in film and literature by refusing to define the setting of the show beyond what little is directly stated in the narrative. By allowing listeners the space to define Night Vale in their imaginations rather than forcing them to accept set images, Welcome to Night Vale is again granting its listeners the ability to choose how much of the show’s infinite setting to incorporate into their experience of the podcast. It is here that the Gothic returns to Welcome to Night Vale. While, as this chapter has argued, the desert is a gothic setting in its own right, the loss of visual cues created by the aural medium of podcasting means that some sense of the Gothic is downplayed. However, podcasting is able to utilise the same techniques used in horror film soundtracks to manipulate chemical pathways in the brains of their audiences to create a fear response. This allows podcast creators to invoke a sense of terror on a relatively low budget, allowing podcasting production to remain at a primarily grassroots level. Reliance only on sound also allows creators to let their audiences perform the bulk of the work in regards to the setting by allowing their imaginations to run wild. In the case of Welcome to Night Vale, this means that the setting of the desert can be as detailed as each individual listener desires. Either way, the show’s reliance on music and narration to create atmosphere positions Night Vale on the edge of the void, as neither of these mediums permit excessive detail; it is up to the listener to decide how much of that void they wish to explore.

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Notes





1. For overviews of podcasting as a medium, see Llinares, D. & Fox, N.’s Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (2018), Spinelli, M. & Dann, L.’s Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution (2019), and for a more in-depth focus on Welcome to Night Vale, see Weinstock, J.A.’s Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting Between Weather and the Void (2018). 2. Sivils, Matthew Wynn (2013) ‘American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-Present,’ The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron & Dale Townshend. Taylor and Francis, pp. 121– 131, 130. 3. Drahos, p. 149. 4. Drahos, p. 151. 5. Crow, C.L. (2012) ‘Fear, Ambiguity, and Transgression: The Gothic Novel in the United States,’ A Companion to the Gothic Novel, ed. Alfred Bendixen. London: WileyBlackwell, pp. 129–146, 131. 6. Ibid. 7. Sivils, pp. 124–125. 8. Sander, S.P. (1993) ‘Southwestern Gothic: On the Frontier Between Landscape and Locale,’ Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literatire, eds. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders & Joanne B. Karpinski. London & Toronto: Associated University Press, pp. 55–70, 55. 9. Eaton, Michael “Vanishing Americans.” Sight & Sound 10, no. 6 (June 2000): 30–32. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505863496&site=ehost-live&scope=site (emphasis mine). 10. Fink & Cranor (2012) ‘1. Pilot’ and ‘2. Glow Cloud’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 11. Fink & Cranor (2012) ‘7. History Week’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 12. Fink & Cranor (2012) ‘7. History Week’. 13. Cecil, along with several other residents of Night Vale, appears to exist outside of any sort of functioning time stream. His origins are inconsistent and he appears to be able to broadcast to the town prior to the town’s founding or the invention of radio technology. 14. Fink & Cranor (2015) ‘67. [Best Of?]’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 15. Fink & Cranor (2012) ‘7. History Week’. 16. Ibid. 17. Fink & Cranor (2015) ‘67. [Best Of?]’. 18. Bell, Michael Mayerfeld ‘The Ghosts of Place.’ Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (1997): 813–836, 824. 19. Eaton (2000). 20. Fink, J. & Cranor, J. (2018) A Spy in the Desert. Welcome to Night Vale Live Tour 2018–19. 21. Fink, J. & Cranor, J. (2012) ‘9. PYRAMID’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 22. Fink & Cranor (2018). 23. Laity, Julie. Deserts and Desert Environments. Chichester, UK & Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2008, p. 269. 24. Fink & Cranor (2012) ‘2. Glow Cloud’. 25. Fink & Cranor (2013) ‘19a. The Sandstorm’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 26. Fink & Cranor (2013) ‘19b. The Sandstorm’ Welcome to Night Vale podcast. 27. Fink & Cranor (2013) ‘19a. The Sandstorm’. 28. For more on this, refer to Lerner, N. (2010) Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, and Koelsch, S. et al. ‘The Roles of Superficial Amygdala and Auditory Cortex in Music-Evoked Fear and Joy,’ Neuroimage 81 (2013): 49–60. 29. Whittingtong, William (2014) ‘Horror Sound Design’, in A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff. Wiley, pp. 168–185, 171.

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30. Whittington, p. 173. 31. Bernstein, J. (2014) ‘About’. Disparition. Available at: http://www.disparition.info/. Accessed 1 December 2018. 32. Ibid.

Bibliography Bell, Michael Mayerfield. ‘The Ghosts of Place.’ Theory and Society 26, no 6 (1997): 813–836. Bernstein, J. ‘About.’ Disparition. Available at: http://www.disparition.info/ (Accessed 1 December 2018). Crow, C.L. ‘Fear, Ambiguity, and Transgression: The Gothic Novel in the United States.’ A Companion to the Gothic Novel, ed. Alfred Bendixen. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 129–146, 131. 2012. Drahos, Tom. ‘The Imagined Desert.’ Coolabah, No. 11, pp. 148–161. Available at: coolabahplacedness.blogspot.com.au (Accessed 20 November 2018). 2013. Eaton, Michael. ‘Vanishing Americans.’ Sight & Sound 10, no. 6 (2000): 30–32. http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505863496&site=ehost-live &scope=site (Accessed 30 November 2018). 2000. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York, NY: Stein and Day. 1966. Fink, Jeffrey & Joseph Cranor. Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 1. New York & London: Harper Perennial. 2016. Fink, Jeffrey & Joseph Cranor. The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2. New York & London: Harper Perennial. 2016. Fink, Jeffrey & Joseph Cranor. Welcome to Night Vale [Podcast]. Available at: https://itunes. apple.com/gb/podcast/welcome-to-night-vale/id536258179?mt=2 (Accessed 11 November 2018). 2012. Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature. New York, NY: Russell and Russell. 1958. Folsom, James K. ‘Gothicism in the Western Novel.’ Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, eds. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders & Joanne B. Karpinski. London & Toronto: Associated University Press, pp. 28–41. 1993. Goddu, Theresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1997. Koelsch, S. et al. ‘The Roles of Superficial Amygdala and Auditory Cortex in Music-Evoked Fear and Joy.’ Neuroimage 81 (2013): 49–60. Laity, Julie. Deserts and Desert Environments. Chichester, UK & Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. 2008. Lerner, N. Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. New York, NY: Routledge. 2010. Llinares, D. & Fox, N. Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. McCumber, Andy. ‘“It Would Make More Sense for It to Be There Than Not”: Constructing Night Vale as a “Place”.’ Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting Between Weather and the Void, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 69–82. 2018. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th Edition. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. 2001, 1967. Sanders, Scott P. ‘Southwestern Gothic: On the Frontier Between Landscape and Locale.’ Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, eds. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders & Joanne B. Karpinski. London & Toronto: Associated University Press, pp. 55–70. 1993. Sivils, Matthew Wynn. ‘American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-Present.’ The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron & Dale Townshend. Taylor and Francis, pp. 121–131. 2013.

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Smith, Andrew & William Hughes. Ecogothic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. 2015. Spinelli, Martin, & Lance Dann. Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. 2019. Sykes, Brad. Terror in the Deser: Dark Cinema of the American Southwest. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers. 2018. Whittington, William. ‘Horror Sound Design.’ A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff. London: Wiley, pp. 168–185. 2014.

Immersive and Pervasive Performance Madelon Hoedt

The scene is a dark alleyway, somewhere behind Cardiff Central station. A neon sign of the word ‘BRAINS’[sic] can be seen in the distance.1 A number of ­people wearing high visibility armbands are coming down this little street. They are walking, a normal speed, maybe laughing, joking, talking, yet they are a­ pprehensive. For good reason: before long, a number of figures appear from the shadows, shambling forward. Their breathing is ragged, non-existent; their clothes are torn; they are covered in blood. Gathering speed, they chase after the newcomers, trying to catch them, perhaps to hurt them, perhaps to infect them. Those with the armbands seem to take no chances as many scream and run, trying to escape the lumbering shapes that are after them, shapes they might just recognise as their friends underneath the heavy makeup and fake blood. After all, this is not the real zombie apocalypse; it is just a game. This anecdote is an example of a growing trend within the horror genre, where more traditional forms of stage performance are integrated into new environments and scenarios. The terms most commonly used to refer to these experiences are immersive or pervasive, each of which signifies a distinct category of work and a performance event with specific characteristics. I will define both of these terms and provide examples of shows and theatre companies to help illuminate the experiences they provide. I will also draw these relatively new expressions of terror into the wider context of existing gothic scholarship and discuss how immersive horror ties in with older examples from the gothic mode. Turning first to a definition of immersion, or immersive theatre, one will need to look towards the field of (digital) game studies and performance theory. Little attention has been paid within gothic studies to performative expressions of the mode; instead, the primary focus is on literature and film. For this reason, the amount of material available on (contemporary) gothic drama is scant, with virtually no scholarship on the more recent and innovative experiences I wish to

M. Hoedt (*)  University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_60

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discuss here. However, over the last ten years, the form, and thereby the study of, immersive theatre has gained a foothold within performance studies. Drawing on the concept of immersion as used in game studies in her book Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), Josephine Machon makes reference to the work of games scholar Gordon Calleja to explain the connections between the fields.2 In the writing on digital games, whether academic or popular, the notion of immersion has become ubiquitous, a term referring to a connection between the gamer and what they are playing. It is a (supposed) feeling of presence within the world of the game, of being so involved in the action or the narrative that one feels as if one were ‘really there’. However, as far as digital games are concerned, there is a problem with this: ultimately, the player will always be removed from what appears on their screen, primarily as a result of the interference of hardware. No matter how lifelike I feel the game world is, or how attached I get to the story or the characters, it is only present on a screen. I am not performing any of the actions (swinging a sword, shooting an arrow, riding a horse) myself; rather, players use a device (keyboard or controller) to provide input to a system (computer or console). They do not perform the action, but a representation of the action (press X to shoot), even if the represented environment appears particularly authentic and engaging. This phenomenon is known within game studies as the immersive fallacy (a concept coined by Salen and Zimmerman), and it is here, Machon argues, that theatre differs from games. Theatre does not deal in digital representations of actions, and immersive theatre does not simply offer the illusion of ‘being there’. Instead, it places audiences in the middle of the fantastical space and in the middle of the action. Definitions of either digital immersion or immersive theatre often remain vague and changeable. For the purposes of this chapter, I will be using the definition presented by Gareth White in his 2012 essay ‘On Immersive Theatre’, in which he states that ‘“Immersive theatre” has become a widely adopted term to designate a trend for performances which use installations and expansive environments, which have mobile audiences, and which invite audience participation’.3 These words encapsulate some of the key elements of immersive practice: high levels of detail in design elements, the creation of a world for audiences to walk through, and the active position of the spectator in which they are asked to move and interact. These same elements can be found within Machon’s work. In the book, she wishes to present a taxonomy of immersive theatre, outlining the elements which help to delineate an immersive experience from a more traditional one. Within her scale of immersivity, Machon pays attention to the role of actors, audiences, scenography, sound, and space, but each of these is underpinned by two larger principles: the ‘in-its-own-world’-ness and the contract of participation.4 With the first idea, Machon highlights the emphasis within immersive practice to present a performance world for audiences to move through and take part in, created primarily through set design and aesthetics. It is the element which moves immersive work away from more traditional practice: although still aiming to present a play and its world, its realities, older forms of drama only do so on the stage, often behind a fourth wall and thereby away from the spectators. By contrast, immersive theatre

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productions tend to use non-traditional performance spaces such as warehouses, hotels, or tunnels, in which the reality of the performance is carefully constructed through the use of set, sound, and props. Audiences are not only invited to enter into the worlds created by these productions; they are actively encouraged to see, touch, and explore, to find their place within this performative reality and the stories hidden within it. The spaces of immersive theatre are not separate from the audience but are meant to be lived in (at least for the duration of the show). The second element, Machon’s contract of participation echoes White’s description, and points to the changing role of audiences within these experiences. Those attending an immersive show can no longer be passive; they cannot simply sit in their seats and let the play wash over them, but instead are invited to enter the world of the performance and seek out its mysteries and surprises. Indeed, many immersive shows reward this kind of exploration by introducing secret rooms and one-to-one encounters, thus foregrounding the possibility of a unique journey for each visitor. Furthermore, immersive work not only removes audiences from their seats, but through its story and theming, the event will often give spectators a role to play. This provides audiences with a function within the narrative and makes them more central to the production, as opposed to simply being transformed from a sitting backdrop into a moving backdrop in front of which the action unfolds. These two elements, then, ultimately define immersive work in the balance between the creation of the world and the role of spectators within it. As described by Machon, immersive work radically repositions the relationship between performer and spectator and ‘destroys the binaries of auditorium / stage and spectator / performance, relocating the relationship conceptually, spatially and physically’.5 The traditional distance between stage and auditorium is removed, resulting in what is often typified as a more direct and visceral experience for those who take part. Lacking the distance between actor and audience present within the traditional auditorium, and thereby removing a layer of (imagined) safety, a marrying of horror, immersion and live performance offers potent mix. In her 2007 essay ‘Contemporary Gothic Theatre’, Emma McEvoy discusses the immediacy offered by live performance: ‘Theatre […] has a temporal and material presence that neither the novel nor the film has: the material is both physically present and the action is unfolding in the same time dimension as the audience’.6 Through the introduction of real space and real time, an encounter can take place between audience and performance / performer, and, relevant to our current context, between audience and monster. As hinted at by McEvoy, the Gothic and horror appear to be fertile ground for inspiring immersive practice. Established theatre companies known for immersive work, such as Punchdrunk and SlungLow, have shown use of the macabre alongside other types of work. Punchdrunk’s archives include adaptations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (2005), Goethe’s Faust (2006–2007) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008),7 which sit alongside reworkings of other classic texts such as The Duchess of Malfi (2010) and Macbeth (titled Sleep No More, 2011– ongoing at the time of writing). Across years of theatre making, it seems that

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darker themes continue to find their way into Punchdrunk productions, a number of which are indicated by the descriptor ‘gothic’ (gothic Hollywood; gothic fantasies; gothic aesthetic) in Biggin’s monograph on the company.8 In the case of SlungLow, elements of the Gothic are found in the vampire trilogy titled They Only Come Out at Night, consisting of Visions (2009), Resurrection (2012) and Pandemic (2012).9 A quick survey of SlungLow’s other work reveals a number of recurring strands in their productions: the use of technology (such as audio tours), a relationship to the site where the work is produced and performed, and an affinity with local stories, particularly local histories. They Only Come Out at Night may appear to be a significant departure for the company, a move into a purely fictional and much darker realm. Yet here, too, there are themes of exploration and of history, of exploring spaces where vampires and hunters have walked long ago, creating a fictional past for audiences to engage with. As pointed out on the company’s own website, They Only Come Out at Night deals with imaginary events that ‘maybe […] weren’t so imaginary after all’.10 As argued by McEvoy, gothic theatre can point to a reality in what is often only imagined, materialising the spaces of the haunted house, the abandoned ruin, or the ancient castle. In this space, playing out in close proximity to the audience, the horrors of the imagination may suddenly seem terrifyingly close, and horribly real. Yet it is outside of the realm of mainstream theatre that most immersive horror experiences find their home, linked with popular culture and entertainment as opposed to such artistic frames (although this does not take away from the quality of these productions). Within the landscape of creators working exclusively within the horror genre, two strands of immerse work start to appear. The first is a type of entertainment which is well-known within the United States and is rapidly gaining ground in the UK and mainland Europe: the haunt or scare attraction. Represented by the big theme parks such as Universal Studios and Knott’s Berry Farm all the way down to private home haunts, scare attractions differ widely in their theming, scope, and scale, but they do possess certain characteristics which are shared across the industry. Haunts are designed as walkthrough theatrical experiences, where audiences enter into the attraction and move from room to room. Within these rooms, they will be treated to either performed scenes or to what is best described as obstacles such as strobe lighting or blackouts, which hinder their movement around the room. Performers known as scare actors will be present throughout the attraction with the aim to scare visitors, whether through jump scares, physical feats, or uncomfortable (scripted) exchanges. Audiences may find themselves simply chased through the attraction, with an emphasis on fear and adrenaline, or may be asked to interact with actors or perform simple tasks. It is for this reason that it is difficult to describe scare attractions as fully immersive, in the way that the term is set out by White and Machon. Although these experiences are undoubtedly able to create the ‘in-its-own-world’-ness described by Machon, the element of audience participation that is highlighted by both authors is more nebulous. All haunts, in one way or another, will acknowledge the presence of their visitors; after all, the performers within the attraction will directly address and attempt to scare those who go through, thus obliterating

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the fourth wall present in traditional theatre. Yet within this dynamic of direct address, visitors may only serve as a moving backdrop in many haunts, where they are mobile, but not able to engage on a deeper level. For example, the invitation extended to their audiences by theatre company Punchdrunk, asking them to wander, to explore, and to discover, is absent in the vast majority of scare attractions as visitors are led through a predetermined route. In addition, it should be noted that the term ‘immersive horror’ has certain connotations when read in the context of these attractions. Within the industry, a small number of haunts are defined as extreme, offering an experience that goes beyond the content of most walkthrough mazes. Although scare attractions are generally described as having the opportunity to ‘star in your own horror film’, extreme haunts truly cast audiences as the victim in their narrative. Following scenarios which may include physical or psychological terror, or both, extreme haunts take the mobile, but passive, visitor of a traditional attraction and thrust them into the spotlight.11 Sometimes designated by the label immersive horror, extreme haunts are not the benchmark of the industry, but instead present a fascinating subset of experiences. They do not solely represent the concept of immersive horror and the experiences that may be described by such a term. In addition, extreme haunts present similar challenges with regards to their immersive nature as more traditional scare attractions. In these events, too, one can see the creation of a fictional world, which often extends beyond the performance itself and into the means used to communicate with audiences (for example, personality surveys or mysterious phone calls to help build tension prior to the night of the show). Audiences are given a clear role, that of victim, yet this is arguably a passive one. In these scenarios, actions are done to those who participate in the extreme haunt, as opposed to an audience being offered the ability to engage how they wish. The fictional world is present, but the active spectator is not, as performers will need to have full control of the situation in order to ensure the safety of those taking part in an extreme event. Despite challenging the notion of immersivity, in particular in relation to audience engagement, scare attractions do follow McEvoy’s observation in which the spaces of the Gothic are materialised, and confrontations with what is deemed fictional are suddenly only too real. The other strand of immersive horror is closer to the definition of immersive theatre provided above and is exemplified by the work of companies such as Just Fix It Productions and Delusion, run by Justin Fix and Jon Braver, respectively, and backed by a team of creatives.12 Linked to the rich history of the US haunt industry, both companies offer their own brand of interactive theatre, where there is still an aim to scare and create discomfort, but in a setting that goes beyond a simple walkthrough attraction. Although traditional haunts are still popular, questions have been asked within the industry about other creative directions, moving away from traditional walkthroughs with perhaps overused and contested themes (for example, the continuing use of the setting of the asylum and its representation of mental illness as, by default, scary and murderous). A number of experiences are responding to these challenges in a variety of ways, working, for example, on historical sites and tapping into aspects of education on true events or existing legends connected to the site. The Terror Behind the Walls event at Eastern State

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Penitentiary (Philadelphia, PA) encourages visitors to visit the prison both at night, to see its Halloween attractions, and during the day, to join a tour and receive information about the history of the site. The same can be said for the companies referenced here in that they are presenting a new approach to what haunting can be. As stated on the Just Fix It website, the company’s first production, Creep LA, sought ‘to reimagine the conventional and formulaic Halloween experiences’.13 Both companies show a distinct interest in unsettling their audiences, in inducing fear and discomfort, and the narrative and aesthetics behind their work display this. The production Creep LA from Just Fix It plays around with the idea of what it means to be a creep, and allowing the audience to perhaps become a creep themselves. Their more recent work The Willows can best be described as a psychological drama, offering a mixture between a murder mystery dinner and a ghost story. Audiences are invited as guests to dinner at a mansion in LA, home to the Willows family, able to meet and interact with members of the family and of the staff to uncover the events that took place within the house. As the website for Delusion explains, each of their shows fits into the same narrative universe and have played around with the border between horror and fantasy. Earlier works such as Delusion [2011], Blood Rite [2012] and Masque of Mortality [2013] play around with wellknown elements from the gothic and horror traditions: a haunted house and the mysteries hidden within; the mysterious saviours in a plague-ridden world; mad psychiatrists; and secret cults. Delusion’s productions in recent years (Lies Within [2014], His Crimson Queen [2016], and The Blue Blade [2018–2019]) are starting to push the boundaries of the genre and incorporating more fantastical elements in their stories of the vanishing of an author of dark fantasy and her daughter, of love, the supernatural, and returning home, and of the use and protection of a mysterious artefact. The work of both companies manages to include the two central elements of immersive performance in their work: the creation of a fictional world and the incorporation of the audience. In the case of Just Fix It, this is done through the choice of scenarios and their presentation. Within The Willows, visitors to the mansion find themselves with a rationale to their presence as they are expected for dinner. A review of Creep LA, meanwhile, describes the attention to pre-show elements to slowly integrate audiences into the world of the performance before showtime, where the inclusion of a bar scene allows them to mingle and interact with the performance. Delusion, meanwhile, is even more direct in its approach to their audiences: the homepage of their website specifically describes the process of incorporating the audience into the narrative as characters, inviting potential ticket buyers to become key players in the next story. Here, then, are various steps and developments into integrating the aesthetic and approaches of immersive theatre into truly terrifying scenarios. Within the context of both strands of immersive horror, use has been made of new technologies, and in particular Virtual Reality (VR). Although still grounded by Salen and Zimmerman’s notion of the immersive fallacy, as audiences find themselves connected to the space through headsets and input controllers, the VR experiences provide a new way to connect with immersive spaces. Following the advent of VR hardware that is more easily accessible to consumers, horror

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games quickly gained ground on these new platforms. Not only have monsters and haunted houses found another way to join audiences in their homes, these technologies have also started to find their way the work of theatre companies as a new way to immerse and connect with their visitors. Some, such as Just Fix It and Delusion, have offered VR versions of existing theatrical productions (The Willows and Lies Within, respectively), opening these narratives up in a variety of ways. Firstly, it allows companies to connect with wider audiences, even worldwide, who may not be able to travel to meet the time and date of a true performative encounter. However, it also offers a ‘replay’ value for those who have attended the live production. As both companies (and indeed many creatives working within the realm of immersive work) stress, the choices made during the show can and will affect the outcome of the night. A VR version, then, allows visitors to revisit their experience, to try out different choices and live through all possible scenarios; the website for The Willows in VR, for example, boasts the length the experience takes to complete, as well as the duration of all material included for audiences to explore.14 VR elements have also been integrated into live performances. One of the earliest experiments with this was the scare attraction Fear VR: 5150, which ran at Knott’s Berry Farm in 2016. Although now shut down, the attraction offered a combination of live and digital immersion, where audiences were greeted by live actors before moving on to being placed into a VR headset and experiencing part of the haunt in this way. A more recent performance by the company DotDotDot, entitled Somnai, ran in London in 2018, which presented a narrative themed around the idea of sleep, tapping into the work by a clinic (or perhaps cult) on the phenomenon of lucid dreaming.15 The experience of these dreams are realised through the use of VR headsets before audiences find themselves chased by what might well be their own nightmares. Although reviewers have noted the production is not always successful in integrating technology, performance and narrative, Somnai represents an interesting step in the integration of VR into immersive performance. It remains difficult, however, to obtain information on exactly how many events are using this method of integration, and how many horror VR experiences are tied simply to having access to the hardware, whether on location or at home. What can be said is that this new technology has been another conduit to connect with and scare audiences in a variety of new ways. At this point, I would like to move away from the concept of immersive horror and into the second category of immersive horror experiences, which can best be defined using the concept of pervasive games. In one of the earliest game studies texts, Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga sets out to identify the elements of play, thus attempting to define this often nebulous activity. Among these, according to Huizinga, is the fact that play is separate from real life: ‘All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course […]’.16 Listing a number of examples of such a play-ground (such as a card table and a tennis court), Huizinga uses the term ‘magic circle’, and it is this concept which has been adopted by game studies to define the arena in which play and games take place. When individuals get together to play, they are said to enter the magic circle, in which specific

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rules apply and actions and items gain special significance: imagine, for example, a football match, in which a specific space (the pitch) and item (the ball) suddenly become very important to help determine the outcome of the game. In the words of scholars Salen and Zimmerman, within the magic circle ‘a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players’.17 Although the concept of the magic circle has since been challenged,18 the term remains a helpful shorthand to try and delineate the experience of play from ordinary life and to identify the space(s) in which it takes place. Arguably, immersive (horror) experiences can be defined in terms of the magic circle, whereby audiences enter into the world created by the performance, in which particular rules of behaviour and interaction apply, and where the scenes and items encountered gain significance within the narrative of the space. Audience interaction in an immersive show may well be typified as a ‘move’ as it is used in the context of board games, whereby actions and exchanges which take place within the performance space may provide new information or even open new pathways into the story and the space. Within this context, then, the magic circle retains the meaning designated by Huizinga, as that of a play-ground, separate from the normal world and ordinary activities, into which audiences can enter, inside which they can play, and from which they will ultimately depart. Even if the experience occurs outside of a traditional performance space, or changes its duration and its relationship with its audience, the immersive show is still finite and provides a separation between the real world and the fictional one. By contrast, what happens in the case of pervasive games is a manipulation of the magic circle. As Montola et al. explain: ‘A pervasive game is a game that has one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially’.19 Rather than being confined to a specific play-ground, pervasive games are expansive, taking up more space, more time, more people than ordinary games. They cross the boundaries of the defined play-space and moving into ordinary life. An example of this is a game called Killer: A Game of Assassination, whereby players are given the role of a contract killer. They are instructed to go about their everyday life, but in secret, they are stalking a target: another player, part of the game, who our player is supposed to find and eliminate. Meanwhile, our player is in turn the target for someone else and will need to be vigilant in order to survive. The rules are simple: stalk your target and avoid becoming a target, yet the options available to players as to how to accomplish these tasks are manifold. More important for my current argument is the fact that the game is played, as stated previously, while players go about their everyday life. Not restricted to a designated arena, the game expands spatially, and is played anytime, anywhere, as players watch for their targets and watch their own backs. As a result, perhaps, a game of Killer is likely to take weeks, even months, to fully resolve itself. Finally, the expansion is a social one, where not only players are privy to the game and its rules, but members of the public may realise something is happening, or can be enlisted by players to help provide information on their target. The potential number of players and player interactions is restricted only by the imagination of those involved. Instead of being confined to a set arena, players

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of pervasive games carry the magic circle with them, sharing a secret with other players while ordinary life continues around them. This close intermingling of reality and fiction is key to the modes of horror and the Gothic. As Daniel Shaw notes in his essay ‘Power, Horror and Ambivalence’, it is in the clash between normality and the intrusion of the monstrosity that much of horror can be found.20 Similarly, in his 2002 book Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative, Roger Salomon describes this phenomenon as the threshold, constituting of the space between the natural and the supernatural world. The threshold, then, is the point where these may cross over, and where one may intrude upon the other through the appearance of extraordinary elements (such as monsters or ghosts) in the ordinary world.21 This translates into the subject matter that many of the novels and films deal with, but can also be found in how they are presented, emphasising the reality of the supernatural elements. Indeed, devices of this nature can be found as far back as what is considered the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Within the book, Walpole uses a framing device, presenting the novel as a translation of an Italian manuscript, which itself was derived from an even older source. Although Walpole acknowledged his authorship in later editions of the work, the conceit of translation or collage, of the printing of ‘true accounts’ or the use of ‘real footage’ in an attempt to add to the authenticity and believability of unnatural events has remained a staple of the genre. The adage ‘Based on a true story’ has been attached to many a horror novel or film and found footage, dealing with authentic materials and presented in a realistic frame, is a well-known subgenre. It is in this space that pervasive horror games find their strength, once again, referring to McEvoy’s words, materialising the spaces of the Gothic and creating real-world encounter with that which is most frightening. Pervasive horror experiences have gained more ground in the last two decades, especially through familiarity with (horror) videogames and the rise of the internet. Phenomena such as Slender Man and the wider collection of ‘creepypastas’, perhaps best described as internet folk tales, have demonstrated the ability to blur reality and fiction, but the practice has also found its way into performance. Here, I wish to discuss the now defunct 2.8. Hours Later event and the work by the company Yellobrick, in particular their Red Man trilogy, which currently consists of Everwake (2012) and Reverie (2013). The 2.8 Hours Later experience was designed by slingshot in 2010, inspired by the zombie movies 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. Described as a zombie chase game, the setup of the event borrows elements from street games and can best be summed up as a citywide game of tag, which takes around three (or 2.8) hours to complete. Audiences (who I will refer to here as players) are instructed to find their way to a location within a given city, which serves as their starting point. From there, they are given basic instructions and are asked to navigate the streets, completing tasks and (hopefully) getting access to safety. They will meet multiple obstacles along their way, not in the least the presence of hordes of zombies, seeking to feed on and infect players. If caught, players are tagged as infected, and have effectively lost the game. Although the game saw three different iterations and ran until 2015, financial problems forced

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the event out of business. Although simple at its core, one of the defining elements of 2.8 Hours Later is its status as a citywide zombie chase game. Using location scouts to find spaces appropriate to the story, players are able to see a range of sceneries which they would not otherwise encounter. Especially for those living in the city where the game is being run, it is likely to allow them access to spaces and locations they have not encountered before. Secondly, these locations are not cordoned off in any way: while players are running away from zombies or solving puzzles, they are surrounded by other people who are not part of this fictional world, but simply going about their day-to-day lives. This may result in some confusion for them, but for the players, there is the distinct sensation of separation, and of sharing a secret, of being part of something others do not know about. The same can be said for Yellobrick’s work, which, like 2.8 Hours Later, often takes inspiration from street games. Sitting alongside other projects, it is the two performances from the Red Man trilogy that deal most directly with gothic themes in presenting what is, at its heart, a ghost story. For Everwake, players are introduced to the character of Tom Watson, who has recently moved from London to Cardiff, specifically the Cathays area of the city. Soon after moving, however, Tom realises he seems to have a gift, an ability to see people who other people cannot see, ‘footprints of souls trapped in the cracks of time’,22 ghosts. Tom calls upon the players for help and during the performance, they will explore Cathays and solve simple puzzles in an attempt to let the spirits move on. In the follow-up, Reverie, other, more sinister, forces have learned of Tom’s gift and wish to gain access to his ability. In a coma and kept at Brookhaven Hospital, players once more encounter a series of tasks, this time not to help the city’s phantoms, but to set Tom himself free. These practical elements take place on the night of the live performance, but what makes the Red Man trilogy stand out is the work done by Yellobrick to create a narrative frame. Weeks, even months, before the show dates, websites go online, blog posts are created and Twitter feeds go live, allowing potential audiences a space to encounter the characters and learn about the event. Beyond this, however, those who are curious can start to interact with these online presences, sending emails and tweets to learn more about these individuals and their stories. For Everwake, Tom ran a blog, publishing the photos he took around the city and notes about his experiences, and communicating via Twitter. In the case of Reverie, some players tried to contact the hospital via their website in an attempt to gain access to him prior to the event date. This type of engagement is actively encouraged by the Yellobrick creative team and players who commit in such a way, either during the show or in the months prior, as the story develops, will often be rewarded by replies and one-to-one interactions. On the night of the performance, as is the case with 2.8 Hours Later, players will discover the resolution of the narrative as they navigate and (re)discover the city and its stories. In both types of experiences, the magic circle is present in the creation of a fictional world for players to enter into, but it is a circle which they can carry with them. The city is now their playground. The events created by slingshot and Yellobrick show the dynamic of pervasive games, where the game itself is expanded spatially, temporally, and socially. They also give permission to audiences to play in a way that is

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rarely given to adults. Finally, while leading players to a variety of (gothic) spaces, their principle aesthetic is the fictionalisation of the everyday, offering what can be considered as a renegotiation of the urban Gothic. Rather than tapping into existing, but perhaps unknown, stories, new layers of fiction are created as an overlay to the existing landscape, blurring the boundaries of the natural and the supernatural elements present in the world, and revising where the threshold between the two might lie. Immersive and pervasive horror experiences have found new ways to engage with and reinvent traditional gothic tropes. Often with aid of new strategies and technologies, they are able to tell their stories in a variety of novel ways. As described by Maggie Kilgour, the gothic narrative itself can best be typified as a Frankenstein’s monster, pulling together scenes and locations and emotions into a narrative that cannot always be considered a coherent and continuous whole.23 What can be seen in the case of immersive and pervasive Gothic, then, is not so much a breaking down of these narratives into complete incoherence, but rather, a rearranging of parts. Text in the classic sense of the written word becomes less important than the relationship to space, where worlds are created or existing spaces imbued with new meanings. The importance of location to the Gothic has been addressed repeatedly by various authors, and the worlds created by scare attractions, immersive theatre and pervasive games only help to solidify this assessment. Fictions are extended and find their way into performative and everyday spaces, layering a narrative of the supernatural and horrifying onto ordinary life. Within these performances and experiences, audiences are asked to cross the threshold into a realm where the spaces of the Gothic, and the monstrosities which inhabit them, suddenly become frighteningly real.

Notes



1. SA Brains (http://www.sabrain.com/) is a brand of beer and markets itself as the national brew of Wales. Established in 1882, its brewery is located in the heart of Cardiff, behind Cardiff Central Station. As such, its iconic sign became part of the route of the 2013 production of 2.8 Hours Later in the city. 2. Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 59–63. 3. Gareth White, “On Immersive Theatre”, Theatre Research International vol. 37, issue 3 (2012), 221. 4. Machon, Immersive Theatres, 93, 99–100. 5. Ibid., 35–36. 6. Emma McEvoy, “Contemporary Gothic Theatre”, Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), 216. 7. See the following websites for more information on each performance: https://www. punchdrunk.org.uk/early-work; https://www.punchdrunk.org.uk/faust; https://www. punchdrunk.org.uk/masque-of-the-red-death (Accessed 11 March 2019).

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8. Rose Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Reference made to pages 79, 106 and 199. 9. See the following websites for more information on each performance: https://www. slunglow.org/come-night-visions/; https://www.slunglow.org/come-night-resurrection/; https://www.slunglow.org/they-only-come-at-night-pandemic/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 10. https://www.slunglow.org/come-night-resurrection/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 11. See https://www.haunting.net/extreme-haunts/ for an excellent introduction into extreme haunts (Accessed 11 March 2019). 12. See the following websites for more information: http://jfiproductions.com/ and https:// www.enterdelusion.com/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 13. http://jfiproductions.com/creep/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 14. http://jfiproductions.com/the-willows/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 15. See the following websites for more information: https://www.dotdot.london/somnai-home/ (Accessed 11 March 2019). 16. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London, Routledge, 1949), 10. The book was first published in Dutch in 1938, with an English translation appearing in 1949. It is the translation which is quoted here. 17. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003), 96. 18. The following essay provides an excellent overview of existing scholarship on the magic circle: Jaakko Stenros, “In Defence of the Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play”, ToDiGRA vol. 1, issue 2 (2014), n.p. 19. Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2009), 12. 20. Daniel Shaw, “Power, Horror and Ambivalence”, Film and Philosophy: Horror Special Edition (2001), n.p. 21. Roger B. Salomon, Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002), 9. 22. http://www.everwakethegame.co.uk/story.html (Accessed 11 March 2019). 23. Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York, Routledge, 1995), 5.

Bibliography Biggin, Rose, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Calleja, Gordon, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2011). Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (London, Routledge, 1949). Kilgour, Maggie, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York, Routledge, 1995). Machon, Josephine, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). McEvoy, Emma, “Contemporary Gothic Theatre”, Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), 214–222. Montola, Markus, Waern, Annika, and Stenros, Jaakko, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2009). Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003). Salomon, Roger B., Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002).

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Shaw, Daniel, “Power, Horror and Ambivalence”, Film and Philosophy: Horror Special Edition (2001), n.p. Stenros, Jaakko, “In Defence of the Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play”, ToDiGRA vol. 1, issue 2 (2014), n.p. White, Gareth, “On Immersive Theatre”, Theatre Research International vol. 37, issue 3 (2012), 221–235.

Gothic Lifestyle

Fashion Gothwear Victoria Amador

Gothic fashion embodies a number of elements which reflect the variations on the Gothic in popular culture. Often utilising black fabrics and embellishments; draping the body in unusual and frequently taboo designs; creating a mysterious, ethereal and/or unexpected profile; implying a mysteriously romantic appeal; echoing medieval, antiquarian, and eighteenth or nineteenth-century styles; and adorning the look with smoky or pallid makeup and untamed hair, gothic fashion represents an image of the mystical outsider, evocative of the strange and the fantastic. Finding its roots in a variety of inspirations, gothic fashion continues to evolve, reflecting both contemporary and historical inspirations. From the gauzy peignoirs of Fuseli’s nightmare paintings to Victorian mourning garb to rock and pop stage costumes to steampunk leather, gothic garb provides a creative mode for the fashionista wishing to express a darker, shadowy silhouette. The trend has metamorphosed from a subcultural trend of ancient lace, black leather and red gashes of lipstick to an integral element of such couture designers as Olivier Theyskens, Alexander McQueen and Anna Sui. This discussion of gothic fashion, primarily in women’s clothing but also in male attire, will address some of the significant elements incorporated in this unique, enduring style statement. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto appeared in 1764 and places its story earlier—between 1045 and 1223, than its supposed publication—in 1529. This seminal gothic text immediately establishes in terms of gothic fashion one of the latter’s central tenets—a quality of the timeless, directly unidentifiable past. The gauzy quality of Walpole’s timeline becomes reflected in subsequent works as well as in the resulting aesthetic. Equally, there is often in women’s gothic fashion an identifiable, traditional, conventional feminine profile, and this is posited in Walpole’s description of Manfred, the Prince of Otranto’s daughter at the beginning of the novel:

V. Amador (*)  London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_61

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Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to Matilda.1

Virginal, an outsider, beautiful, and royal: these are four of the recurring stylistic elements in much gothic fashion. From rich materials like silk, silk velvet, and embroidery, to deep jewel tones, to young displays of arms and bosoms, to then odd details which emblematize the Other, such as the ‘mountain of sable plumes’, and the ‘proportionable quantity of black feathers’ which ‘shaded’2 the absurdly large helmet that horrifically smashes Conrad to death. Black plumage which to this day top traditional British hearses helps to establish the luxurious haberdashery so apparent in many gothic fashion designs. This combination of the virginal and the strange continues in eighteenth-­ century depictions of gothic heroines. Henry Fuseli’s, The Nightmare (1781), offers one of the most disturbing representations of psychological horror of the era.3 A blonde woman lies unconscious on her back, curls flowing, arms dropped behind her head, legs extended, and upon her midsection perches a dark, hairy, Caliban-like figure. Half beast, half human, muscular and compact, the creature stares at the viewer with red eyes and lips pursed as in thought. What will he do to her? Why is he there? What is the purpose of the horse’s head with blind eyes smiling around the corner of the scene? And in terms of fashion, as defiled as the woman is, her figure is also beautiful. The rich red curtains hanging behind her suggest sensuality, and the bed upon which she reclines appears draped with an exotically patterned shawl. The woman’s dress is white, clinging chiffon which accentuates her curves, ruched at her prominent breasts in a V-neck, with cap sleeves. The flow of the fabrics has become a defining characteristic of gothic fashion. The influence of Fuseli’s painting can be seen in the cover of 1847s Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood. A terrifying creature rises behind the supine female, whose brunette locks also trail down from her bed of doom, her white nightgown exposing her décolleté.4 Yet the Gothic and its fashion also allow for the heroine to be not traditionally beautiful, but arrestingly attractive nevertheless. Catherine Moreland, the charmingly hapless heroine of Jane Austen’s gothic pastiche Northanger Abbey, illustrates that quality of beauty and, in turn, the attraction to gothic adornments favoured by many young people: She was now seen by many young men who had not been near her before. Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran around the room, nor was she once called a divinity by anybody. Yet Catherine was in very good looks, and had the company only seen her three years before, they would now have thought her exceedingly handsome. She was looked at, however, and with some admiration; for, in her own hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a pretty girl. Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before—her humble vanity was contented—she felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a true-quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.5

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The arresting quality of much gothic fashion, often worn by young people who might not identify with the traditional acknowledgments of beauty within their culture, can also be seen to be influenced by this alternative vision of the gothic heroine. The Romantic influences of the early nineteenth century also helped to create the template for gothic fashion. Dangerous heroines, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and John Keats’ ‘Lamia’, established mystical women who wandered through woods alone; it followed their clothing would not be respectable but rather suggestive of winding sheets. ‘Christabel’ offers a catalogue of stylistic elements apparent in many gothic designs which echo the fairy world and the supernatural, including cloaks, silky white robes, exposed skin, gems, and wild hair.6 The notion of the fractured fairy tale heroine, or seductive villainess, both of whom invoke various gothic tropes, appears in the illustrations of Edmund Dulac, Aubrey Beardsley, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, John Bauer, and Kay Nielsen. The sylph-like figure, flowing hair and garments, all mirror Coleridge’s Christabel. Keats’ Lamia also reflects an aesthetic of the supernatural, her white feet honoured with pearls by forest creatures.7 Presented as both beautiful and dangerous, ‘practitioners of magic, and female witches have been referred to collectively as lamiae’8; that persona subsequently has informed a variety of gothic clothing designs. At the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) in New York in early 2016, curator Colleen Hill presented a popular exhibition entitled Fairy Tale Fashion. While not purely gothic in terms of a dark or creepy/crepey perspective on the clothes, Hill noted that ‘the sense of wonder and fantasy…is integral to the fairy tale genre, but fashion within these tales often holds a deeper meaning. It can be symbolic of a character’s vanity, power, privilege, or transformation’.9 This is true of gothic fashion as well, illustrated in Hill’s choice of a fall 2007 Alexander McQueen dress to illustrate Rapunzel as portrayed by the Brothers Grimm. A highnecked, long-sleeved blue-black velvet gown ‘densely embellished with a cascade of beaded golden tresses, was part of a collection inspired by witches’.10 Moreover, the imported Indian muslins and exotic, embroidered silks; new dyeing technologies; empire waists; exposed bosoms; and loose chemises of the early decades of the nineteenth century reiterated a sensuality and a new bohemian chic in feminine wear which has also become a staple of gothic fashion. Flowing, curling locks, pinned up to expose the neck, while loose tendrils suggestively caress the skin, further enhanced this image of the unconstrained yet vulnerable female. That delicacy and unorthodoxy, paradoxically, is seen not only in Austin’s heroines but also in the works of the Brontë sisters. From beautiful Blanche Ingram to the haunted Bertha Mason Rochester to immortal Cathy Earnshaw to indomitable Helen Graham, these heroines have reflected both the conventional and unorthodox women of their time, and the fashion inspiration resulting has given women sumptuous fabrics, windswept silhouettes, and British musician Kate Bush. July 2018 was the two-hundredth anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birthday. In a tribute to the author and the lasting influence of Wuthering Heights, Town and Country magazine offered a cover feature entitled ‘In Search of Wuthering Heights’, no surprise

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considering editor-in-chief Justine Picardie’s paranormal literary output—the 2002 memoir of her sister’s death and Picardie’s fruitless search for her afterlife, If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death, as well as her books and articles about Daphne du Maurier and Coco Chanel. Shot on the moors around Haworth, the fashion layout offered a white, ghostly tulle dress by Dolce and Gabbana (known for their love of body-hugging lace); a red chiffon Valentino gown with a long adorned skirt resembling a shredded shroud, whose model posed at the parsonage front door; a black silk and velvet cape and long gown by Dior; and an aesthetic which echoed the ‘gloves, shoes, dresses and jewellery (some containing interwoven locks of their hair)’11 belonging to the three weird and wonderful sisters and on display at the parsonage. Windswept organza and flowing locks offered an haute couture take on the haunted landscapes of the Brontës. As the Gothic frequently incorporates the ancient or antique, a further nineteenth-century influence upon contemporary clothing includes the volup­ tuous, colour-suffused, nonconformist women in many of the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Already hearkening back to idealised mythologies of knights and ladies, heroes and pomegranate-lipped heroines, the personal stories of such models as Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal contributed a frisson of forbidden passion and untameable femininity to many of the works, along with the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the scandals enlivened by the brotherhood members. In a Tate Britain exhibition of Edward Burne-Jones’ painting in late 2018–early 2019, the timeless elegance of a medieval robe, or the gauzy suggestion of a Greek tunic, was celebrated in a November 2018 fashion portfolio for Tatler magazine. Author Helen Rosslyn quoted the artist himself, who said his paintings and drawings presented ‘“a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any that ever shone—in a land that no one can define or remember, only desire.” Fantasy world creator he may have been, but he was also much more’.12 That the Pre-Raphaelite attire of the females, and males, in the paintings can be translated into contemporary fashion attests to this lasting style of spiritual romance. The feature offered a variety of romantically gothic garments, including a deep purple-blue silk satin gown by Schiaparelli Haute Couture which looked perfect for trailing along the battlements at sunset; an oversized, enormous white tulle, and Swarovski-crystalled coat reminiscent of Eiko Ishioka’s wedding dress for Lucy Westenra/Sadie Frost in 1992s Bram Stoker’s Dracula; a vintage velvet cape; and for men, a crimson red wool, bow-tied, Edwardian-length coat by Gucci. All of the designs are redolent not only of the Pre-Raphaelites but of their timelessness. It is sometimes difficult to place gothic fashion in terms of eras or designs within contemporary stylings, and that ephemerality reflects again the atmosphere of many novels, poems, and plays. One of the major cultural trends in both America and Britain from the 1830s onward was a macabre celebration of melancholy and death. This may have been a result of wars fought, disease, and infant/mother mortality rates, but it was a continuing influence throughout the century, so much so that Mark Twain mocked

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it in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In the novel, the late, young Emmeline Grangerford loved to draw mourning women and write soporific titles for her work; a parody of soporific poet Julia A. Moore, Emmeline’s drawings were humorously ghoulish while at the same time illustrating the popularity of mourning dress: There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old…blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage, in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said ‘Shall I Never See Thee More Alas’.13

However, this obsession with death and the rituals around it, including the appropriate garments, was authentically important in the United States as well as in Britain. Lynne Zacek Bassett argued that there was a melancholy predisposition in American colonial culture, but that the Romantic movement both there and in the UK ‘fed on melancholy in a more complex intertwining of nature, contemplation, religion, and death’.14 One of the results was going into mourning in a huge way, and this included ‘[o]btaining a new wardrobe of sober black crepe and bombazine….dull black dresses and black crepe veils…. Men in the early nineteenth century generally wore black suits already, so needed to do little more than add a black armband…or tie a black scarf…around their tall-crowned hats’.15 The length of time for mourning also varied from two years for a spouse to eight months for a sibling, further developing a need for a variety of dark fashions. The greatest gothic fashionista of the latter nineteenth century is Queen Victoria for her extended, permanent mourning dress in honour of Prince Albert, whose passing from typhus in December 1861 led HM to dress only in black for the last forty years of her life. Mourning became a tremendous business in Europe as well as in America, although the British, led by Victoria, imposed remarkable limits upon women’s dress particularly, while men did not escape the dictates of polite society where grief dressing was involved. Extreme black for mourning was not unusual. Wearing a black veil and dress after a husband’s death was practiced in Greece, for example. However, Victoria led the way to far more dramatic clothing expressions of grief and death. Bustles in black silk crepe (this fabric being the predominant choice for mourning garb) were adorned with elaborate jet beading by such couturiers as the famous Charles Frederick Worth; jet jewellery for mourning in the form of earrings, rings, and brooches established Whitby, England as a major manufacturer as well as an appropriate location for Count Dracula’s arrival upon English shores. Emporiums dealing in the business of death appeared; one of the most popular was Jay’s Mourning House in London, which opened in 1841; the manufacturer Courtaulds made their fortune in selling black crepe.16 The usual expenses for a funeral of the time often included supplying funeral gloves and scarves to those attending the service.17

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The trend for black mourning—which faded gradually to purple, then l­avender, then white for summer grief—continued to the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, even as dress silhouettes changed. Belle Epoque-era, wasp-waisted corsetry resulting in the S-shaped female form developed into corset fetishism within gothic fashion today, but 120 years ago, it was also seen in black, grey, and dark purple day dresses by Parisian designer Jeanne Paquin. This shape, incorporated into and reflected in Art Nouveau design, was serpentine, lush, and the adornments of a decadent fin de siècle world included long beaded fringe, heavy embroideries, velvet appliques, voluminous skirts, and body-hugging bodices, all of which are still seen in contemporary gothic clothing.18 The use of fabrics other than crepe, including chiffon and charmeuse, and the evolving movement of wearing black solely for evening events, was seen in French designs by Jacques Doucet and Callot Soeurs, and the trend crossed into Britain and America.19 At the same time, the splendid draperies of the Pre-Raphaelites, allowing the female form freedom from the strictures of boning and layered undergarments, reappeared. Oriental and Indian motifs, rich fabrics, trailing trains, and dramatic caftans in dark colours and sumptuous adornments were designed by Maria Monaci Gallenga. Fang-sharp pleating in black silk and velvet, imprinted with golden images of mythological birds, scintillated in Mario Fortuny’s collections.20 The daring image of the female rejecting all propriety, very much a part of much gothic adornment, as well as wearing black as a symbol of rebellion, was set when ‘John Singer Sergeant’s Portrait of Madame X was first shown to the Paris Salon in 1884, with its subject, Madame Pierre Gautreu, wearing a revealing black satin dress with jewelled straps…it caused outrage’.21 The romantic fascination with the gothic female transformed beyond imagination into the next century. The gothic sensibility in fashion in the new century continued the evolution of mourning adornment, timeless draping, and a growing eccentricity in design. As female undergarments became looser and men’s daytime fashions streamlined, the incorporation of black as an element of chic became established. Particularly during and after World War I, the accoutrements of fussy Victorian grief dressing became absurd and ‘wearing black in public became socially acceptable across the board. Not only did black express the collective grief and devastation caused by the war, it was also utilitarian. Darker shades were more practical at a time when increasing numbers of women were working outside the home’.22 The rise of the female vamp in cinema coincided with these shifts in fashion. In 1915, Theodosia Goodman, aka Theda Bara (an anagram for ‘Arab Death’), appeared as ‘The Female Vampire’ in the lost film A Fool There Was. In truly preGoth fashion iconoclasm, ‘Fox Studios decided to launch the first-ever publicity campaign. They exoticised Theodosia by draping her voluptuous figure in furs and hip-hugging diaphanous gowns, lining her innocent wide eyes with heavy kohl, and weighing her down with kitschy jewellery’.23 The result was the prototypical gothic female, and the twentieth century became one in which gothic fashion truly crystallised.

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One of the key elements of the gothic wardrobe for women is the little black dress, which emerged in the second decade of the twentieth century and remains a necessity in most women’s wardrobes. ‘When a simple, short black dress, designed by Coco Chanel, appeared in American Vogue in 1926’,24 it became iconic. Allowing for legs, arms or a bosom to be exposed or hidden as desired, embellished and luxe or severe and nun-like, the black dress moved from flappers to punks to Madonna, all of which/whom incorporated various gothic affects in their garments. This new spirit of personal expression in garments, another key in gothic fashion, was personified in this century, as in the previous Madame X portrait, by wealthy society women, aristocrats, and actresses on and off screen. When one has position, power, and a purse, publications and the general public seem more amenable to posing, particularly in the dark eccentricities of gothic patrons. British grandees and jolie laide aristocrats Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dame Edith Sitwell employed their distinctive profiles and considerable budgets to wear unique, flowing, and Poe-esque capes and millenary. Marchesa Luisa Casati’s dark, shadowed, haunting eyes, when combined with a black mantilla and gauzy cocktail dress and her depiction by such artists as photographed Man Ray and painter Kees Van Dongen, contributed to her tragic air and lasting couture influence.25 That artists could establish fashion trends which often suggested the melancholy, quirky, and strange has always been accepted; genius allows for excess and peculiarity. While acknowledging her Mexican heritage, Frida Kahlo also provided in her dress and her self-portraits a uniquely gothic way of adorning her body. The depiction of her various surgeries and disabilities helped to create ‘her cult today [which] has to do with the earlier cults of saints and martyrs: suffering transcended, in her case through art’.26 At the Victoria and Albert Museum show of Kahlo’s personal wardrobe, accessories, and even her body casts and artificial leg, Kahlo’s delicacy and ‘Mexican genius for combining death and sadness with fertility and joy in symbols’,27 their gift shop carried fashion items such as beaded skulls, crimson scarves, and cloth and brightly coloured, felt flores para los muertos (to paraphrase Tennessee Williams’ gothic masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire). Another artist whose peculiar fashion sense inspired not only a cult following but a second career as a scenic designer is the elegantly, humorously macabre Edward Gorey, known for his pen and ink drawings and ‘funny little picture books….set in some unmistakably British place, in a time that is vaguely Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz Age all at once’.28 In such ghoulishly funny works as the children’s death alphabet, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, both his male and female caricatures of a nostalgic, bizarre, and decadent past wear trim suits and cloaks, or trailingly vampiric cocktail dresses. Gorey won a 1978 Tony Award for his costume designs for the revival of Dracula, and his enduring influence was demonstrated in a 2011 exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum and a 2018 biography. Gorey’s adoration of the ballet and dance-appropriate garments is reflected almost every year in some couture or high street collection.

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Photographers too facilitated a gothic sensibility in fashion. One of the most significant was Deborah Turbeville, whose fashion shoots looked like no one else’s and presented women frequently as ‘characters that seemed to float in and out of the frame with a sense of mystery and distance, an otherworldly quality…. There was a dancer-like quality to her photos, a liquid, languid movement to the bodies’.29 That self-containment is key in gothic apparel, as it varies from transparency to a winding sheet, and to wear these garments requires a sense of individuality and a bit of bravery. The notion of a fashion profile which is bigger than life, other worldly, uniquely expressed, is central to gothic fashion, and the proliferation of horror films from the 1920s through to the present further contributed to the concept of the shimmeringly dangerous fairy with fangs which has become something of a stylistic trope. Many of the women, along with the caped men, who appeared in these films also helped to establish an alternative gothic silhouette which was more sophisticated and sensual, sexually dangerous, and distinctly urban. If we consider some of the major gothic/horror/thriller film and television fashionistas of the twentieth century, we can see how the various elements of those films came to incorporate the multifaceted aesthetic of gothic fashion. Theda Bara’s untamed hair, dark makeup, and trailing, long-trained gowns can be seen as a kind of homage in such femme fatales as Lupita Tovar in the 1931 Spanish language Dracula; Carole Borland’s Luna in Mark of the Vampire (1935); Charles Addams’ Morticia in print, on television embodied by Carolyn Jones, and in cinema by Anjelica Huston; on 1950s television hostess Vampira (Maila Nurmi) and her 1980s reincarnation Elvira (Cassandra Peterson); and on Winona Ryder’s goth teen in Beetlejuice. The little black dress becomes the long, corseted black gown, an essential for anyone making an impact at a Halloween party or on a red carpet, as Angelina Jolie demonstrated at the 2000 Oscars in a vampish dress by Marc Bouwer. That fitted frame also embodies less dramatically black evening wear while ­fitting and hugging the gothic body. Carole Borland’s beautiful bias-cut jersey gown, designed by MGM’s great costumer Adrian, gave her undead monster shapely beauty. The following year, Gloria Holden wore a similarly soignée evening design in 1936s Dracula’s Daughter, as well as flowing evening capes and sophisticated tea dresses. As portrayed by the tall, cool, brunette Louise Albritton, Katherine Caldwell, the heiress, arcane magic aficionado, and bride of Lon Chaney, Jr. in 1943s Son of Dracula is a Louisiana heiress who has explored voodoo and has a predilection for morbidity and winding sheet-like gowns. Marcel Escoffier’s contemporary designs for Annette Vadim’s reincarnation as Carmilla in Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses offered another kind of Gothicism—styling Annette like his former wife Brigitte Bardot, her Carmilla is a meta-reincarnation of dangerous blonde bloodthirstiness and unrestrained passion. Escoffier designed the wardrobe for Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête and brought that understanding of rich fabrics and timeless designs to this film. The bloodthirsty elegance of Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness (1971) deliberately referenced, in her gowns by Bernard Perris, the decadent sexuality of Marlene Dietrich, and there has never been a more stylish vampire couple than Catherine

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Deneuve in Yves Saint Laurent and David Bowie wearing Milena Canonero in 1983s The Hunger. We also see the love of the flowing garment in many film and television gothic productions. The most gossamer of all dangerous women are the Hammer Horror actresses. Their heaving bosoms are a subversive riff on the Austenian empire dress of the early 1800s. In chiffon, revealing ample décolleté and plump bare arms, these vamps and victims all represent that wonderful mixture of camp and couture which also characterises a great deal of gothic clothing. Whether dressed in an improbable crimson red evening dress like Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers or in a white, low V-necked, belted peignoir drizzled with blood, this ghostly form continues to inspire contemporary film and fashion designs. Sadie Frost’s red gossamer negligee by Eiko Ishioka in Bram Stoker’s Dracula was dazzling and derivative and contributed to Ishioka’s costume design Oscar. It is important to recognise in terms of rock and roll, metal and pop music stage costuming the lasting influence of singer Stevie Nicks, both as a solo artist and as a member of Fleetwood Mac. With her long blonde hair, Nicks is suggestive in some ways of the Hammer Horror heroines of the 1950s onward, while also mirroring the jeune femme/hippie/Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of the 1960s. Her predilection for black certainly links Nicks to the Gothic, and she has worn it throughout her career. The black and white cover of Rumours, the 1977 bestselling album by Fleetwood Mac, set the template for her mysterious ‘look’. With the streaming locks of a mad fairy tale heroine, she poses balletically in dark chiffon, a bat-wing sleeve trailing behind her. Over the years, the swirling chiffon—scarves, skirts, dresses, blouses, and capes—has accommodated Nicks’ figure as she has aged, but the black has become ubiquitous. Now she is more likely to wear a dusky tailored crop jacket or a long Edwardian coat with a chiffon skirt. The scarves are often tied to a microphone stand and catch the breeze like musical ghosts. Nicks biographer Zöe Howe observed that not only would these materials make the 5’1” performer appear larger and more visible onstage, but she was appropriating ‘Victorian modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller, who used voluminous fabrics in a similar way’.30 Nicks continues to be cited in contemporary fashion layouts whenever theatrical gothic elements appear. The influence of a gothic sensibility upon fashion continues in recent and current designer collections. The variety of interpretations—from steampunk to streetwear to performance garments to haute couture—continues to inspire generations of women and men to express their shadow side through fashion. As Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park have noted in the notes for their seminal 2009 Exhibition at FIT, Gothic: Dark Glamour, ‘[F]or a fashion to be Gothicized means that either the clothing itself or its representation in a fashion photograph or catwalk show alludes in some way to the vast pool of gothic associations’.31 Internationally, and among many young people, gothic fashion design has gone in exciting new directions. Punk was always aligned to the Gothic in its employment of the torn and tattered garments, black leather, underwear as outerwear, fetishism of objects like chains and safety pins, and tattoos and piercings. Even

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today, Vivienne Westwood’s couture designs reflect a corseted sensibility and love of jewel tones. One of the most powerful outcroppings of this aesthetic is steampunk fashion. Developing in the last century and continuing today, ‘steampunk imbricates historical (and usually Victorian) iconography with supposedly futuristic technology…frequently inflected with Gothic atmosphere… [and containing] supernatural beings such as the vampire’.32 The fashion influence of architectural clothing, black fabrics and adornments, and science fiction-inspired embellishments makes steampunk both a street and couture gothic fashion expression. In Southern California, the Latino/Latina demographic is redefining punk in many ways, one being Gothic. This fashion movement incorporates a number of trademark punk/goth statements with a unique, contemporary spin. The Chola (a street term for females in Mexican/Hispanic gangs) style of extreme makeup is paired with dark lips and cat’s eyes to evoke more of a dark, mysterious mood, and black fishnet tights and tops combine with elaborate floral headdresses reminiscent of Dia de los Muertos festivities. Their rebellious interpretations from ‘a shared sense of boredom and disaffection’33 have resulted in an interesting minority assertion of the gothic aesthetic. The international quality of punk, along with its iconoclasm and non-binary representations of gender, has led to a variety of other gothic subgenres of personal adornment. Japanese Gothic, for example, offers a fascinating take on the tropes of western gothic gear. Utilising the tradition of ghosts and demons in Japanese culture, the elements of anime (including the large, wide eyes created with makeup and false eyelashes of the characters), cyberpunk and steampunk,34 this look incorporates black leather, sharp architectural patterns, variations on samurai and kimono designs, fishnet stockings, Mary Janes or Doc Martins boots, and the individualised street adornments of the wearer. Another element of gothic fashion which is inspired by Japanese fashionistas as well as an international interest is Lolita Gothic. This look ticks many of the taboo boxes of the Gothic, particularly liminal sexuality, and at the same time it offers a camp and ironic take on this underage sexual obsession. The wearer of Lolita Gothic will often sport multiple flounced petticoats of the sort Shirley Temple would wear, starched and layered, but in black taffeta. Another Lolita variation repurposes the Catholic schoolgirl uniform of white blouses, cardigans, and tartan skirts, with mini-lengths, chain adornments, kohled eyes and red lips, punked pigtails, and over-the-knee black hose. This conflation of tartan and girliness, mixed with untamed long, dark hair, lace, and grunge accoutrement, offered an interesting gothic layout in W Magazine in 2018 entitled ‘Into the Light’, featuring couture pieces by Armani, Balenciaga, Prada, and Versace.35 Anna Sui is another practitioner of this transgressively feminine style. These and more traditional gothic elements have been incorporated into the couture and ready-to-wear designs of Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo. The founder of labels Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market, she has worked alone and in tandem with such renowned designers as her former protege Junye Watanabe to forward a singular and provocative style of gothic fashion. Beginning

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in the early 1980s ‘with distressed black clothes that served as a counterpoint to the era’s thrusting, androgynous outfits’,36 Kawakubo frequently demonstrates in her collections a mixture of sumptuous fabrics and leather/fetish/zipper adornments, flowing chiffons and highly tailored suits, and a philosophy which is both rebellious and elegant. Given the various formal associations with the Gothic—heightened makeup, prominent footwear, outré structural elements, and sumptuous fabrics—Gothic Drag has also become a significant subculture. Some of this look is inspired by the various drag queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it also signifies that enduring use of the Gothic as a way of combining individuality with a dramatic sensibility. Gothic Beauty magazine, established in the autumn of 2000, continued until November 2017 to feature the evolving elements of this mode of personal style. The popularity of gothic elements in fashion continues to demonstrate a fascination which remains for the darkly evocative and mysterious. Alexander McQueen’s impact upon fashion generally, and the gothic elements of many of his collections, continues past his death in 2010 and the landmark exhibition dedicated to his couture, Savage Beauty, shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011 and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015. From his first Jack-the-Ripper-inspired collection at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design to his pod-shaped, platform hoof shoes to his trademark skull adornments, McQueen’s dark vision still occasionally rears its head in his successor Sarah Burton’s designs. The true heir to McQueen’s gothic throne is Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens, whose fashions incorporate a number of weirdly elegant tropes—fetish wear, trailing evening dresses, layered lace and tulle, platform boots, PVC trousers, and sumptuous silk day dresses, all realised in shades of black. The little black dress also finds reincarnation through the decades, and often that wardrobe staple metamorphoses into something more dangerous. Still designing, Dame Vivienne Westwood recently offered ‘a unique, vampy take on the classic model—slashed, cut and corseted’.37 Halloween offered such magazines as British Vogue a chance to offer ‘all the Halloween make-up inspiration you need’38 both for costume and for chic; black lipstick was ubiquitous. A publication as conservative as The Wall Street Journal used a black and white layout of trending model Gigi Hadid in an October 2016 cover feature entitled Spellbound. In this ‘mystery tour in dark, dramatic looks that are enchanting in any place or time’,39 Hadid’s wardrobe featured a dark tulle Valentino skirt, Balenciaga coat, black leather boots, a Haider Ackermann dress, and a Comme des Garçons shirt and skirt; a genuinely international testimony to the Gothic’s lasting influence in contemporary fashion. Not all gothic fashion is draped black crepe or shredded organza, however. Sofia Coppola’s 2017 remake of The Beguiled hearkened back to those earlier centuries of pure southern gothic, antebellum madness. The prim costumes for the film in shades of white, cream, and almost-hand-tinted pastels, worn against the background of an isolated mansion draped in Spanish moss, inspired by southern photographer William Eggleston, provided a lighter way of presenting the dark

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side.40 An affinity for fang-like crystals and ice queen vibe has been reflected in Alexander McQueen’s 2013 winter collection and angular crystal jewellery.41 Still, the hauntingly consistent tropes of black and red, embellishment, flowing fabrics, sexualized décolleté balanced with nun-like modesty, all still continue to influence current designers. The August 2018 Harper’s Bazaar UK provided a full-page look at the coming trends. The top of the page offered frothy ‘pastel princess’ frocks, but the bottom of the page brought pure drama for ‘the wickedest witch… with fantasy gowns, acres of tulle and even a dragon’.42 Balmain offered a variation on Gothic Lolita crossed with Blade Runner. Oscar de la Renta provided a black tulled, tiered evening gown and a red chiffon swing coat perfect for dark alleys. Gucci’s evening look sent a corpse-pale model down the runway in ruched, tucked, draped, and dripping crimson silk velvet. Valentino designed a large black evening gown with a ruffled hem that echoed Victorian shrouds. And Fendi gave its idealised woman a black velvet, high-necked evening cape. The desire for mystery, for elegance, for nostalgia, and for dramatic flourishes ensure that gothic fashion, in its many transformations, will continue to evolve in popular culture—just like our favourite monsters.

Notes

1. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto [1764] (1901), (2012), Project Gutenberg, para. 1. Accessed January 6, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/696/696-h/696-h.htm. 2. Ibid., paras. 6, 9. 3. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781). 4. James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood (1847). 5. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1803] (2018), ch. 2. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 6, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/121/121-h/121-h.htm. 6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ [1800] (2019), part I, stanzas 7 and 8. Poetry Foundation. Accessed January 9, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/ christabel. 7. John Keats, ‘Lamia’ [1820] (2019), ll. 14–16. Poetry Foundation. Accessed January 12, 2019. https://www.bartleby.com/126/36.html. 8. William Hughes, Key Concepts in the Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 98. 9. Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion, Brochure (New York: The Museum at FIT, 2016), 2. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Justine Picardie, ‘The Fables of Emily Brontë,’ Town and Country, Summer 2019, para. 3. Accessed July 2018. http://www.townandcountrymag.co.uk/magazine/ tcs-summer-issue-pays-tribute-to-the-bronte-sisters. 12. Helen Rosslyn, ‘Love Among the Ruins,’ Tatler, November 2018, 98. 13. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) [2006]. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c17. 14. Lynne Zacek Bassett, Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2016), 74–75. 15. Ibid.

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16. Stefan Bassett, ‘Mourning Fashion and Etiquette in the Victorian Era,’ The Vintage News, September 16, 2018, paras. 4–5. Accessed December 9, 2017. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/09/16/mourning-fashion/. 17. Christine Alexander and Sara L. Pearson, Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre (Haworth: Brontë Society, 2017), 71. 18. Kyoto Costume Institute, Fashion: A History from the 18th to the 20th Century (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2015), 221, 227. 19. Ibid., 320. 20. Ibid., 351–352. 21. Chloe Fox, VOGUE Essentials: Little Black Dress (London: Conran Octopus, 2018), 6. 22. Ibid., 6, 8. 23. Addison Nugent, ‘Cinema’s First Sex Symbol Was Also America’s First Goth,’ Messy Nessy Chic, December 28, 2016, para. 6. Accessed October 2, 2018. https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/12/28/cinemas-first-sex-symbol-was-also-americas-first-goth/. 24. Fox, VOGUE, 6. 25. Stefanie Bottelier, ‘Lady Luisa,’ Harper’s Bazaar Art, Rijks Museum, April 2018, 10–15. 26. Margaret Atwood, ‘Death Becomes Her,’ Harper’s Bazaar UK, August 2018, 158. 27. Ibid. 28. Mark Dery, ‘Nightshade Is Growing Like Weeds,’ The New York Times, Art, March 6, 2011, 20. 29. Vera Wang, ‘Deborah Turbeville,’ Vogue US, January 2014, 44. 30. Zoë Howe, Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams & Rumours (London: Omnibus Press, 2017), 103. 31. Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park, Gothic: Dark Glamour (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and The Fashion Institute of Technology, 2009), 10. 32. William Hughes, Key Concepts in the Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 143–144. 33. Cenan Pirani, ‘The Look: New Punks of Southern California,’ The New York Times, Sunday, November 4, 2018, 4. 34. Hughes, Key Concepts, 97. 35. Paolo Roversi and Max Pearmain, ‘Into the Light,’ W Magazine, Vol. 2, 2018, 192–199. 36. Suzy Menkes, ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary,’ The New York Times Magazine, December 8, 2013, 152. 37. Fox, Vogue, 84. 38. ‘The Trend Report,’ British Vogue, November 2018, 46. 39. Inez & Vinoodh, and George Cortina, ‘Spellbound,’ The Wall Street Journal Magazine, October 2016, 87–103. 40. Lynn Hirschberg, ‘What Sofia Sees,’ W Magazine, June/July 2017, 52–55. 41. Carolina Irving, Miguel Flores-Vianna, and Charlotte Di Carcaci, ‘Wintery Solace,’ The New York Times Style Magazine, December 8, 2013, 96–97. 42. Avril, Mair, ed., ‘10 Things We Love,’ Harper’s Bazaar UK, August 2018, 66.

Bibliography Alexander, Christine, and Sara L. Pearson. Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre. Haworth: Brontë Society, 2017. Andrews, Stefan. ‘Mourning Fashion and Etiquette in the Victorian Era’. The Vintage News. September 16, 2018. Accessed December 9, 2017. https://www.thevintagenews. com/2018/09/16/mourning-fashion/. Atwood, Margaret. ‘Death Becomes Her’. Harper’s Bazaar UK. August 2018.

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Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey [1803] (2018). Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 6, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/121/121-h/121-h.htm. Bassett, Lynne Zacek. Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy. Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2016. Bottelier, Stefanie. ‘Lady Luisa’. Harper’s Bazaar Art. Rijks Museum. April 2018. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Christabel’ [1800] (2019). Poetry Foundation. Accessed January 9, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/christabel. Dery, Mark. ‘Nightshade Is Growing Like Weeds’. The New York Times, Art. March 6, 2011. Fox, Chloe. VOGUE Essentials: Little Black Dress. London: Conran Octopus, 2018. Fuseli, Henry. The Nightmare (1781). Hill, Colleen. Fairy Tale Fashion. Brochure. New York: The Museum at FIT, 2016. Hirschberg, Lynn. ‘What Sofia Sees’. W Magazine. June/July 2017. Howe, Zoë. Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams & Rumours. London: Omnibus Press, 2017. Hughes, William. Key Concepts in the Gothic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Inez & Vinoodh, and George Cortina. ‘Spellbound’. The Wall Street Journal Magazine. October 2016. Irving, Carolina, Miguel Flores-Vianna, and Charlotte Di Carcaci. ‘Wintery Solace’. The New York Times Style Magazine. December 8, 2013. Keats, John. ‘Lamia’ [1820] (2019). Poetry Foundation. Accessed January 12, 2019. https://www. bartleby.com/126/36.html. Kyoto Costume Institute. Fashion: A History from the 18th to the 20th Century. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2015. Mair, Avril, ed. ‘10 Things We Love’. Harper’s Bazaar UK. August 2018. Menkes, Suzy. ‘Fashion’s Purest Visionary’. The New York Times Magazine. December 8, 2013. Nugent, Addison. ‘Cinema’s First Sex Symbol Was Also America’s First Goth’. Messy Nessy Chic. December 28, 2016. Accessed October 2, 2018. https://www.messynessychic. com/2016/12/28/cinemas-first-sex-symbol-was-also-americas-first-goth/. Picardie, Justine. ‘The Fables of Emily Brontë’. Town and Country. Accessed July 2018. http:// www.townandcountrymag.co.uk/magazine/tcs-summer-issue-pays-tribute-to-the-bronte-sisters. Pirani, Cenan. ‘The Look: New Punks of Southern California’. The New York Times, Sunday. November 4, 2018. Rosslyn, Helen. ‘Love Among the Ruins’. Tatler. November 2018. Roversi, Paolo, and Max Pearman. ‘Into the Light’. W Magazine. Vol. 2. 2018. Rymer, James Malcolm, and Thomas Peckett Prest. Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood (1847). Steele, Valerie, and Jennifer Park. Gothic: Dark Glamour. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and The Fashion Institute of Technology, 2009. ‘The Trend Report’. British Vogue. November 2018. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) [2006]. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c17. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto ([1764] 1901), (2012). Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 6, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/696/696-h/696-h.htm; https://www.bartleby. com/126/36.html. Wang, Vera. ‘Deborah Turbeville’. Vogue US. January 2014.

Walking with the Lancashire Witches Alex Bevan

The story of the Lancashire witches centres upon ten supposed witches living in and around Pendle, Lancashire, who were executed in August 1612 at Lancaster Castle. The alleged activities of the witches, and the subsequent details of the witch trials were written by the clerk to the court, Thomas Potts, at the request of the trial’s judges, Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Potts’ account is titled, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, and was published in 1613. The book is arranged as a series of ‘accusations’ and ‘examinations’ of, and ‘confessions’ by, each of the alleged witches. Potts lists the ten ‘witches’ who were eventually sanctioned to death by hanging: Anne Whittle, alias Chattox; Elizabeth Device; James Device; Anne Redferne; Alice Nutter; Katherine Hewitt; John Bulcock; Jane Bulcock; Alizon Device; and Isobel Robey.1 Elizabeth Device was the daughter of Elizabeth Southerns (‘Old Demdike’), the region’s most notorious, self-proclaimed witch, who died before the trial. Following Potts’ account, a number of influential literary texts arose which depicted the Lancashire witches. For the purpose of this chapter, I will analyse perhaps the most influential text to arise since Potts’ narrative: The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (1849) by William Harrison Ainsworth. While one is a historical account and the other is a novel, each text has shaped our cultural understanding of witches, and has continued to extend our fascination into the story of the Lancashire witches, which I will go on to argue has created the demand for Lancashire-witch-based tourism in rural Lancashire. This chapter will begin by examining the history of the Lancashire witches, before considering closely the implications of both Potts’ and Ainsworth’s narratives. I will then go on to analyse the contemporary ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, a popular mode of gothic tourism which enables the tourist to follow in the footsteps of the Lancashire witches, and moreover, to read Carol Ann Duffy’s site-specific poem, ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (2012).

A. Bevan (*)  University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_62

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The investigation into the Lancashire witches is said to have begun when, on 18 March 1612, Alizon Device encountered a pedlar from Halifax named John Law, and she asked Law for some pins. The pedlar refused, and later suffered an attack which, today, would most likely be determined as a stroke. Alizon was convinced she had caused his pain and paralysis, and she subsequently confessed to having cursed the pedlar. Consequently, Alizon, Elizabeth and James Device were summoned to court on 30 March 1612, where Alizon spoke further of her family’s association with ‘witchcraft’, while also accusing Anne Whittle and the Chattox family of murder by witchcraft. On 2 April 1612, a further court hearing took place which saw the alleged witches disclose additional confessions, including Old Demdike having reportedly traded her soul to the devil. On 10 April 1612, a large group of suspected witches gathered at Malkin Tower (the Demdike’s family home) in what appeared to be a coven, thus fuelling the authorities with further ammunition to try many of those individuals with practicing witchcraft. After the famous two-day trial, which took place from 18 to 19 August 1612, Potts reveals in The Wonderful Discovery of Witches that Bromley summoned the ten witches to death: ‘It only remains I pronounce the judgment of the court against you by the Kings [sic] authority, which is: You shall all go from hence to the Castle, from whence you came; from thence you shall be carried to the place of execution for this county: where your bodies shall be hanged until you are dead; AND GOD HAVE MERCY UPON YOUR SOULS’[sic].2 The fact that the Lancashire witches’ most famous coven was held at Malkin Tower is interesting when one uncovers the intertextual reference to ‘Malkin’ in Macbeth (1606) by William Shakespeare, a play which also prominently features witches. In Act One, Scene One, the audience encounters the Three Witches, and Witch One states: ‘I come, Gray-Malkin’.3 Gray-Malkin can be understood to mean ‘Little Grey Mall’, another term used for a cat.4 Cats are well-known, of course, as witches’ familiars (evil helpers). The ‘Gray-Malkin’ is therefore an ‘evil’ assistant to the Three Witches, symbolically casting Malkin Tower as an arena within which the Lancashire witches gained strength from the Devil. As Potts notes, there was ‘a special meeting at Malkin Tower in the forest of Pendle, upon Good Friday […] of all the most dangerous, wicked, and damnable witches in the county far and near’.5 It remains unknown as to whether Old Demdike named her family residence Malkin Tower, or if this was a name coined by locals. If Old Demdike did name her home Malkin Tower, this would suggest she was familiar with the language of witchcraft and its ‘familiars’, muddying her supposed innocence and positing her as a knowledgeable, outward celebrator of witchcraft. One could also argue, of course, that Old Demdike named her home Malkin Tower in order to satirically play up to the locals branding her family as witches, without realising the catastrophic consequences yet to come. It is most likely, however, that the locals and the authorities themselves assigned Old Demdike’s residence with the name ‘Malkin Tower’ in order to brand these individuals as ‘criminal’ Lancashire witches. The authorities would have strengthened their case for arresting the Lancashire witches by exploiting the association between ‘Malkin’ and the evil, conspiring Three Witches in Macbeth.

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Having established in Act One, Scene One, that they will meet Macbeth ‘Upon the Heath’ later in the play, the Three Witches meet Macbeth and Banquo on ‘A Barren Heath’.6 Just as the tourist trails rural Lancashire during the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, Macbeth and Banquo meet the Three Witches while on foot in a rural setting, where they proclaim Macbeth a future King: Witch One:All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, thane of Glamis! Witch Two:All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! Witch Three:All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be King hereafter!7

Shakespeare positions witches as creatures residing in remote settings, contributing to the belief that Old Demdike and her associates at the rural Malkin Tower are indeed witches operating in the wilderness. The Three Witches’ prophecy seen in this quotation ultimately leads Macbeth to murder King Duncan. In Act Four, Scene One, Macbeth states: ‘I conjure you, by that which you profess (Howe’er you come to know it): answer me’.8 Here, Macbeth is asking the witches for assistance, and the Three Witches cast a spell in a cauldron in front of Macbeth, where they produce a series of visions which herald his downfall. The Three Witches in Macbeth are, therefore, treacherous and deceitful, and any intertextual association between Macbeth and the Lancashire witches further demonises the Lancashire witches and positions Malkin Tower as a space housing beings which may threaten King James I, the reigning King of England during the era of the Lancashire witches. King James I, a staunch protestant, feared Catholic revolt, and also feared assassination after having narrowly escaped the Gun Powder Plot in 1605. The religious and political climate of uncertainty fuelled James to become especially concerned about witchcraft. Perhaps James’ fear of witchcraft could have also been intensified by Macbeth, given the play’s investment in threatened monarchs. Augmenting Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts’ in 1563, James introduced ‘An Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits’ in 1604 in an attempt to harshen the punishment for those practicing witchcraft. The act states: ‘If any person or persons […] shall use practise [sic] or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, […] every such offender or offenders in witchcraft […] shall suffer pains of death as a felon or felons’.9 James sought to execute anyone suspected of practicing any form of witchcraft, and this severe (and rather vague) Act is heavily open to speculation, interpretation and manipulation. Further highlighting his preoccupation with the dangers of witchcraft, prior to these events, James wrote a book titled Daemonologie (1593), wherein he shares his theories about witchcraft, stating: ‘My intention in this labour is only to prove two things, as I have already said: the one, that such devilish arts have been and are; the other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merit’.10 The book is written in the form of a conversation between a sceptic, Philomanthes, who asks a believer, Epistemon, about the world of witchcraft. Of course, the sceptic, by the end of the text, is utterly convinced by Epistemon’s case that evil witches exist.

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The active ‘witch hunting’ that took place in Lancashire during the early seventeenth century is undoubtedly in part due to the witch propaganda present in Daemonologie, and moreover, the fact that convicting witches would have pleased James, thus heavily rewarding those who sought the conviction. Here, we can see how the issue of witchcraft is highly politicised, and yet increasingly reliant upon storytelling: it is after all James’ and Potts’ imaginative stories about witches that resulted in prosecutions, deaths and even changes in the law. It is therefore unsurprising that these events inspired authors such as Ainsworth to write a novel, as one could argue that his novel was, to some extent already being written throughout the course of history. In order to expand upon my assertion that the so-called ‘historical’ understanding of the Lancashire witches perpetuated by James and Potts belong perhaps to the realm of fiction rather than historical fact, it is worth returning to Potts’ account and its (in)authenticity. The leader of the investigation into the Pendle witches was Roger Nowell, a magistrate from the neighbouring village of Read who grew intent upon having the witches prosecuted. It is Nowell’s ‘evidence’ gathering that formed the basis for Potts’ The Wonderful Discovery of Witches. It is believed that Nowell manipulated and coerced many of the alleged witches into providing accounts which were later interpreted as witchcraft. In some instances, even innocent stories told by children were sensationalised and used as evidence against the so-called witches. Despite much of the ‘evidence’ being questionable, Potts eloquently presents these stories in The wonderful Discovery of Witches, and convinces his readers of their authenticity and truth. Marion Gibson has previously highlighted Potts’ use of formulaic legal documents in The Wonderful Discovery of Witches, explaining that Potts wants his readers to be in awe of the legal justice system, its fairness and his credibility.11 Despite its formulaic approach, Potts closes his text with a rather unusual plea to his readers to believe in the truthfulness of this account, implying such belief is a matter of public safety. While it is for the most part obvious to the modern reader that many of the supernatural events detailed in Potts’ account are simply untrue, sensationalised or explained by other means, Philip C. Almond reminds us that for the seventeenth-century readership, the boundaries between fact, fiction and the supernatural were blurred.12 Potts’ text is therefore highly influential to the cultural understanding of witches in both the time it was written, and for centuries to come. William Harrison Ainsworth wrote The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest in 1849. The book retells the story of the Lancashire witches outlined in Potts’ account. One may immediately notice Ainsworth’s intertextual reference to Ann Radcliffe’s earlier gothic novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), perhaps signalling Ainsworth’s intention to position his novel, The Lancashire Witches, within the bourgeoning arena of gothic fiction. Ainsworth’s novel follows the stories of the Devices and the Chattoxs, explaining the intricate relationships and events that are believed to have occurred. The Lancashire Witches has received very little critical attention, David Punter being the key scholar to have written about it. In comparison to one of Ainsworth’s earlier novels, The Tower of London (1840), Punter positions The Lancashire Witches as a more comprehensive

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exercise in gothic writing.13 Punter goes on to identify how The Lancashire Witches is given extra conviction by Ainsworth’s geographical and historical familiarity with rural Lancashire.14 Ainsworth is almost akin to a tour guide to his readers, describing vividly rural Lancashire: ‘Through a lovely green valley meandered the Calder, now winding round some verdant knoll, now washing the base of lofty heights feathered with timber to their very summits, now lost amid thick woods, and only discernible at intervals by a glimmer amongst the trees’.15 The fact that Ainsworth repeatedly uses the word ‘now’ when his narrator is describing the movement of the Calder reinforces the notion that the reader is experiencing the landscape alongside the narrator. When reading The Lancashire Witches, it is Ainsworth’s familiarity and love for the Lancashire landscape that therefore contributes to the reader’s desire to visit rural Lancashire and to explore the regions associated with the Lancashire witches via participation in the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’. The Lancashire Witches is therefore a gothic novel which utilises the tale of these historical witches in order to create a supernatural text which will be significant to the cultural understanding of witches more generally. Moreover, The Lancashire Witches can be described as a rural gothic text. Bernice M. Murphy coined the phrase ‘rural Gothic’ and she argues that it often contains meetings between individuals who have permanently resided in one place, and those who are mobile.16 The Lancashire Witches is infiltrated with conflict between those who are permanently settled in rural Lancashire (namely the accused ‘witches’), and those mobile characters such as the overzealous magistrate, Nowell. Nowell is described by Ainsworth as ‘Head of an ancient Lancashire family, [and] though a worthy and well-meaning man, [he] dealt hard measure from the bench, and seldom tempered justice with mercy’.17 One could also argue that social ‘mobility’ is driving the legal case orchestrated by Nowell against the Lancashire witches, as those ‘worthy’ individuals working for James seek to improve their status within society. While this gothic novel is presenting readers with the horrors of the events which occurred in 1612, Ainsworth’s style of writing seems to reflect nostalgically upon this historical region of rural Lancashire. When describing Roughlee, for example, it appears as if Ainsworth is reminiscing over this brutal past: ‘The scenery was stern and sombre, the hills were dark and dreary; but the very wildness of the place was attractive, and the old house, with its grey walls, its lofty chimneys, its garden with their clipped yews, and its rook-haunted trees, harmonised well with all around it’.18 Most troublingly, Ainsworth seems to romanticise the witch’s pastoral connections, so much so, that The Lancashire Witches is almost nostalgic for the days of superstition, as Ainsworth implies that such superstition seemingly adds enchantment to the already idyllic landscape of rural Lancashire. Ainsworth’s romantic familiarity with Lancashire makes this rural gothic novel part realist, emblematised through his geographical specificity surrounding Lancashire’s landscape, and part gothic in that the events unfolding upon the landscape are supernatural. Having considered both the history of the Pendle witches, and indeed, the various narratives produced as a result of the witch trials of 1612, I shall now turn to

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the gothic tourism which has arisen from these fictional, historical, and cultural narratives. Before examining the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, it is helpful to clarify what I consider ‘Gothic tourism’ to mean. Emma McEvoy broadly defines gothic tourism as a process wherein a tourist visits a location that is presented in terms of the Gothic.19 McEvoy demonstrates the interconnected relationship between the spaces of gothic tourism and the spaces of gothic fiction, and she makes a case for Strawberry Hill’s tourists becoming immersed within a spatial gothic narrative: that of The Castle of Otranto (1764). Extending McEvoy’s observations, this chapter treats what I term literary gothic attractions such as the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’ as storytelling spaces and the act of participating is, in this sense, a process of reading the multiple historical, literary, cultural and folkloric stories embedded within the space. And, somewhat uniquely for the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, in addition to engaging with the many intersecting gothic narratives associated with rural Lancashire, the tourist physically reads Duffy’s poem along the way. In 2012, in order to commemorate the four-hundred-year anniversary of the Lancashire witch trials, a project known as the Lancashire Witches 400 Project (LW400) was commissioned by Green Close (a Lancashire-based art centre). The project created the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’: a fifty-one-mile walk from the Pendle Heritage Centre in Barrowford, to Lancaster Castle. The route is designed so that tourists can trace the route the Pendle witches undertook when they travelled to Lancaster Castle to be hanged. The route was developed by John Sparshatt and Ian Thornton-Bryar, alongside the Lancashire Witches 400 Research Group. The project collaboratively published a book titled The Lancashire Witches Walk (2013), which includes ‘The Historical Context 1612–2012’, written by Robert Poole, and information about the walking route, including detailed maps.20 While one may assume that some of the walkers are familiar with both Potts’ and Ainsworth’s narratives, Poole nevertheless introduces the tourist to Potts’ account of the witches and he also informs the tourist that Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches has contributed to local myths surrounding the events of 1612.21 The book provides a comprehensive guide for those who plan to conduct the specific fiftyone-mile walk designed by the Lancashire Witches 400 Project. Should walkers wish to receive descriptive passages alongside the detailed maps provided in The Lancashire Witches Walk, they can opt to also acquire The Lancashire Witches Walk Guide (2013) by Sparshatt and Thornton-Bryar, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to follow the walk.22 The Lancashire Witches 400 Project also commissioned Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to write a poem titled ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (2012), each stanza of which has been produced in cast iron and placed onto ten separate way markers made of stone. The ten tercets are symbolic of the ten Lancashire witches hanged in 1612. The tercets were made using specially designed lettering which enables tourists to take rubbings at each tercet in order to collect the whole poem when conducting the walk. The fifty-one-mile walk is, therefore, literary gothic tourism, not only due to the tourist traversing the landscape of the witches depicted by both Potts and Ainsworth, but through its existence as an act of site-specific reading (of Duffy’s poem). The walk is thus both immersive as one enters the literary world of

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the witches, and a unique narrativised experience whereby one walks in order to read the poem. On 27 June 2017, I travelled to the Pendle Heritage Centre in order to begin my journey into the world of the Lancashire witches. This was a completely new experience for me as I had never visited rural Lancashire before, nor had I any past experience of entering the spaces of former witches—though I am familiar, as are many others, with the tale of the Lancashire witches, through various modes of storytelling. The rural walk cuts through open fields and farmland, emblematising the tourist’s isolation, and the total autonomy this form of self-guided rural gothic tourism offers the tourist. I recall gazing upon the vast and open landscape and realising the tranquillity afforded by rural Lancashire. With only the guidebook[s] to hand, the tourist is afforded a unique, unmediated experience of the Pendle region of Lancashire. Unlike historical architecture, wherein one’s connection to the past is often compromised by modernisation and/or commercialisation, and indeed, the presence of tour guides themselves who mediate one’s experience, the rural landscape is the rawest form of historical space, standing almost exactly as it did in 1612. This authentic, unmediated rural landscape is temporally transformative, enabling the tourists to feel that they are truly treading the seventeenth-century ground over which the witches walked. When considering tourists’ engagement with the spaces in which they enter, Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton have contended that a traveller’s imagination may be influenced by past travelling experiences, books (fiction and non-fiction) and objects, to name but a few.23 Having read The Lancashire Witches, on entering the region of Pendle Hill, I could not help but recall the words of the pseudo ‘Lancashire squire’, Nicholas Assheton who, in The Lancashire Witches, states: ‘Pendle Forest swarms with witches. They burrow in the hillside like rabbits in a warren. They are the terror of the whole county’, ironically adding that ‘their solitary habitations are more strongly guarded than fortresses’.24 If the latter were true, of course, the alleged witches would have never been caught and subsequently hanged. Ainsworth’s character serves to highlight the apparent scale of the witch epidemic in Lancashire, while also reinforcing the rural gothic tone of the novel. Despite the rural forest, ‘hill-side’, and overall landscape of the county being purportedly awash with witches, Assheton goes on to state: ‘“I love Pendle Hill […] and from whatever side I view it [and] from all points and under all aspects, whether robed in mist or radiant with sunshine, I delight in it. Born beneath its giant shadow, I look upon it with filial regard. […] Its broad, round, smooth mass is better than the roughest, craggiest, shaggiest, most sharply splintered mountain of them all. And then what a view it commands! – Lancaster with its grey old castle on one hand; York with its reverend minstr [sic] on the other”’.25 I have included this lengthy quotation in order to further demonstrate Ainsworth’s intricately detailed, realist depictions of rural Lancashire and, in particular, Pendle Hill. The geographical accuracy is testament to Ainsworth having visited rural Lancashire, and his studying of the landscape before writing The Lancashire Witches. Ainsworth’s precise details provide literary tourists with map-like instructions in order to physically see the beautiful rural regions of Lancashire which

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the characters describe. However, the reader of this rural gothic novel receives conflicting imagery from Ainsworth, who interweaves the fact that witches ‘burrow in the hill-side’ alongside pastoral idealisations of the very same rural landscape. When standing at the foot of Pendle Hill, gazing upon its ‘broad, round, smooth mass’, the literary tourist familiar with Ainsworth’s depictions experiences the novel’s descriptive accuracy, and therefore also unconsciously imagines the witches themselves roaming that same hill, creating a familiar yet strange, uncanny experience. The gothic tourist, traversing the landscape depicted by Potts, and literary landscape depicted by Ainsworth, can be understood to be undertaking a metafictional process. According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction is both aware of its literary-fictional condition and its wish to create imaginative realities, spaces in which the reader (or literary tourist in this instance) can still become absorbed.26 Metafiction therefore provides a self-consciously inauthentic literary experience which sits on the margin between reality and fiction. The tourist embarking on the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’ is undertaking a form of gothic pilgrimage which is informed by several gothic texts and can thus be considered metafictional: it is a ‘real’ journey through a landscape saturated with gothic tales. The ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’ is after all primarily designed to mirror the real walk undertaken by the witches to Lancaster Castle for hanging in 1612. While the tourist is not stepping into the role of a particular figure/character, the tourist is spatially reconstructing a storytelling experience shaped by historical and literary narratives surrounding the witches. The tourist’s experience of trailing the ground on which the witches walked is thus fashioned and narrativised by Potts’ and Ainsworth’s storytelling, as the tourist passes the supposedly witch-infested ‘Pendle Hill’, evoking images of ‘burrowing witches’ as discussed above. Despite being based upon an actual historical event, when the tourist allows Potts’ and Ainsworth’s sensationalised visions of Lancashire to seep through and construct their own experience of trailing the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, the tourist is aware that s/he is traversing a ‘consciously inauthentic’ narrativised landscape. Returning to my experience of conducting the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, it is important to note that due to the fact that the full fifty-one-mile walk would require approximately seven days to complete, I was unfortunately unable to complete the entire walk on foot. However, I did walk from Barrowford to Barley (four miles), and part of the Barley to Spring Wood (ten miles) section of the route. In addition to walking these sections, I also used my car to access and read the remaining tercets of Duffy’s poem. Upon leaving Pendle Heritage Centre, one encounters the first of Duffy’s tercets. The first line of the tercet states that ‘One voice for ten dragged this way once’, further reinforcing the fact that the walkers are following in the footsteps of the witches, and embarking on a historical, literary journey. The tercets are impressive, solid structures, which will stand the test of time. While the tercets are, in literal terms, modern constructions on an otherwise untouched landscape, by using materials which would have been available in the seventeenth century the tercets are in keeping with the region’s heritage. Though the content of the first tercet, which condemns the witch trials as products

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of ‘superstition’ and ‘ignorance’, is written from a modern perspective, the chosen materials used for the tercets’ construction being cast iron and stone symbolically suggest that the words expressed on these tercets are of universal and historical truth. The Barrowford to Barley section of the walk takes the tourists towards the village of Roughlee, which Potts, in The Lancashire Witches, describes as ‘“the very heart of a witch district”’.27 Roughlee is especially famous for having been the home of Alice Nutter whom, in the novel, King James I condemns as a ‘“notorious witch, and a fugitive of justice”’.28 Given Alice Nutter’s notoriety in the village of Roughlee, in order to further commemorate the four-hundred-year anniversary of the witch trials, a sculpture of her was produced and placed on the outskirts of Roughlee. The sculpture stands behind a post which reads ‘Alice’, encouraging tourists to view this individual as a woman, and not a ‘witch’. The Roughlee tourist information website informs visitors that ‘the local Borough & Parish Councillor James Starkie led the scheme to commission the erection of a piece of public art, a sculpture of “Alice” in an [sic] poignant and evocative stance, which is sited on Blacko Bar Road between Crowtrees and Roughlee’.29 The sculpture is made of brass and Corten steel, and depicts Alice clothed in traditional seventeenth-century dress. Alice’s hands are chained together, and she leans forward as she ascends a set of steps. The descriptive passage, located on the step behind Alice, informs tourists that ‘her poise and demeanour are open to your own interpretation’. The chains clearly depict Alice walking while in the custody of the authorities, whereas her ascending the steps is perhaps symbolic of how the witch’s notoriety placed her well and truly in the public eye. The statue itself deliberately depicts Alice as a woman, and does not depict the cultural stereotype of the witch, in order to debunk the stereotype and embody the modern perception of the ‘witches’ as victims of the state. For the tourist, the human-like sculpture of Alice serves to fill the uncanny absence of Potts’ and Ainsworth’s witches who are surrounded by ‘cauldron[s] and broomstick[s]’ among the otherwise ‘real’ literary landscape within which s/he walks.30 As I departed from the village of Barley, I found the second of Duffy’s tercets, which describes the witches in terms of how they were perceived in the seventeenth century. Here, Duffy educates the walker into the false stereotyping of the Lancashire witches prevalent in earlier texts, especially Potts’ The Wonderful Discovery of Witches, wherein he describes ‘Anne Whittle, alias Chattox’, as ‘a very old withered spent & decrepit creature [and] a dangerous witch, of very long continuance’.31 Duffy uses the word ‘crone’ to describe the witches on this tercet. Stemming from fairy tale and folklore, ‘crone’ refers to an ‘ugly’ and/or ‘old’ woman, who often possesses supernatural powers. Interestingly, Lori Rowlett notes that more recently, women have begun to reclaim the word crone as a symbol of empowerment which suggests a contemporary double meaning in Duffy’s usage of the term.32 The presence of Duffy’s poem on the trail can therefore be said to pose critical questions surrounding fiction and reality, as the inclusion of the word ‘crone’ echoes Potts’ description while simultaneously undermining his assertions. The metafictional journey across rural Lancashire enables the tourist to

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navigate the landscape present in Potts’ supposed ‘factual’ historical account, and Ainsworth’s fictional account respectively, while intermittently imposing a higher consciousness upon the tourist concerning the real events of 1612 through Duffy’s modern poetic tercets. The approach to the third tercet takes the walker deeper into the rural landscape on the outskirts of the village of Whalley. The tercet describes a storm over Pendle: ‘On the wind’s breath, curse of crow and rook’. It is worth noting that this line of poetry is particularly effective when read in the heart of rural Lancashire on a windy afternoon, highlighting the immersive qualities of literary tourism. The weather described by Duffy personifies the actions of the local magistrates and authorities who can be said to have brewed the metaphorical storm of the Pendle witches. Duffy’s reference to the ‘curse of crow and rook’ could be a satirical take on the accusation that the witches ‘cursed’ local cattle, causing the animals to die, when in actual fact, these deaths could have been explained by attacks from such birds. On the other hand, Duffy could be subtly referring to Ainsworth’s depiction of Assheton being attacked by a raven, another member of the crow family of birds. The raven, which ‘croaked merrily’, seemed to cause a ‘huge fragment [to] dislodge from the cliff’ towards Assheton, who describes the bird as ‘“accursed”’.33 Ainsworth adds that ‘a shower of blows fell upon [Assheton], and kicks from unseen feet were applied to his person’ and it is inferred that these are the actions of the Pendle witches.34 Duffy, however, likens the supposed ‘curse’ or, rather, actions of the birds, to events which occur as the wind blows, contending that such actions are nothing more than products of nature. The intertextual references to Potts’ and Ainsworth’s texts and, moreover, Duffy’s re-appropriation of the language used by Potts and Ainsworth, affords tourists a refreshing twenty-first-century perspective on the tale of the Lancashire witches. While traversing these remote sections of the trail, readers of Potts and Ainsworth may assume the role of the gothic walker on the cusp of encountering danger like that of Parkins in M. R. James’ ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ (1904), especially when they recollect Potts’ description of Elizabeth Southerns (Old Demdike): ‘She was a general agent for the Devil in all these parts: no man escaped her, or her Furies’.35 As the isolated walker treads the ground formerly occupied by ‘agent[s] of the devil’, it is unsurprising that his/ her imagination may incite fear, especially in terms of whether s/he will return to civilisation. The walk is, after all, very remote and one would likely struggle to receive mobile phone signal should s/he become lost among the ‘witch district’. However, the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, for the most part, inspires a unique, rare form of gothic walker—a walker who is driven by empathy for the ‘gothic’ subjects. Here, the process of walking while reading Duffy’s poem is, in fact, a process through which one debunks the sensationalised, gothicised characterisation of the witches, and experiences the gothic through an abhorrence of the experiences the witches endured. Where Ainsworth fails to draw explicitly upon the true gothic terror in the tale of The Lancashire Witches, the Lancashire Witches 400 Project creates a physical journey into the lives of the witches which puts participants in touch with the absent morality recognised by Punter in preceding textual

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engagements with the witches.36 The gothic walker, therefore, teeters on the edge of assuming the role of Parkins in his/her inclination to feel both in danger, and wanting to escape the isolating landscape, before ascending the gothicised worlds of Potts and Ainsworth, and recognising him/herself as an uncoverer of a misrepresented past. The remaining seven tercets of the poem, which I reached via car, are spread between Spring Woods and Lancaster Castle. The sixth tercet is particularly poignant in that Duffy captures the notion that tourists are traversing the same landscape as the witches, under ‘the same old witness moon’, thus surmounting the empathetic journey the tourists are undertaking. As stated in the Lancashire Witches Walk book, ‘To walk through [Lancashire] with an awareness of the events of 1612 brings a sense of a past that is in one way strange and remote, but in another curiously close’.37 When one reaches the final tercet of the fifty-one-mile walk, walkers are reminded that the witches were never given gravestones, suggesting that the walk is in part a scattered memorial and process of remembrance. In this sense, the tercets themselves can be said to act as the absent gravestones. The final line of the poem refers to the notion of the tourist grieving, which is something that the gothic tourist may have never considered at the outset of his/her walk through Lancashire. Duffy is right, however: the process of walking and reading the poem is emotional. This form of rural gothic tourism is not commercial; it is self-guided, educational, and enlightening. I would also add that one ought to appreciate the level of stamina and effort one has to apply in order to complete only a partial amount of the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, let alone the entire fifty-one mile route. The longevity of the walk, combined with the harsh terrain, is an integral feature of this form of transformative, educational, rural gothic tourism, as the walker has to physically challenge him/herself, and this physical challenge is symbolic of the cultural challenges at stake during the walk as a whole. Though one cannot compare the circumstances of the tourists with those of the witches, the physical discomfort experienced by the tourist during the gruelling walk promotes a feeling of empathy with the witches’ suffering experienced on this very terrain. The walker may arrive curious or enchanted by the stereotype of the witch propagated by Potts and Ainsworth but, as Duffy notes, ‘that was then’, and now, s/he identifies the term ‘witch’ with victim. The tourist also understands the gothic undertone of this historical tale to be that of the cruel and manipulative legal system, fuelled by the writings of a paranoid King. When the tourist finishes the ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’, and subsequently reaches the end of the guidebook, they learn that ‘the persecution of children and adults for alleged acts of witchcraft is not an issue that has been consigned to history – it is still damaging lives across the world today’.38 The guidebook then encourages the tourist to make a donation to ‘Stepping Stones Nigeria’, a ‘UK-based charity working to uphold the rights of children in the Niger Delta region in Africa, where there is a deeply held belief in “child witches”’.39 What one may have initially assumed to be an historical problem is therefore shown to be a serious problem in the contemporary moment. The tourist’s journey through Lancashire, and indeed literature, history and time, equips them with awareness,

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empathy and a much greater sociopolitical understanding of the damaging effects of branding individuals with practicing witchcraft. The ‘Lancashire Witches Walk’ can therefore be compared to George Dekker’s notion of the secular pilgrimage which was undertaken by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary tourists. Dekker argues that these secular pilgrimages to literary sites culturally broadened and educated tourists in similar ways to religious pilgrimages.40 Having embarked upon this transformative journey, the Lancashire witches tourist may consequently assist charities such as ‘Stepping Stones Nigeria’ by helping to raise awareness of the plight of those accused of witchcraft. While there were no such moral, historical tales with which to educate the seventeenth-century general public, it is important that the tragic history of the Lancashire witches is kept alive by twenty-first-century historians, writers, artists, poets, readers and tourists as this education may contribute to the eventual disbelief in, and abolition of the persecution of alleged ‘witches’.

Notes

1. Thomas Potts, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster: Modernised and Introduced by Robert Poole, ed. by Robert Poole (Lancaster, Palatine Books, 2011), 201. 2. Ibid., 203. 3. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Cedric Watts (London, Wordsworth, 2005), 31. 4. Cedric Watts, ‘Notes on Macbeth’, in Macbeth (London, Wordsworth, 2005), 106. 5. Potts, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches, 108–9. 6. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 24. 7. Ibid., 35. 8. Ibid., 76. 9. Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558–1618 (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 57–8. 10. King James I, ‘Daemonologie’, in The Demonology of King James I: Includes the Original Text of Daemonologie and News From Scotland, ed. by Donald Tyson (Woodbury, Llewellyn, 2011), 45–186, 46. 11. Marion Gibson, ‘Thomas Potts’s “Dusty Memory”: Reconstructing Justice in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches’, in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, ed. by Robert Poole (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002), 42–57, 44–5. 12. Philip C. Almond, The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill (London, I.B. Tauris, 2012), 13. 13. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Volume 1 (Abingdon, Routledge, 2013), 157. 14. Ibid., 157. 15. William Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (North Charleston, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 73. 16. Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 10. 17. Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches, 49. 18. Ibid., 158. 19. Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. 20. Robert Poole, The Lancashire Witches Walk (Carnforth, Green Close Studios, 2013).

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21. Ibid., 4. 22. John Sparshatt and Ian Thornton-Bryar, The Lancashire Witches Walk Guide (New York, Postcard Books, 2013). 23. Garth Lean, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton, ‘Reimagining Travel and Imagination’, in Travel and Imagination, ed. by Garth Lean, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton (Abingdon, Routledge, 2016), 9–24, 9. 24. Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches, 58. 25. Ibid., 131–2. 26. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (York, Methuen & Co., 1984), 131. 27. Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches, 61. 28. Ibid., 253. 29. Roughlee, ‘Alice Nutter’, Roughlee, http://www.roughlee.org.uk/roughlee-commemorates-alice-nutter/. Accessed 15 December 2018. 30. Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches, 61. 31. Potts, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches, 112 [original emphasis]. 32. Lori Rowlett, ‘Crone’, in Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, ed. by Lorraine Code (Abingdon, Routledge, 2000), 111. 33. Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches, 135. 34. Ibid., 135. 35. Potts, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches, 102. 36. Punter, The Literature of Terror, 158. 37. Poole, The Lancashire Witches Walk, 6. 38. Ibid., 30. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. George Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005), 18.

Bibliography Ainsworth, William Harrison, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (North Charleston, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015). Almond, Philip C., The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill (London, I.B. Tauris, 2012). Code, Lorraine, Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (Abingdon, Routledge, 2000). Dekker, George, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005). Gibson, Marion, ‘Thomas Potts’s “Dusty Memory”: Reconstructing Justice in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches’, in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, ed. by Robert Poole (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002), 42–57. King James I, ‘Daemonologie’, in The Demonology of King James I: Includes the Original Text of Daemonologie and News From Scotland, ed. by Donald Tyson (Woodbury, Llewellyn, 2011), 45–186. Lean, Garth, Russell Staiff, and Emma Waterton, Travel and Imagination (Abingdon, Routledge, 2016). McEvoy, Emma, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Murphy, Bernice M., The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Poole, Robert, The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002). Poole, Robert, The Lancashire Witches Walk (Carnforth, Green Close Studios, 2013).

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Potts, Thomas, The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster: Modernised and Introduced by Robert Poole, ed. by Robert Poole (Lancaster, Palatine Books, 2011). Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day: Volume 1 (Abingdon, Routledge, 2013). Rosen, Barbara, Witchcraft in England, 1558–1618 (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). Roughlee, ‘Alice Nutter’, Roughlee, http://www.roughlee.org.uk/roughlee-commemorates-alice-nutter/. Accessed 15 December 2018. Rowlett, Lori, ‘Crone’, in Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, ed. by Lorraine Code (Abingdon, Routledge, 2000). Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, ed. by Cedric Watts (London, Wordsworth, 2005). Sparshatt John, and Ian Thornton-Bryar, The Lancashire Witches Walk Guide (New York, Postcard Books, 2013). Tyson, Donald, The Demonology of King James I: Includes the Original Text of Daemonologie and News From Scotland (Woodbury, Llewellyn, 2011). Watson, Nicola, The Literary Tourist (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (York, Methuen & Co., 1984).

The Influence of the Genre in High Fashion Jennifer Richards

Within Fashion, there seems to be a resurgence in the fascination with all things gothic across the fashion landscape. From Haute Couture to Street Style, many new permutations and hybrids have appeared. These include the Health Goth, Ninja Goth and Pop Goth, to fashion designers such as Rick Owens and Alessandro Michele both of whom have been drawn to the darker side of our existence throughout their recent collections. This chapter will propose that these new facets of the gothic mode reflect its resilience and ability for adaptation from its origins in the early eighteenth century continuing through history and into contemporary society. Throughout the subsequent centuries, these adaptations have in turn strengthened the core of the Gothic, yet simultaneously have stayed true to its origins. This discussion will explore how the emergence of gothic themes have shaped and inspired fashion creatives and designers in contemporary society examining street style, haute couture, themes within the traditional gothic mode and new representations of gothic influences in contemporary fashion. Brigid Cherry states in twenty-first-century Gothic that we are experiencing a “temporal cusp”.1 This, argues Cherry, is observed as being very similar to how gothic themes originated in the early eighteenth century. In the twenty-first century, are we again experiencing an influx of goth modes due to our current circumstances; politically, economically and socially? The origins of the gothic resonate strongly throughout our own political and social climate, and so reappear in their different guises in contemporary examples throughout film,literature and fashion. In the eighteenth century gothic themes of horror, the supernatural and suspense provided a suitable arena in which fears regarding science and religion could be examined and explored. Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful sets out to argue that the gothic mode’s intention was to give an experience of the sublime, yet simultaneously

J. Richards (*)  Royal College of Art, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_63

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“shock” the audience out of their everyday lives and give them the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation. Therefore, in drawing parallels between the origins of the Gothic in the eighteenth century and the re-emergence of these themes within our twenty-first-century contemporary society, I propose that the reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, that the Gothic is transitional. It allows for movements to be made within its own definition, both across disciplines and culture. This allows the Gothic to create new modes by clashing different time periods, modes, dress, ancient and modern equivalents of the style. Secondly, the Gothic is open to the notion of possibility. Underpinned by the ideas surrounding the uncanny and the other, it offers a wide range of tropes and motifs which are both simultaneously familiar but also frightening. For example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) contrasts the new modern Victorian era of technology with the old ruins of Whitby Abbey. In contemporary society, the rise of augmented reality and the concerns around our increasingly technological age have developed the rise of the virtual influencer most notably with the AI creation Lil’ Miquela. She and subsequent other creations have successfully managed to fool the Instagram generation simultaneously creating a sense of uncertainty and unease due to their human-like natures. The gothic mode clearly has its own rich, visual vocabulary which has evolved from a set of narrative associations evoked initially by the rise of Gothic Literature. Gothic Literature became for many authors the playground of horror and terror, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Further to this the work of Edgar Allan Poe, HG Lovecraft and poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal helped to secure the gothic mode and developed the aesthetic of the time. This in turn became emblematic of the subcultural style. All three writers used the tropes of dark colours and black clothing within their work and emphasised the themes of superstition, sorcery, witchcraft and the occult. Drawing parallels from Literature to Fashion, Catherine Spooner posits that the garments which have subsequently become synonymous with the gothic mode do emphasise many of the themes within Gothic Literature. Many of the characters’ garments reflect the events and happenings which occur to the individuals within the novels. Themes such as imprisonment, haunting and madness are reflected within the vivid descriptions present within the books. For example, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations wandering throughout her home in her old and worn wedding dress and Elsa Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress (1938). Gothic fashion is linked to a particular sensibility, a type of “dark romanticism”. Catherine Spooner in Fashioning the Gothic (2012) argues that gothic clothing as representing by “engaging generic demands, subtlety altering according to context”.2 This supports the fact that detailed descriptions are hard to find within gothic texts. This echoes the statement of gothic clothing as both flexible and transient. So how have these themes of gothic dress been appropriated? Valerie Steele argues in Gothic: Dark Glamour (2008) that through the development of the mode, the gothic subculture has emerged and has helped to define the gothic aesthetic across the decades. Steele defines this rise of the subculture as beginning with the “groups of young people who are in opposition to the dominant culture”.

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Therefore, Steele states that the rise of the subculture allowed for the increase in expressions of individuality to emerge. Young people gathered to present their own personal reflection of the gothic mode. This was most notably through the emergence of the gothic music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These goths were directly associated with the music of this era and their aesthetic reflected the darker themes and sombre musical style, with dark and predominantly black clothing being synonymous with this era. The London Goth scene was the most important within this era through clubs such as The Bat Cave, which was founded in the early 1970s by Anna Goodman. In writer Nancy Kilpatrick’s The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (2004) she emphasised that by only dressing like a Goth, it did not mean necessarily that you would be Goth. Kilpatrick refers to these people as the “Bat babies”, copying the aesthetic of the goth community but not reflecting the deep and complex set of values that the Goth youths of the time reflected. This example of the “Bat babies” echoes Walter Benjamin’s view of Fashion as death. According to Benjamin, the essence of fashion is fetishism, because sex appeal derives from the inorganic clothing and jewellery. Even the face is covered with cosmetics. Benjamin concludes that the living person becomes a kind of mannequin, a gaily decked-out corpse. In Benjamin’s analysis, he proposes that there needs to be an inner belief which makes up part of the individual in order for them to be deemed a “Goth”. Here, the clothing is not enough. There are many different permutations currently of the Gothic in contemporary street style, commercial fashion and haute couture. These individuals are not just people with “surface decorations” (as Benjamin would argue), they are individuals, expressing their creativity and celebrating their uniqueness. New permutations have developed within the last decade which celebrate these new and exciting hybrids. The gothic subculture and style have been a major influence since the early 1970s. Themes of the dark and melancholic permeate through the street-style Goths from Japanese Goths to Steam Punk, with a new range of Goths emerging within our ever-more connected contemporary world. Since the turn of the millennium, there is an increased influence surrounding the question of gender fluidity and bodily norms. The renewed pursuit of perfection via social media platforms such as Instagram has created a new wave of people wanting to reject these stereotypes and seeking out alternative means of expression. Therefore, the more traditional themes of the goth aesthetic are evolving, clashing wide-ranging influences from across the globe and creating new and exciting street-style looks. The Pop Goth emerged from the resurgence of the 1990s styles through art, literature and fashion. Partly inspired by Grunge, it is characterised by a mix and match aesthetic. It borrows from the do-it-yourself culture, combining a huge array of different materials such as sequins, velvet and floral items combining these with accessories and graphic elements. This notion of recycling works twofold by creating a new aesthetic from found items and updating the modes in which the Pop Goth is expressed for a potential new demographic. It combines pretty and macabre elements such as pastel coloured clothing with crucifixes and

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dark make-up. The wearers also take on the “death of goth”, mourning more traditional garments associated with the gothic trends and yet simultaneously celebrating the “pop” culture references and “undead” status. The Pop Goth mourns and celebrates simultaneously. The Lolita Goth style originates from Japan’s Harajuku district in Tokyo. This style borrows heavily from the goth movement fusing them with elements from Japanese culture. Many permutations exist in this style from classic to steampunk. Overall it is primarily inspired by the aesthetic of the Rococo period and the Victorian period. It clashes the two styles together to create a new aesthetic. Beginning in the 1980s it has risen and evolved to create many different and varied facets from blouses and bows to Victorian petticoats and wide skirts. The term “Lolita” has many different connotations, but is probably most well-known from the infamous novel of the same name written by Vladimir Nabokov. In the case of the street-style Lolita, the reference is only made to the “child like” qualities of the choice of clothing. Elegance is prioritised over any subsequent western connotations we may have misplaced. The Lolita Goths also undertake pastimes which reflect their style through the overtly feminine use of activities such as embroidery, sewing and baking.3 The Health Goth in contrast highlights the emergence of the importance of sportswear trends which have been steadily on the increase for the last decade. Aesthetically there is an emphasis on menswear and menswear-inspired looks for women, but the clothing tends to be of high performance used by athletes and professionals within the sports arena. Initially spurred on by fitness and street goth fashions, the Health Goth has evolved over time to incorporate not only aesthetics through clothing and garments, but has embraced this through social media, blogging, Health Goth websites and fashion brands developing this mode through their online searches. Alexander Wang’s collaboration with H&M for example, allowed the reach of the Health Goth to penetrate into the mainstream with Adidas and Nike following with their own variations soon after. Wang’s 2014 H&M collection was unisex (reflecting the blurring of genders through clothing) and incorporated cut-out garments, figure-hugging body-con styles and artificial fabrics. Critics felt that the line was “too sporty” but was quickly embraced by the emerging Health Goths. The success of the Health Goth demonstrates how what is deemed to be a “subculture” can have the time to develop and evolve creatively. This emphasis on the sensitive nature of the gothic mode lends itself to the creation of Fashion and the influence of these themes on Fashion creatives alike. The occult has been a major influence for fashion designer Dilara Findikoglu. She staged her first collection in Autumn/Winter 2017 which included her signature use of red and black with dead and decaying roses. She assimilates and evolves the themes of punk, gothic script, fetish and heavy metal. Her Spring/ Summer 2018 collection evoked these occult references with dark glamour in her clothing and models punctuated with occult motifs, pentagrams and one model decked out as the Devil. Press for the show highlighted Findikoglu as a “Satanist”. The show itself was held in Holborn St Andrews Church, adding to the gothic tone for the show. Applique illustrations were emblazoned across the garments and bedecked with jewels. In September 2016, Vogue and W Magazine defined

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the Fashion Week as the “Season of the Witch”. Since this moment, themes of the Occult and Witchcraft has been increasingly present within catwalk collections such as Comme de Garcons SS 2016 “The Blue Witch”. Following on from this, The Costume Institute payed tribute to Japanese Designer Rei Kawakubo and her anti-fashion pieces for Comme De Garcon. One hundred and twenty pieces were displayed in the exhibit focusing on the designers’ interest in the “interstitially”—the space between the boundaries. Kawakubo’s “Blue Witch” marked a departure from her symbolic references such as blood and roses, to a new more optimistic view of the world. One of her reference points included the Celtic Witch, a symbol of patience and peace. Madsen (2015) states that the Blue Witch symbolises “a fairy godmother”.4 Preen’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection continued to explore Occult themes primarily being inspired by the film British Horror classic, The Wicker Man (1973). The collection included lots of Occult symbolism through the prints and embellishments. Devore and sequinned embroidery was present in many pieces form the collection. The pentagram motif became a particular focus of interest within the collection. Pentagrams were applied to many of the designs, featuring in embroidery and sequins. This symbol has a long history of association with Paganism and was a major influence due to designers Thornton and Bregazzi, as they grew up on the Isle of Man. Thea Bregazzi stated that Witchcraft was deemed to be a “normal” practice within her home town. Bregazzi added that she grew up on the Isle of Man surrounded by “Witchcraft and Pagans5”. The integration of this theme within the collection reflects a sense of nostalgia and her own use of personal memory. Other elements which expressed these sensibilities included the styling, hair and make-up choices for the collection. Make-up artist Val Garland and florist Flora Starkey created looks with fresh flowers which were pressed to the models’ lips, and fern leaves pressed onto their necks. This notion of fraying and decaying of flora and fauna became an integral part of the design process, with some garments being created where flowers were left to dissolve and change naturally throughout the materials of the collection. Throughout the following Autumn/Winter 2018 collections, designers Alexander Wang and The Row both referenced Occult themes as part of their AW18 collections. References to recent Horror films such as The Crucible and The Witch were reflected in their choices of garments. Designers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen for The Row referenced women’s dress throughout American History from the pilgrims of New England to more contemporary example of women’s uniforms. Pieces included full-length dresses in white and black with nipped-in waists and tied aprons. This reflected the costumes present in Robert Egger’s 2015 film The Witch. Set in 1603, it tells the story of a young girl accused of the practice of Witchcraft within her community. The clothing within the film was meticulously re-created by costume designer Linda Muir and served in some scenes to be the only “sense of order” within a scene. Muir also added elements such as the red cloak for the audience to make clear associations with the fairy tale and myth surrounding the depiction of Witches. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi set the

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scene for the show by including his sculptures dotted around on the poured-concrete floor. The designers chose to collaborate with Noguchi to create a surreal, serene somewhat apocalyptic landscape. The theme of witchcraft reached its pinnacle in Spring/Summer 2019s Rick Owens collection, Babel. For the SS19 womenswear collection, Rick Owens created his own Coven which included his own burning pyre which occupied the centre of the catwalk. According to the show’s notes, a coven of mountainous witches was depicted wearing long overcoats and caged accessories which attempted to suck and hold in certain parts of the models’ bodies. This collection referenced the creation of towers and monuments, reflecting Owens’ own burning pyre which was present during the show. Owens made reference to both Tatlin’s Tower and the Tower of Babel. Tatlin’s Tower, or the project for the Monument to the Third International, was a design for a grand monumental building by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, that was never built. By referencing Tatlin’s Tower, Owens draws on the sense of hope and celebration that this structure (although never constructed) created for the Russian people. In contrast to this sense of order, he also included another tower, the Tower of Babel. This Biblical reference, as told in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united humanity in the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar. This inspiration through the construction of Towers evolves shape-making from the engorged and bulbous shapes of Rei Kawakubo’s work for Comme de Garcon to a more angular set of forms. The shapes are predominantly geometric and are dominated by rectangles and triangular forms. Although the body is presented in a more angular and geometric manner, the garments do retain elements of the softness present in some of Kawakubo’s forms and designs. Exaggerated arms and collars reflect these geometric and angular lines but are made in softer materials. Owens’ design process evolves this aesthetic from the very heavy sculptural shapes to shapes which are now much looser in form for the Spring Summer 2019 collection. It is as if the internal structures of these geometric shapes are beginning to be broken down, creating in turn a sense of a more expressive exaggeration. In terms of the material process and development of the designs, silken fringe was made by using rubberised elements to change it in the way in which it moved when a model walked whilst wearing the garment. Coloured rubber and lacquered denim was also used within the collection and emphasised the breaking down of the geometric forms. Caged elements appear to be bending with their own weight, softening the shapes and creating curves around the body. Owens describes the collection as “shredded”, the geometric column forms of the dresses reflect back to Owens’ evocation of priestess or pagan vestments. This collection also notably sees a departure from Owens’ signature use of black. The darker tones are interspersed with pastels such as pale blue and also olive green. This extension of the colour palette (something he had explored in his Spring/Summer 2017 collection) sees Owens begin to create his own signature aesthetic incorporating new approaches and materials within his designs.

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The influence of the nineteenth century has been a major part of the resurgence of the Gothic within fashion design, most notably with designers exploring darker and more melancholic themes within their work and collections. From Autumn/ Winter 2015, the rise of Victoriana has been evident through a wide range of catwalk collections. Many designers have referenced nineteenth-century styles and have used these motifs within their collection’s designs, styling, make-up and hair. The Victorian influences in Rodarte’s Autumn/Winter 2016 build on their already established aesthetic for the macabre. This collection presented a catwalk full of broken rubble punctuated by flowers, red and black roses. Models walked in their lace creations influenced by the Victorian’s desire for high collars and ruffles. As a finale, models broke out of the rubble and through coffins littered through the catwalk. Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Christabel”, the models enclosed in deep pillowed outfits and walk as if they were still sleeping. For the Autumn/Winter 2016 collection Burton wanted to express the state between sleeping and dreaming, where reality is blurred. This interest in the nineteenth-century Gothic has continued into the recent Spring/Summer 2019 catwalk shows. Ann Demeulemeester explored themes surrounding the uncanny with designer Sebastien Meunier becoming fascinated with the inspirational story of L’Inconnue, an unidentified young girl pulled out of the River Seine in Paris in the late nineteenth century and who became the inspiration for many artists of the time. L’Inconnue de la Seine was fixed in time through the creation of her death mask when she was retrieved from the River Seine. It is claimed that she was a possible victim of suicide. A pathologist at the morgue became so enchanted by her face, he preserved her for eternity by casting her face. The general public became fascinated by the L’Inconnue, with the cast being reproduced and able to buy copies of the original and display it in their homes. It became an “object d’art” and a source of inspiration for literature and the Visual Arts. Boddaret (1993) discusses the writer and philosopher Albert Camus and his reaction to his first viewing of L’Inconnue.6 He compared her expression to that of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. There is no doubt that L’Inconnue became endlessly intriguing and fascinating to both artists and the public alike within the Victorian era. There is also little doubt that Albert Campus’ comparison to Da Vinci’s masterpiece only helped to propel the myth surrounding the victim. Through Sebastien Meunier’s womenswear collection for Ann Demeulemeester, the Spring/Summer 2019 collection reflected his fascination with L’Inconnue expressing through the collection the melancholic and gothic themes within his work. Veils and heads were covered obscuring the individual and creating ambiguous shapes and patterns with the fabrics. Catherine Spooner suggests that the “authentic self” is hidden beneath these veils. The clothing seeks to obscure, simultaneously closing off the body yet opening up the surfaces of the body.7 This theme was also present in Ann Demeulemeester’s Menswear collection. It again was influenced by the Gothic through the choice of Irish folk songs, genderless shapes and relaxed tailoring. Predominantly black in colour, the collection was interspersed with female models in white gowns which created an ethereal and uncanny feeling.

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Meunier also referenced artist Odile Redon’s nightmarish depictions of ghouls creating a sense of tension and unrest within the collection. The Victorian era also witnessed a rise in fantasy and fairy stories. These grew in number through the Victorian era offering a sense of escapism and novelty. These fairy-tale themes have been revisited and explored through recent fashion designers’ work. The “American Gothic” Autumn/Winter 2018 collection by Coach. This collection reflected feminine floral pieces which had a gothic fairytale element and a sense of melancholic. There are many references made to a handmade mentality and this is reflected through the craft-based sentiment and whimsical elements present in the collection. The set reflected this theme and was staged in a dark wood filled with mist and fog. Cementing the fairy tale, poisoned apples were carried by the models and eyes were placed around the set that followed the viewer around the room. In Ryan Lo’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection, his work has been consistently underpinned by the desire to explore the romance of the fairy tale. The Spring/ Summer 2019 collection was titled “Saturn Returns”. Themes of astrology, films including The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella and the character of Carrie Bradshaw were a major part of Lo’s inspiration behind this collection. Pastel hues were most prevalent within the collection with tuille, crochet, jacquard, ribbons and feather evoking the themes of love and romance. Peter pan collars, Fairy Godmothers and even a knight in shining armour closed the show and reflected this search for love. Elements of the character of the Wicked Witch appeared thorough the inclusion of pointed hats and boots and props such as twisted broomsticks. The inspiration came from Full Metal Alchemist’s Sorcerer’s Stone, which the designer said made him come to a realisation, one that he doesn’t want people to think is “shallow”: “human beings are just dust in this massive universe”.8 The Horror film has been a source of inspiration for many fashion designers and collections through fashion. Alexander McQueen’s Spring Summer 1995 collection referenced Hitchcock’s classic The Birds (1963) and brand Undercover Spring/Summer collection which included twin models reminiscent of the Grady twins which Danny Torrance observes in Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining (1980). Both Miu Miu and Ulla Johnson explored the film creating looks inspired by Shelley Duvall’s 1970s wardrobe. The check skirts and turtle necks made an appearance with an emphasis on the 70s colour palettes which featured in the film and the use of exaggerated cuts on the pinafore dresses with oversized 70s buttons. Gareth Pugh referenced The Wicker Man (1973) for his Spring Summer 2015 show. He combined the influences of the film with iconic location Stonehenge manifesting in a range of looks which included long dresses, some included pentagram motifs and were belted with hessian. Hats obscured the faces of the models and one was presented with the head covered in a hessian sack creating a sense of tension and otherworldly. Hellraiser (1987) became a fascination for designers Junya Wanatabe and Thom Browne. For Wanatabe’s Spring Summer 2006 collection, models wore a range of oversized headpieces adorned with paper mohawks and spikes, reminiscent of the iconic character of Pinhead. Thom Browne’s Autumn Winer 2012 Menswear collection also reflected the film with punk influenced

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garments and models also wearing masks made of tweed which were pierced with metal spikes. For Spring/Summer 2018 collection, Raf Simons’ themes for Calvin Klein was packed full of references to the horror film from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to the film American Psycho (2000). The signature themes of Americana were present within the collection, although this particular season took a darker turn. These references drew from a wider context—Horror films including classics such as Carrie (1976) and The Shining (1980). Simons kept the classic 1950s influences through the collection’s silhouettes but these were given a slasher edge. For example, a classic Macintosh raincoat was shown but with a twist—one mac included rivulets of red blood spatter, another a homage to Leather face’s apron from A Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). This continued with a blood-soaked Carrie and Andy Warhol’s infamous Electric Chair (1964). Accessories included a set of high heels created from Jason Voorhees’ infamous Hockey Mask. A seminal moment in the exploration of one of the most famous of gothic themes was at Milan Fashion Week at Gucci’s Autumn/Winter 2018 show. Creative Director Alessandro Michele, in reference to the show, was quoted as saying “We are all Doctor Frankenstein of our lives”. Michele’s aesthetic and influence draw from wide-ranging sources including history, art and literature, splicing them together to create his own “hybrid” looks. The act of cutting and reforming the self through Fashion is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s creature in her novel Frankenstein (1818) and demonstrates how the themes of transformation continue to be relevant within today’s society. “We are all the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives”, said Michele with a shrug. “Inventing, assembling, experimenting” with identity as expressed through clothes, which “can accompany you while you develop an idea of yourself”. We are all, he added, “hybrids” now.9 Designer Alessandro Michele was also inspired by the essay Cyborg Manifesto (1984) by author Donna Haraway. This essay explores the concept of the cyborg as a rejection of the boundaries we establish. This use of hybridity between the organism and the machine is used metaphorically to illustrate the breaching of our contemporary boundaries. She explores this notion through three areas: human and animal, animal-human and machine and thirdly, the physical and non-physical. Michele’s collection included models walking with accessories including animals such as snakes and chameleons and in some cases, their own severed heads. Haraway states that evolution has allowed for the blurring of boundaries between the human and the animal with twentieth-century machines creating ambiguity between the natural and artificial. The lines between reality have become blurred and have created new spaces in which to engage with this discourse. Michele’s catwalk space reflected this blurring of boundaries through the creation of an operating theatre painted in medical hues of green and permeated with the sounds of hospital monitors. Haraway describes the Cyborg as being “reassembled”. The cyborg has no origin and no end. Frankenstein’s monster is immortal, with no true genesis as he is assembled from a myriad of different people. Shelley’s character of Victor Frankenstein who chooses to use a selection of different body parts in order to

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create his perfect specimen rather than choosing to revive a complete dead subject. Parallels can therefore be drawn between the idea of the assembled parts of a cyborg becoming manifest. But the Monster longs for a companion and a reason to live. He is somewhat out of time within the nineteenth century, more akin to Haraway’s postmodern society, criticises the more traditional notions of Feminism, particularly identity politics. The cyborg has no genesis, no beginning or end. Haraway speaks of it as a “monster”, at the limits of community. The metaphor of the cyborg is used to urge beyond the limitations of the traditional notions of gender and politics. Alessandro Michele harnesses this hybridity creating a collection which engages the social issues of the contemporary fashion landscape. Frankenstein has also appeared in the recent Autumn/Winter 2019 show for fashion house Prada. Frankenstein’s monster appeared on women’s pencil skirts and dismembered hands appeared on men’s shirts. Other motifs synonymous with the classic story included lightning bolts and roses. The electrical motifs were also present through the use of fuzzy hats and jumpers reminiscent of static or the monster being awakened through an electric shock. The set included printed circuit boards and yellow flashing light bulbs. It is clear that gothic themes in fashion resonate through many creatives and their collections in the recent years. Back in 2008, Cintra Wilson claims in her article “Haute Goth” for the New York Times, that the visual aesthetic synonymous with the Gothic (such as the use of black clothing) is continuing to play a part within fashion design just because it is so varied and diverse in its proposition.10 Valerie Steele continues to support this view in her book Dark Glamour (2008). The diverse and evolutionary elements of the gothic support the more traditional modes but also allow for new contemporary hybrids to emerge. Fashion allows for this to take place as it is somewhat out of time. The transitional nature of fashion and its constant evolution allow for reinterpretation of themes with new hybrids appearing every season. Philosopher Walter Benjamin observes that death lies at the heart of fashion because unlike the living and dying body, fashion is neither alive nor dead. Fashion also allows for possibility due to its ever-evolving nature and its need to embrace and inspire through new styles and modes of thinking. Our contemporary digital age also engages globally with traditional borders being slowly eroded and new and exciting identities emerging. This chapter examines a handful of the current influences such as Street Style, Occult, Victoriana, Fairy tale, and literary classic Frankenstein, posing the question of the significance of the Gothic and its place within contemporary society. Theatricality, spectacle, darkness and the macabre are all evident in the recent collections with influential designer Rei Kawakubo for Comme De Garcon examining the gothic within her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection. There seems to be little evidence of the gothic mode slowing down within fashion with new and exciting expressions of the theme evident in many current collections. The multifaceted nature of the Gothic allows for the cross-pollination of ideas, thinking and philosophies. The Gothic in fashion draws on the Punk mentality, but also on a vast array of historical literary, art and creative sources for its inspirations. The complex nature of the theme allows for endless interpretations and possibilities in fashion. Goodlad

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and Bibby (2007) suggest that the gothic clothing is an intrinsic part of fashion as it is this that gives it “life”. Fashion therefore is a place in which dialogues can be created and the norms are rejected as a place to explore and be free with ideas.

Notes

1. Brigid Cherry (Ed.), 21st Century Gothic Preface (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). 2. Catherine Spooner, Curtain’d in mysteries: an introduction to Gothic Fashion Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, p. 5). 3. Masafum Monden, The Nationality of Lolita Fashion, http://www.academia. edu/4825302/The_Nationality_of_Lolita_Fashion, Accessed 5 November 2018. 4. Anders, Christian Madsen Paris Heals the World, i-D Magazine, 4 October 2015, https:// i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/9kygqe/paris-heals-the-world, Accessed 21 October 2018. 5. Thornton Bregazzi, Vogue, https://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/spring-summer-2017-readyto-wear/preen-by-thornton-bregazzi, Accessed July 2018. 6. Francois Boddaert, Petites Portes d’eternite: La Mort, la gloire et les litterateurs (Paris, Brèves littéraires, 1993. 7. Catherine Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, p. 5). 8. Ryan Lo, Interview, Hunger Magazine, https://www.hungertv.com/editorial/ryan-lo-onsaturn-returns-his-bewitching-ss19-collection/, Accessed 5 November 2018. 9. Alessandro Michele, New York Times, 22 February 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/02/22/style/gucci-alessandro-michele-milan-fashion-week.html, Accessed 4 March 2018. 10. Cintra Wilson, Haute Goth, You Just Can’t Kill It, New York Times, 17 September 2008, https:// www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/fashion/18GOTH.html, Accessed 18 September 2018.

Bibliography Allwood, Emma, and Davidson, Emma. Rick Owens Started a Fire at His Ceremonial SS19 Show. Dazed Digital, 27 September 2018. http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/41588/1/rick-owens-spring-summer-2019-paris-fashion-week-palais-tokyo-birkenstock. Accessed 15 December 2018. Ankenbauer, Sam. Dressing the Witch: An Interview with Costume Designer Linda Muir, 27 May 2016. https://brightlightsfilm.com/wp-content/cache/all/dressing-witch-interview-costume-designer-linda-muir/#.XEX_p_77R-U. Accessed 1 December 2018. Anon. http://vivisxn.com/dilara-findikoglu-delivers-super-cool-lfw-show-labelled-a-satanic-orgyby-alt-right-info-wars-alex-jones-lol/. Accessed 10 November 2018. Boddaert, Francois. Petites Portes d’eternite: La mort, la gloire et les litterateurs (Paris, Brèves littéraires, 1993). Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Gothic (Dublin, Ireland, British Library, 1757). Cherry, Brigid. 21st Century Gothic London (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Friedman, Vanessa. At Gucci Dressing for the Post-human World, 22 February 2018. https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/style/gucci-alessandro-michele-milan-fashion-week.html. Accessed 7 July 2018.

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Furness, Jo-Ann. Miu Miu Fall 2015 Ready-to-Wear, 11 March 2015. https://www.vogue.com/ fashion-shows/fall-2015-ready-to-wear/miu-miu. Accessed 22 April 2018. Goodlad, Lauren, and Bibby, Michael. Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, UK, Duke University Press, 2007). Hannsen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London, UK, Bloomsbury, 2006). Hess, Liam. Free-Wheeling Flaneurs. Hero Magazine, 24 June 2018. http://hero-magazine.com/ shows/ann-demeulemeester-ss19/. Accessed 26 June 2018. Kilpatrick, Nancy. The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (London, UK, St Martin Griffin, 2004). Madsen, Anders. Christian Paris Heals the World. i-D Magazine, 4 October 2015. https://i-d.vice. com/en_uk/article/9kygqe/paris-heals-the-world. Accessed 7 October 2018. Monden, Masafum. The Nationality of Lolita Fashion. http://www.academia.edu/4825302/The_ Nationality_of_Lolita_Fashion. Accessed 5 November 2018. Mower, Sarah. Preen by Thornton Bregazzi. Vogue, 18 September 2016. https://www.vogue. com/fashion-shows/spring-2017-ready-to-wear/preen-by-thornton-bregazzi. Accessed 21 June 2018. Phelps, Nicole. Calvin Klein 205W39NYC. Vogue, 8 September 2017. https://www.vogue.com/ fashion-shows/spring-2018-ready-to-wear/calvin-klein. Accessed 21 June 2018. Robson, Kitty. Ryan Lo on Saturn Returns His Bewitching SS19 Collection. Hunger Magazine, 18 September 2018. https://www.hungertv.com/editorial/ryan-lo-on-saturn-returns-his-bewitching-ss19-collection/. Accessed 22 September 2018. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012). Steele, Valerie. Gothic: Dark Glamour (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008). Vogue. The Row Autumn Winter 2018. Vogue. https://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/autumn-winter2018-ready-to-wear/the-row. Accessed 31 October 2018. Whelan, Sarah. Dilara Findikoglu London Fashion Week SS18. Jungle Magazine, 19 September 2017. https://jungle-magazine.co.uk/dilara-findikoglu-london-fashion-week-ss18/. Accessed 11 October 2018. Wilson, Cintra. Haute Goth You Just Can’t Kill It. New York Times, 17 September 2008. https:// www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/fashion/18GOTH.html. Accessed 11 June 2018.

The Geisha Ghost Jenevieve Van-Veda

The ‘Geisha Goth’ style which is becoming more and more visible within goth subculture, is not just some fashion designer’s creative concept plucked from the ether, or a mere superficial appropriation of cultural heritage. It is a style with historical explanation and deep transcultural, transnational, aesthetic sympathies lending to its substance. Beginning with a little geisha history, I will then expand upon the intertwining threads that stitch together the ‘Geisha Goth’. The iconic geisha we recognise today developed fully in the eighteenth century. Before this, geisha, under various guises, had been evolving for centuries. They have their roots in the seventh-century Saburuko. These were Japanese women who, in desperate economic times, yielded to the trade of sexual favours for survival. Some of these women utilised their talent and education to earn higher pay at upper class parties. In the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Shirabyoshi, or daughters of the rich, were called upon to perform at parties to make ends meet for their families. These were very highly educated young women valued for their musical, dancing, and poetical talents. In the 1730s, geisha emerged as a distinct class within Yoshiwara’s licensed pleasure district which boasted many high-class prostitutes called Oiran. As the brothel customers awaited their chosen courtesan, they were artfully distracted by dance, song, and amusing conversation by what were initially male geisha. However, female geisha employed in the same role proved much more popular with brothel attendees. The unisex term geisha then began to split. Male geisha gradually became known as otoko geisha, hōkan, or taikomochi. Female geisha became geiko, a term still used to refer to geisha from Kyoto, and trainee geisha were called maiko which translates into dancing girl/ child. In order to avoid confusion between professional performers and the similarly adorned high-class courtesans, the geisha were strictly limited on when they could work and what they could wear. Geisha were forbidden from owning a prostitution licence and were restricted to a more subdued appearance. One notable

J. Van-Veda (*)  London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_64

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way to discern the difference between geisha and courtesans, was to observe their obi sash. The courtesan would require her obi tied in the front so that she may remove it for her work, but the geisha would have the obi tied firmly by an aide at the back with no need of its removal. The geisha became completely distinct from their roots in prostitution, and as sexual favours were not the geisha’s trade, they thrived under the imposed confines. Adopting a less elaborate aesthetic was thought to be chic and led to the geisha becoming something of a style icon. The modest appearance is still worn by fully trained geisha today. However, it is the maiko, with her porcelain make-up, ornate kimono, and ornamented hairstyle that has become the iconic vision of the geisha globally. To the geisha art is life, and life is an art form to be cultivated through rigorous discipline and dedication to their craft. The word ‘Geisha’ comes from gei, meaning ‘performing arts’, and sha, meaning ‘person’. Therefore, geisha literally means artist. Specifically an artist of the ukiyo, or ­‘floating world’. The floating world provided a place where visitors could cast aside their weighted concerns and assume a constitution that is lighter than air. A rich, bohemian treasury flush with creative individuals, elaborating upon the sensory indulgence that luxuriated in the pleasure and theatre quarters of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. We tend to imagine nineteenth-century Paris as the epitome of modern decadent culture, but these decadent quarters of Japan were doing a valiant job of this much earlier. The word ukiyo is a homophone, a Buddhist term meaning ‘sorrowful world’, signifying the torment inherent in an ephemeral life. By virtue of their talents, the artists of the floating world provided stimulating medicine for this existential sorrow, fully encouraging the balm of fleeting pleasures. Presently… the decadence of the floating world has shattered into pockets of nostalgia, delicately dispersed and sensitively maintained under the severe neon glow of Tokyo’s hi-tech, labyrinthine streets. Around six geisha districts in Tokyo remain. Collectively, they are referred to as the ‘Tokyo Roku Hanamachi’ or ‘The Six Flower Towns’. The most popular of these is Asakusa, a tourist location next to the famous Senso-ji Temple. After the sun has set, and if you are lucky, you can glimpse for an instant the geisha softly shuffling along backstreets en route to their evening’s performances. If you happen to find yourself flush with Yen, the remaining shards of the floating world will open to you and glimmer in the hubbub of restaurants and bars in which you can still experience the cultivated talents of the geisha. In keeping with historic traditions, geisha perform tea ceremonies, play traditional instruments, dance, sing, and initiate finely crafted conversation. They are entertainers of the highest skill and elegance, and they are still hired for breath-taking fees as live flowers blooming proudly as emblems of Japan’s cultural history. Still popular in Japan today is the Kabuki theatre. One of the most colourful attractions to arise from the floating world. Despite its origins in the early 1600s where it existed in the form of comic dances performed by women, and then evolving into a theatrical art thereafter, the theatre banned all women from performing in 1629. Fearing prostitution and romantic brawls between male admirers. Male actors, onnagata, then began to play both male and female roles. The

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distinctive white face worn by these actors dates back to the Heian era where it was worn by courtesans to reflect candlelight on their delicate features during their dark exchanges of the night. The resurgence of this make-up in Kabuki theatre was partially due to a romanticised view of the Heian ‘Golden Age’, and partially for the very same reason, to reflect the light of actor’s expressions in a dimly lit evening performance. Geisha of the ukiyo were enamoured with onnagata, sometimes romantically, and were also inspired to adopt the ghostly aspect for their own performances. The white rice powder layer (Oshiroi) was accented with colours representing different character qualities in kabuki theatre. For example: black represents fear, while red represents anger, passion, or cruelty. The supernatural characters portrayed by the actors on stage were drawn from richly visual Japanese folklore. The fertile depths of Japanese folklore are teeming with hundreds of yōkai, this is an all-encompassing term for spirits, benign or otherwise. Yūrei, specifically, are ghosts or apparitions that have been denied a peaceful afterlife. It is disquieting just how many of the most notorious, and vengeful yūrei are female. A common narrative in some of the most feared yūrei is that of a woman wronged or betrayed by a man just before death, her ghost becoming that of rage, sorrow, and resentment with a thirst for retribution never quenched. A good example of this is Kuchisake-onna or ‘The Slit-Mouthed Woman’ who, as the story goes, was mutilated by her husband before death in a way you can vividly imagine owing to her name. Stalking the streets disguised under a surgical mask, she will approach you and casually ask ‘Am I pretty?’. If you answer no, you are killed with giant scissors, if you answer yes, you are slit from mouth. Another famous example of a particularly wrathful yūrei, otherwise known as an onryō, is that of Yotsuya Kaidan. In this story, a woman is disfigured by poison as the result of a plot to enable a marriage between her husband and a younger woman. She glimpses her ghastly aspect in a mirror, and distraught by what she sees, kills herself cursing her husband’s name. Her vengeful spirit returns to trick her husband into killing his new bride. She then torments him incessantly to insanity. ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1959), is the definitive film portraying this story, but the narrative of the scorned woman turned fearful onryō has also been utilised to create the character of Kayako in ‘Ju-On’ (2000) otherwise known as ‘The Grudge’ (2004) spreading fear of the vengeful yūrei globally. But revenge is not all there is to fear, there is also a woman’s seduction. The Hone onna or ‘The bone woman’ is a rotting, skeletal corpse with a large sexual appetite. She returns from the grave to her former lover’s embrace appearing to him as she did in her prime. He is bewitched by her charms and blind to her true aspect. She drains him of his life force night by night until he perishes, joining her in death. This could be mirrored in Western Gothic literature as Cathy’s cry to Heathcliff, urging him to join her beyond the grave. Some yūrei are straightforward, man-eating succubus. With the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a snake, the Nure-onna lures her victim with trickery, and drains them of blood with her serpent’s tongue. The Jorogumo or the ‘Whore Spider’ presents herself as an irresistibly beautiful woman, and can spin a silken web strong enough to ensnare

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her preferred prey: a young, virile man. She has a venom that can slowly weaken her prey providing an agonising death for him, but evident pleasure for her. ‘The Saint of Mount Koya’ (1900) is a short story by Izumi Kyōka, a writer likened to Edgar Allan Poe at his best. A monk, wearied from a Dante-esque journey, finds what he hopes to be respite in a secluded cottage owned by a beautiful woman with mysterious powers. Later, he must ultimately decide whether to give into the temptation of the flesh or continue his life as a monk. The story is eerily reminiscent of Matthew Lewis’s ‘The Monk’ (1796) in its portrayal of punishment waiting for those who succumb to the evils of female seduction. The succubus must perpetuate their own life by draining the essence of others. The succubus, lifeblood. The geisha, a livelihood. Beauty and charm play a lead role in the seduction process in both cases. Women in Western Gothic literature, generally speaking, tend to be thrust into positions of which they have no control, whether the perpetrator possessing control is real or imagined. Men are larger than life patriarchal mirrors of the general zeitgeist that do as they choose and get what they want. There seems to be no restraint on their desire. But also, in Gothic literature, our empathy is directed towards the story concerning the struggle of the vulnerable female in restraint, and her usual triumph over her perpetrator. We do not fear her as is intended with the yūrei of Japanese folklore and literature. They are representative of the latent fear of a woman’s retribution for centuries of maltreatment. The ghost of a scorned woman straddling the worlds of the living and the dead transcends the rules that bind her social repression, making her all the more frightening. Maruyama Ōkyo, an Ukiyo-e artist, painted the first known example, and the most enduring definition, of the now-traditional Yūrei: The Ghost of Oyuki (Ōkyo 1750). The image was a sincere rendering of an apparition that visited Ōkyo and lingered a while on a damp summer’s night. The spectre he saw was that of his recently deceased lover, Oyuki, a young geisha. Ōkyo’s bereavement cascaded on to silk as soon as he could touch his brushes. The result was a delicate, gossamer figure with pale countenance, death-white burial kimono, long falling wisps of black hair, and entirely without feet. A figure that has haunted Japan’s consciousness, and concretized the classic yūrei form ever since. Most of the yūrei I have mentioned previously in this chapter are depicted in this manner, and are now instantly recognisable in whatever media they are portrayed. Consider the popularity of ‘The Grudge’. So, the globally absorbed icon of a Japanese ghost is, in fact, the image of a geisha. This intrinsically absorbed otherworldliness of the geisha seems ripe for unnerving literature and media portrayals. For example, the folkloric legend of the shape-shifting Jorōgumo mentioned earlier may have served as the inspiration behind a powerful Japanese gothic short story called ‘The Tattooer’ (Tanizaki 1910). The tale can easily be likened to Frankenstein’s creature creation story. In it, a tattooist attempts to find the perfect female to present his art. He finds a beautiful young geisha, drugs her, and tattoos a magnificent spider on her back. He is creating his monster. She awakens, and with her awakens what seems to be the spirit of the spider, the revealing of her ‘true self’, the frightening seductive power

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of a woman, and ‘with a glance as bright as a sword’, she destroys her maker. In the Edo period, ukiyo-e artist Suzuki Harunobu (1724–1770) painted geisha as slight, boneless delicacies with no bodily reality. Almost ghost-like. We look at them but never do they glance back. They seem to exist in their very own intangible, floating world. Madame Hanako (1868–1945) was a former geisha and actress who toured Europe extensively from 1904 until the first world war. Her death scene expressions of simultaneous rage and resignation inspired Rodin’s ghostly capturing of her image in busts and masks (Rodin 1908–1911). It is clear from Ōkyo’s iconic yūrei, to ghostly etchings on ukiyo-e, to frightening depictions in literature, Rodin’s Hanako busts, and now in anime series, video games, fashion videos, and even ghost walks featuring ghosts of murdered geisha in Matsue, that there is something intrinsically frightening constructed from the perceived otherness of a geisha. Just as the ghost of a scorned woman straddling the worlds of the living and the dead transcends the rules that bind her social repression making her all the more frightening, the geisha has rectified the power imbalance and subverted her expected submissive role under the patriarchal glare of Japanese culture. The geisha has become the very image of that fear of woman. The geisha has become the yūrei. She has become the ghost. Otherworldliness is obviously not the only perception of a geisha. In the West, a certain image of the geisha has perpetuated stemming from the mid-nineteenth century. Japan, after two centuries of self-imposed isolation, opened its trading ports to the West and with curious new Western customers, geisha business was booming. Postcards and calendars of exotic ‘it girl’ geisha flooded Europe and America. The Japanese aesthetic composed waves of enchantment in the worlds of art, interior design, textiles, and fashion. This fervour for ‘Japonisme’ glorified the glamour of the east in impressionist paintings. For example, ‘La Japonaise’ (Monet 1876) left every stylish woman longing for a lavish kimono or two, and so by the late 1870s kimonos were readily available in stores such as Liberty’s of London. Luscious Japanese silks and fabric patterns lent a hint of the exotic east to the rigidity of Victorian fashions. The infatuation with all things Japanese was brimming. Unfortunately so was the often misplaced idealisation of the culture. This is evident in ‘Madame Chrysanthème’ (Loti 1887), an extremely popular novel by Pierre Loti. It is considered the decisive text in moulding Western perspective on Japan during the fin de siècle. Written in fictionalised diary form, it tells the story of a naval officer in want of a temporary ‘wife’ to amuse him while wallowing away a summer in Nagasaki. Temporary portside ‘marriages’ between Westerners and local Japanese women were completely legal at the time. Chrysanthème, his temporary ‘wife’, is referred to as doll-like. She is a purchased object, and a caricature of the delicate, feminine, perfect Japanese woman that had soaked into the psyche of Western imagination. The novel was the base inspiration for André Messager’s 1893 opera of the same name, the short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ (Long 1898), and also served as a source for Puccini’s opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ (Puccini 1904). The idea of the demure, quiet and servile ‘wife’, the Yamato Nadeshiko was already a familiar Japanese concept. However, the confused Western image of geisha as compliant and tame was just Orientalist fantasy

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cemented by a wishful portrait of a Madame Chrysanthème/Butterfly. The geisha, in reality, was the complete opposite of this, they were brazen, bold, unabashed, and independent enough to earn a living from their art. Another traveller to Japan in the twentieth century had a decidedly different observation of a geisha’s character. Angela Carter’s gothic inversion of feminist geisha in ‘Poor Butterfly’ from Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (Carter 1997) doubts the Madame Chrysanthème/Butterfly convention. Instead, she observes a mutual exploitation while working as a geisha-like hostess in a nightclub. The naive male customers pay extortionate bar tabs under which the hostesses seem to be benefiting, on top of earning their wage for the evening. Again, the supposedly delicate and vulnerable geisha as assumed by previous convention is in fact a capable victor over her oppressor, or even a vampire. Carter unashamedly shows the geisha for what she truly is, violating the categorical scheme developed by the Orientalist fantasy. This fantasy spreading throughout Europe in the nineteenth century seemed to have been reciprocated by a romanticisation of all things Western in Japan. In 1871, Emperor Meiji prescribed European dress for himself, his Court, and his officials. This included elements such as lace up boots instead of sandals, and jackets with buttons in lieu of a kimono tied with an obi sash. Japanese women, including some geisha, struggled with restrictive European fashions such as corsets and bustles. Here, I think, a mutual sympathy was sparked between women’s fashions of both Europe and Japan that has never faded. This style rapport continues throughout the twentieth century. For instance, in the post war ‘jazz age’, fashion became more streamlined adopting the linear cutting pattern of the kimono, and the cylindrical silhouette of the geisha. Even the well-known gothic fashion icon and screen vamp Theda Bara (1885–1955) was photographed wearing a luxurious kimono. Another very prominent Western icon who nurtured an aesthetic sympathy between Japan and the West was the great progenitor of Punk, New Wave, Goth, and many other musical and subcultural movements: David Bowie (1947–2016). Bowie was a well-known Japanophile and had been a student of Lindsay Kemp’s (1938–2018) Kabuki styled performance art. He was even taught by famous onnagata how to apply traditional kabuki make-up which became evident in Ziggy’s memorable lightning bolt. Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto (b. 1944) was behind most of Bowie’s dramatic stage outfits. He drew from traditional Japanese garments such as Samurai trousers, and kimono. For example, a shortened kimono with classic Japanese print. Iconic now, and very, very influential. There are countless quotes from those who became famous during the punk explosion regarding just how influential Bowie was, not just musically, but visually and culturally. Siouxsie Sioux (b. 1957) is one of those from the infamous Bromley Contingent who rode the rapid cultural contortions from Punk to Goth. In an interview with Bowie biographer Dylan Jones (b. 1960) she venerates the artist’s ‘otherworldliness’ (Jones 2012, pp. 124–125). Siouxsie soaked up Bowie’s influence and made it her own, this can be seen particularly in her sharp kabuki style make-up, not copied directly but blended together with a dark Neo-Victorianism influenced by

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Gothic literature and film, with a whisper of the screen vamp Theda Bara as she appeared in the 1917 film Cleopatra. Siouxsie’s look became a staple in the goth subculture and spawned a dark army of lookalikes. As the geisha flirted with the dramatic style of kabuki, so did arch goth Siouxsie who wanted to achieve those things she so admired in Bowie. The ‘Geisha Goth’ aesthetic combination proved extremely successful on the catwalk. For example, in 1981, as modern gothic style was flowering, Yohji Yamamoto (b. 1943) combined billowing black dresses using the straight cuts of kimono with wide brimmed hats to create a chic, gothic witches coven (From the Corporate Priestess Archive: Yohji Yamamoto show 1981 Part IV, 2014). This style rapport has never really strayed from the catwalk. It is always lurking darkly in the shadows perpetuating the strange cycle of influence from culture to catwalk to street fashion and around again. From high fashion editorials in Vogue, to street shops frequented by alternative subcultures such as ‘Johnson’s’, ‘Boy:London’, and in some designs for ‘World’s End’ on King’s Road. The style then became so commercial in the 1990s that it was usurped briefly by Madonna in her ‘Nothing Really Matters’ music video in 1998, and on Bjork’s ‘Homogenic’ album cover in 1997. Rihanna’s ‘Princess of China’ (2011) music video in which she sports a ‘gangsta geisha’ image shows us that the initial wave of geisha allure is still very much flowing through the undercurrent of popular culture. The art world too, still finds a muse in the geisha. British street artist Hush creates Klimt-esque geishas, mixing old with new, East with West, and sensuality with complexity (Hush 2010). There are even ‘Geisha Goth’ make-up tutorials lurking in the depths of YouTube. Some may see this as appropriation, but as a geisha is constantly working on her craft making her life her art, this is similar for individuals within goth subculture who are not attempting character creation but aesthetic conviction. The attention to detail, the research, the vision needed to make a ‘Geisha Goth’ outfit, or to apply geisha inspired make-up, does not come from a place of mere appropriation, but that of affection. The aesthetic is a physical manifestation of respect and affection for the artistry of the geisha and the culture in which she exists. But what makes the affection stronger is the truly reciprocal cultural exchange between Japan and the West. Incorporated into goth culture are an array of inspirations and acknowledgements. There is, of course, the aforementioned Japanese performing arts make-up influence. But the dramatic contrasts in goth make-up may also have absorbed visual impact from another vein. Much like Japanese performance artists, actors on candle and oil-lamp lit theatres in eighteenth-century Britain adopted white make-up, darkened lips, and heavy black eyeliner to make their features more distinct. The sloppy, thick make-up was then refined when early nineteenth-century gas light made obvious any flaws in its application. Actors became adept at applying their own grease paint and powders. In silent cinema, the orthochromatic or blue-sensitive film meant that actors had to apply much heavier, more dramatic make-up in order to ‘normalise’ their appearance on screen. It was a time of experimentation for actors, who were expected to apply their own make-up and often stumbled over correct colour, tone, and thickness creating a wide variation in early cinema ‘looks’. Theda Bara, the vamp of early cinema, cultivated her trademark

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look with delicately applied lilly-white powder and smokey kohl around her eyes. This fell out of fashion in the late 20s with the adoption of panchromatic film allowing for a more naturalised make-up palette. But the idea of the screen vamp and the striking image of Theda Bara was cemented and was revived and echoed in successive screen vamps. From a 1938 comic strip in the New Yorker by cartoonist Charles Addams (1912–1988), Morticia Addams was introduced to the world inspiring Maila Nurmi’s (1922–2008) Vampira, in turn inspiring a classic, instantly identifiable gothic visual that screams something uncanny to its onlookers. The Damned’s Plan 9 Channel 7 (1979) provides a loving tribute to cult horror icon Vampira and a lost age of Hollywood legends. A theme repeated in Beauty of the Beast (2001). Both songs were written by lead singer, Dave Vanian (b. 1956). In 1976s ripped-up safety-pinned haze of dis-beauty, Dave Vanian was one of the first who stood brazenly elegant and singular, with darkly inclined sartorial tastes. In an interview, Vanian states his sophisticated look was based on early cinema, esoteric art, and of course Gothic Fiction (Amaranth 2011). UK Decay tended towards dark lyrical content based on Gothic literature with songs such as Black Cat (1979) based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, Dorian (1981) based on Oscar Wilde’s deeply disturbing novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Werewolf (1982), clearly invoking the great gothic beast. UK Decay frontman ‘Abbo’ gave a now infamous interview with Steve Keaton for Sounds in which he coined the term ‘Punk Gothique’ for the first time acknowledging what had been his unmistakeable influence. And Also the Trees, another early goth band with a Dark Romantic visual and macabre lyrical leanings said of themselves in an interview that they were the only truly ‘Gothic’ band. Most iconic of all is the resounding Bella Lugosi’s Dead (1979) by Bauhaus which has become the beacon of goth music still echoing through goth clubs all over the world. Goth subculture may have many influences from which to draw, but it seems that an appreciation of Gothic literature, and the assorted media that drew from that, is strongly ingrained within its varied complexion. The spectres, monsters, and ghosts of Gothic literature have always been posed as a mirror for the societal anxieties of the age. After the explosive nihilism of Punk’s politics, reanimating the Gothic within goth subculture may have been a more nuanced cultural expression of these anxieties and frustrations. On the level of the individual, Gothic literature, by its very definition, is an art form that attempts to sculpt tragedy and invoke a frisson of terror within its reader. Tragic art, or as it is otherwise known, painful art, tends to conjure negative emotions such as horror, sadness, and dread. All of these are negative emotions that we tend to avoid in reality. But most importantly, painful art affords us a curious peek into our own death, something which we can never imagine in reality. Our individual mortality is an elusive black which we cannot ever consciously contain, and that which compels us to rummage around maddeningly for an impression of its tangiblity. It is both a radio silence, and a perpetually piercing scream in our consciousness. However, depictions of death in fictional representations, or painful art can help us to experience death vicariously, and therefore satiate a collective

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human longing. Goth subculture is not alone in its propensity towards this, but it is a subculture that embraces this fully and carries the acceptance much further through lifestyle choices and sartorial semiotics. Graveyard picnics, upside down crosses, skulls, and Victorian mourning attire are just a few examples. It seems entirely rational to wish to experience positive emotions, such as serenity, hope, and pride, but why is it rational for goth subculture, in general, have such a propensity towards painful art? And why do its members rather literally wear memento-mori on their sleeves? One way of answering this would be to consult philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Coming from an assumption of normative hedonism, and advocating any rational means by which pleasure is the result, he would have posited that painful art is not in fact painful, or at least that it can be endured when balanced with something positive. This is called the compensation theory, and there are various approaches as to what that ‘positive’ compensatory factor may be. In Hume’s version, pain is only a small element in the much more potent appreciation we feel for beauty. There is artistic achievement in rousing the feeling of terror of our own mortality. But the raw horror of these sentiments are dissolved by the mightier of the two competing emotions, that is admiration of beauty, resulting in an overall experience of pleasure, hence the conversion. This recipe of majestic beauty peppered with pain could easily be likened to Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797) concept of ‘the sublime’. Burke would agree that what makes the experience of the sublime so much more heady than just the gratification realised by beauty, is fear, the apprehension of our own mortality. While Hume dismisses the importance of pain, Burke realises that pain is an essential ingredient for full appreciation. The sublime was obviously a very influential concept among gothic writers and artists. It looms desolately over Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ (1826). In this novel, Shelley compensates her deep felt grief forged from the deaths of those she loved, with beautifully crafted prose in a sublime fictional representation of the extinction of the entire human species. The lives of her thinly veiled characters are one by one cut short with swift elegance. As harrowing as this novel is, with its parade of war, disease, and endless death, we are never moved to disgust. We can contemplate death but we cannot touch its other-worldly corpse. This sublime sort of death can also be observed in Japanese gothic fiction. Notably, ‘One Day In Spring’ by Izumi Kyoka (1996). In this, a man gazes upon two drowned bodies. The horrible beauty of what is evident hovers faintly in the mist of Kyoka’s delicate visuals. We are in suspense of our gruesome expectations. However, there is a melancholic acceptance of death here which is not present in ‘The Last Man’. ‘The Last Man’ is the very embodiment of Hume’s compensation theory. Shelley is grieving, and compensates this very real pain with a sublime world crafted under her comfortable control. According to Hume, we, as the reader experience painful art in much the same way. There is a comforting element of control as we are able to choose the art we consume, and we are able to absorb the terror of mortality as long as it is submerged in the promise of beauty. So it could be said that by outwardly displaying a beautifully morbid aesthetic, members of the goth community are comforted by their artistic control over their appearance, or lifestyle

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expression. The absorption of painful art becomes effortlessly refashioned into glimmering skulls, billowing dresses, pitch-black lyrics, and wraithlike dancing. Dark, but beautiful. However, what if it may perhaps be worthwhile, or even rational, to pursue painful experiences for their own reward? If you think the purpose of art is to portray virtue and communicate moral truths then you would agree with the aesthetic cognitivist who holds that there is a cognitive gain in the viewing of all art forms, even painful art, including depictions of death. So imagining death through fictional representations is useful in order to achieve a deeper knowledge, or understanding. Art is a kind of blueprint, or a concretisation of ideas on how to live, and in order to make judgement on what is good, we must see the tragic. Therefore, experiencing death via painful art is a worthwhile experience in order to make informed decisions about life, or perhaps, on how to die a good death. This is however an understanding gained that is not easy to articulate. If we cannot convey in conventional terms what we have learned through this cathartic experience, then have we really gained an understanding at all? In saying that, can we articulate the knowledge of how to emote when singing, or how to express a piece of music through dance? Art, beauty, and death are on another level of understanding, and seem also to be on another level of communication. The philosopher Roger Scruton (b. 1944) suggests that what we gain from painful art is an innate, emotional knowledge that aids our ‘emotional competence’ (Scruton 2010). Painful art helps us practice the right thing to do, or the right way to feel, and arms us with an intuitive knowledge for when we confront the thought of death in those quiet moments. In this, Scruton furthers the argument of aesthetic cognitivism by countering the objection that the knowledge we presumably gain from art cannot be articulated and is therefore questionable in its existence. His ideas also highlight the inarticulable nature of impermanence, which is possibly why we are urged to contemplate this experience through the higher medium (according to Scruton) of art. An example of this is ‘Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages’ which was painted on handscroll by Japanese artist Kobayashi Eitaku in the 1870s. This is a late example of kusozu, a Japanese artistic tradition devoted specifically to the study of human postmortem changes. Kusozu was inspired by Buddhist beliefs including the contemplation of impermanence which is an integral part of meditation. The figurality in these images is loud, entirely tangible, and surprisingly liberating. Openly familiarising and accepting death in this way eliminates a certain element of fear, as death is no longer the unthinkable unknown. Aesthetic cognitivism puts forth that what we learn from contemplating this fictional representation is that to live fully we must be cognizant of our limitations, the most significant of which is the scarcity and uncertain duration of time we are each granted, and not to be fooled by the illusion of an eternal future. Meanwhile, in a workshop in Florence, Clemente Susini’s (1754–1814) wax models were posed, insides exposed for the eyes of anatomists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This was art crafted specifically for knowledge. But, the sensual ecstasy of the Venerina (Susini 1780–1782), for example, betrays a beauty that only serves to mask the inevitable. There is a very practical, educational purpose behind this beautiful flesh, which

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satisfies the argument of the aesthetic cognitivist. And there is exceptional beauty in the sculpture’s languishing, which would satisfy Hume’s compensation theory. But the figure, however, appears to be in the throes of ecstasy, not the decay of death. The audience of this art remains censoriously detached from the rot, and not truly involved in a tangible experience of mortality, or in contemplating our impermanence on the same level as kusozu would inspire. It could be argued that this detachment stems from an ingrained cultural fog of religiously imposed guilt. This is something that really is not an issue for the Shinto/Buddhist-based Japanese culture. Hence the bold bodily reality of kusozu. But, very broadly speaking, in the Western world, the sins of the flesh detach us from pagan animism and render our bodily reality intangible. The shame in which religion shrouds the body almost detaches us from the real nature of our own bodies and can even influence how we treat those who have passed. We fill our dead with harmful chemicals in order for them to look anything but dead until we cannot see them any longer but for the fresh replay of our memories. It is this detachment through shame of the body that portrays death as taboo in Western art. Death is a passer by tempted into a brothel, death is sordid, death is taboo, death is a dirty, unspoken word. When portrayed in this way, the audience cannot fully experience death through art in any meaningful way. There is a barrier that results in frustration, the radio silence of an innate knowledge. So, it could be said that the goth subculture’s predilection for a semiotic display of death is an articulation of an innate knowledge through the higher medium of art. The religious symbology mixed with pagan symbology within that could be a subversive nod to the fog of guilt making death the unspeakable taboo. Perhaps by artistic self-creation, individuals within the goth subculture can communicate a transcendence of societies taboo and terror of death. So, using Hume’s compensation theory we can surmise that the goth subculture’s consumption of painful art is made logical by counterbalancing the negative and refashioning it into something aesthetically pleasing. This still does not answer the question as to why this art manifests as an entire lifestyle. It is more likely to take the aesthetic cognitivist approach and say that negative emotions felt towards painful art, specifically death, are worthwhile and provide us with a more full, more nuanced palette of emotional understanding that cannot always be communicated. Thus, art as a higher medium is required. Goth subculture’s propensity towards painful art, death, and morbidity is, as mentioned previously, not unique to this subculture. However, what is unique is the conviction in artistic self-creation that leads to an outward display of the morals and values that may be gained from an embracing of painful art, negative emotions, and above all death. The goth subculture is communicating a healthy reflection on mortality by becoming the very image of it. They become the ghost. Death is, of course, a great blank screen in which we see reflected only our own inquisitive faces. We cannot envision not existing and this may haunt us as horror vacui, or kenophobia: a fear of emptiness or nothingness. The term is used as an analogy to an Aristotilian idea that all of nature abhors a vacuum. So the urge is to fill the silence of death with some kind of meaning. But perhaps, contrary

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to Scruton’s idea, what is put forth as inarticulable really is in fact a nothingness that we should try to welcome. Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945), the most influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century put forth the philosophy of nothingness in which he builds upon the experience of nothing or ‘mu’ in our self-awareness or ‘Jikaku’. Our self-awareness as absolute nothing allows us to become mindful of the greater nature of reality and our place within that reality. Therefore the relation between jikaku and mortality has, much like the contemplation of impermanence, the ability to free us of mortal fear. However, to think of yourself as nothing does have quite the whiff of nihilism about it. And in Japan, after the brutality of war, you can measure by the barometer of the Japanese film industry a growing taste for what can be deemed as nihilism. Japan churned out low budget thriller, mystery, and horror movies, some of which, such as ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’ (1969), based on the writings of Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965), became major contributions to Japan’s developing Vulgar Gothic. Japan’s Vulgar Gothic, according to Edward P Crandell in ‘21st Century Gothic’ (2011), features among other things, the macabre, cruelty, a morbid fascination with pain, motiveless murder, and senseless death. According to Crandell, in Vulgar Gothic, death is just ‘a bummer’. Koushun Takami’s novel ‘Battle Royale’ (1999) was a watershed in the Vulgar Gothic tradition, and was made into a famous film the year following its publication. In this we follow an empty fight to the death with no requirement upon the audience to search fruitlessly for meaning. Senseless death is also found in the opening scene of Sion Sono’s ‘Suicide Club’ (2002) where we see 54 high school students throw themselves in front of a train committing mass suicide. Later in Suicide Club, a character asks ‘If you die, will you lose the connection with yourself?’ Is this perhaps an echo of Nishida’s philosophy of nothingness? Implying that self-awareness of absolute nothing as a connection not only to oneself, but a connection to the greater nature of reality is something which transcends the physical boundaries of death. Motiveless murder and senseless death in fictional representations create a vacuum of meaning that can be seen as nihilism, or perhaps as a frustratingly unanswered question. But, perhaps these fictional representations are merely an extreme mirror image of a Japanese culture that has transcended the fear of mortality by embracing it wholly either through contemplation of impermanence, or through self-awareness of absolute nothing. It is safe to surmise that Hume, or the wider Western mainstream culture would not perhaps view Vulgar Gothic as beautiful. Nevertheless, Western movie audiences have been embracing mortality through the incredibly popular horror subgenre of splatter films, or as it is alternatively known: torture porn. In torture porn, the endurance of the human body is pushed to extreme levels by extreme methods. Our fragile flesh is ever on the cusp of death. We can almost touch it. And it is this visceral experience that we need to feel through painful art in order to be comfortable with our own death. I would adduce, amid a profusion of cultural difference, that these transcultural fictional representations point to a looming, shifting pattern in our collective reflection of mortality on a transcontinental level. This is a positive shift towards death acceptance. In Japan, kusozu shows no shame in its raw

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figurality, and the Vulgar Gothic is a modern example of a deep history of healthy meditation of impermanence. In the West, there is a tangibility of death in portrayals such as those in torture porn. But here, the audience can exit the cinema and return to their non-torture-porn lives. It is the goth subculture that truly absorbs the embrace of death integrated with lifestyle, that equates most closely to the contemplation of impermanence. I have explained goth subculture’s relationship with painful art using the individualistic notions pervasive in Western culture. Individualism, or the concept of a concrete self developed within the subject/object dichotomy is at the heart of the paradox of painful art. Looking at this from the angle of Japanese philosophy, Nishida would deny this premise altogether. He was interested in the pure consciousness that exists prior to differentiating subject from object. Transcending the concrete self, or ego allows us to reflect upon our place in the world, which he called ‘Basho’ and recognise our human finitude as something which, without ego, we do not really own. So why fear it? Mediation as absolute negation is mediation as absolute death, or in other words, death is not a fearful event at the end of one’s life, but penetrates life at each and every moment without ever revealing its aspect. So vicariously living out our mortality through art can help us glimpse this aspect for an instant, and wearing that art is communicating a transcendence of fear allowing it to lose its potency. Additionally, it is this lack of ego presented in Nishida’s philosophy and ingrained within Buddhist teachings that shapes Japanese cultural history. As a creature of this culture, the geisha, although making the choice as an individual to become an artist, is but one complimentary brushstroke within a much larger artwork that spans centuries. There is of course a stark difference here between the geisha and the more individualistic leaning of goth subculture. So why does the geisha appeal to goth subculture specifically? The superficial similarities are apparent: The pale visage, the contrasting theatrical make-up, heightened footwear by which to hover, and a meticulously formidable pinnacle of black entangled hair art. But my argument is that the sympathy between the two aesthetics, and indeed why they have blended so harmoniously, goes much deeper. I began by relating some geisha history, focusing on differentiating the courtesan from the geisha as an artist. Then, it was relevant to acknowledge the intimacy in the floating world between geisha and onnagata in the kabuki theatre who were depicting vengeful yūrei from Japanese folklore. The depths of Japanese folklore divulged the ghosts of women driven mad with rage and sorrow, acting as a barometer for a tangible patriarchal fear. Just as these ghosts of scorned women straddling the worlds of the living and the dead transcend the rules that bind their social repression making them all the more frightening, so too has the geisha rectified a power imbalance and has subverted her expected submissive role under the patriarchal glare of Japanese culture. The geisha has violated the categorical scheme developed by the Orientalist fantasy, and has become the very image of that fear of woman. The geisha has become the ghost. Frequently quite literally in various literature and media. One could argue this is what is apparent in goth subculture, as the geisha’s otherworldliness is poised to become another ghostly icon,

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the equivalent of which are portrayed in Gothic literature from which the subculture draws. Goth subculture’s propensity towards painful art, particularly death, is uniquely expressed within the semiotics of the subculture, and worn outwardly as an expression of artistic control. The appearance of individuals within the subculture is an externalisation of societal anxieties which, when overcome by taking artistic control of self-creation, lose their potency. Artistic control, whether compensating the negative emotions of painful art with dark beauty, or articulating the innate knowledge and morality of death acceptance, results in a transcendence of the terror and taboo of death by becoming the very image of it. Individuals within goth subculture also become the ghost. Through examples I have put forth considering the aesthetic entanglement between goth subculture and the geisha, it seems that the geisha as a ghostly icon has been absorbed compatibly and affectionately in the body of a ‘Geisha Goth’. Furthermore, the contemplation of impermanence within Japanese culture, as portrayed in Vulgar Gothic, is shared wholeheartedly by the goth subculture. But what makes the affection stronger is the truly reciprocal cultural exchange between Japan and the West, from the initial Victorian-Meiji mutual fascination, through the intertwining strings of literature, media, and evident aesthetic sympathies. So, both goth subculture and the geisha through their physical depiction, artistic self-cultivation, and concretisation of their own form of ghost, have therefore familiarised themselves with, and tamed the fear of the real haunting anxieties. The geisha, fear of women. The goth subculture, fear of mortality. But as they are still, to the standardised aesthetic sensibilities of onlookers, an ‘other’, they become objects of fascination, both strange, beautiful, and just beyond human. Straddling the line between fantasy and reality, just like the yūrei who becomes much more frightening without its earthly societal shackles. The pale, mask-like countenance thwarts the natural ability of the onlooker’s brain to decipher whether what they are seeing is actually threatening, or just benevolently beyond their comprehension. They become sublime ghosts creating their own rippling frissons of terror floating loftily along the gawping streets of aesthetic realism. Spectrelike, sublime creatures, glaring through a pale countenance.

Bibliography Amaranth. (2017). ‘Interview with Dave Vanian’. Fashion’s Alternative, 28 July 2011 [Blog]. Available at http://www.fashionsalternative.com/articles/interview-with-dave-vanian/. Accessed 12 January 2019. Bauhaus. (1979). Bela Lugosi’s Dead [CD]. UK, Small Wonder. Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, Routledge. Carter, A. (1997 [1972]). ‘Poor Butterfly’, in Uglow, Jenny (ed.), Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. London, Vintage. Chappell, T. (2014). Truth in Fiction [Chapter 3]. Milton Keynes, The Open University.

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Crandall, E. P. (2011). ‘Natsuo Kirino’s Real World: Murder and the Grotesque Through Teenage Eyes’, in Olson, D. (ed.), 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. Plymouth, UK, Scarecrow Press, pp. 496–505. Devereux, E., Dillane, A., and Power, M. (2015). David Bowie: Critical Perspectives. New York, Routledge. Eitaku, K. (1870). Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages [Handscroll Painting]. London, The British Museum. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (25 April 2017). Encyclopaedia Britannica [Online]. Available at https://www.britannica.com/art/Kabuki. Accessed 12 January 2019. From the Corporate Priestess Archive: Yohji Yamamoto show 1981 Part IV. (2014). YouTube Video, added by corporatepriestess [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6qggpEU04k4. Accessed 12 January 2019. Hopper, J. (2016). ‘And also the Trees: Born into the Waves (an appreciation)’. Unofficial Britain [Online]. Available at http://www.unofficialbritain.com/and-also-the-trees-born-into-thewaves-an-appreciation/. Accessed 12 January 2019. Horrors of Malformed Men. (1969). Directed by Teruo Ishii [Film]. Japan, Toei Company. Hume, D. (1757). ‘Of Tragedy (in, Four Dissertations)’ [Online]. Available at https://literature-proquest-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/searchFulltext.do?id=Z000730184&divLevel=0&area=prose&DurUrl=Yes&forward=textsFT&queryType=findWork. Accessed 12 January 2019. Hush. (2010) Studio-Hush [Online]. Available at http://www.studio-hush.com/?fbclid=IwAR0-0gdZKWdXdbTqKxwwm-312DkMxzaD2hkmTAsfeiDH53va3e73OHbYX4c. Accessed 12 January 2019. Jones, D. (2012). When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie, the Man Who Changed the World. London, Preface Publishing, pp. 124–125. Jones, A., Kato, Y., and Wong, T. (2016). ‘David Bowie’s Love Affair with Japanese Style’. BBC News [Online]. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-35278488. Accessed 12 January 2019. Ju-On. (2000). Directed by Takashi Shimizu [Film]. Japan, Toei Video Company. Kawaguchi, Y. (2010). Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture. New Haven, Yale University Press. Kyōka, I. (1990 [1900]). The Saint of Mount Koya (Trans. from Japanese by Stephen W. Kohl). Kanazawa, Japan, The Committee of the Translation of the Works of Izumi Kyoka. Kyōka, I., & Inouye, C. (1996). ‘One Day in Spring’, in Japanese Gothic Tales. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqq5c. Lewis, M. G. (1998 [1796]). The Monk: A Romance. London, New York, Penguin Books. Loti, P. (1887). Madame Chrysanthème. Available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3995/3995h/3995-h.htm. Accessed 12 January 2019. Meyer, M. (2012). The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons: A Field Guide to Japanese Yokai. Matthew Meyer. Monet, C. (1876). La Japonaise [Portrait Painting]. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. New World Encyclopedia. (24 May 2017). New World Encyclopedia [Online]. Available at http:// www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Geisha. Accessed 12 January 2019. Ōkyo, M. (1750). The Ghost of Oyuki [Painting]. Public Domain. Rodin, A. (1908–1911). Masks of Hanako [Sculpture]. Japan, Niigata City Art Museum. Scruton, R. (2010), in Chappell, T. (2014). Truth in Fiction. Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 84 and 107. Shadowofadreamblog. (2018) ‘The Black Chat—Abbo on the Roots of Goth’. Shadow of a Dream, 10 June 2017 [Blog]. Available at https://shadowofadreamblog.wordpress. com/2017/06/10/the-black-chat-abbo-on-the-roots-of-goth/. Accessed 12 January 2019. Shelley, M. (1826). The Last Man. London, Henry Colburn.

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Silent-ology. (2019). ‘Silent Film Makeup: What Was It Really Like?’. Silent-Ology, 22 February 2016 [Blog]. Available at https://silentology.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/silent-film-makeupwhat-was-it-really-like/. Accessed 12 January 2019. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2015). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Online]. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/. Accessed 12 January 2019. Suicide Club. (2002) Directed by Sion Sono [Film]. Japan, Earthrise (Japan) or TLA Releasing. Susini, C. (1780–1782). Venerina. Bologna, Italy, Museo Di Palazzo Poggi. Takami, K. (1999). Battle Royale. Tokyo, Japan, Ohta Publishing. Tanizaki, J. (1910). The Tattooer. Available at https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/iblog.iup.edu/ dist/4/81/files/2015/04/The-Tattooer-xvpi0a.pdf. Accessed 12 January 2019. The Damned. (1979). ‘Plan 9 Channel 7’, in Machine Gun Etiquette [CD]. UK, Chiswick Records. The Damned. (2001). ‘Beauty of the Beast’, in Grave Disorder [CD]. UK, Nitro Records. The Ghost of Yotsuya. (1959). Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa [Film]. Japan, Shintoho Film Distribution Committee. The Grudge. (2004). Directed by Takashi Shimizu [Film]. Japan and USA, Columbia Pictures Corporation. UK Decay. (2009). ‘“Black Cat”, “Werewolf”, and “Dorian”’, in For Madmen only [CD]. UK, Complete Music Ltd. Victoria and Albert Museum. (2016). VAM [Online]. Available at http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ articles/h/a-history-of-the-kimono/. Accessed 12 January 2019.

Theoretical Gothic

Three French Modernists Giles Whiteley

When considering modernist Gothic, we may think of the nightmarish journey of Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1899) or the haunted and haunting ‘unreal city’ of T.S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) The Waste Land (1922). We may think of the ghostly presence of the past in the novels of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) or James Joyce (1882–1941), or of the futuristic gothic spaces of Fritz Lang’s (1890– 1976) Metropolis (1927). In the context of French modernism, we likely think first and foremost of Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) À la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past], which begins in Du côté de chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (1913) with an uncanny fantasy of recovered memories and ends in Le Temps retrouvé [Time Regained] (1927) in a gothic cathedral. But when looking back upon the history of modernism from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, one French author writing during the period has perhaps had the most significant impact on how later gothic literature has been constructed and conceptualised: Georges Bataille (1897–1962). Bataille is a significant figure for any attempt to write the history of Gothic for three interrelated reasons. Firstly, he wrote gothic horror fiction of his own, such as Histoire de l’oeil [The Story of the Eye] (1928). Secondly, he wrote about figures from literary and cultural history who are strongly associated with the Gothic, such as the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Bataille’s theoretical writings, which meditate on the complex interrelationship of sex and death, taboo and transgression, eroticism and excess, have also proven a significant intellectual resource for later generations of gothic writers and critics. This chapter contextualises Bataille’s contributions to the gothic heritage, before suggesting some of the ways in which his Gothicity influenced two of his friends and most significant heirs in French modernism, Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) and Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003).

G. Whiteley (*)  Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_65

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Today, Bataille is best remembered for the extremity of his writings: his novels are pornographic fantasies replete with scenes of shocking sexualised violence, while his theoretical works revolve around considering the relationship between eroticism, death and the idea of the excessive. Writing after Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Bataille sought to address the ways in which experiences of sexual jouissance and sacrificial violence alike ruptured the idea of the philosophically discrete subject in a moment opening up the individual to the community, but also marking an irredeemable moment of expenditure. Bataille was born in 1897 in Billom, Auvergne, before attending school first in Reims, then Épernay. Like one of his great decadent influences, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), Bataille converted to Catholicism in 1914.1 He considered the priesthood, before becoming atheist in the mid-1920s, after he had moved to Paris. For a while, Bataille was associated with surrealism, friendly with André Breton (1896–1966), although the two men later fell out. He published his first novel, Histoire de l’oeil, anonymously in 1928 under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, for ‘aux chiottes’, ‘to the shithouse’.2 He was a leading figure in the Collège de Sociologie [College of Sociology] between 1937–1939, when meetings were ended by the war, formed in opposition to surrealism’s emphasis on ‘individualism’ over what Roger Caillois (1913–1978) called ‘social experience’. Other important figures in French intellectual life were also members of the Collège, including Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), Callois and Klossowski.3 Beyond the Collège, Bataille’s other friends from the period included Blanchot, whom he met in 1941, and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who left with Bataille his manuscript of the Passagenwerk [The Arcades Project] upon fleeing Paris.4 During the same period, Bataille published the review Acéphale, the second number of which included his influential essay, ‘Nietzsche et les fascistes’ (1937), defending the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) from his appropriation at the hands of Hitler. The title of the review, derived from the Greek akephalos, ‘headless’, alludes to the decapitation of Louis XVI, whose execution during the Revolution is read as auguring the opening of a new form of community. The same name was also used for a secret society Bataille belonged to during the period, among the ranks of whom, according to rumours, Klossowski could also be counted, while a young psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1901– 1981), also attended meetings.5 Members apparently discussed committing a human sacrifice, although these plans never materialised. Following the war he published La Part maudite [The Accursed Share] (1949), his work on political economy. Developing Bataille’s ideas on ‘general economy’ or heterology, this work proved influential on later writers such as Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).6 Bataille’s first published piece was on gothic architecture, ‘Notre-Dames de Rheims’. Dating from the summer of 1918, it recounts a ‘vision’ of the city and its Cathedral, built in the High Gothic style after a fire had destroyed the older church in 1211.7 The subject recalls a very different tradition of the Gothic than

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the one Bataille is today principally associated with, firmly entrenched within a lineage of writing on gothic architecture which, passing through the Victorian art-critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), had so fascinated Proust. Many years before embarking on À la recherche du temps perdu, in which Ruskinian echoes are so prominent, Proust had served an important role in popularising Ruskin’s ideas on the Gothic in France with his translations and commentaries on La Bible d’Amiens (1900) and Sésame et les Lys (1906). For Ruskin, gothic architecture was a perfect expression of man’s humility before God, with its unfinishedness, its grotesques and architectural nooks, testifying to a spiritual investment in every individual workman’s soul. Bataille’s short piece on ‘Notre-Dames de Rheims’ glories in the rich gothic architecture of the Cathedral, but differs from Ruskin or Proust insofar as the Gothic is marked by trauma. He describes the city under attack during the early years of the First World War, its Cathedral ‘mutilated’, set on fire by the Germans.8 The gothic structure is now haunted by ‘signs of death and desolation’, so that the grotesques of the Cathedral, its gargoyles, are no longer simply carved into the edifice, but instead ‘a rictus of a skeleton grimaced from the torn cracks in the stone, like on a human face’.9 The pattern Bataille established here in this first published piece was significant: he links the historical Gothic with trauma, in a manner which is modernist. As an artistic movement, modernism is often said to be characterised as a response to a series of different ways in which the stable subject of the ‘modern’ period, based on Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality, was fractured by philosophical, scientific and historical developments, including Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the violence of the First World War. The war was certainly traumatic for Bataille. In his preface to Histoire de l’oeil, published many years later in 1943, he remembered how, during the German advance in August 1914, he and his mother had abandoned his father, who had suffered a mental breakdown the year beforehand.10 In that same preface, Bataille considers his feelings of guilt (a recurrent topic in his work), but notes that since his father had conceived him when he was blind, Bataille could not ‘tear my eyes out like Oedipus’.11 The allusion takes in Freud, and Bataille himself began psychoanalysis shortly after the war ended. In a manuscript entitled ‘Rêve’ [Dream], dated June 1927, Bataille recalled his childhood home in Reims in a dream he recounted to Dr. Adrien Borel, his psychoanalyst. In the cellar were ‘enormous atrocious rats’ which threatened to bite anyone who went down: ‘Horrible rats and all the terrors of infancy. […] Terrors of childhood spiders etc. associated with being stripped on my father’s lap’.12 The horror of the presence of familiarly nightmarish animals marks the gothic associations and is associated in this dream with the memory or fantasy of being beaten by his father and with abuse. This fantasy and the fear of rats was strong in Bataille, who would revisit the topic in Histoire de rats (1947). This short fictional piece takes the form of a journal, with the narrator telling two narratives: in the first, the narrator ‘X’ reaches sexual pleasure when another individual tortures and kills a rat; in the second, the narrator visits a basement brothel, asking the madame if she has any rats, specifying his need for ‘enormous’ ones, before ‘pouncing’ on an old prostitute who is waiting for him.13

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As the narrative progresses, the journal gets more and more fragmented, suggesting the narrator’s mental dislocation. Rats here stand as metonyms for different fetishes: death, the phallus, the figure of the prostitute.14 Both ‘Rêve’ and Histoire de rats associate the fear of rats with eroticism, recalling Freud’s ‘Rat-Man’, described in his Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose [Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis] (1909). That patient, recounting his fantasy of rats boring into his anus, in a similarly fragmented attempt to narrate his dreams, was apparently unaware that his expression revealed a ‘horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’.15 Bataille’s central contribution to modernist Gothic and to those writers who followed him lies in the ways in which, writing after Freud, he interrogates this link between horror and pleasure. In L’érotisme (1957), Bataille defines eroticism as ‘assenting of life up to the point of death’.16 Eroticism names the desire that seeks to overcome the discrete borders of any given individual subject, in a ‘transition from discontinuity to continuity’.17 In the moment of eroticism, ‘I am losing myself’,18 which is to say, losing my discrete sense of myself as a subject. In this sense, eroticism is linked by Bataille to what Freud calls Todestrieb, the death-drive, the desire towards dissolution.19 Eroticism links sex and death: in both, the integrity of the subject is violated. Bataille also associates eroticism with religion and is interested in the historical ways in which communities have been established precisely at the moment of sacrifice. Understood anthropologically, Bataille argues, the rites of sacrifice become conceivable not as a form of murder (although he is aware of the ways in which the two are linked), but as ethical, in the sense of the forming of a community, where the subject opens up to the Other.20 Citing Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913), Bataille also considers taboo and transgression.21 ‘Without the taboo being observed with great fear it lacks the counterpoint of the desire which would give it its deepest meaning’, Bataille writes, so that transgressing the taboo produces a moment of almost limitless jouissance, one which links ‘desire and terror, intense pleasure and anguish’.22 As Michel Foucault (1926–1984) writes in his famous essay on Bataille, ‘the limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess’.23 ‘There is no prohibition that cannot be transgressed’,24 as Bataille puts it, so that the existence of the limit implies both the possibility of transgression and its pleasure. We recognise in Bataille’s work, and in Foucault’s important commentary on it, perhaps the central dynamic underwriting gothic fiction, which seeks to juxtapose pleasure, terror and violence and probe the boundaries linking sex and death. This moment of transgression is ‘excessive’ in Bataille’s terms. This is a point he makes in his important early article ‘La notion de dépense’ [The Notion of Expenditure] (1933), in which he links the idea of sacrifice to the notion of expenditure, understood as ‘limitless loss’,25 referring to the potlach, the idea of the gift that cannot be adequately returned, described so influentially by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). Such a notion of expenditure ruptures ‘restricted’ ideas of how economies work. This is a point he had discussed in an earlier piece on ‘La valeur d’usage de D.A.F. de Sade’ [The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade] (1929). Written as a reply to Breton’s reading of Sade, and by extension as a reply to

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surrealism, this piece was a political statement to his ‘Comrades’. According to Bataille, classical economics rests on the principle of conservation: as he puts it in La Part maudite, a ‘restricted economy’ seeks to limit the waste in any system, reappropriating it and putting it to work.26 But in the example of Sade, Bataille finds a project that resists any such attempts at reappropriation. For Bataille, Sade’s writing is not governed by the principle of utility but of excretion, ‘an irruption of excremental forces’.27 He associates Sade’s gothic not only with the power of transgression but also to the possibility of political and economic revolution. Developing the point, Bataille proposes the idea of ‘heterology’ (literally: writing of the other or difference), a discipline that would not only study but glorify this excessive moment of limitless expenditure, one which is present alike at the moment of orgasm, sacrifice and death.28 Sade’s Gothicity is put on a pedestal in Bataille’s writing, as it would be in the writings of Klossowski and Blanchot, although for slightly different reasons. For Bataille, ‘poetry leads to the same point as other forms of eroticism’.29 This is a point he develops in La littérature et le Mal [Literature and Evil] (1957). This volume collected and revised work that had originally appeared in the journal Critique, including chapters on Sade and Proust, as well as on other writers associated with the gothic, including Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Franz Kafka (1883–1924).30 In his preface to La littérature et le Mal, Bataille claims that the essence of literature resides in its ‘acute form of Evil’. ‘Literature is not innocent’, he argues, and it should admit to its complicity with horror.31 For this reason, Bataille holds that ‘literature is itself, like the transgression of moral laws, dangerous’.32 In his chapter on Emily Brontë (1818–1848), he reads the Romantic Gothic of Wuthering Heights (1847) as concerned with ‘the tragic transgression of the law’. Bataille cites Jacques Blondel’s comparison between Brontë and Sade, arguing that the invention of a character such as Heathcliff, ‘so perfectly devoted to Evil’ represented ‘on the part of a young moral and inexperienced girl, a paradox’.33 But moreover, the invention of Heathcliff is more troubling still, because ‘Catherine Earnshaw is absolutely moral herself’. ‘Evil’, Bataille concludes, is not simply ‘the dream of the vicious, it is to a certain extent the dream of the Good’.34 In other words, the power of the Gothic is in showing us that, no matter how virtuous we seem, we all repress ‘evil’ desires. In this sense, Sade is not so exceptional. As much as Sade himself tried to distance his work from the label of the Gothic, he could not shake the associations. Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome [The 120 Days of Sodom] (1785), a horrific story set in Château de Silling, a remote medieval castle, is clearly a work both inspired by and inspiring the Gothic. For Bataille, this book ranks as perhaps the only one ‘in which the soul and the spirit of man is shown really as it is’.35 In his essay on Sade in La littérature et le Mal, which is prefaced by a quotation from the Victorian aesthete and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), another figure who may be associated with decadent gothicism, Bataille argues that psychological diagnoses of sadism do not explain Sade’s force, referring to Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). Such diagnoses seek to rationalise the power of ‘desire’, something that precisely escapes rational understanding, a moment

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eluding such a ‘restricted’ viewpoint.36 It is for this reason that Bataille is fascinated with Sade, whose work fails as literature precisely insofar as he attempted to subordinate literature to the expression of the inexpressible. Bataille argues that the insights which Sade sought to communicate—that the very idea of communication requires a loss of consciousness—could only be partially, never fully articulated in literary experience. Sade then was not simply a writer of gothic horror, but showed in practice the limitations of the gothic form, limitations that the gothic seeks to investigate and probe, but can never fully transcend. Bataille’s fascination with Sade is the fascination with the figure of excess. In this sense, his continued meditations on his ‘use value’ and the ways in which Sade ruptures such restricted economies finds a counterpoint in his study of a figure from the historical Gothic, Gilles de Rais (1405–1440). In Le procès de Gilles de Rais [The Trial of Gilles de Rais] (1959), Bataille considers the Baron who fought alongside Joan of Arc (1412–1431), commonly considered the inspiration for the figure of Bluebeard, and who was later revealed to be a mass murderer and paedophile. In Huysmans’ Là-Bas [The Damned] (1891), a book Bataille cites and discusses,37 Durtal announces that Sade was ‘no more than a timid bourgeois, a wretched little fantasist’ when compared to Rais.38 Indeed, Bataille notes that while Sade himself rarely appears to have acted on his fantasies, Rais’ rooms were, in their horrific reality, ‘fitting for the cruel imaginings of Sade’.39 For Bataille, ‘nothing in Gilles de Rais is reasonable. In every regard, he is monstrous’.40 This monstrosity is key, for ‘only reason defines monstrosity’, and ‘in a world in which reason reigns, […] monstrosity is fascinating’, with the monstrous figure one who ‘escapes the necessary order’.41 This point also passes comment on Bataille’s own fascination evident throughout his study of Rais. But also significant is the ways in which Bataille links his monstrosity to the question of ‘sovereignty’, an idea which he had also discussed in La Part maudite, and both to the medieval social order in which Rais operated. Rais was a nobleman, whose relations and friends were all ‘feudal lords, proprietors of vast rural estates, dominated by massive fortresses’.42 In this sense, Rais ‘belongs primarily to his time’, ‘unreasonable’ in his demands on his subjects, and unable to control his own desires,43 so that he is a gothic figure both in the historical sense and in what he comes to represent to the later imaginary. But once again, as in ‘Notre-Dames de Rheims’, what is Gothic is also modern. As Bataille argues, it is only by understanding Rais’ horrific actions within the context of medieval feudal life that it becomes ‘possible to imagine the brutalities of the Nazis’.44 Bataille speculates that Rais must have been aroused by disembowelling his enemies during battle, and notes that ‘the feudal world, in effect, cannot be separated from excess, which is the principle of war’.45 As such, the ‘tragedy’ of Rais is precisely that of the gothic period itself. ‘Nobody, unless they remain deaf, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées without feeling ill’,46 Bataille remarked, and his line about Sade’s book may as well as describe his own Histoire de l’oeil. This novel follows two teenage protagonists, an unnamed male narrator and his girlfriend, Simone, on an horrific sexual journey, beginning in France. The two lovers torture and degrade another teenage girl, Marcelle, who goes mad and eventually hangs herself, with the narrator and

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Simone having sex next to her corpse.47 They flee to Spain, where they meet an Englishman Lord Edmund, a voyeur, based in part on Sade and in part on the various decadent and dandiacal Lords that populate so many nineteenth-century gothic novels. Simone seduces Don Aminado, a Catholic priest, whom she and the narrator then murder in his church, while Lord Edmund watches and performs a perverse simulacrum of the Eucharist with the priest’s bodily fluids.48 Histoire de l’oeil is perhaps Bataille’s most famous attempt to write his own version of Sade’s fiction: it represents a modernisation of Sade, as well as a modernist Gothic, both in its focus on the excessive moment which ruptures the stable subject and insofar as its series of interlinked imagery of eyes, eggs and the ovular, disrupts any sense of a fixed narration. Another writer fascinated with Sade was Pierre Klossowski. The older brother of the painter Balthus Klossowski (1908–2001), Pierre was born into a wealthy, well-educated family. At the age of eighteen, he became the secretary to André Gide (1869–1951), who introduced him to French literary circles. A regular contributor to Acéphale and a member of the Collège, Klossowski gave papers on Sade and politics to an audience including Bataille in 1939, a theme which would later be developed in his book, Sade mon prochain [Sade my neighbour] (1947). While Bataille would later take issue with this book in La littérature et le Mal, on the supposed grounds that Klossowski’s Christianity led him to read Sade’s work as an inverted simulacrum of religious as much as political thought,49 he was open in his admiration for its achievements, and the work remains hugely influential. Like Bataille, Klossowski considers the ‘monstrosity’ of Sade,50 his political significance and also the sense in which his ‘philosophy of the bedroom’ may indeed be said to constitute a form of thought worthy of intellectual consideration. Politically, Klossowski contextualises Sade’s thought alongside the events and the French Revolution. The Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789, and only a few days earlier, Sade had been a prisoner in the castle. Although a Marquis, and in a position of power and privilege, Klossowski suggests that his philosophy anticipates and critiques the supposed emancipation promised by the Revolution, one which was to be based on the belief that human reason would produce a fairer and freer world. Sade, however, believed in a negative rather than a positive form of liberty: that freedom would not mean substituting one set of laws for another, but would instead be an expression of a limitless or ‘absolute’ freedom. His aim was to ‘bring about a complete remoulding of the structure of man’.51 Such a remoulding required an extraordinary fortitude, according to Sade, a willingness to transgress the norms violently, in a repeated reiteration of heinous acts that eventually numbed the actor into a state of apathy. Sade’s system was not simply atheistic, since atheism was just ‘an inverted monotheism’,52 still reliant on a principle of identity and justifying the stable and single subject: instead, Sade proposed a system of ‘integral atheism’, in which ‘the principle of identity disappears along with the absolute guarantor of this principle’.53 Like Bataille, Klossowski emphasises the sense in which transgression is both predicated upon the existence of norms and taboos, and implies an excessive moment of expenditure, ‘the pure explosion of accumulated energy’.54 For Sade, such excess is experienced in the act of

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sodomy, in which ‘sterile pleasure’ is ‘taken in a sterile object, experienced as a simulacrum of the destruction of norms’.55 Sodomy is a sign, one which ‘strikes precisely at the law of the propagation of the species’, ‘the simulacrum of the act of generation’.56 Repeating the act of transgression to the point of apathy, the subject itself is voided in another simulacrum, and Klossowski argues that in Sade, ‘monstrosity is the zone of this being outside of oneself, outside of conscience’.57 Reissuing Sade mon prochain some twenty years after its first publication, Klossowski added an epitaph drawn from his own novel, Roberte ce soir (1954), published in the intervening years, in which the two fictional characters discuss a book entitled Sade mon prochain. This novel marks the beginning of Klossowski’s own experiments with gothic fiction, clearly influenced by Histoire de l’oeil, but differing from it both in tone and focus. Roberte ce soir focuses on the character of Roberte, the young wife of a cleric, Octave. Octave has instituted the ‘laws of hospitality’, permitting visitors to his house to have sex with Roberte, which the two discuss with her nephew, Antoine. The novel takes the form of a dialogue between the three, which focuses on the relationship between perversion and theology: throughout, Klossowski dwells on the question of the relationship between the body and the spirit. In the sequel, La Révocation de l’édit de Nantes [The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes] (1959), Klossowski revisits the characters: Roberte has taken on a role on the council for censorship, but revolts against society, exploring her own sexuality on a journey which she hopes will lead to ‘freedom’. Unlike the dialogue form of Roberte ce soir, the narrative in La Révocation is mainly structured through alternating Octave’s journal entries and Roberte’s diary entries: it gives Roberte more of an inner voice, and her journey of sexual discovery becomes one which she seemingly has more ownership over, disrupting the simple ways in which she may be said to be an expression of Octave’s (and Klossowski’s) male gaze. The Second World War provides a backdrop to the events, and it is implied that Roberte’s abuse at the hands of an S.S. Officer may have prompted her sadomasochistic desire. In these novels, then, gothic themes relating to horror and desire are weaved into a historically situated reflection on the trauma of modern war, and pornographic fantasy into a complex theological investigation of the limits of the body and the spirit. Less viscerally affecting that Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil, Klossowski’s work deals with its material at a distance, portraying its gothic themes in less of the tumultuous frenzy of Bataille, but as a kind of ‘hanging in suspense’.58 In Sade mon prochain, Klossowski compares Sade with Nietzsche, and the idea of the dissolution of the subject which is produced in the reiteration of the horrific act with the experience of the eternal return.59 It was a topic to which he would return in Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux [Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle] (1969), a work which was hugely influential on French philosophy, and particularly on Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), to whom the book was dedicated. Rather than read Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as a cosmological speculation on the repetition of a single set of events, Klossowski links the idea to Nietzsche’s descent into madness. He suggests that the eternal return names the experience of the loss of the subject, who ‘deactualize[s] my present self in order

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to will myself in all the other selves’ it may be.60 This experience of the willed dissolution of the subject, one which links Sade, Nietzsche and also Roberte, forms the central focus on Klossowski’s later, and most explicitly gothic novel, Le Baphomet (1965). The plot revolves around the ghosts of the monks of the Knights Templar, suppressed by Philip IV in 1307 for heresy. The novel sees various different figures reincarnated and given a voice, including both Nietzsche and Klossowski himself, as well as the Baphomet, the deity the Knights supposedly worshipped, popularly imaged by Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875) as a Sabbatic Goat. Again, sexual perversion is intermingled here with gothic themes of demonic possession, ghosts and haunting and the relationship between body and spirit, as well as with religious themes that associate sexual transgression with the sacred. Blanchot was also a writer fascinated by Sade, his reading in Lautréamont et Sade (1949) deeply indebted to Klossowski in his emphasis on Sade as a ‘systematic’ thinker.61 In that work, Blanchot also collected his essay on Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) (1846–1880), a figure who was lifted out of obscurity by the surrealists in the interwar period. Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) follows the figure of Maldorer, a Byronesque Manfred-figure who is bitten by a tarantula, waking up in a nightmarish version of Paris populated by prostitutes, hermaphrodites and monsters, and is another gothic work of nineteenth-century French decadence, violent, transgressive and surreal. Friends with Bataille, Blanchot had earlier studied at the University of Strasbourg where he met another close friend, the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), and his work often finds itself operating in the interstices of Bataille’s transgressive meditations on death and Lévinas’ influential understanding of ethics. Blanchot’s ethical response to death thus marks both a development and a riposte to some of Bataille’s most significant ideas with respect to the Gothic. Blanchot knew the reality of trauma. In June 1944, he was lined up by a Nazi firing squad, but by a stroke of luck survived, an event he recounted in his fictionalised récit, L’instant de ma mort [The Instant of My Death] (1994). The event created a lasting resonance, a consciousness of ‘the instant [l’instant] of my death’ being ‘from now onwards in abeyance [en instance]’. The lyrical repetition of the phrasing suggests the moment of death also ‘insists’ in the sense so crucial to Lacan and later twentieth-century French psychoanalysis, an unconscious reminder that presses on the subject, its trace present in all things.62 Unsurprisingly given this context, Blanchot often reflected on the vertiginous power of death throughout his oeuvre, both its horror, but also its doubleness or impersonality, the sense in which, since it marks the moment when the subject is lost irretrievably, it is always someone else who will die. The point recalls Bataille and his reading Kojève’s influential lectures on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Delivered at the École Pratique des Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939, Bataille had attended Kojève’s lectures, which read Hegel through Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Kojève had famously focused on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit] (1807), in the preface to which he spoke of

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consciousness as wielding the power of death, insofar as dialectical analysis destroys the object it analyses.63 Bataille however reads this system as another restricted economy, for Hegel’s engagement with death is always a recuperative one, putting ‘death’ to work by and for his system. Bataille instead sought to demonstrate the ways in which death required a moment of sacrifice, opening up a ‘general economy’, as a moment of limitless expenditure, a loss which cannot be recuperated. Developing Bataille’s point, Blanchot investigates the ways in which writing and death alike open up a space of ‘worklessness’. For Blanchot, writing is allied with death: both mark the moment of an impersonal loss of the subject. The idea proved influential on the intellectual development of Derrida, prefiguring the post-structuralist idea of the dissemination of the sign. Derrida’s approach constitutes a kind of ‘cryptomimesis’, as Carla Jodey Castricano’s puts it. Castricano shows the ways in which works such as Spectres de Marx (1993) are informed by the Gothic, as well as the ways in which Derrida’s philosophy is itself conceivable as constituting a kind of gothic language, focusing on the sense in which the metonymic slide of signification deconstructs texts from within, returning as the repressed.64 Castricano’s argument might equally well be applied to Blanchot, whose writing, like Derrida’s, is marked by a haunting quality, a spectrality. Blanchot’s own contribution to gothic fiction rests in particular on his récit, L’Arrêt de mort [Death Sentence] (1948). The title is double, with the French meaning both a ‘death sentence’ in the juridical sense, but with the verb, ‘l’arrêt’, meaning ‘arrest’, so that this death sentence also marks a moment of the suspension of death. It foreshadows L’instant de ma mort, where the firing squad aiming at the narrator stand paused at the very instant in an ‘immobility that arrested time’.65 L’Arrêt de mort is set during the backdrop of the Second World War, and can be read as offering a commentary on it. Divided into two sections, the first narrative takes place on 13 October 1938 during the Munich Crisis, the second in the days before, during and just after Operation Paula, 3 June 1940. In the former, the plot revolves around an unnamed narrator and his relationship with a woman, J. The narrator works as a journalist in Paris, as did Blanchot himself during the period, and J. is ill, with her doctor having said that ‘from 1936 on he had considered her dead’.66 She suffers ‘nightly terror’, in which the narrator imagines that J. faced a danger that was ‘nameless and formless, altogether indeterminate’.67 She is a ghostly figure from the start, at once infantile and cadaverous, her eyes characterised by an ‘abnormal fixity’.68 But her illness seems to give her an ‘extraordinary’ beauty, one which is a product of her impending death, for the narrator remarks that ‘it is well known that for an instant after dying, people who were once beautiful become young and beautiful again’.69 The image of a youthful vitality in the face of the recently deceased recalls Madeline of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) by Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849), whose gothic narratives were crucial to the tradition of French decadence which Blanchot reads and responds to. When J. eventually dies, the narrator misses the instant itself, arriving too late to find her body with ‘the stillness of a recumbent effigy’, ‘no more than a statue’.70 Miraculously, however, after calling her by her first name (which we never learn,

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for she is always referred to by the initial), ‘a sort of breath came out of her compressed mouth’, and J. returns to life, so that she becomes a kind of zombie-figure, mesmerising the narrator with ‘the most terrible look which a living being can receive’.71 The situation is uncanny, marked by an unnerving ‘strangeness’, the familiar first made unfamiliar in death, and then this Unheimlichkeit doubled in the resurrection. Like Jesus (implied by the initial), ‘J.’s waking took place at dawn, almost with the sunrise’.72 But the strangeness of the situation also marks the uncanny question of repetition, the sense that ‘the same terrible thing that happened the day before was in danger of repeating itself’.73 J. refuses to take her medicinal shot, and in the delirium of her illness points at the narrator to tell him to ‘take a good look at death’, implying the sense in which he incarnates death itself.74 In ‘the instant of her last agony’,75 she finally calls for a shot, with the narrator doubling her normal dose, and she dies again. It remains unclear if the narrator has in fact euthanised her, and at this point, the first narrative concludes. The second narrative picks up the story of the presumably same unnamed narrator some eighteen months later. By this point, the Munich crisis is over and the Second World War has begun. The story follows the narrator’s relationships with three women: C(olette), S(imone) and N(athalie). J. is not mentioned at all, all the more extraordinary given the remarkable scene of her resurrection in the first narrative, but her presence is still felt, ghosting the other women, as an unnamed trace which can be read, for instance in the figure of S(imone), whose hands recall J.’s, and like her is figured as a ‘statue’.76 Paris is by now beginning to be emptied of its citizens,77 and the city becomes otherworldly, a gothic space. The narrator and the women find themselves walking into one another’s rooms, often by mistake, often in the darkness, where they surprise one another, and where they wait, like ghosts, desperate for communication, for some genuine touch of the other. The narrator too gains a ‘touch’ of the quality of J., his doctor telling him his blood had become ‘prematurely “atomic”’, ‘mysterious’, marking him also with a sentence of impending death,78 so that he becomes another of her doubles. In this sense, both the narrator and the women now serve as doppelgänger figures of one another, and the second narrative doubles the first and vice versa. The narrator is also beginning to lose his sense of himself, calling himself ‘a madman’,79 driven by the death-drive and haunted by the ‘fascinating’ image of his grave opening up before him.80 When the Luftwaffe bomb Paris, the narrator and N(athalie) take refuge in the Metro, which is figured as a kind of crypt, and where he proposes to her in another language, seemingly feeling ‘irresponsible’ for his words.81 When they emerge after the bombers have left, they are separated by the panicked crowds, before eventually finding one another again. They fight over a cast the narrator has had made of her head and hands, recalling the fact that the narrator had earlier had a cast of J.’s hands made, making N(athalie) another double of J. The cast is a death mask, a simulacrum of her form, an uncanny presence of J. as an object which survives her, lives on and remains after her death. N(athalie) reacts strongly against the idea, and the narrative ends with the two disagreeing, their relationship presumably over. A short coda, cut in its entirety when Blanchot revised the novella for republication in 1971, considers the ethical demand on the reader, who

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is asked to consider the ways in which the author lives on in the text but otherwise, as another moment of irredeemable loss, so that they are impressed and inscribed in the text, which functions as their own death mask. Read in this light, the entire book becomes a document of cryptomimesis. Like Bataille’s early piece ‘Notre-Dames de Rheims’, Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort is a work that links the Gothic with the trauma of modernity, this time in dealing with the Second World War rather than the First. Indeed, while the narrator excuses himself from dwelling on a seemingly inessential or personal story during this time of great crisis,82 and notwithstanding the clear sense in which the title and plot of L’Arrêt de mort foreshadows L’instant de ma mort and Blanchot’s own trauma, the novella nevertheless also passes comment on the ­world-historical events in which it is set, allegorising them. J.’s suspended death, that moment between her initially passing and her final and irreplaceable loss seems to read the period of the Munich Crisis as a moment of the suspension, the arrest (l’arrêt) of the impending death of the war itself. In its modernism, L’Arrêt de mort reads historical time as out of joint: the narrator remarks that the only date he can be sure of is Wednesday, 13 October 1938, but this was a date that in point of fact fell on a Thursday.83 Such displacements mean that the narrative is untimely or Unzeitgemässe, another kind of uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit, with history itself becoming haunted, Gothic. Likewise, in the second narrative, all of Paris becomes a gothic space, emptied of life, uneasy and unfamiliar, shrouded in both literal and metaphorical darkness. The narrator calls the past, and his memories of it, ‘an inaccessible, unreal country’,84 recalling Hamlet’s description of death (III.i.78), but the phrase also describes France during the period. With seemingly nothing to do but await the German aggression, all of Western Europe is ghosted by the presence of the yet-unrealised ‘disaster’, the traces of which insists everywhere, promising violence, death and destruction.85

Notes



1. The best available biography of Bataille in English is Michel Surya’s Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London, Verso, 2002). 2. ‘Préface a l’histoire de l’oeil’, Œuvres completes, 3: 59; Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), 76. A note on translations: I give references to Bataille’s French to the Œuvres completes, followed by a reference to the standard English translation where one exists, for ease of reference. Translations are occasionally silently modified, as appropriate. Likewise, citations to other works in French and German are given first to the original, then to the translation. 3. The surviving documents of the Collège are reproduced in Denis Hollier, ed., Le Collège de Sociologie (Paris, Gallimard, 1979); The College of Sociology, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 4. On Bataille’s meeting with Blanchot, see Surya, Georges Bataille, 312–15, and for his meeting with Benjamin, see Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014), 518–20.

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5. See Surya, Georges Bataille, 252. Lacan would later marry Bataille’s wife, Sylvia Maklès (1908–1993), after they had divorced. 6. See Jacques Derrida’s important essay on Bataille in L’Écriture et la Différence (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 369–407; Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, Routledge, 2001), 317–31. 7. Bataille, ‘Notre-Dames de Rheims’, Œuvres completes, 1: 67. For a reading of this short piece, one of Bataille’s less well known, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989), 14–23. 8. Ibid., 1: 612. 9. Ibid., 1: 614. 10. See Surya, Georges Bataille, 17–18. Bataille discusses the point in his ‘Préface’, Œuvres completes, 3: 61; Story, 77. 11. Ibid., 3: 60; 77. 12. Bataille, ‘Rêve’, Œuvres completes, 2: 9, 10; ‘Dream’, Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3, 4. 13. Bataille, Histoire de rats, Œuvres completes, 3: 122; The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, City Lights, 2001), 37. 14. See Jeremy Biles, ‘A story of rats: Associations on Bataille’s simulacrum of abjection’, Performance Research vol. 19, issue 1 (2014), 111–25. 15. Sigmund Freud, Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940–1952), 7: 391; Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001), 10: 166. For more on the comparison between Freud and Bataille’s rats, see Biles, A Story of Rats, 112–14. 16. Bataille, L’érotisme, Œuvres completes, 10: 17; Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London, Marion Boyars, 2006), 11. 17. Ibid., 10: 20; 14. 18. Ibid., 10: 35; 31. 19. Ibid., 10: 58–65; 55–62. Compare in particular Freud’s comment that ‘the aim of all life is death’ in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), Gesammelte Werke, 13: 39; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, 18: 37. 20. Bataille, L’érotisme, Œuvres completes, 10: 91–92; Eroticism, 90–91. 21. Ibid., 10: 50; 47. 22. Ibid., 10: 40, 42; 37, 39. 23. ‘Préface à la transgression’, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, 4 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), 1: 233–50, 237; ‘A Preface to Transgression’, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000), 69–87, 73. 24. Bataille, L’érotisme, Œuvres completes, 10: 66; Eroticism, 63. 25. Bataille, ‘La notion de dépense’, Œuvres completes, 1: 311; ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Visions of Excess, 123. 26. Bataille, La Part maudite, Œuvres completes, 7: 27–33; The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, 2 vols (New York, Zone Books, 1991), 1: 19–27. 27. Bataille, ‘La valeur d’usage de D.A.F. de Sade’, Œuvres completes, 2: 56; ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’, Visions of Excess, 92. 28. Ibid., 2: 62–63; 97. 29. Bataille, L’érotisme, Œuvres completes, 10: 30; Eroticism, 25. 30. Like Bataille, Kafka was influenced by the gothic of Huysmans, whom he had read, and French decadence more broadly, with his story ‘In der Strafkolonie’ [In the Penal Colony] (1919) modelled on Octave Mirbeau’s (1848–1917) Le Jardin des supplices [The Torture Garden] (1899).

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31. Bataille, La littérature et le Mal, Œuvres completes, 9: 171; Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2012), 3. 32. Ibid., 9: 182; 17. 33. Ibid., 9: 178–79; 14. 34. Ibid., 9: 179; 14. 35. Ibid., 9: 255; 102. 36. Ibid., 9: 256; 104. 37. Bataille, Le procès de Gilles de Rais, Œuvres completes, 10: 300; The Trial of Gilles de Rais, 2004: 31–32. 38. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1891), 75–76; The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), 46. 39. Bataille, Le procès, Œuvres completes, 10: 308; The Trial, 38; and compare L’érotisme, Œuvres completes, 9: 252–53; Eroticism, 100. 40. Bataille, Le procès, Œuvres completes, 10: 282; The Trial, 17. 41. Ibid., 10: 290; 24. 42. Ibid., 10: 291; 25. 43. Ibid., 10: 291, 294; 25, 27. 44. Ibid., 10: 294; 27. 45. Ibid., 10: 306, 318; 36, 46. 46. Bataille, La littérature, Œuvres completes, 9: 254; Literature, 102. 47. Bataille, Histoire de l’oeil, Œuvres completes, 1: 46; Story, 43. 48. Ibid., 1: 63–64; 61–62. 49. Bataille, La littérature, Œuvres completes, 9: 247–49; Literature, 95–97. 50. Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 19; Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1991), 14. 51. Ibid., 60; 48. 52. Ibid., 20; 15. 53. Ibid., 25; 19. 54. Ibid., 27; 21. 55. Ibid., 12; 6. 56. Ibid., 32; 24. 57. Ibid., 41; 32. 58. Klossowski, Les Lois de l’hospitalité (Paris, Gallimard, 1965), 16; Roberte Ce Soir and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York, Marion Boyars, 1989), 100. 59. Klossowski, Sade, 44, 125; 34, 90. 60. Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris, Mercure de France, 1969), 94; Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London, Continuum, 2005), 45. 61. Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963), 18; Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004), 9. 62. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), 11, 12. This edition includes both the French original and an English translation of Blanchot’s récit, followed by Derrida’s important essay on it. 63. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris, Gallimard, 1947); Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1980). 64. See Carla Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 65. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 4, 5. 66. Blanchot, L’Arrêt de mort (Paris, Gallimard, 1948), 13; Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis (New York, Station Hill Press, 1998), 5.

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67. Ibid., 22; 11. 68. Ibid., 12; 4. 69. Ibid., 28; 15. 70. Ibid., 35; 19, 20. 71. Ibid., 36; 20. 72. Ibid., 39; 22. 73. Ibid., 46; 27. On the question of repetition and the death-drive, see Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Gesammelte Werke, 12: 248–49, 255; ‘The “Uncanny”’, Standard Edition, 17: 235–36, 242; and see also Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Gesammelte Werke, 13: 19–20, 34–40; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, 18: 20–21, 33–38. 74. Blanchot, L’Arrêt de mort, 48; Death Sentence, 28. 75. Ibid., 51; 29. 76. Ibid., 60–61, 65; 35, 38, 77. Ibid., 106; 66. 78. Ibid., 78; 47, 48. 79. Ibid., 56; 32. 80. Ibid., 86, 91; 52, 56. 81. Ibid., 100; 61. 82. Ibid., 76; 46. 83. Ibid., 11; 4. 84. Ibid., 57; 33. 85. On the ‘disaster’, see Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris, Gallimard, 1980); The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

Bibliography Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, 2 vols (New York, Zone Books, 1991). ———, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London, Marion Boyars, 2006). ———, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2012). ———, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1970–1988). ———, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001). ———, The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, City Lights, 2001). ———, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles, Amok, 1991). ———, Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Biles, Jeremy, “A story of rats: Associations on Bataille’s simulacrum of abjection”, Performance Research 19, no. 1 (2014): 111–125. Blanchot, Maurice, L’Arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). ———, Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis (New York, Station Hill Press, 1998). ———, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris, Gallimard, 1980). ———, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004). ———, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963). ———, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Blanchot, Maurice, and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000). Castricano, Carla Jodey, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

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Derrida, Jacques, L’Écriture et la Différence (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1967). ———, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, Routledge, 2001). Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014). Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, 4 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1994). ———, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000). Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940–1952). ———, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001). Hollier, Denis, ed., Le Collège de Sociologie (Paris, Gallimard, 1979). ———, The College of Sociology, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988). ———, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989). Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Là-Bas (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1891). ———, The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001). Klossowski, Pierre, Le Baphomet (Paris, Mercure de France, 1965). ———, The Baphomet, trans. Sophie Hawkes and Stephen Sartarelli (New York, Eridanos Press, 1988). ———, Les Lois de l’hospitalité (Paris, Gallimard, 1965). ———, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London, Continuum, 2005). ———, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris, Mercure de France, 1969). ———, Roberte Ce Soir and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York, Marion Boyars, 1989). ———, Sade mon prochain, precede de Le Philosophe scélérat (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1967). ———, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1991). Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris, Gallimard, 1947). ———, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1980). Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London, Verso, 2002).

Dark Modernisms Matt Foley

As Daniel Darvay has suggested, in established criticism both modernism and the Gothic are understood as “prismatic categories that easily lend themselves to multiple shapes and configurations”.1 The aesthetic characteristics by which the Gothic and modernism are defined rarely mirror each other. In this chapter, though, I suggest that there is a modernist gothic body of writing and that several important modernist contributors made new the aesthetics of terror and horror by establishing distinctly modernist motifs of transgression and haunting in their fiction and art. With perhaps the exception of the writing of the Surrealists, a productive engagement with the Gothic tradition of writing is rarely signalled explicitly in modernist theories of the aesthetic. Indeed, a paradox haunts the connections between twentieth-century modernism and Romantic and Victorian Gothic. The moderns had an anxiety over being seen to engage with such lowbrow and mass-market forms; one “which becomes visible in the readiness with which modernist authors tend to find the Gothic tradition useful while emphasizing its uselessness”.2 The Gothic is the art of nightmares and excess, of course; and, even at its most traumatised, modernism tends to show a certain restraint in its rendering of terror, while, certainly in the British modernisms of the interwar period, horror is the stuff of the Front rather than of artifice. Yet, the scarcity of overlap in content or form between modernism and the Gothic should not deter scholars from exploring modernism’s rarely rendered gothic iconography. Indeed, modernism, loosely defined, is the art and literature of fragmentation. Why would we expect its relationship to any existing forms to be simple or merely derivative? In this chapter, I focus on reading moments of haunting, excess, or transgression in predominantly British, Irish, and Continental modernisms that, in many cases, to recall that well-worn phrase that titled a 1934 collection of essays by Ezra Pound, ‘make new’ the Gothic. Yet, this remaking of the Romantic or Victorian Gothic— the two dominant historical modes that predate early modernist experimentation of

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the fin de siècle—should not be read as the visionary modernist artist transcending the old and reinventing the wheel entirely. Instead, the modernist remaking of terror connects to two key psychological contexts that are already emerging by the late nineteenth century: the birth of the unconscious (in culture) and the turn towards an aesthetics of interiority in writing. Gothic modernisms is not a neatly definable critical field. Two essays collections appeared in the 2000s that, however briefly, seemed to signal the emergence of a new line of enquiry in gothic studies that revisited and recast the assumption that the Gothic (as a lowbrow, mass-market form) had little connection to the often self-proclaimed “high” art of the intellectual elites of modernism.3 The essays and arguments proffered in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace’s (eds.) Gothic Modernisms (2001) and John Paul Riquelme’s (ed.) Gothic and Modernism (2008) are invaluable foundations for the field. Their scopes begin to chart a gothic modernist canon—that is, a regime for categorising these texts—which could be said to begin with the publication of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and end with Samuel Beckett’s later (and ghostly) writings such as his Ill Seen/Ill Said (1981). Gothic modernisms, then, encompass both early and late modernisms, as well as the texts published in the interwar years that make up the majority of this body of writing. Monographs that aim to interrogate, in a sustained way, the Gothic presences in modernist literature, however, are few and far between. Notably, Daniel Darvay’s Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature (2016) draws a detailed and critical lineage between gothic ideas of the English Reformation and the modernist concerns of Joseph Conrad, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and others. Focusing on place, Sam Wiseman’s Locating the Gothic in British Modernity (2019) has more recently provided a long overdue, extended, and illuminating analysis of the connections between late-Victorian and modernist Gothic. Of course, there are books that are focussed on primarily modernist aesthetics that, too, engage with what may be considered gothic concerns but whose methodologies do not wholly sit within the field of gothic studies. Such texts argue that the modernists recast iconographies of the dead and the ghostly to distinguish themselves from their Romantic and Victorian precursors.4 In her reading of predominantly American modernisms through the lens of posthumanism, Erin E. Edwards contends, for instance, that modernist representations of the corpse are often “anti-representational and anti-optic, requiring the reader to engage with unfamiliar forms of corporeality”.5 Such representations of dead bodies work to confront readers or viewers with questions about their own humanity; this modernist “corpse-power” is a radical departure from the conciliatory spirit of death photography of the Victorian period and those cultural images of the dead that form part of more life-affirming (and perhaps narcissistic) processes of mourning. Indeed, one central concept may go some way to explaining the rarity of modernist Gothic. Broadly speaking, modernism is a conscious rejection of Victorianism. Modernist practitioners promised to destroy the sentimental, and often spectral, pathos of nineteenth-century letters. This antagonist attitude to Victorianism comes to the fore, for instance, in the diatribes that Wyndham Lewis penned for his BLAST magazines in 1914 and 1915. As Lewis notes, and indeed attacks, in his short essay “Vortices and Notes: Futurism, Magic and Life” (1914),

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many cornerstones of nineteenth-century literature invoked the gothic imagery of haunted spaces and places, such as in the fiction of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontës. In the nineteenth-century’s final decades, amidst cultural anxieties over the emergence of modern sexuality and the imagined threat of reverse colonisation, which was symbolic of British imperial decline, the figure of the gothic monster proliferated, too, in characters such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Richard Marsh’s orientalist monster The Beetle. The early modernists were not immune to these gothic currents and hauntings (Conrad’s sea stories; Henry James’ writing of Bly in his The Turn of the Screw) and excesses (Baudelaire’s corpses; Wilde’s Dorian Gray) abound in transnational pre-modernist texts. Yet, the modernists of London—the “Men of 1910” and beyond—came to consciously reject the aesthetic of the Gothic in the high years of their experimentation, rise, and influence. In a selection of essays and reviews in the 1920s, including the piece now collected as “Gothic Romance” (1921),6 Virginia Woolf lauded the modern ghost stories of Henry James, on the one hand, and rejected the gothic lineage from which James undoubtedly draws on the other. T. S. Eliot appropriates the urban imagery of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, as well as the gothic atmosphere of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1898), in The Waste Land (1922), but in the same move cleanses these texts of their excesses. Thus, the London-centric modernists’ attitude to the Gothic is contradictory: a game of concealment and yet of subtle derivation. In certain modernist currents of experimentation, a solidity of form was emphasised, one that may be read as a direct challenge to the ephemerality of the rapidly changing world of late modernity. An important example of this privileging of plasticity of form, Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist project brought together a network of poets, sculptors, and painters who, at least for brief time from 1914 to 1915, clustered their practice around Lewis’ principles of art. Ever eager to assume the dynamic role of networker and promoter, Ezra Pound played an important part in promoting the group’s work through forging intellectual and interpersonal connections between Lewis and the Imagists; although, it is really the art of Lewis and the French sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska that encapsulates the Vorticist project—and its fixation upon the “vortext” or moment frozen in time—most neatly. In the BLAST years, Lewis collaborated with that elder statesman of English letters Ford Madox Ford and he benefited from Ford’s connections to the established men of letters in London. In turn, Lewis allowed his artwork to adorn the cover of Ford’s free-verse war poem Antwerp (1915), which itself ends with the ghostly arrival of Belgian refugees—mostly women and children—at London’s Charing Cross. True to form, Lewis wished to distance himself from the impressionistic qualities of Ford’s (and Conrad’s) writing. On the surface, at least, the external aesthetics of the Vorticists could not be more detached from the spectral aesthetics of interiority presented in the writing of, say, Virginia Woolf from the early 1920s onwards, which elaborated upon the earlier Impressionist aesthetic. The work of the Vorticists does become haunted, though, and these spectral impasses are tied to the inherent possibilities presented by the modernist desire to achieve an aesthetics of totality.

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In modernism, the aesthetic is also often doctrine, a series of rules that, although altering from group to group (from the Imagists to the Futurists to the Surrealists), all carry the force of law and the promise of achieving an impossibly pristine form. This is an idealised, theorised aesthetic that could represent the artist’s influences, their practices, and the contexts of late modernity which they either engage with or deplore. As exemplified in the ghostly figures of femininity that populate his pre-war novel Tarr (1918/1928), it is womanhood that Lewis’ ideology of the aesthetic fails to neatly demarcate. Lewis’ eponymous avatar in the text treats femininity either as abject or spectral. For instance, Tarr’s complex relationship with his fiancé Bertha is represented often in spectral shades. Her tastes, and her aesthetic, become aligned with German Romanticism; that is, to a mode that Lewis is actively writing against. In spite of the explicit opposition that is constructed between these supposedly masculine (Vorticism) and feminine (Romanticism) aesthetics, there seems always to be a scrap of Tarr’s desire that renders Bertha as attractive to him. Tarr tries to convince himself that Bertha is repulsive—full of sentiment and bathetic emotion—and he constructs her as his antithesis and other. Yet, she remains a paradoxical object of desire who troubles and haunts Tarr’s pugilistic rhetoric in this gloomy rendering of pre-war Paris. We can, then, understand the gothic turns to modernism—this making new of representations of terror and horror—as relying upon explicit disavowals that are followed by quiet appropriation. Reading gothic modernism through such a lens would, I suggest, account for Woolf’s dismissal of the Gothic Romance in her review of Edith Birkhead’s Tales of Terror: A Study of Gothic Fiction (1920), on the one hand, and her lauding of the ghost stories of Henry James, on the other. The Turn of the Screw may include direct reference to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as the psychological terrors at Bly unfold for James’ governess, but Woolf saw in the writing of James a distinctly “modern” incarnation of the ghostly tale that locates the spectral as a psychological and subjective sensation or symptom. James’ invocation of Udolpho seems focalised through a governess whose sanity is unravelling and that choice, in itself, places the appropriateness and relevance of such a comparison between the old Gothic and the new in question: “Was there a ‘secret’ at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in suspected confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained”.7 The intertexts invoked here are Romantic (Radcliffe) and Victorian (the “relative” imprisoned could be an allusion to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre [1847]). James’ text is “writerly”—to borrow a term from Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1971)—in that the reader co-constructs and interprets the narrative. In fits of hysteria, does the governess imagine Florence’s and Giles’ responses to the spectres she sees at Bly, and then read these as confirming her own visions, which are in fact hallucinatory? Or, in the other possible interpretation, is the governess acutely sensitive to the ghostly and is this an attitude to the departed that she shares with the innocence of children? It is this hesitation regarding narrative closure that makes the

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story “modern” even if it relies upon much of the paraphernalia of mid-Victorian Gothic, such as in its setting, and in the motif of the distressed governess. Indebted to James, Woolf’s work presents a somewhat paradoxical psychologising of the ghostly tale. On the one hand, interiority is presented as the gateway to discovering the truth of alienated modern experience. To paraphrase Woolf’s ­oft-cited injunction from her essay “Modern Fiction”, which she wrote in 1919 but which was not published until her experimental short story collection Monday or Tuesday appeared in 1921, she sought to capture the myriad atoms that fall upon the mind; in so doing, her aesthetic would both usurp the mimetic and materialist modes of Victorian realism and inaugurate a new, more authentic and psychologically inscribed form of mimesis. Time and again, however, Woolf’s fiction demonstrates that interiority has its own horrors. In her short story “The Mark on the Wall” (1921), for instance, the narrator wakes from a “midnight dream of horror” and, to assuage their fear, they seek out reassurance from the material world: “one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours”.8 Losing touch with the “outside”— so as to become lost forever in the labyrinthine structures of thought—is a radical form of solipsism of which Woolf’s writing is cautious. Such danger is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the fate of the shell-shocked veteran of Mrs Dalloway (1925) Septimus Warren Smith. Presumably the results of the trauma of the Front, Septimus’ illness leaves him detached entirely from his wife, Lucrezia, and from the social and cultural codes of London life. The relationship he feels most profoundly is with the ghost—or rather the hallucination—of his fallen captain Evans. For Septimus, there is no route out of madness—and this, in part, is due to the poor “common sense” treatment that he receives from medical men after the war. Indeed, his eventual suicide is not only symbolic of the lasting damage of the First World War. It also demonstrates the horror that lurks in absolute solipsism—an excessive investment in interiority that occurs once the saving function of materiality is left behind. Thus, Woolf’s staging of interiority, we may suggest, does not entirely usurp the importance of the “object”—that is, of the material, of touch, and of tactility—to anchoring the self; instead, there is at work a polarity of experience. These two poles of being (interior and exterior) are central to Woolf’s aesthetic. Although often mediated through her measured handling of stream of consciousness—that is, her narrators’ often complex renderings of sustained Free Indirect Discourse in a distinctly Woolfian and unifying voice—there is still a privileged place for the material. In stories like “The Mark on the Wall”, tactility is the gateway to experiencing a form of presence that, however briefly, acts as an antidote to the terror and horror of interiority that so shapes these gothic modernisms. If, at least for Woolf’s narrator in “The Mark on the Wall”, the dreamscape is a space of horror, then for the Surrealists in the 1920s it represented something more liberating: the gateway to the unconscious. It was the writings of Sigmund Freud, particularly his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which most influenced the Surrealists’ understanding of the interpretive, transformative, and even

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political potential of the imagery of the dreamscape. The purveyors of surrealism had a respect for the Gothic Romance that was equal to Woolf’s—and some of her fellow modern’s—disdain for the genre. André Breton penned the “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924 having already fashioned himself as an acolyte of Freud’s— beginning a correspondence with the old master from 1919 and visiting him in 1921. The youthful and experimental forms of avant-garde art that Breton produced bamboozled rather than gratified Freud. Nevertheless, as Freud would turn to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories to elucidate his theory of the uncanny in 1919, so, too, would the Surrealists engage with the nightmare literature of the Gothic in to order to locate and elaborate upon their understandings of the unconscious. In a brief footnote to the first manifesto of surrealism Breton acknowledges the genius, at least in his eyes, of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and its dreamlike narrative logic and imagery.9 Even if Breton’s reference to Lewis appears only in the paratext of the 1924 manifesto, the connection between surrealism and the Gothic has long been recognised by critics. In his study The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (1938), Montague Summers derided the English Surrealists for an uninspired appropriation of gothic iconography; however, a more nuanced reading of the connected, hybrid identities of Gothic and surrealist writing can be found in J. H. Matthews’ Surrealism and the Novel (1966). In his exploration of the afterlife of surrealism, Matthews begins by considering the mode’s precursors, and in so doing dedicates a chapter to the Gothic Romance. As Matthews points out, and has long been recognised, Horace Walpole’s comments in his 1765 preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) that the Gothic is a hybrid of the modern novel and medieval Romance reflect the heart of the genre. Matthews points out that Breton, too, was conscious of the hybridity of what he hoped would be a utopian experience of “surreality”; that is, “the future resolution of … two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality”.10 Breton viewed himself as an acolyte of Freud’s but his surrealist project moved beyond the attempted “curing” of neurotic individuals as surrealism tapped into the anarchic spirit of its precursor Dada. Even if it is clear that Breton’s ideal of surrealism as politically revolutionary never reached fruition, surrealist imagery does suggest that opening up a pathway into the unconscious leads to a personal liberation of desire and sexuality, and this is one of the concerns that surrealism shares with the Gothic novel or the roman noir. As Neil Matheson has argued, the connections between surrealism and the Gothic are divisible into three broad categories: (1) their mutual exploration of shared “aesthetic categories” and “theoretical concepts” (such as the dreamscape or the marvellous); (2) their interest in the “pre-rational, ‘medieval’ mentality;” and, (3) through surrealism’s adoption of gothic iconography, such as “the castle, the convent, the accursed outside, or the supernatural”.11 Perhaps the most explicit surrealist engagement with the Gothic Romance can be found in Dorothea Tanning’s painting of 1944 “A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today”. Tanning once confessed in an interview that “[i]n the forties I was in a kind of gothic mood”.12 Intriguingly, she felt that the Gothic aesthetic allowed her to quench her desire to present the human form in abstract painting. The iconography of “A Mrs Radcliffe

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Called Today” is identifiably Gothic—there is a flying buttress familiar to the architecture of the gothic revival; a fortified castle wall; and an isolated figure of femininity stalking the perimeters of a gothic edifice. In surrealist fashion, the woman is not entirely identifiable, as flames burn brightly in place of her head. Breton, of course, connected his work to Lewis. The Monk has become emblematic of a masculine Gothic preoccupied with lust, body horror, and objectification of the female form. Tanning’s appreciation of Radcliffe suggests new directions for critics of the gothic modernist aesthetic to pursue; that is, lines of enquiry that speak of a female surrealist Gothic and that critique—rather than indulge in—the surrealist liberation of masculine desire and fantasy in the name of revolutionary aesthetics. These theories of masculinised “surreality” are fleshed out in surrealist cinema, and in particular in the standout collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali Un Chien Andalou (1929). As a fledgling scriptwriter Buñuel had recently helped to adapt a screen version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1844), which was directed by Jean Epstein (1928), and marketed as a horror film upon its release. Yet, in spite of having already dabbled in transgressive material, Buñuel was so nervous about the audience’s response to Un Chien Andalou—his directorial debut—that at its premiere he kept rocks in his pockets in case the invited guests became riotous. The theatre’s audience included Breton and the Parisian surrealist set. Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s artistic film took their movement beyond the automatic writing and forms of collage that are privileged in Breton’s manifesto of 1924. Buñuel may have been cautious as he knew that the film was doubly transgressive: both explicit and uninterested in narrative convention. The surrealist worldview is inaugurated in Un Chien Andalou through body horror, and an act of violence that may also be read as gendered. At the denouement of the film’s opening scene, Buñuel himself appears on screen, sharpens a blade, and cuts through the eye of a young woman (to achieve this gory effect, the camera performs an extreme close-up of a dead cow’s eye being slit).13 The film’s female lead or “young woman” (Simonne Mareuil) is the subject of this violence, and the new gaze of the Surrealists seems quintessentially male, a position which connects with its predilection for objectifying the female body. Later in the film, the liberation of an unrefined masculine desire is symbolised in the paradoxical imagery of the living.dead. The lustful protagonist (Pierre Batcheff) becomes zombified as his hands roam uninvited across the ever-transforming body of the young woman. Her clothed chest morphs into a nude mannequin’s body and then transforms, again, into a pair of naked buttocks. All the while, blood drips from the assaulter’s mouth, and his unruly libidic perversions paint a picture of gothic excess, as his hands continue to smother these objects of desire. The zombie is a figure that is intuitively associated, then, with body horror; but modernism, too, draws from the symbolism of wandering corpses and somnambulism to evoke terror—with somnambulism being taken up, at least thematically, in Djuna Barnes’ surrealist Gothic novel Nightwood (1936). The most iconic gothic modernist figure of somnambulism, however, is found in the German Expressionist cinema of Robert Wiene. His The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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bears many of the hallmarks of Expressionism in its mise-en-scène; the chiaroscuro lighting and painted shadow play; the geometric scenery and spiralling set; and, its anti-realist costuming and make-up. Space is essentially psychologised as the film’s central concerns of madness, the dizzying effects of authoritarian power, and transgression are reflected in its asymmetrical and claustrophobic stage set. Recalling the Gothic tradition in literature, the film has a narrative frame that is set in an asylum; one that was added by Wiene to cast in doubt the veracity of the protagonist Francis’ story that is conveyed in the embedded narrative. In Francis’ account, he discovers that a hypnotist named Caligari has been mesmerising the somnambule Caesar (played by a gothically styled Conrad Veidt) and compelling him to commit a sleuth of murders. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s critique of authoritarian power is a theme that it shares with other early gothic cinema in the German tradition, such as The Student of Prague (1913), which was co-directed by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye, Otto Rippert’s Homunculus (1916), and Wegener’s The Golem trilogy (1915–1920). The tensions brought to the fore by the modern clashing of bourgeois, democratic government with seemingly ever-persisting aristocratic power structures fascinated German filmmakers before, during, and after the First World War. After Caligari, the cinema of the Weimar Republic would give birth to one of the most unsettling monsters of all early gothic film: Max Schreck’s portrayal of Count Orlok in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). The paradoxical fear of, and fascination with, the strong man authoritarian figure—such as Caligari—maps, at least in part, onto the allure and repulsion felt for the figure of the aristocratic vampire as it is depicted in Murnau’s film. These gothic modernisms would go on to influence Universal Horror and the genre cinema of America. Not merely limited to surrealist excess or the magic of somnambulism, a broader zombification of modernism has been invoked, for instance, in critical discussions of T. S. Eliot’s centrepiece of Anglo-American modernist production The Waste Land.14 Such readings of the modernist walking dead centre upon the London Bridge fragment of “The Burial of the Dead”, which, drawing from Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1320) as a patterning text, presents a modernist crowd traversing an urban purgatory. In part, the gothic shades of The Waste Land, if we may discern any, emerge from the sublime intensity of Eliot’s verse as it fragments Victorian and Edwardian standards,15 such as the haunted house. From its dedication to Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal, who fell during the Great War at the Battle of Gallipoli, to the sailors of the Punic Wars, to the allusion to the “demobbed” husband of the “Sweet Ladies” interlude, figures of fallen and returning soldiers appear throughout the poem. In “A Game of Chess”, Eliot’s epigrammatic verse renders a ghostly conversation in the quotidian, which invokes the trenches of the Front through the imagery of rats’ alley. We may read this particular fragment of Eliot’s modern epic as the poem’s very own haunted house, particularly if we attribute the voice that is not reported in speech marks to a fallen soldier, be they a spectral visitant to the quotidian, or merely imagined by the other interlocutor. The gothic modernist preference for inference—and this

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particular epic poem’s formal montage of scenes—leaves both the living and the dead disembodied as the fragmented narrative moves forward without closure. Eliot’s haunted house is only implied but Woolf more explicitly engages with the tradition of the ghost story in the first fragmentary instalment of her collection Monday or Tuesday. In “A Haunted House”, it is the dead who seem to be the repositories of joy and love, while the living suffers from entropy as they have lost the way of their own desire. In a less experimental form, Elizabeth Bowen takes up this theme, too, in her debut short story collection Encounters (1923), particularly in “The Shadowy Third”. In Bowen’s early story, spectral presences and space are modernised almost to the point of mundanity. The “shadowy” gaze that haunts the dull (but living) couple Martin and Pussy is merely the implied presence and imagined gaze of Martin’s first wife, of whom he never speaks. Such silence from Martin, however paradoxically, makes Pussy all the more sensitive to the fact that she is walking in the shoes of the departed. As has been elaborated upon by critics such as Maud Ellmann,16 thirdness is itself a spectral economy and Bowen’s fiction and novels often play upon such multiplicities in social relations to create a sense of drama and crisis, such as in her gothic modernist novel The House in Paris (1935). Bowen’s writing does not reach the experimental heights of the work of her compatriots such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but her novels’ handlings of temporality, and her indebtedness to Woolf for a sustained, third-person mediation of stream of consciousness, position her as an important contributor to both modernism and to intermodernism. It was the ghost story, perhaps, that was most explicitly theorised as “modern” by the gothic modernists, with Bowen and her contemporaries contributing critical forewords to some of the many ghost story collections that proliferated in the interwar period. The modernist short story is the literature of modern epiphany; that is, the form’s narrative progressions, if we may use such a phrase to describe the renderings of atrophied quotidians these stories often undertake, culminate in moments of revelation and self-knowledge. As Dominic Head noted some time ago, the modernist short story reflects or “captures the episodic nature of t­wentieth-century experience”.17 These episodes are often fragmentary, ephemeral, and open to hauntings. In his posthumously published Stephen Hero (1944), Joyce’s narrator defines the epiphany as “the most delicate and evanescent of moments” and it is the fragile nature of such revelations, particularly when they involve opening up oneself to melancholic self-knowledge or ethical experiences of loss,18 which are conveyed in the ghostly registers of gothic modernisms. In “The Dead”, which is the final story of Joyce’s seminal Dubliners (1914), Gabriel Conroy is a repressed, officious male lead. He is accused of being a “West Briton” by those sympathetic to the nationalist cause in the story, and he seems both alienated from “authentic” Irish culture, and from his wife Gretta. In her (now lost) youth, Gretta was passionately attracted to a young man, now departed, by the name of Michael Furey. Furey’s spirit seems to echo throughout the dimly lit streets of middle-class Dublin until his presence is more explicitly invoked in Gretta’s confession of her love for

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him: “It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate”.19 The memory of Furey seems, for Gretta, to encapsulate a lost Celtic energy that is libidinal, tender, and romantic. That Furey, too, was “delicate” suggests that a Joycean epiphany in the present moment of the narrative—that is, Gretta’s realisation of the symbolic importance of Michael as a marker of what she has lost—is connected back to a period of intense being in the past. In his account of the “neo-Gothic” ghost story of the late Victorian and modernist periods, Luke Thurston has argued that modern hauntings push “the text to the edges of signification through figures of music or epiphany, voice or gaze”.20 In “The Dead”, which is perhaps itself on the edge of being a neo-Gothic ghost story, there is a sensuous intermingling of music and epiphany that suggests that revelation in this modernist purgatory— however fleetingly—is achievable when one listens to (and learns from) the ghosts and desires of the past. Existing critical work on gothic modernisms, at least that which labels itself as part of gothic studies, predominantly reads British, Irish, and Continental modernisms; although many key gothic modernist texts—such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Barnes’ Nightwood—were written by American emigres to Europe. In the American Gothic, William Faulkner has been read as a gothic modernist, and his short story “A Rose for Emily” (1930), as well as his novels Sanctuary (1930) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), evoke the often visceral iconography of the Southern Gothic in modernist prose. Faulkner’s renderings of horror—and the monstrous everyday— provide a counterpoint to the more refined New York hauntings of Henry James, and to Edith Wharton’s ghost stories that critique masculinity, such as those found in her Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). Collectively, these examples of the modernist Gothic may, at least on first inspection, suggest a rich canon of writing to explore as critics begin to conceptualise the multiple relationships between modernism and the American Gothic more closely. Indeed, in an important recent contribution to the field that reads H. P. Lovecraft’s writing through the contexts of religious and spatial modernisms, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard provide “a different map of modernism, one that is not core-centric and primarily fascinated by metropolitan centers such as Paris or New York”.21 There is, then, no grand narrative that we can call upon to explain away the inherent dualities and aporias that come to the fore as we encounter these American Gothic modernisms. What, then, can we conclude with certainty about these fragmentary and transnational gothic modernisms? In canonical modernist literature—particularly British post-WWI writing—there is clearly a tendency to render ghostly scenes of modern purgatories to depict modern warfare and its aftermaths on the Front and at home. The London modernists—such as Woolf, Eliot, and Lewis—seem to either overtly deplore or discretely circumvent received Gothic representations of terror and horror. Yet, figurations of haunting and sublime terror do appear in their interwar writings. Contrastingly, forms of modernist gothic horror emerge more overtly in the interwar period in Continental Europe, particularly in avant-garde and Expressionist cinemas, which engage, respectively, with two important contexts of production: the birth of the psychoanalytic unconscious and the political

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(and ideological) legacies of the First World War. It is the modernist preference for dissonance over unity, perhaps, that most endures beyond these contexts and into the modern and contemporary Gothic. We need only think of the appropriation of atonal modernist music in gothic and horror cinema that came after German Expressionism—such as James Bernard’s scores for Hammer or the pillaging of Béla Bartók’s oeuvre in more contemporary horror films—to realise that the field will continue to develop as we explore ever more closely fragmentary, transnational, and transmedia gothic modernisms.

Notes

1. Daniel Darvay, Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), vi. 2. Ibid., 26. 3. See Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds.), Gothic Modernisms (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and John Paul Riquelme (ed.), Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 2008). 4. See Erin E. Edwards, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and Matt Foley, Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 5. Edwards, The Modernist Corpse, 33. 6. See Virginia Woolf, “Gothic Romance”, in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols. (New York, Harcourt, 1988), vol. III, 304–307. 7. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 132. 8. Virginia Woof, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 9. 9. André Breton, “From the First Manifesto of Surrealism”, in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwell, 2005), 718–741, 723. 10. Cited in J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor, MI, Michigan University Press, 1968), 16. 11. Neil Matheson, Surrealism and the Gothic: Castles of the Interior (Abingdon, Routledge, 2017), 6. 12. Dorothea Tanning, “A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today”, Dorothea Tanning: Painter, Sculptor, Writer (2013). Available Online: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-andwork/view/65/. Last accessed 21 February 2019. 13. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (dir.), Un Chien Andalou (1929). Available Online: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/000E5DDF?bcast=123875477. Last accessed 15 January 2019. 14. See, for instance, John Paul Riquelme, “Modernist Gothic”, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 33–34. 15. See Steven Vine, “Ecstatic or Terrible: The Waste Land’s ‘Criterion of’Sublimity’”, English, 60: 228, 45–65. 16. See Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 17. Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–2.

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18. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (Binghamton, NY, New Directions, 1944), 212. 19. James Joyce, Dubliners (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000), 220. 20. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (Abingdon, Routledge, 2012), 163. 21. Steven Shapiro and Philip Barnard, Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture (London, Bloomsbury, 2017), 146–147.

Bibliography Breton, André. ‘From the First Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwell, 2005), 718–741. Buñuel, Luis and Salvador Dali. Un Chien Andalou (1929). Available Online: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/000E5DDF?bcast=123875477. Last accessed 15 January 2019. Darvay, Daniel. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Edwards, Erin E. The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). Joyce, James. Dubliners (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000). Joyce, James. Stephen Hero (Binghamton, NY, New Directions, 1944). Matheson, Neil. Surrealism and the Gothic: Castles of the Interior (Abingdon, Routledge, 2017). Matthews, J. H. Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor, MI, Michigan University Press, 1968). Riquelme, John Paul. ‘Modernist Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014). Shapiro, Steven and Philip Barnard. Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture (London, Bloomsbury, 2017). Tanning, Dorothea. ‘A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today’ (1944), Dorothea Tanning: Painter, Sculptor, Writer (2013). Available Online: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/65/. Last accessed 21 February 2019. Thurston, Luke. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (Abingdon, Routledge, 2012). Woof, Virginia. The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001).

Post Modern Gothic

The Postmodern Genre Joakim Wrethed

The haunted house has been a recurring feature of the gothic genre ever since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Within the American literary canon, associations immediately tend to go to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In relation to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the latter historical reference is especially pertinent, since, as Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm have suggested: “Poe calls attention to the way the house itself seems to resist any conscious attempts to understand it”.1 Even if this trait partly applies to any gothic story in which supernatural things happen within a specific house or castle, it is even more striking in the case of House of Leaves. In this intricate narrative, it is indeed the house itself that constitutes a manifestation of irrational spatiality. In Leaves, the whole house has ontologically become a dream-space or nightmare-space that practically from the beginning displays its fearful asymmetry. From the outset, the dichotomies of inner and outer; psyche and world; past and present, have been disturbed. Similarly in “Usher”, the materiality of the house has amalgamated with Roderick Usher’s semi-deranged mind to such an extent that the character’s affectivity makes itself manifest as existing in complete symbiosis with the physicality of the building. These normally distinct realms are apparently inseparable since Usher’s belief in “the sentience of all vegetable things” has extended and “connected […] with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers” and eventually made him into the miserable wreck he is.2 Since the supernatural elements in “Usher” are witnessed by the narrator, the possibility of a strong emphasis on subjective ambiguity is weakened. That is also the case in Leaves because the rest of Navidson’s family are exposed to the same or similar uncanny experiences in The Navidson Record (the film that establishes the “main” narrative). In addition, quite early in the novel Navidson’s twin brother Tom, the friend Reston and the whole exploration team are called into investigate the idiosyncrasies of the house’s ontology. The Escher

J. Wrethed (*)  Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_67

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spatiality of the house is never questioned in terms of contending perspectives between different subjectivities, even though there of course exist distinctly individual responses to the house’s peculiarity.3 However, Danielewski utilises ambiguity extensively but in other ways and in other situations. Even though there are a great deal of similarities between the houses of “Usher” and Leaves, there are also significant differences. In “Usher” it is indicated that the past haunts Roderick in the form of his illness—hyperaesthesia and nervousness—which is “a family evil” that chains him “[t]o an anomalous species of terror”.4 Thus, there is the emblematic gothic haunting of an infected past that has infested the family and the mansion. In Leaves, the supernatural is causeless and belongs to the house as such, or more accurately, it is the house.5 This is mainly confirmed by the fact that different characters react differently to the house or the tale of the house. Before going more deeply into the specifically post-modern traits in Leaves, it is appropriate with a brief description of its central plot and its narratological structure. Danielewski’s work, which was first published online in 2000, mainly involves five intertwined narratological layers.6 Firstly, there is the film—shot by the distinguished photographer Will Navidson, his friends and family—that at least appears to be the “source narrative”. They have moved to the house on Ash Tree Lane to start a new life. The family consists of Will, his wife Karen and their two children. Supposedly, Will has cut and edited the film and a man named Zampanò has got hold of it and has tried to put it together in writing with the help of assistants, which is necessary since he himself is “blind as a bat”.7 This constitutes the second narratological layer. After Zampanò’s death, the remaining material and texts have ended up in the hands of a mentally and bodily scarred LA drug and sex addict Johnny Truant. This narrator makes up the third stratum of narration and Truant tells his story in close relation to Zampanò’s patchwork of the Navidson film, but he does it in the form of footnotes in the Courier font to distinguish it from Zampanò’s footnotes that are set in Times and the other editors’ notes that are denoted by Bookman font. According to Truant, the film itself does not seem to exist anymore, if it even ever existed.8 The fourth strand of narrative is House of Leaves itself as a book. This dimension is heavily influenced by the set of unknown editors who most certainly have gathered all of the material, textual as well as non-textual. It is also possible to regard the letters from Truant’s mother in the appendix as yet another level of narration. As is made clear already from this short summary, the text or rather the ­unlucid conglomerate of texts, is a highly complex entity that asks questions about text-ontology and ontology in general. Essentially, it perhaps asks the question whether human existence is just a temporary inscription in the meaningless void. A post-modern version of the actor that struts and frets an hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. Something that appears as more distinctly Gothic is that the house is haunted by something threatening and beast-like. This thing only makes itself known in the form of growls or sometimes scratch-marks and it transcends all three of the main narratological layers—Navidson’s, Zampanò’s (scratch-marks had been found close to Zampanò’s dead body) and Truant’s. Truant on several occasions feels the presence of this “something” that perhaps most resembles fear

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itself and how that affects the individual characters.9 The entity forces characters to confront something within themselves, which is different for different characters. This is also what in the film layer of the narrative makes Holloway—a member of Navidson’s exploration team that attempts to survey the house’s strange labyrinths—go insane and start shooting his team companions. In terms of the gothic tradition, there is something supernatural or semi-supernatural that affects characters in the present. This phenomenon is in itself never explained, but at least on Truant and Navidson’s narratological levels, there are more “realistic” past experiences that torment them. In Truant’s case, it is severe mental and physical abuse from his own biological mother and a foster father. For Navidson it is an ethical dilemma about a photograph he took of a starving girl with a vulture coming closer, together with guilt about shortcomings and failures in his marriage. In terms of the photograph, the haunting ethical predicament is about whether a Pulitzer winning photo actually parasitises on the girl. In short, the immorality of taking a photograph instead of trying to help her, even if only for a brief period of time before the inevitability of death. Like most gothic fiction, Leaves like “the beast, like the House itself, inhabits a borderland between the metaphoric and the literal, the imaginary and the real”.10 As we shall see, the gothic aspects are intricately intertwined with more clear-cut post-modern characteristics. Leaves obviously quickly establishes itself as a typical postmodern pastiche. It sifts out central gothic themes and takes them further through post-modern theoretical and philosophical concerns, but this is done without any overtly detectable intention of mocking or “over-writing” the gothic conventions. If it in instances plays with the Gothic through postmodernism, it also somehow plays with postmodernism through the Gothic. Therefore, pastiche might be the better overall label and Leaves shows how the Gothic transcends the post-modern discourse and potentially opens post-postmodern possibilities, perhaps referring to ­something Thomas Davidson calls “the uncanny in the information age”, pushing the post-modern to its very limits or beyond.11 Even though I do not wish to go as far as Maria Beville and rename the subgenre “Gothic-postmodernist”—in order to distinguish it from Post-modern Gothic—I would definitely contend that the following description made with other post-modern works in mind fits Leaves perfectly too: “[…] Gothic-postmodernist works do not merely supply entertainment value. They can and should be acknowledged as eagerly adept literary explorations of ontology, epistemology and selfhood”.12 This is precisely what Danielewski does throughout his palimpsest of postmodern/gothic narratives. The focus of what follows will be thematically or topically significant gothic themes that in turn are carefully scrutinised with the aim of highlighting what is specifically post-modern about them in Leaves. Most often that is just a matter of the degree of emphasis, since the post-modern tropes evidently have strong roots in the gothic genre of writing in the first place. I will begin by probing deeper into the concept of the haunted house. It will soon become clear that Danielewski skilfully and playfully deconstructs both the gothic genre and the postmodern discourse. As concluded by Josh Toth: “Postmodernism has done its job. Time to move on”.13 As an artwork in its own right, House of Leaves urges us to move on.

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In her chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, Carol Margaret Davison refers to Terry Castle’s argument that the haunted house is “the apposite locale for […] a fragmented post-Enlightenment subject haunted by pre-Enlightenment certainties and ideals”.14 In addition to the haunting of an old order, which we witness in Otranto, the Gothic challenges Enlightenment rationality more generally. This phenomenon seems to have followed the genre all the way into our times. Moreover, in a post-modern context, the Enlightenment ideals themselves are further defied by more recent discourses. If we allow ourselves to see the gothic genre as a reaction to Enlightenment doctrines, it immediately becomes quite obvious why the Gothic and the post-modern are in many respects intertwined from the start. If we list a few central tenets—the enumeration is of course by no means exhaustive—we are able to see how the Gothic and the post-modern subvert Enlightenment’s stipulated pillars of certainty: the self is stable, coherent and knowable, it is also rational and autonomous; language is the tool by which the subject gains knowledge about the world and language is trustworthy and transparent; the knowledge it produces is science, which is true and universally valid, etc. Already in The Castle of Otranto, we are invited to witness a general problematisation of these creeds. The son of the house and heir apparent, Conrad, is crushed by a huge helmet, “an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for a human being”.15 As this happens unexpectedly, it is seemingly completely causeless and irrational, making up the backdrop and setting the tone of the rest of the narrative. This makes clear from the very beginning of the novel that there is a reverse side to the rational order of knowing and that this aspect constitutes a significant force in the characters’ lives and, perhaps more aptly put, in their deaths. The tenacious insistence on rationality simultaneously produces its irrational twin. Similarly, in Leaves, Zampanò’s representation of The Navidson Record immediately reveals a spatial anomaly or aporia of the house: “The width of the house inside would appear to exceed the house as measured from the outside by 1/4″”.16 The label of “aporia” denotes the anomaly in the Derridean deconstructive sense, in which the certainty of Euclidean geometry deconstructs itself from within. In addition, to go deeply into the etymology of the word “aporia” would just add emphasis on the point made already by the gothic genre conventions—which is even further enhanced within the post-modern discourse—that is, such an endeavour would introduce even more linguistic and ontological instability when solidity is sought for. What a post-modern ontology augments here is a more markedly strong stress on language as a deceitful and untrustworthy tool that sets up a chimera of a reality, temporarily hiding the fact that nothing is there beneath the surface.17 The thing itself (if there is such a thing) is always already distorted by layers of mediation and remediation. The signifier leads to other signifiers forking out into endless paths leading away from any possibility of unity, coherence and conclusion. In Otranto, we find a disturbance of the rightful order. The master of the castle is a usurper and an immoral tyrant. Supernatural intervention sets things right again. This disturbance mirrors and makes public the disorder hidden beneath

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the surface of the castle of Otranto. In Otranto the castle is reasonably stable as an edifice even though it contains a labyrinthine aspect of secrecy and unknowing (secret doors and subterranean corridors). Correspondingly, the narrative also has a relative solidity even though preternatural events occur in its fictional world. To be sure, the text is never on the verge of collapsing. Thus, the tale told is by and large kept apart from the telling (the text certainly does not become the castle and vice versa). In contrast, in Leaves we encounter a primordial challenge to the very opposition order–vs.–disorder; it attempts to eliminate established oppositions, dichotomies and distinctions from the outset. The house is a represented house as well as a house of words (leaves of thin, fragile paper with inscriptions of word formations on them). A precise distinction between metaphorical and literal has lost its meaning from the inception of the tale. This is emphasised in the macrostructure of the narrative of Leaves. Zampanò’s story is a compilation of comments on a collection of film clips. Who has actually filmed, edited and put together all of the different clips is somewhat unclear to begin with. Even though it is hinted that Will Navidson has done most of it, there are problems with some textual information here concerning who could have filmed certain scenes.18 On top of that, according to Johnny Truant, Zampanò was blind, so he must have had people helping him by means of mediating descriptive language about what goes on in the clips. Such description always shapes its object, so already on this level empirically solid knowledge—in the Enlightenment sense—is challenged. In turn, Zampanò’s scraps and bits of an account have been put together by the footnote narrator Truant, and in addition, there is a set of unnamed editors who obviously have helped put Truant’s pieces into place.19 Truant and the other editors have also added footnotes and comments (some from “real” thinkers and texts, others are completely fictitious, thereby blurring yet another ontological distinction).20 Thus, there exists no core text, just a rhizomatically growing textual mass without a centre and without any kind of available “objective” truth about what actually happened in the house on Ash Tree Lane. In addition, the novel does of course not “end” in the ordinary sense. As its final sections, Leaves has a rich appendix divided into three main parts with subdivisions. It contains unfinished plans and ideas by both Zampanò and Truant, poems, disparate quotes, photos, images, an excerpt from a comic or graphic novel adaptation of The Navidson Record, letters from Truant’s mother, collages, a model of the house, artworks, etc. Consequently, the novel peters out into the disordered heap of bits and pieces that it has apparently been constructed out of in the first place. Therefore, the haunted house and the text itself have blended on the same ontological plane. The house’s flexible spatiality is mirrored in the typographic playfulness in the novel’s text. Entering the house’s Escher areas implies that the text metamorphoses into a maze of prompted reading directions, which incarnate the lack of a telos. If it is difficult to get a grasp on the overall structure of the house, it is equally difficult to grasp the text. However, this aspect is not unambiguous either. Sometimes the text emphasises its material affinity with the represented world in for instance typographically forming an image of a camera on a tripod when referring to Navidson’s camera “firmly fixed on the tripod”.21

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The text pulls off in many directions at once, thereby not giving the privilege to any one direction and ultimately confirming what the text semantically articulates: “‘direction no longer matters’”.22 Directionlessness and a lack of ultimate meaning emphasise the self-deconstructive text’s lack of a telos, which summarises the entire epistemological condition of postmodernity. The empty white spaces on the pages of Leaves are indicative of nothingness into which both text and house constantly threaten to disappear. The effect that this writing technique has is that it makes esoteric post-modern philosophical issues palpable and even interesting and entertaining to a consumer of popular fiction. As stated by Rune Graulund: Danielewski’s tale of the haunted house is therefore a parable for the post-modern realization that the concepts of the real, the authentic and the true — once stable and familiar concepts — now ring uncannily hollow. Post-modern fable aside, however, the main narrative momentum of House of Leaves — the momentum that makes it a highly readable novel instead of just another academic treatise on the ‘loss of the real’ — is the very palpable sense of the uncanny evoked by Danielewski.23

The highly experimental aspects of the philosophy of the novel medium have been given an attire of readability through the use of the popular genre of the Gothic and a very smooth transition from well-known gothic themes and tropes into post-modern philosophical concerns. Heidegger’s statement that language is the house of being gets a very specific timbre in the context of Leaves. In the house of the novel, there is obviously no clearing, just further obfuscation. Since any subject is always already within language and thereby discourse, it is also by default in the house. In all, this illustrates the impossibility of stepping out of language to fully understand language. Analogously, Navidson cannot step out of the house’s labyrinthine caves and corridors to overview and analyse its structure.24 This is clearly shown in the impossible and aporetic part when Navidson burns up his copy of House of Leaves to get enough light to read it. First of all the book cannot exist yet because it cannot have been finished at this stage, alternatively, the film was made after the book, but nothing else points in that direction. N. Katherine Hayles denotes this strange ontological phenomenon of future becoming present as belonging to the “paradoxical inversions” in Leaves.25 The novel does not even content itself with levelling any possible hierarchy of narratives and narrators. It also in places obliterates the distinction between the narrative’s represented level and the temporality of the reading. Navidson apparently holds a copy of the same book in his hands that the reader is reading in her/his current moment of reading. In Navidson’s filmed desperate reading in the dark, the novel is consumed to cinders; in a similar way, we as readers are consumed by the book we are consuming: “It is an artifact fashioned to consume the reader even as the reader consumes it”.26 The book can be read by Navidson on the condition that it consumes the material prerequisite of its existence, the white paper on which it has been inscribed. There is no way out of the book other than by constructing yet another text to add to all of the texts making up the novel. This illustrates another Derridean idea. Arche-writing is endlessly ongoing. The reader is drawn into the

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book and thereby into the house, consumed by its nothingness and epistemological dead ends. Generally speaking, metafiction is certainly one of postmodernism’s most significant features. In House of Leaves, this characteristic is displayed on several levels, not least on the typographical plane on which the text literally pulls in different directions. As pointed out by Nick Lord, Leaves displays awareness of itself as fiction as one of its absolutely fundamental attributes: What this dazzling, confusing, and, above all, conspicuous combination of self-criticism and typographic virtuosity does is remind us of the tangibility of the book as a form that requires the reader employ a specialized set of navigational and interpretative strategies. All fictional texts require such strategies to some degree, but while fictional realist fiction attempts to conceal the markers of its own fictionality, House of Leaves flaunts them as a condition of its existence.27

What does this add to the gothic genre and what does postmodernism contribute to a contemporary epistemological set of circumstances? As stated above, the Gothic has always challenged a strong belief in reason and order. Obviously, the genre has managed to be entertaining while simultaneously providing a cathartic dimension, suggesting that there is a place for the abnormal and the abject in fiction and thereby in people’s lives.28 It most certainly utilises the uncanny in terms of its repulsive-attractive tensions. However, on the more philosophical and epistemological stratum opened up in Leaves, the reader is made aware of the “world” as a multifaceted blend of discursive constructions. Since the novel was originally published online and contained hyperlinks, it also led the way out into cyberspace, encouraging readers to become writers and thereby “continue” the text. As formulated by Patricia Waugh: Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.29

If for instance, The Castle of Otranto suggests that there is a hidden “rightful” order that may be revealed through supernatural intervention, Leaves intimates that there is no order at all. Whatever order we may discern is completely dependent on language and discursive decisions about what order to impose on the existential nothingness we call “world”. As put by Sean Travers, the haunted house “is no longer occupied by ghosts and apparitions but depicted instead as disturbingly empty, as a void-like non-sensical space that is haunted by the far more chilling reminder of life’s apparent meaninglessness”.30 Even though this aspect has a horror-like side to it, perhaps made most urgently clear in cases of mental illness, it also displays post-modern ethics as regards teaching the reader of such fiction to avoid being gullible when it comes to the constant post-industrial media feed of constructed illusions. If Leaves is seen as an analogy to the way our human world is constituted, coherence can only appear in the heterogeneous narratives themselves and hardly even there, since for instance

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Truant on several occasions takes back what he has narrated. As already predicted by Jean-Françoise Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, the whole of our world would consist of islands of coherence in the absence of a reliable metanarrative: “Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games – a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism”.31 Leaves makes manifest a literary world that is constituted by a set of language games. By presenting the narrative as “critifiction”, several categories are blurred: writer becomes critic, the reader has to become writer, since to put the “text” together is almost as demanding as writing it, outside the text becomes inside the text and vice versa and imagining Leaves as a textual space, one gets something like the house’s impossible spatiality. However, does this mean that Leaves ultimately forwards the idea that nothing is real? No, this is not the case, which is something that is as skilfully balanced as the ability to make entertaining literature out of rather esoteric and obscure post-modern theory. The carrying element as regards this aspect is the dimension of affectivity. The darker side of the psyche, most thoroughly theorised by Freud, has in various ways followed the gothic tradition. I shall below outline how affectivity balances the more theoretical facets of Leaves’ literary structure. In fact, I would argue that this is what brings gothic postmodernism back towards the gothic pure and simple. As Davidson maintains: “If the real and the fictional have equal affective power over the subject, then the distinction between the two no longer matters”.32 In the appendix of Leaves, there are some photos of collages and in #1 there are two stamps with Edgar Allan Poe on them.33 This insertion is apposite since the appendix also contains the letters from Truant’s mother displaying her struggles with psychosis and insanity. The collages themselves become strong images of a chaotic collection of objects, which may very well mirror an individual’s disordered reservoir of past experiences partly making up the Real in the Lacanian sense. As suggested by Nick Lord, Leaves’ obsession with the symbolic order— different signs desperately trying to represent whatever has been going on—simultaneously draws attention to “what falls outside our systems of representation”.34 In “Usher”, Poe never directly reveals what “mental disorder” afflicts Roderick, but he hints that the family tree of Usher has never “put forth […] any enduring branch”, which intimates that procreation belongs to the house and presumably to its family members.35 The insinuations of an incestuous past are possibly confirmed by the death of Usher and his sister and the collapse of the house settling the end of the family line. Analogously to the situation in Leaves we are presented with what lies in the shady borderland between what can be represented and what cannot. Even though the Real cannot be approached other than through the symbolic order or through symptoms in the form of various ailments, it can nevertheless become a dominant and controlling force in an individual’s life. This is certainly the case for Truant, who compulsively feeds his reward system with

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alcohol, drugs and sex. The contrast with older Gothic is just the level of awareness the text displays. For instance, Truant’s mother has been institutionalised and is probably on medication. These very palpable effects of trauma and mental illness are in fact realistic and the link to similar forces in the gothic tradition are affectively secured, even though the symbolic attire would be different, as it is in for instance “Usher”. For Truant, the Real clearly dominates most of his actions and thereby most of his life. He does not seem to function at all without some form of input of stimulants. The Navidson–Zampanò project only becomes another addiction for him and he gets stricken with the same monomania that has taken hold of both Will and Zampanò. So the affective force in a way has two faces in Leaves, one that would be explicable from a modern medical discourse, but the other is the void itself, the house’s unrepresentable centre that is not a centre but a centre: “the void at the heart of the house represents by its very resistance to representation the moment when systems of signification can only turn back on themselves in a reflexive loop”.36 However, on the more realistic side, Truant himself needs to interpret his situation and his trauma of the loss of his mother when he was only seven years old. This part of the loop of trauma is also part of the hermeneutic loop of interpretation and re-interpretation: One day I received a letter in which she apologized for what she’d done. At first I thought she was talking again about the pan of oil she’d accidentally knocked to the floor when I was four but that wasn’t it at all, though in an awful way her confession did change the way I began to view my scars, their oceanic swirls now spelling out suspicion and much too much doubt for me to really address properly.37

It turns out that the mother, Pelafina, had in utter frustration and confusion tried to smother her son just before she was finally sent off to the mental institution Whalestoe. The affective effect of the Real is displayed and may be placed in a system of causality, but the Real itself may not. It is impossible to tell where the line between experienced trauma and the more existential level of the growling beast goes. However, it is interesting to see that the new information affects how Truant “reads” his scars. They are now “spelling out” something different. The inscription is the same, but it needs a new interpretation. This is again partly a post-modern trait if we think about for instance Michel Foucault’s concern with the concept of madness and Derrida’s problematisation of Foucault’s reading of Descartes. The bottom line is the philosophising of the historical point at which the state of madness was silenced and barred from dialogue: “The Decision, through a single act, links and separates reason and madness and it must be understood at once both as the original act of an order, a fiat, a decree, and a schism, a caesura, a separation, a dissection”.38 The point here is that Leaves and “Usher” draw the line differently, but that the force itself is a gothic concern without further determination. If we call it the gothic force, it can appear in different shapes throughout history and in the post-modern theoretical context, it will render a form that is something like the House of Leaves.

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For Navidson the guilt he carries is as mentioned the girl, Delial, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, but also a sense of letting down friends and family he loves. The monomania that urges him to return down into the illogical cavity of the house is never clearly articulated, but it is evidently in order to confront his own fears, deepest feelings and demons. [A]s urea pours into his veins and delirium sets in, Navidson begins rambling on about people he has known and loved: “Tom … Tom, is this where you went? Don’t look down, eh?”—Delial, his children and more and more frequently Karen—“I’ve you. I’ve lost you”.39

As in the case of Roderick Usher, the repressed feelings find their way out at some form of narratological climax. In Poe’s story this means the collapse and destruction of Usher (house and family, which have become indistinguishable anyway), but in Leaves Navidson survives and is reunited with his wife and family. The central point is that the Abject and the Real are just as affectively real in older works within the gothic genre as in the post-modern version of it. Typical post-modern characteristics are more dominant on a structural level, questioning the conditions of possibility of the realm of representation and any reliable access to something we could call “reality” or “the world”. As has been argued above, Leaves, as an example of the post-modern Gothic, mainly enhances gothic genre characteristics by means of post-modern theoretical ideas. The house becomes an analogy of the intersection of discourses (literary, historical, theoretical and philosophical) that instead of creating synergy towards a conclusive understanding, it makes sure characters and readers alike are lost in the maze. The labyrinth is both concretely textual and about characters’ selfhood or search for their “core self”.40 Alongside this obvious thematic endeavour Leaves also asks questions about what the literary form can do within the post-modern discourse. However, if one scrutinises a gothic text such as “Usher”, it soon becomes clear that the nineteenth-century short story contains sophisticated ruminations on similar issues. If excessive intertextuality is a prominent post-modern feature, it was definitely prefigured in the gothic tradition. In “Usher”, the narrator reads from the “Mad Trist” by Sir Launcelot Canning in order to calm the agitated Roderick. The romance is of course an invention by Poe but presented as if being an authentic existing work. Precisely when the knight in the tale breaks through a wooden door it seems to the narrator that “there came, indistinctly to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described”.41 This whole situation resembles Leaves a great deal. If everything is fiction, why bother about what happens to Usher and the mansion? To the reader this mainly functions as a teaser making her even more curious about the climax and resolution. This technique is as many other gothic features excessively magnified in Leaves. Especially, as mentioned, this uncertainty permeates Zampanò’s footnotes: “The footnotes supplied by Zampanò are a mix of fictional and nonfictional sources that actually exist outside the novel”.42 The effect of this move is

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of course to perpetually keep asking the question: What is real? However, as with many other characteristics the issue is pushed even further in Leaves, for instance through the notoriously unreliable narrator Truant. Towards the end he narrates about him being taken care of by two friends who are doctors and events fill a month of his diary narration, only to abruptly end: “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you really think any of that was true? September 2 thru September 28? I just made all that up. Right out of thin air. Wrote it in two hours. I don’t have any friends who are doctors, let alone two friends who are doctors”.43 What exists is only the affectivity of fear and anxiety combined with a desperate writing in the void. Whether this is anchored in reality is not important. Nevertheless, in terms of the affectivity itself, it keeps returning as long as narratives can cast spells and draw readers “inside” the text. This feature is the same in both gothic texts. The sentience of the house in “Usher” had earlier seemed to belong to Roderick only and the narrator attempts to keep a rational balance, but just before the Romance reading episode he has felt the affectivity of Usher and the house becomes contagious: “It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions”.44 Poe is here describing the power of narratives and literature. The same goes for Leaves, since the intra-textual affectivity of wanting to know and to narrate about the house is carried over from house to Navidson to Zampanò to Truant to the unknown editors and to the readers. Thus, this establishes an analogy to the novel itself and its readers. It does not matter how much the text undermines itself, the reader goes on to the bitter end. As regards the relation between art and reality more generally the gothic tradition suggests a mutual haunting. The one cannot exist without the other. Any life is the exploration of this state of affairs. If viewed thus, an artistic expression more real than the real becomes possible. Poe makes use of pictorial art to transcend the boundaries between different ontological levels in the short story. Roderick Usher has the ability to reach impressive levels of intensity in his paintings: By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arouse out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.45

The artwork, which is manifested as an artwork within Poe’s artwork—displays its power to induce “awe”. This means that it can cast a spell and, as suggested by the narrator, an enchantment that is stronger than the “real” force of Fuseli. What is philosophised here within the old gothic text is the same as what is at stake in Leaves, albeit in the latter in a blatant way already from the outset. It does not matter how much one tries to undercut the raison d’être of literature and art, they always reintroduce themselves. The affectivity that is drawn attention to in these works is partly what makes up the unpresentable force or forces that have been a

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gothic concern all the way from the romantic era up to the post-modern one and presumably beyond. As we have seen, House of Leaves is a gothic novel with very clear post-modern characteristics. For the most part these are enhancements of already existing gothic features. What unites these two aspects are problematisations of a set of Enlightenment convictions: the stability of the self, the reliability of language and perception, the possibility of science and its truths, in short, an epistemological optimism and a strong belief that reason will salvage the human being from her existential woes. Postmodernism pushes such problematisations to their limits. Mark Z. Danielewski has found a sophisticated literary form through which he preserves gothic elements but also takes these further within the context of a post-modern discourse. In Leaves, mediation and remediation potentially create a Baudrillardian hyperreal that does not have any contact with anything “real” and objectively valid. However, in addition, the novel is still to be situated within the gothic genre and in terms of the transcendence of affectivity and imagination, it retains the power of the literary art form. Moreover, it adapts the novel form to a cyber-technological world in that it opens up for a multimedia environment. It remains to be seen though, whether the novel form has the capacity, in the Bakhtinian sense, to swallow also the new media technologies or whether it will become one constituent out of many others in the cyber-machine. Be that as it may, as a post-modern gothic novel, House of Leaves holds a unique position in the genre.

Notes





1. Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm, Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic, 1st ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009), 84. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems, 2nd ed. (Castle Books, New Jersey, 2001), 171–183, 177–178. 3. N. Katherine Hayles, “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves” (American Literature, 74:4, 2002), 779–806: “[T]he impossible house nevertheless enters the space of representation, much like M. C. Escher’s ascending-descending staircases (references to Escher’s self-deconstructing spaces pepper the House’s footnotes)” (788). 4. Poe, “Usher”, 174. 5. Hayles, “Saving the Subject”. Hayles argues that Leaves is merely “[c]amouflaged as a haunted-house tale” (ibid., 779). 6. Rune Graulund, “Text and Paratext in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Word & Image, 22:4, 2006), 379–389, 381–383. 7. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (London, Doubleday, 2001), xxi. 8. Ibid., xix–xx. 9. Natalie Hamilton, “The A-Mazing House: The Labyrinth as Theme and Form in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1, 2008), 3–15: “It is as if there is no need for a physical beast, because each character has his or her own psychological demons with which to contend” (12). 10. Hayles, “Saving the Subject”, 789. 11. Thomas Davidson, “The Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: ‘Real Virtuality’ and the ‘Ontological Indifference’ of the Information Age” (Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics, 4:1, 2014), 70–82, 70.

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12. Maria Beville, Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (Postmodern Studies, 43, Rodopi, 2009), 56. 13. Josh Toth, “Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54:2, 2013), 194. 14. Carol Margaret Davison, “Southern Gothic: Haunted Houses”, The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (eds.) (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55–67, 56. 15. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London, Penguin, 2001), 18. 16. Danielewski, Leaves, 30. 17. Sean Travers, “Empty Constructs: The Postmodern Haunted House in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Irish Journal of American Studies, online: http://ijas. iaas.ie/issue-7-sean-travers/): “Suffice to say, the postmodern era is underscored by a radical and increasing repudiation of our overarching concepts of truth and reality” (Paragraph 2). Accessed 28 January 2019. 18. Hayles, “Saving the Subject”: “[T]he tape of Navidson watching the tape would itself have been subject to editing, cuts, and other manipulations, so it could not function as a naive record but merely as another interpretation” (787). What Hayles draws attention to here is the endless layering of interpretations and the lack of certainty about who did what. 19. Hayles, “Saving the Subject”, 786. 20. Michael Hemmingson, “What’s beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52:3, 2011), 272–287. 21. Danielewski, Leaves, 433. 22. Ibid., 433. 23. Graulund, “Text and Paratext”, 387. 24. Hamilton, “A-Mazing House”: “Two-dimensional diagrammatic mazes have been used for centuries in religious rituals to symbolize man’s suffering and confusion within a divine plan, again emphasizing the difference between a synchronic and a diachronic experience of a labyrinth” (12). The “divine” synchronic perspective is simply not available. The characters and readers of Leaves are forced to diachronically experience the labyrinth. 25. Hayles, “Saving the Subject”, 792. 26. Ibid., 802. 27. Nick Lord, “The Labyrinth and the Lacuna: Metafiction, the Symbolic, and the Real in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 55:4, 2014), 465–476. 28. Graulund, “Text and Para-Text”: “It is thus by a combination of these two shifts, that of the uncanny and that of postmodernist levelling of the hierarchy of narrative levels, that Danielewski brings his part-mockery, part-celebration of high-flown poststructuralist theory to converge with the more popular form of the Gothic tale” (388). 29. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (Routledge, London, 1984), 2. 30. Travers, “Empty Constructs”, Paragraph 7. 31. Jean-Françoise Lyotard, “From The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, The Postmodernism Reader: The Foundational Texts, Michael Drolet (ed.) (London, Routledge, 2004), 123–146, 124. 32. Davidson, “The Spatio-Temporal Dimensions”, 74. 33. Danielewski, Leaves, 582. 34. Lord, “The Labyrinth”, 475. 35. Poe, “Usher”, 172. 36. Lord, “The Labyrinth”, 471. 37. Danielewski, Leaves, 380. 38. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, The Postmodernism Reader: The Foundational Texts, Michael Drolet (ed.) (London, Routledge, 2004), 86–111, 92.

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39. Danielewski, Leaves, 474. 40. Hamilton, “A-Mazing House”: “Each level of Danielewski’s text involves characters attempting to navigate the maze of the self, and these attempts are in turn echoed in the structure of the text” (5). 41. Poe, “Usher”, 181. 42. Hamilton, “A-Mazing House”, 4. 43. Danielewski, Leaves, 509. 44. Poe, “Usher”, 179. 45. Ibid., 176.

Bibliography Beville, Maria, Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (Postmodern Studies, 43) [Electronic resource] (Rodopi, 2009). Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves (London, Doubleday, 2001). Davidson, Thomas, “The Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: ‘Real Virtuality’ and the ‘Ontological Difference’ of the Information Age” (Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 4:1, 2014), 70–82. Davison, Carol Margaret, “Southern Gothic: Haunted Houses”, The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (eds.) (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55–67. Derrida, Jacques, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, Alan Bass trans., The Postmodernism Reader: The Foundational Texts, Michael Drolet (ed.) (London, Routledge, 2004), 86–111. Graulund, Rune, “Text and paratext in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Word & Image, 22:4, 2006), 379–389. Hamilton, Natalie, “The A-Mazing House: The Labyrinth as Theme and Form in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1, 2008), 3–16. Hayles, Katherine N., “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves” (American Literature, 74:4, 2002), 779–806. Hemmingson, Michael, “What’s beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52:3, 2011), 272–287. Lord, Nick, “The Labyrinth and the Lacuna: Metafiction, the Symbolic, and the Real in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 55:4, 2014), 465–476. Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, “From The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi trans., The Postmodernism Reader: The Foundational Texts, Michael Drolet (ed.) (London, Routledge, 2004), 123–146. Perry, Dennis R., and Carl H. Sederholm, Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic, 1st ed. (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems, 2nd ed. (New Jersey, Castle Books, 2001), 171–183. Toth, Josh, “Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54:2, 2013), 181–197. Travers, Sean, “Empty Constructs: The Postmodern Haunted House in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (Irish Journal of American Studies, online: http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-7-seantravers/). Accessed 28 January 2019. Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto (London, Penguin, 2001). Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (Routledge, London, 1984).

Heterotopian Horrors Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović

A thorough analysis of any of the numerous appearances within the gothic or horror genre usually relies on a steady reading of aspects such as plotlines, characters, the social, or other types of critique, as well as the occasional debate about the amount of violence being presented. Regardless of the extension of the critique or analysis of the mentioned features, one aspect remains only partially addressed, and that is the issue of space. The idea of the relevance of spatiality in this type of narrative reaches to the very beginnings of the gothic genre, with one of the first novels belonging to the genre in general—Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). The “castle” in the title determines the narrative by presenting itself as the setting for almost all of the (super)natural occurrences that take place within the storyline. This approach to gothic spaces will soon be emulated by other authors such as Matthew Lewis (The Monk, 1796), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and many others after. Despite the various stories, characters, and settings, the dark menacing spaces, however, remained the same—gloomy, oppressive, atmospheric, and sometimes even directly dangerous—while at the same time retaining their initial (and simple) function of a setting. Over the years, with the modernisation of the genre, the introduction of the house during the American Romantic period as the new site for gothic narratives, together with the gradual breach into horror, the setting became modernised as well, offering readers and later viewers new and more complex spatial platforms through which to experience the superimposed storylines. However, although spaces and settings were becoming modernised and consequently more complex, an adequate understanding of gothic/horror locations as something more than a locus was still not addressed. This was particularly noticeable with the development of later horror narratives, with stories such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), where M. Lukić (*)  University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia T. Parezanović  Alfa BK University, Belgrade, Serbia

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_68

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the emphasised duality of space between the laboratory and the apartment is crucial although rarely addressed, or in the case of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where the concept of urban London blends with the image of the vampire roaming its streets. More contemporary cases are following a different trend. No longer satisfied with providing only a scary but nevertheless simple setting, modern horror innovations are increasingly structuring their storylines around the occurred spatial turn, relying on the dynamics of space as an actively participating element of the storyline. What this chapter aims at addressing is the role and a possible reading of the position and function of space(s) within contemporary horror narratives. More specifically, it will address the application and use of Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework focused on the notion of heterotopias as a particularly versatile approach to reading and understanding spaces within horror narratives. As it will be elaborated in the chapter, it is through the recognition and later use of heterotopian spaces that a possible analysis can be developed, directed towards the actual articulation and symbolical birth of horror within particular narratives. Although it retains the initially intended functions of a setting, space through its changes and permutations creates specific contexts that allow for the horrific elements to pour into our realities. Before exploring the subtle connections and the subsequent (relevant) repercussions relating to the dynamics between the horror genre and heterotopian notions and spaces, it is necessary to properly address the theoretical context as initially proposed by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s exploration of heterotopian spaces yields a rather succinct theoretical outline of this phenomenon, with the possible explanations ranging over the span of three different analyses. Starting with an introductory address in The Order of Things (1966), where he deliberates about these “alternative” types of spaces by stating that they covertly disturb the regular syntactic order within language and beyond, by bringing together things whose mutual relations are otherwise hardly conceivable,1 Foucault moves onto a much more elaborate analysis titled “Of Other Spaces” (1967). Here heterotopian spaces are defined as those that coexist and to a specific degree interact with ordinary sites in which people perform their daily routine. Using the notion of utopias and utopian spaces as an introductory concept, Foucault argues about their unreal nature structured around the projected image of perfection. Utopias are unreal spaces/sites, unable to exist within or alongside regular spaces—they can only be imagined but not enacted. Foucault uses the metaphor of the mirror to show how utopias work: the mirror reflection is, in his view, the perfect utopia because it is an impossible, placeless place. The mirror reflection is, however, also the perfect example of heterotopia because it is only due to the projected/reflected image that individuals can observe their body/reality/space and locate it in the here and now, while at the same time denying the possibility of actually crossing into this projected space/reality. This leads towards the second proposed analysis of heterotopian spaces, which relates them to enacted utopias. Such heterotopias, as Foucault observes, could be found in the settlements established during the first wave of European colonisation, especially in the Jesuit Missions in South America. These settlements were

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meticulously built and organised in such a way as to provide an image of the perfect society, where everything functions properly—unlike in the old world.2 This second approach to Foucault’s complex concept indicates that utopia, once tied to a specific location, can become heterotopia. The approach has recently been elaborated on by Kelvin T. Knight, who relies on a radio talk given by Foucault between the publication of The Order of Things and the lecture “Of Other Spaces”, titled “Les Hétérotopies” which remains unavailable in English. The becoming of heterotopia, as an enacted utopia, could be achieved by means of imagination—for example, through children’s games, which can transform the familiar space such as the attic or the garden into fantastic and fanciful places such as the ocean or the Wild West—or by means of literary fiction as children’s imagination recedes before the world of adulthood.3 The major relevance of this reading lies precisely in its insistence on the textuality of heterotopias, which directs any research of the concept away from architecture or social sciences and towards areas such as literary or film studies. The idea that heterotopias are rendered particularly important in fictional texts serves as the primary motivation for analysing, in the present case, the Twin Peaks TV series and film Fire Walk With Me (1990–1991; 1992), and the more recent Stranger Things series (2016–). Within the broad confines of the horror genre, it is, of course, difficult to speak of any utopian dimensions of heterotopias. It is therefore necessary to resort to the third possibility of approaching heterotopia analytically, and this possibility is also rooted in the previously described metaphor of the mirror. While the reflection allows one to constitute the self and provides the space in which one’s existence is confirmed and described, the image provided is never quite accurate; the mirror, namely, has the curious heterotopian ability to invert, distort, or otherwise warp the reality one is experientially accustomed to. The interaction between the ordinary space we inhabit and the heterotopian one—on the other side of the mirror— is not a harmonious or complementing one; rather, it is premised on the opposing and possibly negatively mirroring characteristics of heterotopias. Heterotopian spaces project a reality that might represent or mimic our own, but that also might change, distort, or subvert what is being reflected, denying us an active ability to influence their functioning.4 When Foucault describes heterotopias of crisis or deviation as places designated for people and situations that in some ways deflect from the standard socially accepted norm—prisons, honeymoon hotels, psychiatric institutions, retirement homes, etc.,5—the implication is that these places contain, in one form or another, a lurking danger the release of which might threaten and utterly shatter the conventional social order. When he describes cemeteries as heterotopian spaces known to every culture in any historical period, as the other city in which dead people reside, and which perversely imitates relationships within the living families as well as urban infrastructure,6 the danger becomes, if not more ominous or outright explicit, then certainly more relatable to any analyses of gothic and horror narratives. It is, therefore, this third approach to heterotopia as a threatening place with the potential to subvert and distort the ordinary (spatial) reality that the genre relies on in its aspects of spatiality. The existence of this theoretical construct within

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various horror narratives becomes a very evident one if observed through the prism of the interaction of different characters and their surrounding spaces. As customary within a large portion of horror plotlines, a character or a number of them is (usually involuntary) positioned or pushed towards a dangerous, forbidden, or completely alien space. What is more, horror narratives seem to possess a certain authority over heterotopia, or rather, the capacity to contribute to the theoretical readings of the concept, or perhaps exploit it to present a specific kind of reality. As will be made clear through the analyses of the Twin Peaks and Stranger Things narratives, the concept acquires, within the genre, the status of what can be called dark heterotopia, which differs slightly from Foucault’s initial considerations. While the basic premise that heterotopia is built on is that of a set or cluster of spatial relations, which includes different locations, each clearly separated from the others and not reducible to, superimposable or replaceable by, or mixable with the others,7 dark heterotopias possess the capacity to invade ordinary places and transfigure them into equally threatening “other” spaces. The TV series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch renders itself especially suitable for the present analysis due to the pronounced aspect of placeness and the apparently clear segmentation of different kinds of spaces. The series is concentrated almost exclusively on the small American town of Twin Peaks, near the Canadian border, the state border between Washington and Idaho, and the surrounding Ghostwood forest, which is from the start depicted as the source of evildoing. As Sheriff Truman remarks at a certain point, there is “something very, very strange in these old woods. … A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but … it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it”.8 The visual and conceptual contrast between the town and the mist-veiled forest is one of the most prominent structural elements of the Twin Peaks world: Douglas fir trees feature even on the emblematic “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign, and one may also recall the scene from the “Pilot” episode in which Ronette Pulaski, visibly tortured and barely conscious, returns to the town after the night of the murder of Laura Palmer—she is crossing a rail bridge, with the Ghostwood trees looming tall behind her.9 The bridge itself stresses the gap between what the town and the wood symbolically represent and serves as a present-day image of the traditional frontier,10 delineating the known and rationally comprehended from the wilderness of the unknown. Such clear delineation of two different spatial entities allows for an easy construction of the otherness located on the other side of the border, and any interaction with this otherness (which is, essentially, heterotopian) becomes a potential cause of danger. It appears, on the surface, that the simple act of crossing over, moving beyond the frontier, is what has brought about the death of Laura Palmer, with Ronette miraculously surviving. The question of who, among the familiar faces of the local community, killed Laura Palmer is posed as central from the very start. It gradually inspires increasingly more fear, panic, and paranoia into everyone, and reveals that everyone has haunting secrets, but it receives a definite answer in the fourteenth episode. What, then, drives the plot for another fifteen episodes of the second season? With the noticeably more aggressive subversion of the spatial syntax that occurs in these

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fifteen episodes, we should assume that, in its efforts to locate the source of the evil that has enveloped the town, the narrative pushes the initially established frontier towards a higher spatial order of dark heterotopia. To return for the present to the 51,200 inhabitants of Twin Peaks and the placeness of their lives inside and outside the town, all the characters seem to be identified by the places to which they ordinarily belong. The narrative visually stresses this belonging by emplacing the characters in a limited set of locations,11 which can be described, following Foucault, relationally, as sites of transportation, relaxation, rest, etc.12 Thus, for example, Ed Hurley is usually seen at his gas station, which defines him as a working man, or at the Double R Diner, a site for relaxation since this is where he meets his high school sweetheart Norma; he is less frequently pictured inside his own house, which reflects the unhappiness of his family life. The place where one is, therefore, determines their background and preoccupations, as well as their relationships with both space and members of the community. Lucy Moran is almost exclusively tied to the police station and, most iconically, the switchboard she operates—on rare occasions of outings, she is again in the company of the police department members, and, since she is also romantically involved with one of them, such emplacement accentuates that the police station is the site of both work and rest/home for her. Benjamin Horne never leaves the Great Northern Hotel, to him also both home and office, and Eileen Hayward and Sarah Palmer rarely leave their homes (the former’s movements being additionally restricted by the wheelchair), which positions them as motherly safekeepers of homely values. Any disruption of the customary setting indicates that certain disorder has also affected the families in question or the community in general: Eileen’s appearance at the Great Northern introduces a possible family secret regarding Donna’s real father,13 and Sarah’s words to Leland at the cemetery, during their daughter’s funeral—a warning that he should not ruin that too14—sound all too revealing in retrospect. The disruption of the spatial (and social) order acquires heterotopian qualities, which come to prominence in, among others, the funeral scene, as havoc is created with Leland’s falling onto the coffin and the fight ensuing between Bobby Briggs and James Hurley. The scene becomes theatrical, assembling people—all the major characters—who would otherwise hardly ever be seen all together in the same place. If we follow the previously established importance of the setting, within which each character is normally identified with a specific place, we may then think of the cemetery as a space which in itself juxtaposes numerous incompatible places, scattered all around the town of Twin Peaks.15 And, quite importantly, the scene resonates with Bobby Briggs’s screaming address: “Everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything… all you good people… you wanna know who killed Laura… you did! We all did”.16 Bobby’s words at the cemetery expose the seemingly harmonious community as a group of hypocrites, which is essentially the effect of heterotopia—its illusory qualities bear the potential to reveal every other site, the town in this case, as even more illusory.17 The cemetery scene, which gathers numerous mutually incompatible characters, and the Great Northern, which, with its multitudes of guests, functions in

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pretty much the same way, do not exhaust the heterotopian imagery of the Twin Peaks universe—they simply reflect one of the possible approaches to heterotopia. The secret society of Bookhouse Boys, on a different note, assumes the role of a utopian project, whose origin traces back to the distant past, and whose purpose is to protect the town from the evil influences from the forest. The society functions by granting admission only to the chosen ones, which is also a common feature of heterotopian places.18 And there are, of course, even more examples of those disturbing heterotopias which present a distorted mirror reflection of the seemingly well-functioning community. Such is, perhaps most obviously, One-Eyed Jacks, modelled on Foucault’s exemplary brothel, and literally removed to the other side of the Canadian border, where it hosts some of the most virtuous or respectable members of the Twin Peaks community (such as Laura Palmer or Benjamin Horne), who can only here freely indulge in the experiences sanctioned in their everyday surroundings. The established binary dynamics of spatial order appear up to this point simple enough: ordinary and other/different spaces are complementarily defined in relation to each other. Heterotopias such as One-Eyed Jacks, the Bookhouse, or the cemetery do not possess any qualities that make them different per se—they are different only in relation to places such as houses, the diner, or the police station. We might even go so far as to claim that one of the primary functions of all characters is to demonstrate this spatial order: Sheriff Truman’s appearance at the police station, for example, designates this place as ordinary because this is where he performs his daily duties; his presence at the Bookhouse endows this other place with secrecy and almost otherworldly dreamlike qualities—because no duties performed at the Bookhouse are ordinary. Had spatial relations in the Twin Peaks narrative remained at the level of simple dichotomies, the series might have ended in the fashion of a usual murder mystery, with the perpetrator revealed and the community subsequently put back in order, the intruding evil at least temporarily eradicated. The horror genre, however, moves beyond the initial displacement across the (physical or metaphorical) border, and towards a paradigm in which heterotopian space does not operate relationally but rather as a separate entity. Such heterotopias, magical sites of forces far greater than any common human weaknesses or wrongdoings, are pertinent to the horror genre and therefore present, in terms of spatiality, as one of its most distinctive features. Perhaps the most disturbing location featured in Twin Peaks is the Red Room, the entrance area to the mythical Black and White Lodges. Although the essence and purpose, as well as the exact location, of both the Red Room and the Lodges remain a perplexing mystery even to the most careful of viewers, it is immediately obvious that the Red Room operates on the heterotopian principles of disrupting the spatial syntax and opening and closing at certain intervals. The disruption is inherent in the concept of the Red Room: it is a place where it is eerily possible for Agent Dale Cooper to leave the room only to reappear in the other corner of that same room, perpetually moving in the labyrinth of red curtains.19 The opening and closing of this heterotopia is in the focus of the final episode of the second season, with the part of the Ghostwood forest known as Glastonbury Grove

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suddenly transformed into a red-curtained doorway.20 The otherness of the forest is sufficiently easy to grasp; the most horrible thing in the series, the murder of Laura Palmer, takes place in a deserted train car right in the heart of the woods— the otherness of the Red Room, however, is hardly comprehensible to the majority who have never set foot there (and the minority who have include Agent Cooper, the Log Lady, and Major Briggs). Most importantly, this obscure place seems to be, however much real, still unlocatable—a floating island with a curious ability to make incursions, instead of forming relations, into all other real sites, which are visually transformed and spatially distorted in the process. As the woods are foreboding per se, and even outright dangerous, the fact that the Red Room makes an incursion precisely there is not as surprising as its encroachment upon the ordinary, domestic, and apparently tame places in the town. Among the most disturbing revelations is certainly the one regarding evil: while even Harry Truman in his capacity as both the sheriff and a Bookhouse boy dismisses it as an element of the woods, it in fact comes in the guise of Leland Palmer, a husband and father, and a respectable member of the community. Leland recalls the presence of demon BOB in his early childhood,21 which again confirms that the Black Lodge, a dark heterotopia, and its inhabitants have in the past also made incursions into the ordinary world of family houses. Certainly, the viewer becomes aware that Leland, on those nights when he sexually abuses his daughter, actually is BOB—and this awareness is substantiated by the simple image of a mirror reflection. It is Leland standing in front of the mirror, but the person staring back from the heterotopian space behind the glass is BOB (and the scene is repeated at the very end of the second season, with Agent Cooper now standing in front of the mirror). In the same way that Leland is BOB, Laura’s room in the Palmers’ household, where the assaults happen, is on these occasions a dark heterotopia—the Red Room and, possibly, also the Black Lodge. In order to show this superposition of evil otherworldly spaces onto the domestic setting of an ordinary American household, the narrative makes use of uncanny motifs, the most prominent among which is precisely the mirror. The uncanny, a concept relating to objects at the same time familiar and eerily strange, relies on its inexplicability and the sense of unease it creates to evoke dread; it operates on the principles of doubling.22 It is doubling that makes (heterotopian) mirror imagery, in which Twin Peaks abounds, the perfect representation of the uncanny. Seeing Leland in Fire Walk With Me bring a glass of milk to his wife could be an ordinary enough scene; seeing Leland in the mirror as he brings this glass of milk to Sarah, however, is far from ordinary.23 While Leland’s reflection has the same appearance, it is not in fact Leland but BOB, or rather, Leland’s double. Applying the uncanny as a technique, the Twin Peaks narrative in this way creates two parallel—juxtaposed— realities: one is the domestic reality of the Palmers’ household, and the other is its mirror reflection, in which Leland (still not transformed into BOB) does horrible things within his family. And it is the uncanny that gives way to the intrusion of the dark heterotopia, which, in quite an original contribution the show makes to any analyses of spatiality, represents a third level of spatial reality, one that is not juxtaposed to the other two but rather superposed onto both. The image of BOB

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(Leland now completely transfigured by his mirror reflection) entering Laura’s room through the window belongs to this third level. That ‘BOB’ enters Laura’s room through the window, while Leland uses the door, indicates the disorder and chaos that dark heterotopias exert on the everyday spatial reality. Analysing yet another scene from Fire Walk With Me, which similarly relies on the uncanny mirror imagery, leads the viewer into the most intimate place in the Palmers’ household—Laura’s room. The visibly and increasingly more distraught Laura starts towards the door to leave her room, and then turns around to take a look at the painting hung on her wall, which she received from the Chalfonts—like BOB, also creatures of the Lodges who have invaded Twin Peaks. The painting features an empty room with an open door; behind this door red curtains can be glimpsed. As Laura looks at it on this particular occasion, she suddenly sees herself in the painting. In her own reality, she is standing at the slightly open door, her back turned towards her room. In the painting reflection, she is similarly standing at the open door, turned towards the room in the forefront and looking back behind the door. What is behind the painted door—those red curtains the viewer has glimpsed—is, therefore, judging by the position of her body, her own room.24 The uncanny moment in which Laura sees herself over there, on the other side, is followed by a close-up of her frightened face as she stands in her room, suddenly with red curtains behind her. Introduced by the Chalfonts’ painting, the Red Room thus invades and completely supersedes the site of Laura’s privacy. Grasping and ultimately curbing such spatial incursions and distortions, which reveal the supremely powerful existence of higher-level (dark) heterotopias, is the driving force behind the denouement of the second season of Twin Peaks as well as the 2017 season Twin Peaks: The Return. As opposed to the potentially all-pervasive chaos created in a horror narrative, the alternative always remains of—in the words of Benjamin Horne—“the perfect arrangement of all objects in any particular space, [which] could create a resonance the benefits from which to the individual dwelling in that space could be… could be extensive, could be far-reaching”.25 This option, however, is rarely viable within the genre. A more contemporary case of heterotopian overflow into “our” realities can be found in a possible analysis of the celebrated television show Stranger Things (developed by Matt and Ross Duffer), although its contemporaneity can be perceived only in relation to its production date, while the show structures its narrative around a series of events in the 1980s. The show develops around a somewhat repetitive storytelling pattern that characterised genre fiction during the decade. Influenced largely by Stephen King’s fiction, Stranger Things proposes an almost mythological battle between good and evil, involving children and young adults fighting off not only a potential monstrosity but also the traditionally clueless adults, who either through their direct involvement (such as the conducting of experiments, military activities, etc.,) or through a simple inability to perceive and understand the occurrences at hand, facilitate the articulation and spreading of evil. To this there is a purposely added element of the 1980s nostalgia and symbolism embodied in various American suburban life consumerist practices, elements

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of popular culture such as films, posters, and other similar products, and the general aesthetics of the series. The combination of all of these elements successfully creates a perfect fictional rural town of Hawkins, Indiana, reminiscent of so many other similar towns created by King in the 1980s as locations for different supernatural or otherwise violent storytelling events. The series of predominantly unexplainable events starts with the strange disappearance of a young boy (Will Byers), caused by an unknown creature, and the almost simultaneous appearance of Eleven, a young girl with psychokinetic abilities, while the town witnesses a surfacing of a number of occurrences and conflicts between the unsuspecting public, a military research organisation aware of these unusual occurrences (being themselves responsible for them) and the creatures now invading the otherwise normal and peaceful small town reality from an alternate dimension. A narrative structured in such a way that it follows these patterns can obviously use a number of different devices in order to obtain the horror effect. Ranging from the standardised monstrous approach with the different creatures invading and attacking the local population, to the moral and human-based monstrousness expressed through the remorseless testing on human subjects performed by the government organisation, the storyline provides different and stereotypically unique ways of exploring various venues of horror. However, although these venues articulate a satisfactory horror effect, mostly through their instantly gratuitous nature, they fail to locate the actual source of the proposed horror. More precisely, it could be argued that the horror elements contributing to the creation of the horror context are in fact only a surface level manifestation, with the actual horror stemming from a different locus. Following the previously elaborated notion of heterotopian spaces in Twin Peaks, it is possible to observe the emergence of a similar spatial pattern in Stranger Things as well. Although lacking the analysed collocation of various characters in specific spaces together with the appropriate nuances, as well as symbolism, now replaced by a less artistic and more dynamic narrative approach, a clear spatial polarity between normal/everyday spaces and heterotopian spaces can be observed. Starting with the Wheeler residence, the place where the initial group of four boys—Mike Wheeler, Will Byers, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair enjoy a Dungeon & Dragons session, following with the Byers residence and later on the local school and the police station, the narrative is once again setting up the spatial parameters of a small town, creating an homage to the previously established patterns of a small town narrative, while simultaneously adding through its recognisability to the effect of nostalgia. These spaces are clearly opposed by the Hawkins National Laboratory, a guarded site in charge of conducting secretive research under the formal authority of the United States Department of Energy. The proposed space(s) and their binary and opposing nature conform to the initial heterotopian and non-heterotopian spatial division as seen in Twin Peaks. The secret laboratory is therefore a heterotopian space, on the outside portrayed as a normal space, while at the same time being characterised by an internal set of rules, with the potential to undermine the surrounding spaces and, as the narrative will show, normality itself. Its heterotopian nature allows for a reflection of normal

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spaces, although the proposed image is in fact deceiving, hiding beneath its heterotopian surface the possibility of distortion and/or subversion of what is being reflected. As the storyline develops, the viewers become increasingly exposed to the “subverting” realities of the laboratory ranging from testing on human subjects, through military research directed towards the exploration and exploitation of alternative dimensions, to the explicit intent and efforts to keep their activities secret. However, regardless of the inner workings and regulations of this heterotopian construct, its activities are symbolically and actually regulated by the limiting confinements of the heterotopian concept itself. Following the previously elaborated necessity for a third type of spatial construct, one that will articulate the symbolic and actual spatial gap between regular spaces and heterotopian spaces, and therefore fulfil the basic premise(s) of the genre, the notion of a dark heterotopia emerges once again. The subliminal and ever-present fear of the possible release of something dangerous which might menace and finally destroy the conventional social order, locked initially (and metaphorically) within the space of the laboratory, is now, due to the conducted research, sprung onto the world. Appropriately named by the characters as the Upside Down, the now opened alternate dimension once again mimics regular space, functions according to its own internal dynamics, but also violently merges and overspills into the unsuspecting space of the town of Hawkins. The now disrupted relational structuring and functioning of ((non)heterotopian) spaces allows for a rapid diffusion of the dark heterotopia, simultaneously allowing the articulation of all horrific occurrences that will follow. One of the elements that necessarily needs to be addressed while tracing the evolution of dark heterotopia in Stranger Things is the moment of convergence between regular spaces and its heterotopian alternative, or more precisely the various elements which directly or indirectly allow for the manifestation of dark heterotopias. Although similar to the world of Twin Peaks in its relying on a multitude of recognisable popular culture tropes, which in turn contributes to the creation of a familiar space, the narrative of Stranger Things localises its heterotopian spaces somewhat differently. While the perception and consequence of the emergence of dark heterotopias within Twin Peaks can potentially be observed as an imminent but simultaneously precisely localised threat (the Palmer household, the Black Lodge, Ghostwood forest, etc.), triggered through the uncanny and perpetuated by certain characters within the narrative, the articulation of dark heterotopias within Stranger Things occurs differently. By following the storyline, it becomes obvious that the unleashed heterotopian threat to regular space does not have a fixed pattern, or is in any way localised and induced by a particular character, event, or object. The absence of the symbolically impregnated uncanny element becomes replaced by a cancer like spatial construct, a deformed and poisonous mirrored copy of the town of Hawkins, that not only fulfils its heterotopian notion but it also through various (apparently random) dimensional breaches overflows into regular space, endangering anybody and everybody within it. The initial connection between the two dimensions established by Eleven—one of the many subjects that the government was experimenting upon—causes the unfolding of the until then hidden space. It is from this point on that through various sequences and brief

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flashes the Upside Down dimension presents itself as an exact copy of the regular space, observed and confirmed through a series of moments when some of the characters manage to crossover the threshold dividing the two dimensions only to find themselves within a mirrored reality with the key difference of being a cold world, void of light and energy while being covered in an organic combination of overgrown roots and spores. Characters such as Nancy Wheeler, going through a temporary portal within a tree only to find herself in a decaying world, or sheriff Hopper and Joyce Byers, entering the Upside Down while wearing protective suits that will hopefully shield them from the surrounding toxic environment, are all witnesses to a mirrored lifelessness. By simultaneously mirroring, coexisting, and apparently randomly spilling over into regular spaces, dark heterotopias become a new parallel reality, similar to the one that can be observed within the Twin Peaks storyline. However, although the concept of parallel realities between the two cases is conceptually identical, a quantitative difference can be observed in the further development of heterotopian space in Stranger Things. More precisely the dark heterotopian spaces in Stranger Things develop to such an extent as to threaten the reality of all of the characters within the storyline, an idea that is not present within the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, although it has been addressed as a possibility in the recent third season of the show. In spite of these slightly different approaches to the articulation and function of heterotopian spaces between the two storylines, the exclusive ability of certain characters to interact with these alternative spaces remains. The character of Eleven, in particular, retains a crucial responsibility through the narrative by acting as a constant connecting point between the two dimensions, while simultaneously being the only character able to exert some sort of minimal control over the extending mirrored reality. It is through her activity during the initial experiments that the gate between the Upside Down and normal space was established, and again she is the only character that manages to (un)intentionally open or otherwise control the portals between the two realities. Her role, as well as the role of the rest of the children, is pivoted around the metaphoric mapping of dark heterotopias, as well as the episodic structuring and climaxing of the element/ context of horror. Their ability to instantaneously exist within and accept the possibility of a regular space as well as a parallel “upside down” alternate dimension allows for a twofold sequence of events. On one level, the function of the characters within the narrative is to be the element that, through their interaction, will allow for the (re)presentation of the horror originating from the alternate dimension. Similarly to Twin Peaks, with characters such as Dale Cooper or the Log Lady, the interaction of selected characters like sheriff Hopper, Joyce Byers, or the group of kids in Stranger Things with space (dark heterotopias) will directly influence the ability to adequately show (to the viewers) the threat of the Upside Down. Additionally, on a simpler level, their ability to interact with this liminal type of space allows them to recognise and fight any and all potential threats that might emerge from it. With the progression of the storyline and the increasing presence of the alternate dimension which starts affecting larger portions of regular space, the ability to understand the nature of the Upside Down, as well as the ability to

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successfully interact with it, extends to other characters, grownups such as Will Byers’s mother Castle Byers, as well as sheriff Jim Hopper. Consequently, such an extension (both in the number of participating characters and the actual size of the heterotopian space) allows for the possibility of a further theoretical articulation of the notion of dark heterotopia. Although the breaching into and subverting of normal space is still its primary function, the newly discovered, expanded, and now evolved space potentially equates the normal one, and by doing so questions the notion of heteroropian spaces, or more precisely the “alterity” of its own nature. As the authors themselves presented during the second season of the series, the idea of Hawkins with its surroundings functioning as a primary, normative space, is no longer an unchangeable fact. Quite the contrary, Hawkins becomes a surrounded space ready to be invaded by the now controlling dark heterotopias. Although initially only a spatial rift, it is the gate opened by Eleven that has the potential to become the new normative space, a threat that, although apparently removed, ominously overshadows the last installment of the season. Regardless of a specific case that might be addressed, the issue of space remains a key element to be used when evaluating the horror genre. Heterotopian spaces in particular play a crucial role not only in the process of creating a possibly interesting, dynamic, dangerous, or outright morbid setting for a particular narrative, but they also function as a key element in the process of creating the always sought-after horror effect. The simply mirroring but nevertheless subversive nature of heterotopian spaces offers an insight into what might be, and the horror narrative promptly accepts the offered possibilities. Although Twin Peaks and Hawkins are quintessential small American towns, both haunted by real monsters, whether it is a homicidal father, or a fantastic creature from a parallel dimension, the origin of their horrors is not derived from a physical manifestation of the monstrous. The actual genesis of horror, regardless of its later manifestations, is being derived from the interaction between ordinary and heterotopian spaces. The metaphoric friction that exists between these two opposing and separated types of spaces allows for the articulation and later manifestation of the subversive potential contained within the heterotopian one, regardless of whether it is presented as a wood, a secret society, or a government laboratory. This friction between spaces, characteristic of the horror genre in particular, generates a new type of space, also heterotopian in its nature, but with far more agency in its interaction with the reality which the characters inhabit. It is dark heterotopia, a manifestation of transgression and the fulfilment of the previously promised danger, which exerts its power over all other spaces, be they heterotopic or not, by transfiguring them or forming a completely different superimposable reality. Every potential fear or threat to the initially established order is now being channelled through the physical bodies of the various evil doers and monsters, and their destructive forces are in turn projected towards their victims. Therefore, conclusively, this polarity between spaces has and continues to provide an intricate reading of contemporary realities by exploring various foreboding heterotopian reflections.

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Notes

1. Heterotopias “secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance”. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), xix. 2. “[T]heir role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. … I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved”. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 27. 3. Utopia can sometimes “be tied to a specific time and place … with which children are all too familiar; in the spaces of their play, the attic, the garden or their parents’ bed, they find the ocean, the sky or the Wild West”. Thus, utopia can become enacted through heterotopia. Kelvin T. Knight, “Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia”, Textual Practice 31, no. 1 (2017): 146. 4. Heterotopian sites “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect”. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 24. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. Ibid., 25. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Twin Peaks, season 1, episode 4, “Rest in Pain”, directed by Tina Rathborne, written by Harley Peyton, aired April 26, 1990, on ABC Network. 9. Twin Peaks, season 1, episode 1, “Northwest Passage”, directed by David Lynch, written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, aired April 8, 1990, on ABC Network. 10. The frontier is mythologised as the dividing line between the “pagan continent”, as perceived by the Puritan settlers in contrast to the “normal” spaces they inhabited, the heterotopian wilderness where“Satan had seduced the first Indian inhabitants for the purpose of making a stronghold”. Roderick Nash, Wilderness, and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 36. 11. “[M]ost of the characters are visually connected to certain places as they frequently or nearly always (with rare exceptions) appear in the surroundings the viewer comes to regard as naturally attributed to the character in question”. Tijana Parezanović and Marko Lukić, “Tracing the Nowhere: Heterotopian Incursions in Twin Peaks”, The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 1 (2018): 113. 12. “Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation – cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest – the house, the bedroom, the bed, et cetera”. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 23–24.

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13. Twin Peaks, season 2, episode 18, “On the Wings of Love”, directed by Duwayne Dunham, written by Harley Peyton and Robert Engels, aired April 4, 1991, on ABC Network. 14. Twin Peaks, season 1, episode 4, “Rest in Pain”, directed by Tina Rathborne, written by Harley Peyton, aired April 26, 1990, on ABC Network. 15. “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 25. 16. Twin Peaks, season 1, episode 4, “Rest in Pain”, directed by Tina Rathborne, written by Harley Peyton, aired April 26, 1990, on ABC Network. 17. “[T]heir role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory”. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 27. 18. “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures”. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 26. 19. Twin Peaks, season 2, episode 22, “Beyond Life and Death”, directed by David Lynch, written by Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, and Robert Engels, aired June 10, 1991, on ABC Network. 20. Ibid. 21. Twin Peaks, season 2, episode 3, “The Man Behind the Glass”, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, written by Robert Engels, aired October 13, 1990, on ABC Network. 22. “Its favourite motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same”. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3. 23. David Lynch dir., Fire Walk With Me (1992). 24. Ibid. 25. Twin Peaks, season 2, episode 11, “Masked Ball”, directed by Duwayne Dunham, written by Barry Pullman, aired December 15, 1990, on ABC Network.

Bibliography Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces”. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. Knight, Kelvin T. “Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia”. Textual Practice 31, no. 1 (2017): 141–158. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Parezanović, Tijana, and Marko Lukić. “Tracing the Nowhere: Heterotopian Incursions in Twin Peaks”. The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 1 (2018): 109–128. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

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Filmography Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer. Stranger Things, Season 1, Netflix, July 15, 2016. Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer. Stranger Things, Season 2, Netflix, October 27, 2017. Dunham, Duwayne, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 2, episode 11, “Masked Ball”. Aired December 15, 1990, on ABC Network. Dunham, Duwayne, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 2, episode 18, “On the Wings of Love”. Aired April 4, 1991, on ABC Network. Glatter, Lesli Linka, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 2, episode 3, “The Man Behind the Glass”. Aired October 13, 1990, on ABC Network. Lynch, David, dir. Fire Walk with Me. New Line Cinema, 1992. Lynch, David, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 1, episode 1, “Northwest Passage”. Aired April 8, 1990, on ABC Network. Lynch, David, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 2, episode 22, “Beyond Life and Death”. Aired June 10, 1991, on ABC Network. Rathborne, Tina, dir. Twin Peaks. Season 1, episode 4, “Rest in Pain”. Aired April 26, 1990, on ABC Network.

The New Batman Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis

In a recent Facebook post, comic book artist Peter David, responding to Bill Maher’s comments on the latter’s HBO show that comic books were for children, calls comic books, and by extension comic book inspired works like comic- book movies, “modern myths”. Describing myth as something defined by “its own essence”, the artist brings the example of Superman and his global reach and popularity to demonstrate that Siegel and Shuster’s character has far exceeded the context of its creation; Superman stands on his own as the symbol of hope and optimism (Peter David). But the Man of Steel is a boy scout; and while he flies around looking good and saving people, someone gets the job done quietly. Someone lurking in the shadows, striking fear in the hearts of his foes. He is vengeance, he is the night, and I think we all know where this is going… He is Batman. The character created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger is a merchandising powerhouse, a transmedia phenomenon that started from comics and branched into television, cinema, video games, board games, novels, audiobooks, porn, virtual reality experiences, theme parks…and the list could go on. The different versions of the character make him appealing to a wide variety of audiences of different ages. Nevertheless, Batman’s dark origins permeate even the campy representation in popular media of the 1950s–1970s era, keeping the same sublime elements that make him so popular. Batman’s success, to a great extent, could be linked to the parts of his mythos that make him compelling. A tragic background, a determination and force of will akin to obsession, a grotesque gallery of villains almost as notorious as the character himself, an uncanny urban setting that is often portrayed beyond redemption, and webs of conspiracies the vigilante often falls prey to: Batman is the quintessential gothic hero of our times. I discuss Batman’s post-1980s media appearances and transmedia influence as echoing, through uncanny narrative, existential

M.-C. Markodimitrakis (*)  Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_69

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anxieties about the self and providing unsettling political and social commentary. Batman is a popular icon constantly revamped and reintroduced to audiences (in a true comic book fashion), keeping intact, in its core, modern gothic elements that help him to maintain his immensely popularity: a monstrous, anthropomorphic urban legend navigating the faceless technology-ridden metropoles, a fallen hero that descends into darkness only to rise and become the marginal figure that embodies and battles the fragmented realities and indeterminate dreads of the postmodern world. Why call the post-1980s portrayals of Batman ‘Gothic’? And why does it matter to call him a ‘new Gothic’ hero? If, by association, we consider “old” gothic works those that belong in the (pre) Romantic era in English and American literature, then I situate Batman’s immense popularity in, a period primarily influenced by a scarred collective unconscious as Spooner calls it1: the progressive disillusionment of people with politics and society in the millenium. Batman’s influence on popular culture feeds from what Punter calls “urban invisibility and its criminal concomitant”,2 a gothic motif that finds itself prevalent in the modern city: the Dark Knight hovers over Gotham and sees all, defends those who are in need of a saviour and delivers his own sense of justice towards those who disrupt the city’s order and social peace. He operates beyond the veil of anonymity that usually covers social interactions in modern cities. If someone deviates from socially acceptable behaviour, if they commit a crime, or even attempt so, Batman will find them: there are no Adam West jokes to be expected here. True in the comic book medium convention, Batman’s story has been told many times in many different media. As such, choosing the definitive Batman stories across media could be a subject of controversy among fans, marketing strategists, and film executives. His origins have been retconned a number of times, a lot of the stories have fallen out of continuity and then in again casually. Perhaps there is something to be said about the gothic aspect of the characters’ past as well: it is impossible to accurately pinpoint, beyond the readers’ reach. There is an indeterminate past that feels familiar but often contains elements that historically contradict each other and the readers and audiences simply need to accept it. Nevertheless, I argue that the “new Gothic”, immensely popular, Batman owes a lot to definitive works of the 1980s. Contextually, the 1980s was a decade during which the New Right governed in both UK and USA; the neoliberal administrations brought forth groundbreaking changes in society and economy and followed a strategically tense foreign policy. Neil Cornwell brilliantly notes that “It might well be thought that ten years of Thatcherite government in Britain would be more than enough to send anyone fleeing to the realms of escapist literature, there to seek out subversive meanings”.3 The Reagan administration was in decline, but enjoying an unprecedented protection by the press, the AIDS crisis was about to cause a mass hysteria and activate homophobic reflexes within the US society. And Batman? The popularity of the Dark Knight was waning. Stuck in the campy representations of previous decades, under the influence of the Comic Code4 Batman felt

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out of time. Comic book writers, no longer restricted by the CMAA regulations, were finally free to touch upon adult themes and contemporary fears of a society. Jack C. Harris refers to the 1980s as a time when comic book superheroes were motivated more by personal demons than the philanthropic incentives of before. “Mania, fervor and obsession had replaced ‘Truth, justice and the American way’”.5 Comic books, as Harris iterates, more than often reflect their times.6 As the moment writers managed to bypass the censoring of CMAA of anything horrific from 1956 to 1971 finally came, it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel would come out dealing with issues that could not be touched before. The name then of that transformative era for comics and comic book characters should reflect the very qualities that brought the medium into focus. The gothic association was there, invading the themes and providing a language to express the anxieties of the time: Voger in 1997 proposed in a three-part article the name of the era, “Dark Age”, influenced from Frank Miller.7 A dark age, with conflicted heroes that often seem like villains, and villains that range from compelling to disgusting. Beville, while discussing postmodern Gothic, calls attention to the “terrifying realities” of the twentieth century: fascism, genocides, and the nuclear threats that provided humanity all over the world with as much terror as it could take.8 This Dark Age seemed akin to a kind of “depressive Gothic” as Punter calls it, a “powerless abjected subject position which invites us to view the world as our worst fears shaped it”.9 In 1986, The Dark Knight Returns is published and Batman becomes relevant to wider audiences again. Frank Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns in an age known for relaunches of popular icons.10 Miller was not interested in Batman’s origins, but his descent over the years. Wayne’s first entrance to the Batcave after many years is covered in a sense of mystery, as he ends up there without intention, while in a sleepwalking condition having shaved his moustache. Ironically, it is the 10th anniversary of his retirement, after one of his partners, Jason Todd, was murdered; he is an alcoholic 55-year-old man, troubled by his inner demons, realising that Batman was not his persona, but his true identity. The inner dialogue in which Miller accompanies Wayne’s movement that night is revealing; this is not a hero in tights anymore, but a dark gothic hero; the most recognisable gothic figure in the last century (Dracula aside). The dual personality of Batman, reminiscent of Poe’s dramatic inner dialogue anchors the work in the gothic tradition, bringing forth the clash and the revelation of the character’s true Self. “He laughs at me, curses me. Calls me a fool. He fills my sleep, he tricks me”.11 It is his instincts that finally prevail, the animal in the human soul; “The time has come. You know it in your soul. For I am your soul” (Miller 25). In The Dark Knight Returns (TDKR) elements of reality are present and form a dystopian future. A gothic reality that uncannily reminds us of our own, but is somehow off; As Harley Sims notes “His world was a crucible of nuclear brinksmanship, and he was just one grumpy old man with something left in the basement”.12 This world has changed the character everyone loved through the 1960s TV series, reflecting a world of readers that had given up on the character. In Miller’s world, Reagan is the president of the USA and uses Superman as a

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weapon to win the Cold War, gangs are infesting the streets, Joker is considered cured only to appear in a show similar to David Letterman’s (David Endochrine) where he kills everyone there, while Two-Face, after supposedly also being cured, reverts immediately to crime. David By traces the origins of Batman’s dark change with the change that the city underwent during his absence, talking about “infection”13 and prompting an inner struggle that goes beyond the duality of comic book characters in literature and films. This Batman is uncanny to his readers: he carries the bat symbol, but he is bulkier, slower, and brutal. As the readers flip the pages they see their hero fight others and himself and come dangerously close to breaking his vow to never take a life. Batman tortures his enemies, he “looks on with pleasure as their bones shatter and their flesh oozes”.14 Batman progressively becomes more violent to match Gotham’s new breed of criminals and recognises that he is on an irredeemable path: yet he does not stop. He is more similar than ever to the villains he fights against, yet “he no longer cares”.15 He is unhinged; while fighting a mutant gang leader, he sadistically enjoys breaking his bones. “You don’t get it boy. This isn’t a mudhole. It’s an operating table. And I’m the surgeon”.16 He is a mutated, gothic hybrid, compelling old and new readers alike. It is a dark age, and the characters live up to their horrific reputation. Batman in TDKR is a threat to the government, a hero turned villain in the eyes of the public upsetting the societal order. The comic book (?) version of Reagan, an opportunist, and ultra-conservative press-friendly president appoints Superman to deal with the “threat”, setting up a power showdown that sets up the fall of the modern gothic hero. And while most characters in gothic literature do not seem to care or realise the repercussions of their actions, Batman breaks gothic conventions by coldly orchestrating his survival with the help of theatricality and technology. The collateral damage is inescapable; he loses the only father figure he had, Alfred. He could not adapt to the world as it had become and died along with the destruction of Wayne manor. At the end of the graphic novel, Batman is reborn once more, and with him a whole new generation of fans, who, for the first time, saw the character touching upon the horrors of reality, commenting on real-life events. Miller, while explaining the depiction of Gotham, with its gothic statues and its dark alleys, describes how he transferred in TDKR his everyday experiences from living in New York and the power American people were ready to give to anyone promising their safety, even if it meant taking their freedom away17 (Voger 22). If Moore’s Watchmen (1987) is an example of how Gothic could intervene and make a medium popular, then TDKR effectively demonstrates how the most striking gothic figure in popular media violently enters reality. Batman controversially defends his own morals and rights while, at the same time, fights with its inner demons; “This will be a good life. Good enough…”18 Miller’s definitive works on the Batman (gothic) mythos extend to the character’s origins as well. Batman: Year One (1987) is a set of issues, later turned into a graphic novel that centres on the course that led Bruce Wayne to become Batman. Miller retains the same approach and style he takes to the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman in terms of the gothic atmosphere that prevails in Gotham and the

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inner monologues of the characters. The reinvention of Batman follows the TDKR faithfully in tone; gothic elements that had been established over the years through various storylines make their appearance and successfully become definitive of the character. Writing Year One for Miller meant to explore the personal relationship he has with the character. In the introduction to the graphic novel edition of the work, he talks about how for him, despite the campy past, the character was “never funny”. Blurring the barrier between reader and writer Miller writes on his first experience with Batman, A shadow fell across me, from above. Wings flapped, close by and almost silent. Glistening wet, black against the blackened sky, a monster, a giant, a winged gargoyle hunched forward… Moonlight glanced across its back, across its massive shoulders down its craned cabled neck, across its skull striking a triangle at one pointed bat’s ear. It rose into space, its wing spread wide, then fell, its wings now a fluttering cape wrapped about the body of a man. It fell past me, its shadow sliding across walls, growing to shallow whole buildings, lit by the clouds below. The shadow faded into the clouds.19

Miller strived as a writer (Mazzucchelli was the drawing artist) to faithfully portray the uncanniness and esoteric determination coming from fear as Batman experiences it. With the symbol of a bat, an animal that traumatises Wayne as a child, a near suicidal young man is lead into the belief that he will strike fear in the hearts of his adversaries. “I shall become a bat”,20 he promises to himself. Turning to gothic theory, Spooner argues that in gothic texts, the past is a site of terror, of an injustice that must be resolved, an evil that must be exorcised.21 Wayne’s coping mechanism becomes an anthropomorphic persona that in time becomes him. Throughout the years, Batman has been portrayed to confess that Bruce Wayne is a façade; Batman is his true self. Gotham as a literal gothic site contributes to his transformation: the tragic death of his parents at Crime Alley, the city where the police is corrupt and Mafia prevails, all set a fertile ground for the hero to flourish and prevail. The childhood traumas empower Bruce Wayne, who turns his own fears into a massive Gotham phobia. Miller uses bats quite literally to set up/introduce Batman to Gotham: in the case of Batman’s entrapment by the police in an abandoned building, the vigilante uses a device to attract all bats in his vicinity in order to inflict terror on the media and the bystanders and cloak his escape,22 setting the foundations of his attributed mythic qualities. The synergy of technology and human–animal collaboration constructs a modern gothic character that remembers and reminds readers of his origins. In one of the most cited origin stories, Detective Comics #33 (1939), Finger and Kane have Bruce Wayne ponder what form his vigilante would take: “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…a…a…A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen.. I shall become a bat!” Gotham City of Year One is not yet plagued by supervillains, but by common street crime, an epidemic Batman needs to tackle, directly connected to his origins. It is drawn in dark colours: only the last few pages take place in broad daylight. The darkness is used as a weapon from Batman to inflict terror to its opponents, and we see criminals flee in terror of the unknown. On a metanarrative level, even though Batman is an amalgam of gothic conventions on his own, the

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writers of graphic novels present him with a conscious self-referentiality, applying gothic literature techniques and motifs to intimidate his opponents. An example would be his dramatic introduction to Gotham’s crime syndicate while thinking “It’s showtime”.23 Gothic scholars extensively comment on the self-referentiality of the gothic mode, as it is profoundly concerned with its own past, dependent on traces of other stories, often using familiar images, narrative structures, and intertextual allusions. “If this could be said to be true of a great many kinds of literature or film”, Spooner writes, “then Gothic has a greater degree of self-consciousness about its nature, cannibalistically consuming the dead body of its own tradition”.24 Foes will come and go to challenge the hero, while the latter’s past will eventually come back to threaten his status quo in the world, making popular gothic tropes part of the modern Batman canon. A new Gothic Batman, one that has strong foundations in the 1980s revisionist works, needed to revisit his relationship with his alter ego. The Killing Joke, the graphic novel Alan Moore and Brian Bolland created in 1988 enjoys a notoriety because it strips Batman of all his heroic elements and presents him as a fragile character on the verge of mental collapse. If The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One contain certain gothic conventions that reimagine Batman, as a modern gothic hero, after his decades-long campy media appearances then The Killing Joke is a work that strongly resembles a gothic story of the nineteenth century, very close to the standards set by E. A. Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Much like many of the Romantic era’s gothic tales, The Killing Joke includes an unreliable narrator, a hostile environment that hides secrets and transforms (quite literally) those navigating it, horrific crimes, and finally an ambiguous conclusion that leaves the reader without closure, trying to uncover the different layers of the narrative. Moore himself was not very proud of his work, as he later admitted.25 It is “a terrible book” as he called it, because “it doesn’t say anything”. Admittedly, the story starts with yet another cliché escape of Joker from Arkham Asylum. However, it quickly evolves into a Clown Prince of Crime vivid backstory exposition and the horrific acts he commits in order to prove that a single bad day in any random person’s life can turn them to a dark path with no redemption. Throughout the course of the story, Joker will commit a series of gruesome actions, prompting Batman to hunt him down with a mania-like fervor. Joker will shoot Barbara Gordon, Commissioner James Gordon’s daughter and Batman’s sidekick; he will then take her clothes off and take voyeuristic pictures of her as she’s bleeding. After capturing her father, he will also strip him off his clothes, and put him on an amusement ride. Joker will then force the Commissioner to see pictures of his daughter naked, shot, and paralysed. The psychological implications and the gruesome depicted violence in the work, made the publishers of the graphic novel put on the back a “suggested for mature readers” warning, making it officially a tale for adults, one of the very first Batman stories that cuts all ties with a childfriendly era. The past in Moore’s tale is a force majeure, explaining the motifs of the villain and his madness, as well as his complex relationship with Batman. A “new

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Gothic” Batman is a hero of his own accord, but has an instrumental role in creating his arch-nemesis. The readers will see the transformation of a failed magician with a wife expecting a baby, through a series of unfortunate events, accidents, and Batman’s intervention as he turns into the “Clown Prince of Crime”. As the Joker ironically states, “Remembering? Oh I wouldn’t do that. Remembering’s dangerous. I find the past such a worrying anxious place. ‘The past tense’, I suppose you’d call it”26 (21). The past is always coming back to haunt in gothic tales and in this story the tension comes from both characters acknowledging how one gives meaning to the other’s existence. Moore is directly tapping into gothic fiction’s trope of duality, redefining the hero–villain relationship for decades to come. Cowling and Ragg even ponder whether it would ever be possible for Batman and Joker to be the same person.27 While that is not possible (albeit it has been explored in other non-canonical stories), the duality of characters has been created and maintained since the first appearance of Joker in comics in Batman #1 (1940). The complicated relationship between the Joker and Batman goes beyond the villain’s signature mental state, extending to a legendary ying/yang portrayal: “while insanity doesn’t distinguish the Joker amongst Batman’s adversaries —Two-Face, for one often gives him a run for his money on the crazy-as-can-be count— the Clown Prince of Crime’s deranged escapades have certainly earned him the dubious distinction of being the Dark Knight’s chief antagonist and foil”.28 The book itself starts with Batman confessing to a Joker duplicate that he was worried about what would happen to them at the end. “We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we?”29 confesses the hero soon before he realises the escape of his foe. Moore has drawn the characters of two people that “psychologically are mirror images of each other” (interview by Brad Stone). As a discursive mode, the gothic functions “to blur the distinctions that exist when oppositions such as these are presented”.30 Moore wants the reader to doubt whether the differences between Batman and Joker are distinct at the end. In this context, the end is brilliant; Joker makes a joke and they both end up laughing hysterically under the lights of the approaching police cars. Close to Moore’s publication and a few months after Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) another graphic novel writer made his Batman debut and significantly contributed to the new Gothic Batman mythos. No other author has played with the mind of Batman and his readers as much as Grant Morrison. The writer combines several Dark Knight storylines, in the past 30 years, firmly establishing Batman as a gothic character, tormented by his own mind and often inexplicably supernatural foes and demonic forces. Under Morrison’s tenure(s) the readers will see Batman persevere as a man, an icon, a symbol, even a God. Characteristic of Morrison’s writings is the desire to make almost every period in Batman’s publication and screen history canon: incorporating elements from the character’s first years, along with Golden and Silver Age incarnations the writer constructs a character that exhibits recognisable traits to different generations of readers.31 In an interview with Kevin Smith Morrison explains his thinking process over Batman’s intertextuality, constructing a character that turns a comic book trope on its head: accepting all previous incarnations and runs of the character as

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canonical. “The best way to do Batman that’s never been done is to accept every single year as one guy’s biography. […] Batman from 1938 who’s out there with guns in his hand and he’s fighting vampires and crooks, I thought, well, imagine that’s Batman at 20, you know”.32 Batman campy years are to be understood as a combination of Robin’s effect on him and the father–son, or even sibling relationship they develop: a “Norman Bates Batman” and a “cocky”, “circus kid”, fighting crime, and having fun. Or at least they think so because in Morrison’s interpretation memory is but another unreliable narrator: Then it’s suddenly Adam West and Burt Ward for a few months, where it’s just really synthetic and fucked-up because they’ve been on so many mind-altering chemicals from The Scarecrow and The Joker. They don’t know what the fuck’s happening. When they punch people they’re seeing graphics in air. I thought, imagine it’s just all real. […] It fit beautifully into the personality of this insane, billionaire, unique human.33

As Spooner notices, Gothic is not ‘original’; it is always the revival “of something else”.34 In that sense, Morrison’s Batman resolves a common comic book problem, that of (non) canonical storylines, by constructing, much like the gothic mode, a character that subverts and incorporates previously successful incarnations and tropes. Even the weirdest Batman stories present themselves as products of PTSD or hallucinogen drugs, adding to the character’s torment and mental exhaustion from years of fighting crime, a past that weighs heavily on the new Gothic Batman. Morrison’s significant contributions include Batman’s son, the definitive Arkham Asylum tale, and Batman’s death and rebirth. While exploring Bruce Wayne’s family tree and dating life is beyond the scope of this chapter, a jail with direct links to early twentieth-century horror literature is instrumental to the character’s contemporary storylines; the “Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane” is often the site where Batman faces his greatest fears and foes. Making its first appearance in the 1970s, Harris mentions that it was Lovecraft’s great influence on him that made him suggest to the writer Denny O’Neil that villains such as Two-Face and Joker should be locked in an insane asylum, similar to the Arkham, “the dark dwelling of the tormented souls from Lovecraft’s horrific tales”.35 Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989) puts Batman in a claustrophobic environment, facing a cast of his most compelling enemies. Written and drawn with a heavy emphasis on symbolic elements (often disorienting), abstract imagery, and psychological horror, Arkham Asylum significantly concentrates on deconstructing the superhero genre, and in this process constructing a modern gothic hero. The graphic novel has Batman navigate Arkham like a maze, with villains exerting mainly psychological violence on him; the villain that takes centre stage in the story is ultimately revealed as the director of the penitentiary. In the course of the story, Batman’s rogue gallery will reveal their traumatised character traits, many of which will define them in later adaptations and reincarnations in other media. In fact, some of the villains had to be censored by the editorial board because their depiction was particularly disturbing: in the case of Joker, who was drawn at some point as a cross-dresser, the DC Comics board decided to omit certain pages from several editions so as not to confuse the readers and audiences with Jack Nicholson’s film

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depiction. A most characteristic gothic subversion in modern Batman mythos is that of the villain Mad Hatter: in Morrison’s Arkham Asylum the readers first see him so clearly connected to Lewis Carrol’s story and learn of his murderous tendencies, his infatuation with an “Alice”, and his constant invocation of distorted fairy tale tropes. “Killer Croc” will also acquire his signature lizard-like look from this story. Morrison’s graphic novel legacy can be seen in the series of Arkham Asylum-themed Batman games, some of which are loose adaptations of the 1989 story. Morrison’s tenure on Batman (2005–2013) signalled some of the Dark Knight’s character defining moments in his modern history, including a mental breakdown, his death, and eventual rebirth. Morrison’s plot choices, with the revival of obscure villains and simultaneous acknowledgement of Batman’s publication history creates the sense of a continuity of a gothic tale, where the past (better yet, multiple pasts) come(s) to haunt the hero’s present. From animistic demons that rule from the shadows (Barbatos) to seemingly immortal doppelgangers (Dr. Hurt), Morrison’s Batman reaches his breaking point through cosmic rays, hypnotic suggestions, otherworldly torture devices, and time travelling several times. The common element in those escapades is how the protagonist perseveres: against all odds the readers will see villains and heroes alike in awe and fear of Batman’s sublime ability to overcome a brainwash by exhibiting a carnivalesque personality (Zu-EnArrh): a nearly unhinged Batman without Bruce Wayne. Batman’s time traveling journey back to the twenty-first century after his death in Final Crisis was received with mixed reviews, The Return of Bruce Wayne (2010) could be an allegory for Gothic as a mode and the new Gothic Batman himself: surviving several different (literary) periods, incorporating several interpretations and narratives, the Dark Knight emerges as an unstoppable force whose reputation and symbolism far exceeds its human limitations. In fact, it even surpasses the boundaries of Gotham. Instrumental to the “new Gothic” Batman born in the 1980s was the on-screen representations of the character both in the cinema and on television. Following the success of The Dark Knight Returns, DC and Warner Brothers felt confident enough to adapt a Batman story onto the silver screen that would capitalise on the darkness of the character, rather than its past campy portrayals. Even if Tim Burton himself was not very enthusiastic about the controversy prior to the film’s release, because of the fans’ strong response to casting choices,36 Batman rebooted a comic book character that has become a fan—and corporate—favorite franchise, generating billions for the entertainment industry annually. The unique gothic character of the movie was visible in the press of the time, with a prominent example that of The New York Times, which had an extensive report published in February, four months ahead of the release of the film speculating on its possible success, while making, at the same time, the point of calling it a “gamble”37 due to its budget, the other movies that were to be released in 1989, and the early audience reactions to the choice of cast and director. The controversy throughout the stages of the production of Batman was expected to somehow hinder the success of the film, as at the time one of the main problems the Time-Warner company faced was the desperate need to redefine

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and re-market the character they were building the movie around. As the production allowed very few details to be made public and the stars of the movie were notoriously secluded and secretive,38 both merchandisers and fans were equally unnerved. Burton would walk into shops where petitions were being signed to stop the movie he was working on,39 while Warner Bros. had to release a teaser trailer that would underline the dark tone and completely depart from previous on-screen incarnations of the character, especially the 1960s series and movie.40 The 50,000 letters of complaints for the casting choice of Keaton were quite ominous in terms of the film’s success and needed to be addressed appropriately. The doubts of fans, audiences, and critics ahead of the movie’s release were to be expected: Burton chose to embrace the fundamental truth of the Dark Knight universe, its dark tone. “For as witnessed by the architecture of the Gotham cityscape and by the pervasive presence of fear, the unknown and the uncanny, Batman’s story is a clearly gothic one” writes Jensen in retrospect,41 perhaps explaining why Batman has the influence it currently does in popular culture. In a true (mystery) gothic fashion, a simple and cryptic theatrical trailer was quickly created and tested at a theatre in Westwood, California to an unsuspecting audience, receiving a standing ovation. The trailer acquired such a notoriety that theatre owners would report people paying full price for movie tickets just to see the trailer, and leaving before the film began.42 The importance of uncanny elements in the success of the trailer was also by the form it took: the only cast credits were those of Nicholson and Keaton, and instead of a title it had the bat-symbol front and centre. It was now clear: the (new Gothic) “[…] Batman means business”.43 The corporate and fans’ worries were further put to rest as soon as the film and related merchandising hit the theatres and shops: the movie generated seven hundred and fifty million dollars in merchandise, with its tickets being five hundred million,44 which made the film the most successful in Warner Brothers history (until 2002s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). For the first attempt of building a Batman movie franchise, one flourished and declined by 1997, only to be rebooted in 2004 with Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and in Zack Snyder’s 2015 Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, merchandising affected the success of the films more than its gothic elements. The dark tone of Burton films made them difficult to be directly associated with the preteen audiences and consumer categories marketing campaigners were after. This led to the lighter tone of the films following Burton’s work on Batman, with Warner Bros. thinking that “The film [Batman Forever], purportedly lighter and more humorous than its predecessors, [would be] expected to help make merchandising the property to kids and adults easier”.45 While indeed the franchise made a commercial return after Batman Returns (1992) with a worldwide gross for Batman Forever (1995) of $333 million dollars (Hughes 44), Batman and Robin (1997) earned $237 million and put the franchise on hiatus, while the merchandising for those films never reached even close to the success of the 1989 hit. Strong reactions to the film would reveal how the darkness and gothicism of Batman are inexorably tied to his media presence. For example, Brooker46 details how Batman is often understood as being bifurcated into “dark” and “camp” aspects. Studying

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the strong fan reactions against Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997), he quotes an expletive-laden rant from an online poster named Jeff Shain: “Batman isn’t some two-bit circus freak like your bearded lady of a mother! He is the essence of gothic darkness, a man dripped between reality and fantasy, teetering on the brink of insanity, with only his partner and butler and his mission to keep him from going crazy!”47 The slippage of “gothic” and “darkness” is significant where Batman is concerned, because while Schumacher’s films might fairly be described as lacking darkness—both figuratively and literally—they are just as clearly gothic. The rising importance of the young audiences would be apparent in how Warner Brothers treated the Batman franchise after 1989, expanding on animated incarnations of the character to mine the market that the movies could not. With toy lines that were innovative in that they were the first to market Batman as a single character and not as part of another line of products,48 Batman, Batman: The Animated Series and the sequels and spinoffs reveal how Warner Bros. were anxious to capitalise on the success of their dark, new Gothic product, while also making Batman child-friendly. Perhaps the greatest success in that attempt to reach younger audiences in the character’s recent history is Lego Batman: The Movie (2017), which was an immense success. Brown (2017) uses the film as an example of how the comic book industry with its film tie-ins tried to lure young audiences back by downplaying the dark elements that define superheroes, infantilising them instead.49 A Nielsen study commissioned by DC in 2012 reveals that less than 2% of comic book readers after the relaunch of the titles were under the age of 18. In response to that, DC and Marvel attempted to remarket some of the popular characters for younger audiences: “That even characters primarily defined by dark and violent motivations and actions such as Batman, Wolverine, Deadpool, Lobo and The Punisher have been turned into kid-friendly figures in comic books, animated television programmes, toys and merchandising reveals not just effective marketing strategies, but an affective relationship between consumers and fictional characters”.50 The new Gothic Batman is great for adults, not so many kids; in a more recent comic book controversy, Batman: Damned (2018), a title published under DC Comic’s “Black Label” for mature readers, the latter get a glimpse of Bruce Wayne’s penis after the Dark Knight experiences a traumatic memory loss, only for DC to censor the explicit nudity in digital versions of the issue. The discussion for definitive “new Gothic” Batman stories in comic books and other media is bound to exclude several ones due to the nature of comic book characters: they are often reset so as to be introduced to new readerships and appeal to younger audiences. The new stories often contain elements of older ones, but also constitute fertile ground for the introduction of new villains and complicated backstories. It is no accident that most Dark Knight stories adapted in other media come from the defining for the character Dark Age of comics, despite the success of recent runs, such as the one by Scott Snyder (2011–2018) and Tom King (2018–). What remains in most original and adapted Batman stories, even the ones that target younger audiences, is the darkness of Batman and his tormented

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psyche. As a new gothic hero, Batman cannot be happy, with writers having him experience tragedies related to his extended Bat-family every other year to justify his lifestyle and reclusiveness. Bruce Wayne’s alter ego remains consistent across media and platforms, captivating readers with his qualities and pushing the human boundaries of flesh and spirit to their absolute limit. At the end of the day Kane and Finger’s creation commands the respect of foes, friends, and readers/audiences alike: he becomes a symbol that, much like the gothic mode, mutates as years go by but remains surprisingly relevant and ultimately uncanny. When the Bat symbol shines at Gotham’s sky criminals know that no shadow is safe for them; a horrifying bat-shaped humanoid creature lurks at the corner of their eye.

Notes



1. Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 9. 2. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (New York: Longman, 1996), 184. 3. Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York, 1990), xi. 4. Further information on the Comic Book Code, a timeline of its implementation and its eroded impact can be found in Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg’s “Comics Code History: The Seal of Approval”. http://cbldf.org/comics-code-history-the-seal-of-approval/. 5. Jack C. Harris, “Foreword.” The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-modern Comics. Edited by Mark Voger et al. (Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2000), 4–5. 6. Harris, The Dark Age, 5. 7. Mark Voger, The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-modern Comics. Edited by Mark Voger et al. (Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2000), 6. 8. Voger, The Dark Age, 56. 9. Punter, The Literary Fantastic, 212–213. 10. Voger, The Dark Age, 124. 11. Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (10th Anniversary Edition) (New York: DC Comics, 1997), 19. 12. Harley Sims, “How the Knight Went Dark: Batman Has Been a Gloomy Figure for 60 Years, but His Current Posture of Messianic Suffering Is a Product of the Nuclear Brinksmanship of the 1980s, and of One Writer’s Imagination.” The Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 2008, 3. 13. Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, 2. 14. David By, “Holy Nightmare, Batman! A Crime-and-Corruption Infested Gotham City Has Turned millionaire Bruce Wayne into a Brutal Vigilante. Definitely Not for the Kids—See End of Text.” Newsday: 4. 20 January 1987. ProQuest. Web. 17 May 2013. 15. By, “Holy Nightmare Batman.” 16. Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, 101. 17. Voger, The Dark Age, 22. 18. Miller, The Dark Knight Returns, 199. 19. Frank Miller, “Introduction.” Batman: Year One (New York: DC Comics, 1988). 20. Miller, Year One, I, 22. 21. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 18. 22. Miller, Year One, I, 61. 23. Miller, Year One, II, 37–38. 24. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 10.

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25. Alan Moore, interview by Brad Stone, Comic Book Resources. Comic Book Resources, 2001. https://www.cbr.com/alan-moore-interview/. Accessed 19 June 2013. 26. Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke—The Deluxe Edition (New York: DC Comics, 2008), 21. 27. Chris Ragg and Sam Cowling, “Could Batman Have Been the Joker.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 143. 28. Christopher Rochibaud, “The Joker’s Wild: Can We Hold the Clown Prince Morally Responsible?” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 71. 29. Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke—The Deluxe Edition (New York: DC Comics, 2008), 4. 30. Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 41. 31. Grant Morrison, interview by Kevin Smith, #27: Grant Morrison: Bat Christ. Fatman on Batman, 2013. Accessed 26 January 2019. 32. Morrison, Bat Christ, 2013. 33. Morrison, Bat Christ, 2013. 34. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 10. 35. Harris, The Dark Age, 5. 36. David Hughes, Comic Book Movies (London: Virgin, 2007), 43. 37. Hilary de Vries, “FILM: ‘Batman’ Battles for Big Money.” The New York Times, 5 February 1989. www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/movies/film-batman-battles-for-bigmoney.html. 38. de Vries, “‘Batman’ Battles for Big Money.” 39. Hughes, Comic Book Movies, 43. 40. Joey Paur, “10 Fun Facts About Tim Burton’s BATMAN You May Not Know.” GeekTyrant. geektyrant.com/news/10-trivia-bits-you-may-not-know-from-tim-burtonsbatman. Accessed 4 May 2017. 41. Randall M. Jensen, “Batman’s Promise.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 92. 42. Paur, GeekTyrant. 43. Hughes, Comic Book Movies, 41. 44. Hughes, Comic Book Movies, 42. 45. Shari Sanders, “Picking a Powerhouse (Choosing the Best Licensed Merchandise for Apparel Stores).” Discount Store News (vol. 34, no. 12, 19 June 1995). 46. Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York: Continuum, 2001). 47. Brooker, Batman Unmasked, 306. 48. Alex Malloy and Stuart W. Wells, Comics Collectibles and Their Values (Radnor, PA: Wallace Homestead Book Co., 1996), 2. 49. Jeffrey Brown, “‘I’m the Goshdarn Batman!’ Affect and the Aesthetics of Cute Superheroes.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (vol. 9, no. 2, 2017), 2. 50. Brown, “‘I’m the Goshdarn Batman!’”, 2.

Works Cited “Batman Busters.” The New York Times. 29 June 1989. www.nytimes.com/1989/06/30/opinion/ topics-of-the-times-batman-busters.html. Accessed 7 February 2019. Beville, Maria. Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.

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Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001. Brown, Jeffrey A. “‘I’m the Goshdarn Batman!’ Affect and the Aesthetics of Cute Superheroes.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9, no. 2 (2017): 119–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/2150 4857.2017.1299023. Burton, Tim, director. Batman. Warner Bros., 1989. Burton, Tim, director. Batman Returns. Warner Bros., 1992. By, David F. “Holy Nightmare, Batman! A Crime-and-Corruption Infested Gotham City has Turned millionaire Bruce Wayne into a Brutal Vigilante. Definitely Not for the Kids—See End of Text.” Newsday: 4. 20 January 1987. ProQuest. Web. 17 May 2013. Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. David, Peter. Response to Bill Maher’s Comments on the Appeal of Comic Book Characters to Adults. Facebook. 26 January 2019, 10:17 p.m. https://www.facebook.com/peter.david.9256/ posts/2160294490732912. Accessed 27 January 2019. Fisher, Mark. “Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 1–10. Greene, Darragh, and Kate Roddy, eds. Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. Harris, Jack C. “Foreword.” The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-modern Comics. Edited by Mark Voger et al. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2006: 4–5. Hughes, David. Comic Book Movies. London: Virgin, 2007. Jensen, Randall M. “Batman’s Promise.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008: 85–100. Lewis, Jon. “Following the Money in America’s Sunniest Company Town: Some Notes on the Political Economy of the Hollywood Blockbuster.” Movie Blockbusters. Edited by Julian Stringer. London: Routledge, 2003: 61–71. Malloy, Alex G., and Stuart W. Wells. Comics Collectibles and Their Values. Radnor, PA: Wallace Homestead Book Co., 1996. Marich, Robert. Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. Maslin, Janet. “It’s in a Box: Maybe It’s a Movie.” The New York Times. 13 April 1991. www. nytimes.com/1991/04/14/movies/film-view-it-s-in-a-box-maybe-it-sa-movie.html. Accessed 4 May 2017. Miller, Frank. Batman: Year One. New York: DC Comics, 1988, Print. Miller, Frank. “Introduction.” Batman: Year One. Edited by Frank Miller. New York: DC Comics, 1988, Print. Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (10th Anniversary Edition). New York: DC Comics, 1997. Moore, Alan. Batman: The Killing Joke—The Deluxe Edition. New York: DC Comics, 2008, Print. Moore, Alan. Interview by Brad Stone, Comic Book Resources. Comic Book Resources, 2001. Web. 19 June 2013. https://www.cbr.com/alan-moore-interview/. Morrison, Grant, and Dave McKean. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. New York: DC Comics, 1989. Morrison, Grant, et al. Batman R.I.P.: The Deluxe Edition. New York: DC Comics, 2009. Morrison, Grant, et al. Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne. Titan, 2012. Paur, Joey. “10 Fun Facts About Tim Burton’s BATMAN You May Not Know.” GeekTyrant. geektyrant.com/news/10-trivia-bits-you-may-not-know-from-tim-burtons-batman. Accessed 4 May 2017. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic. New York: Longman, 1996. Punter, David, ed. A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

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Ragg, Chris, and Sam Cowling. “Could Batman Have Been the Joker.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008: 142–155. Reichstein, Andreas. “Batman—An American Mr. Hyde?” Amerikastudien/American Studies 43, no. 2 (1998): 329–350. www.jstor.org/stable/41157373. Robichaud, Christopher. “The Joker’s Wild: Can We Hold the Clown Prince Morally Responsible?” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008: 70–84. Round, Julia. Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2014. Round, Julia. “Grant Morrison, Dave McKean, and Gaspar Saladino’s Arkham Asylum (1989).” The Gothic: A Reader. Edited by Simon Bacon. Peter Lang, 2018: 161–168. Sanders, Shari. “Picking a Powerhouse (Choosing the Best Licensed Merchandise for Apparel Stores).” Discount Store News 34, no. 12 (19 June 1995). Retailing Today. Sanna, Antonio. “Batman: Gothic Conventions and Terror.” Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 2, no. 2 (December 2015): 33–45. Sims, Harley. “How the Knight Went Dark: Batman Has Been a Gloomy Figure for 60 Years, but His Current Posture of Messianic Suffering Is a Product of the Nuclear Brinksmanship of the 1980s, and of One Writer’s Imagination.” The Ottawa Citizen, 26 July 2008. ProQuest. Web. 17 May 2013. http://search.proquest.com/docview/241183751?accountid=8359. Skoble, Aeon J. “Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.” Superheroes and Philosophy Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way. Edited by Tom Morris and Matt Morris. Chicago: Open Court, 2012: 29–42. Smith, Kevin. “#27: Grant Morrison: Bat Christ.” Fatman on Batman, Episode 27, 20 February 2013. https://www.mixcloud.com/FatmanOnBatman/27-grant-morrison-bat-christ-fat-man-onbatman/. Accessed 26 January 2019. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. White, Mark D. “Why Doesn’t Batman Kill the Joker?” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul. Edited by Mark D. White. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008: 5–16. Whitington, Paul. “Batman … and a Knight to Remember.” Irish Independent: 21. 19 July 2008. ProQuest. Web. 17 May 2013. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007, Print. Vries, Hilary de. “FILM: ‘Batman’ Battles for Big Money.” The New York Times. 5 February 1989. www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/movies/film-batman-battles-for-big-money.html. Voger, Mark, et al. The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-modern Comics. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2006.

Post Human Gothic

Global War from Tokyo to Barcelona Naomi Simone Borwein

A visually striking recruitment billboard, circulated by the United States Military in 2018, evinces an Americanised transnational War Gothic for purposes of propaganda.1 It employs WWI British poetry aesthetics like those of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, as well as nineteenth-century imagery of revolution and surcease seen in Théodore Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse and Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté Guidant le Peuple—the former depicting a real disaster related to war in 1818, and the latter, commemorating the 1830 July Revolution.2,3 In the advertisement, the chiaroscuro of the landscape is a source of sublime and terrible beauty. It heralds back to the Romantic Gothic, and the romanticisation of warfare, but still evokes the abiding spectre of WWI Gothic, and the French Revolution. Yet, the photorealism of the billboard, which recalls iconic photographs like Thomas Franklin’s Raising the Flag at Ground Zero (2001) and Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945), and visual referents to American soldiers in the Middle East, accentuates a central feature of War Gothic texts: the perceived dichotomy between the realistic horrors of combat and the excess, macabre, and decadence of the Gothic.4,5 In literary production, the complexity and variability of War Gothic discourse, and how writers pursue the aesthetic in different cultural registers, is heightened by the continued focus on Anglo-American perspectives in criticism. This chapter includes an analysis of the real/unreal paradox of War Gothic used as a discursive device in set texts, where the graphic realism of war chronicle and the popular sensationalism of the gothic novel collide—for example, in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) from Iraq, Blood Crime (2016) from Spain, and After Darkness (2014) an Australian-Japanese hybrid. Each text incorporates aesthetics of literary and historical realism with the Gothic. The aim of this chapter is first, to survey the mode of War Gothic as defined by various scholars; second, to examine it on a transnational scale—across various national productions; and third, to analyse the engines of war and gothic aesthetics with particular focus on modern twenty-first-century

N. S. Borwein (*)  Western University, London, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_70

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literary extensions, while looking at gothic reality in narratives from nations affected by the Anglo-American theatre of war. This analysis allows for an investigation of how “gothic” and “war” suffuse select novels in disparate cultural contexts. Thematic and substantive transformations are observed at the global and the regional level.6 Ultimately, each text uniquely exhibits a narrative that relies on the diaspora of the Gothic as a parallel to modern warfare. Using the example of the French Revolution, Joseph Crawford describes War Gothic as existing along a spectrum from history to horror-fantasy, which is apposite to an understanding of how war chronicles and the Gothic blend in definitions: “stories which had begun as semi-fictional propaganda or quasi-pornographic fantasy”, seemingly “slid into historical record”.7 As a counterpart to historical works by Thomas Carlyle or Edmund Burke, gothic novelists “were free to focus almost exclusively on its most bloody and spectacular incidents”.8 From the French Revolution to Second World War, propaganda and print sensationalism of recycled war atrocities have often relied on popular horror and gothic stories9 that cross national boundaries. In 2014 David Punter states of mass media and modern war, “every revolution is now our own: we see it, we hear it, it is distributed through the increasingly instantaneous media every night”,10 mirroring the diaspora of the genre. Contemporary gothic war writing stretches from Kyrgyzstan to Barcelona; the aesthetic is used to describe vastly different wars across international lines, and across time. In Kyrgyzstan, literary and popular consumption of the Gothic has been linked, for example, to “Bush’s war on terror” and the Tulip Revolution of March 2005; yet, gothic style was absorbed into the Kyrgyz literary tradition through Russian writing.11 Volumes like Muireann Maguire’s 2013 Red Spectres expose a Soviet wartime gothic aesthetic during the Russian Revolution; government officials wanted Gothicism “shut in its coffin”,12 as it powerfully depicted their culture—for instance, in works by Mikhail Bulgakov or Aleksandr Chayanov. Equally, gothic, surreal aesthetics flourished in Russian wartime propaganda posters of the same era.13 Within Israeli gothic tradition, writers like S. Y. Agnon in his novel Me’oyev Le’ohev (From Foe to Friend) (1941), use European Gothic and Hasidic parable to describe incidents like the 1929 Arab Riots. In Mexico, the bloody internecine conflicts of pre-Columbian Aztecs and Toltecs as much as the 1920s Mexican Revolution, described by the gothic novelist Mariano Azuela, are given what Jesse Alemán calls “a trans-American Gothic space haunted by the spectres of empire” and the mythologised and exotic Mexico that “the American imagines”, and Spain often “expressed through gothic discourse”.14 Additionally in gothic Barcelona, the long shadow of the Franco Dictatorship still defines the genre. Yet, most War Gothic is critically analysed along a spectrum from the Seven Years War (1755–1763) to post 9/11 and American wars in the Middle East. Gothic was born in an epoch of war. Angela Wright views the Seven Years War, the first global war, as the “crucible” in which the Gothic was “forged”, incorporating Terry Hale’s argument on gothic translation.15 Dr. Samuel Johnson famously associated the early genre with wild adventures of war and gothic romance,16 which found new life in the “‘drama of terror’ of the Revolution”.17

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The setting of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) evokes the actual Castle of Otranto in Puglia, Italy, with its first Duke, but also with the later “mass-murderer and Napoleonic spymaster”, Joseph Fouché.18 Like Otranto the sounds and imagery of war are infused in early gothic narratives from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho (1794) and The Romance of the Forest (1791), to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). The shock and awe of war are embedded in the sublime horror of the Gothic. Agnieszka Monnet and Steffen Hantke note that in the background of the gothic tale, “the rumble of cannons and the sound of marching boots” continue to echo.19 Indeed, “with these thematic, tonal, and affective elements … the Gothic shows its affinity to the subject matter of war”.20 This broad aesthetic characterisation translates across cultures. War Gothic has transnational, global, national, and local manifestations. Elements such as shock and awe (at times as thrall or reverence injected with a sinister aspect) have a strong place in narratives outside of the West—for example, in Japan or Iraq. Reminiscent of early criticism by Johnson and others, contemporary global War Gothic can still be defined by its intersecting relationship between the realism of war, as a chronicle of horrific events, and the fantastic and macabre of the Gothic. Because modern global War Gothic uses discursive devices to comment on the nature of war, these antithetical elements are often used to create discourses on nationhood and identity. Gothic tropes take many forms, from medical experimentation and chemical warfare, to dissection. Horror, absurdity, madness, terror, and monstrosity often invoke realistic atrocities to describe literal corporeal manifestations of memory, trauma, or apocalyptic events. Global War Gothic texts balance the historical realism of war in various political, religious, and cultural contexts with conventions of the global gothic movement, or regional sensibilities that take the place of those conventions. A subset of standard wars and military engagements is typically described in scholarship that categorises War Gothic as a distinct enterprise. Despite their seeming diversity, the national scope and perspective of these wars is surprisingly limited. A brief critical survey of works from Crawford and Linnie Blake to Sara Wasson suggests the centrality of the following conflicts and their associated images of terror: the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (Madam Guillotine, Reign of Terror, Terrorism), American Civil War (Sherman’s March), Spanish Civil War (atrocities of Franco’s regime), World War One (trenches, gas warfare), and Second World War (Nazis, Third Reich, Holocaust or Shoah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pearl Harbour, Blitzkrieg). An Anglo-American focus directs much of the analysis. After the Second World War scholars generally centre on the Cold War as an American concept, but include post-Second World War Japan, Germany, and Russia, while stretching into the aftermath of the Cuban Missile crisis. Equally, there is an emphasis on the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1955–1975) but mainly interpreted from a Western standpoint. New criticism on Modern American Wars dominates the period from 1990 to present: the Gulf War (1990–1991) to post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. From such conflicts arise new areas, or subgenres, of gothic criticism including 9/11, the War on Terror, New Wars; Cyber War Gothic; and, new forms of

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torture porn that develop out of, for instance, graphic depictions of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Within standard wars and related areas of gothic study, there are recurrent types of conflict. Contemporary War Gothic narratives showcase colonial wars; guerrilla, industrial, and cyber warfare; civil, national and international actions; massacres, insurgencies, conspiracies; and, war terror and “terrorism” under completely different lenses and perspectives. Such narratives display many of these themes within regional forms. The modern war on terror is found in images of the Middle East, special ops and “terrorist conspiracies”, as part of a legacy of real and sometimes creatively reimagined ruses linked to “Jacobin, anarchist, nihilist, nationalist, communist, [and] Islamist” plots.21 For modern War Gothic, intelligence agencies, terrorist networks, secret societies, and organised crime have an important role in creating the narrative backdrop. In American literature, Anti-Fa, neo-Nazism, the Alt-Right, and conspiracy theorists are equivalent “factions” that get swept up in War Gothic discourse. These basic dynamics of warfare are visible across a spectrum of gothic texts in different cultural contexts, which emphasise divergent nationalist ideology and rhetoric. This will be analysed in the section “From American-Iraqi to Australian-Japanese: Textualising War Gothic”. War Gothic texts after 1900 are dominated by gothic horror themes of trauma, supernaturalism, death, history, monsters, terror, ghosts, and the politics of fear. These broad motifs are integrated into a plethora of war settings, with particular modern emphasis on civil wars and the aftermath of 9/11. Yet such images and elements have strong antecedents in fin-de-siècle fiction: for example, H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). They range from an engagement with colonialism and monstrosity, to futuristic extra-terrestrial invasion. These themes continue to be revisited and reconceptualised in contemporary narratives and criticism. There is a strong realist tradition in World War One British war poetry that has had a lasting effect on War Gothic—through poets like Rupert Brooke and Sassoon, much like Owen and his 1920 “Dulce et Decorum Est”, and Rosenberg and his 1916 “Break of Day in the Trenches”. This aesthetic is mirrored in realistic American and German writing, for example, William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay (1926) and German veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) to William March’s Company K 1933, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Natural History of the Dead (1933). World War Two novels that follow in this tradition include John Hawkes’s The Cannibal (1949), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), or James Jones’ The Thin Red Line (1962). Nevertheless, images from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) to Christopher Bram’s Father of Frankenstein (1995) increasingly take the realistic ghosts and traumas of war to phantasmagorical heights. Scholars examine zombies, apocalypse, and futuristic dystopic war through texts like Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006), Karl Schaefer and Craig Engler’s Z Nation (2014–) or Uwe Boll’s Zombie Massacre 2: Reich of the Dead (2015). For instance in World War Z, gothic war rhetoric is artfully appropriated for

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contemporary geo-political and internecine tensions between China, Russia, Israel, Cuba, South Africa, and the “American Empire”.22 Such imagery of cross-cultural contamination and decay builds on the works of George A. Romero and Richard Matheson. The Vietnam and Post-Vietnam war are continual sources of material for American production, for instance, works like Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), or Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981). A paucity of Vietnamese texts are discussed, by scholars like Andrew Hock Soon Ng. Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1990), and Diong Thu Houng’s Without a Name (1991) or Paradise of the Blind (1993) play with themes of historical anxiety and trauma that are exposed by war at cultural junctions; they individualise the Other, and thus its exoticism. Cold War, as cultural paranoia, is explored by critics from the German perspective, for instance in films like Jorg Buttereit’s Nekromantik (1987) and Nekromantik 2 (1991), and from the American stance, in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984). Conversely, Japanese postwar texts, and their international spin-offs, tend to focus on body horror, awe, historical realism, and fantasy violence: standard examples include films like Ringu (1998), Onibaba (1964), Kwaidan (1964) and Kuruneko (1968) and Koji Suzuki’s The Ring (2002). Japanese War Gothic writing encompasses Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain (1965), Mamoru Oshii’s Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale (2003), Hideyuki Kikuchi’s post-apocalyptic Vampire Hunter D (2007–2013), Shigeru Mizuki’s War and Japan (1991), and more. These Japanese texts showcase unique forms of post-war apocalyptic Gothic deeply impacted by Japanese fascism and nuclear fallout and imbued by the samurai tradition. While in Japan apocalypse is tied to Hiroshima and the horror of nuclear war, in other cultures civil war is prevalent and used to explore politics, national ideology, and the Gothic itself: from the American to the Spanish Civil War. Like Marie Mulvey-Roberts, scholars investigate Vampires and American Civil War through texts such as George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982), David Wellington’s novel 99 Coffins (2007), or Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010). Conversely, like Xavier Aldana Reyes, critics examine the gothic ambiance of the Spanish Civil War from Francisco de Goya and his Disasters of War in 82 engravings—not published until 1863, an era of revival in Victorian gothic taste—to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El Laberinto de los Espiritus (The Labyrinth of Spirits) (2016/2018) as an example of “Gothic Barcelona”.23 Surrealism in this Spanish horror softens the prose while heightening the visual dichotomy between grotesque fantasy and realism. Nazism is evident in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Horror-Gothic films. Notable examples include Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow (2009), a Norwegian zombie-splatter film, Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein’s Army (2013), set in Second World War, where Russian soldiers in Eastern Germany find a hidden Nazi lab. Furthermore, in Timo Vuorensola’s Iron Sky (2012) Nazis wake from dormancy in a secret military moon-lab, and concoct

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plans for global conquest. Interestingly, in the sequel Iron Sky: The Ark (2018), characters are pitted against the Illuminati, emphasising the topical relevance of Nazism for American apocalyptic war narrative. Nazi characters are used as romanticised monsters, or iconic villains in post-war America that rival Islamic martyrs and ISIS fighters. By making Nazism speculative fantasy, these films drift away from historical realism, and extend forms of fear into the horrors of today. Furthermore, Johan Höglund, Gwyneth Peaty, and others analyse virtual war through platform games like Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as apocalyptic Dubai, through the WW2-inspired games like Castle Wolfenstein in 2D (1992), 3D Wolfeinstein (2014), and Doom (1993); or, BioShock Infinite (2013) set in 1912. These games make players a virtual fixture of the global gothic war scene, becoming part of a global war dialogue. Placed in the fantasy realm of gaming, the image of war is altered by its dissociation from fear, trauma, and loss. In each case, fantasy and realism are navigated through the Gothic. Motifs of monstrosity, vampirism, zombification, and (post)apocalypse proliferate. Nazism, cold war, civil war, revolution, Korea and Vietnam are lasting images reconceptualised in War Gothic. Cold War paranoia is incorporated into modern conspiracy and virtual war. As will be seen, propaganda, realism, terror, and fantasy play heavily into global and transnational representations. The above survey establishes some variations and themes explored in the mode. Increased homogenisation of individualism in contemporary War Gothic is apparent, through mass media, and a concomitant de- and hyper-personalisation of victims, as well as a dynamic oscillation between fantastic and realistic representations of horror. Embedded cultural markers are under-analysed because of the American War focus, but they are integral to an understanding of themes and contexts of “war” and “gothic”. Elements highlighted in the section, “Thematic Approaches”, are applied to an analysis of global War Gothic narratives in four regions—Frankenstein in Baghdad from Iraq, Blood Crime from Spain, and After Darkness as a Japanese/ Australian hybrid. Examples were chosen based on their global relevance; they have been translated into English, accrued accolades, and been broadly circulated. The purpose of this analysis is to explicate how aspects of “gothic” and “war” permeate these narratives through the gothic-real paradox, and how different cultural contexts impact the constituent parts of these narratives. Global criticism of War Gothic in the twenty-first century is predominantly from an American lens, affected by American anxieties, and driven by American Wars. American War Gothic exists on a gradation from historical-social realism to apocalyptic fantasy, for example, from George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2018) to Brooks’ World War Z. They are invested with cultural paranoia, alienation, isolation, fear of the gestalt (Marxist horror of the ductile masses), and conversely, dissipation, monotony, and death. Studying Iraqi War Gothic gives a unique opportunity to analyse the “other side” of military occupation. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, much like Hassann Blasim’s 2013 The Corpse Exhibition is an example of internationally acclaimed Iraqi War Gothic. Both texts are split between real horror and gothic allegory. Terror and terrorism are juxtaposed to propaganda, paranoia, and censorship, playing with the

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distinction between reality and lies. On one level, these texts expose “injuries and psychological effects of violence” in military occupation, using a “rhetorical toolbox” to describe the horrors of war.24 Indeed, Terry Phillips posits, War Gothic incorporates the dynamic nature of war as a binary of old world and modern, with the dissolution of “cultural boundaries” and “racial distinctions” that expose representations of horror and monstrosity25—much like the clash of American and Iraqi culture seen in Saadawi’s text. The subgenre of Iraqi War Gothic is a Western construction. To develop a definition of global Iraqi War Gothic, consider scholarship on the novel that uses gothic elements to describe Iraqi context; critics focus on themes like national dismemberment and aesthetics of horror in Iraqi narratives26; monstrosity the human condition and international relations27; and, reportage, fiction, and photography.28 English reviews of Saadawi’s book highlight the dichotomy between gothic terror and realism in the depiction of war; the incorporation of absurdism; and bizarre, haunting, and macabre events. They emphasise sectarian violence, allegory, dark humour, and rhetoric. Helen Benedict comments, “[w]eaving as seamlessly from parable to realism…, [the novel] captures the absurdity, mayhem, and tragedy of war”.29 In a 2014 The New Yorker review, Ursula Lindsey states “[m]atterof-factly, Saadawi sets out a reality—Baghdad in 2005—so gothic in its details … that, when the novel makes a turn into the supernatural, it barely shocks”.30 Thomas McGuane suggests the novel stems “from the heart of terror”, like Poe and Conrad, “where violence dissolves the divide between reality and unreality”.31 These are markers of global War Gothic set in Iraq. However, beneath this global register of defining terms, lurks a more complex mode with regional manifestations that reach beyond martyrdom and monstrosity, where for example, death is tinctured by religious cultural norms, and local understanding of terror (through martyr, terrorist, and civilian) while tied to international representations of identity; the use of gothic tropes then is highly discursive, allegorical, and parabolic. Note that Blasim’s volume of short stories, The Corpse Exhibition, engages with other national War Gothic traditions. For instance, he incorporates the Latin American tradition of Alvero Mutis and Carlos Fuentes in the story “The nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. While through “Reality and Record”, he confronts truth and lies with gothic war discourse.32 Unlike Saadawi, Blasim engages more with the lexicon of the Global Gothic in labyrinthine shadows, nightmarish terrors, medical horror, and macabre surcease. Originally published in English in 2018, Frankenstein in Baghdad is set in the aftermath of the American occupation of Iraq—Baghdad in 2005. Military occupation and sectarian violence become a background to gothic fantasy and horror in a novel that plays with the real and unreal, much like the title does by placing Frankenstein and his “monstrosities” in occupied Baghdad. Indeed, the paratext of this novel showcases central thematic elements and places them within an aesthetic discourse on the Gothic, and on war. In the penguin edition, the first epigraph by Saadawi binds the title of the book to a passage from Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein. The quote focuses on the moral and physical repercussions of creating an unnatural abomination, asking Frankenstein to “destroy the work of

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your hands”.33 The other two epigraphs are from The Whatsitsname, as a metafictive religious parable, and the “Great Martyr”,34 which are, illustrative of how gothic monstrosity is represented by blending chimeras of gothic legacy and martyrdom through the body politic of Iraqi war. The novel begins with a “Top Secret Final Report”, and ends with one35 as a narrative device. By beginning at the end, these military reports (as literary realism) create a juxtaposition between factual records and temporal-spatial distortions typical of the Gothic. This use of the initial prefatory report also serves the purpose of mimicking the initial narrative structure of Shelley’s Frankenstein. The report links activities of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, in 2005, around the occupation of Iraq by the United States to “the author” and “the story” that “should not have been written”.36 This metafictive author is a questionably monstrous character in the story; and, the narrative is the text being written in the book. It is a book confiscated by Iraqi and American officers,37 thus blurring fantasy and war realism. Throughout the narrative, characters habitually tell bizarre horror stories that are a mixture of anecdote, folklore, and myth. Paralleling the way propaganda and lies function in periods of war, Trudi Tate notes certain “stories were deemed too obscene”, too horrible “to publish”, and were “circulated as rumour or folk lore”.38 In this way, Saadawi explores the nature of truth through the unreal. And, reality is intermittently sublimated by supernatural intrusions, through local religious beliefs and the ghosts that preside over war torn streets.39 Gothic tropes are layered with regional specificity, against a backdrop of war. The first chapter, “The madwoman”, evokes a longstanding gothic trope, and the first image is a bombing near “Tayaran Square in the centre of Baghdad”.40 The crowds “watched in shock as a ball of smoke rose, dark and black … assaulted by the sound of car horns and of people screaming and shouting”,41 creating an auditory and visual gothic warscape. Elishva, the madwoman, is known to have Baraka, as a folkloric supernaturalism that hangs over the scene: some “locals believed… her spiritual powers … prevented bad things from happening”.42 But, the gothic lexicon underscores a global genre, “the sense of gloom” and “melancholy”, “cloudy eyes”.43 “Bitter taste” infuses a paragraph that introduces the backdrop of American-invaded Baghdad.44 Isolation is connoted by disruptions in cellular and satellite technology, and telephone service. “Death”, an appreciable character, “stalked the city like the plague”.45 The path of the grim reaper is catalysed by American missiles that “destroyed the telephone exchange”.46 Internationalism is accentuated through “Christians of other denominations”, Muslims, and a “young Assyrian priest”, and “Thuraya satellite phones”.47 Thus, Saadawi plays with a modern global Iraqi War Gothic, through the reworking of global and local images and aesthetics. The corpse collector is a staple of war narratives. The grotesque representation of the corpse collector, Hasib Mohamed Jaafar, is associated with Frankenstein, insurgent guerrilla warfare, and war propaganda. He is a gothic architect of monstrosity used to create a metaphor for Iraqi identity. Hasib’s monster is constituted by pieces of Iraqi bodies blown up on the streets of Baghdad, a “massive” patchwork corpse stitched together in a shed—which doubles as a laboratory.48

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The construction of the monster is described in graphic details, with the substitution of a fresh blood-coated nose, which is sewn onto the “badly disfigured” and putrefactive face of the corpse.49 While gradations of decay are reflective of distortions of time and reality in the war narrative, they emphasise the atrocity of sectarian violence through religious and corporeal defilement. Elsewhere, likened to the reality of Baghdad, Saadawi blends monstrosity, identity, and propaganda. This is achieved with metafictive renderings of the lies told to the population over mass media by the “supreme security commanders”.50 The now disfigured “Criminal X” is implicated in “acts of sectarian violence”, and “in murders for hire”, dismemberment, “spreading alarm and fear”, and “suicide bombings”.51 A final image of the novel is used to question the Iraqi government’s account of events, other repercussions from the American occupation of Iraq, and the gothic absurdity of civil responses to this account. Aesthetically, the war narrative is mirrored in the gothic sky, where the “spectre of an unknown man” watches “people celebrate” under dark thundering clouds.52 Through War Gothic aesthetic he makes an indictment of the fictional government: “the sky over Baghdad crackled with gunfire” the news leaving people in a state of hysteria.53 “[W]hat the government said must be true”.54 Saadawi’s story oscillates between representations of “semi-fictional propaganda” and lurid “fantasy” tinctured by historical war record.55 Baghdad is gothicised, but ultimately the novel is a commentary on war horror and censorship in Iraq, a “[c]riticism of the war” that also “reveals some of the obscene pleasures which drive the war psyche economy” as a gothic economy; it is mobilised in Saadawi’s writings through “corporeal fantasies”56 embodied by Frankensteinian allegory and body horror. Novels like Blood Crime by Sebastià Alzamora, and The Labyrinth of Spirits by Zafón are modern, internationally syndicated Spanish War Gothic narratives set in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and each offers a different perspective on the aesthetic. Extracting war elements described in extensive analysis of Spanish Gothic, by Aldana Reyes and others, Spanish War Gothic can be defined as “an artistic mode” that evokes “a sense of social revolution”57; it is this “revolutionary” theme and movement paralleled in criticism58 that in contemporary texts underlies “the connection between the real and the imagined”.59 Like any genre, it is an amalgamation of adapted sources that create variations on themes. Twenty-first-century Spanish War Gothic also uses a “brand of local, yet” increasingly “transnational, Gothic”, that is “nationally distinctive”, but puts “forward a Gothicised version of” Spanish culture and history as a mythic national Other.60 Often rendered in civil war settings, classic gothic narratives and tropes are married to the architecture of war-torn cities, like Barcelona, where anti-Catholic violence against, for instance, the Marist order (a Roman Catholic sect devoted to the Virgin Mary) is used to describe torture by oppressive political factions like the FAI (Federacion Anarquica Iberica) and builds on anti-religious elements in the Gothic. Yet, the mode includes standard gothic motifs like the reincarnations of demonic figures and revenge from beyond the grave—for example, nuns, mummies, or vampires. Ideological effects of censorship, rules and reigns of terror, as well as aesthetic movements (or traditions) like spiritualism, occultism, modernism, and surrealism, have all impacted

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what Spanish War Gothic is today. In the global sphere, new fears around dissolving international borders are juxtaposed to old fears. Through religious, social, and ideological hierarchies, this imagined Spain is often built on and cloaked in historical realism, even though prose may oscillate from gothic romance to gothic horror. Zafón’s The Labyrinth of Spirits is a representation of literary Gothic. Analysed through the Spanish gothic tradition, it starts with a surrealist dream that becomes a nightmare as the narrative spills out onto city streets. Alzamora’s Blood Crime is an example of popular vampire genre fiction; it was first published in Spanish in 2012 and translated into English in 2016. The book has had limited circulation compared to the works of the prolific contemporary Spanish writer Zafón. Yet in a recent New York Times Book Review of “The Latest and Best in Horror”, Terrence Rafferty praises Alzamora’s “startling” novel, describing how the author negates “the supernatural-horror elements more or less completely” by “concentrating instead on the real-life horrors of its historical setting”.61 This focus on real horror is exacted through, religious atrocity, which becomes a gothic allegory for war. The epigraph of the novel is from Josep Llui Aguilo, which hints at the underlying discourse on monstrosity: “From man’s deepest recesses emerged the monster”.62 The narrative begins with a vampire monologue about the nature of monstrosity in wartime: The word most frequently employed to label what I am is monster…. The Holy Spirit is also a monster. God is a monster. And it is a well-known fact that He infused monstrosity into all of creation.63

The blasphemy of this passage, and the commensurate pleasure and horror of war, is mimicked in acts of men and monsters throughout the novel. The apprehension of war in real/gothic terms is a structural device. Firstly, Alzamora describes the backdrop of war in gothic terms from the perspective of the vampire, who “hear[s] the sound of bombs exploding, resounding in the night like a threat, like an approaching thunderstorm”.64 This extends to a representation of the monstrosity of the masses and collective violence where “[l]iving bodies” become “merely machines” of war65—ergo, neither amoral nor immoral. Thus, Alzamora presents a real indictment of the Francoist regime where “order entails repressing the appetite for crime by committing another crime”.66 Thus war crimes are “collective deliverance” punctuated by “an enormous, devastating sigh exhaled from the depths of the souls of victims and executioners alike”.67 The fantastic and supernatural—gothic death, bellicosity, and bloodlust—are representative of the comprehensive breakdown of moral order. Alzamora contrasts this initial vampiric representation of war, with the realistic perspective of Brother Darder of the Marist order: war “contaminated everything: the streets of Barcelona, the air one breathed”.68 Yet, the city takes on a gothic ambience through “[t]hat breath of air” that is “extinguished in Barcelona”.69 Realistic urban imagery is layered onto a cadaverous city, which “appeared rigid, shackled” and in death vibrating, “wailing”, “trembling” with the sirens and “falling bombs”.70 But, the “patina of filth” caused by both the war and moral decay “seemed to cling to everything”, including “rat” like Brother Plana, and “soulless” Brother Darder.71

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Even the debris-laden air and the vampire’s lack of need for oxygen, connect to the breath of the city and the collective exhale of the murderers and victims of war.72 Beneath the sensationalism of popular genre elements, Alzamora utilises historical realism to emphasise “a moment of horror”73 in Spanish history. For example, real historical facts and political insurgents and militias build the narrative: the Central committee of Antifascist militias of the CNT-FAI; and the Marist order. Alzamora also incorporates real geographic places like Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona,74 and intimations of the known murder of Perugorri, Bishop of Barcelona, by FAI Anarchists.75 Actual revolutionary figures are fictionalised; the “FAI bigwig” Manuel Escorza del Val (1912–1968) becomes a character in the novel, who in turn is described in gothic caricature: “a sinister man, a cripple”.76 Equally, this Gothicism as discourse on religion and politics is visible in Catholic sermons in Blood Crime, which are laced with gothic metaphor: “being and against nothingness, in the service of light and against shadows, in the service of life and against death”.77 In its phrasing it is tinctured by Spanish Christian existencialismo. But, Alzamora extends the rhetoric of philosophical horror to the Gothic. Anti-Catholic violence and propaganda is a “twisted ruse”78 that is represented through the “desecrated” “tombs of five previous mother abbesses”, whom are “exhumed”, and “their mummified bodies”, as gothic monsters, are “hauled” into the street by the FAI.79 Alzamora intersects the fabulous supernatural world of the vampire and the spiritual and historical “realism” of the Catholic order in 1936; he does so through a child victim of the vampire, brought into church and into the brethren’s narrative thread: “The corpse was lying on a stretcher” to be examined “before autopsy”80; the nature of the crime is implied by the “ugly, complicated laceration on his neck”.81 The child’s mother is a “madwoman” spewing blasphemies. Through gothic horror, the scene emphasises the “absurdity” of war.82 In the background, “the strident affront of the air raid warnings” become a “lament”, an “apology for the horror” of the scene.83 The author connects vampiric (gothic), religious (spiritual), and political acts to “war-crime”.84 By indicting spiritualism as supernaturalism, in the narrative, the Gothic is used to question the Franco government. Despite the fact that Blood Crime is popular fiction, the narrative is symptomatic of the gothic legacy of Spanish war in literature. The book seamlessly contrasts the real, as social realism and war chronicle, and the unreal, as supernaturalism, spiritualism, and gothic fantasy. This section examines how Australian and Japanese Gothic modes are represented in a hybrid war chronicle, as a means of investigating aesthetic and cultural differences. Moving from a transnational shift between Britain and American85 to a global diaspora, War Gothic in Australia and Japan are clearly thematically and substantively different; the case can be made for this by analysing Christine Piper’s 2014 Australian-Japanese novel After Darkness. First, consider the aesthetic roots of Japanese Gothic in war narratives and its position to modern scholarship. Note that Japan features more prominently than Australia, because of its intimately enmeshed and at times tense history of armed conflict. In the introduction to Monnet and Hantke’s recent volume, Japanese War Gothic is framed around photographs of napalm victims and the mutilation of

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corpses, extended to Second World War Japanese horror cinematography.86 In their edition, Japanese tradition is placed within Second World War veteran Gothic, virtual war, and Nazi Zombie Gothic in video games like the Call of Duty series. Elsewhere, critics like Ng, Henry Hughes, Leith Morton, and Collette Balmain analyse a unique Japanese Gothic tradition, long associated with local wars, which “draw[s] material from a medieval past, periodically devastated by war and disease and affiliated with superstitions and religious extremism…”.87 Hughes notes that orientalist images of “fighting evil” infused in “rhetoric and imagery generated during World War II”—like “red dragons, pagodas”, hideous “monsters”, and exotic, fatally seductive figures—create “the Japanese as dark, alluring, dangerous other”.88 This caricature “may explain the reluctance of critics to use the term Gothic for works in Japanese”.89 However, the tradition exists in Japan with early figures like Takeo, Kyoko, Jun’ichiro, and Rampo. This legacy is complicated by the relationship between Asian Gothic and Global Gothic. Take the example of Glennis Byron’s edition, Globalgothic (2015). The cover features a photograph of a figure reminiscent of a Butoh actor, face painted white with black lips drawn back in horror, countenance more zombie than dancer: Butoh [bu-tō], often translated as “Dance of Darkness,” rose out of the ashes of post-World War II Japan as an extreme avant-garde dance form that shocked audiences with its grotesque movements and graphic sexual allusions when it was introduced in the 1950s.90

In the context of Byron’s volume, haunting figures of Asian Gothic become the symbolic global Other, implicitly fed by imperialism, but the cover incorporates the physical and visual, grotesque manipulations and contortions of the body as part of post-war horror. In the edition, Charles Shiro Inouye’s article “Globalgothic” describes the rejection of Gothic as a Western construct during the zenith of Japanese fascism, and the current production of contemporary War Gothic literature in modern Japanese Light Novels like Oshii’s Blood, and Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D as part of the Japanese horror tradition epitomised by writers like Otsuichi and his 2002 text, Goth. This is opposed to books like Black Rain or Yasunari Kawabata’s 1954 The Lake that rely on the realist novel form and war horror (sectarian and guerrilla). The dominant expressive form is no longer the realistic novel, but the animated film. These “expressions of high figurality” are creating “a complicated, nuanced fear that appears as both horror and reverence”91—reconfiguring the balance of aesthetics associated with the West. Piper’s novel After Darkness is a beautiful, but jarring synthesis of Japanese and Australian aesthetics; the narrative does not meld the two styles, but instead they are iteratively employed through landscapes like Tokyo and Broome. Japanese themes of darkness, decay, damsels in distress, verboten love, elements of the undead, supernatural oppression and transgression,92 omnipresent war references, horror through “wronged women” and “vengeful Samurai”,93 and distorted reflections of honour and self-sacrifice94 are represented in this book. Australian themes are redolent of images from Gallipoli, the Anzacs, British Commonwealth derivatives, invasions in Darwin, and extensions of colonial and convict bellicosity and horror in the antipodes, compounded by isolation, alienation,

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anthropomorphic land, and bone-bleaching sun. Australian War Gothic has a tradition that intersects with the terror of the outback and convict horror—as in Chris Womersley’s 2010 novel Bereft. After Darkness is a gothic meditation on war; drawing on haunting imagery, it is heavily realistic in its representation of war between Tokyo and Australia. The first passage is a juxtaposition of Japanese and Australian Gothic aesthetics, evoking the vastness and isolation of sun-bleached land, and bleak, unnatural light that is used to describe a Japanese internment camp in Southern Australia. In that geographical space, desiccated trees typical of Australian Gothic merge with the awe or thrall of the Japanese Gothic, where “[d]ead trees haunted its edges, their limbs stretching skywards”, or “as if begging for forgiveness”, kowtowing.95 Piper also immediately introduces the idea of medical and body horror through what we learn is military experimentation and “biological warfare development” related to the Russian-Chinese border in Manchukuo—an example of historical realism. Seen through the Japanese protagonist, Ibaraki Tomokazu, a doctor and “enemy alien”, the narrative landscape is bifurcated between cultures and the resultant backdrop is a blending of Japanese and Australian war imagery and gothic atmosphere. For example, the juxtaposition of Australian and Japanese aesthetics of climate, arid heat and humidity, light and dark is amplified through the urban decay of a hospital in Tokyo and the organic absorption of the hospital in Broome by the land. In Japan, “[o]utside, the sun bathed the building in pristine light, but once we were inside I saw that dampness cling to everything. Paint flaked off the ceilings and walls, and dark spots of mould clung to crevices”.96 In Australia, characters try to “protect the Japanese association building from dampness and tame the dark tangle of vegetation that sprouted”,97 representing the romantic horror of colonial wilderness in early Australian Gothic. Elsewhere, the surreal emptiness of the fly-infested bush accentuates the diseased abnormality of the occupation of land.98 This organic abnormality is mirrored in gruesome medical horror, and explicit macabre details about the contents of large wooden crates in Tokyo; they clink in gothic foreshadowing. Ghoulish “specimen jars of various sizes”, a “severed head”, in sallow formalin, its crenulated brain exposed through deep-etched surgical incisions, “mouth open” as if its “final words” were “stolen at the moment of death”.99 The novel is rife with descriptions of dead babies, gangrenous and frostbite-blackened skin, and dissection. Historical details are a marker of realism and War Gothic: as numerous shipments of specimens arrive at midnight from the laboratory at Manchukuo—a puppet state of the empire of Japan held in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia from 1932–1945, and taken over by Russia in 1945. These specimens of warfare are linked to body horror and folklore—prevalent in Japanese Gothic. There were severed body parts “in small jars”, and a “large[r] metal container filled with formalin and whole bodies…” and “the body of a woman”, “her arms outstretched”, “trying to cling to something” temporal,100 seemingly playing with the ghostly image of the Yūrei from Japanese folklore. Such figures are typically female, and usually positioned with outstretched, beckoning arms.

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They are described in lyrical terms, as ethereal dark residues tied to earth in revenge and the completion of tasks: “ghosts of the two sisters appeared, wearing masks that bore the suggestion” of facial features “in thin black brushstrokes”.101 These gliding figures are also reminiscent of the ghostly Yūrei; in “long white robes”, they float, “circling”, lamenting “their lost love”.102 An extinguished flame, lost love is echoed in the air-raid death of the protagonist’s estranged wife.103 The novel ends by invoking a Japanese trope of redemption through Ibaraki Tomokazu’s exposure of “Unit 731—the military unit responsible for biological warfare development during world war II”.104 Thus, in the final passage, Piper refocuses the aesthetics and themes of the narrative onto Japanese Gothic through the lens of cultural specificities of local war details. Japanese War Gothic under other authorial constructions can be radically different. For example, Mo Hayder’s Tokyo (2004) is a Japanese gothic narrative tinctured by the “strange”,105 and entrenched in contemporary Western horror perceptions of 1930s Japan and China. However, After Darkness is diagnostic of a substantial difference in the aesthetics and the affects of Japanese and Australian Gothic on war narrative. Together they form a dialogic relationship between the two cultures, creating an amalgam of realistic horrors, far removed from the hyperbolic theatrics and grotesque gesticulations of the Butoh—whose symbolic representation of the haunting post-war era embraces the fantastic. Tokyo settings, metaphors, and stylistic devices push the aesthetic into Japanese War Gothic, and the converse is true of Australian settings and devices, which reinforce an Australian aesthetic. In the above section, “Textualising War Gothic”, literary analysis of Iraqi, Spanish, Japanese, and Australian variants suggest that cultural transparencies and palimpsests proliferate in War Gothic. This chapter explores two overarching ideas (a) how transcultural differences are equally thematic and substantial, and (b) the way in which “Gothic tropes become literal”,106 or real, in various globally syndicated national war narratives due to underlying critiques of internecine conflict and the hyperrealism of mass media. The real/unreal paradox is reconfigured into the real/gothic paradox in these texts; where, it is discursively utilised in Baghdad, Barcelona, and between Broome and Tokyo; influenced by aspects of Global Gothic, the omnipresent real of virtual media and war, and the representations of the Gothic in the age of terror integrated with forms of propaganda. These texts exist along a spectrum from genre fiction—for example, global vampire fiction or apocalyptic zombie fiction, with very specific details of war portrayed as historical realism—to truly global War Gothic, as well as multinational War Gothic gestalts with hybrid regional nomenclatures. Fantasy and supernaturalism are often juxtaposed to local spiritualisms, like Baraka, and ghostly figures and figments like the Yūrei. Varying political or religious factions alter thematic elements and aesthetic tropes, yet in War Gothic the dissolution of boundaries that Monnet, Hantke, Phillips, and others note as an essential aspect of the mode can be seen in the dissolution of boundaries between real and unreal, as much as the archaic and the modern. When considering word choice and frequency in the novels, with particular emphasis on gothic or war-related terms, it becomes apparent when a text is global War Gothic; for example, they often use words like labyrinths,

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gloom, and melancholy. When it is more regional, the gothic lexicon makes way for regional ghosts, spiritualisms, body horrors, and historio-cultural trauma. In late 2018 Aardman animations announced a “[v]ideo game that recreates horrors of World War One”; set in 1917, it is called 11:11—the end of the war to end all wars.107 The name is clearly an allusion to 9/11, drawing a parallel between WW1 and the geopolitically problematic present; the stills of the game distil the horror imagery of WW1 into virtual apocalyptic and dystopic visions of modern global war. This is emblematic of some current trends in Global War Gothic. To recapitulate, first an exploration is undertaken of the critical landscape of war and narrative, and thematic elements used to critique War Gothic texts. Such texts are dominated by gothic horror motifs of trauma, monstrosity, as well as death, history, terror, phantoms, and the politics of fear. These broad features are integrated into various war settings, with a contemporary focus on civil wars and the aftermath of 9/11 in myriad modern wars. Second, this chapter does a textual analysis of global forms of War Gothic, moving from American-Iraqi to Australian-Japanese perspectives. The real/unreal paradox of War Gothic pervades many contemporary “global” narratives that use the mode, becoming a discursive device to navigate the horrors of war and its gothic imprint. The transfer of War Gothic from Europe to America, that scholars describe, now extends to a transnational Gothic diaspora, through the immediacy of global war and mass media, as a personalisation that equally depersonalises and dehumanises an assumed or constructed Other; where, the requisite transition in aesthetics and contexts amplifies differences as much as similarities in gothic substance and theme.

Notes



1. Military Recruitment Billboard (USA, Arkansas, 2018). 2. Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté Guidant le Peuple. Oil on canvas, 2.6 × 3.25 m (2.8 × 3.6 yards) (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1831). 3. Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse. Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm (16 × 23.5 ft) (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1818–1819). 4. Joe Rosenthal, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, Photograph. Washington Post, front page, February 25, 1945. 5. Thomas E. Franklin, Raising the Flag at Ground Zero, Photograph. The Record, front page, September 12, 2001. 6. This consideration of thematic and substantial difference is in part an extension, and indeed a derivation of, analysis on British and American War Gothic seen in Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, “Transnational War Gothic”, in Transnational Gothic, eds. Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (Farnham, Ashgate, 2013). 7. Joseph Crawford, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (New York, Bloomsbury, 2013), 174. 8. Ibid., 174. 9. Trudi Tate, “Propaganda Lies”, in Modernism, History, and the First World War (New York, Manchester University Press, 1998), 48–49. 10. David Punter, “Trauma, Gothic, Revolution”, in The Gothic and the Everyday, eds. L. Piatti-Farnell and M. Beville (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 30.

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N. S. Borwein 11. Anara Karagulov and Nick Megoran, “Discourses of Danger and the War on Terror: Gothic Kyrgyzstan and the Collapse of the Akaev Regime”, Review of International Studies 31, no. 1 (January 2011), 29. 12. Muireann Maguire, “Introduction”, in Red Spectres, ed. Mureann Maguire (New York, Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Pub, 2013), 13–15. 13. To deceived brothers (in the trenches of the White Guard), Digitised Poster Collection (Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, 1918). 14. Jesse Alemán, “The Other Country”, American Literary History 18, no. 3 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, Fall 2006), 410. 15. Angela Wright, Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12; Terry Hale, “Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic”, in European Gothic, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002), 46. 16. Montague Summers, “The Romantic Feeling”, in The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London, Fortune Press, 1938). 17. Peter Haining, Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror & Romance (London, Gollancz Publishing, 1972), 2, 715. 18. Crawford, Gothic Fiction, 196. 19. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke, “Introduction”, in War Gothic in Literature and Culture (Abington, UK, Routledge, 2016), xi. 20. Ibid., xii. 21. Crawford, Gothic Fiction, 191. 22. Fred Botting, “Globalzombie: From White Zombie to World War Z”, in Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 199. 23. Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Why the Spanish Civil War Continues to Haunt Gothic Literature”, in The Conversation, August 30, 2018, http://theconversation.com/ why-the-spanish-civil-war-continues-to-haunt-gothic-literature-102001. 24. Monnet, “Transnational War Gothic”, 173. 25. Terry Phillips, “The Rules of War”, in Gothic Studies 2.2, ed. William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2000), 235. 26. Haytham Bahoora, “Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War”, in Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015), 184–208. 27. Sinéad Murphy, “Frankenstein in Baghdad: Human Conditions, or Conditions of Being Human”, Science Fiction Studies 45.2, (Indiana, USA, DePauw University, 2018); Richard Devetak et al., eds., An Introduction to International Relations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). 28. Roger Luckhurst, “Iraq War Body Counts”, Modern Fiction Studies, 63, no. 2 (Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 355–372. 29. Helen Benedict, “Acclaim for Frankenstein in Baghdad”, in front matter of Frankenstein in Baghdad (New York, Penguin and UK and Australia, OneWorld, 2018), n.p. 30. Ursula Lindsey, “The Novel After the Arab Spring”, The New Yorker (New York, Condé Nast, 2014), 1. 31. Thomas McGuane, “Acclaim for Frankenstein in Baghdad”, in front matter of Frankenstein in Baghdad (New York, Penguin and UK and Australia, OneWorld, 2018), n.p. 32. Hassan Blasim. “The Nightmares of Carlos Funetes” and “Reality and Record”, in The Corpse Exhibition (New York, Penguin, 2014), 185–196, 1–10. 33. Ahmed Saadawi, Epigraph, Frankenstein in Baghdad (New York, Penguin and UK and Australia, OneWorld, 2018), n.p. 34. Ibid., n.p. 35. Ibid., 1–3, 269. 36. Ibid., 16, 419. 37. Ibid., 262. 38. Tate, “Propaganda Lies”, 48–49.

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39. Saadawi, Frankenstein, 272. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Ibid., 5. 42. Ibid., 5. 43. Ibid., 5–6. 44. Ibid., 6. 45. Ibid., 6. 46. Ibid., 6. 47. Ibid., 6. 48. Ibid., 24. 49. Ibid., 24–25. 50. Ibid., 269. 51. Ibid., 269–70. 52. Ibid., 272. 53. Ibid., 271. 54. Ibid., 271. 55. Crawford, Gothic Fiction, 174. 56. Tate, Propaganda, 61. 57. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic (London, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2. 58. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, “Gothic Criticism”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (West Sussex, Blackwall Publishing Ltd., 2002), 285. 59. Aldana Reyes, Spanish Gothic, 152. 60. Ibid., 179, 166, 179. 61. Terrence Rafferty, “The Latest and Best in Horror”, NYT Book Review (New York, 2016), n.p. 62. Sebastià Alzamora, Blood Crime. Translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent (New York, Soho Crime, 2016), n.p. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Ibid., 8. 65. Ibid., 8. 66. Ibid., 8. 67. Ibid., 9. 68. Ibid., 15. 69. Ibid., 15. 70. Ibid., 15. 71. Ibid., 14. 72. Ibid., 14, 9. 73. Ibid., 22. 74. Ibid., 19. 75. Ibid., 23. 76. Ibid., 22. 77. Ibid., 28. 78. Ibid., 23. 79. Ibid., 23. 80. Ibid., 31. 81. Ibid., 31–32. 82. Ibid., 32. 83. Ibid., 34. 84. Ibid., 37. 85. Monnet, “Transnational War Gothic”, 173. 86. Monnet and Hantke, War Gothic in Literature and Culture, xvi, xvii. 87. Henry J. Hughes, “Familiarity of the Strange: Japans Gothic Tradition”, Criticism 42, no. 1 (Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, Winter 2000), 83. 88. Ibid., 83.

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89. Ibid., 83. 90. Jeff Goldberg, “How Butoh, the Japanese Dance of Darkness, Helps Us Experience Compassion in a Suffering World”, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (New York, James Shaheen, November 13, 2017), https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/ butoh-japanese-dance-darkness/. 91. Charles Shiro Inouye, “Globalgothic”, in Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 212. 92. Collette Balmain, “East Asian Gothic: A Definition”, Palgrave Communications 3.31: ISSN (online) 2055-1045. 93. Collette Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 50. 94. Hughes, “Familiarity of the Strange: Japans Gothic Tradition”, 84. 95. Christine Piper, After Darkness (Crows Nest, Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2014), Loc. 66. Kindle edition. 96. Ibid., Loc. 699. 97. Ibid., Loc. 2034. 98. James Doig, “Introduction”, in Australian Hauntings (Maryland, USA, Wildside Press, 2013), 4. 99. Piper, After Darkness, Loc. 2304. 100. Ibid., Loc. 2537. 101. Ibid., Loc. 617. 102. Ibid., Loc. 618. 103. Ibid., Loc. 3730. 104. Ibid., Loc. 3780. 105. Mo Hayder, Tokyo (United Kingdom, Bantam Press, 2004), 9. 106. Sara Wasson, Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 107. Anonymous, “Video Game That Recreates Horrors of World War One”, BBC News, October 24, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-bristol-45942108/videogame-recreates-horrors-of-world-war-one.

Bibliography Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2017. Spanish Gothic. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. “Why the Spanish Civil War Continues to Haunt Gothic Literature”. The Conversation, August 30, 2018. http://theconversation.com/why-the-spanish-civil-warcontinues-to-haunt-gothic-literature-102001. Alemán, Jesse. 2006. “The Other Country”. American Literary History 18, no. 3 (Fall): 406–426. Alzamora, Sebastià. 2016. Blood Crime. Translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent. New York: Soho Crime. Anonymous. 1918. “To Deceived Brothers (In the Trenches of the White Guard)”. Digitised Poster Collection from Hoover Institution Library and Archives. Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford University. Anonymous. 2018. “Video Game Recreates Horrors of World War One”. BBC News, Bristol, October 24, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-bristol-45942108/video-gamerecreates-horrors-of-world-war-one. Bahoora, Haytham. 2015. “Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War”. Arab Studies 23, no. 1: 184–209. Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. 2012. “Gothic Criticism”. In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 267–287. West Sussex: Blackwall Publishing Ltd.

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Balmain, Collette. 2017. “East Asian Gothic: A Definition”. Palgrave Communications 3, no. 31: ISSN (online) 2055-1045. ———. 2008. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Benedict, Helen. 2018. “Acclaim for Frankenstein in Baghdad”. In front matter of Frankenstein in Baghdad. New York: Penguin. Blasim, Hassan. 2013. The Corpse Exhibition. Translated by Jonathan Wright. USA: Penguin. Botting, Fred. 2013. “Globalzombie: From White Zombie to World War Z”. In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 188–201. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crawford, Joseph. 2013. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism. New York: Bloomsbury. Delacroix, Eugène. 1831. Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté Guidant le Peuple. Oil on canvas, 2.6 × 3.25 m (2.8 × 3.6 yards). Paris: Musée du Louvre. Devetak, Richard. 2005. “The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime After September 11”. Review of International Studies 31, no. 4: 621–643. Doig, James. 2013. “Introduction”. In Australian Hauntings, 6–36. Maryland, USA: Wildside Press. Franklin, Thomas E. 2001. Raising the Flag at Ground Zero. Photograph. The Record, front page, September 12. Géricault, Théodore. 1818–1819. Le Radeau de la Méduse. Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm (16 × 23.5 ft). Paris: Musée du Louvre. Goldberg, Jeff. 2017. “How Butoh, the Japanese Dance of Darkness, Helps Us Experience Compassion in a Suffering World”. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, November 13, 2017, n.p. New York: James Shaheen. https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/butoh-japanese-dancedarkness/. Haining, Peter. 1972. Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror & Romance. London: Gollancz Publishing. Hale, Terry. 2002. “Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic”. In European Gothic, edited by Avril Horner. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayder, Mo. 2004. Tokyo. United Kingdom: Bantam Press. Höglund, Johan. 2014. American Imperial Gothic. London: Routledge. Hughes, Henry, J. 2000. “Familiarity of the Strange: Japans Gothic Tradition”. Criticism 42, no. 1 (Winter): 59–89. Inouye, Charles Shiro. 2013. “Globalgothic”. In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 201–214. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Karagulov, Anara, and Nick Megoran. 2011. “Discourses of Danger and the War on Error: Gothic Kyrgyzstan and the Collapse of the Akaev Regime”. Review of International Studies 31, no. 1 (January): 29–48. Lindsey, Ursula. 2014. “The Novel After the Arab Spring”. New Yorker, May 8, 2014. https:// www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-novel-after-the-arab-spring. Luckhurst, Roger. 2017. “Iraq War Body Counts”. Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 2: 355–372. Maguire, Muireann. 2013. “Introduction”. In Red Spectres, 13–21, edited by Mureann Maguire. New York: Overlook Press. McGuane, Thomas. 2018. “Acclaim for Frankenstein in Baghdad.” In front matter of Frankenstein in Baghdad, n.p. New York: Penguin and UK and Australia: OneWorld. Military Recruitment Billboard. 2018. USA: Arkansas. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. 2013. “Transnational War Gothic”. In Transnational Gothic, edited by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, 173–185. Farnham: Ashgate. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik, and Steffen Hantke, editors. 2016. War Gothic in Literature and Culture. Abington, UK: Routledge. Morton, Leith. 2009. “Gothic Stylistics”. In The Alien Within, 126–139. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Murphy, Sinéad. 2018. “Frankenstein in Baghdad: Human Conditions, or Conditions of Being Human”. Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 2: 273–288.

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Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. 2007. “Tarrying with the Numinous: Postmodern Japanese Gothic Stories”. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 2: 65–86. Phillips, Terry. 2000. “The Rules of War”. Gothic Studies 2, no. 2: 232–244. Piper, Christine. 2014. After Darkness. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Kindle edition. Punter, David. 2014. “Trauma, Gothic, Revolution”. In The Gothic and the Everyday, edited by L. Piatti-Farnell and M. Beville, 15–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rafferty, Terence. 2016. “The Latest and Best in Horror”. New York Times Book Review, October 26, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/books/review/graveyard-apartment-and-morehorror.html. Rosenthal, Joe. 1945. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Photograph. Washington Post, front page, February 25. Saadawi, Ahmed. 2018. Frankenstein in Baghdad. New York and UK and Australia: Penguin and OneWorld. Summers, Montague. 1938. “The Romantic Feeling”. In The Gothic Quest, 17–59. London: Fortune Press. Tate, Trudi. 1998. “Propaganda Lies”. In Modernism, History, and the First World War, 51–73. New York: Manchester University Press. Wasson, Sara. 2010. Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, Angela. 2013. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zafón, Carlos Ruiz. 2018. The Labyrinth of Spirits. Translated by Lucia Grave. Canada: Harper Collins.

Posthuman Interstellar Gothic Holly-Gale Millette

As Davis reminds us, Goths were the first ‘Barbarians’ who, in or around 376 BC, entered the Roman Empire and lived to tell the tale (Davis 2015).1 They were refugees; asylum seekers, if you will. Their price for entry: convert to Christianity; assimilate. Only a select few—the useful ones—were allowed across, and thus these gothic immigrants sped their ethnic empowerment and spread their ethnic heritage by culturally assimilating and hybridising. Amalgamation, quite simply, secured their prosperity and continuance. The urgency of issues such as migration and the increasingly complex relationships it raises, form the problems and polemics of our current societies. Societies in which we, increasingly, feel unwelcome or estranged. The theme of estrangement, of the stranger and the unfamiliar, is what roots the Gothic in the Sublime—something that both draws us yet repels us. What is unfriendly; unheimlich (unhomely) is, reminds Freud (1899), uncanny—a central tenet of the Gothic precisely because it represents the return of that which should have remained dead and buried. Lacan connected this to the sublime via the Other by attaching anxiety to that which frightens us in what ought to be familiar—anxiety that is really anxiety and desire for enjoyment (jouisance) of the proprietary rights of the Other. Regardless of which of these psycho-social conditions—the Freudian unheimlich or Lacanian jouisance—you apply, there is a correlation between the sublime monstrosity that typifies the gothic mode and the Uncanny as a particular form of that which frightens and lures us. Critics have argued2 that such environments have created a ‘return of the repressed’ which, in turn, creates an ironic tension to any interpretation of gothic monstrosity. The postmodern gives content to gothic forms of monstrosity, reaching beyond the simplistic, and all too often extrinsic, in what is monstrous—either in the Other or in ourselves—by questioning what it is to be ‘ourselves’; to be human. In this the Gothicism of the monster is multiple, intersectional and always already in all of us everywhere.

H.-G. Millette (*)  University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_71

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Monstrosity and the uncanny are also central tenets of the Gothic and so they are here, with the post-human interstellar Gothic. However, the starting premise in this essay is that it is the amalgamation of traditional loyalty with the alienation of the strange that is both necessary and inevitable in new interpretations of the Gothic. Such a view of the Gothic, takes a significant twist in the early twenty-first century where, like the Goths, we have our backs against the Danube and are being forced to make a choice between opting (vainly) for a stable mono-culture or welcoming the new—the unfamiliar and the strange. Recently, and certainly since the turn of millennium, the hybridised gothic and hybridising Goths have been seen as increasingly associated with a non-supernatural world, or in a world where what is ‘super’ in nature has shifted. There is a perceived connection to both Cyberpunk’s emergence in the late 1980s and the recent millennial emergence of Young Adult Fiction (YAF). Nevertheless, while YAF and fantastical gothic works may have a certain mythopoesis (they are, without a doubt, world imagining) they do not incline the reader to think outside the terms of a mechanical and automatic reality about the systemic constructions of dominant and alternative value systems within their own world’s reality. Interstellar Gothic does this, especially, in its hybrid post-human form. Fredric Jameson, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005) makes a clear argument for this, while also calling for a distinction between science fiction and these modes. Gothic mashups of alternative worlds, punk rebellion, border identities and anachronistic machines are known as ‘steampunk’ and are not to what the Posthuman Gothic refers. Originally coined in the late 1980s, the term ‘steampunk’ was just as hedonistic and extrinsically obsessed as culture and society was at the time. While I do not, for a minute, think that steampunk is entirely unrelated to the Gothic, I do make a firm distinction when it comes to any relationship which that form may claim to have to the Posthuman. Here, and elsewhere, the Posthuman refers to a real, lived and intellectualised contemporary condition that is as critical as it is factual. Steampunk has, and always will be, retro-fitted Victoriana in techno-fantasy form. It is an aesthetic more than a lived condition, and it’s tied, firmly, to its Promethean predecessors. Howsoever, its magic and fantastical technology may look, it and its subjects are still beholden to a self-contained order within a universe that is centred around the human. Science fiction, on the other hand, is marked by a rigour and its relative autonomy from the commercial market—it is viewed as a sub-genre and one that has limited rates of consumption. However, science fiction’s preferred mode of historicism treats differences in modes of production and its main narrative function as allegories for posthuman hybridisations. One of the projects of contemporary post-human gothic narratives is that they move beyond the modernist philosophy and enlightenment philosophies on which they were built, as China Miéville puts it, to ‘surrender’.3 As Heise-von der Lippe perceives, the ‘involvement of the Gothic in these matters, consequently goes beyond a mere aesthetics of representation: borne out of the immediate reaction to Enlightenment rationalism’.4 Further, and as Botting notes, increasingly the Gothic exists ‘in excess of, and often within, realist forms, both

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inhabiting and excluding from its homogenizing representations of the world’5— recent critical developments see Botting’s definition extended to ‘representations of the universe’ and/or ‘representations of knowable life-forms’. This essay surveys the category of Posthuman Interstellar Gothic as a hybrid gothic genre that unites recent critical developments in posthumanism (theory) with less recent gothic forms of science fiction (writing) in representing the universe, its knowable life forms, and our anxieties within it. The Gothic is a much more open field since feminist and post-structuralist critical methodologies compelled new histories that let us see how the form has consistently participated in a range of intersectional stories as they arose across gender, politics, society and culture. Among the most persistent of approaches to critical Gothic Studies has been the genre’s preoccupation with the shaping of individual subjectivity. In Posthuman Interstellar Gothic, the sublime, the uncanny and monstrosity are all present as tropes, however, the genre moves way from the shaping of individual subjectivity and towards the shaping of communal futures, often in future-redeeming and/or future annihilating narratives. Since the mid-twentieth century, writers have been positing that the next frame or phase (unwelcome though it may seem) of representation involves the amalgamation of science with fiction—the new ‘Goths’ of the twentieth century were using familiar gothic formulas amalgamated with science to reframe engagement with the private self and the public’s assumption about that self as far back as post-war period. Such writing offered writers the opportunity to use recognisable and accepted conventions to discuss and challenge the issues that frightened mainstream society: immigration; gender; invasion; the next stage in evolution; identity politics; and the ethics and residue of imperialism, most prominent among them. All topics that were thought too terrible and complex to be worked out in ‘normal society’, became the key themes of mid to late twentieth century popular reading and watching. Cloaked in the protection of the Gothic or science fiction genres, complex societal confrontations and critical theories could be reasoned out within the ‘safe’ space of amalgamation. The unknown and unfamiliar of other galaxies in the cosmos meant a victory for the Other, which was cast aside as a pressing issue as remaining alive ‘out there’ took precedence. Here we must consider posthumanism in theory and in the gothic mode, and science fiction as it has emerged to chart alternative futures and exit strategies out of our anthropic dystopias. I on N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) theoretical work in posthumanism to discuss post-human subjectivities, ethics and hybrids that have been, and are being, represented in gothic pre-millennial and postmillennial narratives. But specifically, it will chart the convergence of the Gothic with science fiction to expose and dismantle the heresy of humanism and the dark realities of anthropocentrism. Here and hereafter ‘human’ refers to that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy: ‘The Cartesian [following Descartes] subject of the cogito, the Kantian “community of reasonable beings”, or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen rights-holder, property holder, and so on’.6 In this, Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein

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(1818), anchors my discussion on one end, and the Syfy Channel’s/Netflix’s/ Amazon’s The Expanse (2015–) anchors it on the other, as both represent seminal conjunctions among science, fiction and the Gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) draws post-human gothic links back to that science fiction and dark science practised by the titular Dr. Frankenstein.7 Some locate science fiction’s emergence later in the century in the works of H. G. Wells,8 but no matter where the convergence can first be traced, most critics agree that gothic fiction was an influential part of the complex mesh of forms that saw the rise of science fiction. At first glance the gothic mode and science fiction may seem diametrically opposed: the former featuring inexplicable phenomena and strangeness, and the latter derived from a rational, scientific world. However, both forms commit to interpretations of a strangeness or uncanny (unheimlich), both forms are driven by feelings of otherness, and both forms locate monstrosity in the mind and in our culture. Otherness or Alien-ness and monstrosity then, in their literal and symbolic forms, are the fictive tissue that conjoins the Gothic with science fiction. The Gothic and science fiction are narrative ways to expand on a vocabulary and often this is via a new critical route, theory or interrogation. The gothic mode emerges readily in any fictions of science that explore power, anxiety, resistance and capital. In all these cases, the gothic imperative of resisting and/ or challenging social, political, racial and gendered hegemony and homogeneity within conventional cultures and science is a potentiality. Fredric Jameson closes the distinction between these two categories by arguing that both gothic literature and science fiction tend to be politically reactionary and critical of the human condition—if science fiction can distance itself from its ‘medieval’ and ‘romanticised’ notions of the status of the human in the cosmos,9 as first introduced in popular form in Frankenstein. Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale imbricated by the Enlightenment’s Promethean philosophy, wherein the (white, male, land-owning) human takes precedence as the Cartesian subject and the Monster is external and alien to it. The post-human gothic begins with Frankenstein because its referential emphasises how far society and the Gothic has come from the heretical position of the human. Posthumanism as I use it here, is a discourse that is characterised by a relationship between humans and their hybrid and/or non-human others, thus exhibiting a tendency to think beyond humanism, anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism. Critical posthumanism or meta-posthumanism, as I will show shortly, is not anti-humanist. It thinks with the human to dissipate the humanist and re-establish a connection with the true nature of what it is to be human. Critical posthumanism emerges as hybrid in form because the future of our species depends on hybrid flexibility and shared sustainability in the face of disappearing natural resources. Posthumanism is famously associated with Donna Haraway,10 who embraced the figure of the cyborg—a human/machine hybrid—as the symbolic form in the late twentieth century’s advancement in technology. Significantly, Haraway’s hugely influential A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) saw that the potential of mankind to overcome the nature/artifice polarity of Cartesian (Enlightenment) thought and the future subversion of dominant, post-industrial, Western ideologies would only

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be possible through the intersection of technology and the human. Offering an essentialist challenge to embodied identity, other theorists have since explored new ways of understanding the human and their place in the universe. Popular culture writers have too—the best example in context, being Battlestar Galactica (1978; 2003–2009). Originally conceived as a trio of made-for-television films, it charted the ruination of virtually all of humanity at the hands of an artificial cybernetic race within its first scenes. The introductory text to its story-world is chillingly clear: The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.11 Battlestar Galactica (BSG) follows a ragtag fleet of survivors, led and protected by a formidable military vessel—the eponymous Battlestar Galactica, as it begins its interplanetary odyssey to find a mythical ‘thirteenth colony’ called ‘Earth’. The longest and most central story arc was The Cylons’ struggle for survival and their assimilation and hybridisation with the human species. In BSG the human body becomes a focus for ambivalent, transformative and often insurgent, possibility—the most horror-filled discovery being ‘they look just like us now’. But what was groundbreaking for popular television is that BSG took Haraway’s manifesto of intersection and made it crucial to the very survival of humanity in the solar system. What is significant about Shelley’s Frankenstein, what made it so Promethean, was that the Monster’s ‘stitches showed’ and he ‘included arbitrariness and supplementarity’ that was not human12—signalling that there will be no reconciliation between the Self and the Other in the story and that the human would always take precedence over monsters and in the universe. Two hundred years on, and in the Posthuman Interstellar Gothic of BSG, the ‘monsters’ stitches do not show— they ‘look just like us now’—and far from arbitrary or supplementary augmentations, their technicity makes them decidedly more advanced, more advantageous and crucial to all species’ survival. The Cylons are naturalised and hybridised in ways the Promethean ‘monster’ of Shelley’s Frankenstein could not—nor was ever intended to—be. The Posthuman Interstellar Gothic of BSG posits that if we are descended from an alien race, if the most revered among us has a corporeal agency and superiority beyond the human and if the alien and the monstrous look like us now, the Gothic fear and struggle between the Other (alien) and the self dissolves; the clear boundaries and hierarchies constructed in Shelley’s Frankenstein collapse. Posthumanism, critical posthumanists argue, ‘is a discourse which in envisioning the beyond of the human, opens onto openness itself. It is the unknowable itself, the unthinkable itself.13 Or, as Katherine Hayles classified it, ‘an amalgam,

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a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informed entity, whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’.14 Hayles’ book and project are key to the posthuman movement. She offers a nuanced approach to the Posthuman that avoids the trap of simply grafting the ‘post’ onto a liberal humanist subjectivity, yet acknowledges what about the Posthuman threatens— that technology will in some someway compromise the human body and in other ways subjugate or, worse, enslave it. This is what Luckhurst observes as ‘science fiction shading into horror or Gothic writing’.15 The enormous reserves of capital through biopower held by multinational conglomerates that trade in biomedical implants, cloning, genome editing and cybernetics, call into question the status of the body and the ethics of science. Biopower is a Foucauldian term that understands the position of the human and the health of that human to be in thrall to medicinal science and knowledge, to the degree that that knowledge and power have the potential to control lived experience.16 Narratives of biopower proliferate in science fiction and are Gothic in the sublime terror they reproduce for their readership. The cybernetic empire of the Borg in the Star Trek, The Next Generation is an easy example of this, but far more frightening are depictions of an organ harvesting species (the Vidiians, Star Trek, Voyager, e.g.) and species’ enslaved by nanotechnology (the Asgard, Stargate, SG1, e.g.) in other narratives. Beyond sublime anxieties over machines and technology, the alternative modes of thinking which decentre man by privileging non-human or Other[ed] perspectives in posthumanism is provocative precisely because it provokes both elation and anxiety—the paradox of the sublime—at the proposition of the de-centring of ‘Man’ and the Heresy of the Human. It has become lazy and short-sighted to continue to believe the pagan and, latterly, savage Judeo-Christian fiction that the world was made for man and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world. Indeed, this conflict has been at the heart of outsider fiction since the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century with writers like H. G. Wells. Contemporary authors (Frederick Pohl’s Man-Plus [1976] and his sequel, MarsPlus [1994], written with Thomas T. Thomas, and the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick, e.g.) have progressed this exponentially to ask: What does it mean to be human, beyond the human? Such writers sit alongside Arthur C. Clark, Ernst Bloch and Carl Sagan—who wrote fiction based on truths that they saw as causing rapidly mounting tensions. Storytellers and writers of today are very much aligned with this progression and both the science and philosophy that propelled it. These storytellers and writers are incorporating theories from Darwin to Derrida and are continuing the legacies of P. J. Lovecraft and Le Guin in reconceiving of ghosts as alternative species, mourning the traumatic destruction of a planet by the human stewards meant to protect it, and inviting the ‘sublime terror’ of contagions of disaster that man’s hubris and greed have courted to level the fears of its readership. An especially salient example of Descartes’ (and thus Cartesian) downfall can be seen in Philip K. Dicks’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)—later, Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982)—and in its protagonist, Deckerd (a phonetically morphing of the name of Descartes) who utterly fails to police the boundary between the real human and the simulacrum. In Do Androids Dream of Electric

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Sheep? (1968), humanism slips its yoke to fall into the bounds of posthumanism, thus illustrating that anthropocentrism always already contains the conditions of its own transcendence. The question that sits in opposition to ‘What does it mean to be human?’—a patently philosophical query and one belonging to the humanities—is ‘Can machines think?’—a patently artificial intelligence enquiry and one belong to the sciences. First posited in terms of the posthumanist discourse we know today by Alan Turing in 1950,17 this scientific notion assumes a positivist enquiry that debunks the human. Philip K. Dick mocks what he regards humans as incapable of answering clearly or factually: the positivist scientific query: ‘Can Machines Think?’, by illustrating the inherent bias of the humanities that sits within Turing’s man/machine experiment, The Imitation Game (thinly disguised as ‘The VoightKampff Test’ in Dick’s text): that implicit in the test is the questioner’s readiness to acknowledge the other as less than human. In Dick’s tale, however, the test is wrongly ascribed and used as a form of psychological torture by the police. Part of this torture is designed to inhibit Deckard from philosophising on what it is to be human and thus represents not a void of the human but a kind of unravelling, which is more particular to the definition of posthumanism we are pursuing here. This unravelling, for Deckard, can be seen the moment he eschews cognition of the human Kadalyi for the recognition of Polokov— ‘You’re not Polokov, you’re Kadalyi’, Rick said. ‘Don’t you mean that the other way around? You’re a bit confused.’ ‘I mean you’re Polokov, the android, you’re not from the Soviet police.’18 and the android shows an obvious interest in being recognised and acknowledged. By calling him by his actual name and by making an incorrect logical statement, the android feels some sort of obligation to correct it, even if it will mean certain death. This is the moment the human unravels and then evolves into the posthuman. Posthumanism cannot mark an absolute break from the legacy of humanism, rather it is in discussion with its ghosts. The question of what it means to be human has been a source of contentious debate in the humanities for three decades now. We have deconstructed and emancipated ourselves from the oppressive feudal order of ‘Man’ many times over in these decades. The Matrix (dir. The Watchowski’s, 1999), especially shows us how these discourses have become ubiquitous in our popular consciousness’. As a philosophy, posthumanism cannot simply forget its past—it is a critical practice and, thus, it is unproductive to dwell on popular ideas of posthumanism without grounding the argument in the critical. If we approach posthumanism as Hayles suggests, then we have an ability to account for the affect of posthumanism in the sublime that so often accompanies these narratives—she insists that the story of the posthuman is not linear, rather, it exists in relation to the overlap and interstices created in innovation and replication.19 Artificial reproduction, GMOs in our food-production, nanotechnologies, the ubiquity of algorithms that have unleashed a new era of hysterical capitalism (coined as Surveillance Capitalism as early as 2014 by Shoshona Zuboff) underscores that we are all already posthuman. The value of the posthuman in society, Gothic Studies, and critical thought is the degree to which it resists stable identity

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categories and blurs the boundaries of Promethean hubris. The posthuman is all about resisting these essentialisms and embracing the intersectional, the hybrid, the alien and the other. Rosi Braidotti20 is the most recent and compelling of philosophers to write on the posthuman in terms of resisting essentialisms. Braidotti offers posthuman theory that takes account of contemporary debates on the ethics of posthumanism in the, so-called, ‘posthuman turn’, and she does so through a lens of critical feminism. She builds a relationship between posthumanism, neo-materialism and necro-politics and deals with the complex issues surrounding pain, resistance, suffering and dying. We have become disenchanted with and/or disengaged from the realities of our anthropocentrism. We live at the tail-ends; the rag ends of biopower and amid the globalised hyper-consumption of all that lives and this has left us bereft of all nostalgia for ‘Man, the measure of all things’. Instead, we embrace multiple personalities and opportunities for humanity in the intersections, the limens and the interstices. The most obvious and seminal example of this in new fiction is China Miéville, who plays with time, topos and language to create interstitial spaces that disrupt hegemonic space. These in-between spaces cut randomly into and across the topos of his storytelling and they unnerve. The parallel lives in King Rat (1998), or the sliding pathways of ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’ in Looking for Jake (2005) and especially the disintegrating cross-hatching and wasteways that drive the plot of City & the City (2009) all situate the uncanny of the Gothic within a larger, posthuman, discourse that he firmly ties to postmodern critical theory. Miéville laughs, at the derangement of Cartesian thought and writes on how the centrality of the human has been fatal to our anthropic condition—a condition that has separated society from nature, humans from non-humans and waste from capital. He concludes that the millennial gothic mode is gripped by anxiety that succeeds from humans who are dominated, shaped and devoured by the built structures of late capitalism.21 Vampires, as they emerged in fiction, were easy metaphorical characterisations for Marx to apply in his dissertation on Capital. With their associations of invasion, retrogression, infection and addiction, Vampires symbolised the panic society felt throughout the financial uncertainties of the late nineteenth century and they have as much resonance with the robber barons of that period as they do with the consuming networks of corporations and the viral greed of pharmaceutical companies today (see, e.g. I Am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence, 2007). Like Star Trek’s Borg, vampires have a unique capacity for resilience and mutation in the face of culture, desire and/or anxiety—assimilating with a universalism whose legacy can be traced to Marx’s theories on capital accumulation. Likewise, the liminal (not dead, not alive) position of the Zombie of Caribbean voodoo legend that became appropriated by gothic texts is a potent symbol of neoliberal neither/ nor-ness and apathy that terrorises the modern viewer in its representation of the abject underclass of modern capitalism. The Zombie is also seen to function in a science fictional mode, but more as a manifestation of potentially destructive aspects of capitalist society. Other ‘weird’ players in new posthuman texts—most all of which are based on old science fiction—are: tales of Genetic impurity/purity

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(e.g. Cronos, dir. Guillermo del Toro, 1993); Imperial Power vs. Bio Power (e.g. District 9, dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009) Nanotech and Genetic Modifications (e.g. Altered Caron, Netflix, 2018–); Geo-dystopias (e.g. IO, dir. Jonathan Helpert, 2019) and Contagion (e.g. 12 Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995). Clearly, as identity has become a central site for liberation of the repressed out of the bounds of normativity, the concept of what is monstrous has shifted. News media and social media have completed and enhanced this cultural transformation. Spectres are no longer as ‘benign’ or supernatural as Frankenstein (1818), The Mummy (1827) or Dracula (1897). Nowadays they are more likely to be agricultural biotech companies, crazy foreign billionaires, drone-warfare in false wars undertaken on behalf of an oil companies’ stakeholders, and 18-year-olds who, while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the caption ‘Humanity is Overrated’ mow down their classmates with automatic weaponry.22 The monster’s function has shifted from being the gentle reminder of that which threatens the psychological coherence of the self, to something far more sinister. This monster is monstrous in the Derridian sense as, ‘that which appears for the first time, and consequently, is not yet recognised’.23 The monster’s function in the post-human Interstellar gothic is as the harbinger of crisis, and that crisis brings with it the kind of unforeseen consequences that must be confronted if we are to survive as a species. As Terry Eagleton concludes: ‘Fascination with ghouls and vampires have little to say of evil. Perhaps this is because the post-modern man or woman – cool, provisional, laid-back and decentred – lacks the depth that true destructiveness requires. For post-modernism, there is nothing really to be redeemed’.24 Science fiction too has, and since the 1960s, been subjected to ever newer and more critical scrutiny that demands a more rigorous approach to science, a greater depth of characterisation of its subjects and an increased awareness and sensibility to our political and economic realities. Two storytelling vanguards are notable in this regard: Charles Beaumont (1929–1967) and Samuel R. Delaney (1942–). Beaumont is best known for his work in television and films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), The Intruder (dir. R. Corman, 1962), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1962–1965) and The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (dir., G. Pal, 1964). His work first appeared in cult magazines of the 1940s, and brought the mode of the Gothic to the moods and tensions of the racially and sexually conflicted 1950s and 1960s. Beaumont wrote of the shifting identities created out of neoliberalism—specifically the disillusioned, dispossessed night people of the world that would have otherwise been overlooked in that televisual generation. Like neoliberalism itself, his stories were bittersweet and filled with characters whom hegemony, politics and the market had left behind—sad and anxious people who had no voice and so dissolved into the shadows. Ray Bradbury was a friend and another author who wrote in this vein, but it would be Samuel R. Delaney—a Black, sexually fluid, gender fluid author from Harlem—who would take disposed, intersectional and anxious people out into the cosmos, where they might celebrate these subjectivities against an interstellar gothic backdrop. Delaney’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976), being a seminal example, was written

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as a response to a private conversation he had with Ursula Le Guin’s on the themes in her The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974).25 In the writing of Le Guin and Delaney, whole interrogations of the interstellar uncanny in our universe-to-come emerged out of discussions on what it was to be human. Central to this was the concept that the old, Promethean, configuration of what it is to be human, is heretical. We live in a world where enhanced humans are all around us and where human embodiment and subjectivities are undergoing profound mutations daily. In such an age of transition we are not, cannot, be clear of our way forward or what is truly happening around us, and this makes us anxious. Instead, we look for these shifting mutations and our anxieties over them in fiction, fiction whose ideas of the ‘Monster’ and the ‘Human’ have become false binaries and are now only deployed to shut down any possibility of critically engaging with political discourses such as terrorism, authoritarian overconsumption and the ravages of global capitalism. Only extremists (Right wing as well as Left) are still comfortable with such absolutist moral judgements post-millennium. This, as Braidotti and other phenomenological philosophers have explained, smacks of self-betrayal—the real millennial monsters externalise alterity and cannot see the life beyond the self. In light of the complexities awaiting our species, in and post the Anthropocene, surely the lack of surety in this alterity is the real horror? The Anthropocene is our current lived epoch wherein the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet, and it has been the subject of increasing attention since its acceptance by the earth sciences as such in 2011. The Anthropocene’s key tenets and queries concern our ecology, climate change, globalisation, bio and chemical waste, pollution crime, inequalities in poverty and hunger, pharmaceutical mafias and the irrevocable and dystopian effect that humans have had on our planet. Against this backdrop, the posthuman subject is emerging as a transversal and affirmative answer: a hybrid between the human and non-human forces that may help us cope with the, often painful, challenges of the contemporary world. Carl Sagan once voiced a most apposite definition of scientific inquiry in the millennium as the ‘tension between the natural tendency to project our experience on the universe and the universe’s noncompliance with this human tendency.’26 The tensions between the legacies of Shelley’s 1818 Promethean tale of ‘Man’ projecting its hubris onto life in an attempt to control the human tendency may, to some, still represent contemporary gothic dialogue, but it is precisely counter to where human knowledge has now advanced us to. Today, interstellar travel tales push against the idea of ‘Man’ as sole proprietor and progenitor of this universe. Victor Frankenstein was a composite of a generation of men who emerged from the Enlightenment intent on chemistry and galvanising experiments to control what it was to be human, but such men are now understood to be unevolved backward colonialists. Evolution, philosophy and higher mathematics have provided a new essential viewpoint that condemns such narrow homo-centric thinking and underwrites the mismatch between the way we are and the way the universe (or multiverse) is constituted. In a universe that is so patently plan-less, it is heresy to believe that Man is at the centre of it; that humans are central to the larger plan of

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creation. If proof is needed, just look at what we have done to the planet we have, for centuries, harnessed and attempted to control with our centralist perspective. Such arrogance has cost us everything. The anxieties held in the time of Shelley are still there to be worked out in the gothic tale, but in a far more postmodern form. Anxieties over: gender blurring; transgressive sexualities; racial hybrids; hybrid contagions; species hybrids; species disability; waste and the degeneration of the planet; extinction-level infertility, the impact of relativity and quantum physics; biological inquiry into the nature and purpose/chaos of the universe; and the absence of faith, all vie for attention in our contemporary psycho-social. For some, the collapse of the Promethean ideal is perhaps the greatest anxiety of all. The Posthuman Interstellar Gothic insists that we separate ourselves from the myth of the Promethean and lose our humanity in order to seek what is beyond it. It asks us to pay attention to the bends in our reality, to insist on learning and knowledge, and to seek humanity within ourselves not without. The advance of capitalism into neoliberalism, post-war, signalled the social collapse of the Promethean model and by the 1980s, the human creators of commodity’s social energy were reduced to their servants and torch-bearers rather than their originators. Post-neoliberalism, value in surplus and surveillance economies have accelerated to such a degree that commodity value self-creates and self-replicates at a hysteric pace. In the millennium, and especially since the global crisis of 2008, we are all now able to perceive world-systems and the death of humanity in ways otherwise unavailable. Concomitant apprehensions and anxieties of global capitalism and anthropocentrism have pushed our apocalyptic anxieties and future-proofing desires out into the stars and the resulting narratives have found the Syfy Channel and global streaming services to be useful cyphers. There, Posthuman Interstellar Gothic serials place supernature in a proto-political construction, one that registers and then blows out all the contradictions (especially those that haunt us) of social, technological and medical anxiety. Like the rise of science fiction in the 1960–1980s, the heightened supernaturalism we are seeing on our television screens in the twenty-first century are cultural markers that insist that the accumulated effects of capitalism’s spiral make the Gothicism’s of the twentieth century less poignant. To borrow phraseology from Sylvia Wynter, by 2008 a ‘new ceremony had to be found’27 that expressed the gothic effects of the plethora of global crises in the millennium. As previously alluded to, perhaps, the most popular forerunner of the Posthuman Interstellar Gothic in form, was Star Trek’s apocalyptic Borg storyline. Located at the intersection of the late twentieth century’s new imperial paradigm of the multitudes networked through machines and the rise of information and communication technologies as sites of biopolitical production, the Borg storyline was a gothic exemplar of the biopolitical discourses that were destabilising us in the late 1990s. Cannibalising human and ‘alien’, The Borg were read as exemplars of the cyber-vampire. However, the boundaries between Star Trek’s Federation and the Borg Collective were continually being blurred, and this destabilised the monstrosity of the Borg species—especially following Jean-Luc Picard’s abortive

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assimilation as Locutus; Assimilant number 2366 in ‘The Best of Both Worlds, Part I’ (Star Trek, The Next Generation, S3:E26). The Borg, viewers and critics began to understand, were not the only collective to ‘assimilate’: in order to exist within the Federation, alien species had to assimilate Federation protocol, Federation directives, and Federation uniforms as early as 1966. Although cultural difference was accepted for the most part in Star Trek, it was always subverted in favour of the human species’ dominance—thus, still following the Promethean legacy, situating fear in the external Other, and continuing the heresy of the human. Scratch beneath the utopian surface promised us by Gene Rodenberry in 1966, and you are assaulted with white patriarchal colonising constructs. For all their breaking of barriers, the premise of the future in Star Trek rests solidly in the far-from-peaceful colonisation of the inner, and later outer, galaxy by a Federal conglomerate not unlike Apple or Microsoft. First appearing on American television at a time when the devaluation of post-war masculinities were all that could be offered in other prime-time formats, Star Trek offered a future that learned nothing from our past, except how to live without speculative capital and how intersectional identities might be an asset to your flight deck. In form and function, those of the Earth were still the centre of the universe, destined to colonise the rest, and aliens were a mere continuation of their racist imaginary. Arguably,28 this postcolonial discourse playing out on our television screens was intellectually about right in terms of trend. However, the entrance of the Borg into popular culture, signified a shift in popular consciousness towards the Posthuman—towards critical discussions in the pubic fora of technology as a life form, consumption as a political and imperial mode of being, and the illegitimacy of the primacy of the human. In the twenty-first century, these interrogations would emerge as the driving force behind new gothic narratives. Far more groundbreaking, in terms of its realistic understanding of what awaited our world if, left to its own devices, it one day found itself on the verge of extinction, threatened with assimilation with a cyborg race, and hurtling through the outer limits towards a fragmented future, was Battlestar Galactica (1978; 2003–2009). If greed is good, and global greed is better, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) proved that greed could grow, learn from us, turn on us then chase us, unabated, throughout the Galaxy. Like Star Trek, BSG had an abortive start on television. Unlike Star Trek, BSG posited world-building—not colonising—in its franchise and was developed as a complex multi-text, best described as a televisual Space Opera. Continuously reloaded in backdoor pilots and fan-targeted episodic television, it was supported by a stalwart fan-structure that recognised how rare the show was for its devotion to realism and complex depictions of ordinary men and women living in constant precarity. The absence of stable structures, identities or boundaries in BSG, and ‘the “in-betweenness” of the fleet’s uncertain odyssey focuse[d] the viewer’s attention on the social, political and economic structures of global capitalism’s permanent state of exception’.29 The term state of exception is most substantially explored as a modern form of totalitarianism—capitalism’s post-modern political paradigm—by Giorgio Agamben. This ‘voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency’30 is a hegemony that stems from

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neoliberalism’s ethos of competitive individualism—and it was the individual in a permanent state of emergency that BSG portrayed so well. Since BSG went off the air in 2009, new transmission forms have created aesthetic democratisations of Posthuman Interstellar Gothic story-worlds for the discerning viewer and writer. Attempts, for example, have been made to regenerate the Star Trek franchise (Star Trek: Discovery, 2018); the Stargate franchise (Stargate Universe, 2009; Stargate Origins, 2018) and streaming services have permanently archived earlier cult programmes such as Lexx (1997–2002) and Joss Weedon’s Firefly (2002–2003). Of particular significance is Lexx, which combines Vampirism, the living Dead in various forms, and a cybernetic—later computerised—Dr. Frankenstein counterpart (named Mantrid and first introduced in S2: E1) with hybrid species and the deselection of the human race as dominant in the cosmos. All of these Posthuman Interstellar multi-texts are formed by questions and debates over how best to represent our impact on the world in future scenarios. The latest sci-fi multi-text to establish itself in this formula is The Expanse (2015–). Based on a series of novels written by James S. A. Corey, its first three seasons were broadcast simultaneously on America’s Syfy Channel and on Netlfix globally, but its fourth season has been picked up by Amazon. Developed by showrunners Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, narratives of class warfare and ecological transformation come together, run parallel, collide, diverge and depart from one another so swiftly, you would think you were reading a graphic novel. Set two hundred years in the future, a colonised Mars has suffered an acrimonious separation from its coloniser, the utopian Earth, to become a roving militaristic planetary force while Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest object in the vast, mineral-rich, asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, has been privatised by various mining operations. The elite remain on a protected Earth (“Earthers”), middle-class militaristic inhabitants of Mars (“The Reds”) who are bound by their heavier atmosphere live on board their fleets of battlecruisers, and the mining colonies of the asteroid belt and Ceres (“Belters”) live any way they can. A two-planet system divides those caught in the middle, while Belters merely provide their labour and raw materials. Elsewhere, a distress signal leads to the mysterious destruction of a ship, stranding Captain Jim Holden (Steven Strait) and his ragtag crew in deep space aboard their pirate-like ship, the Rocinante. Essentially, this is Marx—in Space. Especially, potent is the wretched subterranean of the belt whose denizen have never seen the sun and have developed their own patois—a symbol of their peripheral wasteland existence. Belters in form and function are the gothicised lumpen proletariat of the Victorian gothic slum, now relocated to the margins of the universe. The series has a formulaic beginning—detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), a ‘Belter’ born on Ceres in the asteroid belt, is assigned to find a missing young woman, Juliette “Julie” Andromeda Mao (Florence Faivre). Julie’s father is an ‘Earther’ pharmaceuticals tycoon, and as such a man of incredible wealth and power. He is paying for information leading to his daughter’s whereabouts. Drawing on Le Guin (The Dispossessed, 1974; The Heron, 1978) in its theoretical divisions, and threatening to surpass BSG in its critical strength, The Expanse, is,

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possibly, the best example of Posthuman Interstellar Gothic being broadcast currently. Its crime fiction storyline is a mere precursor to a challenging and developing set of gothic narratives involving anarchists, warmongers and greedy politicians and a series of interrogations on environmental scarcity, interstellar class warfare and capitalism’s catastrophic residue at the end of the Anthropocene. The Expanse is not a Star Trek exploration saga about discovering new aliens every week—it’s the story of real people fighting for their small corner of the universe day after day. A world where water is scarce and air is rationed—something those hit by the gaseous smog and ‘dead’ rivers in Delhi or Bejing can, all too realistically, imagine. The characters and the viewers regularly explore issues like empathy, martyrdom, poverty and how fear can dictate one’s actions. Viewers are never truly in suspense over what has happened to Julie Mao—we know her fate before the other characters do and are also the first to read her as transformed and/or hybridised by the crystalline pathogen that has killed her. What intrigues us is whose perspective we see the cosmos from, and how frail and exploited the universe has become as a result of man’s short-sighted impact. Seeking Julie Mao is the mere tip of the iceberg in a larger story arc that will see humanity transformed and leaves the viewer with no resolution, just ugly truths: that everything is unravelling and that man and his greed is to blame. Motives and experiences that we see all around us suggest that Age of the Human is far from idealised. Neither, for that matter, does it appear the Age of the Posthuman will pan out all too well. Since the turn of the last century, world’s end narratives and/or human’s end narratives have proliferated, and we know that the resurgence of such representations occurs only in periods of ontological and epistemological crisis. In exploring the dystopic and grotesque imaginings that arise from, and express the darker side of, our postmillennial life, our evolution towards cataclysmic extinction is the pressing narrative. The next, critical and aesthetic reinterpretation of the gothic trope has emerged in the aesthetic narration of the Anthropocene, how we may be speeding towards a self-inflicted Armageddon, and how the posthuman insists we abandon the primacy of the human in the face of it. And, two-hundred years from now—if we do not embrace species hybridity and curb our greed—we will condemn ourselves to doing the same things all over again, only to a whole galaxy.

Notes

1. Craig R. Davis in Hussam S. Timani, Allen G. Jorgenson, and Alexander Y. Hwang (eds.), Strangers in this World: Multireligious Reflections on Immigration (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2015), pp. 129–142. 2. E.g.: Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, Rev. Ed., Trans. Sus Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London, Verso, 1988); J. J. Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1995).

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3. Stephen Shapiro [in conversation with China Miéville], for “Gothic Politics” in Gothic Studies, 10.1, May, 2008, Ed. Stephen Shapiro, Special Edition on Material Gothic: 61–70, 67. 4. Anya Heise-von der Lippe (as editor), Posthuman Gothic, Gothic Literary Studies Series (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2017), p. 3. 5. Fred Botting, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 12. 6. Cary Wolfe, Posthumanities, 2010, https://www.carywolfe.com/post_about.html, accessed 2 April 2019. 7. E.g.: Maryjean D. Purinton, ‘Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott’ in Romanticism on the Net 21 (February 2001), no page numbers, https://ronjournal.org/articles/n21/science-fiction-and-technogothic-drama-romantic-playwrights-joanna-baillie-and-jane-scott/, accessed 23 March 2019; Theodora Goss and John Paul Riquelme, ‘From Superhuman to Posthuman: The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis’ in Modern Fiction Studies, 53.3 (2007): pp. 434–459. 8. E.g.: Judith Wilt, ‘The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 14.4 (1981): pp. 618–628. 9. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, Verso, 2005), p. 63. 10. Donna Haraway, D. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985). 11. Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, Battlestar Galactica [the Miniseries] (Universal Pictures, 2003). 12. Timothy Morton, Ecology with Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 194–196. 13. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ‘Critical Posthumanism’ in Subject Matters, 3.2–4.1 (2007): pp. 15–29, 16. 14. Katherine Hayles, How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. 15. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005), p. 5. 16. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), p. 140. 17. Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)’ in Jack Copland (ed.), The Essential Turing (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 433–464. 18. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (London, Rapp & Whiting, 1968), p. 79. 19. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman’ in Cultural Critique, No. 53, Winter, 2003: pp. 134–137. 20. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London, Polity Press, 2013). 21. See, e.g.: Roger Luckhurst, ‘In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness’ in Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (eds.), Gothic Science Fiction, 1980–2010 (Liverpool, University of Liverpool Press, 2011), pp. 21–35. 22. In November of 2007 Peka-Eric Auvinen (18) opened fire on his Finnish classmates, killing eight people before shooting himself. Prior to the killings he had posted a video on YouTube—which ran uninterrupted well after the event—where he was shown wearing a t-shirt with the caption “Humanity is Overrated”, discussed in Braidotti, 2013, pp. 6–7. 23. Jacques Derrida, ‘Passages—from Traumatism to Promise’ in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points. Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 372– 398, 386. 24. Terry Eagleton, ‘Of Men and Monsters’ in The New Statesman, 1 April 2010, https:// www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/04/evil-social-essay-human-case, accessed 1 April 2019.

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25. Discussed in: Samuel R. Delaney, Starboard Wine: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Elizabeth Town, NJ, Dragon, 1984). 26. Carl Sagan, The Variety of Scientific Experience (New York, Penguin, 2006), p. 35. 27. Sylvia Wynter, ‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’, boundary 2, 12.3 and 13.1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism Special Edition (Spring and Autumn, 1984): pp. 19–70. 28. Lynnette Russell and Nathan Wolski, ‘Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, The Borg, and the Post-Colonial’ in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 1 (2001), no page numbers. https://intensitiescultmedia.com/2014/08/27/beyond-the-final-frontier, accessed 30 March 2019. 29. Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, Radical Cultural Studies Series (London, Rowman & Littlefield), p. 96. 30. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005), State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beaumont, C. (1959–1964), The Twilight Zone, CBS. ———. (1962–1965), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, NBC. ———. (1962), The Intruder, Roger Corman (dir.), Pathé American Distribution. ———. (1964), Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, George Pal (dir.), MGM. Berman, R. and Braga, B. (dev’s.) (2001–2005), Star Trek: Enterprise, UPN. Berman, R. and Piler, M. (dev’s.) (1993–1999), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, UPN. Berman, R., Piler, M. and Taylor, J. (dev’s.) (1995–2001), Star Trek: Voyager, UPN. Blomkamp, N. (dir.) (2009), District 9, Tristar Pictures. Botting, F. (1996), Gothic, London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, London: Polity Press. Davis, C. R. (2015), Strangers in this World: Multireligious Reflections on Immigration (eds. Hussam S. Timani, Allen G. Jorgenson, and Alexander Y. Hwang). Fortress Press: Minneapolis, pp. 129–142. Delaney, S. R. (1976), Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, New York: Bantam Books. Delaney, S. R. (1984), Starboard Wine: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Elizabeth Town, NJ: Dragon. Derrida, J. (1995), ‘Passages—From Traumatism to Promise’ in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points. Interviews, 1974–1994, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 372–398. Dick, P. K. (1968), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, New York: Doubleday. Eagleton, T. (2010), ‘Of Men and Monsters’ in The New Statesman, 1 April 2010, https://www. newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/04/evil-social-essay-human-case. Accessed 1 April 2019. Emmerich, R. (dir.) (1994), Stargate, MGM Universal. Fergus, M. and Ostby (dev’s.) (2015–), The Expanse, Syfy, Netflix and Amazon. Foucault, M. (1978), History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, S. (1919), ‘Das Unheimlich’ in Gesammelte Werke, X11, pp. 229–268. Fuller, B and Kurtzman, A. (dev’s.) (2017–), Star Trek, Discovery, CBS. Gilliam, T. (dir.) (1995), 12 Monkeys, Universal Pictures. Goss, T. and John Riquelme, P. (2007), ‘From Superhuman to Posthuman: The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis’ in Modern Fiction Studies, 53.3: pp. 434–459. Guillermo del Toro, G. (dir.) (1993), Cronos, October Films.

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Halberstam, J. (1995), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (1985), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hassler-Forest, D. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (2003), ‘Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman’ in Cultural Critique, No. 53 (Winter): 134–137. Heise-von der Lippe, A. (2017), Posthuman Gothic, Gothic Literary Studies Series, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Helpert, J. (dir.) (2019), IO, Netflix. Herbrechter, S and Callus, I. (2007), ‘Critical Posthumanism’ in Subject Matters, 3.2–4.1: pp. 15–29. Ilvedson, M. and Terry, J. M. (dev’s.) (2018–), Stargate Origins, Stargate Command Digital Network. Jameson, F. (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso. Kalogridis, L. (dev.) (2018–), Altered Caron, Netflix. Larson, G. (1978–1979), Battlestar Galactica, ABC. ———. (1980), Battlestar Galactica, ABC. Lawrence, F. (dir.) (2007), I Am Legend, Warner Bros. Le Guin, U. (1974), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, New York: Harper & Row. ———. (1978), ‘The Eye of the Heron’ in Virginia Kidd (ed.), Millennial Women Anthology, New York: Delacorte Press. Luckhurst, R. (2005), Science Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press. ___________ (2011), ‘In the Zone: Topologies of Genre Weirdness’ in Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (eds.), Gothic Science Fiction, 1980–2010, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, pp. 21–35. Matalas, T. and Fickett, T. (dev’s.) (2015–2018), 12 Monkeys, Syfy. Miéville, C. (1998), King Rat, London: Macmillan. ———. (2005), Looking for Jake, and Other Stories, London: Macmillan. ———. (2009), City & the City, London: Macmillan. Moore, R. D. (dev.) (2003–2009), Battlestar Galactica, Syfy. Moore, R. D. and Eick, D. (2003), Battlestar Galactica [the Miniseries], Universal Pictures. Moore, R. D. and Larson, G. (2003), Battlestar Galactica [the Miniseries], Sky One and Syfy. Moretti, F. (1988), Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Revised Edition, Trans. Sus Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller, London: Verso. Morton, T. (2007), Ecology with Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Pohl, F. (1976), Man-Plus, New York: Random House. Pohl, F. and Thomas, T. T. (1994), Mars-Plus, New York: Simon & Schuster. Purinton, M. D. (2001), ‘Science Fiction and Techno-Gothic Drama: Romantic Playwrights Joanna Baillie and Jane Scott’ in Romanticism on the Net 21 (February), no page numbers, https://ronjournal.org/articles/n21/science-fiction-and-techno-gothic-drama-romantic-playwrights-joanna-baillie-and-jane-scott/. Accessed 23 March 2019. Rodenberry, G. (1966–1969), Star Trek, CBS. ———. (1987–1994), Star Trek: The Next Generation, CBS. Russell, L. and Wolski, N. (2001), ‘Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, The Borg, and the Post-Colonial’ in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 1, https://intensitiescultmedia. com/2014/08/27/beyond-the-final-frontier. Accessed 30 March 2019.

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Sagan, C. (2006), The Variety of Scientific Experience, New York: Penguin, 2006. Scott, R. (dir.) (1982), Blade Runner, Warner Bros. Shapiro, S. (2008), [in conversation with China Miéville] for “Gothic Politics” in Gothic Studies, 10.1 (May) Ed. Stephen Shapiro, Special Edition on Material Gothic: 61–70. Shelley, M. (1818), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones. Stoker, B. (1897), Count Dracula, London: Archibald Constable and Co. Turing, A. (2004), ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)’ in Jack Copland (ed.), The Essential Turing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 433–464. Watchowski, L. and Watchowski, L. (dir’s.) (1999), The Matrix, Warner Bros. Webb, J. (1827), The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, London: Henry Colburn. Wilt, J. (1981), ‘The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction’ in Journal of Popular Culture, 14.4: pp. 618–628. Wolfe, C. (2010), Posthumanities, https://www.carywolfe.com/post_about.html. Accessed 2 April 2019. Wright, B. and Cooper, R. C. (dev’s.) (2004–2009), Stargate Atlantis, Syfy. ———. (dev’s.) (2010–2011), Stargate Universe, Syfy. Wright, B. and Glassner, J. (dev’s.) (1997–2007), Stargate, SG1, Showtime and then Syfy. Wynter, S. (1984), ‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’ in boundary 2, 12.3 and 13.1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism Special Edition (Spring and Autumn): pp. 19–70. Zuboff, S. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: Public Affairs.

Degeneration in H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson Antonio Alcalá González

The purpose alluded by the title of this chapter is to study the presence of the fears of degeneration from the fin-de-siècle in the works of Hodgson and Lovecraft. I propose the reading of the concept degeneration as depository of those disturbances concerning a degradation of humanity that generated from both the evolutionary theory and a growing social deterioration within cities in which increasing crime and vice were observable during the second half of the nineteenth century. The accelerated scientific advance, characteristic of that century, facilitated an unprecedented systematisation of human knowledge; this allowed the discourses coming from the biology and the anthropology to sustain what before had been based on the mere speculation and presupposition, but now it was supported in arguments emanated of the scientific observation. As a result, The Victorian fin-desiècle, the last two decades of the nineteenth century, marked an environment in which beginnings and endings were combined; there was a frontal clash between the outdated and the new which ended up marking this period as full of volatility and transitions (Ledger, xiii). There was a growing fear that if man was part of a biological evolution scheme, then there would be a risk of an inverse process that could be identified as involution; in other words, a degeneration. This was understood as the process by which the structural complexity of an organism decreases as a result of the corresponding reduction of demands to survive in its environment (Lankester, 32). This idea ended up becoming a fear concerning an almost inevitable return to the animal past of humankind which had been previously postulated by Darwin during the second half of the century. According to Darwin, man seems to be the summit of the evolutionary chain, only as long as his intellectual powers and articulated language allow him to transform the world according to his needs and interests (Norton Critical, 201). This is ability granted him success in Nature’s constant struggle under the principle of

A. Alcalá González (*)  Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_72

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natural selection or survival of the fittest (210). Such a selection process, together with the constant evolution that this entails, supposes the extinction of those less apt to survive (Darwin Origin of Species, 198). Although at first opposed to the ideas of Darwin, T. H. Huxley also observed that the struggle for existence tends to eliminate the least able to survive under the circumstances within the same environment. He took his studies about the relationships of man and great apes to conclude that, in effect, man is one more animal, as related to his close relatives as they are to each other: “I have endeavored to show that not absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves” (Huxley, 152). The distance proposed by Huxley is so short, and the conviction of a fluidity of beings and elements so universal, that in the second part of the nineteenth century everything seems to indicate that the process of evolution could be full of broken lines between the ascendant and its opposite, with the risk of being, even, reversible. After what had been done by Darwin and Huxley, the identity of the species is characterised by amalgamating movements and in flow rather than by integrity and immobility because it was known that being called “human” carried within his evolutionary history acquired habits and abandoned, emergent and attenuated needs, as well as developed and repressed instincts; his body was no longer a unit, but a combination of vestiges of his evolutionary past. Simultaneously to the fears emanated from scientific work, the social view pointed out at the presence of an escalating of criminality and social division in increasingly stratified cities, as well as the apparent contamination coming from the contact with the imperial subjects in the colonies. This gave rise to the mere suspicion that there actually was a degenerative process in motion. The fear was that it was actually occurring, although in a remote corner, hidden to the common viewer, but verifiable through the careful observation made by experts. The resulting social anxieties of degeneration were expressed in the pens of gothic writers from the fin-de-siècle. Through an obsessive insistence to exemplify its degrading results, they emphasised the necessity of limits that could prevent the fall of humankind. The experience of the characters in their texts demonstrated that “by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, services to reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits” (Botting, 7). The desire to categorise any dangerous element, the power to redeem man after what Darwin worked, produced narratives aimed at creating characters and discourses that could become receptacles of fear towards the final dissolution: “Writers responded to the typology of reversal because they could have it both ways: it offered To place the ‘other’ in a reassuring framework of scientific authority, while exploring the uncontrollable and transgressive, in encounters between the subject and ‘other’” (Greenslade, 73–74). The testimonies left in these stories of fiction allowed to point out and warn about any monstrous attempt to get out of the way towards the perfection of the species. In the Gothic, the transgressive presences that disrupt normality are usually generated from within the observer’s self (Jackson, 108). Polluting dirt takes

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physical form creating abominable entities, which can be explained as abject and polluting. Based on Mary Douglas’s ideas on the proper and the improper, Kelly Hurley proposes them as bordering beings that exist between two categories (24). When applied to the human race, the abomination results in a subhuman entity; such a creature is the heir of Darwinism and the literature of the fin-de-siècle. It is a mutable body that starts from the human being that was once to become something else (3–4). The existence of this being evidences the arbitrary nature of man’s classifications since its mere presence reveals that categories can cross, and dirt exists only from the point of view of the system itself. The human eye sees the infrahuman body as a transgression; it is a monster whose form arises from the union between armed parties in a diseased way that does not respect limits (Punter and Byron, 263). Monomania is what leads to the creation of monsters: “… [it] forces the subject to gothicize “others” while attempting to elevate or purify the self. Paranoia is precisely a gothic mechanism, a production of a demon who represents a multitude of fears” (Halberstam, 117). Its power lies, precisely, in an inherent ability of man, which consists in merging “contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinctions, and ontological categories” (Gilmore, 194). As a product of this process, monsters abdicate their humanity and cannot be processed by our rationality (Asma, 8, 10). The monster becomes a mark, a representation of the barriers and the risk of trespassing them. If others crossed such borders, they would also observe the system from outside and understand the arbitrary nature of it. Nordau emphasised that those abnormal beings that showed evidence of degeneration were prone to the inability to adapt which facilitated their disappearance. However, since there is a risk that the disease spread (whether due to inheritance or direct contagion), it was necessary to keep them confined and separated from society, and even to use violence, as was done with inmates of mental asylums (537). The primitive, the abnormal, the inappropriate became synonymous with degeneration in relation to the characteristic of Western civilisation as the norm of the appropriate. Within such discourse, it was ambiguous to be able to affirm whether the man of the late nineteenth century was really the apex of evolution on earth. William Hope Hodgson lived at a time when the fears of the fin-de-siècle from the previous century seemed to be more a reality than mere speculation due to the scientific advance of the time. Like his literary predecessors, he relies on the Gothic to express his feelings towards those fears. He knew that “Gothic fiction is a literature of destabilisation in that it inspires its readers to ask questions about themselves, their society, and the cosmos surrounding them” (Oakes, 1). Through the use of creatures and supernatural events, Hodgson transmits his fears about the lack of certainty about a predominant position of the human race. While serving in World War I, he realised that the horrors of his fiction were closer to reality than he had thought. Towards the end of his life, shortly before his death on the front during the First World War, he witnessed it in the latter convinced him that the supernatural elements in his fiction were not far from what man was capable of producing by himself in his experience on earth:

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… talk about a Lost World, talk about the end of the world; talk about The Night Land -it is here, not more than two hundred miles off from where you sit infinitely remote. And the infinite, monstrous, dreadful pathos of the things one sees- the great shell-hole with our thirty crosses sticking in it; some just out of the water - and the dead below them, submerged. (Hodgson Qtd. Tremayne, 10)

These lines, subsequent to any of his publications, seem to be the confirmation for the author that the terrors he illustrated in his fiction sooner or later they could manifest themselves outside the pages of their stories. In them, he portrayed his fears about the future of civilisation, which focused on a total collapse into lower states of existence and, ultimately, his own demise from Earth. The House on the Borderland (1908) is presented through three different narrators. The memories of the house Recluse make up the events that occurred in relation to the space referred to in the title; these, in turn, were found by Berreggnog who devotes the first chapter to explaining how the text reaches his hands and also presents a final set of conclusions about the experience of having read the manuscript and its chilling content. On the other hand, Hodgson becomes the mere editor that provides the full text found by Berreggnog plus his two chapters. The advantage of this is that Hodgson detaches himself from any relationship with the space where the events occurred. The framed narrative provides a triple filter that grants security of distance for the final reader in the elation to the atrocity of events confronted by the Recluse. His narration tells what happened in a lonely house in an area abandoned by human experience which does not appear even on the maps. Although the place is ignored by human activity, it was once inhabited, but the presence of man is now only a stone ruin. What is known from the diary is that the human inside the house succumbed after dealing with the threatening irruption of the animal; that is, the bestial, which struggled to enter into the context of the domestic. In an origin, the environment of the protagonist shows man as superior above the animal; his dog obeys him faithfully, and even when the instinct seems to indicate otherwise, he can follow his master wherever he goes even if it means staying “barking and crying like a forsaken pup” (Hodgson The House on the Borderland, 236). However, when leaving the house, the safe environment, the narrator confronts the presence of unknown natural spaces from which the pig creatures emerge. They contravene any boundary between the human and the animal: “It had a grotesquely human mouth and jaw: but with no chin of which to speak. The nose was prolonged into a snout; this it was, that, with the little eyes and queer ears, gave it such an extraordinary swine-like appearance” (195). The irruption presented by what he calls “The Swine-things” presents a mixture of categories without referent. Like in their physical description, in other aspects they also show a combination between species, a hybridity, which completely collapses the concept of the gap between man and beast. Their voices border areas between what one species and the other can articulate: “The Thing dropped with an almost human groan” (222). In addition, these are entities that do not observe conventions such as those that maintain the functioning of humanity. When one fragment of the facade of the house crushes one of them, another eats its remains. Paradoxically, though some of their actions bring them closer to man

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and even to something higher, others keep them as inferior beings in relation to the refinements of man: That the creatures should, so soon, have found the door, was -to me- a proof of their reasoning capabilities. It assured me that they must not be regarded, by any means, as mere animals. I had felt something of this before, when the first Thing peered in through my window. Then I had applied the term superhuman to it, with an almost instinctive knowledge that the creature was something different from the brute-beast. Something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather, as something foul and hostile to great and god in humanity. In a word, as something intelligent and yet inhuman. The very thought of the creatures filled me with revulsion. (213)

The narrator finds the amalgam between the human and the bestial as something unacceptable. However, our reading can find in the existence of the Swine-things a reminder of the fact that the species on earth are mere constructions in movement. One observed from a human perspective, the combination of characteristics in the pig makes it an example of degeneration towards the wild, but if viewed from outside, they prove to be something above the human. This particularity is verified when the creatures manage to hypnotise the narrator. At that moment his reason and the tools produced with its support turn completely futile: There was no need to be afraid of the creature; The bars were strong, and there was little danger of their being able to move them. And then, suddenly, in spite of the knowledge that the brute could not reach to harm me, I had to return from the horrible sensation of fear, that had assailed me on the night, a week previously. It was the same feeling of helpless, shuddering fright. I realized, dimly, that the creature’s eyes were looking into mine with a steady, compelling stare. I tried to run away but could not. I seemed, now, to see the window through to mist. Then, I thought other eyes came and peered, and yet others; Until a whole galaxy of malignant, staring orbs seemed to hold me in thrall. (205)

The mesmeric power of the antagonists is the irrefutable sign of its supremacy. The described event exhibits the apparent degeneration shown by their hybrid bodies as something existing only from the human point of view, since their superior faculties make them a mirror that allows the protagonist to recognise the vulnerability of his position in the cosmos. The fears of the human existence as something transitory that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century become verifiable when the protagonist and his dog turn into a decrepit old man and a lot of dust, respectively. Within the resulting scene of darkness and absence of the human, the Swine-things finally take control of the house completely before the disappearance of any race that could face them. However, the final turn from a degenerationist perspective is not this fall of man versus his pig rivals, but the mere fact of the body contamination that comes through the dog that licks the hand of the narrator; this is the fictional materialisation of the fears of animal pollution inherited from the fin-de-siècle which Hodgson presents as verifiable within a temporality of a few days: “A horrible fear has come to me. It creeps into my brain-the dog’s wound, shines at night. With a dazed feeling, I sit down on the side of the bed, and try to think; but cannot. My brain seems numbed with the sheer horror of this new fear … Six days and I have eaten nothing … I will become a terrible mass of living corruption” (310–311). At the end of the story,

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the fall that accompanies the protagonist seems to have spread to the second narrator, Berreggnog. In that last moment, his words become almost equal to those of the occupant of the house: “Sometimes, in my dream, I see that enormous pit, surrounded as it is, on all sides by wild trees and bushes. And the noise of the water rises upwards, and blends -in my sleep- with other and lower noises” (317). It is almost as if the mere reading of the Inmate’s testimony was the channel of contagion towards the possession of a devastating knowledge. The danger is so imminent that the reader himself can be infected in his role as a spectator of the inmate’s narrative, which he shares with Berreggnog. This marks the final turn in Hodgson’s technique that allows him to leave in his audience a feeling of helplessness against the forces that go beyond the scope of understanding and transcendence of man in the space and time that surround him. The merit of the most extensive text produced by Hodgson, The Night Land (2012) lies in the creative overflow behind its composition. In relation to this characteristic, Lovecraft himself commented: “Allowing for all its faults,1 it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written” (Weird Work, 237). This exercise of imaginative power results in overwhelming detailed descriptions that portray Hodgson’s anxieties of degeneration in connection with the imminent sun’s extinction. He presents a context of permanent darkness where the sun is only mentioned in ancient stories and the human being survives while the reduced energy that emanates from the earth, “the Earth -Current”, keeps flowing. Such a world is populated by other species more apt than humanity to survive without a source of energy. The resources of the inhabitants of the last refuge, “the Last Redoubt -that great Pyramid of gray metal which held the last millions of this world from the Powers of the Slayers” (Hodgson Night Land, 21) are also limited in knowledge; they only have the reduced information kept in their “Great Library” and whatever they can observe of their environment from their telescopes. They live in a decline of human knowledge and its application in which, for instance, flying machines have not been built for hundreds of thousands of years. The treasured technology and knowledge are focused only on keeping the Great Pyramid and its underground structures functioning, but they do not seem to be producing new artefacts. The outside world is described as a “black monstrosity” (23), which functions as the space where the return to the bestial past, manifests itself in full surface. The few humans that survive in the Last Redoubt are stalked by the presence of constructions and monstrous beings that await the constant expectation of being able to attack them. All the space surrounding them is infested by entities that, like the Swine-things in action and body are neither human nor animal, but the result of the contamination between species and limits that affected the human environment. The resulting danger is that everything is dangerous in the nighttime land: “the peril that did be everywhere, save in the Last Redoubt” (186). It should be noted that, in both novels, an immediate source of infection for humans is linked to a dog, the most docile animal, and therefore, a clear example of the human domain on earth. For the same reason, if the contaminant comes from this pet, this fact confirms that the human being has not assured his definitive

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control over the other species. In a way similar to how the Recluse in the house is infected by his pet, the beloved of the narrator of the night is bitten by a sick and mad hound, and although the fact does not produce major effects, it is the preamble to the failed childbirth complications that cause her death at the beginning of the work. The use of reason, the difference between humans and other mammals, is what makes the narrator stand out above all the beings with whom he crosses paths. Contrary to his enemies that he groups under the category of “evil Brute” (93), in his walk through the darkness and uncertainty, his battles against the BeastMan and the Humped Men are won through plans of attack obeying meticulous observation against the majority use of brute force by their opponents. He prevails against the inhabitants of the Lesser Redoubt who open their doors to the arrival of evil forces when reason cannot protect them anymore. They end up hiding behind bushes or running away immersed in uncontrollable panic while “in rags or utter naked, and all torn by the rocks and the bushes, and did seem, indeed, as that they had been wild things that did go by so swift and lost” (197). There is no longer any light for them like the one that still remains around the Great Redoubt, which is reflected in the reason that guides the protagonist. This makes the inhabitants of the minor refuge become the base of the food chain around the dry sea in which the small pyramid stands. The sea, origin of life on earth, is presented as a dead place in which the chain of predators has been completely reversed with the irreparable fall of the man who is now prey and food of the “dreadful brute-men” who hunt them. As with the Swine-things, the antagonists of humanity in The Night Land are hybrids that reflect the fall of the anthropomorphic towards the bestial, not only in their body, but in their language: “the speech of Men that must have the bigness of elephants, and that did not have kindness in all their thoughts; but were utter monstrous. And the speech was slow, and it rose up out of the hollow, brutish and hoarse and mighty” (98–99). These troglodytic subjects who lurk and attack their prey with a scheme based on their brute force, represent a suggestion of humans who have fallen on the evolutionary scale. When these beings organise themselves to hunt, they remind the reader of a group of Neanderthals chasing a mammoth: … there came very quick, a great and ugly thing, that had an ugly way of putting down the feet, and did have seven feet to each side, which was very strange; and the back was as if it were horny, and the belly of the thing seemed to brush heavy on the earth, and it was as it went, and shook the earth with the weight of it … And that it did so make after the man, was in truth because that had been wounded and made fierce; for, indeed, there came blood from the creature from the great wounds upon the back … And it did go under the tree in which I was hid; and in that moment when it was under the tree, the seven Humped Men did leap out of the branches, and did catch to the brute by the great horns of the spine … (152–153)

They have evolved to survive in their environment, while the inhabitants of the refuge are attached to a kind of life alien the reality on the outside, but possible to hold within the structure that isolates them. They are in a sealed environment

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until any attempt to break in from the outside becomes successful; this gives them the opportunity to create a completely one-sided world view from which they can afford to catalog everything external to their walls as abjectly monstrous. However, those other organisms outside the pyramid have a different vision about the relationships between species on the darkened land created by Hodgson. The final appropriation of the Recluse’s house by the Swine-things and the imminent fall of the Great Redoubt in distant futures allow to offer some tranquillity due to the extremely long distance in the horizon of time for such events to happen. Although the Recluse is infected by uncontrollable forces in our own time, the effect does not go beyond himself as his experience concludes in a state of isolation that keeps him away from any action that can spreads the contagion. Contrary to these proposals, H. P. Lovecraft confronts his reader with scenarios where the humanity at the beginnings of the twentieth century is the least apt to prevail among diverse species that have dominated the Earth. These are races that reach standards of physical and technological development beyond what has been achieved by man and his apparent progress. He makes us understand that the human race is a thing of the moment; that its existence on this planet is extremely recent, as infinity is reckoned, and that its possible existence in all the expanse of illimitable space is but a matter of yesterday. Lovecraft’s ideas about humankind and the cosmos are concise and clear in his letters and essays, but it is through the imaginative creation taking place in his fiction that they produce a devastating effect on his readers who witness the demolition of any possibility for the human race to claim superiority on Earth. In his fiction of degeneration, the point of view that would correspond to Hodgson’s creatures, depriving man of terrestrial preponderance, is magnified with the arrival of beings coming from dimensions beyond the known and understandable. Both “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) are based on the existence of secrets that is better to keep hidden and which were found in isolated secluded places, not visited by the human eye. The horror that freezes the narrators is the result of collecting several pieces that come to them through different sources related to hybrid monstrosities of sinister character. When they are assembled, they produce a knowledge that is as irrefutable as unbearable. “The Call of Cthulhu” is formed by three superimposed levels of perspective. The three chapters of the story correspond to the narrator’s (Francis Wayland Thurston) accounts of the notes and testimonies left by third parties. First, he comments on the delirious experience of the sculptor, Wilcox, reported in the notes of the late Professor Angell, his great-uncle; this is followed by what Angell himself referred to the history of the police inspector, Legrasse; the final part is the Johansen’s diary summarised by the same narrator. The narrative resource framed by Hodgson in The House on the Borderland is shared by Lovecraft although, in this case, the immediate purpose is not to provide comfort for the reader but to emphasise the impossibility to deny the occurrence of events that align dates and events in the experience of many witnesses. The result is the feeling shared with the narrators of the stories previously analysed:

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should go far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying views of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (125)

The fear expressed in these lines which opens this story result from the fatal work done by the narrator to associate what should not be linked. The product of this is the abandonment of the pleasant ignorance to which he himself refers. His final fear is that, although for the moment he is an isolated witness of unbearable knowledge, sooner or later the curiosity that led him to obtain it will lead others to follow in his footsteps. In fact, like with the Recluse’s narration, the reader is also at risk, since he has shared the same knowledge, although indirectly and, apparently, more securely. The narrator is dragged into a journey towards understanding the existence of Cthulhu and his worshippers among humanity. The creature’s body obeys to characteristics that are not familiar to man: The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came almost up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench of a thousand serious, and that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where-God in heaven! -the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form. (156)

The contradiction to the familiar and comfortable, goes beyond its body; the gigantic body that can recombine when it is believed to be destroyed, inhabits a city where perspective and proportions challenge the human mind and what it thinks it knows. Both ingredients, their mass and the architecture they inhabit, make evident the fact that there are things that humanity has not been able to perceive due to the limitations of its reach. The man is so insignificant at Cthulhu’s side, that Cthulhu seems to consider him as a mere toy as the Ancients who inhabited the mountains of madness did. In fact, Cthulhu is waiting to resurface to return humanity to a wild and primal state: “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revealing in joy” (142). From the perspective of a biologically more advanced being, it seems as if the cultural achievements reached by humankind did not even correspond to our minimal place in the cosmos. Those who follow him belong to what humanity is from his perspective. They are described as inferior to the learned white man represented by the protagonist. The mestizos of the Pacific who aim to liberate Cthulhu have an “abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting” (149). Their obvious degeneracy justifies their annihilation for Johansen and his companions: “There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost to duty” (152). The sailor is described as “of some

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intelligence” (148) just as Legrasse is a rational being. As for the narrator and his uncle, their academic formation places them in the cultural culprit of humanity, which, as I have already pointed out, seems to have gone against what belongs to man from Cthulhu’s vision. On the contrary, Wilcox, the sculptor of the statuette that forms the first piece in the search for the narrator, is described as “ of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered” (145) and the worshipers of Cthulhu apprehended by Legrasse in the distant swamps of Louisiana have a behaviour not expected in human beings; they emit sounds that would be expected to be perceived coming from a beast while performing a rite of animal behaviour: “leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality …Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire” (139). From the narrator’s perspective, the being who can manipulate the mind of Wilcox and is followed by degenerated humans is itself a hybrid. Its hybrid body brings together an anthropoid body with peculiarities of two animals and an imaginary being: “The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal … I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen” (151). For the narrator, the horror comes from knowing that the presence of this being confirms the arbitrariness that is contained in the fact of thinking of the world as a place of security for humanity. When it is contemplated from outside the Earth, it turns out to be a grain of salt on the vastness in space and time. His experience confirms that the position of man is as tiny as his own understanding within a context where matter and centuries can transcend beyond what the anthropoid has come to glimpse. The perspective necessary to issue such an utterance can only be reached from a non-human point of view; that is, the one that corresponds to Cthulhu, which the protagonist is able to share after his experience. His only consolation is that, according to the words of the worshipers arrested by Legrasse, the definite arrival of Cthulhu will only be verified again “till the stars came right again” (142). In contrast to the magnitude of the cosmic eras alluded by the events around a definite return of Cthulhu, the darkened fall of humankind in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”2 is confirmed as evident in the twentieth century. The human race is presented as an intermediate step between others that have walked on the planet. Similar to the story of Cthulhu, this story is a product of the amalgam formed by six pieces of information collected by the narrator, Robert Olmstead.3 The first four are third-party narratives that prepare him to personally experience the two final revelations that lead him to the edge of madness. The fourth one, that of Zadock Allen, consists of textual citations. This adds to the fact that government authorities found extremely strange events occurring around the town to justify the imprisonment of countless inhabitants. Both facts combine to emphasise the impossibility to deny the strangeness around Innsmouth and its people. As with Cthulhu, the events around this town present so many coincidences between objects and the experience of other characters that the narrator finds it impossible to deny the truth behind them. In addition, the fact that events do not occur in an

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isolated swamp in Louisiana or in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean but in a town once similar to any average one on the coast of New England, produces a stronger feeling of insecurity. After making him witness some allusions to the physical appearance of the inhabitants of Innsmouth, Lovecraft considers his protagonist ready to face one of them in person. The image of most obvious transgression of limits among species is that of Joe Sargent, the bus driver who covers the route between Inssmouth and its neighbouring towns: His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and he had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As I walked towards the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how I could buy any shoes to fit them. (584)

At first sight, his face presents the impossibility of categorising him within a known racial group: “His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage” (585). It is precisely his biological deformation what produces extreme shock, because it is impossible not to think of him as belonging to an irruption of elements that should not amalgam with a human body if the experience of what is observed on Earth has to remain valid. While in “The Call of Cthulhu” the contributions provided by the cases of Wilcox, Legrasse and Johansen are equitable in extension and weight to solve the enigma that reveals the fall of humanity, in Innsmouth, the words of Zadock Allen become the only narrative of a third person that occupies practically a complete chapter of the story. The weight of the facts provided by such a framed narrative is crucial to conform the penultimate key that brings the narrator closer to unbearable knowledge. The old man reveals that the existence of the Deep Ones, the hybrid beings between fish, batrachian and human, whose existence came to the ears in Innsmouth through the Kanaks of the South Pacific. This implies contact with a less civilised group (similar to those mentioned among the worshipers of Cthulhu) in order to access the focus of degeneration. The beings of the oceanic depths, explains Allen, share the evolutionary line of man. Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts—that everything alive come aout o’ the water onct, an’ only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent. (603)

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Although biologically related to the human species, the immortality of these marine beings is enough to place them on a position of evolutionary superiority over their terrestrial counterparts. Moreover, they have a higher technology that gives them the possibility of eradicating humanity if they wished to do so. The words of the old man provide the revelation about the true implication of what happened in Innsmouth. It is not an epidemy or a simple case of xenophobia, but a series of events that refers to the inheritance of hybrid characteristics which confirm the inferiority of man against other races. What began as a journey that included tracking down his own past, becomes for the narrator an immersion into unbearable secrets about humanity, and in particular about his own family heritage. The penultimate chapter consists of more encounters with evidences that confirm before his eyes the existence of the amphibian humanoids in Innsmouth. The chapter ends with his abandoning the town though the dark tunnel that places him on an escape route towards the natural surroundings of the town. This event symbolises the process of gradual revelation and assimilation in the protagonist. After coming from the tunnel, as if it were a return to be born, he abandons the human civilisation that originally built Innsmouth to enter the nature to which the marine beings that have appropriated the place belong. The chapter concludes with his fainting after he confronts the existence of what the human eye cannot stand: I saw them in a limitless stream -flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating-surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare… Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had not more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked. (634)

After a series of gradual revelations that accumulate for more than 24,000 words, Lovecraft directly attacks his reader with a detailed delivery of what these creatures visually are. On the one hand, the human perspective of the narrator appreciates them as something degenerate and aberrant. However, the words of Allen, who has observed them closely for decades, confirm that, from a non-human perspective, they possess more advantages to survive on Earth. The final chapter marks Robert’s discovery of his being a direct descendant of Obed Marsh, the town leader who established contact between Innsmouth and the Deep Ones. He also discovers in the mirror his starting to have the “Innsmouth look” (641). After showing the first signs of hybrid change, his uncle committed suicide and his cousin was locked up in an asylum. However, Robert adopts a turn of perspective; he sides with the beings for whom the human race is something they do not even have to worry about given their inferiority in terms of resources to survive on the planet. What both writers propose in the texts studied here is an extension of the panorama that reveals humanity as one more member of the animal kingdom; therefore, a member of the evolutionary ladder and the changes that allow the survival of the fittest. They extend the apprehensions of degeneration inherited from the fin-desiécle into the twentieth century and magnify them. They do so by presenting the

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gothic motif of the hybrid monsters (which represents a degenerative perspective for the human eye) as a creature that will survive the extinction of humankind because of their being better adapted. Here conclude the similarities between them as their proposals take different paths provoking different reactions in their readers. In Hodgson’s novels, the fears of degeneration turn into threats that combine the animal with the human in creatures that will burst upon the planet in a remote future. Such a union will eventually reign after the imminent disappearance of humanity, but not before it will end up finding a distant day when not even its knowledge and technology will allow it to be the most suitable species to survive. While Hodgson is benevolent towards his own species projecting a lengthy process for its fall, Lovecraft goes even further and places us as a just one more step in the ladder of entities that have dominated the Earth. He depicts a present where, although his perceptive restrictions do not allow him to appreciate it, the human being is a degenerate creature as his reduced physical and technological possibilities prove when compared with those of other species. To crystallise this proposal, he relies on monsters that exceed the dichotomy between beast and man present in Hodgson’s fiction. He confronts the reader with the transgressive attack of entities that combine more than one species around an apparent anthropomorphic countenance. With their presence he suggests what Hodgson alludes to: the human being is an insignificant presence; an ephemeral figure inside the spatial and temporal vastness of the cosmos, which the human sciences have gradually started to reveal since the nineteenth century in a process that echoes the assemblage of pieces performed by his narrators.

Notes 1.   Lovecraftand Peter Tremayne point out the presence of a bulky style in The Night Land which results from a failed attempt to use a type of English from the seventeenth century, the time when text opening diegesis is placed. This produces an evident artificiality in the author’s own English. However, the permanence of the text until our days proves that the creative talent of Hodgson is sufficient merit in this novel over its deficiencies in style. 2.  S. T. Joshi judged this story as: “Lovecraft’s greatest tale of degeneration …clearly a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different and, as such, may be considered a vast expansion and subtilization of the plot of ‘Facts Concerning Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family’” (162). In my opinion, the relationship between both texts is based on the maturation of an idea, which goes further than the simple fact proposed by Joshi of reworking a plot. The discovery by the protagonist about a hybrid union in his family past is the common anecdote in both texts; starting from it, and eleven years later, Lovecraft proposes an exploration of the limits of a hereditary degenerative pollution that goes beyond the case of a single family, the Jermyns, whose existence can be erased from human memory to deny such a case of degeneration. Nevertheless, in the case of Innsmouth, the degeneracy reaches a potentially infinite number within the human race; besides that, the degenerative process is only apparent since it is not a return but an advance towards a more developed species. 3.   Although not mentioned in early publications of the story, the notes and the author’s draft include a family tree of the protagonist in which his name is provided as Robert Olmstead (Lovecraft New Annotated, 573, 641).

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Bibliography Asma, Stephen T. Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Darwin, Charles. Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. and Sel. Philip Appleman. 3rd edition (New York: W. W. Norton &Company, 2000). ———. The Origin of Species. Ed. and Introd. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998). Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002). Gilmore, David D. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke: Duke University Press, 1995). Hodgson, William Hope. All Gothic 1: The Boats of the Glen Carrig & The House on the Borderland (New York: The Essential Library Edition, 2000). ———. The Night Land (Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1976). Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the fin de siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Huxley, Thomas H. Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1981). Joshi, S. T. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Wildside Press, 1996). Lankester, E. Ray. Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880). Ledger, Sally and Luckhurst, Roger. The Fin De Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, C. 1880– 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Lovecraft, H. P. “The Call of Cthulhu.” The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. and Notes, Leslie S. Klinger. Introd. Alan Moore (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 123–157. ———. “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. and Notes, Leslie S. Klinger. Introd. Alan Moore (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 573–642. ———. “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson.” Collected Short Stories of William Hope Hodgson (CreateSpace, 2013), 236–237. Nordau, Max. Degeneration (London: William Heinneman, 1896). Oakes, David A. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, C. 1848–1918. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Punter, David and Byron, Glennis. “The Monster.” The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 263–267. Tremayne, Peter. “W. Hope Hodgson: His Life and Work.” William Hope Hodgson: A Centennial Tribute 1877–1977 (Essex: The British Fantasy Society, 1977), 7–10.

Lovecraft, Decadence, and Aestheticism James Machin

H. P. Lovecraft has been regarded widely as a writer of ‘cosmic indifferentism’, a nihilist whose weird fiction finds its register of horror in the revelation that human existence is essentially meaningless.1 The typical Lovecraft tale—‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1927) perhaps being the exemplar—begins with the curious inquiry into mystery of the doomed protagonist/s, and culminates in the discovery of malignant non-human agency, the existence of which shatters the human assumption that the universe is somehow calibrated towards human aspiration or wellbeing; that there is a fundamental, anthropocentric telos to the cosmos. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock have described this as an ‘antihumanist undoing of human exceptionalism’, a philosophical stance that has led to Lovecraft being described as possessing an ‘absolute hatred of the world’ tantamount to philosophical nihilism.2 In this respect, Lovecraft has been seen as the wellspring (or perhaps ‘sickspring’ would be more apt) of an austere pessimistic (or, to use Lovecraft’s preferred specificity, ‘indifferentist’) strain in contemporary horror and weird fiction, which incurred notably into mainstream consciousness with the inclusion of anti-natalist discourse and weird aesthetic of the first season of the HBO series True Detective in 2014.3 Its writer, Nic Pizzolatto, certainly acknowledged the influence of Lovecraft, and Lovecraft’s contemporary heir apparent in terms of gloomy, ascetic naysaying, Thomas Ligotti (1953–), who ‘describes his own brand of weird fiction, and weird fiction in general, as constituting a strategy by which to spread pessimistic ideas.’4 According to this—certainly not unjustified—view, Lovecraft can be seen as a typical product of a preceding era in which the known bearings of religious and humanist certainty have been obliterated by advances in scientific knowledge, and associated literary ‘premonitions of modernity’.5 I will demonstrate below that Lovecraft’s literary roots in the fin de siècle, and especially the associated literary movement that became known as Decadence, are very evident in his writing.

J. Machin (*)  Royal College of Art, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_73

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I will then go on to argue that regardless of his reputation as a nihilist, pessimist, indifferentist, or some intersection thereof, another aspect of Decadent writing— the aestheticism of Walter Pater—can inform an interpretation of Lovecraft’s worldview that transcends existential pessimism, and resolves an apparent contradiction in Lovecraft’s fiction: why should the writing of a convinced pessimist so frequently hit a register that is more accurately described as ecstatic and visionary, rather than downbeat and nihilistic? Lovecraft emerged as a writer in the pulp milieu of the early twentieth century, and critics including China Miéville, Mark Fisher, and Benjamin Noys, have situated him convincingly as a modernist, albeit a ‘pulp modernist’.6 However, as I have argued elsewhere, Lovecraft and various Weird Tales contributors and editors considered themselves to be part of a longer literary tradition, rather than part of a post-war avant garde. As Roger Luckhurst has argued, Lovecraft’s celebrated essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ was an act of self-conscious canon formation; an invention of a ‘weird’ tradition in American, British, and European letters, spanning centuries, from which Lovecraft implicitly saw himself as emerging.7 Key in this tradition was Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Due to both Poe’s overriding and formative influence on Lovecraft, and Poe’s seminal influence on what became literary Decadence, Lovecraft’s writing fits almost seamlessly into that same, more specific, tradition. As well as providing a platform for contemporary weird fiction, Weird Tales reprinted work by Baudelaire, Gautier, Arthur Symons, and others, and Lovecraft conceived of this Decadent tradition as a preferable alternative to the standard ‘English nineteenth century’ canon, citing authors such as ‘Walter Pater, Lafcadio Hearn, Arthur Symons, Arthur Machen, Wilde, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé’ as his, alternative, ‘titans’ of the period.8 Indeed, he not only aligned himself with Decadence, but also co-opted his circle of correspondents and writers, including, for example, Frank Belknap Long and Samuel Loveman9: We belong to the wholly aesthete-pagan tradition of Keats, Poe, Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, & so on, hence may seem a trifle bizarre from the standpoint of the milder Tennyson-Browning-Matthew Arnold &c. tradition […] Art for art’s sake only is our motto […]10

—‘Art for art’s sake’ being the Anglophone version of ‘l’art pour l’art’, the aestheticist doctrine originating in the early nineteenth-century philosophy of Victor Cousin, disseminated by ‘French Romantic and Symbolist poets’, and popularised at the fin de siècle by Oscar Wilde.11 One can schematise Lovecraft’s relationship with decadence into three different, though related, streams. The first is the manifestations of decadent style, aesthetic, and worldview in some of Lovecraft’s earlier fiction; more traditionally Gothic, yet also quieter and less cosmic in scope. This decadence emerges from Lovecraft’s intense valorisation of Poe and his conscious influence on his work, an influence that was shared by decadent writers of the Baudelaire tradition and writers of supernatural tales more generally—traditions both shaped by Poe’s legacy, and engaged with by Lovecraft, who was keenly aware of this cross-pollination:

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[Poe’s] elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal aesthetic movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists.12

The second is the more historically and culturally calibrated decadence of Lovecraft’s later fiction (for example, ‘The Mound’ [1930], At the Mountains of Madness [1931], and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ [1936]); the contemplation of grand sweeps of history, on a cosmic scale, often science-fictional, and the rise and fall of human and non-human civilisations alike. These two aspects of Lovecraftian decadence have been connected by Brian Stableford, for example, who encapsulates both in the following comment in his 1998 study of literary decadence: Lovecraft made extravagant, if belated, use of such Decadent tropes as hereditary degeneracy, ultimately formulating a strange cosmic perspective which made such degeneracy a condition of the universe. […] Lovecraft’s aesthetic theories were thoroughly Decadent […]13

The third aspect under discussion in this essay, while perhaps gestured towards in previous criticism, is what I hope is a more novel commentary on the resonances that Lovecraft’s fiction and worldview has with the aestheticism of Walter Pater, which was popularised by Wilde and came to be intimately entangled with literary decadence. Carolyn Burdett has argued that while aestheticism and decadence continue to be contested terms, it is still possible to distinguish the former for its emphasis on ‘the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty’ and the latter for its narrower focus on a ‘set of interlinked qualities’ including ‘the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality.’14 Dennis Denisoff notes that both terms were also used interchangeably to ‘condemn almost any artwork that displayed innovations in aesthetic philosophy, subject or style’, especially those that also challenged social and political norms.15 As suggested by these definitions, both aestheticism and decadence had a performative aspect, usually transgressive, this being one of the reasons why both were controversial movements in their time, with ‘decadence’ being used as a pejorative by the movement’s critics, reclaimed by its proponents, before finally falling out of favour after the Wilde trial. This continuing slippage or looseness in meaning of the terms has led to apparent contradictions in writing about Lovecraft’s relationship with both, made resolvable by identifying the more specific sense in which either term is being employed in any specific instance. For example, Vivian Ralickas has written recently on the influence of decadence on Lovecraft’s ‘deportment, political view, and fiction’, though through the lens of Lovecraft’s performance of an associated ‘Dandyism’, described as a ‘strategic appropriation of certain crucial aspects of British gentlemanliness pivotal to the Dandy persona’.16 However, Lovecraft’s biographer S. T. Joshi writes of the 1926 story ‘The Silver Key’: ‘It is rare that Lovecraft so bluntly expressed his

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philosophy in a work of fiction; but “The Silver Key” can be seen as his definitive repudiation […] of Decadence as a literary theory.’17 Joshi’s comment here, and Stableford and Ralckas’s identification of Lovecraft’s distinctly decadent literary lineage, can be reconciled if we acknowledge—as we should—that decadence is a capacious enough term to encompass, on the one hand, the sort of bohemian, amoral lifestyle of the type Lovecraft detested, and on the other a distinct aesthetic of the Poe tradition, which he adored. This is an apparent, though not actual, contradiction that Lovecraft himself identified in a letter of 1930: Parts of Huysmans’ A Rebours and La Bas could have been modelled in a way more pleasing to Anglo-Saxons without any subtraction from the substance or proportioning […] I don’t consider either my own distaste, or Br’er Joris-Karl’s possible carelessness or poor taste or difference of nationality, of sufficient importance to read the riot act about! […] many of these definitely diseased minds have produced much material of the highest artistic value […] Writers I’d call morbid are D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Huysmans and Baudelaire. Yet every one is an indispensable figure in the expression and interpretation of Western Europe between 1850 and 1930.18

Ignoring the conflation of decadence and modernism for the purposes of this essay, Lovecraft is clear that, in his opinion, decadent writers can be ‘morbid’—with that word’s implication of pathological or physiological decadence, or what Symons described as a ‘spiritual and moral perversity’, rather than morbid subject matter— but nevertheless aesthetically successful and productive in their morbidity.19 Conversely, Lovecraft exploited the aesthetic potential of decadent morbidity in his own fiction, while making regular use of the word ‘decadent’ as a pejorative in his correspondence when discussing what he perceived as the cultural, political, and racial decline immanent in Anglo-American modernity: ‘[New York City] has moved past the zone of civilisation into that of definite decadence—being rotten, as it were, before it is ripe’20; ‘[…] Protestantism itself—as a supernatural faith— will decline because of the graduation of its thoughtful members to philosophic atheism or agnosticism (& of its thoughtless members to decadent and disorganised drifting)’21; ‘Democracy means decadence—the triumph of the machine over the individual.’22 Lovecraft’s use of decadent tropes, and the word ‘decadence’, in his fiction, is similarly pejorative, yet freights many of his texts with one of the following calibrations of decadence—related to but not identical with the ‘three streams’ identified above—or more often some mix thereof: 1. a gothic aesthetic and Poe-like atmosphere replete with familial decline, rot, decay, and the tomb; 2. the notion of decadence as atavistic, physiological ‘degeneration’ or ‘zoological retrogression’, inspired by writers influential on Lovecraft including Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, and contemporaneous evolutionary, scientific, and pseudoscientific discourse of the type popularised by Max Nordau (1849– 1923) and Wells23; and 3. using decadence as an ur-narrative on an explicitly cosmic scale, engaging with the sublime register in its contemplation of the aeon-long waxing and waning of remote alien civilisations, and of the vanishingly insignificant contingency of human history within this context.

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Combinations of these various ‘decadences’ are already in place in earlier stories such as, for example, ‘The Lurking Fear’ (1923), which relates the discovery by the protagonist—a local investigator—of the slow decline and atavistic degeneration of the Martense family in the Appalachian Mountains. The seventeenth-century patriarch, Gerrit Martense, was ‘a wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant’, and the family’s decline is symbolic of the decadence of the whole region24: The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes.25

Due to their extreme isolation and indulgence in cannibalism, the Martense family eventually become so degenerate as to lose their humanity. The protagonist describes one as a ‘filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur’ and ‘the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground.’26 However, when describing the inhabitants of the surrounding region as ‘mountain decadents’, the protagonist is clearly not suggesting that they are Baudelaire-reading exquisites.27 There is therefore a fourth type of deployment of the word ‘decadence’ by Lovecraft, indicated by its capitalisation in, for example, ‘The Hound’ (1922), where he is clearly writing about ‘Decadence’ as an artistic and literary movement: […] St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.28

Joshi has argued convincingly that in such fervid passages Lovecraft is writing ‘at least partially with tongue-in-cheek’, and that his treatment of ‘the Decadents’ is knowing and wry rather than an earnest attempt to recapture the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siècle letters.29 Nor was Lovecraft unique in this combination of an appropriation of the Decadent style with a willingness to treat it with irreverence: Dennis Denisoff has observed that: […] even contributors to the Aesthetic or Decadent movement—such as Richard le Gallienne, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater—voiced displeasure at some of their qualities [and] late aestheticist and decadent works such as Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings and Ada Leverson’s short stories imply that the movements had in fact fallen into self-parody.30

A similar mixture of Decadent tropes is found in the 1926 story ‘The Silver Key’, which is predicated on the profound aesthetic experiences of the protagonist, Randolph Carter, who is alienated in adulthood from an idealised ‘dreamland’ accessible in his youth:

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He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find.

He tries to recapture this visionary state through a variety of means which, as with ‘The Hound’, offer a condensed iteration of and homage to the adventures of Huysmans’ protagonists, who through a series of connected novels, seek to cure their existential ennui through a sequence of aesthetic, dissolute, satanic, and then redemptively Catholic, explorations and experiences31: It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. […] So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever afterward.32

Like Huysmans’ central character des Esseintes in À rebours (1884), Carter has the means to ‘live on a rarer plane’, decorating and furnishing his ‘Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.’33 Despite the misgivings towards the movement identified by Joshi, therefore, Lovecraft borrowed from its literature enthusiastically and unapologetically. Max Beerbohm’s account of Decadence in the leading journal of the British manifestation of the movement, the Yellow Book, tracks on to Lovecraft’s own fiction almost seamlessly: for Beerbohm, Decadence has implications of ‘marivaudage, lassitude, a love of horror and unusual things, a love of argot and archaism and the mysteries of style’.34 This neatly sums up Lovecraft’s prose style, antithetical to what Roger Luckhurst has described as ‘orthodox creative writing […] dominated for years by the model of Raymond Carver’s minimalism, which demands the erasure of all adjectival intensifiers and clausal repetitions’, but still the result of ‘a conscious aesthetic choice’ by Lovecraft, and one for which he had an adroitness far beyond that of his parodists.35 One of the writers that Lovecraft includes in his alternative list of literary ‘titans’, compiled in reaction to the dominant ‘Arnoldian’ canon, is Walter Pater. It is Pater I would now like to focus on, since (as I will argue) the influence of Pater’s exposition of aesthetics—with its ‘momentous, and potentially redemptive, ethical implications’ beyond the realm of the metaphysical and religious—can be clearly delineated in Lovecraft’s fiction and worldview.36 Pater’s atheism, or at least religious doubt and agnosticism, pervades much of his writing and contributed to contemporaneous controversy surrounding his work and its influence. It also dovetails with and evidently shaped Lovecraft’s own worldview. For example, Marcus Aurelius’ long exposition of stoicism, influenced by Heraclitus, contains many pre-echoes of Lovecraft’s own ‘ethics of diminishment, the undoing

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of human pretence and self-aggrandisement’ in the context of deep time and deep space37: Bethink thee often of the swiftness with which the things that are, or are even now coming to be, are swept past thee: that the very substance of them is but the perpetual motion of water: that there is almost nothing which continueth: of that bottomless depth of time, so close at thy side. Folly! to be lifted up, or sorrowful, or anxious, by reason of things like these! Think of infinite matter, and thy portion—how tiny a particle, of it! of infinite time, and thine own brief point there; of destiny, and the jot thou art in it […]38

This civic address by the Emperor continues for several pages in this vein; his rumination on ‘the sepulchral inscriptions of all peoples and times’, their testimony to the futile ‘striving’ of the multitudes, which afterwards ‘dissolved again into their dust’, and his conclusion that we are ‘creeping through life’ on a ‘tiny space of earth […] a pigmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave.’39 However, if, as previously discussed, Lovecraft’s worldview is similarly indifferentist, there is an ecstatic or visionary register in his writing which belies the nihilism or pessimism of which he is often accused. Miéville has argued that this ecstatic register places Lovecraft in a ‘tradition […] of a number of the ecstatic religious poets of the Middle Ages and later’ in the tradition of Julian of Norwich (c.1342–c.1416).40 He associates this aspect of Lovecraft’s writing with a ‘simultaneous striving for and inevitable failure of the representation of the unpresentable through language’ located in modernism.41 Miéville also concurs with Houellebecq’s observation that Lovecraft’s pathological racism occasionally manifests itself as a hallucinatory, ‘poetic trance’, associated with an ‘ecstatic collapse of the subject position’ that can manifest itself in his writing.42 I will offer a third account of the ecstatic in Lovecraft’s writing, predicated on Paterian aesthetics, of which Lovecraft was a keen enthusiast. Before I do so, however, I should provide some examples of Lovecraft’s ecstatic register. The basic plot of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1931) is almost irresistibly amenable to readings that gloss it as a crude metaphor for Lovecraft’s hysterical abhorrence of racial miscegenation, with its associated horrors of atavistic degeneration, and the corruption of the ‘pure’ Nordic or Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. Hence, the protagonist investigates an isolated seaport on the New England coast, and finds the inhabitants physically and morally degenerate, and of course ‘decadent’, corrupted over centuries by their interbreeding with a grotesque humanoid fish-like species of abyssopelagic and possibly alien provenance.43 However, when the protagonist, at the denouement, discovers that his own family originate in Innsmouth and that he, himself, also carries its taint, his reaction turns from abject self-destructive horror to ecstatic wonder: So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!

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I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.44

In this specific passage, it is difficult to locate racism as the animus, since even if the stream-of-consciousness were specifically calibrated by Lovecraft to demonstrate the protagonist’s insanity-as-response to the revelation of his racial ‘impurity’, the result for him is ‘wonder and glory for ever’ rather than abjection. Regardless of the crude irrationality of Lovecraft’s racism, his literary expression of it is no blunt ideological instrument; horror and revulsion frequently elide with transcendent awe. This sense of transcendent awe and the sublime, as well as Lovecraft’s Epicurean enthusiasm for aesthetic experience, is similarly discernible in his nonfiction, manifesting itself in the ecstatic register of his responses to weird fiction in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’; in, for example, his descriptions of the sublime ‘altitudes of sheer spiritual fright’ of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and the ‘wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside’ Lovecraft encounters in the work of Arthur Machen, and especially in Lovecraft’s consideration of Poe45: And in the prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit—inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker’s hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; daemoniac patterns and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes.46

This level of fervid intensity may be unusual in most literary criticism, but is encountered as regularly in Lovecraft’s celebrated essay as it is in his fiction. Mark Fisher astutely points out that in ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ (1933), Lovecraft’s own emphasis is on ‘vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy’ rather than horror.47 Lovecraft goes on to further define these ‘impressions’, which through his fiction he seeks to visualise ‘more clearly and detailedly’ with an emphasis on their aesthetic affect. They are to be conveyed by ‘certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature’ (p. 175). Here, Lovecraft is conceptualising his writing practice in distinctly Paterian terms, privileging his subjective responses to fleeting ‘impressions, images, sensations’ and the ‘poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’.48 Lovecraft refers to reading Pater several times in his correspondence. He makes passing reference to re-reading Marius the Epicurean in a letter of 1 August 1924.49 In a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, dated 8 March 1929, Lovecraft comments, ‘Walter Pater writes in prose, but much of what he says is equivalent to poetry. Marius the Epicurean, The Renaissance, & Greek Studies will give the cream of his genius— especially the first named.’50 Barton Levi St Armand connects Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for Paterian aestheticism to Lovecraft’s famously unhappy sojourn in New York, 1924 to 1926:

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It is no accident […] that Lovecraft spent the days of his so-called New York Exile reading such works as Wilde’s The Critic as Artist and Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean […] for the Decadents and Aesthetes opened up for him a world where he could escape the dread realities of the present.51

Houellebecq cites Lovecraft’s time in New York—specifically the acute perception of his own failure in the context of the city’s dynamic and thriving immigrant communities—as the catalyst of an escalation of Lovecraft’s bigotries into a ‘hallucinatory’ intensity bleeding into his fiction.52 However, once again, the convulsive, febrile racism evident in, for example, the New York-set 1925 tale ‘The Horror of Red Hook’, can be contrasted with another, very different, response to the city discernible in ‘He’ (1925): Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities.53

He imbues the metropolitan cityscape with a sublime, ecstatic visionary wonder, a palimpsest of the real and the irreal, urban architecture being one of the key ­conveyances of Lovecraft’s aesthetic ideal, even to the point of ameliorating his violent antipathy to religion: Religion would be gloriously justified if it had never done more than evoke the Gothic cathedral and the painting of Renaissance Italy. It is only Protestant Puritanism which tries to choke off art and absorb the feelings that ought to go into an appreciation of beauty, but even Puritanism hasn’t held that pose very vigorously since the 17th century. The most beautiful thing in Providence is the steeple of the 1st Baptist Church, put up in 1775; and if you saw the half-finished Baptist Church on Riverside Drive, New York, you would have a new revelation of what soaring, pinnacle Gothic loveliness can be.54

The key artistic virtues for Lovecraft are, then, to be found in aesthetic harmony: ‘So far as I am concerned—I am an aesthete devoted to harmony, and the extraction of the maximum possible pleasure from life.’55 A surprising claim, perhaps, from a writer so frequently caricatured anhedonic and ascetic. However, in this letter of 1929, Lovecraft explicitly articulates his Paterian philosophy, one evidently informed by Pater’s infamous ‘Conclusion’ to the first edition of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), in which Pater argues for the primacy of the subjective aesthetic response over other religious, metaphysical, or ethical concerns. Especially resonant with Lovecraft’s own worldview is Pater’s assumption of the fleeting ephemerality of human life, as demonstrated by scientific materialism, and what Pater calls the ‘tremulous wisp’ of the sensorium, ‘constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.’56 This conviction of Pater’s, ‘this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity’, also carried with it an ‘ideological threat’ in ‘the book’s assertion that “no fixed principles of either of religion or morality

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can be regarded as certain”, as [John] Wordsworth had phrased it’.57 Once again, Lovecraft follows Pater’s lead in his assertion that his own ‘marked distaste for immoral and unlawful acts which contravene harmonious traditions and standards of beautiful living’ is ‘not ethics but aesthetics’ (italics Lovecraft’s own).58 So Pater writes of Marius, ‘Yes! there were the evils, the vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure in good taste.’59 As Matthew Beaumont points out, the controversy over Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ was exacerbated when ‘Decadent [Oxford] undergraduates, their enthusiasm sharpened by the older generation’s indignation, sloganized its statements on aesthetics and used them as a rough guide to ethics.’60 Of course, the assumption was that free of the constraints of a religious moral framework, only amoral hedonism could ensue, rather than Lovecraft’s aesthetic appreciation of what he regarded as correct behaviour. Again, this moral conception, predicated on aestheticism, free from entanglement in what he regarded as fallacious metaphysical notions of good and evil, is explicitly articulated in Lovecraft’s fiction: But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.61

Moreover, Lovecraft cited aesthetic contemplation as not only a rare source of pleasure in the face of a universe devoid of meaning, but also as the font of meaning itself. Writing to August Derleth in 1930, Lovecraft explains why suicide is not of interest to him, despite his committed position of cosmic indifferentism, claiming that the reasons he would not consider it are: […] strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory—impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future.62

Lovecraft continues in this Paterian vein to speculate about the possibility of a ‘heightened perception which shall make all forms and combinations of beauty simultaneously visible’ to him. His thinking here resonates with the ending of his 1927 story ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in which Randolph Carter’s visionary pursuit of an oneiric ‘marvellous city’ culminates in his realisation that his ‘gold and marble city of wonder’ is ‘only the sum of what [he has] seen and loved in youth’, i.e. the aesthetic beauty of the old Boston skyline, and it is this aesthetic reengagement with the ‘beauty and light’ of his childhood home that redeems him.63 As Kate Hext writes of Pater’s aesthetic response to ‘deep time’: ‘Thus does art save the individual from the apparent meaninglessness of a single life under the conditions of modernity. For even if all is nothing in the end, it is least made meaningful by the beauty of its passing.’64

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Although these moments of beauty and awe in Lovecraft’s writing are easily overshadowed by his engagement with the horrific, and with physical and philosophical threat, their consistent presence in both his fiction and non-fiction reveal a deep commitment to not only the tropes of literary Decadence, but also to ecstatic Paterian aesthetic uplift. Lovecraft’s claim that aesthetic contemplation of architecture, art, and literature provides a meaning for existence overriding any other does more psychological heavy lifting than it is usually given credit for: for Lovecraft, this aesthetic philosophy was no mere sop, or occasional poultice, for existential ennui and despair. It was the bedrock of his expressions of robust enthusiasm for consciousness and its consolations, and his commitment to ‘the extraction of the maximum possible pleasure from life’.

Notes





1. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Introduction’, in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 1–42 (p. 5). 2. Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. by Dorna Khazeni (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005), p. 57; Sederholm and Weinstock, p. 36. 3. H. P. Lovecraft, The Classic Horror Stories, ed. by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: OUP, 2013). 4. Mike Mariani, ‘Terror Incognita: The Paradoxical History of Cosmic Horror, from Lovecraft to Ligotti’, Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/terror-incognita-paradoxical-history-cosmic-horror-lovecraft-ligotti/ [accessed 25 April 2016]; Ethan Stoneman and Joseph Packer, ‘No, Everything Is Not All Right: Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument’, Horror Studies, 8.1 (2017), 25–43 (p. 27). 5. John Ashby Lester, Journey Through Despair, 1880–1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. xvi. 6. China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould and Others (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 510–515 (p. 513); Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. by Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018), p. 336; Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Introduction: Old and New Weird’, Genre, 49.2 (2016), 117–134 (p. 117), https://doi. org/10.1215/00166928-3512285. 7. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Weird: A Dis/Orientation’, Textual Practice, 31.6 (2017), 1041– 1061, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358690. 8. James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, Palgrave Gothic (London: Palgrave, 2018), p. 231; H. P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 2: Literary Criticism, ed. by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), p. 71. 9. Barton Levi St. Armand, H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (Providence, RI: WaterFire, 2013), p. 23. 10. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Letters, ed. by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, 5 vols. (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1968), ii, p. 276. 11. Gene H. Bell-Villada, ‘The Idea of Art for Art’s Sake: Intellectual Origins, Social Conditions, and Poetic Doctrine’, Science & Society, 50.4 (1986), 415–439 (p. 415). 12. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther, 1985), pp. 421–512 (p. 462).

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13. Brian M. Stableford, Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1998), p. 132. 14. Carolyn Burdett, ‘Aestheticism and Decadence’, The British Library, 2014, https://www. bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence [accessed 12 March 2019]. 15. Dennis Denisoff, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 31–52 (p. 31). 16. Vivian Ralickas, ‘Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism’, in New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. by Sean Moreland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 127–154 (p. 128). 17. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, 2 vols. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), ii, p. 654. 18. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Letters, ed. by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, 5 vols. (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971), iii, p. 155. 19. Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1893, 858–867 (p. 859). 20. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Letters, ed. by August Derleth and James Turner, 5 vols. (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1976), iv, p. 169. 21. Lovecraft, iv, p. 280. 22. Lovecraft, iii, p. 81. 23. Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13–30 (pp. 14–16). 24. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 62–81 (p. 73). 25. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 63. 26. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 81. 27. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 75. 28. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Hound’, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 81–88 (p. 81). 29. S. T. Joshi, ‘Explanatory Notes’, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 361–420 (p. 378). 30. Denisoff, p. 31. 31. À rebours (1884); Là-bas (1891); En route (1895); La cathédrale (1898). 32. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Silver Key’, in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 252–263 (p. 256). 33. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Silver Key’, p. 256. 34. Max Beerbohm, ‘A Letter to the Editor’, Yellow Book (July 1894), 281–284 (p. 284). 35. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, in The Classic Horror Stories, by H. P. Lovecraft, ed. by Roger Luckhurst, vii–xxviii vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2013), p. xix. 36. Matthew Beaumont, ‘Introduction’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by Walter Pater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. vii–xxix (p. ix). 37. Sederholm and Weinstock, p. 7. 38. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. by Michael Levey, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 149. 39. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, pp. 149–150. 40. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Interview with China Miéville’, in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 231–243 (p. 234). 41. Weinstock, pp. 233–234. 42. Weinstock, p. 241.

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43. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 268–335 (p. 275). 44. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, p. 335. 45. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, pp. 441, 494. 46. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, p. 463. 47. Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), p. 16; H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, in Collected Essays 2: Literary Criticism, ed. by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004), pp. 175–178 (p. 175). 48. Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 118–121 (pp. 119, 121). 49. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Selected Letters: 1911–1924, ed. by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Arkham House, 1965), p. 341. 50. Lovecraft, ii, p. 315. 51. Armand, p. 23. 52. Houellebecq, pp. 99–109. 53. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘He’, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 119–129 (p. 119). 54. H. P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft (Sporting Gentlemen, 2010), p. 122. 55. H. P. Lovecraft, Against Religion, pp. 115–116. 56. Pater, ‘Conclusion’, p. 119. 57. H. P. Lovecraft, Against Religion, p. 120; Beaumont, p. xxvi. 58. H. P. Lovecraft, Against Religion, p. 115. 59. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, p. 178. 60. Beaumont, p. viii. 61. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Silver Key’, p. 254. 62. Lovecraft, iii, p. 243. 63. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. by S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 155–251 (pp. 249–251). 64. Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 145.

Bibliography Armand, Barton Levi St., H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (Providence, RI: WaterFire, 2013). Beaumont, Matthew, ‘Introduction’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by Walter Pater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. vii–xxix. Beerbohm, Max, ‘A Letter to the Editor’, Yellow Book, 2 (July 1894), 281–284. Bell-Villada, Gene H., ‘The Idea of Art for Art’s Sake: Intellectual Origins, Social Conditions, and Poetic Doctrine’, Science & Society, 50.4 (1986), 415–439. Burdett, Carolyn, ‘Aestheticism and Decadence’, The British Library, 2014, https://www.bl.uk/ romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence [accessed 12 March 2019]. Denisoff, Dennis, ‘Decadence and Aestheticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 31–52. Fisher, Mark, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. by Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018).

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Noys, Benjamin, and Timothy S. Murphy, ‘Introduction: Old and New Weird’, Genre, 49.2 (2016), 117–134, https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3512285. Pater, Walter, ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 118–121. ———, Marius the Epicurean, ed. by Michael Levey, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Ralickas, Vivian, ‘Lovecraft’s Debt to Dandyism’, in New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. by Sean Moreland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 127–154. Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Introduction’, in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 1–42. Stableford, Brian M., Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1998). Stoneman, Ethan, and Joseph Packer, ‘No, Everything Is Not All Right: Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument’, Horror Studies, 8.1 (2017), 25–43. Symons, Arthur, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1893, 858–867. Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13–30. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ‘Interview with China Miéville’, in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 231–243.

List of Contributors

Dr Stacey Abbott works at the University of Roehampton, UK Dr Mark Richard Adams is an independent researcher, UK Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes works at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Dr Victoria Amador, independent researcher, UK Dr Emily Alder works at Edinburgh Napier University, UK Simon Bacon is an independent researcher, Poland Alison Bainbridge is at Northumbria University, UK Dr Jen Baker works at University of Warwick, UK Dr Jenny Bavidge works at the University of Cambridge, UK Emeritus Professor Clive Bloom, Middlesex University, UK Dr Alex Bevan works at the University of Lincoln, UK Dr Naomi Simone Borwein works at Western University, Canada Associate Professor Simon Brown works at Kingston University, UK Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley works at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Dr Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, works at Binghamton University-State University of New York, USA Lauren Christie, a researcher at the University of Dundee, UK Laura Davidel works at the Université de Lorraine, France Chelsea Eddy is an independent researcher, USA Dr Matt Foley works at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Dr Kaja Franck is an independent researcher, UK Dr Kelly Gardner works at the University of Stirling, UK Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve works at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia Jon Garrad is an independent researcher, UK Dr Antonio Alcalá González, works at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico Gerry Del Guercio is an independent researcher, Canada Dr Holly Hirst is at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Dr Madelon Hoedt works at the University of Huddersfield, UK Dr David A. Ibitson works at the University of Leeds, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8

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List of Contributors

Valeria Iglesias-Plester, is an independent researcher, Spain Dr Brian Jarvis works at Loughborough University, UK Dr David Annwn Jones works at the Open University, UK Dr Timothy Jones works at the University of Stirling, UK Tanja Jurkovic, Postgraduate Researcher at the University of East Anglia, UK Dr Agnieszka Kotwasińska works at the University of Warsaw, Poland Dr Laura R. Kremmel works at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, USA Dr Erika Kvistad works at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway Dr David Langdon is an independent researcher, UK Dr Murray Leeder, works at the University of Manitoba, Canada Associate Professor Marko Lukić works at the University of Zadar, Croatia Dr J.S. Mackley works at the University of Northampton, UK Sian MacArthur is an independent researcher, UK Dr James Machin works at the Royal College of Art, UK Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis works at Bowling Green State University, USA Dr Holly-Gale V. Millette works at the University of Southampton, UK Dr Kirstin Mills works at Macquarie University, Australia Dr Kristine Moruzi works at Deakin University, Australia Stephanie Mulholland is an independent researcher, UK Dr Inés Ordiz, works at the University of Stirling, UK Emeritus Dr Paulina Palmer, University of Warwick, UK Joan Passey is an independent researcher in the UK Assistant Professor Tijana Parezanović works at Alfa BK University, Serbia Dr Joana Rita Ramalho works at the University College London,UK Jennifer Richards works at the Royal College of Art, London, UK Dr Julia Round works at Bournemouth University, UK Laura Sedgwick is at the University of Stirling, UK Dr Robert K. Shepherd works at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson, Independent Researcher, USA Professor Gina Wisker works at the University of Brighton, Sussex, UK Dr Michelle J. Smith works at Monash University, Australia Dr Lauren Stephenson works at York St. John University, UK Dr Tosha R. Taylor works at Manhattanville College, USA Jenevieve Van-Veda is an independent researcher, UK Associate Professor [Docent] Giles Whiteley works at Stockholm University, Sweden Associate Professor [Docent] Joakim Wrethed works at Stockholm University, Sweden

Index

A Abject/Abjection, 5, 9, 18, 23, 103, 106, 107, 118, 168, 169, 171, 194, 198, 230, 293, 309, 395–398, 401–407, 419, 420, 424, 570, 572, 574, 576, 636, 727, 729, 753, 759, 783, 839, 875, 881, 884, 889, 890, 895, 896, 1015, 1112, 1129, 1198, 1211, 1230 Abject and pollution, 1211 Abominations, 283, 307, 395, 1177, 1211 Abu Ghraib, 416 Adaptation, 1, 2, 42, 63, 92, 201, 212, 214, 226, 247, 254, 277, 278, 304, 345, 394, 398, 405, 432, 494, 514, 531, 541, 545–548, 602, 610, 644, 661, 679–681, 684, 686–688, 694–696, 765, 766, 769–772, 774, 775, 820, 823, 825, 831, 842, 865, 870, 919, 921, 923, 929, 931–934, 996, 1021, 1063, 1127, 1160, 1161 Aestheticism/Aesthetics, 4, 7, 49, 56–58, 109, 123, 124, 126–129, 132, 133, 135–137, 171, 183, 202, 231, 305, 321, 331, 341, 359, 365, 370, 375, 380, 397, 398, 405, 417, 433, 443, 488, 525, 548, 570, 579–581, 610, 628, 651, 686, 688, 695–699, 701, 702, 706, 707, 711, 715, 725, 734, 735, 750, 758, 767, 771, 782, 788, 837, 838, 844, 845, 847, 848, 883, 885, 888, 896, 908–910, 920–923, 929, 931, 940, 941, 944–946, 948, 950, 1006, 1020, 1022, 1024, 1029,

1035, 1037, 1038, 1042–1044, 1064–1066, 1068, 1069, 1071, 1072, 1075, 1076, 1079–1081, 1083–1085, 1087, 1088, 1109– 1115, 1145, 1171–1174, 1177– 1179, 1181–1185, 1192, 1203, 1204, 1210, 1223–1233 Affectivity, 1123, 1130, 1133, 1134 African American Southern Gothic, 125–127 Agency, 22, 102, 230, 231, 233–235, 287, 397, 442, 527, 529, 530, 533, 536, 551, 557, 558, 569, 570, 572, 574–576, 581, 590, 592–594, 597, 665, 753, 924, 987, 1011, 1148, 1195, 1223 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 1049, 1052– 1056, 1058–1060 Aliens, 2, 18, 52, 111, 131, 166, 202, 204, 311, 381, 396, 492, 510, 516, 525, 557, 566, 801, 806, 807, 809, 811–813, 819, 822–825, 827, 830, 831, 833, 893, 896, 974, 1140, 1194, 1195, 1198, 1201, 1202, 1204, 1215, 1219, 1226, 1229 Alternate reality games (ARGs), 994 Ambiguity, 36, 40, 287, 365, 366, 385, 433, 439, 697, 704, 705, 707, 788, 789, 848, 963, 1071, 1123, 1124 American Gothic, 9, 14, 15, 124, 148, 164, 250, 251, 307, 686, 1005–1007, 1009, 1070, 1118 American independent cinema, 702, 727, 765 Anaconda (1997), 247 Anansi’s Goatman Story, 991

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8

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1242 Andy Griffith Show, The, 169, 170 Angel, 237, 238, 260, 265–269, 271, 453, 526, 532, 562, 611, 614, 749, 750, 755, 758, 760, 771, 788, 813, 814, 838, 868, 890 Animals, 243, 245, 248–252 Anthropocene, 245, 253, 590, 602, 1200, 1204 Anthropocentrism, 524, 590, 1193, 1194, 1197, 1198, 1201 Anxiety, 8, 52, 63, 81, 91, 93, 102, 153, 166, 226, 229, 236, 292, 310, 362, 393, 407, 422, 452, 458–460, 469, 470, 472, 473, 479, 481, 522, 529, 551, 557, 563, 610, 614, 698, 751, 755, 789, 810, 819, 823–825, 827, 830, 832, 845, 848, 874, 905, 911, 935, 976, 979, 985, 988, 997–999, 1082, 1088, 1109, 1111, 1133, 1154, 1155, 1175, 1191, 1194, 1196, 1198, 1201 Architecture, 6, 9–13, 15, 17, 56, 58, 80, 84, 200, 202, 434–436, 438–440, 442–444, 611, 706, 855, 927, 944, 949, 1055, 1094, 1095, 1115, 1139, 1162, 1179, 1217, 1231–1233 Argentina, 35, 44 Arielismo, 36 Arthouse, 696, 697, 699, 701–703, 705–707 Asylums, 22, 58, 450–452, 454, 455, 458, 459, 662, 1023, 1116, 1160, 1211 Atwood, Mary Anne, 324 Audition, 417, 422 Australia, 91–93, 95–98, 100, 109, 168, 415, 423, 964, 1181, 1183 Australian Gothic, 91–96, 99–101, 129, 1005, 1183, 1184 Authorship, 125, 145, 362, 544, 959, 1027 B Babadook, The, 990 Baise-moi, 414, 415, 420 Bateman, Patrick, 294, 467, 478–481, 490, 494, 496–499 Báthory, Erzsébet, 419 Batman, 3, 457, 751, 1153–1164 Bats, 243 Bedlam, 58, 451 Belief system, 153, 512, 532, 772 Bennett, Arnold, 325 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 169 Black Metal, 905, 908–910, 912 Blackwood, Algernon, 325, 328, 330

Index Blackwood’s Magazine, 328 Blavatsky, Helena, 324 Body horror, 261, 270, 393–395, 397–401, 403, 405, 407, 411, 413, 414, 431, 698, 1115, 1175, 1179, 1183, 1185 Body-without-organs, 442, 561, 562, 565 Bogdanovich, Peter, 765, 774, 775 Bokor, 33 Bolivia, 38, 39 Boy, The, 414 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 452, 453, 462 Braidotti, Rosi, 894, 899, 1193, 1198, 1200, 1205 British Empire, 246, 251 British horror, 194, 275, 276, 287, 288, 431–433, 438, 443, 1067 British horror literature, 275, 934 Brodie-Innes, J.W., 328 Old as the World, 328 Bronte, Charlotte, 266, 388, 1112 Brothel perspective, 894 Buchan, John, 323 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 323, 324 The Coming Race, 323 ‘The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain’, 323 A Strange Story, 323 Zanoni, 323, 324 Bunny Game, The, 420, 423 C Caliban, 36, 871, 873, 874 “The Call of Cthulhu”, 598, 600, 1216, 1219, 1223 Camp, 21, 53, 294, 298, 433, 682, 692, 746, 757, 788, 791, 856, 861, 889, 896, 1043, 1044, 1162, 1183 Candle Cove, 993, 996 Cannibal Holocaust, 416, 423 Cannibal(s), 16, 19, 33, 36–39, 44, 171, 377, 399, 723, 888, 1227 Captivity, 413, 418–420 Captivity narratives, 165 Caribbean, 31–39, 43, 45, 106, 117, 118, 261, 265, 511, 513, 514 Caribbean fiction, 260 Carnival, 24, 664, 666, 672, 686, 745–747, 749, 750, 753, 754, 756, 757, 759, 760, 774, 882, 886, 889, 890 Carnivalesque, 270, 667, 750, 754, 857, 885, 889, 895, 897, 920, 1161 Cartesian, 513, 523, 595, 1194, 1196, 1198

Index Catholicism, 331 Cecil, L. Moffitt, 326 Censorship, 279, 398, 423, 713, 734, 766, 1100, 1176, 1179 “Chac Mool”, 63, 71, 75 4chan, 986, 987, 996–998 Children’s literature, 517, 591, 609, 610 Christianity, 323, 332 Cinema, 12–14, 22, 91–94, 163, 212, 222, 307, 393, 396–400, 404, 411, 421, 422, 431–434, 439, 443, 444, 511–513, 547, 661–665, 679–681, 685, 686, 688–690, 692, 693, 695–699, 701, 703–705, 707, 711–713, 715, 726, 727, 730, 732, 733, 755, 767, 770, 774, 781–783, 788–790, 793, 794, 821, 823, 919, 934, 1040, 1042, 1081, 1082, 1087, 1115, 1116, 1118, 1153, 1161 Civilisation and barbarism, 37, 38 Civilization/Civilized, 64–66, 71, 164, 215, 216, 309, 313, 344, 546, 565, 599, 854, 855, 859, 905–907, 909–914, 1006, 1211, 1212, 1219, 1220, 1225 Class, 4, 8, 13, 18, 38, 42, 49, 64, 65, 85–87, 94, 95, 126, 130, 133, 166, 168, 169, 171, 185, 188, 193–201, 203–206, 215, 266, 287, 311, 343, 344, 367, 368, 383, 452, 478, 556, 609, 693, 716, 769, 792, 845, 891, 894, 1075, 1203, 1204 Claustrophobia, 92, 247, 259, 365, 377, 381, 434, 1007 Collection, The, 413 Collector, The, 413 Collins, Wilkie, 266, 452, 462, 1111 Colonialism/Colonisation, 164, 252, 725, 726, 854, 858, 859, 861, 1006, 1111, 1138, 1149 Comics, 3, 12, 279, 307, 559, 624–628, 630, 631, 633, 634, 636, 638, 639, 714, 716, 718, 751, 757, 759, 771, 793, 804, 896, 897, 919, 926, 932, 959, 1076, 1082, 1127, 1153–1155, 1159, 1163 Concealment, 108, 838, 1111 Conquest, 36, 38, 39, 64, 65, 75, 1176 Consumerism, 15, 34–36, 38, 80, 479, 526, 529, 745 Contemporary Gothic, 97, 101, 200, 291, 295, 297, 373, 379, 381, 492, 579, 701, 725, 838, 840, 842, 845, 848, 942, 952, 1007, 1040, 1119, 1200

1243 Contemporary horror, 400, 471, 481, 712, 867, 940, 1006, 1119, 1138, 1223 Corman, Roger, 3, 14, 24, 212, 277, 765–777, 1199 Cosmic horror, 307, 602, 656, 1010, 1223 Cosplay, 24, 624, 756, 758 Costume, 2, 24, 25, 220, 263, 542, 548, 559, 566, 575, 578, 668–670, 689, 693, 701, 756, 758, 810, 837–844, 846, 848, 932, 1014, 1035, 1041, 1043, 1045, 1067 Creed, Barbara, 418, 426 Creepypasta, 991–998 Critifiction, 1130 Crowley, Aleister, 326–331 The Equinox, 328, 330 Cuban, 33, 36, 809 Cultural trauma, 13, 128, 232, 738, 1185 Cyborgs, 524, 1071, 1072 Cylons, 1195 D Danse macabre, 991, 996 Dark cabaret, 881–885, 887, 894 Dark Ecology, 231 Davidson, Thomas, 1125, 1130, 1134, 1135 Dawkins, Richard, 989, 1000 Dead, the, 619, 1117, 1118 Deadgirl, 413, 420–422 Decadence, 20, 126, 486, 491, 754, 867, 888, 897, 1076, 1101, 1102, 1105, 1171, 1223–1228, 1233 Defamiliarisation, 108, 109, 113 Degeneration, 321, 393, 406, 451, 949, 976, 1201, 1209–1211, 1213, 1214, 1216, 1219–1221, 1226, 1227, 1229 Deliverance, 164, 166, 169, 172, 176 Demon, 13, 15, 24, 173, 174, 237, 344, 402, 403, 490, 510, 515, 516, 664, 665, 679, 726, 728–732, 738, 1211 The Demonic, 16, 285, 431, 434, 435, 438, 442, 487, 578, 664, 668, 669, 826, 827 Derrida, Jacques, 151, 160, 802, 815, 1094, 1102, 1106, 1131, 1135, 1196 Descent, The, 167 Desert Gothic, 1005 Deterritorialisation, 42 Devil’s Rejects, The, 167, 411, 413, 420 Diegesis, 1221 Digital culture, 989, 990, 999 Digital folklore, 985, 991–993, 999

1244 Doctor-patient relationships, 457, 459 Dolls, 128, 580, 635, 645, 649, 748, 750, 753, 754 Dracula, 1, 2, 6, 10, 14, 17, 18, 24, 40–42, 53–55, 57, 93, 247, 248, 263, 276, 278, 279, 284, 345, 347, 364, 365, 455, 457, 463, 541, 542, 545–548, 550–552, 555–557, 561–565, 571, 613, 639, 680–683, 685, 686, 689–693, 695–697, 704, 706, 716, 727, 766, 768, 811, 821, 844, 919, 925, 927, 929, 932, 964, 1038, 1041–1043, 1111, 1138 Drag, 1045 Dress, 57, 97, 98, 175, 441, 486, 548, 549, 566, 614, 616, 632, 682, 685, 729, 756, 758, 786, 837–841, 843–848, 882, 889, 909, 1036–1043, 1045, 1057, 1064, 1067, 1068, 1070, 1080, 1081, 1084 Duality, 15, 361, 365, 370, 469, 470, 472, 477, 509, 776, 964, 980, 1138, 1156, 1159 Duffy, Carol Ann, 1049, 1054, 1056–1059 Dunsany, Lord, 326, 329, 330 Dystopia, 96, 168, 828 E Ecocriticism, 225, 226, 228, 232, 235, 237, 243 Ecogothic, 225–227, 229, 232, 237, 239, 243–255, 911 Ecophobia, 228–230, 232, 243–246, 253, 602 Edelstein, David, 411, 412, 414–418, 420, 422, 425, 426 Edwardian, 58, 59, 326, 341, 492, 884, 885, 1038, 1041, 1043, 1116 Empathy (lack of), 485, 488, 496 Emperor (band), 74, 216, 905, 1229 Enlightenment, 13, 143, 228, 232, 246, 268, 324, 338, 441, 455, 512, 542, 591, 691, 907, 939, 975, 1095, 1126, 1127, 1134, 1192–1194, 1200 Environmental degradation, 44, 225 Epistemology, 155, 1125 Eroticism, 18, 346, 399, 613, 759, 867, 1093, 1094, 1096, 1097 Eugenics, 168, 172 European, 11, 14, 18, 24, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 53, 64–66, 73, 74, 93, 97, 99, 100, 105, 107, 115, 125, 130, 148, 155, 212, 213, 218, 233, 247, 251,

Index 261, 399, 413, 420, 543, 547, 603, 611, 696–699, 730, 735, 737, 738, 910, 935, 1005, 1006, 1080, 1138, 1172, 1224 European horror cinema, 212, 711, 725, 727, 738, 739 EverymanHYBRID, 994, 995, 998 Evil, 10, 14, 15, 20, 71, 79, 127, 130, 148, 164, 166, 167, 170, 206, 212, 262, 263, 278, 281–288, 293–296, 299, 300, 308, 312, 339, 343, 348, 359, 365, 376, 378, 384, 385, 394, 397, 437, 442, 468, 469, 472, 473, 477–479, 486, 487, 491, 499, 509, 514, 521, 555, 563, 572, 575, 576, 594, 596, 597, 599, 611, 613, 616, 645, 646, 648, 650, 652–656, 698, 748, 750, 757, 768, 770, 772, 786, 788, 808, 811, 812, 824, 831, 909, 913, 926, 934, 998, 1050, 1051, 1097, 1124, 1141–1144, 1148, 1157, 1199, 1215, 1217, 1232 Excess, 35, 52, 58, 73, 126, 134, 220, 294, 327, 365, 369, 375, 377, 386, 399, 402, 408, 440, 456, 561, 570, 577, 581, 624, 627, 638, 639, 666, 672, 673, 687, 702, 707, 728, 759, 767, 772, 787, 837, 893, 1041, 1093, 1098, 1099, 1109, 1111, 1115, 1116, 1171, 1192 Experimental science, 233 Expressionism, 13, 686, 687, 697, 766, 1116, 1119 F “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 696, 765, 767–770, 772, 781, 925, 1102, 1115, 1123 Fandom, 985 Fantastic, the, 312, 589, 591, 595, 664, 725, 727, 730, 732, 734, 736, 786, 853, 966, 977, 982, 1020, 1035, 1173, 1180, 1184 Fashion, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 108, 154, 281, 286, 307, 309, 476, 486, 490, 496–498, 526, 559, 613, 692, 703, 749, 758, 767, 776, 784, 792, 794, 795, 837– 839, 841, 844, 845, 847, 848, 882, 929, 942, 1008, 1009, 1036–1045, 1063–1066, 1069, 1070, 1072, 1075, 1079–1082, 1115, 1128, 1142, 1154, 1162

Index Faulkner, William, 163 Feeding, 50, 57, 450, 542, 544, 545, 562, 570–577, 579–581, 613, 615, 732, 785, 813, 869, 951 Femininity, 97, 134, 188, 375, 565, 750, 753, 754, 758, 838, 842, 845, 846, 1038, 1112, 1115 Feminism, 229, 232, 309, 358, 422, 459, 757, 895, 1072, 1198 Film musicals, 547, 680, 686, 753 Fin-de-siècle Gothic, 247 Folklore, 33, 40, 43, 50, 56, 84, 86, 87, 128, 133, 134, 148, 185, 187, 298, 505– 508, 510–513, 515, 543, 591–594, 598, 599, 679, 682, 691, 705, 713, 715, 729, 819, 826, 827, 965, 985, 989, 991–993, 1057, 1077, 1078, 1087, 1178, 1183 Fortune, Dion, 331 Foucault, Michel, 166, 177, 206, 464, 1096, 1131, 1138–1142, 1149 Frankenstein, 2, 10, 12, 13, 21, 40, 53, 55, 57, 230, 232, 233, 235, 292, 394, 399, 512, 543, 639, 679–683, 686, 689, 690, 692, 695, 766, 810, 811, 823, 919, 921, 923, 924, 929, 932, 964, 1071, 1171, 1176–1178, 1193– 1195, 1199 Freemasonry, 324 Freud, Sigmund, 268, 482, 734, 769, 802, 804, 806, 807, 810, 812, 815, 816, 826, 834, 1094–1096, 1105, 1107, 1113, 1114, 1130, 1191 Frontière(s), 414, 423 Frontierism, 164, 166, 172 Fuentes, Carlos, 42, 63, 65, 66, 70–73, 75, 1177 Funny Games, 414, 419, 423 G Gender, 5, 8, 13, 18, 24, 42, 44, 85, 94, 97, 116, 117, 130, 163, 168, 182, 184, 188, 309, 310, 344, 363, 367, 368, 370, 393, 395, 421, 450, 452, 457, 459, 523, 525, 526, 529, 534, 550, 557, 559, 570–572, 575, 609, 615–617, 620, 627, 682, 684, 685, 690, 692, 705, 726, 729, 745, 746, 748–751, 753, 754, 758–760, 789, 802–804, 814, 857, 896, 897, 1044, 1065, 1066, 1072, 1115, 1193, 1199, 1201 Gender, feminism, 459 Gender regeneration, 804

1245 Genre, 323, 411–420, 422–424 Genre criticism, 124 Genre misogyny, 418, 791 German, 10, 13, 19, 23, 217, 338, 416, 690, 696, 697, 721, 722, 727, 730, 735, 737, 754, 766, 822, 823, 827, 883, 886, 891, 991, 992, 1095, 1104, 1112, 1115, 1116, 1119, 1174, 1175 Ghost, 3, 7, 13, 16, 31, 50, 56–59, 61, 68–71, 74, 97–100, 106, 111, 114–117, 131, 134, 143, 145, 150–153, 155, 156, 164, 165, 170, 237, 259, 262, 264, 266, 282, 284, 286–288, 292, 295, 308, 312, 321, 323, 338, 375, 386, 402, 419, 507–509, 516, 517, 543, 575, 611, 624, 626, 632, 634, 661, 663–673, 679, 701, 702, 706, 715, 729, 731, 771, 781, 782, 786, 813, 821, 826, 831, 833, 838, 839, 841, 919, 928, 929, 931, 932, 950, 957, 958, 964–966, 974, 976, 1008, 1024, 1027, 1028, 1043, 1044, 1077–1079, 1082, 1085, 1087, 1088, 1101, 1103, 1104, 1111– 1113, 1118, 1129, 1174, 1178, 1185, 1196, 1197 Ghost story, 11, 53, 61, 134, 349, 509, 516, 543, 663, 700, 701, 1117, 1118 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 235, 455, 1021 Global crisis, 1201 Global Gothic, 41, 43, 123, 136, 1173, 1177, 1182, 1184 The Gothic and history, 301, 307, 433, 443, 856, 928, 974, 1093 Gothic beauty, 1045 Gothic castle, 23, 436–438, 691, 795, 940, 974 Gothic fashion, 1035–1038, 1040–1046 Gothic horror, 2, 4, 22, 136, 364, 377, 399, 400, 433, 438, 442, 486, 505, 557, 696, 714, 728, 767, 768, 774, 775, 949, 1093, 1098, 1118, 1174, 1180, 1181, 1185 Gothic nature, 244 Gothic theatre, 2, 10, 13, 1172 Gothic tourism, 1049, 1054, 1055, 1059 Goths, 24, 856, 857, 859, 906, 1065, 1066, 1191–1193 Graulund, Rune, 1128, 1134, 1135 Green Inferno, The, 416 Grief, 100, 173, 237, 308, 312, 489, 494, 700, 701, 747, 807, 813, 831, 842, 848, 934, 961, 1039, 1040, 1083 Grotesque, 417, 420, 423 Guaraní, 43

1246 H Haiti, 33, 34, 512 Halloween, 418 Hamilton, Natalie, 1134–1136 Haneke, Michael, 414 Hannibal Lecter, 294, 467, 475–477, 693 Hare, Robert, 468, 469, 476, 482 Haunted house, 58, 100, 193, 260, 434, 437, 449, 661–663, 666, 668, 673, 689, 700, 831, 919, 924, 925, 927, 928, 958–961, 969, 1022, 1024, 1025, 1116, 1117, 1123, 1125–1129 Haunting, 8, 15, 39, 43, 52, 56, 66, 68, 77, 83, 92, 93, 99, 105–108, 126, 127, 130, 148, 149, 164, 165, 216, 230, 263, 264, 295, 374, 380, 436, 442, 510, 623, 634, 638, 649, 656, 662–666, 672, 673, 697, 700–702, 706, 707, 725–727, 729, 773, 794, 813, 832, 841, 842, 844, 847, 860, 871, 875, 881, 884, 886, 892, 893, 958, 962, 965, 976, 989, 1005, 1024, 1041, 1064, 1088, 1093, 1101, 1102, 1109, 1111, 1118, 1124–1126, 1133, 1140, 1177, 1182–1184 Haute couture, 1038, 1043, 1063, 1065 Haute Weird, 323 Hayles, N. Katherine, 523, 524, 526, 527, 531, 533, 536, 537, 555, 566, 1128, 1134, 1135, 1193, 1195–1197, 1205 Heaven, 132, 237, 267–269, 271, 327, 433, 485, 506, 529, 745–754, 757–759, 788, 790, 890, 909 Hell, 15–17, 237, 267–269, 271, 310, 312, 433, 443, 455, 495, 544, 679, 745–748, 750, 752–754, 757, 759, 760, 890, 929, 991 Heresy of the Human, 1196, 1202 Hermeneutics, 321, 331, 332, 1131 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 323–326, 331, 332 Hillbillies, 163, 168–170, 172–175 Hills Have Eyes, The (1977), 166, 415 Hills Have Eyes, The (2006), 170 Hodgson, William Hope, 321, 1209, 1211– 1214, 1216, 1221 Hogarth, William, 451 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 991 Hollywood, 12–16, 59, 398, 431, 432, 438, 443, 457, 487, 541, 662, 664, 665, 673, 679, 680, 682, 690, 693, 695–697, 702, 711, 712, 726–728, 749, 765–767, 785, 795, 882, 1022, 1082

Index Homophobia, 99, 165, 228, 311, 326 Horror podcasts, 1014 The Host, 516, 558 Hostel, 20, 405, 411, 413, 416, 418–420, 423, 727 House of 1000 Corpses, 167, 171, 419 The House on the Borderland, 1212, 1216 Human Centipede, The, 413, 415, 416, 420, 423, 424 I I Am Legend (2007), 254 Ichi the Killer, 417 Identity, 6, 12, 63–65, 73, 75, 86, 93, 98, 101, 105, 112, 148, 155, 157, 182, 183, 187, 200, 203, 244, 248, 261, 268, 298, 309, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 398, 401, 403, 404, 433, 434, 452, 454, 496, 497, 509–511, 513–517, 524, 526, 530, 532, 534, 535, 550, 558, 560, 563–565, 570–573, 577, 614, 627, 645, 666, 680, 683, 685, 690, 693, 700, 704, 705, 715, 716, 719, 733, 734, 738, 749, 750, 753, 758–760, 791, 802, 804, 806, 839, 844, 845, 856, 859, 876, 910, 945, 1071, 1072, 1099, 1155, 1173, 1177, 1179, 1193, 1195, 1197, 1199, 1210 Illustrated text, 143 The Imitation Game, 1197 Immersive, 1, 467, 698, 756, 786, 958, 969, 1019–1026, 1029, 1054, 1058 Imperialism, 10, 37, 38, 105–107, 110, 114, 115, 117, 148, 164, 556, 599, 603, 685, 1182, 1193 Incarceration, 102, 197, 475, 713 Indifference, 200, 378, 478, 480, 485, 488, 498, 499, 839 Individualism, 148, 437, 527, 534, 1087, 1176, 1203 Infantile anxiety, 812 Inhumanity, 405, 493, 810, 1007 Insanity, 11, 37, 200, 284, 296, 327, 452, 453, 456, 462, 468, 470, 473, 480, 481, 871, 949, 998, 1077, 1130, 1159, 1163 Interactive, 12, 18, 24, 756, 757, 919–921, 923, 926, 928–932, 934, 935, 952, 958, 967, 1023 Intergenericity, 759, 884, 885 Intermediality, 759, 885, 887, 1218 International Gothic Association members, 25

Index Inter-racial relationships, 260 Intersectionality, 542, 545, 853 Intertextuality, 373, 456, 647, 728, 759, 885, 1132, 1159 Interwar Gothic, 1109, 1110, 1117, 1118 Iraqi Gothic, 1176–1178 Irréversible, 414, 415, 420 I Spit On Your Grave (1978), 415 I Spit On Your Grave (2010), 420, 423 Italian, 17, 19, 43, 215–218, 399, 400, 647, 768, 891, 1027 J Japanese, 21, 22, 43, 107, 111–113, 115, 116, 123, 360, 416, 417, 420, 426, 525, 691, 986, 1044, 1065–1067, 1075, 1077–1081, 1084–1088, 1171, 1175, 1176, 1181–1185 Japanese Gothic, 1044, 1078, 1083, 1181–1184 Jean-Françoise, Lyotard, 1130, 1135 Jeff the Killer, 986, 995, 996, 998 Jepson, Edgar, 328 No. 19, 328 K Kato, Izumi, 996, 997 Killer, 17, 20, 39, 60, 213, 215, 217, 275, 287, 306, 376, 435, 405, 406, 417, 435, 467–473, 475, 476, 478, 479, 481, 618, 687, 737 King James I, 1051, 1057, 1060 Knudsen, Eric, 988, 989, 991, 995, 996 L Labyrinth, 77, 200, 269, 287, 292, 564, 645, 782, 802, 809, 1125, 1132, 1135, 1142 Lacan, Jacques, 914, 1094, 1101, 1105, 1130, 1191 Lancashire, 1049, 1051–1057, 1059 Landscape, 3, 11, 13, 15–17, 20, 23, 35, 50–52, 74, 77, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 105, 117, 129, 132, 134, 136, 144, 163–167, 172–174, 193, 194, 196– 203, 205, 206, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 243–252, 260, 261, 265–271, 280, 303, 304, 308, 370, 438, 522, 564, 590, 592, 595–598, 601, 602, 628, 694, 705, 706, 713, 719, 731, 732, 734, 768, 772, 773, 786, 794,

1247 812, 824, 829, 833, 855, 859, 895, 907, 959, 1005–1010, 1022, 1029, 1038, 1053–1059, 1063, 1068, 1072, 1171, 1182, 1183, 1185 Language, 10, 14, 15, 17, 41, 43, 56, 108–110, 113, 114, 123, 127, 129, 136, 145, 158, 195, 204, 211, 212, 228, 230, 231, 235, 243, 245, 247, 251, 253, 327, 401, 405, 414, 422, 454, 461, 542, 548, 589, 592, 617, 656, 670, 699, 702, 714, 719, 746, 870, 876, 886, 890, 896, 905–907, 910, 911, 913, 914, 977, 990–992, 999, 1042, 1050, 1058, 1068, 1102, 1103, 1126–1130, 1134, 1138, 1149, 1155, 1198, 1209, 1215, 1229 Language games, 1130 Last House on the Left, The (1972), 415 Last House on the Left, The (2009), 420 Latin America, 18, 31–45, 63, 1177 Latin American Gothic, 32, 33, 39, 43, 44 Les 7 jours du talion, 417 Lewis, Matthew, 10, 20, 245, 265, 377, 394, 451, 1078, 1173 Lifestyle, 4, 12, 24, 37, 94, 173, 183, 228, 449, 530, 716, 730, 734, 838, 845, 846, 886, 910, 1083, 1085, 1087, 1164, 1226 Liminality, 5, 8, 9, 23, 25, 85, 86, 118, 157, 243, 253, 609, 610, 612, 639, 705, 730 Literatura, 31, 32 Little Red Riding Hood, 248–250 Live burial, 116 London, 1, 4, 6, 16, 25, 40, 55, 57, 58, 61, 77, 80, 81, 194–196, 235, 259, 275, 276, 280, 281, 283–285, 326, 367, 384, 434, 436, 459–461, 469, 471, 516, 543, 544, 630, 646, 663, 681, 682, 698, 794, 801, 809, 814, 820–822, 825, 827, 831, 865, 866, 869–872, 874, 875, 886, 891, 892, 1025, 1028, 1039, 1065, 1079, 1111, 1113, 1116, 1118, 1138 Lord, Nick, 1129, 1130, 1135 Lovecraft, H.P., 2, 3, 12, 15, 23, 111, 116, 120, 269, 307, 312, 321–323, 325, 327, 365, 456, 463, 512, 589, 590, 593, 597, 598, 600, 601, 605, 656, 771, 772, 774, 810, 967, 1010, 1064, 1118, 1160, 1209, 1214, 1216, 1219–1221, 1223–1235 Loved Ones, The, 420 Low culture, 2, 669, 882 “Luvina”, 63, 67

1248 M Machen, Arthur, 323, 325–331 ‘The Great God Pan’, 328 The Hill of Dreams, 325, 328 The Three Impostors, 326 ‘The White People’, 328 Mad scientist, 21, 398, 686, 688, 690, 773, 831 Madwoman in the attic, 359, 434, 453, 454, 456, 462 Magical realism, 31, 63, 75, 134, 728, 730 Malkin, 1050 2001 Maniacs, 165, 170 Marble Hornets, 994, 995, 998 Martyrs, 414, 420 Masculinity, 93, 94, 201, 310, 343, 384, 421, 565, 692, 726, 1118 Mask, 23, 24, 217, 219, 265, 400, 468, 470, 471, 474, 479, 481, 488, 494, 495, 525, 578–580, 666, 672, 949, 1184 Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor, 324, 326 Maturin, Charles, 6, 10, 451, 462, 1230 Maze, 20, 375, 413, 443, 649, 795, 1023, 1127, 1132, 1136, 1160 McGrath, Patrick, 450, 457–459, 461, 463, 669, 675, 895 McKean, Dave, 457, 463 McQueen, Alexander, 1035, 1037, 1045, 1046 Medical horror, 1177, 1183 Memes, 172, 244, 357, 875, 963, 985–999 Memory, 12, 23, 71, 85, 95, 96, 98, 102, 126, 128, 130–132, 134, 144, 228, 374, 655, 662, 704, 714, 715, 719, 726, 728, 735, 738, 793, 825, 826, 839, 906, 913, 927, 962, 969, 981, 1008, 1067, 1095, 1118, 1160, 1163, 1173, 1221, 1232 Mental Health Act of 1959, 450, 460 Mental illness, 171, 312, 449, 450, 454, 456, 457, 461, 467–469, 472–474, 480, 1023, 1129, 1131 Metafiction, 260, 933, 1056, 1129 Metanarrative, 1130, 1157 Metaphor, 10, 15, 34, 36, 37, 72, 87, 113, 123, 126–137, 149, 156, 183, 185, 200, 202, 236, 249, 259, 342, 363, 404, 433, 454, 494, 531, 533, 571, 592, 684, 716, 730, 733, 745, 824, 888, 913, 948, 1072, 1138, 1139, 1178, 1181, 1184, 1229 Mexican, 18, 35, 40–42, 63–66, 68, 71–73, 75 Mexican history, 18, 68 Mexico, 42, 63, 64, 66–71, 73–75, 1172

Index Military dictatorship, 43 Misogyny, 309, 407, 418, 420–422, 791 Modern Gothic, 79, 291–294, 298, 300, 301, 454, 705, 943, 947, 948, 952, 1081, 1154, 1156–1158, 1160 Modernism, 5, 46, 128, 136, 347, 1093, 1095, 1104, 1109, 1110, 1112, 1113, 1115–1119, 1179, 1226, 1229 Modernista, 39, 40, 42 Modern Terror, 486 The Monster, 260, 262, 265, 311, 312, 682, 683, 685, 871, 1072, 1174, 1194, 1195 Monstrosity, 13, 33, 36, 37, 39, 44, 94, 97, 130–132, 135, 227, 262, 305, 378, 396, 404–406, 505, 525, 570–578, 580–582, 601, 609, 613, 617–619, 698, 719, 726, 753, 757–759, 792, 868, 871, 872, 874, 893, 928, 975, 1010, 1015, 1027, 1029, 1098– 1100, 1144, 1173, 1174, 1176– 1180, 1185, 1191–1194, 1201 Monstrous, 8, 9, 15, 17, 20, 23, 33, 36, 38, 72, 81, 93, 99–101, 111, 116, 129, 155, 164, 167, 175, 193, 199, 227, 228, 230, 234, 236, 266, 293, 307, 327, 350, 376, 393–396, 398, 401, 404, 407, 431, 433, 434, 441, 442, 444, 452, 457, 477, 488, 511, 515, 524, 526, 532, 557, 558, 561, 569–573, 575, 576, 578, 580, 581, 602, 609, 610, 613, 614, 616–619, 664, 668, 670, 683, 684, 734, 735, 757, 760, 784–786, 789, 792, 828, 840, 853, 854, 860, 861, 865, 871–875, 893, 894, 919, 927, 934, 950, 963, 1098, 1118, 1145, 1148, 1154, 1178, 1191, 1195, 1199, 1210, 1214– 1216, 1218 Moral panic, 422–424, 999 Morrison, Grant, 457, 1159–1161, 1165 Morton, Timothy, 230, 231, 233, 253, 256, 1205 Mourning clothes, 1039 Movable books, 919, 927, 929, 931, 933, 934 Multiterritorialisation, 44 Mulvey, Laura, 417, 426 Music, 4, 5, 9, 12, 25, 93, 107, 305, 490, 549, 595, 689, 701, 756, 767, 786, 787, 821, 855, 881–888, 890, 893, 910, 942, 948, 967, 1011, 1014, 1015, 1043, 1065, 1081, 1082, 1118, 1119

Index N Nanotechnology, 1196 Narcissus, 486, 491, 499 National identity, 34, 41, 63, 91, 94, 97, 690, 727 Nature, ecogothic, 225, 911 Necro-politics, 1198 Neighbor, 420 Neo-colonialism, 38, 45 Neo-Gothic, 6, 133, 212, 437, 438, 784, 868, 871, 947, 1118 Neoliberalism, 734, 848, 1199, 1201, 1203 Neo-Victorian, 750, 758, 792, 841, 844, 845, 847, 889 New French Extremity, 414, 417, 420, 422 New Gothic, 4, 10, 11, 16, 1202 Newgrounds, 995 The New Hollywood, 398, 765, 774, 776 The Night Land, 1214, 1215 Nightmare on Elm Street, A, 418 Night of Fear, 163 9/11, 415 Non-heteronormativity, 749 Nostalgia, 2, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25, 126, 185, 186, 714, 717, 786, 843, 844, 847, 934, 1046, 1067, 1076, 1144, 1145, 1198 O Obeah, witch, 260–263, 265 Occult, 3, 6, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 128, 278, 305, 307, 312, 321–332, 337–350, 435, 438, 457, 593, 595, 597, 598, 602, 603, 688, 734, 826, 1064, 1066, 1067, 1072 Occulture, 321, 322, 324, 331, 339, 350 Occupation, 32, 33, 44, 73, 531, 896, 1176–1179 O’Connor, Flannery, 163 Oldboy, 417 Ontology, 127, 590, 593, 597–600, 603, 1123–1126 Origins of humanity, 907, 912, 913 Other (the), 41, 244, 246, 693, 1175, 1191, 1193, 1195 The Other, 277, 669 Othering, 153, 403 Otherness, 32, 36, 37, 109, 453, 759, 760, 859, 868, 875, 881, 889, 893, 894, 1079, 1140, 1143, 1194 P Paganism and Neo-Paganism, 323

1249 Paratext, 172, 357, 624, 626, 628, 639, 993, 1114, 1177 Participatory culture, 757, 985, 994–996 Passion of the Christ, The, 417 Pastiche, 5, 15, 19, 20, 23, 42, 814, 927, 1036, 1125 Patriarchy, 201, 260, 359, 616, 754, 757 Pedro Páramo, 63, 68, 69 Pendle, 1049, 1050, 1052, 1055, 1058 Performance, 54, 57, 100, 182, 201, 205, 265, 271, 277, 343, 346, 436, 451, 541, 547, 570, 571, 577–581, 653, 672, 681, 682, 705, 750, 754, 757, 758, 771, 786, 793, 821, 829, 865–871, 874, 881, 883–887, 889–891, 895, 995, 1019–1021, 1023–1029, 1043, 1066, 1076, 1077, 1080, 1081, 1225 Performativity, 530, 571–573, 581, 757 Perry, Dennis R., 1123, 1134 Peru, 37, 41, 790, 791, 793 Pervasive, 95, 103, 349, 794, 858, 884, 889, 893, 1019, 1025–1029, 1087, 1162 Pessimism, 215, 773, 1224, 1229 Podcasts, 467, 1005, 1007, 1008, 1011–1015 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 3–5, 11, 14, 39, 78, 88, 183, 433, 441, 639, 647, 686, 765, 781, 796, 925, 931, 1021, 1064, 1078, 1082, 1102, 1115, 1123, 1130, 1134, 1158, 1224 Popular culture, 5, 9, 11, 22, 25, 33, 35, 124, 131, 304, 339, 467, 510, 517, 522, 541, 661, 685, 702, 728, 766, 792, 811, 814, 844, 875, 881, 887, 977, 1006, 1022, 1035, 1046, 1081, 1145, 1146, 1154, 1162, 1195, 1202 Pop-ups, 919, 929, 931–934, 936 Pornography, 19, 413, 414, 480, 721, 788, 1094, 1100 Postcolonial, 105–114, 117, 118, 147, 212, 226, 230, 246, 248, 726, 730 Posthuman, 34, 36, 511, 521–524, 527–536, 555–566, 759, 1192–1199, 1201–1204 Postmodern/Postmodernism, 40, 41, 125, 126, 322, 456, 486, 521, 522, 570, 656, 745, 759, 885–887, 893–895, 942, 943, 950, 1124–1126, 1128–1132, 1134, 1135, 1154, 1155, 1191, 1198, 1201 Potts, Thomas, 1049, 1050, 1052, 1054, 1056–1060 Pre-Columbian myths, 40 Pre-Raphaelite, 1038, 1040, 1043 Price, Vincent, 14, 16, 664, 684, 777

1250 Promethean (hubris), 523, 1198 Promethean (ideal), 1201 Propaganda, 684, 711, 713, 827, 1052, 1171, 1172, 1176, 1178, 1179, 1181, 1184 Psychopath, 20, 360, 406, 468, 469, 471, 472, 478–481, 493, 699, 718 Psychosis, 100, 468, 471–474, 481, 988, 998, 1130 Psychotic, 24, 171, 468, 472, 474, 479, 481, 767, 895 Puerto Rico, 34, 35 Pumpkinhead, 172, 174 Punk, 2, 4, 24, 277, 718, 745, 756, 758, 759, 882–884, 892, 945, 946, 950, 1041, 1043, 1044, 1066, 1070, 1072, 1080, 1082, 1192 Q Quandt, James, 414, 425 Queer, 8, 43, 187, 188, 260, 263, 265–268, 271, 341, 343, 345, 364, 692, 693, 749, 750, 752, 755, 759, 891, 1212 Queer sexuality, 8, 259, 265, 268, 270 R Race, 8, 33, 42, 71, 72, 99, 111, 126, 133, 163, 168, 195, 260, 261, 296, 312, 323, 344, 497, 508, 516, 532, 550, 556, 563, 564, 592, 593, 598, 609, 688, 690, 692, 806, 811, 812, 819, 825–827, 855, 1195, 1202, 1203, 1211, 1213, 1216, 1218, 1220, 1232 Racism, 9, 19, 34, 36, 39, 99, 106, 107, 111, 165, 169, 185, 228, 232, 599, 603, 1229–1231 Radcliffe, Ann, 245, 246, 248, 252, 254 Radical humour, 894 Rake, The, 986, 987, 989, 993, 994, 996–998 Ravens, 243 The Real, 1130–1132 Realism, 31, 51, 66, 124–127, 131, 133, 135, 137, 170, 202, 226, 303, 590, 595, 603, 609, 646, 664–666, 673, 697, 701, 705, 725, 728–731, 734, 840, 842, 848, 853, 1088, 1171, 1173, 1175–1178, 1180, 1181, 1183, 1184, 1202 Realistic Southern Gothic, 126, 132, 133, 136 Reason, 64, 65, 98, 109, 110, 131, 148–150, 153, 175, 206, 228, 230, 244, 247, 267, 268, 276, 284, 292, 379, 395, 397, 411, 422, 423, 449, 458, 461,

Index 476, 496, 567, 576, 610, 612, 619, 645, 647, 648, 656, 673, 695, 726, 738, 757, 784, 829, 839, 859, 868–871, 887, 905, 907–910, 912, 939, 944, 945, 963, 966, 968, 978, 1019, 1022, 1064, 1072, 1077, 1093, 1095, 1097–1099, 1129, 1131, 1134, 1213–1215, 1225, 1229, 1232 Reddit, 992 Repression, 8, 95, 231, 292, 295, 395, 440, 453, 725, 731, 735, 738, 759, 804, 805, 906, 1078, 1079, 1087 Revenant, 7, 16, 21, 108, 505, 507, 508, 510, 512, 517, 542, 545, 555, 578, 820, 861 Rhys, Jean, 33, 260, 454 Rice, Anne, 14, 41, 42, 126, 133, 134, 288, 552, 555, 570–572, 575–578, 580–583, 610, 613, 614, 681, 945, 948 Ritual, 17, 18, 128, 135, 156, 282, 307, 322– 324, 340, 344–346, 349, 395, 401, 495, 509, 575, 611, 686, 687, 693, 729, 731, 747, 790, 793, 806, 807, 812, 829, 887, 1008, 1039, 1135 Romantic, 244 Romantic Southern Gothic, 134, 136 Rosicrucianism, 323, 324 Rulfo, Juan, 63, 65–70, 75 Rural Gothic, 1053, 1055, 1056, 1059 Rurality, 163–165, 168, 170, 172, 723 Rural locations, 259, 311 Russian Sleep Experiment, The, 988, 995, 997 S Sacrilege, 881 Sadistic, 18, 211, 219, 226, 400, 413, 416, 478–480, 625, 684, 687, 790 Satyricon (band), 905 Saw, 411–413, 417–419 Schizophrenia, 469, 472, 473, 566, 786 Science fiction, 1, 2, 5, 12, 117, 211, 303, 307, 557, 673, 685, 692, 695, 711, 766, 767, 774, 775, 784, 787, 794, 819, 820, 822, 823, 825, 828, 832, 1044, 1192–1194, 1196, 1198, 1199, 1201 SCP Foundation, 987, 993, 996 Sederholm, Carl H., 776, 1123, 1134, 1223, 1233, 1234 Self, 38, 130, 131, 228, 496, 530, 533, 610, 611, 616, 619, 757, 795, 804, 846, 858, 859, 1195

Index Selfhood, 395, 505, 511, 513, 515, 535, 592, 945, 1125 Serbian Film, A, 416, 420, 423 “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, 111, 1216, 1218, 1229 Shakespeare, William, 1050, 1051, 1060 Silberer, Herbert, 323 Slavery, 9, 34, 108, 111, 117, 118, 127, 155, 164, 165, 230, 260, 261, 263, 271, 511, 526, 529, 531, 935 Slavic Gothic, 726, 727 Slender Man, 988–999 Smile.jpg, 987, 988, 997, 998 Social exclusion, 39 Sociopath, 407, 468, 469, 474–476, 479, 492, 496 Soho, 888, 891–894, 896 Something Awful, 988, 991, 993, 995, 997 Sontag, Susan, 418, 426 Southern Gothic, 15, 94, 123–133, 135–137, 163, 181, 183–185, 187, 188, 406, 705, 793, 841, 1045, 1118 Spanish, 15–18, 33, 37, 46, 64, 65, 75, 126, 155, 156, 221, 222, 399, 510, 613, 631, 726, 735, 768, 770, 787, 1175, 1179–1181, 1184 Spanish Gothic, 1007, 1042, 1045, 1179, 1180 Spatiality, 86, 859, 1123, 1124, 1127, 1130, 1137, 1139, 1142, 1143 Spectatorial identification, 417, 418 Spectrality, 144, 145, 149–152, 154, 158, 260, 638, 662, 668–670, 673, 1102 Sport, 611, 666, 773, 1044, 1066, 1081 Steampunk, 1035, 1043, 1044 Stenbock, Eric, 323 Stoker, Bram, 2, 6, 11, 40–42, 54, 93, 247, 248, 255, 278, 279, 283, 284, 323, 345, 455, 463, 541, 545, 546, 552, 555, 556, 561–564, 566, 567, 571, 572, 613, 680, 695, 716, 727, 925, 929, 945, 948, 1038, 1043, 1064, 1111, 1138 Street style, 1063, 1065, 1072 Style, 9–11, 14, 40, 58, 65, 75, 123–129, 131, 133–136, 169, 199, 226, 271, 280, 284, 288, 328, 329, 376, 386, 417, 455, 467, 476, 494, 495, 548, 639, 651, 680, 685, 686, 690, 696–698, 701, 767, 790, 791, 838–841, 844, 846–848, 856, 857, 866, 871, 882–884, 889, 890, 920, 923, 925, 931, 942, 944, 948, 952, 993, 1012, 1035, 1038, 1044, 1045, 1053, 1064–1066, 1075, 1076, 1080,

1251 1081, 1094, 1156, 1172, 1182, 1221, 1224, 1225, 1227, 1228 Subcultural audiences, 746 Sub-genres, 136, 357, 358, 367, 368, 381, 387, 673, 692, 696, 1125, 1192 Sublime, 7, 131, 227, 228, 232, 234, 244–247, 250, 251, 253, 269, 330, 576, 579, 784, 829, 885, 907, 908, 912, 913, 924, 1006, 1063, 1083, 1088, 1116, 1118, 1153, 1161, 1171, 1173, 1191, 1193, 1196, 1197, 1226, 1230, 1231 Supernatural, 3, 7, 8, 23, 31, 40, 56, 63, 75, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 135, 147, 149, 152, 156, 172, 216, 230, 237, 245, 246, 253, 259, 280, 281, 283, 284, 288, 308, 311, 322, 323, 339, 350, 359, 365, 366, 369, 374–376, 393, 394, 400, 412, 414, 419, 436, 437, 450, 455–457, 472, 510, 516, 517, 547, 552, 555–557, 561, 566, 575, 579, 580, 591, 593, 595, 597, 599, 601, 602, 612–615, 619, 623, 624, 628, 630, 634, 663–667, 672, 673, 683, 685, 687, 688, 691, 695, 696, 701, 714, 732, 770, 772, 784, 785, 794, 801, 826, 832, 875, 929, 931, 942, 943, 950, 963, 965, 966, 975, 977, 980, 986–988, 993, 998, 1024, 1027, 1029, 1037, 1044, 1052, 1053, 1057, 1063, 1077, 1114, 1123–1126, 1129, 1145, 1159, 1177, 1178, 1180–1182, 1211, 1224, 1226 Supernatural fiction, 369, 593 Supernatural Southern Gothic, 123, 126, 127, 133, 134, 136 Superstition, 10, 43, 70, 114, 219, 250, 542, 543, 691, 695, 794, 819, 825, 827–829, 833, 906, 1053, 1057, 1064, 1133, 1182 Surrealism, 1114 Surveillance, 23, 82, 166, 198, 214, 283, 406, 564, 749–752, 944, 947, 951, 997, 1201 Symbolism, 17, 39, 124, 330, 331, 433, 557, 575, 788, 789, 946, 1067, 1115, 1144, 1145, 1161 T Tall Man, The, 172 Tartan Films, 417

1252 Technology, 5, 8, 21, 23, 40, 166, 401, 440, 468, 472, 516, 526, 541, 546, 551, 552, 557, 559, 562–564, 663, 666, 669, 673, 682, 690, 691, 794, 801, 809, 810, 826, 829, 843, 929, 947, 969, 973–976, 981, 982, 997, 999, 1016, 1022, 1025, 1044, 1064, 1154, 1156, 1157, 1178, 1192, 1194–1196, 1202, 1214, 1220, 1221 Ted the Caver, 990 Television, 1–6, 12, 14, 18, 22, 24, 39, 56, 92, 94, 147, 170, 194, 203, 236, 307, 398, 404, 405, 407, 432, 498, 517, 545, 549, 550, 562, 610, 625, 644, 668, 699, 702, 703, 705, 715, 751, 759, 767, 794, 801, 812, 813, 819–821, 823, 831, 833, 837–849, 853, 865, 934, 975, 993, 996, 1005, 1014, 1042, 1043, 1144, 1153, 1161, 1163, 1195, 1199, 1201, 1202 Telos, 853, 1127, 1128, 1223 Terror, 292, 293, 297, 436, 589, 590, 593, 624–626, 752, 771, 772, 801, 802, 809, 810, 812–815, 829, 832, 859, 866, 907, 925, 929, 931, 934, 975, 1015, 1019, 1023, 1055, 1058, 1064, 1082, 1083, 1085, 1088, 1095, 1096, 1102, 1109, 1110, 1112, 1113, 1115, 1118, 1124, 1155, 1157 Terrorism, 415, 737, 1173, 1174, 1176, 1200 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 163, 164, 167–170, 414 Theatre, 1, 21, 53, 156, 270, 304, 338, 408, 443, 468, 525, 547, 578, 580, 582, 663, 681, 721, 722, 732, 775, 787, 814, 865–875, 883, 885, 886, 891, 919, 920, 929, 940, 943, 1019– 1025, 1029, 1071, 1076, 1077, 1081, 1087, 1115, 1162 Theatricality, 666, 673, 1072, 1156 Tibet, David, 327 Tiger(s), 251, 252 Time travel, 58, 237, 533, 775 “Tlactocatzine del Jardín de Flandes”, 63, 75 Tomb, 67–70, 74, 167, 452, 456, 459–462, 683, 697, 768, 771, 810, 961, 962, 979, 1226 Tortured, The, 416 Torture porn, 19, 94, 398, 405, 406, 409, 411–424, 721, 723, 1086, 1087, 1174 Toth, Josh, 1125, 1135

Index Tradition, 21, 24, 40–45, 47, 65, 80, 83, 94, 97, 105, 123–125, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 148, 149, 163, 174, 184, 187, 196, 202, 236, 237, 275, 277, 282, 287, 291, 293, 298, 299, 321–324, 331, 339, 346, 349, 358, 366, 369, 377, 381, 383, 400, 431–433, 435, 437, 438, 450, 452, 454, 508, 517, 524, 542, 551, 589, 598, 609, 611, 615, 617, 625, 656, 696, 697, 701, 702, 705, 712, 720, 748, 760, 784, 819, 841, 847, 858, 866, 869, 871, 887, 890, 891, 895, 909, 910, 931, 939, 943–946, 948, 949, 952, 953, 967, 980, 998, 1024, 1044, 1076, 1084, 1086, 1094, 1102, 1109, 1116, 1117, 1125, 1130–1133, 1155, 1158, 1172, 1174, 1175, 1177, 1179, 1180, 1182, 1183, 1224, 1226, 1229, 1232 Transgression, 9, 36, 44, 50, 52, 66, 71, 98, 144, 147, 155, 156, 294, 297, 298, 365, 368, 378, 385, 407, 432, 433, 454, 572, 574, 581, 609, 618, 619, 624, 627, 638, 639, 720, 725, 727, 750, 785, 790, 859, 860, 866, 925, 934, 942, 945, 949–951, 1093, 1096, 1097, 1099–1101, 1109, 1116, 1148, 1182, 1211, 1219 Transgressive, 43, 66, 225, 260, 349, 363, 365, 368, 370, 405, 433, 452, 453, 550, 558, 569, 626, 634, 638, 639, 673, 726, 754, 889, 894, 896, 950, 1101, 1115, 1201, 1210, 1221, 1225 Translation, 6, 40, 45, 75, 127, 128, 171, 510, 515, 662, 870, 991, 999, 1027, 1095, 1172 Transnational, 43, 99, 106, 128, 129, 131, 288, 549, 703, 727, 732, 735, 737–739, 1075, 1111, 1119, 1171, 1173, 1176, 1179, 1181, 1185 Trauma, 9, 13, 19, 22, 91, 92, 97–102, 165, 187, 204, 236, 237, 295, 370, 385, 406, 422, 475, 478, 549, 563, 580, 698, 705, 725, 726, 730, 734–736, 738, 782, 786, 805, 808, 831, 832, 838, 841, 842, 845, 847, 949, 979, 1095, 1100, 1101, 1104, 1113, 1131, 1157, 1173–1176, 1185 Travers, Sean, 1129, 1135 TribeTwelve, 994, 995 Tropicalisation, 32, 42 Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, 174

Index Tulpa, 991, 992 Turistas, 413, 416 Twentieth-century haunting, 1109, 1117 U The Uncanny, 5, 7, 9, 31, 45, 260, 265, 266, 268, 705, 725, 730, 795, 1064, 1162, 1191–1193, 1198 Urban legend, 84–86, 683, 959, 964, 965, 967, 985, 987, 991, 992, 1154 Urban sites, 259 Uruguay, 36, 39 “Usher”, 768, 1123, 1124, 1130–1133 V Victorian, 2, 16, 24, 25, 41, 49–51, 53, 55, 57–59, 129, 184, 196, 197, 247, 278, 297, 323, 384, 450–455, 459, 487, 492, 631, 679, 681, 750, 757, 768, 770, 781, 792, 794, 801, 809, 814, 829, 831, 844, 845, 847, 848, 850, 858, 865, 866, 871, 872, 875, 882–885, 891, 893, 894, 897, 1035, 1040, 1041, 1043, 1044, 1046, 1064, 1066, 1069, 1070, 1079, 1083, 1095, 1097, 1109, 1110, 1112, 1113, 1116, 1118, 1175, 1203, 1209 Victorian horror, 14, 287, 288, 486, 489 Video nasty, 422, 423 Violence, 2, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17–19, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 44, 57, 92–94, 96, 99, 105, 110, 113, 115, 116, 124, 126, 166, 171, 172, 175, 187, 194, 195, 200, 202, 211, 215, 216, 222, 229, 238, 244–247, 249, 254, 275, 279, 285, 309–311, 350, 362, 367, 393, 394, 398–400, 405–407, 412–423, 451, 453, 454, 469, 473, 474, 478–481, 488, 515, 559–561, 680, 687, 689, 698, 712, 720, 721, 723, 737, 745, 747, 754, 759, 760, 784, 785, 787, 790, 791, 807, 809, 828, 839, 842, 844, 848, 854, 860, 866–868, 871, 881, 892–894, 896, 935, 989, 999, 1006, 1013, 1094–1096, 1104, 1115, 1137, 1158, 1160, 1175, 1177, 1179–1181, 1211 Violence (against animals), 251, 254

1253 W Waite, A.E., 326 Walking, 1054, 1056–1059 War Gothic, 1171–1177, 1179–1185 Waugh, Patricia, 1056, 1129 Weird fiction, 12, 321, 323, 327, 328, 331, 589, 590, 598, 601, 602, 1223, 1224, 1230 The Weird Tale, 325, 598 Wendigo, 991 Werewolf, 14, 19, 23, 394, 403, 491, 549, 560, 680, 684, 1082 Whedon, Joss, 419, 420, 426 White trash, 168, 169, 171, 172, 176 Wilde, Oscar, 326 Wilderness, 129, 134, 148, 165, 166, 193, 237, 243–255, 264, 271, 443, 738, 810, 829, 911, 1006–1008, 1011, 1051, 1140, 1149, 1183 Winter’s Bone, 171 Witchcraft, 128, 264, 265, 628, 688, 692, 1050–1052, 1059, 1060, 1064, 1067, 1068 Witches, 1049–1060 Wolf Creek, 411, 413, 416, 418, 419 Wolf(ves), 243, 249, 251 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 53, 449–452, 459, 461–463 Woman, The, 413, 420 Working-class horror, 194, 196, 197, 206, 275, 279 Wrong Turn, 170 X X-Files, The, 170 Y Yamamoto, Keisuke, 996 Yeats, W.B., 325–327 Young adult fiction, 609, 610, 646 Youth culture, 4, 308, 892 Z Zeitgeist, 419, 593, 690, 944, 973, 1078