Fairytale and Gothic Horror pp 43-73 | Cite as
Gothic Transgression, Horror and Film
Abstract
This chapter suggests that despite gothic’s tendency to reinstate order, disturbances resonate at a narrative’s ending. Motivated by a cyclical return of the repressed, gothic has a propensity for transgression, and for critiquing repression. The chapter explores the life–death quality of cinema, and the subtleties of style and tone that formulate a specifically ‘cinematic gothic.’ Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ helps to articulate the dualities of public and private, or external and internal, suggesting the haunting return of something that should have remained hidden. Horror upsurges from within—devastating boundaries between self and ‘other’ and preconceived concepts of ‘home.’ Cinematic devices help to ignite gothic concerns, such as the doppelgänger and split self, excess, fantasy /reality boundaries, or the persistence of the past within the present.
References
- Abel, R., and Altman, R., eds. (2001). The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).Google Scholar
- Barthes, R. (1982). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang).Google Scholar
- Bazin, A. (Summer 1960). ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, translated by H. Gray, Film Quarterly, 13: 4, 4–9.Google Scholar
- Bloom, C. (2007, 1998). Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).Google Scholar
- Bluestone, G. (1957). Novels into Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press).Google Scholar
- Blum, V. (2005). ‘Becoming the Other Woman: The Psychic Drama of Cosmetic Surgery’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26: 2, 104–131.Google Scholar
- Botting, F. (1996). Gothic (London and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
- Bunnell, C. (1984, 1996). ‘The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press), pp. 79–100.Google Scholar
- Byron, G., and D. Townshend. (2013). ‘Introduction’, in G. Byron, D. Townshend (eds.), The Gothic World (London and New York: Routledge), pp. xxiv–xlv.Google Scholar
- Cahill, J.L. (Fall, 2008). ‘How It Feels to Be Run Over: Early Film Accidents’, Discourse (Wayne State University Press) 30: 3, 289–316.Google Scholar
- Christie, I. (1994). The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: BFI).Google Scholar
- Dent, J. (2016). Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and Representations of the Past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft (Manchester: Manchester University Press).Google Scholar
- Du Maurier, D. (1975). Rebecca (London: Pan Books Ltd).Google Scholar
- Frayling, C. (2013). ‘Foreword’, in J. Bell (ed.), Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (London: BFI), pp. 5–7.Google Scholar
- Freud, S. (2003). ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Uncanny, translated by D. McLintock (London: Penguin Classics), pp. 123–162.Google Scholar
- Groom, N. (2012). The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
- Hopkins, L. (2005). Screening the Gothic (Austin: University of Texas Press). Google Scholar
- Jackson, R. (1991, reprinted version). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
- Luckhurst, R. (2013). ‘The Living Dead’, in J. Bell (ed.), Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (London: BFI), pp. 36–42.Google Scholar
- Pagden, A. (2013). The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
- Rank, O. (1925). Der Doppelgänger: Eine psychoanalystische Studie (Lepzig: Internationaler Psychoanalysticher Verlag), pp. 68–69.Google Scholar
- Reyes, X.A. (2014). ‘Gothic Horror Film, 1960—Present’, in G. Byron, D. Townshend (eds.), The Gothic World (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 388–398.Google Scholar
- Robson-Scott, W.D. (1965). The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press).Google Scholar
- Smith, A., and Hughes, W. (2003). Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan).Google Scholar
- Spooner, C. (2010). ‘Preface’, in B. Cherry, P. Howell and C. Ruddell (eds.), Twenty-First-Century Gothic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. ix–xii.Google Scholar
- Spooner, C., and McEvoy, E., eds. (2007). The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
- Stevens, D. (2012). The Gothic Tradition (Cambridge and Mexico City: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
- Walpole, H. (1762). Anecdotes of Painting in England; with some Account of the principal Artists; and incidental Notes on other Arts; Collected by the late Mr. George Vertue; And now digested and published from his original MSS. By Mr. Horace Walpole (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill).Google Scholar
- Walters, J. (2011). Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers).Google Scholar
- Warner, M. (1994). From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto and Windus).Google Scholar
- Wittmann, A.M. (1990). ‘Gothic Trivialliteratur: From Popular Gothicism to Romanticism’, in G. Hoffmeister (ed.), European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models (Michigan: Wayne State University Press), pp. 59–75.Google Scholar
- Wood, R. (2009, second edition). ‘Strangers on a Train’, in M. Deutelbaum and L. Poague, (eds.), A Hitchcock Reader (Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford and Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 172–182.Google Scholar
- Woolf, V. (1972). ‘The Movies and Reality’, in H.M. Geduld (ed.), Authors on Film (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press).Google Scholar