Unusually Gothic : Robert Sigl's Laurin (1987)

Marcus Stiglegger revives a lost Gothic treasure in this brief discussion of Robert Sigl's Laurin—a rare case of German genre film-making and the heir to FW Murnau's legacy. Phantastic genre cinema is very rare in contemporary Germany—especially in the 1980s, the time when Italian horror reached another peak with Dario Argento's Opera (1985). The cliché of the German "easy comedy" ruled mainstream film production at the time, and so it appeared a kind of miracle when 27-year-old writer/director Robert Sigl was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize in 1988 for his debut feature: the Gothic horror fairytale Laurin

“Cycles upon cycles, stories upon stories” : contemporary audio media and podcast horror’s new frights

During the last ten years the ever-fertile horror and Gothic genres have birthed a new type of fright-fiction: podcast horror. Podcast horror is a narrative horror form based in audio media and the properties of sound. Despite association with oral ghost tales, radio drama, and movie and TV soundscapes, podcast horror remains academically overlooked. Podcasts offer fertile ground for the revitalization and evolution of such extant audio-horror traditions, yet they offer innovation too. Characterized by their pre-recorded nature, individualized listening times and formats, often “amateur” or non-corporate production, and isolation from an ongoing media stream more typical of radio or TV, podcasts potentialize the instigation of newer audio-horror methods and traits. Podcast horror shows vary greatly in form and content, from almost campfire-style oral tales, comprising listener-produced and performed content (Drabblecast; Tales to Terrify; NoSleep); to audio dramas reminiscent of radio’s Golden Era (Tales from Beyond the Pale; 19 Nocturne Boulevard); to dramas delivered in radio-broadcast style (Welcome to Night Vale; Ice Box Theatre); to, most recently, dramas, which are themselves acknowledging and exploratory of the podcast form (TANIS; The Black Tapes Podcast; Lime Town). Yet within this broad spectrum, sympathies and conventions arise which often not only explore and expand notions of Gothic sound, but which challenge broader existing horror and Gothic genre norms. This article thus demonstrates the extent to which podcast horror uses its audio form, technology and mediation to disrupt and evolve Gothic/horror fiction, not through a cumulative chronological formulation of podcast horror but through a maintained and alternately synthesized panorama of forms. Herein new aspects of generic narration, audience, narrative and aesthetic emerge. Exploring a broad spectrum of American and British horror podcasts, this article shows horror podcasting to utilize podcasting’s novel means of horror and Gothic distribution/consumption to create fresh, unique and potent horror forms. This article reveals plot details about some of the podcasts examined

The body in the pool: reflections on David Cronenberg’s 'Maps to the Stars'

Placing David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (2014) in the Gothic tradition reveals the ghostly and often overlooked mother-daughter dynamics at play in that genre, veering between the internalized fears of Gothic terror and the externalized evil of Gothic horror

Misty, Spellbound and the lost Gothic of British girls’ comics.

This article is a case study of the 1970s British girls’ comics Spellbound (DC Thomson, 1976–1977) and Misty (IPC, 1978–1980). These mystery anthology comics followed the more famous American horror comics from publishers like EC Comics - but were aimed at pre-teen girls. The article situates these comics with respect to Gothic critical theory and within the wider landscape of British girls’ comics. Firstly, it closely considers and compares the structure and content of their stories with respect to theories of the terror and horror Gothic. It discovers that both comics offer similar fare, with a subversive streak that undercuts established horror archetypes. The article then looks closely at both titles’ aesthetics and their use of the page to draw comparisons. It uses comics theory and Gothic cinematic theory to demonstrate that the appearance of Misty is more strongly Gothic than the aesthetic of Spellbound. Finally, it considers a selection of stories from both comics and analyses their common themes using Gothic critical theory. It argues that both comics rework Gothic themes into new forms that are relevant to their pre-teen and teenage readers. It concludes by summarising the study’s findings and suggesting that these comics offer a “Gothic for Girls” that is part cautionary tale and part bildungsroman. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror

Gothic Matters: Introduction

Once considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This special issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and maps its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and influence. Chapters include work on the French Revolution and the representation of the female body, Frankenstein, colonialism and museum displays in the 19th century, disembodied hands, Native American vampires, neoliberal anxieties in horror film, gender, and post-industrial culture

Fifty Shades of the Gothic

The article deals with phenomena of the Gothic the most often described as a set of often-linked elements rather than a fixed genre. The text presents a variety of cultural incarnations of the convention: from the eighteenth century novel by horror movies to subcultural style of Goths. This essay also examines the basic Gothic concepts, like the uncanny and the abject, which determine the worlds depicted in Gothic narratives, especially characters who remain in close connection with the space formed as a labyrinth. Finally, the article is an attempt to answer the question about the source of the expansion of the aesthetics of the Gothic in the contemporary culture.The article deals with phenomena of the Gothic the most often described as a set of often-linked elements rather than a fixed genre. The text presents a variety of cultural incarnations of the convention: from the eighteenth century novel by horror movies to subcultural style of Goths. This essay also examines the basic Gothic concepts, like the uncanny and the abject, which determine the worlds depicted in Gothic narratives, especially characters who remain in close connection with the space formed as a labyrinth. Finally, the article is an attempt to answer the question about the source of the expansion of the aesthetics of the Gothic in the contemporary culture

‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revolution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colonialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic.’ By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some British radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic.

The Macabre on the Margins: A Study of the Fantastic Terrors of the Fin de Siècle

It demonstrates that in spite of the dominant associations of fantastic literature with horror, terror, as the marginal and marginalized fear of the unknown, with its uncanny, sublime and suspenseful qualities, holds a definitive presence in fin de siècle fantastic texts. Literary analysis of the chosen texts registers significant examples of the importance of terror to fantastic writing, and as such functions to extract an “aesthetics of sublime terror” from the margins of critical studies of this often macabre literary mode

East Asian Gothic : a definition

Abstract This paper offers a definition of East Asian Gothic cinema in which a shared cultural mythology, based upon cultural proximity and intra-regional homologies, provides a cinematic template of ghosts and ghouls together with a grotesque menagerie of shapeshifting animals, imagined as either deities or demons. East Asian Gothic is an umbrella term which encompasses the cinemas of PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, acknowledging the difficult histories and conflicts between the nations, as well as film making practices and industries. This is in opposition to critical work which views East Asian gothic and horror films as extensions of Japanese horror, and therefore J-Horror as a meta-genre; for example David Kalat in J-Horror (2007) and Axelle Carolyn in It Lives Again! Horror Films in the New Millennium (2008), or focus almost solely on the relationship between contemporary Western and East Asian Horror cinema through an analysis of the remake. In order to demonstrate the transnational and regional flows that form East Asian gothic cinema, this paper focuses in on one of the oldest and most enduring gothic figures found in literature and mythology across East Asia, the nine-tailed fox: known as the huli jin in China, gumiho in Korea and kitsune in Japan. While much has been written about the vengeful ghost, little attention has been paid to that of the fox-spirit even though ‘she’ is ubiquitous in East Asian popular culture. On screen, the fox-spirit (also known as the fox fairy) is either represented as a variation of the femme fatale or the sacrificial woman—or indeed both in some cases—creating a parallel between existing gender relation and the gothic imaginary. This paper explores the representation of the fox-spirit in contemporary Chinese cinema, at two ends of the spectrum in terms of budget and ambition, the big budget, CGI spectacular, Painted Skin (Hua Pi; dir. Gordon Chan, China/Hong Kong/Singapore, 2008) and the low-budget, low fi, The Extreme Fox (dir. Wellson Chin, Hong Kong, 2014) in order to map out the multiple border crossings which are constitutive of East Asian Gothic: while Painted Skin is representative of a global, or globalising trend, in East Asian Gothic Cinema, The Extreme Fox can be understood as resistant to globalisation through the emphasis on the local and the regional

Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction

Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters