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In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain (2016), Christina Crosby establishes a critical dialogue between horror fiction and her own experience of spinal cord injury and chronic neurological pain. In the chapter "The Horror! The Horror!" Crosby gives a phenomenological meaning to the Freudian concept of uncanniness (Unheimlich), a narrative element in horror stories that dislocates readers from their familiar world. Considering Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" as the prototypical terror tale that challenges logic and rationality, Crosby reflects on how quadriplegia and chronic pain abruptly threw her into the unfamiliar world of dependence and loss. This article analyses the experience of uncanniness in the context of bodily dysfunction and the fear resulting from the uncertainty about the future after permanent damage to the central nervous system. The concept of "uncanny" will be expanded beyond its Freudian connotations to explore the symbolic and phenomenological meanings of the (body) double and the relationship between sublimity, horror and pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain (2016), Christina Crosby establishes a critical dialogue between horror fiction and her own experience of spinal cord injury and chronic neurological pain. In the chapter “The Horror! The Horror!” Crosby gives a phenomenological meaning to the Freudian concept of uncanniness (Unheimlich), a narrative element in horror stories that dislocates readers from their familiar world. Considering Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” as the prototypical terror tale that challenges logic and rationality, Crosby reflects on how quadriplegia and chronic pain abruptly threw her into the unfamiliar world of dependence and loss. This article analyses the experience of uncanniness in the context of bodily dysfunction and the fear resulting from the uncertainty about the future after permanent damage to the central nervous system. The concept of “uncanny” will be expanded beyond its Freudian connotations to explore the symbolic and phenomenological meanings of the (body) double and the relationship between sublimity, horror and pain.

Mariana Enriquez and Luciano Lamberti take advantage of the widespread ecological sensitivity of our time to provide new disruptive devices to introduce supernatural terror into their stories. They transform the haunted house into natural spaces, which maintain the same characteristics and reactions as the former, but are more in tune with the reader’s concerns. A nature that is hostile because it has been previously mistreated (such as a polluted stream or an abandoned and dirty forest), functions as a haunted house and as a monster. It is a symbolic expression of the taboo upon which an economic development that has ignored so many victims has settled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although casual readers of Northanger Abbey often still interpret the novel as a straightforward parody of the Gothic, a range of critics have pinpointed the realistically Gothic horrors that do reside in Austen's narrative. This essay applies a similar lens to crime novelist Val McDermid's understudied and underappreciated retelling of Northanger Abbey, arguing that the new version of Austen's text employs the form of Gothic writing in which the most horrifying types of violence are gendered everyday injuries: experiences of gaslighting and denials of physical and verbal agency. Responding to reviewer criticism that has painted the new Northanger Abbey as pointlessly derivative, I also argue that McDermid innovates on Austen's original narrative by refiguring the novel's conclusion, giving her version of Catherine Morland an assertive voice with which to resist Gothic psychological violence. In this reimagined ending, the figure of General Tilney becomes defined by his anti-queer bigotry, highlighting the gothicism of pathological heteronormativity and the importance of intersectional approaches to feminist resistance. Grasping how McDermid's Gothic approach both echoes and innovates on the rich complexities of Austen's novel is key to recuperating this contemporary text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses techniques that contemporary South Korean horror films use to depict historical trauma, how these techniques are harnessed to frighten audiences and how different approaches articulate different relationships to the historical traumas that they depict. It analyses Gidam (Epitaph) (Jeong and Jeong 2007) and Gonjiam (Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) (Jeong 2018) as case studies for how the articulation of historical trauma operates by showing historical trauma in the former, but by concealing it in the latter. It considers not only how history is referenced on-screen but also how historical consciousness can be felt through the horror genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in a world increasingly dominated by technology, and there are many technological advances that we frequently use about which we know very little. Among them, one we know mostly through metaphor stands out: “cloudification”. Metaphors play a central role in our understanding of the concepts and ideas that present themselves, revealing for the first time something that was already there. In this way, we propose the term mistification as a more accurate expression of the current technocratic/technological status quo for which the terms “cloud” and “cloudification” are used. The proposed term – a neologism – conveys elements of Gothic horror which, we hope, precisely capture the current experience of endusers of the cloud. Using New Dark Age (Bridle, 2018) as a point of departure, we propose an analogy between end-users of the cloud with players in a Gothic horror role-playing game, namely the Ravenloft campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Similarly to players in aGothic horror game, end-users remain ignorant and helpless against all too powerful technocratic/technological giants and their pursuits. This article adds elements belonging to a horror role-playing game campaign setting to a wider cross-disciplinary discussion regarding human-machine interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality television at its heart is designed to reward sustained viewing and involvement on the part of the audience. It has distinctive visual styles, serial characters and storylines and a filmic quality, all of which is evident in Game of Thrones (2011–2019). This article discusses how the scale and cinematic production values of quality television, adds value to the Game of Thrones series through the enhancement and articulation of the Gothic horror.

This article analyzes an interview conducted by Malena Rey with the Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez at the Museo Malba in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There the interview addresses the condition of women in Latin America and the rest of the world. Firstly, an introspection is made from a gender philosophy point of view on the present day role women writers have and the place they have in the literary canon. Social critical perspective is developed as a result of the emerging crisis which covers the whole continent as of Covid-19 pandemic, which, in turn promoted an opening in the different way of understanding society and culture. Later, they address the social issue of inequity and violence from an analysis of the writers’ texts. This develops different issues in each one of the texts. Lastly, they bring up the importance of presenting these issues in the museum environment, the relevance of this topic and the urgent changes derived from these new types of writing.

This article explores connections between C.S. Lewis and filmmaker Terence Fisher, notably how their works explore themes like the charm of evil, white magic's dubious nature, and myth hinting at divine truths. By viewing these themes, Fisher and Lewis's common views on fairy tales, and how feedback informed their work, scholars discover nuance in the perceived "Inklings versus secular British culture" dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a 1980s theatrical adaptation of a 1980s novel from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; the production experienced by the author was a live performance in its twenty-fifth anniversary year. The Woman in Black, adapted from Susan Hill's 1983 novel, has run virtually unchanged since its transfer to the West End in the late 1980s. While the Woman has been read as a feminist depiction of a female ghost who defies patriarchal control, this article argues that such readings are mitigated by the material performance and marketing strategies necessary for the creation of a commercially successful Gothic horror production. While the play mirrors the novel's depictions of 1980s cultural horrors, its apparent depiction of a powerful female ghost elides the various strategies which contain and limit that power, and work to erase the actor. The production's unusually long run serves to emphasise these Gothic erasures, elisions, and sleights of hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic horror destabilises the ordinary, the familiar everyday, revealing seemingly safe relationship and places to be undependable, even dangerous. Simultaneously, she disturbs the complacencies of familiar worldviews and the narratives with which we direct and understand our lives, including those of family, security, identity, order and romance. In Rebecca, “Ganymede”, “East Wind” and “The Birds”, she builds on Freud’s theory of the uncanny and the questioning of constructed reality offered by existentialism to undermine securities, upset self-deceptive internal narratives, inverting the familiar and unfamiliar in liminal places and spaces whether a grand house, exposed coast or a touristic version of Venice. Everyday anxieties flower into destructive realities as loved ones, idealised or homely places and creatures are no longer trustworthy and dependable, and indeed, it is revealed, they never were. As instability and the unknowable disturb complacencies and certainties in these narratives, Du Maurier overwrites the Gothic romance of popular fiction, replacing it with Gothic horror.

Using the example of the Italian film industry of the 1960s and 1970s and, in particular, popular erotic thriller cycles, the article focuses on different types of time periods closely associated with film production: the shooting stage and the phase of apprenticeship for newcomers. These labour temporalities were fraught with hierarchical tensions and power imbalances. Directors appropriated the length of film shooting as a means of occupational distinction. Under the pretext of apprenticeship, experienced mentors took advantage of moneyless trainees who lacked a personal network of supportive film practitioners. Apprentices weathered through this period in anticipation of fairly compensated freelance work.

Aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll affirms that grotesque forms 'are all violations of our standing categories or concepts; they are subversions of our common expectations of the natural and ontological order'. In breaking structural boundaries, consequently, the grotesque appears as deformations, aberrations, exaggerations, metamorphosis or startling portmanteaus. Given both its nightmarish texture and the evil ingenuity of Dr Lecter's murders, Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15) ploughs fertile ground in putting together conceptually distant and even contradictory elements. Hence, this article explores how the aesthetic and philosophical principles of the grotesque are a pervasive presence throughout the entire Hannibal TV series, defining its style, characters' personality and metaphorical themes. Putting art theory in dialogue with the Hannibal televised text, this article demonstrates how the grotesque – one of the key concepts in Gothic horror – permeates every level of the show, from the opening credits to the protagonist's inner transformation, converting the narrative into a comprehensive and cohesive liminal artistic ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines nineteenth-century travel routes and transcultural encounters as imagined in recent films by Latin American directors working abroad and on transnational productions. The examples discussed are Lisandro Alonso's Jauja (Into the Unknown) (2014), Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant (2015), Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak (2015), Raúl Ruiz's Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon, 2010) and Valeria Sarmiento's Linhas de Wellington (Lines of Wellington, 2012). The diverse settings and genres of these films frame stories of the cultural, political and economic change wrought by the nineteenth century's networks of human mobility and global power. The films have been selected not only because they examine the past through a globalized, intercultural lens, but also because they were explicitly made for transnational audiences and represent the contemporary conditions of transnational production, distribution and consumption. From the networked meta-narratives of Mysteries of Lisbon to the neo-western colonial frontier of The Revenant, the nineteenth century is represented through visual design and in both realist and non-realist modes, but consistently evoking transnational interconnectedness and its relationship to political and economic change, even where that change is not the explicit focus of the story. The invocation of the emergence of global modernity, its visual recreation from the present day, suggests a kind of spectrality, in which the hauntings of both past and future confront and define us now, and inform the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary globalized encounters. Our consumption of these imagined pasts, with their implicit and their explicit ghosts, has the capacity to provoke an ethical reflection on the present. The past is not a space of pure fantasy or escape, but irrevocably present in our lives. The nineteenth century is no simple exotic object of desire nor canvas for fantasy when it is read through the process of imperialism and emergent global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio listeners recognize a monster when they hear one, basing their imaginings on information they receive aurally. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, aliens, and various creatures are adapted for radio from the pages of classic horror and science fiction tales written by Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. Radio, an aural medium, relies on sound and description and, therefore, is ideal for horror. For the audience, listening to the radio is a subjective experience. The listener fills in the details and is free to conjure the monster in the imagination. This article explores the monster in a selection of American radio horror and science fiction programs that aired between the 1930s and 1950s and poses two questions: how does radio aurally render the monster for listeners and how does radio aurally convey horror? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper proposes a brief analysis of the Brazilian film O Anjo da Noite (The Angel Of The Night, Walter Hugo Khouri, 1974). The analysis seeks to understand how this film, inspired by the Gothic literature tradition of the eighteenth century and in the classic The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898), conducted a sophisticated reflection on sexual and social anxieties that challenged the Brazilian society at the time. The work analyzes the dialogue undertaken by Khouri's movie with the discursive operations of gothic horror fiction, suggesting that the director used that style (emerged during the decadence of the Ancien Régime, in the eighteenth century) to represent Brazilian social tensions in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach for exploring the semiotic changes involved in the transformation of a novel into stage and screen productions. It examines how semiotic resources are deployed in each medium through elements of mise-en-scène, such as speech, music, sound, lighting, props, staging, and cinematographic techniques, and the viewing perspectives that are thus established for audiences. The genre of Gothic horror is selected for this purpose, given how this form of performance has transfixed audiences for centuries and has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. In order to demonstrate how each performance medium has produced its own unique set of foregrounding devices to enthral and captivate audiences, a comparative analysis of excerpts from the novelThe Woman in Blackby Susan Hill, a videotaped theatrical performance, and the 1989 British television film of the same name is undertaken. The paper discusses the implications of the multimodal semiotic approach for developing a better understanding of the semiotic transformations that horror genre conventions undergo in different media and the viewership positions that are thus re-drawn for audiences. The paper concludes with a view of multimodal recontextualisation processes which form the underlying basis of human sociocultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines industrial and stylistic aspects of the cult soap opera Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–71), whose protagonist was a vampire. The series addressed two distinct audiences simultaneously: the traditional daytime target of housewives and a juvenile cohort of both sexes enthralled by its gothic horror format. In 1970, a plotline described the threat of a supernatural cult called the Leviathans that tangentially acknowledged the tumult of the Vietnam era. That year, too, the series was adapted into a feature film soon after the Motion Picture Association of America's censorship had ended, creating new stylistic and thematic negotiations regarding the juvenile audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the public understanding of science literature dealing with fictional scientists claims that scientist villains by their nature embody an antiscience critique. I characterize this claim and its founding assumptions as the “mad scientist” trope. I show how scientist villain characters from the science fiction television series Doctor Who undermine the trope via the programme’s use of rhetorical strategies similar to Gilbert and Mulkay’s empiricist and contingent repertoires, which define and patrol the boundaries between “science” and “non-science.” I discuss three such strategies, including the literal framing of scientist villains as “mad.” All three strategies exclude the characters from science, relieve science of responsibility for their villainy, and overtly or covertly contribute to the delivery of pro-science messages consistent with rationalist scientism. I focus on scientist villains from the most popular era of Doctor Who, the mid 1970s, when the show embraced the gothic horror genre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]