The Gothic on screen

Abstract

It may come as a surprise, in view of the generic force of the term Gothic , that there is no established genre called Gothic cinema or Gothic film . There are Gothic images and Gothic plots and Gothic characters and even Gothic styles within film, all useful to describe bits and pieces of films that usually fall into the broader category of horror , but there is no delimited or demonstrable genre specific to film called the Gothic. This is at least in part due to the fact that film, as a medium born with the twentieth century, is both a late-comer to and an avid, unashamed plagiarizer of earlier, literary forms of the Gothic. As such, the Gothic does not “belong” to film, and the film medium must content itself with providing a home for that catch-all category of terror and spookiness, the horror genre. Nonetheless, if it is surprising that there is no such thing as Gothic cinema, that is because we perfectly well know the Gothic when we see it. There is, in fact, something peculiarly visual about the Gothic. As William Patrick Day has pointed out, the Gothic tantalizes us with fear, both as its subject and its effect; it does so, however, not primarily through characters or plots or even language, but through spectacle (Day, Circles of Fear and Desire , p. 63). The fearful effect of the Gothic, at least in its literary forms, depends on our ability to cast certain conventionalized images from the text onto the “screen” of our mind’s eye. The Gothic is thus particularly suited to the cinema, trading as the latter does in images that affect the individual psyche, albeit in culturally legible terms. Indeed, this is both the strength and weakness of the Gothic on screen: its ability to capture the spectacular element of the Gothic effect and encode it in culturally recognizable – ultimately perhaps in all too recognizable – forms.