As the British Film Institute heads into its season of Gothic fiction, Roger Luckhurst wonders what keeps the genre so fresh in pop culture:
The gothic has offered a sinuous line of cultural commentary since Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764. It falls in and out of favour, but never quite goes away, because its metaphors of haunting and the undead prove so adaptable. Today, horror seems urgent again in an era of profound insecurity. George Romero updated the zombie as an emblem of consumption. The metaphor has now moved back closer to its slave plantation origins, imagining modern masses sapped of every ounce of living labour. Zombie contagion, despite Brad Pitt’s best efforts to ruin the genre in World War Z, remains an effective way of thinking about global interdependence and fragility.
It doesn’t take much to see aristocratic vampires as pulp versions of plutocrats supping on the blood of the merely-human, parasites hoarding wealth across the centuries. The Occupy movement even had a cross-over with the imagery of monstrous horror: Octopi Wall Street was a slogan and internet meme. Elsewhere, nasty and demonic things crawl out of war zones in the films Outpost or even Iraq in Adam Baker’s undead shocker, Juggernaut. But then the gothic, right from its nightmare beginnings, was about colonial anxiety and fears of what comes back to haunt from nefarious doings overseas.
Revisiting the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Sam Jordison pushes back against all the goth-love, finding the genre too moody and meandering:
Even the most famous stories, such as The Fall of the House Of Usher, left me cold. And not cold in a chills-up-the-spine sense: just a bit bored.
The image of the house reflected in the black tarn is admittedly impressive. So too is the description of the crumbling house itself, and the “minute fungi” that cover its exterior. But the symbolism quickly becomes overbearing: the pathetic fallacy of the awful weather, the gothic archways, the wild guitar playing, the gloom, the doom, the adjectives pertaining to gloom and doom, the decayed trees. Too much! And that’s before we get to the dialogue: “‘I shall perish!'” said he. ‘I must perish in this deplorable folly.'” You said it.
It’s possible to defend Poe as a pioneer. Here we can see the model of haunted houses ever since. Generations of writers, not to mention special effects teams and film directors, have been inspired by him. Then again, his scary buildings and emotional weather patterns aren’t a patch on those described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, while his gothic excesses don’t compete with those conjured by writers such as Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe half a century earlier.
So why do we still read Poe? Is he simply a curio – an early American writer with a crazy personal life? I hesitate to say that, for I still haven’t read enough, for a start. And even though I’ve frequently been bored, I’ve found odd moments fascinating, and gloriously weird. What is this thing about female corpses, for instance? Good job he was born before psychotherapy.
The Dish 