![]() ![]() Certainly its popularity cannot be disputed - films like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968), ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) take home Oscars, and Stephen King habitually tops the best-seller lists - but why are we driven to consume these fictions? Is this craving something structural or social? Does it stem from our desire to see the political tyrant bested or the weak, deformed, or unfortunate (as in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ ) scapegoated in a ritual purgation of blood? Nor is the idea of origin the only problem here, for there is also the problem embedded in my title: why we need the contemporary Gothic. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations. How, then, might we define a contemporary Gothic? For to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. ![]() Peter Straub’s ‘Julia’ (1975), Doris Lessing’s ‘The Fifth Child’ (1988), and John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ (film version: ‘The Village of the Damned’ ) all feed off ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) by Henry James, itself arguably a revision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Emile’ (1762), a treatise on the education of two children at a country house.Īnd as many contributors to this volume demonstrate, the central concerns of the classical Gothic are not that different from those of the contemporary Gothic: the dynamics of family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology. And contemporary Gothic does not break with this tradition: Stephen King’s ‘IT’ (1987) and Anne Rice’s vampire narratives (begun in the 1970s) weave in and out of the distant past in order to comment on the state of contemporary American culture, while other narratives foreground their reliance on prior, historically distant narratives. However, the title proposes more questions than it answers.įirst, what exactly counts as “the contemporary Gothic”? Since its inception in 1764, with Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, the Gothic has always played with chronology, looking back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed, mourning a chivalry that belonged more to the fairy tale than reality. My title suggests a rather straightforward enterprise: I want to account for the enormous popularity of the Gothic - both novels and films - since the Second World War. ![]()
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