Like many, I've always enjoyed a good scare. We enjoy being frightened as a result of the Fight or Flight response triggered by our brains when confronted with a stressful situation and adrenaline rushes through our body as, for example, when we ride a roller coaster. That's the biological explanation but I like the psychological one: each scare is a mini dress rehearsal for our eventual death, the Big Scare.
But thrill-seeking joy-rides aren't quite the same thing as the slow build-up of a good scary story that you read with a growing sense of dread and expectation while sitting pensively biting your nails. For many of us, we actually enjoy that build-up of tension and subsequent relief. I'll take sitting in a darkened movie theater witnessing a ghoul on a larger-than-life screen traipsing around a cemetery at midnight anytime over a reckless dare-devil ride on a motorcycle.
This blog is a continuing, if sporadic, record of my thoughts and reactions to what I am currently reading or viewing in the Gothic mode of the horrific, the dark, the grotesque and macabre. This is a log of my personal exploration of the Gothic genre in literature in film.
As I explore new titles in literature and film--or revisit some of my favorites I've read or viewed in the past--I intend to record my critical views in commentaries here in hopes visitors may find some of my remarks interesting and insightful.
I regard my study of, and search for, the weird and bizarre, as a Gothic Quest because most any good tale of terror or film of horror owes its foundation to elements of the early Gothic genre. Some of the more obvious components are: thunder and lightening storms, haunted castles, spiraling staircases, madness, monsters, mayhem, voyeurism, cemeteries, ladies in distress, flickering candlelight, shadowy figures in half-lit rooms, and the like.
But there are more subtle ingredients that give bone-chilling stories their special, strangely dark flavors of the grotesque and macabre. One such element (a favorite of mine) is the dop
pelganger--known also as The Double or The Other or The Twin. This psychological motif is present in many films (Fight Club, Strangers on the Train, Vertigo, Psycho, Body Double, Magic, Face Off--to name a few) and countless stories (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, "The Jolly Corner", "William Wilson", Frankenstein, "The Birthmark", "The Mezzotint", "The Oval Portrait", "The Secret Sharer").
There's an endless menu from which to select--a variable feast to spread upon the table--from classics like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to contemporary Ramsey Campbell's fantastic collection of short stories, Alone with the Horrors. Novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and films will be the landscapes of my search for the Gothic. Some non-fiction resources will be included when reference is made to scholarly criticisms and contemporary reviews.
Join me, then, on a journey into the shadowy realms in search of the uncanny, the speculative, the hauntings, the suspenseful, the sexual, the horrifying, the entertaining, the thrilling, the psychologically chilling--in a word, the Gothic in literature and film...
But thrill-seeking joy-rides aren't quite the same thing as the slow build-up of a good scary story that you read with a growing sense of dread and expectation while sitting pensively biting your nails. For many of us, we actually enjoy that build-up of tension and subsequent relief. I'll take sitting in a darkened movie theater witnessing a ghoul on a larger-than-life screen traipsing around a cemetery at midnight anytime over a reckless dare-devil ride on a motorcycle.
This blog is a continuing, if sporadic, record of my thoughts and reactions to what I am currently reading or viewing in the Gothic mode of the horrific, the dark, the grotesque and macabre. This is a log of my personal exploration of the Gothic genre in literature in film.
As I explore new titles in literature and film--or revisit some of my favorites I've read or viewed in the past--I intend to record my critical views in commentaries here in hopes visitors may find some of my remarks interesting and insightful.
I regard my study of, and search for, the weird and bizarre, as a Gothic Quest because most any good tale of terror or film of horror owes its foundation to elements of the early Gothic genre. Some of the more obvious components are: thunder and lightening storms, haunted castles, spiraling staircases, madness, monsters, mayhem, voyeurism, cemeteries, ladies in distress, flickering candlelight, shadowy figures in half-lit rooms, and the like.
But there are more subtle ingredients that give bone-chilling stories their special, strangely dark flavors of the grotesque and macabre. One such element (a favorite of mine) is the dop
pelganger--known also as The Double or The Other or The Twin. This psychological motif is present in many films (Fight Club, Strangers on the Train, Vertigo, Psycho, Body Double, Magic, Face Off--to name a few) and countless stories (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, "The Jolly Corner", "William Wilson", Frankenstein, "The Birthmark", "The Mezzotint", "The Oval Portrait", "The Secret Sharer").There's an endless menu from which to select--a variable feast to spread upon the table--from classics like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to contemporary Ramsey Campbell's fantastic collection of short stories, Alone with the Horrors. Novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and films will be the landscapes of my search for the Gothic. Some non-fiction resources will be included when reference is made to scholarly criticisms and contemporary reviews.
Join me, then, on a journey into the shadowy realms in search of the uncanny, the speculative, the hauntings, the suspenseful, the sexual, the horrifying, the entertaining, the thrilling, the psychologically chilling--in a word, the Gothic in literature and film...
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