David Punter, 1996. The Modern Gothic: Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980. In: David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present day. Longman, London, 1996 (p. 96-119).
The international history of the horror film to 1980 may be seen in three principal phases: the German masterpieces of the silent era; the developments in America between 1930 and the late 1950s; and the largely British-centered product of the 1960 and 1970s." (p.96)
"In this chapter, I want, as with the fiction, to restrict myself to American and British work, but it worth nothing from the outset that behind all subsequent horror films there lurks, in a curiously resonant parallel with eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, a German presence. It manifests itself in theme, in content, in a specific set of photographic styles, indeed in an entire mis-en-scene which runs from the range of Universal studios films of 1931 and 1932 to the Hammer cycle of the 1960s" (p.96)
"The horror film thus has a complexly twisted provenance: out, originally, of a body of legendary which owes much to real or fake German and central European sources and 'Transylvanian' settings, via English nineneenth-century fictional developments, but then mediated again through the directional styles of the great German directors, Wegener, Wiene, Murnau and Lang." (p.96)
"This is by no means to assume that all horrifying films are Gothic; but at the same time it is true that the fundamentally formulaic model which isconventionally known as 'the horror film' hs indeed many Gothic aspects." (p.96)
"... still the forgers of the most culturally prominent images of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula respectively." (p.96-97)
"In one sense at least the horror film is very similar to eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, in that, while being a popular form, it demonstrates on closer inspection both a surprisingly high level of erudition, actual on the part of its makers and also imputed to its audience, and also a very high level of technical virtuosity." (p.97)
"To connect the thematic and the technical, one might perhaps say that what the 1930s horror films essentially possessed were content to be unrushed, to allow space and time for their conceptions to emerge on the screen, and in doing so they managed to create a series of works which posessed a genuinely tragic quality, at least insofar as they realised a sense of powerful forces, forces of destiny, operative in human life." (p. 98)
"He is a splendid mixture of the diabolical and the gentlemanly..." (p.100)
"danger usually brings out not the best but the worst in people, and where it does bring out the best, that best is generally unrecognisable to the world outside. " (p.103)
"... Gothic act of divine defiance, and thus necessarily entailing its own defeat." (p.105) Promethean defiance
"... who is indeed a bourgeois character, trying to impose a schema of rationalism on the events with which he is confronted" (p. 106)
"... deliberate vulgarisation, which is presumably in itself a significant element of an attempt to deal with historical problems." (p. 107)
"Corman's films - and Price's acting - demand audience collusion, and it is this structural sense, and not merely because of the extent of their appeal, that they can most fairly be called 'cult' films. They permit their audience to asknowledge its own intelligent and reasonableness before deliberately abandoning. It has often been said that only a secure avant-garde can afford seriously to affront or abandon good taste, and certainly Corman's films afford intellectual relief - not scape - of a kind which cannot be far distant from the esxitement ladies in the late eighteenth century derived from observing the wickedness of an Ambrosio. Corman's cinema is neither realist nor psychological: it is, in a sense, a cinema of pure formalism, and only because it is so reliant on fixed form can it afford the gross excess of colour and dialogue which typify it." (p.107)
"When The Course of Frankstein first appeared, it was rapidly condemned on the grounds of explicit sadism, a criticism which seems to us now rather surprising, for the kinds of ritualised violence which occur in Hammer films seem very much bounded by assumptions of the form." (p.108-109)
"... Fisher shows him simultaneously capable of cruelty and disinterested kindness, and brings him into close proximity with the stereotype of the victimised pioneer." (p.109)
"That all the vampires, male and female, in Hammer's films are sexually attractive, sometimes to the point of caricature, recalls precisely scenes in Stocker like that of the three female vampires..." (p.110)
"For it is not enough to say that horror motifs have lost their bite because we no longer 'believe in' them: we have never believed in them as simply existent, but more as valuable and disturbing fictional images which gain their vitality, when they do, from the underlying truth which they represent." (p.118)
