Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980 (David Punter, 1996)

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)

Horror (Mark Jancovich, 1992)

Mark Jancovich, 1992. Horror. In: Mark Jancovich. Horror. B.T. Batsford, London, p. (p.7-25).

Introduction

On censorship:"they claimed that 'video nasties' were a new category of media products, and that they had dangerous effects on viewers, especially young viewers. No clear definition of the video nasty existed but it was generally accepted that they were examples of pornography and horror" (p.7)

"the language which is frequently used to describe these genres is one of disease and contagion. They are referred to as as 'sick' and 'perverted', and their diffusion is described in terms of corruption and contamination" (p.7-8)

"the study of horror is important, if only because claims about it have had political effects - effects which extend far beyond the limits of the genre itself. However the social unacceptability as a genre has meant that there has been, as with the study of pornography, little real investigation of its forms and effects." (p.8)

Post-structural psychoanalytic criticism = shifts the focus of study from the individual artist or text to the system of signification itself. "they stress that all cultural activities have rules and codes, whether of language or visual imagery. Not the individual author who should be the source of meaning, but these rules and codes. They maintain that: our sense of ourselves as individuals (or our subjectivity) is not we who speak language but language which speaks us, the very way we think is determined by the structures of language" (p.9)

"In the case of horror it is claimed that the pleasure offered by the genre is based on the process of narrative closure, in which the horrifying or monstrous is destroyed or contained". Structure order- disorder- order re-established. The audience's pleasure is supposed to be based upon the expectation that the narrative will reach this particular type of conclusion, and the eventual fulfillment of this expectation."

This narrative structure is claimed to have specific ideological effects. Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of the se type of ideological effects.

Ideological effects: Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of these effects. "The narrative closure of horror texts is not only claimed to contain the elements which are disturbing dominant order, but to produce psychological effect in the audience" (p.9). It suppresses conflicts which might threaten their subjectivities (sense of self). This process is referred to as 'the positioning of the subject within ideology' and is considered undesirable regardless of the ideology within the subject is positioned" (p.10)

"the reasoning behind this argument is that while we appear to express our own thoughts through the use of language, the very way in which we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject, or the sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent. It makes what is social, constructed and historical to be individual and natural" (p.10)

Therefore: the very way we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject is a product of ideology. In positioning the subject within ideology, this sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent.

Modern gothic, a reader (Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996)

Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996. Postmodernism/Gothicism. In: Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (ed). Modern gothic, A reader. Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. (p. 1-19).

Introduction

"This essay attempts to interpret the unmistakable presence, through structural or verbal allusion, or wholesale rewriting, of the Gothic in some of the fictions of the postwar period." ( p.1)

"The Old Gothic, however, as the backdating of Stevenson's own tale suggests, doesn't stand still as a point of reference: even in the eighteenth-century, it was itself anarchic, popular, an indeed 'camp' recycling the past, long before Sir Walter Scott sought to transform and rationalise it into an official literary genre, the so-called 'historical romance'." ( p.1)

"Evidently, the Gothic is not merely a literary convention or a set of motifs: it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into present." ( p.1)

"As these essays demonstrate, there is no point in thinking of the Gothic as 'pure'; it is an apparent genre-badge which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes: the uncanny, a form of Gothic fantastic effect quite central to modern fictions of screen and novel, is not one code but a kind of gap between codes, a point at which representation itself appears to fail, displace, or diffuse itself." ( p.2)

"But these Gothic black spots, lurking like the sites of past road accidents in so many contemporary contexts, are not simple deconstructive aporias transformed into spatial metaphors; they form in themselves textual negotiations with history, and the corollary of this critical preoccupation of the Gothic's latest history of itself is a description of a present whose very presentness is diminished and vitiated by disruptive images of the past." ( p.2) Interference of the past into the present.

"The anxiety of influence is not a pattern for the authors and critics represent in this book - the Gothic, it seems, is a language that, by definition, belongs to no one; with its air of pastiche - only made, never born - it forms a ready-made language for the aesthetic and cultural politics of our time. ( p.3-4)

"The Gothic is perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away" (p.4)

"Reiteration is the modern form of haunting; reiteration of narrative manouevres and motifs, unholy reanimation of the deadness of the past that has the power to make something new" ( p.4)

"But whereas early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the Gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful. Hence the peculiar effect we sometimes find, akin to the dropping of a stone through a spiders's web, when the actuality or realisations of the horrors of the contemporary life strikes through the web of highlighted representation with an effect that may be comic, or grotesque, or uncannily chilling." ( p.5) Although the popular evocation of horror is itself significant, the mode does not simply 'reflect' a modern condition by a form of inverted mimesis.

Modern Gothic- be it the "barbarous vitality of the Past, the Alien or the Other to erupt, and threaten the familiar plot, an accepted environment, the repeated pattern allows us first to glimpse, and then to reflect critically upon, the changing processes at work in our imaginings, and even in our theories, of our own contemporaneity." ( p.5)