The Fall of the House of Usher

In the summer of 1960, American International Pictures released a little gothic number called The Fall of the House of Usher based on the strange and phantasmagoric short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839. AIP was a low-budget, independent outfit that banged out cheap…

The Phantom of the Opera: The Last Gothic Novel

Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… Now in the thirty-fifth year of its theatrical run on both sides of the Atlantic and showing no sign of stopping, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera has completely assimilated Gaston Leroux’s original character. Official accounts of the musical’s creation therefore downplay the cultural significance of…

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Extract of a piece I wrote for Wordsworth Editions just before Christmas on The Picture of Dorian Gray... ...As a narcissist and living work of art, in Nietzschean terms Dorian is an ‘Apollonian’ figure and Hallward also paints him as Adonis, Narcissus, Paris, and Antinous. Against nature, he has the cold edge of the purely aesthetic;…

The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Bly Manor

Extract from a contextual review for Wordsworth Editions, originally entitled ‘Based on the Writings of Henry James’: The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Bly Manor'. The Innocents (UK, 1961) is a scary film based on a scary book. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was first published as a…

Dracula (BBC 2020) Review

The last of the big three BBC winter schedule Victorian fantasy dramas dropped this week, with the epic three-part miniseries Dracula written by Sherlock and Dr Who team Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat which concluded last night. And I have to say, I think the Beeb left the best until last. Following the reimagining of…

The Saw Is Family: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Meaning of Murder

This week, horror fans and old goths like me around the world mourn the passing of Tobe Hooper, who died on Saturday at the age of 74, barely a month-and-a-half after we lost George A. Romero. Few directors get to redefine a genre, but Romero and Hooper both achieved this with Night of the Living…

The House of Horror: A History of Hammer Films

Hammer was a small, family-run British film production company that once dominated the global horror market and remains hugely influential. Hammer resurrected the gothic icons discarded by Hollywood after the war in stylish, sexy and violent films that captured the essence of the original literary form, and functioned as dark reflections of the conventional costume…

A Very Popular Murder: The Narratology of Jack the Ripper

The piece originally appeared in Blot the Skrip and Jar It, September 15, 2014. So, among all the other poignant, pointless and terrifying news stories that broke last week, it was announced in a Daily Mail ‘world exclusive’ that the hunt for the true identity of Jack the Ripper was over (again). Journalists across the…

Remembering Richard Matheson (1926 – 2013)

Richard Burton Matheson (1926 – 2013) would have been ninety this weekend, so let us just pause to remember the man who, along with H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, is probably the most significant and influential horror writer of the twentieth century. Matheson was a prolific novelist, short story and script writer responsible for some…

“He wants to be just like Vincent Price”: Influence & Intertext in the Gothic Films of Tim Burton

I wrote this essay for my wife. We got married because of Tim Burton and Vincent Price. I was lecturing at an old fashioned Art School (now long since rebranded as a ‘university’), when I first met Gracie, a graphic designer who had just joined the college and moved into the area. We met professionally a…