The Essence of the Gothic: In Conversation with Audrey Chin

Extract of an interview on the ‘Essence of the Gothic’ with novelist Audrey Chin What is Gothic literature? Is there a difference between the modern and Victorian variety? Or the Asian and European ones? And why is it considered part of the literature of subversion? I’m a neophyte to the genre. Indeed, I would not have…

A Gothic Chronology

This is a resource I initially put together when lecturing Gothic fiction about ten years ago which I’ve now attempted to update. It is relatively straightforward to compile a list of primary sources for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but after that it gets tricky, firstly because it becomes more difficult to categorise within the…

“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…

Gothic Film: A Brief History

Gothic films are at once very easy and very difficult to categorise. Within the wider context of the “horror” genre, gothic films are linked directly to the literary gothic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often adapting the original novels – for example: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (Germany, 1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein…