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…

‘An Artist is Meant to be Extreme’: David Cronenberg’s Creative Manifesto

Something for Halloween, originally published in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) edited by W. Hughes, D. Punter & A. Smith... David Cronenberg is a Canadian auteur filmmaker who made his name with intelligent, innovative and graphic horror films. His work explores human fears and desires not commonly expressed in cinema, such as disease,…

A Short History of Monster Movies

‘Monster movie’ is a colloquial term for a sub-genre within horror, science fiction and fantasy film characterised by the threat of something large and frightening (or a bunch of small ones). Although most traditional horror antagonists are, technically, monsters, the designation is usually limited to oversized but essentially dumb animals. The label ‘Creature Feature’ (which…

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…