Browse

Gothic has, since its inception, been concerned with the liminal nature of dreams and their relationship to the material. Monstrous figures within dreams function as manifestations of anxieties, but within the Gothic text, we see examples of beings and monsters who move from dream image to literal embodiment. This chapter explores the material manifestations of dream figures in the Gothic, taking the nineteenth-century short story as its focus. Gothic writing employs the dream primarily as a form of communication and is also concerned with the materiality of language, with articulation and (re)iteration. This materiality is a focus for psychoanalytic critics following Freud, such as Lacan, who regards language as essentially material, and Derrida, who in his concept of the trace picks up on the relationship between presence and absence, present and past, which these stories also explore. This chapter, then, will engage with theoretical concepts around language and communication to consider the materiality of the dream’s communications, through its nocturnal visitors/visitants. The concept of the trace is particularly fitting to the short story, which is able to infer without fully elucidating, to leave a trace, or a suggestion, of an idea. Like the dream, the short story’s latent content may appear ‘scant’ in comparison to its interpretation. Through the concept of embodiment in the dream narrative, the chapter will investigate the use of this format to explore anxieties around the unconscious dreaming state and its vulnerability to the monstrous, to a trace which becomes a presence, the spectral made manifest..

Many of Thomas Ligotti’s tales are endowed with an oneiric nature and narrate encounters with otherness within an uncanny framework. Horror pervades the narrators’ accounts, who often find themselves lost in the claws of some mysterious nightmare that has suddenly breached into their reality, recalling the atmosphere of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Through these disturbing dreams, narrators discover that the reality they know and take for granted might be only a façade, a creation of cosmic unknown forces to disguise the true nature of the world. In fact, once these protagonists step into these alternate realities made available by dreams, they have contact with ‘the madness of things’, a phenomenon that encompasses evil, chaos, and monstrosity all combined. The purpose of this chapter is then to examine how Ligotti resorts to the dream to explore the limits of Gothic fiction, expanding its span towards the uncanny and the weird, by means of these eerie encounters with otherness. In this context, it is also important to explore the dream as a literary phenomenon that gives way to the intrusion of cosmic horror, which, in turn, is liable to deconstruct the world of the narrator and put into question his identity, thus leaving him hopeless and on the verge of madness..

The interpretation of Gothic dreams frequently focuses on psychoanalytical or narratological readings of Gothic dreams. This emphasis is often based on the underlying and often averred assumption of the secularisation of the period and the Gothic’s essential lack of concern with the metaphysical realities of the supernatural events it portrays. This chapter contests the assumption of secularity in early British Gothic literature, pointing to the survival of theological interpretations, their importance in contemporary dream discourse, and the ways in which Gothic texts engage with these beliefs. In order to map the complex nature of dream discourse in the period and its connection to the theological, this chapter provides a historical overview of theological ghost belief. It points to the survival of these conceptions of the dream and elucidates their influence on, and importance to, Gothic dreams. Theologised understandings of supernatural dreams and their provenance, purpose, and meaning are central to the Gothic. They are also intrinsically linked to wider theological debates about the nature of the soul, free will and determinism, theodicy, and providence, making, as will be explored, Gothic dreams as an index to the theological concerns of Gothic novels. Dream depiction in Gothic novels was by no means static. This chapter also maps the ways in which an increasingly medicalised discourse around dreams manifested in Gothic fiction. The influence of these discourses did not result in the rejection of supernatural understandings of the dream but rather in an increased emphasis on interpretative ambiguity, which allowed for both secular and theological possibilities of interpretation.

In Samuel T. Coleridge’s Romantic poetic narrative ‘Christabel’ (1816), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Victorian Gothic novella ‘Carmilla’ (1872), Théophile Gautier’s hallucinatory novella, ‘La Morte Amoureuse’ (1836), and Mircea Eliade’s Romanian horror novel Domnișoara Christina (1936), the bizarre, unsettling dreams that the protagonists experience are alternately erotic, repulsive, and/or premonitory, either resembling the state of trance or appearing to be a vivid simulation of real life. In this context, this chapter constitutes an individual but also comparative analysis of the dreams and nightmares in these four classical literary vampire works and the ways they expose the central character’s subconscious, forbidden desires and fears, at the same time remaining attentive to each text’s sociohistorical context. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which dreams are employed by each author to depict different forms of complex vampiric relationships, while the chapter will also demonstrate how the ambivalent persona of the female vampire represents (queer) sexual desire, but also parasitic otherness and how these features are illustrated through the use of dreams. In this respect, the exploration of the emblematic figure of the female vampire as a classic Gothic horror motif, as well as the theme of repressed sexuality within the broader scope of dreams and nightmares in Gothic/horror literature, adds an intriguing dimension to an already fascinating topic. The inclusion of lesser-known continental literary works will offer fresh perspectives on the subject, thus providing a more comprehensive, enhanced view of the misty landscapes of troubled sleep in Gothic/horror fiction. .

The term ‘folk horror’ has been used to refer to horror that most frequently has strong rural, occult and sometimes folkloric elements. Whilst discussion has unearthed examples of ‘folk horror’ from numerous different nations, the designation is most strongly associated with a limited number of British films and other media in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the socio-political and wider cultural factors of this period within the UK and explore how they may have influenced and/or inspired this particular mode of cinema. From there we look at the revival of ‘folk horror’ and its growth in stature and status within the 21st century and again consider the influence that the contemporary social, political, cultural and perhaps environmental situation has had upon its resurgence. In this exploration we pay strong attention to films of both the psychedelic era and of the current folk horror revival but also consider folk horror in relation to sub-genres or modes like hauntology, urban wyrd and backwoods horror. We explore the cultural climate that the first wave of British folk horror arose in and question why it has again taken root and grown more vigorously now.

This chapter explores the regionality of folk horror and argues that the Celtic looms large in the English imaginary as a location for the rural. The chapter examines how folk horror evokes an ambiguous Celtic-ness, culturally, religiously, and aesthetically, to make strange what was once more prevalent across the British Isles more generally. In doing so, it highlights the dominance of an English lens both textually and extra-textually and questions the notion and usefulness of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Celtic’. Folk horror has an established history of exploring the rural through an urban lens. The rural becomes a site of difference, of fear, but also of hope and deliverance for the those entering its limits. But for the rural to be a site of contrast, those that enter both textually and extra textually, must be from elsewhere. With the creep of English suburbia, the rural is being forced further and further into other regions of the British Isles. Films such as Apostle illustrate the importance of the representation of Wales for maintaining these folk spaces in the face of Anglo imperialism, an imperialism shown to be deleterious to all. Apostle is demonstrative of an English protagonist marked by English religious proselytising as he enters a Welsh space of cultural and religious difference. Initially, this space is shown as oppositional to its English counterpart, offering escape and redemption for as long as Anglo creep can be prevented. Does the introduction of the English protagonist make clear underlying issues with these rural spaces, or is he the catalyst for them?

Lion Productions’ The Wicker Man can claim to be the archetypal folk horror film, with a considerable influence on the whole genre. This essay examines its inspiration, consisting of an image, a book, and a literary tradition. The image is that of the giant wickerwork figure in which ancient Roman writers accused the Druids of burning human sacrifices. This provided the main motif of the film. The book was Sir James Frazer’s Edwardian classic The Golden Bough, a massive compendium of real and alleged human belief and custom. This provided most of the folk rites in the screenplay. The literary tradition was the British one of a modern rural community secretly preserving an ancient (and usually orgiastic and malign) pagan religion. This furnished the setting for the story. This essay explains how each developed, and how the film itself both transcended and reinforced each.

Often hailed as the quintessential Folk Horror film, the ethical cosmology of The Wicker Man (1973) contrasts sharply both with British horror films that precede it and with many later films overtly influenced by it. Neither demonizing pre-Christian British religion as satanic, as films such as Night of the Demon (1957; aka Curse of the Demon in the USA) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) explicitly do, nor using pagan ritual trappings to facilitate neo-colonialist Heart of Darkness polemics on human evil, as in Kill List (2011), The Wicker Man stands out for a curiously positive representation of contemporary Pagan worldviews. This chapter contrasts the Pagan cosmology of The Wicker Man, recognizable to, if not representative of, actual Pagan practitioners, with the conflation of non-Christian practices into the ‘satanic’ in other Folk Horror films. Such elision perpetuates Christian hegemony, its concomitant xenophobia, and censuring of sexuality. Despite the intentions of its creators to continue in this tradition, The Wicker Man instead follows a different trajectory, driven in part by desire to distinguish the project from Hammer gothics, especially Christopher Lee’s Dracula franchise. This difference also helps explain why, despite being hailed as a third of the ‘unholy trinity’ of Folk Horror, The Wicker Man nonetheless fits uneasily within the horror genre more broadly. Though packaged as a Pagan exploitation film, The Wicker Man can nonetheless be read, and has been read, by contemporary practitioners as an actual Pagan film.

Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning conversations on folk horror, but I argue that it is actually a key text. Not least, it is a clear influence on Robin Hardy’s 1973 film, The Wicker Man. It was, moreover, directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape; the screenplay was written by Clive Exton; and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind the folk horror classics, Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The plot of the film follows Dr. Del Shaw to Balfe, an island off the coast of Cornwall, where he is investigating whether an oil spill has disrupted the island’s ecosystem. While there, Shaw must contend with unaccountably hostile locals, who do everything they can to get him off the island. Doomwatch thus exemplifies the familiar structuring dynamic of folk horror—the often-violent encounter between the local/rural/primitive and the global/urban/modern. However, Doomwatch fails to offer the expected ‘sacrifice’ at the centre of folk horror. Instead, with its emphasis on the dire effects of both military and industrial pollution, Doomwatch represents the island itself as a ‘sacrifice zone’: the land and the community that lives on the land are ceded to the inexorable processes of the globalising economy. Literally abandoned at the end of the film, the island is positioned throughout as already lost to global modernity – and while the islanders themselves (at least at first) appear to be the powerful and even threatening ‘folk’ of folk horror, they, like their land, turn out to be already lost, ‘wasted humans’ rather than generative ‘folk’. In the end, there are no rituals promising fertility in Doomwatch, only the life-destroying sickness of a globalisation that dooms land and people alike.

Folk-horror should be characterized by a conflation of three discourses: the pagan (incorporating both witchcraft and satanism), the rural, and of course, the folklore itself. The folk horror film operates in the nexus of these three, and therefore should be analysed in light of these. Evoking a Venn-diagram, folk horror is where these three discourses overlap. This current paper seeks to re-evaluate The Wicker Man in its conflation of these three discourses: the pagan, the rural, and the folklore, and then to apply this discursive methodology to The Company of Wolves. And to this end, it will offer an alternative methodology, if not definition, of the term ‘folk horror’.