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Though presenting itself as pulpy example of hardboiled American fiction, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me opens up in important and unexpected ways when read as a subversive Gothic novel. Such a reading sheds light on a range of marginalized characters (especially women and rural peoples) who often remain shadowed by more conventional readings. Reading the novel as Gothic also highlights thematic concerns which counter the halcyon image of post-World War II America as a golden age and reveal instead a contemporary landscape fraught with violence, alienation, and mental instability.
area of Gothic influence (Hand, 2013 : 271). The primacy of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and the subsequent influence of Expressionist films in general on 1930s Hollywood cinema have led to the instatement of Gothic Noir as a cinematic sub-genre. Writers of new Gothic fiction such as Stephen King and Joyce
1990s Telco produced a walking Dracula ‘Motionette’ with glaring red eyes. In Neocore’s action role-playing video game The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (2013), Gothic Noir nineteenth-century Europe juxtaposes the adventures of Van Helsing’s son with flailing robots. Thomas Kuntz is one of the most inventive contemporary makers of unique automatons embodying Gothic and horror themes: ‘Babylon Vampire, Blood Drinking
noteworthy is a monograph on Murnau by Eric Rohmer. 35 Rohmer, after all, views issues of guilt and personal salvation in ways that are substantially different from the views embodied in the Faust legend. It is tempting to regard the sunlit, almost miniaturised Perceval le Gallois (1978) as a reversal of Faust , purging the themes of temptation and salvation from their Gothic, ‘ noir ’ associations
des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut; the anonymous 1797 French translation of Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790); and Jean Cohen’s 1821 translation of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). In the concluding section of this chapter we shall, however, further examine such related issues as the dissemination of translated Gothic, noir and frénétique novels across
of portrayals of isolated ruins still elicited potent and multifarious responses from the observer. These, after all, were the deepest spiritual responses of humans’ inner being – a confrontation with the mysteries of mortality. After the Second World War, the ruins of Vienna served to symbolise the destruction of a city and old friendship caused by greed in Carol Reed’s work of Gothic Noir: The
Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) was perhaps the most notable and earliest example of Gothic Noir, Roger Corman’s cycle of Poe adaptations (1959–64) returned to explore the nineteenth century, whilst Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and its spin-offs like Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) explored earlier encounters with evil. Tony Scott’s The Hunger