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The journey North is a recurrent motif throughout the Gothic literary tradition, often representing a journey back in time to a more primitive location where conventional rules do not apply. Within the context of contemporary Scottish Gothic this journey continues to involve a temporal regression. The North of Scotland, and specifically the Highlands, is still a Gothic location, allowing for an interrogation of the homogenising notion of ‘national identity’. In this article the journey North is explored in the work of contemporary writers and film directors including Iain Banks, Alan Warner, David Mackenzie, and Neil Marshall.
The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.
Clive Barker found joy in painting at the age of 45, two years after the release of Lord of Illusions ( 1995 ), his third and last feature as a film director. 1 Speaking in the documentary Clive Barker: The Man Behind the Myth ( 2007 ), the artist described his encounter with the medium in a wistful voice: ‘It was like opening a door
This chapter provides a historical survey of the rise of the Gothic in Nordic literature, film, TV series and video games. Going back to the first generation of Gothic texts, the chapter notes that German, British and French novels around 1800 were quickly translated into the Scandinavian languages, and that they inspired Nordic writers – and, later, film directors – to emulate this tradition but also to adapt the genre to Nordic audiences. The chapter then discusses the evolution of Nordic Gothic during the nineteenth and twentieth century, noting the most important writers and their work. Finally, the chapter describes the emerging scholarship that shows how Nordic canonical authors and filmmakers have been influenced by the Gothic, and addresses what can be termed the Nordic Gothic boom that can be said to begin in 2004 with John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Låt den rätte komma in.
combine critical social realism with supernatural Gothic. Arthouse film director Lars von Trier's turn to the TV medium and the creation of a Gothic TV series about a haunted hospital proved to be surprisingly popular with TV viewers in Denmark and Sweden, as well as with critics. 3 Riget was also successfully presented as a four-hour film at national and international film festivals. In 1995, it won the national Bodil Awards for the best Danish film, best actor, best actress
Although the preoccupation of Gothic storytelling with the family has often been observed, it invites a more systematic exploration. Gothic Kinship brings together case studies of Gothic kinship ties in film and literature and offers a synthesis and theoretical exploration of the different appearances of the Gothic family. The volume explores the cultural mediation of the shifting relations of kinship and power in gothic fictionfrom the eighteenth century up to the present day. Writers discussed include early British Gothic writers such as Eleanor Sleath and Louisa Sidney Stanhope as well as a range of later authors writing in English, including Elizabeth Gaskell, William March, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite, Patricia Duncker, J. K. Rowling and Audrey Niffenegger. There are also essays on Dutch authors (Louis Couperus and Renate Dorrestein) and on the film directors Wes Craven and Steven Sheil.
Arranged chronologically, the various contributions show that both early and contemporary Gothic display very diverse kinship ties, ranging from metaphorical to triangular, from queer to nuclear-patriarchal. Gothic proves to be a rich source of expressing both subversive and conservative notions of the family.
have considerable impact on adaptations. These media have also had varying statuses in different national and regional contexts over time. For instance, Twin Peaks (ABC 1990–1991), which influenced Danish art film writer and director Lars von Trier's foray into that medium, was an unusual instance at the time of an American film director making a TV series. 10 Although, as Helen Wheatley argues in Gothic Television ( 2006 ), television may be the
the 1990s and 2000s, this chapter suggests they demonstrate how Barker has been more successful as a brand-name auteur across media, rather than as a feature film director. Moreover, it can be argued that the design of the mazes and the philosophy behind them reflect a broader sense of Barker as an artist and producer experimenting with the cinematic horror genre as an immersive form beyond
aesthetic of light, shadow and spectacle’ derived from his work with theatrical producer, Max Reinhardt. 129 As Greta insists to Murnau’s character: ‘A theatrical audience gives me life while that thing [as she points to the camera] merely takes it from me.’ Her eventual demise is, in a sense, death by camera in a process that Merhige, as a film director, would have recognised as intrinsic to the vampiric
contemporary culture by writers as well as theatre and film directors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who return to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the context of the current proliferation of the Gothic. To re-map Gothic literature onto the literary production of the Renaissance thus does not entail undoing the historical distinction between the two by collapsing two historical