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This article examines the post-millennial popularity of the found footage movie, in particular its engagement with the representational codes of non-fiction media. Whilst the majority of critical writings on found footage identify the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre as a key visual referent, they too often dwell on the literal re-enactment of the event. This article instead suggests that these films evoke fear by mimicking the aesthetic and formal properties of both mainstream news coverage and amateur recording. As such they create both ontological and epistemological confusion as to the reality of the events depicted. Rather than merely replicating the imagery of terror/ism, these films achieve their terrifying effects by mimicking the audiences media spectatorship of such crisis.
about lunacy. 2 Thus The Times article both critiqued sensation journalism and reflected general feelings about Victorian lunatics. For those with little first-hand experience of mental disease, media stories would have been the most likely, and the most frequent, encounter with the issues of insanity. These stories helped shape cultural tropes of madness. While the most common types of article written on madness were narrative updates on local asylums, these would only attract the interest of
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new media) from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Placing Gothic forms and productions in an explicitly interdisciplinary context, it investigates how the engagement with technologies drives the dissemination of Gothic across diverse media through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while conjuring all kinds of haunting and spectral presences that trouble cultural narratives of progress and technological advancement.
When the moving image is invented and early film turned from the simple recording of everyday scenes to telling stories in the beginning of the twentieth century, these early films frequently turned to classic Gothic texts such as Frankenstein and Dracula . In this way, Gothic is multimodal and intermedial from its earliest beginnings and it invades virtually all new forms of artistic communication as these are invented. When computers and digital communication enabled what has been termed ‘new media’, Gothic moved with it, taking the form of hypertexts, or what
media discussion about the threat of the illegal entrance of foreign workers into the USA. In the course of the film, the discussion of an illicit border crossing turns into a far more toxic boundary transgression from death back to life. By cross-mapping Brooke’s lyrical imagery with the lore of voodoo zombies, my chapter proposes that what we get is a sense of an uncanny
The official journal of the International Gothic Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.
While Goths tend to be neglected in more mainstream media, they are thriving as part of online communities as part of the phenomenon of net.Goths. This paper considers some of the recent manifestations of such subcultural activities online, especially in relation to the practice of demarcating the boundaries of participation through displays of cultural capital (such as music and fashion), and aspects of communication that have emerged on the Internet such as ‘trolling’. The overarching concern of this paper is to explore some of the ways in which defining a subculture virtually may reinforce activities of the group in other environments.
This article defends the view that Gothic Studies should encourage research on contemporary gothic youth cultures from a Cultural Studies point of view. This is justified on two grounds: research on these youth cultures is a unique chance to consider gothic as a living cultural practice and not just as textual analysis mostly disengaged from the present; on the other hand, these subcultures are currently under attack by the media and moral minorities, especially in the USA, and Gothic Studies could - maybe should - help correct this regrettable situation born of prejudice against, and ignorance about, Gothic itself. The article reviews the embarrassing position of the Gothic Studies researcher today as regards gothic youth cultures and calls for the reinforcement of the poor knowledge we have of the evolution of these cultures in the last 20 years.
As a gothic iteration of Ovid‘s Pygmalion myth, the television show ‘Dark Angel’ demonstrates how anxiety over the laboratory creation of people persists in popular culture. The paper looks through the lenses of media representation of cloning, complexity theory‘s trope of iteration, and gothic literary criticism, first to analyze Dark Angels heroine as a gothic version of Pygmalion‘s statue. It goes on to explore some of the implications of rewriting sculptor/lover Pygmalion into Dark Angels Donald Lydecker and Logan Cale, before examining the first season in its entirety. The analysis ends on a short exploration of some interactions between the show and the popular culture that produces and consumes it.
This article explores the trend in contemporary vampire media to highlight racially-charged issues, demonstrating a consciousness of the way the vampire has been used in conjunction with racial stigmatisation. While the traditional figure of the vampire spoke strongly to late nineteenth-,and early twentieth-century white American fears of miscegenation, I argue that some contemporary vampire narratives, such as Blade (1998), Underworld (2003), and True Blood (2008-), rewrite the figure in order to question and/or undo,the link between ‘monstrosity’ and racial otherness. Central to this task is not only the repositioning and characterisation of the vampire, but also — considering that the female body was once perceived as the locus for racial purity — that of the heroine.