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From its earliest days, horror film has turned to examples of the horror genre in fiction, such as the Victorian Gothic, for source material. The horror film has continually responded to cultural pressures and ideological processes that resulted in new, mutated forms of the genre. Adaptation in horror cinema is a useful point of departure for articulating numerous socio-cultural trends. Adaptation for the purposes of survival proves the impetus for many horror movie monsters. This book engages generic and thematic adaptations in horror cinema from a wide range of aesthetic, cultural, political and theoretical perspectives. These diverse approaches further evidence the horror genre's obsession with corporeal transformation and narratological re-articulation. Many horror films such as Thomas Edison's Frankenstein, John S. Robertson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, David Cronenberg'sVideodrome, Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, and Terence Fisher's The Gorgon are discussed in the book. The book sheds welcome light upon some of the more neglected horror films of cinema's first century, and interrogates the myriad alterations and re-envisionings filmmakers must negotiate as they transport tales of terror between very different modes of artistic expression. It extends the volume's examination of adaptation as both an aesthetic process and a thematic preoccupation by revealing the practice of self-reflexivity and addresses the remake as adaptation. The book analyses the visual anarchy of avant-garde works, deploys the psychoanalytic film theory to interpret how science and technology impact societal secularisation, and explores the experimental extremes of adaptation in horror film.
Two great works of fiction at opposite ends of the nineteenth century continue to be paradigms of horror with the concept of ‘adaptation’ at their heart: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus ( 1818 ) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Both present mad scientists who experiment with adaptation in the sense of
Haunted places are the only ones people can live in. (Michel de Certeau) 1 Sinclair’s first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987, cited edition 1988), draws upon the events of the autumn of 1888, the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ of Jack the Ripper. It is also a consciously intertextual novel, drawing upon (amongst other things) Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (particularly A Study in Scarlet ). It completes the first ‘triad’ of texts ( Lud Heat
This essay examines the proliferation of visual representations of Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), considering the question of what links contemporary (Scottish?) Gothic to its problematic origins. After a survey of cinematic and graphic adaptations, the essay focuses on Steven Moffatt‘s Jekyll (BBC, 2007), which combines the post-Darwinian anxieties surrounding Stevensons tale of human regression with a much more contemporary interrogation of the ‘human’ against the backdrop of complex globalised scientific conspiracies. Significantly, the production draws on the Scottish origin of the text, re-proposing the question of (national) identity and authenticity against the threat of globalisation.
pathologies of the mind constitute a significant strand in Gothic literature from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca , so the reason/madness opposition underpins, at various levels, Moore’s complex retelling of the murders. In destabilising the fixed boundaries within the binary opposition, however, the graphic novel points to a
This essay examines the Gothic trope of monstrosity in a range of literary and historical works, from writings on the French Revolution to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I argue that, in the various versions of the Frankenstein myth, what has ultimately come to seem most monstrous is the uncanny coupling of literary and political discourse. Beginning with Jacobin and anti-Jacobin discourse, this essay traces the tendency of literary tropes to turn into political tropes. In Frankenstein and in the Victorian rewritings of Shelley‘s novel, the trope of monstrosity functions, with remarkable consistency, as a mechanism which enables the unstable and often revolutionary turns between aesthetic and ideological discourse. Because the trope of monstrosity at the heart of Frankenstein exists on the border between literary and political discourse that trope has emerged as one of the most crucial forces in current critical theoretical debates about the relationship between aesthetics and ideology.
‘real’. In addition the trials were highly theatrical affairs and Wilde’s often theatrical performance in the witness box suggested that it was masculinity, and what was meant by that term, which was really on trial. David Punter has noted that Dorian Gray shares a Gothic context concerning theories of degeneration which includes Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H
would overthrow it. Civilisation is, in other words, a destroyer of selves, and this self-destructive impulse would seem to explain why so many fin-de-siècle Gothic texts, including Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), culminate in suicide. However, these points of contact to theories of degeneration are largely superficial because, as we shall see, the fin-de-siècle Gothic repeatedly employs suicide as a trope through which to examine a new model of the
Gothic literature set in fin-de-siècle London has often been argued to highlight duality. However, the urban Gothic truly flourishes through its liminality, which allows chaos and order to coexist. Texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray offer versions of a Gothic London that have the appearance of structure but are difficult to navigate. Likewise, the Batman franchise has embraced Gotham City as a setting that provides tensions between order and chaos. In Gotham, as in fin-de-siècle London, liminality puts pressures on apparent boundaries. While the urban Gothic initially developed through nineteenth century British texts, modern-day comics and films within the Batman franchise have allowed us to see how a multiverse normalises liminality and embraces multiple works to speak collectively about Gothic tensions. This article analyses the liminal nature of the urban Gothic in both cities side by side to argue that the urban Gothic’s liminal nature allows instability to reign.
cinematic imagination before there was a cinema’, writes Siegbert Prawer of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) in Caligari’s Children ( 1980 : 105). Prawer’s examples include ‘close-ups’ of Utterson’s face, the externalisation of an internal conflict in the form of Jekyll and Hyde and, of interest here, the lawyer’s dream