Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives

By Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson

This book looks at contemporary Gothic cinema within a transnational approach. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study invokes its literary as well as filmic forebears by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic: the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and, finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, or region, or culture. It was considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, and post-colonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the broader range of forces from a wider international perspective while at the same time also engaging with concepts of nationalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277757

Keith McDonald

After having several failed marriages and relationships, I decided to start researching what was wrong with me or what I could do different to have a successful relationship. As I learned more, I started sharing my knowledge and began counseling couples. I became so passionate about relationships that I became an ordained minister. Now along with counseling couples, I begin their lifelong journey by marrying them. I currently live in Bacliff, Texas, with my beautify wife, Kim, who I share a most wonderful life with. I wrote this book with the hope to share my knowledge to teach people how to have a happy and loving relationship in this day and age.

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Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film

Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film

Transnational Perspectives

Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937606

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-773-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-773-1 (Hbk)

Cover design by www.grafik.co.uk.

This title is also available as an e-book.

Dedicated to Roger Clark

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.The Gothic Tradition Illuminated on Screen

2.Grief Encounters: Ghost Narratives

3.Folk in Hell: Rurality in Transition

4.Vampire Gothic as Post-Exotic Gloom

5.Shock and Awe: Cosmic Horror as Existential Crisis

6.De-composmolitanism: Zombie Horror as Apocalypse

Coda

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Keith would like to thank Kelly for her invaluable love and support. He would also like to thank Alan Clarke for his humour, expertise and advice and Matt Selway for his keen eye and useful assistance.

Wayne would like to thank the wonderful team at the British Library in Boston Spa for their unstinting help. He would also like to thank Graeme Callister for his friendship and conversations, and, eternally, Kaitlin for her love and positive encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Classic, 24)

H. P. Lovecraft

Often located in the middle of the eighteenth century as a ‘transgression’ to the ‘light’ of Enlightenment ideas of reason and science, the Gothic has been dogged by what Fred Botting refers to as a ‘negative aesthetic’ (Gothic, 10). It seemed to represent a counterpoint to the seemingly predestined move to order underpinning the era, a lingering infection of Dark Age fever in this brave new world of man triumphing over nature and the divine. The chief setting of the pioneering literature, for instance, in Middle Ages Catholic Europe, offered a similar interstitial counterpoint; light versus dark, order versus disorder, nature versus supernature, reason versus superstition. The ‘atmosphere’ of the stories, which have influenced the horror film genre beyond any doubt, seemed to throw up a competing subterranean world, supposedly kicked into the past by the confident rationalism of the new age, which heralded an inevitable and secularized transubstantiation (God, then man as God) and which seemed to threaten that rational certainty. These Gothic texts, which have had such an overpowering as well as perpetual influence on horror cinema, in fact revealed ‘disturbances of sanity and security’, according to Botting (2).

Catherine Spooner offers a useful definition of the Gothic for our own purposes: ‘undead revenants, ancient curses, outmoded belief systems, hauntings, trauma—all are central to Gothic narrative’. But, she goes on: ‘perversely what comes back-what returns-is determined by the concerns of the present’ (184). The bulk of the completion of this work was written in 2020 during a national lockdown, implemented as a consequence of a global pandemic, Covid-19. This predicament forced the authors to reflect upon a number of those very uncertainties discussed above; the actual parameters of science in this, our own postmodern age, and the dire consequences of uncontrolled human activity, among other things. Thus, what started out as a statement on the condition of the horror film genre in the postmillennial era, became a deeper meditation not only upon the pervading influence of those literary forebears but also of the stubborn influence of the Gothic ‘spirit’ on modern horror. As Lucie Armitt states, ‘in the active pursuit of what most frightens us, we continually reshape our Gothic monsters to fit society’s changing fears’ (150). Yet it also elicited responses to the perpetual themes at work here; loneliness, isolation, faith in progress, and the realities of a world in chaos, inflected in these works of popular culture, although the traditional Gothic literary form also portrayed emotional violence and perverted obsession; feelings out of place in a new ‘rational’ world, a world on the edge of at least certain knowledge.

Ultimately, these texts reveal an interstitial world on the borders of certainty and knowledge, faith and progress. Clearly Gothic horror addresses two key impulses: the consequences of the pursuit of knowledge and the seeking of consolation. Horror can also provide answers to grief (The Babadook, 2014), guilt, (The Ritual, 2017), the nature of sin (Tumbbad, 2018). As H. P. Lovecraft has stated in his own essay on supernatural horror and the ‘weird’:

a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species. (Haunter, 521–2)

As such, horror can serve the same functions as religion and awe. Horror has consistently seen this tension between faith and progress, belief and scientific empiricism. From the Gothic, in which a recent past haunted the world, through ghost hauntings, in which a recently deceased member authors apparitions, to folk horror, which presented the collision of rival, but equally hubristic world views, and on to cosmic horror, whereby the world pre-dates our flimsy human appearance, all adhered, as Lovecraft would have defined it, to a sense of us being both lost in a world of chaos and to realize the insignificance of the human form. As he would have it, nature and the cosmos were indifferent to our screams and cries for help; God, then man as God, and now man as an insignificant vessel in his own environment.

This volume will look at contemporary Gothic cinema from a transnational perspective. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study will invoke its literary as well as filmic forebears, by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic; the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalization in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, region or culture. It was now considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, as well as postcolonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the ‘broader nexus of forces’ from a wider international perspective, while at the same time still engaging with concepts of nationalism, regionalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself (Kuhn and Westwell, 432). It also facilitated studies to focus on notions of hybridity where terms were not fixed but were constantly shifting and mobile. This transnational approach to horror cinema has even reached as far as the wilds of Siberia, in the Far East of the Russian republic of Sakha, where according to The Economist there is a burgeoning film industry (The Economist, 13 July 2019). Filmed in the local Yaku language, the Russian film director Stefan Burnashev filmed a sequel to the much respected Setteekh Sir (Cursed Land), made in 1996. Other films have been hugely influenced by Yakut folklore and nature. A Lovecraftian tale, it gives an account of an unaccounted-for germ which comes to life after an area of permafrost thaws.

Ezra and Rowden state that transnational cinema ‘comprises both globalisation […] and the counter hegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and third world countries’ (1). In this context, genre fiction serves a function as a part of a reverse discourse to established narrative and aesthetic codes and conventions. That is not to suggest though, that the Hollywood mainstream has acted as an arbiter of taste and limits with regards to the horror genre. In fact, the opposite is often the case. Take for instance, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a Hollywood production that, through hybridity, both embraces and deconstructs genre traditions. As Krutnick reminds us, ‘genres serve as frameworks for mediating repetition and difference’ (11) and this oscillation between the established discourse of genre and the counter discoursal responses continues to regenerate in the genres of Gothic and horror in the twenty-first century, invigorated by a heightened transnational ecology due to the increased effects of globalization in real world and artistic contexts. This is by no means, however, a phenomenon of the twenty-first century; in fact, it is woven into the troublesome and polluted DNA of the genre itself. As Raphael and Saddique ascertain, ‘[f]‌rom its origins, what would eventually come to be called the horror genre has been deeply transnational, both in contexts of production and reception […] as the first works of horror stitch together the flesh of various national and generic texts’ (2). Such stitchings will be explored in the first chapter of this book and this ongoing mutation and exchange will hopefully be further illuminated as this study progresses.

Transnational horror cinema was invigorated by Hispanic film successes, extreme Asian cinema and re-make culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We are concerned with a more recent period and a wider remit. As will be discussed, international and transnational exchange is part of the long lineage of Gothic and horror film. As a discipline and approach, then, transnational cinema studies have thrived in the twenty-first century, growing from postcolonial studies, studies in world and international cinema, including such areas as ‘third cinema’; the discipline was further galvanized by the launch of Transnational Cinemas (Intellect) in 2010. The term, scope and methodologies are rightly debated considering the notion of shifting territories at the heart of this. In horror film studies, there has been an increasingly broad understanding of the first decade of the twenty-first century as a locus for discussion. This stems from two elements: the first is the mode of production (including transmedia trends) as well as distribution and audience studies, and the second is content and is stylistically related with particular reference to the philosophies, wider contextual factors and their relation to ongoing genre and artistic concerns of which this book hopes to add to, with regards to post-2005 transnational Gothic and horror on screen.

Guillermo del Toro is perhaps the most recognizably transnational film director working today. As a filmmaker in exile from Mexico and as a part of the wave of Hispanic creatives, he has genuinely made an impact on global visual culture. In addition, he is an artist who explores key themes associated with transnationalism such as that defined by Hamid Naficy as the melancholia of loss, desire, longing and nostalgia (Accented Cinema, 128). In the work of del Toro, such themes are woven into Gothic and horror fantasies. The magnetic allure of del Toro’s sensibility is enhanced by the Gothic and horror genre, drawing upon a rich heritage of the canon itself, which is made more opulent by the transnational synthesis of its components and alchemic fusions. Providing a highly useful case study in order to locate the ongoing ecosystem of transnational horror in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Jessica Balanzategui focuses on del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001) as a film which engages in a cultural dialogue which typifies a trend. The ghost of Santi in the film echoes images of ghost children in, for instance, Ringu (1998) (blended with iconic images of ghost figures in American horror cinema), and the popularity of both these films boosts other intertextual tropes which lead to a transnational hub of supernatural horrors (Australia’s Lake Mungo (2008) and the Spanish-British-Bulgarian collaboration The Abandoned (Nacho Cerdà, 2006). As Balanzategui states that

the cycle of transnational horror films that emerged in the early years of the new millennium illustrates the extent to which American, Japanese, and Spanish supernatural horror films engage with one another through the traumatic temporal contortions wrought by their uncanny child figures. (222)

These three national bases and their engagement with other international creative territories can be considered in relation to other genre traditions during this period such as the torture porn narrative, survival horror, found footage cinema, and the ongoing genre hybridity such as the science-fiction horror The Host (2006), the horror comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004) and the horror romance Thirst (2009).

Certain filmmakers, like del Toro, typify transnational horror cinema in terms of thematic relevance and industrial influence, and he emerges as a prominent creative voice in cinema and the wider culture by drawing upon a vast catalogue of influences, blending these in such a way that is exciting to audiences in terms of cultural flow in the digital age and engaging with others, as a highly active producer and collaborator as well as an auteur. McDonald and Clark contend that as well as being an artist in his own right, del Toro is part of a transnational creative and productive model which has played a major role in the ways in which cinema is engaging with global audiences. As they state, del Toro’s emergence and success

define a mode of production across film cultures from the ‘art house’ Cronos to Pan’s Labyrinth, through Hollywood action adventure films in Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army and through the blockbuster spectacle in Pacific Rim. In addition, as a Hispanic film-maker, del Toro can be seen as part of a generation of film-makers who have raised the film-making profile of their geopolitical region and gained an international audience. Others, such as Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, have mobilized as Mexican artists, developing a platform for their (and other’s) work. (61)

The critical success of The Shape of Water (2017) and other transnational productions have paved the way for the further achievement of films such as Parasite (2019), which is itself a factor in the ongoing global celebration of South Korean cinema of where Gothic and horror narratives play a part.

It is worth noting that del Toro is also not only a genre polymath but also an artist and producer embracing and promoting transmedia storytelling. Working in animation in cinema and television, in comic books and their adaptations and in video-game forms, del Toro and many others are mining the vast potential and popularity of convergent media and the cultural globalization that digital media forms can enhance. Of course, this involves engagement with web platforms such as Netflix as part of the ongoing sea change that cinema is currently experiencing, a change that has both utopian potential and dystopian possibilities with regards to the cinematic world and that has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its effect on collective on-site art appreciation. Therefore, we are concerned about, with other transgressions, the emergence of interstitial space and imaginative locations. As with other evolving but also resilient genres, horror embraces a multitude of conventions, characteristics, narratives and styles. The codifying of genres as well as subgenres, either for marketing purposes, audiences or academic pursuit, and the hybridization of horror across a range of forms (novels, films, theatre, etc.), all makes it enormously difficult to give it appropriate coherence. Indeed, one look at Brigid Cherry’s attempts to offer subcategorizations, subgenres, cycles, hybrids, styles (e.g. the Universal Studios style in the 1930s) makes it clear that one can only identify a specific path and follow that (3–4). Carroll focuses on the stirring appeal of the horror genre and ‘the emotion that such works are designed to elicit from the audience’ (Philosophy, 53). As such, a ‘genre-specific inventory of distinctive features’ is deemed necessary (Hantke, vii), alongside a transnational approach, as a theoretical framework. These explorations of generic codes and conventions (and their deviations) will be illustrated through the close textual analysis of selected case studies.

Chapter 1

THE GOTHIC TRADITION ILLUMINATED ON SCREEN

According to Glennis Byron, in her account of the global Gothic, transnational Gothic and regional Gothic, all are often portrayed as evolving from Anglo-European influences as a kind of ‘colonial imposition’ which are re-appropriated and then develop local forms for mutual but separate origins (370). Indeed, the Gothic literary style has increasingly been identified with English national identity. Further, a form of Gothic tourism takes place. In his account of the ‘imperial Gothic’, Patrick Brantlinger establishes a number of key processes the protagonists undergo in their contact with the wilderness, namely the sense of the so-called Englishman, so typical in a range of stories by writers such as M. R. James and others, where the protagonists are portrayed as ‘losing their physical and mental and moral integrity’, in other words, ‘the terror of going native’ (64). Secondly, there is the fear of invasion and of contamination; a reverse colonialism (65). As Punter asks then, ‘has Gothic become, in the contemporary marketplace, a means of expression for local ghosts, or a means of imposition of western conceptions which have no idea of […] the enduring cultures and communal power of the ancestors?’ (New, 2–3).

Darryl Jones is correct to point out that ‘the development of the Gothic and modern horror coincides with the formation of a British national identity’, if we accept that a sense of nationalism as being ‘articulated through narrative, myth and symbol’ (Horror, 8). Secondly, that sense of Britishness was defined by Protestantism. Jones defines the Gothic as being complex in this sense with its anti-Catholic chauvinism depicted in the way Catholicism is portrayed, with its barbaric superstition and blood ritual. Similarly, Robert Miles argues that ‘to be British was to be Protestant, with both identities driving strength from deep wells of residual anti-Catholicism. The Catholic became the convenient other of British identity’ (15). Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) or the depiction of Spaniards in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), or even Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, published in 1864 and filmed in 1947 (dir. Charles Frank) and involving a close up which would cinematically ‘demonise’ the French governess, Madame de la Rougierre. Thus, to return to Jones, who contends, ‘the Gothic novel allowed a British audience conversely to identify as Protestant, rational, ordered, stable and modern’ (9). Again, Miles has posited that ‘Britain’s identity was of a modern, progressive nation transforming itself, and the world, through commerce and science’, and this was a transformation ‘guided by the advanced condition of its constitution and government’, which stood ‘in sharp contrast’ to Europe, which is often portrayed in Gothic tales as ‘despotic, backward, feudal’, and of course, Catholic (15).

I

In The Call of Cthulhu (1928), H. P. Lovecraft wrote, ‘the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents’. He goes on:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Classic, 24)

This helps establish the appeal of horror stories, either of the literary or cinematic form. Horror narratives loiter in the realm between faith and disbelief, both of a spiritual and scientific kind. Briggs is also correct to assert that

almost from the start, scientific interests in primitive beliefs, whether remote in time or in space, offered a convenient mixture […] in which the old mysterious certainties could be played off against rational speculation and explanation, and the inadequacy or superficiality of the latter could be shown up. (99)

One of the key features of Gothic and horror cinema is an intellectual violence that results in a rational entropy which is a rich source of entertainment. Collision is exciting, and that collision results in change or transformation, and this is one of the key factors which feeds into the appeal of horror cinema. It is the audio-visual quality of change, made furious, beautiful and poetic, which fuels creative minds and keeps horror on screen. In this and other ways, physical and mental journeys are intertwined. Noël Carroll encapsulates the conceptual reaching (or grasping) which horror provides;