Central to this horror is the fear of foreign otherness and monstrous invasion. He discusses at length the degree to which the Second World War, the Cold War, and the space race gave rise to particular kinds of horror in the 1940s and 1950s. One of these anxieties, taken up by Stephen King is his nonfictional ‘Danse Macabre’ (1982), is political and historical. We can best address the question of audience need by placing the contemporary Gothic within a number of current anxieties - the ones we need it both to arouse and assuage. Like the question of origin I addressed above, the basis of need and desire is not only a theme in Gothic narratives but a theoretical quandary for the spectators and readers who consume those narratives. I do not necessarily take the same things from a Gothic narrative as do the others who have bought the book or the theatre ticket. I do not necessarily need the same things you do.
The Gothic has always been a barometer of the anxieties plaguing a certain culture at a particular moment in history, but what is the relationship between these general social trends and particular individual psyche? When the children of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984) conjure Freddy Kruger in their dreams, are they expressing a personal nightmare about what lies beneath their consciousnesses, a social nightmare about how America treats its dispossessed, or some amorphous combination of the two? For that matter, do we need to see each child’s Freddy Kruger as the same Freddy Kruger? The “we” who needs the Gothic is by no means a unified, homogeneous group. Certainly its popularity cannot be disputed - films like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968), ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) take home Oscars, and Stephen King habitually tops the best-seller lists - but why are we driven to consume these fictions? Is this craving something structural or social? Does it stem from our desire to see the political tyrant bested or the weak, deformed, or unfortunate (as in Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ ) scapegoated in a ritual purgation of blood? Nor is the idea of origin the only problem here, for there is also the problem embedded in my title: why we need the contemporary Gothic. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations. How, then, might we define a contemporary Gothic? For to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. Peter Straub’s ‘Julia’ (1975), Doris Lessing’s ‘The Fifth Child’ (1988), and John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ (film version: ‘The Village of the Damned’ ) all feed off ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) by Henry James, itself arguably a revision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Emile’ (1762), a treatise on the education of two children at a country house.Īnd as many contributors to this volume demonstrate, the central concerns of the classical Gothic are not that different from those of the contemporary Gothic: the dynamics of family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology. And contemporary Gothic does not break with this tradition: Stephen King’s ‘IT’ (1987) and Anne Rice’s vampire narratives (begun in the 1970s) weave in and out of the distant past in order to comment on the state of contemporary American culture, while other narratives foreground their reliance on prior, historically distant narratives. However, the title proposes more questions than it answers.įirst, what exactly counts as “the contemporary Gothic”? Since its inception in 1764, with Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, the Gothic has always played with chronology, looking back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed, mourning a chivalry that belonged more to the fairy tale than reality. My title suggests a rather straightforward enterprise: I want to account for the enormous popularity of the Gothic - both novels and films - since the Second World War.
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