But is it Gothic? – Adventure Time

But Is it Gothic? – Adventure TimeMarceline the Vampire Queen, Adventure Time opening sequenceVampires? Check. Creepy landscapes? Check. Radioactive fallout resulting in mutations of sentient lollipops – come again? No I didn’t spill magic-mushroom flavour ice cream all over my handbook to Gothic literature, I’m just very excited to be writing a piece on one … Continue reading But is it Gothic? – Adventure Time →

Forshadowings: Performance Gothic in ‘Over the Garden Wall’ (Featuring ‘Penny Dreadful’ and ‘American Horror Story’)

In our next session, Sheffield Gothic is continuing with this semester’s theme of ‘performance Gothic’. This week, we turn to the silver screen: Penny Dreadful, American Horror Story and Over the Garden Wall. Frequent visitors to this blog will perhaps recall that I’ve gushed about Over the Garden Wall, Patrick McHale’s 10 part 2014 animation … Continue reading Forshadowings: Performance Gothic in ‘Over the Garden Wall’ (Featuring ‘Penny Dreadful’ and ‘American Horror Story’) →

Forshadowings: Religious Gothic and ‘The Monk’ by Matthew Lewis

Last week, Sheffield Gothic had its first meeting of the new semester, screening the 1947 film Black Narcissus, based on Rumer Godden's 1939 novel of the same name. It was a brilliant film about madness and desire in an isolated convent full of troubled nuns. Afterwards we discussed surveillance within convent life and how the … Continue reading Forshadowings: Religious Gothic and ‘The Monk’ by Matthew Lewis →

Forshadowings: ‘No Place for a Nunnery’: the Powell and Pressburger’s Sublime "Black Narcissus"

On asking my tutorial group ‘what makes Wuthering Heights a Gothic novel’, I rediscovered just how much the popular conception of the Gothic is rooted in aesthetics. Ghosts were mentioned, someone touched on morality – but the dead giveaway, the ultimate indicator of Gothicness, was the setting. As a Gothic scholar, and one who is … Continue reading Forshadowings: ‘No Place for a Nunnery’: the Powell and Pressburger’s Sublime "Black Narcissus" →

Foreshadowings: Terror and Technology in the Digital Age

Ahead of our next GRG meeting, I wanted to explore the ways in which technology – specifically, the internet – has changed how horror stories are disseminated and received. We will be looking primarily at the phenomenon known as Creepypasta: popular horror microfiction (often centred on allegedly ‘haunted’ images, videos, games or other media) that … Continue reading Foreshadowings: Terror and Technology in the Digital Age →

Foreshadowings: Folklore, Fairy-tales and the Gothic

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, folklore and fairy-tale has influenced the Gothic across decades and in its many forms. With its origins in oral tradition, folklore is generally considered the generational passing down of narratives bound in a particular culture’s beliefs and customs. Associations with … Continue reading Foreshadowings: Folklore, Fairy-tales and the Gothic →