It is often said that we live in Gothic times. In fact, I think that most generations feel this way as the Gothic embodies uncertainty, anxiety and change, emotions and experiences that so often bubble up around us individually and as a society. These unsettling emotions require expression and the Gothic is a perfect outlet. These past few months I truly have felt that I live in Gothic times…or at least I have been wallowing in the excess of the Gothic, exploring its many, often contradictory, meanings; revisiting its history; pondering its future; and considering how as a genre it speaks to readers and audiences in the past and present. The centrepiece of this study of the Gothic has been the British Film Institute’s four month season of Gothic screenings and events at the BFI Southbank (October 2013-January 2014) – although this was preceded by the TV Fangdom conference at Northampton University in June, the Gothic Technologies/Gothic Techniques conference at the University of Surrey in August, and the Contemporary Gothic seminar series at Manchester Metropolitan University in October. I truly have been ensconced in a liminal gothic world.
The BFI season has of course been largely focused upon Gothic cinema (with forays into literature and fashion), programming a complex and dynamic series of screenings that look back at the history of the genre on screen, while also questioning the nature and understanding of the gothic across media, and within film itself. What does gothic cinema mean? How is it different from horror? Are zombies gothic or anti-gothic? Through a programme that included titles as historically and culturally diverse as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940) and Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke 2008), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine 1919) and An American Werewolf in London (John Landis 1982), Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981), the season’s curators and organisers deliberately set about questioning the very nature of Gothic for cinema as well as the distinctions between high and low art that come hand in hand with the genre. In the panel discussion, Welcome to the Darkside, that opened the season, Sir Christopher Frayling pointed out that decades earlier he had struggled to get the National Film Theatre to programme a season of spaghetti westerns, and here the very same organisation was going to be screening Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1976) as well as hosting the maestro of Italian horror in an on-stage interview. The season put the debates about gothic and cinema at its very centre and the many people who engaged with the season were justly rewarded with exciting films and stimulating discussion.
For me, however, one of the highlights of the season was the strand of screenings devoted to television. In previous blogs by Lorna Jowett and I among others, we’ve discussed how our contemporary television screens seem to have been overwhelmed by horror and gothic programming (see Tis the Season, The Horror of Grief, Vampires on My Mind, Masters of Mise-en-scene,Top 5 New TV Drama of 2013, Horrible Histories) but these screenings at the BFI reminded me of the lush history of horror and gothic on TV. As someone who did not grow up in the UK (born and bred in Canada), I had not had much opportunity to engage with this history and knew much of this material by reputation alone. The season therefore offered the chance to explore these often discussed but rarely screened classics and also to have the rare opportunity of watching Gothic TV as a shared experience with an audience. In many ways this undermined what Helen Wheatley argues is what makes Gothic television so unsettling – watching these often domestic-set horror tales within our private domesticate setting, blurring the barrier between audience and programme. But as with all things, the loss of one kind of pleasure created space for new pleasures, most notably the shared frisson of the uncanny and the delightful glee in the performances of loved actors like Peter O’Toole and Patrick Troughton, offering their own distinct take on the gothic villain. These public screenings also offered the opportunity for the BFI to invite the producers and creators of many of these classic TV productions to discuss their work and to consider why and how British TV screens became home for the uncanny and the horrific.
For instance, a screening of the 1992 TV drama Ghostwatch – a fictional foray into the genre of TV paranormal investigation that foreshadowed reality TV series such as Most Haunted and Dead Famous — was followed by a panel discussion with writer Stephen Volk, director Lesley Manning, producers Ruth Baumgarten and Richard Broke, and cast members Sir Michael Parkinson and Gillian Bevan. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion focused upon the controversy surrounding the drama, as many audience members fell ‘victim’ to the drama’s conceit that it was a live broadcast of a ‘real’ paranormal investigation. When everything went horribly wrong, as they usually do in paranormal dramas, many called the BBC first in distress and later to complain that the BBC had betrayed their trust and that the drama was too frightening for TV (a point that itself raises very interesting questions about the purpose and nature of the Gothic on television). The discussion also explored the issues of re-imaging the ghost tale through the televisual conventions of documentary and reality TV, abandoning dramatic music scores and chiaroscuro for talking heads and night vision photography, something we take for granted in a world where horror is dominated by the found footage subgenre but which was cutting edge in 1992. [For more information on the making of this programme and its fascinating aftermath, see the excellent documentary Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains (Rich Lawden 2012)].
The creators also described the hesitancy on the part of the BBC to have the programme look, at times, messy and improvised rather than carefully composed. The style of Ghostwatch, like Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape ([Peter Sasdy 1972] also screened in the season) before it, resisted the urge (and pressure) to make the horror tale look like all of the versions that have come before it and reinvented the gothic as a modern form, preoccupied by contemporary technologies and finding the horror in the everyday, the overly familiar and in television itself.
Another key event was Shades of Darkness: The Gothic Anthology Series Panel discussion featuring TV scholar Helen Wheatley, actor and comedian Reece Shearsmith and Ghost Stories for Christmas director Lawrence Gordon Clark. This event took as its subject a distinctly televisual form of horror, which is the anthology series – a format that has fallen out of favour in recent years where serial narrative has taken root but which has, over time, delivered some of the very best of TV horror both in the UK and the US (see Lorna Jowett’s and my discussion of anthology horror in TV Horror). This panel discussed the transgressive appeal of the anthology format, tending to adopt diverse approaches to horror – the style of Mystery and Imagination (ITV 1966-1970) diverging substantially from Hammer House of Horror (ITV 1980) — but all pushing the boundaries of acceptability of television in terms of content and form. For instance, much discussion was had about the gory and disturbing imagery of the Hammer episodes making me want to reach for the box set and revisit this series. Some debate was had about whether the act of viewing these series in the home made the audience feel comforted and therefore more at ease with the subject matter (Gordon Clark’s view) or whether watching them in the seeming safety of the home made them all of the more frightening, undermining our perceived home security (Wheatley’s view); all very important questions that we will continue to debate. Perceptively Shearsmith emphasised that what made these series so unsettling was that they usually had dark and disturbing conclusions. No neat endings in which the hero rescues the Gothic maiden and everyone lives happily ever after but rather frightening conclusions in which evil reigns or the dead claim yet another victim. This view was supported by the accompanying screening of ‘Feet Foremost’ an episode of the Granada series Shades of Darkness (1983-1986), which presented a modern take on the ‘wronged woman’ ghost story, in which the ghost possesses anyone who unsuspectingly carries her across the threshold of a 16th century manor house. Of note in this particular episode was a fascinating class distinction (with a touch of country vs town) in which the knowing servants stay silent while the wealthy owners who have recently purchased and refurbished the house despite warnings of its ghostly history suffer at the hands of the spectre. The episode’s cyclical structure, beginning where it ended, reminds the audience that once entering the gothic world of ghosts and spectres, there is no escaping its machinations.
The absolute highlight of the season for me was the screening of the three part serial adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu’s novel Uncle Silas, renamed The Dark Angel (BBC 1989) starring Peter O’Toole as the unscrupulous, near vampiric titular villain. It is a classic gothic tale of inheritance, family shame, innocence, debauchery, civility met by barbarism, but presented in a stunningly – near experimental – visual style evoking the dreams and nightmares of the gothic. Shot by cinematographer Paul Wheeler, the series utilizes wide angle lenses, reflections, dissolves and superimpositions to create a dream-like landscape where the narrative’s protagonist Maud is never quite certain what is reality or fantasy (and neither is the audience). The pleasure of the series’ visual style was however topped by stunning performances of O’Toole as Uncle Silas and Jane Lapotaire as the heroine’s gothic and grotesque governess (seriously only in Gothic fiction would anyone think that this person was a suitable companion for their daughter).
While Lapotaire’s performance is exaggerated to the point of Grand Guignol – mugging and dancing her way through the story, alternating between respectable (if unbelievable) authority and drunken cruelty – O’Toole’s is, comparatively, subtly insidious. Luring (and leering) his niece into his web with displays of family affection (that occasionally border on the incestuous with kisses that go on a little too long) and vulnerable ill health, O’Toole offers a fresh take on the gothic villain – not dark and brooding (no foreign ‘other’ here) but blond haired and beautiful. The picture of a seducer, his first appearance at the beginning of the second episode (yes they make you wait an entire hour before he appears outside of the youthful portrait that his niece so admires) has him in bed, drinking wine laced with laudanum – his medicine—as his niece is gently welcomed to his home and invited to indulge in the freedoms his household celebrates as opposed to the restrained isolation of her father’s home. O’Toole delivers a comic and terrifying performance, deliberately playing upon his reputation as a libertine but drawing out from his charismatic image, the potential for violence and abuse.
This series, among many others in the season, presented new ways of thinking of classic gothic texts, re-imagining the literary as the televisual. The season at the BFI also called attention to the great affection that so many have for the British tradition of Gothic horror on TV, an affection that is contributing to the increasing presence of the gothic on our TV screens. Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of M.R. James The Tractate Middoth (previewed in the season and broadcast on the BBC at Christmas) alongside his documentary about James, is in many ways a love letter to the tradition of the Ghost Story at Christmas, while Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s upcoming gothic/comedy anthology series Inside No. 9 (previewed at the BFI and scheduled to begin its broadcast on BBC2 on the 5th February) is a return to the classic gothic anthology series with their own particular macabre spin on the genre. What this season said to me as I sat in the NFT, watching films/TV series, listening to scholars and producers speak, trying to unpack the nature of the gothic across a wide range of media, is that in addition to an exciting and genre-defining history in cinema, the gothic has an equally fascinating and distinct history on television, encompassing a wide variety of interpretations and understandings with the genre and pushing the boundaries of television and the gothic in equal measure. We do indeed live in Gothic times and long may they continue.
Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007) and Angel: TV Milestone (2009), and co-author, with Lorna Jowett, of TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013). She is also the editor of The Cult TV Book (2010) and General Editor of the Investigating Cult TV series at I.B. Tauris.
