Gothic effigy: A guide to dark visibilities 9781526101235

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JONES

GOTHIC EFF I GY

DAVID ANNWN JONES

A GUIDE TO DARK VISIBILITIES

David Annwn Jones is Lecturer in English at the Open University

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Providing original insights for readers, most of the interviews with contemporary Gothic artists included are unique to this volume. The approach taken is pluralistic and scholarly, with the work of many influential critics of the Gothic brought to bear on the media and materials. This guide is a groundbreaking survey which serves as an invaluable reference and research book. In its wide range and closely detailed descriptions, it will be attractive for students, academics, collectors, fans of popular Gothic culture and general readers.

G O T H I C E F F I GY

Goth visual cultures are discussed from their inception in the early 1980s to the present day. Current popular areas such as the development of Gothic films are considered, as are the projections of their precursors, the monstrous and macabre images of magic lantern shows. The discussion also draws attention to dark creations such as Gothic dolls, music album covers, photography, costume and fashion, jewellery, posters, statuary and collage which, though popular, have often been marginalised and omitted from the mainstream of Gothic Studies. These are considered in relation to historical and literary contexts. New gaming media are covered, as are dance and theatre, as well as the rise of Gothic comic strips and graphic novels.

A GUIDE TO DARK VISIBILITIES

Gothic effigy brings together for the first time the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic, some of which have never received serious study before. This guide is the most comprehensive work in its field, a study aid that makes links between a considerable array of Gothic visual works and artefacts, from the work of Salvator Rosa and the first illustrations of Gothic Blue books to the latest Gothic painters and graphic artists.

GO T H IC E FFIGY A GUIDE TO DARK VISIBILITIES

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gothic effigy

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Gothic effigy

A guide to dark visibilities

David Annwn Jones

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © David Annwn Jones 2018 The right of David Annwn Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 0122 8  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For Lesley, Gwyn, Gareth, Margaret and all my family, I. M. Joyce and Bryn who gave ‘nothing less than everything’

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There is, in fact, something peculiarly visual about the Gothic […] ‘The Gothic tantalizes us with fear, both as its subject and its effect; it does so, however, not primarily through characters or plots or even language, but through spectacle.’ William Patrick Day cited in Misha Kavka (2002) Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Exodus, 20:4

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

x xiv 1

Chapter 1 1.1 Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture 1.2 Graveyards, crypts and mausolea 1.3 Ruins 1.4 Follies and gardens 1.5 Décor, domestic furniture and uncanny household items 1.6 Theatre and stage 1.7 Masquerade, Halloween and Gothic as pageant and immersive spectacle 1.8 Dance and mime

16 16 20 23 26 30 35

Chapter 2 2.1 Early painting to the eighteenth century 2.2 Painting: Goya to Giger and after 2.3 Engravings: icons of ancestral fear 2.4 The macabre graphic art of the blue books and penny dreadfuls 2.5 Revivified and spectral portraits: Otranto’s yawning picture to M. R. James’s ‘The Mezzotint’ 2.6 Uncanny signs and posters

47 47 50 54 58

38 42

62 65

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viii

Contents

Chapter 3 3.1 Sculptors and statuary 3.2 Wax simulacra 3.3 Dolls, effigies, mommets and poppets  3.4 Moving statues and automata 3.5 Tableaux vivants and poses plastiques 3.6 Cabinets of curiosity  3.7 Postmodern Gothic sculptures and figurines  3.8 Taxidermy 

70 70 73 78 82 86 89 92 96

Chapter 4 100 4.1 Ghost machines: the Satanic Eidophusikon and peepshows  100 4.2 Phantasmagoria and magic lanterns: E.-G. Robertson’s lantern-of-fear103 4.3 Stereoscope Diableries 107 4.4 ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ and the domestic lantern horror show 111 4.5 Eerie sight machines, zoetropes and the whirling witches of Plateau’s Phenakistoscope 114 4.6 Gothic Kinetoscopes to early American horror film 118 4.7 Gothic films, from silents to electronic movie making 121 4.8 Gothic TV 126 Chapter 5 5.1 Gothic comics, graphic novels and icons 5.2 Silhouettes, ombres chinoises and shadowgraphs  5.3 Damnable lithographs: Louis Boulanger’s Satanic La Ronde de Sabbat and the dark barbarism of the ‘lapidary art’ 5.4 Dressed, adorned and altered prints and books  5.5 Leporellos, moving books and monstrous concertina texts 5.6 Gothic calendars

130 130 135

Chapter 6 6.1 The dark hold of Daguerreotypes and early photography  6.2 Mourning and spirit photographs  6.3 Gothic collage, photocollage and shadow boxes 6.4 Haunts, great houses, cadavers and ossuaries: the photography of Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris  6.5 Modern photography

155 155 158 162

141 144 148 151

166 171

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Contents

ix

Chapter 7 7.1 Gothic scripts, fonts, ciphers and calligraphy  7.2 A dark chaos of marbled papers  7.3 Gothic labelling, packaging and ads 7.4 Graffiti, curses, sigils and heraldry 7.5 Tapestries and embroidery  7.6 Book covers and magazine covers  7.7 Record and CD cover art 

178 178 181 185 189 193 197 201

Chapter 8 8.1 Gothic costume, ancient and modern  8.2 Gothic jewellery  8.3 ‘Gothic toys through Gothic glass’ 8.4 Masks, weapons and athames 8.5 Playing cards and the Tarot

205 205 209 213 218 221

Chapter 9 9.1 New media: the art of Gothic gaming and horror apps 9.2 Ghost trains 9.3 Horror environments and itineraries, escape rooms, Halloween hayrides and tourist attractions  9.4 Gothic installations  9.5 Performance art, body art, tattoos and facepaint

226 226 230

References Index

246 256

234 237 241

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Illustrations

11 Charles Alexander Moffat, Sexual Blasphemy 1, 2005 (© Charles Alexander Moffat) 14 12 Stainborough Castle (photo © David Annwn Jones 2015) 18 13 Gothic shelter at Painswick Rococo Gardens (photo © David Annwn Jones 2014) 29 14 Senora Lucia Zarate and Gothic Revival chair, c. 1884 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 31 15 Mansfield beer Vampire ashtray (collection of David Annwn Jones)33 16 Gothic cake with webs and spiders motifs (© Abby Betts 2016) 34 17 Zebb Clench, painting from The Masque of the Red Death sequence (© Zebb Clench 2015) 41 18 Vampire Ball, The Bram Stoker International Film Festival (photo © David Annwn Jones 2016) 42 19 Scorpius Dance Theatre presents Lisa Starry’s A Vampire Tale (photo © Rose Torres) 45 10 Charles Alexander Moffat, Succubus in Corset, 2001 (© Charles Alexander Moffat) 53 11 ‘December’ from John Leighton’s The Life of Man, 1866 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 57 12 Henry Anelay, ‘He Dashed through the Funeral Train’, illustration from G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf, 1884 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 61 13 E.-G. Robertson, engraved poster for Phantasmagoria, 1799 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 65

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List of Illustrations

xi

14 Poster for the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, 2015 (© Michael McCarthy) 68 15 Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Soul in Hell, c. 1700 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 74 16 Amy Gregory, Brontë, 2015 (© Amy Gregory) 77 17 Jo Hodgkins, ‘Mina’, a Foojoo Doll, 2015 (© Jo Hodgkins, photo © David Annwn Jones 2015) 81 18 The ‘demon cyclist’ living statue (photo © David Annwn Jones 2016) 83 19 John C. Browne, ‘A Children’s Play’ (‘Bluebeard’s Wives’), c. 1866 (courtesy of the George Eastman Museum) 88 20 Stone gargoyle ornament (photo © David Annwn Jones 2016) 94 21 Sam Carless, bat skeleton and Dracula text, 2016 (© Sam Carless, Careless-Creations) 99 22 ‘The Bleeding Bride’, magic lantern slipping slide, c. 1840 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 105 23 ‘The Bleeding Bride’, magic lantern slipping slide, c. 1840 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 106 24 One side of ‘The Haunted Lovers’ stereoscope slide (collection of David Annwn Jones) 109 25 ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ show illusion (collection of David Annwn Jones) 112 26 Mat Collishaw’s ‘Seria Ludo’ zoetrope, 2015 (© Kippa Matthews and Mat Collishaw, image courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern)116 27 F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922 (public domain) 123 28 Metal sign of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein and the Monster from 125 Hell, 1974 (© Robin Milsted of Original Metal Signs 2012) 29 Joseph Franz von Götz’s Lenardo and Blandine, 1783 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 131 30 Herman Inclusus (Stuart Kolakovic), ‘Lifting of the Shroud’ icon, 2015 (© Stuart Kolakovic) 135 31 Charles Burns, ‘A Pair of Modern Silhouettes of Kevin and Kerryanne Bates’, 2015 (© Charles Burns and K. & K. Bates) 137 32 Trish Shaw, ‘Dancing Skeletons’, paper cut, 2015 (© Trish Shaw) 140 33 David Annwn Jones, ‘Fantasy on Boulanger’s Ronde’, 2011 (© David Annwn Jones) 143 34 Dracula decoupage (collection of David Annwn Jones) 147

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xii

List of Illustrations

35 Hippolyte Bayard, ‘Self Portrait as a Drowned Man’, 1840 (public domain) 159 36 Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier, From the Madame B Album, 1870s (photo © Art Institute of Chicago) 163 37 Alexander Korzer-Robinson, ‘Danse Macabre’, 2015 (© Alexander Korzer-Robinson)  165 38 Sir Simon Marsden, ‘Largoët Fortress’, 2005 (© Caroline Marsden, Simon Marsden Trust) 168 39 Michele Selway and Alex Mannion-Jones, ‘Tin Type Trailer’, wet plate collodion, 2015 (© Michele Selway and Alex Mannion-Jones)174 40 Miranda Jones, ‘selfie’, 2015 (© Miranda Jones) 175 41 Rik Garrett, photograph from Earth Magic, 2013 (© Rik Garrett)176 42 Katie Eleanor Morrison, ‘Jeanne’, 2015 (© Katie Eleanor Morrison)177 43 Thomas Ingmire, Mary Shelley’s Elisions, 2015 (© Thomas Ingmire, photo © David Annwn Jones)  181 44 Marbling from Bishop Percy, after 1765 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 182 45 Advertisement for Lux, The Illustrated London News, 1905 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 187 46 Von Oesterling’s family coat-of-arms (collection of David Annwn Jones) 192 47 Anne Jackson, ‘The Great European Witch Hunt: The Word Witch in Ten Languages’, knotted tapestry, 2014 (© Anne Jackson) 197 48 Gerard Gaubert, cover of Udolpho: The Magazine of the Gothic Society, spring 1996 (© Gerard Gaubert, courtesy of Jennie Gray) 201 49 Bat costume, Fliegende Blätter, 1882 (public domain) 208 50 Modern Victorian Goths (photo © David Annwn Jones 2014) 209 51 Goth jewellery (photo © David Annwn Jones 2014) 213 52 Thaumatrope toy, c. 1870 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 215 53 Thaumatrope toy, c. 1870 (collection of David Annwn Jones) 216 54 Neal Harvey, ‘Rubber Gorilla’, masks montage, 2016 (© Neal Harvey) 219 55 Joseph Vargo, the Queen of Pentacles from ‘The Gothic Tarot’ (© Joseph Vargo, courtesy of Christine Filipak, Monolith Graphics) 224

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List of Illustrations

xiii

56 ‘Spook Gun’ poster, 1950s (courtesy of Freddie Bailey) 57 Façade of ghost train at Jahremaktfest, 2011 (photo © David Annwn Jones 2011) 58 ‘Hell in a Cell’ poster, 2015 (courtesy of Carl Busby, Darkest Hour Events Ltd) 59 Christine Kennedy, scripts from The White Lady’s Casket, 1996 (© Christine Kennedy) 60 Cross tattoo design, 2016 (© Free Tattoo Designs)

227 232 237 241 243

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Acknowledgements

A

publi c a t io n s u c h a s this accrues a pleasant and large debt of gratitude. I’d like particularly to thank Stuart Kolakovic (Hermann Inclusus) and Trish Shaw for their trust at an early stage of this project and their thoughtful answers to my questions about the Gothic nature of their work. Thanks are also due to Dr Catherine Spooner and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes for answering my ‘Gothic Imagination’ queries (so important here) and to Dr Dale Townshend for encouragement. More votes of thanks go to: Lisa Starry of Scorpius Dance for bringing Phoenix to Whitby, Neal Harvey of Rubber Gorilla, Mike, Michael and Judy McCarthy of the Bram Stoker Film Festival for their kindness and permissions, Miranda Jones, Anne Jackson, Mat Collishaw and Kyle Darroch of Mat’s studio for their kind permission and assistance, Jasmine Becket-Griffith, Freddie Bailey for his knowledge of arcades and sending posters of coin-operated machines, Aimee L. Marshal of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lauren Lean of the George Eastman Museum, the staff at V&A Images, Bob Gray of Shabby Cheek for a timely magic lantern table and his help and Andrew Lifford for all our discussions and for casting his discerning IT gaming eye over my work. I’d like to show my gratitude also to Rik Garrett, Christine Kennedy, Katie Eleanor Morrison, Abigail Betts for her Gothic cake, to Charles Burns for his permission, words and silhouette and Kevin and Kerryanne Bates for their friendship and cheerful permission to feature their Goth/Steampunk silhouette, Alexander Kortzer Smith, Zebb Clench for his skill as an alchemist, Charles Alexander Moffat, Jo Hodgkins of Foojoo Dolls, Jennie Gray for looking over covers of The Goth for me and granting her permission to use a cover from her collection, and to Robin Milsted of

Acknowledgements

xv

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‘Original Metal Signs’. I’d also like to express my thanks to Emma Brennan of MUP for her care and attentiveness, to Gemma Marren for her great skill and patience in copy-editing and to my two peer reviewers for their very enthusiastic reception of my proposal and helpful advice for this book. My main gratitude remains with Lesley, my wife, without whose love, support and patience, this book would not have been completed.

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Introduction

G

othi c a s w e kn o w it today is a term that is both hybrid and hybridising, simultaneously morphing to refer to an increasingly wider span of new cultural productions whilst also continuously expanding retrospectively to appropriate more materials from the past. Gothic as a genre has become more amorphous and difficult to contain. As Fred Botting has written: ‘The diffusion of Gothic forms and figures […] makes the definition of a homogenous generic category very difficult’ (Botting, 1996: 9). Though the first burgeoning of Gothic novels is easy to locate chronologically, the Gothic leaches acquisitively backwards and forwards in time whilst also crossing generic borders. For example, David R. Castillo writes of Julián de Medrano’s La Silva Curiosa / The Strange Wood, published in 1583, nearly two centuries before the first commonly accepted date for the appearance of Gothic writing: ‘The story has all ingredients of a full-blown gothic fantasy: Faustian motives, visions of damnation, voices from the dead, restless corpses […] as is so often the case in classic gothic fiction beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), this is ultimately a story about the crushing weight of the past’ (Castillo, 2010: 69). If critics have started to note the proleptic nature of early modern literature in terms of anticipating the Gothic, theoretical descriptions of the ‘domestic Gothic’ of the 1860s onwards and the late Victorian Gothic of the 1890s have helped give weight to Richard J. Hand’s confident instatement of German Expressionism within the area of Gothic influence (Hand, 2013: 271). The primacy of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and the subsequent influence of Expressionist films in general on 1930s Hollywood cinema have led to the instatement of Gothic Noir as a cinematic sub-genre.

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Gothic effigy

Writers of new Gothic fiction such as Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have also challenged and pushed back the boundaries of Gothic artistic and literary demarcation. Oates, for example, has linked the horrific ‘yet somehow natural-seeming monsters of Hieronymus Bosch’ with those evoked in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Oates, 1996), that champion of Gothic writing of ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ (Luckhurst, 2013). Mary Ellen Snodgrass has also associated Bosch, a painter of the late fifteenth century, with much later  Gothic architecture and art. Though one of course keeps specific and distinct historical contexts in mind, it is notable that critics and writers, in identifying traces of Bosch’s influence in Lovecraft’s monsters, are increasingly arranging and re-assigning such cultural artefacts due to properties perceived to be held in common. In writing of Gothic art, Hywel Livingstone writes that Dieric Bout’s painting ‘Hell’ (1470) ‘would not look out of place in the contemporary oeuvre of artists Jake and Dinos Chapman’ (Livingstone, 2014: 39). Simultaneously, a number of critics have started to identify an increasing variety of media and technologies from within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Gothic. Sophie Thomas has linked the diorama craze to Gothic writing; and Ian Haywood, de Loutherbourg’s mechanical show, the Eidophusikon, to Gothic drama. Jeffery Sconce linked the development of electricity with uncanny fictions of disembodiment. David Kunzle has shown that Rodolphe Töpfler’s comic strips were steeped in Gothic themes. Indeed, if blue books and penny dreadfuls with their lurid engravings were Gothic, why not those magic-lantern-of-fear shows contemporaneous with such publications, especially when these projections involved stock Gothic images such as the Bleeding Nun from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)? The first time Charles Nodier viewed E.-G. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria magic lantern show in the Capuchin convent in Paris in 1800, he linked them with the novels of Ann Radcliffe. The Citizen (formerly Marquis) de Sade, Hester Piozzi and Henry Lemoine also wrote about the Gothic nature of such shows. A few decades later, Sheridan Le Fanu and Robert Louis Stevenson readily associated their writing with these entertainments and the writer of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ([1906] 2005, first published in 1886) himself gave Phantasmagoria shows. Gothic resurgens Gothic has a way of wrongfooting the most sympathetic and perceptive of critics. In rounding off an essay in 1997, Anne Williams wrote: ‘And yet, I would speculate that the Gothic tradition may at last be coming to a close […]

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Introduction

3

Nowadays it seems that the popular vocabulary most likely to appeal to the serious artist is that of science fiction: not Montoni, one’s wicked uncle by marriage’ (Williams, 1997: 158). In March of that year the first series of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer began to appear on TV and, a few months later, Joyce Carol Oates’s My Heart Laid Bare (1998) with its study of the nefarious Licht clan was published. In 1999 the first title in Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket sequence, which Emily Drouillard called ‘the most gothic children’s book series’, was published, specifically focusing on the evil uncle Count Olaf and initiating ‘the domination of the current childrens’ and juvenile literature market by gothic tales’ (Drouillard, 2016). The main books of this latter series sold in excess of 60 million copies worldwide. The last 20 years have seen a remarkable resurgence in the popularity of the Gothic and, consequently, an unparalleled emphasis on Gothic visibilities. Films such as Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012), Gary Shore’s Dracula Untold (2014), Crimson Peak, A Gothic Romance (2015), I Frankenstein (2014) and Bernard Rose’s Victor Frankenstein (2015) as well as the TV series The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015), Báthory directed by David Eick and Joel Silver and John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (2014) have been screened. Gothic seasons at the British Film Institute, Alexander McQueen’s Gothic-inspired fashion shows, Andrew Graham Dixon’s BBC documentary, The Art of Gothic, and an exhibition at the British Library entitled ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’, have also supported this trend. Since the Gothic Association was founded in 1991, Gothic literary and interdisciplinary studies have flourished. Online and hard versions of journals such as The Irish Journal of Gothic and Studies in Gothic Fiction and Aeternum and websites like Dale Townsend’s ‘The Gothic Imagination’ hosted by Stirling University have led to wide dissemination of relevant scholarship. Gothic and Goth festivals continue to proliferate in Manchester, Liverpool, Leipzig, throughout the USA and at Leiria in Portugal. The Goths of Whitby draw upon Bram Stoker’s novel for their main inspiration and their annual visitation for the Goth weekend in October 2014 saw such a surge in numbers that major roads and the swing bridge in the centre of town had to be closed to traffic. Yet how readily can we associate this recent proliferation of festivals, exhibition catalogues, vampire balls, TV programmes, Gothic jewellery, ephemera such as posters and Frankenstein toys with ‘Gothic’ used to signify artistic and literary movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Do such artefacts and events in fact degrade, distort or blur Gothic traditions? In 2014, I asked Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies whether he interpreted events such as rock performances and dance previously marginalised from studies of Gothic literature as ongoing ironic

4

Gothic effigy

critiques of Gothic or as integral to the developing spectrum of Gothic studies. He replied:

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I do think that these types of events are integral […] to the development and health of Gothic Studies and, in fact, reflect trends in academia towards a form of the Gothic that is approachable, interdisciplinary and transmedial. I do think we are quickly moving away from a critical model where the Gothic needs to legitimise itself. (Aldana Reyes, 2014, personal correspondence)

I asked Dr Catherine Spooner the same question, and her answer revealed a keen sense of how these performances and different media are being used to challenge a sense of a clear-cut authoritative literary canon of Gothic texts and an academic practice devoted to the support of such a theoretical model: I do think that irony and spectacle are intrinsic to Gothic and I wonder whether rather than being a critique of Gothic as such, these performances and events enable us to make a critique of the way Gothic Studies has tended to prioritise the novel and construct a canon of Gothic texts. I feel that Gothic Studies is now at a critical juncture where it has become sufficiently legitimated within the academy that it is able to challenge these traditional critical formulae and offer a more fluid, multi-medial understanding of what Gothic is and does. (Spooner, 2014, personal correspondence)

‘A more fluid, multi-medial understanding’ This book serves as the first reference work of its type in its field: a critical guide, sourcebook and a study aid, which makes links between a very considerable array of visual works: paintings, films, computer gaming, TV programmes, statues, magic lantern shows, photographs, Daguerreotypes  and  other artefacts, and the literary Gothic. Its pages bring together for the first time many of the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic together with areas that have never received serious study or mention in this regard before. The paintings of Salvator Rosa, Gothic Revival architecture and the illustrations of Gothic blue books are considered as are the creations of the latest Gothic painters and graphic artists. For the first time, well-known subjects such as the development of Gothic in films and TV are discussed both in their own right but also in relation to the precursors of these devices: kinetoscopes, peepshows and zoetropes. I also draw attention to an array of dark artefacts such as Goth and Gothic jewellery, dolls, posters and food, which, though part of popular mass marketing, have often been marginalised and largely omitted from the mainstream of Gothic Studies publishing. Despite a number of books currently available that cover Gothic fashion, art and music, a wide range of

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Introduction

5

the current artistic practices including the revival in antique wet collodion photography, again magic lanterns, ‘dressed’ books, icons, toys, fonts, t­apestries and silhouette-work, for example, have largely been unnoticed and the inclusion of neglected areas such as Gothic collage and tableaux vivants also mark this book out. It is important not to underestimate the impact of Gothic on contemporary visual art. Christopher Grunenberg’s exhibition, Gothic, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1997, preceded the widely influential Sensation show of the transgressive art of young British artists in London, New York and Berlin. In 2001 Charles Alexander Moffat, a formative figure of the NeoGothic movement, issued ‘The Neo-Gothic Art Manifesto’ (‘We are social rebels, misfits, a society within a society’) and followed this with a revised version two years later (Moffat, 2001/2003). Martin Myrone’s historical exhibition ‘Gothic Nightmares’, which opened at the Tate in 2006, drew in references to modern TV and comic book characters. ‘Gothic Contemporary Art’ at the Fieldgate Gallery (2008) and the LMA ‘Gothic London’ exhibition (2014–15) were followed by the British Library’s ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’ (2015), which included etchings by Jake and Dinos Chapman, ‘Gothic Edinburgh’, a fine art exhibition (2015), the ‘Gothic North’ art exhibition in Manchester (2016) and ‘Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion and its Legacy’ (2016) at the Wadsworth Athenaum. Glennis Byron’s term ‘Globalgothic’ certainly seemed a fitting description for such a strong surge in international interest in this field. As this book makes clear, one of the strengths of visual Gothic is that at present it remains a popular art form, from graffiti to performance art, from altered books to cinema, and from skull bracelets to prestigious fashion shows held in international museums. It is possible that, partly because of its popularity and ubiquity, it has been largely unnoticed that recent forms of Gothic visual expression comprise vital links between the ‘Sensation’ art shows, the work of related conceptual artists of the 1990s such as the manikins of the Chapman Brothers and Mike Kelley on one hand and, on the other hand, the newer craft-based arts movements that have started to gain recognition since 2010. Some of the celebrated artists whose work is included in this volume have spoken and written of their close affiliation with Gothic at some length. These include fashion designer Alexander McQueen, installation artist Christine Kennedy, fantasy artist Joseph Vargo, painter Charles Alexander Moffat and others like Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas and Banks Violette who, as Gilda Williams writes: ‘knowingly root their work in Gothic sources’ (Williams, 2007: 13). These are acts of conscious association that are as purposive as Guillermo del Toro’s subtitling of his film Crimson Peak as A Gothic Romance.

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Gothic effigy

Installation artist Tony Oursler has acknowledged his family’s Gothic connections as performing magicians. In the compiling of this volume, younger artists like icon-painter Stuart Kolakovic, artist Zebb Clench, cut-out artist Trish Shaw and dance designer Lisa Starry have spoken to me enthusiastically of their close association with the Gothic. Taking in, therefore, the work of those artists and artisans who acknowledge their Gothic and Goth connections, those whose oeuvre might only contain elements of this shifting genre, and also the relevant creations of those who would deny such associations with Gothic and its multifarious appropriations, I have brought together a myriad of relevant ‘visibilities’ under a single roof. I also focus upon associated complex fields of visual thematics within the Gothic, considering these both in relation to an array of visualities and visualisations in foundational Gothic texts but also in relation to a wide range of different media that are currently still developing and are therefore still in flux. My approach is unapologetically pluralistic and transmedial, crossing boundaries both generically and temporally as can be seen, for example, in my links between Mike Mignola’s comic strip The Ghoul (2005), Thomas Warton’s The Pleasures of Melancholy (1745), and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743). Many artists whose work is covered in this book are already well known but, in keeping with Goth and Goth art as burgeoning fields of intermedial production, others are innovative artists, their work just starting to gain attention. Consequently some of the artist’s statements as recorded here are valuable records and unique to this collection. Visibilities and the Gothic unseen The multitudinous visual manifestations of the Gothic, the subjects of this book, seem, on one level at least, to be diametrically opposed, even to obviate that which is unseen and obscure, those qualities that are needed, according to Edmund Burke, ‘To make anything very terrible’ (Burke, 2008: 133). Burke supports his assertion by quoting the ‘judicious obscurity’ of John Milton’s description of Death in the second book of Paradise Lost (Burke, 2008, 134). Yet, despite the fact that obscurity, darkness and invisible forces are quintessential to the Gothic, there is ample evidence to argue that terror and fear have always existed in the interplay between disclosure and evasion, obscurity and startling clarity, recognition (including some degree of representation) and that which is optically indecipherable, the seen and the unseen. Rosemary Jackson writes that fantastical literature of different types ‘traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture, that which has been silenced, made invisible. Covered over and made absent’ (Jackson, 1981: 4). Yet Gothic also

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Introduction

7

involves revelatory forces, the surfacing of that which has been concealed and repressed. In Adeline’s frightening dream-visions in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), she is initially restricted in her viewpoint: ‘a turn in the passage, which was very long, prevented her seeing from what it proceeded’ (Radcliffe, [1791] 1998: 109). All that is invisible and, hence, the seemingly inexplicable or supernatural are fraught with menace: ‘she went up to the coffin, and while she gazed upon it, she heard a voice speak, as if from within, but saw nobody’ ([1791] 1998: 109). Yet the sudden close-up, the burst into closely focused visual acuity is all the more effective for Radcliffe’s previous use of evasion and disembodied dread: ‘his features were sunk in death’ and ‘While she looked at him, a stream of blood gushed from his side, and descending to the floor, the whole chamber was overflowed’ ([1791] 1998: 109–10). Whether through supernatural agency, oneiric suggestion or the surfacing of her own repressed suspicions over her father’s fate, or all these combined, Adeline has discovered that which has been previously hidden and, in Freudian terms, unheimlich. For Sigmund Freud, that information which is taboo, rationally rejected and hidden from sight is uncanny, provoking fear and disgust, because this subconsciously reminds us of our own Id, and repressed impulses. Anxiety over that which is unseen, the loss of sight and hence blindness is, Freud argues in discussing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), by way of subconscious transference, manifest as a terror of castration. At other times in Gothic writing, that which is vague and obscure is plainly less frightening than that which is foregrounded as visible monstrosity. For example, in Mary Shelley’s tale Transformation ([1830] 2004), it is precisely as the unfortunate protagonist Guido is able to view the approaching lineaments of ‘a misshapen dwarf, with squinting eyes, distorted features, and body deformed,’ that this vision becomes ‘a horror to behold’, not when the figure is distant and unseen or even, when coming closer, as a vague ‘something’ floating on ‘dark breakers’ (Shelley, 2004: 13). Darkness and shadow can of course also create suspense in Gothic film too yet, as Cristina Massaccesi writes in discussing F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire film: ‘The real horror in Nosferatu does not lie in what is unseen or what can only be glimpsed at through blurred vision but can be found instead in the possibility of seeing things in such a sharp and unforgiving manner’ (Massaccesi, 2015: 55). Indeed, to further adapt Milton’s words: there is a sense in which darkness itself can become a visible entity and Gothic literature often brings the unseen to light. Elizabeth McCarthy writes that Gothic horror ‘not only invites mutation, it thrives on it, and in particular, it thrives on making that mutable visible’ (McCarthy, 2014: 342). There is also a concomitant sense that, with Gothic horror, we are only ever seeing the tip of a hidden and monstrous

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p­ reponderance, a vast concealed reality, contingent upon and subversive of rational life. The making visible of that which is horrific is often just a stage in a much longer struggle, the preface or proleptic ante-chamber if one likes, to other, greater horrors. Gradually awakened to threat of vampirism, the main mortal characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) begin to mistrust the appearance of mundane Victorian existence. This delusory surface conceals an ongoing conflict between good and evil; the ‘crew of light’ must take account of and combat representatives of a demonic zone of hidden predation and risk. Dracula and his brides or sisters are a sub-group, representatives of multitudes of hellish and devilish forces. Dracula is only one of the graduates of the Scholomance school of devilish magic. This sense of a greater evil impinging on reality is also particularly true in relation to the creations of H. P. Lovecraft. Gothic expression comprises a mutable dialectic between darkness and light, sudden vision and vanishing shadow, that which is explicitly threatening and that which is always eerily just out of view and evades our definitions. Though the artists discussed in this book often, in their creations, employ imagery of peripheries, borders, liminal edges, portals and vanishing-points beyond which darkness visible predominates, the subject matter of the book in hand starts at the point at which these terrors become visible, however faintly or freakishly, to the human eye. Gothic: meanings and span Amorphous and heterogeneous in association, the word Gothic has accrued a great many successive and distinctive meanings and therefore my usage of the term in these pages needs clarification. This book does give brief background consideration where relevant, to the ancient Goths, those nomadic tribes who roamed, and their leaders such as Theoderic (section 1.2) and Alaric (section 8.1). ‘Gothic’ was subsequently a designation employed originally by Renaissance artists to refer to Medieval architecture. I begin my consideration of Gothic art and architecture starting in France in the early twelfth century and continue my discussion with the work of Carlo Crivelli and Jan Van Eyck, painters of the Late Gothic period in art. As Fred Botting writes, politicians in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century onwards inherited the word and used it ‘loosely’ and vaguely to embrace the history of ‘Celtic and Germanic tribes’ (Botting, 1996: 42). William Camden’s and other ­eighteenth-century antiquarians’ and artists’ subsequent imaginative reconstructions of these Teutonic people’s lifestyle and costume are also touched upon in my discussion. William Kent’s designs and the architectural Gothic Revival stemming from travels and aesthetic debates of the 1730s are also broached. The devel-

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Introduction

9

opment of these styles of course coalesced with Horace Walpole’s collaborations with John Chute and Richard Bentley at Strawberry Hill and in the house Walpole leased from Elizabeth Chenevix, the toy and trinket seller. Within a built environment that was to be both solemn and airy in its Gothic ambience, Walpole assembled an eclectic collection comprised from over 500 years of paintings, armour, engravings, tapestries, caskets, miniatures, china and ingenious gewgaws. The first major success of the Gothic literary fields, The Castle of Otranto subsequently influenced imitations of and variations on Walpole’s themes including John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Aikin’s ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’ (1773), which also forwarded a lively debate on the nature of the pleasure derived from reading tales of terror and wonder. Nathan Drake’s essays ‘On Gothic Superstition’ (1790) and ‘On Objects of Terror’ (1798), Burke’s theories and Ann Radcliffe’s ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) contributed to these aesthetic controversies, and the famous ‘recipe’ for novels of a ‘terrific cast’ written by an anonymous correspondent in 1798 helped define, if ironically and critically, a kind of mock Gothic literary repertoire (Anon., 1798: 184). The book in hand engages in places with these attempts after definition yet also notes that Walpole’s considerable artistic assemblage within a hybrid architectural structure at Strawberry Hill, his Gothic bricolage as it were, would allow no such discrete rational and aesthetic parameters. As Dani Cavallaro writes: ‘Strawberry Hill brings together a bewildering variety of motifs and forms into an extravagant assemblage that irreverently flouts the distinction between reality and illusion […] Eclectic juxtaposition is its priority’ (Cavallaro, 2002:  29). Such eclecticism and bricolage are also evident in William Beckford’s exorbitant artistic collection at Fonthill Abbey, Walter Scott’s array of antiques and armour at Abbotsford and in the Comtesse ­d’Osmond’s ‘Gothic Study’ in Paris. As Walpole wrote in the second preface to his novel, he was ‘desirous’, in his artistic project, ‘of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention’ (cited in Hogle, 1980: 335). If then, one requires context for Oates’s, King’s and Snodgrass’s claiming of Bosch’s work for the Gothic, Walpole’s creative project as collector, writer and amateur architect instates the importance of fancy and eclectic appropriation in this regard. My use of the term ‘Goth’ starts with ancient Germanic tribes but predominantly involves those musicians and other artists who developed their style and aesthetics within the late Punk rock scene from the early 1980s onwards. As in the case of Gothic art, Goth visual expression has been linked to a wide array of influences, Nancy Kilpatrick stating that Goth artists are joined to

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Michaelangelo, William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood ‘at the soul level’ (Kilpatrick, 2005: 225). Yet, as well as conceding here the general free-ranging openness of my discussion, I also consistently check my progress and applicability throughout by offering a span of critical views regarding the Gothic and Goth nature of the materials involved. My first chapter moves from the earliest Gothic architecture to décor (including kitchen design and food) and visual aspects of theatrical design, masquerade and dance. Chapter 2 focuses on paintings in two historical spans (1434–1790) from Jan Van Eyck to Henry Fuseli (1819–2008) from Goya to H. R. Giger, moving on to consider Clovis Trouille’s works influenced by horror films and Vincent Castiglia’s paintings in blood. I then cover Gothic engravings, motifs of spectral portraits, posters and signs. My book’s title engages with the Biblical injunction against the making of ‘graven images’, and the creation of effigies in the form of statues, dolls and waxworks is the subject of the third chapter, which refers, as background, to images of the Palaeolithic such as the ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’. I also take in ideas of moving or mobile statues and taxidermy, ancient and modern. In Chapter 4 I use early visual devices like Eidophusikon and the long-lived entertainment of peepshows to introduce a discussion of projection technologies like magic lanterns and, subsequently, film and TV. I have mentioned (above) David Kunzle’s highlighting of Gothic motifs in Rodolphe Töpfler’s comic strips and in Chapter 5, I discuss caricatures, silhouettes, lithographs, moving on to examine adorned and ‘moving’ books and, latterly, calendars. Chapter  6 deals with Gothic photography from Daguerreotypes onwards, with particular emphasis given to the work of Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris. My seventh chapter moves from exploration of the Gothic font, scripts and calligraphy, to marbled papers, focusing on their association with the ­anti-Enlightenment libertine darkness. We pass on to consider associations with the theme of chaos in paper staining in the 1820s and marbling in later Victorian Neo-Gothic volumes. Retail labelling, tapestries and book covers are then discussed. Chapter 8 provides an overview of major trends in Gothic and Goth costume and jewellery with reference also to descriptions of these adornments in Gothic novels. This chapter closes with a description of an array of masks and weapons, both real and fake, as well as coverage given to playing and Tarot cards. Finally, Chapter 9 opens with a survey of the development of newer Gothic media, such as video gaming, VR (virtual reality) games and survival horror apps. A range of horror s­ ideshows, rides, environments and artistic installations is discussed with p­ articular emphasis on the venerable thrill-ride: ghost-trains. The book opens with considering architecture: the largest free-standing and external visual artefacts and structures embodying the Gothic in its varied forms, and

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Introduction

closes with those artistic expressions closest to the skin: performance and body art. In keeping with a ‘more fluid, multi-medial understanding’, my approach to these materials is pluralist, the styles of different sections varying and adapting to the heterogeneity of the materials discussed and allowing for a wide and diverse readership comprising academic and more general readers: fans of film, media students, enthusiasts of Goth culture and collectors of many types of Gothic artefact. In some sections my analysis is mainly chronological, providing some general historical overview and explanation where necessary, as in my discussion of pre-cinematic media. In other sections, I devote more analytical space to individual artistic works as in my description of Louis Boulanger’s landmark lithograph La Ronde de Sabbat (5.3) and Simon Marsden’s and Paul Koudounaris’s photography (6.4). In terms of readers interested in décor and jewellery and collectors in general, I also offer a wide and viable survey of products currently available. So, for example, section 1.5, as well as referencing household items in relation to The Addams Family TV series, Sarah Bernhardt and Lord Byron, also provides a room-by-room description (in a notional house) of Gothic furniture, artefacts and brands. Though in general I follow the open discursiveness of Gothic eclecticism mentioned above, my discussion is historicist in emphasis throughout. Amongst the diverse range of critical theories I cite are Jonathan Crary’s ­post-structuralist ‘techniques of the observer’ and Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘Unheimliche’ otherness in studying the visual imagination. I also draw upon Otto Rank’s ideas on döppelgangers, David Punter’s sense of Gothic ‘interiority’ and Jerrold Hogle’s influential essay on ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’ as well as the work of notable critics in the field such as Catherine Spooner, Terry Castle and Barbara Maria Stafford where relevant. Parameters of darkness Clearly a note of caution is in order here. In his Hollywood Gothic, David J. Skal lists the merchandise bearing Bela Lugosi’s likeness in the early 1960s: children’s phonograph records, plastic toy pencil sharpeners, greeting cards and talking greeting cards, plastic model figures, T shirts […] self-erasing magic slates, cutout paper dolls and books, ‘monster mansion’ vehicles, wax figurines, candy dispensers, transparencies, kites, calendars and prints, sliding-square puzzle games, children’s and ladies jewellery, belts and belt buckles, wall plaques, wallets […] animated flip books, lapel buttons, photo printing kits. (Skal, 2004: 252–3)

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Gothic effigy

These are promotional items bearing the likeness of only one actor playing just one monstrous figure of the Neo-Gothic horror revival in film and every item can be classed as visual artefact. Though my approach has been pluralist and inclusive and I have sought to give a sense of the wealth of Gothic visual artefacts available, such a guide can never in any sense prove exhaustive. Might not such a proliferation of creations and media work against the longevity of Gothic? When there are Gothic tours to Transylvania, Goth weddings, Alexander McQueen and Szabo, Gothic Studies university courses, Gothic toys and children’s cartoons, dark-themed hen and stag parties and Dracula ­ cocktail-sticks, have we reached saturation point? When Gothic seems ubiquitous, is its generic threatening, wandering, metamorphosing power gone? As Tanya Krzywinska writes: ‘It is tempting to see’ the Gothic ‘as opposed to the quotidian’. But, as she continues: ‘Caution is required’, because, obviously regarding contemporary mores, Gothic is embedded in our quotidian (Krzywinska, 2013: 267). This realisation might provoke a further question: when does a sub-culture, or rather a wide and diverse span of suband c­ ounter-cultures, become absorbed and assimilated into that marketing abstraction: the mainstream? When there is no one left to shock, what then? Fred Botting has observed regarding teen-Gothic trends: ‘Domesticated, welcomed, assimilated, “normal monstrosity” eclipses the possibility of difference and otherness’ (Botting, 2007: 212). Yet it is beyond the remit of the present book to speculate whether Gothic expression has now reached its zenith. It would be wise also to remember Anne Williams’s premature valedictory speculation whenever the end of Gothic is envisaged. Setting parameters for exclusion is, of course, as important as inclusiveness in such a volume. Though I recognise Gothic’s strongly transgressive agency, this book does not include the artistic expressions of convicted murderers, even though the paintings and drawings of certain of these individuals includes imagery that might be characterised as darkly and disturbingly Gothic. Additionally, no photographs of scenes of violence or killing are included. In terms of cinema, I do mention Cannibal Holocaust (1980) ‘tortureporn’ and French extremity but stop short of film productions such as Fred Vogel’s exploitative August Underground’s Mordum (2003). There is also a conscious decision to exclude websites, films or photographs devoted to exhibiting actual accidents, bloodshed and the suffering of the unfortunate. No doubt a kind of subconscious release and catharsis as well as the satisfaction of ghoulish curiosity, shame and fear are felt in viewing such productions but, as all those who support the Sophie Lancaster Foundation realise, Goth and Gothic share a common responsibility to humanity. As nihilistic as Gothic expression periodically becomes with the need to subvert, shock and scare inspiring this artistic

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dialectic, there is a precondition of mutual care and respect as well as a scholastic objectivity felt here. One case in point: there has been growing controversy in recent years over Goths being photographed during festivals in the graveyard of St Mary’s church in Whitby where Bram Stoker imagined Dracula’s first encounter with Lucy Westernra. Local residents feel that the Goth visitors treat the gravestones and tombs with disrespect, and that they view the memorials simply as background props. In some cases, graves have been climbed over and semi-pornographic pictures taken of female Goths. After wide coverage on TV and social media, organisers of the Whitby Goth Weekend have condemned such behaviour yet Nancy Kilpatrick’s The Goth Bible (2005) advocates cemetery picnics and taking rubbings of gravestone designs and many Goth and Gothic publications feature staged scenes in such settings. As one Goth photographer evinced to me, the Whitby graveyard allows public access and appears in a key scene in Dracula and therefore is part of the iconography of this dark fiction, which in turn brings so many people and so much funding to the seaside town. In many ways, although this debate could be taken simplistically as a clash between, on one hand, local families whose forbears are commemorated by the headstones and monuments and, on the other, costumed visitors and lifetime Goths insisting on their own freedoms, it also encapsulates another type of conflict between different interpretations of Gothic aesthetic visibility. Photographers such as Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris stress their reverence for the dead, their remains and monuments. Yet there are artists who emphasise their performativity and risk and their defiance of norms, those who link the Gothic, as Fred Botting terms it, ‘with the overstepping of boundaries that hold our social realities in their conventional shape’ (Botting, 1996: 1). Charles Alexander Moffat’s ‘The Neo-Gothic Art Manifesto’ (2001/2003) states: GOTH IS ABOUT REBELLING AGAINST SOCIAL NORMS, AND DEFYING OLD FASHIONED SEXUALITY & REPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION.

There is no hint of compromise here in those strident capitalisations. Those for whom the mordant outlines of gravestones and otherworldliness of tombs provide an opportunity to express their liberty, create a spectacle, strike a pose or imitate the CD covers of their favourite Goth rock band might argue that such words support their case. Moffat’s painting Sexual Blasphemy 1 (2005) shows a rear view of a naked woman dressed only in net stockings and with spiral armlet kneeling before a Celtic monumental cross. It is a deeply sensual, thoughtful and provocative image. The viewer enters into the rich ambiguity of

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1  Charles Alexander Moffat: Sexual Blasphemy 1, 2005

the painting: is the subject defying the Christian symbol with her bodily exposure or honouring an older pagan mystical tradition, or both at once? It does seem a particularly apt image to contemplate in this context. The answer to the Whitby farrago is perhaps, as Mike McCarthy, director of the Bram Stoker Film Festival suggested, to provide (in Hollywood style), a second, artificial graveyard devoted to photography and staged posing. Yet the tensions involved in such controversy are live and contentious ones. That, after all, is their point and I have no need or desire to harmonise them here. Gothic splendidly contains paradoxical, contradictory and discordant impulses. The graves with their legend: ‘Sacred to the Memory’ still remain. In my years researching this book and meeting many of the diverse practitioners mentioned here in the pages devoted to contemporary art, I have been both awed and humbled by the skill and commitment revealed by the artists working in spaces from the smallest of ateliers to the largest of galleries. The rich paradoxes and contradictions continue. As well as the darkness, seeming nihilism and irony

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implicit in Gothic expression, there is also a need felt to register care, a strong strain of idealism and urge to commemorate. Charles Moffat wrote to me on the completion of this book: ‘As both artist and art historian, I thank you for your efforts to preserve this influential part of art history. Like painters trying to depict what they see, they know [they] can only attempt to depict and preserve. There is no perfection that can be achieved, but one must always attempt to strive for perfection for the sake of posterity’ (Moffat, 2016, personal correspondence).

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Chapter 1

1.1  Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture

I

t i s possi bl e t o argue that the pointed arch and pointed rib vault (consisting of arches supporting an enclosed space within a barrel structure or tunnel) comprise the foundational epitome of Gothic architectural style. These shapes, together with spires, crenellations, soaring buttresses, piers with clustered and arched windows with interlacing patterns, remain recognisable as hallmarks of Gothic today whether they occur in buildings, statues, jewellery, a mirror or reliquaries. The abbey church of Saint-Denis (c. 1135–44) in Paris is often cited as one of the earliest buildings where these different elements of construction and decoration were brought together. Abbot Suger’s (c. 1081–1151) remit was to commission a building for a specific sacramental purpose of the housing and display of Saint-Denis’s holy relic and, therefore, for a structure that admitted more light and space for pilgrims to process round the relic yet, as Bruno Klein has written, there were other pressing needs involved in its construction: The first involved reaffirming ancient traditions in order for the French monarchs to establish themselves as direct descendants of the legitimate royal house […] The second involved introducing new ideas in order to supersede the events of the immediate past. In other words, the new (politically and architecturally) was seen as a means of acknowledging and restoring the past. (Klein, 1998: 32)

Therefore, from the outset, Gothic architecture manifested innovation in service to an emphatic reinstatement of past history. Certain aspects of decorative art in Renaissance buildings such as such as Coppo di Marcovaldo’s lurid mosaic ‘Hell’ (1265–70) on the vault of the Florence Baptistry conveyed nightmarish

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scenes of rare power. The intricate mosaics above the bas-reliefs on the Gothic frontage of Orvieto cathedral are outstanding examples of this art. The fourteenth century witnessed the development of the ‘Second Pointed’ or ‘Decorated’ style of Gothic architecture with further embellishments of the ogee form (double-curved and wide s-shaped) in recesses, canopies and other structures. There was also usage of more complex window forms including rose and marigold windows. Foliate tracery became more profuse and exuberant in decoration as seen in, for example, the carved leaves of the Southwell Minster Chapter House (c.1290). Between the last years of the fourteenth century and around 1412 the wonderful, interlacing form of fan vaulting developed in the cloister of Gloucester cathedral and again, nearly a century later, at the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. The perpendicular style of Gothic reached its apogee in England, with its soaring vertical tracery, vast windows and battlemented transoms spreading over walls. It needs to be added that, though Gothic novels abound with secret passages, chambers and priest holes in British architecture (such as the subterranean complex described in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783)), these features were mainly created from the 1550s onwards in the face of fierce persecution of Catholics and were obsolete by the time of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. William Kent is rightly credited with reviving the fashion for castellated façades pierced by arches and Medieval-style Gothic towers, in his early designs of the 1730s and Batty Langley’s landmark text: Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (1741–42) was clearly influenced by Kent’s ideas. Kent’s designs for the Bishop of Winchester’s house at Esher at the instruction of Henry Pelham were revolutionary in their day, combining, as they did, the existing gatehouse towers dating from 1480 and adding multi-storey wings and Gothic ornamentation. On visiting Wentworth Hall, Horace Walpole wrote: ‘This place is one of the very few that I really like […] nobody has a truer taste than lord Stafford’. Best of all was ‘a handsome castle in the true style, on a rude mountain, with a court and towers: in the castle yard, a statue of the late lord who built it (Walpole, 1840: 1756). Walpole’s language of approbation here, as often elsewhere, involves imaginary gigantism. The ‘rude mountain’ was merely a moderately rising hill topped by the ‘true castle’, more truly the folly of Stainborough Castle. At that time, there were many elements in this landscape’s recent history that anticipate the writing of Otranto: anger and fear of a very public and shameful disinheritance, the rows over succession and burning of deeds, questions of dynastic legitimacy, Stainborough folly with its four-towered keep, the enclosed ‘yard’ within the bailey wall with Michael Rysbrack’s paternalistic statue; from one

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Gothic effigy

2  Stainborough Castle

critical angle in a long perspective, it might be easy to conclude that Gothic literature in Britain started at the moment Walpole first clapped eyes on this building. Work on Walpole’s own house at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham had been in progress for three years at this time, with Gothic balustrades, bow windows

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topped with painted glass and vestibules opening in arches, all realised with a lightness that served to parody weightier ancestral and architectural pretensions. Linking the three storeys of the older building to the new rooms, the staircase with its armorial beasts on the newel posts, rising out of the hall and lit by glazed quatrefoils in the roof giving the impression of an inner courtyard went on to inspire the idea for Walpole’s first novel. As the craze for Gothic fiction took hold, even the interiors of Neo-Classical buildings could be adapted to reflect the change in taste. The monk’s parlour (early 1820s), a suite of rooms decorated in subdued colours in the basement of John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, embodied the architect’s humorous attitude towards tales of solitary, studious clerics. Charles Barry won the 1835 competition to redesign Westminster Palace in the English perpendicular style but Barry had to call on the assistance of Augustus W. N. Pugin to help create the ornate decoration and furnishing of the interiors. The weight and authority of the river-front façade, in fact a blend of Classical and Gothic principles, and Pugin’s interiors, helped place Gothic styling at the heart of national life. William Burgess was a flamboyant Gothic Revivalist, applying sturdy and colourful additions to Cardiff Castle and re-creating Castell Coch above Tongwynlais in South Wales. The three vast stone towers of Castell, renewed from Gilbert de Clare’s thirteenth-century fortress according to plans provided by the antiquarian, George Clark, resemble turrets of French fortresses with conical roofs rather than Medieval Welsh castellations. The interiors of Castell are richly decorated, the octagonal drawing room with its floral panels, its doorways embellished with carved beasts, the b­ utterfly-covered vaulting and wonderful central sunburst are particular highlights. The room also features a minstrel’s gallery running round each of the eight sides and supported by turquoise and gilt borderwork. The vaulted stone ribs are influenced by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, a major figure of the French Gothic Revival, who had restored Notre Dame de Paris with Jeanne-Baptiste Lassus. Charles Kightly called Castell Coch ‘the crowning glory of the Gothic Revival’ (Kightly, 2005: 74). During the late nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival became a mass style in Britain, influencing the design of railway stations, railway hotels, factories, tea-rooms and bath-houses. Alexander Jackson Davis became a champion of Gothic Revival in the USA, and the William J. Rotch House (c. 1844) with its steep roofs, arched windows and asymmetrical floor plan became perhaps the first major example of this style. The Bowen House, or the ‘Pink House’, Woodstock, Connecticut (c. 1846) and General Vallejo’s Home in Sonoma, California developed Carpenter Gothic or Rural Gothic style, which

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had evolved with experimentation in jig-sawn features to imitate the most flamboyant of Gothic architectural detail fashioned in stone in Europe. In one sense Gothic Revival architecture, though superseded in the early twentieth century by Bauhaus simplicity and Deco lines, has never actually died out, and has been followed by smaller, similar Neo-Gothic revivals. The décor of modern Goth nightclubs like Le Phonographique in the Merrion Centre, Leeds, might also now be considered in any account of Neo-Gothic style, taking into account its narrow entrance with metal awning and the central pillar in the dance floor influencing the two steps forwards, two steps back style of Goth dance. 1.2  Graveyards, crypts and mausolea If there is one visual setting that has proved indispensable to Gothic visual expression, it is the graveyard, serving, simultaneously, as terminus, stage set and point of re-entry, resting-place and haunt of vengeful revenants. As a counterpoint to all the abodes of the living: castles with turrets and dungeons, the great houses with their secret passages and haunted galleries (see section 6.4) the town-houses, slums and madhouses of the domestic Gothic and the motels and apartments of modern suburbia, graveyards and crypts are always salient points of reference for Gothic artists. As evidenced in my discussion of the recent furore over photographers in St Mary’s graveyard, Whitby, in my introduction, it is not for nothing that the fiercest clashes in contemporary Goth and Gothic culture tend to emerge over places of burial and the monuments placed over the remains of the dead. The 1970s vampire craze at Highgate Cemetery in London where, in response to sightings of a dark apparition passed to the British Psychic and Occult Society, David Farrant and Sean Manchester, two magicians at the time, claimed that an evil occult presence had been resurrected. Vaults were broken open, parts of a skeleton torn from a coffin and another coffin set alight. Just as Stoker’s Dracula may have influenced the initial visions of a dark spirit, so the Hammer Horror film, Alan Gibson’s Dracula AD, 1972 with its black magic ceremony in the deconsecrated St Bartolph’s Church may have been influenced by tales of the Highgate depredations. In the early eighteenth century antiquarians gathered engravings of ancient ‘Gothic’ tombs, including the mausoleum of Theoderic, ruler of both the Ostrogoths and Visigoths; this was an imposing ten-sided structure made of Istrian stone, located outside Ravenna and built in 520 AD. The imaginations of artists were also influenced by sepulchres and graveyards. In Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1743), the narrator, obviously enjoying the frisson

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that l­egends of ghosts afford, addresses a yew tree and imagines a generalised topography of graveyards: the texts inscribed on gravestones, worms and yew roots probing tombs and skeletons: Cheerless, unsocial plant! that loves to dwell ‘Midst sculls and coffins, epitaphs and worms, Where light-heel’d ghosts and visionary shades, Beneath the wan cold moon (as fame reports) Embodied thick, perform their mystic rounds. (Blair, 1802: 3)

He goes on to mock the ways in which death effaces the names of the ‘more illustrious dead’ and destroys those symbols of nobility, title and lineage: ‘shreds of ‘scutcheons / And tatter’d coats of arms’ so beloved to antiquarians, landowners and engravers (Blair, 1802: 4). Thomas Parnell and Edward Young also wrote lengthy poems that dealt with these themes and which gained these writers the retrospective title of the ‘Graveyard School’, some of Young’s lines becoming so famous they were cut onto gravestones. Sepulchral monuments, crypts and graves are, of course, vital topoi in the first flowering of Gothic novels. A tomb is used as a hiding place in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and, in A Sicilian Romance (1790), Hippolitus rescues Julia but the couple flee into a monastery’s innermost vault used by the banditti as their charnel house and the couple wait amongst rotting cadavers. Jerrold E. Hogle writes that: ‘If anything distinguishes the English Gothic novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is surely the ubiquity, indeed the power, of the ominous crypt at the heart of the setting’ (Hogle, 1980: 333). It is in the labyrinthine passages of the burial ground and subterranean cavern under the monastery and convent in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk that Ambrosio encounters the treacherous demon. Ambrosio hides Antonio in the catacombs in order to seduce her. Étienne-Gaspard Robert (who used the stage name E. G. Robertson) was highly aware of the impact of sepulchral imagery and prefaced his l­ antern-of-fear show by leading his audience through a ruined convent and past the piled gravestones of nuns in the cloisters, making verbal references in his speeches  to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Sterne meditating amongst the tombs (he probably meant James Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs (1746)). Slides featuring Young burying his daughter and the spirit of Robespierre rising from his grave were then shown as part of the main Phantasmagoria show. As well as eliciting macabre feelings and thoughts, it is notable that church cemeteries were linked to illicit sexuality. Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin probably started their physical affair in St Pancras Church graveyard in 1814. It was not until the 1820s that the earliest public cemeteries in England were

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established. There are also key scenes involving graveyards in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) and Carmilla (1871–72), E. A. Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844) and, perhaps most famously, Lucy’s appearance as the ‘Bloofer Lady’ in the cemetery in Stoker’s Dracula. In terms of ideological evocations of graveyards, Casper David Friedrich’s paintings of Eldena Abbey and P. J. de Loutherbourg’s A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (1790) still exert considerable fascination. In de Loutherbourg’s picture a male figure in a dramatic grey costume stands in the light of a full moon looking at a tympanum frieze of the Resurrection in front of the ivyclad transept of Tintern Abbey. A night breeze stirs the ivy, the scudding clouds above him and the man’s cloak. Piled below one set of columns, a scattered group of five skulls is emphasised, as are tumbled sarcophagus lids, one bearing the effigy of a mailed and armed knight, Loutherbourg’s own name worked into a stone border. It is a work that anticipates decades of Victorian Medievalist graveyard masonry. The connection of graveyards in the public imagination with the supernatural, necromancy and Satanic rites was not lost on caricaturists, such as George Murgatroyd Woodward’s ‘Gravedigger and a Ghost’ (c. 1790–92) and ‘Gravedigger and Monster’ (c. 1790–92), the latter’s vivid depiction showing a goggle-eyed, winged creature crouched on top of a sarcophagus lit up by the streaming illumination of the gravedigger’s lantern. Funerary monuments often involved skeletal figures as in the cases of J. B. Wieland’s ‘Death’ from the monument commemorating the Salem Abbots, Switzerland (late eighteenth century) and Louis-François Roubillac’s ‘Tomb of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale’, Westminster Abbey (1760). ‘Transi’ tombs with the deceased imagined in sculptural form before and after death are discussed in section 3.1. Antoine Etex’s dramatic full-length, shrouded effigy of Madame Raspail (1854) who died whilst her husband was incarcerated at Doullens, was chosen by Goth band Dead Can Dance as an album cover image (see ­section 7.7). High Victoriana brought in a profusion of Gothic Revival tombs and memorials all across Europe: with pointed arches, trefoils and soaring pinnacles. The main influences on George Gilbert Scott’s successful Gothic design for the Albert Memorial (1864–76) were the thirteenth-century ‘Eleanor Crosses’. Soon after the appearance of film, directors began to appreciate the dramatic possibilities of these settings. D. W. Griffith’s The Greatest Question (1919) is amongst the first films to culminate in a dream-like graveyard scene. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) opens in an actual graveyard in Pittsburgh, and the most effective and visual jolt in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) is delivered by the dead girl’s hand erupting from the earth to grip

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her friend’s wrist under a cheapjack grave-marker (a white ‘For Sale’ sign). Poltergeist (1982) reveals the supernatural havoc caused when a new estate is built upon an old graveyard (now something of a cliché in film) with the headstones moved but the bodies left in situ, the story based on the fate of Mount Prospect cemetery, Denver. In terms of horror film poster depictions, it is interesting that graveyards seem to appear less frequently than other motifs. For example, in the case of Hammer film posters, out of 158 productions over forty-one years (including the ‘Exclusive Years’) there were only four Hammer film posters advertising films between 1968 and 1974 that featured graveyard iconography, amongst the best: a tilting gravestone in middle foreground with the film title in red, white-edged capitals in Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) and a huge gravestone with two female nudes and scenes from the film in Peter Sasdy’s Countess Dracula (1971). Current Goth fashion sites such as Azrael’s Accessories, The Dark Angel and A Rose Ad Mortem advertise by showing their models posing amongst mausolea and graves and the first Goth picnic in a cemetery was reported in Heather Spear’s magazine The Web in the early 1990s (Kilpatrick, 2005: 180). Haunted Headstones create ‘Halloween decoration headstones’ for the committed Goth. 1.3 Ruins By the time of the publication of Joachim de Bellay’s Les Antiquités de Rome (1558), the appreciation of ruins, the material vestiges of earlier civilisations and dynasties, was already millennia old. As the poet writes, ruins helped travellers to imagine a lost age: Rome’s vanished, yet if toppled masonry Might still revive some shade of Rome’s vitality Cadaver-like raised up by magic. (author’s trans.)

William Shenstone’s ‘The Ruin’d Abbey; or, the Effects of Superstition’ (after 1745), points out the pleasing visual role of ‘An abby’s rude remains’ to instruct and ‘attract the view’ (Shenstone, 1764: 116). It was over the same period that Giovanni Battista Piranesi started to produce his Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione), a series of prints depicting huge labyrinthine vaults and underground chambers, fantasies based on the artist’s familiarity with the ruins of Classical Rome. The first stage proper in the development of the British Gothic Revival architecture came in the practice of clearing and adapting of certain ­landscapes that

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already contained authentic ‘antient’ Gothic ruins, such as that at Duncombe Park which included the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. In gauging the ways in which ecclesiastical ruins were perceived during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, it is useful to contrast Samuel Buck’s engraving (1721) and Edward Dayes’s watercolour (1804) of Rievaulx. Samuel with his brother Nathaniel Buck embarked on a huge project of engraving: their Views of Ruins of Castles & Abbeys in England (1726–39). Buck’s image of Rievaulx’s veritable remains, complete with appended armorial bearings and legend, is as flat and artificial as a stage set. By contrast, Edward Dayes’s wonderfully evocative and sprightly watercolour of Rievaulx with its bristling ivy outcrops, scudding clouds and sense of quickly drifting shoals of shadow in the foreground has a distinctly Romantic feel and recalls Ann Radcliffe’s topographical descriptions of monastic remains. Dayes himself wrote about the prospect: ‘In short, Rievale [sic] Abbey, from the fine state of its remains, enriched by weather tints and ivy, its retired situation, and boldly rising grounds covered with wood will afford ample amusement to those who are emulous to delineate after nature’ (Dayes, 1805: 225). Indeed, in Dayes’s picture, the abbey seems an integral part of the landscape rising organically out of the land and clustered with growth. Such an effect might be kindred to William Gilpin’s devastating anti-Catholic commentary expressing the idea that ‘abbeys  […] being n­ aturalized to the soil, might indeed, without much impropriety, be classed among its natural beauties […] where popery prevails, the abbey is still inhabited, and of course less adapted to landscape’ (Gilpin, 1786: 12–13). P. J. de Loutherbourg, using aspects of the ruins of Tintern Abbey, painted A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard, discussed above (section 1.2), an optical meditation on mortality and religious belief. That this depiction, a moonlit, almost deserted scene of what was in reality one of the busiest of tourist attractions, should serve as a touchstone for metaphysical speculation during the French Revolution is testament to the imaginative power of ruins. E.-G. Robertson’s most successful form of Phantasmagoria lantern show was an immersive entertainment, his powerful new lanterns and uniquely sensitive screen suitable for back projection – marvels of contemporaneous science – were sited within the ruins of the Capucine Convent in Paris, 1799. The impact of the whole ruinous structure of a vast deserted ecclesiastical building was part of the collective visual experience for the audience. One of the first three dioramas by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, exhibited in Paris and London in 1826, was ‘The Effect of Fog and Snow Seen Through a Ruined Gothic Colonnade’. Another was ‘The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel, Edinburgh by Moonlight’. The Panorama craze also drew upon vistas of long-collapsed shrines and cities: panoramas of Karnak, Thebes and ‘View of the Ruins of the

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Temple of Baalbec’ being shown at Leicester Square in the 1830s and 1840s. Very soon after the discovery of Daguerreotypes, Pierre-Gustave-Gaspard Joly de Lotbinière, Horace Vernet and Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet travelled to Egypt to take pictures of the ancient ruins. As photography developed into a popular art form, so expensive illustrated tomes such as William and Mary Howitt’s Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland (1862) gained considerable approval. With each stage of technological discovery, particularly those innovations linked to information and entertainment, the appeal of ruins was re-stated. There is an hallucinatory but also enervating quality to the stark trees, Gothic arch and monk’s burial in Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Eichenwald Abbey’ (c. 1809–10). The fragmentary and ravaged exteriority of the abbey ruins, the interior exposed to the elements, seems at one with the seasonal bleakness of nature, and yet a promise of dawn fills the upper picture. Friedrich’s words regarding a cathedral near Meissen are recalled: From the debris filling the interior emerge mighty pillars with slender and gracious columns bearing lissome vaulting. For this temple, the time of glory is long gone; and from its ruins issues a new time, a new longing for clarity and truth. (Makarius, 2005: 141)

The vagueness of Friedrich’s abstract nouns here is consciously applied, a cipher for Teutonic resistance and resurgence rising out of fragments of the noble past, a Germany recovery after Napoleonic occupation. Through the efforts of Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo and other artists and conservationists, the chateaux, stately homes, Medieval buildings and ruins of France began to be rescued. Yet it was one thing to meditate upon the buttresses of ancient forts ruined in distant wars, but quite another to scan albumen prints of the ‘Ruins of City Hall’ from the photographic album Hôtel de Ville de Paris (1871) taken just after the Paris Commune and revealing burnt out shells of buildings in a living city. Tourists, including Gustave Flaubert, flocked to see the desolation. For the Symbolist painters, like Arnold Böcklin with his various paintings of ‘Ruins by the Sea (1880–81), the successive refinement of portrayals of isolated ruins still elicited potent and multifarious responses from the observer. These, after all, were the deepest spiritual responses of humans’ inner being – a confrontation with the mysteries of mortality. After the Second World War, the ruins of Vienna served to symbolise the destruction of a city and old friendship caused by greed in Carol Reed’s work of Gothic Noir: The Third Man (1949). In a trend closer to the present day, Christopher Smith’s film Creep (2004) initiated a cinematic fashion for horror movies that explored the

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fates of young intruders lost in or exploring dilapidated environments. Tomm Coker and David Elliot’s Catacombs (2007), Carter Smith’s The Ruins (2008) and Oliver Thau’s Urban Explorer (2011) are other examples. Subterranean labyrinths, Tube stations, Second World War bunkers and deserted mental asylums are some of the most recent ruins to feature in a lineage that goes back to Radcliffe’s ruined abbey in The Romance of the Forest and beyond. Ruins currently feature as and in a wide range of Gothic products: ruined follies for one’s garden, backdrops for figurines, stage sets, tea towels, cigarette lighters and coasters. Whitby Abbey is a particularly multivalent symbol for Goths, harking back to the time of Hild’s monastery and also serving as a potent reminder of Dracula’s arrival in England in Stoker’s novel. The phenomenon of Urban Exploration or ‘Urbex’ has led to a recent upsurge in the seeking out, navigation and portrayal of ruins. Often linked to types of unofficial industrial historical research and unsanctioned trespass into forbidden urban zones, photographer Bianca van der Werf has juxtaposed a young woman in dark Goth Victorian dress striding past mullioned windows in RomanyWG’s series of The Beauty in Decay books (2011–). In Eric Rondepierre’s ‘The Trio’ (c. 1996) from his Moires series of photographs, two men confront each other in a scene from an old film, as a terrified female observer watches from the stairs, seeming to hover like a spirit in the upper right of the picture-space. The film is photographed at the moment the celluloid begins to blister and smear with projection heat, the whole midground disintegrating into a sea of dust, yellow liquid leaking the foreground. As an image of corrosion, displaying the physical limits and deterioration of film, it is beautifully phantasmal. 1.4  Follies and gardens The histories of Gothic ruins, gardens and follies are, of course, intimately related. Follies can be added to existing ruins, ruins can be renovated as a folly, and follies can, of course, fall naturally into ruin. Alternately, the effects of time can be imitated as in the case of the sham castle at Hagley commissioned by Lord Lyttelton in 1756, where the full tower, the mock ruined towers and wall were purposely breached by large, mossy boulders as if these, with age, had tumbled from the structure. Each of these sham edifices are accommodated in a larger landscape and often associated with gardens, woodland, streams and, increasingly as the eighteenth century passed, man-made lakes as in the scape at Studley Royal. The earliest follies began to be built in the mid-sixteenth century, one of the earliest being Freston Tower, south of Ipswich in Suffolk, built by Edward

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Latymer (c. 1549), consisting of six redbrick storeys with the largest pedimented windows being placed towards the top of the structure. In the early eighteenth century, antiquarians, architects and landowners began to show a greater interest in Medieval design. In some places like Shobdon, an original Norman church was pillaged in order to create a Gothic eye-catcher on the brow of a hill: a symmetrical screen comprising two connecting walls with arches and three gable-ends supporting cross, trefoil and pinnacle. Stainborough Castle, one the earliest purposely created Gothic follies (see section 1.1), is part of a garden on a landscaped hill, the fake Medieval building created by James Gibbs or John Vanburgh. Sham Gothic castles were usually the first folly to appear in the parks and these were usually followed by grottoes, temples of various kinds, eye-catchers on high ground, obelisks, rotundas and even fake ecclesiastical structures like priories or monasteries. Another of the earliest Gothic follies is Alfred’s Hall (1732) which rises out of woodland strewn with other later follies: a hexagonal temple, ‘Pope’s Seat’ (a pavilion), a Round House complete with arrow slits and castellations and a Square House with tower. Alfred’s Hall was consciously sited in the shade of densely planted trees to give the sham castle a feeling of seclusion, melancholy and age. Created by Lord Bathurst with advice from the poet, Alexander Pope, this conglomerate pile was as much a fantastical poetic as architectural construct, as if it rose like an enchanted fortress from the forest in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96). This irregular building, a long room in shape, is partly enclosed by a castellated curtain wall, which serves nominally to screen and protect it. There are two impressive entrances, numerous arched windows with diamond and cross-patterned stained glass, ornamental buttresses and an enclosed courtyard. Bathurst and Pope succeeded in giving this sham the feeling of a structure developed rather haphazardly over many generations as in the case of many Medieval buildings. In the early 1730s, William Kent began to work for Lord Cobham at Stowe, redesigning to east wing of the hall and opening out the garden landscape following a painterly vision rather than strict, architectural outlines, letting a stream run down into the valley. Kent made use of the existing slopes of the fields and trees, creating the Temple of Ancient Virtue and the Temple of British Worthies (1735). James Gibb, who succeeded Kent and Vanburgh at Stowe, created the Temple of Liberty, or Gothic Temple. This building symbolises a scholarly reverence for the foundations of British freedom. Designed with triangular floorplan and a façade involving three great arched windows with trefoils and doorways and a castellated Gothic tower of Northamptonshire

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ironstone, it is one of the most imposing Gothic follies of Britain. It is inscribed with the words: ‘Liberty of our Ancestors’. In the first stirrings of Gothic aesthetic taste, garden designs had gradually been freed from the strictures of architecture and geometry, following instead the painter’s more subjective attention to shades like the brown of foliage, varied greens of grasses and the changing hues of waters. The overall effects of contrasting elements, the interplay of landscapes with plants, trees and lakes and, within these settings, encounters with structures of counterfeit antiquity, were supposed to nurture meditation and an ability to sense eternal values. Kent’s apprentice, Lancelot or ‘Capability’ Brown, became master gardener at Stowe, paying attention to the varied viewpoints of visitors passing through the gardens: the grouping of features to influence the mind of the observer and the matching of a diverse range of plants around the undulations of the stream that flowed through and connected the diverse elements of this scape. Stowe, Alfred’s Hall and Hagley were by no means isolated examples. Close to Hagley, the poet William Shenstone moved onto the Leasowes estate in 1745 and began to transform his surroundings with walks, woods, a hermitage, a ruined priory with armorial crests, gardens, grottoes and picturesque vantage points, all created with a melancholy, pictorial outlook. It is worth remembering that Ambrosio’s Capuchin monastery garden in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk is crossed with alleys and features plots of rose bushes, orange trees and a hermitage. Shenstone’s estate, managed with a reverence for natural contours and supplemented with buildings that seemed to have aged with the land, proved widely influential. The owners of surrounding mansions and properties all sought out Shenstone’s advice on landscape gardening. Even small Gothic follies could encroach engagingly on a garden that held quite different general resonances. The Gothic alcove, pavilion and exedra (a semi-circular screen or plinth, often crowned with a semi-dome or set of pinnacles) at the Rococo Gardens at Painswick are like mock-Medieval fragments situated rather haphazardly within the dancing visual rhythms of what feels like a much more frivolous horticultural vision. The alcove and its shady situation are encountered like a suddenly quiet passage in a much gayer general movement of music. Compared to and isolated from the brio of its surroundings, the alcove is rather plain and austere: one central castellated arch is flanked by two smaller ones, the interior rendered dark when viewed from a distance. The structure is supported on two narrow pillars and two ­side-pilasters and is a simple box shape with a plain back. It is no accident that this most obviously Gothic of features is set slightly away from the planted plots, fish pond and bright kitchen garden, at the apex of a straight, descending walk of beeches. Yet it is perhaps here that the Gothic structure is seen at its lightest and also its

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3  Gothic shelter at Painswick Rococo Gardens

most contemplative and impressive, rather than in the form of more imposing, ramshackle and vast of follies. Modest in scale, the structure grows slowly in size as one approaches, the long perspective and screening trees to either side working to augment the outline of its fretted shape. Like the sashed Gothic temple or shelter framing the Surprise View at Studley Royal, the Painswick alcove is just like a modern stage set made of stone, a front or façade nominally made for a larger structure that has vanished. Today there is a company, ‘Gothic Garden Folly’, which offers to erect stone Gothic arches and supply Gothic garden folly kits for the discerning gardener. There is a seating area and chapel window as part of the ensemble. Redwood Stone company’s ‘Gothic Arch Folly’ garden won the gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1991. In organising their flowerbeds, Goth gardeners favour flowers and shrubs of darker, purple or dark red hues: black hollyhocks, black calla lilies, ‘Dracula’s kiss’ iris, ‘love-Lies-Bleeding’ amaranthus and a stand of ‘sad cyprus’, all assisted by ‘gravestone’ growing stakes. Gothic garden mirrors, sun and moon dials and gazebos can enhance such a design. There is a ‘Poison Garden’ at Alnwick Castle in which Strychos nux-vomica

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(strychnine), foxglove and hemlock are allowed to flourish. There are continually new twists in different types of Gothic garden features too: Andrew Firth (‘Jack of Dust’) creates miniature bonsai gardens grown on dark plastic skulls that have been cast on human skull models. Artificial moss and grass ‘grows’ close to the skulls’ surface, sometimes imitating the effects of a scalp and hair. Demon mask fountains are also available from ‘Kinsman’ products. 1.5  Décor, domestic furniture and uncanny household items Currently one can stock one’s home with Goth and Gothic items from floor to ceilings, and from macro to micro level. In the Grand Designs TV programme, set in Monmouth, 2008, horror film buffs Jo and Shaun Bennett decided to create a Gothic mansion reminiscent of the The Addams Family. The transformation included new decorative finial figures carved onto their staircase’s newel posts and a huge ‘feudal’ fireplace. Perhaps the most common large articles of Gothic furnishing are, unsurprisingly, chairs, tables, bookcases and beds. As well, of course, there are extant examples of late nineteenth-century Gothic Revival furnishings. Senorita Lucia Zarate, pictured c. 1884, was referred to as one of the ‘Fairy Sisters’, drawing on ideas of the preternatural, and was also called far more demeaningly the ‘Puppet Woman’ or ‘Finger Puppet’, terms that draw on ideas of the uncanny. In the image below, she leans against the seat of a Gothic Revival hall chair, heavily influenced by church architecture, with the splats shaped into three pointed arches, a foliate triangle decorating the toprail and stiles decorated at the tops with roofed finials. The chair knees are pierced with ornate patterns. There is a very wide range of furniture available for those who wish to provide their abode with dark-themed interior décor. The Vampire Rave website lists twenty-seven items of furniture, including a Red Black coffin couch fashioned from heavy duty padding and leather, a Gothic ‘sanctuary’ side table cabinet, a Playboy coffin pool table, a coffin cat-bed and custom-made coffins lined in colours of the customers’ choice. Sarah Bernhardt famously slept in a coffin and from the 1880s onwards into the new century, there was a cult associating young women with coffins and funerary trappings, often in domestic settings. There are Gothic writing sets with quills, metal-tipped pens, skull ink vessels, wax and armorial seals to adorn the dark-themed library table but also plastic ‘Dracula’s Blood’ syringe pens containing red ink. Amazon sells the red velvet-lined ‘Nicodemus’ coffin bed fashioned from pine and stained with ebony. The Elegy Brand Furnishing company, a division of Alchemy, has created a stylish coffin cocktail cabinet and, in response to

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4  Senora Lucia Zarate and Gothic Revival chair, c. 1884

a customer’s request, an electronically operated coffin drinks bar. The solid oak bar finished to a high degree of client specification was made by a firm usually employed in the restoration of churches. The finished bar and furniture comprised a twelve foot table and six chairs with two demonic thrones facing each other. Thrones are a popular item for the Goth lifestyle and range from the Carved Mahogany King Winged Lion Gothic Throne Chair to the Black Lacquer Baroque Throne and the Black Skull Throne Chair. Minster Gothic kitchens create a Classic ‘Lydiard’ kitchen with larder, wall  cupboards, cooker surround and Belfast Sink. Bella company provides Gothic kitchen doors in thirty-one variant colours and Café Express markets a host of kitchen utensils including ‘Crow on Cross’ and Edgar Allan Poe style coasters, black-winged Goth Heart drinking glasses and a garish skull illusion apron. Alchemy stocks a range of pewter-handled cutlery based on René

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Lalique and Georges Fouquet’s designs and also a range of candlesticks and chandeliers to light their customer’s banquets. Dutch Lab fashion a dramatic coffee machine in the shape of a soaring Gothic cathedral, complete with ­laser-cut spires. Lord Byron used to drink claret ‘like the Goths of old’ from a silver-mounted skull cup. He went on to write a mordantly humorous drinking poem, ‘Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull’ (Anon, 1825: 8). Joseph Addison, essayist and poet, remembers being confronted by an actual death’s head at a feast, presumably a playful decoration of the type employed at those sacreligious parties for society rakes, the Hell Fire Clubs. Nemesis Now and Angel Clothing furnish the Goth kitchen with a wide range of polyresin goblets and cult chalices including ‘Skeleton Arm Goblet with Skull’ and ‘Dracula’s Cup’. The latter vessel has blood-red Swarovski crystals dripping from burnished pewter points. The base rises in twisted twines of pewter to support the glass on interlaced tendrils. A skull and crossbones corkscrew is available to open wine bottles and an embossed beer bottle opener, a free gift and spin-off from Phil Claydon’s Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009). Smoking as a habit is mercifully down amongst Goths as well as the general population, but for die-hard death-wish acolytes, there are a plethora of skull, dragon and vampire ashtrays, brightly coloured Dia de Muertas varieties and a range of vintage examples. The splendid Mansfields beer ashtray in black Bakelite (c. mid-1970s) features a transfer print of Dracula and an exhausted looking female victim with the legend: ‘He might have done a lot of drinking after hours …but he’s never had a pint of Mansfields’. If one smokes, and frequents patios and balconies, there are flights of bats and witches mobiles, Gothic wind-chimes and arched external mirrors to keep one company. For one’s private chamber of meditation or devotion, there are black, red and purple candles, incense, chalices and icons (see section 5.1). A very wide range of foodstuffs with Gothic connections are available from Annabel de Vetten’s Conjurer’s Kitchen, which specialises in remarkably realistic skull chocolate sculptures and cakes imitating body parts. Abby Betts’s Whitby Gothic cake features delicate web-like motifs and spiders. There are Count Dracula lollypops and Walls Dracula ice lollies from the 1980s (the original cartoon advert is still viewable online). To dry up the plates afterwards, one can utilise the vivid ‘Whitby Dracula’ kitchen cloth designed by Kevin Wright Design studios. Hobgoblin beer is widely available as is Newcastle Werewolf beer and Dracula wines (Legends of Dracula red from Romania and a Podgoria Dealu Mare, Conte Dracula Merlot and Whitby Vampire Cabernet Sauvignon, for example). Perhaps the most authentically Gothic alcoholic link-in is Bleeding

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5  Mansfield beer Vampire ashtray

Nun Oatmeal Stout brewed by Legend Brewing Company, an association that takes us back to Matthew Lewis and earlier German legends. Bexley’s eighteenth-century Gothic Bath House reminds us of the Gothic taste for timely ablutions. Nightmoth sells handmade dark-grey soaps impressed with skulls and vampire crowns, a Necromicon creature and a coffin. Monster’s Kids darkbone unique Gothic toothbrushes in their coffin holders are available. Smiths ‘Fangs’ cheese and onion snacks had a free gift offer for a Fangs toothbrush with a top-hatted vampire on the handle. Infiniti’s Gothic series of hair colouring include Gothic Black and Anthracite. For a thrilling shower, there are Nosferatu horror film shower curtains with the dark outline of Max Schreck as the vampire juxtaposed against stair banisters and, perhaps reminiscent of the Bates Motel bathroom in Psycho, Spinning Hat productions have produced

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6  Gothic cake with webs and spiders motifs

a bathmat featuring bloody drip-marks and footprints. To complete the lustral round-up, Magenta Crow market vampire toilet roll holders and Nemesis Now, a Grim Reaper toilet paper holder. There are numerous Dracula flags and vampire banners of various sizes to choose from in adding a chilling blazon to one’s garden or rooftop.

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1.6  Theatre and stage A viable working definition of Gothic theatre might take in Gothic Revival drama (with elements inherited from early Miracle plays, Elizabethan theatre – including Shakespearean tragedy – and Jacobean tragic drama), Sturm und Drang drama from the Continent, Victorian Gothic melodrama and the recent surge in contemporary Gothic drama. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk had drawn on Revolutionary plays such as Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (1793), and dramatists in this genre had long utilised castle and convent settings. Jeffery M. Cox writes: ‘liberated c­onvents […] both fed and were fed by the Gothic imagination’ (Cox, 2002:  125). Dramatists like the contemporaries Edward Fitzball and J. R. Planché also p­ rofited from the kind of stage designs, special effects and lighting innovations pioneered by Giovanni Nicolo Servandoni and PhilippeJacques de Loutherbourg running the gamut from shadow puppetry, fireworks, reflections and flares. George Colman’s Bluebeard (1798) employed mechanical elephants and a secret chamber with a moving skeleton and James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest (1794) used blue gauze screens. Lewis’s own play Raymond and Agnes (1809) employed an image of a phantom scroll rear-projected from Argand lamps (Jones, 2011: 54). Boaden’s spectre revealed behind blue gauze as the character Adeline finds a manuscript in a deserted abbey’s most remote rooms conveyed a very powerful visual impression: The whisper of the house, as he [the spectre] was about to enter – the breathless silence, while he floated along like a shadow, – proved to me that I had achieved the great desideratum. (Cox, 2002: 132)

As Gothic stage productions grew more popular, so revenue generated the means by which flat, painted backdrops of castles could become towering structures jutting forwards with serviceable stairs and galleries. As Paul Ranger writes: ‘The most direct way of making a spectacular impact’ in this type of drama ‘was to mass numbers of costumed actors in a procession’ (Ranger, 1991: 72). Some directors, stage managers and actors, particularly John Kemble, tried to ensure the historical accuracy of costumes to the period represented but other concerns such as the actors’ mobility and freedom to perform onstage often resulted in looser, hybrid clothing from many periods. Though the antiquarian, John Carter, approved of the presentation of the supernatural in plays such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) (‘this magic scene enchants our ravished senses’ – Townshend, 2014: 186), as Dale Townshend writes: ‘for all their purporting to provide representation of the Gothic past, [these plays] were frequently at loggerheads with the antiquarian

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spirit of the day, regarded as they were, as inaccurate, irresponsible and offensive renditions of medieval times’ (Townshend, 2014: 186). Carter apparently failed to appreciate that, from its literary outset in Otranto, Gothic had always been a hybrid and eclectic form of fantasy. At the insistence of Samuel Arnold, Planché brought his play The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles to the London stage in 1820, preserving, against his own misgivings, the Scottish setting of the French vampire melodramas derived, ultimately, from John Polidori and Byron. Engravings of the onstage action reveal the cast in authentic enough Scottish costumes posed against elaborate abbey windows and statuary. Thomas Cooke, who played the vampire, also appeared as the monster in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823) at the Lyceum (the English Opera House). This version of Mary Shelley’s tale alternates between fear and comedy, and Peake keeps the monster mute, so the actor had to rely on pantomime to convey his moods. In terms of make-up, the monster’s skin was light blue and his cotton costume was quite revealing, showing his muscular build as he broke down doors and leapt from a balcony to the table beneath. While flames and fumes were seen bursting from the red glare of Victor’s laboratory as the monster first entered, critics were disappointed that they were not treated to a vista of the laboratory itself. Planché became an ever-more rigorous supporter of historical accuracy in costumes, and managed to carry his own way in increasingly lavish productions, whilst also creating particularly startling trapdoor ‘disappearances’. Other visual effects came to the fore in Gothic melodramatic plays and operas: Fitzball used a magic lantern on tracks to project the ghostly vessel in The Flying Dutchman (1826), Dion Boucicault employed panoramic vistas in The Corsican Brothers (1852) and a whole host of dazzling illusions made C. M. von Weber and Friedrich Kind’s Der Freischütz (1821) a very popular work. The international influence of French operas was felt on the British and American stages as a result of operas with infernal themes such as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable / Robert the Devil (1831) and Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859), a grand opera in five acts, which was revived in 1862 finding great success, playing at the Operá with the addition of ballet scenes. The great dramatic spectacles of Jacques Offenbach’s féerie and science fiction-inspired La Voyage dans la Lune / A Trip to the Moon (1875) and his version of Les Contes d’Hoffmann / The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) prepared the way for Henry Irving’s extravagant sets and costumes with fantasy themes. Irving’s production of W. G. Wills’s adaptation of Faust (1885) was one of the most costly and elaborate ever mounted on the Victorian Gothic stage. Dominating all, Irving’s Faust was a formidable presence: limping and dressed

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in a flame-red costume with a hat with a soaring red plume. The set for the scene on the Brocken’s summit was breathtaking, apparently with macabre winged creatures and witches flitting through the air above the pandemonium of the demonic throng (warlocks, fiends and infernal imps), and a ghostly portrait of Margaret, her white neck scarred with a red line, appearing in the sky. The grey and green shades of the lighting and scenery reminded contemporary observers of Gustave Doré’s images and, in the earlier duel scene, jagged sparks were emitted by mortals’ swords as they struck against the devil’s weapon, long before the buzzing light sabres of George Lucas’s Star Wars films. Barbara Belford mentions another prescient moment in the production: Irving’s apocalypse stunned London. A Dracula foreshadowing occurs at the moment when Faust defies the devil and is silenced with: ‘I am a Spirit!’ (‘I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome’) (Belford, 1996: 180)

Jim Sharman’s Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) with its transgender motifs and cross-dressing actors and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera (1986) with its lavish sets, lighting and costume have proved worthy inheritors of the uncanny Parisian opera productions. Stephen Mallatrat’s The Woman in Black (1987), a dramatic adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel, has enjoyed a remarkably successful run. Just as notable, is the fact that this production strips the Gothic ghost story down to its essentials, employing only two actors and minimal sets. Lighting and atmosphere are all, as the stage imaginatively becomes the treacherous salt-marshes and dunes around Eel Marsh House. Rarely has so much fear been built out of anticipatory anxiety and silence, the narrative’s depth allowing levels of foreboding to emerge. In terms of spectacle, the prospect of the solitary Arthur Kipps (a  clever play on H. G. Wells’s character’s name) surrounded by darkness gazing up to the open cross-section of the child’s bedroom in the ill-fated house, and the haunting pause before the rocking chair starts to move, are charged with a dramatic intensity. Just as worthy of mention in this regard is Philip Dart’s production of Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel (1991) where audiences were brought to their feet trembling whilst watching an actress writhing in suffering nightmares on a chaise longue as shadowy shapes materialise behind her in the hotel French windows. The visual impact of the scene is matched perfectly with Glyn Houston’s side-stage narrative: the actress’s sudden superimposed scream, a recorded louder scream and drum struck behind the audience are truly shocking. No short account of the Gothic stage would be complete without ­registration of how digital technology is now affecting Gothic productions.

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Ian Kershaw’s adaptation of The Mist in the Mirror, another of Susan Hill’s writings, premiered at the Oldham Coliseum in 2015. Here Kevin Shaw’s use of pea-souper mists is enhanced by the dense, stalking shadows and shuttling interiors created by  the digital media company Imitating the Dog. As Monmouth pursues Conrad Vane’s satanic manuscript, the digital productions change and merge scenes before our eyes: the interior of rail carriages, dockland apartments and moorland. Doors vanish and stairwells and beds appear in an hallucinatory haze, as if all part of Monmouth’s increasing delirium. Manuscript and gravestone lettering rise to dominate the backdrop reminiscent of the cinematography of Peter Greenaway; backdrop becomes foreground and vice versa. 1.7  Masquerade, Halloween and Gothic as pageant and immersive spectacle The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habilements of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. (Poe, 1986: 101)

These words from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and the tale itself have had a prodigious effect on horror films and novels as well as modern Gothic subcultures. Félicien Rops’s illustration ‘La Morte au Bal Masqué’ / Death at the Masked Ball’ (1875) and Lon Chaney’s skull-masked appearance in the final masquerade in Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925) are popular variations on the same theme. Moreover, by the time of Poe, masquerade had enjoyed a wide and accepted popularity of at least 200 years in the West. The very nature of modern Gothic and Goth are dependent upon the concept of masquerade, that is of dark-themed celebrations in disguise in social spaces. These events differ considerably in their size and nature. The Black Rose Ball, a masquerade charity ball with vampire theme encouraged is staged annually in the De Grey Rooms, York. Viona Ielegems’s Gala Nocturna, an annual dark Romantic masquerade ball, has been staged in the Augustinian Cloister in Ghent and in the Marble Hall at Antwerp Zoo. An online dress code is issued for this event, if not strictly enforced. On a weekend adjacent to the Autumn Goth Festival, the Vampire Ball at the Bram Stoker Film Festival is held in the Whitby Pavilion ballroom. The dress code encourages macabre costume and stipulates: ‘No jeans’. Each of these events features an emphasis on photography and film, includes sales stalls and musical entertainment. The Bram Stoker event features

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an impressive line-up of Goth bands playing live and an extraordinary array of Goth, Gothic, industrial, folk-pagan, Victorian and eighteenth-century ghostly costumes. The prominence of Rubber Gorilla mask-making artists at the festival makes for a potent Halloween ghoulish and slasher element. Gothic masquerade and Halloween costume events probably both originate in Celtic and Germanic festivals of ‘souling’ for soul cakes, guising and mumming, seasonal ceremonies linked to remembering the dead, either in a propitiatory or apotropaic sense. Different aspects of these perambulatory customs linked to All Souls’ Night and imported by different groups of emigrants to America began to coalesce into Halloween celebrations involving ghostly costumes in the 1880s. In the 1930s, elements of popular media and film culture began to influence the choice and evolution of Halloween garb. Interestingly, Tommy Lee Wallace’s film Halloween III, Season of the Witch (1982) traces the evil power invested in a company’s Halloween costumes to ancient pagan rituals and an attempt to restore an age of witchcraft. While Terry Castle (1986) makes distinctions between the types of aristocratic masquerade current in the sixteenth century, theatrical masques and eighteenth-century masquerades, it is possible that these too share the same origins. Though displayed in a theatrical context, it is wise also not to forget the influence of the dark masques of Jacobean Tragedy plays. A plate of 1771 shows one of Mrs Cornelys’s masquerades, and the assemblage includes ­revellers costumed as a witch, a bear, a monk and a nun, Commedia del Arte figures and, significantly enough for Gothic interest, a mobile corpse with feet protruding from its coffin. Castle writes: ‘Satanic costume seems both to be a vestige of the grand Diablerie traditions of the European carnival and a humorous acknowledgement of the devil’s paradigmatic role – witness events in Eden – in the invention of the masquerade (Castle, 1986: 64). Whilst the large public masquerades proliferated during the eighteenth century, private costume parties and masques continued, and the 1760s saw the rise of the Medmenham Brotherhood, a group of aristocrats, politicians and worthies who gathered at the behest of Sir Francis Dashwood in the Hell Fire Club to dress in quasi-ecclesiastical robes and conduct feasts, orgies and supposedly pagan ceremonies. Horace Walpole loved both private and public masquerades. He probably visited Medmenham during the heyday of the Brotherhood, but he had also taken pleasure earlier in the grand scale masquerades at Venice, dressing in his domino, a great dark robe and hood falling in many folds. In 1740 he wrote excitedly: ‘I have found a little unmasked moment to write to you […] I have done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my domino’ (Haggerty, 2011: 61). Emma McAvoy makes a fine case for Walpole’s

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home at Strawberry Hill becoming an immersive entertainment environment (McEvoy, 2016: 43–52). These celebrations and masked parties co-existed in the late 1700s with another type of entertainment: the pageant, often historical in nature and derived ultimately from the pageant wagons of the Mystery plays and entertainments at Medieval festivities. In the summer of 1783, Brooke Boothby mounted a Gothic pageant for Henry Fuseli, the celebrated painter. Fuseli, who did not suspect the divertissement about to occur, was conducted by his host through the woods belonging to a Colonel St George, only to meet a cast of costumed actors: knights, monsters, fairies and other mythical denizens of the wilderness. The colourfully dressed actors recited lines written by Elizabeth Ryves and Anna Seward read her poetry. The popularity of these entertainments with a rather Spenserian atmosphere and perhaps indebted to a surge in imaginary Medievalism and the influence of Milton’s Comus (1634) persisted into the Arthurian banquets, balls and tournaments of the nineteenth century, including Queen Victoria’s own Arthurian Bal Costumé of 1842 (mentioned in section 8.1). Another type of immersive Gothic event, this time with Orientalist associations, was held by William Beckford over three days at Christmas at Fonthill, his Palladian country house in Wiltshire. Beckford had hired the famous painter and set designer, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg to create an awe-inspiring environment. On entering the building, the small band of revelers encountered a vast Egyptian temple flickering with the stained, uncanny light of transparencies. Eerie music rose from counterfeit subterranean chapels and singing was provided by Italian castrati. Nine great rooms opened from this Pharoanic setting, one of them a Turkish lounge with gold and blue ceiling and s­ ilk-covered divans inviting sexual intimacy. This exotic environment was hermetically sealed off from the external world in a manner that anticipates Poe’s ‘Masque’: no one could leave or enter for the duration. In terms of literature, though one senses the Gothic possibilities of Mr Monkton costumed as a black Lucifer in Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and the salacious insinuations associated with the masquerade in Elizabeth Inchbalds’s A Simple Story (1791), it was left to Anne Swansea, a writer taken to task by critics for her inveterate writing of Gothic novels, to show, in her Guilty, or Not Guilty; or, A Lessons for Husbands, A Tale (1822), how a young, innocent lady, Lady Caroline Fitzallen, could be abducted from a masquerade. A much darker, indeed demonic, set of associations started to be linked to masques and masquerades in Friedrich Schiller’s The Ghost Seer (1787–89), Thomas De Quincey’s Klosterheim: or, The Masque (1832) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla (1821). Poe’s stories, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846)

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7  Zebb Clench, painting from The Masque of the Red Death sequence

and ­‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), follow this trend, revealing acts of murder committed during or in the throes of masked carnival. It is at one such event that the General Spielsdorf in Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire tale Carmilla, first meets the predatory revenant: I remarked a young lady, dressed magnificently, but wearing a mask, who appeared to me to be observing my ward with extraordinary interest […] A lady, also masked, richly and gravely dressed, and with a stately air, like a person of rank, accompanied her as a chaperon. Had the young lady not worn a mask, I could, of course, have been much more certain upon the question whether she was really watching my poor darling. (Le Fanu, [1871–72] 2013a: 70)

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8  Vampire Ball, The Bram Stoker International Film Festival

Cinema has proved an ideal medium for exploring the rich visual, erotic and menacing associations of masquerade. For example, one remembers the s­ tartling occult masked ritual and orgy of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the firework masquerade ball in Roger Vadim’s version of Carmilla: Blood and Roses (1960), and the richness of the masquerade in Stephen Sommers’s Van Helsing (2004), where the dancers’ mirrored invisibility was gleaned from Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). 1.8  Dance and mime Gothic literature arose in a European context where an enthusiasm for ethnic and folk music and dance was well established, and this fashion can be glimpsed in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. Though we do not know the exact choreography of ‘The Dance of the Witches’ and the ‘Ballet of the Mummies’ as part of E.-G. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, in Henry Fuseli’s painting ‘The NightHag Visiting Lapland Witches’ (1794–96) revellers with horned hats dance a version of the back-to-back round-dance formerly depicted as performed at witches’ sabbats. Variations on round-dances can be seen in Fuseli’s ‘The Shepherd’s Dream’ (1784–85) and William Blake’s ‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies’ (mid-1780s) and are evoked in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830). We cannot know how the living and undead danced in Edward

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Loder’s Raymond and Agnes (1855), his operatic adaptation of Lewis’s The Monk but, in his own productions, August Bournonville preserved the choreography for ‘The Ballet of the Nuns’ in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1831). In this waltz-based dance, Maria Taglioni as Abbess Helena leads a host of undead nuns rising from their tombs and swirling alluringly to seduce a knight. Edgar Degas caught the first ungainly emergence of the nuns, leaning wildly and thrusting their bodies at strange angles. A reviewer wrote: ‘A crowd of mute shades glides through the arches. All these women cast off their nuns’ costume, they shake off the cold powder of the grave; suddenly they throw themselves into the delights of their past life; they dance like bacchantes, they drink like sappers’ (Williams, 2003: 71). One can also gain a sense of the variety of dances used in these and later Gothic productions by the ways in which they are parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, or the Witch’s Curse (1887). A sense of ceremony is intrinsic to modern Goth and Gothic dance. Live concerts by modern bands like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim are often regarded as rituals, the latter band’s 2012 album being entitled Ceromonies. Emerging from a crowded vista of subculture dance in the late 1970s – mainstream freeform, heavy metal pre-mosh headbanging and shoulder flips, the vestiges of Punk leaping and pogo, nascent Dark Glam moves – Goth dance developed and isolated several moves from rock/hippie and metal dance (particularly forward/upper zone hand and arm movements), refined and slowed these down, gaining impact from, and adding new structures and steps. Shunning the tightly orchestrated moves of other macabre dances such as that on the video for Michael Jackson’s zombie-thronged Thriller (1982), Goth choreography developed informally, evolving over years in audiences watching groups such as Siouxsie and the Banshees. Dance is obviously one of the most conspicuous ways in which Gothic bodies are socially visible and, though previous musical movements often exhibited a tribal and ritual ambience, a strong sense of ceremony remains a key concept in Goth. David Punter writes that ‘The ceremony always points past and beyond, behind itself’ (Punter, 1999: 38). Gothic dance is a mode that always references other implicit, secret, inner and outer realities: the darkness and light beyond. Though popular websites can be found detailing different moves – ‘Washing the windows’, ‘Wiping the cobwebs’, ‘Step over dead bodies’ and ‘Which way is the exit’ – all of which sinuous movements are indicative, many individual Goths develop their own moves within a structure shared with others in a given environment. Sometimes, the more expansive moves are impossible. For example, Fields of the Nephilim audiences are often crushed together too tightly for any dances other than toe-tapping, body sway, arm tendrilling up

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and the building of suspended human pyramids where young men stripped to the waist adopt cruciform ‘Which way is the exit’ attitudes. On more expansive occasions, there is certainly a processive element to the dancing, a cat-like swerving pace to and fro, with hand movements being in the forward, upper zone. Isabella van Elferen writes accurately that ‘Goths move twice as slowly as disco, house or trance dancers; rather than accentuating every beat in four-to-the-floor manner, their movements tend to emphasise only the first and third beats in every bar’. She goes on to write of the ‘spectacular’ effect when one sees or becomes ‘part of an entire dance floor heaving slow motion’ (Van Elferen, 2012: 143). Yet Gothdom is a hybrid field and the present author has witnessed Victorian Goths and Dark Georgians engaged in fast and furious jig, whirling, throwing and clashing their staffs together overhead. Goth and Gothic dance companies and productions offer a wide and varied field of performance. Indianapolis-based ‘The Casket Girls: A Modern Gothic Vampire Ballet’ and Northern Ballet’s and Mark Bruce Company’s productions of Dracula seem at different ends of the dance spectrum. Matthew Bourne’s adaptation Sleeping Beauty, a Gothic Romance received mixed reviews. There are also more intimate and small-scale productions: Gothic burlesque (for example ‘Emilie Autumn and the Bloody Crumpets’), and belly-dancing artists, one-off Halloween shows and Rocky Horror tributes, Lisa Starry, writer and director of A Vampire Tale by Scorpius Dance (2015), has spoken of the intensely visual aspects of the production and of the Punk/ slashed aesthetic in design. An initial dark carnivalesque atmosphere is created by the lumbering ‘Strange Man’ clown figure. When the vampire klans emerge, the leader of the male vampires, Gavin Sisson is a glowering figure, vigilant and assertive, prowling around. Ably supported and challenged by Haydehn Tuipulotu and the other males, Sisson moves between stage, floor and rope dancing with sleek assurance. Nicole Olson as the Queen of the female vampires succeeds in switching between imperious star-like hauteur, the hurt rage of a spurned lover and animalistic tooth-and-claw savagery with great poise, her dance on the lid of a grand piano being a particular highlight. Some of the early, establishing gestures in, for example, the entry of the male and female klans hold hints of Joel Grey’s transgressive performance in Cabaret: the rhythm, the solid oncoming mass towards the audience, the expansive, arrogant flourishes and raised shoulders, yet the embodied power of the dancers is Starry’s own invention. Sisson’s signature crawling leap down from and up to the stage is broken later in the production to great effect. Despite (and indeed because of) his mastery of the ropes, his sudden abject lack of power in the face of his Queen’s change in affections, is one of the most

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9  Scorpius Dance Theatre presents Lisa Starry’s A Vampire Tale

shocking moments in the show. Lateral rolls, backflips and ‘under and over’ alternating somersaults are used to reveal the ebbing and flowing of power between the klans and the King and Queen. At one point the struggle for sexual dominance and control of the girl builds to a new peak, the whole cast using their outstretched arms, strenuous pulling gestures and rhythmic shouts like spells of power to suggest lines of force spanning the stage. The look of the production is impressive, George Johnson and A. K. Klovenas’s design enhancing a sense of characters through primeval contrasts,

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raw textures and cutaway costume detail. Act 2 Scene 2 presents an alluring vista of seemingly disembodied pale wrists and hands swirling out of opened coffins like tendrils. It is an oneiric and beautiful movement, the audience caught up in this strangely surreal display as if confronted by images from Odilon Redon’s paintings, the wrists moving singly then in unison as if in a circadian rhythm with the moon. Apart from the ‘Strange Man’, all dancers in Scorpius Theatre’s ‘A Vampire’s Tale’ rely on dance, wordless movement and mime for their impact. Writers have often been drawn to the dark and subversive qualities of mime. In Stéphan Mallarmé’s short story ‘Mimique’, Pierrot has inherited the mime show warning of a murder from the players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the clown himself becoming the assassin. Gothic mime and dumbshow obviously have links with mainstream drama, dance, tableaux vivants and poses plastiques. Small independent groups and duos such as Creepy Mime Theatre, and Abby Hancock (Ybba Kcocnah) and Sophie Willis (Eihpos Sillw) create disturbing and haunting effects.

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Chapter 2

2.1  Early painting to the eighteenth century

G

othi c pa i n t in g de v e l o p e d h a l f a century later than Gothic sculpture, around the turn of the thirteenth century, and is characterised by a new pictorial handling of human figures both in themselves and in relation to their background, more natural facial expression, strong lineation, application of perspective and decorative elements. One of the most impressive paintings of the Late Gothic period is Jan Van Eyck’s Annunciation (1434–36) with its splendid Madonna painted with weight and form inside her rich blue, ermine-trimmed robe. Van Eyck’s depiction of the effects of light playing over materials, their intricate folds and decorative surfaces, reveals a high level of skill. The way that the temple interior’s arches change from Romanesque to Gothic styles further down the walls reveals a new freedom in the deployment of symbolic architecture. It is worth also comparing this painting with Carlo Crivelli’s very different realisation of Italian Late Gothic art: the Annunciation with St Emidius (1486), replete with iridescent plumage, glassware and carpets. It seems ironic that it is during the period 1470–1550, when the graphic arts in Northern Europe develop from the Late Gothic (words used in their earlier aesthetic theoretical sense), through the High Renaissance whilst still retaining some notable features of Germanic Medieval style, that those artists flourished whose work is identified by postmodern artists with the Gothic in its later post-1760 sense. Dieric Bouts’s (1415–75) Hell (1470) has been identified with nineteenth-century and modern Gothic visions of damnation, one detail being used as a cover image for a Penguin Books edition of Lewis’s The Monk. Joyce Carol Oates links the horrific ‘yet somehow natural-seeming m ­ onsters of Hieronymus Bosch’ with those evoked in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Oates,

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1996). Stephen King, in his The Dark Tower (2004), writes that his taheen monsters resemble the creations of Bosch, and Mary Ellen Snodgrass, in her Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature, places emphasis on the influence of Bosch’s ‘bestial humanoid shapes’ in the lineage of Gothic architecture and art (Snodgrass, 2014: 148). Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528), Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) and Hans Baldung Grün (1484–1545) are some of the artists very clearly identified with Gothic style by critics. Postmodern Gothic retrospectively lays hold on Bosch’s hallucinogenic imagery of monstrosity just as adeptly as heavy metal bands use ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ for their album covers. After two centuries of advances in industrious Gothic painting, with gains made particularly in realism and attention to detail, Bosch’s paintings present an eclectic mixture of entrancingly beautiful and inventively demonic and unnatural life drawn from vernacular and learned references travelogues, details of gargoyles, the illuminations of religious treatises and moralistic codices. If the inventive tortures of Hell that Bosch pictures seem features of a primitive and sadistic outlook, the lambency of the light of the Creation, his blazing colours and evident learning seem associated with the High Renaissance. He pictures suspect dark-skinned foreigners, monsters called grilli, composed exclusively of heads and legs with missing bodies, and circular erotic rides where humans canter round and round, getting nowhere except, presumably, closer to orgasm and hell. Postmodern Gothic lays hold of Bosch’s art because of its atmosphere of exotic doom, his wide array of monsters and the hints of exuberant freethinking lurking within these panoramic diptychs and triptychs. In the left panel of ‘The Last Judgement’ (c. 1482) God is shown casting out Lucifer’s angels and changing them into insect forms, a transformation proleptic of modern Gothic art. Goths admire the inventive demonological bestiaries, the apparent signs of heretical sects and alchemical symbols whilst critics still debate whether such gorgeous invention and capacity for wonder can be at the service of such brutal moralising. Gothic themes within the work of several other painters of the late Renaissance  have also proved influential. The central panel of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16), a harrowing depiction of the Crucifixion with its agony-wracked, disease-stippled Christ, reinstates a fervid Gothic linear style but also, as Durtal the protagonist in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là Bas (1891) perceives, the artist has joined extreme mortal suffering to the spiritual realm. The blasted trees on the outer panel where St Paul visits Anthony influenced many artists including Salvatore Rosa in his depiction of savage landscapes. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s paintings such as Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1530) reveal an apparent fixation on ladies of fashion with

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a penchant for posing with a recently severed heads. Judith’s rich wine-red jacket, gold rings, tilted bonnet and her insouciant expression as she displays a large sword seem to reveal a ruthless femme fatale. Cranach’s depiction, elsewhere, of a lavishly attired St Catherine about to suffer her own decapitation at the hands of a foeman with a bulging codpiece manifests barbarous sexual tensions. Sexual tensions are also present in Hans Baldung Grün’s fascination with the vigorous and shapely charms of cavorting witches of different ages, subjects that persisted into his late period. Contemporary viewers were presumably repulsed by the witches’ mockery of the rosary and the exhumed bones that they hold, but the depiction of the witches’ secret feasts, their vigour and playful energy seems to invite more ambiguous feelings. (One such scene was used for a New Year’s card.) We question whether the moral of these chiaroscuro woodcuts is as uncompromising as it seems to be in, for example, in Grün’s painting, Death and the Maiden (1518–19), where death’s chilly skeleton presses up suggestively behind a fleshly young woman. Their overall impact remains ambiguous. Of course, there are any number of chiaroscuro paintings of priests, monks and brooding rakes from the Quatrocento onwards who might remind one of Radcliffe’s Schedoni or Montano. Vanitas pictures like those trompe l’oeil paintings by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, where life-like seemingly ­three-dimensional human skulls toppled together negligently with dead grass, tobacco and musical instruments, gave memento mori themes a new edge. Caravaggio developed the extreme form of chiaroscuro called tenebrism (tenebroso: dark), and Salvator Rosa became one of the main exponents of this gloomy style. Ann Radcliffe has only to mention ‘Salvator’ in her gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1799) to denote the kind of landscape and atmosphere she is trying to describe: the steep cliff-scapes and forested mountains with toppling trees as in Landscape with the Dream of Jacob (1665), wild rivers and dark valleys haunted by banditti. Radcliffe was celebrated for the association of her word-pictures with the paintings of Rosa. A particularly potent scene of horror is portrayed in Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations (c. 1646) where, almost lost in darkness, various harridans clip a hanged man’s nails for use in magic, offer a swaddled babe for sacrifice and squeeze blood from a human organ into a cauldron. The most famous and widely disseminated image in Gothic art (where ‘Gothic’ is used in its later post-Walpolean sense), is Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1782), where a demon squats atop the torso of the body of a sprawled woman dressed in white. The demon, as if disturbed by the viewer, turns his reddened eyes in askance to us, the observers. This is a monster that recurs in his art, for example in Cobweb (1785–86), which features the fairy avatar of sleep and dreams, a leering Queen Mab accompanied by the fairies,

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Cobweb and Mustard-seed, a soaring Puck and, most tellingly to the left of her knee and chained to her, the ‘Nightmare’ creature reprised. Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom (1780–90) is rife with references to witches and malign magic including a hooded witch in the lower right corner who is supporting a changeling whom she has just fashioned from wax. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (1790) (discussed in sections 1.2 and 4.1) and the Anglo-American painter Benjamin West’s Death on the Pale Horse (1796) are quite rightly viewed as important if very different types of Gothic works, but it is Fuseli’s paintings that exerted a lasting influence on the Victorian ‘fairy painters’ and British visual culture in general. 2.2  Painting: Goya to Giger and after The most important and innovative paintings of psychological horror in the early nineteenth century were created by Francisco Goya. His oil mural Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23), one of his Pinturas Negras (1819–23) originally painted on the walls of his house, is a raw and expressive work of visceral revulsion. The famous Capricho 43 ‘Universal Language’ (1797), The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, where the slumped figure of the dreamer is haunted by a huge, dark bat, owls and a lynx-eared cat, is often used by critics to bear out the truths of the Enlightenment but also, paradoxically, to reveal the limitations of rationality concerning the human mind. The Disasters of War, his graphic reactions to the Peninsula War, have proved important to modern Gothic artists, including the Chapman Brothers. Goya mocked the Inquisition, the baying crowds at religious pilgrimages and the gullible followers of superstitions as in The Witches’ Sabbath or Aquelarre (1821–23). After the détente cordiale of 1819, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe enjoyed spectacular success in Europe, and amongst French artistic circles in particular. Eugène Delacroix’s The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (1829) is one salient manifestation of this Scott-mania, the shocking assassination at the Bishop’s palace described in Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823) realised in garish fire-lit gold colouring against consuming darkness. In a quieter and more contemplative Gothic vein, François-Marius Granet produced a series of tranquil monastic scenes such as Monks on the Terrace at the Certosa in Capri (c. 1820) where three monks are revealed bathed in lambent moonlight reflected off the sea. Charles Renoux followed this trend and Louis Daguerre, the ‘father of photography’, produced the famous Ruins of the Chapel at Holyrood by Moonlight (1824), which also featured as a diorama display. It is interesting that, despite their similar subjects and atmospheres, these works were probably produced without direct

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k­ nowledge of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Monastery Graveyard in the Snow and views of Eldena Abbey (c. 1825), where the Teutonic ecclesiastical remains rise from the surrounding forest. The so-called ‘Frenetic’ school of French artists grouped around Charles Nodier and Victor Hugo openly delighted in rebellion against religious and artistic conventions. Louis Boulanger’s Mazeppa Tied to His Horse (1827) was a key work of this aesthetic movement, as was Delacroix’s Interior of a Dominican Convent (1831) picturing the scene in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) where the brutalised Alonzo Moncada is dragged before a merciless bishop, a religious procession over to the right of the ­picture-space indicating that this cruelty is all part of routine church business. Delacroix’s Lucy Ashton’s Bridal Night, The Bride of Lammermoor (c. 1824) and his lithographs (see section 5.3.) for Goethe’s Faust (1826–27) reveal a long-term interest in the more violent, horrific and uncanny aspects of literature. In Britain, it is clear that, just as Fuseli’s and Theodor Von Holst’s paintings provided a link to later Victorian fairy paintings, the latter’s dark fantasies provided a link to the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti recognising that Von Holst’s work was ‘of the satanic school’ and writing of his admiration of the older painter’s vision of the scene in Auerbach’s cellar. Rossetti suggested that Von Holst was the ‘Edgar Poe of painting’ and indeed Poe had been a close contemporary of the painter (Myrone, 2006: 121). In 1831, Von Holst created the first pictures for the second edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831). The mid-Victorian cult of Medievalism as well as its Gothic and Arthurian associations as inherited by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were, of course, indebted to Walpole’s precedent and tastes. For the modern Goth movement, the connections are obvious. Nancy Kilpatrick writes: ‘Pre-Raphaelite art and Goth are linked at soul level […] The subject matter involves brooding faces, sometimes trance-like and full of moodiness. Sensitive men and dreamy, languid women full of half-requited or suicidal passions portray moments of mythological stories and legends that had often been told through poetry’ (Kilpatrick, 2005: 225). John Martin’s immense paintings of supernatural cataclysm, volcanoes and apocalyptical scenes drew the same awed audiences as panoramas. Philip Burne-Jones’s most celebrated work The Vampire (c. 1897), almost contemporaneous with the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, was viewed in an artistic context where depictions of women as monstrous demons and treacherous Salomes were commonplace. C. H. Schmidt-Helmbrechts’s Empusa (1896) pictures the blood-drinking child of Hecate, a monstrous being, flanked by spider and snake motifs, with the serpent gliding round a crowned skull. Influenced by an fin de siècle upsurge of interest in occult philosophy and practice, Albert-Joseph Pénot and Luis Ricardo Falero painted representations of

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witches and diabolism. Landmarks of Symbolist art influenced by Poe’s Gothic stories include Odilon Redon’s The Masque of the Red Death (1883) and The Cask of Amontillado (1883). In Devil Carrying Off a Head (1876), Redon’s Satan wings his way into the sky above the artist’s town holding a huge, decapitated face. Redon also produced the macabre, human-faced creature of The Smiling Spider (1881). Arnold Böcklin painted at least five versions of his Toteninseln / Isle of the Dead, which became as popular with the general public as Franz von Stuck’s fervid The Wild Chase (1889), allegedly one of Hitler’s favourite paintings. One of the painters who transmitted an interest in occult themes into the twentieth century was Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), an artist profoundly respected in some circles of modern Goth culture. Richard Tennant Cooper’s paintings of the spirits and monsters attendant upon disease and modern medicine draw upon the work of Bosch and the British fairy painters in portraying the influence of science in the post First World War world. The work of Ernst Fuchs, who founded the ‘Vienna School of Fantastic Realism’, was an important link between the mystical paintings of Gustave Moreau, Austrian Secession artists and the elongated monstrous forms ­created by H. R. Giger. It is a curious irony that, if Swiss native Fuseli’s The Nightmare was the acme of visual horror from its first appearance in 1782 and the decades that followed, and Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s Toteninsel (1886) was the most popular image of Symbolist mordancy, there is no doubt that Swiss artist H. R. Giger’s alien Xenomorph creature became the template for terrifying monstrosity nearly a century later in Ridley Scott’s film Alien (1979). Giger had been fascinated from an early age by H. P. Lovecraft’s Necromicon and produced his own illustrated version of the imaginary book in 1976 as well as using the image of the Goat of Mendes in his work and assembling his own collection of occult objects. He also produced tributes to Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel. It is interesting given Bosch’s, Fuseli’s and the Symbolist painters’ use of insectoid forms that Giger’s alien was based on hybrid insect-snake anatomy. His acrylic painting on paper and wood, Witches Dance, reveals a leering skeletal figure in fedora surrounded by the loops of a serpentine monster. This macabre figure aims a catapult in the shape of a young witch’s body straight at the viewer. Giger’s visions not only anticipate Cybergoth and associated festishised culture but also sections of Steampunk. Anne Cranny-Francis proposes that Giger’s work deals with ‘the traditional preoccupations of the Gothic – fear, desire, sex […] t­orture, bodily mutilation’ and ‘uses conventional Gothic images and strategies’ such as ‘darkness’ and ‘bodily f­ ragmentation’ (Cranny-Francis, 2005: 32). Anna Quéma concurs that Giger’s pictures ‘rest on a tension between the Gothic and the fantastic’ (Quéma, 2004: 81).

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Clovis Trouille (1889–1975) worked as a restorer and manikin, which perhaps goes some way to explain the lurid colours and apparent simplicity of his paintings. Adopted by the Surrealist movement, Trouille’s work always exhibited fetishistic Gothic tendencies. His paintings reference Nosferatu and other horror characters from horror cinema. My Tomb shows a naked nun (a shadowed hand below her breast, a bat on her crotch) phoning from the centre of the artist’s imagined sepulchre. A red-haired naked woman embraces an obelisk and figures in monkish crimson robes pursue various acts of depredation

10  Charles Alexander Moffat: Succubus in Corset, 2001

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amongst the graves, including one man kneeling, whip in hand, beside a stone decorated with a vaginal mouth. One only has to remember Matthew Lewis’s graphic descriptions of sadism in Roman Catholic convents and the engravings of lurid blue books to realise Trouille’s imaginative genealogy. Contemporary Gothic often places a new emphasis on nuanced figurative representation. Charles Alexander Moffat’s paintings have already been mentioned. His Succubus in Corset (2001), reminiscent of Expressionism and E.  L.  Kirchner’s creations, is a powerful and unnerving visual statement, revealing a leaning, dark-haired young woman with her clawed wings and inescapable, probing gaze seemingly fixed on the observer. Artists exhibiting with the Lilith Gallery, Toronto, are Eliza Bathory, Judith Weratchnig and Rachel Stone. Also notable are Vincent Castiglia’s nightmarish scenes painted in blood, John Coulthart’s Lovecraftian illustrations, Anne Sudworth’s gleaming pastel landscapes and Raphael Lacoste’s panoramic visions of looming fortresses and abbeys. Victoria Reynold’s detailed paintings of internal organs as in Reindeer Voluptuary (2008) and Jasmine Becket-Griffith’s baskets of plush fruit have given a new and dark edge to nature morte art (Becket-Griffith, 2016, personal correspondence). There are also a growing number of sophisticated street artists, often anonymous, gracing the streets of Europe and the USA with their Gothic creations. 2.3  Engravings: icons of ancestral fear For many Gothic writers, as well as from the evidence gained through their travel and first-hand observation, their main experience of castles, abbeys, ruined monasteries and mausolea stemmed from their study of engravings. Ann Radcliffe pored over books of engravings of the Continent in researching foreign travel. Her subsequent publishers made the most of this interest; Joseph Farington’s Britannia Depicta (1814) juxtaposes quotations from Radcliffe’s Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795) with topographical engravings. This imaginative, intermedial commerce between word-descriptions and the craft of engraving also extended into physiognomy, following the ideas of J. K. Lavater. In Radcliffe’s The Italian we encounter Schedoni’s servant, Spalatro, who has ‘“villain” engraved in every line of his face’ (Radcliffe, 1824: 625). Joseph Strutt, author of the Gothic adventure Queenho Hall (1808, completed by Walter Scott), was himself also an engraver and was so interested in this art that he produced a Biographical Dictionary of Engravers (1785–86). Jane Eyre finds terror in the vignettes of Thomas Bewick’s book of innovative woodcuts: ‘The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him’ and ‘the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock’ (Brontë, [1847] 1966: 40). Sheridan Le Fanu possessed an ‘elephant’

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folio of engravings and it is probable that certain scenes in his novels derived from long study of this volume. In Le Fanu’s novel Willing to Die, the narrator associates ‘some volumes also of engravings’ with ‘signs of care and refinement’, proof against the ‘terrifying’ and ‘desolate character’ of the setting (Le Fanu, [1872] 2013b: 316). Engravings could be used to further religious interests too. In Melmoth the Wanderer, we are told of Sir Roger Mortimer, a devout Reformer in religious matters who, instead of dispensing beef and ale to his tenants like other landowners at Christmas, gave them Tyndal Bibles that contained an ‘uncouth print’ (Maturin, 1820: 190). The engraving inside depicted Henry VIII handing out English Bibles to the common masses. From its first arrival in England, engraving inherited the project of visual legitimisation from antiquarian and heraldic authorities, the system of the validation of familial inheritance, a subject close to the nub of the earliest Gothic novels. Edmund Spenser was amongst the many of Queen Elizabeth’s supporters who employed antiquarianism and heraldry as part of that which Jerrold E. Hogle in his landmark study, ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’, calls ‘Renaissance symbolization of the self’ (Hogle, 2012: 499). As Hogle accurately points out, even by Shakespeare’s day, this form of symbolisation ‘was already’ venerable and ‘counterfeit’ (2012: 498). The increasing distance of such imagery from, in Hogle’s terms, ‘aristocratic based concepts of signification’, only increased with the rise of engraving (2012: 501). The Bohemian engraver Wenceslas Hollar in his service for Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel (that collector whom Horace Walpole called ‘the father of virtu in England’), pursued just this enterprise (Hervey, 1921: vi). The first act of grand consolidation in aligning antiquarianism and engraving came a generation later when Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood published his Historia, et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis (1674) sooned followed by David Loggan’s book of engravings Oxonia Illustrata (1675), with instructions on how to tip the illustrations into the Historia. In terms of a general account of engravings involving those subjects we now associate with the Gothic, Albrecht Dürer’s Death, Famine, War and Plague (1497–98) and Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death (1584) contain some of the most ingeniously disturbing images of violence, suffering and skeletons, those representatives of Death, arriving in different guises to capture m ­ ortals. We have discussed the impact of Hans Baldung’s engravings on viewers ­(section 2.2) and the wide popularity of the medium gave rise to depictions of religious and Classical subjects, as well as tableaux of witches, memento mori and danse macabres. During the early 1780s, Henry Fuseli’s paintings achieved a high degree of notoriety and success. James Neagle’s engravings and John Raphael Smith’s

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mezzotints of Fuseli’s designs featured in books served to spread the taste for Gothic subjects. Neagle was a prolific and very skilful engraver and Smith’s employment of the mezzotint medium (prints created from a scraped and burnished engraved metal plate, the surface contrasts of which, when printed, gave effects of light and shadow) produced extraordinarily subtle images. As Gothic novels were pirated and filleted for chapbooks and blue books, the accompanying, often hand-coloured, engravings by Thomas Rowlandson, Robert Cruikshank and William Marshall Craig became a prime attraction in these cheap publications. Henry Anelay’s prints for Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf will be discussed further in section 2.4. Mary Byfield, who was attached to the Chiswick Press, for many years also provided a wealth of inventive illustrations and melodramatic scenes. William Chevalier’s famous steel engraving of Theodore Von Holst’s frontispiece to Shelley’s Frankenstein is an exercise in darkness: a mis-matched head is fixed to the monster’s muscular body and a skeleton placed under his legs. It is a work of primitive power, both Chevalier’s and Holst’s: the three skulls atop the bookcase and the uneven trefoil and broken windowframe letting in moonlight seize the attention. The twenty-six-year-old engraver could also reveal great delicacy as in the stippling of the shadow of the Galvanic apparatus behind the monster’s head. Chevalier grew to be a sophisticated enough engraver to exploit the Chine-collé method where the original outline is pressed onto a heavily weighed surface for printing, allowing for complex, minute effects. In the subsequent age of penny dreadfuls and in a work regime that must have been punishing, Frederick Gilbert made 104 sensitive wood-­ engravings from designs by G. F. Sargent for J. M. Rymer’s Edith the Captive; or, the Robbers of Epping Forest (1861–62). Hugo Buerkner was the engraver for Alfred Rethel’s powerful sequence, Auch ein Totentanz / Another Dance of Death (1849), published in Leipzig and depicting the bloody European revolutions of the previous year as a modern dance macabre complete with leering skeletons. John Leighton (pen-name Luke Limner) was a prominent engraver, artist and bibliophile who created The Life of Man Symbolised (1866). Every spare space in the volume is crammed with heraldic crests, mottos and emblems, all designed to bolster the status of its dedicatee, Lord Houghton. In this image at the book’s close, we see ‘December’, the patriarch’s spirit leaving his aged body, the ruined castle in the background, the abandoned armour, the shifting miasma of incense smoke, broken tree of life and empty winged hourglass all marking this out as a work of High Victorian Gothic. A different side of British life was revealed in Gustav Doré’s collaboration with journalist Blanchard Jerrold. The book London, A Pilgrimage (1872) with

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11  ‘December’ from John Leighton’s The Life of Man, 1866

180 engravings revealed the capital as a city of endless night, poverty and deprivation. Doré was an innovative master of his craft, who with his wood engravings for The Divine Comedy (1857–67) had established a visual vocabulary of stark shadows and contrasts employed in Weimar horror cinema and film noir sixty years later. He subsequently illustrated a large edition of steel engravings to accompany Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ (1884).

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If there is a single image that encapsulates the modern taste for the Gothic, it would be Doré’s engraving for the lines: ‘“Get thee back into the tempest and Night’s Plutonian shore!”’ with the dead lover’s spirit hovering over the waves in her elongated shroud, the dark villa in the background and raven circling the full moon. Félicien Rops’s aquatints and etchings of a sexual and fetishistic nature are justifiably admired by Gothic artists but M. R. James’s haunting short story ‘The Mezzotint’ (1904) returned to antiquarian engravings in order to express deep anxieties about dynastic guilt. Lynd Ward’s God’s Man (1929), a wordless woodblock series of prints published in book form, revealed fresh ways of realising the Faustian myth. In his tale, ‘The Picture in the House’ (1920), H. P. Lovecraft describes Filippo Pigafetta’s volume Regnum Congo (1598) and the shocking accompanying wood engravings of the Anziques’ cannibalism by Theodore and Johann Israel de Bry. This reference also takes us back to the lifetime of Hollar (see above), and the arrival of engraving in Britain, revealing the enduring power of this medium in evoking Gothic nightmares. 2.4  The macabre graphic art of the blue books and penny dreadfuls Gothic chapbooks and blue books were published and consumed in bulk quantities in the early nineteenth century and often consisted of abridgements of longer works such as the heroic tales of Walter Scott; their narratives usually concerned chivalric adventures: tales of imprisonment and rescue. Magic and the supernatural were often involved, with a judicious punishment meted out for foul deeds on the final page. Though they were sold and distributed in different ways, blue books generally superseded chapbooks, sometimes called ‘pamphlets’. Both forms of cheap production featured vivid and eye-catching frontispieces to arouse the interest of the general public. Their visual vocabulary included the depiction of dark forests and caves, towering citadels and profound dungeons, graveyards, skeletons, skulls, witches and ghosts and prone heroines threatened by thugs and acts of treachery, cruelty and murder. Alison Milbank writes of the colours involved in illustrations: The Gothic bluebook replaces the frequent crude wood-engravings of the traditional chap-book with one copperplate or wood-engraved frontispiece usually produced specially for that work, and signed. (Charlotte Dacre’s The School for Friends has a frontispiece by Thomas Rowlandson). Sometimes these engravings are hand-coloured in gay tones of yellow, blue, green and pink, as in Glenwar, in which the slumbers of the evil Lord Dacras are interrupted by the outlaw Glenwar in a plaid of startling green. (Milbank, 2016)

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The general rule in such publications was to streamline the narrative, trimming or eliding lengthy speeches, and transporting the reader quickly to a series of horrific and piteous scenes. The writers of blue books could also pillage and adapt contemporary stage productions, as in the case of Lewis’s The Castle Spectre. Sarah Wilkinson’s The Castle Spectre, an Ancient Baronial Romance (1798) ‘founded on the original drama’ published by J. Bailey and priced at a shilling and comprising twelve pages only is truly a ‘shilling shocker’. The frontispiece shows Earl Percy, cloak billowing, jumping from a castle turret window onto a rather flimsy-looking sail-sheet held by four men in a rowing boat. In the play Earl Percy was played by John Philip Kemble and this death-defying leap was perhaps, accompanied by Kemble’s famous histrionic gestures, a moment that caught the play-goers’ attention and remained with them. This might be the reason this dramatic moment was chosen to front Wilkinson’s book rather than the famous ghost scene. The torches referred to in the text as being held by the men have been abandoned. The boat is situated precariously between a lowering drawbridge and raised portcullis in a narrow channel of the moat. Some illustrations could be blood-curdling. William Marshall Craig’s frontispiece (engraved by Hollier) for Ildefonzo and Alberoni, or the Tales of Horrors published by Tegg and Castleman (1803) reveals a shrouded, monstrous horseman with skeletal features and, to the right a woman in a pose of supplication before a cauldron, as bats, snakes and a serpent-tailed bird descend from the foliage above her. Sometimes framing devices like heraldic shields, quarterings in the form of a central cameo and four panels or arches were used in the frontispieces of these works to preview and highlight exciting events in the blue book. A good example is The Bleeding Nun, of the Castle of Lindenberg; or, The History of Raymond and Agnes (1823), which includes six colours added by hand to the engraving, with blue and red predominating. In this frontispiece, probably executed by Robert Cruikshank, we are given a close-up of the crazed nun’s face, her shoulders and rosary, a bloody wound over her right breast, poignard in right hand and lamp in left, all shown in the circular cameo. Foreboding clouds billow behind her. Four various bloody and dramatic events from the book are spaced around this, starting with ‘Death of Baptiste’ in the upper left, a well-detailed cell-scene and the ghost of the ‘Bleeding Nun appears to Raymond’ at the lower left (her habit hyperbolically coloured in red in some versions). Later in the nineteenth century, advances in printing technology and literacy rates led to a greater demand for cheap, accessible and thrilling tales of fantasy and terror. In R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mr Utterson, the solicitor sees the dispirited masses of the poor traversing a foggy street and passing ‘a shop for the retail of penny numbers’ (Stevenson,

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[1906] 2005: 27). It is a moment of intense medial reflexiveness as Stevenson draws the reader’s attention inside his monstrous tale to the public’s escapist appetite for tales of monsters. The penny ‘bloods’ or penny dreadfuls were novels serialised in various kinds of periodicals, with ‘penny numbers’ being the smallest and cheapest type of publication, usually consisting of eight pages with a woodcut frontispiece. The appeal of these works to a newly literate population when triple-decker novels were prohibitively expensive can clearly be seen. The subjects of highwaymen, murderers as well as historical conspiracies remained very popular throughout the second half of the century. Pierce Egan the Younger (1814–80) created all of his own illustrations for his popular titles like Edward the Black Prince; or Feudal Days (1854–56) and Paul Jones, the Privateer (1842). Egan liked to furnish his books with profuse illustrations. Other famous titles included James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood (1847), Frederick Marryat’s The Flying Dutchman or the Demon Ship (1839), Edward L. Blanchard’s The Mysteries of London (1849) and the tale of Sweeney Todd: James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls; or, the Barber of Fleet Street (1850). The synergies between the theatrical stage and these ‘dreadfuls’ was similar to that described in the age of the blue books: The Flying Dutchman had already been the subject of operas and a play. The String of Pearls was itself turned into a play. Varney, attributed to James Malcolm Rymer but also to Thomas Peckett Prest and published by K. Lloyd, featured a most sensational woodcut frontispiece: whilst a skeletal Varney himself in his shroud rises through the centre-ground to loom over a sleeping raven-tressed woman in nightdress, seemingly couched on the motto ‘Feast of Blood’, two bat-winged devil-heads above and two gesticulating demons urge him on to his act of gory despoliation. George G. Reynolds’s Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf (1846–47), was a penny dreadful tale of Fernand, a Florentian nobleman fated to become a werewolf at sunset on the last day of each month. It featured illustrations by Henry Anelay (1817–83), an extremely versatile artist who completed a wide range of commissions involving novels, religious tomes and books for children, portraits of celebrities and watercolours of mountains. The Gothic ‘dreadfuls’ placed great emphasis on building eerie atmosphere with weather and effects of lighting and Reynolds takes pains to describe when the uncanny wolf disrupts a monk’s funeral with the monk’s torches: flaring with the breeze that is now springing up, cast an awful and almost magical light upon the dark grey walls of the edifice – the strange effect being enhanced by the prismatic reflection of the lurid blaze from the stained glass of the oriel window. The solemn spectacle seemed to madden the Wehrwolf. His speed increased – he dashed through the funeral train. (Reynolds, [1846] 2008: 60)

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12  Henry Anelay, ‘He Dashed through the Funeral Train’, illustration from G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf, 1884

In the upheaval, the corpse is thrown from its coffin and an eighty-year-old monk is cast aside, falling against a monument so heavily that his brains are dashed out. In his illustration of this scene, Anelay successfully captures the drama of the werewolf’s maddened leap, its dark extended shape boldly emphasised by the paleness of the monks’ robes. The monks’ flaring torches are expressively rendered and, in two cases, their fearful expressions make them grotesque figures, with an impression of the ‘lurid blaze’ of the church windows behind them. The diagonals of the longest torch, the edge of the coffin and the toppled cleric’s ceremonial crucifix lead the observer’s eye down to the lower

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left corner. It is clear that, in the shadows of this area and under a flurry of cross-hatching, Anelay has tried to capture the subliminal horror of the monk’s extruded brains, in a few impressionistic flourishes and without too graphic a representation.

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2.5  Revivified and spectral portraits: Otranto’s yawning picture to M. R. James’s ‘The Mezzotint’ In Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), seeking revenge, the villainous Manfred tries to force himself on Princess Isabella. At this juncture in the novel, the portrait of Ricardo, Manfred’s grandfather, begins to move, utters a sigh and descends from its frame, making the young man cry: ‘Do I dream […] or are the devils themselves in league against me?’ (Walpole, [1764] 1966: 34). Animated, revivified and moving portraits became such common feature of Gothic fiction that, by the time of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851), the supposed antics of the haunted portrait are recounted in a decidedly ironic way. The painted Colonel, subject of the picture that is deemed to be intrinsic to the fate of the house itself, is seen to frown, clench its fist, giving many signs of its agitation and then, on the suggestion that the house switches ownership, attempts to climb down from the frame. Yet, the visceral impact of paintings that come to life, the sense of artworks as haunted with the spirits of their subjects, continued to influence writers. In Vernon Lee’s collection Hauntings (1890), two stories deal with these themes. ‘Amor Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka’ tells the story of a young man who becomes so obsessed with the image of a sixteenth-century noblewoman, Medea di Carpi, that he finally enters her plane of existence. In the same year as Lee’s anthology was released, Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, the story of the eponymous young socialite who, influenced by the laissez-faire philosophy of Lord Henry Wotton, wishes that a portrait of himself ages instead of himself. His wish is granted with horrific consequences. Will Self’s novel Dorian, an Imitation (2002) updates the Gothic threat by transforming the painting into a video installation. M. R. James’s ‘The Mezzotint’ (1904) reveals the increasingly horror-struck reactions of Mr Williams, an art curator, and his friends as a depiction of an unknown manor in a freshly purchased mezzotint begins to change. James understood that, as contemporary readers sensed, just as the paintings in Otranto move, so could engravings. Gothic themes of unavenged violence, legitimacy and anxieties over usurpation are expressed in these shifts in pictorial autonomy and fixture. A ghostly nemesis will come seeking the vulnerable progeny of the guilty. James shows an almost bestial presence wearing the

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heraldic blazon of the tomb and bearing down upon the present illegal owner of the manor: ‘It was crawling on all-fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back’ (James, 2007: 24). Of course, magic lantern shows had been projecting images that seemed to spring into motion in front of the audience’s amazed gaze for centuries by the time of Wilde’s novel and M. R. James’s story: skeletons sitting up out of coffins, young brides becoming horrifying ghouls were just some of the subjects of these slip-slide moving images. In the early days of films or ‘moving pictures’ the potential of cinema, by way of freeze-frames and jump cuts, to show pictures coming to life as in Georges Méliès’s The Living Playing Cards (1904) was well established. Thomas A. Edison’s An Artist’s Dream (1900) and The Artist’s Dilemma (1901) and the British Mutoscope production, The Spirit of his Forefathers (1900) where painted versions of Scottish warriors from past generations climb down from their frames for a taste of whisky, contain other examples of this theme. The devil climbs down from a picture frame in Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (1917). The obsession continues in more recent films such as Ghostbusters II (1989) and The Conjuring 2 (2016). Rumours of actual haunted and changing paintings persisted into the twentieth century and beyond and legends still accrue round certain works, assisted by the rise of internet technologies. Bill Stoneham’s painting The Hands Resist Him (1972) depicts a young boy in pale turquoise top and shorts standing to the right of a life-size girl doll in front of a glass-panelled door. A number of hands are pressed against the far side of the glass, mostly grouped around the outline of the boy. According to the artist, the hands represented different future possibilities for the boy in life and the doll his guide into the imagination. However, when registered for sale on the ebay internet site, the painting was accompanied with photographs documenting a supposed incident where the girl doll had threatened the painted boy with a gun, and his figure had exited the picture frame. Due to this story going viral on the internet, the painting sold for a vastly inflated price. The owner of the gallery where the painting was first displayed and the Los Angeles Times critic who reviewed it died within a year of coming into contact with the painting. Similar legends have accrued around Bruno Amadio’s The Crying Boy (1950s), which supposedly causes house fires and The Anguished Man (n.d.), a work by an anonymous artist who, according to legend, added his own blood to the paint and committed suicide soon after completing the picture. Richard King’s Love Letters (c. 1990), which hangs in the Driskill Hotel, Austin, Texas also holds a powerful spectral presence. Hotel guests claim that the ghost of Samantha Houston, a four-year-old child who fell to her death down a staircase, has attached herself to the work and that the painted girl’s expressions change.

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‘Changing Portraits’, sometimes called ‘Halloween Portraits’, usually lenticular prints involving adapted Victorian portraits or staged modern versions of these, have become very popular over the last decade. Since the 1950s, small, lenticular children’s ‘flicker pictures’ or ‘wiggle’ scenes have been given as free gifts in packets of sweets or cereals. These were usually flat images that seemed to change with a slight suggestion of three-dimensional depth. In the 1970s and 1980s, these images, which were becoming sharper and more sophisticated in appearance, with more illusory depth, began to appear on business and bank cards. Since 2003 artist Edward Allen of Haunted Memories has been producing a range of portraits based on antique photographic imagery, where seemingly vintage Victorian and Edwardian photographs suddenly decay or change into skeletal images swagged with cobwebs. The effect is as old as the magic lantern slip-slides showing similar transformations, but it remains impressively chilling. Dark Imaginings supply a similar range of lenticular works, with titles such  as  ‘Niles’, ‘The Nurse’, ‘The Newlydeads’ and ‘Granny Pearl’, each with  their own fictional backstory in verse. Perhaps the most inventive ­example  is ‘Playthings’, which initially seems to depict an ordinary Victorian family grouping of a smartly dressed father and mother, their youngest d­ aughter on their knee. An older daughter in checked dress stares over their  shoulders at the portraitist’s camera. Perhaps it is the unsmiling i­nsouciance and stiffness of their poses that elicited the notion of the older daughter, Sara, becoming so bored with her dolls that she discarded them and  killed her family, subsequently transforming them into her playthings. In the changed version, the two parents and the toddler on their knee have ­morphed into slack-jawed, gaping-mouthed and dull-eyed human puppets whilst Sara stands proudly and passively to the rear, seeming to control them. A wide range of computer-generated imagery (CGI), virtual reality, laser projections, hologrammic images and laser-etched glass cube holograms have also developed over recent years, some with horror, Halloween and Gothic applications. Italian animator Rino Stefano Tagliafierro has produced a wide range of internet films where the subjects depicted in famous paintings seem to shift and flex. Other sophisticated animated films have also emerged on the internet, showing changing portraits, where an attractive subject in the full bloom of youth transforms by slow or fast stages into a bony skeletal or an aggressive zombie suddenly lurching towards the viewer. These images have begun to proliferate, another current example being ‘Master Gracey Changing Portrait’. Often the attention paid to painterly finish and other detail is remarkable.

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2.6  Uncanny signs and posters Posters advertising Phantasmagoria shows and horror-themed entertainments at fairs are amongst the earliest posters that we can confidently associate with visual Gothic media, and the late eighteenth-century popularity of Gothic novels. The poster designed by Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, the magic lantern showman himself, depicts the witch of Endor summoning Samuel’s spirit at the behest of King Saul. The subject, a popular one in eighteenth-century art, is rendered with a grotesque simplicity in the engraving. Led out of billowing smoke by a skeleton holding an hour-glass on the right, Samuel stands hesitating in his cerements. A kneeling King Saul cowers on the left. The dark setting lit by a single tall candle obviously evokes the room of the Phantasmagoria. There are also posters extant from the vampire plays of the 1820s, notably The Vampire (1820) starring T. P. Cooke, the poster helpfully supplying a description of the vampire’s bloodthirsty modus. By the late eighteenth century more theatrical ‘great bills’, as posters were called, began to appear in France and Britain. Until the later steam-driven printing and lithographic printing processes began to appear in the early 1850s, images had to be added separately to the text featured on posters. Lithography also had the advantage

13  E.-G. Robertson: engraved poster for Phantasmagoria, 1799

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of permitting more than just two colours (black and red), and the possibility of producing posters with a wide range of colours, effects and patterns. The Belle Époque in France witnessed a burgeoning of poster art amongst which the depiction of violent and bloody Grand Guignol plays played an important role. A 1897 poster by Privat Lavemont for Montjuich’s play, Le Masque Anarchiste / The Anarchist Mask shows a murderer astride a helpless woman, grasping her beautiful, serpentine hair and about to strike her with a bloody axe and add her to the two corpses in the background. The right margin borderwork reveals a sword impaling a column of two heads and a skull, with a dagger slotting into the middle head’s eye-socket, the pictorial style anticipating the art of American Pre-Code horror comics by half a century. Of course, any number of political posters featuring propaganda and general information with macabre, monstrous or darkly haunting imagery might be claimed as Gothic. For example, Aldo Mazza’s poster for the journal Science for Everyone (1909) features a glamorous redhead woman in low-cut crimson robe with an inset panel to the upper left revealing a corresponding section of her grey skeleton. A Punch cartoonist conceived of ‘The Irish Frankenstein’ in 1882, but in terms of the depictions of fictional monsters, it was an anti-clerical poster by Eugène Ogé (reproduced later as a magazine cover), with ‘VOILA L’ENNEMI’ in bold capitals, which pictured a sallow-faced priest as a vast Dracula-figure encapsulating the Sacré Coeur. The darker side of Alphonse Maria Mucha’s imagination can be seen in his poster for Médée (1898) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec produced a harrowing image at the foot of the guillotine to publicise the Abbé Faure’s memoirs. Though Aubrey Beardsley produced some chilling and macabre posters, the diabolical Symbolist art of Félicien Rops and Valère Bernard was confined mainly to illustrations, small engravings and lithographs. A range of fascinating poster art was created for the UFA studios in Weimar Germany. Hans Poelzig’s nightmarish orange and yellow poster for Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920) with its swirling city walls and eaves seeming to dance like flames captures a feeling of delirium. Other notable examples include: Otto Arpke and Erich Ludwig Stahl’s poster of ‘You Must Become Caligari’ for Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) with jagged and tortuous black lightning, tumbling lettering and the bony-wristed figure clawing itself upwards, and Josef Fenneker’s film poster for Otto Rippert’s Totentanz / Dance of Death (1919) where a naked dancer lurches across the skulls of three skeletons whilst they stare upwards towards her in the darkness, one clutching a fizzing sparkler in its claw.

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A poster for the Hamilton Deane production of Dracula at the Mason Opera House in 1938 is still extant with its bold black bat encapsulating within its shape the title in vivid yellow block capitals. Horror film posters from 1930s cinema are the most valued and sought after of all today, some commanding extremely high prices. A poster for Frankenstein (1931) was discovered in a projection booth in an abandoned theatre and sold for £202,000. This three sheet (three panels) poster (6ft 6 ins by 3ft 5 ins) shows the head and shoulders of the monster in close-up, his eyes looking straight at the observer, his features bathed in a red glow as if from a light source below him. The film title in white bold capitals swings in a flourish upwards followed underneath by ‘The Man Who Had Made a Monster’ in smaller blue capitals. The record for a film poster was set in 2014 for a one-of-a-kind poster for the lost horror film London After Midnight (1927), which sold for $478,000. In terms of Goth popular music, the artwork on associated posters was intimately connected with a Punk aesthetic (appearing in the late 1970s), which rejected the lush psychedelic visuals of Rick Griffin, Roger Dean and Alan Aldridge. Whilst acknowledging the graphic art linked to the early career of Black Sabbath, the first posters for Goth rock groups had a DIY style evolved from Punk fanzine art; the posters were often hand-made with jagged lettering drawn in pen, with xeroxed pictures and split or ripped motifs and sometimes influenced by German Expressionist art and films like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, as in the case of the group Bauhaus’s early publicity. A good example is Christopher Marsh’s hand-drawn poster publicising the groups Bauhaus, The Birthday Party and Dead Can Dance playing at the The Batcave, London in the early 1980s. Over the top of a toppled table, a strange monster with one enormous bulging and red-veined eyeball rips apart its host: a knife-wielding spiv. The letters of Bauhaus as headlining band are drawn in black capitals whereas The Birthday Party appears on the left swirling inside the hazy circle of the spiv’s exhaled cigarette smoke. Yet, despite this edgy, home-made dynamic, and the grainy, sparse photography of Anton Corbijn, a richer style of full colour (with dark shades of red, black, purple, grey and white still predominating) photographic poster for Goth groups such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure emerged, with a sophisticated professional surface. These changes in style occurred in response to growing fame, the identification of a niche market and increasing fandom. This type of poster still persists with newer Goth bands opting for moorland backdrops for in Wuthering Heights-style and dark Romantic settings. With the evolution of digital media and Adobe Photoshop, multi-layered images for music-themed poster-work became fashionable. Carl McCoy, vocalist for

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Fields of the Nephilim, owns his own graphics business, Sheerfaith, and, using LightWave 3D, creates posters for the band with darkened hues, mirror writing and arcane magical symbols.

14  Poster for the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, 2015

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There is a wide array of other Gothic posters and signs, including imaginative flyers for Gothic posters, metal display signs for vintage horror films and perhaps the most venerable of public blazons: pub signs. Pub signs can be works of dark imagination and humour with pictorial renditions of ‘The Quiet Woman’ (a grim sexist joke: a headless woman), ‘The Last Drop’ (a pun on drinking and hanging) and ‘The Black Dog’ where local lore of hauntings has influenced the sign artist to create a demonic canine like a Barguest.

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3.1  Sculptors and statuary

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n the la tt e r h a l f of the twelfth century, monumental Gothic sculpture proliferated on the façades and around portals of cathedrals, with column statues often carved from the same blocks as the columns themselves. The Gothic style manifested in stylised elongated figures in sharply folded robes, often with hands in hieratic gestures. The three west portals at Chartres cathedral reveal outstanding examples. The thronging, more fluid style of fourteenth-century Gothic is seen in the handling of figures in the bass relief marbles from the façade of Orvieto Cathedral. Scenes like the impressive Last Judgement were probably produced under the influence of Tuscan Gothic art and were created by three or more sculptors. Memento mori and danse macabre subjects also became popular as did monsters of a more demotic fairytale kind, as is seen in the fifteenth-century Bern fountain statue of a brightly clothed male with a child’s head crammed into his mouth, with other children fearfully awaiting the same fate. This figure represents the Der Kinderfresser / The Child-Eater of folklore. Curt Herr links this monster to the sexually voracious Lord Oakendale in Mrs Carver’s Gothic take, The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797). The French Renaissance brought new themes of sculptural horror: Ligier Richier’s memorial to René de Chalon, a ‘transi’ tomb sometimes called ‘Squelette de Bar’ (c. 1550) is situated in the church of St Etienne in Bar-leDuc. A ‘transi’ tomb is organised on two levels, one above the other, where, on the upper level a recumbent statue likeness of the deceased is positioned; on the lower level there is the representation of the dead person as a decaying cadaver carved in stone. The corpse is sometimes shrouded and is often shown

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as preyed upon by worms and maggots. The image is often, wholly or partly, revealed as an écorché (a flayed or skinless body with raw muscle showing), and also may display elements of skeletal bone structure. This kind of imagery does, of course, remind us of the English Metaphysical poets’ gorier lines and anticipate ‘Graveyard’ poets who influenced Ann Radcliffe’s writings and Matthew Lewis’s ballad of ‘Alonzo the Brave’: The worms they crept in, and the worms crept out, And sported his eyes and temples about. (Lewis, [1976] 1845: 89)

In the grounds of the Villa Palagonia near Palermo there sits a statue of a cross-legged triple-headed monster with fleeced shoulders. It sits in the context of the villa grounds bristling with macabre stone creatures, clowns and hybrid beasts. Confronted by such strange, hybrid statuary as this and other disturbing forms like The Sorceress at the Villa Widman and An Old Woman with a Pig at the Schwarzenberg Palace, which proliferated from the early to mid-eighteenth century, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco seems nonplussed: It must be admitted that some figures, spawned by particularly fertile imaginations, make one puzzled about what the artist’s intention should have been. What is the significance of the grimacing, slack-breasted hag dressed in rags and accompanied by a pig that Lorenzo Mattielli carved for the garden of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna?’ (Dell’Arco, 2013: 828–9)

Though the grotesquerie associated with local and folk art traditions cannot be ruled out as influences, these unnerving creations probably evolved through Rococo asymmetrical styles from the type of monstrous Mannerist art exhibited in the grounds of the Parco di Mostri at Bomarzo, below the castle of Orsini and other assorted fantasies. During the early eighteenth century, the handling of sculptural Classical subjects began to change. In Nicholas-Sébastien Adam’s contorted and visceral statuette, Prometheus (1738–62), the figure is flexed, turning in pain, between sharply angled rocks, the inverted torch wildly toppled, the eagle’s beak gouging a tear in the muscular torso. This work reveals an emphasis on the expressive realisation of agony, the valorisation of the male physique and defiance of traditional spatial concepts. Thomas Banks’s The Falling Titan (1786) also bears out this French emphasis on the human figure captured reacting to tumbling and skewed natural settings, an aesthetic probably influenced by ‘five point drawing’ exercises. This kind of work can be said to have pioneered sculpted forms to satisfy the taste for bodies captured in strenuous and sometimes tortuous movement.

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Until the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832, the only bodies legally available for dissection in England were those of executed criminals. However, in the late eighteenth century, artists and anatomists began to experiment with more elaborate poses and deeper levels of dissection. James Legg, who had murdered a fellow pensioner, was hung in November 1801, and his body suspended from a cross. When the body heat had left the corpse, Banks gave instructions on how a plaster-cast should be made of it. This structure was taken to Carpue’s scientific theatre, where the body was flayed and Banks subsequently made a new cast. The fact that Banks went on to display both casts at his own studio and the spectacle drew crowds supports the perception that the sculptor saw the casts as artistic works as well as visual aids for science. Such a creation sets up complex tensions, which we encounter regularly in postmodern Gothic art. Jean-Jacques Feuchère’s Satan (1834 and cast in 1850) embodies the melancholy and rebellion of Romantic Parisian artists: the powerfully realised defeated spirit sits sheltered by his curved and inturned wings, a broken sword in his hand. The shade of the beautifully stippled wings gives Satan a brooding intensity and inwardness. At the fin de siècle, artistic attention turned once more to interpretations of  vanitas and infernal themes: Rinaldo Carnielo’s Tenax Vitae (1893) depicts  a  struggle between a skeletal death and a young man, and Auguste Rodin’s La Porte de l’Enfer / The Gate of Hell (1885–1917), reacting to Lorenzi Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise and Medieval cathedrals, depicts a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Figures of Sphinxes, Salomes, demonic dryads, gorgons and she-beasts abound in Symbolist sculpture. There are also transgressive erotic images of bestiality in Gerhardt Henning’s Nymph and Faun (1910) and Jeff Lambeaux’s The Bitten Faun (1906). Franz Flaum created a haunting three-dimensional vision of a crawling female revenant in Vampire (1904). Postmodern sculpture has returned to images of extreme depredation and monstrosity. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Goya-esque manikins are mentioned in section 3.7. David Altmejd’s Les Noix (2014) is a structure made from steel, polystyrene, epoxy, clay and other substances and daubed over with acrylic paint. Hands emerge bearing an ice cream cone from inside the fractured body and the figure’s werewolf head seems frozen in mid-transformation dissolving in gouts of wax. The sculpture’s skin is splitting as if multiple identities are waiting to burst from the interior. When Tim Noble and Sue Webster were asked to contribute work to a touring exhibition for the Design Museum, London, they created The Head of Isabella Blow. Blow, a fashion designer, gave boxes of her personal accessories

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including Manolo Blahnik shoes and red lipstick to the artists, but they thought that ‘Any portrait of Issy should not be made of “Sugar and spice and all things nice”, but the darker side of life – in this instance we sourced a handful of materials we felt suited this Gothic style – a raven from the Tower of London and a black rat from the Plague…’ (Rink, 2010: 72). Blow’s artistic vision and sartorial style involving a wide array of black masks and veils, Philip Treacy bird hats, billowing cloaks as well as her sense of fashion as a ‘vampiric thing’ and her statement that, after death, she wanted her ‘head decapitated from my body, and buried on the estate of my father’ obviously influenced this Gothic attribution (Rink, 2010: 17 and 176). Czech sculptor Anna Chromý’s Il Commendatore / The Cloak of Conscience (2006–11) is a huge faceless and bodiless figure draped in a shroud and executed in white Carrara marble. This work reminds of the strange, haunting sculptures of monks in Michele Soavi’s La Chiesa / The Church (1989), a film that is based in turn on M. R. James’s story ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ (1904). Jakub Hadrava has produced a myriad of plaster statues of shrouded ghosts to sit and stand in the deserted church of Luková in the Czech Republic. Philip Jackson’s ‘Venetian’ figures and groups of faceless monks strolling in dark metal habits also seem kindred creations. Some commentators on Mark Porter’s statue of Baphomet (2015) have claimed the work as libertarian, individualist and Gothic. Yet the most graphic contemporary sculptural manifestation of Gothic demonic threat is Roberto Cuoghi’s Pazuzu (2008), an Assyrian demon-king of the wind, modelled on a fifteen-centimetre sculpture in the Louvre museum. The image of this entity featured in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Cuoghi’s six-metre high metal effigy, winged, fanged, scorpion-tailed and hoofed, presently gazes across rooftops from a balcony of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art with the Queen’s express permission. 3.2  Wax simulacra There are early records of wax dolls, figurines and effigies being given as votive offerings and statues of saints were often modelled in wax. Wax replicas of kings and queens were carried in funerals on top of coffins to offset the effects of heat and putrefaction on the real bodies. The history of wax memento mori is an extremely long one, and at least by the early seventeenth century, one could purchase framed wax reminders of what life in hell might look like for the unpenitent sinner. A later wax relief in the style of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Soul in Hell (c. 1700), is terrifying, the condemned sufferer seeming to shout in agony but also to glower in gleeful hatred at the observer.

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15  Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Soul in Hell, c. 1700

Throughout the eighteenth century, waxworks remained a popular entertainment. Soon after 1711, Mrs Salmon’s Fleet Street waxworks opened featuring the disturbing wax tableau: ‘The Rites of Moloch, or the Unhumane Cruelty, with the manner of the Canaanitish Ladies, Offering their First-born Infants, in Sacrifice to that ugly Idol, in whose Belly was a burning Furnace, to destroy those Unhappy Children’ (Altick, 1978: 52–3). Themes of violence and sexual menace persisted in displays after this studio was taken over by a surgeon named Clarke such as: Angerstrom stabbing the King of Sweden and Rhynwick Williams, ‘the London Monster’ cutting the Misses Porters. In 1771, a ceroplastic studio was established at the Imperio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale or ‘Le Specola’, which resulted in one of the most comprehensive and medically accurate collections of wax simulacra of the human body.

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The bodies of these wax creations could be stripped back layer-by-layer down to their veins, arteries and structures of nerves inside their muscles. These figures, when female, were sometimes known as Venuses, Venus Endormie or Florentines. Gaetano Zumbo’s theatres of death, his tableaux of highly expressive wax figures arranged in thematic groups entitled The Tomb, The Plague, The Triumph of Time and The French Disease, were seen by the Marquis de Sade who was so impressed by this scene that he wrote in Juliette: So powerful is the impression produced by this masterpiece that even as you gaze at it your other senses are played upon, moans audible, you wrinkle your nose as if you could detect the evil odours of mortality […] These scenes of the plague appealed to my cruel imagination: and I mused, how many persons had undergone these awful metamorphoses thanks to my wickedness? (Rampley, 2015)

In 1782, Dr Philippe Curtius, uncle to the future Madame Tussaud, opened his ‘Caverne des Grands Voleurs’ / ‘The Cavern of the Great Thieves’ at the Boulevard du Temple, prefiguring his niece’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ (opened 1802). Here Curtius exhibited the figures of famous criminals and also, later, effigies of the royal family who had been executed. The bringing together of thieves and murderers in such a setting played to the fashion for Räuber and Schauerroman novels and plays and particularly Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), which exercised a considerable influence on Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic productions. Emily’s encounter with the wax figurine behind the black veil in The Mysteries of Udolpho is both a climactic and anti-climactic moment of Radcliffean fear: within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands. […] Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax. (Radcliffe, 1799: I, 69)

Here the narrator dissipates and explains away fear just as quickly as they create the atmosphere. Yet wax models did not just supply counterfeit versions of death. On a visit to the morgue, Champfleury pointed out that the characteristics shared by corpses and wax figures were fragmentation, colouration and artificial eyes. Often it was the very uncertainty relating to the realistically rendered human flesh, human expression and even inanimate objects that made waxworks uncanny. For example, in William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805), a cradle and a chest of bed linen seem to compose a tableau vivant but they are

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in fact waxworks. The fascination with magic and wax effigies had also spread to paintings. In the right lower corner of Henry Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom with the Ass’s Head (1789), we see a cowled witch holding a changeling (soon to be exchanged for a human baby), fashioned from wax. In one of Dickens’s most frightening Gothic amalgams, Pip’s first view of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, imaginatively fuses waxwork, skeleton and living being: I saw that the dress had been put on the rounded form of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know now what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of the vault under the church pavement. Now waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. (Dickens, [1861] 1993: 57)

Yet the trope of waxworks applied to humans became so widespread that it could also stand in for very subtle types of disapproval and disdain. Jane Eyre describes her previously hateful cousin, Georgiana: ‘This was a full blown very plump damsel fair as a waxwork’ (Brontë, [1847] 2005: 289). The sentence has the ring of a shopkeeper showing off their dummies. At the far side of the spectrum from the appearance of fairness, for many novelists the paleness of wax became an epithet for illness, even for vampirism. In Dracula, Lucy has a ‘poor face with the same awful waxen pallor’ (Stoker, [1897] 2008: 211). By the advent of the twentieth century, the waxworks setting had become a milieu for unnatural behaviour: murders and sexual perversity in a myriad of detective novels. In A. M. Burrage’s story ‘The Waxwork’ (1931) a journalist stays in the ‘Murderers’ Den’ of a wax museum and meets a most malevolent serial killer. In John Dickson Carr’s, The Corpse in the Wax Works (1932), a young woman is found in the arms of a waxen satyr in the Paris waxworks’ darkest chamber. In Angela Carter’s dystopic novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977), the character Zero discovers a whole hall of waxworks of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean laid out with candles at hands and feet as if in a chapel of rest. Film-makers were not slow to realise the horror potential of such ­subject-matter. Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924), Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), André de Toth’s House of Wax (1953) and Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork (1988), a horror comedy film, play on anxieties about the ambiguities of waxworks coming to life, humans hunted and turned into waxwork displays, or humans forced to participate in the violent scenarios depicted by wax manikins.

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Despite the general decline of waxworks, many artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman model wax figures to appear in unsettling tableaux and also use wax as an essential constituent of their works in other ways. The series of images in Laura Paddock’s After Gainsborough dramatise the anonymity of the eighteenth-century artist’s women models, marking out the grotesqueness of

16  Amy Gregory, Brontë, 2015

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their outlines by applying dripping wax, adhering like a shadows, to velvet and acrylic. Amy Gregory’s Brontë is a quintessentially Gothic creation. The monumental Victorian floral dress steeped and stiffened  in a torrent of wax is also an embodiment of feminine domestic paralysis and constraint: the garment that would normally flow in space is fixed and caught a downpour of set liquid. Does dress define woman or vice versa? This work seems the relic of an unspeakable tragedy but also appears as the mobile-seeming ghost of its own wearer’s absence, swishing by us in its paradoxical stasis. In Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Neo-Gothic Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Bertha Rochester is the vengeful destroying angel of and candle-bearer for her home/prison. Candles burn houses and people but, in Gregory’s work, the  missing wearer has somehow been subsumed into the status of a candle without wick. Garment as waxwork: the dress uncannily outlives its wearer. 3.3  Dolls, effigies, mommets and poppets Effigies of humans, figurines and dolls such as the ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ made of limestone, ivory and clay are some of the earliest human artefacts of all, dating far back into the Palaeolithic. Deuteronomy’s injunction that ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image’ refers to the idols worshipped by the tribes who surrounded the Israelities. Effigies, three-dimensional images fashioned from wood, papyrus, paper or wax and stuffed with hay or herbs and made to resemble a specific person might be the subject of sympathetic magic, in which rites the doll becomes a designated person. The words ‘poppits’, ‘mommets’ and ‘moppets’ often refer to effigies that are used in a similar way, though they can also refer to dolls used in ordinary child’s play. (This ambiguity led to accusations of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials.) Dolls were also used as votive tokens and, in the case of Teutonic and Scandinavian ‘kitchen witches’ or poppets, were often hung in kitchens to enhance good luck and to ward off evil influences. In the nineteenth century, Anton Chekov, Leo Tolstoy and Fitz-James O’Brien wrote stories involving eerie images of dolls. In O’Brien’s ‘The Wondersmith’ (1859), a band of Romanies transform children’s Christmas dolls into vengeful miniature figures. There are also a host of literary women characters who uncannily resemble dolls including Charles Dickens’s Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield (1849–50) and Jenny Wren, the doll’s dress-maker in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), is described as small and doll-like as is Polly Home in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). As well as evoking the ways in which children anthropomorphise their doll toys, such narratives often dramatise the objectification of the male gaze, the desire to own and control female bodies. Pediophobic (fear and

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dislike of dolls) tensions are also viewed in M. R. James’s story ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’, where Punch and Judy puppets are the objects of fear and a most revealing link to Gothic paintings is made: ‘There was something Satanic about the hero […] he lay in wait, and to see his horrid face – it was yellowish white, I may remark – peering around the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli’s foul sketch’ (James, 2007: 274). Other relevant literary works are: Vernon Lee’s ‘The Doll’ (1927), Daphne du Maurier’s story ‘The Doll’ (1937), Susan Hill’s Dolly (2012) and Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘The Doll-Master’ (2016). It is usually argued that the first ‘demon doll’ and ventriloquist’s dummy film is The Great Gabo (1929), but eerie dolls and puppets had long existed in movies by this point, as seen in Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919) and in Le Lion company’s production The Witch (1909), where an innocent girl’s spirit is imprisoned in a manikin. Subsequently, Michael Redgrave appears memorably as Maxwell Frere with his ventriloquist doll, Hugo, in Alberto Cavalcanti’s section of the anthology film Dead of Night (1945). Anthony Hopkins as Corky persuades himself to become a killer through the medium of his foul-mouthed dummy ‘Fats’ in Richard Attenborough’s Magic (1978). Killer and demon dolls have also proved a popular type of filmic monster. The zuni doll in Trilogy of Terror (1975) is a frightening and vicious presence manifesting anger over the plundering of native cultures by Western tourists. The idea of souls caught inside dolls is explored again in Stuart Gordon’s The Dolls (1987). Perhaps the most famous cinematic doll predator is Chucky, first revealed in Tom Holland’s Child’s Play (1988). This is a vivid, scarred and orange-haired toy that contains the spirit of Charles Lee Ray (‘The Lakeshore Strangler’). The doll itself was created by Don Mancini, who modelled the toy’s form on the ‘My Buddy’ doll and coloured it like the popular Raggledy Andy dolls. Other notable examples include: Pinocchio’s Revenge (1996), Dead Silence (2007), The Conjuring (2013) and Annabelle (2014), the two latter films inspired by an actual doll called Annabelle, which is rumoured to be a haunted artefact. Ed and Lorraine Warren, self-styled demonologists, have linked this real doll to a series of uncanny events affecting her previous owner. In the late 1800s another haunted toy figure, Robert the Doll, was presented to Robert, the son of artist Thomas Otto by a Hawaiian nanny who had been dismissed from the family’s service, allegedly for holding voodoo ceremonies in the back yard. This doll is dressed in a white sailor costume and holds a pet toy dog or lion. The doll’s skin is pecked and chipped, his eyes black beads and his face wears a satisfied smile. After Robert reached adulthood and inherited his parent’s home, the doll is rumoured to have caused Robert’s wife’s madness by moving around and playing tricks.

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In his famous essay, ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ / ‘Zu den WachsPuppen von Lotte Pritzel’ (1913, updated 1921), Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that dolls, in eliciting children’s affection and devotion, whilst also remaining unresponsive to these emotions, also cause subsequent feelings of anger and bitterness. Yet Pritzel’s wax and cloth creations were intricate and highly fashionable productions, created for the collector’s display case rather than the nursery. These dolls took the form of anorexic, vampiric and highly sexualised figures in sumptuous gold-threaded clothes. The Weimar Republic was a high point in the fashioning of uncanny dolls, with Dada women artists’ puppets and Hans Belmer’s fetishistic models. Dolls remain an important constituent of Goth and Gothic culture, in terms of artistic expression, fashion and décor. Perhaps the most famous and easily accessible line of dark dolls is Ed Long and Damien Glonek’s Living Dead Dolls (Mezko Toyz), originating in 1998. These were originally hand-made, collectible craft dolls, selling through mail order and horror conventions, mainly with the post-Buffy the Vampire Killer audience in mind. A wide range of different characters – ‘Damien’, ‘Eggzorcist’, ‘Lizzie Borden’ and ‘Bad Habit’ (serving as a reminder of Matthew Lewis’s Bleeding Nun), for example, each posed in their coffin-shaped containers – are available in this series. At the high end of this market for eerie art-dolls are expensive, meticulously produced creations by Marina Bychkova, and Wilde Imagination’s Tonner dolls, character-based figures such as ‘Evangeline Ghastly’ who struts in a ‘Gothic Gold’ display, moonlight reflecting on her gilt-sequinned dress offset by her black lace top and black pearl necklace. Mattel’s ‘Monster High’ dolls or ‘Goth Barbies’ as they have been nick-named are mildly vampish dolls mass-produced from the film, book and franchise of the same name, for a younger market. A range of Día de Muertos dolls have enriched the Gothic scene over the last few years. Shabby Cheek specialise in offering ‘Frozen Charlotte’ dolls, as owner Bob Gray relates ‘these intriguing bisque/china porcelain dolls were originally produced as Victorian Bathing Dolls, called Frozen Charlotte, so named from a song about a Victorian era girl who went out dancing with her beau to a ball at a nearby inn. She left without a wrap against her mother’s wishes and froze in the snow’ (Gray, 2015, personal correspondence). Jo Hodgkins of Foojoo Dolls (‘Uniquely Freaky, Transformed, Creepy!’) offers a variety of children’s conventional dolls converted into beautifully detailed horror figures: the winged vampire Mina being particularly impressive and all models dressed beautifully in detailed Victorian costumes. Hand-painted cloth dolls of a more cheerful Gothic disposition are produced by Gothic Moppets of Scarborough and more of this type can be found in Fiona McDonald’s Gothic Knits (2012).

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17  Jo Hodgkins, ‘Mina’, a Foojoo Doll, 2015

Jenn Stocks create polymer memorial dolls, often an effigy of a deceased baby, to help the grieving parents. Mike Kelley (1954–2012) used dirty, degraded, worn and damaged dolls and manikins, particularly soft and stuffed toys, in biting artistic satires of the American mainstream culture. Some of the most recent life-like and life-size vampire baby models can be extraordinarily

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unsettling. ‘Dolls from the Dark Side’ from the Twisted Beanstalk nursery with the theme of vampire revenancy, can be seen in prams or baby-carriers at Gothic festivals. Shain Erin’s doll ‘Sabelia’ is one of a series of genuinely disturbing mixed-media ‘Exquisite Monsters’, inspired by antique medical models and revealing severe disfigurement and grotesque forms, though the bodily conditions portrayed are imaginary, Erin’s own invention. 3.4  Moving statues and automata On the face of it, there is a world of difference between a cold marble statue transforming into a living, warm-skinned human being as in the manner of the Pygmalion myth, and the spectacle of a humanoid automaton beginning to stir. The idea of moving statues is archaic, a trope drawn upon by Walpole in Otranto, where we encounter the results of colossal ancestral effigies beginning to shift and fracture. In the late eighteenth century, the fascination with animated statues continued in the form of European tourists making nocturnal visits to Italian art galleries. During these visits, guides moved their torches round the exhibits so that the statues seemed to have come to life. Amongst popular operatic scenes of the day, that which reveals the statue of the wronged Commendatore arriving to confront the amoral philanderer in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) was one of the most memorable. Part of this fascination with moving statues can be attributed to anxiety related to uncertainty. In his essay ‘The Uncanny’ Freud mentions Ernst Jentsch who located the uncanny in uncertainty about whether ‘an apparently animate being is really alive or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’ (Freud, [1919] 1959: 369–70). These two types of eerie doubt evoke the contrasting immobility and mobility of tableau vivant and animated statues. Such doubt would seem to be warranted during the age of Giuseppe Salerno’s ‘anatomy machines’ (1763–64), two human bodies preserved with their artery and vein networks intact, now stored in the vault of the Museo Cappella Sansevero, Naples. Golem stories from early Jewish folklore tell of a figure kneaded from clay that came to life to follow its maker’s bidding. In the 1890s, there was also a fashion for ‘Statuette Portraits’, which involved transforming photographic shots of a subject into a whitened Classical bust complete with a stand. William Hope Hodgson’s first published story ‘The Goddess of Death’ (1904) involved a statue of the Hindu deity, Kali, which comes to life in a town park and kills a dozen people. When, in Abel Gance’s Help! / Au Secours! (1923), a bizarre, hallucinatory film of Gothic horror and comedy, the protagonist Max enters the haunted castle for a wager, he encounters a coat stand in the form of a

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footman, which springs to life when a flame is held to its fingers. Voted one of the most terrifying and memorable monsters since their first appearance in the BBC TV series Dr Who episode ‘Blink’ (2007), the Weeping Angels are aliens who resemble eighteenth- and nineteenth-century funeral statuary. On the

18  The ‘demon cyclist’ living statue, 2016

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same principle as the children’s game, ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’, they move forward when the human victim looks elsewhere. An Angel of Death graveyard statue is brought to life in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). Such imagery is not limited to a works of fiction. Over the summer of 1985 statues of the Virgin Mary and holy saints (Gaelic: Bogadh na nDealbh) were observed to move synchronously in different locations of Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of believers subsequently visited the sites in question, including Ballinspittle, County Cork. One of the most common forms of street entertainment and busking currently in modern Europe and America is the ‘living statue’ where a street artist adopts the appearance and pose of a statue. One might be tempted to call this a form of an updated tableau vivant but, in fact, the whole point about this particular spectacle is that the seemingly immobile figures perform a small action for a small payment. If Pygmalion is a founding myth of a statue that comes to life, Talos, the legendary bronze colossus that circled Crete daily to protect Europa is one of the most well-known founding myths of automata. Early humanoid automata appear in those very Medieval works that authors of the literary Gothic wished to emulate and pastiche. In a tale contained in Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval (1135–90) two mechanical statues guard the tent of Alardin and Le Roman d’Enéas (c. 1160) features an automaton archer who stands watch over the tomb of Camille. Amongst early automata used by the clergy in Western Europe were animated scenes of the Crucifixion with a moving Christ-figure and the Last Judgement complete with gesturing, bloodthirsty fiends. There were subsequent additions to the range of diabolical machines in Giovanni Fontana’s fire-spitting devils and Pierre Manfredo Settala’s demonic automaton. Throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the humanoid mechanical creations of artists such as Jacques de Vaucanson and Henri-Louis JaquetDroz revealed an incredible sophistication and detail in artifice. Gothic artists, in their creations, drew upon this complex array of automata. One of the ‘Gothic Nightmares’ revealed in Martin Myrone’s catalogue of the same name is revealed in a tenebrous canvas by John Hamilton Mortimer depicting Sir Artegall, the Knight of Justice, with Talus, the Iron Man (1778) wandering through shadows at the mouth of a cave. He is ‘made of iron mould, immoveable, resistlesse [sic]’ (Myrone, 2006: 80). The Frankenstein monster, fashioned from re-vivified dead flesh and endowed with his own independent will, is more biological agglomerate than automaton yet perhaps Shelley’s tale owes more than might meet the eye to François Félix Nogaret’s Le Miroir des événements actuels / The Mirror of Actual Events (1790). In this tale a young woman has to choose between six automata, the inventor’s name is ‘Wak-wik-vauk-on-son-frankésteïn’. One of the most

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remarkable of the automata of the nineteenth century is that of ‘feé Carabosse’ housed at the Musée d’horlogerie du Locle. This mechanical version of an evil enchantress, the witch from Perrault’s tale of Sleeping Beauty, is beautifully fashioned in glistening gilt copper repousée. When started up, the witch walks forward crouched over and leaning on her two canes. The most haunting of all nineteenth-century works concerning automata is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann / The Sandman (1816), where Nathanael becomes obsessed with Coppola and Spallanzani’s mechanised woman: Olimpia. This was a theme taken up in many other stories and Jules Verne’s ‘Master Zacharius’ (1854), Ambrose Bierce’s ‘Moxon’s Master’ (1899), and W. C. Morrow’s ‘The Haunted Automaton’ (1897), drew upon the apparent devilry of automaton-making. Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Ève future / Tomorrow’s Eve (1886) is a key work in the retrospective Gothicising of modern technological advancements. Despite its proleptic title, the novel shows the protagonist, Lord Ewald, mocking the inventions of his friend, the scientist Edison, with the words: ‘“it seems to me that I’ve come into the world of Flamel, Paracelsus, or Raymond Lull, the magicians and alchemists of the Middle Ages”’ (De L’Isle Adam, 2001: 61–2). Descriptions of Edison’s android Hadaly recall Hoffmann’s Antonia and Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (1836), and the android’s subterranean ‘paradise lost’ is compared to a witches’ Sabbath where one can hear mechanical birds singing Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust (1846) (De L’Isle Adam, 2001: 97). Though there is no doubt that science fiction and visions of futurity continue to dominate modern filmic narratives of automata, as in James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), Stephen Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), a dark Gothic atmosphere also persists as in, for example, Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos, where an alchemical scarab’s injection initiates humans into an ancient world of vampirism. In Del Toro’s films, as Victoria Nelson writes, machines carry ‘the unredeemed repetition which is the dark side of the underworld’ (Nelson, 2012: 67). Just as Gothic in mood, a scenario is revealed in Timothy and Stephen Quay’s The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006) where Felisberto, the tuner, is summoned to the evil Professor Droz’s island to tune his automata. Felisberto and the revenant opera singer, Malvina, finally remain trapped inside the sixth automaton. Over the 1960s Louis Marx and Company began to produce monstrous battery-powered remote-controlled toys with popular titles including Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, and Frankenstein. In the early 1990s Telco produced a walking Dracula ‘Motionette’ with glaring red eyes. In Neocore’s action role-playing video game The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (2013), Gothic Noir nineteenth-century Europe juxtaposes the adventures of Van

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Helsing’s son with flailing robots. Thomas Kuntz is one of the most inventive contemporary makers of unique automatons embodying Gothic and horror themes: ‘Babylon Vampire, Blood Drinking Automaton’, a four-horned, ­dagger-toothed vampire fills his goblet from the neck of a decapitated victim. Kuntz’s danse macabre of crank-driven skeletal twins, ‘Fusion’ (2005), is a tribute to the ninth-century alchemist Gber. Matt Collishaw’s ‘All Things Fall’ zoetrope (see section 4.5) seems to bring the realities of moving statues and automation together again. 3.5  Tableaux vivants and poses plastiques There is a long and rich tradition of claiming tableaux vivants with their emphasis on frozen stasis, a kind of living rigor mortis, as an inherently Gothic (in both senses of that word) form. Perhaps this is partly because there was a vogue for their employment as part of ecclesiastical drama during the late fifteenth century. In 1484 a tableau vivant depicting the original transmission of the Holy Ampulla to earth was staged for Charles VIII at his coronation. The actors in such tableaux vivants seemed to be turned to stone as if by the Medusa’s gaze, or actually to be positioned corpses as in the ‘cadaver synod’ (the name given to the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus by Pope Stephen VI) but, strictly speaking, all the subjects of a tableau vivant should be alive. Halfway through Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637), a dramatic tragedy by Joost van den Vondel, Amsterdam is invaded on Christmas Eve at the turn of the fourteenth century. As Tim Vergeer writes: the most intense moment in the tragedy: on stage, the nuns of the Order of Saint Clare (Klaerissen) are raped and stabbed to death before the eyes of the audience. The nuns lie dead, their bodies in heaps across the floor of their beloved monastery, like a fallen garland of red and white roses. To leave the most intense impression, all action in the play is suspended and the characters stand frozen for some ten minutes. This means a prolonging of the massacre and, thus, the spectator absorbs every detail of the scene. (Vergeer, 2015)

The form famously came into prominence again with Emma Hamilton’s staging of ‘attitudes’ from 1787 onwards, using ‘mimoplastic’ art to entertain guests by posing scenes from Classical sculpture in the house of Sir William Hamilton. Goethe saw and praised Emma in this series of poses and was considerably impressed. Her example was followed by other prominent European socialites like Ida Brun and Henriette Hendel-Schütz. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) the tableau vivant is shown to be a hybrid and ambiguous medium where women achieve some degree of self-expression whilst

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also ostensibly fulfilling patriarchal fantasies of feminine silence and paralysis. This paradox is realised with especial piquancy when the Architect repeats his own stance in the tableau but this time in front of Ottilie laid out in her coffin, frozen in death. Considerable critical attention has been drawn to the depiction of tableaux vivants in Gothic novels and also to the ways in which these spectacles evoked Gothic atmospheres in different types of writing. Diane Long Hoeveler has  written of scenes in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) and Thomas Holcroft’s melodrama, Tale of Mystery (1802) as tableaux vivants (Hoeveler, 2012: 103–20). Kamilla Elliott has described the way that ‘unbridled enthusiasm’ is expressed for tableaux vivants in contrast to the aristocratic portraits in Rosalia St Clair’s Marston (1835) (Elliott, 2012: 76–7). Simon Cooke has written of the protagonist’s shameful interview with his father in Wilkie Collins’s Basil (1852): ‘Overwhelmed by their emotions, they freeze into a static tableau, a moment of terrible ‘truth,’ that is held for ‘some minutes’ (Cooke, 1998). The characters’ gestures of fear are described as even more emblematic of fear. Rebecca Rainof has written of the ‘suspended Gothic horror’ of the tableau vivant in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) (Rainof, 2015: 87). In L. M. Alcott’s most Gothic and macabre story, ‘Behind a Mask: or A Woman’s Power’ (1866), the character Jean Muir infiltrates the respectable Coventry family and seduces three of the menfolk. Muir uses a tableau vivant, that of Judith entering Holofernes’s dwelling, to advance her interests and, in taking part, she adopts the look of a passionate and vengeful heroine: She had darkened her skin, painted her eyebrows, disposed some wild black locks over her fair hair, and thrown such an intensity of expression into her eyes that they darkened and dilated till they were as fierce as any southern eyes that ever flashed. Hatred, the deepest and bitterest, was written on her sternly beautiful face. (Alcott, 1997b: 49)

Around the same time as Alcott’s story was published (under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard), John Coates Brown of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia took a wet plate collodion image of six young girls frozen in a tableau vivant of a scene from a children’s play version of ‘Bluebeard’s Wives’, c. 1866. The visceral impact of the shot (five of the girls are playing the corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives dangling from the wall by their hair) is softened by the air of deadpan and knowing pantomime. Ranged in order of size, with the tallest at the centre, five young girls stand on top of a platform covered in a white sheet. They wear voluminous white robes and, in each case, their long hair is suspended from string or ribbon tied to the wall behind them. Their faces have

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been whitened and they are faking death, as if they have been hung like prone trophies. The girl playing Fatima, Blubeard’s present wife, dressed in exotic Eastern costume, has her hand raised and face turned towards the viewer as if in shock with her discovery. The oldest girl in the middle is obviously enjoying hamming it up with her mouth lolling open. Tableaux vivants depicting bloody crimes and murders were a long-term attraction in London. In 1886 there was a ‘The Celebrated Tableau of the First Fratricide’ after a performance of King Lear the Pantheon Theatre. Charles Musser writes that such tableaux survived into the age of cinema, becoming a particular fashion in America in 1894 when Edouard von Kilanyi and Oscar Hammerstein displayed their ‘living pictures’ (Musser, 2006: 163). One of the most graphic and decisive reinstatements of Gothic tableaux vivants are the six posed photographs taken in 1931 to accompany Antonin Artaud’s translation and abridgement of Lewis’s The Monk. In two of the tableaux Artaud places himself in the role of Ambrosio and, even though the melodramatic gestures seem somewhat humorous to a modern eye, there is no denying the chilling power of ‘L’Empoissement’ / ‘The Poisoning’, a tableau where nuns set the point of their poignard to their prone victim’s breast. The Bleeding Nun is wonderfully realised in a sinuous split-screen shot and the

19  John C. Browne, ‘A Children’s Play’ (‘Bluebeard’s Wives’), c. 1866

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tenebrous vision of a hooded monk encroaching on the drugged Antonia in the sepulchre is haunting. There are tableaux vivants in Val Lewton and Jacques Tournier’s Gothic  Noir  film The Cat People (1942) and in Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman (1951). Leslie Megahey’s horror film, Schalcken the Painter (1979), references the still interiors and vanitases of Vermeer. The way that the artist’s master organises his models in allegorical tableaux vivants, prefigures the terrible fate of a young relative sold to an elderly stranger who turns out to be an embodiment of Death. The startling photographic tableaux vivants of Peter Greenaway and Steve F. Arnold contain many scenes of darkly Baroque Gothic. Erotic aspects of tableaux are described in Miles Gibson’s novel Kingdom Swann (1990) and in David Nobbs’s TV film Gentlemen’s Relish (2001). Davy and Kristin McGuire’s Starkers (2015), staged at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum is a blend of tableau vivant and moving statue, which eerily superimposes an the face of an actress on a statue of Canova’s Venus, the resultant film relying on techniques of projection mapping, shadow show and spoken narrative for its unsettling and humorous effects. Joel-Peter Witkin’s photograph ‘Sanitarium’ inspired the final presentation of Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2001 collection based on avian imagery, the walls of another box within the faux psychiatric ward collapsing to reveal a startling (if slightly mobile) tableau vivant: a reclining, masked nude breathing through a tube and surrounded by fluttering moths. A new type of coloured tableau vivant that saps all life from the artists is the key to the horror in Kyle Broom’s film Tabloid Vivant (2016). It remains to be seen whether the very recent craze of ‘manikin challenge’, a videoed form of tableau, will have Gothic appeal. 3.6  Cabinets of curiosity In drawing attention to Horace Walpole’s and William Beckford’s curiosity cabinets at Strawberry Hill and Fonthill Abbey respectively, Diane Long Hoeveler states that ‘the very nature of Gothic tends to attract aficionados of the memento mori’ (Hoeveler, 2013: 1). Consequently, it is not surprising that cabinets of curiosity housing such memento as well as diverse dried reptiles, mummies, baby crocodiles in fluid, preserved embryos, rich corals, wax death masks, stuffed bats, shells and holy relics should be claimed as Gothic. Additionally, Julius von Schlosser regarded cabinets of curiosity produced in northern Europe as the expressions ‘of a local spirit linked to the medieval and “Gothic” […] tradition of marvels and miracles’ (Mauriès, 2002: 24).

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One of the earliest of such collections, the treasury of the abbey church of Saint-Denis sought to display a microcosm of a hierarchically ordered world and its wonders and, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it became a fashion for aristocrats, physicians, art patrons and apothecaries to assemble and exhibit their curios in cabinets and drawers for display. The intellectual drive to trace, tabulate, store, preserve and show rare specimens to likeminded individuals was the prime motivation. These proto-museums, cabinets, Kunstschrank (‘art cupboard’) or Wunderkammers with their shelves, cases and compartments, placed a strong emphasis, in the arrangement of their materials, on symmetry and order. Sometimes given as gifts to visiting potentates, these cabinets often held great material value, with gems and minerals, the rarest of pearls, cameos and metals and exotic shells. Some of these cabinets also contained the exempla of the deformed: monstrous foetuses with extraneous limbs, double-headed lizards, strange hybrid creatures, which seemed to transgress the boundaries of genus and species. In an age when Western powers still supported slavery, it was perhaps no wonder that many different kinds of human deformity and abnormality were also exhibited, perhaps an exploitative prelude to the so-called fairground ‘freak show’. Petrus Gonsalvus, an inhabitant of the Canary Islands born with hypertrichosis, a condition that covered his face and body in a thick coat of hair, became part of Margaret of Parma’s cabinet in Antwerp. In Jack Sheppard (1839–40), one of Harrison Ainsworth’s ‘Newgate novels’ (a literary hybrid of historical and Gothic romances), Sir Rowland Trenchard stumbles on a particularly macabre cabinet: On this side was a razor with which a son had murdered his father; the blade notched, the haft [sic] crusted with blood: on that, a bar of iron bent, and partly broken, with which a husband had beaten out his wife’s brains […] every gibbet at Tyburn and Hounslow appeared to have been plundered of its charnel spoil to enrich the enjoining cabinet. (Ainsworth, 1850: 102)

The idea of enrichment juxtaposed with the ‘spoil’ of charnels holds a distinctly gruesome necromantic charge here. Ainsworth’s fascination with criminality and the minutiae of inhumane violence, an almost documentary curiosity, is linked in this passage to magical potency, the dark virtue of objects associated with spilt blood. Some royal cabinets that exhibited statues representing the elements and paintings of foreign exploration also had an esoteric meaning: that nature as a whole could be brought into subservience through human art and occult power. In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1862), Sir Philip Derval initiates the protagonist, Allen Fenwick, in the mysteries of the dark arts

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of alchemical magic within a strange maze formed by his own collection of exotic stuffed animals: a dead elephant and anaconda’s shapes looming over the humans. In other Gothic novels, cabinets can seem to become live actors caught up in the action. In the Spiritualist pastiche, All in the Dark by Sheridan Le Fanu, it is a ‘confounded cabinet’ and ‘its shadow’ that begin to morph into ‘a great fellow in a loose coat extending his arm to strike’ (Le Fanu, [1866] 2011a: 55). The so-called psychic calls this cabinet her ‘spiritual tympanum’ and ‘spirit-gauge’ because ‘It thrummed so oracularly; it cracked with such a significant emphasis’ ([1866] 2011a: 45). The visual culture of curiosity cabinets is, of course, highly emblematic. Paul Reichel copied an engraving from Vesalius’s work as a centre-piece for his memento mori cabinet. A human skeleton, one bony elbow leaning against a classical podium, ponders over an hourglass and a fruiting vine intertwined with a serpent. Behind him, a bow and gold-tipped arrow, emblems of time elapsed, lean against the inner chamber wall of the cabinet. The resulting display is elegant and beautiful whilst remaining desolate and forbidding, semi-precious stones set into a gleaming arch, a skeleton regarding now-useless trifles, a cold and monumental meditation on vita brevis. In writing of the post-millennial revival of cabinets of curiosity in museums and art galleries, Philip Hoare remarks: ‘their revival speaks to our own vexed relationship with the natural world, at a time when we seem bent on destroying it – partly as a result, some might say, of the schism between science and art (Hoare, 2014). This very schism is, of course, the subject of much contemporary Gothic art and Hoare develops his argument by highlighting the ways that Marco Blanco’s show at the Prado seems to seek to restore links between science, transgressive magic and art in remembering how: ‘A cabinet of curiosities was part-witches’ cave, part-apothecary’s chamber and part-science lab. Thus, one of the Prado set-pieces incorporates Goya’s “The Witches’ Sabbath”: a fabulously gothic depiction of a gathering of witches attended by Satan in the form of a goat. Blanco has responded to Goya’s work by assembling a vitrine containing the ingredients for the hideous crones’ potions: bat skeleton, preserved snakes and toads, all labelled with their scientific names’ (Hoare, 2014). Here a law of Gothic regression seems at play, the modern artist stepping backwards from Goya’s enlightenment into a zone characterised by the impedimenta of superstition. Over the last decade, the curators, authors and artists involved with museum exhibitions, books, fashion displays, etchings, websites and paintings have all appropriated the title ‘cabinet of curiosity’ for their work. The ‘Cabinet of Curiosity’ section of Savage Beauty, the posthumous exhibition of avowedly Gothic fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s recent collections, featured a carefully chosen assortment of fetishistic objects discovered by McQueen

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and placed alongside his collaborations with jeweller Shaun Leane and milliner Philip Treacy. Printmaker, Érik Desmazières obsessively produces graphic works of a range of cabinets of ‘rarities’. Marc Scott Zicree calls celebrated film-maker Guillermo del Toro’s home, ‘Bleak House’, ‘del Toro’s great cabinet of curiosities, deliberately so. It is a microscopic reproduction of the world seen through his own lens’ (Del Toro and Zicree, 2013: 32). One can also mention Victor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities and his Cabinet of Wonders book, the La Rosa Hotel, Whitby, with its ventriloquist, circus and medical memorabilia and Lewis Carroll-themed décor and Emi Slade’s Cabinet & Curiosity, an installation inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Slade’s wooden display case is both a distressed cabinet and stylised clock-tower in which is coiled a pustulant, tentacled abomination, frozen in mid-writhe, a single, unblinking, golden eye gazing out from its dark mass. 3.7  Postmodern Gothic sculptures and figurines The dismembered ‘Disaster’ polymer figures of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s installations, Damien Hirst’s statues and Alexander McQueen’s clothed manikins have each influenced each other in Gothic aesthetic terms, and continue to influence the production of art sculptures. Ken Kagami produces unnerving sculptures from altered children’s toys: Fluffy Bear (2006) is a cuddly bear with a leering skull face and Kitchen (2005) a child’s modern kitchen unit, where a frying pan is full of eye-balls and a severed arm rests on a red hotplate. A savage humour is as important in Kagami’s work as the horror of a nightmarish playroom, all realised in bright Crayola colours. Ricky Swallow’s wooden carvings of skulls, skeletons and dismembered body parts draw on the traditions of seventeenth-century vanitas paintings. His The Exact Dimensions of Staying Behind (2004–5) is a wooden skeleton, its skull raised as if looking to the sky, sitting on a wooden chair and resting one hand on a staff cut from a branch. The work reinstates the connections between human mortality and our shaping of the natural world for our comfort, whilst also dramatising our predilection for trying to look beyond our own deaths. The proliferation of multifarious Goth and Gothic dark-themed statuary probably has its origin both in graveyard statuary and the macabre figurines featured in some household collections and cabinets of curiosity. More recently, both the bourgeois fashion in fin de siècle France for bronze and ivory busts of, for example, versions of Mephistopheles following on from revivals of Faust, and in the widescale production in the 1960s of Hollywood horror film statuettes and dioramas (in the sense of small scenic settings), prepared the ground for this type of artefact.

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Though I have briefly discussed film horror figures in relation to toys in section 8.3, there is no doubt that the most detailed and sophisticated of these  models are attractive to adult collectors, and function mainly as display items. The original Aurora models that instigated the craze for figurines of horror film models in the 1960s now emanate an aura of nostalgia and are highly prized. The factory-painted models of The Creature from the Black Lagoon  feature an upright monster with glistening green scales, arm-frills, goggling eyes and claws red with blood. The model base also features a small diorama of Gila monster-like lizard, a white skeletal hand, a shrub and stylised seashore. The box designs for the models, created by James Bama, were also colourful and expressive. As Kirk Hammett comments: ‘reinterpretations of these images ended up on posters, puzzles, games, wallets, plaques etc.’ (Hammett, 2012: 131). The Marx organisation also issued movie monster figures in the 1960s. Interestingly enough, Aurora also worked with film director William Castle to produce a line of horror model merchandise, which would not be as frightening as the earlier figurines for children. These figurines had large, cartoonish features and included an emphasis on huge eyes, an overall look reproduced in the more fey and gentle of the Goth fairy and fantasy models. Busts remain a popular form of sculpture. For fans of Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there are numerous Victorian bronze busts of Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson still extant, and plentiful modern busts of H. P. Lovecraft. Smaller modern busts of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and Lon Chaney’s Wolfman remain popular, the Universal Studios Monster Legacy DVD collection (2004) featuring the bonus of exclusive ‘commemorative busts of the three monster icons, developed by award-winning “Sideshow Collectibles”’. These are highly detailed and hand-painted, resin head-and-shoulders busts, standing on name plinths, with the cruelly smiling Lugosi effigy being particularly effective. A bust with Coppola’s Dracula, pictured in red and gold jacket and sculpted licking his razor, is highly collectible. An inventive miniature tribute bust of Bram Stoker made by Vinolata shows the writer’s likeness clustered around with smaller representations of Nosferatu, Vlad the Impaler and, hollowed out on left side, a Gothic archway containing the three vampire sisters. Mezco offer the ‘Silent Screamers Reel Masters’ series of mid-price models including seven inch tall statuettes of Edison’s 1910 version of the Frankenstein monster with skulls and display stand. The pre-painted action figure with ­flexible limbs and waist is well detailed and the stark diorama around it composed of laboratory doors, books and a broken bottle is effective. This is a particularly intriguing figurine because, though Aurora ignored Edison’s monster

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because, in their modelling heyday, the film seemed primitive, Mezco have updated this version of the monster for a post-millennial audience, making it more fearsome, with added peeling skin on its face and by disposing of the wild mop of hair. The pictured reels of film on the packaging also make it clear that this production is for the early movie connoisseur. ‘Silent Screamers’ also include figures from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu.

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The market for collectible Goth figurines and generic types of figure is currently vast, involving companies such as Alchemy, Nemesis and Medieval Collectibles. Faced with such diversity, I only have space here to offer a compressed overview: Grim Reaper Shelf Sitter figures, Edgar Allan Poe Raven’s Skulls, Cloaked Guardian Angels, Spirit Guide figurines by Anne Stokes and Storm Maiden Lady with Wolf figurines remain popular models. Nemesis statues include flamboyant, young witches and a Raven Fallen Angel figurine, scantily clad in black leather, crouching on a crumbling balustrade flanked by a horned gargoyle. There are multifarious variations on this theme. The models, mostly resin, sometimes feature metal or Whitby jet details, Swarovski crystals, small clocks or glass globes. All manner and size of gargoyles fashioned from stone or resin can be acquired for garden or office, some of them modelled on Viollete le Duc’s Notre Dame sculptures. One can even buy a Design Toscano Gaston Gothic Gargoyle Computer Climber Statue with a model of a lithe gargoyle, which will, when in place, seem to the reaching out from the computer towards the user. Snake, bat, spider, scorpion and wolf statues are very much in the Goth vein. There are different fairy, Celtic, pagan, Dio de Muerte or Steampunk emphases and styles in modern Gothic decorative statuary, and Alchemy offers a range of three-dimensional skulls in different sizes, including the Angel of Hades skulls. The skull motif is ubiquitous in this type of modelling, and crops up in miniature decoration, small-scale sculpted mortuary displays of various kinds and large stand-alone glass skulls (hollow or solid) and even, for the wealthier buyer, crystal versions. One remembers Damien Hirst’s infamous artwork, For the Love of God (2007), a platinum cast of an eighteenth-century skull encrusted with over 8,000 diamonds. Wealthy collectors and movie insiders like Guillermo del Toro can also collect a wide range of original film monster maquettes, which are also sold by outlets like YourProps. From the mid-1990s, Dragon statuary has been popular in Gothic marketing but since the popularity of the Game of Thrones TV series (2011–) and Daenerys Targaryen’s three dragons, the theme has taken on a new lease of life. Dragon motifs also draw on Celtic aspects of Goth and Gothic literature (with the Mabinogion being a key text). Fairy waifs clad in purple and black, ­sword-wielding bat-winged women-warriors and lissome vampirellas abound. In terms of gory horror, the Dawn of the Dead Figma Flyboy Zombie, 14 centimetres high with open mouth, grey skin and a broad-bladed knife sinking into his head is indicative of the shock effect that can be achieved. The fetishistic 6 inch Surgeon figure from the Hellraiser films with eye and mouth clamps is particularly disturbing but many kinds of humorous zombies and monsters are available too for the younger market. Razor-fingered Freddy

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Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the ‘Leather-Face’ figure from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) are marketed by several companies. Action Kits International sell a resin one-fifth scale model of The Masque of the Red Death and Frederic March’s version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ready for home painting. Gecco market a kit for a resin model of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu and, for those with 3D printers, dramatic Cthulu 3D models are available for free from Autodesk 123D. There is, of course, considerable overlap between collectible, hand-made figurines and dolls (discussed in section 3.3) especially in relation to a porcelain creation like Marina Bychkova’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ figure with its futuristic headpiece with electrical aerial, huge tearful eyes and extensive morgue stitch-work in the ‘flesh’ over her breast. 3.8 Taxidermy Taxidermy, the practice of treating, stuffing and mounting the hides or skins of animals for display, still arouses considerable unease as well as interest amongst the general public. To some, the art will always seem a vestige of imperialistic hunting and collecting and to others a method of gaining knowledge about animals, and therefore an aid in conservation. From their inception the macabre and sometimes humorously mordant associations of such exhibits as well as their obvious powers of attraction had been apparent. Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic taxidermy tableaux exhibited from 1861 onwards at Bramber in Sussex, included The Death and Burial of Cock Robin, which featured ninety-eight species of native birds. Groups of stuffed animals were dressed in miniature costumes and positioned as if they were involved in the social rituals of the Victorian human world. For example, Potter created a guinea pigs’ cricket match and arranged twenty kittens wearing their suits and dresses to a wedding. Animals with birth defects were also displayed, including a two-headed lamb and chickens with four legs. Charles Waterton had cut and sewn the animals he collected in South American jungles into ‘nondescripts’, eerie Bosch-like hybrid creatures with strangely combined body parts to suggest his political views. A range of Victorian and more recent writers found taxidermy to be a powerful metaphor for the forbidden arts and transgression. In Edward ­ Bulwer-Lytton’s Victorian Gothic tale, The Haunters and the Haunted (1859), Sir Philip Derval, an occult seer, initiates Allen Fenwick, a young doctor, into the mysteries of magic in the centre of a menagerie of stuffed beasts: a huge elephant and immense anaconda amongst them. In Henry James’s ghost story ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, there is a premonitory glimpse of future entrapment for

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women in the vision of their home with its stuffed animals on bookcases. In a rapid search of premises in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), the reader is given an eerie side-glance at a stuffed cat in a glass case ironically juxtaposed with a portrait of a police superintendent. This interest in taxidermy persists into Neo-Gothic novels including Joanna Scott’s The Manikin (2002) with Mrs Craxton’s collection of stuffed creatures and Kate Mosse’s thriller The Taxidermist’s Daughter (2014) so clearly influenced by Mosse’s childhood memories of Potter’s taxidermy museum. Despite requests by several celebrities, amongst them Jeremy Bentham, that their mortal remains posthumously be stuffed and displayed, human taxidermy is still illegal in many countries and has periodically elicited public outrage and notable horror novels and films. Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) and Hitchcock’s eponymous film make clear that Norman Bates has killed, stuffed and mummified the body of his mother, Norma. Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Landlady’ (1960) (subsequently a title in the Tales of the Unexpected TV series), concerning a young visitor to Bath being poisoned and stuffed is so close in date to these earlier works that one can but infer influence. In relating the theme of taxidermy in the film of Psycho (1960) to Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986) and The Silence of Lambs (1991), Jeffery Niesel writes: In short, taxidermy is a more explicit version of the way we incorporate the world around us through commodification and the use of systems. It is the most systematic of systems, and it uses violence to make life itself into a system and make sense out of patterns that are, as Hannibal Lecter describes the murders in Silence, ‘desperately random’. (Niesel, 1994: 64)

In Joe D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness / Buio Omega (1979) one of the main characters has embalmed his dead girlfriend. The ghost of a taxidermist ­station-master pursues Heidi, the heroine of Tom Elkins’s Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013). Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Livide (2011) intersperses the iconography of human taxidermy with automata and vampirism. The Penny Dreadful TV series juxtaposes imagery of human corpses with stuffed animals. Since the cow and calf exhibited in formaldehyde in Damien Hirst’s Turner Prize-winning Mother and Child Divided (1993) and the appearance of preserved animals in other British Sensation artists’ works, the appeal of taxidermy as a contemporary visual art form in its own right has become apparent: Alexander McQueen’s costumes have featured animals’ antlers, skulls and bones, some of his exhibitions have involved a stuffed tiger, a woman connected by a breathing tube to a stuffed monkey. The brutality (the evisceration, sanitation and display of animal bodies), the mordant wit, beauty and shock value of such exhibits and artefacts has not been

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lost on a new generation of taxidermist artists. The tableaux of Tessa Farmer, one of the most gifted and imaginative of contemporary practitioners, involve teeming and dark visual narratives as in Little Savages, where a tousled fox is beleaguered by beetles, wasps, skeletons of sea-creatures and small ‘fairies’ made from minute roots and insect wings. These fairies – strange beings realised as minute human skeletons – are viewed in combat and struggle with each level of the natural world. The overwhelming feelings of fascination and disgust in relation to such a scenario are tinged with pity for the dead fox, a desire to clear its matted fur of the insect pupae, probosci and claws battening onto its form. Farmer is the great grand-daughter of Arthur Machen and that writer’s The Great God Pan (1894) has recently become an influence on her work. In her creation Harbour, the celebrated taxidermist Polly Morgan has arranged octopus tentacles spiralling out of the body of a dead fox (its head tilted back, its eyes glazed), as if trying to snare two flying birds in mid-air. Again, it is a scenario of concealed but potent threat (the natural world of sea and land conflated unnaturally around the idea of consumption). Has the ­octopus hatched out inside the fox or the fox eaten the octopus, only to become its victim? It is a scenario that reminds of John Carpenter’s film The Thing (1982) until we remember that the octopus and birds are as dead as the fox, and at that point the whole fictional narrative runs back over itself as if trying to find dialectical escape or meaning in the gaps of logic. Another work, Morgan’s witty and menacing Someone on the Phone (2014), where a large magpie sits forebodingly atop the receiver of an antique telephone is chilling and seems closer to the sardonic spirit of an Edgar Allan Poe story than her other work. Perhaps though, in a Gothic sense, pride of place must go to Melbourne-based Julia deVille’s Kitten Drawn Hearse (2010) where a small cat in jewelled harness pulls a tiny coffin (its own?) on an elaborate driverless wagon. It is perhaps the most heartrendingly cute and piteous example of dark pageantry in miniature. Sam Carless is a practitioner of the kindred art of vertebrology, where the artist works exclusively with the cleaned bones of various creatures, assembling these into macabre structures. Carless ‘skeletizes’ these remains, sometimes disassembling specimens (‘reverse taxidermy’) to present Gothic tableaux: small bat skeletons juxtaposed with peacock feathers or text extracts from Dracula for example. Carless writes: ‘I’m glad that you can show the artistic merit in what was previously considered a biological teaching medium; taxidermy has always sat neatly in Gothic areas whereas skeletal models were confined to teaching institutions, museums and the occult’ (Carless, 2016, personal correspondence). She obviously feels that her own work, which j­uxtaposes reconstituted bone structures in new intermedial contexts, pioneers an innovative means of Gothic expression.

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21  Sam Carless, bat skeleton and Dracula text, 2016

A wide range of Goth and Gothic suppliers offer stuffed ravens, hooded crows and owls fixed in various poses to furnish a room. An online site advertises Valentine Auctions’ item of a bat with folded wings and exposed fangs presented in a red-lined ebonised coffin. The Gothic subsection of Japanese Victorian and Edwardian Lolita styles and dark aristocrat of dress (sometimes shortened to GothLoli) and originating in Tokyo’s Harajuku district, often incorporates stuffed animal accessories. It is obvious that artists in other media like Paul Koudounaris and Eric Tidemann are also drawn to this practice, though we have included Gunther von Hagens’s plastination techniques and Thomas Banks’s and Honoré Fragonard’s écorchés or flayed figures elsewhere in sections 3.1 and 9.5.

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4.1  Ghost machines: the Satanic Eidophusikon and peepshows

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hi li p J a m e s de L o u t h e rb o u rg presented the first Eidophusikon, a kind of framed miniature three-dimensional theatre display with mobile sets and props worked by rods and pulleys, in London in 1781. Effects were produced by the manipulation of light, smoke and tinted glass and gauze. The Gothic nature of some of the moving scenes on display in productions such as ‘Satan arraying his Troops on the banks of the Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium, from Milton’ is obvious. A contemporary reviewer wrote: Beelzebub and Moloch are seen to rise from the horrid lake […] Thousands of Demons are then seen to rise, and the whole brightens into a scene of magnificent horror. (Anon., 1792: 180–1)

The show also featured a shipwreck and a tempest with thunder and lightning and, as Mervyn Heard has written: ‘something to appeal to the Gothic romanticists: “The Incantation”’ (Heard, 2006: 128). De Loutherbourg was a skilful showman and designer and, by way of a series of special effects, could convince the audience that a storm was moving closer towards them, producing terror and wonder. Mr Chapman, De Loutherbourg’s assistant, revived this show five years later at the Strand, foregrounding the wreck at sea and ‘Pandemonium’. These shows obviously prefigure John Martin’s engravings and paintings of vast hell-scapes and apocalyptic cataclysm. Like magic lanterns and ombres chinoises, from their earliest appearance, peepshows (not to be confused with paper peepshows, which were more like perspective theatres, or tunnel books) were linked with peering into and seeing

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that which was forbidden. Alongside this appeal were the illusions of depth, perspective and illumination. Peepshows were basically a closed box (perhaps with string-pull holes or openings for the insertion of ‘flat’ scenes) with a viewing hole (usually a lens). The peepshow’s quasi-erotic appeal was intrinsic to its basic structure: a viewing hole or lens that gave an intimate and personal access to a vision of an enclosed and secret place. There was a sense in which peepshow viewers were gaining a privileged insight into hidden matters and gazing into inner realities, closed off from those who couldn’t afford the entertainment. Yet, for the viewers themselves, the subjects that they regarded held a dangerous vitality. As Lynda Nead has written: The space around the peepshow in these nineteenth century images is always highly animated and potentially dangerous. It is as though the physical motivation of the oblivious viewer has been displaced onto the figures round him and the dangerous secrets of the scene within have been projected out of the box, rather than having been contained within its four sides. (Nead, 2007: 182)

Though eighteenth- and nineteenth- century engravings reveal that the subjects of these peepshows were a mixture of political events, battlefields, women in déshabillé and children’s fables, they also featured Gothic tales of hauntings, devils and murder. The infamous story of the brutal murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn combined details of a nefarious slaying, sexual conspiracy and an apparition. Maria was callously slain by her lover, William Corder, and buried in a rural barn in Polstead, Suffolk. Corder made his way to the city and took up with other women who had replied to his newspaper adverts. Meanwhile Maria’s ghost came to her mother in dream to reveal her sad fate. Serving as the inspiration for ballads, various broadsides and narratives, and a famously popular play, Maria Marten; or The Murder in the Red Barn (1828 onwards), the story also featured in a wide array of Victorian fairground peepshows. In fact, so great was the demand for this particular peepshow topic that, when they exhibited it, the showmen were obliged to add new viewing holes to their apparatus to keep their customers happy (Donaldson, 2004: 168–9). Small-scale and domestic peepshows also featured macabre, unsettling and Gothic visions. The Sorbonne collection includes a ‘haunted peepshow’ called ‘The Ghost’, created by the celebrated toymakers, H. G. Clarke of Covent Garden from the mid-nineteenth century. By manipulation of the flaps of the viewing box one can see a vista in broad daylight of a church spire, graveyard and sloping trees. Viewed the other way round, the suddenly moon appears in the sky and a graceful phantom materialises at the side of one of the trees.

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Since peepshows were linked in the public imagination with gazing at secret and forbidden images, peepshow operators and peepshow display owners were often linked with the devil. One of the Eugène Lepoittevin’s Diableries reveals a bearded, devilish peepshowman with pointed hat and wearing a dress. In this depiction, his show has attracted two young men about town, and one gazes through the device’s viewer only to see the backside of a lithe demon who is defecating sparks, flies and roots into a chamber pot below. In Maximilien Klinger’s Faustus: His Life, Death, and Descent into Hell (1791), the Devil is revealed giving a peepshow to seduce Angelica in Faustus’s favour by showing her carnal, seductive visions. The first peepshowman in Robert Buchanan’s allegorical poem ‘The Devil’s Peepshow: Old Style’ (c. 1874) evokes two young children’s views of Cain soaking the ground with his brother’s blood and all the killers since ‘Countless as grains of sand’, the drowned dead of Noah’s flood and: The crew of shame, who in hell-flame Complain eternallie! (Buchanan, 2002)

It is difficult to judge whether this peepshowman wishes to frighten the children away from sin by showing its wages, or impress them with the Devil’s power. The ‘New Style’ version of the show features images of Christ’s mercy, which overrides the ‘Hell-fire’ associations. In discussing the character of Tackleton, the toy salesman, in Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), Michael Hollington writes of his connections to devilish peepshowmen: Not content with his own intended bliss, he is anxious to destroy Peerybingle’s, showing him in Satanic fashion, a peep-show of Dot embracing the stranger […] (The scene is reminiscent of similar trompe l’oeil effects in Gothic novels, notably Lewis’s The Monk.) (Hollington, 2014: 14)

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, coin-operated kinetoscopes and mutoscopes appeared in parlours and arcades dedicated to these new amusements, which had, for the most part, taken the place of the old travelling peepshows. These were mainly hand-cranked or automatic devices, which worked by quickly flicking through and showing stacks of small photographs (like flipbooks), mimicking continuous movement, rather than peepshows operated by string-pulls. In the interval before and period during the dominance of cinema proper, these machines inherited the codes of Gothic sexuality from earlier peepshows and magic lanterns. Because mutoscopes often exhibited voyeuristic, ‘What the butler saw’ tableaux, these devices became associated with libidinal curiosity. Pornographic onstage revues and live sex displays were given the name ‘peepshow’ enhancing these associations. Yet, eerie and ­supernatural

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themes also followed works like Herman Casler’s mutoscope show ‘Ghost Trouble’ (c. 1895). In Angela Carter’s novel The Abominable Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972) a peepshow owner is one of the main proponents. In Len Jenkins’s Gothic play Kraken (2004), the female figure of Death shows an unsuccessful writer a visual scene where a fairground peepshowman tempts Nathanial Hawthorne and Herman Melville with a sexual peepshow. In John Shackleton’s film Sleeping Room (2014), the main character, Blue, a prostitute, visits Bill, a young decorator, who is renovating a Victorian brothel and is shown a mutoscope. Bill knowingly introduces the show fairground huckster’s spiel: ‘Fancy a gander madam?’ The images tell the story of a sex scene where girls are molested by a highly disturbing masked figure. Blue learns that this menacing presence is Freddie Fiskin, a violent and sadistic father who only enjoyed sex with his female family members and, if these refused his advances, he killed them. Peepshow was also the title of Gothic band Siouxsie and the Banshees’ album (1988) as well as Short, Scarey Tales Publications’ erotic horror magazine, which flourished from 2001 to 2004, and a subsequent anthology of these tales. 4.2  Phantasmagoria and magic lanterns: E.-G. Robertson’s lantern-of-fear Until very recently, there was no more ignored medium associated with Gothic artistic culture than the magic lantern. Jeffery N. Cox writes that ‘the horror movie’ is the ‘descendant’ of Gothic theatre (Cox, 2002: 125). Theatre is certainly an important precedent for the development of film but so are magic lanterns. Some of the very first depictions of what we might call magic lanterns feature projections of demons, skeletons and monsters. As Laurent Mannoni has written: ‘Diabolical subjects were one of the commonest themes of lantern imagery over a long period’ (Mannoni and Campagnoni, 2009: 186). By 1668 Robert Hooke stated in a report to the Royal Society that the very basis and purpose of magic lanterns was to delight or horrify the public with ‘apparitions of Angels and Devils’ (Jones, 2011: 22). We also have beautifully graphic slides of devils hand-painted in oils (one complete with inturned fangs and clawed nipples), from the Musschenbroek workshop in Holland. Though we know that Josef Pieter Zallinger (1730–1805) of Augsburg and other German ­shop-owners had slides of totendanz (dance macabres) for sale, Georg Schröpfer, a Leipzig coffee-house owner, was the first canny showman to terrify his audience-­participants in quasi-religious ceremonies, by seeming (by way of smoke’s concealment of magic lantern projection), literally to raise apparitions of the illustrious dead from the floor of his premises. Samuel Halle

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described a Schröpferesque lantern show where a spirit hovered in the air over a death’s head and we also know that Schröpfer summoned up the ghosts of celebrated noblemen. Though Schröpfer’s career in projection would be relatively brief, other showmen like Philidor and Johann Carl Enslen were quick to capitalise on his travelling throughout Europe mounting these Phantasmagoria spectacles (as Philidor called them.) Philidor also augmented his Geisterscheinung (Ghost-shining projections) with magic tricks and physics demonstrations: the concealed lantern show visual repertoire was expanding considerably. The slides used depicted good and bad spirits, fairies, rogue priests, a dance of witches on the Bloksberg mountain and, by 1792, the phantoms of famous people. Back projection and moveable lanterns with particularly powerful beams were used to enhance the effects. Philidor finished his shows with the image of a red devil, ‘armed with claws, horns and a pointed tail’ but also wearing the gown and a mitre of a priest. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson in his shows at the Pavilion de Échiquier and the Capucine Convent, Paris, evolved a repertoire of projections that included ‘The Nightmare’, ‘Preparations for the Sabbath’, ‘The Bleeding Nun’ (culled from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk), ‘The Bleeding Bride’ and the ‘Head of the Medusa’. It is then no surprise that Charles Nodier, the father of the Classical side of what was to be called the ‘frenetic’ and ‘barbaric’ school of French literature, on viewing Robertson’s show in 1801, immediately identified these projections with the novels of Ann Radcliffe. This close association of lantern shows with the literary Gothic was widely attested in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by the Citizen (Marquis) de Sade, Hester Piozzi and Henry Lemoine as well as many other writers. Robertson’s entertainment in the ruined and largely deserted convent relied on conducted tours around the cloisters, past dark paintings and tombstones, a scientific demonstration and amusements in a physics laboratory before entrance into the room of the lantern show itself. This form of the show became a succès de scandale, engravings of the event depicting women fainting and men crouching to the floor in fear or drawing their swords to combat airy phantoms. The success of Robertson’s show was spectacular and imitation entertainments sprang up throughout Europe and America. It is difficult perhaps for contemporary viewers of cinema today to understand that the majority of frightening projections that we associate with horror films – demonic abductions, animated skeletons and talking skulls (see the films of Georges Méliès), soaring witches, fanged revenants, bestial riders and vengeful female nemeses (Fatal Attraction, Kill Bill 1 and 2) – had been developed and shown for over two previous centuries by lanternists before cinema was invented. Indeed,

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22  ‘The Bleeding Bride’, magic lantern slipping slide, c.1840

instead of calling the magic lantern ‘pre-cinematic’ technology, it is possible to call cinema a ‘post-lanternist’ medium, though lanterns are still with us. Lynda Nead rightly links the ‘animated paintings and statues’ of The Castle of Otranto ‘with the effects that blended magic and science, the sacred and the secular, enchantment with technology’ and with ‘the art of the magic lantern’ (Nead, 2007: 50). Though, by 1830, the age of the spectacular, large-scale Phantasmagoria was waning, several developments allowed the lantern-of-fear shows to continue in different milieux. On one hand, lantern projection moved away from garrets and deserted convents, to the lecture theatre and fairgrounds. The mass ­production of lanterns on an industrial scale made them more affordable for the

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23  ‘The Bleeding Bride’, magic lantern slipping slide, c.1840

bourgeois market. Nuremberg manufacturers produced ‘Geister-Maschines’ or ‘Geister Erscheinung’, toy tin lanterns in the early 1820s. In Britain, Philip Carpenter of Regent Street, London launched a new design of lantern called the ‘Phantasmagoria’. Several sets of slides from the period 1833–50 recently discovered and identified at the Filmoteca Española, Madrid also reveal that high quality ‘placas’ were being produced for a more private audience or coterie. These aren’t slides for a frightening public Phantasmagoria show – they lack the head-on, visceral impact of earlier lantern-of-fear slides. Suitably described as ‘Cuatro placas de linterna mágica lineales con motivos fantasmagóricos’/ ‘four magic lanterns slides for producing phantasmagoria’, they are urbane and witty artefacts, which supply references to the Phantasmagoria, possibly for a domestic audience or to be shown as part of a light artistic entertainment in a gallery.

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Probably Parisian in origin, these beautifully coloured and modelled slides are copies of the Louis Boulanger lithograph, La Ronde de Sabbat (1828), a major example of French diabolism of the frenetic school and works from Eugène Lepoittevin’s Les Diables de Lithographies (1832). They seem to have been created by an artist with close knowledge of Boulanger’s and Lepoittevin’s work. These sets of slides are a unique and important link between the artistic and projection history of French frenetic Romanticism in the late 1820s and the craze for visual diabolical fantasies in the early 1830s. Though they did not rely on magic lanterns but rather a strong type of theatrical lamp, ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ or the Dircksian Phantasmagoria (section 4.4), which made its stage debut in 1862–63, also revived the lantern-of-fear’s fortunes. Georges Méliès used Phantasmagorias as part of his early magic shows and also in his film La Lanterne Magique / The Magic Lantern (1903). Both Henry James and M. R. James wrote stories involving the domestic form of Phantasmagoria. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1909), as a malevolent spectral presence causes him to lose consciousness, Henry James’s narrator remembers the ghostly projections of his childhood: It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; […] the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. (James, 2001: 330)

4.3 Stereoscope Diableries The whole landscape looked like a beautiful scene beheld through a glorified stereoscope – eminently real as far as detail went, but fixed and motionless as death. (O’Brien, 1969: 261)

These words from Fitz-James O’Brien’s tale of horror ‘Mother of Pearl’, prefiguring as they do the fates of the narrator’s wife and daughter, hold a keen awareness of the sinister associations of a device that changed n­ ineteenth-century viewers’ optical perspectives. Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope, a device where two flat pictures were displayed to the viewers’ eyes separately, and by way of mirrors angled at 90 degrees; the user saw the two-dimensional views in three dimensions. The marvellous machine was revealed to the Royal Society in 1838. For many witnessing this marvel for the first time in a pre-cinematic world, the sense of depth gained by this invention was breathtaking and eerie. David Brewster invented a refracting stereoscope based on this device and Jules  Dubosc, a

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Parisian purveyor of optical instruments, manufactured the stereoscope and stereoscopic cards for commercial purposes. Jonathan Crary comments on the perceived eeriness of this medium from its inception. For example, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz wrote of the uncanny feeling when, on viewing a house through a stereoscope, one thought ‘we actually have already seen it before’ (Crary, 1992: 124). One can only imagine the uncanny resonances of three-dimensional post-mortem stereoscopic slides, especially when the deceased loved one had been specially posed before the original photograph had been taken. The firm, Dubosy Soliel, created stereo slides of still life vanitas motifs: a baby’s skeleton under a glass sconce, a skull, an hourglass and a crucifix. When so-called ‘spirit’ photographs came into vogue (see section 6.2), it was almost immediately recognised that, if these images were rendered with the stereoscopic process, those viewing them would experience a much more intensely three-dimensional and unsettling experience than that gained from looking at ordinary double-exposure shots of ‘spirits’. Brewster was quick to recognise the potential for this in stereoscopic entertainment. He wrote: For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry us even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as ‘thin air’ amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture. (cited in Kaplan, 2008: 28)

Brewster then gives instructions on how to make ‘the appearance of an aerial personage’ as if for viewing at a social gathering. George Swan Nottage at the London Stereoscopic Company created a new series of cards series, entitled ‘The Ghost in the Stereoscope’ on the basis of Brewster’s instructions (cited in Kaplan, 2008: 29). Louis Kaplan writes: These uncanny images depict a ghost’s invasion of domestic scenes, which surprises and startles the homebody, who realizes that he or she is living in a haunted house. One can imagine these stereo cards as constituting the ghost story genre for this new popular entertainment, which functioned as the television set of the nineteenth century. (2008: 29)

Perhaps viewing the domestic versions of the magic lantern and diorama shows were closer in terms of collective experience to watching a television set than the manipulation of a stereoscope which, after all, could only be witnessed by one viewer at a time (though this was to change later in the century). Yet Kaplan does catch the popularity of these tangible ghost spectacles with their illusion of depth, in which the lurch of suddenly registering visual p­ erspective

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24  One side of ‘The Haunted Lovers’ stereoscope slide

augmented the supernatural chill of the tableaux. A later example of this genre, ‘The Haunted Lovers’ (1893), reveals a couple, faces turned towards the viewer, sitting in central mid-ground in a diaphanous arbour, a beautiful interior draped with lace curtains, with floral wallpaper and a display of potted shrubs placed to each side of them. The viewer is led to question whether this is an engagement or marriage celebration. The shapes of the expensively dressed lovers are almost totally enveloped by the pale and veiled shape of a woman in the foreground, almost twice the size of the other figures, who strides towards the left of the picture-space. The diaphanous lineaments of the spectre are emphasised against a darker and tasselled wall-panel behind the surprised couple. The phantom (is her pale gown funerary, matrimonial or both?) looks towards the left of the picture-frame and her left hand is raised as if to stop the

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lovers, who watch on aghast. The female observer raises her arms too, seeming to recoil in distress. This ghostly confrontation in this finely detailed and ornate setting works very well, even with the slightly humorous hindsight of over 120 intervening years. Crary writes that, in order for the effect of three-dimensional depth to work, ‘there must be enough points and significant changes in the angle of convergence of the optical axes. Thus the most intense experience of the stereoscopic image coincides with an object-filled space, with a material plenitude that bespeaks a nineteenth-century bourgeois horror of the void’ (Crary, 1992: 125). This potency of detail and ‘plenitude’ in stereoscopic effects would work particularly well in the Diableries cards of Pierre Adolphe Hennetier and Alfred Habert. In the wake of the activities of Romantic artists (christened as the ‘school of barbarism’ by conservative critics), gathered round Charles Nodier and Victor Hugo, the innovative graphic arts exhibited a particular taste for diabolism. The work of caricaturist Cham (Amédée-Charles-Henri, comte de Noé), Louis Boulanger’s lithographs and Eugène Delacroix’s illustrations to Goethe’s Faust (1828) all utilise infernal imagery. Eugène Lepoittevin published his immediately popular Diableries / Devilries (1832), which started a craze for erotic and humorous pictures of scampering devils who teased young girls and offended all known bourgeois morals. Quite naturally, such a trend also led to Diableries magic lantern slides such as Lafayette’s ‘La Laboratoire du Diable’ (c. 1840). Collected over the period 1868–73 by publisher Alfred Block, there are over 180 stereo card Diableries, the core of which collection was created by Hennetier and Habert, the first three stereoscopic tableaux depicting a Heaven, Hell and Purgatory bristling with skeletons and devils. Hennetier had started his career as a small-scale sculptor of ecclesiastical ornaments and scenes for churches, and the success of his work photographed for stereoscope was based on the intricacy and accuracy of his clay models. In some cases, these models could be lit from behind, giving an infernal red glow to the devils and a glare to their eyes. A particularly macabre card from the first series is ‘Le Sabbat ou Les RendezVous Des Sorciers’. The scene is set in a remote cavern entrance and presided over by a snarling dragon. A great red devil kneels atop the rocky entrance sounding his horn. Satan, gargantuan, winged and bare-chested, standing with his wand and book, leans atop an infernal altar as a cauldron fuelled by burning red-eyed skulls bubbles below him. To the left, a semi-naked witch, a broomstick in one hand and a host from the Mass in the other, performs a high-kicking dance under the skeleton of a hanging man. Arm-in-arm with another s­ keleton,

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to the right stands a cowled witch holding a snake and a leering wizard in pointed hat. Such images on stereoscopic cards link the world of Robertson’s Phantasmagoria and Lepoittevin’s Diableries with the operas féeries and, ultimately, the films of Georges Méliès. Modern Gothic and horror artists still work in the stereoscopic medium offering images of monsters, witches, axe-murderers and vampires but buyers should display caution. Some of these tableaux are really lenticular images, which jump under the viewer’s gaze and display a certain, transitory depth but are based on a different form of technology, as are contemporary holograms. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Black Dossier (2007) comic book contains a cardboard stereo viewer for use on the final 3-D pages. Zoe Beloff’s stereoscopic projection, part of her installation, Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. shows actors performing famous séance scenes. Actual Victorian stereoscopic images hold an impact all of their own, which only grows with the passing of the years. As Lara Parker’s novel The Salem Branch (on which the Dark Shadows (2012) film is based) reveals, even a vampire can be shocked by the sudden leap in time, the jolt of déjà vu, which a nineteenth-century stereo image can provoke: The woman looked demurely down at the flower. Sliding the picture back and forth on the rack, and trembling even more, Barnabus adjusted the focus to see her more clearly. As he did this, the woman appeared to jerk slightly forward, thrusting the flowers towards him. A cold chill ran down the back of his neck. Only now did he look at her face and instantly recognized her. (Parker, 2006: 221)

4.4  ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ and the domestic lantern horror show The successful form of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was a mixed media show that involved a stage, actors, a strong, concealed light and mirror. Henry Dircks, a civil engineer, had thought of a method of projecting ‘ghost reflections’ on a stage, by the use of concealed huge mirrors and this idea was augmented and improved with the introduction of a single mirror below the audience sight-line by John Henry Pepper, a science lecturer who gave displays at the Regent Street Royal Polytechnic. The image of an actor under a sheet, standing below the audience in a space analogous to the conventional orchestra pit, would then be picked out by the beam of a powerful limelight magic lantern also hidden under the stage. The actor’s illuminated image would then be captured in a large reflective pane of glass set at a 45 degree angle to the audience; the image was clearly a reflected one but the glass of the mirror itself remained invisible against the black back-drop.

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The first ‘ghost’ show involving this technology was presented at a preview given for the press before Christmas in 1862 at the Polytechnic, and the vignette used was from a tale by Edward Bulwer Lytton, but for his later, main performance for the general public, Pepper chose Charles Dickens’s story ‘The Haunted Man’. The tale of Redlaw, the chemistry teacher protagonist, starts with a prolonged account of his domicile, his ‘haunted ground’; it is a description which places Gothic survival at the heart of the city. It describes a ‘once a brave edifice’, which is ‘ancient’, ‘vaultlike’, full of ‘low passages and  empty rooms’, a ‘forgotten crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth’ (Dickens, 1995: 304). The estrangement of Redlaw’s dwelling from the present day, its fabric ‘so remote in fashion, age and custom’, mark it out as a thwarted, Gothic space centred, like its inhabitant, upon the past and ‘thundering with echoes’ (1995: 303). The scientist’s instruments are ‘spectral shapes’ and the reflections in his vessels ‘phantoms’ (1995: 304). Redlaw is revealed as a prisoner of an obsession with his past privations and failures, his grudging and corrosive memories of the hardships and denial in his life. This bitterness is so deep that it has paralysed the lecturer  and has, over the years, become externalised into a palpable form, assuming a ghost-life of its own. These two forms, the human and the spectral  shape of  his bitterness, are shown to co-exist. As Redlaw broods before  the fire, the familiar shade, a kind of doppelgänger-phantom emerges and offers a devilish pact in which he will release the afflicted Redlaw from his memory.

25  ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ show illusion

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The Gothic resonance of the tale, its popularity and the possibility, with Pepper’s reflective trick, for human and ghostly double crossing and re-crossing of each other onstage proved irresistible to the showmen and, subsequently, to successive audiences. Inspired by John Tenniel’s and John Leech’s illustrations for Dickens’s story, Pepper used a combination of painted backdrops, lighting effects and mirrors to construct his theatrical magic. Henry Dircks’s account of the spectacle in The Ghost! (1863) gives a clear impression of what the public would have seen: A student is seen sitting at a table spread over with books, papers and instruments. After a while he rises and walks about the chamber […] the audience is perplexed by a different circumstance: they see a man rising from his seat and see him walking about, but they also see that he still sits immovably in his chair – so that evidently there are two persons instead of one, for, although alike in dress, stature, and person, their actions are different. They cross and recross […] one, after pushing down a pile of books, passes off by walking through the furniture and walls. (cited in Jones, 2011: 112)

In the case of Dickens’s story, where the phantom is the image of Redlaw, both actor and ghost had to resemble each other. In this way, a moving, gesturing phantom could appear to interact with live actors on the stage. The angle of the mirror’s tilt necessitated that the actor who played the ghost in the original shows was leaning on a sloping board and this made natural movement very difficult. Initially, this new attraction stunned contemporary audiences. Though the original exhibition only lasted a few minutes, the enthusiastic crowds who attended donated thousands of pounds to the treasury of the Polytechnic. No account of the illusion is complete without a reference to Pepper’s accompanying lecture, which wove an anti-Spiritualist message through Dickens’s story, at the same time instructing the audience about optical effects more generally. By August 1863, the demonstration had extended to three scenes, some at a very wide tangent from Redlaw’s tale. Two months earlier, the introduction of a new mirror to augment the illusion had meant that the ‘ghost’ actor could stand in his setting below the stage and move around quite naturally. Those who witnessed ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ saw the spectralisation of a live human body: here the intense lantern-light didn’t just project slides showing simulacra of the body onto a hidden screen or smoke, but illuminated and cast the eidolon of the body itself onto the stage. As a contemporary critic wrote: The spectres and illusions are thrown upon the stage in such a perfect embodiment of real substance, that it is not till the Haunted Man walks through their apparently solid forms that the audience can believe in their being optical ­illusions at all. (Jones, 2011: 61)

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That ‘real substance’ is indicative. This was perceived as a living, breathing image that seemed to possess, especially post the 1863 show, all the mobility and dimensionality of a 3-D body turning in space. In a volte face anticipating the workings of cinema, instead of, as Coleridge predicted, the technology of lantern shows and Phantasmagoria passing into the brains of its viewers, the human body had instead passed into the projective repertoire of a lantern’s projection. It was a moment of impeccable technical two-way reciprocity. The body’s reflective trace, the ‘ghost’ thrown outwards by the machine and mirrored, had at long last climbed up to take its place amongst the living actors. It must have seemed as revolutionary a moment as it may do when the first virtual avatar appears in public and walks amongst wondering spectators. Using newer techniques in developing the same stage illusions, in 1869, the  Polytechnic brought their machinery to bear on a more venerable Gothic  text. Pepper and his colleague James Walker supplied the special effects for a dramatic version of The Mysteries of Udolpho complete with ­‘dissolving views and ghost effects where multiple ghosts emerged from a single figure, a specially created moving skeleton slide and a scene in which black beetles crawled over the dungeon walls’ (Jones, 2011: 200). These shows were great successes and spawned many imitations across Europe, even, eventually, giving rise to a number of children’s toys using the same technology in miniature. Many other inventors and artists were to take up, compress and improve the technologies present in Pepper and Dircks’s illusion, including Emile Reynaud in his praxinoscopes, which relied on prismatic mirrors for their replication of human movement. The shows at the Polytechnic are recalled in novels like Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886) and Jules Verne’s Le Chateau des Carpathes (1893). Pepper’s mirror-trick is also recalled in the transformation of a human body into a skeleton resting in its coffin in the Parisian entertainments: Cabaret du Néant and Cabaret de l’Enfer. 4.5  Eerie sight machines, zoetropes and the whirling witches of Plateau’s Phenakistoscope In a particularly nightmarish visionary sequence in R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mr Enfield’s tale passes before the lawyer Utterson’s mind ‘ in a scroll of lighted pictures’: He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on

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regardless of her screams […] and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. (Stevenson, [1906] 2005: 7)

A ‘scroll of lighted pictures’ reminds of the technology of moving panoramas. These devices could range from the most enormous of pictures to the children’s hand-held toys and these were ‘peristrephic’: the unrolling painting was pulled across a very slight convex (curves outward) surface, adding an extra sense of movement. ‘The great field of lamps of a nocturnal city’ and lamplighted labyrinths shift us into wide-focused urban scenes captured from above as in the bird’s eye view of London exhibited at the Colosseum panorama in Regent’s Park. By the time Stevenson was writing The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the widespread panorama revival was in full spate; when Utterson dozes, the scenes seem to coalesce in a way that resembles the spinning action of a thaumatrope (a disc with two separate scenes on either side that combined when spun), moving more and more swiftly, causing the dizziness mentioned in the above quotation. It is hardly surprising that Stevenson, a keen magic lanternist himself, should draw on these early optical technologies and that the thaumatrope and the whirling effect of a zoetrope’s pierced barrel are evoked in the final sentences. Some of this writer’s most terrifying scenes use visualisations drawn from these media. William George Horner, an English mathematician, invented the first zoetrope in 1834, a revolving drum with thin viewing apertures cut into the curving surface and attached to a static stand. From its earliest form, the zoetrope was associated with dark forces. Horner called his invention the ‘daedalum’ or ‘daedatelum’, which, by means of spoof etymology, he claimed to mean ‘the wheel of the devil’, though associations with the flight of the mythic Daedalus seem to be evoked as well. In the 1860s the row of viewing apertures were placed higher up the exterior surface of the drum so that paper strips of pictures with slight variations could be placed inside. When the drum was revolved, the viewers gazing through the slits could see the multiple images on the strip (by way of the visual blurring caused by the speed of rotation and ‘persistence of vision’) thereby resolved into one flickering, moving image. William F. Lincoln christened his American form of the device, a ‘zoetrope’, or ‘wheel of life’. Given its early association with dark magic, it is not surprising that one of the very first strips of zoetrope images recorded in England is of a horned devil leaping out of a box, and subsequent early strips featured witches in flight, a demon opening a door to step into a house and grotesque, leering heads.

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Film-makers continue to visit the zoetrope in order to evoke uncanny horror. In William Malone‘s film The House on Haunted Hill (1999), Geoffrey Rush, the owner of an amusement park, exploring a deserted mental asylum where patients massacred the doctors, is trapped inside a huge whirling zoetrope and pushed to the verge of insanity. There has been a great revival in the commercial use of zoetropes as in advertisements for Stella Artois, Coca-Cola and Airbnb and in the opening credit sequences for the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (2008). The darker, Gothic and more socially transgressive side of these amusements is realised in Matt Collishaw’s gigantic ‘Massacre of the Innocents’-themed zoetrope entitled ‘All Things Fall’ (2015) with modelling and animation by Sebastian Burdon. When the device is started, a host of statues seem to come to life. In the setting of a domed temple influenced by Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome, a corpulent man flogs women, a baby is thrown into mid-air, a pile of infants lie on the stairs and the bludgeoning gestures of the men are repeated endlessly. In Collishaw’s steel, aluminium, plaster and resin zoetrope, ‘Throbbing Gristle’ (2008), an endless cycle of predation is shown with animals preying on children, men hacking at beasts and hawks hovering over it all. ‘Seria Ludo’, his spectral zoetrope chandelier installation in the Banqueting House at Studley Royal, reveals groups of feasting and urinating aristocrats. Charlie Deaux’s Zoetrope (1999) interprets a Kafka-esque penal colony into a vision of torture and unremitting

26  Mat Collishaw’s ‘Seria Ludo’ zoetrope, 2015

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oppression. Alex Friderici, a designer who has created disturbing, surreal effects for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005), also uses three-­dimensional stereolithography to create terrifying zoetropes. Perhaps the most impressive darkly themed contemporary stroboscopic zoetrope is the immense people-driven ‘Charon’ made by Peter Hudson. This 11-metre tall steel and aluminium kinetic sculpture fashioned by 100 operatives consists of twenty animated skeletons whirling in a vast arc. When the mechanism is turned, the sculpture relates the departure of souls into the afterlife in Charon’s shadowy ferry-boat on a massive zoetropic scale. The phenakistoscope was invented by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and the Austrian professor of geometry Simon Stampfer in 1832. Plateau noted that, if he gazed at the action of two juxtaposed cogwheels turning quickly in different directions, it produced the optical effect of a still wheel. Experimenting with similar effects, Stampfer produced Stroboscopischen Scheiben oder optischen Zauberscheiben (stroboscopic discs or optical magic discs) and, of course the reference to ‘Zauber’ or seeming magic is important. When Joseph Ackermann & Co. published the first two sets of phenakistoscope discs, they called them the Phantasmascope and Fantascope, immediately making links with the Gothic lantern show Phantasmagoria (see section 4.2). Two of the initial designs were ‘Death-Head Emerging from Centre’ and ‘Serpent Disappearing Over Edge’. The disc-picture of the serpents, probably painted by Jean-Baptiste Madou, cleverly employed the motion and shape of the medium. In contrast to the confines of the zoetrope barrel, the circumferences of these discs opens onto the surrounding world of the viewer. Accordingly, when the device started, the green snakes seem to slither quickly outwards and over the edge of the disc into reality, an unnerving effect of the world of the illusion overlapping on one’s own. David Robinson has called this illusion of the ‘demonic green death’s heads’ emerging ‘from an infinite hole, growing larger as they approach and pass the viewer’ ‘Plateau’s masterpiece’ and added that as ‘a piece of Gothic horror it compares with the Phantasmagorian showpieces of Plateau’s fellow-countryman, Etienne Robertson’ (Robinson, 1990: 251–4). It is not at all strange that Robinson makes such links: the green faces spiralling outwards have dark eyebrows, goggle eyes and a red mouth opening to reveal huge asymmetrical fangs, a type of the vampire so popular in lantern shows. Plateau added to his machine’s visual repertoire with a revolving tableau of an attractive lady’s face turning into that of an ancient hag and then into a horned and fanged devil. This transformation is surely appropriated from Phantasmagoria slip-slides of this subject, which, by this time, had existed for half a century. Another of Plateau’s early subjects was a series of black witches riding on their broomsticks. Such horrific subjects were obviously popular; another disc

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shows a flock of white birds skimming outwards only to be eaten by a redhaired monster with gaping crimson maw and bulging eyes that move from side-to-side. Modern admirers of this device can draw and animate their own macabre imaginings on the Strobotop Modern Phenakistoscope Strobe Light Optical Animation Toy.

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4.6  Gothic kinetoscopes to early American horror film The film Monkeyshines, No. 1 was shot by William Heise between 1889 and 1890. The construction of the machine that took this film was the work of William Dickson, an employee of Thomas Edison’s, who had been in charge of developing the inventor’s idea for the kinetoscope: a box with a mechanism that levered a strip of film over a bright light. Members of the audience watched the film by gazing into an opening in the top of the box. The images, arranged in sequence, appeared quickly one after the other like those in a flip-book, giving the viewer the impression of seamless action. The film showed a blurry image of a figure, another of Edison’s employees, performing a dance or doing exercises, but today this grainy humorous short is oddly unnerving. Tom Gunning and Charles Musser have reminded us that the context for the first organised viewing of the first kinetoscopes were the American slot machines parlours and arcades (Musser, 2006: 162). (It is interesting that Zombie slot machine games such as Necro Brainz persist to the present day.) On 14 April 1894 Edison’s motion pictures had their commercial debut in a Broadway kinetoscope parlour. These new ‘peepshows’ (not to be confused with the older string-pull devices with static scenes: section 4.1) were immediately popular. The appeal of the kinetoscope was very specific and, as early as 1895, W. R. L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson were writing of the horror of viewing successive ‘moving’ photographic images of vastly magnified insect forms via this medium: A series of inch-large shapes then springs into view, magnified stereographically to nearly three feet each, gruesome beyond power of expression, and exhibiting an indescribable celerity and rage. Monsters close upon each other in a blind and indiscriminate attack, limbs are dismembered, gory globules are tapped, whole battalions disappear from view. (Dickson and Dickson, 1895: 43)

Bloodthirsty effects of a more artificial nature were also to appear in the ­alternative medium of films (in continuous reels) projected onto screens for collective public viewing. Clive Bloom writes: It was soon realized that ‘peep shows’ appealed to a voyeuristic male audience and that it was an ideal medium for the thrills of sexual titillation. It was

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not too long before the improved medium of film was available for Gothic horror which in essence shared much of the voyeuristic and titillating. One of these popular new attractions was The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. (Bloom, 2010: 171)

In fact it was only a matter of months between Carmencita (1895), the first kinetoscope feature banned for sexually explicit material, and Alfred Clarke’s film The Execution (1895). This was one of the first films of historical scenes and was 18 seconds in duration. Clarke’s actors stand in four lines level with and  behind the execution block. The executioner, Mary, and her ladies in waiting stand in the foreground, the apron of the woman to the left stirring in the breeze. The stop-motion effect where, prior to the axe descending, the body of the actress playing Mary is replaced with a manikin is skilfully handled. This jump in the film is most visible in relation to Mary and the axeman’s positions and hardly noticeable at all in relation to the other figures. The action is plainly differentiated in terms of gender roles, the soldiers raising their swords at the moment of execution, and crowding to see the severed head, the women lifting hands to their faces and turning away from the scene in distress. Though Georges Méliès’s Manoir du Diable (1896) is often claimed as the first Gothic film in terms of supernatural villainy, Mary’s execution, the culmination of Francis Walsingham’s plotting against her, is, in thematic terms, eminently Gothic and the event itself is a primary subject of Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess (1783–85). The Mutoscope and Biograph Company, taking a lead from Méliès’s La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine (1898), produced their own version of the tale with Arthur Marvin on camera and an actress in tight ‘fleshings’ appearing nude. In terms of narrative and iconography, both productions reveal a heavy debt to Phantasmagoria shows. Comedic horror films flourished, such as Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Josh’s Nightmare (1900), featuring the devil in underwear, and Porter’s sequel, Uncle Josh at a Spooky Hotel (1900), relying on the antics of a disappearing ghost. Porter obviously held an interest in these spoof tales of the supernatural. In his Méliès-esque The Cavalier’s Dream (1898), as the cavalier dreams, an old witch appears and provides a magical meal. She then transforms herself into a young woman and Mephistopheles materialises. Porter’s masterpiece of this genre was his cinematic adaptation of Winsor McCay’s newspaper cartoon, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), where a young toff in a silk top hat gorges himself on food and wine and, exiting the restaurant drunk, finds the city swaying around him. Three small devils in white climb from a hot-dish to prod him and the aerial journey on his bed over the city skyline is wonderfully accomplished for its time.

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After Alice Guy Blaché’s French productions of La Esméralda (1905) and Dr  Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1908), D. W. Griffith’s The Sealed Room (1909) is ­probably the first authentic film with serious Gothic themes. Despite the histrionic gestures of the king (Arthur Johnson) when he discovers that his favourite paramour (Marion Leonard) is having an affair with his minstrel (Henry Walthall), the bitterness of his rage is palpable. Griffith’s conflation of E. A. Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) and Honoré de Balzac’s ‘La Grande Bretêche’ (1831) (perhaps influenced by André Calmette’s own cinematic adaptation of Balzac’s story of a walled-up lover made in the same year), is the most uncompromising of early revenge films. Griffith has made the French court all low, obeisant bows, be-ribboned staffs and symbols of mortal transience: an hourglass, falling petals and wreaths of flowers, yet the floral motifs do not indicate an effete monarchy. The unsuspecting lovers, tricked by the king into revealing their dalliance, are walled up in the dovecote initially intended for the king’s own amours. As the minstrel and his unlawful lover draw back the thick curtain, to reveal stone, we feel a real frisson, enhanced by the king taunting them and striking his sword on the stone on the other side. There is no reprieve, sentimental rescue or mercy. The obedient masons who filled the doorway in are despatched to their death by the ruthless king, the lovers, reproving each other, expire. The Sadean relish of the monarch and the horror of the situation were not lost on contemporary audiences. The reviewer for the Biograph Bulletin wrote: Like a flash, the horror of the situation besieges them and they realize their fate. Their cries and beating on the walls are answered only by the taunts of the King, who stands outside in fiendish satisfaction of the terrible punishment he has meted out for them. Slowly the torturing oppression of the air-tight room overcomes them, which death only can relieve. (Anon., 1909: 23)

In J. Searle Dawley’s production of Frankenstein (1910), Shelley’s grotesque creature becomes the first authentically frightening monster of film. In the second scene, set in a dilapidated student’s garret, we see Victor Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) enter the room where he will create the monster. Slowly, out of a smoking flux of shifting figurative contours, the monster (Charles Stanton Ogle) emerges. In Dawley’s hands, this ‘new man’ made from the corpses of criminals becomes a moving symbol of failed sublimation, a desperate, botched attempt to reconcile the atomised condition of the human in the modern world. The attitudes and gestures of the monster eerily reference Gothic works. When he looms forwards from a curtained space over his maker’s prone body on the divan, we see Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’ demon, a figure that would acquire a remarkable longevity in cinema. Just as Elizabeth’s corpse in

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Shelley’s book reminded many of Fuseli’s nightmare-demon (the author almost certainly knew the painting), Victor’s sprawled body reminds us of Fuseli’s troubled sleeper. In the final scene, Ogle’s monster, broken down by his unsuccessful attempts to be with his creator, enters the room, stands transfixed before the mirror and holds out his arms in dumb entreaty. Gradually, the real monster fades away, leaving only the image in the mirror. A moment later, Frankenstein himself enters. As he stands directly before the mirror, we see at first the pale but detailed after-image of the monster reflected instead of Frankenstein’s own form. Gradually, however, under the effect of love and his better nature, the monster’s image fades and Frankenstein sees himself in his rightful young manhood in the mirror. Film was to prove more durable than the kinetoscope, but the uncanny associations of the slightly earlier medium recur in Max Goldblatt’s horror film Kinetoscope (2005). 4.7  Gothic films, from silents to electronic movie making Because the term ‘horror film’ was first used by reviewers after the release of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1932), some critics have exclusively characterised early films which inspire fear before that date as ‘Gothic’, a ­period-specific categorisation disputed by David Pirie in A New Heritage of Horror (2008) and Jonathan Rigby in English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015 (2015) whose definitions of ‘Gothic cinema’ take in a considerable number of Hammer Horror titles from thirty years later. Georges Méliès’s Manoir du Diable / The Haunted Castle (1896) is sometimes cited as the earliest film concerning a diabolical, supernatural subject. Because a bat is also shown transforming into the Devil in some scenes, it is sometimes cited as the first vampire film, though no sign of bloodsucking or revenancy is revealed. Alice Guy Blaché’s La Esméralda (1905), based on Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1908) are usually claimed as the first films drawn from Gothic sources. Five years after the first filmic version of Jekyll and Hyde, Alice Guy Blaché’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1913) appeared. Early American series of ‘cliff-hangers’ also incorporated Gothic elements. Theodore and Leopold Wharton’s series The Mysteries of Myra (1916) revealed an occult organisation called the Black Order plotting the destruction of the young eponymous heroine by using vampires, magic, Spiritualism and baleful monsters. Of course, Gothic themes such as Faustian pacts, despotic tales of abduction and forced rape and/or marriage, döppelgangers (The Student of Prague) and

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­ onstrous transformations abound in early films. Paul Leni’s The Cat and the m Canary (1927) introduced the ‘Old Dark House’ motif. Plainly derived from The Castle of Otranto by way of myriad Victorian domestic Gothic dramatic productions, this was a genre exploited in The Bat Whispers (1930), James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932), Carl Laemmle’s The Secret of the Blue Room (1933). Usually concerned with events occurring in or near a dark mansion, disputes involving dynastic inheritance, concealed passages, murder, grotesque or mad characters and comedic interludes, this type of narrative reached its most bizarre expression in Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footsteps to Satan (1929). The majority of Gothic cinematic references (in music, fashion, photography, painting) are gleaned from just a few horror productions to which artists and critics return: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, Witchcraft through the Ages (1922), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Todd Browning’s Dracula (1932), Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1981) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as Hammer productions such as Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958), and a number of Italian horror films. It is also true that several of the earliest of these films, particularly vampire titles, created a contrasting array of visual styles by which the cinematic Gothic would later be defined. Opening intertitles of Nosferatu inform the audience of the primacy of the plague in this version and Murnau makes the most of the foliage of supposed Bremen streets and the Hutter’s luxuriant garden where the estate agent plucks a bouquet for his wife Ellen. The film has become famous for the striking and stark visual repertoire as in the moment when Hutter arrives at Nosferatu’s castle and the fiend’s dark hunched figure, thin and tall, is revealed from the back, sharply outlined against the gateway, and viewed almost side-on to the young man’s approach, as though the vampire’s attention is elsewhere. Just as dramatic as the famous shots of Nosferatu levitating from his coffin later on the ship is the moment when Hutter tries to leave his bedroom and sees the vampire immobile in the corridor and devastatingly revealed in his predatory stance, beautifully caught in two enlarging static shots. The vampire’s castle is all circular towers, angles and asymmetry, triangular wall-supports and low arched entrances, a hint of the influence of the Expressionist aesthetics of Albin Grau, Herman Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), though Murnau uses real buildings not sets. Shreck as the monster is both hesitant and powerful, staring over the top of the fateful letter of command, his bushy eyebrows and bulging pupils exposed, or lying in his tomb, his odd central rodent-like fangs revealed. Dark, scudding clouds flood the sky at intervals. Time is marked off on the vampire’s clock by a skeleton

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27  F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922

striker. Nature seems beautiful and, as in the ‘Venus fly-trap’ lecture and rat infestation, terrible. In his Dracula (1932), Todd Browning famously constrained Karl Freund’s fluid, Expressionist camerawork, yet, even before we arrive at the castle, camera angles are used to involve the viewer at a visceral level. The sudden cuts by which, in the scene at the country inn, the viewer stands where Jonathan Harker was positioned a moment before, and the innkeeper seems to be pleading with each person in the audience to avoid Dracula, are very effective. Juxtaposed with Harker’s journey, we suddenly switch to the vampire’s vault, rats stirring amongst bones and hands groping from beneath coffin lids. As Bela Lugosi moves towards the steps, a plume of dust at his heels, a quiet threat is being carefully instated. At his first entrance to the castle, Harker is dwarfed by the vast interior. Addressed by Lugosi, Harker’s head is set inside a lattice of shadowed bars projected by moonlight from the windows. The subsequent cobweb shots are rightfully famous, but just as effective as Lugosi mounts the stairs with candle, is the swift tableau of the massive stone pillar, symbol of the vampire’s ancient strength, draped on the right with cobwebs, and also framing Lugosi’s figure on the left. In the discussion scene that follows, the periodic masking of Lugosi’s face in shade whilst his eyes are embellished with a pen-light is one of the most celebrated effects in Gothic cinema. Lugosi’s ­movements are slow and

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trance-like, almost ritualistic and always moving towards stillness as though the fiend is psychically emptying out humans of any vitality. The imagery of castles came into its own again twenty years later in Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava’s I Vampire (1956), an adaptation of the story of Elizabeth Báthory, in the dilapidated interiors of Mario Bava’s The Mask of Satan (1960) and Terence Fisher’s colour Dracula (1958). A poster for Fisher’s film foregrounded its sexual interest, stating ‘The TERRIFYING Lover who died – yet lived!’ The film starts with red Gothic lettering juxtaposed with a funerary eagle, and the vampire’s name on his tomb suddenly flecked with brilliant crimson. Shot in Eastman colour and lit by Jack Asher, the overall feeling of the castle interior is one of lavish, aristocratic comfort: fires blazing in large hearths, bright banks of candles, barley-twist-style columns, chess sets, stained glass, liqueur stands, and the overall emphasis on armorial bearings and letterheads, crossed pikes and the gilt heraldic motto, ‘Fidelis et mortem’/ ‘Faithful even in death’, over the fireplace. Christopher Lee’s powerful and dynamic figure dominates the screen, especially in the famous scene in the library where the appealing maiden in white embraces the globe as she moves in on Harker. We suddenly cut to Dracula with blood-­ spattered mouth, magnified fangs and red eyes. After a series of films from Hammer featuring Baron Frankenstein and his monster, Terence Fisher gave Mary Shelley’s story a Caligari-like twist by setting Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) in a Carlsbad asylum for the criminally insane. The Baron’s hulking creation is a patchwork of body parts cut from corpses provided by a local body snatcher. The action is claustrophobically limited to the dark rooms of the asylum. Frankenstein’s increasing madness, the creature’s bloody dismemberment at the hands of the inmates and the unresolved, pessimistic conclusion mark this film out as a peculiarly dark example of British Gothic horror cinema. Whilst Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) was perhaps the most notable and earliest example of Gothic Noir, Roger Corman’s cycle of Poe adaptations (1959–64) returned to explore the nineteenth century, whilst Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and its spin-offs like Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) explored earlier encounters with evil. Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1993) was perhaps the most important of several films to make the crossover between Gothic rock music, modern American urban culture and the Gothic film. Chris Roberts’s writes: ‘Dismissed as flashy and near-pornographic on release, its bravura opening (Bauhaus sing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” over a libidinous nightclub scene) and tragic ending […] have earned the film a camp-sincere crossover following’ (Roberts, Livingstone and Baxter-Wright, 2014: 114).

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28  Metal sign of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, 1974

The visual appeal of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) with its often vertiginous, swirling camerawork was created with a computer-­ controlled montage editing system; it was one of the first Gothic horror films to be cut and sound-edited on video by computers. Coppola also supplied a montage of visual effects and sly cinematic references: the human arms holding flickering lights in Dracula’s castle are culled from Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la

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Béte (1946). The blue flames seen from Dracula’s coach are an effect borrowed from F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). A roundel in a peacock’s feather morphs into a railway tunnel, a train steams over the pages of a diary, the writing is projected over Harker’s face and Dracula’s eyes appear in the sky á la Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962). It is in all respects a lush and theatrical production created on set. The emergence of ‘the brides’ in their glittering headdresses through Harker’s flowing bedsheets is particularly memorable. The scenes of Gary Oldman in London with long hair, wearing a silk top hat and purple tea shades launched the careers of a thousand Victorian-look Goth dandies. There have been at least five cinematic versions of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, including the most successful: Dominik Moll’s sombre and melancholy realisation of the tale in 2011. Bleeding, vindictive nuns have returned to terrorise and arouse modern audiences in ‘nunsploitation’ cinema. While Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1966) initiated the trend for ‘Slasher Movies’ of extreme violence in America, Norman Bates’s killing of his mother recalls the matricidal and incestuous behaviour of Lewis’s Ambrosio. 4.8  Gothic TV Even the slick interior sets of an episode such as ‘Man from the South’ (1960) from the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents airing on CBS between 1955–65 harboured Gothic nightmares. Set in a modern Las Vegas hotel bar and bedroom, it follows the story of an attractive young hustler (Steve McQueen) who is drawn into a bet – that his cigarette-lighter won’t start flawlessly ten  times – by a stranger, Carlos (Peter Lorre). Carlos wagers his car and, alternatively, if the hustler fails, he will forfeit his small finger. As McQueen’s wrist is tied to the table and he starts the challenge, Lorre’s psychopathic gambler cradles a meat cleaver lovingly to his chest in readiness to claim his prize. Series such as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Boris Karloff’s Veil (1958, though originally unaired) followed this professional and slickly produced format, though a very different type of Gothic TV was evolving in Britain. BBC adaptations of Jane Eyre in 1956 and 1963 established a strong tradition of ‘old dark house’ and nineteenth-century horror revivals and these trends were taken up and extended in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of M. R. James’s story, ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ (1971), the first of the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series. Archdeacon John Haynes (Robert Hardy), having gained his post, it is implied, through the murder of his predecessor, hears women’s laughter and ghostly whispers on the dark staircase of his home. Hardy’s restrained and credible performance as the doomed churchman

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matches the restraint and care of Clark’s direction and John McGlashan’s uncanny camerawork. One of the most frightening moments (and beautifully realised) is where Haynes paces the cloisters listening to the echoing footsteps of an invisible follower. He turns to confront his tormentor and Alan, the unctuous verger, is heartstoppingly revealed. Clark’s Barchester and subsequent works like Lost Hearts (1973) and Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) with their brooding ecclesiastical buildings, great halls concealing secrets and haunted countryside reveal the quintessence of British Gothic TV. The popularity of Hammer films in the late 1960s led to graphic horror themes percolating into mainstream soaps, Satanic hooded figures and a hand of glory appearing in The Newcomers (1965–59). Leslie Megahey’s icy masterpiece Schalken the Painter (1979), a radical and horrific subversion of the art film form, is a creation of a different and more ruthless imaginative order. In America, the anthology series The Twilight Zone led to programmes that featured the intrusion of terror into domestic settings, the TalkyTina doll with her menacing child’s voice and rolling eyes of the ‘Living Doll’ episode (1963) proving a particularly effective protagonist. Jane Eyre was again the main inspiration behind what was to become something of a televisual institution: Dan Curtis’s Dark Shadows (1966–71), a ‘gothic soap opera’ – a truly popular production which ran to 1,225 episodes. Most of the melodramatic action in the first episodes occurred in the foyer, reception room and around the Gothic staircase of the Collinwood mansion, a great complex of buildings in Maine, after Victoria Winters’ (Alexandra Moltke) arrival. One characteristic technique is the way that the camera suddenly cuts from close-ups on Victoria to a long view of her outlined in the doorway as if seen from an unknown presence gazing out from behind the balusters. The look of the series – simple ­woodcut-like title images, vertiginous mid-focus shots of the sea and the ­glowering, bejeweled portrait of the vampire Barnabas Collins – are ­perfectly augmented by the theremin theme tune. The plots also borrowed widely from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Slightly earlier, David Levy’s The Addams Family (1964–66) and Allan Burns and Chris Hayward’s The Munsters (1966–64) had confirmed that a mass market existed for TV comedy shows that spoofed the old monster movies. These aired over the early evening and proved as popular with children as with adults. Yet it wasn’t until Tim Child’s Knightmare (1987) that a viable horror-themed game show for children would be shown in Britain. With the help of nascent computer technology and painted backgrounds, Child was able to create a notional space (in a blue room) where a child – ‘the dungeoneer’ (his or her sight obscured by a magical helmet) – entered a world of dragons, armed ogres, talking trees and frightening guardians.

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David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–91) series, which mingled Gothic themes such as murder, monstrous fathers, incest and secret societies, drew major inspiration from Hitchcock’s visual creations, notably Vertigo (1958) and the dance academy’s hidden chambers in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). Against the backdrop of the evergreen woods where evil lurks and seemingly peaceful households where demonic powers possess humans, Lynch uses a wide range of visual effects involving the psychopathic BOB (Frank Silva), superimposed faces, ‘doubles’ as in Laura and Maddy and waterfall and river motifs to suggest the resurgence of subconscious desire and flow of dreams. Dark and persistent, Grimms’ fairytale motifs intrude. A raft of subsequent programmes exhibited the longevity of Lynch’s influence, most recently Fabrice Gobert’s The Returned / Les Revenants (2012–), yet a different strain of TV horror in the 1990s came by way of rite-of-passage narratives of youth in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–). The adventures of Buffy Summer’s (Sarah Michelle Geller) and her Sunnydale High peers negotiate the fraught relations of teenagers with figures of social authority. Buffy’s attempts to balance the demands of education, dynastic responsibility and her own sexuality are admirably figured in the mixed blazon of costumes she wears, one a full-length lemon prom dress, high heels and leather jacket and carrying a triple-shafted crossbow. Taking up such supernatural teen trends and also building upon the humour and magic of the Bewitched series (1964–72), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–) and Charmed (1998–2005) were to usher in a succession of TV titles with enchantresses as leads, continuing in The Secret Circle (2011–12). Just as, if not more, potent in terms of TV horror have been a string of teen vampire titles ultimately stemming from the fiction of Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer: Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec’s Vampire Diaries (2009–) follows the fortunes of Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) in Mystic Falls, Virginia, as she tries to distinguish between benevolent and maleficent vampires from the same family. Almost contemporaneously, AMC witnessed the massive popularity of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (2010–) survivalist zombie franchise. In Britain, for a time it looked as though reality paranormal shows such as Most Haunted (2002–10) might, by way of imitation titles on burgeoning cable TV outlets, pose a viable alternative to horror drama. The series spawned over fifty programmes using similar formats and on both sides of the Atlantic. The recent resurgence in Gothic TV has been spearheaded by programmes that delve into the history of specifically British and Irish supernatural writing. Using the notional early pulp sensibility of penny dreadfuls, American writer John Logan in his eponymous series (2014–) has turned to a recognizably Victorian milieu, which is distinctly dark in atmosphere and bloody in its

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v­ iolence. Characters from Frankenstein, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray are juxtaposed as promiscuously and knowingly as they are in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic (1999–2007) and Stephen Norrington’s film of the same name (2003), but Logan’s visual sense is altogether more historicist, his sense of the London back streets, garrets and slums is authentically disturbing. Toby Haynes’s mini-series Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015), based on the novel by Susanna Clark was, at least in prospect, beguiling. Only slightly indebted to the Harry Potter book craze, the narrative follows the struggles of two British magicians to revive the mystic art just before and during the Napoleonic wars, starting with Norrell’s animation of statues in York Minster. There are some fine visual set pieces: the conception and rendering of the portal to the kingdom of Lost Hope, with its entranced waltzing victims ruled over by the dark fairy, the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair (Marc Warren), is masterful. The fact that this set was constructed at Wentworth Woodhouse just below Stainborough Castle takes us back to the foundations of Gothic writing.

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Chapter 5

5.1  Gothic comics, graphic novels and icons

T

he G oth ic p e digre e o f the first graphic novel proper, Joseph Franz von Götz’s Lenardo and Blandine, was amply manifest at the time of its publication. Von Götz adapted the ballad ‘Lenardo and Blandine’ by Gottfried Bürger into an imagined series of dramatic scenarios. Bürger’s work, particularly his poem ‘Lenore’, is a well-known constituent of the traditional Gothic repertoire and the refrain ‘die Todten Reiten schnell’ / ‘The dead travel fast’ from that poem is quoted in Stoker’s Dracula. Von Götz produced a sequence of 160 single-panel images with accompanying captions in the form of copper etchings. This tells the story of Blandine, a princess, and her noble lover who are betrayed by the girl’s father who wants to give her in wedlock to another suitor. Lenardo is murdered and the bewildered Blandine is confronted by a succession of veiled strangers bearing her gifts: Lenardo’s bloody ring, a letter and her lover’s heart in an urn, a sight that drives her to madness. Such a narrative with its doomed love affair, the moonlit and sequestered woodland tryst, vicious murder, veiled strangers, the grisly contents of the urn and Blandine’s madness can be recognised as exactly kind of Gothic melodrama as might be seen in Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802). Few graphic sequences embody Otranto-esque themes as directly as George Cruikshank’s satiric triptych, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (1815), where, in the first panel, the slumbering Regent wakes to view a huge figure of himself encased in armour and looming over the bed. His imagined face looks ­blistered as it emerges from a metal collar, the word ‘ROYALTY’ inscribed over his head.

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29  Joseph Franz von Götz’s Lenardo and Blandine, 1783

Ann Radcliffe’s and Matthew Lewis’s works had a considerable impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Bandit’s Revenge or the Fatal Sword (1835), which he titled a  ‘Romantic Drama’. This playful knockabout story has its dreadful and spasmodically violent turns. A bandit chief’s anger results in instantaneous and multiple beheadings. At one point, the hero, Vivaldi, is shown as an emaciated captive wasting away in a bandit’s cell surrounded by skulls, snakes, toads and bats. He breaks out of his cell and escapes on horseback, his skinny form giving him the appearance of Benjamin West’s painting, Death on a Pale Horse (1796). Gothic visual representations are cleverly

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p­ arodied throughout. Thackeray clinches the association in his portrayal of a newly rotund Vivaldi with his beloved Bertha on their wedding day, the marriage feast knowingly crammed into a large panel adjoining their chamber into a space entitled: ‘Gothic Cupboard’. Another of Thackeray’s comic strips: his notebook version of Fitzboodle’s Confessions (early 1830s), features a monstrous woman, Ottilia von Rosenthal, stealing out to the churchyard at night to gorge herself on dead bodies. A devil perched on railings watches the unholy feast. A nun sitting on skulls gnaws the meat from human bones as the ravaged cadaver slumps back in the coffin. David Kunzle writes that, as Rodolphe Töpffer’s short narrative: ‘La Peur / The Fear’ (1833), and his novel Rosa et Gertrude (1847), involve dark sexuality and Gothic details such as a haunted graveyard, spectral creatures and a mouldering horse and reveal a much earlier knowledge of Radcliffean motifs, it was conversely the Swiss artist’s graphic narratives that persuaded artist’s like Thackeray to create Gothic comic strips. Kunzle writes that Töpffer’s Mr. Vieux Bois (1830) taps into ‘a tradition of the Gothic novel with its chambers of Catholic/monastic horrors’, especially Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Quick, successive stages of the tale shows eponymous hero Vieux Bois trying to hang himself, hacking off a monk’s beard with his cutlass and then being pursued by hordes of vengeful monks. Deriving from the intertwining influences of the British Gothic and Töpffer’s graphic traditions as well as the mode for visual and barbaric grotesquerie led by the lithographers, Louis Boulanger and the Devéria brothers, the comic strip and graphic novel enjoyed a more prolific and vigorous growth in France from the mid-1840s onwards. In the hands of Cham (Amédée de Noé), Nadar and Gustave Doré, the medium flourished in journal and book form as well as in cheaper pamphlets. Doré’s interest in fairy stories, succubi and legends like that of the wandering Jew marked him out for interest in the ‘Gothick’ long before his famous illustrations for his edition of Dante’s Inferno (1861). In 1854 he produced the most vivid and disturbing Gothic graphic novel of the nineteenth century: his Histoire Pittoresque, Dramatique et Caricatural de la Sainte Russie (1854). Wars over dynastic succession, terrifying and autocratic rulers, monks brooding in the towers of ruined monasteries, monstrous dreams and funeral processions with the mourners shown as headstones all reinforce a Gothic hallucinatory quality to this work. The cyclical violence and images of sadistic clerics again remind one of The Monk and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilhelm Busch engaged with a much wider range of Gothic materials in his long career of producing comic strips for the hand-coloured Bilderbogen (broadsheets), and the Munich Fliegende Blätter, in southern Germany from 1859 onwards. Busch’s Pater Filucius (1872) takes up the Gothic theme of a

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sinister cleric plotting to overthrow the wedding plans of Gottlieb Michael, a wholesome local householder. Lynd Ward’s Faustian God’s Man (1929) and Gilberton Publications’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1943) prepared the way for the flourishing of the American horror comic industry spearheaded by the triad of EC Comics anthologies: The Haunt of Fear (1950), The Crypt of Terror (1950–54) and The Vault of Horror (1950–55). These collections, modelled on portmanteau films such as Dead of Night (1945), featured the ghoulish narrators, the Crypt Keeper, the Old Witch and the Vault Keeper, and from 1954 control of these publications was regulated by Comics Magazine Association of America’s ‘Comics Code’. South of the border, in a cultural sphere largely independent of these developments, the figure of the Mad Monk (‘El Monie Loco’ – ultimately derived from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk), long popular in films and radio, was given his own comic series in Mexico in 1953. Over the 1960s, with the influence of Hammer Studios and similar films and a more tolerant cultural milieu, British and American Classics comic series produced issues featuring versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1966) Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow featuring Norman Nodel’s illustrations (1969) and Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The decision was then taken to introduce (or rather reinstate) Bram Stoker’s full-blown Dracula in Gerry Conway and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula (1971). The character Blade, who was to become a major scourge of vampires in his own series, emerged in this imprint two years later. Julia Round accurately cites Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (1988), with its spoofing of Hammer Horror black magic ceremonies, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989), and Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher (1996–2001) as innovative developments in Gothic comics (Round, 2014: 8 and 24). A work like Arkham Asylum takes the lurid artwork of The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror (often reminiscent of the gorier illustrations from penny dreadfuls), several technical steps forward. Strips such as Lise Myhre’s Nemi (1997–), Rob Reger’s Emily the Strange (2001–) and Aly Fell’s Rosie Poe (2005–) exhibited feminist humour in following the exploits of young Goth girls and women. Modern productions sometimes thrive on quotation and citation of their Gothic sources. In James O’Barr’s The Crow (1981), Eric, the revenant hero, quotes macabre lines from Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poetry and in Mike Mignola’s The Ghoul (2005), the necrophagous villain obsessively recites Thomas Warton’s The Pleasures of Melancholy (1745), and Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743): ‘hush’d as the foot of night. / Again the screech-owl shrieks’

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(Mignola, 2005: 9). Yet it is perhaps not so well recognised that Mignola’s feaster on dead flesh also follows in a very long graphic tradition of such disturbing figures. The artist Herman Inclusus (Stuart Kolakovic) has produced the haunting graphic novel, Dismal Incantation (2013), and an array of impressive visual artefacts including beautiful and sinister icons involving his own private mythos based on the life of a thirteenth-century Czech monk credited with the creation of the Codex Gigas. The Codex was rumoured to have been formed via a pact between a monk and the devil. The accused monk was walled up alive (hence ‘inclusus’) as an act of penitence. Stuart’s ‘Lifting the Shroud’ icon is a skilful parody of Byzantine icon, the church fathers represented as emaciated figures with high wrinkled foreheads and gold-leaf haloes. The shroud itself is lifted above a pile of skulls attended by huge flies. The icon arrives in a black and gold cloth bag with a sealed certificate of authentication. As revealed in comics such as the tale of Varnae, Lord of the Vampires in Marvel’s Bizarre Adventures series (1982), icons can prove potent defences against the undead. However, Varnae only fears icons dating from the period of his own life as a human. Often the focus of disapproval in the Protestant West, some icons have an ambiguous status in legend as in the novel Life of St Andrew the Fool (c. 950), and the icons of St Christopher which, due to his status as a Canaanite (cananeus), sometimes show him as a dog-headed figure, evoking for some the idea of monstrous races or werewolves, which led to the icons being banned by the Eastern Orthodox church. Icons are also shown to provide protection against strigoi and vampires in Mario Bava’s film Black Sunday (1960). Ambrosio’s creation of an icon of the Madonna for his devotion and, latterly, lustful fantasies, in The Monk proves ultimately to be an act of Satanic deception. Interestingly, Stuart Kolakovic identifies the Gothic with ‘Ambrosio from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Father Schedoni from […] The Italian; the dark contradictory behavior of religious leaders and indeed, the hypocrisy of Religion as a whole’ (Kolakovic, 2015, personal correspondence). He continued: ‘I find the whole aesthetic of Byzantine art, and many other religions, morbid and depressing (as well as incredibly inspiring)’. When asked whether he related his art in any ways to the wider Gothic movement he replied: That depends entirely on your definition of the ‘Gothic movement’. I feel a great affinity for the term when describing cellars and catacombs dripping with rank dungeon slime, a place of decayed grandeur, once full of life and vitality, but now seeped in decrepitude and putridity. That’s definitely an association I’d like my work to have with true ‘Gothic’. (Kolakovic, 2015, personal correspondence)

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30  Herman Inclusus (Stuart Kolakovic), ‘Lifting of the Shroud’ icon, 2015

5.2 Silhouettes, ombres chinoises and shadowgraphs The first cutting of human profiles in dark paper dates back to late sixteenth-­ century France, a century before they were named after Etienne de Silhouette, a finance minister, who also enjoyed this art. Their evolution in Gothic literature and art is intertwined with the history of paper-cuts of macabre scenes,

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ombres chinoises (or shadow puppets), and shadowgraphs. Charles Burns, a master ­silhouette-cutter, comments: In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries silhouettes, then known as ‘shades’, were considered the poor-man’s portrait. The earliest professional silhouettists were portrait-miniature artists for whom the shade, a simple profile outline painted in black, was their least expensive offering. Shades really took off and became a craze all over Europe after the publication of J. K. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy in the 1770s. These popular writings described in great detail how to read personality from a profile. ‘Profilists’ appeared everywhere, offering to take a likeness in profile for a shilling or two. Many of these were not artists at all; they relied on a weird variety of pseudo-scientific apparatus, such as the physiognotrace, to create their profiles. Operators of the physiognotrace, which worked by passing a thin brass rod around the sitter’s face, claimed it could create a scientifically accurate portrait, without the need for fallible human craft or artisanship. (Burns, 2016, personal correspondence)

Following the invention of the camera, the fashion for silhouettes and ­silhouette-cutting faded in the 1860s and profilists were put out of business. Charles Burns has reintroduced this medium into Gothic culture and instated its importance as Goth expression by appearing as the ‘Roving Artist’ and hand-cutting silhouettes at Goth and Steampunk festivals throughout Britain. One fine, stately example is a pair of silhouettes of Kevin and Kerryanne Bates. Even after the recession of silhouette profilists, writers of Gothic fiction were to remember the sinister associations of silhouettes and, its sister art, ombres chinoises. One of Sheridan Le Fanu’s most terrifying tales is The Mysterious Lodger (1850). In this story, the strange cadaverous character Mr Smith, with his top hat, green goggles and respirator, haunts a young landlord, his wife and two children to such a degree that the wife is nearly driven out of her wits and the children both die, one poignantly in a premature burial. The first view of the Mephistophelean Smith immediately recalls the dark lantern show: I drew the curtains […] and looking out, saw a very tall thin figure,[…], and motioning with head and hand impatiently towards the hall-door. Though the night was clear, there was no moon, and therefore I could see no more than the black outline, like that of an ombre chinoise figure. (Le Fanu, [1850] 2015: 21)

Ombres chinoises was a puppet show, often with flat cut-out silhouettes worked with strings and sticks against a backlit screen. As early as the 1740s, a ­showman named Chiarini gave a shadow puppet show in Hamburg.

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31  Charles Burns, ‘A Pair of Modern Silhouettes of Kevin and Kerryanne Bates’, 2015

The Schattenspielmann (shadow showman) became a well-known figure in German society. Goethe’s Jahrmarkstfest zu Plundersweilern (1773) is an evocation of a licentious and bawdy shadow-projection at an annual market festival. Though the atmosphere at these shows was often humorous, a strong air of mystery and magic also prevailed. In 1772 François-Dominique Séraphin gave a display of a shadow spectacle with puppets and ombres chinoises in Versailles, the beginning of widespread ombremania. One of the major characters in

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Séraphin’s entertainments was the wizard Rothomago who was renowned for his satanic laughter, his prophetic powers and ability to transport characters from a theatre to the garden of the Palais-Royale. In Spain, Chinese shadow plays were all the rage in the late eighteenth century in the Madrid teatrillos, and their intermedial influence is evident in the paintings of Antonio Carnicero, Noches lúgubres (1789–90) by José Cadalso and in Goya’s Disparates prints (1821–25) and ‘Black Paintings’. Le Fanu was apparently fascinated by the medium, silhouettes featuring in his story, ‘Checkmate’ (1873) and a vengeful spirit described in terms of a distorted ombre chinoise figure in ‘Ultor de Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen’ (1861) where the form is projected ‘so obliquely that the hands reached to the window-sill, and the feet stretched and stretched, longer and longer […] toward the ground, and disappeared in the general darkness; and the rest, with a sudden flicker, shot downwards’ (Le Fanu, 2006a: 81). Anxieties around missing shadows are revealed in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl Miraculous Story (1814), where a naïve young man sells his shadow to the Devil, and E. T. A. Hoffman’s ‘A New Year’s Adventure’ (1815). In cartoons and comic strips of the nineteenth century, ombre chinoise effects were often introduced to signal a transition into Gothic malevolence or  plotting. Wilhelm Busch’s Pater Filicius (1872) follows the evil scheming of a Jesuit priest to destroy wholesome Teutonic wedding preparations. The cleric secretly forms a cabal with Jean Lecaq (literally ‘The Shit’), a Frenchman and the local ‘Inter-Nazi’ with his bludgeon. As the trio meet to plan the final massacre, Busch cuts into the narrative and changes the conspirators into an ombre chinoise tableau to suggest their dire intent. The cartoonist Nadar (Felix Tournachon) even started his darkly satirical Vie Publique et Privée de Mossieu Reac (1849) with a graphic rendition of twelve months of the previous year entitled ‘Ombres Chinoises de 1848’. It is a tenebrous style, which has reached Mike Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head (2002) and Hellboy graphic novels seemingly via the shadow puppet drawings of Caran D’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré) and the shadow puppet shows at Le Chat Noire nightclub. Silhouette animation in film, pioneered by Charles Armstrong, was taken up by Lotte Reiniger in skilfully created fantasies such as Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzens / The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart (1919). These productions ­co-existed with live shadow puppet shows throughout Europe and Eastern Asia and with a resurgence of the art of dark paper-cutting, with Walter Draesner’s volume of cuts, Danse Macabre (1922), adding a chilling mordant impact to memento mori expression. Enthusiasts of early film are familiar with the silhouettes and distorted shadows of Expressionist cinema: Wiene’s

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Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926) a silhouette of the occultist Haddo (Paul Wegener) cut by a fairground artist proves instrumental in first casting a spell on Margaret Dauncey. In Laurence Gordon Clark’s Lost Hearts (1966), an ITV adaptation of an M. R. James’s ghost story, an elderly alchemist, Mr Abney, preys upon young children, ripping out their hearts to further his rituals for immortality. In the scene where Abney encounters a little Italian boy he will later kill, the pair are glimpsed in a stark silhouette. Due largely to the popularity of the British artist Rob Ryan, paper cut-outs have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. The outstanding Gothic dark cutout artist Trish Shaw uses her macabre art depicting interlaced wolves, ravens and gesturing skeletons in a therapeutic way: I started to cut paper as my Crohns disease, which I have had since I was 20, had flared up and I was facing more surgery. I decided to use my art to help me through a very painful time, facing very serious surgery, and with that started to use a scalpel to make my work, to cut away negative and positive images to make my work. The scalpel became my tool. I particularly enjoy the darker side of art and hope to be able to continue to make art that reflects this, while making it have that contrast that makes the art enjoyable too. (Shaw, 2015, personal correspondence)

Shaw uses a black silhouette paper called Scheren-Schnitt paper imported from Germany to create her images. This is a very thin paper, black on the front and white on the reverse. Her incredibly detailed and impressive dark composite images are cut using scalpels with small blades In writing about her Gothic affiliation, Trish writes: ‘I do consider the style and the symbols I use to be Gothic in style and nature. I enjoy the darker side of life and looking behind symbols’. A phrase that she feels sums up her work is Jennifer Mason’s: ‘Goth is the ability to find the art where art seems to be lacking, to find the light in the darkness and embrace it for all its worth’ (Shaw, 2015, personal correspondence) As well as the celebrated artist Kara Walker’s use of silhouettes and shadow projections, a wide array of contemporary artists explore the uncanny possibilities of these techniques. There are James Aldridge’s silhouettes of dark crows, cobwebs, fungi and skeletons in his cut-out installations, Sybille Schenker’s Hansel and Gretel (2011) using cut card, paper, transparencies and heavy silhouettes, Paul Morrison’s book of wall paintings, Haematoxylon (2003), inspired by Casper David Friedrich, a series of site-specific broadly contoured monochrome work, and Nikki McClure’s ‘x-acto’ knife-cut visions of childhood and eerie, magnified nature.

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32  Trish Shaw, ‘Dancing Skeletons’, paper cut, 2015

Ernie Gehr’s installation Carnival of Shadows (2007) at MoMA, New York, uses early twentieth-century shadowgraphs toys (sequential silhouette drawings passing in front of a stroboscopic screen). The original toys were French, dating from 1900–5, and Gehr draws on five different sequences. The artist has made a silent, digital video version of these monochrome sequences, which seem to move along the walls of the museum. The devil makes an

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appearance in an early automobile rather in the spirit of Hennetier’s Diableries (See section 4.3.)

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5.3  Damnable lithographs: Louis Boulanger’s Satanic La Ronde de Sabbat and the dark barbarism of the ‘lapidary art’ In 1828, the correspondent for Le Mercure confessed himself ‘astonished’ and tried to give readers ‘a feeble idea’ of ‘the orgy so poetically infernal’ that he had encountered in viewing La Ronde du Sabbat, Louis Boulanger’s new lithograph inspired by the Victor Hugo’s poem of the same title exhibited at Schroth’s showroom. A storm of demons of all forms and qualities arrive through the broken roofs, shattered portals, smashed windows and pour into the chapel of the ancient cloister. They form a tableau: a tortuous spiral […] which seems to turn more and more and grow bigger. How can this church, immense as it is, contain these legions which arrive incessantly? (Anon., 1828: 43)

The reviewer writes of demons plunging and disappearing but also of this downpour of spirits scribing an endless curve without beginning or end (Anon., 1882: 43). Though artists as notable as Thédore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix had been creating lithographs for a decade by the time of Schroth’s show, this medium was still seen as a new and burgeoning form of artistic expression in the late 1820s, and it was Achille Devéria, Boulanger’s close friend and associate, who produced one of the first lithographed posters: Delacroix’s flying Satan, using this process in 1827 (Weber, 1966: 64). Lithography itself was increasingly popular but still viewed in some circles as a highly ambivalent medium. It was relatively quick to produce and reproduce and was perceived as potentially eroding the relation between an artist and their unique expression. The medium was just as easily used for caricatures, polemic and pornography as for fine art. Significantly, even as late as the 1831 Salon, entries for many lithographs featured were listed under the names of their printers rather than their original creators. This de-centering of the creator and openness to caricature and parody held profoundly Satanic resonances. Boulanger’s Ronde is a provocative lithograph full of dark humour and Diablerie and which vaunts the suspicious hybridity of its medium. It seems an intensely derivative and conglomerate work, drawing as it does on the spiraling  figures of  seventeen engravings of witches’ sabbats, a host of whirling Rococo trompe l’oeil ceilings and Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret’s bronze panels on the Place Vendome column. It is possible also to see the influence of Henry Fuseli’s

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cartwheeling sprites, and Olivia Voisin mentions Boulanger’s debt to  John Martin’s crowded vistas and Goya’s visions of black magic, all ­merging here in a teeming bizarrerie (Voisin, 2012). Boulanger was ­marrying wild excitement and French figurative precision with a dense Gothic Anglo-Saxon gloom. One challenge that Boulanger faced was of how to produce a vision of such a cyclonic rush of bodies crowded together in what appears to be a Late Gothic cathedral in the Perpendicular style. A further technical challenge faced the Frenchman: how to compress a feeling of ceaseless activity, great throngs of figures constantly arriving and departing and infinity itself into this flat, bounded space? How, additionally, to embody Hugo’s paradoxes, in his eponymous poem, of individuality and lack of distinction, the great contour that evades the eyes’ embrace? Amongst Boulanger’s answers to these questions were his use of flickering shade and light, his deployment of ranks of toppling figures and his manipulation of fluid outlines and techniques approaching anamorphosis. For his overall cathedral setting he chose sharply tapering perspectival planes and, set against and countering these, the great coil of bodies. He also used an array graphic signs indicating rapid volition: rhythmical figurative recurrence, bodies captured in successive stages of movement, blurring and speed lines. When forms moving at high speed are seen, it is impossible for the human eye to maintain a uniformly detailed view of their surface area. In the distance, the figures in the furthest column are simplified to fleeting and abstract bird shapes, delicate and impossible to decipher. There is the skilful use of tiers of sloping lines in the forms of arms stretched to either side of torsos (visually ‘rhyming’ with the faux monks’ torches), to suggest the ‘quartered’ image of the poem and creating an erratic visual rhythm. The perspective of the sharply receding diagonal lines along the tops of the monks’ stalls is jerkily uneven, the diagonal to the left higher than on the right and this, together with the great noose of the dance, which cuts across this in the foreground, subverts traditional laws of perspective. Whilst at the front of the lower circle of the ronde, we see strong individuality expressed in some dancers – an Egyptian in a head-dress, female nudes, a skull in a biretta – at the rear we see the wresting demons become simulacra, interchangeable copies of each other caught in stepped, successive stages of the action. Where rotational torque is at its most acute, the cornering dancers are pulled away from each other and are forced to strain outwards to keep hold; Boulanger, in stretching these bodies also thins them almost to the distorted anamorphic proportions. Lucifer appears here as an anti-clerical caricature, and, if one allows the eye to gaze along the perspective diagonals, then move up and down, along the great writhing coil of life that slides through and against these, and then

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glance back at Lucifer, the robed figure seems to loom out of the picture towards the viewer – a rather unnerving phantasmagorical moment. This is a clever optical illusion and managed both by interrupting perspective, making the upright Lucifer and flanking monk figures larger than the dancers, and by framing a bright Lucifer against an arch of darkness. In discussing uses of near-­anamorphoses, sleights of perspective and illusions, we are reminded that the Paris of Boulanger’s day enjoyed a bustling commerce in vue d’optiques (paper and card descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspective boxes), joke ‘upside down’ heads, portable ‘trucs’ and anamorphic cards. In the case of lithography, in contrast to the painter’s sloping upright easel, the stone matrix is laid horizontally before the artist who is free, as they create the image, to walk around the picture’s surface and view it from different angles. The sinistral and dextral cues in Boulanger’s print are

33  David Annwn Jones, ‘Fantasy on Boulanger’s Ronde’, 2011

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f­ollowed ­carefully, the carousers dancing from Lucifer’s right to left. Given that the devil was seen superstitiously as turning the world upside down and was, according to canonical tradition, hidden inside the texture of everyday life, one might be curious about the result when the picture is inverted. Accordingly, I created a ‘Fantasy on Boulanger’s Ronde’ (2011). In my re-­ imagining of the image, I adjusted and blocked out some background detail to make the a­ pparent figure that emerges clearer. Up-ended, Lucifer becomes part of a monstrous apparition: a domed head, a masked face rather like that of ‘wild men’ carvings with his mitre now an elegant waxed moustache and goatee. His crozier and the dance that whirls around it transform into two raised arms conjoined, brandishing a raised etching needle, the serpents and snakes become his fingers. We will never know whether Boulanger intended such a display but such a viewpoint enhances the pervasive integration of the elements of the picture, the devil’s followers collectively embody his evil. The cleanly etched, thin-featured face, the elegant goatee, the needle with the point’s coil of fire: if this is one vast caricature, the subject can only be Boulanger’s best friend and fellow enfant terrible, Achille Devéria. ‘Upside-down’ pictures, a­ namorphs and composite images were also part of Robertson’s cabinet de physique and the image of the ‘Diable à l’envers’ is ubiquitous in Gothic and esoteric symbology, from the popular cartoons of the Revolutionary years to the requisite card of the Marseilles tarot. Symbolist lithography took up and developed Boulanger and the Romantic artists’ serpentine and infernal imagery in works such as Ferdinand Khnopff’s extraordinarily nightmarish vision ‘Istar’ (1888), influenced by the occult writings of Sar Péladan and Valère Bernard’s lithograph ‘Le Répit’ (‘la mort allaitant une-chave souris’) / ‘The Respite’ (1895). In the 1960s, experimental lithography began to interact with photographic elements and abstraction, as in Christiaan Diedericks’s powerful ‘Dance Macabre’ (1965). 5.4  Dressed, adorned and altered prints and books A volume with red covers rests with pages open on a bookstand. From the centre of the pages, a drawing of Edgar Allan Poe’s face framed inside the borders of a reliquary, which is fashioned from gathered pages, gazes out at us. The vision elicits both a shock and lurch of displacement. From the upper apex of the reliquary, a lighted candle gleams atop a metal orb and to one side, perches a raven. To the right, behind serried pages, a black ghost leaks out from under a grandfather clock. To the left, a crowned, chivalric couple – two skeletons – step out trailing their funerary wrappings. This is Susan Hoerth’s Edgar Allan Poe, Altered Book, Antique Reliquary created from Tales of Poe, The

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Cameo Edition (1904). It is as if the Gothic Poe cult has materialised in three-­ dimensional form here in situ and is to be viewed in context with his carved-out pages of his texts. When is a book an artistic display of folded texts? When is a book a faux shrine? When is a portable mock-shrine a book? The attendant reflexive ironies and associations are legion. The practice of altering and adorning individual prints and books has a venerable history. During the Renaissance, prints and broadsheets were pinned to walls in houses, bookplates and prints fastened into books and woodcuts were coloured by hand and embellished with decorative materials. Anatomical medical books featured copious diagrams of the body consisting of layers of glued-in flaps to be lifted to reveal secret interiors: deeper and even deeper subcutaneous levels. ‘Adorned’ or ‘dressed’ prints were used as decorations in offices and boudoirs. In the seventeenth century, readers interested in fashion sometimes cut out engravings of dresses in books and filled in the gaps with silks, lace and other materials. In eighteenth-century Britain, the owners of biographies and technical books often fixed ‘extra-illustration’ supplementary materials into their volumes. With the twentieth century and the proliferation of artist’s books that assumed different shapes, tested medial boundaries and incorporated more transgressive juxtapositions of materials, books became the sites of an incredibly diverse range of experimentation. Surrealism led to illogical, humorous and haunting juxtapositions. The urge to deconstruct and reconfigure literary and other texts was widely felt. In 1960, the playwright Joe Orton and actor Kenneth Halliwell were sent to prison for defacing and doctoring library books. They pasted a baboon’s head to the centre of a rose on a book of flowers and affixed a tattooed man to a volume of John Betjeman’s poems (this last intervention – see below – is eerily proleptic of Dr Lakra’s practice.) In 1970 Tom Phillips published his A Humument, a treated version of W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), where pages of the original are coloured and p­ atterned to leave a few phrases showing creating their own dynamic. Ronald Johnson’s poem RADI OS (1977) emerges, by way of extensive deletion, from the first four books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Satan’s rebellious legions transformed into swarms of glittering and necessary insects. In Su Blackwell’s The Last Unicorn (2012) strips are peeled back from pages to create grass, wizened trees rise from the text to form a forest for the unicorn to canter through and the lop-sided turrets of a fairytale castle rise from the foreground surrounded by birds. Paper grass and trees are flecked with the torn words of their source pages. As in the case of the Gothic blue books and penny dreadfuls, earlier books are appropriated, plundered and pirated but this time the original pages themselves are re-fashioned and ‘up-cycled’ (the latter

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a key process in this craft), to make new works. As the internet widens and grows more inclusive, the number of obsolescent textbooks increases as does the opportunity to salvage and re-use these volumes for their very materiality, their ‘book-ness’, and to fashion them in new contexts. Terry Braunstein’s Egg-plant (2002) consists of an altered book of alchemical prints with cut-away whirling stars, mystical symbols and cosmonological diagrams to bear out the meanings of a modern poem in palpable form. On the cover, a wooden gate and hollow windows are affixed to and gouged into the picture of a huge eggplant (aubergine). The eggplant is juxtaposed with archaic engraved figures of Adam and Eve attended by tiny human faces emerging from tree-limbs. Turning the pages of the book involves the reader in metaphors of hybridity and a narrative that turns back on itself to myths of human and vegetal origin. These hybrid book/sculpture/tableau works can also be pressed into service to support reading and literacy. Over eight months in 2011, ten small sculpted books ‘In support of libraries, books, words and ideas’ appeared in diverse locations in Edinburgh. The artist ANONYMOUS had selected original books with remarkably Gothic pedigree for her or his creative endeavours. For example, the book sculpture ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, left at the Writer’s Museum, is shaped from Hide and Seek (1991), a novel by Ian Rankin, a detective fiction author. The novel is a tribute to R. L. Stevenson’s most famous work. The sculpture raises itself out of the lower half of Rankin’s opened book manifesting as several rickety Victorian tenements with projecting gas lamp and birds of ill omen perched on ropes. Figures lurk in doorways and a man (Hyde?) seems to vanish sideways into a black crack in the wall as a girl collapses onto the paving at his side. A huge, winged full moon teeters over it all and the ramshackle houses, with tears and rents in their wordy surfaces, seem about to disintegrate. In some cases, the altering of books has been a stimulus to a range of related artistic activity. Dr Lakra (El Dotore Lakra) began work in class by scrawling over the covers of textbooks and this practice has influenced all his subsequent work, such as scribing fashion photographs of women with complex tattoos and adding comic art to different types of illustration and publication. One of his particularly macabre creations involves a glamorous model doing her make-up on the cover of La Familia magazine from May 1943 whilst a skeleton looming behind her holds up a magnified wristwatch with one hand, whilst his other scrabbles at her waist. Belinda Schneider, Pilar Pollock and Tina Shoaga produced a ‘Gothic Arch Book Project’ with cut-outs of Poe, Victorian photographs and angels with parchment bodies, the work stemming from Gothic sections in Beryl Cook’s Mixed Media Explorations (2006). The internet abounds with ‘Spell Book’ Halloween and Vampire ‘altered book tutorial’ videos.

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In some cases, the medial divisions between altered books, collages, artist’s books and book sculptures dissolve completely as in Sandra Jackman’s Witches’ Sabbath (2013). The original basis for this structure is a painted found book cover but the whole comprises a display set and cloth-covered cabinet that also

34  Dracula decoupage

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contains three books. The red silk interior of the cabinet is dotted with witches, skeletons and hobgoblins. The inside door of the cabinet features another three-dimensional collage and features the title ‘THE WITCHES’ SABBATH’ in bold capitals. Jackman comments: ‘I was reading about Wordsworth and his poetry and his description of how he likened his form to “a gothic church”, and the poems that were part of the work equivalent to “little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses”, and I decided to explore the form in a concrete way […] the church sent out their righteous to do away with the witches’ (Jackman,  2016). There are two addenda to this work: a pouch containing a torch to light up the interior of the cabinet and a hand-made doll. Another pouch lettered with the words, ‘What is present will soon be past/What is past may still be present in another form’, contains the text of several tales of witches (Jackman, 2016). The references draw on a multitude of Gothic texts, the figures cited include: Circe, Medea, the witch-goddess Hekate and Morgan Le Fey. This art object certainly features treated and altered books: several pages are painted in black oil and collaged with new words and pictures but the overall structure evades exact taxonomy. Because some changed pages feature pop-up images and accordion pull-outs, this hybrid work could as well have featured in the section that follows, as in the present one. Gothic decoupage, as distinct from collage, is also a popular medium with, for example, flat images of Dracula and his sisters cut out and re-arranged in raised steps to give the impression of dynamic forward movement. 5.5  Leporellos, moving books and monstrous concertina texts It is intriguing that, in an age of digital displays, advanced CGI effects, holograms and ever more advanced online 3-D visual media, ‘paper engineers’ David Hawcock and Becca Zerkin’s The Walking Dead Pop-up Book (2015) should  garner such wide attention. It is true that, as well as embodying a linear  narrative of sorts, the pop-up turns the book format into an artistic ­display for exhibition. (A leporello is simply another name for an accordion-fold or concertina format book probably derived from Leporello, the servant in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who exhibits the roll of his master’s sexual conquests in a long, accordion-fold list.) The questions remain: what is it about Frank Darabond’s apocalyptic zombie TV series or David Benioff and D. B. Weiss’s The Game of Thrones that their promotional teams should ostensibly choose to turn back the clock by presenting their franchises in the form of a medium that was already venerable by the start of the nineteenth century? Why did Heinz Keller, in his chilling meditation on the wars in Eastern Europe produce In Bosnien hat der Tod detantzt. Totentanz in 5 Bildern / Death

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Has Danced in Bosnia/ A Death Dance in 5 Frames (1996) in the form of a concertina book? It is interesting that modern Gothic visual artists still explore images of divination, ciphers and human anatomy and these may well be the sources of moving books. Ann Montanaro argues that the volvelle, the paper or card rotational wheel used in books in the fourteenth century for divinatory purposes and codes, was one of the first attempts to move beyond the two-dimensional space of pages (Montanaro, 2016). The philosopher, Raymond Lull (c. 1232–1315) used his ‘Lullian wheel’ to elucidate logic, and anatomical plates on a series of flaps provided depictions of cross-sections of the human body. Montanaro also mentions Dean and Son Publisher’s pioneering the kind of transformational plate ‘based on the jalousie or Venetian blind’ that, when pulled, moved a surface under paper slats, revealing and juxtaposing new views (Montanaro, 2016). Robert Sayer also produced ‘turn-up’ books or ‘harlequinades’ where pages could be opened on paper hinges upwards and downwards to reveal hidden pictures and text, techniques allied to masquerade disguises and the kind of ‘upside-down double’ pictures used in the Phantasmagoria. John Plunkett maintains that the first such concertina-fold, pop-up and moving books were an attempt to mimic early optical media, including magic lantern shows (Plunkett, 2015). ‘Tunnel books’, where a hole is cut through the book revealing different layers, were called ‘peepshows’, appealing to children. To enliven the learning of alphabets, such amusing works as George Cruikshank’s A Comic Alphabet (1836) were devised. Though never exclusively intended for a children’s audience, this work really does reveal the macabre potential of this medium for sudden fear: after the knockabout of ‘C’ for ‘Chimpanzee’, with a simian toff gazing at a chimp at the zoo and ‘H’ for ‘Holidays’ revealing a middle-class family gorging on buns, ‘N’ for ‘Nightmare’ produces a shock, showing a variation on Fuseli’s demon, with a swarthy Turk mounted on a pig, ready to set upon the sleeping man with his meat-carver and fork. Presumably the moral here concerns gluttony but nothing prepares us for the visceral jolt of ‘Z’ for ‘Zoophyte’ (an animal resembling a plant), where a gormless looking traveller is digging his fork into the back of a shrub shaped like a living pig. A monstrous Puck re-emerges in Dean and Son’s Royal Moveable Punch and Judy (1870) where action in each of the framed scenes is operated by paper levers at the foot of the page and the thirty-six plates of A. Bertini’s leporello: Costumi degli Ordini Religiosi. Chiostra della Certosa alle Terme Diocleziane / Costumes of the Religious Orders. The Certosa Cloister at Diocletian Baths (1848) provides a wonderfully sobering guide to dark-robed monks and priests for the English child of the mid-nineteenth century.

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Pop-up books were very popular during the late Victorian period and during the 1920s and 1930s, with Ralph Tuck’s moveable and pop-up books such as Father Tuck’s Panorama Fairy Tales achieving notable success. Yet they fell out of favour in the 1950s, perhaps because of the advent of TV and the fact that the books were easily torn with re-use. Ib Penick and Wally Hunt, with their well-designed books for Random House, helped to bring back the popularity of the medium in the 1960s and  1970s. Penick also created the mobile motifs of arch-Gothic parody for Edward Gorey’s pop-up book, The Dwindling Party (1982), where the MacFizzet family visiting Hickyacket Hall get picked off one-by-one by a series of monsters. Gorey’s The Tunnel Calamity (1984) manifests a clever formal pun. It is both a ‘tunnel’ book with cut-out frames in accordion format for a peepshow effect, which embodies a story of a haunted tunnel and, simultaneously, a manipulable perspective theatre. Almost contemporaneous with Gorey’s books is Babette Cole’s Don’t Go Out Tonight, Creepy Concertina Pop-Up Book (1982). This is an inventive volume that opens into six scenes of, for example, a festive vampiric Count Kissmequick singing in a rock band and ‘digging it at the local graveyard’, overlooked by huge bats and dangling worms. The base of the tableau pulls forward by four inches, the scene opens up into a vista of headstones and hands reaching out from sarcophagi. Cole’s book operates both as a story and a frieze. In Emily the Strange, Seeing Is Deceiving (2006), Rob Reger uses cutaway pages, inverted text, sight charts, superimposed images and Escher-like illusions to instate his Goth girl character’s eerie powers. It was probably the unexpected popularity of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991) with its mixed-media collages, interleaved cards and letter envelopes that actually contained hidden messages, which led to a new wave of ‘interactive’ and moving books. Suddenly, paper engineering became a viable business, especially in catering for the tastes of the young adult market. Harper Collins published Vampyre: The Terrifying Lost Journal of Dr Cornelius Van Helsing (2007), incorporating a hidden compass volvelle, letters, flaps, a court document, transformational ‘jalousie’ plates and heat-sensitive images. The ‘Ology’ series from Templar also addresses this market with a tale of a vengeful mummy: Dugald Steer’s Egyptology (2004). Sam Stall’s Dracula’s Heir: An Interactive Mystery (2008), which incorporates a full facsimile cover of the first edition of Dracula, demented entries from Renfield’s journal and a sealed Doctor’s testimony that has to be broken, finishes with a spoof note from the publisher about the protagonist’s fate. If anything, David Hawcock, Anthony Williams and Claire Bampton’s pop-up comic book version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2009) even exceeds Hawcock’s earlier work in effectiveness,

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a ­miniature house and street-scene looming up impressively on the night of the death of Lucy’s mother, a huge bat surmounting the vista. The market for such productions seems relatively healthy at present and, as well as pop-up and sometimes accordion versions of horror films and TV shows, there are Kellie Strøm’s leporello of marine monstrosity Worse Things Happen at Sea (2011), Clementin Sourdais’s ingenious perforated accordion version of Charles Perrault’s Le Petite Chaperon rouge (2012), which casts huge, long and haunting tree shadows when opened out and illuminated, and Terry Oakes’s pop-up anthology, Classic Tales of Horror (2010). Artists like Maddy Rosenberg continue to explore such media in, for example, her pop-up collaboration with Hubert Sommerauer, Shadow of Descent (2003), which contains text from H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’. Christine Kennedy’s wonderful concertina book of photographs, Garden of Hysteria (2000), explores the haunting gardens and topiary at Hardwick Hall in a series of pop-up grottoes and statuary. 5.6  Gothic calendars It is interesting that, in starting her landmark work, Contemporary Gothic (2006), out of all other uncanny artefacts Catherine Spooner could have chosen to support her discussion, she foregrounds a Gothic calendar as a touchstone for her introduction. For Spooner, this calendar with its Cezanne and Evelyn De Morgan prints wrenched out of their original contexts and juxtaposed in a seasonal sequence ‘provides an excellent example’ of Gothic’s ‘dependence on the concept of revival’ where, in a process of ‘reappropriation and reinvention’, the selected materials take on new shapes (Spooner, 2006: 11). Martin Fradley writes of this discovery: A dislocated and mass-marketed emblem of contemporary time(s), this apparently banal product serves as a metonym for the mainstream commercialization of artifacts that strive to exist at a marginal or culturally subterranean level. Above all, Spooner notes, ‘Gothic sells’. (Fradley, 2010)

Spooner continues: ‘if Gothic is inherently concerned with the incursions of the past into the present, with hauntings and repetition, it sits oddly with  the  sequential tabulation of calendar time, which always points not towards what has already happened in the past, but to what is about to happen in the future (Spooner, 2006: 12). This is certainly true but, as calendars reveal, that which ‘is about to happen’ also depends upon recurrences, temporal echoes half-heard, anniversaries, name days, Halloweens that ineluctably roll round and annual social rituals. Gothic holds within it a strong sense

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of ceremony, of rites of return and the uncanny resurgence of that which has been suppressed. Calendars have always depicted days of evil as well good omens, cycles of the moon, bad times for planting and grafting and riskier ones, hallowed nights and haunted ones. They are, it seems, as useful in the next life as this. The calendar of Bak-en-Mut’s funerary papyrus (Louvre, No. 3297) features gods and demons. In one picture Horus, in assuring the dead that he garners and receives their hearts, has lassoed a jackal-tailed serpent. We see that enemies have been gorily disposed of, their arms tied, their heads hacked off. The earliest portable calendars were almanacs: records of saints’ days, festivals and information for the activities of the agricultural and pastoral year. Vintage paper wall-calendars, especially macabre examples, are gaining increasing recognition as artworks and can command high prices. St Louis doctor, Louis Crucius, having trained as a painter earlier in his career, over the period 1897–1901, produced a series of chromolithographs for The Antikamnia (‘Anti-Pain’) calendar for the chemical company of the same name. In tableaux that evoke comic and disturbing emotions, these calendar paintings show extremely well-realised skeletons that have followed different professions: a physician, a cyclist, a cowboy clothed in their habitual costumes. The gruesome prints were popular. The company boasted, rather worryingly in context, that this calendar was their most successful product. In a macabre twist, the toxic properties of acetanilide (a constituent of Antikamnia medicine) were publicised in 1907. Crucius’s joke was better and more mordant than he realised. One of these calendars will cost an interested party over $4,000 to purchase. Almost exactly contemporaneously, Manuel Orazzi’s ‘Calendrier Magique’ published in Art Nouveau review in 1896 revealed acts of divination, magic and a nude woman and skulls in a Black Mass. Other eminently desirable calendars with Gothic iconography include an antique calendar of witches, complete with card stand and instructions for reading one’s fortunes in the new year, from 1928, featuring a little girl in gypsy dress, holding out her palm, and a vintage calendar for 1966, produced by that doyen of Hollywood monster makeup and marketing: Don Post. Don Post’s Hollywood Monsters calendar depicts his upper body makeup for the Wolfman, the Mummy, Count Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, the Mad Zombie and the Martian. The older of Elvira calendars, redolent of the golden age of American TV and Hollywood horror, are highly valued, and the signing of particular niche-­ market horror calendars lifts the price of even the more recent products such as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday calendar, 1995, signed by actress Barbara Steele. The dark-themed TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, have all

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commissioned franchised calendars and The Munsters calendar has appeared as recently as 2010, as has the Dark Shadows calendar, published by the New Jersey Festival, which celebrates the 1960s cult show. Britain’s paranormal reality TV has issued an Official Most Haunted Calendar in 2005 and Crimson Peak features beautiful stills from the film. As the taste for Gothic style and aesthetics has grown, so more artists have begun to issue calendars in their names. One of the more prominent examples is the Myka Jelina Art calendar (2010). This artist’s winsome Gothic fairies draw upon that which is, by now, a very popular strand of teen fantasy art depiction. The subjects are doe-eyed child-like feys with ringlets and pointed ears, a kind of nominally dark-themed version of Walt Disney’s Frozen heroines or Monster High art without monsters. More carefully and lavishly painted, surrounded by glistening still lives of flowers and fruit, are the ‘Strangeling’ creations of Jasmine Becket-Griffith, which do exude a genuine charm, menace and oddity. These girl-children pout and stare as if in quasi-erotic trance; mischief and whimsy are the desired associations. In conversation with me, Jasmine has mentioned Margaret Keane’s paintings, Disney and fairy artist Brian Froud as influences. Her soubrettes show us glistening hyper-real fruit and flowers with silky petals and their feline companions grin malevolently. Manga art or the more subversive and playful ‘kitsch as anti-kitsch’ of Jeff Koons might also come to mind yet, as Fred Botting has observed about teen-Gothic trends elsewhere, ‘Domesticated, welcomed, assimilated, “normal monstrosity” eclipses the possibility of difference and otherness’; there is something deeply unsettling about the way this artist’s work elicits yet subverts child-like affection in the observer (Botting, 2007: 200). The undercurrents in her painting are contradictory and genuinely unnerving. Gothic calendars that exclusively feature images of females run the gamut from restrained renditions of pre-pubescent she-elves to quite lurid erotic work. The Gothic Art of Victoria Frances calendar reveals a more mature artistic vision of slightly more rounded subjects, with elements of ethereal fairydom still persisting but also feral retinas, hints of bared fang and blood tastefully spattering the pearly white skin above the heaving bustiers of these slightly vampiric subjects. A Gothic Fantasy wall calendar by Belgian artist Viona Ielegems features some of the most romantic photographs, with sumptuously gowned women posed in church doorways and in Medieval courtyards. Ielegems’s comments during an interview give an idea of the nature of the visual fantasies that her work seeks to embody: ‘The evening is like a page from a storybook – the page where you meet your prince charming at a ball and dance till dawn in tones of mysterious music’ (Ielegems, 2016). Calvendo Verlag publishes Will Hans’s Creatures of the Night calendar, which shows photographs of various d­ ifferent

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types of Goth women, the images becoming more revealing as the year develops. One might hope that the name of Hutton von Darte’s Graveyard Girls calendar might be a sly dig at the famous ‘Boneyard Boys’ eighteenth-­century poets, the pictorial offerings are examples of skilfully shot but uncomplicated soft-lensed pornography. There are of course Goth and Gothic calendars of sterner mettle and the cover illustration of Gothic Zodiac calendar, Dark Art, 2010, depicts the Grim Reaper, his knuckles cut with letters forming ‘Game Over’, a witty trans-­ medial link to the world of Gothic gaming. With the Teutonic cast of names like Zauberhafte Hexenwessen (Gothic and Fantasy) and S.O.D. Skulls of Death, Totenkopf Artworks promise a sensibility closer to death and doom metal music imagery and these startling illustrations of skulls, iron-clad avengers and devils do not disappoint. The British company Alchemy started its series of widely marketed calendars appropriately enough with a pair of ‘Alchemnacs’ in 2004. Alchemical themes are a recurring concern with mystic rose elements dominating these products in cycles. The Raven and The Rose (2016) is a cleverly designed calendar, opening with a double-page spread overview of the year and featuring Doctor Obsidius’s Patent Soul Obscura, a clever take on antique cameras and visual devices. These calendars are obviously designed for the collectors’ market and Alchemy seems to relish crossing media and genres for further sales, the images employed referencing their other products such as tiaras, masks, statuettes, dresses, claw rings, skull goblets. A degree of intellectual depth and a wisp of backstory are imparted by Christina Rossetti and Snorri Skuleson quotations and Alchemy even hedges its bets in crossover appeals to Steampunks in ‘Corvus Corsair’ (November) and genuine heraldic and folklore from Switzerland for ‘The Coronation of Coraxia’.

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Chapter 6

6.1  The dark hold of Daguerreotypes and early photography

A

la tti c ed o rie l w in do w in Lacock Abbey taken by William Fox Talbot in 1835 may be the oldest existing photographic negative image. Fox pioneered the salted paper and calotype forms of photography. The Abbey was founded in the early thirteenth century and its architecture reveals examples of both the original Gothic style and later Gothic Revival styles, the last due to John Ivory Talbot’s renovations. In 1798 Joseph Mallord William Turner published his Studies of Gothic Architectural Details at Lacock Abbey. Fox Talbot’s views of the Abbey can then be said to instate the very close relation between the medium of photography with these early forms of Gothic from its very inception. Daguerreotypes, first exhibited in public in 1839, were invented by the partnership of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce. The process involved the polishing of silver-plated copper that was then exposed to chemical fumes, which created a light-sensitive surface. This surface was then placed in a camera’s dark chamber, directed at a subject and exposed for a short period. Mercury vapour was then used to clarify the resultant latent image of the sitter. These captured images, with all their detail and exactitude, awed contemporary viewers. As well as the link to an ancient abbey, associations of wizardry, alchemy and black magic began to cluster around these devices very early in their evolution. Fox Talbot called his visual productions ‘natural magic’ and David Brewster, in sending Talbot’s photographs to Professor Forbes, called them ‘the specimens of the Black Art’ (Fox Talbot, 2013). Honoré de Balzac advanced that each Daguerreotype had stripped away and fixed a vital part of the pictured subject, and others feared the loss of their soul or essence to this

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machine. In Champfleury’s humorous tale, ‘La Légende du daguerréotype’ (1857) a M. Balandard arrives in Paris to have his picture taken by means of the new photographic art. After fifty attempts and in the process of developing the print, Balandard literally dissolves due to the Daguerrotypist’s excessive use of acid. As his portrait takes shape, the subject vanishes and only his voice remains. Another related fear was that Daguerreotypists were indulging in a damnable art, playing God the creator by manufacturing infinitely duplicable souls. Daguerreotype cameras also seemed vampiric in the way they could retain and exhibit the earlier likenesses of those transient mortal subjects who had since aged, moved away from the site of production or died. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s wrote: ‘The Mesmeric disembodiment of spirits strikes one as a degree less marvellous’ (cited in Groth, 2003: 1). When tilted in the hand, Daguerreotypes produced alternate positive and negative views and also the unsettling effect of mirroring the viewer’s face so that often the images of the person handling the Daguerreotype and its sitter were juxtaposed. Alan Trachtenberg writes: In popular fiction of the 1840s and 1850s, daguerreotype likenesses appear not only as amulets but also as objects of unique obsession […] Most often they appear in Gothic settings of preternatural fantasy, wrapped in the same cloth of motifs and imagery examined by Otto Rank in his study of the döppelgänger and by Freud in ‘The Uncanny’. (Trachtenberg, 2007: 13)

The ways in which composite photography could assist the antiquarian imagination are shown in Edouard Baldus’s ‘Cloister of Saint-Trophîme, Arles’ (1851), where the artist has created ten sharply detailed negatives and fused them together using hand painting. Gustave Le Gray’s photographs of Fontainebleau Forest (1849–52) are variously lyrical and dramatic in their use of light and shifting shade. Romantic ideas of ‘solemn grandeur’, to use Ann Radcliffe’s terms, instil these pictures (Radcliffe, [1791] 1998: 83). Eugenia Parry Janis writes that Le Gray used his waxed-paper negative techniques to instil a kind of magic: Ensemble of trees, subjected to long exposures, emerge as mysterious spectres that seem to be composites of many superimposed moments […] Certain views […] seem to convey especially beautifully a magical sense of place […] we feel drawn in, as if by enchantment. (Janis, 1987: 49)

In terms of explicitly realising themes from Gothic fiction, David Octavius Hill’s calotypes of Waverley tableaux (early 1840s) and other scenes from the works of Walter Scott are prime examples of intermedial influence. His

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photograph of John Henning and Mrs Cleghorn playing a scene from The Antiquary (1816) domesticates the tensions and humour of Scott’s book. Hill also pictured Patrick Byrne as ‘The Harper’ from Scott’s poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), an Ossianic figure complete with robes, tankard and crown. George Washington Wilson’s photographs and photographic lantern slides shadowed Scott in his descriptions of sites like Melrose Abbey, an activity that Helen Groth links to Ruskin’s sense of the Gothic (Groth, 2003: 108). Two decades later, Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron started to photograph Tennysonian quasi-Medieval scenes. Robinson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1860–61) comprises a montage of two negatives is a stark rendition of the lady drifting in her small vessel between water lilies, sharp reflections of tree-trunks and, overhead, their actual glittering leaves. It is a striking Neo-Gothic creation with the contrast between the prone woman’s plain chemise and ornate blanket and the obscure border between one field and another in the background. In Cameron’s ‘The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere’ (1874), care has been taken with the overall soft focus effect and details such as the knight’s chain mail under his robe and small metal vessel in the lady’s hand. ‘The Passing of King Arthur’ (1874), heavily influenced by an engraving by Daniel Maclise, is also carefully staged. Though critics mocked the Tennysonian solemnity of such subjects (in this image, broomsticks had to stand in for oars and cloth for waves), the figures of the mourning women still exert considerable power. Risible in a historicist sense as some of these photographs are, one cannot ignore the ways in which, as in so much Gothic fiction, a counterfeit chivalric idea of the past had been imaginatively pressed into service. The expansion of photography in Britain from the 1860s onwards meant that we have a record of the appalling conditions in which the mass of urban dwellers lived. One can imaginatively juxtapose these with the nostalgic, elitist fantasies of the upper classes: for example, photographs of Captain J. O. Fairlie in the armour he wore at the royal Eglinton Tournament from around 1850. Over forty years later, J. C. Carr’s lavish drama King Arthur (1895) proved a runaway success and the actor Johnston Forbes Robertson was photographed posing proudly in his armour as Sir Lancelot. The first photographic firm per se, Fratelli Alinari, was formed in Florence in 1852. Though the first flowering of enthusiasm for Gothic literature had long faded by the 1860s, the dissemination of photography meant that readers of newer writers like Poe and Hawthorne could view the settings of their uncanny tales such as Naples, Venice and Padua in this novel medium with a new acuity. The kind of roaming banditti so essential to Ann Radcliffe’s works and to a host of Gothic, Räuber and Ritter novels had appeared again in Maturin’s Melmoth the

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Wanderer (1820) and Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1826–27). These figures had been painted since the 1770s but, over the 1860s, the anonymously taken photographs of Agostino Sacchitiello and his fellow bandits from Bisaccia (1862) held an altogether different impact. The famous female brigand Maria Oliverio, also called Ciccilla, was also photographed. Such productions might be supposed to de-mystify their subjects’ Gothic wildness. Yet, to cite another example: though many scientific photographs featured the human skeleton, Nadar’s project taking pictures of the massed skulls and femurs in the Paris catacombs (1861–62) did nothing to reduce their power as an immense and haunting memento mori. Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s work spanned the gap between realism and allegorical fantasy. His photograph ‘John the Baptist’s Head on a Charger’ (1856) elicits multiple and uneasy leaps in perception. Even though we know the model still lives, the photographed head so intimately presented holds the desolation of a recent death yet without the horror of blood. His more disturbing portraits of child prostitutes and of Charlotte Baker in revealing stances bring this ambiguity to bear on the portrayal of innocence and sexuality. Rejlander’s tableaux vivants, his overlaying of negatives and trick photography anticipate more macabre experimentation in fin de siècle practice. That which I’ve called the ‘dark hold’ of Daguerreotypes has proved remarkably resilient and has begun to influence modern artists as well, with the appearance of nineteenth-century wet plate collodion images returning in the work of Michele Selway and like-minded photographers. 6.2  Mourning and spirit photographs Hippolyte Bayard was perhaps the first artist to fake his own death on camera. Disappointed by the way the French Academy had ignored his invention of the proto-photographic direct positive process, which involved the exposure of silver chloride paper, Bayard orchestrated the taking of his own portrait, his body posed as if he had been recently drowned. He even added a bitter and funny note to the back of the picture, describing the reasons for the subject’s ‘suicide’. Amongst the first books published that featured a photograph is one entitled, Record of the Death-Bed of C. M. W. (1844), which contains a Talbotype (another name for Fox Talbot’s calotype silver iodide process) of a sculptural bust of Catherine Mary Walter (1819–44), but, by that date, post-mortem Daguerreotypes had been popular for three years and millions of these types of memorial photographs were taken over the next two decades. The practice of photographing and preserving the images of deceased relatives and friends, which had developed from the idea of painted portraits of

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35  Hippolyte Bayard, ‘Self Portrait as a Drowned Man’, 1840

the dead, was not considered maudlin or exploitative by those members of the middle and working classes who commissioned these works. In an age of high infant mortality rates, deaths of women in childbirth, bloody revolutions and widespread epidemics, such images often gave comfort in the form of material reminders of those dear ones who had often lived brief lives. The appeal of a medium that could lend a permanence and fixity to bodily presences which, in the nineteenth century, proved all too fleeting, is easy to imagine. We can grasp the strength of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words (even though post-mortem photographs were not her principal subject) when she commented: ‘It is not merely the likeness which is precious – but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing … the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! … I would rather have such a memorial of one dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced’ (Richardson, 2012: 237). Stanley and Elizabeth Burns make a distinction

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between ‘mortuary’ photographic portraits, where the dead person is pictured with closed eyes and with clear signs of having passed on, and ‘posthumous mourning portraits’ where the dead person is posed as if still alive and as part of an appealing tableau, with their eyes open. This latter type of shot could be hand-tinted, with flowers or a favourite toy placed in the subject’s hands and a decorative backdrop added (Burns and Burns, 2002: 2). It is vital to understand the appeal of such images for a nineteenth-century audience and that, in such cases, the Daguerreotype version consolidated an existing respect for icons of the deceased young. For a writer of Gothic horror tales like Sheridan Le Fanu, even the mental visualisation of such a scene brought innocence to mind. In Le Fanu’s tale, The Mysterious Lodger (1850), Smith, an evil and cadaverous stranger, invades the peace of a young landlord’s family. After numerous haunting and uncanny incidents, the landlord’s little daughter, Fanny, is literally frightened to death. After the funeral, the grieving father comments: To me few things appear so beautiful as a very young child in its shroud. The little innocent face looks so sublimely simple and confiding amongst the cold terrors of death-crimeless, and fearless, that little mortal has passed alone under the shadow, and explored the mystery of dissolution. There is death in its sublimest and purest image-no hatred, no hypocrisy, no suspicion, no care for the morrow ever darkened that little face; death has come lovingly upon it; there is nothing cruel, or harsh, in his victory. (Le Fanu, [1850] 2015: 52)

It is difficult to trace any apparent irony here, the extent to which the dependability of the narrative might be undercut and coloured by the views of the speaker: a free-thinking father who is still in thrall to the ideas of Voltaire and Paine. The story (narrated from a much later date), is set in 1822, and clearly prefigures but also reveals a predisposition for the vogue for post-mortem photography. Henry Peach Robinson produced photographs that offered a fictionalised vision of the death of the young, as in ‘Fading Away’ (1858) where family members are grouped around a dying girl, a father – his back to the observer – gazing through a window. A staged death of this theatrical kind might seem even more curious to postmodern eyes than the staged photographic tableau of an actually deceased body. Despite the sanitisation of their medium, both types of image have an eerie, morbid and unnerving effect. Though the popularity of such images dropped out of fashion in some Western cultures in the 1930s, the practice has never been obsolete and there has been a recent resurgence in the market for post-mortem shots. Mark Dery has drawn attention to the way modern sellers of Victorian post-mortem photographs are courting the Goth

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market by emphasising ‘the macabre’ aspects of these prints, advertising the: ‘Haunting Open Eyes […] POST MORTEM DEAD WOMAN in GLOWING CASKET’ (Dery, 2015: 136). Post-mortem photography also comes to the fore in Alejandro Amenábar’s film, The Others (2001) and in Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree (2014) a YA (young adult) Gothic murder-mystery novel. David Brewster had written in his book on the stereoscope that, because of double exposure or subjects who moved when photographed, photography might ‘carry us into the realm of the supernatural’ by way of registering so-called ‘ghostly’ images (Leeder, 2015: 23). The quasi-mystical possibilities of Daguerreotypes had been sensed since the invention of the medium. A decade before the discovery of Spiritualist photography, Nathanial Hawthorne drew upon Spiritualist connotations in describing the character of Holgrave the Daguerreotypist in The House of the Seven Gables (1851). It was William Howard Mumler, working at Mrs H. F. Stuart’s Photographic Gallery, in the Spring of 1861 who discovered the shape of a young girl in a self-portrait of himself, where he had been alone in the room. Spiritualist organisations hailed this image as proof that the spirit world could be photographed. As news of the discoveries spread, Mumler, assisted by his wife, Hannah, who was a spirit medium, was able to command high fees for these ‘spirit photographs’. Perhaps this was hardly surprising in a nation undergoing the ravages and in the aftermath of civil war and the consequent deaths of thousands of young people. These albumen silver prints, often collected as cartes de visite, most typically showed the sitter in close proximity to a figure recently deceased. For example, in one of the most celebrated examples, when Bronson Murray was photographed by Mumler in 1872, the resultant print revealed the pale image of a woman floating above Murray’s head, with her arms resting round his neck. Hannah Mumler identified the faint image as the spirit of Ella Bonner, recently photographed and deceased. Robert Bonner, Ella’s husband, on seeing the photograph, confirmed the pictured person as his wife. Subsequently, Bonner, a sturdy, bearded gentleman, sat for Mumler, and, once again, an image of his wife appeared behind his shoulders, this time with her hair changed and the index finger of her right hand pointing to heaven. This last image of Ella obviously derives from a doctored version of the original photograph, the template for her shoulders looking particularly artificial. In the fullness of time, skepticism began to prevail. After he was imprisoned for tricking clients with his spirit photography, Édouard Isidore Buguet’s began to create ‘anti-spirit photographs’. Yet ideas of photography’s spectrality lingered into the age of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. As Marianne Hirsch writes:

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The referent is both present (implied in the photograph) and absent (it has been there but is not here now). The referent haunts the picture like a ghost: it is a revenant, a return of the lost and dead other. (Hirsch, 1997: 5)

Spiritualist and psychic photography persisted into the 1960s, with Sven Türck’s and the Sorrat Group being involved. Zoe Beloff’s installation, Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C., continues to reference such exploration (see section 9.4). Horror films such as Banjong Pisanthankun and Parkpoom Wongpoom’s Shutter (2004), its remake in Masayuki Ochiai’s Shutter (2008) set in modern Connecticut, and Kôta Yoshida’s Ghost Photos: The Cursed Images (2006) reveal how long-lived such ideas about photography as a haunted medium have proved. 6.3  Gothic collage, photocollage and shadow boxes There is a sense in which collage is the most Gothic of artistic expressions. We only have to think of ideas of the tearing apart and piecing together of misshapen, conglomerate bodies (Frankenstein), ‘impure’ hybridities (Dracula) and the recycling of humans in the laboratories of a host of cinematic mad professors to realise the truth of this premise. Horace Walpole knew how to authorise the irregularity of Gothic bricolage and Poe, in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), composed a thematic collage of pagan, ancient Egyptian and Christian beliefs. Glennis Byron writes that, as we moved towards the t­ wentieth century in the arts the notion of a ‘fortress of identity’ is shaken by a multiplicity of ‘unstable selves’ and nothing would seem to confirm that shattering of discrete somatic and psychological unities more than collage (Jones, 2011: 154). It could be argued that Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s composite photography was a notional way of uniting complex social bodies and psychologies. Hans Christian Andersen’s variegated collages on screens created by him during the winter of 1873–74, when illness confined the writer to his flat, were partly based on the fashion for panoramas. The tightly superimposed imagery of animals, and the tableau of a seated captive, surrounded by staring owls, who rests his feet on a toad and whose chains are kept in place by a tiny nymph, is close in spirit to the fairy paintings of Fuseli. The fashion for collages, especially in middle- and upper-class lady’s albums, burgeoned in the 1860s. In one such example from Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier’s Madame B album (1870s), a large hand-drawn spider waits at the centre of a web that fills the page; a wasp, fly and ladybird are caught in the  web. Seven numbered cartes de visite of family and friends in fashionable costume are also grouped around the web. Four splayed, but still predatory,

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36  Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier, From the Madame B Album, 1870s

bats also seem to be transfixed in the web at its four corners. The drawn bat at the upper left possesses an extraordinarily human face. The web motif also recurs in other photograph scrap books of this type, for example in Alexandra, Princess of Wales’s Album (1866–69) where oval sepia cameos of acquaintances are scattered over a fine web with beetles, a dragon-fly and butterfly. This time the spider, positioned towards the upper right, its hairy legs locked in a threatening stance, has a man’s face pasted across its abdomen. There is, of course, a danger that our eyes accustomed to postmodern and Gothic imagery read these album pages in too sinister a light. There is a playfulness in the way these prized likenesses are gathered into these ladies’ daybook albums, the spider’s creation of a sticky trap (also kindred to needlework), ironised in the way the book’s owner hoards the photos. There is perhaps a keen wit exhibited in the exact positioning of each image in context, the way each new addition finds itself within the developing cluster of figures. Yet the ready association of predatory bats and insects with women in art, jewellery and costume – Kustüm a la Fledermaus (bat costume) was contemporary with these albums – certainly does challenge the innocence of such humour. The burgeoning art movements of the early twentieth century – Cubism, Dada, Futurism and Surrealism – led to a resurgence in the artistic practice of collage. Max Ernst’s collages such as ‘Or Down There, the Indecent Amazon in Her Small Private Desert (1930) actively mock Gothic conventions such

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as warrior queens, the heraldic coats of arms and monks gathering exotic plants by moonlight. Kimberley Marwood writes that Ernst’s and Valentine Penrose’s collages: combine facets of Surrealist practice – collage and found imagery, with ­nineteenth-century Victoriana, giving their visual compositions a distinctly Gothic complexion. Penrose’s monochrome imagery, as Roy Edwards has suggested, can be seen as ‘an homage to […] Gustav Doré’s woodcuts’, exhibiting a tacit tribute to early Nineteenth Century Romanticism and the English Gothic novel through the emulation of their aesthetic principles. Ernst similarly took the Gothic as a motivating influence for his images, as Marina Warner has described with reference to his collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté: Ernst, ‘adopts with glee penny-dreadful commonplaces of women mauled, ravaged, and possessed by various winged and monstrous hybrids’. (Marwood, 2009)

Carter Ratcliff has called Joseph Cornell ‘a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences’ and his mid-career collages such as ‘The Puzzle of Reward, 1670’ (mid-1960s), ‘Isle of Children’ (1963) and ‘Untitled’ (1962), where a girlish  out-of-scale doll is revealed in the top branches of a tree under a full  moon  (or  shining earth), are imbued with a feeling of Gothic loss (Ratcliff, 1990: 43). These figures resemble the young Laura in the opening ­chapter of  Carmilla, somehow bereft and defenceless, hemmed in by surrounding dark.  Yet perhaps this artist’s most Gothic work is the construction, ‘Untitled’  (Bébé Marie) (early 1940s), where a doll in straw hat and cream  dress is shown trapped and shut off from the viewer by a thicket enclosing her. Hugh Stevens writes that Cornell’s work with gifts and magical objects allies him with E. T. A. Hoffmann and writes: ‘In a confusion between literature and life and between past and present, Cornell seems a living reincarnation of that fictional type of the past, the mad inventor, whose arts dangerously mix magic and science’ (Stevens, 2003: 98). Cornell was interested in American Gothic architectural ideals as applied to the shallow, latticed structures devised to house birds, as viewed in his ‘Dovecote American Gothic’ (1954–56) or observe astrological changes as in ‘Observatory American Gothic’ (1954). Astrology and alchemical symbolism were also of interest to collagist Jess Collins: a dog’s head emerging from the wings of a vast owl that holds a tuning fork in its beak whilst playing cards cascade; a sphinx’s body juxtaposed with a chess board, whilst putti watch a Victorian woman searching a mine shaft and a young boy sits atop a skull. A wide array of modern collagists engage with the Gothic. I have mentioned Sandra Jackman’s collage boxes Witches’ Sabbath (section 5.4), but Alex Farquharson identifies Richard Hawkins’s mixed media

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collages from the 1990s, for example ‘Disembodied Zombie George White’ (1997), with the Gothic (Farquharson, 2006: 91). Marnie Weber makes collages from her film stills, dramatising the postdeath experiences of ‘The Spirit Girls’ a fictional all-female rock band. In ‘Below’ (2004) the young girls pose in spattered dresses both in and around

37  Alexander Korzer-Robinson, ‘Danse Macabre’, 2015

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a horseless hearse at the edge of a graveyard. In ‘In the Haystacks’ (2004), a C-print collage, one of the prone girls is being carried off through the hay crop by a monstrous pumpkin-headed Halloween character under a livid, orange sky. Other modern practitioners of collage in a Gothic vein include Amanda Beck Mauck, Michael Copertari, John Digby and Alan Halsey (The Hunting of the Lizopard, 2007). It needs to be said that Alexander Korzer-Robinson’s constructions straddle the borders between collages, altered books, cabinets of curiosity and shadow boxes. These intricate assemblages dazzle the eye with the layering of diverse engravings enclosed within a wooden box-frame. ‘Danse Macabre’ (2015) is based on Korzer-Robinson’s ‘cut-book’ sculptures and incorporates layers of images receding in scale and is printed in lightfast pigment ink on archival cotton paper. Exotic large finches and pigeons perch in the imagined foreground of a tropical forest (recalling the world perhaps of the Victorian collector-explorers). A fragmentary map of Sicily provides the uneven frame within the wooden frame, and images of a Classical traveller, a saint and a Mycenean maiden are placed within the crowded forest-scape. In mid-ground, a tall monochrome skeleton looms grinning, its upper figure enclosed within and emphasised by a large, tan circular form. A line of heraldic coats of arms is almost hidden amongst the foliage. Korzer-Robinson writes: Through my work in the tradition of collage I am pursuing a very personal obsession of creating narrative scenarios in small format. By using antiquarian books, it makes the work simultaneously an exploration and a deconstruction of nostalgia. We create our own past from fragments of reality in a process that combines the willful aspects of remembering and forgetting with the coincidental and unconscious. On a general level, I aim to illustrate this process that forms our inner landscape. (Korzer-Robinson, 2015)

This idea of a danse macabre skeleton looming inside the serried paraphernalia of our own sense of self (some of it hierarchical and armorial), reconstituted continuously from perceptions and memory, is a deeply Gothic preoccupation. 6.4  Haunts, great houses, cadavers and ossuaries: the photography of Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris Though a great many photographers involved with Goth and Gothic arts have created studies of graveyards, houses reputed to be haunted and skeletal remains, due to the scale and ambition of their exploration of these motifs, the work of Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris invite sustained attention.

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Simon Marsden (1948–2012) was the younger son of a baronet and was raised in two of the great houses of Lincolnshire, both rumoured to be haunted. His father told him ghost stories that scared the young boy and led him to claim that his photography was an attempt to exorcise these fears of the supernatural. In time his favourite authors became Arthur Machen, M. R. James and E. A. Poe. Given his first camera, a Leica IIIg 35mm, his first photo shoot was of cardboard cut-outs of ghosts that he arranged in tableaux. From the appearance of his first major collection, Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland (1980), a book that revealed mansions and castles as pale, ethereal presences as if lit by moonlight and darkened masses with eerie, glaring arches, Marsden’s work received wide attention and accolades. He appeared on TV and radio and was the subject of Jason Figgis’s documentary The Twilight Hour (2003). His work was used for album art by different Goth bands, including Cradle of Filth and was widely collected, with original prints demanding high prices. Marsden made black and white photographs on infrared film, favouring the Nikkormat FTn and FT2 cameras; his use of these media gave his works a bleached, washed-out look, as if landscapes themselves were charged with spectral energies. This photographer was also an expert printer, taking great pains over minute detail. The greenery of grass and leaves became mottled and seething spaces of white and grey and shadows darkened in the sky and massed forebodingly next to buildings. Haloes of brightness leach into the outlines of towers and spires, and in some images, ‘Fortified Farm, Chastenay, Burgundy’, for example, foliage seems to have turned to heaped snow and the outlined vista seems on the verge of vanishing into itself as if into a different plane of existence. In his print of ‘Largoët Fortress, Brittany’ (2006) two castle towers set against a grainy sky and reflected in a moat seem to frame the entrance to another plane of existence. Marsden spoke of his desire to reveal ‘the unreality of the “real” and the reality of the “unreal”’, saying that it wasn’t his intention to: try and convince you that ghosts exist but rather to inspire you not to take everything around you at face value. I believe that another dimension, a spirit world, runs parallel to our own, and that sometimes, when the conditions are right, we can see into and become part of this supernatural domain. The mystical quality of my photographs reflects this ancient order and they attempt to reveal what is eternal. (Marsden, 2016)

Marsden’s special subject remained the noble houses of Britain, Ireland and France, as if he felt an affinity with these buildings, ‘my own particular darkness’, as he called it (Marsden, 2006: 136). His work spanned over thirty years and over twelve major volumes including The Haunted Realm: Ghosts, Witches

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38  Sir Simon Marsden, ‘Largoët Fortress’, 2005

and Other Strange Tales (1986), Visions of Poe (1988), The Journal of a Ghosthunter: In Search of the Undead from Ireland to Transylvania and Venice: City of Haunting Dreams (2001). Bitterly opposed to modern digital photography, there is a sense in which the artist, in following the technical processes that he did, thought he was using an arcane method pioneered by Daguerre for exposing the spiritual energies in the scapes around us.

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Perhaps because of the power and spectacular nature of the visual work, Marsden’s skill in producing texts, some almost the length of short stories, to accompany these extraordinary images, has not received the recognition it deserves. These reminiscences of visiting often remote mansions and listening to local legends of ghosts are intimate and companionable as diary entries (the reader often wishing he or she was there); the author’s fears are rendered sensitively and so it is often with a shock that we turn from the implied quiet tone of the author’s voice to the next spectral photographs. Though Marsden occasionally ventured into photographing human remains – the cadaver of Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz, skulls (illuminated by a blaze of light) at the Church of Saint-Jean and the ‘Hidden Cadavers of  Collégiale Church’ – these subjects were not his main focus. His attention was drawn most by energies perceived in empty, seemingly disembodied  structures and landscapes. Paul Koudounaris’s photographs reveal him as an artist fascinated by the materiality of human remains and the efforts of the living humans around them to arrange these remains. As in Marsden’s case, Koudounaris is influenced by his youthful experiences in this regard. When he was five, he had dreams about possible inscriptions on his own headstone. In 2011, Thames and Hudson published Paul Koudounaris’s The Empire of Death (derived from a sign at the entrance to the Paris Catacombs and not the author’s own choice for a title). This text in this volume cites Jean Baudrillard’s sense of death as a line of demarcation and argues that in many other cultures death is conceived as a transition, ‘a dialogue between the living and the dead’, and that, since the Enlightenment, Western civilisations have exiled and banished the dead (Koudounaris, 2011: 9). Koudounaris photographed the great charnel houses and ossuaries of Europe  and North and South America including the patterned and layered skulls and bones of Cappela dos Ossos, Portugal, the shelved skulls of the ossuary chapel of San Martino Della Battaglia, Italy and bones arranged in chandeliers and heraldic motifs at Sedlec Monastery in the Czech Republic. The spectacular photographs of Sedlec are indicative, the bones conserved and bleached white by chlorinated lime. Frantise˘k Rint, a local woodcarver, organised and patterned these displays. One of Koudounaris’s double fold photographs reveals spires of skulls and bones topped by piping cherubs and skulls looping over the ceiling. The author had gained unique access to some sites and text provided anthropological insights into the decorative structuring of human remains. There is, in some of these studies, a tenderness in the depiction of individual skeletons in, for example, the Chapel of the Virgins in the crypt of the

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Monastery of Santa Maria della Pace in Palermo, where relatives visited the tombs on the Day of the Dead to anoint them with perfume and tend their ­clothing. However, one also senses, especially in the pages relating to the decorated skeletons of the Basilica at Waldsassen (imported from the Roman Catacombs) where the goldsmith Adalbert Eder created a gilt and jewelled helmet for the remains of the martyr Theodosius, the author’s fascination with these embellishments. Koudounaris’s photography lingers on the gaudy display of gold leaf, multi-coloured gem-stones and highlights the opulence of the ornately jewelled cadavers and skeletons and this impression is supported by his next book, Heavenly Bodies, Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs (2013). This volume explores a larger number of these jewelled ‘saints’. Though the selfless devotion of craftsmen, nuns and local believers adorning these remains is emphasised in the text, Koudounaris rightly perceives the business acumen in the way these relics were imported and displayed. Juxtaposing reactions to these decorated skeletons by Protestant and Catholic visitors, the author tries to persuade us of the macabre beauty of these constructs for devotion, and the authenticity of that devotion, whilst simultaneously informing us that most are not actually the bodies of early Christian martyrs. There is more than a hint of Baroque styling about such creations. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ sings Ariel to Fernando in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and these figures seem to gaze at us with blue, red and green gems for eyes. Though the author’s is emphatic over the care, attention and reverence extended towards the pictured bodies, for a modern observer it is difficult to disentangle such morbid and extravagant visual tableaux from a myriad of horror films, Indiana Jones movies (Koudounaris has been nicknamed ‘Indiana Bones’), the underground mortuary of Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), and arthouse versions of these. Another and starker strain of Gothic photography is found in Teresa Margolles’s depictions of the morgues of Mexico City and Andres Serrano’s photographs of the recently dead in his series Morgue (1992–). The reception of the imagery in Koudounaris’s work is complex. Postmillennial eyes are trained to absorb such shock juxtapositions of mortality and luxury. The lush stills picking out the intense water of each gem (false and real) seem akin to shots in a Swarovski or Thomas Sabo catalogue and coincided, on publication, with the public taste for the exotic, the disturbing and even the macabre. In fashion, Alexander McQueen has also juxtaposed skulls, rich gems and images of death and we recall Damien Hirst’s diamond-­ encrusted skull. Both Marsden and Koudounaris deplore the ways in which the dead and past generations have been sidelined and forgotten by modern societies.

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6.5  Modern photography Books and booklets of like Walter Finnex Eagleson’s Trick Photography, or, Twenty-Four Interesting Experiments with the Camera (1902) signal the increased  availability of cameras and photographic illusions. Some of these could be macabre like Eagleson’s plate of a suited man clutching a butcher’s knife in his right hand and the hair of his own severed head in his left. In the 1890s Dr Hippolyte Baraduc, followed by Louis Darget and Jules-Bernard Luys, attempted to capture the ‘nuée fluidique’ / ‘fluidic mist’ or the aura essential to human beings on film, experiments that culminated in the photographing of the departure of the soul of Baraduc’s wife from her body (Jones, 2011: 142). The Symbolist and Expressionist movements and aesthetics certainly drew upon Gothic and Neo-Gothic sources. There is a clearly discernible lineage between Alfred Stieglitz’s, George Seeley’s and Annie Brigman’s more tenebrous and primordial photographic works: blurred scapes and ethereal phantom-women and the modern darkly neo-Romantic visions of Viona ­ Ielegems published over the last two decades. John Cimon Warburg’s ‘The Incantation’ (1901) is a key work in terms of the Gothic from this period, depicting a hooded, androgynous witch seemingly surrounded by a pale nimbus of mist. A narrow plume of smoke flows upwards from a magically suspended vessel, and the trees and sky behind the witch seem to float in water, the world transformed into a miasmic trance. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths’s photo-montages of the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ (1917) caused a cultural furore. After all, if fairies could be photographed what about those kind of incubi, succubi and spiritual larvae discussed by Des Hermies in Joris-Karl Huysman’s Là-bas (1891)? In the aftermath of the First World War, Franz Fiedler’s portfolio ‘Narre Tod, Mein Spielgesell’ / ‘Fool Death, My Playmate’ (c. 1922) depicted nude female models juxtaposed with human skeletons in quasi-sexual positions. The editor Robert Denoël instructed Antonin Artaud to translate Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, which Artaud, in part, managed to accomplish. As part of this project Artaud produced a series of six highly stylised photographic tableaux vivants with himself as the Ambrosio and Cécile Brusson, wife of Denoël, as Matilda. After the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, Irina Ionesco also chose to juxtapose images of death with scantily clad women. Ionesco’s work fell into disrepute after she issued photographs of her underage daughter in questionable poses. Those critics and website writers who have remained loyal to her art recognise her photography as the acme of 1970s Gothic styling, a

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cross between those themes that have since emerged as Gothic and Baroque Orientalism. Her photography began to appear in the Nikon Gallery in Paris in 1974 in the wake of a series of darkly erotic and exotic films often dealing with transgressive sexuality such as Jaromil Jireš Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) and Walerian Borowczyk’s Contes immoraux / Immoral Tales (1974). Ionesco’s highly imaginative work featuring forbidding but alluring and veiled women wearing black lipstick, models in close-ups, posing in déshabillé next to strange busts, masks and manikins and gesturing with pointed finger extensions won great acclaim in the mid-1970s. Writing in 1978, before the emergence of a postmodern Goth visual aesthetic, Katharine Holabird writes of ‘the retreat’ in Ionesco’s work ‘from banal reality into a dark realm of the mind […]: the black veils against the naked flesh, the unsmiling faces, the sudden appearance of a skull by a thigh, or the juxtaposition of an adolescent in white like a vestal virgin surrounded by brooding ladies of the night’ (Holabird, 1978: 3). Influenced by surreal, Gothic and macabre elements in the photography of Duane Michals and Arthur Tress, the work of Francesca Woodman remains both challenging and formidable. Michals’s associations with Gothic expression have proved long-term and perhaps realised most tellingly in his study, ‘Homage de Puvis de Chavannes’, which was adopted by the group Bauhaus for the cover of their first album In the Flat Field (1980). The image shows a naked youth, seemingly involved in a drama or ritual, looking back over his shoulder and holding what seems to be a spirit trumpet. A bright open space or window to the right of the picture-space seems to indicate an initiation or entrance to a different reality. Tress based many of his photographic tableaux on accounts given by children of their nightmares. He re-staged theses dreams of entrapment and menace in safe environments with the support of the children’s parents. Francesca Woodman’s oeuvre instates her as an influential and powerful presence in modern photography. One of her most frequently shown works is ‘House #3’, which depicts the ghostly presence of a young woman in a dilapidated room, seemingly crouching below a casement set into cracked plaster. She seems both to be hiding within the interior and yet also to be moving forwards on a different plane, her dress held up, her arm or scarf blurred with speed. This work bears a resemblance to nineteenth-century ‘spirit’ photography. The use of shadows, absences and fragments, the struck matches and ripped paper littering the timber floorboards, all create a spellbinding environment. The influences of Urbex (Urban Explorer) and Simon Marsden’s work are evident in Mara Acoma’s impressive extended photographic journey, The Ghost Project (2015), undertaken in memory of the artist’s mother. These

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images, sited in graveyards, crypts and disused medical theatres, are printed on dark paper and shimmer with an otherworldly light. Joel Peter Witkin’s photographic tableaux of bodies usually relegated to the edges of public consciousness are discussed in section 9.5. Though a multifarious and widespread group of independent and press photographers including Derrick Ridges, Cindy Ord, Frederic Bukaijo and Eric Charles can be credited with establishing and recording the visuals associated with Gothic fashion and musical styles, Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn forged an impressive and dramatic form of black and white photography. Tracing late Punk culture as well as mainstream acts like the Rolling Stones for the New Musical Express magazine, Corbijn went on to shoot expressive portraits of Goth group members in a stark, challenging style, sometimes employing reversed shades and grainy, bleached-out textures. Mick Mercer’s stark, playful and imaginative images of Goth singers and rock groups are also rightfully celebrated. In 1982 Sony demonstrated their first electronic digital camera. Yet, soon afterwards, the backlash against digital photography began. In the 1980s a group of artists later dubbed ‘Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde’ by Lyle Rexer in his 2002 collection of the same name, began to re-visit wet plate collodion and other early photographic techniques, with John Dugdale, Stephen Berkman and Dan Estabrook’s work showing most explicit Gothic affiliations. We have already mentioned the work of wet plate collodion enthusiast Michele Selway who travels with her ‘Tin Type Trailer’ around Britain, offering to take and develop pictures of the public at Goth, Steampunk and similar festivals and events. Selways’s process, ably assisted by Alex MannionJones, produces stark and darkly detailed images (Plate 39). Though this kind  of consciously retrospective, photography with Gothic associations might  be viewed as a niche area of production, one can also cite Monica Carocci’s Nosferatu-like ‘Untitled’ photographs (1995), J. R. Pepper’s ‘spirit’  photographs taken with low shutter speeds, Konstantin Korotkov’s ‘energy signatures’, a form of p­ resent-day Kirlian photography, and Miranda Jones’s menacing pinhole camera shots challenging the limitations of a ‘selfie’ and its position within the fine art environment. In Jones’s work the ­self-defining subject, a living negative, is viewed and caught recording its own dark nativity. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière / The Sorceror (1862) inspired Rik Garrett’s Earth Magic book of photographs, made by using a nineteenth-century camera and the wet collodion process. These productions are impressive earthy and grainy

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39  Michele Selway and Alex Mannion-Jones, ‘Tin Type Trailer’, wet plate collodion, 2015

visions of  naked female witches engaged in their rituals in the forest, as Garrett ­imagines: ‘a matristic, nature-based world: a female-centric, ritualistic ­community completely apart from the rest of society’ (Garrett, 2014). The bodies of Garrett’s witches seem to blend in with the gnarled bark, dead leaves

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40  Miranda Jones, ‘selfie’, 2015

and waters around them. Beverley Carruthers’s ritual photography also draws on Wiccan themes and has been used on the covers of Fields of the Nephilim albums. Philip Stokes proposes for the ‘secret Gothic of personal sexualities’ a study  of  the oeuvre of Jan Saudek, and states that ‘the Gothic of ancient forces  will be found in the photographs of Mario Giacomelli. There are many  more’ (Stokes, 1998: 156). Indeed, and I would add to this list: Kiki Smith’s portraits of herself as witches, Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits as devils, selected tableaux by Steve F. Arnold, and the graveyards and Gothic cathedral images of Josef Sudek. Particularly impressive in terms of composition and Gothic intricacy are Katie Eleanor Morrison’s hand-tinted images of women’s profiles spectrally juxtaposed with cathedral and abbey architecture. Her photograph ‘Jeanne’ (2015) is a characteristically complex scene with overlays of patterning, foliage and arches, and a dark hooded female figure holding a longsword in the lower mid-ground. Currently, the areas of Gothic digital and Photoshop creation, editing and printing are crowded fields. Notable examples are Avelina de Moray’s ‘Carpathian Kiss’, Michael Park’s

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41  Rik Garrett, photograph from Earth Magic, 2013

‘Die Nächtliche’ / ‘The Nocturnal’ and Andy Smales’s shimmering and provocative work. Alva Bernadine’s work depicts darkly surreal succubi and female demons. His unsettling vision of a nude woman with a front view of her breasts combined with her hind quarters reprises Valère Bernard’s engraving of a fiend.

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42  Katie Eleanor Morrison, ‘Jeanne’, 2015

Amateur paranormal investigative groups continue to provide a great wealth of photographic shots of orbs, streaks, arches, ‘extras’ and anomalies from cameras, webcams and iphones. The new ‘Cameraless’, Deepweb and Urbex photography supply a great wealth of eerie and captivating images.

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7.1  Gothic scripts, fonts, ciphers and calligraphy

G

othi c s c rip t is s o m e t im e s thought to refer exclusively to ‘Blackletter’ or ‘Gothic minuscule’, a type of writing originating in the mid-twelfth century, but recurring in the form of print-fonts and used in some German publishing and newspapers well into the twentieth century. ‘Fraktur’ or ‘Broken’ is a popular, angular sub-group of this script. Because it was also termed ‘Old English’, with all the different associations of those words, this family of scripts became associated with archaic Saxon and Teutonic cultural expression and customs, often the very kind of antiquity sought out by Gothic artists of the late eighteenth century. Consequently, doubly reinforced in resonance in this way by the original appellation ‘Gothic’ and the later intermedial Gothic, these fonts drew upon memories of chiselled letterforms on old graves, monuments and manuscripts forming a series of graphic links with the past. Due to the type’s association also with early Bibles, mystical books and grimoires, late nineteenth-century artists associated it with the occult. The poster for the  Swedish-Danish silent film, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922,) concerning witchcraft and based partly on the director’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, featured enormous white Gothic capitals with the downthrust of the ‘h’ like knives and the variegated stems of the ‘x’ creating uneasy visual dynamics. The sharp angular structuring of Gothic or Blackletter type, its black-blocked bars, spikes and roundels and even its lesser legibility when compared to Roman scripts, also appealed to those, like the Nazis, involved in ­promulgating myths of archaic racial authenticity and superiority. After the Second World War, the type (identified as ‘the German type’ by the

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Third Reich), seemed to hold highly suspect historical resonances of t­yrannical domination, cruelty and death. Red Gothic lettering was used for the opening titles in Hammer’s Dracula (1958). For more recent generations, the occulted, staunch and somewhat taboo nature of these forms also appealed to heavy metal, Punk and Gothic artists to use on album covers, posters and other publicity. Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin writes: ‘For current music and youth cults, blackletter is a means of proclaiming multiple identities: a collective, a people, a race, a nation, heavy metal, black metal, gothic – all of which celebrate brutality, or in a highly artificial way, the symbolism of death and destruction’ (cited in Tucker, 2014). As related above, as well as the link with Gothic music, with its folk and metal variants, and Nordic death metal scene, Gothic lettering, because of its use in early books, is also associated with horror and the occult. Type designer Gunnar Vilhjálmsson writes: ‘There’s no other style of writing the Latin script that is as bold and powerful’ (cited in Tucker, 2014). This is true, although Goth musical artists have also used Expressionist Art Deco and freehand graffiti-like lettering on their album covers to good effect and, perhaps because of its hyperbolically sombre resonances and over-employment in publicity, today Gothic script is contemporaneously used more sparingly and with a certain irony. Nancy Kilpatrick writes of Goth’s involvement in esoteric traditions, particularly Wicca, and Anna Powell states that ‘the broadly pagan perspectives sought out by such goths include witchcraft/Wicca, Earth Mysteries, Chaos Magick and “left hand path” occultism’ (Powell, 2007: 365). For those who are interested in ceremonial magic and the Kabballah, the creative power that gave rise to the Universe, also gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet, the three ‘mother letters’ comprising Aleph (A), Mem (M) and Shin (Sh) or air, water and fire. There is also interest in Runic, Celtic Ogham and Alchemical alphabets and scripts, and this fascination is sometimes represented in Goth cover art, comics and jewellery. I have discussed Gothic sigils, graffiti and calligraphy/graffiti elsewhere in section 7.4, but it is clear that mystical scripts including ‘angelic writing’ and mirror-writing (one of the most common forms of ciphers), have influenced a wide range of Gothic artists including Carl McCoy and Faustus Crow. Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by codes and ciphers and wrote them into several of his stories. Mystical tables and ciphers including ‘The Rose Cross Cipher’ became popular in the late eighteenth century and again, later, with Eliphas Levi and the French occult revival and Theosophists. Enochian, hermetic script and alchemical symbols are shown in the written pact between Nosferatu and Thomas Hutter’s employer in Murnau’s Nosferatu. Amongst modern writers, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) contains passages in code, a diverse range of fonts and typefaces, and mirror

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writing, and his Only Revolutions (2006) contains inverted text, coloured letters and circular photographs. In Terence Fisher’s version of Dracula (1958), Christopher Lee reveals the vampire as a fair penman who writes Jonathan Harker a note in an expressive script with loops and flourishes. The internet abounds with free Gothic calligraphy and ‘Horror fonts’; these are usually scratchy digital fonts, though one occasionally encounters more expressive and individual font families such as: ‘Abysmal Gaze, Regular’, ‘Theme for Murder, Normal’ and ‘Ruthless Drippin ONE, Regular’. The series of ‘Litograph’ posters employ printed versions of full chapters of novels such as Dracula to create a tableau from the story. In terms of hand-created artwork, Gothic calligraphy usually refers to lettering that features the Gothic alphabet as defined above, yet there are fine examples of modern and experimental artwork strongly related to Gothic traditions. For example, an inventive version of E. A. Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart by ‘Jennifer of Red Pumpkin Studio’ is a particularly well-realised artist’s volume, with form and content imaginatively matched. Here red colours are used over dark shades, the artist making scrawly and vivid capitals executed in waterproof ink to allow subsequent painting, with the paper spattered and smudged with red stains and grey smears in keeping with Poe’s dark atmospheres. This is a highly expressive, one-of-a-kind book and might be fruitfully contrasted with a more conventional if also pleasing rendition, a single-page work evoking ‘The Call of Cthulu’, replete with letter-flourishes and encapsulated inside a skull border by Tom Hasit. Thomas Ingmire, a calligrapher at the apex of his craft, has shown his interest in Gothic themes in his early work Boundless (1988) where he employed language from Poe’s poem ‘Dream-Land’. In his one-of-a-kind book, Mary Shelley’s Elisions (2015), Ingmire chose a poem of my own to celebrate the art of Shelley and the creation of Frankenstein (first edition, 1818). In writing it, I was interested in the gestural and spatial significance of elisions and excisions in Shelley’s handwriting in her manuscript in the scene of the monster’s appearance. There are also hints in Shelley’s manuscript of lexical hesitations and changes  adopted due to orthographical history. Ingmire’s work takes up these suggestions and develops many other visual ideas. He juxtaposes a skewed finished and, latterly in some lines, incomplete black-letter Gothic script with his beautiful lettering of my words, interspersing these with  his own breathtaking facsimile of Shelley’s writing and ‘corrections’. Circles add focus to some words and phrases; ink blots down the page the sense of a text in the throes of its own production. In the image below, two strokes of the pen, like rips across the page, are used to introduce a rich layering of gilt. In this evocation of the ‘­monster’s’

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43  Thomas Ingmire, Mary Shelley’s Elisions, 2015

­awakening, the chilled objectivity of the genderless ‘thing’ is caught up in contradictions: attraction and repulsion, the preciousness of life’s gold, set against ‘lifelessness’, an oblivious limpness against ‘breath’. The operatic coloured pages with their suggestions of wrenched stage curtains (we had both taken an interest in the Shelley’s admiration for Mozart’s Don Giovanni), trembling black stress lines and smoking fissures are a revelation. On one of these pages, words drop away altogether and the apassionata of the stricken woman artist, hounded creator and betrayed ‘monster’ rise up again with a truly raw and remarkable visual power and in a medium that Ingmire has continuously re-defined. 7.2  A dark chaos of marbled papers Marbling involves a process by which paper is lowered onto the tray of water that has been previously treated with coloured paint. The paint, infused with ox-gall fluid, floats on the water’s surface and then is patterned by the use of a special comb or stroking with hairs or blowing through a straw. The paper absorbs the patterns and accordingly, though fixed, inherits the look and associations of liquid. Such marbling was used in binding a very wide range of books and, obviously, the paratextual codes associated with the marbling would vary considerably according to the book’s subject matter. Walter Scott, a writer

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who valued Gothic characteristics, thought of Laurence Sterne’s introduction of a marbled page into the text of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759) as an affectation, a trick to snare the vulgar (‘unmeaning’ ‘black or marbled pages’) (Scott, 1833: 52). Accordingly, marbling was linked to that which is chaotic, lacking significance and which evades interpretation. Yet for others these motley and whirling patterns must have seemed exotic and exciting, the product of hand-crafting, a stilled turmoil of vivid shapes, frozen in writhing like salamanders in a fire. More specifically, Barbara Maria Stafford has recognised strong links between marbling and kinds of anti-Enlightenment libertine discourse, which play so prominent a part in Gothic novels. Marbled papers were also used to bind the collections of those poetic writings that eighteenth-century enthusiasts termed ‘Gothic’. In his essay ‘Pierce Plowman’s Visions’, in the three volumes of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Bishop Percy writes of the Gothic pedigree of the earliest poets, and the vigour and strength of their poetry, which outweighs the roughness of its measures. These volumes, much mined by that generation of writers which succeeded that of Percy, abound with narrative poems with subjects associated with what was to be called ‘Gothic’ in its newer sense: there are

44  Marbling from Bishop Percy, after 1765

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betrayals, ­barbarous murders, hauntings and ‘The Witch of Wokey’ (‘Here screeching owls oft made their nest, While wolves its craggy sides possest / Night-howling thro’ the rock’) (Percy, 1765: 331). In its third edition, these eminently Gothic tomes were bound in beautifully marbled inner boards with swirling marbled endpapers matching the roiled intricacy and variety of the gathered poems and ballads. Stafford advances that marbling evokes the subjective errancy of an anti-­ Enlightenment interiority left to its own devices, that ‘nondiscursive libertinage’ and the ‘expression of normally unacceptable ideas’, which are familiar from readings of Ann Radcliffe’s work (Stafford, 1993: 199–201). David Punter asserts that the Gothic is always involved with interiority: ‘the dominant trope of much Gothic is of claustrophobia, of being reduced to an imprisoning interiority from which one cannot escape’ (Punter, 2010: 176). According to Stafford, unfocused libertine darkness and ‘aimless pandemonium’ are incarnated by the artistic practice of marbling and marbled pages, those physical borders to a reading of books which, in a paratextual sense, figure as the acme of enclosure and secrecy. Marbling manifests the secluded fantasies, the potential undisciplined and unprincipled mental abandon, of the private reader. In Stafford’s sense, marbling, that confused flow with its ‘jumbled distinctions’, is the graphic equivalent of the sophistry, ‘the riot of rhetorical colors’ in the immoral sophistry of freethinkers (Stafford, 1993: 204). Libertinage and libertine sophistry, one type of uneasy inheritance of British Gothic from the age of Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace and Richardson’s French imitators, is the source of much evil and suffering in, for example, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. The lengthy and meandering verbal ratiocination, full of false deduction and links, of the Marquis de Montalt is used as a means to persuade his listeners of the puerility of any check to lust and pleasure-seeking. Justifications of licentiousness can change seamlessly to a culturally relative and relativising defence of murder in Montalt’s speeches, which are, like marbled pages, expressions of ‘shifting feelings and mobile desires’, expressions of a ‘liquid psyche’ (Stafford, 1993: 204). This kind of immoral progress, the dispersiveness of the social individual, the relaxing of moral guards and liquefaction of consciousness, always leads to unconsciousness, insanity or death in Gothic novels. As Jane Eyre struggles with Rochester’s defence of bigamy and her own correlative desires and moral objections to becoming his bigamous wife, she finds herself sinking towards an aqueous obliviousness comparable with a marbled surface and the liquid staining that produced it: ‘My eyes were covered and closed; eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow [sic]. Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless […] I came into deep waters;

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the floods overflowed me’ (Brontë, [1847] 1966: 371). The vivid colours and patterns of some marbled pages are similar to the kind of hallucinations and nightmares characterised as ‘form constants’ by Heinrich Klüver; one such vivid riverine hallucination is suffered by Gus Lorrimer, a libertine in George Lippard’s Gothic novel The Monks of Monk-Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life (1845) (Klüver, 2011). Gothic to postmodern Gothic writers, from Matthew Lewis to Stephen King, have always exhibited a keen interest in the physiology of terror, the way in which fears play upon the highly strung nerves of isolated heroines. King’s narrator in Salem’s Lot offers a quick analysis of a female character’s nervous system: ‘It was from her spinal cord, a much older network of nerves and ganglia, that the black dread emanated in waves’ (King, 2002: 67). Again, the reference to waves surging along nerves to evoke the deepest levels of fear is suggestive of marbled patterns. Marbling, a chaotic flow of coloured shapes combed into different rills and jagged contours, seemed to offer a visual equivalent of the hidden behaviour of nerves in states of excitation, conveying horror, delirium and maniacal transport. Eighteenth-century neurophysiologists, frustrated with the way that a comprehensive anatomy of the human nervous system seemed to lie beyond the range of their strongest microscopes, advanced new theories of fluidist and vibrationist continuity. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a proponent of the vibrationist cause, linked the human nervous system to chaos itself. Marbled papers with their visual rhythms, their streaks, striae, whorls and discontinuous series and roiled patterns, offered a fixed, physical template of such biological flux. From the mid-Victorian age onwards, binders and publishers have not been slow to realise the potential of cover and endpaper marbling to complement the impact of Gothic novels. A first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was re-bound early in the twentieth century with a blood-red Tiger marbling on the covers and endpapers. Such an approach seeks to emulate the swirling and bubbled patterns of oxygenated blood, haemoglobin and veins seen under a microscope. The Folio Society’s edition of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk features Bernard Cockerell marbled sides, the dramatic marbled orange and black flaring patterns arranged vertically with alternating leaves like sharp blades. It is an admirable visual accompaniment to the enclosed narrative embodying the workings of a depraved and ruthless mind, especially when confronted with the imminent threat of hellfire. There are hints that similar infernal associations persist in relation to this art. Franz Weisse was so impressed with the properties of ox gall in m ­ arbling, he wrote: ‘whoever it was who had the notion to employ the gall of oxen for this purpose must have stood in compact with the Devil’ (Wolfe, 1991: 159). In

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devising section dividers for his catalogue to accompany the Gothic Nightmares, Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination exhibition (2006) at the Tate Gallery, Martin Myrone used a selection of marbled papers. Natasha Mostert describes sheets of handmade marbled paper piled amidst skeletons of birds, dried herbs, an astrolabe and the other impedimenta of witchcraft in her novel Season of the Witch (2009). So widespread has the horror cachet of nineteenth-century marbled endpapers become that works like Firebrand Books’s edition of the vampire-themed The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez and Nate Pedersen’s The Starry Wisdom Library (2014), an ornate spoof catalogue in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft’s work, feature photographic reproductions of marbled endpapers. Dennis Cooper’s narrator in The Marbled Swarm (2011) captures the deranged sexual and brutal depredations of his own cannibalistic gang in the eponymous marbled ‘swarm’ of his language, a conceit that is again mirrored in the book’s endpapers. 7.3  Gothic labelling, packaging and ads It comes as a shock to realise that one of the last women executed for witchcraft in Germany was Maria Renata Saenger von Mossau as late as 1749. In context, it makes us realise the risky nature of the humour in Hans Baldung Grün’s New Year’s card (c. 1514) depicting three witches playing leap-frog, a young one about to leap over another’s back, carrying a smoking vessel for fumigating corpses. Witches, as well as devils and monsters, were to play formative roles in that newer kind of bewitchment and mass hypnosis: capitalist advertisements. Monstrous Punchinello characters from the Commedia del’Arte traditions can be viewed in engravings of masquerades in the 1770s and, transmitted via the newly coined ‘cartoons’ of the famous satirical magazine Punch, The London Charivari (1841) with all kinds of infernal associations, they appeared in advertisements like that for Chew Punch Plug tobacco (1886). In 1836, La Presse was the first French newspaper to accept advertising and Thomas J. Barratt of the Pears Soap company, London, became known because of his skilful use of images and slogans, as the progenitor of modern advertising. The depiction of devils proliferated in advertising in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including a German Persil washing powder advert with a running red devil, Hölle-Bier ‘Trinke hier’ sporting a devil’s profile, Bellwoods Brewery transmuting temporarily into ‘Hellwoods’ to enhance the infernal association, Demonio cigarettes and even an attractive demon appearing in a Cutex Lipstick cosmetic splash. Graphics from the vintage Red Devil Rotgut whisky line are still featured on retro liquor hipflasks. The American firm Underwood used a devil logo in 1870 as a witty sales gimmick to sell their tins of devilled ham.

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Over the following decades, devils became most commonly associated with advertising food, drinking chocolate, liquor, tobacco and magicians’ shows; witches were linked to cleansing products, women’s underwear and jewellery. Nearly forty years before the writing of Dracula, in the early 1860s, Amalia Facundo Bacardi originally suggested the bat logo for the fledgling Bacardi Rum company because of fruit-bats hanging in the firm’s distillery. Buying into the vampire’s sexual allure, a modern postcard foregrounds a huge pair of fangs protruding from a woman’s glossy red lips against a black ground. Underneath the Bacardi bat appears the legend: ‘You look tasty … Can I drink you?’ Bacardi is now ‘the drink of the night’ and presentation bottles can be purchased featuring a huge red pipistrelle on dark glass. 1905 was evidently a very good year for Gothic and supernatural imagery in advertising. Celebrated Italian commercial artist, Leonetto Cappiello (yet another ‘father of modern advertising’ with emphasis on the ‘modern’), created an advertisement for the French firm Thermos, which employed images of a devil to the left of the picture-space to indicate the capacity of the ‘Bouteille Magique’ / ‘Magic Bottle’ to preserve extreme heat and extreme cold in the figure of an Eskimo to the right. Cappiello makes use of a type of devilish figure very familiar to the Parisian public: the curly tailed red imp with sweeping horns and exaggerated sharp features long recognisable from Lepoittevin’s Diableries and ads for magic shows. Yet Cappiello gives this devil a real contemporary brio and sheen as he balances on one claw-foot in order to suck a cooling draught from the drink he pours into his chilled glass from a glistening thermos. Small descending banners on the ‘Froid’ ‘Sans’ ‘Glace’ (‘Cold without ice’) supply the hook and both Eskimo and imp gleam brightly against Cappiello’s trademark black background. A contemporary advert from the other side of the Channel was, seemingly paradoxically, referencing the past stylistically in order to state its modernity. Lux (‘Purifying and Refreshing’) ran a prominent full-page ad in The Graphic for 4 February1905 and The Illustrated London News for 25 March of the same year, revealing a white-haired, strangely androgynous figure, splendid with torclike serpent necklace. She or he is large-featured, probably a witch or druid or both and wears a light-coloured, loose robe with ragged sleeves and bears an impressive staff in their left hand and up-ends a packet of Lux soap flakes into a large, simmering cauldron. This is no stereotype of a repulsive hag or wizard to scare children. A hook-nosed physiognomy reveals an odd mixture of attractiveness, wisdom and, though their rather sensual, downturned mouth is gap-toothed with age, this figure seems to invite understanding. Their gaze engages directly with the overworked householder anxious for clean laundry; it is a look that seems to embody a certain solidarity, the passing on of secret

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45  Advertisement for Lux, The Illustrated London News, 1905

skill. A huge moon is crossed by scudding clouds behind the subject’s head and a large raven is perched on their right shoulder. It is an extraordinarily detailed image, even the flames around the cauldron-rim billow and swirl naturalistically. Beyond the obvious ironically humorous connotations and the link of the soap flake packet hookline, ‘Works Wonders’, to the image, we wonder about

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the mingling of signifiers here. The accompanying text reminds that Lux is a multi-functional cleanser, washing ‘Dainty Fabric’, ‘Silver and Cutlery’ and is ‘A Luxury in the Bath’ for a ‘A Good Hair Wash’ (the witch/druid’s hair is unkempt and blown in the night air). The words ‘purifying’ and ‘purity’ are stressed, though the subject’s robe isn’t perceptibly dirty; is the joke here based on the tacit conceit that the viewer has caught this being at their furtive nocturnal dalliance with light (‘Lux’)? The date 1905 coincides with a great intermedial upsurge for English lore, music and traditions, as in the work of Edward Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and A. E. Housman. Following on from the boom in horror films from Universal and Hammer studios and the gradual acceptance of American Halloween conventions in the UK and some European and Asian countries, there has been a series of surges in dark Gothic marketing, starting with the Bela Lugosi craze (see the Introduction) and continuing in waves. Smirnoff’s ‘The Vampire Gimlet’ ­advertisement appeared in 1972 with the featured woman model’s plaintive thought: ‘Hurry sundown …’. She seems a lonely figure but by March 1998, a Smirnoff spread could feature five Goth women conducting their nightclub toilette, the most glamorous of whom is enclosed in a Smirnoff bottle, her lack of reflection manifesting her vampiric authenticity. By 2015 Sainsbury’s s­ upermarkets were confident enough that Halloween monsters had flooded the children’s sales market to position a ‘Spooky Speaker’ booth outside their stores: ‘Bring your Halloween costume to life with our free voice-changing app’. Wines such as Legend of Dracula are products of Romania and Conte Dracula is a Merlot hailing from Podgoria Dealu Mare in the Carpathians; both sell with a facsimile wax seal of a flaming bat on the labelling. The vintners of Whitby’s Witchcraft opt for mixing the visual signifiers on their bottles: a witch with a pointed hat, silhouetted by the full moon, sailing past Whitby Abbey. The field of vampiric beverage marketing is currently so crowded that a Californian group started to sue a Belgian brewery for using the brand name Vampire Slayer because it interfered with the sales of its own Vampire Pale Ale. California winery Armida produces Poizin, which is packaged in white and black coffins. Moira Coon’s online store (Memento Moira) markets pendants created in the form of Victorian poison bottles including ‘Arsenic’. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab of Los Angeles label their scent bottles with a range of dramatic prints, their ‘Blood Kiss’ design resembling borderwork from a Gothic grimoire. The dispenser of Skulls and Roses Ed Hardy Eau de Parfum is a small bottle shaped like a white marble skull biting a red rose. There are also scores of darkly themed TV commercials including the ­movie-derived shock-horror Phones 4U Samsung Tocco Zombie and dead girl ads and the notorious Little Baby’s Ice Cream man who sets about eating

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himself by digging a spoon into his own head. Patterns of trans-medial appropriation and re-appropriation intensify as international corporations vie for custom in Gothic markets. Perhaps the most famous and Gothic in feel is Enda McCallion’s Judderman film for Metz (2000). Here, even a cannily utilised Lewis Carroll-themed warning can be enrolled to attract youth cultures to hard drink. The film was shot with a hand-cranked Arri camera to give a jerky, Expressionist feel. Budapest puppet-makers provided the story-frame for the short, doomed journey of the anonymous traveller lured to his fate by an icyhaired sprite of the forest. Nikos Meletopolous’s looming forest sets, the roots snaking alarmingly after the traveller’s feet, the use of after-images and blurring focus, Jean-Marie Vives’s digital matte backgrounds and Katy Minter’s superb costumes all serve to make this a truly memorable and macabre visual experience. 7.4  Graffiti, curses, sigils and heraldry Monica Soare writes of graffiti’s role as a Gothic signifier in Bernard Rose’s horror film Candyman (1992). Helen Lyle, played by Virginia Madsen, collects graffiti: Helen’s Gothic involvement in landscape is through her fascination with the ornate graffiti of the housing projects. Graffiti involves the Gothic motif of ­hieroglyphs; the intricacy and mystery of graffiti suggests a two-dimensional labyrinth, while its association with gangs makes the buildings it covers as ­dangerous as Gothic ruins. (Soare, 2008: 103)

I’d go considerably further: graffiti often hints at territorial limits, it is a graphic token of ownership and tacit warning of retribution if bounds are crossed. Yet graffiti in Gothic fiction also provides evidence of others who have passed through a public or private space. In Stephen King’s short story ‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’ (2001), the protagonist, Alfie Zimmer, a travelling salesman, has made a record of graffiti that he discovered on his journeys to alleviate his loneliness and sense of isolation. Scrawls from motel walls such as: ‘Mammon is the king of New Jersey’, these ‘voices’ of the missing now populate his thoughts as he drifts towards suicide. Graffiti are amongst the oldest of signs and some such marks on cave walls may date back to the stone age. Ninth- and tenth-century graffiti in the Gothic language involving liturgical quotations from Wulfila’s Bible have been found in the Mangup basilica on the Crimea. Scratched and grooved portraits of Medieval demons have often been found on ecclesiastical buildings such as St Mary’s Church at Troston and St Mary’s

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Church at Beachamwell. Star and pentacle shapes are sometimes incised over these images as if to ward off their infernal power. Witch-marks such as ladder symbols and zigzag motifs sometimes representing the possibility of lightning strikes were also used in an apotropaic sense. Each of the other graphic forms discussed in this section – curses, sigils and heraldry – have been found in graffiti form. Matthew Champion discusses the graffiti charms, symbols, curses and sigils at some length. He writes: Given the church’s enthusiasm for curses, and the fact that many of the ritual protection marks and devotional graffiti appear to have been both accepted and acceptable to the everyday officers of the church, it is hardly surprising that members of the congregation didn’t feel prohibited from adding their own curses to the church walls. (Champion, 2015: 75).

It seems that the distinction between sanctified symbols and magic may have, on occasion, been a hazy one. Gothic cultures, especially those groups that practice ceremonial magic, are also fascinated by mystical symbols; the links between Gothic literature and occult scripts are venerable. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant), friend of the occult student and writer of mid-Victorian Gothic mysteries Edward Bulwer-Lytton, went to great efforts to stress the power of mystical symbols and writing. Grimoires such as The Lesser Key of Solomon supply the sigils or secret symbols of demonic hierarchies for use in sorcery. The heavy metal band Led Zepellin incorporated sigils and personal emblems into the cover of their untitled fourth album (1971). Geomantic characters, alchemical glyphs, hermetic signs, angelic and demonic sigils, sigil ciphers and seals as well as pentacles and neo-pagan scripts are used by some Gothic and dark metal artists. Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim discusses the work of magical artist Austin Osman Spare: Spare needed the sigils and the art to come together as a magical language. His style was able to help me in what I did as far as understanding and interpreting the whole current, and the spiritual instinct that surrounds us. He tried to explain that which is not dimensional, and he did it perfectly. (McCoy, 2006)

On a fictional level, in M. R. James’s story, ‘The Fenstanton Witch’ (1999), the would-be necromancers, Hardman and Ashe, try to summon supernatural aid by marking ‘out with some pains the symbols of the planets and a few Hebrew letters which were meant to indicate names of angels and of the Great Power’ (James, 1999: 78). From Mathilda’s magical mirror in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, ‘the borders of which were marked with various strange and

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unknown characters’ (Lewis [1796] 1845: 204) to that other most famous of James’s stories, ‘Casting the Runes’ ([1911] 2007), where Edward Dunning tries to use mystical runes to reverse Karswell’s curse, the potency of sigils, occult symbols and signs is attested in these texts. At its best, Gothic irony can be difficult to fathom: where do the myriads of parodic or decorative signifiers give way to the signified actual interest in supernatural? Modern merchandising of Gothic costume, jewellery and accessories mirror this ambiguity. Alchemy Gothic produce a green pewter Angel Rune Ring Pendant, which is called ‘Sigils and Correspondences’: ‘The seven planetary  angels are depicted within the enamel of the pendant, corresponding with the reverse side inscribed with their respective names, planets and days’ (Alchemy, 2014). Whilst the rubric for some of Alchemy’s products inscribed with codes and sigils seems plainly tongue-in-cheek – for example the ring ‘Encircled by encoded ceremonial rites, the three black cabochons control the powers to arouse the dead. The power of the necromancer is a fine gothic ring’ – there’s no mistaking the intent at least of the ‘goetic sigil altar cloths’ issued by BlackMass Incubus (Alchemy), Elijah Burgher’s sigil paintings, Rik Garrett’s fluent sigils that accompany his photographs and Faustus Crow’s sigils to assist in shamanistic dreaming. Heraldry was a primary means by which royal and noble patrilineal genealogy was recorded and subsequently blazoned in the form of display, legal rolls and deeds and architecture. Further, heraldry was a form of substitution and abstraction by which the authority vested in a sign represented its owner’s power even at a considerable geographical and trans-generational distance. Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser were amongst the many of Queen Elizabeth’s supporters who employed antiquarianism and heraldry as part of that which Hogle has called ‘Renaissance symbolization of the self’ (Hogle, 2012: 499) and heraldic terms themselves were employed in this enterprise. The ghost  of Hamlet’s father has a beard that is ‘A sable silver’d’, a knowing ­heraldic metaphor where a reported phantom becomes a sign of absence. The actor who plays Pyrrhus is covered with a ‘heraldry more dismal; head to foot’ and is ‘total gules’ but both these blazons are counterfeit and untrustworthy (Hogle, 2012: 502). Some coats of arms contain macabre detail. The arms of the von Oesterling family are quite an eerie spectacle. Despite the beautiful billowing lines of the mantling that swirls from the helm, the first and fourth quarters feature crossed thighbones in saltire positions and ‘chapless’ skulls in the second and third quarters. The image has a powerful impact, hinting perhaps at the passing generations of the family, but also suggesting martial prowess and ruthlessness. The crest surmounting the whole display recapitulates the crossed

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46  Von Oesterling’s family coat-of-arms

t­ highbone motif, but this time larger, in isolation and turned the other way up, as involved in a mirroring effect with the bones below, with hints of memento mori and ossuary signification. Heraldry is the ‘favourite study’ of Laura, the heroine of Mrs Carver’s The  Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797) and the foregrounding of heraldry in E. A. Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) is emblematic of a family history of malevolence: A huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel. With the motto ‘Nemo me impune ­lacessit’. (Poe, 2012: 375)

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The space above the fireplace in Terence Fisher’s 1958 Dracula film is occupied by a coat of arms consisting of two sea-creatures bearing tridents above a gules shield, a ship crest and the gold motto ‘Fidelis et Mortem’. It is different from the heraldic symbols on the ring worn by Lee’s Dracula, copies of which are available from several jewellers. A modern version of this ring marketed by W. Hamond shows a shield featuring a large initial ‘D’ surmounted by a single bat-form. Four crowns also feature and a crowned ruby in the crest. Lee inherited the ring from John Carradine who played Dracula in House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) and from Bela Lugosi in Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Modern Goth artist Jenna Whyte features an heraldic crest on all her stationery: a floriate bird’s skull surmounts a blazon of human skull and rose, with the motto: ‘Scientia Vincere Tenebras’ / ‘Science Will Vanquish Darkness’. Oscar Chichoni’s coat of arms for the Sharpe family with a concealed skull at its centre surmounts the mansion furniture in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015). 7.5  Tapestries and embroidery Tapestries, as well as heraldic blazons, panoplies of armour or weapons, hatchments, flags and baldachins, are arguably some of the most significant bearers of symbolic meaning in Medieval and Renaissance public and private spaces. Deployed to reveal wealth and status, to add colour to plain walls, retain heat and impede drafts, the important capacity of these decorative hangings also to conceal dark deeds, intrigue and plotting is prominently conveyed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Yet as in the case of armorial bearings (and coats of arms were often the subject of tapestries), these woven creations were pictorial and portable accounts of ancestral lineage and rights. They could be used to bolster authority in dynastic feuds and disputes. The fact that they hung over entrances and wall-spaces, often stretched to the ground, moved in breezes and featured life-size figures might explain why they were so often linked to uncanny, paranormal activity. In fact the wind-impelled movement of tapestry figures was mentioned so often in Ann Radcliffe’s novels, Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont (1798) and Mrs Carver’s The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey, that it became a clichéd motif. Tapestries were often used to instruct children, especially by female tutors, yet they have also been employed in Gothic texts to warn, seduce and deceive. Because of the long periods taken in their creation, their beauty and intricacy, tapestries were often associated with guile and skill. In Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), the evil character Busyrane is seen as a type of spider, his Ovidian tapestry depicting the travails of virtuous women is

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spliced with metallic thread. It is beautiful to view but is specifically designed to seduce and ensnare women in its dangerous web-like mesh. The Renaissance ­master-weaver, Willem de Pannemaker of Flanders, produced a marvellous tapestry depicting the Last Judgement, yet, even his artistry in depicting grotesque monsters and demons was surpassed by one of his students, Peter Coeke van Aelst. The serpent-tailed, winged lady in his woven tableau ‘Vertumnus appears to Pomona in the Guise of a Vintner’ (c. 1544) is just one of the many hybrid creatures thronging his brightly coloured weaves. His study of ‘Pride’ from the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ tapestry panels shows a wonderfully sportive and menacing seven-headed dragon, the metallic threads in its texture seeming to glisten like scales. Memento mori subjects also featured in tapestries: there is a vanitas tapestry panel depicting a cherubic baby blowing bubbles whilst leaning against a chopless skull and bones and featuring the lettering: QUIS EVADET? dated to 1734, the question implying that no one evades death’s grasp. Walter Scott associated The Castle of Otranto with tapestries. In writing his Introduction to the novel he specifies that, if his readers had spent a night in an old mansion in early life, it was ‘the gigantic and preposterous figures dimly visible in the defaced tapestry’ amongst other details that excited a sensation of ‘supernatural awe’ in a similar way to Walpole’s book (Scott, 1827: 491). In fact, this reference to woven ‘giants’ might be taken as a glancing comment on Walpole’s inspiration and imagery in his novel as a whole. Walpole displayed several important tapestries at his Strawberry Hill home. Writers who satirised Gothic novels also used wall hangings to characterise their sensationalist thrills. In Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Henry Tilney mockingly questions Catherine Morland: ‘Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry? […] Will your mind not misgive you, when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber […] with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size, its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures large as life?’ (Austen, [1817] 1972: 164)

Yet, despite such gentle and serious mockery, tapestries persisted in tales of horror into the Victorian period, into the stories of Walter Scott, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe. Tapestries are one of the most important means of focalised, premonitory warning in Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Hanging in the room where Carmilla, the lesbian vampire, is taken after the initial crashing of her carriage in Le Fanu’s novel, several tapestries depict hunting and hawking scenes, and another ‘sombre’ one opposite the foot of the bed showed Cleopatra with asps clutched to her breast. The subjects of these ambiguous weaves not only symbolise aristocratic sports and Classical knowledge, but they foreshadow, to the seemingly oblivious castle residents, the ways in which Laura, the young

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scion of the schloss, will be hunted by the vampire, with a view to sinking her fangs in the teenager’s neck. In Le Fanu’s ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family’ ([1839] 2011b), Lord Glenfallen of Cahergillagh associates ‘the waving tapestry’ and ‘mildewed sheets’ with the ancient feudal order yet the ancient terrors will reassert themselves in the present despite the lord’s preference for aired beds and his young wife will be unable to discover the source of the misery (perhaps bigamy) that drives him to cut his own throat (Le Fanu, [1839] 2011b: 150). As she first enters her rooms in the house, ‘something like a black tapestry as it appeared disturbed my sudden approach, fell from above the door’ ([1839] 2011b: 161). Tapestries on which characters seem to move, gesture or leave their woven setting are common features of the nineteenth-century literature of suspense. Edgar Allan Poe gives an extraordinarily detailed description of a tapestry in  ‘The Tomb of Ligeia’ (1838) likening the hangings to a Phantasmagoria show: The lofty walls, gigantic in height […] were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry […]. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. […]. By a contrivance now common, and traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and, step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms […]. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies – giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole. (Poe, 2012: 113, emphasis added)

It is notable here that the ‘strong continual current’ is deliberately introduced, in order for the tapestry to resemble an optical horror show. In Poe’s early short story ‘Metzengerstein’ (1832), the young Frederick Metzengerstein, lost in reverie gazing on a huge, faded tapestry, imagines that he sees a huge horse depicted there stirring and, lying behind the steed, is the body of a knight killed by one of his forbears. It is a pivotal moment in galvanising the cruel lord towards a disastrous course of action. Tapestries also play important roles in Vernon Lee’s story ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1896), Walter Scott’s ‘The Tapestried Room’ (1829) and Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lovely House’ (1950). Following on from the moving figures who descend from their paintings  in  Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (1887), Mikhail Fokine produced

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his ballet La Pavillion d’Armide (1907) where the Vicomte de Beaugency falls asleep in the pavilion of a strange castle only to dream that the figures in the tapestry hanging in the room come to life. As part of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites produced hangings that  featured Medieval and Ovidian themes such as the transformation of King Picus into a woodpecker by Circe, the evil sorceress. Morris, amongst other Gothic Revival artists, also wished to return to the kind of surface embroidery in wall hangings so popular in the Middle Ages in contrast with canvas work. There is no shortage of contemporary artists who explore horror and related dark themes in tapestry. Society 6 produces painted and embroidered tapestries representing characters from horror films, including The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist. Tapestries are used to expose racial persecution in Kara Walker’s ‘A Warm Summer Evening in 1863’ and the wholesale murder of women accused of witchcraft in Anne Jackson’s knotted tapestry ‘The Great European Witch Hunt: The Word Witch in Ten Languages’ (2014). Anne writes: From the top, the tapestry is framed by the word for ‘witch’ in English, German, French, Polish, Danish/Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Italian  and Hungarian. In descending order, these words represent the ten regions of Europe where witches were most heavily prosecuted between 1450–1750. The figure of 60,000 executions, depicted here, is extremely conservative. The images in the body of the tapestry depict the three major beliefs about witches at that time: that they could transform into animal shape (the Romans believed that women could change into owls, hence ‘strigae’); that they could fly (the chemical formula depicted is for atropine, the active ingredient in ‘flying ointmen’); and that they performed magic. ‘Abracadabra’ is the earliest-known magic charm, originally Arabic; and the ‘magic square’ depicted was found scratched on a wall at Pompeii. A famous English witch, Ursula Kempe’s charm against rheumatism is also shown. (Jackson, 2016, personal correspondence)

Alice Eaton’s mixed media works ‘Decorated Individuals’ (2015) involve a process of embroidering photographs derived from antique glass slides. The artist feels that the resultant images are gothic in their materiality, which is analogous with ‘history and fiction’ and also signifying the artist’s distance from and occluded knowledge of the subjects (Eaton, 2015, personal correspondence). Kustaa Saksi’s ‘Hynopompic’ jacquard tapestry (2014) references the state of mind and visions experienced whilst surfacing from sleep. These are vivid and nightmarish visions. Vik Muniz’s threaded tapestries explore Piranesi’s imagery from a textile-worker’s perspective.

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47  Anne Jackson, ‘The Great European Witch Hunt: The Word Witch in Ten Languages’, knotted tapestry, 2014

7.6  Book covers and magazine covers Yellowbacks, sometimes called ‘railway fiction’, were the earliest British paperbacks, competing with and then replacing penny dreadfuls in widespread popularity. Routledge was the most prolific publisher of yellowbacks, closely followed by Ward & Lock. One Routledge edition of Frankenstein (1882) with board rather than paper covers reveals the influence of contemporaneous yellowback front covers. The front features an image of the strangely beautiful monster, minus bolts and square head, in red-striped cloak towering above his creator with mountains rearing over them in the background, all captured in misty blue haze. Such a scene is in marked contrast to the hardback first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula published by Archibald Constable in 1897, which

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relied on the contrast between a deep yellow cover with red title lettering and bordering for its impact. It is only on closer viewing that one notices that the crimson border-lines seem to run out of the huge ‘D’ and smaller ‘A’ of Dracula, like transfusion tubes conveying blood from a punctured vein. The progression towards decorative depiction on twentieth-century horror hardback fiction in Britain can be seen in the contrast between two related volumes of tales by M. R. James. The first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published by Edward Arnold in 1904. The cover features the main title in black Gothic lettering on a tan buckram cover and orange border-work on front and spine panels. There is no cover illustration to elucidate or enhance the subject matter. The volume was an obvious success. By the time of the first hardback edition of James’s subsequent volume, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911) from the same publisher, a prominent black bat in flight had appeared on the upper front of the pale grey cover board, with its head turned towards the swashed black cursive lettering of the book’s title. A few years later, such a tame if effective embellishment would seem somewhat outmoded. Sydney Horler’s sensational hit, The Vampire, in its hardback first edition, which appeared from Hutchinson in 1935, featured the marketing slogan ‘Smashes all records’ and the evening news endorsement: ‘Plenty of Thrills’ (Horler, 1935: 1). The main cover image of a tastefully painted if kitsch young woman with bouffant, lipstick and bracelet cradling a crucifix like a phone to her mouth whilst bats appear in the dark atmosphere at her back, would be at home in a 1930s fashion magazine. The font used for the author’s name (black) and the title (red) was the bold sans serif Johnston type, which went on to be called Johnston’s Railway Type, and which had appeared two years before on the London Underground, a clear gesture towards modernity. By the 1940s, airbrush illustrators like Gerald Gregg were producing covers for anthologies of ‘terror stories’ just as lurid as any imagery in the Pre-Code horror comics. Dell’s volume Bar the Doors! (1946), an anthology of stories selected by Alfred Hitchcock, featured a Gregg cover dominated by a warty, four-fingered hand with swollen knuckles and overgrown, hairy nails. The hand has been severed at the wrist and an iron spike driven through it, the spike seemingly projecting up three-dimensionally from the picture-space, a credibly trompe l’oeil flourish. The fact that the hand is nailed to a blank and jagged page just smaller than the book’s pages instates a neat reflexive joke. During the 1950s, mass-market paperbacks also drew on the kind of sultry and suggestive poster art used to advertise movies of the day. For example, Lion Books’ edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1953) features a surprisingly well-dressed and hirsute monster (a Heathcliff surrogate perhaps) posed in a doorway with hands flexed. His red-haired victim, her bust foregrounded

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in a low-cut pale yellow dress, is sprawled over a bed, resembling a late but up-dated tribute to Fuseli crossed with a poster-depiction of Jennifer Jones in one of her steamier roles. Arrow Book paperback covers of the 1960s for Dennis Wheatley ‘Black Magic’ books revealed a mixture of motifs including spiders, graveyards and woodland settings whereas later editions, with red and white lettering on black, relied more on still-lives. The Devil Rides Out ([1934] 1966) cover, for example, relied on an athame and candle set in a skull-shaped vessel in the foreground whilst a naked woman dances through flames in the background. Gothic appropriates, hybridises and parodies its sources. Such strategies are apparent in new approaches towards packaging the Gothic writing. Jeremy Dyson’s The Haunted Book (2013) is a thoroughly postmodern self-reflexive work, ludic and claustrophobic, as if the dark presence at the centre of the overlapping narratives haunts itself and gradually takes over the book-as-­ object, its final pages phasing from black, through greys to blank cream. The hard, printed version of the cover image – Dyson’s head flanked with library books poised over an open tome floating over the amber title lettering and a green glow emerging from a stone circle – is only one of the options on offer to the consumer here. A detachable sticker and final page notice indicate the opportunity to download a free Blipper app, which provides an interactive cover for further reader exploration. Furthering a genre characterised as ‘horror mash-ups’, Doogie Horner’s witty, blunt and ingenious cover of Seth Grahame Smith’s Pride Prejudice and Zombies (2009) adapts a William Beechey’s painting of Marcia B. Fox. The story re-casts Jane Austen’s tale of the Bennet sisters into an aristocratic landscape ravaged by zombie incursion. In the book’s cover, the Regency female sitter’s coiffure with its dangling curls is intact, her warm brown gaze seeking out the book-owner’s, is inviolate and her long, distinctive nose and the creamy pale aristocratic skin of her upper face are still attractive, yet the skin around her jaw and neck has been flayed, her gums and full teeth exposed and her cervical vertebra bloodily laid bare. The frothy lace neckline is flecked with blood. The collective design and layout of the cover parodies and transgresses the literary marketing conventions of Penguin Books and Oxford University Press ‘classic’ editions. Distinguished paper sculptor, Jeff Nishinaka, has also produced a highly imaginative cover for David Mitchell’s horror novel Slade House (2015). Despite various Goth models realising the sinister power of white materials and dresses, apart from the obvious traditional associations of ghosts with white, artists in general have been slow to capitalise on this potential. Nishinaka’s dust cover reveals tuberous white branches snaking outwards out of a layered monochrome hole towards a curving, distorted house at the centre. The title lettering and some berries are

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picked out in crimson and one of the house’s upper left-hand windows is delicately cut away revealing the glittering red showing through from one the red glossy letters on the book’s boards underneath, these front boards also bearing a disconcerting design by Neal Murren. The inter-generational predation of the monstrous Grayer twins from the increasingly frightening house in Mitchell’s narrative is admirably prefigured in this subtle and edgy design. One should of course mention clever spoofs, pastiches and parodies for teenager’s and children’s consumption such as Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (2013) and Jennifer Adams’s Little Master Stoker, Dracula: A Babylit Primer (2012). The purple cover of Adams’s book reveals the illustrator, Alison Oliver’s, very safe-looking miniature vampire bearing the book title on his cloak. The first popular journals with horror themes were the movie monster magazines that emerged in the 1950s, supplied with lurid cover images by artists such as Basil Gogos. This type of production burgeoned again in the 1970s with titles like Monster Mag, For Monsters Only and Fangoria. These publications coincided with the first issues of Man, Myth and Magic, appearing in 1970. The cover for the first number featured an Austin Osman Spare painting, The Vampires are Coming, of a leering, goat-eyed being. In 1990 Jennie Gray founded The Gothic Society (1990–98) and collated the first issue of its journal, The Goth (later re-named Udolpho). The covers were sometimes laser-printed copies of historic engravings but Jennie also enlisted the assistance of talented artists like Gerard Gaubert. The unsettling image reproduced here is from the Spring 1996 issue and shows a voluptuous, skeletal-faced woman with large beetles escaping from her underwear. Gothic Beauty is one of the longest-running Goth lifestyle magazines, founded by Steven Holiday in 2000. Articles cover Goth fashion, music, accessories, news and views and events. This is a glossy production with impressive covers usually featuring professionally photographed models under the trademark white lettering on dark background. Meltdown (2000–4), edited by Natasha Scharf, was a leading Goth magazine publication in the UK, often featuring interviews with band members and the advent of Deathrock. Meltdown’s covers were more variegated in colour and subject than Gothic Beauty, seeming to aim more for graphic impact than fashion. Goth online magazines such as DarkestGoth still proliferate. Allan Bryce remains as editor of The Dark Side (1990), Britain’s most successful magazine devoted to horror films, with a range of suitably garish, monster-flooded covers, designed by artists including Kevin Coward and Rick Melton.

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48  Gerard Gaubert, cover of Udolpho: The Magazine of the Gothic Society

7.7  Record and CD cover art Though many bands might claim to be precursors of Goth and Dark Wave music, there is a consensus that Black Sabbath’s eponymous first album of 1970 introduced many of the themes and imagery associated with Goth bands. Marcus Keef’s cover photograph of the fifteenth-century Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire looks grainy, somehow uncanny and enchanted, as

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if taken through a filter or using infra-red film. The woman in the crepuscular foreground with her yellow-toned skin looks simultaneously unreal and spectrally menacing; her outline is bold but her features are blurred and vague, as though she has been superimposed on the scape around her. It is worth remembering that most of the albums mentioned in this section were first issued as records and were designed with that format in mind and there are of course major differences in impact between a visual design on a record album sleeve (32 cm square) perhaps organised as a gatefold and one on a CD (14 cm x 12.5), the latter well under half the size of the former. The surface area of an LP or 12-inch single is nearly six times the size of a CD and this larger size (roughly the dimensions of a small painting or PC screen), allows for greater study, detail and immersiveness. The design of early Goth album cover art shows a marked interest in German Expressionist and other 1920s film art, so-called primitive and tribal art and low definition, manipulated and blurred photography. There was a marked trend towards a DIY aesthetic, perhaps revealing a mistrust of big record company’s lush over-productions. The spasmodic and rough feeling of these late 1970s and early 1980s productions registered alienation with Thatcher’s Britain. I have written of Duane Michals’s photograph used for the cover of Bauhaus’s first LP, In the Flat Field, in section 6.5. The band’s original 12-inch release was Bela Lugosi Is Dead (1979) cut on white vinyl and limited to 5,000 copies, which featured a sleeve bearing an image from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). The monochrome sleeve for the second black vinyl version used a startling image from the final part of D. W. Griffith’s silent film The Sorrows of Satan (1926). Responsible for the camerawork and cinematography of this film, Harry Fischbeck and Arthur de Titta’s image shows the devil’s huge, bat-like shadow encompassing the character Geoffrey Tempest’s (Ricardo Cortez’s) figure in the writer’s ornate flat, after the protagonist realises the full  implications of selling his soul for money. The band’s bassist, David J.’s, use of this image is sketchy, its darkness leaching out as if copied on an old Xerox machine. The black typeface used underneath for the band’s name is a rough approximation of Herbert Bayer’s experimental Universal typeface (1925) but it is bumpy and amateurish in appearance as if h­ and-stencilled. The handwritten album title appears below and seems as though it has been dashed off in cursive. Michael Kostiff created the sleeve photography for another of Goth music’s formative albums: The Cure’s Pornography (1982). Despite the band’s ­self-confessed imbibing of LSD at the time of its composition, the music is  more redolent of hallucinogenic tranquilisers, and the cover art matches

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this feeling of depressive, swirling menace. The low definition blurred head and shoulders shot of the musicians on the front sleeve is composed of red, black and pink, a billow of flame and smoke seeming to rear up from right to left of the picture-space. The group are tilting over, as the black-attired figure on the extreme right reaches forwards, his hand a lilac blur of fire. The three men’s faces seem like pale masks, and their eyes to be mere shadows, and this distortion is visually echoed by the rear sleeve design, where a curved shot of the band seems about to waft into surrounding darkness, the mouth of the rearmost man seeming to drip blood. All lettering is red and minimal. Despite Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy’s disavowals of any affiliation to Goth music, the sound of their early albums has influenced a host of Goth bands. The front cover of their first studio LP, First and Last and Always (1984), comprises two rectangular panels resembling red material textured, folded and flecked with black against a black ground. The title is in simple capitals in a column separating the columns. Eldritch is listed as responsible for the sleeve design and Jill Furmanovsky and Ruth Polsky for the sleeve photography. The first pressing of the LP had a gatefold sleeve with a shot of Eldritch on stage and the inner sleeve had a stark black and white photograph of the group in darkness outside the illuminated façade of ‘Detroit’s Finest Adult Movie’. Red lettering with white outlines is featured throughout. The overall impression is of a nocturnal, forbidding urban world with secret passions at play. I’ve already discussed some of the early imagery associated with Siouxsie and the Banshees (2.6). Yet it was with the band’s fourth album, Juju (1981), an evocation of Halloween murder, voodoo dolls and horror films, that truly Gothic material began to predominate. Rob O’Connor has stated that the musicians themselves suggested the use of an African figure or fetish on the sleeve. O’Connor commissioned Thomi Wroblewski to photograph the image at the Museum of Mankind and then he combined the results with crumpled and hand-coloured sheet music. He goes on: ‘Thomi had a bunch of prints of the fetish, some of which had been printed using the transparencies as negatives, which turned the almost black wood of the object to look more like gold’ (O’Connor, 2004). One can view the impact of negative textures on the fetish’s tendrilled base. Above this image in the upper right corner, the band’s name appears in gold lettering, varied between ordinary and italicised script inside a black block. It is clever packaging: to appeal both to fans of African tribal culture, fetishism and cut-up art. On the cover of Fields of the Nephilim first LP, Dawnrazor (1987), Greg Copeland, Richard Stanley and Justin Thomas follow through the theme introduced in the first musical track, which reprises Ennio Morricone’s ‘Man with the Harmonica’. Back-lit by a blaze of light emerging from grey-green smoke,

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a five-piece band stand grouped, McCoy’s figure foregrounded in Stetson and Duster with eyes blazing out of his darkened form. The band used Beverley Carruthers’s layered and ritualistic cover art, reminiscent of her ‘Goddess’ sequence, for their album Elyzium (1990) and, subsequently, McCoy, with his Sheer Faith company, created a sleeve with superimposed surfaces, shadows and mirror-writing in Earth Inferno (1991). Australian duo Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance, for their album Within the Realm of a Dying Sun (1987), employed Bernard Oudin’s photograph of the Antoine Etex’s François-Vincent Raspail family tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery. The image has a cold mordant and yearning feeling, perhaps following on from Joy Division’s album covers. With the development of Dark and Ethereal Wave, synthesised voices and digital art, an Orchestral Goth metal band like Winter in Eden could feature such complex images as Russian Canadian artist George Grie’s ‘Haunting Goth’ on the sleeve of Awakening (2010). Grie’s work is influenced by dark surrealism, fantasy art and the work of Jerry Uelsmann, pioneer of photo-collage in America. The fashion for ­quasi-Celtic designs on Gothic LP covers is well illustrated in Lynette Wager’s art on Faithful Dawn’s Temperance (1997). Rich Mills’s red and black image of a tattooed woman wearing bondage gag on Global Citizen’s album, Broken Doll (2010), reasserts the transgressive nature of Dark Gothic. Vampyre Heart’s The Ghost of Time (2012) album features a logo of a winged, naturalistically ­red-veined heart pierced by a sword with a dark ground on the front sleeve. The rear sleeve (photography by David Freeman, Sarah and Carol Vesty), shows a hooded woman in black and light crimson costume, lightning flashing around her, juxtaposed against pale church spire and graveyard.

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8.1  Gothic costume, ancient and modern

D

ur i ng the e a rl y l if e t im e of Alaric the Goth, a contemporary writer expressed alarm at those Goths who donned the toga in order to listen to imperial oratory but then reverted to their native furs when re-joining their tribe. William Camden imagined ancient Gothic apparel, writing that they ‘cover their Feet as high as the Ancle, with hairy Leather. Their Garment is high, close, and particolour’d, hardly reaching down to their Hams’ (Groom, 2015: 28). Compounding the kind of ahistorical compression already well in progress by the early eighteenth century, the engravings of Samuel Wale and Charles Grignion in Bishop Percy’s Ancient English Poetry show women and men in Tudor costume and knights in full Medieval armour listening to a Gothic harpist, as quaint a sartorial confusion as Fuseli’s depictions of Gothic themes. Metaphors of costume came to Walter Scott’s mind in describing Walpole’s prose in The Castle of Otranto: In one case, his romance would have resembled a modern dress, preposterously decorated with antique ornaments; in its present shape, he has retained the form of the ancient armour, but not in its rust and cobwebs. (Scott, 1968: 7)

‘Gothic’ costume in the first wave of Gothic novels were deployed in a highly selective and retrospective sense to evoke characters active in bygone ages but also to stress these figures’ status and roles in the sexual drama of the texts. In The Romance of the Forest, a novel set in the 1660s, the dress of Ann Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline is described as a ‘habit of grey camlet, with short slashed sleeves’, which ‘shewed but did not adorn, her figure […] The light veil hastily thrown on, had, in her confusion, been suffered to fall back’

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(Radcliffe, [1791] 1998, 7). A camlet is a fine garment of goat’s wool, angora or a silk/wool mixture with its fashionably slashed sleeves in the form of ‘a habit’, which links to Adeline’s hidden past, sequestered inside a convent. Emily in the The Mysteries of Udolpho (set in 1584), also wears unostentatious but stylish garments as is clear when her aunt tries to dress her in a more ornate and revealing garment ‘made, not in the Venetian, but, in the Neapolitan fashion’ for her nuptials with Count Murano (Radcliffe, 1799: I, 83). Male apparel in these novels often remains a signifier of class and martial  prowess. Peter, in The Romance, remains a ‘man in hunter’s dress’ or draped  in his soldier’s garb and the Marquis wears a ‘the star of one of the first orders of France’ (Radcliffe, 1799: II, 398). The most extended and ­emphatically phallic description of male costume in Udolpho is of a hunter ‘whose gun was slung across his shoulders, the […] horn hung from his belt, and in his hand was a small pike, which, as he held it, added to the manly grace of his figure […] he wore a faded military uniform; sandals were laced on his broad legs, and a kind of short trowsers hung from his waist. His hat resembles an ancient Roman helmet’ (Radcliffe, 1799: II, 399). Even Emily, with her mistrust of outward show and dislike of Madame Montoni’s ostentation, is drawn into ‘admiration, tinctured with awe’ at military officers’ dress: cap plumes, armorials coat, Persian sashes, and Spanish cloaks (1799: II, 399). We can of course, supplement these references, with mention of Schedoni’s ecclesiastical dress in The Italian (1797). Peasants are recognisable in these texts from their attire and French working-class women have simple dresses. In terms of representing monstrosity, Lord Byron and John Polidori stay silent on their aristocratic vampire’s and Lord Ruthven’s attire but by the time of James Robinson Planché’s production, The Vampire (1820), the fiend is dressed in ‘Silver breast-plate, studded with steel buttons, a plaid kelt cloak, flesh arms and leggings, sandals and gray cloak’ (Norton, 2015). Successive writers on fashion have associated Gothic style with different decades of the nineteenth century (Mighall, 1999: 286). N. J. Stevenson links the fashion of Gothic Romance to the revolt against the freer Classicism of Parisian fashion and, therefore, to dresses of the 1820s, with Medievalist retrospective touches like string-tied or slashed sleeves, the reintroduction of the corset and Elizabethan flounces and ruches, whereas Anne Hollander refers to the ‘gothic’ clothes of the 1840s: ‘both sexes with long black hair and large eyes, elongated torsos, sharply sloped shoulders, men in boots’ and with ‘standing collars. Women’s dresses might be drab or rich, but they would always have constricted shoulders, a long pointed bodice, and full, unstiffened, mobile skirts in a bell shape’ (Hollander, 1993: 438). Perhaps E.-G. Robertson’s sartorial self-styling, dressing exclusively in black

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in his convent-based Phantasmagoria lantern-of-fear show in 1799, was one of the first conscious attempts to match Gothic spectacle with black apparel. The wearing of black had already a long history as a registration of mourning or high station but as the nineteenth century continued, black increasingly gained associations with qualities of respectability, religiosity, personal drama and, latterly, masculine conformity. Yet novels and plays also celebrated the activities of colourful Gothic dandies, symbols of an effete, fading aristocracy, who transgressed safe social dress-codes with their flamboyant silk jackets, lace ruffles and florid waistcoats. For Max Nordau in Degeneration (1891–92), the fashion of the fin de siècle was degenerate straightforwardly because it concealed the true nature of the wearers: ‘The impression is that of a masked festival, where all are in disguise, and with heads too in character’ (Nordau, 1896: 9). Fancy dress had, after all, never been out of fashion, as is borne out by Lord Eglinton’s tournament for Queen Victoria. Illustrations from popular European newspapers and magazines, like Fliegende Blätter and books such as Butterick and Company’s Masquerade and Carnival (1892) show that, by the end of the century, more sinister (and playful) costumes such as bat dresses, cloaks and accessories were appearing. We can already glimpse the foundations of modern Gothic costume in these macabre and parodic cultural artefacts, especially when reinforced by the influence of Stoker’s Dracula and similar vampire and horror-themed literature. It is clear from the photographic record, magazine articles and magic lantern slides that the popularity of witch outfits, skeleton disguises and devil costumes didn’t diminish in the early years of the twentieth century. The Cabaret du Néant and Cabaret de L’Enfer (fl. 1890s–1920s) continued these traditions. Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan (1928) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan (1930) were films that focused on socialites furthering their plans by donning devilish, macabre costumes. Charles Addams’s The Addams Family cartoon for the New Yorker debuted in 1938 and proved popular; the depiction of Morticia Addams influenced Maila Nurmi’s highly influential Vampira TV series (1954). David J. Skal’s link between Bela Lugosi-themed merchandise and ‘Halloween costumes and masks’ in the 1960s is crucial because the American Halloween cult helped promote and disseminate monstrous disguise. Modern Goth style emerged out of a mélange of heavy rock necromantic imagery culled from the group Black Sabbath, the post-Punk style of Siouxsie and the Banshees and similar bands, and the experimentation of The Batcave club in the early 1980s. Starting with black bodices, dark T shirts, fishnet stockings, dog-collars and skull and cross jewellery, this style was soon augmented

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49  Bat costume, Fliegende Blätter, 1882

with Medieval detailing. As Emma Baxter Wright explains: ‘Women’s gowns followed the lines of the body from the shoulder to the waist, with a long, full skirt attached to a bodice that flattened chest like a corset’ (Baxter-Wright, 2014: 178). Wright also cites the influence of Hammer Horror film. There

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50  Modern Victorian Goths

was also a strong individualistic, eclectic and second- hand aesthetic at work in Goth clothing. Buoyed up by the influence of the look of Gary Oldman’s vampire as a top-hatted dandy in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a Goth Victorian aesthetic emerged with women wearing laced bustiers, layered purple and red dresses and dark-feathered bonnets and sometimes bustles, and men in long topcoats, waistcoats and walking sticks. Cybergoth and Día de Muertos’ style variations followed. Starting with coverage in Marie Claire and other, smaller magazines, Goth fashion finally emerged onto the international stage as acknowledged by Laura Craik writing in The Times in 2012 and also evident from the retrospective Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015 (Craik, 2012: 6). 8.2  Gothic jewellery It is often supposed that modern Goth and Gothic jewellery is predominantly derived from rings, brooches and necklaces worn in eighteenth-century and Victorian masked balls, and also from mourning brooches, rings and related

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accessories. Yet the range of styles and designs currently available also remind one of much earlier sources and artefacts, some of which originated in the Gothic era of European art. One of the most impressive paintings of the Late Gothic is Jan Van Eyck’s Annunciation and the visitant angel’s jewels and be-gemmed crown are key details of the scene. Van Eyck was able to make the stones of the necklace gleam and dazzle by painting glaze over highlights, an effect that is only emphasised by the shade of the chapel interior. The growing popularity of this type of adornment in the fifteenth century is also reflected in the glinting facets of the Madonna’s diamonds in the Ghent altarpiece. Necklaces, rings and ring-seals as signs of devotion and office, jewelled clasps and buckles were also very popular during the original Gothic age, though during the early period, earrings were not as important as decorative headwear. Necklaces of gold rings, ruby and pearl chokers and brightly gemmed thumb and finger-rings were the preferred adornment of the fashionably attired models of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) as they posed for portraits of Judith and Salome accompanied by severed heads. There are many extant examples of memento mori jewellery, some in the form of charms and rings from the early sixteenth century, which show inlaid skeletons in coffins and with accompanying religious mottos. Jewellery is also intrinsic to Gothic Revival and Victorian Gothic and to the literature and art of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century. In these works, gemstones, chains, gold and pearls function as emblems of a wide range of qualities and associations, amongst them both greed and virtue, love and lust, secrecy and vanity, high station and Satanic power. They can be given as simple keepsakes, as a promise of faithfulness, as proof of identity accompanying a message or financial transactions and they also hint at duplicity and soul-ensnaring danger. Amongst prominent examples in fiction are the jewel and ring that Manfred gives to Bianca in The Castle of Otranto, the diamond-encrusted miniature worn in The Mysteries of Udolpho and Dracula’s jewelled ornaments in his castle treasure store (‘There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained’) (Stoker, [1897] 2008: 94). Yet Stoker’s Dracula tends to hoard not wear his jewellery. In other Gothic texts, both women and men are shown adorned with precious stones. In Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Victoria is tempted by a young attractive stranger whose vest glitters with jewels. Ann Radcliffe seemed to delight in languorous visions of noblewomen with pearl-sprinkled tresses. In Udolpho, Emily’s good taste and self-forgetfulness are shown in the way ‘Her beautiful chestnut tresses were negligently bound up in pearls, and suffered to

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fall back again on her neck’ (Radcliffe, 1799: I, 399). The Queen in Gaston de Blondeville (1826) has a robe trimmed with pearls and a velvet hood with large pearls. Pearls can be associated with purity, innocence and healing. Given this writer’s fondness for pearls, there might be a certain ironic aptness in the online ‘Museum of Jewelry’s’ naming of the ‘Ann Radcliffe Pearl earrings’ which are: Earrings that seem to have come straight from a famous museum. Gothic romance novelist Ann Radcliffe could easily have sported these radiant cultured pearls set in a filigree cone design. (Museum of Jewelry, 2016)

In general, Radcliffe emphasises the role jewels play as indicators of wealth and position and the jealousy that these cause. In The Romance of the Forest, La Motte tears from the Marquis ‘a brilliant star, some diamond rings’ and a ‘miniature set of brilliants’ (Radcliffe, [1791] 1998: 311). Yet the function of precious items can be transformed by the virtues of their owner as when, in A Sicilian Romance (1790), Julia gives Niccolo a diminutive diamond cross, originally part of a store of wedding ornaments given to bribe her into an unwilling marriage, for helping her escape. In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the seductive attraction of gemstones is used as a Satanic ploy by a Daemon to draw Ambrosio to his destruction. A gorgeous youth, a disguised emissary of the devil, beguiles Ambrosio with his splendid panoply of gems: ‘Circlets of Diamonds were fastened round his arms and ankles, and in his right hand He bore a silver branch, imitating Myrtle. His form shone with dazzling glory’ (Lewis, [1796] 1845: 78). Myrtle is sacred to Venus but the erotic appeal of the androgynous boy combined with precious stones and metal are part of a trap. In the Neo-Gothic of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Lucy Snowe watches as a picture moves to reveal the entrance of a dwarfish woman: the greedy ‘Malevola’ who drips with portable wealth and who will lay a curse on Lucy’s future. The sadistic debutantes and prostitutes shown in Henry Fuseli’s paintings are adorned with precious chokers and pendant earrings, his Queen Mab’s neck gleaming with lustrous pearls. The brows of Theodor Von Holst’s heroines are strung with glistening diadems, their waists encircled by beads of amber suspending precious crosses. In both cases, there is an element of gem fetishism, the women’s voracious lust for the jewels supplanting any natural desire for men. Gem-encrusted objects, accessories and trinkets are also important in Gothic literature: the ornamental box in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand (1864) glimmers with ‘the blue flash of brilliants’ (probably sapphires), and the detailing is quite exceptional: ‘a little set of tablets – a toy – the cover of

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enamel, studded in small jewels, with a slender border of symbolic flowers, and with a heart in the centre’ (Le Fanu, [1864] 2006b: 63). Black enamelled mourning jewellery became popular after 1820 but it was Queen Victoria’s period of mourning from 1861 that initiated the fashion for a wide range of adornments associated with bereavement including miniature portraits and lockets, ‘name’ brooches and rings, silhouette lockets, memento mori skeletal bands and hair necklaces and watch-ropes. Jean Arnold maintains that ‘In the Victorian era, women’s practices of wearing jewellery became so widespread that jewels served as a focal point in novelistic narratives; recall for instance, titles like The Moonstone […] We can trace the very raison d’être of these works to the pervasive signifying power of jewels in the culture’ (Arnold, 2011: 2). Different types of crosses, magical symbols and organic forms such as flowers and branches were already popular decorations associated with ­ ­personal adornment by the early nineteenth century. Bat, spider and snake bangles and brooches in silver and turquoise start to appear in the 1880s onwards, and grew in popularity during the Art Nouveau and Symbolist ­artistic periods. The hippy movement of the late 1960s and the heavy metal offshoot led to an eclectic taste for large ornate rings, ankhs, crosses, necklaces and bangles from many periods and the advent of the Goth movement led to more specific emphasis on crosses, chains, spiked dog-collars and jewels for piercings. Geoff Kayson and Trevor Phillipson of Alchemy started in 1977 with skull rings but moved on to Dracula ‘blood moon’ pendants, large rings with leonine motifs, claw earrings and talismans. As discussed in section 7.4, W. Hamond Workshops have produced ‘The Jewellery of Dracula’: a replica of the Dracula family crest signet ring and Dracula lockets of many types. Dark Elegance Designs have produced an Amethyst Purple ‘Immortal Cross’ on Black Lace Gothic. There has also been a small trend in certain Goth circles for full-finger claw-rings. Goth and macabre jewellery has gone mainstream and international manufacturers such as Swarovski, Butler and Wilson and Szabo now specialise in fine quality skull rings and winged skull brooches. The new generation of Gothic jewellers includes Diane Falkenhagen, Dauvit Alexander and Julia deVille and exhibitions of dark-themed jewellery, such as Jivan Astfalck’s ‘Black on Black’ at Manchester Art Gallery in 2015, proliferate. If there is one medium that combines Victorian adornment, mourning jewellery and contemporary Goth culture it is Whitby jet. Hal Redvers-Jones and his daughter Imogen of the Whitby Jet Heritage Centre are acknowledged masters of fashioning glistening black bats, roses, hearts and crosses.

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51  Goth jewellery

8.3  ‘Gothic toys through Gothic glass’ In his poem, The Pursuits of Literature (1794), Thomas James Mathias complains about the influence of Horace Walpole’s writing on cultural life, by asking: Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display’d, Since Walpole play’d the virtuoso’s trade,

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Bade sober truth revers’d for fiction pass, And mus’d o’er Gothic toys through Gothic glass? (cited in Wright, 2013: 74)

He is impugning the author of Otranto’s famous weakness both for narratives involving phantoms and his hoards of gewgaws: rings, stained glass and cameos at Strawberry Hill. By ‘toys’, Mathias didn’t, of course, primarily mean children’s playthings but he was implying that the success of Gothic novels had had an infantilising effect on the arts and literature in particular. The present market for Goth and Gothic toys both for children and adults is prodigiously large, with the influence of the nineteenth-century texts of Frankenstein and Dracula (and all their subsequent spin-offs in terms of films, TV, bowdlerisations and parodies) still being felt in this market. Though I discuss dolls in more detail in section 3.3, it is also notable that one can currently buy a personalised double-jointed figure of Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire Carmilla for a mere $499 from Ringdolls. Diamond Select Universal toys also offer action figures of Jekyll and Hyde and the Phantom of the Opera, sculpted by Jean St Jean and sold complete with diorama settings for display. The Strange Dolls firm has strayed even further into early Gothic by offering ‘The Bleeding Nun’, though this beguiling creation bleeds from her eyes instead of her breast. If it is then easy to establish that toys are a major constituent of postmodern Gothic visual culture, it is perhaps not as simple to distinguish clear divisions between, for example, effigies of monsters, hero-gods and demons used for ritual, magic or play in antiquity. Yet, even allowing for changing moral horizons, we do know that some toys combined comedy with sadistic cruelty in a manner reminiscent of a story by Poe. These involved living creatures in actual imprisonment and injury. For example, the bodies of toy figures were created in Nuremburg with holes in their necks to surround the head of a trapped bird; as the frantic creature struggled for release, so the figure flailed around in a manner amusing to some children. In other cases, the origins of some popular toys obviously owe a great deal to tales of the supernatural and diabolical lore. According to legend, Sir John Schorne once cast the devil into a shoe to save local villagers. A Gallic version of the toy is titled ‘Diable en boîte’ (‘Devil in a box’) and some eighteenth-century engravings show a horned Jack bursting from his site of confinement, a feature somewhat toned down in the case of the thousands of Jack-in-a-box toys that followed. Perhaps the two most venerable playthings that we can certainly associate with the craze for Gothic literature are Skelt’s and Pollock’s toy theatres and Phantasmagoria lantern toys, both media developing in synch with diabolical p­ eepshows (section 4.1). The heyday of the lithographed card and paper

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play-­theatres, with characters and sets being sold in the form of cut-out sheets was between 1840 and 1880. Charles Dickens and R. L. Stevenson were keen boy dramaturges, directing and running their own productions on these tiny stages. Skelt’s repertoire of plays included Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799), James Planché’s The Brigand (1829) and John Home’s drama of Hibernian Gothic: Douglas (1757). Writers such as Citizen de Sade, Hester Piozzi and Charles Nodier recognised the Gothic pedigree of Phantasmagoria lantern shows when they first appeared. The celebrated Geister Erscheinung was a type of toy tin magic lantern produced in Nuremberg in the early 1820s. Philip Carpenter of Regent Street, London produced a new range of lanterns called the ‘Phantasmagoria’; these devices possessed lenses of a very high quality and a later double model could produce dissolving views. As a young lad, Robert Louis Stevenson was to mount such lantern ghost shows for his cousin. The firm of Walker produced a toy version of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion as exhibited in London (12 shillings per dozen.) The production of these pastimes was accompanied by the production of a wide range of optical shows for children, including zoetropes, thaumatropes and shadow puppets alongside the more traditional knick-knacks like cup-and-ball bilboquets, toy weapons, spinning- and humming-tops all of which could be carved or painted with demons and witches.

52  Thaumatrope toy, c. 1870

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53  Thaumatrope toy, c. 1870

There were also thaumatrope children’s toys depicting many amusing and frightening scenes. The one featured here shows a sleeping lady on one side and a crouching demon on the other, which, when the disc is revolved quickly, coalesce into an image resembling Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’. Automata are dealt with elsewhere (section 3.4) and here it is enough to comment that, as the second half of the century developed, the production of mechanical wind-up toys increased with, to cite one famous example, ordinary children able to purchase their own clockwork tableaux of Punch and Judy, which lurched, uncannily, into life. The skeletal hand creeping from the wind-up coffin bank to grab one’s sixpence was a favourite corner shop amusement of the 1960s. Today there are of course straightforward examples of toy witches, zombies and vampires, and Frankenstein monsters and several toymakers like Mezco and McFarlane even offer toy Jack the Ripper models. Representations of the Krampus monster are common amongst German children’s games and toy trolls, and skeletons are, of course, ubiquitous. Films like Hotel Transylvania (2012), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and The Addams Family (1991) bring new waves of customised playthings: Murray the Mummy plush dolls, Jack Skellington figures and likenesses and masks of Uncle Fester and Lurch.

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In some cases the spin-off is from cartoon strips such as Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo’s Casper the Friendly Ghost and Warren Kremer’s Hot Stuff, the Little Devil both of which series spawned toy merchandise. In the original story Casper was actually a lonely dead boy who lived next to a grave and became friends with a fox. Alex Randolph’s board game Ghost features an assortment of good and bad ghosts competing in a haunted castle and Plaid Hat Games’ Dead of Winter involves competitors trying to take control of groups of zombie apocalypse survivors whilst finding sources of water and staving off the undead. Interactive Toys produce a Vampire Hunter Indoor/Outdoor Vampire Hunting Game (‘This vampire can really fly!’) and internet searches for ‘zombie guns’ elicit a bafflingly huge range of products for sale: some obviously toys, others air-rifles and others a chilling array of real fire-arms. The Hallow’s Eve company’s ‘Boule à Neige Musicale’ or ‘Musical Waterglobe’ shows a raven sitting on three dark tomes, the spines of the two lower ones lettered in silver with the titles: ‘Boo’ and ‘Spells’. The dome itself rests on a handturned wooden base. The raven’s claws rest on the pages of an opened book bearing a pentacle and mystical runes. When shaken and turned on, the globe fills with whirling and glittering black ash and a sound is heard akin to the high organ tones played in old horror films. When the cycle is complete, the dark flakes rest on the pages of the top book in a most dramatic manner. Other Halloween snowdomes involve a dancing skeleton and bride (revealing the longevity of danse macabre motifs), profiles of the Frankenstein monster and, in a rare Waterford Crystal example, a ‘Black Cat and Halloween Pumpkin.’ Halloween toys are still an expanding market with witches’ treasure chests and toy-filled Jack-O’-Lanterns stocked with miscellaneous monster bendables, rubber bats, Halloween pinwheels (hand-held windmills), skull stickerbombs, Winnie the Witch toys. An orange ‘scary candy’ ‘Trick or Treat’ bowl with a green and grabbing witch’s hand is particularly inventive and will give younger children a shock. Wind-up (faux vintage import clockwork) and battery-powered Dracula and Frankenstein monsters are as readily available as they were in the 1960s. Children today are as likely to be attracted by holograms and computer wallpaper, as by solid model monsters. Young horror buffs can purchase a Hologram Pyramid Movie Vampire Bat or Zombie Horror Hologram and a Windows program, ‘Holograms for Halloween’, is available. Customised computer wallpaper with dark themes can run the gamut between patterned spiderwebs, dark castle outlines and fiery infernos. Following the venerable tradition of Skelt’s and Pollock’s toy theatres, Edward Gorey’s Dracula, A Toy Theatre with die-cut card characters, fold-out stage and props appeared in 2007.

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8.4  Masks, weapons and athames Certain aspects of Gothic masks have been explored elsewhere in this volume, particularly in the sections on masquerades (1.6), Gothic costume (8.1) and Halloween artefacts. Fantastic and demonic masks and costumes seem both to be a vestige of the grand diablerie traditions of the European carnival and a humorous acknowledgement of the devil’s paradigmatic role. Halloween customs stimulated the annual creation of home-made masks and Hollywood cinema and cinematic productions led to a new mass market for horror masks. Lon Chaney, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, was probably one of the most famous actors to design his own masks and make-up. Don Post and his studios created a wide range of innovative, full-head masks of latex rubber with remarkably detailed styling as in his pallid Frankenstein monster mask dating from 1966. The surface is ridged, the monster’s eyes hooded, and a trail of blood runs from the furthest left of five metal head staples. Post’s Dracula mask, sculpted by Pat Newman, is green-skinned, a good Lugosi facsimile, with slightly recessed, hypnotic eyes and red, disdainful lips. These are high quality, custom-made and hand-painted masks. Cheaper versions were produced by Topstone and designed by Keith Ward. This range also included Dracula, Frankenstein, various devils, including an imperious red and black fiend with aquiline nose, and also ‘The Melting Man’, an eerie mask where the left side of a crew-cut man’s face is in rivulets of plastic, one eyeball precariously bursting from its socket. Rick Baker’s work on special effects transformations and masks in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Rob Bottin’s special creature effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) influenced a new generation of special effects artists. In particular, Sergio Stivaletti in his work on Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985), Michel Soave’s The Sect (1991) and the Euro-shock film, Stivaletti’s own, The Wax Mask (1997) reveal the power of these influences. Stivaletti’s mask of the deformed mutant boy from Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985) is a disturbing artefact, posing a real shock on its appearance in the film. Trick or Treat Studios, mask designers and suppliers, are one of the biggest professional suppliers of hand-made Halloween masks in the USA. Casey Wong and Daniel Horne, Halloween mask sculptors and character designers for Trick or Treat, reveal the influence of Rick Baker and Lon Chaney Senior on their work. One of the most imaginative and innovative mask companies in the UK is Neal Harvey’s Rubber Gorilla, established 2005. This firm has close links with the Bram Stoker Film Festival and Goth festivals at Whitby, and many at the respective Vampire Balls can be seen wearing Neal’s designs.

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Neal’s work gravitates towards the hardcore slasher and pagan end of the horror spectrum. One example is the Mendes Goat skull mask described as ‘A large weathered goat skull mask cast with very thick latex and painted with weathered looking effect. It has heavy duty Hessian straps with a thick rubber pentagram buckle at the back’ (Harvey, 2015: 2). Another example of a character mask is: ‘Miss Emily, Timmy 12Stroke’: ‘Half-head mutant slasher mask design … complete with mutant drool’ (2015: 2). Neal has shown considerable commitment and energy in following his vocation and these meticulously painted and carefully designed masks are a world away from the mass-produced Jason, Scream, Michael Myers or Hannibal Lecter costume shop productions. In recent years, perhaps influenced by the ritual masque in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Venetian carnival masks have begun to appear at Goth festivals, and the long-beaked Dottore della Peste or Plague Doctor is particularly favoured. Swords and daggers remain popular artefacts on Goth and Gothic band CD covers and posters, for example Vampyre Heart’s first album. This is a venerable Gothic artefact: in Walpole’s Otranto, the Marquis of Vicenza, Isabella’s father, arrives at the castle with an immense sword borne by a hundred men. Scribed on its blade is the legend that only Manfred’s blood can atone for sins done to the family of the castle’s heir. In Ann Radcliffe’s novels, the swords of nobles are imbued with sexual as well as martial connotations. As he tries to attempt Emily’s rescue, Morano’s abandonment of his sword by her bedside in The Mysteries of Udolpho is a duplicitous subterfuge designed to lead her on to a forced marriage. Swords occupy key positions in a wide array of Gothic paintings and media. Dwarfing the symbolic cross beside it, a huge broadsword is held projecting

54  Neal Harvey, ‘Rubber Gorilla’, masks montage, 2016

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upwards from the hip of a dark-robed, baleful female representing the Spanish Inquisition in Fuseli’s The Inquisition (1806). Henry Fuseli’s Percival Delivering Belisane of Urma (1783) and Oscar Rescuing Siritha from the Giant (1781) reveal the redemptive and heroic associations of these weapons, as does his The Oath of the Rütli (1780) where a sword is elevated in a vow of common allegiance by three representatives of Swiss cantons. Settings involving pagan and Gothic themes of witchcraft, revenancy and Satanism are explored in Michele Soavi’s horror film La Chiesa / The Church (1989), Christopher Smith’s Black Death (2010) and Dominic Sena’s Season of the Witch (2011). Each of these films involves sword-wielding knights combating paganism. Over recent years, swords of a wide variety have been highlighted converging trends of horror, Gothic and martial arts films, in titles such as the Burr Steers’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016). In terms of fashion, Goths generally prefer accessories other than swords to accompany their laced greatcoats, T shirts and boots, or dresses with bustles, dark Regency, Victorian and Edwardian attire. Where early Georgian fashions do appear – ruffs, waistcoats and breeches – they are usually not attended by costume rapiers. Sword-sticks, swagger-sticks and canes are available online but one would like to think that the myriad silver- and steel-topped canes and one sees at festivals are harmless. Knights appear with swords, chain mail and staffs at the Heidniches Dorf (Pagan Village) Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig. Companies such as Ancient Warrior, King of Swords and Darksword Armory provide swordtypes from the thirteenth century with runic inscription on their pommels and an array of Medieval weapons and armour for re-enactment groups, as well as Gothic daggers made of polyethylene. Fantasy hybrid weaponry is currently more popular with Steampunk groups. As well as swords appearing in combat and rescue, they also appear as ritual artefacts in depictions of magic. For example, in the centre foreground of Salvator Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations (c. 1646) a bearded man in a cloak receives a sword that pierces a bleeding heart and pagan Goths may well purchase such blades for ritual purposes. An athame is a witch’s or Wiccan’s ceremonial dagger, sometimes fashioned from silver or steel; symbolic types of wood are also involved in their construction. These blades are mentioned in the Medieval grimoire, Key of Solomon, and in the teachings of Gerald Gardner, member of the New Forest Coven. These ritual tools are often mistakenly identified as weapons and associated with sacrifice as in, for example, Frans Francken the Younger’s painting Witches’ Sabbath (1606) where preparations for the witches’ Sabbath are shown in a kitchen. A fashionably dressed young woman is depicted presiding over a candlelit magical circle containing skulls, seeds and stones. One athame rests within the circle,

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its tip crossed by a strip of parchment with mystical writing and pointing to a toppled skull. One athame blade is jammed into the crown of a skull and another, surrounded by occult symbols, has been driven into the cross-beam above the great hearth; blood sprays from the hole this last blade has made and into a cauldron stirred by witches. In Fuseli’s painting, The Night Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (c. 1794–96), an athame features prominently in the context of child sacrifice, the ritual blade gleaming in the lower right-hand corner, as the hag arrives in the sky followed by her pack of hounds. The athame has passed into popular culture through its use in magical contexts in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and has also featured in different ‘teen-witch’ TV dramas and video games. There is a large market currently for those Goths who feel an affinity with Wicca or other pagan esoteric lore: Amazon sells a heavy weight athame with ‘Gothic styling’, which helps to add ‘a medieval feel’ to its owner’s ritual. 8.5  Playing cards and the Tarot There are long-standing and obvious links between the practice of divination by cards and the magical and uncanny elements of Gothic fiction. Quite apart from the esoteric connections, Jesse Molesworth sees links between the narrative potential of the major and minor arcana, Tarot cartomancy and Gothic storytelling, which is ‘ever in transition, ever seeking to contradict its own causal logic, ever seeking to imbue coincidence with the fateful atmosphere of the uncanny (Molesworth, 2010: 230). Perhaps the most frightening Gothic story relating to playing cards is Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1833) where a young soldier, Hermann, tries to utilise a magical sequence in gambling given to him by a wise woman whom he subsequently killed in the struggle to elicit information. In the fateful cardgame that follows, the sudden transformation of his winning Ace into the Queen of Spades and then the change of the playing card Queen’s face into that of the murdered woman is haunting and deftly handled: ‘Ace has won!’ cried Hermann, showing his card. ‘Your queen has lost,’ said Chekalinsky, politely. Hermann started; instead of an ace, there lay before him the queen of spades! He could not believe his eyes, nor could he understand how he had made such a mistake. At that moment it seemed to him that the queen of spades smiled ironically and winked her eye at him. He was struck by her remarkable resemblance. (Pushkin, 1994: 24)

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Hermann subsequently loses his mind. Thorold Dickenson’s 1949 film, a very effective adaptation of this text, abounds with Gothic visual tropes. The connection between the cards, magic and the devil is again richly evoked in Louisa May Alcott’s Gothic novel A Long, Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866, which recounts a series of infernal events instigated by the rash heroine, Rosamund Vivien, who, bored with her existence, cries ‘“I’d gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom”’ (Alcott, 1997a: 11). Philip Tempest, the libertine antihero, arrives soon after and wins Rosamund in a game of cards. After such a transaction, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong, and Rosamund’s marriage to Tempest is revealed to be bigamous, a discovery that starts a cataclysmic downward spiral. Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1979) reveals a Countess, queen of the vampires and daughter of Nosferatu, who consults her Tarot in order to read her unchangeable fate in the cards. When an English soldier crosses into her land, the Countess draws ‘Les Amoureux’ from the Tarot and the fate described in the cards arouses her ‘just as a single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’ (Carter, 1979: 133). When the young man enters her apartments, the Countess accidentally knocks over the cards and the soldier stoops to gather them: ‘What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one – of two young lovers, smiling at one another’ (1979: 135). Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Duke de L’Omelette’ (1832) tells the tale of an over-fastidious nobleman who dies whilst eating an undercooked song-bird and, finding himself consequently in Hell, cheats his way out of damnation by outplaying the Devil in a card-game. Characters from horror books and films can also, of course, appear in decks of cards as has happened in the cases of Bicycle’s ‘Classic Horror Movie’ poker deck, Heritage Toy and Game Company’s ‘Hammer film’ playing cards (c. 1990) and the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark volumes where Steven Gammell’s eerie and disturbing accompanying charcoal drawings have also been turned into a card pack. Tarot packs, playing cards and divination are a staple of horror and fantasy films. Inheriting one of the oldest motifs of Gothic horror, that of the picture brought to life, Georges Méliès, in Les Cartes Vivantes / The Living Playing Cards (1905), reveals a magician blowing up playing cards to life size. He sets fire to some fragments of the Queen of Hearts (‘Judith’) card in a crucible and an enlarged version of the card appears on the blank sheet. After a few more passes in the air, the conjurer watches as a living, breathing Queen of Hearts descends from the picture-space. It is a tour-de-force of early cinematic trickery. George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941) established the convention that the sign of lycanthropy was a pentacle (imported from the Tarot symbol), and that each werewolf is able to envision this sign in the palm of their

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next victim. The Tarot is also instrumental in Freddie Francis’s Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III (1990), Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), Sam Raimi’s The Gift (2000), Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions (1995), Ernest Dickerson’s Bones (2001) and Rob Minkoff’s The Haunted Mansion (2004). A pack of falling cards is shown as an premonitory hint of dangerous chance in the opening credits of the Tales of the Unexpected series (often based on Roald Dahl’s short stories), and the ‘Cut Wife’ character is shown teaching the Tarot to the clairvoyant, Vanessa Ives, in John Logan and Sam Mendes’s Penny Dreadful series(2014–). Cards are also used in the title sequences for Peter Walker’s Frightmare (1974) and Norman J. Warren’s Satan’s Slave (1976). Currently there are many different packs of Gothic playing and  Tarot cards on the market and it is illuminating to view the ways in which a gifted graphic artist can adapt the traditional panoply and visual attributes of a Major Arcana card. The Queen of Pentacles from Joseph Vargo’s ‘The Gothic Tarot’ pack reveals an alluring vampire queen spreading her demonic wings as she stands before an ornate archway. Her thin arms are crossed between her breasts: her figure is almost an embodiment of the Pentacles motif. Her triple crown intersects with the lowest zone and centre of the pagan pentagram displayed behind her, ‘signifying that she commands the mystical powers of the universe’ (Filipak, 2016, personal correspondence). The same intertwining pattern of antlers is shown on both of the stone pillars: on either side of her and on the arch itself. Her eyes are closed as if in trance or divination. The elaborate trappings of the Rider-Waite Tarot pack – the Queen’s ornate throne with ram-headed arms, her red robe and green veil and the lush and fruitful if volcanic landscape behind her and the rabbit prancing at her  side – are eschewed here. Instead, Vargo’s Queen seems to represent a liberated female who stands independently against a backdrop of darkness and is driven by her own inner ambitions to soar upwards in life. Her ­trappings – the robe, rings and crown – show a woman of some wealth, power, determination and passion. Her closed eyes and stance reveal her reliance on her inner resources. The great pentangle is placed behind the Queen’s head, rather than held in her lap as in the Rider-Waite Tarot pack, hinting perhaps that the symbol’s force pervades her consciousness. She is seen in an attitude of intense concentration, gathering her power to herself. She is glimpsed occupying the elaborately carved portal to material success. She is a true queen in her regal presence and stance but also, in a reverse sense, potentially aloof and eccentric. There is also a real force to her vampiric associations: a thirst for wealth can

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55  Joseph Vargo, the Queen of Pentacles from ‘The Gothic Tarot’

sap human vigour and drain energy. A cool, shadowy blue light picks out the scene beautifully. Vargo’s ‘The Gothic Tarot’ comprises a boxed set of full colour ­seventy-eight cards, size 3 x 5 cm, each unique illustration printed on heavyweight glossy card stock. The cards feature gargoyles, vampires, ghosts and dark angels and refer the user to Vargo’s accompanying volume for more detailed readings.

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As hinted above, this area of publication is a crowded one. Even a casual trawl of the internet can reveal the popularity of The Bohemian Gothic Tarot, Aeclectic Abysmal Tarot and All Hallow’s Tarot, Anne Stokes’s Gothic Tarot, Crow’s Magick Tarot, Dark Goddess Tarot, Edward Gorey’s Fantod Pack Tarot Cards, Ghosts and Spirits Tarot and Dracula Tarot. ‘Fortunes of Ravenloft’, a section of the Ravenloft game franchise, involves the reader in a gypsy card reading in order to establish Count Strahd, the vampire’s, priorities.

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9.1  New media: the art of Gothic gaming and horror apps

G

othi c g am in g c a n p ro b a b l y be sourced, on one hand, to masquerades and costume parties (the distant forbears of role-play games), and on the other, to the pre-computer mechanical arcade slot machines with themes such as ‘The Haunted Churchyard’, ‘Midnight in the Haunted Churchyard’, ‘The Nightwatchman’ and ‘Necromancer’. A slot-machine game ‘Spook Gun’ (c. 1958) involved, as the publicity poster stated, the shooting of ‘ghosts, skeletons, owls and other spooky, scary figures popularised by “shock-shows” of television’. In terms of computer technology, the first of these home entertainments developed from games of chess, tic-tac-toe and pool in the early 1950s and first culminated in the Russell Saunders, Peter Samson, Martin Graetz and Dan Edwards’s science fiction video game Spacewar! (1962). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, amusement arcades throughout the West echoed to the sound of shuttling green and white columns of Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders (1978). From the outset, computer gaming evolved a strongly adversarial and adventure style. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons (1974) was a tabletop role-playing game, influenced by the writings of H. P Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien, often credited as the origin for tactical gaming subject to a manual of written rules. Gothic-themed amusements continued in Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), developed for the PDP-10 (now discontinued), a text adventure game that initiated its players in a chthonic quest for treasure and involving encounters with a dragon and other obstacles. Despite the early influence of Tolkien on Gygax, Arneson and Crowther’s games, Tanya Krzywinska has accurately written that: ‘The Gothic in games is

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56  ‘Spook Gun’ poster, 1950s

far from easy to pin down. Undeniably mutable, its purpose is at times frightful fun and frolic, but at the same time questions some of the very basic truths, assumptions, and fictions that we use to shore up and solidify our existence’ (Krzywinska, 2013: 269). The first fully fledged if tongue-in-cheek Gothic

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game based on colourful animation was Rick Dyer and Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair (1983), a LaserDisc video game. The game introduces the Medieval knight, Dirk the Daring, on a quest to save Princess Daphne who is imprisoned in the treasure room of Singe, the dragon’s castellated fortress. The first view of the castle is heavily derived from horror film artwork and Dirk’s search through the many floors and secret rooms of the building involves clashes with aquatic monsters, suspended skulls, livid ghosts and perhaps most Gothic of all, statues of armoured adversaries that spring to life. Bluth’s cartoon artwork is sophisticated and clearly indebted to Disney creations such as Sword in the Stone (1963). Attractive to younger children, the game nonetheless involves the tall and leggy Dirk being trapped in darkened chambers and crypts, being confronted by hostile skeletons and armed, luridly coloured demons and falling through flagged floors that continuously crack and disintegrate. Gygax had been developing Dungeons & Dragons modules such as Tomb of Horrors (1975) throughout the 1970s and Tracy and Laura Hickman went on to develop the Ravenloft (1983) franchise. This was advertised as ‘a classic gothic story’, which Hickman said was inspired by ‘the original Bram Stoker text and the old classic films’ (Hickman, 2016). A fine cover image was created for the product by Clyde Caldwell, with the red-eyed vampire revealed glowering from a castle balcony flanked by carved dragons. This game proved so popular that DreamForge Entertainment launched the fantasy role-playing title Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession (1994). This was a point-and-click adventure that involved a journey through a rudimentary rendition of the land Barovia (ruled over by vampiric Count Strahd von Zarovich) searching for the stolen Holy Symbol of Helm with recourse to a red and gold ‘weapons and spells’ framing console. Despite the aerial overviews, the perils of bats and werewolves are rather sketchily rendered. The isometric maps by Dave Sutherland build up the sense of an interconnected 3-D fortress. Vampires were also important in Konami’s Castlevania (1986) games. The term ‘survival horror’ was first used in relation to Shinji Makami and Tokuro Fujiwara’s Resident Evil (1996) video horror game where players are abruptly set upon in an urban dystopic setting by zombies and other monsters infected by the T virus released by an international corporation. This franchise was an immediate success and the frisson gained in trying to gun down waves of brightly coloured assailants moving unpredictably through the darkness as one’s ammunition ran low proved addictive. During the 1990s more games with horror and supernatural fantasy themes were released. Designed by Roberta Williams and the action directed by Peter Maris, Phantasmagoria (1995) is an interactive movie horror point-and-click game. Profiting from the popularity of earlier interactive movie games such as

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the spoof Gothic Dragon’s Lair (1983), it involves the adventures of Adrienne, a writer who moves into a lonely mansion only to be assailed by supernatural evil. The game featured graphic sexual and violent content. The castle setting of Ravenloft continued to be influential. The first of the MediEvil video Playstation ‘hack and slash’ games was released in 1998. The figure of the one-eyed, snaggle-toothed knight as he bustles and runs through the graveyards and castle courtyards of Gallowmere with a huge sword remains signally indebted to the Tim Burton’s artistic vision in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Gothic, created by Piranha Bytes, is a single-player role-­playing quest game released in 2001, with the player confronted by a number of beasts and hostile creatures in order to gain skill points. There is also an emphasis on gaining fighting skills and knowledge of magical potions to achieve goals. P.T. (Playable Teaser) (2014) is a psychological horror game by Konami that uses first person perspective to move through a haunted house in a loop encountering a radio, pictures of murdered family members and a vengeful ghost called Lisa. When a loop is successfully completed, the walls and corridors are re-decorated and objects moved round. Directed by Hideo Kojima, assisted by Guillermo del Toro, this game was originally released as a free teaser, but it has proved so frustrating, frightening and intriguing for players that it has gained a large following. A full version of the game is planned for 2017. Other very successful games with an emphasis on Gothic scenarios, horror and dark, disturbing themes include Namco Bandai Games’ Dark Souls (2011) with its high resolution artwork and jump scares designed for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and Soma (2015), Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddies (2014) and Parsec Productions’ Slender Man (2012), a game based around a paranormal creature originating in an urban legend. The new The Dark Descent for PS4 and the sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs with the downloadable Amnesia: Justine (2016) are the most intense of the series so far, especially in their lingering explorations of the monstrous depredations of Brennenburg Castle and the dangerously lapsing sanity of the protagonist, Daniel. At present the future of VR (virtual reality) headsets such as the Occulus Rift and Play Station VR looks bright and most games produced for this media are horror/jump scare games. Richard Pearsey’s Resident Evil 7 (2017) for the PS4 and Sony Interactive’s Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (2016) are amongst the most impressive of these products, providing visceral jolts and with vivid, shockingly palpable visuals. With the arrival of iPads and iPhones, a new generation of app games evolved, including Haunting Melissa, Horror Escape, Mirchi’s Escape Victorian Gothic House Walkthrough and Escape Highgate Cemetery Gothic Walkthrough, as

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well as logic challenges and puzzle-solving games grafted onto horror scenarios. Future developments like the prospect of the ultra-immersive Night Terrors Augmented Reality Survival Horror game from Novum Analytics are intriguing. This game will use the player’s own smartphone to map out their immediate environment as a viable gaming terrain through the phone’s camera and screen. The drive to be transgressive in gaming, to scare oneself as well as others, has led to ‘Sad Satan’, a game supposedly originating from the deep web. The scenario in this game involves the protagonist walking monotonously down a featureless corridor past pictures of Hitler and child molesters whilst overlaid and reverse soundtracks play. Some players have claimed that this game is invasive and damages their computer devices. At the other end of the Gothic market are apps for ‘Goth Girl Makover’, ‘Halloween Costume Party’ and GrupoAlamar’s ‘Dark Gothic’, a dress-up game that also allows you to customise a Gothic girl, choosing tattoos, piercings, eyeshadows and hairstyles. A crucial element of the play is the final sharing of the different resultant girls on social media. This kind of amusement is designed for the generation that grew up with IT avatars and Facebook. 9.2  Ghost trains By the mid-1800s ghost shows and horror displays, walk-in theatrical productions that incorporated illusions, actors and static models, were a major part of the fairground scene, starting initially with rather lowly imitations of the metropolitan Phantasmagorias and galleries of fear. With the advent of steam trains, with their thunderous noise, gushing smoke, rapid increase in size as they grew nearer and horrific crash-scenes, observers had begun to think of these as reminiscent of the Phantasmagoria shows. Infernal and spectral associations began to proliferate. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad (1843), a dark novella, parodying Unitarians, depicted a crowd of unctuous passengers being shunted off to Hell by Satan. As early as 1860, one of Hennetier’s Diableries stereoscope cards featured the ‘Chemin de Fer Infernel’  / ‘The Infernal Railroad’, a train driven by a leering devil and, six years later, Charles Dickens’s short story ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866) revealed some of the ways in which the railways had become a haunted technology. Phantom and ghost entertainments persisted in the milieu of the fairground,  new spectral illusions of the stage like ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ being ­incorporated into Randall Williams’s ‘Great Ghost Show’, a regular attraction at  the World’s Fair, at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, London. Alternately, an audience seated in a mock-up of a static railcar (or real one as in Hale’s Tours of the World), could be given the illusion of travelling vast

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d­ istances by way of moving panoramas and dioramas unscrolling behind the vehicles’ windows. The original form of fairground railways, the ‘scenic’ and ‘pleasure’ railways that actually moved along small networks of tracks, appeared in the late nineteenth century. No doubt Hippodrome-style equine circuits would have been a viable ‘dark ride’ (after all, pit-ponies had been pulling wagons in the darkness underground for over a century by this point), but the size of structures needed to accommodate a steady stream of paying riders, the distance an impressive illusion would have to span and the space needed to turn horses made this entertainment idea unattractive. Steam engines themselves would be too large, costly and smoky to tow wagons of passengers underground. The real advent of ‘dark’ (subterranean or mainly subterranean) fairground rides came in the form of Tunnels of Love where small vessels conveyed the customers into fabricated grottoes (with multifarious possibilities for young lovers) along narrow canals. Leon Cassidy, the owner of the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company, patented the first single-rail electric dark ride in 1928. Pretzel rides were named as such because of the sharp double-twists in the track. Joseph Emberton opened the first actual ghost train roller-coaster-style ride in 1930, the name derived from Arnold Ridley’s popular stage play. This was built on a large scale at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and consisted of a small ‘car’ running on a looping rail-track predominantly in darkness but with sudden flashes and lights to scare the riders. There were sudden r­oller-coaster-style drops and swoops in the rails and the ghost train craze soon caught on at pleasure fairs throughout Britain and in the USA. With the spreading fame of film monsters, Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong and the Wolfman began to appear as static or mobile artificial figures with moving eyes looming out of the darkness at the side of the track. Peter Cushing notably compared Hammer Horror films to the ‘delights of a joy-ride in the ghost train at a fun fair’ (cited in Huckvale, 2010: 1). Flickering ceiling lights and localised spotlights augmented the horror shocks, as the figures of monsters jerked towards the viewer who was caught inside the small car, which shuddered with the track’s twists and turns. Sirens signalled danger, hands reached down from the rigging above the riders, string cobwebs brushed their hair and, in the more sophisticated rides, steam, moisture or odours were sprayed into the air. It is no accident that this mode of entertainment ride, where individual cars moved forward on tracks, was adopted for the Yorvick Viking journey into the past or in the fictional tourist route through Jurassic Park in the eponymous film. In terms of general Gothic aesthetics, there are three different levels of visual interest in the ghost train attraction: the frontage (often elaborately designed as

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a ruined castle, decaying mansion or hotel) incorporating entrance and trackdoors, the rail cars themselves and the design of the track-route sets and props (often appearing on several floors). The façade is sometimes a collection of painted flats and signs with leering monster faces, skulls, demons and various portrayals of spectres. If one motif does dominate, it is usually a yawning skull or ghost’s face or monster’s head swollen to huge proportions reminiscent of a Hell-mouth structure from the Miracle plays. Axes, knives or weapons are sometimes part of the overall design and the lettering is usually large and prominently positioned to gain the fairground audience’s attention. The lettering often seems ripped, decayed or to be swirling phantasmally. Alternately, bright garish colours, yellow and red, are used to suggest hellfire, or green to suggest reptilian or other creaturely qualities. In the case of the more ornate frontages, the structure appears built up like a bumpy or uneven stucco to suggest a more permanent structure and live stagehands in Gothic dress are sometimes used to support this effect. Different names (‘House of Horror’, ‘Horror Ride’, ‘Ghost Safari’, ‘Carnival of Death’, etc.) for the ride can subtly alter the overall signification of the whole attraction and this is sometimes mirrored in its general design and lay-out, and fashions in and resurgences of particular cinematic monsters can bring old favourites to bear, occupying prominent settings in new façades. At Brighton Pier’s Haunted Hotel attraction, a structure

57  Façade of ghost train at Jahremaktfest, 2011

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strongly reminiscent of Disneyland’s horror-rides, a statue of Frankenstein stands alongside the payment booth. The ghost train cars can be of a standard round ‘dodgem’ or oblong shape with skeletons or ghosts painted on the side or, in the more theme-based examples, each car can seem to be a compacted, naturalistic human skull or a monstrous animal. The design of such shows, created to draw the largest possible group of clientele amongst rival attractions, demands a great deal of ingenuity and a canny eye for novelties and trends in horror as well as an understanding of the variegated tastes of different age groups of horror fans. The 1980s saw the gradual decline of fairground ghost train rides but rail travel itself lost none of its potential for imaginative fear. Freddie Francis’s Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express (1974), Aldo Lado’s Night Train Murders (1975), and Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (2008) are notable works as well as Gideon Raff’s gruesome Train (2008), which built on the success of the Hostel ‘torture porn’ films. In their turn, ghost trains have acquired their own spectral lore possibly partly due to the discovery of an actual dead body, that of Elmer McCurdy, an American bank robber, found inside the ghost train attraction at the Patterson Carnival Show, the cadaver painted with coloured paint, hanging from a noose in the dark. The TV detective shows Trial and Retribution (1997–2009), The Bridge (2015–), Endeavour (2014–) and Midsomer Murders (1997–) all feature murders or disappearances on fairground ghost trains. A group of rash young travellers start their descent into mayhem by riding Captain Spaulding’s hand-propelled ghost train ride in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003). The painter of spring-jawed aliens, H. R. Giger, created his own ghost trains replete with images of phantoms and hanged men and wrote of the sexual connotations of such amusements. The skull-armoured, snake-covered ghost train of the film Species (1995), where the surging train is code for alien DNA, is also his invention. There are small collectible ghost trains such as ‘The Journey of Doom’, a hand-crafted and ‘illuminated’ ‘slaughter and monster’ model train collection. Pleasure-grounds often run Halloween Haunted train rides and even supply ‘phantom’ train stations where passengers can disembark. After touring widely, Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2009–14) with its superb array of effects finally returned to the home of such attractions, Blackpool, and impressed local audiences with its thoroughly contemporary evocation of destruction, violence and personal histories lost. The golden days of ghost trains and ghost train themed films are remembered in Tristan Bates’s portmanteau horror play The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (2016). Derren Brown’s ghost train remains a firm favourite with horror ride fans.

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9.3  Horror environments and itineraries, escape rooms, Halloween hayrides and tourist attractions Though the Phantasmagoria shows and Cabaret du Néant and Cabaret de L’Enfer (fl. 1890s–1920s) number amongst the first modern immersive horror environments, one cannot discount the influence of several other types of attraction in shaping contemporary live horror entertainment. We have discussed Curtius’s ‘Caverne des Grands Voleurs’ and Tussaud’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ in section 3.2, but the rise of fairground ‘freak shows’ and also the opening of dungeons and torture chambers to the public are also important in the evolution of Gothic media. Inhuman as most so-called ‘freak shows’ are (as revealed in Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932)), the so-called ‘monstrous’ other has been a key feature of Gothic literature from Frankenstein onwards. Torture Museums have also proved influential in this respect. The distinctions between museums that simply exhibit historical instruments of torture as in Amsterdam and San Giminiano and those torture and incarceration-themed fantasy attractions with live actors such as the London Dungeons have often become negligible over recent years. Ghost houses have proved another major influence on today’s horror environments. The first play ghost house was constructed by George Orton and Charles Spooner. The house appeared as an Edwardian fairground attraction around 1915. This structure still exists at Hollycombe Steam Fair, Liphook and the present façade features a red roof, steps to an entrance, and exit, and a stage between these. Above the stage are various mock windows featuring a skeleton holding a candle, a white spider and web and long-haired ghoul all above the legend: ‘Ye haunted cottage’. Below the sign a grill seems to open dauntingly onto the interior darkness. Many imitation amusements followed, including fairground misshapen and ‘Crooked Cottages’ with tilted or see-saw floors and ceilings that sloped suddenly down constricting the bodies of the children entering the rooms as if they were shrinking Alices in Wonderland. In the 1960s, Marx created the ‘Hootin Hollow Haunted House’ toy where the roof buckled, a bowler-hatted skeleton jumped up the chimney and various windows and doors featured scares. The first version of Disneyland’s ‘dark ride’ attraction, ‘Haunted Mansion’, combining the conventions of ghost trains and haunted houses, opened in 1969 and proved immensely popular. This spawned a host of imitators such as ‘Netherworld’, ‘13th Gate’, ‘The Darkness’ and ‘Rocky Point Haunted House’ and, in 1995, Halloween Productions created the video ‘How to Create Your Own Haunted House’, which sold over 20,000 copies. In the 1970s, the first ghost walks emerged in England, where the audience was led by a guide on a short tour around haunted locations. Originating in York, these tours probably

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stemmed from organised itineraries of great houses where attention was drawn at intervals to ghostly legends regarding the buildings’ history. The ‘Necrobus’ in London is a mobile version of these guided tours. Some haunted houses and rides became lucrative businesses in America in the late 1990s, a fact not lost on the film industry. Rob Zombie was designing a new horror house when he thought of the idea for his House of 1000 Corpses (2003). McKamey Manor in San Diego, the most recent in a growing number of extreme haunted houses where guests are limited to four a week-end and vetted for health conditions, is a far cry from Orton and Charles Spooner’s original. Haunted hayrides, experiences, days, theme parks, zombie runs, mazes and journeys around the labyrinths, like those below the Berlin bunkers, spread across the USA and Europe, the movement gathering pace between 1997 and 2005. Many of these attractions involve special effects, frightening automata and live actors. As Emma McEvoy discusses, the use of live personnel in Gothic spectacles dates back at least as far as the Phantasmagoria shows and William Beckford’s Gothic pageant for Lord Nelson in 1800 where the progress of the company to the upper floors of Fonthill Abbey was lit ‘by certain mysterious living figures at different intervals, dressed in hooded gowns, and standing with wax-torches in their hands’ (McEvoy, 2016: 41). A special sub-group of the horror house is the Hell house event, usually operated by Christian denominations. A 2002 documentary, George Ratliff’s Hell House, follows the establishment of one of these houses by Trinity Church (Assemblies of God) in Texas. In Britain several TV programmes, notably the Dungeons and Dragons-derived children’s quest-game Knightmare (1987–11) and the Crystal Maze (1990–95) anticipated live quest games involving some dark elements. Slightly later, impressive films such as Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997) and James Wan’s Saw (2004), dealing with the attempts of small groups of people to escape incarceration in ingeniously constrictive settings, prefigured the escape room genre of games and horror environments involving player challenges. Inspired by the films of George A. Romero, zombie games and comics, the first ‘zombie walk’ event took place at the GenCon gaming convention in Milwaukee in 2000. This was followed by numerous diverse zombie events including charity runs involving hundreds of thousands of participants made up like members of the decomposing and bleeding living dead, and large scale games such as ‘2.8 Hours Later’ (taking after Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later (2002)), where players cross a given environment trying to avoid capture by zombies, are popular at university campuses. There are even tamer and sanitised ‘Family Zombie Runs’ such as ‘Run for Your Life’. The earliest escape room attraction, ‘Origin’, was created in Silicon Valley in 2006. Takao Kato developed fully immersive real escape games (REGs)

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in 2007 and several related escape events were developed in Kyoto, Japan over the following few years. Attila Guyrkovics’s creative team Parapark in Hungary originated the format whereby players paid to be locked into a room and discover articles and solve puzzles that facilitate their release. Once again, cinema seemed to be part of the ongoing creative intermedial synergy: in Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña’s Fermat’s Room / La Habitación de Fermat (2007), mathematicians and inventors have to solve a series of problems in order to escape a room with walls closing in upon them. Escape room attractions can prove particularly lucrative and in 2015 there were nearly 3,000 escape room venues throughout the world. The success and increasing ambition of a TV series like Release the Hounds (2013–) is indicative of a taste for escape and survival dramas. The series was originally filmed near Hemel Hempstead (the fantasy setting being a haunted English country estate). The makers, Gogglebox Entertainment, learning of plans to make similar shows in Scandinavia, Russia, Denmark, Lithuania and the Netherlands, transferred the set to the Lithuanian forests for a more authentic feel. The iconography of many horror game environments are derived almost exclusively from film, with props such as flashing lights in darkness, chainsaws, maquettes of hanging men, oubliettes, cells and cages, mock or real blood, asylum beds, surgeons trolleys, figures in masks, movement in sacks, the sudden display of monstrous faces, and hands suddenly reaching from walls or ceilings. There are large scale operations like the different themed attractions at Thorpe Park, with their trommels, perspex walls and two-way mirrors, and more intimate themed walk-through attractions like the ‘Dracula Experience’ in Whitby. Part of the visual impact of this latter amusement is the black shop frontage, four arched windows, red lettering and moulded vampire faces. Madame Tussaud’s ‘Scream’ uses the ‘asylum taken over by its inmates’ paradigm effectively in the basement of the famed wax model collection. ‘Hell in a Cell’, a game for two to ten players and lasting one and a half hours, utilises old cells underneath Bristol Crown Court. The organisers advise customers to immerse themselves in the ‘reality’ of the show and to imagine it as a cross between Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and  Crystal Maze. Every Halloween, Yorkshire Scare Ground Scream Park provide a disturbing real-time horror experience in their 24-acre property Hell Lane in Heath near Wakefield. And in Dublin, Macnas performed ‘Sleep No More’ as part of the 2016 Bram Stoker Festival, an interactive street performance with towering, fire-breathing monsters, as well as their annual Halloween parade bringing chaos to the streets of Galway city (Macnas, 2016).

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58  ‘Hell in a Cell’ poster, 2015

Finally, Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ (2015) in Weston-Super-Mare, with its broken carousel, dead Cinderella, crashed carriage and recurrent references to death and torture (possibly copied from ‘Fun Land’ in the Father Ted TV episode: ‘Good Luck, Father Ted’ (1995)), bridges the gap between fear environment and art installation. 9.4  Gothic installations It could be argued that many of the attractions covered in other sections of this collection – cabinets of curiosity, the Eidophusikon, Phantasmagoria, waxworks, dioramas, panoramas, Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2009–14),

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etc. – would satisfy some of the modern definitions of ‘installation’. The older seventeenth-century sense of the English word refers to the act itself of installing, originally a ceremony of induction. By the 1880s, this sense was broadened to include the setting up of a mechanical apparatus. Citing their all-immersive status, sonic and visual properties and three-dimensional structure, recent reference works indicate the Exhibition Lab at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (founded in 1869) and Disneyland (1955) amongst formative installations. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in the Capucine Convent (1799), William Beckford’s celebratory events at Fonthill and Jack Bologna’s show involving mechanical fireworks, optical experiments and ghostly elements certainly answer to these requirements for installations. In 1853 there was a most spectacular London street show involving beautifully coloured mechanical figures moving in time to wild music. At one end of the stage was a cavern ‘containing some supernatural and mysterious being of the fiend or vampire school’ and a Turk who raised a dagger over a fallen slave (Altick, 1978: 432). After a certain period: ‘the fiend in the gloomy cavern whips suddenly round and glares with his green eye’ as if to leap on the other actors (1978: 433). With a great crash, ‘the fiend in the corner rushes forth from his lair with a portentous howl’ only to be defeated by a mechanical Queen Victoria (1978: 433). Such mechanical installations prefigure both horror theme parks but also video and animated installations in art galleries. Marcel Duchamp with his readymades (ordinary objects reconfigured in transgressive ways) and Kurt Schwitter’s site-specific Merzbau maze-like assemblages are often cited as early forms of installation, yet from a Gothic perspective, Richard Wagner’s multi-media operas, Gesamtkunstwerk (1849) and the Cabaret du Néant and Cabaret de L’Enfer (fl. 1890s–1920s) with their successive horrors, sculptures, hidden recesses and audience interaction, might also be seen as viable precursors. American innovators like Allan Kaprow have expanded the imaginative vista of installations into the creation of large environments and installations that have also evolved into spaces of complex intermedial interaction between architecture, sculpture and live action videos. The artists’ intention as a defining factor in installation theory might seem to imply that, in this context, visual art theory has eschewed the qualms of literary criticism in relation to Intentionalism. The Gothic potential of installations has been recorded across different media. In an updating of Oscar Wilde’s most famous novel, Will Self’s Dorian, an Imitation (2002), the eponymous anti-hero contracts an asymptomatic form of AIDS and infects friends, acquaintances and other sexual partners with the virus. The results of these events – Dorian remains visibly unchanged whilst his

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body suffers the traumas of the disease – are captured on his masterwork, the ‘Cathode Narcissus’ video installation. Bruce Conner’s Couch (1963), a work of ‘Funk’ art where a sculpture decays into a rotting Victorian couch with candle wax dripped over it is one of the most disturbing installations of its era, perhaps inspired by Miss Havisham’s home in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Tony Oursler’s work Skulls and Still Lives (1998) was based in three rooms and involved a series of floor-level skulls, some with lips and teeth projected on them, one juxtaposed with crystals and another with jewellery dripping from its eye and nose sockets. A camera obscura shows a huge fly on a wall of another room and the words ‘Interpreted as Erotic Look’ are projected onto tiny buildings. Oursler has commented: ‘Growing up a Catholic, Satan played a big part in my religious education’, and he has talked of his work with ‘the demonic’ and the association of the devil with new media’ (Oursler, 2001: 286). ‘Imponderable’, his 2017 exhibition at MOMA New York, explores interfaces between the occult and technology in a 5-D environment with updated versions of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ and effects inspired by spirit photography and the paranormal. Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman and Banks Violette are artists whose installations draw upon dark, spectral visions and Gothic themes. Scottish artist, Gordon’s, video installation Twenty-Four Hour Psycho (1993), stretches out Alfred Hitchcock’s original film to last a day, playing at two frames a second. Such a project exposes the viewer’s reception to a new self-aware scrutiny, dealing with the film-watcher’s complicity in themes of deception and violence. In Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), Gordon juxtaposes William Friedkin’s Exorcist (1973) and Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette (1943), revealing an interface of scenes with a young woman receiving angelic visions and another conventionally portrayed being possessed by the devil. A much discussed scene seemingly reveals a crowd of nuns at Lourdes witnessing the throes of Reagan’s traumatised body yet, since the films are of different lengths and are looped to run continuously, there are often jarring and random juxtapositions. Cindy Sherman’s cibachrome assemblages and extreme close-ups of masks, manikins and her own face realised in garish colours draw upon ideas of infernal masquerade in confronting norms of portrayal. Banks Violette’s ‘Untitled’ is founded upon a performance by the rock band Sunn O))). During the show the lead singer was encapsulated in a black coffin. Violette steeped the band’s stage equipment in salt, an ironic reference to mortality, and attempted to preserve the ‘lingering aura of ominous phenomena’ (Violette, 2016). David Redfern and his team designed a ‘Gothic Immersive Event’ as a climax to The Dark Heart of Cinema season, 2014, with props, magicians in r­ esidence

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and interactive sets designed to enhance the viewing experience of the public at the Riverside. Gothic media have proved instrumental in the ongoing dissolution of boundaries between art, public spectacle and entertainment. Gothic expression and Freud’s essay on the Uncanny have influenced a wide range of installation artists. Stan Douglas’s film installation Der Sandmann (1995) reveals the way that German urban planning since the 1960s has negated the Schrebergärten ethos, based on nineteenth-century ideas that the poor should be able to grow their own food in gardens at the heart of the city. The installation comprises two projections that are discrete but also coalesce at points. The films were made in the Ufa studios and shot on grainy 16mm film. In his installation project The Uncanny (1993), Mike Kelley curates a series of highly significant objects from his youth and juxtaposes these with sculptural works in an ongoing exploration of early memories and horror. Carolee Schneemann’s multi-media installation Known/Unknown-Plague Column (1996) explores cellular and personal representations of the body, focusing on representations of health, illness and the so-called objectivity of medical science. This work was inspired by a Plague Column constructed by monks in 1750. Jennifer Linton’s installation The Disobedient Dollhouse (2014), uses images culled from horror films and Gothic novels, which are made into three-dimensional, lithographed paper sculptures to expose the sentimentality of nostalgic visions of childhood. Zoe Beloff and Christine Kennedy, together with Tony Oursler, discussed above, are those major contemporary installation artists most concerned with spectrality, hauntings and séances. Beloff’s Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. is a black and white four-channel DVD installation with surround sound. This eerie spectacle involves the recreation of Baron Albert Von Shrenk Notzing’s séances with the medium Eva Carrière observed by a doctor at the faculty of Medicine at Lyon. Two video machines project images on a central silver screen, and life-size images of the actors seem to rise in the space between the gathered viewers. Laser shows and Urban Projection Mapping, where video displays cast coloured and moving scenes, images and texts over the exteriors of buildings, including historical structures like Enniscorthy Castle or Whitby Abbey, can make for genuinely awe-inspiring immersive experiences. Gothic installation art also involves text and live readings as well as video and projection technology. In Christine Kennedy’s The White Lady’s Casket (1996), an installation at Bishops’ House, Sheffield, fragments of historical text were randomly chosen in a process resembling that of automatic writing from historic accounts of the building and were distributed about the house, in the walls, floors, windows and doors. Over the period of the installation, in imitation of a poltergeist-type movement of objects, the artist re-positioned the

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59  Christine Kennedy, scripts from The White Lady’s Casket, 1996

texts. Kennedy comments: ‘This procedure and the titling of the work allude to the two stories of hauntings associated with the house, the White Lady apparition, and the poltergeist that opens the small locked casket in the bedchamber […] By manipulating language and materials new spaces are opened where meanings can emerge. Gothic is the grand tradition of the opening of these spaces’ (Kennedy, 2016, personal correspondence). 9.5  Performance art, body art, tattoos and facepaint Whether realised as a folly, a painted backdrop for Matthew Lewis’s Castle Spectre, a dark masquerade, an Alexander McQueen exhibition or a production by Scorpius Dance, Gothic is performative. Live, videoed and photographed performance art is currently a growth area of Gothic creative expression. Gabriela Fridriksdottir’s performances involve a cast of mutant characters with distorted faces kneaded from bread-dough and draped in bandages in Katharsis (2004) and the disturbing Operazione Poetika Selfportrait (2002). Erik Tidemann’s live performances in the Norwegian woods enact nightmarish ­rituals and involve using the bodies of dead animals. He states: ‘I do deliver carcasses to Satanic black metal concerts. I know it’s filthy and does not show much decency and honour for the dead animal. But the kicks […] I like trash, gore, blood, nunchuck catapults, shitty monsters, violence and over-used ­clichés

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like that. I like images that punch the viewer in the stomach’ (cited in Gavin, 2008: 154). Tidemann’s violent performances where he throws Molotov cocktails in the snow also foreground his own body in the spectacle, often stripped to the waist, his face hidden under masks made from heads of deer. Catherine Spooner writes: ‘Contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle, provoking  disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented’ (Spooner, 2006: 63). For some involved with Goth and Gothic lifestyles and dark themes,  their own bodies evolve into their ultimate creative territory. This is sometimes because their bodies can become the living paradigm of their dreams and nightmares, a culmination of their art’s temporary triumph over nature. For others involved in fetishistic ‘Death chic’ rejection of the body, their body modifications can be a kind of personal sublimation, a jettisoning of self. Diablo Delenfer has spent a small fortune on manipulating his corporeal appearance so as to resemble a Mephistopheles figure. He has a forked tongue, horns that protrude from his forehead and tapering, sharp fangs. Yet this ‘devil’ is a splatter-punk version of Satan, a row of metal studs inserted into his crown to create an infernal Mohican crest. Erik Sprague, ‘The Lizardman’, is also well known because of his body modification, again with sharpened teeth, split tongue, green lips and an overall body tattoo of green scales. Sprague performs as an act in freak exhibitions and other sideshows but also interacts with dancers and ballerinas in Gothic burlesque. There are obvious links between such shows and the fetish clubs that influenced Clive Barker in the researching of the look of his Hellraiser (1987) ‘body horror’ film. Within the Renaissance of tattoo art due to the success Kat Von D on the TV show LA Ink and other related programmes, Goth and Gothic tattoo and body piercing are thriving, with mainstream dark companies like Alchemy and Nemesis selling jewellery for ear, nose and lip piercing. The sales rhetoric for nipple piercing jewellery such as Blackline barbells, Darkside black closure rings and Hematite Clip-ins involves the pursuit of sensations of edginess, hardcore commitment and the making of dramatic statements. Gothic tattooists specialise in dark roses, Celtic trellises and borderwork, inverted crosses, winsome Lolitas, bats, dark angel wings, dragons and skulls often with red, black, green and blue remaining the most dominant colours. Dark crosses combined with Celtic tracery: fronds, tendrils and spirals are perennially popular. For those who wish their tattoos to be temporary, there are ranges of transfers, which look convincing enough and last for up to three days. Just as in the case of Don Post where a film make-up artist applied his skills to form his own brand, Christien Tinsley, who was nominated for an Oscar for his prosthetics and effects, has marketed a series of transfers in his own name. Tinsley offers

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60  Cross tattoo design, 2016

a colourful ‘Christopher Lee’ Hammer Dracula with mansion background and also bandaged mummies transfers. Three-dimensional FX transfers are also available to mimic slightly indented or raised features like vampire bites. For those who like their scarification to look genuine, these transfers run as far as gory ‘Supertoos’, sheets of gory wounds augmented by dabs of scabby blood paint from a bottle. Taking the make-up one stage further, ‘Startled FX’ offer foam prosthetics such as ‘Killer Clown’, ‘Hillbilly’ and ‘Mutant’. Theatrical Dracula and Frankenstein face-paints date back to the 1960s but today even low budget chain stores like Poundland carry ‘Kids Dracula Paint Step-by-Step’ and similar kits to give children the faces of zombies. The Mexican Dia De Los Muertos fashion has given new style and impetus to horror make-up. There are ‘Gothic Skeleton Face Painting Make-up Tutorials’ on YouTube. Multivalent medial cross-fertilisation thrives in these areas: Lado

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Alexi’s dolls and manikins feature elaborate Halloween and witch make-up, which is then mimicked by real models in fashion magazines like Hype for their readers to imitate. Online sites such as ‘Popsugar’ offers advice on Halloween body paint and this medium is also the subject of masterclasses at the largest stores in San Francisco. Sarah Swingle from Boulder, Colorado, is self-styled as a ‘transformational’ ‘extreme’ body artist, and can create beautifully executed if bizarre effects of grotesque creatures emerging from her chest. The ongoing somatic projects of Mireille Suzanne Francette Porteho, who has adopted the name Orlan, include the cutting, excision and augmentation of aspects of her body, which has been used to evoke horror and disgust in her large audience. The artist recites her texts and theories on the posthuman as flaps of skin are lifted and sub-dermal body implants are inserted in filmed operations. She invokes the Gothic through the perceiver’s fear and projected, vicarious pain. In her voluntary and creative submission to, indeed promotion of, transformational science and its power to shape the body, Orlan inherits and supplants the Gothic scenarios of deranged scientists experimenting on trapped victims. Other artists like Alice Newstead and Constant Elevation use hooks to suspend their bleeding bodies, in order to draw attention to human cruelty towards animals, notably in shark-fishing techniques. Gunther von Hagens’s ‘Body Worlds’ exhibits with their flayed muscular structure and exposed anatomy remind one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s écorchés. Fragonard served as a professor of anatomy (1756–61) and was responsible for the flaying and preservation of hundreds of dead bodies, re-arranging some in tableaux as riders on skinned horses. Von Hagens has pioneered the use of ‘plastination’ where resins or polymers are substituted for body fluids and the faceless, anonymous bodies, in various states of subdermal exposure, are exhibited in large warehouse-type spaces interspersed with potted plants. Von Hagens, who advertises for members of the public to sell their bodies to him for use after death, has been characterised by the popular media as a transgressive Dr Death or Victor Frankenstein figure, with no respect for the sanctity of human remains. The relation of these public exhibitions of such anonymised bodies to the evolution of memento mori motifs seems obvious. In essence, one might ask how such exhibits differ from the stacks of bleached skulls displayed in church crypts and charnel houses but, though Von Hagens’s exhibits are often observed to be clinical and sanitised, human bodies that show muscle and tissue rupture post-Enlightenment Western taboos on exposure and burial. From the 1990s onwards, the usage of bodies, blood and body parts in artistic contexts has become an important aesthetic preoccupation. Anthony Noel Kelly made casts of stolen dissected body parts for an exhibition at the London Contemporary Art Fair. Marc Quinn has made self-portraits by soaking a cast

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of his own head in ten pints of his blood and immersing this in frozen silicone to avoid decay and the danger of infection. The aim was apparently to create an effigy closer to reality than bronze or marble. Joel-Peter Witkin is an artist who works directly with death – some of his morbid tableaux feature actual corpses or body parts. Catherine Spooner writes that Witkin is ‘perhaps the most thoroughly and consistently Gothic of any artist’ because, though his photographs with their historical pastiches and horror evoke Gothic performativity, the way that they reinstate the spiritual existence of their subjects embodies a ‘new kind of Gothic revival’ (Spooner, 2006: 85). Some photographs, their surfaces darkly smudged or scratched, reminding of the treatment of Henri Ballocq’s prints, reveal transsexuals and amputees posed in mythological tableaux. ‘Woman Once a Bird, Los Angeles’ (1990) shows a woman, her waist constricted and back disfigured by scars where imaginary wings have been torn off, turned away from the viewer. His models, often particularly those humans traditionally relegated away from the public gaze because of their bodily conditions, assume a new mystery and beauty in these photographs, which re-inscribe so-called ‘disabled’ people and their pain into the history of painting and photography.

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Ainsworth, Harrison (1850) The Work of Harrison Ainsworth Esq., Vol XI, Jack Shepherd, A Romance, London: Chapman and Hall. Alchemy (2014) ‘Alchemy 1977 England’, www.alchemyengland.com/pendants/272– angel-ring.html (accessed 5 November 2016). Alcott, Louisa May (1997a) A Long, Fatal Love Chase, Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press. Alcott, Louisa May (1997b) Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louise May Alcott, ed. Madeleine Stern, New York: William Morrow and Co. Altick, Richard D. (1978) The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press. Anon. (1792) ‘A View of the Eidophusikon’, European Magazine (March), 180–1. Anon. (1798) ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ in E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds) Gothic Documents, A Sourcebook 1700–1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 182–4. Anon. (1825) Anecdotes of Lord Byron, London: Knight and Lacey. Anon. (1828) ‘Louis Boulanger: La Ronde du Sabbat’, Le Mercure, journal de la literature et des beaux arts, Paris. Anon. (1909) ‘Review of D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Sealed Room’, Biograph Bulletin, Los Angeles, 24–5. Arnold, Jean (2011) Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture, Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington. Austen, Jane ([1817] 1972) Northanger Abbey, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Baxter-Wright, Emma (2014) ‘Fashion’ in Chris Roberts, Hywel Livingstone and Emma Baxter-Wright, Gothic: The Evolution of a Dark Subculture, London: Goodman, 174–213. Belford, Barbara (1996) Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Blair, Robert (1802) The Poetical Works of Robert Blair, Containing The Grave Etc., London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

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References E-mail interviews quoted Jasmine Becket-Griffith (2016) Charles Burns (2016) Sam Carless (2016) Alice Eaton (2015) Christine Filipak (2016), Monolith Graphics, on behalf of Joseph Vargo Bob Gray (2015) Anne Jackson (2016) Christine Kennedy (2016) Stuart Kolakovic (2015) Charles Alexander Moffat (2016) Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) Trish Shaw (2015) Catherine Spooner (2014)

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Index

Adam, Nicholas Sebastien 71 Addams, Charles 207 Addams Family, The (Charles Addams) 207 Addams Family, The (David Levy) 30, 127 Addison, Joseph 32 Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia 9 Aldana Reyes, Xavier xiv, 3–4 Alien (dir. Ridley Scott) 52 Allen, Edward 64 ‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’ (Stephen King) 189 ‘Alonzo the Brave’ (Matthew Lewis) 71 Anelay, Henry 56, 60–2 Antiquarian, The (Walter Scott) 157 Argento, Dario 3, 128 Auch ein Totentanz (Alfred Rethel) 56 Baker, Roy Ward 23 Banks, Thomas 71 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 156, 159 Basil (Wilkie Collins) 87 Báthory (dir. David Eick and Joel Silver) 3 Bauhaus (group) 43, 67, 124, 172, 202 Bava, Mario 134 Beardsley, Aubrey 66 Becket-Griffith, Jasmine xiv, 54, 153 Beckford, William 9, 40, 89, 235, 238–9

Belmer, Hans 80 Beloff, Zoe 111, 162, 240 Berlioz, Hector 42 Bernhardt, Sarah 11, 30 Bewick, Thomas 54 Bierce, Ambrose 85 Biographical Dictionary of Engravers (Joseph Strutt) 54 Birthday Party, The (group) 67 Black Sunday (dir. Mario Bava) 134 Blair, Robert 6, 133 Blake, William 10, 42, 185, 239 Bloch, Robert 97 Blood and Roses (Roger Vadim) 42 Blow, Isabella 72 Bluebeard (George Colman) 35 Boaden, James 35 Böcklin, Arnold 25, 52 Botting, Fred 1, 8, 12–13, 153 Bosch, Hieronymus 2, 9, 47–8, 52, 96 Boulanger, Louis 11, 51, 107, 110, 132, 141–4 Bout, Dieric 2, 47 Boyle, Danny 235 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) 125, 209 Brontë, Charlotte 54, 76, 78, 104, 211

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Index Brontë, Emily 67 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 27 Buck, Samuel 24 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon) 3, 128 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 90, 96, 112, 190 Burke, Edmund 6, 9 Burne-Jones, Philip 51 Burney, Frances 40 Byfield, Mary 56 Byron, Glennis 5, 163 Byron, Lord George Gordon 11, 32, 36, 206 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Robert Wiene) 66 Camden, William 8 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 49 Carceri d’invenzione (Giovanni Battista Piranesi) 23 Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu) 22, 41–2, 164, 194, 214 Carrie (dir. Brian de Palma) 22 Carter, Angela 76 ‘Cask of Amontillado, The’ (Edgar Allan Poe) 120 Castle of Otranto, The (Hugh Walpole) 1, 9, 17, 36, 62, 82, 105, 122, 130, 194, 205, 210, 214 Castle Spectre, The (Matthew Lewis) 59 Castle, Terry 11, 39 Cecilia (Frances Burney) 40 Champfleury (Jules François FleuryHusson) 75 Chaney, Lon 38 Chapman, Jake and Dinos 2, 5, 58, 72, 77, 92 Clench, Zebb 41 Cobham, Lord 27 Collins, Jess 164 Collins, Wilkie 37, 87 Collishaw, Matt 86, 116 Colman, George 35

257 Comus (John Milton) 40 Coppola, Francis Ford 93, 122, 125, 209 Corbijn, Anton 67 Cornelys, Mrs Teresa 39 Corpse in the Wax Works, The (John Dickson Carr) 76 Countess Dracula (dir. Peter Sasdy) 23 Cox, Jeffery M. 35, 103 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 48–9 Cranny-Francis, Anne 52 Crary, Jonathan 11, 108, 110 Creep (dir. Christopher Smith) 25 Cricket on the Hearth, The (Charles Dickens) 102 Crimson Peak, A Gothic Romance (dir. Guillermo del Toro) 3, 5, 153, 193 Crivelli, Carlo 8, 47 Cruikshank, Robert 55 Cuoghi, Roberto 73 Curtius, Dr Philippe 75 Dacre, Charlotte 58 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 24, 50, 155, 168 Danielewski, Mark Z. 179 Dayes, Edward 24 Dead Can Dance (group) 67 Deane, Hamilton 67 Delacroix, Eugène 51 De Loutherbourg, P. J. 2, 22, 24, 35, 40, 50, 100 Del Toro, Guillermo 5, 85, 95, 117, 193, 229 De Madrano, Julián 1 De Palma, Brian 22 De Sade, Marquis Donatien Alphonse François 2, 75, 104, 120, 215 De Quincey, Thomas 40 Dickens, Charles 76, 78, 97, 102, 112–13, 215, 230, 239 Divine Comedy, The (Gustave Doré) 56 ‘Doll-Master, The’ (Joyce Carol Oates) 79 Doré, Gustave 37, 56, 132, 164

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Dracula (Bram Stoker) 8, 12–13, 20, 22, 26, 51, 76, 98–9, 129–30, 133, 162, 180, 184, 186, 197–8, 207, 214 Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher) 122, 124–5, 180, 193 Dracula (dir. Tod Browning) 121–3 du Maurier, Daphne 79 Dürer, Albrecht 55 Edison, Thomas A. 63, 85, 93, 118 Egan, Pierce the Younger 60 Eick, David and Joel Silver 3 Etex, Antoine 22 Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick) 42 Exorcist, The (dir. William Friedkin) 73 Faerie Queene, The 27, 193 Faust (Charles Gounod) 36 Faust (J. W. von Goethe) 51, 110 Faust (W. G. Wills) 36 Fields of the Nephilim 43, 68, 175, 190, 203 Fisher, Terence 122, 124–5, 180, 193 Fitzball, Edward 35–6 Flaubert, Gustave 25 Fleetwood (William Godwin) 75 Flying Dutchman, The (Edward Fitzball) 36 Flying Dutchman, The, or the Demon Ship (Frederick Marryat) 60 Fontainville Forest (James Boaden) 35 Fragonard, Honoré 99, 244 Frankenstein (dir. J. Searle Dawley) 120 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) 51, 56, 93, 129, 133, 162, 180, 197–8, 214, 234 Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (dir. Terence Fisher) 124–5 Freaks (Tod Browning) 234 Freud, Sigmund 7, 11, 82, 156, 240 Friedkin, William 73 Friedrich, Caspar David 22, 25, 51, 139 Fuseli, Henry 10, 40, 42, 49–52, 55–6, 76, 79, 120–1, 141, 149, 162, 185, 199, 205, 211, 216, 220–1

Index Ghost-Seer, The (Friedrich Schiller) 40 Giger H. R. 10, 50, 52, 233 Gilbert, Frederick 56 Gilbert, W. S. and Arthur Sullivan 43 God’s Man (Lynd Ward) 58 Godwin, William 75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 51, 86, 110, 137 Goya, Francisco 10, 50, 72, 91, 138, 142 Grave, The (Robert Blair) Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) 239 Greenaway, Peter 38, 89 Gregory, Amy 77–8 Griffith, D. W. 22, 120, 202 Grün, Hans Baldung 48 Grünwald, Matthias 48 Halloween III, Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace) 39 Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 46 ‘Haunted Man, The’ (Charles Dickens) 112 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 62 Hide and Seek (Robert Louis Stevenson) 146 Hill, Susan 37–8 Historia, et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis (Anthony Wood) 55 Hitchcock, Alfred 97, 124, 126, 128, 198, 239 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 7, 36, 40, 85, 164 Hogle, Jerrold E. 9, 11, 21, 55, 191 Holbein, Hans 55 Hollar, Wenceslas 55, 58 House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) 40 House of Seven Gables, The (Nathaniel Hawthorne) 62 Hugo, Victor 25, 51, 56, 110, 121, 141–2 Hunger, The (dir. Tony Scott) 122 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 48, 171 Ielegems, Viona 38, 153, 171 Inchbald, Elizabeth 40

Index

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Italian, The (Ann Radcliffe) 54 Ivanhoe (Walter Scott) 50 Jackson, Shirley 89, 195 James, Henry 107, 96 James, M. R. 58, 62–3, 73, 79, 107, 126, 139, 167, 190–1, 198 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) 54, 76, 104 Jones, Miranda 173, 175 Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (Ann Radcliffe) 54 Julian, Rupert 39 Kelley, Mike 5, 81, 240 Kemble, John Philip 59 Kennedy, Christine 5, 151, 240–1 Kent, William 8, 17, 27–8 Kilpatrick, Nancy 9–10, 13, 23, 51, 179 King, Stephen 2, 9, 48, 184, 189 Kingdom Swann (Miles Gibson) 89 King Lear (William Shakespeare) 88 Kirchner, E. L. 54 Klosterheim: or, The Masque (Thomas De Quincey) 40 Kolakovic, Stuart 6, 134–5 Koudounaris, Paul 10–11, 13, 99, 166, 169–71 Krzywinska, Tanya 12, 226–7 Kubrick, Stanley 42 Kunzle, David 2, 10, 132 Là Bas (Joris-Karl Huysmans) 48, 171 Lalique, René 32 Lavater, J. K. 54 Lee, Christopher 124, 180, 243 Lee, Sophia 17, 119 Lee, Vernon 62, 79, 195 Le Fanu, Sheridan 18, 38, 57, 70–1, 107, 136, 138, 160, 194–5, 227–8, 214, 250 Leighton, John 56 Leni, Paul 76

259 Lesbian Vampire Killers (dir. Phil Claydon) 32 Levy, David 30, 127 Lewis, Matthew 2, 21, 28, 33, 35, 43, 47, 54, 59, 71, 80, 88, 92, 102, 104, 126, 130, 131–4, 171, 184, 189, 190–1, 211, 241 Life of Man Symbolised, The (John Leighton) 56 ‘Ligeia’ (Edgar Allan Poe) 85 London, A Pilgrimage (Gustave Doré,) 56 Lovecraft, H. P. 2, 8, 47, 52, 54, 58, 93, 96, 151, 185, 226 Lucas, George 37 Lugosi, Bela 11, 93, 123, 188, 193, 207, 218 Lynch, David 128 Machen, Arthur 98, 167 Marechal, Sylvain 35 Marryat, Frederick 60 Marsden, Simon 10–11, 13, 166–70, 172 Martin, John 51, 100, 142 Maturin, Charles 51, 55, 132, 157–8 ‘Masque of the Red Death, The’ (Edgar Allan Poe) 38, 40 McAvoy, Emma 39–40 McCarthy, Mike 14 McCoy, Carl 67, 179, 190, 204 McQueen, Alexander 3, 5, 12, 89, 91–2, 97, 170, 209, 241 Méliès, Georges 63 Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Maturin) 51, 55, 132, 157–8 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 36 ‘Mezzotint, The’ (M. R. James) 58, 62 Michaelangelo 10 Mignola, Mike 6, 133–4, 138 Milton John 6–7, 100, 145 Moffat, Charles Alexander xiv, 5, 13–15, 53–4 Moore, Alan and Kevin O’Neill 111 Moreau, Gustave 52

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Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 82 Mucha, Alphine Maria 66 Murnau, F. W. 1, 7, 122–3, 126, 139, 179 Myrone, Martin 5, 51, 84, 185 Noble, Tim and Sue Webster 72 Nodier, Charles 2, 25, 51, 104, 110, 215 Nosferatu (dir. F. W. Murnau) 1, 53, 93–4, 122–3, 139, 179, 222 Oates, Joyce Carol 2–3, 9, 47, 79, 87 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Charles Dickens) 97 ‘On Gothic Superstition’ (Nathan Drake) 9 ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’ (John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Aikin) 9 ‘On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel’ (Rainer Maria Rilke) 80 Oursler, Tony 6, 239–40 Oxilia, Nino 63 Paradise Lost (John Milton) 6, 145 Passion of New Eve, The (Angela Carter) 76 Peake, Richard Brinsley 36 Penny Dreadful (John Logan) 3 Pepper’s Ghost 107, 111–12 Phantom of the Opera, The (Rupert Julian) 38 Phenomena (Dario Argento) 193 ‘Picture in the House, The’ (H. P. Lovecraft) 58 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Oscar Wilde) 62 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 23, 196 Planché, J. R. 35–6, 206 Poe, Edgar Allan 22, 31, 38, 40, 51–2, 57, 85, 95, 98, 120, 124, 127, 133, 144–5, 157, 162, 167–8, 179–80, 192, 194–5, 214, 215 Poelzig, Hans 66 Polidori, John 36, 206

Index Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper) 23 ‘Premature Burial, The’ (Edgar Allan Poe) 22 Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein (Richard Brinsley Peake) 36 Prinzessin Brambilla (E. T. A. Hoffmann) 40 Psycho (Robert Bloch) 97 Pugin, Augustus W. N. 19 Punter, David 11, 43, 183 Queenho Hall (Joseph Strutt and Walter Scott) 54 Quentin Durward (Walter Scott) 50 Radcliffe, Ann 2, 7, 9, 21, 24, 26, 42, 49, 54, 71, 75, 87, 104, 131–2, 156–7, 183, 193, 205–6, 210–11, 219 Rank, Otto 11 Räuber, Die (Friedrich Schiller) 75 Raymond and Agnes (Edward Loder) 43 Raymond and Agnes (Matthew Lewis) 35, 43, 59 Recess, The (Sophia Lee) 17, 119 Redon, Odilon 46, 52 Reed, Carol 25 Rejlander, Oscar Gustave 158, 162 Rethel, Alfred 56 Reynolds, George C. 60 Rilke, Rainer Maria 80 Robert le Diable (Giacomo Meyerbeer) 36 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard 2, 21, 24, 42, 65, 103–4, 111, 117, 144, 206 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (Jim Sharman) 37 Romance of the Forest, The (Ann Radcliffe) 7, 21, 26–7, 183, 205, 211 Romero, George A. 22, 225 Rops, Félicien 38, 58, 66 Rosa, Salvatore, 4, 48–9, 59, 87, 132, 220, 222 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 51 Rowlandson, Thomas 55

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Ruddigore, or the Witch’s Curse (W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Sullivan) 43 ‘Ruin’d Abbey; or the Effects of Superstition’ (William Shenstone) 23 Rymer, J. M. 56, 60 Sandman, The (E. T. A. Hoffmann) 7, 85 Schiller, Friedrich 40 Schreck, Max 33 Sconce, Jeffery 2 Scott, Ridley 52 Scott, Walter 9, 50, 54, 58, 156–7, 181–2, 194–5, 205 Sealed Room, The (dir. D. W. Griffith) 120 Sharman, Jim 37 Shaw, Trish 6, 139–40 Shelley, Mary 7, 36, 51, 56, 84, 93, 120–1, 124, 133, 180–1, 198 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 21 Shenstone, William 23 Sicilian Romance, A (Ann Radcliffe) 21, 211 Sidney, Sir Philip 191 ‘Signal Man, The’ (Charles Dickens) 230 Siouxsie and the Banshees 43, 67, 103, 203, 207 Sisters of Mercy (group) 43, 203 Skal, David J. 11, 207 Soane, John 19 Spenser, Edmund 27, 40, 55, 191, 193 Spooner, Catherine 4, 11, 151, 234–5, 242, 245 Spooner, Charles 234–5 Stafford, Barbara Maria 11, 182–3 Starry, Lisa 6, 44–5 Stevenson, Robert Louis 2, 59–60, 93, 114–15, 127, 146, 206, 215 Stoker, Bram 1, 3, 8, 13–14, 20, 22, 26, 38, 51, 76, 93, 122, 125, 130, 133, 158, 184, 197, 200, 207, 209–10, 218, 228, 236 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The 2, 59, 93, 96, 114–15, 120–2, 133, 146, 214

Strutt, Joseph, 54 Suspiria (Dario Argento) 128 Thomas, Sophie 2 Tolstoy, Leo 78 Töpfler, Rodolphe 2, 10 Townsend, Dale 3 Transformation (Mary Shelley) 7 ‘Treasure of Abbot Thomas, The’ (M.R. James) 73 Trouille, Clovis 10, 53–4 Tussaud, Madame Marie 75 28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle) 235 Twin Peaks (dir. David Lynch) 128 Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu) 22 ‘Unheimliche, Das’ (Sigmund Freud) 7, 11 Vadim, Roger 42 Vampire Lovers, The (dir. Roy Ward Baker) 23 Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, The (J. R. Planché) Vanburgh, John 27 Van Eyck, Jan 8 Vargo, Joseph 5, 223–4 Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood (J. M. Rymer) 60 Victor Frankenstein (dir. Bernard Rose) 3 Villette (Charlotte Brontë) 78, 211 Violette, Banks 5, 239 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 19, 95 Von Hagens, Gunther 99, 244 Von Holst, Theodor 51 Wachsfigurenkabinett, Das (dir. Paul Leni) 76 Wagner, The Wehr-Wolf (George C. Reynolds) 60 Walpole, Hugh 1, 9, 17–19, 39, 49, 51, 55, 62, 82, 89, 162, 194, 205, 213, 219 Wegener, Paul 66

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West, Benjamin 50, 131 Whale, James 122 Whedon, Joss 3, 128 Wieland, J. B. 22 Wiene, Robert 66 Wilde, Oscar 62 Willing to Die (Sheridan Le Fanu) 55

Index Witkin, Joel-Peter 89, 173, 245 Wood, Anthony 55 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) 67 Young, Edward 20 Zumbo, Gaetano Giulio 73–5