This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that gothic has energetically participated in the cultural flows and deterritorialisations that characterise globalisation. It reviews the question of cultural exchanges with specific reference to virtual networks and online vampire communities. The book offers one of the earliest examples of globalgothic with an analysis of a global dance practice, 'Ankoku butoh'. This was first performed in Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata in 1959, on the eve of Japan's signing of the US-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty. It reflects upon Mataku as an active engagement between non-Western and Western cultural practices. The book considers the degree to which the vampire communities reveal cultural homogenisation and the imposition of Western forms and the degree to which there is hybridisation and a productive melange of cultures.

Lies Wesseling’s Chapter 4 traces the genealogy of evil children, by analysing the success of William March’s portrayal of the demonic adoptee in The Bad Seed and its remediations. The success of this unprecedented work becomes all the more remarkable when we take its cultural context into account. The Bad Seed, Wesseling argues, takes issue with the two dominant US discourses on adoption at the time. It subverts the adoption professionals’ paradigm of similarity, by suggesting that even when parents and children are perfectly matched, conforming as closely to the ideal of the white middle-class family as one could wish for, a bad seed could nevertheless still assert itself and wreak havoc. It is also at odds with the ‘love-and-faith-will-conquer-all’ optimism of inter-country-adoption-enthusiasts, suggesting that the normative nuclear family may not be such a great model for world politics after all.

The idea of an online vampire community reveals a desire and nostalgia for an old sense of community which has been eclipsed in contemporary societies, a concept that is, however, regressive and utopian. Online vampire communities argue that they want to be more believable online and do not tolerate the sexualisation of vampiric imagery. They very often court media attention, flaunting and celebrating their stereotyped exoticism through simulated vampire imagery. They become mere figures in a media show that serves the economic interests of corporate television. The US vampire community has tried to create a globalised notion of vampire identity that is less fictional and applies to all individuals from around the world. It has in fact facilitated the uniform spread of a Westernised version of the vampire.

This chapter begins with a warning issued by Fred Botting, that 'beyond transgression, all the paraphernalia of gothic modernity change: the uncanny is not where it used to be'. Next, it argues that Michael Haneke's Funny Games's reaction to genre film may be located within the discourses of globalised/transnational cultural production in order to ascertain where the uncanny may be located today. Haneke's stated aim with the first Funny Games film was to challenge the role of spectators who consume images of violence as a matter of enjoyment. Funny Games enacts complex patterns of transnational movements and disruptions. It thus identifies and plays out a new form of the uncanny in globalisation, and Haneke demands of his viewers that they too come to terms with these processes. Any experience of globalisation's procession of media images, consumer culture and so on always takes place in a specific locality.

Ranita Chatterjee explores in Chapter 11 the Gothic kinship ties between hero Harry Potter and villain Lord Voldemort in J.K. Rowling’s famous novel series. Their physically intertwined existence – Harry is Voldemort’s monstrous soul progeny – gives occasion to analyse blood ties beyond the nuclear family. Chatterjee argues that that the Potter series, with its prominence of literal and figurative blood ties, reconfigures the act of sacrifice as not only feminine and maternal, but also problematically generative insofar as Harry’s mother’s blood both protects the hero and empowers the villain.

Many Hong Kong horror films focused on the reworking of traditional Chinese stories and beliefs in order to revisit identity politics in the context of a post-Handover Hong Kong. Fruit Chan's Dumplings has been one of the most commercially successful of these films. By the time it was produced in 2004, the situation Ackbar Abbas described was no longer quite so clear. Administrative borders, as the opening scene of Dumplings makes clear with Mei moving her raw materials from Shenzhen to Hong Kong with such ease, were no longer a sign of division. This film challenges the familiar categories of East and West, tradition and modernity, around which Hong Kong identity politics centred, terms which the conditions of globalisation render meaningless. Simultaneously, through the trope of cannibalism, Dumplings critiques globalisation, showing Hong Kong and China merging together, equally driven by the prevailing imperative of the global economy: consumption.

This introduction situates the volume within the existing academic literature on gothic and family relations, and introduces the guiding research questions. Within Gothic studies, the central role of kinship relations has been acknowledged but it has seldom been studied as a topic in itself; within disciplines that study kinship, such as anthropology or history, the attention for Gothic has been lacking. Starting from the assumption that Gothic fiction is a key site where sociocultural figurations of the family are negotiated, this volume aims to analyze how Gothic figurations of kinship both contest and reinforce orthodox notions of the nuclear family. The chapters address such questions as: how does Gothic fiction mediate the ways in which the family is understood, both as a shifting constellation of social and personal ties and as a powerful regulatory ideal; how does Gothic fiction configure, refigure or disfigure conceptualizations and representations of kinship; when do cultural figurations of kinship become Gothic?

Beginning with Antony Gormley’s Transport sculpture in Canterbury cathedral, the Introduction introduces key conceptual premises of the book. It shows how Transport re-presents bodies in time in a fashion that recalls characteristics of medieval cultural practices: ecclesiastical space, written texts such as Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mystery plays and devotional texts. Discussion of religious iconography between The Book of the Duchess and The Miller’s Tale shows how Chaucer’s writing occupies a distinctive place in this blurring of boundaries between historical materiality, scriptural history, and contemporary fictions. Bodily transport between Chaucer’s own works anticipates the transport that is yet to be made of them in works that he did not compose.

Anne Quéma analyses in Chapter 8 the uncanny kinship narratives in Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between (2002) and the British Civil Partnership Act (CPA) (2004). Quéma argues that the uncanny can be interpreted as the manifestation of the effects of normative power as we adhere to dominant norms such as family norms. In Duncker’s novel, cultural performatives of kinship, sexuality and gender identification relentlessly haunt the protagonist. The CPA betrays a fundamental contradiction: while legitimizing the deletion of binary gender differences by same-sex union, it applies an interdict that reinstates the Oedipal logic of binary relations and undoes the acknowledgment of same-sex union. This constitutes the political uncanny at the heart of English family law. If the uncanny characterizes both the legal discourse and the novel, it is not so much because they operate under sexual and cultural repression; rather, the uncanny effect derives from the ways in which these two texts remain trapped in and haunted by ancestral patterns of gender and sexual identification that posture as universal, natural and commonsensical ways of doing things.

The cult of the happy home as personified by the American suburban nuclear family is scrutinized in Chapter 5 by Bernice Murphy on Wes Craven’s horror films. The American horror film since 1960 has frequently used suburbia as a setting for narratives in which the concepts which allegedly lie at the very heart of the national psyche – the privacy and safety of the home, the sanctity and inherent moral worth of the nuclear family, and the superiority of the capitalist, consumption-driven way of life – are systematically and, at times, gleefully deconstructed. Fictional suburbanites are seldom menaced by a terrible ‘other’ of alien origin: instead, they tend to be violently despatched by one of their own, usually a murderous family member. Murphy analyses how, from the very beginning of his career, Craven’s horror films have depicted brutality and horror at the heart of the modern suburban family.