Introduction

The journey appears as a regular trope in Gothic literature and cinema. Such classic Gothic novels as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer are, in part, journey narratives that trade in a kind of exoticism, enabling the reader to travel to wild, unknown regions haunted by the constant proximity of death. In Emma McEvoy's view, ‘early literary Gothic, with its depictions of abbeys and castles, of ruins and wild landscapes’, can be regarded ‘as a kind of vicarious tourism’, reflecting ‘a time when domestic tourism was becoming increasingly affordable for, and popular with, a middle-class public’ (2014: 479).

The prototypical Gothic journey takes the form of the displacement of a traveller from a safe and familiar home to an enigmatic and unpredictable space. Such journeys often have, no doubt, strong nationalist underpinnings, and, according to Justin D. Edwards, Gothic literature draws on the British tradition of travel writing in order to distinguish ‘the homely place of the nation [… from] the unhomely spaces of foreignness, which are by contrast seen as mysterious, enigmatic and shrouded in darkness’ (Edwards 2014: 57–8). Nevertheless, the Gothic journey tends to lead to the erosion of this demarcation and the subversion of established patterns of self-identity, family, nation and empire. Thus Stephen D. Arata finds in the journey of Jonathan Harker as recounted in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula a critique of the narrator's Orientalism (1990: 635), while William Beckford's Vathek, Justin D. Edwards writes, charts a Gothic journey that ‘subverts the Enlightenment principles of discovery, reason, logic and rationality’ (2014: 57).

The work of Terence Fisher, who directed most of the best known horror films made by Britain's Hammer Films in the 1950s and 1960s, reconfigures the Gothic journey in cinema. As Fisher's characters make their way across the vividly rendered geographies of his films, the initial polarity between home and away progressively loses its organising power. At the same time, the films ground their fantasies of mortal peril and the transformation of human beings in mundane aspects of the experience of travel, including such problems as collisions, roadblocks, jostling, loss of luggage and recalcitrant drivers.