Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
15 - ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Gothic texts are, overtly but ambiguously, not rational, depicting disturbances of sanity and security … displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion and obsession … Gothic texts are not good in moral, aesthetic or social terms. Their concern is with vice: protagonists are selfish or evil … their effects, aesthetically and socially, are also replete with a range of negative features: not beautiful, they display no harmony or proportion … gothic texts register revulsion, abhorrence, fear, disgust and terror. (Botting 2014: 2)
Introduction
In his work on historical iterations of Gothic horror cinema, Xavier Aldana Reyes argues the following:
Gothic horror is interstitial … Gothic horror is hard to define precisely because it is neither a genre, in the strict sense in which horror is a genre, nor a distinct subgenre. Instead, Gothic horror's distinctiveness lies in its reliance on specific Gothic atmospheres, settings, music, tropes or figures, yet always with the intention of scaring, disturbing or ‘grossing out’. (2013: 388)
These latter three elements point to the affective resonance of Gothic horror and explicit associations with the corporeal (chiming with the epigraph opening the present chapter). Focusing on relatively recent developments in the horror genre, key films within the millennial cycle of ‘torture porn’ (namely Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)) are explicitly framed by Aldana Reyes in terms of the Gothic.
These films also act as extensions of earlier films, marking a ‘Gothic turn to corporeality’. The distinctive characteristics of torture porn are described as extending certain Gothic sensibilities:
The Gothic settings, trappings, mood and tone, together with the villainous quality of the horror that followed these two films, need to be acknowledged as distinctly and eminently Gothic. Films such as A Serbian Film (Spasojevic, 2010) or The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (Six, 2011) have once again pushed the boundaries of decorum, instituting the Gothic as the thoroughly excessive genre it is often understood to be. (2014: 398)
It is these latter concerns of excess that will be explicated in the present chapter, specifically how hardcore horror as a Gothic manifestation pushes these boundaries of decorum even further.
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- Gothic FilmAn Edinburgh Companion, pp. 218 - 232Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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