Jan Švankmajer's The Fall of the House of Usher (1980) and The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983) encapsulate Gothic affect. They do this sensationally via images of terror and horror based on touch. Drawing on experiments with Tactilism (touch-based art) in sculpture and animation, these dissident films, made by Czech Surrealists under a repressive, Soviet-led regime, express what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘a touching specific to the gaze’ and present basic tropes of Gothic cinema in small form (1986: 12). Švankmajer's films adapt Edgar Allan Poe's tales for their uncanny mise-en-scène. The Pendulum evokes the tactile terrors of the Spanish Inquisition and Usher shifts sentience to the ‘thing-world’ as the animated Gothic House comes to life.

Švankmajer's adaptations use intensive compression of time and space analogous to Poe's prose poetry. The tales’ perversely erotic plots and dream-like narratives understandably invite psychosexual reading. By linking Poe with Surrealism, Švankmajer's films might appear to be ‘about’ psychoanalysis. Yet, Gilles Deleuze's ideas about what a film does as an experiential event rather than what it means can open up a different kind of Gothic. He consistently refutes the symbolic ‘archaeology’ of psychoanalysis that digs out repressed familial desire. Art is, rather, the language of sensation, ‘composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 176). A schizoanalytic Deleuzian approach to horror film, viewing brain and viscera as a continuum, looks elsewhere than plot and theme. Its focus is the affective images of fear and terror as they impact upon screen/viewer. The Gothic cinema of sensation works via intense affects and shocks that break habitual response and re-imagine the generic formulae they revisit. As well as Deleuze's cinematic insights, I consider theoretical reflections on touch by Švankmajer and artist Eva Švankmajerova and contextualise them via broader studies of corporeal affect.

Švankmajer's films mix genres and stylistic techniques, including live-action footage, puppets, object animations and claymation. Much of his oeuvre has a Gothic inflection, seen most overtly in his literary adaptations, including the playful homage to Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1979). Švankmajer's Gothic-flavoured films include 1968's The Flat (entrapment and claustrophobia), 1970's The Ossuary (morbid religiosity), 1983's Down to the Cellar and 1988's Alice (the vulnerable child in a threatening environment), 1994's Faust (magic and the occult), 2000's Little Otik (the uncanny thing-world) and 2005's Lunacy (de Sade, madness, cruelty).