Pauline Trotry

“LIQUIDS, BLOODLINES AND FLUIDITY: EXTRACTING THE LIFEBLOOD OF CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC CINEMA AND TELEVISION"

My research develops a new approach to the often-blurry definition of the Gothic genre, by reading it through the scope of flows, liquids and fluidity, using contemporary Gothic films,  Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, 2007), Dark Shadows (Burton, 2012), The Woman in Black (Watkins, 2012), Byzantium (Jordan, 2013), Crimson Peak (del Toro, 2015) and The Lodgers (O’Malley, 2017), and the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), The Haunting (2018-2020) and Dracula (2020). By doing so, I recontextualise and legitimise Gothic film as a distinct genre founded upon the trope of flows and liquids. This unprecedented materialist focus on contemporary Gothic audio-visual media through flows re-hierarchises the liquid surface over the depth, showing that the interest of the Gothic lies more in its evocative and powerful aesthetics than in its hidden meanings. This study primarily uses iconographic and sociological considerations of the corpus, in terms of liquid motifs, themes, structures and their resonance within contemporary “liquid” society (Bauman). These reflections show that liquids such as blood, slime, or water materialise the three most crucial syntactic conventions of the Gothic, i.e., haunting past, spectacular excess, and paranoid repulsion. The undeniable signification of flows and liquids in the Gothic cinema and television thus reflects narrative, structural, cinematographic and generic concerns with fluidity. The Gothic is thus not as much a monstrous genre as is regularly argued, but a fluid genre and a genre of fluids.

Guy Austin, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Andrew Shail, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University