Gothic Horror
Gothic Horror Literature to Gothic Horror Movies - By Lord Typhon
A woman is running through the forest, horror, death is chasing her. Overcome with emotion - she thwarts her own progress, she has no direction, she just wants to get away, a maniacal death is coming closer. Blinded by fear, the outcome is now inevitable, the assailant closes in, and then, as fortune would have it, a large human phallus falls from the sky crushing the homicidal character. Gothic Art meets Theatre of the Absurd meets the Horror B movie.
Out of the darkness of the Holy Roman Empire (500 to 1500 AD) rose two distinct worldviews, Renascence and Gothic (1250 to 1450). The Renascence favoured the belief that nature and life could be comprehended best through the faculty of reason. The watchword of the Renascence was enlightenment. The watchword for the Gothic was, reform, a blending of old world spirituality and Roman Catholicism. History for a while was to favour reason as the dominant culture.
In the mid-1700’s New Gothic, Romanticism came to the forefront to answer a backlog of questions that reason alone cannot, questions of human identity. In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), the inventiveness of humanity appears on this earth from some seemingly alien lightening bolt from the sky. American Romantics, such as Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), took these same sentiments and channeled it into the traditional setting of nature, the expansive unknown of the western frontier of America. In a modern twist, the forces of nature and the monsters of Anne Rice’s (born 1941) novels come together to form a higher society that we, like Frankenstein chase, page by turning page.
Hollywoodism (1915 -1965), with the silver-screen of universal acceptance, for a dime, offered the sentiment that all forces, human and natural, could be tamed, not by reason, but by the unassailable spirit of the common man, the everyday man, the American Dream. This storyline had its day, but could not survive the real horror of current events during the 1900’s. The character of Frankenstein’s monster returned to Hollywood in its original form, untamable natural forces and alien lightening bolts from outer space.
In the spirit of Goth and Romanticism, with a campy style emulating the inclusiveness of Hollywood, fringe theatre, the Theatre of the Absurd (1942-1967), came closer to the mainstream. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) emulates the ideal that the inventiveness of humanity is not something to be hunted down before it kills us all, either is it a force that leaves one in an absurd corner as it moves on without most of the people on this planet. Instead, the human intellect is like nature herself, to be encountered, unified in a close-up encounter, in the face of humanity. We face nature as we always have and are still instinctively doing.
The full emotional spectrum of the gods has not disappeared with them. They are available to us all, each individually measured. The Gothic arts and her children preserve the ongoing quest for identity. The audience need not explode into the euphoria of all human woes being temporarily laid aside, but with an elbow in the ribs and a wink of the eye we observe a horror show that doesn’t let us forget, human ingenuity will not get us out of this and neither will it be our downfall. Eyes glued to the screen, transfixed, we watch to see what will happen next.
Contributing Writer, Lord Typhon
For more information about gothic style, read the “Step-by-Step Essential Guide to that Elusive Gothic Look & Style”.
