The California Gothic narratives discussed here thus far have overwhelmingly dramatised fears and anxieties experienced by white Californians of Anglo- American origin. Yet California is one of the most racially diverse US states. A recent report noted that:

When the initial findings of the 2020 census were released, it was reported that California now ‘joined Hawaii, New Mexico and the District of Columbia as a place where non-Hispanic white people are no longer the dominant group’.

As seen in I Am Legend, The Fog and Winchester, in the California Gothic racial unease and guilt about historical crimes and evasions are often projected onto a disruptive (and deracialised) supernatural Other. The almost total ‘whiteness’ of two of the main varieties of twentieth- and twenty-first-century California Gothic narrative – the Hollywood Gothic and the Cult California narrative – is particularly striking. Here, the perspectives – and fates – of Black, Asian and Latino/x characters are always a secondary focus, if such characters appear at all. Apart from the television show Them (2021) – which is in part a pointed corrective to precisely this lack of equitable representation – Gothic unease related to California's rapid post-war growth has usually been dramatised from the perspective of white characters only. Them is still unusual in that it directly engages with the question of what the ‘California Dream’ meant (and continues to mean) for Black Americans and, by implication, for other racial and ethnic groups for whom life in the Golden State has so often been much less ‘Edenic’ than granted to many white Californians.

I began this book by discussing the reasons why the story of the Donner Party became a foundational ‘anti-myth’ for the new, white and resolutely ‘American’ California, and in doing so established several key California Gothic preoccupations. In my concluding chapter, I will focus upon two twenty-firstcentury horror films which are relayed from the perspective of protagonists whose experiences both engage with and reconfigure these tropes: Us (2019), directed by Jordan Peele, and Jonás Cuarón's Desierto (2015).