Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) has received a great deal of critical attention, primarily for its depiction of monstrous motherhood. This essay seeks to extend that discussion through a comparison to Kent's second film, The Nightingale (2019), and its even more explicit construction of violence conducted by and against women. In this way we show that both films draw on the gothic trope of women suffering trauma and the more recent conversion of that suffering to the perpetuation of violent revenge. However, we argue that rather than constituting bravery, a restoration of justice, or a subversion of that victimization along the lines of the figure of Carol J. Clover's ‘Final Girl’, the acts of violence committed by the women in these films compound their traumatization by severing them from both others and themselves. The adoption of behaviours rendered masculine in the Gothic through the invasion of the home and the colonization of the bush thus confirms these women as monstrous rather than heroic. As in other recent Australian horror films, such as Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones (2010), women's monstrosity is bound up with their enactment of a masculine agency, such that there is no opportunity for them within the Australian Gothic to move beyond this traditional binary construct.

The Babadook and The Nightingale share many thematic and narrative concerns, but centrally, both depict a young woman struggling to deal with her traumatic loss: each film functions as a commentary on the impacts of gender on the experience of violence and mourning in the aftermath of horror, in the particular context of Australian colonial and contemporary history.

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have identified the neo-Victorian Gothic as a mode particularly suited to political and ethical cultural engagement, precisely for the way in which it disrupts any “uniform” contemporary iteration of the Gothic; by returning to the past, the neo-Gothic “rekindle[s] an intensely disturbing desire that unsettles norms and redefines boundaries once more” (2012, 2). Indeed, the Gothic more generally attends to the social and cultural problems faced in the contemporary moment, precisely through its interest in the strange, the abject and the Other. This chapter examines the dinosaur narrative as a particular kind of neo-Gothic uniquely positioned to address the collapse of moral, spatial and historical boundaries. Addressing a selection of early dinosaur narratives, as well as the range of films in the Jurassic Park series (1993–2018), this chapter will explore the dinosaur as a figure of the limit of our Gothic imagination, that is, the point at which the known world reaches the boundaries of the unknown or other. In particular, however, the chapter will focus on the specific engagement with Gothic tropes in the most recent Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): the isolated mansion, the rich benefactor, the orphan child, the presence of family secrets and the haunting or stalking figure. In the embedding of the conventional Gothic within a contemporary context concerned with environmental collapse, the dinosaur and its impossible presence is reinvigorated as a problem exceeding our capacity for conservative solution.

The Jurassic Park films, and in particular Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, are perhaps most commonly and readily recognised (and marketed) as works of science fiction, rather than Gothic or neo-Gothic works; however, in their focus on the moral and ethical questions raised by scientific research, and particularly with the moral problems associated with creating (and destroying) artificial, unnatural or hybridised life, these works harken back to a long-standing narrative tradition in which the Gothic and science fiction intermingle.

Perhaps the most obvious precursor of this intermingling of the Gothic and science fiction is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which the scientific research of the eponymous character results in the creation of an unnamed (and perhaps unnameable) monster who threatens the integrity of Frankenstein's mind, body and family.