Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
- Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
- Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo-Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein
- Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights
- Chapter Four Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men
- Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows
- Chapter Six “Here we are, again!”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem
- Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
- Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self-Aware Zombies and Neo-Gothic Posthumanism
- Chapter Nine Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History
- Chapter Ten Doctor Who’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic
- Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter One - “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
- Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
- Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo-Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein
- Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights
- Chapter Four Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men
- Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows
- Chapter Six “Here we are, again!”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem
- Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
- Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self-Aware Zombies and Neo-Gothic Posthumanism
- Chapter Nine Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History
- Chapter Ten Doctor Who’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic
- Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
During the 2019 Halloween season in the United States, Geico Insurance ran a television commercial that was a pastiche of recent horror movies. Four young people are fleeing from something horrible as they leave a forested area. They see a house that looks appropriately formidably haunted or maybe it is the house that Hitchcock built for Psycho (1960). They wisely dismiss each other's proposals for hiding in its attic or the basement. The “dumb” blonde cries, “Why can't we just get in the running car?”—a sensible suggestion, but “the guy” says, “Are you crazy?” Then he offers his own insane idea of their taking refuge behind several dozens of chainsaws suspended at the entrance of a shed, which the brunette affirms as “Smart.”
They scurry to the shed. To most conscious viewers, the dangling chainsaws are like a neon sign shouting, “Danger, Will Robinson.” Sure enough, as the group cowers behind the saws, the camera cuts to a man inside the shed, and he is wearing the iconic goalkeeper's mask, the one worn by Jason in the Friday the 13th movies (beginning in 1987). He shoves up the mask with a look on his face as if to say, “Can anyone be so dumb?” The voice-over concludes: “If you’re in a horror movie, you make poor decisions; it's what you do.”
When the four realize that they are not alone, they dash out of the shed with one of the girls yelling, “Head for the cemetery.” Convenient, for they will soon be dead bodies.
All five characters are played by actors and actresses that should be identifiable to viewers from their previous performances in murder stories on television and in movies. Besides the information that draws on that hypermedia, there are other intertextual references in the commercial. For example, when one character suggests that they hide in the basement of the house, we might think of The House by the Cemetery (1981) or Poltergeist (1982) or other haunted houses built into former cemetery sites thereby disturbing the dead. Besides the basement, the attic is another scary place, especially in Victorian mansions, such as told in The Grudge (2004) and The Attic (2007). And then, of course, the place not to be if you’re already scared to death is the cemetery.
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- Neo-Gothic NarrativesIllusory Allusions from the Past, pp. 13 - 22Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020