Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
11 - The Italian Gothic Film
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
To try and synthesise all the explicit and implicit definitions of what con-stitutes ‘the Gothic’ would make one as insane as Ambrosio in Lewis's The Monk (1796) or one of Poe's narrator/protagonists. Gothic at once refers to a very definite set of creative choices and expectations, while it also can, seemingly, refer to anything with a graveyard or a cobweb in it. Baldick and Mighall (2012) noted how the term has become so overextended as to render it almost completely meaningless: so that anything vaguely scary or sensational is labelled as Gothic (280). Botting (2008: 12) noted, citing Levy, such a proliferation [of different kinds of Gothic] … threatens to gothicise the entirety of human experience. The word becomes meaningless if it can refer to anything. I have no doubt that many of the articles published in this volume proffer better definitions than I could hope to articulate, so I defer to them. In lieu of a proper definition of the Gothic, I will fall in with Gilda Williams (2014: 412) who simply identifies the Gothic as anything which depicts a lurid interest in the macabre: ‘works typically featuring skulls, gore and other “spooky” iconography’. Later on, Williams (417) focuses her definition slightly, seeing the Gothic ‘as a synonym for the aesthetic of the dark, the grotesque, the macabre and the supernatural’.
Work on Gothic film tends to suffer from a similar epistemological malady which attempts to keep the definition open until it becomes almost synonymous with the entire horror genre itself. Consulting Halberstam (1995), Hervey (2007), Hopkins (2005), Kay (2012), Morgan (2002), Aldana Reyes (2014) and Spooner (2006), few could give a concrete definition of what Gothic film actually was. Many of the scholars just noted contain their research by looking only at specific film adaptations of a priori Gothic literary texts, suggesting that Gothic film is an adaptation of a particular Gothic novel. Worland (2014) provides a useful overview and contextualisation distinguishing between Universal Pictures’ cycles of Gothic horror in the 1930s and 1940s, the British Hammer Gothic movies from the 1950s through the 1970s, the Roger Corman-directed Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of the early 1960s and, albeit only slightly, the Italian Gothic films I will be discussing here.
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- Gothic FilmAn Edinburgh Companion, pp. 155 - 169Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020