Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.

The period between the early 1930s, when Universal Pictures’ Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) premiered, and the late 1970s, when the European exploitation boom died out, is arguably the most significant to the history of the Gothic in the twentieth century. Numerous films, from The Black Cat (1934) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) to The Innocents (1961) and The Vampire Lovers (1970), are still hailed as landmarks in cinema history by journalists and critics, and these five decades were also responsible for the emergence of the horror genre as a journalistic label and its consolidation as a specific type of filmic experience. The impact of some of the most significant films of this era has been such that there is no form of popular culture left untouched by them, from literature to television, video games and even breakfast cereals. The various figures in the monster pantheon that surfaced in the 1930s may have originated in nineteenth-century literature and have previously found a long life on the stage, but their transition to cinema immortalised them. In particular, the design and make-up for Count Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, as well as the performances by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would become so iconic that they remain denotative of Gothic horror to this day. Together with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, they form a ‘foundational triptych’ for the Gothic that has generated hundreds of copycats, sequels and parodies. Universal films also popularised other monsters, such as the Wolf Man and the Mummy, that would become horror staples despite not deriving from literary sources or having solid cinematic precedents.

Gothic cinema experienced key changes during the years bookended by the success of Dracula and Frankenstein and Hammer Film Productions’ failed attempts to modernise their Gothic horror brand and eventual hibernation. These developments include the institutionalisation of the horror franchise as a viable commercial venture and the entrenchment of the monster as a visual source of fear in the 1930s and 1940s; the wide spread use of colour film processes in the late 1950s and the 1960s; and the subsequent rise of openly erotic spectacles in Europe's exploitation films in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter provides a survey of Gothic Spanish literature of the nineteenth century to continue the critical task of re-integrating Spain with the literary trends from which it has been traditionally separated. It traces the role of early translations of novels by British and French authors in creating a literary Gothic language in the early nineteenth century, before turning to the output of indigenous writers such as Agustín Pérez Zaragoza and José de Espronceda, as well as to the development of the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) in the 1840s. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s historical legends (1857–71) mark another milestone in the development of an unmistakably Spanish Gothic tradition. The mad scientists that populate the short stories of José Fernández Bremón and Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara illustrate the country’s ongoing participation in transnational tropes by the century’s close. Similarly, the Gothic becomes an effective tool to denounce women’s lack of agency in the short fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán, a local offshoot of the border-crossing Female Gothic.

Gothic cinema in the contemporary period is easily distinguished from its previous incarnations by its investment in increasingly explicit cinematic spectacles, the gradual relocation of events from medieval to Victorian, Edwardian or modern settings, the crystallisation of the supernatural monster as key villain, and the victory, more often than not, of evil over good. As a distinct aesthetic mode, one identifiable by a specific dark or baroque style, or else by given thematic leanings, Gothic cinema has also developed to embrace societal and technological changes: the late 1990s and 2000s saw the beginnings of what could be referred to as a digital Gothic, a cluster of films that explored the nightmarish side of new communication technologies. Although, for some, there is still a line between the Gothic (the subtle, the hinted at, the half-glimpsed, the uncanny, the atmospheric) and horror (the graphic, the explicit, the sadistic, the nihilistic), I would argue that the contemporary period has seen the steady commingling of both. As the Gothic fragments ever further and individual critical and artistic concepts (the sublime, the grotesque) and motifs (the double, hauntings) are themselves conceived as markers of Gothic indexicality, it becomes more and more difficult to extricate the two. While the Gothic is unlikely to overtake horror as a label to refer to frightening cinema because it is not a recognised genre, it is becoming increasingly popular following the widely publicised ‘Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film’ season (2013–14) organised by the British Film Institute. If nothing else, its associations with the literary (via adaptation) and the socially repressed, alongside its high intertextuality and referentiality, will ensure that, at least at the academic level, the Gothic remains an area of debate and discussion in Film Studies.

From 1970 to the Turn of the Century

The early 1970s saw Hammer Horror's last attempts at rejuvenating its brand. Violence and sex had become more explicit in the late 1960s in films of the New Hollywood cinema like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1968) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and Herschell Gordon Lewis had created a more graphic horror subgenre, what would come to be known as ‘gore’, with his Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964).

The portmanteau ‘fantaterror’ amalgamates the terms ‘fantástico’ (literally ‘fantastic’, although in Spanish the word conveys a meaning closer to that of ‘supernatural’ in Anglophone cultures) and ‘terror’ (indistinguishable from ‘horror’, but more ubiquitous). Popularised by director, scriptwriter and actor Jacinto Molina, famous under his artistic name Paul Naschy, fantaterror was coined to refer to the Spanish answer to the type of violent and titillating films that have come to be known as ‘exploitation cinema’ within the European and American contexts (Mathijs and Mendik 2004; Shipka 2011). Since ‘exploitation cinema’ may also cover genres such as the Western or softcore films, other terms have cropped up to refer to the horrific side of the transgressive and provocative B-movie cinema that flooded Spanish screens in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Euro-horror’ is a popular label in the Anglo-American world, but Spanish cinema critics and writers, in an attempt to emphasise the uniqueness of the various occult, dark, sensual and weird elements of films such as La residencia / The House That Screamed (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1968) or Mil gritos tiene la noche / Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982), have come up with other less catchy ones like ‘cine bizarro’ (bizarre cinema) (Diego 2014) or else simply called them ‘cine negro’ (film noir) (Luque Carreras 2015). Seldom does one find ‘cine de terror’ (horror cinema) explored as such in Spanish scholarship; it is normally discussed in broader surveys of supernatural cinema (cine fantástico), which sometimes mingle horror, science fiction and fantasy. The word ‘Gothic’ has been used even more rarely by those who have most rigorously studied the country's horrific output. The term has only gained currency, unsurprisingly, in Anglo-American academia, where scholarly interest in the Gothic has been systematically developing since the 1980s and, especially, since the 1990s.

Given Spain's reluctance to acknowledge the Gothic as a national mode, a stance born out of many decades of the sustained critical championing of social realism as the quintessential artistic form of expression for the country's writers, fantaterror now stands as the most productive term with which to refer to genre filmmaking between 1968 and 1980, the golden age of Spanish horror.