The Gothic: from Dracula to The Shining

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Shop the holiday decor you want online only at Home Depot.com. Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling History Magazine. I'm Ellie Corthon. If I say the word gothic, the first thing that probably springs to mind is count Dracula, or maybe a ghost or a werewolf or something lurking in the dark corners of a spooky castle, decorated with cobwebs, skulls, and blood red curtains. But since its emergence, the fantastical creations of the gothic imagination have been used to explore much more real societal fears. Roger Locust is the author of an illustrated history of the gothic, and I spoke to him to find out more. Your new illustrated history of the gothic covers a huge range of material, so we have everything from architecture, we have novels, hammer horror, anime, and one thing that you say in the introduction is that it used to be easy to define the gothic, which in first of me it's not that easy to define any more. How would you define the gothic? It's always a really difficult question, and you know there are a whole academic careers devoted to arguing this point, as you can imagine. I tend to think of it as it's an imagination of of a pre-modern world. So we think of the gothic as medieval architecture and the medieval kind of world view, the world is full of demons, full of supernatural kind of things. We are menist by naughty nuns and evil monks, and there's always a jibbas moon, and it's always, you know, pointed architecture, and so on. And that really is a projection backwards from the early 19th century. There's a sense in which people are trying to marshal and understand that what we would call the pre-modern world, and they start to call all of that gothic. And if you're an architect, this is a really great thing, because it means that you can embed architecture in a really long history, and it becomes a very positive national architecture in England, so that's why our houses the parliament were rebuilt in gothic form is because, you know, here is the long tradition, the mother of all parliaments. This is where democracy was born and its centuries-old, complete invention. But nevertheless, you know, that's helpful. But if you're a writer, the gothic is full of these really quite frightening pre-modern worlds, you know, so this supernatural demons can appear. We think we're over this. We think we're rational. We think we're modern and enlightened, but actually the gothic in writing form becomes the place where all of our nightmares go. So it's interesting, because we're talking about connected but often slightly different phenomenon here. So a lot of people, I think, would think of the gothic purely as vampires and werewolves, spooky things that go bump in the night, but it's not always as simple as gothic equals scary, is it? Yeah, that's right. The gothic is something that I always say is like a dream. It has a dream logic, which is that things can turn into their opposites at a moment's notice, or you can be in one room and you open into another impossible space, but because you're in a dream, it sort of makes sense. And that's the same with the meaning of the gothic, actually. As soon as you fix one down, it begins to flip over and escape from you. And given that the gothic is all about transgression or breaking beyond boundaries, it's appropriate, I suppose, that we can never quite define it because it's always breaking out. It's always going somewhere else. And hopefully we'll talk about some of the ways in which it's changed and evolved and mutated over time later in the conversation. So you mentioned the 19th century earlier, which I think is often hailed as a golden age of gothic. Is that fair? And is that when we first see this trend emerge? The gothic revival in architecture is very much from the 1720s onwards, actually. So a little bit earlier, the first gothic novel is thought to be, although there's often arguments about this, but thought to be Horace Warpoles, the castle of Attranto, which is 1764. And there was a huge boom in gothic or what they're called terror novels in the 1790s. So people might have heard Van Radcliffe who really was the absolute superstar of her period, like J.K. Rowling, that kind of important. And you've got this huge burst of gothic novels in the 1790s. And then perhaps the other really big famous text is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is 1818. And then there's often an argument that the gothic kind of goes away or disperses into other forms. So it kind of enters into a bit of Dickens here and there, bit of Wilkie Collins. And then it really comes storming back in the late 19th century with Jekyll and Hyde, or Dracula, or the island of Dr. Marrow, all of these sort of monstrous modern horrors that emerge at the end of the 19th century. So it is, it's the golden age of ghost stories, definitely, the golden age of the emergence of these really modern myths like the vampire vampires as this kind of a feat, Aristocrat appears in 1819, clearly modeled on Lord Byron. And then it kind of recurs again with Bramstone, because Dracula in 1897. So you can see that it's kind of beginning and end of the 19th century are really important. And then Slapbang in the middle of the 19th century is John Ruskin, who wrote a very famous book called The Stones of Venice, which argued that Gothic is the perfect form of architecture. It's organic, it's natural, it articulates faith. So for him, having lots of crenellations and nobly bits and finials and all that sort of stuff was for him absolutely quintessential to the Gothic architecture revival, which is why we tend to think of all of those houses that have pointed arches and things in England certainly. But across the world, actually, carping to Gothic in America, you get Gothic churches in India and Australia. So really, that's the point where it goes global. And do we have any sense of why Gothic captured everybody's imagination at these certain times in the 19th century? What are the intellectual movements? Was it tapping into? That's, I mean, it's a really, really good question. And in a way, it's what we're always trying to, trying to want to why the 1790s say is the first boom. Well, the argument is that, you know, in England, the here is a Protestant country that's just got itself back together after a period of revolution. And then right across the channel is the French Revolution, which is descending into the terror and lots of people being guillotined and, you know, this kind of monstrous overthrew aristocracy, really, really unnerved people. So you can see that there's a very kind of drip politically driven idea behind the Gothic. All of that stuff that's happening on the continent, all of these nasty monks and priests are basically, you know, tyranny, tyranny might be returning. So you get that very strongly in the 1790s. And so again, in the 1890s, lots of different contexts there, but, you know, immigration into England, but also into America too, beginning to cause anxieties about the purity of the nation. So you have someone like Count Dracula arriving from the very edge of Christian Europe, buying a house that's nearest as possible to Buckingham Palace, you know, right in the center of London, for this kind of sleeping monster, to kind of awaken contaminators all. So you can see there's lots of potential ways of reading different things at different times. There's a huge boom in the 1970s in England and America, there's a huge boom right now, arguably, and that might be worth talking about too. Let's talk then a bit about Gothic's global spread. So in the book, you describe Gothic's global spread as uncontainable as a zombie virus, which I thought was a nice way of putting it. Why do you think it is proven so popular? Well, I think it's the modern mythology. So it's like a toolkit which provides you with a set of images and a set of narratives which means that you can adapt them in incredibly flexible ways. So that in England say the vampire kind of emerges as this figure of perhaps foreign contamination but elsewhere you know the vampire figure this thing returning from from the dead can lock into local narratives of superstition. So you get vampires stories everywhere in Thailand, in Korea, in Japan, in Australia, all the way around the world and we all have different cultures have this kind of need for these sorts of transgressive figures somewhere hovering between life and death which allow people to kind of work through in some ways what it means to be human, what are the limits of this and if you go through a revolution say in biology which is what we're doing at the moment you know what are the limits of genetic manipulation, what are the what are the anxieties around that then suddenly the Gothic can provide you with extraordinary kind of set of devices to explore that idea. So that's why I think it is like a modern mythology, lots of bits and pieces that you can pick and choose from and turn into different hybrids across the world. As you say I think that the vampire is quite a good way of illustrating that and I wonder if you could just give us some examples of vampires from across the globe and how that figure has been used to explore different anxieties or different themes in different places. Yeah I mean the vampire is a really interesting case because it's a word that emerges from the Balkans and it arrives in the English language we can track this very precisely in the 1730s and that was from reports which were about strange goings on in very rural parts of Romania and Turkey and places like this. There's this odd superstition of the peasants who are not you know educated, who believe that one of their neighbours is coming back from the dead and killing off their cattle or or praying on people in the town and so it was seen as a form of you know what a ridiculous bunch of peasants they are but then it travels rather like you know counteractular himself travels from the edges of Europe into the center so you get these stories happening from the early 19th century of vampires kind of arriving and being these contaminating figures but then you also see that idea there are various forms of this undead creature in lots of different cultures so you get this in even all the way back to Viking mythology and so on you see this kind of undead creature happening in in Siberia or in Africa and so on and it's nearly always a kind of way of dealing with the foreigner, the anxious anxieties about foreigners who are kind of coming in taking out jobs, taking out women those sorts of those sorts of ideas and then recently I think you're able to think through things about diseases of the blood so lots of vampires stories about AIDS in the 1980s when it was this terrifying disease that was incurable and right now of course our zombies and vampires feel like they prepared us actually for COVID you know this idea of the pandemic, zombies are a form of pandemic in many 21st century versions of it and so is the vampire so you can see how it kind of changes and shifts across time and it's again an incredibly malleable device for people to be able to articulate anxiety really and manage it. That was actually going to be one of my next questions about how gothic is used to explore anxieties of the age. You gave some great examples there but I wonder if you could give us some more. I think for example very recently there has been a lot of say horror films which do directly address key anxieties of our time so one of the first horror films to merge around the time of the financial crash in 2008 was this brilliant B movie called Drag Me To Hell which starts with someone refusing to extend a mortgage and she is cursed and then everything kind of erupts from from that point of view she gets completely kind of harassed this poor old bank person and in a way it's just a hugely exaggerated version of economic insecurity and you can look at the films like Get Out which people might have seen you know Jordan Peel's brilliant little film which is emerging about the same time as Black Lives Matter exploring the idea that actually an incredibly wealthy white population might literally be praying on the bodies of Black people. So there is a kind of explicit use of those contexts in horror and sometimes it's really obvious and sometimes it's really not it's really very strange and allegorical and you you're invited to try and interpret what it might really be about which is why I think there is such a vast industry of of Gothic critics like me because you're presented with these texts you just think what that earth is that about it is usually your question. I'm interested that you brought up Get Out there which obviously as you say is about anxieties around racism because also earlier you mentioned how the vampire for example and the Gothic was used to explore fears of foreigners so there's quite a double edged sword there that Gothic could be adapted and evolved to to kind of explore completely polarized themes. Yes absolutely the Gothic is both very very kind of radical and subversive but also very conservative and in a way someone like Stephen King is quite explicit about saying actually my horror is consulatory because there's a kind of resolution to the threat of the menace that he invokes in so many of his books and and he sees it as a conservative thing whereas other people think well it's constantly subversive you know it's it's sexually transgressive it gives all kinds of voice to the the unnameable the monstrous the voices to women it's a very popular genre in with women writers right from the 18th century onwards it it allows you to articulate anxieties are at the edge of colonialism and the empire so Roger Kippling wrote lots of stories about haunting in India which is clearly a kind of way of navigating this this kind of limited empire so yeah it can be really radical can be really conservative and perhaps one of the most important figures for that debate is HP Lovecraft hugely influential hugely important does lots and lots of nasty squeegee tentacular horrors in his fictions but he's also an absolutely pathological racist as well and quite openly so in his letters he was someone who was a nativist who believed that my immigration was was completely destroying America this was in the 1920s America first was his view in in many ways and that's been a real difficulty for people who love his fiction love his imagination but how the hell do you deal with the fact that it might be actually coming from a very bad place but from this kind of racist view so you get really recently fantastic African-American rewriting of Lovecraft as if they're kind of seizing the opportunity taking these monsters off Lovecraft and transforming them in really very clever ways so someone like Victor Laval has written The Ballad of Black Tom which is a rewriting of a Lovecraft story or some people might have seen the TV series Lovecraft Country which makes it an explicit sense that actually the whole of his horror imagination is coming from a white supremacy place so those sorts of a subversive plays with that are all about conservative versus radical it's always the question you ask about gothic fiction yeah I'm interested in that radical potential from a slightly older perspective so when when the first gothic stories for example were emerging and as you say they did contain more potential to be sexually transgressive transgressive in terms of gender norms what's our backlash to that what people worried about this new horrifying scary fiction yeah the so the debates we have now about say video nasties in the 1980s or the or the bad influence of games you know very violent games on children it goes all the way back to the 18th century actually and the these novels that appeared were called terror novels for a reason which is that you know they were terrorizing their readers and they were particularly concerned many commentators that it was women who are reading these books and that their imaginations were being inflamed in all kinds of dangerous sorts of ways which of course they were that was the whole point of them they were they were very kind of you know titillating and exciting so you get people like Jane Austen who wrote Northanger Erby actually is a satire on all of that stuff. But then people like a very famous poet like Samuel Taylor Corridge was completely outraged by a book by Matthew Lewis called The Monk, which came out in 1796. This was seen as the kind of height of licentious, naughty, sexually explicit kind of work. And he was completely enraged by the fact that this was out in the world. And Anne Radcliffe actually stopped writing because she felt that she'd produced this kind of subversive version of it. But I mean, someone like Corridge was actually most enraged about the fact that he couldn't get as much money from his from his writing as Matthew Lewis. You know, it was like, ah, I really hate this stuff. But I wish I could write it. And that's quite a common sort of view. You know, someone like Henry James at the end of the 19th century. Oh, HG Wells, your writing is awful. I wish I could write like that and get as much money. So, you know, there's a kind of twist around that. So it goes all the way back to 18th century. People are always very concerned about the dangerous, bad influence of Gothic imagination on readers. Still to come on the history extra podcast. So I think 70s is a kind of rupture in the in the period in England. There was a huge depression, social breakdown, the rise of punk music, the fears of decline, collapse of the long post-war boom. So, you know, horror is really good for addressing the kind of miseries of that period. This is an advertisement from Surfshark. From the Trojan horse to undercover wartime agents, history teaches us that threats can emerge from unlikely sources. And now, with our lives increasingly playing out online, those dangers are virtual, but no less real. That's where Surfshark comes in. It's an all-in-one cyber security suite that protects every aspect of your online life. It's VPN ensures your data is encrypted, making your online activity much harder to track, vital in a world in which every link you click and every site you visit leaves a trail. 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Yes, one of the things that I had to sort of try and manage in this book, you know, do the whole of the history of the Gothic across the world in about 55,000 words. How the hell do you do that? Well, in the end, I came up with this idea of thinking about a compass. So we associate the Goths as a kind of tribal, dark age race with the North and actually someone like Ruskin Associates with the North as well. But there's always a Southern Gothic. So in America, we associate the Gothic with Southern writers like William Falkner and it's all those kind of dreaded stuff about the Civil War and about slavery and plantations and the kind of legacy of that is still being worked through. But there's also an Eastern Gothic. So this sense of the yellow peril so called coming from Japan or China. There's a colonial Gothic, which is about these strange monsters that you find on the edge of Empire in India or in Africa, particularly or in the Outback in Australia. And there's also a Western Gothic as well, that sense in which, you know, you can head west into the wilderness in America throughout the 19th century. But you were encountering kind of monstrous unknown territory, which is full of these strange creatures and strange tribes, which actually you know that you're very contact as a colonial settler are are killing off, you know, because you're bringing disease with you and and there's that sort of pole of death that is driving behind this. There are lots of landscapes, wild sublime mountains and territories of the unknown, but also landscapes that are that that kind of anxiety increasingly doesn't come from the total outside, you know, from from something disturbed in the in the Arctic or something from the wilds of America, but actually erupts inside your own house. And that that sense of it coming home is a really key landscape, I think that emerges over time. So, you know, Jekyll and Hyde, Hyde appears to be this monstrous figure. He's coming from the back streets, but actually sorry to ruin this, but actually it's jiggle. And it's actually a version of himself that he's let free, and it's erupting from within us. So that's a sense of the uncanniness of home is very important to the modern Gothic as well. Yeah, the haunted house, I think is one of my own personal favorite Gothic tropes in literature and and in films. How has that evolved or changed over time? Yeah, the haunted house is a really good example, and I think it has changed quite quite radically over time. So in the in the early phase of Gothic novels, Gothic writing, it's nearly always associated with ancient buildings with ruins or with, you know, abandoned places. And nearly always, the narrative is about, you know, fleeting images of ghosts or haunting some sort of intrusion into this space. And really, the story is about investigating that and trying to unearth the tree's story, so it might be, you know, this was a place of atrocity, this was a place of a wrongful death that was never acknowledged, and once you tell the story of the ghost, the ghost is later rest. So we still have, you know, narratives like that around haunted house narratives that the work like that. But while I found increasingly interesting was that there's a kind of an opposite of that that's emerged in the 20th century, which is that we are really haunted by places that have absolutely no history. So hotels, you know, places like institutions like mental asylum and so on that that are actually these very modern and very idealistic institutions that were designed to reform people that actually sort of went horribly wrong. We've decided, you know, these aren't great places. What a bad idea to, you know, staff thousands of mentally ill people into one space. That didn't work. And, you know, these themselves become haunted and they're much more about, you know, the uneasy sort of anonymous places, corridors, tunnels in in tube stations, hotels that have no history and yet seem to leak all of these these strange great ghosts and monsters in their basements are in there. In their strange interstitial spaces. So yeah, there's lots of change across the history of the haunted house from this ancient thing to a very kind of modern unnerving place. Something we see as well throughout the history of the Gothic, whether it's Dracula or then in the modern age films like midsummer and the witch is this this idea of folk horror and attention between urban and rural and fears about rural communities. Where do you think you can, you can see that changing. Yeah, folk horror is a really good example of something that's kind of emerged very recently. So no one talked about folk horror until about 2010. And now it's become one of the key ways of thinking through contemporary kind of Gothic. And we tend to bounce back into the 1970s to see films like The Wickham Man as being the quintessential folk horror story. It's a story of a policeman who is sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate a disappearance and it turns out that he's going to be caught up in some ancient ritualistic sacrifice. So that's a kind of classic folk horror thing. But actually, of course, the use of folklore goes all the way back to the beginning of the Gothic. Where walls are centuries old, this idea that there are some men who might turn into walls who might let their beastie or nature overtake them periodically. That's that that's a really kind of crucial idea or folklore and the vampire again is something that that kind of emerges from a folklore position in peasant culture. cultures at the edges of Empire and then becomes a kind of fictional trope. So you can begin to see that actually the use of folklore or what is called the folklore-esque, things that sound like folklore but aren't urban myths and so on. Slendermans, really good example of this, you know, an internet myth actually, that's emerged just through the leaking of this story into the technology and people begin to believe it, begin to act on this kind of myth. So you can see folklore as being really central to the Gothic and actually that roots it in a really ancient centuries-old set of traditions. So it's both a very, very modern genre of the Gothic, 18th century, the enlightenment, the recognisably modern world but it's also all about what survives, what the legacy is of ancient mythology. We thought we'd got over this, we thought we'd superseded all of these superstitions and here they come roaring back as soon as you hear a creek on the stair at three o'clock in the morning. Yeah. We've spoken about Gothic monsters throughout the conversation, where was Vampire Zombies, but I wanted to ask you what your own personal favourite Gothic monsters were. Maybe some that tell us something about the time in which they were created. Yeah, I think, well, everyone has their favourite monsters, don't they? And I think I'm always quite intrigued recently by the much more formless monsters. So things that don't necessarily manifest in physical shape at all. And actually I find that the most kind of unnerving. So things like the mist film, which it's only at the very end, you begin to see these creatures emerging from the mist before it's a kind of vague cloud of menace. Or there is a film called The Wind, which is set on the very borders of the western edge of the wilderness in America in the 19th century. And again, that's just gusts of wind for a long time. How frightening is that? Well, quite unnerving. Algin and Blackwood wrote a great novella called The Willows, which is just simply the willows, these willows shaking a lot at night. And it's just the sound, which completely freaks out the narrator. He thinks that there is something from another world trying to get into our world. And all it is is a natural landscape, nothing, nothing kind of there. Some people might have seen the final destination films, which is where death runs after people. But you never see this creature. You never see this thing. It just manipulates the world around you to create what seemed to be accident. So you get these very elaborate, very funny as well. Deaths, which are kind of manipulated just by the environment around you. So my favorite monster is actually those you can't see, which might not be a very satisfying answer, I suppose. There's also something very interesting about tentacles, I think, and kind of tentacular creatures. Because I think they're so alien, they're so other. So they don't reflect us back. The zombie is just us, reflected back. They're just humans who've gone into a different phase. So vampires, actually, usually, they're just kind of contaminated versions of us. But Octopus, they're completely alien. We don't understand them at all. They have really weird kind of physiology that makes no sense to us. We don't understand it. Or eels. We don't know how they reproduce. That's crazy. So there's this kind of this other physiology, I think, which the Gothic users and has used very recently. Again, someone like Lovecraft is very influential in that, because he actually had phobia of shellfish. And you can tell that in his fiction, because there's all of these tentacles and horrifying kind of protuberances that he just create absolute revulsion in him. So I think that's another kind of area, which I think is very interesting. That point about Lovecraft bringing his own personal baggage as it were to his Gothic is interesting. Who do you think are some of the figures that have had the most influence on the development of Gothic? That's also a really, really good question. And I think, you know, there are versions of the Gothic which have, you know, obvious kind of progenitors. So Anne Radcliffe in the 1790s wrote these kind of classic Gothic romances set in usually in castles, remote in Italy or in Spain or in France, with a long elaborate menacing threat to the heroine. You can see that everywhere still. Edgar Allan Poe is a really important figure, I think, as well. For this, the short story, someone who was completely obsessed with premature burial and was, you know, kind of terrified of it. And you can see that coming up again and again in his kind of short stories. But it's the idea of "consition" and of shortness, what he called a kind of, you know, a harmonious kind of one sitting story was really important for him to get the effect of horror that he wanted. So that's very important. And then someone like H.D. Wells fuses the old Gothic with modern scientific romance, what we now call science fiction. So that fusion was very important as well. Lots of things come from that. And then I think no one can avoid someone like Anne Rice or Stephen King in the 1970s. That's the kind of key moment of those become massive bestsellers, the interview with a vampire, but also the shining or carry, you know, those books by Stephen King were really, really important for updating all of this old material. So you mentioned the 1970s as a golden age of Gothic before. What do you see as going on at that time that led that to happen? Was it the emergence, for example, of just some incredibly popular books from Stephen King that started off a trend? Or do you think that there was something going on in terms of historical background underneath all of that? Yeah, it's always an intriguing kind of question to ask why the 1970s is such an important moment. I think there are several answers always. I mean, one would be, I think, a kind of shift in the thresholds of censorship. So there's a breakdown of the Hollywood Code in 1968, which had kind of really limited what you could represent. And suddenly that was just abandoned. The studio's abandoned it. So you get incredibly explicit films emerging, really, really kind of violent imagery as well. And then someone like Stephen King immediately a massive million bestseller, you know, straight away with his early work. And that seems to answer something about the kind of strife and collapse of authority in the 1960s. A very violent decade, Vietnam is still going on, assassinations. And then also, you know, just straightforward social anxieties like the rise of feminism. And that's really important, I think, for both women using the Gothic to try and address some of these anxieties. But also, it can be very conservative, you know, and these films can become very punitive about women who express themselves sexually or independently. So all of that, you know, slasher horror films, they like Halloween, is it's really difficult material because it's clearly punitive towards women at times. And then again, you know, subsequently, people have reworked it and revised it. Lots of women directors have come in and done really interesting things with that slasher genre. So I think that's why there's an eruption in England, slightly different question in America. And you can see it being copied and transformed and mutated across the world. I wanted to ask you what some of your own personal favourite Gothic cultural moments are. Okay, so I always have to confess as a, you know, an earnest professor of literature that the only reason I am a professor of literature is because of Stephen King's "The Shining", which I read at a very kind of impressionable age. And also the film which came out in 1979 was a huge kind of impression on me, not because it's particularly gory or violent just because of its sort of sensitive menace. But actually, you know, it's an amazing book. I would really encourage people to go back and read it because it's, you know, this hotel is a bearer of all of the of the atrocious history of America in really quite intriguing ways. That doesn't appear very much in the film, but actually the book is extraordinary. And it was just that kind of sense of how is this, how is this novelist doing this to me, you know, to have this kind of effect on me? It's really quite extraordinary. You can kind of, you're both sort of outside it. This is preposterous. This is ridiculous because after all, it's a often collapses into comedy, doesn't it, horror, with the reach for the sublime, but actually you collapse back into the ridiculous. And I think lots of horror fans have have a really strong sense of humor as well, you know, so they know that what they're watching is ridiculous or preposterous. You know you should never go to the basement or go up the stairs, but you always do. Those sorts of things are really kind of crucial. So I think there are, there are cultural moments that have really struck home. And you see them because the first effect was so powerful, you see them endlessly repeated, but You know, one of the most famous probably recently was the Japanese film ring, which came out in the late 1990s. Now, the idea of a long black head woman crawling out of a television towards you sounds ridiculous, but actually the first time you see it, it's the most extraordinary terrifying thing, which can shock even the most jaded of, you know, kind of horror film fans. And that, of course, has been that initial shock effect has been repeated over and over again to lessening effect every time, but it's that kind of inaugural moment that does that. And again, I think I'm someone who's edited Jacqueline Hyde, which I think has been hugely important for a psychological gothic. So the split self, the idea that you don't know yourself is really kind of quite a powerful modern sort of idea, very kind of powerful, or the yellow wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story about a woman who is narrating without realizing it, her own kind of mental breakdown. And she's sort of imprisoned in this nursery by her entirely benign husband who's tried to help her. But nevertheless, it's a kind of gothic story happening at another level at the same time. It's a very wonderful, odd story, which I would really recommend people go and check out. So those are some. Finally, we've spoken a lot about how gothic has been used to talk about anxieties of the age, and it's changed to reflect those anxieties. So where do you see gothic going next? Well, I think the great thing about the gothic is that it's entirely unpredictable. So it's really very surprising. And it's often written off. Genre is often are, you know, you see lots of essays about, oh, this is the end of science vision, or this is the end of the gothic. And of course, something new comes along and totally transforms the form. So it's very unpredictable where it goes. I think at the moment, we've all become as kind of gothic readers. Very interested in a kind of transnational or global forms of the gothic. So what happens to it when it's picked up in, say, Thailand by filmmakers? What happens when it goes to Africa, particularly? You know, that's a sense of how does it get rewritten? Such a rich tradition of mythology and folklore that we aren't necessarily familiar with in the West that we're introduced to through these new kinds of fish. And so it has, in fact, gone very global now. And the refresh voices coming through all the time, a huge subculture which supports this. I was just looking briefly yesterday at a, I googled women horror film makers and came up with a list of 249, I think, in the last 10 years. So that's a sense of people who haven't necessarily had voices in the genre always, or not always acknowledged, coming through and really using it in interesting ways. So some of the most interesting work, you know, of late, has been focused on that. Really interesting horror films about migrants or migration, great film, little film called His House, or a film about haunting called Atlantique, which is about migrants who drown and then sort of come back as the spectral figures. There's a really rich kind of engagement with our contemporary culture. That's what you always get from the gothie. Always get that, I would say, kind of quite political, social engagement with the world around it. Rather than it being an escapist thing, which, of course, it can be, it can also be this very, very turned on and engaged form of writing. [MUSIC PLAYING] That was Roger Lookhurst. His book, Gothic, An Illustrated History, is out now published by Princeton. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Benuret, Jack Bateman, and Brittany Colley. [MUSIC PLAYING] A new and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at the Home Depot. Create stunning light effects. Then switch it up with the top of your fingers. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at Home Depot.com.