Genre Matters: Gothic Fiction and Film

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Professor Roger Luckhurst
• Assessment: a 750-word ‘defining genre’ written exercise (20%), 1000-word review of Gothic text or horror film (30%) and 1750-word final essay (50%)

You're just off to a joyous wedding in your castle when the bridegroom is crushed to death by the sudden appearance of a gigantic, spectral knight's helmet. Unlucky. It could have happened to anyone. What follows is worse: portraits come alive, giant dismembered limbs wriggle in corridors, virgins are menaced, and the castle walls begin to crumble.

This is the outline of the short, disordered book by Horace Walpole called The Castle of Otranto (1764), widely considered to be the founding text of the Gothic. The book has spawned a host of imitators full of supernatural events, unnerving experiences in dungeons, scary nuns, vampires, zombies and the occasional appearance of a transdimensional squid. Horror film over the last 100 years has become one of the central genres of our visual culture, so we will watch alongside reading the fiction as we progress across 250 years.

This intensive module introduces you to the specifics of the Gothic genre in fiction and film, ranging from gloomy poets mooching about in graveyards, the appearance of some unnerving Victorian ghosts and vampires, all the way up to modern-day horrors of zombie hordes. It mixes reading fiction with film adaptations of classics like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The module is designed to help you think through why the framework of genre is so important for our understanding of popular culture.

No prior knowledge is needed, but fans and enthusiasts are also welcome. Those sensitive to representations of horror need not worry too much, you will not be forced to watch anything too nasty in class. This might even be a way of exploring why texts that make us fearful or anxious seem so popular.

Indicative syllabus

• Genre matters: how genres work
• Gothic origins: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); small sample of graveyard poetry (1720s-1760s)
• Monsters: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); film adaptations: Frankenstein (1931); Poor Things (2023)
• Victorian ghosts: Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’ (and BBC film); Bulwer-Lytton, ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’
• Late Victorian Gothic revival: Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde and film adaptations and short story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
• Vampires: Dracula and film adaptations (Karl Freund, 1931; Terence Fisher, 1959; Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
• Cosmic horror and weird fiction: story, H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and film The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
• Zombies: Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) and opening episode of The Walking Dead TV series
• Intensive study day: contemporary horror film: It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and discussion

By the end of this module, you will:

• have built on Level 4 foundations of literary and cultural study
• understand literary genres, specifically the identification of literary genres as a central aspect of literature and film
• have developed frameworks to recognise and analyse instances of the Gothic genre in literature and film.