Editorial Summonings

This journal has “Gothic” in its title; yet, having included within its pages essays on media conventionally categorized as horror such as Stephen King’s Carrie (1.1) and the videogame The Last of Us (1.2), one could reasonably ask if there is a difference between “Gothic” and “horror.” In popular parlance, the two terms are indeed often used interchangeably. However, if we wish to disentangle the two, we might start by considering Gothic as a genre and horror as an emotion or affect—and then to consider how the terms evolved.The Gothic, as many readers of this journal will know, emerged as a category of literature in the late eighteenth century in stories defined by a spooky atmosphere and including violent acts, elements of the supernatural (sometimes real, sometimes not), and a morbid fascination with the past and with death. Horace Walpole is credited with having essentially invented the genre when he added “A Gothic Tale” to the title of the second edition of The Castle of Otranto in 1765, signaling the story’s (faux) antiquity. Many commentators on the Gothic have focused on the recurring tropes, characteristics, and plot devices present in early contributions to the genre that have become synonymous with it. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, for example, writes that, “[a]ssociated with the traditional Gothic Novel is an ivy-covered haunted ruin, a swooning heroine replete with sensibility, and a tyrannical villain, bequeathed with a lock, a key, and a castle” (xxi). Leslie Fiedler offers an almost but not quite parodic portrait of the genre when he writes,Thinking broadly in terms of the genre’s recurring conceits, Linda Bayer-Berenbaum in The Gothic Imagination (1982) usefully argues that the Gothic is characterized by four Ss: sensualism, sensationalism, sadism, and satanism. Sensualism refers to the world of the senses and, within the Gothic, the inability to reach definite conclusions based on sensory data as darkness and extreme states of mind distort perception. The sensualism aspect becomes central for Xavier Aldana Reyes, who in his Gothic Cinema (2020) argues that, at least where cinema is concerned, “Gothic” is marked by a particular aesthetic: dark, gloomy, baroque, antique. Sensationalism refers to the “over-the-top” nature of the Gothic’s representation of the supernatural, violence, and tabooed behavior: ghosts, demons, rape, murder, incest, and so on. Gothic always goes too far, transgressing the boundaries of good taste and decorum (Fred Botting describes the Gothic as the literature of transgression in his Gothic [1996].) Sadism has to do with the genre’s preoccupation with torture and pain, while satanism reflects the genre’s contempt for conventional forms of organized religion. The Gothic, Bayer-Berenbaum concludes, “insists that what is customarily hallowed as real by society and its language is but a small portion of a greater reality of monstrous proportion and immeasurable power.” “The peculiarly Gothic quality of this extended reality,” she continues, “is its immanence, its integral, inescapable connection to the world around us” (21).These things may indeed be horrible—and were described as such by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics and commentators. Gothic author Ann Radcliffe, for example, famously drew a distinction between “terror” and “horror” in her 1826 piece “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” Terror, according to Radcliffe, is evoked by a fear of the unknown and expands the mind by engaging the imagination, mixing fear with wonder. She relates it to the idea of the sublime. Horror, in contrast, is the experience of revulsion and shock elicited by confronting something gruesome or grotesque. Devendra P. Varma explains the contrast between terror and horror as “the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse” (130). In keeping with her own predilections, Radcliffe argues for terror as the proper goal for the Gothic novel.Radcliffe, of course, was not the first to characterize narrative events as being evocative of horror. “Oh, horrible, oh, horrible, most horrible!” is how the ghost of Hamlet’s father describes his own murder (1.5.80)—an assessment presumably shared by the audience. What Radcliffe makes clear though is that horror is a sensation or affect produced in the audience in response to descriptions and actions presented in the text—and this is an understanding that has persisted to the present day. In the introduction to Horror: A Literary History, Xavier Aldana Reyes states succinctly, “Horror takes its name . . . from the effects that it seeks to elicit in its readers” (7).As the example of Hamlet suggests, horror conceived of as an emotion evoked by art is in no way limited to Gothic novels. Greco-Roman myth and theater are filled with actions eliciting a sense of horror, for example, as are Elizabethan revenge tragedies. Nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, “shilling shockers,” and crime novels are similarly replete with horrific scenes. And even works that seem far removed from the intention to evoke fear and disgust can have horrific moments—I’ve personally never quite been able to shake the scene of ants crawling across the face of a dead soldier in Stephen Crane’s Naturalistic novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895).All of this is to say that, up until the early twentieth century, Gothic was a genre defined by a menu of recurring conceits and characteristics—notably, an atmosphere of dread—and horror was an emotional response elicited by Gothic works, although not limited to just Gothic works. The pivot to horror as a genre in its own right took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, initially in conjunction with literature but then more prominently associated with film. As Gary D. Rhodes observes, in the late nineteenth century and around the turn to the twentieth, some works began to be described as works of horror. Rhodes notes, for example, a newspaper article from 1899 suggesting that Rudyard Kipling was almost, but not quite, as successful at writing “the horror story” as Edgar Allan Poe, and a commentator in 1900 attempted to differentiate “the horror story of today from the horror story of the past” (Rhodes 95).The real shift to horror as a genre, however, took place in relation to film. Rhodes explains that, despite Universal Studios’ attempts not characterize Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula as horror, the word nevertheless became associated with it: “The term [horror] came to the fore not as the result of a Universal’s marketing strategy, but rather in spite of it, thanks to its organic usage in the early months of 1931” (93). Once Dracula proved to be a success, Universal embraced the characterization of the movie as a horror film and other studios followed suit in their own marketing campaigns, “with the term ‘horror film’ becoming increasingly common in late 1931 and early 1932, used and readily understood by those creating, publicizing, viewing, and even decrying the genre” (93). “As early as 1932,” Rhodes explains, “many newspapers and trade publications declared that Dracula had inaugurated the ‘horror movie’” (106), and its utility as a marketing device allowed it “to encompass a range of tropes that extended well beyond the confines of the gothic or ghost stories or mysteries” (107).The result was an interesting twentieth-century inversion: Horror became a genre and Gothic transformed into what Reyes characterizes as a “mode” marked more by its “aesthetics, motifs and figures” than by “affect or intended emotional outcomes” (Gothic Cinema 14). Put differently, horror became a genre defined by its intentionality: Works marketed as horror were and remain those that seek to elicit fear, disgust, and/or unease from their audiences. They can do this in any number of ways, ranging from representations of homicidal maniacs and monsters to viral pandemics to getting lost in the woods, and the action can take place anywhere at any time—past, present, or future. Gothic, in contrast—at least as characterized by Reyes—connotes a particular look, a set of tropes, and a sense of pastness. Like the literature that serves as its origin, Gothic looks backward in time, ponderous architecture plays a central role, and the atmosphere is gloomy. Importantly, Gothic may seek to engender fear, but this is no longer required. Thus, one can have what Catherine Spooner has characterized as “happy Gothic.”The result, finally, for us in the twenty-first century is a kind of Venn diagram consisting of two largely overlapping circles. At the center is what we may refer to as Gothic horror—works that make use of identifiable Gothic aesthetic and thematic devices for the purposes of evoking negative affect. We can then identify to one side Gothic works that are not horror—that make use of Gothic settings and devices, but for purposes other than eliciting horror (the works of Tim Burton come to mind here, as does Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975]). To the other side, we can identify works of horror that do not employ a Gothic aesthetic or conventional tropes—perhaps Ari Aster’s brightly lit Midsommer (2019) might serve as an example, at least in terms of aesthetics.For our purposes at American Gothic Studies, we are interested in what Bayer-Berenbaum refers to as the “Gothic Imagination” writ large. This encompasses the various ways that Gothic themes, devices, and aesthetics manifest in American art and culture from Gothic horror to happy Gothic. We are interested in the “cultural work” that Gothic narrative performs—the ways in which it either reflects and reinforces or challenges particular understandings of the world. Excavating the histories of the terms Gothic and horror is itself an interesting exploration of shifting understandings of genre and terminology that will no doubt take many further turns.ENGAGEMENTS: Have thoughts about this column? American Gothic Studies invites responses to this and other essays published in the journal in the form of Engagements. These short pieces (250–1000 words) are meant to encourage dialogue between writers for and readers of American Gothic Studies. They should respond to an article, interview, provocation, or exhumation published in a prior issue of the journal. They can be complimentary, critical, supplemental, or some combination of the three. Engagements should be submitted through the submission portal on the American Gothic Studies website. Please use the same formatting instructions as for journal articles. If you have questions, please contact the section editor, Christina Connor, at [email protected].