This paper investigates some popular twentieth-century incarnations of the ‘explained supernatural’ narrative which came to prominence in the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century. Recent developments in the representation of well-known heroes of the debunking narrative – the kids in Scooby-Doo, Sherlock Holmes – have them battling the actual supernatural, and behaving like superheroes. Referencing accepted readings of the explained supernatural as reflecting the shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from credulity to belief in scientific rationality, this paper suggests that the ‘explained supernatural’ also represented a celebration of the power of the mind at a time when machinery was replacing the human body. Today (by contrast) computers are replacing the mind, and we are being reduced to an irrational state by technology. Moreover science and technology have convinced us that the body is becoming invulnerable to ageing, illness and death. Linking this to the new physicality of characters such as Sherlock Holmes, this essay argues that our complete faith in science and technology – and our infantilisation by the same – has made possible a new ‘explained supernatural’ narrative model in which characters who formerly used only brainwork now need superhuman physical strength to get things done, and the supernatural is no longer explained away, but privileged.

Keywords: Scooby-Doo,  Sherlock  Holmes,  Conan  Doyle,  explained  supernatural, Ann Radcliffe

This paper looks at Living TV’s popular ghost hunting programme Most  Haunted. Immersed in Gothic imagery, Most Haunted may be seen as style over substance. However, I argue that the text is actually firmly rooted in the tradition of subversion and Victorian Spiritualism. Most  Haunted is about imaginatively transporting the viewer into its Gothic spaces through low-tech production values and a distinct and apparent amateurism. Most  Haunted invites the audience into these Gothic spaces precisely through this almost rigid refusal of expertise, technological wonder and proficiency. Most Haunted subverts the elitist and masculine traditions of ghost hunting, creating a new contemporary Gothic space which returns to a more rowdy, sensational and distinctly working class tradition of popular ghost hunts. Most Haunted displays a happy irreverence and this paper argues that it returns the Gothic to where it should be – out of the bourgeois and back into popular culture.

Keywords: Gothic  television,  technology,  subversion,  amateurism,  ghost hunting

In this paper we theorise gothumentary not as a subgenre, but as a critical concept. Through this concept we analyse some of the ways documentary and the Gothic have come together as discursive and rhetorical modes in cinema in order to address similar questions: how the past manifests in the present, how a subject can be represented and interpreted through documents, and how the limits of knowledge are drawn in our representations. Recent cinematic texts such as Capturing the Friedmans (d. Andrew Jarecki, 2003), In the Realms of the Unreal (d. Jessica Yu, 2004), Must Read After My Death (d. Morgan Dews, 2007), Cropsey (d. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, 2009), and Resurrect Dead (d. Jon Foy, 2011) show the potential of the Gothic to undermine longstanding notions that positivistic strategies of representation are the key to what documentary has to offer both audiences and scholars. We theorise that the Gothic tradition’s engagement with the pleasures and torments of the text, along with its manifest anxieties regarding representation, can provide a critical intervention in the current crisis surrounding documentary realism. In contrast to conventional documentary modes, the films included in this study emphasise possibility over conclusiveness to suggest that perhaps the most productive way of thinking about the mysteries of our world is through speculation, interpretation, contemplation, and a certain fearful wonderment.

Keywords: Gothic, documentary, uncanny, reflexivity, hermeneutics

Doubles are everywhere in Gothic narratives. The transmedia universes surrounding the television series Supernatural and the videogame Alan Wake are no different. However, rather than focusing on how, for example, characters are haunted by their pasts, the present essay zeroes in on doubles created by the transgression of medial boundaries. Special attention is given to how the television show and the video game are burdened by the history of the genre and how doubles emerge from the transmedia narratives surrounding these contemporary Gothic texts. In the process, it becomes evident that Supernatural and Alan Wake do not merely draw attention to the present absence inherent in any representation, but, moreover, highlight the constant attempts by the media to not merely replicate, but replace reality.

Keywords: intertextuality, metatextuality, hyperreality, genericity

Taking as case study Robert Harris’s The Ghost, and focusing on the ‘poetics’ of ghostwriting and multiple, disseminated authorship, this article aims to highlight the crucial intersections between truth and fiction, authenticity and self-deception and the disembodying of public accountability from both the political subject and the literary author, made possible by the emergence of professional speechwriters and celebrity politicians. Suggestively embedded in this subtly intertextual novel are a number of Gothic narrative structures and generic conventions, which range from the thematisation of ghostwriting as a spectral activity, to the pervasive use of terms and images pertaining to the semantic areas of “haunting” and “the ghostly”, to neo-Gothic rewritings of landscapes and social milieus.

Keywords: ghostwriting,  political  thriller,  Tony  Blair,  authorship,  Gothic  remediation

In its figuration of white bodies as horrifically deficient, South African Gothic deconstructs apartheid’s white supremacist assumption of comprehensive power and legitimate authority. Apartheid’s toxic fixation on ‘difference’ and its disavowal of solidarity across communities produce a repressed kinship between whites and non-whites, which Nadime Gordimer, Alex La Guma and Marlene Van Niekerk render in tropes of topographical separation and the discursive fetishisation of race. In works that represent the anti-apartheid struggle as a foreordained “twice-told tale”, these authors exhibit the many ways in which apparently discrete nationalist narratives interconnect, shaping both those in power and also those subjected by them. In disclosing white South African histories as spectral, these authors extend the frontiers of Gothic structure and its conventional tropes. Theirs is a Gothic as expansive as apartheid itself: revealing the widening of terror as it moved from law, to land, to body.

Keywords: abjection, uncanny, spectral, body, race

This article aims to examine the social and political function of zombie cinema in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and during the ensuing ‘War on Terror’. Recent zombie films have established a link between the zombie and the figure of the terrorist or political insurgent, but the concomitant humanisation of the zombie figure has complicated this simple association. The post-millennial cinematic zombie subverts its conventional role as representative of the cultural other. By examining several key films this article will focus on the zombie’s increasing sophistication as a Gothic/horror trope; in particular, the humanising process and its consequences for the subject positioning of the audience, who are encouraged to question whether it is the zombie, or the human response to it, which provides the most significant threat.

Keywords: zombie, terrorism, ethics, anxiety propaganda, the other

This essay examines the longstanding fantasy of body swapping, or in more contemporary terms, acquiring a new, younger body to replace the older, sick one through medical technologies. This ancient dream has clear Gothic overtones and can be inscribed in a line of continuity with other versions of Faustian pacts, such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). I analyse Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002) and Richard T. Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest (2011) as present-day instances of this age-old aspiration, re-envisioning Stevenson’s body swapping Gothic fantasy with the tools of modern-day medicine, updating the fantasies for radically extended youth and longer life spans which recent developments in the biosciences suggest might gradually become true. A horror of the aged body permeates both novels, which crucially deal with older men who wish to recover their lost youth and vigour, while the Gothic motifs of the Doppelgänger and devilish pacts constitute recurring features.

Keywords: body-swapping, Gothic (dis)embodiments, posthuman body, uncanny, immortality body transplant

When Danny Boyle directed Nick Dear’s Frankenstein (2011), the stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel performed at the National Theatre in the spring of  2011, he decided to use a dramatic device unusual and provocative: he cast Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in both the roles of Victor and the Creature in order for each actor to inhabit both the creator and the Creature, the aggressor as well as the victim. This essay examines how Boyle’s production of Dear’s adaptation invigorates Shelley’s study of the consequences of monstrous acts. It investigates how Dear changes Shelley’s novel recasting the well-known story by telling it completely through the eyes of the Creature: the play opens with the creation scene, it rewrites De Lacey’s role and it creates an intelligent and daring Elizabeth. Boyle’s two-part production exceeded Dear’s adaptation. This essay also discusses Boyle’s innovative stage design, which includes an incubator, and images from William Blake, and argues that Boyle’s production allows the Doppelgänger motif to collapse.

Keywords: Boyle, Dear, Frankenstein, Doppelgänger, monstrosity

This essay argues that Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful Millennium series is constructed around a Gothic core. This core relies on a structure in which the Gothic terror inflicted by the villains draws forth an anarchic response from the heroine that reflects its cause. The ensuing battle spotlights issues dealing with familial and social authority as well as their justification. The analysis is steered by the ideas Slavoj Žižek has presented about the contemporary socio-cultural situation in the West. Given that most of his examples come from popular culture, his essays foreground moments of Gothic terror in cultural products and political situations. Thus they read like analyses of Gothic cultural circumstances. This perspective fits Larsson’s handling of Gothic elements, for they serve the purpose of focusing on snags and hitches in symbolic structures that cover up perverted libidinal energies.

Keywords: Millennium trilogy, monster, Slavoj Žižek, primal father, Gothic  reversal

In this article I examine Lady Gaga’s fusion of Gothic and pop. Focusing on her provocative performances and ‘dark’ lyrics – from the infamous ‘meat dress’ to her debut album The Fame Monster (2009) – I explore Lady Gaga’s use of Gothic tropes and her creative concerns for “what keeps us up at night and what keeps us afraid” (Gaga quoted in Dinh 2009). Within this context, I argue that Lady Gaga deploys and commodifies the Gothic – perhaps most strikingly in The Monster Ball Tour when she was ‘bitten’ vampire-like, causing blood to dramatically spurt from her neck, before ‘dying’ in a pool of blood – in order to craft the performative subject position and musical persona that is Lady Gaga. I contend that Lady Gaga can be located within a ‘Postfeminist Gothic’ tradition as she is the personification of a ‘sexual subject’ who harnesses the trappings of Gothic horror to express her postfeminist subjectivity. Existing within a domain of risk, she seemingly subverts expectation while at the same time conforming to it. In this way, Lady Gaga’s Gothic pop/self provides expressions of the tensions of subject formation in a postfeminist era. For Lady Gaga, Gothic (per)forms a self that individuates as well as others.

Keywords: Lady Gaga, postfeminist Gothic, horror/romance, performativity,  commodification