“It’s alive!”: the gothic tradition’s enduring legacy on screen

Where to begin? Perhaps it is a dark and stormy night. Or perhaps the clouds hang oppressively in the heavens. Perhaps the moon is on the wane and the silent leaves are still in the shadow of the hill. To approach the subject of the gothic is to take a journey along a long, twisting road to an old dark house. Steeling yourself against the insufferable gloom, you approach the ancestral pile. Inside, Bram Stoker baits Lord Byron before the looming stone mantel, offering up his neck in exchange for eternity. Mary Shelley, all in black, rocks neurotically back and forth, cradling her dead child, cursing her living creation. The shrieks of Matthew Lewis, condemned forever to circle the walls at night, no longer bother Edgar Allan Poe, soaked in laudanum, whose devilish game of cards with Sheridan Le Fanu is nearly at an end, the virtue of his young cousin almost played out. Meantime the ghost of Horace Walpole ambles through the crooked corridors crying out that it was he who built this cursed place. “Stuff and nonsense”, says Ann Radcliffe, “I can explain it all…”

It was a host of half-breed human-supernatural creatures and a visceral desire for terror that came to life on film, not the tortuous prose of the gothic novel, the corpus of which was ransacked for its vital organs, the rest discarded. A cinematographic special effect then transfused into them the lifeblood of other arts – of painting, design, theatre and performance. F.W. Murnau raised Nosferatu from the shadows through German expressionism, and destroyed him not with a stake through the heart, but with the power of light; Rouben Mamoulian created a sensation by turning debonair Dr Jekyll into the awful Mr Hyde in tight close-up without a blink, through the ingenious application of colour flters; Terence Fisher pushed the boundaries by engorging Hammer Films’ creations with as much Technicolor blood, gore and sex appeal as the censors could abide, every scene a sumptuous coronation for those Kings of Horror, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Frankenstein is the creation myth that underpins the cinema: an art of obsessive assembly, sparked into movement through the crackle of electricity. Little wonder that Mary Shelley’s ghastly tale of one man’s drive to bring a magnificent being to life – tactically sidelining Nature’s bountiful gift of procreation – was first adapted for the screen as early as 1910 by Edison Studios. But it was James Whale’s 1931 retelling of the story for Universal, pivoting round Boris Karloff’s iconic portrayal of a tormented child-monster with a bolt through his neck, that defined the cinematic Frankenstein. The process of adaptation from page to stage to screen stripped the story of its cross-continental drift, its perspective of multiple narrators, and the creature of his vengeful articulacy. Whale borrowed liberally from fine art: from Piranesi’s etchings of fantastical interiors to build his laboratory; from Goya’s Los Caprichos to design his monster makeup; from Otto Dix’s war-ruined figures for his shocked and sewn-together body; from Fuseli’s Nightmare to steal into Elizabeth’s bedchamber.

But did he deal a hand of tarot cards into the mix? There’s The Tower of Frankenstein’s laboratory, struck by lightning, destined to fall; there’s The Hanged Man, whose borrowed cadaver begins it all; the blind Hermit… Then, in Bride of Frankenstein, Doctor Pretorius, the acidly camp alchemical Magician, produces his bell-jars of charming, animated homunculi: the Queen and mischievous King; the Archbishop caught between dozing and divine proclamation; the languorous Devil, dainty Dancer and weedy Mermaid, all just about traceable to the figures of the tarot’s major arcana.

It doesn’t matter whether Whale was aware that his film images bear an uncanny resemblance to the tarot. Perhaps it was the Devil’s work? In creating his world of gods and monsters, he was drawing on and refining a powerful set of archetypes to forge the psycho-symbolic landscape of Universal horror. The great vitality of the gothic lies in the transformation of these archetypes – uncannily familiar figures playing out recurring narrative tropes – into profound and sometimes very modern fables, expressing our fears and beliefs, struggles and torments. The myriad subgenres that are the legacies of the gothic, from Conan Doyle’s detective fiction and film noir to the modern horror film, and today’s teen-vampire flicks and zombie romcoms, can feel a long way from that unhomely old dark house of memory. But it was never really about Victorian revival pinnacles, Edwardian raiment, and an attendant aesthetic conspiracy of gloom and dread – the one we’ve come to feel so comfortable with. The gothic is about mystery: the mysteries of the past, and of what lies beyond accepted thresholds of reality; the mysteries of what cannot be controlled by science; of sexual power and of charisma; of the demonised and the repressed; of the mystical and the dead.

Mythic archetypes, like vampires, have a whiff of the eternal, but they mix their blood with ordinary humans and get tangled in worldly affairs which come to mould their evolution. The brooding, powerful, secretive and sexually alluring figure who stands behind Lord Ruthven, Dracula, Rochester – and even Bruce Wayne, whose alter ego’s winged silhouette was borrowed from his vampire forebear – is Lord Byron, the prototype aristocratic hero-villain and original Prince of Darkness (building on Satan’s early work on the character, of course). Vampirism eventually shed its fancy dress, and reinvented itself beyond a decadent aristocracy living off the blood of its social inferiors. George A. Romero’s twisted teenager Martin (1976) tried to cut the bloodline with a social realist manifesto – “There’s no real magic… ever” – but Anne Rice’s crushed velvet Interview with a Vampire was published the same year, and there was more than a little Byronic inspiration in The Lost Boys’ 1980s lifestyle mantra: “Sleep all day, party all night. Never grow old. It’s fun to be a vampire.”

Bella Swan’s moody undead boyfriend in Twilight, Edward Cullen, can trace his genealogy back through to this paternal line of hell-raisers. Cullen may be trying to keep his powers and lustful hunger under wraps, but he still holds the key to that timeless fantasy for any gothic heroine, the jaw-droppingly gorgeous family house. It may be modernist concrete and slatted wood, a far cry from Castle Dracula – or from Hill House, the pile that Julie Harris’s Eleanor will stake her soul to stay in, in Robert Wise’s The Haunting – but it still speaks to that timeless querent’s anxiety: will he just try to suck the life out of me, or will I get my hands on the castle?

The woman in black, that indentured resident of the great old dark houses of Great Britain, began as a stalking nun, like Matthew Lewis’s Bloody Nun in The Monk, but when the black-satin-sheathed Swiss murderess Mrs Maria Manning went to the gallows in real life, a host of writers immortalised her in their fiction, as ghost writer Roger Clarke has observed: Le Fanu’s wickedly black Madame de la Rougierre in Uncle Silas – played to damnable perfection by Jane Lapotaire in the BBC’s 1989 adaptation, The Dark Angel – and Lady Dedlock’s murderous servant Mademoiselle Hortense in Dickens’s Bleak House. You can see her also in Mrs Danvers, immortalised on film by Judith Anderson, whose pure archetypal power is unforgettably unleashed by Hitchcock as her coal-black silhouette darts about the windows of the burning house, a living end that you feel will endure for as long as we return to Manderley in those recurring dreams. It’s no surprise, then, to see that shadow darting from room to room in the Daniel Radcliffe vehicle The Woman in Black, now condemned to prey forever upon living children out of malignant grief for a lost one. The same curse afflicts the dark woman of the woods who comes to stay with Jessica Chastain and play with her stepchildren in the Guillermo Del Toro-produced film Mama.

Even the old dark house itself, so central to gothic lore, has a social history. Underpinned by the old foundations of the mythic labyrinth and the medieval castle, the old dark house surges into prominence with the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ novels of Edgeworth, Le Fanu and Maturin, books based around the very real palatial structures of a land-owning British colonial class – houses built, let’s face it, to express their power and manage their dominion. Since then, the old dark house in gothic horror has almost constitutionally been founded on plundered and ill-gotten lands, as in the case of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, built on that ubiquitous Stephen King piece of dubious real estate: the native American burial ground.

The plundering of Ancient Egyptian tombs in the name of archaeology, following the imperial occupation of Egypt in the late 19th century, unleashed a wave of superstition that brought the returning mummy to walk among the living dead of the Western gothic tradition. Universal’s classic The Mummy was penned by John Balderston, who, as a journalist in the 1920s, had attended the final unveiling of Tutankhamun’s face from beneath his death mask in 1925. As the writer and cultural critic Roger Luckhurst has noted, Karloff’s Imhotep is really the bad conscience of the West’s scramble for ancient loot in the Valley of the Kings.

In the Hammer Films version, directed by Terence Fisher in 1959, for all that Christopher Lee’s mournful eyes command attention as Kharis, it is the fez of Mehemet Bey, devotee of the god Karnak played by George Pastell, which is the scene-stealer, massively over-signifying in glowing Technicolor scarlet. The film’s pivotal confrontation – in which Cushing’s archaeologist tells Bey that it is the endemic violence of Egypt, from ancient pagan sacrifices to the present day, that justifies Britain retaining its colonial treasures – was made just three years after the Suez catastrophe had made Egypt the graveyard of British imperial hopes. The mummy’s return embodies the fear of Egyptian self-determination.

The Mummy’s slavishly detailed reconstruction of the burial rituals of the Princess Ananka is just one example among many of gothic film’s uncanny knack of appearing to bring back to life marginalised cultures and forgotten belief systems through art direction and sensationalist plot turns. In the case of Albin Grau, the producer and production designer for Murnau’s Nosferatu, lifelong student of the occult and member of a German magical order called the Fraternitas Saturni, the engagement was quite serious. Grau had established his company, Prana-Film, for the explicit purpose of making occult productions. He was forced to fee to Switzerland in 1936, along with others, when his esoteric order was prohibited by the Nazis.

More usually on film and TV, pagan and occult symbolism have survived in the popular consciousness through recourse to a garish props cupboard, filled with the bric-à-brac of pentacles, candles and ritual daggers. There’s little authenticity in the rituals of, say, Hammer Films’ tale of an English village coven, The Witches (1966), whose climactic ritual orgy is choreographed like a scene from a West End musical; but there’s often an irrepressible screen energy available to the Devil’s party – usually an unholy cabal of outspoken women, effete men and ‘foreign’ types – that you just wouldn’t see anywhere else. Where else would a woman express an unrepentant, intellectual lust for power, as Kay Walsh does playing coven-leader Stephanie Bax? Who could forget the malevolence of the grinning African demon played by Yemi Ajibade, briefly conjured into being in a pentagram in the upstairs room of an English manor house in The Devil Rides Out (1967)? As the Duc de Richleau, strutting about the grand buildings of Bray Studios, Christopher Lee’s counter-rituals to ward off the forces of darkness look overwhelmingly now like the desperate measures of a frayed ruling class warding off the ghosts of empire.

It’s impossible not to feel embarrassment at the great pantomime and portent of satanic ritual on film, the theatrical silliness of ceremonial masks, cultic diagrams, and the inevitable sacrifice of the young, pretty and hypnotised. These scenes did however carry, to a generation who grew up before Harry Potter put The Dark Arts on the national curriculum, a dangerously counter-cultural promise of power. I remember Sarah-Jane’s frst solo adventure after Doctor Who, K9 and Company, a 1981 pilot for a series that never materialised. Challenging a coven of witches arrayed against scientific advances in market gardening, Sarah-Jane, aided by her robotic dog and his powerful laser beams, crashes a winter solstice ceremony, revealing the identities of the back-to-nature plotters by ripping off their goat’s-head masks. Not, however, before the name of the triple goddess, whom Zeus honoured above all others according to the Greek writer Hesiod, was chanted to 8.4 million viewers: “Hecate, Hecate, Hecate…” It was, for me, a beginning, not an end to a mystery.

Children are increasingly fanatical about fairytales and mad for magic according to a recent survey. Youngsters of nine and under are more likely to use fairytale references in their writing than older children, while 10 to 13-year-olds reveal a taste for the gothic in their use of darker words, according to research findings published by OUP and Radio 2 in 500 Words, a project based on analysis of 40 million words submitted through a short story competition. The word ‘magic’ is on the rise, conjured up nearly 10,000 times (an increase of 7.5 per cent on 2012). Interestingly, in a separate survey carried out by the University of Maastricht, 74 per cent of 4- to 6-year-olds, and 53 per cent of 6- to 8-year-olds, but only 5 per cent of 10- to 12-year-olds, reported scary dreams involving ghosts and monsters. Pre-teens, it seems, are learning to master their fears, drawing on stories and films and online worlds, and exploring their own creativity in order to reflect on and learn about their childhood terrors.

This, it strikes me, is the best audience for gothic films: the 13-year-old. Between worlds; still alive to magic; not yet old enough to stay out at night, but open to the possibilities of what lies in the darkness; broadly accepting of the game-changing moment when humans incarnate as gods, as K-Stew’s Bella Swan does when she joins the immortals in Twilight. It’s an audience quite attuned to strange and symbolic landscapes peopled by archetypal figures, through immersive game worlds, and not just through video and online games, but through the ‘game worlds’ of genre-munching monsters like the BBC’s Doctor Who: televisual time machines that hungrily devour every plot and every character in every genre that has ever gone before and serve them up with a goodly dose of self-reference to adoring fans across the world. Perhaps this heady brew of dark magic, this immersion in a world of gods and monsters, which increasingly occupies the leisure hours of adults as well as children, will fade as other fashions do. Perhaps it will continue to be upgraded; rebooted. Who can predict the future? Perhaps a born-digital generation will come to believe, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, that this audiovisual Wonderland of regenerating archetypes is really just a pack of cards.