ABSTRACT
Gothic is a transgressive gesture. It explores limits and exceeds boundaries such as those between life and death, fantasy and reality, or good and evil. The act of crossing limits occupies an important place in Gothic productions: transgressions are depicted so vividly that audiences almost viscerally see, feel and experience them. Gothic transgression becomes imaginable in descriptions of the vampire’s bite leading to an opening of the senses and a gradual letting go of the borders between life and death. In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Lestat’s bite makes all the colours in the room merge into one, the vampires seemingly radiating with preternatural light; after that there is only sound “louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins” (23). Gothic transgression becomes visible when Neo takes the red pill in The Matrix (“and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”) and feels the body detach itself from one, allegedly virtual, reality and sliding into the other, allegedly real, reality. Gothic actively draws audiences into the twilight zones it sketches, leaving readers, viewers and listeners destabilised, as haunted by the ghosts of the repressed as the characters they read, see, hear.
