ABSTRACT
A transnational co-production like The Others, set in foreign soil and shot in English with international actors, has to be understood within the transnational framework of Spanish cinema at the beginning of the 21st century. Like Tesis and Abre los ojos, The Others contains a metatextual subplot in which the film reflects on reality and fiction, life and death, nature and representation. As the film unfolds in the gothic tradition, the audience is held in suspense along with the characters. Female gothic literature and film typically describe the heroine's moral education and her capacity to distinguish Good from Evil without succumbing to the latter. Like postmodernism, the gothic is associated with the loss of faith in universals and absolutes. Reality, identity, and narrative are constructs of perception that reveal the emphasis of the gothic and the postmodern in spectacle, surfaces, and performance.
