ABSTRACT
The introduction sets out the parameters of the book and of Gothic cinema studies. It begins by arguing that there has been a collapse of Gothic cinema into horror yet simultaneously a clear demarcation between the two that is inherited from early theorisations of the differences between ‘horror’ (visceral, shocking) and ‘terror’ (subtle, suggestive). Teasing out the problems arising from these generic confusions and proposing a separation between horror as a genre premised on intended emotions and Gothic cinema as an aesthetic mode, this chapter then turns to what the main aesthetic cues of Gothic cinema are and proposes three levels on which the mode operates: the aesthetic, the affective and the cultural. It introduces the structure of the book, its roughly chronological and survey-style approach and concludes by making a case for the importance of reading Gothic cinema through an industry lens that acknowledges production forces and markets.
