ABSTRACT
The stock characters, themes, and motifs of Gothic literature continue to circulate today in contemporary horror cinema. The virginal heroines of Gothic narratives are a major cog in the slasher film machinery, while the familial melodrama of Gothic works ranging from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Wuthering Heights (1847) can be seen in family-centered horror franchises like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974-) and Halloween (1978-). Moreover, as Stephen King once observed, the signature Gothic works Frankenstein (1818), Dracula (1897), and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) “stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and films” (60) and helped popularize the omnipresent archetypes of the “Thing without a Name,” the vampire, and the werewolf respectively (61). Indeed, Fred Botting notes that “Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula … have spanned the history of the cinema itself” (Gothic 165), and he credits the medium with “sustain[ing] Gothic fiction in the twentieth century by endlessly filming versions of the classic Gothic novels” (156).
