So, tonight is Halloween, in case you hadn’t noticed. When I was a child I once dressed up as ‘Super Ted’, complete with cape, but this turns out to be an exception to the normal ghost, ghoul, witch, mummy, zombie, vampire or other scary Gothic villain favoured by children and adults alike. I have always found it intriguing, how much we celebrate the gothic villain. Indeed, nobody wants to identify with the victim, even the survivor; what we take away from a horror movie, why we go to see it in the first place, is the killer. Halloween proves that we would all rather identify with the

Zombie Science 1Z? A lecture dedicated to the science of zombies?...

Ryan Petrillo - who did our MLitt in The Gothic Imagination a number of years ago - and his band 'The Bailey Hounds' have released their debut full length album. Along the Gallows.

Thanks again to Claire and Dale for inviting me to be October’s guest blogger. In this last post, I’d like to discuss a mystery that has come up in researching my book project. When I first conceptualized this project, I focused on the mysteries of Madrid and Barcelona. The primary reason was practical: Madrid and Barcelona are Spain’s largest cities and the home of most of nineteenth-century Spain’s literate population. There are several misterios written about both cities that appeared throughout the nineteenth century. The second reason was the two cities represent competi

Tomorrow, Monday 31 October, promises to be a day rich in gory Hallowe'en fare for readers of Stirling's Gothic Imagination Blog.  Please check back throughout the day for the host of interesting articles, interviews and competitions we have lined up for you.

Dr Daniel Serravalle de Sá, of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil, is hosting a one-day postgraduate symposium on the Gothic in Literature and Film on Monday 21 November 2011.  Please contact Daniel for a copy of the exciting programme for the day.  See, too, the Call for papers for Gothic: New Directions, details of which are available here.       

Published the same year as Juan Martínez Villergas’s Los misterios de Madrid, José Nicasio Milà de Roca’s 1844 Los misterios de Barcelona offers a version of the misterio genre that is specific to the political and social concerns of Barcelona. Like Martínez Villergas, Milà de Roca sets his novel in the tumultuous 1830s, and explores the tensions caused by the Carlist War and the liberal conflict.  In the midst of this political turmoil, the novel’s central mystery unfolds: a Cuban orphan is dispossessed of her inheritance by her corrupt guardian, and seeks to recover her fortune a

The November issue of the free online journal Le Fanu Studies is now available here.  The journal seeks to publish essays not only on Sheridan Le Fanu but also on contemporary writers of ghost stories and sensation novels, as well as on other Irish writers of Le Fanu's day.

ICFA 2012: The Monstrous Fantastic 33rd annual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts March 21-25, 2012 Orlando Airport Marriott Orlando, Florida, USA In his seminal article on Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien describes the three monsters of the poem as "essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem." The Fantastic has many similarly integral monsters and monstrosities. But what do these monsters mean? How does the monstrous signify? The Monstrous Fantastic will explore the many creative and cultural constructions of monstrosity in the arts from monsters

The popularity of gothic and the use of gothic tropes in popular culture is reflected in the ways consumer culture is manipulating the figures of zombies, vampires and ghosts, in particular in the following adverts the commodified image of the zombie and the Japanese female ghost. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgYkhjS2mU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Ehg746tCw&feature=related