H.P. Lovecraft opens his essay ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’ with the following declaration: My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualizing more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentari

There has been an overwhelming focus on a Southern Gothic in the key examples of post-modern American Gothic horror film and television, set as they frequently are in New Orleans (Interview with the Vampire, The Skeleton Key), South Carolina (American Gothic), Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico (Carnivàle), Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi (True Blood), and Florida (Invasion, Dexter). Heat and its attendant passions are clearly a significant aspect of these narratives, and the landscape of the southern states (be it the boyou, the everglades or the dustbowl) a key element in each text’s

During a conversation last week with an American exchange student taking my horror film module, he asked how I had ended up with horror cinema as my research specialism. It’s not a very complex history: like a lot of the fans who have contributed to my research over the years, I discovered quite early in life that I had a taste for the macabre, the Gothic, the scary. I knew I was not the only woman to have such tastes, yet when I first studied film it seemed there was little acknowledgement of the enthusiastic female horror film audience, either in the academy or in the industry. Choosing a

As a scholar in the field of horror cinema I consider myself fortunate to work in a most Gothic environment, for my (admittedly rather mundane) office at St Mary’s University College looks out over Horace Walpole’s Little Gothick Castle in Strawberry Hill. In a further example of propitious fate (I am even tempted to call it serendipity), just as I was being invited to contribute this guest blog to Gothic Imagination the newly-restored house was being unveiled from behind scaffolding and plastic sheeting, with the Friends of Strawberry Hill gearing up for its reopening. To begin this po