Knitting a Gothic Fan Culture

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