A bit of a coup for Scottish film. It was announced today that Joss Whedon and Eli Roth will be attending the Glasgow Film Festival 2013 (14th-24th February at the Glasgow Film Theatre). Whedon is attending the UK premier of his Much Ado About Nothing and Roth is supporting Aftershock, which is screening as part of the festival's FrightFest series. Another highlight of FrightFest looks set to be the premier of Byzantium, which is directed by Neil Jordan (Interview with the Vampire) and stars Gemma Arterton. Both will be in attendance. For more, see the GFF13 official site or this arti

Uncontrollable appetite is repulsive and taboo. It reminds us of our animalistic selves and incites a level of horror and fascination that is relished in Gothic texts and by readers of the Gothic. Gothic texts accord a power to all things oral that suggests something much deeper and darker is going on in our dealings with what we put in our mouths.

Gothic texts are often concerned with the question of the human body as food, and the mouth as a site of danger, contamination, death or corruption. Popular representations of the cannibal remind us of the voracity of human hunger and the potentially limitless nature of appetite. The cannibal figure represents the fear that our appetite for consumption knows no end, and indeed reminds us of our own potential inhumanity. Gothic orality involves dangerous food and dangerous mouths.

“Young Adult Gothic” at Lancaster’s Litfest 17th October, 2012 The Gothic always features prominently at Lancaster’s annual literary festival, Litfest. The week-long festival features a series of workshops, lunchtime talks, lectures, readings and panel discussions, with Gothic titles and concerns often on the agenda. In addition to the usual variety of literary delights on offer, LitFest this year has been particularly interested in children’s fiction and have commissioned the young adult novella, Malkin Child by Livi Michael, to commemorate the four hundred year anniversary of

This week saw the release of the much-anticipated filmic adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's 2010 novel, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Graham-Smith, author of the notorious mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has written the screenplay for Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and the film has been directed and co-produced by Timur Bekmambetov the the master of dark cinema, Tim Burton.  For a trailer and a review of the film by the British film critic Mark Kermode, click here.

Today's issue of The Guardian Newspaper contains a supplement to the list of vampire novels initially recommended by Sam Jordison last week.

The Horror Writers Association has recently awarded the newly-created Bram Stoker Award for the best vampire novel of the century to Richard Matheson's I am Legend (1954).  For an interesting article on the award, see here.

Blue Demon was one of Mexico's most famous pop culture icons. Like Santo, he was a trans-media property, spanning free wrestling performances, film and comics. These two characters embraced the Gothic producing a successful mash-up of cultural references.

One cannot refer to Mexican gothic fiction without mentioning Carlos Fuentes. In fact, I would dare to say that one cannot refer to Mexican 20th century fiction in general without mentioning Carlos Fuentes. As early as 1962 the author publishes Aura, a short novel that includes many traditional gothic features. Aura can be easily found in English translation (Manchester University Press) as well as in bilingual edition (Macmillan: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). The narrative tells the story of Felipe Montero, a young historian who’s hired to organise and complete the memoirs of a dead gene

A ghostly question has haunted me even since I grew acquainted with Latin American fantastic literature: how is it possible that, apart from short and little-known articles and unpublished doctoral thesis,  nobody has ever used the term Gothic to refer to its fiction? How come the Latin American literary criticism is so rich in interpretations on the fantastic, but there are no organized and systematic study of the prominent Gothic features of many of its texts? The first answer that came to mind had to do with the bad reputation the genre had in its beginnings, which may explain the crit