Urban Gothic

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Poster for an 1880s dramatization of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Urban Gothic is a sub-genre of

Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).[1]

History

Development

An illustration from Charles Dickens' Bleak House of Tom All Alones, the urban slum credited as a major influence on the development of the genre

In English literature, the architectural

American Gothic Fiction of authors like Edgar Allan Poe in works including "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842) and Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) and "The Birth-Mark" (1843).[5] This in turn influenced American novelists like Herman Melville in works such as Moby-Dick (1851).[6] Early Victorian Gothic novels that employed contemporary rural settings include Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).[7]

Whereas these early Gothic novels had tended to use the city as a starting point and then move to rural locations, abandoning the settings and securities of urban civilization for wild and dangerous rural regions, the Gothic novels of the mid-nineteenth century began either to reverse this process or to be conducted entirely in the modern industrial city, which itself became a zone of

G. W. M. Reynolds' Mysteries of London (1844–8) as well as Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837–8) and Bleak House (1854).[9] These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered, and affluent civilization against the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog in the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film.[10]

The urban Gothic genre that developed in the Victorian

Freud's ideas about the human mind.[10] They often incorporated ideas about the influence of modern science on life, and the mixture of science and the supernatural in urban Gothic novels has led Katherine Spencer to describe them as "a mediating form between science fiction and fantasy."[11] Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores traditional debates about the nature of good and evil through motifs from folklore while incorporating a modern, scientific explanation.[12] Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) similarly revisits the concept of a Faustian Pact in a modern social context.[13] Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) presents the eastern fringes of Europe in Transylvania as a point of origin for the arrival in modern provincial and then metropolitan London society of a creature from folklore.[14] In the early twentieth century, the urban Gothic was extended to other cities, like Paris, such as in Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10).[8]

Modern interpretations

A dark alley in the French Quarter of New Orleans at night, part of the distinctive architecture that made it the centre of Gothic novels by authors including Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite

From the twentieth century urban Gothic helped to spawn other sub-genres, including

Frank Miller's Daredevil (from 1979), Batman (from 1986), the Sin City series (from 1991), James O'Barr's The Crow, Alan Moore's From Hell (from 1991) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999).[19] Urban Gothic aesthetics and themes are also explored in video games by presenting the city as a threat, often as its own character, as in early Silent Hill games.[20]

Film

Urban Gothic novels were among the earliest and most influential works adapted for the cinema, helping to form the genre of horror film. These included

Fight Club,[24] Hamlet (2000), American Psycho (2000), Underworld (2003), The Machinist (2004), Darling (2015) and The Batman (2022).[1]

Notes

  1. ^ a b S. Macek, Urban Nightmares: the Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 240–1.
  2. ^ F. Botting, Gothic (CRC Press, 1996), pp. 1–2.
  3. ^ R. Miles, Ann Radcliffe: the Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
  4. ^ S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: an Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares (Greenwood, 2007), p. 250.
  5. ^ S. T. Joshi, Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: an Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares, Volume 1 (Greenwood, 2007), p. 350.
  6. ^ A. L. Smith, American Gothic Fiction: an Introduction (Continuum, 2004), p. 79.
  7. ^ D. David, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 186.
  8. ^ a b R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 54–72.
  9. ^ R. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
  10. ^ a b R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 56–7.
  11. ^ K. Spencer. "Victorian urban Gothic: the first fantastic literature", in G. E. Slusser and E. S. Rabkin, eds, Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (SIU Press, 1987), p. 91.
  12. ^ B. M. Stableford, Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wildside Press LLC, 1998), p. 174.
  13. ^ James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Duke University Press, 1987), p. 171.
  14. ^ S. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 111.
  15. ^ A. L. Smith, American Gothic Fiction: an Introduction (Continuum, 2004), pp. 121–3.
  16. ^ B. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
  17. ^ a b c J. G. Melton, The Vampire Book: the Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink Press, 1994), pp. 298–303.
  18. ^ G. Hoppenstand and R. B. Browne, eds, The Gothic World of Anne Rice (Popular Press, 1996).
  19. ^ A. W. Smith, "Gothic and the Graphic Novel", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 251–9.
  20. .
  21. ^ K. Spencer, Film and Television Scores, 1950–1979: A Critical Survey By Genre (McFarland, 2008), pp. 222–3.
  22. ^ J. B. Weaver and R.C. Tamborini, Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions (Routledge, 1996), p. 3.
  23. ^ D. J. Skal, The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror (Macmillan, 2001), p. 392.
  24. , p. 84.