Paul Campbell
Literature 5535
American Romanticism
Research Essay

Gothic Influence: Nightmare on Elm Street and Silence of the Lambs

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, America seems to be a country obsessed with the Goth. Our films, news programs, and even our popular talk shows are filled with Gothic subject matter and imagery. Opra Winfrey and Jerry Springer have helped develop a new talk show industry centered around the tortured lives of people being discussed in a public forum. These people's lives are often filled with sin and past evil transgressions that have profoundly changed their existence. They are usually obsessed, addicted, and haunted by traumatic, brutal, and often bizarre events that happened early in their lives. All of this is classic Goth story line told in a modernistic and familiar setting.

They also often harbor deep, dark family secrets that never stay buried and are always coming back to haunt them. The Gothic thematic element of a haunted, secret past coming back to cause trouble in the present is played out daily on our television sets. Viewers are allowed to look into this seamy, strange under world where gothic stories are not fiction but based on the real world we all inhabit.

It's reality TV with a Gothic twist. We have become a society fascinated by this underworld that lies just below the surface of our normal, mundane lives. It is filled with the strange, the macabre and the dangerous world that the new Gothic sub-culture represents.

Daily newscasters lead their programs with the bizarre, the bloody and the gruesome events of the day. Images of brutal murder scenes, bodies lying on black pavement covered with white sheets, of helpless victims of rape, incest and torture filling our television screens nightly for our own personal and very private consumption. Shocking gothic images are wrapped neatly into 30-minute segments for our entertainment.

Reality based TV has also exploded in the past 10 years. Reality based news television features the shocking, the frightening the grotesque and always seem to remind us of how dangerous our world is and how "it could all happen to me; I could be next". The forefathers, of what has become American gothic (Poe, Radcliffe, and Shelly to name a few) would be, I believe, surprised at the pervasiveness their art form has shown in modern American society.

In this new gothic world, you are never safe. Deception is everywhere and no one can be trusted. In fact, in a Gothic world you are only safe when you are alone, locked behind the walls of your own home, protected from the dangers of the outside world. We have all become shut-in victims of a Gothic world or, at least our perception that the world has become this reality. The true reality is that violent crime in this country has actually been decreasing the past 10 years. But still, this trend towards a "Gothic" reality persists and continues to grow. Our perceptions have become reality. The Gothic world now seems to dominate our lives. It has never been more so important than during the resurgence that has occurred over the past 10 to 20 years in mainstream Gothic culture.

It is an interesting social phenomenon that appears to have formed out of the collective physique of an entire country. Our fascination for the Goth has taken a hold of our society and like it or not, we are all headed down this grand social experiment together. No other counter culture has appeared on our horizon to compete with the Goth for the collective physique of America. So it continues to grow and deeply effect our lives unabated.

Although the movies have always been part of the Gothic world, it has only been recently that they have been established as a mainstream, popular form of entertainment. No longer delegated to the slasher, B-movie crowd, Goth now contends with other mainstream styles to be one of our most popular forms of film genre.

As a point of proof for this transformation, a Gothic movie swept the academy awards in 1991. It was also hugely successful at the box office, which gave it the double vindication of both critics and the movie buying public at large. "Silence of the Lambs" was a turning point in American Goth culture and mainstream acceptance.

Many books have been written about Gothic culture and how it has influenced the film industry. This paper will focus narrowly on only two outstanding examples of the Goth influence on this industry; "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Silence of the Lambs". Both films are filled with obvious gothic content on the surface but also at a much deeper and primal level they richly team with the gothic elements.

These films will illustrate how modern Goth movies have been deeply influenced by the traditional Goth. They will also help to shed some light on why this phenomenon is occurring in this country and what it seams to be saying about our society and where we are culturally headed (and, to a certain extent, spiritually).

The best place to start with the Goth is at the beginning. To understand where we are today as a society with an obsession with the Goth, we need to understand where we have come from and where we have already been. To the extent possible, I will show how these early influences in European Gothic have been transferred across the Atlantic to America.

The transformation also involves a re-invention of sorts, so the original Goth elemental structure has changed somewhat over its early European origins but still holds closely to the original Gothic styles. While the forms and styles have remained relatively unchanged over the years, the intent or purpose it serves in society has changed greatly and will be discussed later in this essay.

The word Goth or Gothic has its origins in Eastern Europe. Around 410 AD, the tribes of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe that originally broke early Roman power and actually sacked Rome itself were referred to as "Goths" by Greek and Roman historians. The name has ever since become forever associated with warlike barbarism and anarchy. Their love of plunder and revenge helped usher in the dark ages and swept the European continent into the depths of chaos and feudalism.

Domination, cruelty and the dark world would be forever synonymous with the word gothic. Medieval Gothic art also reflected this sense of fear and dread that came with the cruel domination of the barbarians. Medieval gothic architecture was also the product of early domination and cruelty. The fear and antagonism the Goths roused in the early Europeans had a great influence on medieval religion and architecture during the Dark and Middle Ages.

Distrust of the surrounding world and natural phenomenon made God (the creator of both) a deity to be feared as much as worshiped. This was reflected in early Gothic architecture by high flying buttresses and arches, which symbolized man's desire to reach true salvation (which meant dying and rising to the heavens with the arches).

The early cathedrals were massive, oppressive structures that reflected their personal perspective on the world. Life on earth was truly frightening and a better life waited for them after death. This early fascination with death is also still a very important part of the gothic experience.

It is the spirit of these Goths, those who terrorized Europe in the fifth century, who have returned to haunt our society today. The power they held over the civilized masses became a central theme in the Goth idiom. Oppressive power is a common Goth element. The power of natural forces over man, the power of the autocrat, the power of the scientist, the power of the mob, and later in our century, the power of internal goblins and tormentors on ones own psyche are all part of the gothic experience.

A pattern of dominance and submission is also part of the power theme and a common occurrence in Gothic influence. This particular pattern of dominance and submission will play repeatedly in the 90's resurgence of gothic film in this country. Both "Silence of the Lambs" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" depends heavily on this gothic theme. Sado Masochism (power based sadism) was a recurring theme of both films.

The early origins of modern American gothic really go back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and primarily in England. The French Revolutionary War was the catalyst that started the early English gothic writing tradition that would later help American's like Poe develop a truly American version of the genre. This new version would be much more intense and gruesome with the point being to terrorize and shock the reader.

The French Revolutionary War was a traumatizing event for most Europeans late in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. English writers of the time were horrified at the brutality of the revolution. French mobs descended on the ruling Monarchy with a ferocity that was beyond anything yet seen on the European continent. Heads were loped off at an alarming and seemingly endless rate.

Eventually, the guillotines ran out of monarchs and were turned on the French society instead. The mobs began to feed off themselves. The parents (those that started the revolution) began eating their own children (the general public). Blood flowed through the streets of Paris at an alarming rate. France was the scene of unspeakable horror being played out in vivid reality for all Europeans to witness. This deeply effected English writers of the time and started the process of describing horror to teach society valuable lessons.

Gothic writers were part of the norm and considered progressive for their time. They were revolutionary writers with a political agenda. They wanted to teach a bourgeois society that their elegant world could unravel and come apart at any time with tragic and horrific consequences. They wrote about freedom but indulged in nostalgia and fear.

The price to be paid (the fear) was chaos and brutality. The haunting guilt that permeates the gothic norm had roots in this early conflict. The fear of destroying the old egos of Church and State (i.e., French Revolution) permeated the gothic form and haunted it with guilt.

Gothicism allies itself well with revolution. Gothicism is not only revolutionary but anarchistic because it can not tolerate any restriction of the individual. As all forms of order disintegrate, the gothic mind is free to invade the realms of the socially forbidden. The danger to civilization that is likely is really what enforces the gothic spirit. This spirit seeks to lay ruin and destruction to our well-ordered and understood society and social norms.

Current American Gothic is at considerable odds with the early English writers. Our gothic genre primarily shocks for the sake of shock with no social message behind it. Freddy Krugger and Hannibal Lecter are teaching no lessons of social ideology. Shock and horror for there own sake is the norm today.

The message seems to have developed that our world is very dangerous and dark, therefore we must fear it. Stephen King, modern horror and gothic writer, wrote in his book "Danse Macabre", "We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror .... we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and natural hubris1". The purpose of modern gothic film seems to be for the generation of shear terror. Mark Edmundson wrote about modern gothic in his book "Nightmare on Main Street". In this book, he wrote, "If eighteenth century Gothic helped its readers break through convention and see the world freshly, our Gothic, at least in the majority of its popular forms, seems to do anything but that. Current pop Gothic breeds fear and anger, shuts down the power to make humane distinctions, eclipses thought2".

Another writer, Richard Davenport Hines, shares this view on the new world of Goth. In his book, "Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and

Ruin" he laments our current Goth culture. He writes, "New gothic is Nietzschean in its disbelief in any pre-established harmony between furthering truth and the well-being of humanity. It is illiberally pessimistic...man has been reared by his errors3". By Nietzschean, Hines means it has lost all sense of humanity and human dignity. This fear is echoed by another modern English writer, Patrick McGrath in his book, "The New Gothic".

In his book, McGrath writes about the current evolution of modern gothic. He says, "We stand at the end of a century whose history has been stained perhaps like no other by the blacker urges of human nature. The prospect of an apocalypse-through human science rather than divine intervention-has redefined the contemporary psyche.

The consolation that Western souls once found in religion has faded; Faustus no longer faces a Mephistopheles from divinity's antithetic underworld, nor is Ambrosio doomed to Christianity's eternal hell. Now hell is decidedly on earth, located within the vaults and chambers of our own minds"4.

This concept of hell on earth is now the familiar haunt of modern Goth. It is the central theme to both "Silence of the Lambs" and "Nightmare on Elm Street". Both films recreate a hellish world in our modern American cities to torment us. According to film critic Chris Baldick, for a film to be truly gothic it "should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensioning reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration5". No one does a better job of producing this "sickening descent" than Wes Craven in his gothic masterpiece, "Nightmare on Elm Street". The central character in Craven's movie is a demonic figure called Freddy Kruger. Freddy has, what could be called, a very haunted past.

The story opens with a haunting dream scene where a teenage girl is walking alone in a very gothic urban setting. Streets are dirty and deserted and she is following an illusive, shadowy figure just out of eyesight. The dark streets are lined with decaying and abandon building. A sense of foreboding doom is very present. The shadowy figure leads her down through an underground labyrinth to the underground boiler room below the city. She walks through the maze like structure past humming machines pouring out dense clouds of steam. The urban Gothic setting is surreal and frightening.

The boiler room is cramped, damp and claustrophobic. Exposed metal beams and stairways leading further down into the basement. Freddy appears and comes out in all his freakish horror. Freddy's face is a mass of gruesome images. He appears to have severe burns covering his entire body, as if he had been burned to death and had somehow been reanimated back to life. Freddy is standing in front of a blazing furnace. His disfigured hand has a series of razor sharp knives attached to each finger. As he approaches his young victim, the knives reach forward, and just before impeding doom, the teenager awakes.

Sleep receives considerable attention in the gothic. Dream states are common in Gothic work because they represent an alternative to the ordinary waking world. Dream worlds often offer inspiration or insight to gothic characters. Mary Shelly even wrote that her book "Frankenstein" was the result of a dream. In Nightmare, the dream world is where Freddy victimizes his prey and where the real world turns gothic. In this world, structures take on very Gothic qualities.

Architecture is a key Gothic element in this movie. For a story to be truly gothic, it must be set in a truly terrifying place. Like the castles of old European Gothic, Nightmare is played out in the terrifying dark world of dungeons, mazes and secret passages. Freddy's domain is the boiler room. It is a hissing, steaming mazelike world of urban gothic. The early European equivalent would have been the Bastille in Paris.

The Bastille was to early gothic writers what Craven's boiler room is to us. It represented unspeakable horror and repression that ultimately, the French populous rose up against in the revolution. The haunted prison represented the ruling monarchy's power to capture people off the streets, sweep them into this oppressive prison of torture and death, to disappear forever into this maze of a horror. Freddy also uses his Bastille to capture, torture and murder his victims. His boiler room is a nightmarish world of terror and abuse that clearly has roots in the early Gothic prisons and castles of Europe.

Leslie Fielder believed the purpose of the eighteenth century terror gothic was "to shock the bourgeoisie into awareness of what chamber of horrors it's own smugly regarded world really was 6". The chamber of horrors was also expressed as a decaying castle or monastery. But it was always the perfect setting for gothic horror, as Cravens develops in Nightmare. The family home also serves this gothic creation of horror.

Later in the film, parents of one of the victimized teenagers decides to put bars on all of the windows and doors of the home. The family home has become a replacement for the castles of Europe. European Gothic castles were creations that accentuate a contrast in power of its owner and diminishing power of the victim.

By preventing the prisoner from escaping, the castle renders the victim more passive in comparison to the villain. In the memorable scene where our teenage heroine sees the newly installed bars, she is in utter horror at what she sees. She understands the power of the bars will be to keep her trapped in side the house with Freddy. Her home has been transformed into a Gothic castle in which this horrific drama will be played out.

The central plot of the movie revolves around the haunted past that the character Freddy represents. It becomes apparent early on that members of the community have some sort of real connection to this nightmarish figure. There is a dark secret within this community that is coming back to haunt its inhabitants. The Gothic concept of a hidden family secret coming back to haunt later generations is developed fully and horrifically in this movie. Freddy himself has some very personal Gothic qualities.

The Gothic concept of the grotesque is typified by Freddy's appearance. His face and body are covered with the charred remains of his skin and flesh. The grotesque aspects of gothic work originated in fifteenth-century ornamentation and in the repulsive characters and gruesome scenes from old Gothic literature.

The grotesque nature of Gothic characters can be described as nontranscendent because they are never a complete departure from reality. Freddy does not have two heads or three eyes. He is pretty much the same as a normal person but some qualities has been greatly exaggerated. His physical grotesque quality is the appearance of his skin. It is melted and red showing the effects of a severe burn that has never healed. His physical appearance is horrific yet familiar.

The gothic grotesque can also be understood as a demonstration of chaos. Goth is a quest for chaos. The Gothic world is random, wild and unbounded. In a sense, the grotesque violates our sense of order and conformity, so it is inherently Gothic. The ever-present decay and ruin running throughout Gothic creations evidence this celebration of chaos. Freddy is a grotesque figure haunting the dreams of several of the towns teenagers.

The fact that several teenagers are all having the same horrific dream hints at a common thread connecting them to some awful past event. The primary heroic figure is a young teenaged girl, named Nancy, who has an internal moral code of honor and internal strength that makes her the hero. She is blond and usually dressed in white. The Gothic use of light coloring to represent good is used extensively with her character. The gruesome Freddy with his charred body and dark, sinister appearance opposes her. The Gothic use of dark and light to represent good and evil is used with both of these characters.

About 2/3's through the movie, the awful secret is revealed. It seems in the real world, Freddy was a child molester and killer. About 15 years ago, he was caught molesting then killing about 20 children in the small, generic community of Elmville. It seems Freddy is let off on a technicality and is released to go back to his world of child molesting and killing. Several members of the local community take the law into their own hands by capturing Freddy, then burning him alive in the boiler room he used to terrorize his young victims.

It is this sin of murder of mob murder that haunts the teenagers of Elmville. They are paying for the sins of their parents. Freddy has returned to enact vengeance on the children of his killers. Only this time, he stalks their dream world where there is no escape. In truly Gothic fashion, it is not only the harm done by the event itself that matters, there is also the fact that the trauma continues to ruin the lives of the victims. Its memory eats away from within, a cancer of the psyche. This cancer eats away at the adults in this film.

The parental figures in this movie are all corrupt, mean spirited or useless to protect their children from Freddy. None represent this better than Nancy's parents. They are divorced. Her mother is an alcoholic. Her father, the local police chief, is repressive and uncaring. His character represents authority. The mind of terror Gothic senses hypocrisy in high places.

The police chief who represents the rule of law is hiding a lawless past in which he participated in the vigilante killing of Freddy. This hypocrisy eats away at his character and makes him a mean spirited and cynical. The parental authority figures are no help when Freddy comes back to haunt them. In fact, the parents are responsible for creating a world where Freddy now reins supreme with almost God-like powers.

In one of the most memorable scenes of the movie, while dreaming, the demonic Freddy approaches a young teenage girl. Upon seeing the horrific figure presented before her, she cries out "Please, God!". Freddy responds by saying "this, is God", holding up a clawed hand in front of her.

Cravens also plays a little game with Freddy as a sadistic hero. In the opening scenes of the movie, 4 teenagers (two couples) are spending the night together in a house alone (with no adult supervision). One couple quickly dashes off for a night of fornication. The other sleeps in separate beds. Freddy's first two victims are the fornicating teenagers. Freddy as an avenging angel (killing the sinning teenagers) will be copied by many, many other movies to come later. The monster is given some redeeming quality (albeit at the expense of a lot of teenagers). The humanization of the monster is something that has become a more common theme in our current Goth culture. Gothicism admires the oppressor.

The victimizer becomes the victim. Oprah will often bring the oppressor, abuser, or molester back to face their victims. In this encounter, we often find out that the abuser was also abused and can't really be held accountable for their actions. In Freddy's case, we learn in subsequent sequels that Freddy was actually the product of a gang rape. His mother (a Nun, no less) was raped while working in an institute for the criminally insane. It seems little Freddy was doomed from the start. His dark family secret condemned him to a life of molestation and murder. In gothic work, the victimizer is usually also haunted, obsessed, and abused. In fact, Gothicism admires the tormentor.

In the gothic conflict between tormentor and victim, the tormentor becomes more important. His or her power is magnified rather than that of the victims. Fear rather than pity is the overwhelming and essential Gothic emotion. The Gothic mind admires the power of the tormentor while at the same time supports the collapse of the institutions that support them.

So, in Nightmare, Freddy is admired and feared for in his dream world, he has absolute power. In the final scenes of the film, our heroine, Nancy, attempts to take this power back from Freddy. In the final confrontation between Freddy and Nancy, she turns her back on him and rebukes his power. Saying out load, "you are nothing, just a dream, you have no power over me".

Realizing his victim no longer feared him, Freddy's power quickly evaporated and he vanished forever. So, the gothic principal of power and tormentor worship is balanced with the gothic need to bring about the fall of this power. Both tenants are meet equally well in Nightmare. "Silence of the Lambs" also does a very good job of balancing these two tenants of gothic form.

In Jonathan Demme's "Silence of the Lambs", a serial killer is let loose in the American heartland. Serial killing is the subject of the "Silence of the Lambs". The central characters (aside from Clare Starling, the FBI agent) are both serial killers. The concept of a serial killer is truly gothic for it manifests pure chaos. Killing at random with no rhyme or reason just for the pure pleasure of it. Serial killers, by definition, kill at random. They fit perfectly into a gothic world.

They contribute much to a sense of fear that permeates our society. Their work helps sustain our perpetual fear of our world (fear is the principal emotion in the Goth). In this film, FBI agents are trying to apprehend a legendary serial killer known as Buffalo Bill. Bill gets his name for the gruesome way he handles the bodies of his victims. In the opening scenes of the movie, Clare explains how the name was given to him by police officers in Kansas investigating the scene of his most recent murder. Clare says "someone said, he must be Buffalo Bill because he always skins his humps". The serial killer not only killed his victims (gruesome enough), he also skinned them. Clare, a recent FBI Academy graduate, is recruited to help find Bill. One source of potential information on Bill lies with an equally disturbing character named Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal is a Psychologist with serial killing tendencies. He is believed to have information about the identity of Bill. Hannibal is killer that uses the ghost and demons of human psyche to torment his victims (that is before he actually kills them). He enjoys the psychological torture of his victims intensely. Clare's first assignment is to interview him to determine if he will help them find Bill.

The opening scene is at the Boston Center for the Criminally Insane. This is where Hannibal is kept. The building is old and castle like in appearance. It looks like the ancient Bastille, holding Hannibal and other criminally insane inmates from society. The building is very gothic looking. It even has an old steeple at the center (looking very much like European Mid Evil Cathedrals or castles) giving it a very gothic appearance. It is a gloomy and dark, overcast day.

The natural world is a reflection on the gloom that is on inside of this prison. Clare is guided toward his cell.

Hannibal is kept in the basement of the prison. So, Clare must enter a maze of underground hallways and paths to get to his holding area. The underground area is very similar to Freddy's boiler room under the city. In this underground world, the ways are decaying, bricks are crumbling, and everything is in a general state of decay. The architecture is again key to the gothic setting. A feeling of impending doom follows Clare as she travels through the maze of the underground labyrinth. When Clare arrives at Hannibal's cell, she must walk down the final dark corridor alone.

This scene is particularly terrifying because she must walk past cell after cell of criminally insane before she is finally confronted with the ghost like appearance of Hannibal Lecter. He is pale and vampire like but also very normal. The gothic terror of the dual personality is presented with Hannibal. It is the Gothic wisdom that we all lead a double life. Our other life could chose to assert itself at any moment. Hannibal's normalcy is stark contrast to the other inmates of this facility. He has an outward appearance of normality. It is a frightening Gothic concept that the monster may appear to be very normal.

In this initial meeting, Hannibal begins the psychological torment of Clare. He starts asking her questions about her past. He quickly discovers she is being haunted by her past. Hannibal, the Dr. turned killer, uses this information not to help but to hurt. He begins to probe deeply into her past to discover painful events that continue to haunt her in her present life. He is a disturbed personality that follows the Gothic form.

Mental disorders appeal to the Gothic temperament in much the same way as do ruins. Insanity is a form of mental deterioration, an internal ruin. Rather than the beauty of order, balance, and proportion, Gothicism seeks the partial, the drastic, or the extraordinary. The Gothic hero or villain, be he artist or criminal, has refined or augmented an aspect of himself to the point of inner torment. The intensity of the psychotic and the power of his psychosis to devour all other parts of the self fascinate the Gothic mind. Hannibal is the perfect example of this inner torment.

Among the psychological states that Gothic investigates, extreme states are most abundant. The effect of inner conflict or the relationship between repression and explosion has always been a central Gothic concern as in the superconsciousness that results from mental probing. Clare will be the subject of such probing through out the entire film.

Madness in Gothic work, is often portrayed as a highly developed sensitivity to a reality that normal people are too dull to perceive. Hannibal personifies this highly developed sensitivity. He has a heightened sense of human psychology. So much so, he can torment with words only. In fact, he is later punished for causing the death of an inmate next to his cell. By only speaking to him, dissecting his mind, he was able to kill him. Hannibal is the essential Gothic villain.

Throughout the film, Hannibal insists on a Quid pro Quo with Clare. He will help them find Bill only if she will continue to give him information about herself. In one of the final scenes of this psychological torment, Clare reveals the meaning to the films title. She was orphaned at 10 years old when her father died. After his death, she was sent to live with relatives in Montana. She was sent during the spring, which is the traditional lamming season. Hannibal was able to determine the source of Clare's inner demons that were constantly tormenting her. He asked the right questions and found she had witnessed the slaughter of lambs while living on this ranch. This event had profound effects on her life. In a sense, it was what brought her to Hannibal. The cries of the lambs as they were killed haunted her life. Her work as an FBI agent was a direct reflection of her inner need to silence those screaming lambs. She feels guilt that she could not help the poor creatures and is now determined to make up for their loss.

Hannibal also has qualities similar to the twisted Freddy Kruger. He is extremely intelligent. He has the capacity to help as well as to torment. He eventually does lead them to Bill, but he forces Clare to figure it out on her own. He allows her to discover the truth on her own. In the final scenes of the film, it appears they have developed almost a strange and bizarre friendship. He even calls her after he has made his escape to congratulate her on capturing Bill. The Gothic norm of dual personality, makes Hannibal believable in our Gothic world. The reality of both films is that Gothic has changed our world. So, what does this tell us about ourselves.

We appear to have an inward focus with our lives and the Gothic world helps to justify that attitude. Harold Bloom stated "Americans only feel that they are truly themselves when they are alone". The key premise of Gothic, that to be human is to be haunted remains alive and well in our collective American psyche. The lonely act of watching television plays a big part in the flourishing Gothic culture.

Television has now brought us all together. When a mother kills her two children by strapping them to their car seats and plunging the car into a lake in North Carolina, we all feel the shock and pain together. News crews are reporting live from scene. Gruesome images are transmitted live to our homes. The wiring of American makes shocking and brutal scenes common place. Anywhere around the country where something horrifying is happening, we have instant access to the information and we are immediately transported their (via the TV) to witness the scene.

Harper's Magazine put it this way, "The alienating engine that I perceive in society is broadcast media, particularly television.... The reason people are hermetically sealed in their homes is that they are worshipping the glass tit of fear, which is telling them that the world is too scary to go out in7". One catastrophe succeeds another in a never-ending procession of horror. Television rating prove, we can't get enough of the horror.

Is Gothic horror the reason our society seems to be plagued with excessive crime, murder and mayhem? Nothing could be further from the truth.

All crime statistics show a general decrease in violent crime over the past decade of 10 to 20 percent. So, Gothic culture is apparently out of step with our modern society.

Modern Gothic is often an exercise in what we might call the reductive fallacy. That being, the conviction the worst truth that you can come up with about any person or event is the most consequential truth. The benefit of having this information is that you are never surprised. The downside of Gothic reductionism, though, is timidity, cynicism, and general fear of life.

Mark Edmundson believes the underlying reason for our modern resurgence of Gothic culture is religion. He believes our loss of religious strength and vigor, once a very dominant part of our culture, has left a void that many people feel necessary to fill. Many, he feels have turned from hope in benevolent religion to fascination with the Gothic. There is something to gain in accepting the harsh belief that the world is infested with evil, that all power is corrupt, all humanity debased, and that there is nothing we can do about it.

It is almost liberating. With the turn to contemporary Gothic we recover a horizon of ultimate meaning. We recover something of what is lost with the withdrawal of God from our day to day world. With the Gothic, we can tell ourselves that we live in the worst and most barbaric of times, that all is broken never to be mended, that things are bad and fated to be, that significant hope is a joke, the prerogative of suckers. The Gothic, dark as it is, offers epistemological certainty; it allows us to believe that we have found the truth. We seem frozen, struck with some weird awe, in front of Freddy as he flourishes his blades and croaks, "This is God!"8.

Footnotes

1. Page 23, "Danse Macabre", Stephen King.

2. Page 48, "Nightmare on Main Street", Mark Edmundson.

3. Page 383, "Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin", ,

Richard

Davenport Hines.

4. Page 378, "Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin", ,

Richard

Davenport Hines.

5. Page 5, "Nightmare on Main Street", Mark Edmundson

6. Page 55, "Nightmare on Main Street", Mark Edmundson.

7. Page 30, "Nightmare on Main Street", Mark Edmundson.

8. Page 60, "Nightmare on Main Street", Mark Edmundson.

Bibliography 

Mark Edmundson. Nightmare on Main Street. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997.

Linda Bayer-Berenbaum. The Gothic Imagination. Associated University Presses, Toronto CA, 1982.

David Punter. A Companion to the Gothic. Blackwell Publishers, Malden, Massachusetts, 2000.