g othick a

vic t o ria n el s o n
The dream avatar Paprika swallows the corporate patriarch and his dark dream.
From the anime fi lm Paprika (2006), directed by Satoshi Kon.
 victo ria n el s o n

gothicka
Vampire Heroes,
Human Gods,
and the New Supernatural

harvard university press

cambridge, massachusetts & london, england ■ 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Victoria Nelson.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

The verse translation from The Danse Macabre of Women by Ann Tukey Harrison
is reprinted by permission of The Kent State University Press.
“My Father’s Wedding” from THE MAN IN THE BLACK COAT TURNS
by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of
Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Robert Bly.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nelson, Victoria.
Gothicka : vampire heroes, human gods, and the new supernatural / Victoria
Nelson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978- 0-674- 05014-3 (alk. paper)
1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)— History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival
(Literature)—History and criticism. 3. Horror tales—History and criticism.
4. Spirituality in literature. 5. Horror films—History and criticism.
6. Horror comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. 7. Goth culture
(Subculture)—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN3435.N45 2012
700'.415—dc23 2011041651
For Frank, who likes the Gothick,
and his bright future
 contents

Preface ix
one White Dog, the Prequel 1
Between Imagination and Belief
two Faux Catholic 21
A Gothick Genealogy from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown
three Gothick Gods 45
The Worshipful World of Horror Fandom
four Decommissioning Satan 73
In Favor of His Man- God Whelps
five Gothick Romance 95
The Danse Macabre of Women
six The Bright God Beckons 117
The New Vampire Romance
seven Postapocalyptic Gothick 149
That Means Zombies (and the Occasional Zampire)
eight The Gothick Theater of Halloween 169
Performing Allegory
nine The Ten Rules of Sitges 189
Global Gothick Horror and Beyond
ten Cathedral Head 219
The Gothick Cosmos of Guillermo del Toro
eleven The New Christian Gothick 239
The Shack and Other Cathedrals
twelve Epilogue 261
Questions without Answers

Notes 269
Acknowledg ments 319
Index 321
Title page of a Gothick novel in the Hammond Collection.
Courtesy of the New York Society Library.
 preface

The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like
saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic
sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the
actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
—G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls”

In 1811, a Newport, Rhode Island, dry goods merchant named James Ham-
mond founded a lending library upstairs from his shop that quickly grew to
8,000 volumes of popular fiction with a scattering of playscripts and poetry.
And this fiction, the ancestor of the modern mass paperback, was very pop-
ular indeed; a single novel, usually printed in three volumes, circulated as
many as 400 to 500 times. Hammond’s clients devoured the nineteenth-
century equivalent of airport novels not in economy-class coach but in real
coaches and in sitting rooms up and down the northeastern seaboard of the
new country. They also wrote and drew on the inside front and back covers,
tore out illustrations that caught their eye, and generally read the books to
pieces. Today the bindings of these volumes literally fall apart when they
are opened, leaving a trail of shredded orange pigskin on the surface of the
Rare Book Room reading table at the New York Society Library.
What manner of literary fare were the good folk of Newport so eagerly
consuming? Sensational Gothick fiction full of violence, sexual assault,
 and assorted other outrages and titillations, hot off the press from Lon-
don and quickly reprinted, often in a matter of a month or two, in Ameri-
can editions. Packed with equal portions of sex, gore, and high-flown
sentimentality, the contents of these tattered volumes still hold their power
x to enthrall the modern reader, a fact that partly explains how this book
came to be written. I first encountered Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the
best-known exemplar of this venerable shock genre, in a suitably Gothick
pr e fac e

architectural space: the then unretrofitted bowels of Doe Library at the

University of California, Berkeley, nine floors of stacks compressed Being
John Malkovich– style into a four-story sandwich. As a senior with a prized
stack pass, I should have been engaged in research on my honors thesis on
Chaucer. Instead I sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor enthralled by
this salacious tale of lustful monks, evil abbesses, complaisant nuns, and a
baby’s corpse decaying in an underground crypt. I gulped down its 400-
odd pages in one go, staggering out of the stacks a few head-spinning
hours later stiff and disoriented but eager for more.
Abandoning Gothick novels as such while I pursued a very brief gradu-
ate school career in medieval studies (like Lewis and his fellow Gothick
writers, I loved the Middle Ages), I stayed immersed in the Gothick tradi-
tion without knowing it through my instinctive love of stories of the su-
pernatural. With very few exceptions I found them only in popular fiction
and B movies—ghost stories, horror films, and the like. There was always
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, of course, but the critic Edmund
Wilson had interpreted this work so magisterially through the favored
twentieth-century psychological lens of erotic obsession (i.e., the appari-
tions of Quint and Miss Jessel are the governess’s fevered projections driven
by sexual repression) that no room was left, if you will, for the undead.
My own orientation remained more or less that of Wilson’s until I
began the series of essays that resulted in The Secret Life of Puppets ten years
ago. Ground zero for this study of the Western supernatural grotesque was
an essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and the Polish Jewish fabu-
list Bruno Schulz, two contemporaries who embodied the different destinies
of the fantastic tale in Europe and America. Noting his father’s death from
syphilis and the striking resemblance of his monsters’ deformities to the
physical disfigurations caused by that disease, I fashioned my initial take
on Lovecraft as a by-the-book (the book being the bible of mental health
professionals, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
psychological reading. All the while I was dogged by the feeling that despite
the obvious pathology, despite his own express position as materialist and
atheist, Lovecraft—like many other writers of scary stories—was reaching
for some kind of dark transcendence. But what, exactly, did this transcen- xi
dence consist of?
Because its tracks were much more visible in what I call the “sub-

pr e fac e
Zeitgeist”—the grab-bag mass market popular culture lying beneath or
around or on top of the secular-materialist mainstream—than in high art
of any sort, once again Lovecraft showed me the way. In The Secret Life of
Puppets I argued that a historically distorted supernaturalism, configured
after the Protestant Reformation as a free-floating “demonic” loosely at-
tached to a Christian belief system, has long been an important dimension
of American popu lar culture. This unbalanced worldview has character-
istically emphasized the dark side: ghosts, monsters, and other assorted
creatures of the imaginary grotesque. The result has been that outside the
purview of organized religion, the genre of supernatural horror has been
the preferred mode, or even the only allowed one, a predominantly secular-
scientific culture such as ours has had for imagining and encountering the
sacred, albeit in unconscious ways. That book’s analysis ended in the last
decade of the twentieth century, when the unconscious religiosity carried by
the demonic seemed to be reaching a peak at the same time as it was seeking
broader avenues of expression.
In the years since The Secret Life of Puppets was published, this trend has
emerged as a much more explicit spirituality expressed in performance and
practice as well as in fiction and film. Where that book tracked, through
the end of the twentieth century, the nature of the supernatural in the post-
Reformation popular imagination, Gothicka attempts to describe the sur-
prising new turn toward the light taken in the increasingly transformed
subgenres of the Gothick. Still accessed through the grotesque and mon-
strous but displaying some striking new features, the twenty-first-century
Gothick is showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inher-
ited from its eighteenth-century ancestor.
As part of a broader movement toward reincorporating gnosis in the
episteme-dominated worldview of high intellectual culture in the West, the
Gothick is rehabilitating supernaturalism as an aesthetic mode—brighter,
 more Romantic, and more culturally heterodox within the framework
of postcolonial global popu lar culture. The change in sensibility from
twentieth- to twenty-first-century Gothick (in the words of Stephenie
Meyer’s Twilight heroine Bella Swan) is a journey from horror story to
xii fairy tale. At the same time as it nostalgically reinvents key elements of a
premodern Catholic worldview fused with new elements of popu lar cul-
ture cum folklore from other parts of the globe, I argue, the Gothick is
pr e fac e

serving as a vehicle for developing the frameworks of new religious

movements.
For some, this book will be more notable for its omissions than its in-
clusions. I can already hear my readers asking: “Where’s the X-Men, the
Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four? Where’s the in-depth discussion, surely
relevant, of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
or Neil Gaiman’s American Gods? China Miéville and urban fantasy? Is
that all you have to say about Goths? Where’s the extended treatment of
videogame narrative this book clearly calls for? Where’s the music, for
heaven’s sake?” On the other side of the fence, readers who aren’t familiar
with the films, novels, and graphic novels discussed here will miss, with
one exception, treatment of many contemporary high literary exemplars
of the Gothick, such as Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, and Joyce Carol
Oates. Nor is any space devoted to the subgenre known as American or
Southern Gothic, a synonym for what might be called the realist psycho-
logical grotesque, and its proponents.
Instead, following a thread of logic more intuitive than analytical, trac-
ing a few strands but leaving out many others in the still-mighty tradition
of old-fashioned Gothick, I’ve chosen to focus on a curious sprinkling of
bright nodes in the Gothick darkness and, using the foundational argu-
ments laid down in The Secret Life of Puppets, tried to connect them in a
way that makes sense to me. It may be overgeneralizing to see these works
in a range of Gothick subgenres as early warning signals of a growing tide
of religiosity, one that is perhaps not as threatening as secular humanists
(who traditionally connect religious belief of any sort with fundamental-
ism) might fear, but I leave that determination to the disputandum of the
scholars whose work I am so indebted to.
Which brings me to still another omission: I have made no attempt to
survey the present state of Gothick scholarship and position my own
thinking within it, thereby omitting mention of many current key thinkers
in this vast, rich, and exciting field. Had I expended the necessary time and
space to do so, I would not have had room, either mentally or on the page,
for the explorations presented here. I have learned an enormous amount
from the scholars whose work I do cite and am acutely aware of the large
negative space left by those I omitted. xiii
Missing, finally, are any real judgment calls on all the writers and film-
makers I have discussed. I will simply say that delivering literary-critical

pr e fac e
evaluations felt somewhat beside the point here. Once again I must invoke
G. K. Chesterton and his great essay “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” a
work I also called upon in The Secret Life of Puppets. “Literature is a luxury;
fiction is a necessity,” Chesterton declared. “People must have conversa-
tion, they must have houses, and they must have stories.”1
Chesterton was right. In the rhythms of Story every human being finds
primal solace. Young or old, educated or illiterate, we must have Story.
Gothick writers and filmmakers may not be masters of sophisticated style
or characterization, but they do know Story. The Story of Terror has a
different resonance than the Quest Story or the Story of Love Lost and
Found, but it is still a Story. The fascinating transformations this Story is
undergoing today, in line with larger transformations in our culture, is the
subject of my study.
Metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
—jorge luis borges
St. Dominic at his desk, with attendant animals. Master of James IV of Scotland, Spinola
Hours. Bruges and Ghent c. 1510–1520. JPGM ms Ludwig IX 18, fol. 26ov. Courtesy of the
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
 one

white dog, the prequel

Between Imagination and Belief

Take—
An old castle, half of it ruinous.
A long gallery with a great many doors, some secret ones.
Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.
As many skeletons, in chests and presses.
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.
Assassins and desperadoes “quant suff.”
Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.
Mix them together, in the form of three volumes to be taken at any of the
watering places, before going to bed.
—Anonymous, 1797

What does a Tokyo teenage girl dressed in a demure but mildly sinister
Little Bo Peep outfit known as “Elegant Gothic Lolita Vampire Romance”
(“Goth Loli” for short) have in common with London’s St. Pancras train
station or virtually any midwestern U.S. college building erected in the
1880s, male strippers performing at a romance writers’ convention, Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies (a 2009 mash-up of the Austen classic), a Lovecraf-
tian secret society called the Bate Cabal, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code,
any horror movie you watch on late-night television, Nathaniel Haw-
thorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, the heavy metal band Black Sabbath,
 the television series Lost (about a group of airplane crash survivors on an
island, whose storyline became increasingly metaphysical as the seasons
wore on), and, last but not least, roadside memorials to accident victims?
All partake of a distinct sensibility with a 250-year-old English literary
2 ancestor, dubbed le genre noir by the French but more commonly known
as the Gothic, and rendered here as Gothick to distinguish it from the me-
dieval cultural period its first practitioners drew inspiration from. Aptly
G o t h ic k a

described by Fred Botting as “an invented amalgam of pre-Enlightenment

forms,” a Gothick novel or “romance” composed in England in the late
eighteenth or early nineteenth century might be loosely described as a
sensationalistic, intricately plotted tale set in pre-Reformation (ergo Cath-
olic) England or the Continent and featuring despotic aristocrats, sinful
clerics of both sexes, illicit passion, incest, ghosts or things that look like
ghosts, secret mysteries, and murder, all enfolded in the suffocating em-
brace of an ancient abbey, castle, or ancestral home, the classic charged
Gothick space linked to an oppressive past that generally goes up in flames
by story’s end.1
The traditional bookends for this literary shock genre, also the fi rst to
boast a substantially female authorship, are Horace Walpole’s anomalous
1764 novelette The Castle of Otranto, followed by the more substantial nov-
els of Ann Radcliffe (most notably The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794), and
ending more or less with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820.2
Walpole himself, son of a prime minister and designer-builder of Straw-
berry Hill, a faux-medieval architectural fantasia on the Thames, was right
at the forefront of a mid-eighteenth-century anticlassical reaction to En-
lightenment rationalism that included the Graveyard school of poetry
exemplified by Thomas Gray and Edward Young, the cultivation of “feel-
ings,” and an antiquarian passion for medieval religious architecture, litera-
ture, and folklore, all of which helped lay the foundations for the Romantic
aesthetic as well as the Gothick genre.
Gothic without the -k, in turn, was the insulting label, redolent of nasty
barbarian Huns, bestowed on the European Middle Ages by Italian archi-
tects of the Rinascimento anxious to distinguish their own work, inspired
by Greek and Roman antiquity, from what they regarded as the follies of a
certain style of medieval sacred architecture. In these pages Gothic, or sim-
ply Old Goth, will refer primarily to the late medieval period in England.3
For Horace Walpole and his contemporaries, the Gothic-medieval era
ran straight through to the year 1600; in their eyes, Shakespeare was a
writer of supremely Old Goth plays whose supernatural elements, notably
the ghost of Hamlet’s father, served as inspiration for the otherworldly
flourishes that ornamented their self-described Gothick novels. In a sepa-
rate strand of the Gothick, the novelist Ann Radcliffe made famous a 3
technique, destined to become a major strand in the Gothick, that came to
be known as the “explained supernatural,” in which bizarre events were

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
first presented as otherworldly and later rationalized or revealed as hoaxes.4
Reading Radcliffe, Lewis, or Maturin is like being dumped into a turbu-
lent ocean with only a puny life vest to keep you afloat. Wave after giant
wave of catastrophic plot turns break over your head as a strong undertow
of dread pulls you ever farther from solid ground. Catharsis, when it
comes, never fully dissolves the accumulated tension. By the time you sur-
face, gasping for breath, at the story’s end, the air that’s available is insuf-
ficient to recover from the anxiety of almost drowning. The characters, of
course, take a much heavier beating than readers do. Those who aren’t dead
by the end are pretty thoroughly wrung out, as Charlotte Dacre’s scene of
an (ostensibly happy) father-son reunion in The Libertine (1807) amply
demonstrates: “Their arms entwined, their throbbing hearts met, and
beat in tremendous agony against each other’s bosoms. . . . The tears of
Felix covered his cheeks— sighs and groans rent his breast, but still Angelo
wept not—his brain and heart were bursting—he tore himself from the
arms of his son, and rushed from the dungeon.”5 As imagined by their
equally youthful authors, the teenage heroes and heroines of these early
Gothick novels were not—in lifestyle terms—the first Goths, but they were
almost certainly the first Emos.6
The kind of reading experience such novels induce— one of high-pitched
and unremitting anxiety—was distinctly new in English literature and
a very different effect from that, say, produced by the calculated manipu-
lations of later writers such as Dickens, who yank the heartstrings in ways
still safely contained within the great sentimental plot machinery in whose
gears injustice and bad behavior are slowly but inexorably ground to bits. By
the end of a typical Gothick novel, the dark has almost swallowed up the
light; a heavy pall of death still lingers. The perpetration of multiple vio-
lent crimes is scarcely balanced by a perfunctory meting out of justice that
is likely to produce, as with the proud cleric Ambrosio’s death in The Monk,
further mayhem in the form of a gory execution performed by Lucifer
 himself. The survivors’ putative happy future, tossed out as a meager bone
in a formulaic concluding paragraph, is always overshadowed by lasting
melancholy from the memory of a lost loved one.7 Heart still pounding,
you put the novel down, exhausted. (And then, because this kind of fright
4 is also pleasurable, you go out for the eighteenth-century equivalent of
pizza.)
The readerly sensation of riding a runaway horse carries straight through
G o t h ic k a

into the works of the two most famous Gothick writers of the late twentieth
century. The novels of Anne Rice and Stephen King gallop at the same
fevered, incantatory pace as outrage is piled on violent outrage and an
ending twist often triggers a plunge into further darkness. In contempo-
rary action-adventure videogaming, where many of the scenarios are con-
structed as Gothick narrative, the shift in roles from passive reader to in-
teractive participant as first-person shooter produces an exponential rise in
intensity and attendant anxiety, pushing the Gothick feeling experience
into a whole new territory.
From its inception, the Gothick was regarded as the disreputable but
wildly popular black-sheep older sibling of English Romanticism even as
Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Byron, and Keats indulged in writing
Gothick specimens of their own, and Mary Shelley, wife to Romantic
poet Percy Shelley, wrote the most famous late Gothick novel, Franken-
stein (1818).8 German and English Romantics alike made important con-
tributions to the Gothick (notably to the German genre of “terror novel,”
or Schauerroman), and it is generally recognized now that the two literary
movements/sensibilities, once severely separated by critics, actually made
up a single continuum9 that initially shared the same literate middle-class
readership.10 The Gothick is now often dubbed “dark Romanticism,”
though no one so far, to my knowledge, has had the temerity to call Ro-
manticism “bright Gothick.” Besides sharing a complex cluster of reactions
against the Neoclassical aesthetic, Romantic and Gothick modes had com-
mon roots in political progressivism. The salaciously anticlerical English
Gothick novels, a product of Protestant bias, were wildly popular in revo-
lutionary France, whose ideals and failures in turn deeply influenced both
the English Romantic poets and later Gothick storytellers.
Two centuries after its heyday, Romanticism by name alone is long
gone—though we will see it surfacing again in a high-end Gothick mode
I call New Expressionism—but its evil older twin is bigger than ever.11 As
David Punter fi rst recognized three decades ago, the genre has shown
an uncanny ability to adapt over time to radically different social and cul-
tural matrices.12 Then as now a consummate violator of boundaries, the
down-and-dirty Gothick moved on to colonize a far greater empire than 5
its original circumscribed territory. Much as each level of a fourteenth-
century Old Goth cathedral replicates itself geometrically from the one

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
beneath it in an infinitely divisible fractal sequence, the Gothick has kept
on reproducing its overarching form in a staggering array of new sub-
genres.13 Over the course of the nineteenth century these included not just
the new fiction of ghost stories and theatrical melodrama but also the archi-
tecture and visual arts (the Gothic Revival, Pre-Raphaelite, and Arts and
Crafts movements).
Historically, the rapidly proliferating Gothick quickly subdivided into
overlapping subgenres of supernaturalism, anticlericalism, psychologi-
cal horror, and sentimental romance. Old Goth– style supernaturalism be-
came more prominent, less apologized for or rationalized, in nineteenth-
century ghost stories featuring the mostly menacing spirits of individuals
who survived death. In these tales, notably English but also widespread on
the Continent (e.g., the French contes fantastiques of Charles Nodier, Pros-
per Mérimée, and others), the nasty depiction of Catholic clerics was gone.
Instead, the old Church casts a nostalgic shadow over the ruined abbeys of
Victorian Protestant writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the
meticulously accurate historical settings of Edwardian Montague Rhodes
James’s ghostly tales. In his Dracula (1897), set partly in Catholic eastern
Europe, the Irish Protestant Bram Stoker introduced the crucifi x and
holy water as amulets for warding off vampires in this nineteenth-century
Gothick subgenre based on south Slavic folklore.
Supernaturalism also resurfaced, this time from the Romantic side of
the Gothick-Romantic equation, in Victorian fantasy and children’s litera-
ture. Drawing on shared roots in ballad and folklore revival, proponents
of this genre such as the fantasist George MacDonald and the folklorist
Andrew Lang laid the foundations for twentieth-century writers such as
J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, whose works in turn helped fuel the
immense fantasy literature industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-
fi rst centuries. In this hybrid subgenre, dark Gothick characters and
 themes are typically subsumed within a brighter Romantic folktale matrix
in which “good” supernatural creatures such as fairies and elves counter-
balance the forces of evil.
In North America—where, as Leslie Fiedler liked to say, the haunted
6 forest replaced the ruined castle as the Gothick charged space14 —the ge-
nealogy of supernaturalism runs from Charles Brockden Brown and
Nathaniel Hawthorne through Edgar Allan Poe (in whose detective stories
G o t h ic k a

the “explained supernatural” plays out as a mad caricature of rationalism)

and his twentieth-century literary successor H. P. Lovecraft.15 High literary
culture, meanwhile, remaining almost exclusively realist through the twen-
tieth century, acknowledged an American or Southern Gothic school of the
psychological grotesque starting in the 1940s. The influence of this tradi-
tion, which included the writers William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams,
Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, is visible in contemporary
realist writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates.
Through the twentieth century, the great tidal bore of the Gothick—
from the blue-covered chapbooks hawked on street corners in New York
and London and moving up, in ascending inflationary order, to penny
dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and dime novels— swelled into pulp fiction,
comic books, and B movies, which morphed downriver into a range of new
media from animated cartoons to videogaming to interactive fan fiction
and virtual reality role playing. The emerging subgenre of science fiction,
heir of the Gothick through Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein and
H. G. Wells’s “scientific romances” of the later nineteenth century, put a
new twist on the concept of “explained supernatural” by introducing scien-
tific technology and futurist fantasy as a rationalizing frame for an imagi-
nary otherworld made magically possible by machines—“Gothicizing the
future,” in Alexandra Warwick’s phrase, as the haunted Gothick space
shifted from abbeys and mansions to asylums and ultimately to spaceships
in the twentieth century.16
The 1960s marked the new prominence of these marginal entertain-
ments with a supernaturalist slant as they moved out of the pulps and B
movies into mainstream popular culture, along with a not coincidental
spike in alternative spirituality, dominated almost through the end of the
century by a wide range of groups and movements known as “New Age.”
Supernaturalism also began to play a much more dominant role in chil-
dren’s literature. Werewolves loped into the venerable Hardy Boys series
in 1979, clones and resurrection of the dead by 1987—themes that would
have been unthinkable in children’s mystery novels of two decades ear-
lier.17 In the 1990s, Rowling’s fabulously successful Harry Potter series,
about a boy wizard and his classmates at a school for sorcerers, triggered a 7
surge of young adult fantasy fiction. This body of work quickly jumped
the fence into adult blockbuster movies that, along with sagas of comic

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
book superheroes, dominated the big-screen movie market of the fi rst
decade of the twenty-first century.
The final Gothick strand, the sentimental romance written by and for
women, enjoys enormous popularity today both in its classic forms and in
highly hybridized new ones. Building on the work of Radcliffe and the
other early women Gothick novelists, this subgenre did not find its own
distinctive identity until the mid-nineteenth century. Straight through the
late twentieth century, writers of Gothick romances typically presented,
just as Poe had, the teasing hint of haunting or the supernatural; true to
Radcliffe’s template, however, all mysteries were revealed, by story’s end,
to have a rational explanation.
Today the dynamic, ever-expanding Gothick flourishes in a huge array
of subgenres, most obviously as endless permutations of horror stories
linked with supernaturalism (including tales of vampires, werewolves, and
other imaginary denizens of the dark side that were first introduced as
fictional characters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Still carry-
ing many of its original defi ning characteristics, the Gothick has its ten-
tacles in so many pop culture products at the dawn of the new century
that Maurice Lévy has dubbed the phenomenon “a spreading process and
imperialist conquest of the whole human experience.” Proposing finally
that the greatest Gothick writer of the twentieth century was Sigmund
Freud and that the “Gothic has left the realm of fiction and begun to in-
vade our lives, our brains, even our bodies,” Lévy asks if there’s anything
left that’s “not Gothic.”18
Drawing on a complex layering of sources, the diverse subgenres of
twenty-first-century Gothick share at least four common features. First,
they borrow from— or more accurately, simply belong to—the Anglo-
American Gothick literary tradition that nominally starts with Walpole.
Gothick motifs of the haunted architectural space that combusts by story’s
 end, the imperiled young woman menaced by a dangerous older man, the
manmade monster, and the supernatural shape-shifter are still repro-
duced with remarkable consistency in the global Gothick.
Second, they borrow from the Old Goth historical period of the Mid-
8 dle Ages, usually through the filter of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
“medievalisms.” The original Gothick novels and Romantic poetry imi-
tated the form and content of medieval romances and ballads; current
G o t h ic k a

Gothick subgenres also borrow from such Old Goth art forms as the dream
vision and the morality play. Moreover, many of today’s subgenres affirm
an underlying and pervasive supernaturalism that paradoxically exceeds
that of the original eighteenth-century genre, thereby bringing them
closer in spirit to the cultural products and popular religious imagination
of the medieval Gothic period, even more so as analogous folk beliefs of
Japan, other Asian countries, and Catholic Europe move to the foreground
in the new global Gothick.
Third, they are amazingly hybrid. The Gothick was and is the ultimate
mongrel form. Walpole’s declaration that he was combining “ancient and
modern romances” in Otranto set the template for today’s genre-combining
stories and half-breed human-supernatural characters.19 Proliferating
across all storytelling media, Gothick horror has mated with noir, science
fiction, comedy, romance, and erotic fiction; within individual narratives
Gothick characters fl ip their sex, species, and deep nature (most conspic-
uously, from evil to good). When the half-human, half-vampire heroes of
Blade (a graphic novel–movie hybrid) and Blood: The Last Vampire (a manga–
live action hybrid) hunt down old-style “bad” vampires to kill them, it’s a
perfect parable of the way new Gothick subgenres simultaneously embed
and destroy older conventions.
Fourth, as they have moved increasingly from the margins to the main-
stream over the last twenty years, many Gothick subgenres display—in a
variety of provisional and eclectic ways—an implicit heterodox spirituality
that grows directly out of their robust supernaturalism. 20 The most strik-
ing characteristic of the new Gothick’s spiritual framework is what René
Girard calls “the metamorphosis of the maleficent into the beneficent,”
in which antagonist-villains (vampires, werewolves, assorted demons and
imps of hell) have become protagonist-heroes who struggle with their
darkness even as they incarnate on earth as gods.21 This heterodoxy in
turn has moved a small but significant portion of fans out of the territory
of imagination and into that of belief.
Faced with the continuity and unquenchable vitality of the Gothick, the
temptation to look no further back in historical time for the genre’s origin
story than the eighteenth century is strong. Yet what Erich Auerbach ar- 9
gued more broadly about the arc of Western literature—that twentieth-
century literary conventions were the historical fulfillment of the medi-

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
eval vernacular mixing of high and low styles— surely applies with even
greater force to the Gothick, a genre that continues to draw from the
worldview of the Middle Ages as well as its literary styles and stories.22
Medievalist and film scholar Carol Clover argues that we can never fully
grasp modern American popular culture without first understanding the
popular culture of the European Middle Ages. Medieval literature, Clover
points out, “is a world of the formulaic. A world of cycles, in which there is
no original, no real or right text, but only variants. A world in which texts
can be shortened, lengthened, imitated, disguised, sequeled, prequeled,
changed from verse to prose or prose to verse, and so on. A world in which,
to fall back on an old but useful distinction, character is more a function
of plot than vice versa.”23
This description could be applied equally to the contemporary graphic
novel and many others of the magpie subgenres of the Gothick, past and
present. From its radical (to us) notions of artistic originality to its heavy
underpinning of folk religion, the medieval Gothic cultural era of the Cath-
olic European West—whose denizens believed in a material world deeply
penetrated by the supernatural as manifested in everyday miracles, saints
with superpowers, a feminine divine embodied in the Virgin Mary, a dev il
with a real tail, and an array of hybrid monsters—provides a richer sub-
text to contemporary Anglo-American Protestant popular culture than we
might first imagine. “The past is that Other which we seek to idolize more
than anything else,” the art historian Michael Camille once said, asking:
“Is this what makes the Middle Ages so fascinating for us today—because
it appears (or is so often represented as) a period when people not only
understood their place in the world but had access to symbols and signs
that granted them access to the world to come?”24
I am not making a simple historical analogy between our times and the
Middle Ages, though in recent decades that parallel has begun to replace
 the time-honored fall-of-the-Roman-empire trope. Rather, I would like
to suggest that besides sharing the aesthetic of a kind of mad pantextual-
ity, Gothick writers, filmmakers, gamers, and Goth kids of the twenty-
first century (who live in an utterly different world than, say, Paris in the
10 year 1206 c.e.) are moving intuitively toward an image-based, animistic,
supernaturalist orientation that has some common features with the world-
view that fueled this older historical substratum of our culture. This re-
G o t h ic k a

mains an exceedingly complicated effect to pin down, not least because

characterizing that very long period of European cultural history in any sort
of meaningful way is just about impossible. The Middle Ages, as Leslie J.
Workman states flatly, “are virtually unique among major periods or areas
of historical study in being entirely the creation of scholars.”25
Is it even possible, then, to distinguish between a “true” medieval and
the rampant medievalisms that people in every later historical period have
projected onto this era in the Western past? The answer must be no, but
then and now it’s a spectrum. The Society for Creative Anachronism and
other medieval reenactor groups are an example of self-conscious, nostal-
gic medievalism in our time.26 So are the Gothick story lines of video-
games from Myst and Adventure to Castlevania. But mash-ups such as Bill
Willingham’s graphic novel series Fables (2002– ), featuring Snow White
and other fairy-tale characters living in a secret Manhattan community
called Fabletown that is ruled by Old King Cole, represent, if you will, a
“deep” medievalism in their layering of different story contexts and char-
acters. Where Dan Brown’s ersatz tidbits of Templar, Cathar, and Grail
lore represent a familiar strand of Gothick-style ornamental medievalism,
in her Twilight vampire romances Stephenie Meyer creates (with, one feels,
no totally conscious intention to do so) a radically different effect: a sculp-
tural pantheon of demigods and -goddesses who glitter like haloed saints
and act like Hindu deities or the divine-human anthropoi of late antiquity.
Finally, participating in the topographic allegories of supernaturalist vid-
eogames positions a modern gamer more actively in the dual-reality uni-
verse that premodern Europe shares with traditional cultures around the
world than reading Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron ever did for her
late eighteenth-century audience.
But why the difference—in amount and kind of supernatural content—
between the eighteenth century and now? Scholars have regarded the orig-
inal Gothick as the first Western literary genre operating implicitly in the
vacuum left by the departure of religious belief among large portions of
the educated classes. “Viewing Gothick mystery as a substitute for dis-
credited religious mystery,” says Lévy, “we may consent to recognize that,
despite its wild extravagance and puerile heresies, le genre noir represented
for its producers and consumers alike a genuine expression of profound 11
religious malaise.”27 Victor Sage has defi ned the Gothick not just as a nar-
row literary genre featuring “a decorative metaphysical or graveyard feel-

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
ing” but as “a whole complex of popu lar theological ideals of a pre-
dominantly, if not exclusively, Protestant variety.”28 Robert Geary sees the
Gothick novel in its beginnings not just as an expression of Protestant an-
ticlericalism or as a simple reaction to eighteenth-century rationalism but
as part of the process of the secularization of literature in which the super-
natural moves out of the traditional religious framework to be cultivated
as a sensation in itself.29
By the eighteenth century any supernaturalism outside the fi rmly drawn
boundaries of orthodox religious belief was labeled “superstition” and
firmly (if nostalgically) linked via Gothick entertainments either to exotic
Catholic countries on the Continent or to England’s own Catholic past.30
Belief in ghosts and witches was no longer a matter of public record among
the educated classes but rather was displaced, for a reader’s guilt-free enjoy-
ment, into the imaginary of fiction. As Alex Owen has shown, it was just
this shift in register from belief to imagination, which she views as part of
the modernizing quest for consciousness, that carried forward the process
of secularization in nineteenth-century England.31
Yet the supernatural remained a charged subject for Gothick writers of
the classic period, who were alternately attracted and repulsed by it. Even
as they rebelled against the neoclassic rationalism of the mid-eighteenth
century and laid the foundations for Romanticism, the early Gothick
novelists presented apparitions and the appurtenances of pre-Reformation
Catholic Christianity as window dressing rather than living belief. In his
second preface to Otranto, Walpole felt the need to apologize for the pres-
ence of the supernatural in the form of oversized statue parts that drop
from the sky, ancestral portraits that come to life, and the castle itself
cloven in two as divine punishment for evildoing. “Belief in every kind of
prodigy was so established in those dark ages,” he tells his readers, “that
an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should
not omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself,
 but he must represent his actors as believing them.”32 Diane Hoeveler
argues, on the matter of the “explained supernatural” in the Gothick, that
“explaining away the supernatural in the gothic discourse is another way
of privileging its talismanic force. . . . Because this culture could not turn
12 away from God, it chose to be haunted by his uncanny avatars: priests,
corrupt monks, incestuous fathers, and uncles.”33
In Anglo-American Protestant culture the desacralized supernatural was
G o t h ic k a

of a very specific kind: dark. The Protestant Reformation and the scientific
revolution had set in motion the first stage of this process in seventeenth-
century western Eu rope. As the supernatural was being excluded from
the natural world, any lingering manifestations were demonized. Whereas
the medieval Catholic world, for example, sanctioned belief in ghosts as the
manifestation of souls trapped in Purgatory who could only return to
show themselves to the living if God permitted it, the official Protestant
line eventually became: There is no such thing as ghosts, but if you actu-
ally see one, it was sent by the Dev il to deceive you.34 The new argument
went something like this: If divine intrusions into our lives such as mira-
cles ended with the age of the patriarchs (that is, around the sixth century
c.e.) and if natural wonders such as lightning, earthquakes, and floods were
not God’s punishment but had their causes in the material world, then
anything perceived in the material world that could not be explained ra-
tionally must belong to the dark side.35
The figure of the Dev il or Satan, consequently, is central to the Gothick
imaginary, past and present.36 To understand the role this figure plays in
the contemporary Gothick requires jumping back to a time in western
Europe when Satan was neither a humorous conceit (as in many twentieth-
century Gothick subgenres), a melodramatically imaginary being (as for
Matthew Lewis and his eighteenth-century colleagues), nor simply theo-
logically real (as for John Milton in the seventeenth century and a consid-
erable number of Christian faithful through to the present day), but part
of a belief system in which both Satan and his opposite number, God
(through Jesus and Mary as well as angels and saints), made open and fre-
quent interventions in everyday life—the belief system, in short, of the
Old Goth Middle Ages.
Historically, Satan had not always been a major player in Christian
dogma. After relatively little prominence for more than a millennium, the
Father of Lies moved abruptly to center stage around the beginning of the
fourteenth century, producing what one scholar has called “three cen-
turies of demonic obsession” that deeply impacted western European cul-
ture and led to the witch hunts that swept the region (and the Americas, in
its wake) from the end of the fifteenth century through the mid-seventeenth
century.37 Where Church statements on doctrine in earlier times had been 13
devoted to denouncing heretics, the late medieval period produced the new
clerical discipline of “demonology,” designed to investigate the relationship

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
between demons and their human pawns.
This unholy connection, it was thought, could take one of two forms:
voluntary pact or involuntary possession. For relationships falling into the
first category, the Malleus Malefi carum (1486, “Hammer of Witches [Evil-
doers]”), by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, became the foun-
dational Church treatise on sorcery and witchcraft. The practice of magic,
regarded in earlier medieval Christian times as mere superstition, was now
deemed real— and suspect. The Islamic sciences of alchemy and astrol-
ogy, coming to Europe via Moorish Spain, also fell under the shadow of
theological suspicion. By the sixteenth century, the cautionary legend of
Faust, the doctor of philosophy who trades his soul to the Dev il in ex-
change for unlimited knowledge and power, was widely staged in theaters
across Europe and the British Isles.
The voluntary pact was a heavily gendered transaction. Whereas men
“sold” their souls to the Dev il in a legal contract, those women who made
this choice did so with their bodies, in sexual congress, since women were
considered to be more vulnerable to what one scholar calls “a penetra-
tive, interiorizing union” with divine and demonic forces alike. For a fe-
male saint, ecstatic union with God was considered to be the prime initia-
tory experience; for a witch, it was sexual intercourse with the Dev il.38
With the new focus on the Dev il in the later Middle Ages, attention shifted
from the divine possession of female saints to witches’ matings with Satan.
The conscious choice witches exercised in this transaction made them
culpable and worthy of punishment.
But the Dev il could also take over people without their consent, and
this form of coerced possession could be accomplished either directly, in
the form of demons, incubi, or succubi, or through another person’s curse.
As a spiritual and bodily invasion, involuntary possession was likewise re-
corded most commonly with women. Just as they did with reports of sight-
ings of Mary or angels, however, clerics made a serious effort to distinguish
 between possession by the Dev il and garden-variety madness, which even
by the fourteenth century was already becoming a secular medical diag-
nosis.39 Accusations of either sorcery or possession were also, of course,
a classic tactic of the Church to discredit heterodoxy. The obsession
14 with demonic possession made a late and final appearance in seventeenth-
century France, when the priest Urbain Grandier, possibly for political
reasons, was held responsible for the mass possession of nuns by demons
G o t h ic k a

at a convent in Loudon and was burned at the stake.

The new Protestant movements latched on to the Dev il even more re-
lentlessly than their Catholic counterparts, producing an almost Gnostic
obsession with Satan, whom Martin Luther declared to be lord and master
of the living world as well as the source of any unexplainable occurrences
taking place in it. Satan was widely regarded among Protestant thinkers
as “God’s hangsman” (in James I’s phrase), second cause to God’s first
cause, extracting divine punishment in a material world where God no
longer directly intervened.40 This, as we have already seen, was part of the
move from belief in supernatural agencies capable of doling out both
beneficence and maleficence to belief in a magical universe that was uni-
formly dark, and ultimately to belief in neither. During this transitional
period mysterious events in nature could still be attributed to dev ilish
influence simply because their causes were unknown or uncertain.
In the pivotal seventeenth century God’s divine intervention was no lon-
ger believed to be manifest in everyday life, while Satan’s was. In England,
where Henry VIII’s drastic break from the Church of Rome had caused a
social and intellectual upheaval equivalent to Mao’s socializing of China,
this shift in thinking took a very long time to take root. For the fi rst 150
years of Protestantism in England (along with its colonies in America and
elsewhere), God was still the causal agency for everything that happened
in the world, including “providences” such as material prosperity as well as
natural disasters.
But many of the practices accreted for more than a millennium in Latin
Christendom that Protestants deemed imagistic and hence idolatrous were
retained in Radical Reformation sects. Many of these early dissenting
groups clung conservatively, to a greater or lesser degree, to a number of
tenets of the Old Goth medieval cosmology that the intertwined world-
views of mainstream Protestantism and the emerging new scientific disci-
plines were rapidly rendering obsolete. Foremost among these increasingly
heretical notions was a belief in a deep interconnection between the worlds
of spirit and matter, the primacy of spirit, and its ever-present intrusion
into our world of the senses. This older notion of a hierarchy of “signatures”
or correspondences connecting the celestial realm with the inferior natural
world had come increasingly under attack in the pivotal seventeenth cen- 15
tury, most obviously from the new empiricism that disassociated naturally
occurring events from divine or otherworldly intervention.41

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
The Calvinist view of a cosmos from whose physical workings the
Deity was increasingly detached had helped lay the groundwork for the
mechanistic universe of eighteenth-century Newtonian physics. Many of
the dissenting English sectarians of this time, however, claimed to pos-
sess “that supernatural solution to earthly problems which the makers of
the Protestant Reformation had so sternly rejected,” and, as Keith Thomas
points out, they “revived the miracle-working aspect of medieval Catholi-
cism without its Roman and hierarchical features.” 42
As the first Gothick novels were being written, metaphysicians turned
philosophers were interested in identifying the sources of aesthetically
experienced terror in the natural world now that it was disconnected from
sacred awe. Walpole’s contemporary Edmund Burke said that terror comes
from a triggering agency, known simply as the sublime, that is the diamet-
rical opposite of the beautiful. The fear or terror produced by the sublime
is a big, grand feeling, “the strongest emotion of which the mind is capa-
ble of feeling,” and often comes in reaction either to entities perceived as
supernatural or to wild mountain landscapes.43 This was the moment in
Western cultural history when transcendence shifted from being an attri-
bute of God to being an attribute of nature, with the suggestion that
humans having this experience in consciousness were able to connect
with a desacralized transcendent themselves. As Thomas Weiskel put it,
“The sublime revives as God withdraws from an immediate participation
in the experience of men”—and he adds, significantly, “The essential claim
of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and speech, transcend the human.”44
Just this sense of self-divinization, as we will see, became central to the
evolving spirituality of the Gothick.
As a generator of terror, the sublime after Burke was linked with the
Gothick sensibility as much as with the Romantic.45 The Gothick sub-
lime, says Vijay Mishra, the scholar who coined this term, is a kind of void
(“an absence, a lack in the structure itself”) that attracts “the unthinkable,
 the unnameable, and the unspeakable,” making it “anti-analytic, supra-
sensible, and beyond the grasp of our cognitive faculties.”46 Though he
argues that this brand of sublimity lies completely outside a religious
framework, the very vocabulary of ineffability, and the vacuum these words
16 create, tends to suck the transcendental, acknowledged or not, right back
in. Other commentators have also noted in the Gothick the historical shift
in the sense of the sacred that I have called the transition from “full of
G o t h ic k a

awe” to “awful.” The cultivation of feelings of terror or dread in the face

of evil forces serves as a flawed vehicle to the transcendent— a dark tran-
scendent shorn of the larger metaphysical context that embraces the di-
vine as well as the demonic.47
Taking Rudolf Otto’s classic definition of the religious experience as
fear in the presence of the numinous, we might say that it shifted, in the
post-Enlightenment framework of the Gothick, into a much more nar-
rowly defi ned sensation of horror provoked by the imaginary rather than
the metaphysical.48 Beyond the framework of Protestant Christianity, su-
pernaturalism was the one remnant of the rejected sacred, in the spiritual
vacuum created by secularized intellectual culture, that could safely travel
out of religious belief into the as-if world of the imaginary. In this way
a limited genre with a small and almost exclusively dark vocabulary was
overweighted with a great deal of displaced numen. This strange quirk of
cultural and religious history would set the Gothick’s curiously distinctive
tone through the end of the twentieth century, when the long-mounting
internal pressure blew open this constricted vessel with a more expansive
reinvention of the supernatural.
For me a single miniature found in the Spinola Book of Hours that is the
frontispiece to this chapter says it all. An illuminated Scottish devotional
of the early sixteenth century, the Spinola Hours depicts St. Dominic,
founder of the Dominican order, a friar who, impressed by the simplicity
of the Cathar heretics in southern France (a group that would loom large
in the later fictive Gothick), attempted to scale down his order of mendi-
cant preachers accordingly but whose descendants in the order included
Torquemada, founder of the Inquisition. In this image Dominic sits en-
grossed in a manuscript, blissfully unaware of a dreadful creature with the
wide flat whiskery face of a catfish and a reptile’s long tail whose scaly arm
has stretched under the chair to claw at the hem of his white robe.
 With one important omission, this pairing of oblivious scholar with
floor-scuttling monster could just as easily serve as an illustration for
“The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” or “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,”
Gothick ghost stories written some 400 years later by the medievalist M. R.
James. The difference between James’s desanctified Gothick monsters and 17
the Old Goth Catholic sensibility is exemplified by the presence of a sec-
ond animal in the Spinola Hours miniature: a little white dog crouching

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
under Dominic’s lectern. Clasped in its jaws is a flaming torch signifying
the saint’s ultimate victory over temptation as he carries the light of God
into the world.49
The presence of the monster, and absence of the dog, defines the Gothick
supernatural from the years 1764 through 1999: sheer terror, with no
prospect of salvation. By the end of the twentieth century, the severe and
obvious limitations of the dark Gothick as the only vehicle for the super-
natural outside organized religion finally reached a tipping point. Chafing
at what in most traditional human cultures would be an unnatural distor-
tion and stigmatization of the world of spirits, the sub-Zeitgeist responded
with a kind of unconscious imperative to transform this dark template
into a sunnier, more all-embracing spiritual framework.
And transform it did. Though the Mississippi of traditional “bad” Gothick
still runs broad and steadfastly black, a surprising number of its postmil-
lennial tributaries are letting a bit of Romantic sunlight in. This trend
shows itself in “good” monsters such as Swamp Thing, Hellboy, and Bella
the human turned vampire demigoddess. Hybrid heroes such as Perseus
or “Percy,” the demigod descendant of Zeus in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jack-
son series; Red Riding Hood as a superhero in a steampunk magical world
in Nick Percival’s Legends; and God as a middle-aged African American
woman named “Papa” in William P. Young’s The Shack all break the Prot-
estant post-Enlightenment mold of the dark Gothick as they evoke under-
the-table folk religious beliefs that are present in many other cultures
besides the European Middle Ages.
In the Gothick subgenres of the twenty-first century, as we will see, the
dark sublime’s antithesis—the beautiful—begins to surface, uniting Gothick
and Romantic traditions as this hybrid sensibility continues to morph to
meet the changing consciousness of our culture. These key new tributaries
of the twenty-first-century Gothick no longer promote supernaturalism as
 an evil and imaginary dimension outside ordinary human existence, but
rather (in the words of Alan Ball, creator of the HBO vampire series True
Blood) consider it to be “deep nature,” integral to our daily lives in the way
it was (or we believe it was) in premodern Europe.50 This trend toward a
18 kind of normative supernaturalism in the Gothick mutually reinforces an
equally subliminal activity of new religion building in its contemporary
subgenres.
G o t h ic k a

“Religion building” is a fancy assertion to make about popular entertain-

ments, but here I follow William James’s simple definition of religion as
“belief in the reality of an unseen order.”51 And I argue, along with Philip
K. Dick, that particularly when the divine has been exiled from the table of
serious art and intellectual discussion for well over a century, you have to
look for it in what elite culture thinks of as the trash. That is, in the sub-
Zeitgeist, that disreputable realm of popular culture, B movies, pulp fiction,
and folk belief where, modernity or no, the line between belief and imagi-
nation is often erased, a shadowy territory where—to give Northrop Frye’s
notion of “secular scripture” a slightly different twist— a certain kind of
low-level but potent theological rumination is constantly taking place.
Large numbers of young people around the world who have been raised
essentially outside institutional religion have their only experience of fear
and trembling before the supernatural through global popular entertain-
ment, and it leaves them thirsty for more. At least two American-based
new world religions, Mormonism and Christian Science, were cooked in
this cauldron; the creator of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, moved seam-
lessly from writing science fiction novels to founding a science fiction re-
ligion; and other new religious movements have also blossomed from no-
tions that conflate the fictional extraterrestrial with the formerly celestial.
As we will see in the following pages, belief and imagination also merge in
the quasi-religions and magic cults that have sprung up around individual
works of fantasy and science fiction.
Carrying its own brand of “spilt religion” (as the critic T. E. Hulme fa-
mously dubbed the Romantic movement), for 250 years the Gothick has
served as one of secular society’s disavowed back doors to the world beyond
appearances. By presenting an array of imaginary immortals and humans
with paranormal powers that blend monstrous with good and light with
dark, the twenty-first-century Gothick offers a weird subliminal correc-
tive to Protestant Christianity’s three male gods of light. It’s as if, in those
realms of the Western popular imagination where the horrific has held
sway for hundreds of years, the scaly monster that menaces St. Dominic in
the Spinola Hours has shape-shifted into his little dog, reconfiguring the
sacred through the formerly monstrous and evil in ways that transform our
conceptions of both. The new “bright” Gothick in its many forms makes 19
the radical suggestion that if we want to get to heaven, monsters and demi-
goddesses can help show us it is right here on earth.

w h i t e d o g, t h e pr e qu e l
Ambrosio hoodwinked by the demon Matilda in The Monk. From the 1822 New York edi-
tion published by William Borradaile, engraving by Jean François Eugène Prudhomme.
Courtesy of the New York Society Library.
 two

faux catholic
A Gothick Genealogy from
Monk Lewis to Dan Brown

Scarcely had the abbey-bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the church
of the Capuchins thronged with auditors. . . . But very few were influenced by
[motives of piety or desire for information]; and in a city where superstition
reigns with such despotic sway as Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be
a fruitless attempt.
—Matthew Lewis, The Monk

We have seen it on the big screen any number of times: the possessed woman
writhing, screaming, face morphing (courtesy of computer-generated im-
agery) into a hideous leer as despairing relatives edge prudently away from
the imminent prospect of projectile vomiting.
Demon possession, open-and-shut case. Who you gonna call?
Not your rabbi, imam, or Methodist minister. No, you want that Ro-
man Catholic priest with his collar, cross, holy water, and Vulgate Bible—
all the papist trappings that Protestant Americans shun in real life but
absolutely demand for a convincing onscreen exorcism. A mild-mannered
Episcopal reverend or a megachurch preacher in a track suit reciting the
Lord’s Prayer in English over that tormented soul? I don’t think so. Noth-
ing less, or other, than the sting of holy water, the hiss of the cross against
burning flesh, will make the demon depart, wailing in agony.
 And what about that secret office, always housed deep in the bowels of
the Vatican, laboring over the centuries to keep the parchment containing
secrets threatening to orthodoxy from falling into the wrong hands, or
stop an incarnation of a rebel angel, even Satan’s own child born to a mor-
22 tal woman, from wreaking havoc on the world? What a letdown if the
headquarters of this agency so crucial to the salvation of humankind turns
out to be down the corridor from the bingo room in the local Lutheran
G o t h ic k a

church basement! The narrator of Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 vampire novel

The Historian voices just these doubts: “The hospitable plain Protestant
chapels that dotted the university . . . didn’t look qualified to wrestle with
the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches in the [New
England] town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire.”1
After the incense clears, this is the central paradox in movies and books
such as The Exorcist, Stigmata, The Omen, End of Days, The Order, The Rite,
and countless others: that an exoticized, patently fictional, and some would
say anticlerical fantasy about Catholicism strangely empowers and elevates
the very religious denomination it seems to slander. The Catholic League
and other religious organizations decry these movies and novels but, un-
derstandably, fail to appreciate their implicit subtext: fi rst, that this fantasy
pop culture religion I like to call faux Catholic provides the only effective
defense against the forces of evil as embodied in the Judeo-Christian fig-
ure of Satan or vampires and other supernatural creatures, and second,
that the battle between good and evil is most effectively waged not with
the Church of Rome’s real-life theological doctrine but with its perceived
magical talismans—talismans that continue to exert a strong but guilty
fascination for Protestants and other non-Catholics around the world.
The film adaptation of The Exorcist (1973), from the novel written by a
conservative Catholic, William Henry Blatty, with the full blessing of the
Catholic Church, was the seminal story that set in motion the twentieth-
century faux Catholic subgenre of male priests chasing the Dev il out of
possessed females, a subgenre still going strong forty years later in such
films as The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010), and The
Rite (2011).2 The Last Exorcism is the first movie in this tradition, interest-
ingly, to substitute a Louisiana tent preacher for the Catholic priest, but
in the end the self-confessed phony exorcist Cotton Marcus and his beige
three-piece suit prove no match for the possessed girl and the Dev il cult
she belongs to, headed by the kindly local pastor now got up in a scarlet faux
Catholic hooded robe of Satan.3 In The Rite, the exorcist priest himself is
possessed, a twist of convention that further demonstrates that the func-
tionaries of the Catholic Church, in faux Catholic logic, are effective
against the Dev il only because they somehow remain connected to him.4
The possibility always lurks that in the end they may reveal themselves as 23
emissaries of the very evil they claim to be fighting against.
Furthermore, as we will see in the case of Dan Brown, even an idea he-

fau x c at hol ic
retical to all Christian denominations—that Jesus was only mortal, mated
with Mary Magdalene, and had human descendants—is one seen by his
readers as well as the author himself to be most effectively combated by the
institution of the Catholic Church.
Why the implicit bestowal of greater authority and power by mostly
non-Catholic writers and filmmakers on a religion they don’t belong to or
believe in? The specific historical reason for this ambiguous valorization
lies in the literary source of this fare: the Protestant anticlerical Gothick
novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their cre-
ators’ obsessive fascination with what the Puritans before them liked to
call “egregious popish impostures”— aka the Eu ropean medieval Catho-
lic past with its magical relics and rites, its credulity-straining miracles,
its idolatrous statuary, its corrupt clergy and ecclesiastical hierarchy—
initiated this enduring and endlessly reinvented theme into international
popular culture. For the early Gothick novelists, this love-hate affair with
Catholicism featured a certain amount of secret nostalgia, of two kinds.
The first was for the ruins and living vestiges of the Middle Ages they
could see with their own eyes in southern European Catholic countries
such as Italy or Spain or (as in the case of Ann Radcliffe and, later, Poe)
simply imagine from their own reading.
Beneath their ridicule of past ages’ “superstitious” practices, however,
lay another, more uneasy nostalgia for the comfort and security these rites
offered. The medieval Catholic Church had drawn down God’s power
and blessings into daily life through many rituals, most of which were per-
formed by the priest, and consecrated objects had magical power. Once all
these rituals and holy objects were dispensed with, what protective pow-
ers did Protestants have against the Dev il? It boiled down to external rit-
ual versus internal resolve: if amulets and the holy supernatural powers
invested in the figure of the priest could no longer be used, that put the
burden of exorcism on individual prayer, which all denominations seemed
 to agree was not guaranteed to work.5 As late as 1725, an English Protes-
tant divine could report, in a sentiment that would echo through centuries
of Anglo-American popular entertainments right down to Kostova: “It is
common for the present vulgar to say, none can lay a spirit but a Popish
24 priest.”6 Even today U.S. Catholic priests report being overwhelmed by
requests for exorcism from people of all denominations.7
I take as my foundational text Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, published in
G o t h ic k a

March 1796 when its author was not quite twenty- one. By the tradi-
tional measure The Monk belongs to the “middle” period of the original
Gothick—with Horace Walpole and his Castle of Otranto marking the
genre’s beginning, followed by an avalanche of novels and chapbooks
penned by a host of mostly female writers and culminating in the works of
Radcliffe by the end of the century. It was Lewis more than any previous
Gothick writer, however, whose work took England and Europe by storm.
Like The Da Vinci Code two centuries later, The Monk created an inter-
national sensation and made its author an overnight celebrity. Like Brown,
“Monk” Lewis, as he came to be known, was accused of copying other
sources, and by its fourth edition The Monk had also been expurgated of
some of its more scandalous sexual material.8
Precociously astute about human nature and the temptations of vaulting
careerist ambition, Lewis fashioned a narrative whose mad eroticism, over-
the-top gore, and pell-mell pace keep The Monk— as my own experience
shows— a lively read even today. In the course of a long and convoluted
plot set mostly in sixteenth-century (i.e., Old Goth) Madrid, two young
gentlemen, Lorenzo and Raymond, lose their lady loves to evil clerics—
Agnes, Lorenzo’s sister and Raymond’s lover, and her baby to the wrath of
the abbess of the convent where she has been unfairly confi ned (but from
which she, but not the baby, is eventually rescued), and Antonia, whom
Lorenzo hopes to marry, to the lust of the ambitious and newly fallen ab-
bot Ambrosio. We also meet a third young woman, Matilda, who masquer-
ades as a male novice to gain access to Ambrosio and is the first to tempt
him down the path of perdition. Matilda tells Ambrosio she has made a
pact with the beautiful “fallen angel” Lucifer, and eventually the proud
abbot does too, so that he may fulfill his lustful desire for the innocent
Antonia after murdering her mother to keep her from exposing him.
Ambrosio’s Faustian pact with Satan, unlike the involuntary possession
of females, is typically voluntary and masculine. Once he has killed Anto-
nia as well to conceal his crime, he makes another pact with Lucifer (in his
less attractive winged, horned, and taloned form) to escape further torture
from the Inquisition. Now Lucifer lets Ambrosio know that Matilda is not
human but an agent of Hell, and that Ambrosio’s two victims, Antonia and
her mother, were his own sister and mother. Lucifer flies the hapless monk 25
into the sky and drops him thousands of feet onto a rocky precipice where,
after six days of having his eyeballs pecked, flesh bitten, and blood extracted

fau x c at hol ic
by various natural predators, Ambrosio expires— only to be catapulted in-
stantly into eternal damnation.
Though Lewis serves up the obligatory moldering vaults and gloomy me-
dieval atmosphere of earlier Gothick tales, this faux Catholic story is all about
sexual repression unleashed. The Monk focuses obsessively on the Roman
clergy’s sexual transgressions, abuses of power, and hypocritical cruelty to-
ward confessed sinners. This theme stands in striking contrast to today’s
mainstream faux Catholic films and books, which, in an interesting reversal
of focus, studiously avoid cleric-lay sexuality in spite of (or perhaps because
of?) ongoing revelations about sexual abuse of minors by priests, concen-
trating instead on demonic possession and heretical doctrine.9 As we will
see, heresy (heterodoxy is the correct word these days, but it lacks that Goth-
ick zing) is the twenty-first-century Gothick’s great subject and subtext.
The anticlerical strand of the Gothick carried on in England by works
such as Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer flourished in Catholic countries on
the Continent as well, especially France during the Revolution and after.
Where Maturin’s character Melmoth, like Ambrosio in The Monk, sells
his soul to the Dev il and must suffer the tortures of the Inquisition, the
evil Jesuit of Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew (1844) covets the Wander-
ing Jew’s fortune, which has been collecting interest all those centuries
since the death of Jesus.10 Here the clerical transgression is not lust but
covetousness, and this Gothick theme of an undead capitalist amassing
great wealth thanks to prudent investment over the centuries would trans-
late easily into the vampire subgenre in years to come.11 In Italy, both Garib-
aldi in the nineteenth century and Mussolini (in his pre-Fascist socialist
phase) in the twentieth wrote anticlerical Gothick historical romances.12
Anti-Catholic exposés masquerading as nonfiction but cast in Gothick
fictional conventions— such as the Montreal prostitute Maria Monk’s lu-
rid Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal (1836)—were best
sellers in nineteenth-century America.13
 Today the global Gothick has produced a certain cognitive dissonance
between, to name only one example, the mildly anticlerical thrillers of
the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, on one hand, and the Japanese
manga (comic book) series Hellsing, on the other.14 The latter features
26 the Holy Order of Protestant Knights, a group formed by Dracula’s old
foe Abraham van Helsing and led by his female descendant “Sir” Integra
Hellsing to protect England from vampires; their rivals, in a nice faux
G o t h ic k a

Catholic touch, are a corresponding secret group, Iscariot, deployed by the

Vatican.15 Korean graphic novelist Hyung Min-woo’s Priest series (2002– ),
set in time periods ranging from the Crusades to the Old West to the pres-
ent day, features a former Holy Knight and priest who has sold his soul to
a demon in order to combat a powerful fallen angel; in its 2011 U.S. movie
incarnation, set in the future, the fallen angels became vampires. The role
of warrior-priest has migrated back to at least one U.S.-designed video-
game, Warhammer.16 (How the Anglo-American classic Gothick feeds into
a new global Gothick vernacular with its own distinctive features is a
topic that will be taken up in chapter 9.)
Last but not least is a classic example of Protestant anti-Papism from the
underbelly of American pop culture, a self-published but fairly widely cir-
culating novel of the 1990s with many sequels called The Last Days of Christ
the Vampire, in which that secret department deep in the bowels of the
Vatican is dedicated to concealing just this central fact about Jesus’ true
identity.17 In the shape-shifting, genre-crossing Gothick of the late twen-
tieth century, Christ as vampire was the logical consequence of the long
historical displacement of the divine by the demonic in Western Protes-
tant popular culture.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the faux Catholic Gothick
moved from simple anticlericalism to the exploration of alternative Christi-
anity and other spiritualities. A harbinger of this shift was James Redfield’s
The Celestine Prophecy (1993), a novel cum spiritual manifesto presenting
a New Age meditative discipline purportedly recorded on “parchments”
dating from 600 b.c.e. that were discovered by (who else?) Catholic priests in
Peru.18 Initially self-published by the author, this Da Vinci Code of the 1990s
became a best seller that eventually sold upwards of 20 million copies.
Which brings us to the twenty-first century and Dan Brown, the first
900-pound gorilla of this millennium’s Gothick novelists. Brown’s Apol-
lonian, tightly paced novels Angels and Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code
(2003), and The Lost Symbol (2009) deliver the dense plotting, if not the
fever-pitch emotional excitement, of the classic Gothick. While his most
famous novel gave the venerable faux Catholic its distinctive new hetero-
dox twist, Angels and Demons hews most closely to the classic Monk Lewis 27
model of the Luciferan rise and fall of a supremely ambitious, power-mad
Roman Catholic cleric. This novel also marks the first appearance of

fau x c at hol ic
Brown’s signature character Robert Langdon, the Harvard “symbologist”
who will return in The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.
In Angels and Demons, Langdon is flown to a top-secret Swiss research
laboratory when one of its chief scientists is murdered. Langdon’s task is to
decode the word Illuminati branded on the dead man’s chest, which he au-
thoritatively asserts is the name of a centuries-old but now defunct anti-
Catholic secret society of philosophers and scientists, including Galileo,
that gradually morphed into “the world’s oldest and most powerful satanic
cult.”19 Meanwhile, the scientist’s adopted daughter, Vittoria, herself a
scientist, has discovered that a portion of the antimatter her father has suc-
ceeded in isolating has disappeared. When the news arrives that an anon-
ymous caller has stashed the antimatter somewhere in the bowels of the
Vatican, Robert and Vittoria rush to Rome on the lab’s private jet. The
bomb threat has come just as the cardinals have convened to elect a new
head of church after the death (actually murder) of the previous pope. But
now the four main candidates have disappeared, and one by one their mu-
tilated bodies appear in locations across Rome as Robert and Vittoria vainly
attempt to decipher the Illuminati-laden historical clues the caller phones
in. As the body count climbs, the truth fi nally emerges: the real terrorist
is not a member of the Illuminati but rather a high Vatican official pos-
sessed by a mad desire for power.
In the character of Carlo Ventresca, the camerlengo (cardinal who func-
tions as the pope’s private secretary), we clearly see the lineaments of Lew-
is’s spectacularly sinful monk Ambrosio. Cardinal Ventresca is described
as having “the air of some mythical hero—radiating charisma and author-
ity,” but he also proves to be the novel’s villain.20 Following the more prud-
ish conventions of the modern faux Catholic Gothick, Ventresca commits
no sexual crimes, but in his murderous quest to become pope he shares the
monk Ambrosio’s overweening ambition, justifying his assassination of the
 four cardinals in line for the papacy on the grounds that they were too
liberal. Ventresca’s soul is not carried away by Satan, but there’s a nostalgic
whiff of brimstone in the air when he sets himself alight on a high balcony
overlooking Vatican Square and burns to death.
28 Angels and Demons also features a racist, stereotypical portrait of a
Middle Eastern “Hassassin,” a dark creature with “an appetite for hedo-
nistic pleasure . . . bred into him by his ancestors” (a reference to the Mus-
G o t h ic k a

lim sect founded by al-Hassan ibn al-Sabbah, to whose warriors legend

attributes the conversion of the term hashish to assassin).21 The Hassassin
believes he is taking his orders from an “ancient brotherhood” when all
along he has been under the control of the rogue cardinal Carlo Ventresca.
Much like the hapless Hassassin, however, readers are more likely to take
away the impression they labored under for most of the novel—that the
murders were orchestrated either by the so-called Illuminati or by the or-
ganized bureaucracy of the Vatican itself—than to remember the last-
minute exposure of the true villain. It’s an unintentional effect that recalls
Ann Radcliffe’s revelation in The Mysteries of Udolpho that the images in a
castle’s marvelous mirror are an optical effect, not a haunting, entailing a
complicated explanation that fails to completely erase the indelible impres-
sion of the supernatural the mirror has left on the reader.
Brown employs the same time-honored tactic of bait and switch among
“Manichaean others” (to use Umberto Eco’s useful phrase) in The Da Vinci
Code, whose story goes briefly like this: The night before he is to meet with
Jacques Saunière, senior curator at the Louvre, Robert Langdon is sum-
moned to the museum by the Paris police. Saunière’s murdered body
has just been found, ritually posed, in the museum’s Grand Gallery, but
the curator has managed to leave a string of coded enigmatic clues that
hold the secret of his death and much more. Both Langdon and Saunière’s
granddaughter, cryptologist Sophie Neveu, become suspects as a tangled
story unfolds of an ancient society called the Priory of Sion, of which
Saunière was grandmaster, and the great secret the society has guarded
against millennia-long assaults by the Catholic Church: documents reveal-
ing that Jesus was mortal, not divine, that he married Mary Magdalene,
who escaped to France with their child, and that the bloodline of Jesus
and King David has carried through via the founding dynasty of France,
the Merovingians, to the present day.
 Unraveling two thousand years of suppression of the “sacred feminine”
by the patriarchal church, Robert and Sophie leapfrog across England and
Scotland seeking the answers to the coded messages left by Sophie’s grand-
father, Leonardo da Vinci, the Knights Templar, and assorted others. The
pair are pursued both by law enforcement and by the blind albino assassin 29
monk Silas, who seems to be working for his Opus Dei masters but turns
out to be, like the prelate who heads Opus Dei himself, the dupe of the

fau x c at hol ic
wealthy English Grail scholar Leigh Teabing. At the novel’s end, Sophie
herself and her brother are revealed to be the direct descendants of Jesus
and Mary Magdalene, and she and Robert enjoy a romantic tryst.
Structural similarities between this novel and Angels and Demons include
the following: Langdon hooks up professionally and romantically with the
granddaughter (A&D: adopted daughter) of the murdered wise man, a mu-
seum curator (A&D: priest turned scientist), who is also head of a secret so-
ciety, and the two must follow a path of coded historical clues across France
and England (A&D: Rome). In both, four wise men are murdered (here,
higher-ups in the Priory of Sion instead of Roman Catholic cardinals). In
both, the murders are committed by a simpleminded or crazed assassin and
appear to be the work of a secret society (Illuminati, Opus Dei) but turn out
to be masterminded by a single person operating entirely on his own (Car-
dinal Ventresca, Leigh Teabing). But even though, as Robert Langdon de-
clares at the end of The Da Vinci Code, the Vatican and Opus Dei are “com-
pletely innocent,” once again it’s likely that this last-minute plot reversal is
lost on the vast majority of readers, who take away with them the idea,
foregrounded for most of the story, that Opus Dei really was behind it all.
On his former website (refashioned since the publication of The Lost
Symbol) Brown affirmed that he is a Christian, but he did not specify which
denomination.22 He said that he didn’t read much fiction except the “clas-
sics” and the works of Robert Ludlum, whose low-grade, densely plotted
thrillers have obviously influenced his work. The Da Vinci Code, however,
belongs to a sub-subgenre of the faux Catholic Gothick inspired by the
1983 nonfiction Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh,
and Henry Lincoln.23 The fi rst two of these authors unsuccessfully sued
Brown for plagiarism, though they did not sue any other of the less spec-
tacularly successful fictions before and after The Da Vinci Code that in-
corporate their pseudohistorical thesis: that Jesus was a mortal man, he
 married Mary Magdalene, and their descendants founded the Merovin-
gian dynasty of France.24
The Da Vinci Code has a number of fictional antecedents as well: David
Morrell’s Fraternity of the Stone (1985) boasted a secret society of Crusad-
30 ers who recruit fighters against those same “dark ancestors” of Dan Brown’s
Hassassin and a modern Opus Dei that is a supremely organized covert
information-gathering agency of the Vatican. Pérez-Reverte’s The Flanders
G o t h ic k a

Panel (1996) featured an Old Master painting (fifteenth century, Flemish)

that conceals a murderer’s identity in coded chess-game visual symbols
and a hidden written message revealed in ultraviolet light. Brown may have
also drawn some inspiration from Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) with-
out recognizing that this novel was intended to be a parody of occultist
conspiracy theory, including that found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (whose
main thesis, that “Holy Grail” is the coded image for Mary Magdalene’s
womb, is rendered as one of Foucault’s Pendulum’s later chapter epigrams).
There is a resonance between the opening of Eco’s novel, in which a ritual
murder is about to be enacted in a famous historical space in Paris (the
vault of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Saint-Martin-des-
Champs, where the pendulum of Léon Foucault is located), and Brown’s
situating of his character’s murder with ritual overtones in the Louvre,
followed by a second murder in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, which con-
tains another artifact of early science, an astronomical sun marker that
Brown misidentifies, intentionally or not, as the “Rose Line,” a so-called
older version of the prime meridian that also supposedly runs through the
Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and the Louvre.
Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code each proceed— one sophisti-
cated and tongue in cheek, the other in deadly earnest—with a manic and
completely specious connect-the-dots romp through two thousand years
of Western esotericism. Eco, a fervent anti-occultist, conflates too much
of the esoteric tradition into a single bulky punching bag, but he is dead on
in his satiric take on those whose paranoid desire to find connections over-
whelms their common sense and ability to deal fairly with the historical
record. Taken in the context of Foucault’s Pendulum, the conflated occult
history presented in Brown’s novel reads like the good semiotician’s worst
nightmare. As displayed in Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The
Lost Symbol, Brown’s knowledge of Church history, art history, and West-
ern esoteric societies has the stretched-thin feel of an undergraduate term
paper. You don’t see a sophisticated understanding here, but rather some
earnest and copious note taking from various secondary sources delivered
with the sort of emphatic assurance only a Harvard “symbologist” can
muster. (In The Da Vinci Code Robert Langdon’s scholarly bibliography 31
for his new book is proudly described as containing no fewer than fifty
entries, “many of them academic best-sellers.”)25

fau x c at hol ic
But from the Gothick perspective none of this matters, just as it doesn’t
matter that vampire folklore didn’t originate in Hungary or Transylvania.
In the end it’s all grist for the Gothick mill. Gothick fiction accepts bor-
rowings in an almost folkloric way; elements laid down by one author
(such as Anne Rice’s sculptural metaphor for vampires ) are picked up and
extended by the next in line (White Wolf’s vampire videogame, then
Stephenie Meyer in her Twilight series), and only the really famous ones
get accused, usually unfairly, of plagiarism. The case of Holy Blood, Holy
Grail is a bit different, however. Though it is clear Brown believed he paid
his primary source sufficient homage by playfully introducing two of its
authors’ names in anagrammatic form as the villain “Leigh Teabing” and
including an afterword in later printings explicitly citing the book, read-
ers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail understand that its authors were correct in
asserting that Brown did appropriate, in considerable detail, what they
called the “architecture” of their theory about Mary Magdalene and the
Merovingian line. The awkward point legally was that Brown took their
ersatz scholarship at face value as historically true, and a historical fact
cannot be plagiarized, only transmitted.
The relationship of Holy Blood, Holy Grail to fact, however, had been
exposed as extremely problematic long before Brown drew from this book.
In 1993, Pierre Plantard, the self-proclaimed direct descendant of the
Merovingians (and thus of Jesus) prominently featured in Holy Blood, Holy
Grail, confessed that he had made up the whole genealogy and deposited
the “secret documents” himself in the Bibliothèque Nationale.26 The au-
thors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail may have already had their suspicions about
Plantard’s veracity when they first wrote their book, which was based on an
earlier BBC program. It doesn’t seem, though, that Brown knew of Plan-
tard’s confession when he wrote The Da Vinci Code— and in any event he
gave the Merovingians (and Jesus) a different line of descent in his character
 Sophie Neveu. Since Baigent and Leigh, the litigants, could not possibly
win if their book were judged entirely factual and could equally not confess
to a hoax, Baigent tried to backpedal by saying their book presented “evi-
dence, not proof.” The judge, however, was having none of this and ruled
32 against them, even to the point of concealing a Da Vinci Code–like secret
code of his own devising in his written judgment.27 A subsequent appeal
was turned down.
G o t h ic k a

The industry of more than ninety books on the subject of all the things
Dan Brown got factually wrong will not be examined here simply because
The Da Vinci Code’s power operates in the realm of myth making and reli-
gious speculation, where the factual is irrelevant. The Gothick subgenre
spawned by The Da Vinci Code, its predecessors, and its imitators is note-
worthy among contemporary faux Catholic fictions in making the tenets
of Christianity an explicit topic and proposing a new religious mystery
to take the place of the discredited old one.28 The stated goal of the mur-
dered curator Jacques Saunière, and of Brown himself, is the restoration
of the principle of the “sacred feminine.” As Robert explains to Sophie,
the Priory of Sion “believes that Constantine and his male successors suc-
cessfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal
Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sa-
cred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.”29
In one of many interviews, Brown elaborated further: “Prior to two thou-
sand years ago, we lived in a world of gods and goddesses. Today, we live
in a world solely of God. I simply wrote a story that explores how and why
this shift might have occurred, what it says about our past and, more im-
portantly, what it says about our future.”30
At fi rst glance, it might seem that The Da Vinci Code indeed main-
streamed the notion of the sacred feminine out of the margins of New
Age pop culture, and at a culturally auspicious moment for doing so. In
a decade in which the “Goddess Mary” was featured on a Time magazine
cover with an accompanying article devoted to the new “Protestant
Mary,” along with the trickle-down effect of popular works on the Gnos-
tic Gospels and newly discovered texts such as the Gospel of Judas that
chip away at the façade of the New Testament, “people are looking for a
different kind of religious understanding,” Karen King, Harvard profes-
sor of ecclesiastical history, says of The Da Vinci Code.31 Women, King be-
lieves, “find comfort in the idea of a married woman with a baby as an al-
ternate figure to the polarized female models of virgins and prostitutes
in Christianity.”32
The Da Vinci Code, however, presents no actual goddess character to
its readers, no representation of a divinity. We are told that the Priory of 33
Sion worships Mary Magdalene as “Goddess” and “Divine Mother,” but
this happens offstage, taking a backseat to the dominant issue of Jesus’

fau x c at hol ic
nondivinity. What’s more, if Jesus is a mere mortal, how precisely is Mary
Magdalene divine? Whatever her iconic links to goddesses such as Isis,
Mary Magdalene is portrayed in the novel as a woman who marries, bears
a child, and dies; she is given no ascension-to-heaven moment. There is
also very little mention of Jesus’ mother, Mary, who some would argue
has served, far more than in any Protestant denomination, as the Catholic
Church’s own female principle. The story is told from the perspective of
the traditional thriller’s male protagonist, and the Priory of Sion’s hilari-
ously fictitious list of grandmasters taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which
includes Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau) has not a single woman in it. The
only inadvertent whiff of the goddess in either novel occurs in Angels and
Demons, when the statuesque scientist Vittoria Vetra provokes outrage by
striding through the Vatican in her short shorts. And since no “real” an-
gels and demons are depicted in the story, the novel’s title turns out to be
a metaphoric label, the “explained supernatural” frame, for the good and
evil humans who struggle with each other in the story.
This novel’s greatest attraction for its readers, I believe, is not goddess
culture or the sacred feminine, but rather the assertion that Jesus was no
divinity but a man like everybody else. For those first coming across this
heterodox notion (one that was openly embraced by several of America’s
Deist-oriented Founders in the eighteenth century), packaged as empirical
“fact” in a very palatable fictional form by an enthusiastic popularizer, it’s
heady stuff. Yet as recently as twenty years ago, Martin Scorsese’s 1988
film adaptation of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’s midcentury novel
The Last Temptation of Christ, which did no more than assert the human
side of Jesus and his own doubts about his divinity, generated an enormous
outcry from Christian groups and was more or less buried by the protest.
Why, then, was The Da Vinci Code able to bulldoze the opposition of orga-
nized religion at every turn?
 Not all the reasons for this novel’s staggering success, it turns out, had
to do with its content. Despite its folkloric elaboration of themes, popular
culture is a complex dialogue between mass market content providers and
heterogeneous global audiences, a dialogue that took a quantum leap in
34 interactivity once the World Wide Web was created. The Da Vinci Code
had been groomed for best-sellerdom long before it ever saw print, and it
was a canny top-of-the-line marketing plan, not the book’s controversial
G o t h ic k a

theology, that initially put the novel within reach of the maximum possi-
ble number of readers.
Determined to hit it big with this book, Brown was rightly convinced
of the need to compress his rather complicated historical argument and
accompanying narrative into very short sound-bite chapters that a much
wider audience than dedicated thriller readers would be able to digest eas-
ily and understand. Unlike Kazantzakis’s deeply literary work, The Da
Vinci Code is full of zingy one-liners on the order of “The greatest story
ever told is the greatest story ever sold” and throwaway references to such
personages as Walt Disney, who, Brown tells us, “had made it his quiet
life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations.”33 For the 200-
page detailed plot synopsis he submitted, Brown received a two-book con-
tract and an advance of $400,000, an amount that basically signals a pub-
lisher’s commitment to do everything necessary to make a book a best
seller. After the book’s success proved even greater than projected, this
figure was quickly renegotiated upward. Three months before publica-
tion, 10,000 advance reader copies of The Da Vinci Code were sent to book-
sellers (a larger number than the first print run of any of Brown’s previous
three novels), and the book had a first printing of 230,000.34
Yet it is equally clear that neither Brown nor his publisher was at all
prepared for the juggernaut that followed. After ten weeks, a million cop-
ies were in print. The book sold 6.5 million in the United States in its first
year; after the second year, the total was 10 million.35 As of the end of April
2006, the book had sold more than 40 million copies in hardback and more
than 1 million in the recently released paperback.36 The release of the
movie version the following month spiked those numbers even higher. By
the end of the decade, The Da Vinci Code had sold a total of 80 million cop-
ies and been translated into more than forty languages.37
In the meantime, objections from Christian leaders were immediate and
vociferous, though the first official denunciation by the Catholic Church
did not come until March 2005, two years after publication, when Cardi-
nal Tarcisio Bertone, archbishop of Genoa, spoke out against the book
and urged Catholics not to buy or read it.38 Though Opus Dei refrained
from boycotting the movie, bravely declaring it would “generate interest
in Christianity,” a few weeks before the film version’s release Archbishop 35
Angelo Amato, the second-ranking official in the Vatican’s doctrinal office
and a close associate of Pope Benedict XVI, called on Roman Catholics

fau x c at hol ic
to boycott the film, declaring the novel to be “full of calumnies, offenses
and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the
church,” according to Reuters. “If such lies and errors had been directed
at the Koran or the Holocaust, they would have justly provoked a world
uprising,” the archbishop said. “Instead, if they are directed against the
church and Christians, they remain unpunished.”39
But nobody listened. Promoted in the United States by no less than ten
History Channel programs exploring aspects of the novel with the help of
dubious “experts” (including Baigent and Leigh) and kitschy soft-focus
reenactments, the movie opened to record box office profits worldwide,
including in predominantly Catholic countries. As Thomas Doherty noted
in the Washington Post, this outcome would have been unthinkable for the
previous generation of American Catholics, who had exerted real influ-
ence by observing the church’s boycott and proscription orders. Holly-
wood’s first Production Code of censorship, written in 1930 by a Catholic
publisher and a Jesuit priest, inspired the establishment of the Legion of
Decency, the forerunner of today’s Catholic League. “When the Catholic
hierarchy lost the power to energize millions of parishioners for some real
Catholic action,” Doherty notes, “when American Catholics responded
to calls to boycott Hollywood blockbusters with approximately the same
obedient deference they accorded the Vatican’s advice on birth control,
then Catholic dominion over Hollywood lapsed.” Today, he concludes,
“the only Code that Hollywood adheres to is the kind authored by Dan
Brown.”40
Tellingly, after the record opening (surpassed, ironically, only by Mel
Gibson’s conservative Catholic The Passion of the Christ in 2004), the Vati-
can newspaper L’Osservatore Romano dubbed the movie “much ado about
nothing” and the uproar around it nothing but a clever marketing strat-
egy designed to promote interest in a dull movie and a dull book.41 When
the film of Angels and Demons was released in 2009, there was considerably
 less flurry. The script, by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, made signifi-
cant sanitizing changes to the story: Vittoria Vetra does not wear short
shorts in the Vatican, the assassin is not Arab but indeterminate Eurotrash,
Robert Langdon does not have sex with a descendant of Jesus, and a sooth-
36 ing coda is appended in which Cardinal Strauss says to Robert Langdon
as the new Pope is installed, “Thanks be to God for sending someone
to save this church.” When Langdon expresses polite doubt, the cardinal
G o t h ic k a

affirms, “You know He did.” Having learned its lesson about bestowing free
publicity, the Church wisely declared Angels and Demons “harmless enter-
tainment which hardly affects the genius and mystery of Christianity.” 42
Which brings us back full circle to the Gothick’s charged relationship
with the desanctified supernatural. Following in the tradition of the early
Gothick, The Da Vinci Code’s function is simply the unmaking of a god-
head, not the putting forward of a goddess or any other deity in its place.
The supernatural is not present as an active agency in any of Brown’s five
novels, all of which, along with The Lost Symbol and his two earlier tech-
nothrillers, Digital Fortress (1998) and Deception Point (2001), belong struc-
turally to the conspiracy theory genre. Despite its professed thesis, The
Da Vinci Code is a profoundly secular book, to which Peter Brooks’s com-
ment on the radical Gothick message of The Monk and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein—that “the Sacred in its traditional Christian form, even in
the more purely ethical version elaborated by Christian humanism, is no
longer operative”— equally applies.43 As we will see in chapter 11, it would
be left to Gothick Christian writers such as William P. Young to embody
the “sacred feminine” in his characters Papa, Sarayu, and Sophia in his
neo-Christian allegory The Shack.
Even so, the fact that classic Gothick fiction did not include a married
Jesus indicates just how much closer Christianity stood to Western intel-
lectual life two hundred years ago, when heresy was a much more taboo
subject than fornicating monks and nuns, than it does today. The Catho-
lic Church has reason to be upset about The Da Vinci Code because the
function it serves in secularizing Jesus is not really to promote a dialogue
about Christianity, as both Brown and its apologists have rather ingenu-
ously argued, but rather to help deliver a death blow to the Christian Trin-
ity as it has been understood by all denominations, not just Catholics.
Even with its discourse displaced one remove, the book’s amazing popu-
larity is an indication of the deep interest among the cultural descendants
of the Protestant Reformation (not to mention the rest of the world) in
developing alternative religious narratives in a secular society where the
penalty for heresy is merely controversy, not torture followed by dreadful
and prolonged death. 37
On this issue central to all Christianity, we return again to the ques-
tion: Why construct this fictional heresy around the Catholic Church in

fau x c at hol ic
particular? First and most obviously, as all writers of faux Catholic nar-
ratives know, it is more convenient to represent somebody else’s religious
denomination engaged in scheming, suppression, and conspiracy across
the ages than one’s own. A plot point that would provoke far greater out-
rage in U.S. audiences, for example, would be to identify close associates
of Billy Graham and John Calvin in the historical cover-up around Jesus
and Mary Magdalene.
More than simply deflecting criticism away from Protestant Christian-
ity, however, in Brown’s hands the faux Catholic genre still reveals its su-
premely unconscious deference to the Catholic Church as the most endur-
ing and powerful standard-bearer of a Christianity that no longer seems
entirely relevant. Despite all the polls showing that this or that number of
Americans regularly attend church, believe in the Rapture, and so forth,
many who profess to be Christian believers are simply imaginatively distant
from the precepts of the religion they grew up with. I suspect a large num-
ber of Americans share the confusion of an elderly midwesterner who once
told me that he and his wife were raised Methodist but had started attend-
ing the Catholic Church across the street from their retirement home
because the choir was so much better. He stopped to consider a moment.
Then, brow furrowed, he leaned forward. “You know, the Catholics and
the Protestants?” he whispered. “Which came first?” And he still seemed
troubled after I told him, as if some larger, more important question be-
hind this one had been left unanswered— as, indeed, it had.
Statistics, themselves a kind of peculiarly American secular scripture,
always constitute a dubious proof, but sometimes they can accurately re-
flect certain of these dissonances in belief. One recent poll that records 78
percent of people in the United States as believing in the resurrection of
Jesus also shows the rather astounding number of 13 percent now believ-
ing that Jesus’ death on the cross “was faked” and, as represented in The
 Da Vinci Code, that Jesus was married and had a family.44 The Canadian
pollster himself expressed shock at this result in such a religiously conser-
vative country as the United States. A similar poll in the United Kingdom
(commissioned, notably, by Opus Dei), where no fewer than one out of
38 five adults had read The Da Vinci Code, revealed that 60 percent of people
who had read the book believed Jesus had children by Mary Magdalene,
as did 30 percent— a significant figure in itself— of those who had not read
G o t h ic k a

the book.45 Christopher Partridge has described what he calls the growing
“occulture” of new religious movements derived from popu lar culture.
Against the secularization thesis, which argued that the twentieth century
saw the decline of religious belief in Western societies, he notes that domi-
nant religious institutions are becoming weaker as alternative religions
thrive in a massive shift from organized religion to what is euphemistically
called spirituality.46
After Christianity, then, whither the Gothick, as channeled by Dan
Brown?
Making what we will soon see is an archetypal twenty-first-century
move from classic Gothick faux Catholic to consciousness-based “divine
human” spirituality, Brown’s third Langdon novel, The Lost Symbol (2009),
offers a provocative answer. At first glance the novel seems to focus on
another old-fashioned obsession of the classic Gothick—the Freemasons—
and it presents a plot that again is structurally almost identical to the pre-
vious two: a mutilation of a high priest of a secret organization (Free-
masons instead of Illuminati or Priory of Sion) discovered in a national
public space (Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.), a crime committed
by an implausible villain with a putative ethnic identity (Middle Eastern
again) that is later overturned, complication upon complication unfolding
within the intellectual frame of a grab bag of esoteric ideas once again
mistakenly conflated into a single monolithic tradition.47
Brown’s passion for his project is unmistakable. An ambitious effort,
The Lost Symbol is a blend of Wikipedia-type historical sound bites and
intricately layered flashbacks within flashbacks. This time, however, with
his characteristic flair for identifying the sub-Zeitgeist’s newest preoccu-
pations, he has grafted his familiar mélange of plot elements to a strand of
twenty-first century spirituality and new physics that posits the primacy
of human thought and intention over the world of matter.48 This new sci-
ence of consciousness, Brown says, is actually very old because the ancients
studied the human mind far more deeply than modern science has. All
the religions of the world have been seeking a lost symbol, “the symbol
we all shared . . . the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not
understand.” 39
What is this symbol? None other than God, Brown tells us. But who or
what is God? All sacred texts of all religions also contain a secret subtext

fau x c at hol ic
of truths meant to be shielded from the unworthy: that humans, with suf-
ficient training, possess their own godlike powers to shape matter and the
world around them. But all the functionaries of all the religions on earth
have lost their primal connection to these universal “Ancient Mysteries,”
as Brown calls them (the label and the concept come from Theosophy);
they “no longer knew the Source from which their potent wisdom had
once flowed.”49 What is happening now, he says, is the dawning awareness
that God lies inside humans rather than outside.
The rediscovery of this ancient secret—which Brown boils down into a
trademark sound bite, “Mind over matter”—began after the cataclysmic
events of 9/11 and puts us on the brink of a paradigm shift, a “vast coalesc-
ing of human intention,” that the new discipline of noetic science is inves-
tigating. We now understand that God is a single universal consciousness,
“a mental energy that pervades everything,” and most especially humans.
As his character Katherine Solomon, a noetic scientist, puts it, “The Sec-
ond Coming is the coming of man. . . . The Word of God is really the
word of Man.” We are all man-gods now, Brown says. Humans who train
their minds to tap into this energy become the creators, not the created,
and will “be able to Design the world rather than merely create it.”50
Reviewers of The Lost Symbol made little mention of its central spiritual
thesis, which of course lacks the immediate shock value that “Jesus as mor-
tal” possessed. As in Brown’s previous novels also, the relentless thriller
structure overwhelms the theoretical subtext, and his old-fashioned con-
spiracy theory plot, with its code puzzles and diagrams, remains very
male-centric despite the presence of the obligatory female scientist. Just
as The Da Vinci Code offers no female gods as characters to embody its
thesis, The Lost Symbol never quite makes its point because no human char-
acter turns into a god, or at the least displays godlike powers, in its pages.
Brown’s smoke, however, always portends fire. His nose for cutting-edge
 trends is unerring, and we will find man-gods emerging as a dominant
theme throughout the twenty-first century Gothick, including children’s
literature and comic-book/graphic-novel narrative as well as adult fiction
and film. As later chapters will show, in her Twilight series Stephenie
40 Meyer embodies both the divine human and the “sacred feminine” in her
vampire demigoddess Bella; so does Guillermo del Toro in the character
of Ofelia, the child martyr and underworld princess of his film Pan’s
G o t h ic k a

Labyrinth.
Though the notion of humans as gods in their own right failed to
arouse any noticeable outrage, deification or theosis has been a disputed
doctrine since Christianity began. In late antiquity the ubiquitous figure
of the divine human went by the names Jesus (for Christians), Adam Kad-
mon (for Jews), and Anthropos (for Hermetic philosophers). As the Gnos-
tic “great light man,” he was the intermediary between God and human-
kind, representing a level of conscious awakening and godlike powers that
humans could aspire to. As the Hermetic tradition was revived in the Ital-
ian Renaissance, natural philosopher Giordano Bruno believed he could
make himself the equal of a god by meditating on inner images animated
by astral powers.
A current doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, deification was revived in Western
Christianity by the Protestant Theosophist mystic Jakob Boehme in the
seventeenth century and was carried to North America during the Radical
Reformation. Groups such as the eighteenth-century Immortalists declared
themselves capable of becoming gods on earth, and the Freemasons em-
phasized the divine human in their Rite of Perfection. Such “Perfectabil-
ity” during a person’s lifetime became an important principle not only of
Mormon and Christian Science belief in the nineteenth century—as Mary
Baker Eddy pronounced, “Man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal”—
but also, in the next century, of the breakaway Christian New Thought
movement, which encouraged its followers to harness divine powers within
themselves.51
In its day a sizeable transatlantic organization, New Thought has un-
spooled in a variety of religious and secular versions of the “Mind-cure”
philosophy (as William James dubbed it), starting with its own surviving
denominations, including the Unity and Religious Science churches, the
spiritually based Alcoholics Anonymous organization, various nonaffili-
ated forms of “prosperity Christianity,” and secularized self-help philo-
sophies as expounded in the minister Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 best
seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, all of which stress every person’s abil-
ity to create his or her own reality and physical environment through
conscious intent.52 41
New Thought is thus the direct ancestor of the current “intention-
setting” spiritual practices that Brown cites. Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 best-

fau x c at hol ic
selling self-help book and documentary The Secret, however, brought a form
of reinvented New Thought to a much larger global audience.53 A lifestyle
metaphysics program based on the Old Goth law of correspondence
between levels of reality (also known as the “law of attraction”), The Secret
also drew heavily on Brown’s Da Vinci Code Gothick atmospherics for the
look of its website and film: candlelit rooms hung with velvet curtains,
chests full of scrolls (and “Secret Scroll” emails to its subscribers), History
Channel– style “reenactments” of murky legends around faux medieval
Knights Templar and Roman centurions, and the now obligatory list of
Western male power figures over the ages (Plato, Shakespeare, Leonardo,
Emerson, Einstein, etc.) to whom the Secret is said to have brought success.
In fact, as Byrne explains, the “century-old book” containing the wisdom
that produced this marketing package with high production values was
none other than The Science of Getting Rich, a classic New Thought treatise
by the Christian Socialist Wallace Wattles.54 In an ironic twist of mutual
referencing (though he never mentions the book directly), The Secret seems
to have made its mark in turn on Dan Brown’s marketing team as he wrote
The Lost Symbol, whose cover design of a thick red wax seal oddly resembles
the seal that decorates the cover of The Secret.
Meanwhile, the populace retains its strong appetite for heresy that these
works of new Gothick fiction help to feed. This is no new phenomenon
under the American sun, where transcendental movements and Great
Awakenings war ceaselessly with pragmatic empiricism for hegemony in
the national spirit. The crowd searches, restlessly, for spiritual ideas that
capture its imagination. In examining the way movies rewrite Christian
theology and fabricate new versions, Douglas Cowan has noted that sacred
narratives themselves adapted and mutated in much the same way.55 What
the secularization of Jesus (and the fictional elevation of assorted female
gods and divine humans) simply means in terms of the sub-Zeitgeist of
popular culture, where fantastic literature and religion building have a
 long history of cross-fertilizing each other, is that the gradual departure
of the Christ figure from the category of the divine leaves room for some-
thing else to move in and take its place. Or as Maurice Lévy once said of
the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, “To formulate sacrilege is to recover the
42 sacred.”56
Byrne’s lifestyle metaphysics and Brown’s noetic science of conscious-
ness in The Lost Symbol belong, in fact, to the wider new phenomenon of
G o t h ic k a

“personal gnosis” that reflects a widespread turn from orga nized religion
to individually determined spirituality under the sometimes misleading
umbrella label “New Age.” Catherine Albanese points out the American
preference for unmediated spiritual experience in what she calls the “meta-
physical religions” that constitute New Age spirituality, a potent syncretic
mix of “Transcendentalism and spiritualism, mesmerism and Swedenbor-
gianism, Christian Science and New Thought, Theosophy and its ubiq-
uitous spinoffs, and especially metaphysical Asia” that have blended in
turn with quantum physics, parapsychology, and “an astrological dispen-
sationalism that parallels the Protestant fundamentalist vision.”57 In spite
of the many Old Goth elements evident in New Age spirituality, however,
Wouter Hanegraaff cautions that New Age religions “cannot be character-
ized as a return to pre-Enlightenment worldviews”; they are, rather, emi-
nently syncretic (some might say Gothick) medievalisms that mix esoteric
and secular elements.58
The multiplatform success of The Da Vinci Code occurred in a realm that
is simultaneously a fertile field and an intellectual vacuum—that curious
ahistorical, apocalyptic world of the American pop culture sub-Zeitgeist in
which Brown can be called “one of the best-selling authors of all time” just
as Elvis is the greatest rock-’n’-roll star of all time and Hank Aaron (or
Barry Bonds) is the greatest home run hitter of all time. The prevailing
culture is unlikely to be swept away anytime soon by a New Age goddess
religion—recall that Balzac’s mystical potboiler Seraphita took Paris by
storm in 1835 yet failed to produce a country of Swedenborgian converts—
but we should expect other forms of religious speculation packaged in fic-
tional form (most probably some hybrid of Gothick, thriller, science fic-
tion, and fantasy) to keep arriving on our doorsteps. In another ten years
The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and The Secret will have faded from
memory as completely as The Celestine Prophecy already has. But they count
among any number of faint tremors indicating how far the ground of or-
thodoxy has shifted under our feet. Religion has not so much declined as
migrated in Western societies today. Especially in the United States, not
places of worship or theological seminaries but dog-eared paperback fic-
tion and the Web are the true early warning signals of religious upheavals 43
to come.

fau x c at hol ic
Cthulhu mask. Courtesy Bob Basset Workshop, bobbasset.com.
 three

gothick gods
The Worshipful World of Horror Fandom

Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to M. G. Lewis’ The Monk to C. R.
Maturin’s Melmoth to Edgar All[a]n Poe’s tales and poetry to R. W. Chambers’
The King in Yellow to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and on to Hanns Heinz Ewers,
H. P. Lovecraft and Anne Rice . . . all in their own ways, wittingly or
unwittingly, have contributed to the descent of the Gothick God of Darkness
in popu lar culture.
—Sir Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D., GME

1.

Picture a deserted Montauk beach on a hot summer’s night. The year is

1965. A teenage boy prostrates himself on the sand and prays to Cthulhu,
monstrous “Great Old One” from outside space and time, fictional cre-
ation of the Gothick horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Reciting the only sen-
tence Lovecraft provided in the entity’s tongue Aklo—Ph’nglui mglw’nafh
Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn—the boy cries, “Cthulhu! Cthulhu! Appear
to me!”1
“And then?” I ask, listening to this tale some decades later.
“I went home and went to bed,” said the distinguished scholar telling
me the story.
 With his cephalopod head, scaly body, claws, and wings, Cthulhu re-
minds me of nothing so much as a babewyn, one of those hybrid monsters
who appear in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts.2 A gar-
goyle demon, a humanoid Blemmye or Sciopode of the thirteenth-century
46 Hereford map, the catfish-headed creature menacing St. Dominic in the
Spinola Hours.3
A monster god, a babewyn. Following the trail of Cthulhu leads to the
G o t h ic k a

strange territory where these equivocal creatures still breed today, the place
where the American “secular scripture” of the Gothick has spawned new
religions for hundreds of years, where the strange unions between readers
and writers, the real and the imaginary, the imaginary and the spiritual,
works of fiction and sacred scripture, worshippers and fans have spawned
metaphorical monsters of their own. My point of departure is that last
unlikely hybrid, between worshippers and fans, and a convergence in
twenty-first century American popular culture between a certain subgroup
of Gothick fiction fandom and post-1960 new religious movements. My
focus is Cthulhu’s creator Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose work not
only is plentifully populated with hybrid monsters but also has helped
propagate many of these paradoxical modes.
H. P. Lovecraft’s initial circumscribed reputation as a purveyor of squishy
monster stories for boys has gradually given way, since his death in 1937,
to a belated recognition of an exceptional literary sensibility, at once
unique yet falling very much within both the Gothick tradition and the
broader tradition of American literature. Out of the wide range of Love-
craft’s admirers and literary imitators, I want to single out that special
subgroup of fans for whom his fictions have assumed an ontological and
even theological authority.
Together, Lovecraft and the New England city to which he felt symbi-
otically bound— as witness the famous line “I am Providence,” which was
drawn from one of his letters and now adorns the tombstone that fans
erected at his grave in the 1970s—provide an emblem of this larger cul-
tural phenomenon for two reasons: fi rst, because Lovecraft boasts one of
the oldest still flourishing congeries (to use a favorite word of his) of fan
groups and second, because old Providence—which he dubbed “that uni-
versal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting”—was an important
site in the development of various new American religions that trace their
ancestry back to the Protestant heterodoxies of the seventeenth-century
Radical Reformation.4 And these two elements join in an even more shad-
owy union: between Providence’s historical association with religious
dissension and the fact that its most famous literary son was a writer of
Gothick horror stories.
Let us make a quick detour through the long and dynamic process of 47
religion building in the New World. The postindigenous society known
as “America” began, of course, as a Western religious idea initiated by

g o t h ic k g ods
English Puritans, and since these ideological beginnings it has remained
a culture periodically swept by religious fervor. The eighteenth century
saw the first in a series of Great Awakenings (a disputed term used here
for convenience), galvanic episodes of religious revitalization and populist
evangelism that periodically disturbed the Euro-American dream of rea-
son for the next three centuries.
If we follow William McLoughlin’s classic and much deconstructed
interpretation of this phenomenon, this fi rst grand upheaval was preceded
by a similar upheaval in England—namely, the Puritan revolution, result-
ing in the migration in large numbers of these dissenters to North
America in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was followed by at
least three more, depending on which commentator you believe: a second at
the turn of the nineteenth century, spilling over into Transcendentalism in
high culture as well as countless popular manifestations, including new re-
ligious groups such as the Mormons, Christian Scientists, Shakers, and
Spiritualists. A third shake-up took place between 1890 and 1930, which
included Theosophy; a fourth began in the 1950s and 1960s, and the fifth
we may now be in the midst of.5
Part of the initial thrust of populist religion in North America stems
from the fact that the beliefs of the early sects of the Radical Reformation
mentioned in chapter 1 found more open expression in the relatively freer
arena of the New World, where dissenters could simply pull up stakes and
move to a new territory. Commentators such as John L. Brooke, Arthur
Versluis, and D. Michael Quinn have convincingly traced the dissemina-
tion of Renaissance Hermetic and alchemical traditions among the Eu ro-
pean settlers in America via the revolutionary Protestant religious sects of
seventeenth-century England, including the Quakers, Baptists, Pietists,
Methodists, Universalists, and Immortalists—groups that found a home
outside the pale of Puritan orthodoxy in what Brooke identifies as a “sec-
tarian coast” stretching from Cape Cod through Rhode Island to the
 Connecticut river.6 The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought
further esoteric influences from the other side of the Atlantic, including
Freemasonry, the Swedenborgian church, and the Gothick/Romantic re-
vival of Old Goth medieval esotericism.7
48 Some of these radical Protestant sects of colonial America placed an
almost Gnostic emphasis on the primacy of the spiritual over the evil,
illusory material world. Many, including the Shakers, the Perfectionists,
G o t h ic k a

and the Quakers, also shared a belief in the potential of humans to become
like gods during their life on earth. Where Emerson was waxing eloquent
about the divinity of man, Joseph Smith was devising a religion around
it. The doctrine of human divinity would resurface in Scientology’s no-
tion of the “Operating Thetan,” a perfected being exempt from the cycles
of birth and death, and in the teachings of many other esoteric societies,
from the early twentieth- century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
through New Age religious groups such as the Neopagans, Wiccans,
and the Course of Miracles, all of which subscribe to some form of the
belief that the “Christed” or Higher Self is capable of manifesting in the
earthly body to produce a “divine human.” It is a concept, as we will
see, also central to twenty-fi rst-century Gothick religion building.
Since the time that Bibles were first printed in vernacular languages (not
coincidentally, at the onset of the Protestant Reformation), mass media
publication of scripture helped fuel radical reinterpretations of Christian-
ity. Then as now, a person’s ability to read and reflect on his own copy of a
scripture guaranteed privacy of worship and encouraged as well the devel-
opment of a highly individualistic “personal gnosis” as a means of access-
ing the transcendental. By the nineteenth century, the religious manifes-
tos of the two “American heresiarchs” Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy,
written by the founding individuals themselves rather than by later com-
mentators, were published and distributed to a mass audience within a
relatively short time after they were written.8 This instant scripture, more-
over, was partially shaped by conventions of popular nonfiction and Goth-
ick fiction as well as esoteric folklore (wonder and providence narratives,
the romance of gold tablets written in a secret celestial language, and the
self-improvement tradition begun by Benjamin Franklin, respectively).
In nineteenth-century America, wide distribution of the new scrip-
tures had the subliminally powerful effect of further underlining similari-
ties between their story lines and those of popular fiction.9 In a popular
culture infused with mystic “visions, dreams, and voice,” Swedenborg’s
Heaven and Hell, for example, was a best seller along with the novels of
James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott.10 This structural congru-
ence was dramatically extended in the twentieth century, when individual
works of science fiction or fantasy would be used as the scriptural-narrative 49
basis of new religious groups, either by their authors (e.g., L. Ron Hub-
bard and Scientology) or by a portion of their audience (the fans we will

g o t h ic k g ods
meet in the next section of this chapter).11
Just as Mormonism (wittily dubbed “a modern Pelagianism in a Puritan
religion” by one commentator) promised Christ’s reappearance in the New
World and Mary Baker Eddy injected Christianity with “Science,” the
twentieth century’s new religious movements updated and recontextual-
ized religion’s ground.12 Many of them drew their inspiration both from
the dominant scientific worldview and from the science fiction literature
that uses technology as its great rationalizing device for the supernatural,
often fashioning their gods as extraterrestrials possessing advanced pow-
ers.13 In a transference process Christopher Partridge has called the “sa-
cralization of the extraterrestrial,” for these groups outer space has become
the Gnostic realm whose Archons possess the power to create, control,
and destroy earth and its inhabitants.14 Typically these deities are said to
have traveled to earth in their spacecraft at a distant time in the planet’s
past and set in motion the events that produced humans— either by leav-
ing some of their own kind here with limited or no memory of their extra-
terrestrial (read “divine”) past, or by endowing a select group of humans
with special powers.15
Since the Great Awakening that began in the 1960s, an enormous mag-
pie energy has been poured into the creation of new religious movements
(NRMs) from all kinds of sources. Evoking images of berobed Druidists
shuffl ing around Stonehenge on the eve of summer solstice, New Age
religious movements tend to inspire ridicule from the mainstream, which
has its own ner vous issues around spirituality. Some of the NRMs incor-
porate the latest scientific advances, notably in DNA and string theory;
other “research-based” religions, such as Wicca, draw on Celtic and Nordic
folklore, feminist archaeology, Reichian psychology, comics, movies, and
novels.16 Much like the proliferating sects of Late Antiquity, the current
deeply syncretic new religious movements overlap and borrow from each
other. Following the trend toward personal gnosis, individual practitioners
 also characteristically pick and choose among elements of different reli-
gions old and new.17
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the advent of the World Wide
Web has created an even greater syncretism in these new movements,
50 along with the disappearance of anything resembling single authoritative
texts.18 A prime example is the Neopagan/Wiccan Book of Shadows (first
composed by British Wiccan Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, then adapted
G o t h ic k a

by Stuart and Janet Farrar in the 1970s), which spawned countless adapted
versions and eventually became the generic name for individual magicians’
journals. Likewise, the “dreaded Necronomicon,” a made-up grimoire Love-
craft liked to allude to in his stories, now exists in many faux versions that,
like the Book of Shadows, are often quoted as scriptural authority, a nebu-
lous but unchallengeable sourcing reminiscent of the very stretchable
medieval concept of auctorite.19
Even though the Internet especially has created an almost infi nitely rep-
licating, untrackable intertextuality, written scripture still remains im-
portant in NRMs.20 But Erik Davis, among others, has also observed that
most post-1960 New Age religious movements “owe their existence to
what was in some sense a literary resonance”—that of earlier commenta-
tors such as Margaret Murray, Robert Graves, and Ashley Montagu and
later ones such as the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. 21 Harold Bloom has
also noted the curiously literary sensibility—in terms of both direct influ-
ence and general aura— of some of the older radical Protestant sects turned
respectable religions. “As a gnosis,” Bloom comments, what he calls the
“American Religion”— an unconsciously Gnostic celebration of the self
unique to this country that he fi nds triangulated in the faiths of Mor-
mons, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostalists—“has much in common
with the American romance, a peculiar literary genre that includes nar-
ratives as diverse as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49.” This hybrid trifecta, which Bloom describes as a
“blend of ancient heresies and nineteenth-century stresses,” has cast off
the Protestant sensibility even as it continues to declare itself Christian
and counts an unmediated personal relationship between the individual
and a divinity, “walking and talking with Jesus,” as its paramount reli-
gious experience.22
Along with these Christian denominations, most of the new religious
movements known as “New Age” also emphasize the primacy of the
personal relationship between the individual and the sacred. These var-
ied forms of personal gnosis again reflect the trend toward individually
determined spirituality. Carried to the extreme, personal gnosis can mean,
as Douglas Cowan has pointed out about the freewheeling, mix-and-
match personal pantheons of most modern Pagans, that “subjective ex- 51
perience at the individual level has been raised to the status of personal
ontology” and the simple criterion of personal inner certainty becomes

g o t h ic k g ods
proof of divine revelation, a tenet that obviously carries a number of doc-
trinal consequences. 23

2.

Enter the fans.

The twentieth century marked the appearance of the second element in
our hybrid union of acolytes and aficionados. This was the organized
groups of admirers, under the wide umbrella of mass commercial enter-
tainment, attached to specific entertainers, works of literature or film, or
sports clubs and players. Fan, of course, is the short form of fanatic, a word
current in English since the sixteenth century to describe a person “char-
acterized, influenced, or prompted by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm,
especially in religious matters,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.
Fanatic derives in turn from Latin fanaticus, “temple attendant,” from fanus,
“temple.”24 In late antiquity, the Romans condescendingly applied fanati-
cus (in its sense of going a bit overboard in religious observance) to mem-
bers of marginal and orgiastic sects such as those dedicated to Isis and the
Magna Mater; for Christians, it was a synonym for pagan.25 In English the
word is used as early as the seventeenth century in reference to religious
zealots.26 For almost two thousand years, then, fanatic has been a word that
Western mainstream religious orthodoxy applies pejoratively to members
of marginal and potentially threatening religious groups.
The first modern nonreligious usage of the short form fan appears
in U.S. newspapers of the late nineteenth century in reference to sports
devotees. By the early twentieth century it was stretched to include ardent
enthusiasts of the new mass entertainment genres of movies and science
fiction, fantasy, and horror literature. The emergence and growth of fan
groups in these new areas was an extremely rapid phenomenon: science
fiction, fantasy, and horror grew out of the matrix of Gothick pulp fiction
 that had thrived in America since the late 1800s, and movies had swept
this country by the teens of the new century. During the 1920s sci-fi and
horror enthusiasts, like their movie counterparts, abandoned their roles as
solitary admirers and actively banded together; columns devoted to reader
52 discussion in the science fiction pulps spawned organized groups who
began to correspond independently with one another.27 These reader
communications became so lively and insistent that they soon spilled over
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into their own journals, known as fanzines.

Curiously, while the sci-fi and horror genres spawned fanzines, other
genres well represented in the pulps, such as mysteries and westerns, did
not.28 One reason may well lie precisely in the religious roots of the word
fan and the state of heightened emotion or devotion the word connotes, as
reflected in the title of Francis T. Laney’s fanzine The Acolyte (1942–1946),
an amateur publication that concentrated on Lovecraft. 29 What science
fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror of the Lovecraftian type offer
that the other genres don’t is the attraction of a fully realized alternate
world or universe.30 Movies, in turn, offer the images of stars (a celestial,
divinizing term), entities whose media-enhanced larger-than-life person-
alities and love lives create a shifting pantheon very like that of the minor
Greek deities— and, like them, encompassing a broader spectrum of good
and bad behavior than Catholic saints, who fulfill a not dissimilar panthe-
istic function.
Lovecraft himself began his writing career not as a fan exactly, but as a
member of a kind of group that preceded fan clubs—the amateur journal-
ists’ societies that were created in America in the mid-nineteenth century.
Still a fixture in Lovecraft’s day, these groups published journals for private
distribution containing a wide array of essays, fiction, poetry, and opinion.
But a number of resemblances unite the “ajas,” as they were called, with the
essentially fan-oriented amateur press associations, or “apas,” that followed
them. In fact, the first known unofficial sci-fi fan magazine in America, The
Recluse (1927), was published by a New York club to which Lovecraft be-
longed, and his famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” appeared
in its only issue.31
One scholar of fandom has noted the “curious blend of distance and
intimacy” inherent in fan groups, commenting that they include people
more at ease communicating in print than in person.32 Lovecraft, who is
estimated to have written more than 75,000 letters in his short lifetime,
fits this psychological profile almost too neatly.33 His membership in the
United Amateur Press Association (of which he was president for a time)
provided him with valuable social outlets and even the courage to con-
tinue with his own writing.
The United Amateur Press Association also gave Lovecraft his fi rst op- 53
portunities not only to practice his own art but also to engage in another
kind of literary hybridizing: rewriting and extending other amateur writers’

g o t h ic k g ods
stories. Lovecraft himself little imagined that after his death in 1937 other
professional writers, such as August Derleth, and then a sizeable body of
fans would rewrite, extend, and stretch his body of work into an unimagin-
ably large and ever-growing babewyn of globe-circling proportions.
Historians of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fandom nostalgically regard the
1930s as its golden age. A number of fan associations and their magazines
burst on the scene during this decade, which also witnessed the beginning
of a very important phenomenon of fandom: conventions. The fi rst World
Science Fiction Convention or “Worldcon” was held in 1936 in Philadel-
phia, followed by two more in 1940. At the 1942 convention held in Chi-
cago, it is reported, fans barely old enough to drink alcohol sang “every-
thing from ‘Popeye the Sailor’ to ‘The Internationale.’ ”34 Conventions
were important in adding greater interactivity and strengthening personal
bonds among fans, which in turn led inevitably to a plethora of feuding,
merging, and splitting among the primarily male members of these groups
in a way fondly reminiscent of the various socialist and communist groups
of this highly politicized decade.
As fans continued to band together in ever larger and more organized
groups, they began writing and distributing not just opinion and apprecia-
tion but also works of fiction (known as “faaanfiction” or “sercon faaanfic-
tion,” meaning serious, not parodic) in the spirit of, or using the frame-
work and characters of, their literary heroes’ work.35 The foundational
premise of this ultimate babewyn, as articulated by fan scholar Henry
Jenkins, is deeply hybridizing: “Fandom recognizes no clear-cut line be-
tween artists and consumers; all fans are potential writers whose talents
need to be discovered, nurtured, and promoted and who may be able to
make a contribution, however modest, to the cultural wealth of the larger
community.”36 There is a Gramscian air here of shared “meaning pro-
duction” as a collective, not individual, effort— or as Lovecraft put it in a
pamphlet he wrote extolling the virtues of amateur journalism: “There
 are no limits of age, sex, education, position, or locality in this most com-
plete of democracies.”37 This does not prevent present-day fandom from
being a fraught and feuding landscape of middle-class, college-educated
competitors, however, as revisionist fan scholar Milly Williamson has
54 pointed out.38
Fan scholar Rich Brown sees this early “faaanfiction” peaking in the
late 1950s, declining in the 1970s, and reemerging in the beginning of the
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1990s, when it began a fi n de siècle sea change into its present, supremely
interactive new golden age.39 The 1960s was the decade that marked a real
turning point in the social organization of fandom, however. Synchronous
with psychedelics, communalism, and new spirituality came the main-
streaming of science fiction and the supernatural out of the tripartite ghetto
of pulp fiction, B movies, and comic books. With the television series The
Twilight Zone (1959–1966), followed by the series Star Trek (1966–1969) and
then Star Wars (1977) on the big screen, this genre gained new legitimacy in
popular culture and a much wider audience. The Star Trek series in partic-
ular produced an enormous base of fan groups that is still expanding today.
Starting in 1997, J. K. Rowling’s seven-volume Harry Potter phenomenon
did the same for fantasy fiction and was further mainstreamed via the big-
budget movies of the Potter series, as were other fantasy classics.
The current extreme fan interactivity in Gothick genres began in the
early 1970s with fantasy-oriented role-playing games such as Dungeons &
Dragons (not to mention the Dungeons & Dragons poetry that quickly
sprouted in the wake of the popular game). Though players initially sat
around a table casting dice and simply visualized the Old Goth medieval
characters and story line they were enacting, these exercises in active imag-
ination made role-playing games part of a larger participatory trend that
would quickly blossom into actual performance. The next step, of course,
was videogames that translated these in-your-head fantasy scenarios into
actual visual settings. Earlier works such as those of Lovecraft and the
medieval scholar J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1953 trilogy Lord of the Rings—the lat-
ter a prime influence on the faux medieval story line and general ambi-
ence of Dungeons & Dragons—were quickly retranslated into these new
interactive modes. They were and are heavily Gothick, from the early and
relatively innocent Myst (still the top-selling computer adventure game
franchise) and Castlevania to BloodRayne, Gothic, and many, many more.
 As fandom became increasingly a “mythmaking microcosm,” role play-
ing and videogames joined the rising tide of interactivity by establishing
a much more dynamic relationship with the targeted story than ever before:
from live, full-dress role playing in Renaissance Faires and groups such as
the Society for Creative Anachronism to the increasing prominence of 55
costumers (people outfitted as, and playing the part of, characters from a
television show, movie, or book) at sci-fi conventions, which had mush-

g o t h ic k g ods
roomed after 1970 into much bigger and wilder events that in turn helped
fuel the reenactment phenomenon around historical events ranging from
the American Civil War to the Crusades.40
With this spurt of post-1960s growth, finally, women entered the for-
merly almost exclusively male subculture of fandom, especially in the
crucial area of fan writing. Female fans, and soon all-female fan groups,
quickly made their influence felt in writing narratives that expanded on,
and substantially departed from, the mother narratives of their favorite
authors or TV shows. Since the 1990s these fannish narratives, long and
short, have become complex stories featuring what are for outsiders unex-
pected and sometimes shocking themes: starting in the 1970s, Star Trek,
for example, has produced a huge body of fan writing, known as “Treklit,”
with a range of specific story types, most notoriously “K/S” (for Captain
Kirk and Mr. Spock) or “slash” fiction, which imagines homoerotic rela-
tions, romantic and sexual, between these two characters. Supernormal
traits of telepathy and psychological merging are also presented as key ele-
ments of relationship in many of these stories.41
As a fan fiction genre, erotic slash fiction (in the words of one blogger)
spread “faster than herpes” into every conceivable fictional venue (Harry/
Draco, Frodo/Bilbo) but most interestingly into Judeo-Christian religious
narrative: David/Jonathan, Jesus/Judas, Moses/God, Lucifer/God.42
Unthinkable even twenty years ago, this fannish sexualizing of scripture
is scarcely a sign of sublimated spiritual longing, though using God as a
fictional character, however louche, does underscore the perception of the
Bible as simply another piece of Gothick fiction to be riffed on. The lack
of consequences, legal or otherwise, for the authors of these playful stories
says more about the splintering of Christianity’s hegemony in our culture
than does any amount of academic theological analysis. Graffiti artists,
after all, have a keen nose for the impending demolition/renovation of a
 venerable public building. They don’t have to wait until it’s been vacated
to start tagging; they just know, somehow.
Meanwhile, the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror subgenres carry on their role
as Gothick hypothesis-generating engines, if only because they are the
56 only venues available for presenting realities other than the one we experi-
ence with our five senses. Here cosmogonies and gods can be created and
just as quickly forgotten, with only a select few having the resonance to
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attract a body of initiates. “Fiction, as a vehicle, has often been used by

occultists,” Kenneth Grant, acolyte of the twentieth-century esoteric
practitioner Aleister Crowley, once commented. “Ideas not acceptable to
the everyday mind, limited by prejudice and spoiled by a ‘bread-winning’
education, can be made to slip past the censor, and by means of the novel,
the poem, the short story be effectively planted in soil that would otherwise
reject or destroy them.”43 The religion-making impulse, which remains a
deep part of American culture no matter how denigrated it continues to be
by the intellectual elite, is just as strong among those who grew up outside
organized religion or are alienated from it as it is for the orthodox faithful.
These seekers grasp eagerly at any scraps of the Gothick supernatural,
however spiritually meager they may be, and in attempting to build a tem-
ple on them return the word fan to its original meaning.
The deep spiritual allure of fandom’s alternate world for a culture di-
vided between religious orthodoxy and a secular mainstream cultural elite
was pinpointed by one of its prime apologists, J. R. R. Tolkien, who openly
declared that in The Lord of the Rings trilogy he wanted to create an alter-
nate mythology for England. In “On Fairy-Stories”—his very Gnostic
essay styling fantasy writers as demiurges or world creators—Tolkien de-
scribes the way in which what he calls a “Secondary World,” that is, “story-
making in its primary and most potent mode,” brought into being by “sub-
creators” such as himself, can command the response of “Secondary Belief”
from a reader.44 In a letter to a friend, Tolkien further asserted that The Lord
of the Rings was “fundamentally a religious and Catholic work. That is why I
have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like
‘religion,’ to cults and practices. . . . For the religious element is absorbed
into the story and the symbolism.”45
A co-creator of the main Tolkien fan website sums up this appeal of Sec-
ondary Worlds, especially to those large numbers of readers raised with no
religious training at all: “People want to participate in the universe they
love.” This “True Believer,” as Tolkien acolytes only half ironically call
themselves, goes on to say: “A hundred years ago people all went to church.
Even if they didn’t believe it, they bought into the overarching story that
was involved. Today there is no meta-story. One reason people like Tolkien 57
is because they want a myth that’s true, and they see it there.”46
The experience of Secondary Belief that separates a fan from the ordi-

g o t h ic k g ods
nary reader or moviegoer is an intensity of engagement that accepts the
content of the reading or viewing experience as real, not fantasy. Fans ap-
proach a film or work of fiction by their hero in the spirit of one Tolkien
amateur researcher who said simply, “What I do is treat Middle-Earth as
if it were a real thing.”47 Fans engaged in Secondary Belief include, for
example, those who accepted as documentarian and true the faux “found
footage” horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999) and the Paranormal
Activity series that began in 2009. This kind of experience stands in con-
trast to the more typical Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief” we are
presumed to have during most aesthetic experiences— or, more laterally,
the aesthetic “hesitation” that Tzvetan Todorov identifies as “experienced
by a person who only knows the laws of nature, confronting an apparently
supernatural event” in a work of fiction.48
Secondary Believers come in what I see as two distinct types. On what is
not necessarily a slippery slope to cultdom, what might be called the com-
mitted consumers are followed by the supercommitted performers. These
are fans who attempt to re-create the experience of the alternate world in
their own lives. Some Star Trek fans have adopted the identity of one or
another of the imaginary species represented in this program, such as the
Klingons and the Vulcans, to actively fashion their own way of life. More
than forty years later, there are still self-identified Enterprise officers who
live the series, in uniform, every day of their lives.49 Davis recounts how
members of the Swedish orcish rock group Za Frumi (“The Righteous
Spirits” in the corrupted elvish tongue spoken by the orcs) and hundreds of
other fans go into the woods in midsummer “garbed in elaborate costumes
featuring latex, prosthetics, and Orientalist armor,” enacting mock raids,
speaking orcish, and performing shamanistic rituals. In the course of
these gatherings, one participant told Davis, “sometimes it’s very difficult
to remember it’s not really happening.”50
 In the same way, inspired by the ten-foot-tall blue-skinned indigenous
humanoids of the planet Pandora, online Na’vi communities sprang up
quickly after the movie Avatar appeared in 2009. One site defines “Na’vi
’Kin” as “those who are Na’vi in human form. Be it reincarnated Na’vi,
58 Na’vi on a mental level, or spiritual Na’vi, we have one thing in common—
we are Na’vi, truly, in our hearts and at our cores.”51 Tutorials in the in-
vented tongue, constructed by a retired professor, are popular, too. Na’vi
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are one of the life-forms claimed in the heterogeneous online Otherkin

community, in the words of one website “an assortment of people who have
come to the somewhat unorthodox, and possibly quite bizarre, conclusion,
that they identify themselves as being something other than human.” The
true self, though currently reincarnated as human, may be vampire, angel,
werewolf, or other supernatural entity, and one’s physical shape may show
deformities indicating this secret identity (“back muscle problems from
‘supporting’ wings”). A number of explanations for this conviction, includ-
ing “mental aberration,” are put forward; in the end, says the writer, invok-
ing the mantra of personal gnosis, “it comes down to personal belief.”52
Having brought their favorite author’s world out of a book and then into
their own lives, the Na’vi ’Kin and the blue-skinned orcs are right at the
edge of, and close to erasing, that critical line between imagination and
belief. Even so, between these two groups of Secondary Believers and a
third group we might call the Primary Believers yawns a particularly large
gap. The step from consuming and/or performing to creating a spiritual
practice or worship that attempts to connect to a nonmaterial dimension
of reality is a big one, and only a small minority attempts it. Beyond those
subcommunities that have formed a worshipful relic- and talisman-based
relation to the stars of the TV show Star Trek (strands of hair and blood
samples from the actors in the series sell at conventions for thousands of
dollars) lies, for example, the thirty-year-old Church of All Worlds, taken
from the pages of Robert E. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and
turned into a bona fide religious organization with the New Age adjura-
tion of human divinity: “Thou Art God! Thou Art Goddess!”53
The transformation of Secondary Belief from a temporary state of mind
into an enduring experience of Primary Belief is the bridge that allows cer-
tain individuals to leave behind not just the world of the Muggles but also
the realm of fandom as they enter a brand-new, but also very old, territory.
3.

Now to Lovecraft. What kind of Secondary World did he create, and how
do his fans inhabit it?
Along with the city of Providence, a deeply Gothick-tinged New England 59
past served as Lovecraft’s locus inspirationis. His story “The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward,” a dark-mirror history of Providence, includes many fea-

g o t h ic k g ods
tures of the Old Goth worldview shared by the seventeenth- century New
England dissenting sects, notably the interpenetration of the material and
immaterial worlds and the quest for immortality during life.54 Sorcerers
and the occasional witch (women characters are few and far between in his
stories) represent token nods to the more notorious aspects of New En-
gland’s Puritan past, but these figures seem perfunctory next to Love-
craft’s true and deeply original subject, those misshapen horrors from
“beyond the stars” he called the Great Old Ones.
In a typical Lovecraft story, the protagonist (who is also often the nar-
rator) either encounters or discovers he is related by blood to, or descended
from, a ghastly horror of distorted size and form. This encounter or realiza-
tion either triggers or is coincident with his own regression into the an-
tihuman creature. By story’s end he is either mad (and, conventionally,
writing from an asylum) or engulfed and metamorphosing into an alien
creature himself. In the context of his non-Christian but Puritan-influenced
cosmos, hellfire has been replaced with oozing slime.
Framing this simple narrative pattern was an elaborate cosmogony of
extraterrestrial beings—what his fans (not Lovecraft himself) called the
“Cthulhu mythos,” after the entity we have already met, who lies in a state
of suspended animation in his ruined city deep beneath the Pacific Ocean.
They also include the blind idiot god Azathoth, the demiurge Nyarla-
thotep, and Yog-Sothoth, another mediating entity who wanders in space
and is capable of assuming various loathsome forms in our reality. By the
merest accident, through developing the simple cellular organisms that
became their slave species the Shoggoths, the Great Old Ones are respon-
sible for the creation and evolution of life on earth, including humankind.
As our detached and indifferent creators, these monstrous entities stand
in relation to humans as Dr. Frankenstein did to his own Gothick monster,
which from their point of view is us.
 That’s the pure, unadulterated, stand-alone Lovecraft. Multiple hybrid
babewyn Lovecrafts also survive in the revisions he performed on aspiring
writers’ stories, in effect turning them into part of his own oeuvre. In ad-
dition to these symbiotic collaborations, over the last eighty years Love-
60 craft’s distinctive matrix of deities, hapless humans, and horrific predica-
ments (not to mention all those fake Necronomicons) has provided the raw
material for a dizzying spectrum of spinoffs. Today’s Lovecraftiana is an
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immense uncharted territory that, like some of his monsters, just keeps
on getting bigger. Commercially sold literary knockoffs— especially the
dense cluster of fake scholarship around Lovecraft’s invented grimoire the
Necronomicon— are legion.55 In the global arena, the Japanese pop concept
of kawaii or “cute” was translated by an American toy company into an in-
famous “cute Cthulhu” blood-spattered plush doll, one of many markers of
the twenty-first-century shift to the good (or at the least harmless) monster.
In 1981, Chaosium Press, a major purveyor of Lovecraft-associated wares,
brought out the popular role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu, which now
enjoys a multinational audience of players. The rules follow the narrative
arc of a typical Lovecraft story, but with the distinctively different goal of
defeating the Great Old Ones via brainpower and scholarship, thereby
avoiding physical and/or psychic disintegration (as in the original), or by
employing the impressive array of magical and mundane weaponry cus-
tomary in other role-playing games. Another twist on usual gaming rules
is the substitution of losing “Sanity points” instead of gaining physical
punishment points during encounters with Lovecraft’s monsters. “An in-
crease in an investigator’s Cthulhu Mythos points,” the rulebook tersely
states, “always lowers his or her maximum possible Sanity points.”56
The Call of Cthulhu has its own fan convention, the Cthulhucon, and is
available in French, German, Spanish, and Japa nese as well as English.
Chaosium’s twenty-year commemorative edition of this game in 2001 was
bound in leather and printed in sienna ink on high-quality paper; by its
thirty-year mark the game was still thriving along with a sizeable stable of
spinoff games. For the aspiring writer of Cthulhu mythos fiction as well
as the role player (a distinct overlapping of functions is apparent here), en-
cyclopedias, reference and character lists, and guidelines are plentifully
available. In 1996 the Lovecraft mythos was translated into an action vid-
eogame, Quake, and the phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down in
the new century.57
 The vast domain of cinematic influence exerted by the Lovecraft mythos
stretches far beyond the handful of Lovecraft stories that have been di-
rectly adapted to the movies with middling success: from H. R. Giger, the
Swiss painter and production designer whose work includes the Lovecraf-
tian monster that shares top billing with Sigourney Weaver in Ridley 61
Scott’s Alien (1979), and Guillermo del Toro to countless other horror di-
rectors, screenwriters, and production designers who pay homage to his

g o t h ic k g ods
dark universe.58 The drowned spirit Davy Jones in the popular Pirates of the
Caribbean series, to name only one example, sports Cthulhu’s octopus face.
Lovecraft’s presence in comics and graphic novels is equally ubiquitous,
including an homage in Alan Moore’s Watchmen and the writer’s own fic-
tionalized story in the graphic novel series The Strange Adventures of H. P.
Lovecraft, also adapted to film.59 Davis argues that Lovecraft is that rare
beast among writers, a true “genre originator” whose “narrative tropes,
atmospheric imagery, and monster lore [have been elaborated] into an
intertextual web that, like all realized genres, congeals into an archetypal
reality more powerful than any specific instantiations of the material.” 60
If we divide the world of Lovecraft fandom into the same three groups
of consumers and performers (Secondary Believers) followed by spiritual
practitioners (Primary Believers), some similarities and differences with
the continuum of other fan groups emerge. Even though his monsters
owe nothing to Christian theology and Lovecraft himself was vehemently
atheistic, his fictional universe follows the post-Reformation Protestant
pattern of restricting the supernatural exclusively to that which provokes
terror and fear. Unlike, for example, the vampire subgenre, which has fol-
lowed the new twenty-first-century arc of evil villains morphing into
sympathetic heroes and, ultimately, guardian angels and beneficent gods,
the Lovecraft opus and its proliferating offspring (with the notable excep-
tion of the “cute Cthulhu” toy and its offspring) have proved mostly resis-
tant to this millennial sentimentalizing of the demonic, staying true in-
stead to the classic dark Gothick tradition. Consequently, many Lovecraft
aficionados from all three groups— consumers, performers, and spiritual
practitioners— conflate his Great Old Ones with the dark side of Christi-
anity, though practitioners, as we will see, commit to shamanic energy
rather than Satanic powers in the usual sense.
The Lovecraft consumer fan base has also resisted some other post-1970
transformations in the fan world. Unlike other sci-fi gatherings, up through
 2001 the principal Lovecraft convention, the NecronomiCon (since dis-
banded and reorganized as a general fantasy-horror convention in Flor-
ida), remained 80 to 90 percent male, no doubt because of the almost ex-
clusively masculine universe, monsters included, his characters inhabit.61
62 That’s the respectable center of Lovecraft fandom, the committed con-
sumers: an initially adolescent male culture of literate, sensitive boys who
often, though not always (based on my own informal survey), grow up to
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be scholars or filmmakers. Further down the continuum of Secondary

Belief among group two, the performers, are the lifestyle emulators, in
this case young men who imitate the writer rather than his creatures: they
dress like Lovecraft in cheap suits, eat canned food (the frugal Lovecraf-
tian diet), and only ride the bus (as he did) on their frequent hejiras to
Providence.62
Many ardent Lovecraft fans participate in the annual graveside ceremo-
nies at the Swan Point Cemetery marking the author’s birthday in August
and his death date in March; another ceremony takes place at Halloween.
An astounding ten to fifteen people per day visit Lovecraft’s grave, often
leaving flowers, books, trinkets, and masks. Such visits and ceremonies
constitute what I would call an unconscious religious rite, as opposed to a
conscious one; it’s the gray zone between groups two and three, perform-
ers and believers. A darker interactive note, however, was struck by a real-
life event with an eerie echo of a Lovecraft story. “The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward” contains the fictitious news headline “Nocturnal Diggers
Surprised in North Burial Ground,” after the eponymous main character
returns to Providence and begins digging up cemeteries looking for his
ancestor’s grave. On December 4, 1997, under the headline “Lovecraft’s
Grave Disturbed at Swan Point,” the Providence Journal recounted an epi-
sode in which persons unknown tried unsuccessfully to dig up the family
burial site.63 There is no way of knowing if this attempt at grave robbery
was a prank or an actual attempt to retrieve Lovecraft’s bones for ritual
purposes.
The most flamboyant “performers,” in both senses of the word, have
been, first, the postpunk rock musicians of the early 1980s and, second, the
enormous Goth subculture that grew out of this music and is still with us
more or less in its original form thirty years after that style of rock
morphed into other directions. The original Goth bands drew their aes-
thetic and style of self-presentation directly from Gothick horror movies.
They wore scary costumes and death’s-head makeup and decked out their
performances with fog effects and faux bats, a style that quickly caught on
with their fans and spread to rock nightclubs. Starting in the later 1980s,
the internationally known rock musicians who made Lovecraft their muse
not only drew lyrics, titles, and overall inspiration from his works but also 63
pushed the Goth-Satanic link to its limit. Along with bands explicitly
named H.  P. Lovecraft, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and NecronomicoN

g o t h ic k g ods
(described as a Canadian “spiritual occult death metal” band) are many,
many others inhabiting a specific Goth/Satanic/Lovecraft-framed sensi-
bility. The group GWAR’s lead singer, Oderus Urungus, reportedly wore
“a spiked prosthetic appendage nicknamed ‘The Cuttlefish of Cthulhu,’ ”
and their 1990 album Scumdogs of the Universe has a track called “Horror
of Yig.”64
Fans began to imitate the look of these bands, and Goth quickly morphed
into a lifestyle that was also fed by the burgeoning Gothick vampire fiction
and film of the late 1970s. The self-conscious irony of the original Goth
musicians turned more serious and occult among their followers. Because
it figures prominently in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the town of Whitby be-
came the site of the biggest Goth festival in the United Kingdom in 1993,
a celebration that is still being held annually.65 That same year saw the
publication of Poppy Z. Brite’s novel Lost Souls, featuring the androgynous
male Goth vampires Zillah, Molochai, and Twig, who “outlined their fea-
tures in dark blots of makeup” and “teased their hair into great tangled
clumps.”66 Post-2000, Goths divided into many new sub-subcultures as
the scene leaped to the Internet and proliferated there.67
As Secondary Believers, Goths “believe that the dark parts of the soul
are just as important as the bright parts,” in the words of a carefully neu-
tral work on Goths directed at mainstream teens and available at your
local public library. “They focus on those dark parts because they see
beauty in them,” the author says, going on to say that Goths’ attraction to
darkness includes “moonlit nights, haunted houses, cobwebs, graveyards,
and candle-lit rooms.” They are deeply into music and feelings, frequent
graveyards for the tranquility these places offer, and believe we must un-
derstand death before we can fully appreciate life.68 All these qualities
could be equally ascribed to Thomas Gray or any other poet of the late
eighteenth-century Graveyard school of poetry, though Gray, so far as is
known, did not indulge in piercings or tattoos.
 Like the Lovecraft practitioners and the vampire subculture, the Goths
themselves don’t see their world as dark. As a Goth fan/filmmaker, Blair
Murphy, says: “The entire Goth/vampire/pop funerary subculture is ac-
tually about rebirth, and what we are seeing is actually a phoenix rising
64 from the grave.”69 Amazingly durable for over thirty years, overall the
Goth scene appears to have fallen off somewhat since the turn of the mil-
lennium. Former Goths have cited the 9/11 bombings in New York and
G o t h ic k a

the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado as key turning

points that damaged the credibility of the lifestyle.70
A few of the original rock bands (such as Tool, whose members are Ordo
Templis Orientis initiates and declare the group itself and its music as a
religion) belong to the Primary Believers in the Lovecraft fan spectrum.
These are the small number of dedicated individuals who take this writer’s
fictional universe entirely seriously and attempt to harness its perceived
powers for their own ends. These spiritual groups and magic practitioners
share a hundred-year-plus genealogy that starts from late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century self-described occult groups, heirs of a cultural
Victorianism that had previously embraced Theosophy and Spiritualism.71
Though Theosophy in par tic u lar drew from Hindu and Buddhist eso-
teric traditions, the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which
counted W. B. Yeats as a member, incorporated the same strands of West-
ern esotericism that had been carried to the New World by the seventeenth-
century dissenting Protestant sects. Like so many others, Golden Dawn
initiates subscribed to the idea of the “Divine Self” and the ability of hu-
man consciousness to control the material world. Alex Owen parses their
magical practices involving astral travel adventures (which William James
aptly dubbed “inner romances”) as “an extraordinary and controlled per-
formance of the conscious ‘I’ . . . [as] a shaper of individual psychic reality.”72
As we saw in chapter 2, this early twentieth-century doctrine of shaping
reality through consciousness carried straight through to the “intentional”
spiritual communities of a hundred years later.
A key figure in these early groups, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), broke
away from the Golden Dawn to join Theodor Reuss’s Ordo Templis Ori-
entis (or OTO), a group that was influenced in turn by the rituals of Free-
masonry and Carl Kellner’s Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. Here he cre-
ated the template for twentieth-century “magick,” as he termed it, in his
Thelema (“Do what thou wilt”) creed: developing “powers of will and
imagination” with the goal of projecting them into another dimension and
thereby becoming oneself a kind of divinity.73 Crowley’s disciple Kenneth
Grant made up a chart drawing parallels between Lovecraft’s universe
and Crowley’s (for example, Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth and Crowley’s Sat-
thoth), claiming they experienced the same inner reality with no knowl- 65
edge of each other’s work.74 Grant also discusses Crowley’s technique of
“barbarous names of evocation,” simplistic repetition of a language with

g o t h ic k g ods
no meaning by which the magus connects to the other world, a tool that
would be widely adopted by the Lovecraftian covens.75 Grant’s New Isis
Lodge, by his own account, performed sex rites involving a priestess and
eight prosthetic feelers, a scenario that would have had the notoriously
proper Lovecraft spinning in his grave at Swan Point.
Also following closely in Crowley’s footsteps and helping to cement
the notion of a “Lovecraft/Crowley Axis” 76 was the American showman-
charlatan Anton LaVey (1930–1997, real name Howard Stanton Levey),
who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco during the tumultu-
ous 1960s, naming his Order of the Trapezoid after Lovecraft’s “Shining
Trapezohedron,” the magic stone featured in the story “The Haunter of
the Dark.”77 Pointing out that Lovecraft’s “theme of a constant interrela-
tionship between the constructive and destructive facets of the human
personality is the keystone of the doctrines of Satanism,” LaVey (or rather,
his disciple Michael Aquino, who actually wrote the piece) asserts that the
rites around Lovecraft’s monster gods show an egalitarian advance over
those of other religions:78

The concept of worship is strikingly absent from the Cthulhu

mythos. . . . [The gods’] relationship to their followers is invariably
that of teachers to students. Compare the description of a Lovecraf-
tian ceremony to a Christian mass or a Voodoo rite and it is clear that
the element of servility is defi nitely lacking in the fi rst.79

Aquino (at LaVey’s request) composed two Lovecraftian rites included

in The Satanic Rituals, titled “Ceremony of the Nine Angles” and “The Call
to Cthulhu.” Billed as “translations,” what Aquino in LaVey’s voice has
come up with here is a not-bad imitation of Lovecraft’s Aklo, which he
dubbed Yuggothic after Yuggoth, a planet Lovecraft invented as a stand-
in for Pluto.80 Both rites conflate Cthulhu with Satan, who, following the
 Crowley tradition, is not the “evil scarecrow of Christian myth” but posi-
tive cosmic energy, “a being not evil but rather independent, assertive and
creative.”81 The Nine Angles rite calls upon all the Lovecraftian gods as
well as the “gaunts” (a reference to the “night gaunts,” specters Lovecraft
66 claimed had haunted him in nightmares since childhood). The purpose of
both rites is somewhat vague except as an affirmation of a path through
this “World of Horrors,” but Nine Angles avers that in the course of hu-
G o t h ic k a

man deification “the time shall come when the gaunts will bow before us,
and man shall speak with the tongues of the hornless ones.”82
Though the Church of Satan, as channeled through its charismatic
leader, was as much showbiz as it was a new religion, it did spawn (if I may
use this word) the breakaway Temple of Set, founded by Michael Aquino.
On the Temple’s webpage an essay by Dame Patricia Hardy, GME, makes
reference to the Church of Satan rituals written by her husband, Michael
Aquino, and further describes their purpose (“to destroy old horizons and
bring new ones into being”) as well as useful mood-enhancing devices,
including lighting and music, for practicing “Lovecraftian Workings.”83
It is from this Temple of Set that some current Lovecraft magic sects, still
calling themselves the Order of the Trapezoid (OTr), trace their ancestry
and share grandmasters (such as Aquino and Hardy).
One of these groups, Starry Wisdom (under the umbrella of the Order
of the Trapezoid but calling themselves Setians after Aquino’s Temple of
Set), is named after the invented cult that is the subject of Lovecraft’s story
“The Haunter of the Dark.” The cult in Lovecraft’s story, as the OTr
official website explains, “possessed a stone, the Shining Trapezohedron,
through which they received hidden and unearthly knowledge.” 84 These
Setians declare that “the ability to build an objective foundation is vital to
the exploration of subjective/receptive states,” and they are dedicated to
studying academic subjects related to their pursuits: everything from
quantum mechanics (for manipulating the physical world) to comparative
anthropology (for shaman and dream states). Knights and Dames of the
Trapezoid devote themselves to pursuing goals that include “comprehen-
sion of the ideas of eternity and infinity; survey of the methods and tools
born of the night sky; probing of the boundaries of Self linked to ideas of
space and time; mastering the creation of universes into which the Self
may manifest.”85 In all, the members of the Order of the Trapezoid strive
to “further the Aeon”—that is, the anticipated New Age that twentieth-
century NRMs variously called the Age of Aquarius, the Aeon of Horus
(after Crowley), the Aeon of Maat, and other names, sometimes adopting
their own dating system from whatever point year 1 is designated to be.86
The Lovecraft groups’ debt to the larger Neopagan/Wiccan religious
movements is also reflected in a treatise posted by the practitioner-scholar 67
Stephen Flowers on the OTr website concerning the “Gothick God of
Darkness.” This Hidden God, he tells us, “who dwells in a spiraling tower

g o t h ic k g ods
fortress and who has guided and overseen our development from time im-
memorial . . . has remained concealed but very close to us awaiting the
[approaching] ‘future’ time of reawakening.” He is a “wise and dark com-
municator” whose legacy can help “those chosen by him” achieve “a perma-
nent (immortal) consciousness” which is free to act or not act in the mate-
rial world as it desires.” Flowers’s Gothick God is a familiar syncretic
entity drawn from Neopagan traditions around the Visigoths, a so-called
master race whose “secret traditions” have been passed down through the
ages by “some as yet unknown paraphysical process” encoded in human
DNA.87
The Lovecraft groups also fall under another umbrella category, that of
Chaos magic (or magick, as its practitioners prefer, after Crowley), a late
twentieth-century amalgam of practices defined by its practitioners as “the
cutting edge of the occult sciences” that seeks to create a “synthesis so
that science will become more magical and magic more scientific.” 88 The
founder of Chaos magick is generally recognized as Austin Osman Spare,
a former disciple of Crowley’s, and its major practitioner another English-
man, Peter Carroll, among others, but the practice of Chaos magick, with
its strong Lovecraftian undercurrents, is now widely spread among all
kinds of occult groups and individual practitioners.89
Chaos mages believe that reality is simply a construct of consciousness;
to access extradimensional realities, they can draw freely from any and all
belief systems in their magic ritual and still get “replicable” results. Erik
Davis dubs Chaos magick “postmodern” because of the characteristic way
in which it “erodes the distinction between legitimate esoteric transmis-
sion and total fiction.” Chaos magicians such as Peter Carroll reject tradi-
tional esotericism; Carroll, for example, “gravitates towards the Black, not
because he desires a simple Satanic inversion of Christianity but because
he seeks the amoral and shamanic core of magical experience— a core
that Lovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, guttural chants, and
 screeching horns.” This kind of hybridized Lovecraftian magic, Davis
concludes, is “not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent
‘reading’ set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft’s texts, a set of the-
matic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies” that mirrors Lovecraft’s own
68 distinctive “web of intertextuality.”90 One of the Lovecraft-based groups,
the Bate Cabal, for example, describing itself on its website as a “group of
media oriented, anarchistic occultists,” declares that “every reality is au-
G o t h ic k a

thentic in terms of the system within which it is created.” 91

The Bate Cabal’s mission statement, like those of the other groups, bears
more than a passing resemblance to the rule manual of The Call of Cthulhu
in some elements but departs from it strikingly in others.92 Gamers and
mages concur in their basic perception of the Lovecraft pantheon and the
goal of gaining entry to the nonsensory realm “between the planes” (also
called the “spaces” or the “angles,” roughly equivalent to dimensions). The
difference lies in the fact that in the game the Great Old Ones are— as
they were for Lovecraft—the old-fashioned enemy to be shunned or con-
quered, though (because of their superior powers) never destroyed. For the
mages, however, who have taken the crucial last step from Secondary to
Primary Belief, they are most fervently sought out and prayed to.93
All the Lovecraftian rites seem to involve what the pioneer psychic re-
searcher Frederic Myers noted as the efficacy of “devolutive” states and
trauma for inducing an extradimensional experience.94 Another magic cult
based on Lovecraft and contained within the Bate Cabal is the Esoteric
Order of Dagon, named after the local fraternal lodge run by the sinister
amphibious half-humans in Lovecraft’s great story “The Shadow over
Innsmouth.” An archived rite of the Esoteric Order of Dagon directed at
attracting the “Great Old Ones” who live “between the spaces,” proposed
by a “Soror” of the Yig Lodge in Cincinnati, involves taking a “victim”
chosen randomly from the group to the woods, a basement, or a pit at night.
The victim was to be bound and tied, blindfolded, and subjected to a re-
cording of “a soundtrack of bestial, barbarous and unhuman noise” for
between twenty and forty-five minutes, depending on his or her endur-
ance level. This rite is based on the principle that fear creates an empty
space “or a ‘hole,’ as it were, which can be filled, and generally is, by the
thing it is afraid of.” The intense fear generated by the victim during this
rite should create a “psychic vacuum” that the other members can use “to
attract those Denizens of the spaces ‘between’ the spaces we know. These
Denizens surround us at all times, but are screened from our senses
by the euclidian spatial structures which we inhabit.” The rite allows the
entities to break through these structures and communicate directly with
participants.95
Beyond the specifically Lovecraftian groups, individual spiritual practi- 69
tioners of all kinds have absorbed the Lovecraft mythos into their syn-
cretic practices. In his Pseudonomicon Phil Hines, a well-known Chaos ma-

g o t h ic k g ods
gician, vividly describes the sensory experience of rite-induced “Cthulhu
Madness”: “I felt a pressure inside my head building up—something huge
trying to pour itself into me. Sensations of geological time—layers sleeting
through my awareness. The heat of magma; slow grinding of continents
shifting; the myriad buzz of insects. Nothing human. . . . It sounds so simple
to say I heard [Cthulhu’s] call—but I did. Gods do not, generally, have a lot
to say, but what they do say, is worth listening to.”96
Another individual practitioner, John L. Smith, posts an invocation
on his “Lovecraftian Qabalah” webpage called “The Star Onyx, Being a
Ritual to invoke the Great Old Ones, suitable for regular use by the Ma-
gician,” that uses both Lovecraft’s Aklo language and Enochian (the lan-
guage of the angels the Elizabethan natural philosopher John Dee re-
ported recording, taken up by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
and replicated through Crowley by many magical practitioners today), the
purpose of the ritual being to “activate the Spirit-Vision.”97 Still another
posts a “Lovecraftian Banishing Ritual,” echoing the older terminology
of the Golden Dawn and mixing Lovecraft’s Aklo and Michael Aquino’s
Yuggothic with Egyptian and astrological languages.98
Other practitioners have attempted esoteric dreaming techniques based
on Lovecraft’s invented cultic practices, also having as their goal the break-
down of rationality/sanity, the better to access other dimensions. Love-
craft himself dreamed copiously, as he related to friends in letter after
letter; often these dreams contained the seeds of stories.99 And in the sto-
ries his characters also dream, often to ill effect since their dreams open
them up to the dire influence of the Great Old Ones. The “knowledge and
formulae” needed to open the path to the Great Old Ones were denied to
Lovecraft himself, one recent practitioner asserts, because “in waking life
[he] vehemently denied the veridical nature of the material with which he
was dealing” and so “the process of appropriation was almost completely
subconscious, occurring through the medium of dream-experiences. As
 would be expected,” the writer rather shrewdly concludes, “the visitation
of such unhuman and ultracosmic revelations took the form of the most
hideous nightmares.”100 But when I asked my friend the scholar the out-
come to his youthful prayer to Lovecraft’s Great Old One on the beach
70 at Montauk, he said, “I had a very positive dream in which Cthulhu ap-
peared to me. And after that some very nice things unfolded in my life.”
So here we have a number of highly intelligent imaginations that have
G o t h ic k a

fastened themselves to the work of a Gothick writer dead seventy years to

produce what manner of hybrid spiritual experience? Precious access, they
might tell you, to a transcendental dimension of reality that the prevailing
secular worldview refuses to acknowledge and that organized religion de-
nounces outside its own doctrinal terms. Or the liberation achieved from
the confines of the individual ego into “cosmic immensity,” as Kenneth
Grant puts it, that produces “a divine madness, an inebriation of the senses
which is nonetheless perfectly and exquisitely controlled.”101
As heirs of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century spiritual movements,
the new fan-based magic and spiritual groups have gone far beyond what
their forebears in the Radical Reformation dreamed of by way of restor-
ing what Protestant Christianity stripped away.102 Somehow, between the
efforts of the Lovecraft groups and those of their sunnier counterparts
the Neopagans, some modest foundation laying took place in the 1990s for
broader-based new religious movements yet to come, whose scriptural-
narrative source may well be a work of popular fiction or film and whose
tenets will probably fit within the outlines of Harold Bloom’s post-Christian
American religion, as do those of many of the sects I have considered here.
Now, since the turn of the century, the Gothick Gods of Darkness are
undergoing a further paradigm shift as new religion builders struggle to
widen their narrow palette from black and gray to more colorful hues.
Yet given a choice of transcendences— as today’s spiritual arena cer-
tainly allows—the simple question must still be asked: Why would you
want to worship a squid-headed entity who cares nothing about you and
the mere sight of whom is likely to drive you insane?103
As counterintuitive as it seems to the secular imagination, monstrous
deities have a long history in human religious experience, particularly in
religions, such as Hinduism, that lack the strict dualism of Christianity.
Within Christianity itself, outside the austerely image-free kingdom of
post-Reformation Protestantism and its three bright male Gods there is a
long tradition of the via negativa as a superior way of knowing, and chap-
ter 10 will explore some of the Old Goth Christian monsters and monster
gods.
The worship of fictional monster gods cum teachers, the quest for the
divine via the transformed demonic, is part of a deep shift in sensibility 71
that started in the late twentieth century. For those outside the pale of or-
thodoxy, Gothick pop culture products such as Great Old Ones, vampires,

g o t h ic k g ods
Klingons, and orcs offer the only easily accessible bridge to the transcen-
dental. As the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has said about watching hor-
ror movies, “Believing in supernatural things allows you to actually have
a spiritual experience in a time when you cannot do that in . . . [an] uplift-
ing way without sounding somewhat foolish.”104 And fan-critic Kirk J.
Schneider further testifies: “To a large extent, I arrived at a spiritual under-
standing of life through horror—my own as well as that which I witnessed
in books and movies. Although this may not be the traditional path to such
a sensibility, it is a much more common one, I believe, than is ordinarily
acknowledged.”105
Small wonder, then, that when the gods speak, their language is Aklo.
An archangel mates with a female demon to produce Genesis, the entity that inhabits
Jesse Custer’s soul. Preacher: Proud Americans. Artist: Steve Dillon. Writer: Garth
Ennis. © DC Comics. Used with permission.
 four

decommissioning satan
In Favor of His Man-God Whelps

“God is dead. Meet the kids.”

—Jacket blurb, Neil Gaiman’s The Anansi Boys

1.

“A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head

whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, pro-
digious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind”— so
the horrified narrator describes a stone statuette of the entity Cthulhu in
H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”1
Substitute snakes for octopus feelers and you have the unpleasantly
transformed Lucifer in the final pages of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, whose
“hands and feet were armed with long talons . . . over his huge shoulders
waved two enormous sable wings; and his hair was supplied by long snakes,
which turned themselves round his brows with frightful hissings.”2
Thanks to the Gothick womb Lovecraft’s highly original imagination
inhabited, this avowed materialist’s Great Old Ones carry the unmis-
takable stamp of Christian demonology, and it was certainly one reason so
many of the Lovecraft-derived rituals discussed in the previous chapter
were linked with the twentieth-century alternative religious movement of
Satanism. As Christopher Partridge has argued, the “dark spirituality” of
 contemporary popular culture is deeply rooted in the highly dualistic
iconography of the Christian church.3 But in the decade before and after
the turn of the millennium, the familiar figure of the Dev il and his tradi-
tional realm have undergone a radical transformation.
74 There’s a tangled thread to follow here. Lovecraft himself regarded his
inventions as terrifying to behold and madness-inducing but supremely
indifferent to humans, a position Church of Satan founders Anton LaVey
G o t h ic k a

and Michael Aquino would finesse thirty years later when they declared
that Lovecraft’s entities “are never stereotypes of good or evil; they vacil-
late constantly between beneficence and cruelty. . . . Critics who consider
the Old Ones as Aristotelian elementals— or as a collective influence of
malignancy which man must destroy if he is to prevail— suggest a philis-
tine disposition.” 4
This doctrinal position of the Church of Satan was a harbinger of
a growing trend in the Gothick imaginary and in New Age spirituality
alike: neutralizing the traditionally demonic, repositioning it as an odd but
equally sincere way of turning toward the divine, then handing off its
transcendent powers to the Christian Dev il’s babewyn human offspring.
Down in the sub-Zeitgeist, where the boundary between belief and imagi-
nation is highly permeable, Satan was undergoing the same paradigm shift
that was turning vampires into undead human gods who walk the earth.
Let us pick up the story of Satan from chapter 1 at the time the youth-
ful Matthew Lewis was writing his most famous work. In the late eigh-
teenth century the metaphysical division of territory instituted at the
time of the Protestant Reformation—heaven for God, earth for Satan—
was already being abandoned by scientists and theologians alike and the
stereotyped figure of Lucifer, aka Satan, aka the Dev il, was growing ever
so slightly camp. In The Monk, God doesn’t manifest in the physical
world; only Satan does, and grandly, fi rst as the beautiful young fallen
angel Lucifer, then taking the form of the lovely Matilda, and fi nally as
winged monster.
Only twenty-five years later, a far more modern Satan appears in the
Scotsman James Hogg’s Gothick novel Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner (1824), in which the Dev il, following Celtic folk tradition
rather than Christian iconography, is a shape-shifter who manifests as an
attractive person or a double.5 In this story there is no pact as such, but
the theological framework is that of extreme Calvinism, notably the belief
that only certain people have been elected for salvation and these people
will be saved regardless of the sins they commit in life. The main charac-
ter’s moral weaknesses are cleverly exploited by his “elevated and dreaded
friend” the external tempter, causing the deluded man to commit murder
after murder while still believing himself to be one of the righteous. Hogg’s 75
rendering of the hapless Mr. Wrigham’s downfall, one of the most psy-
chologically nuanced portraits of a religious fanatic in English literature,

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
marks an important step in the move toward the interiorization of evil as a
subjective state. At the end of the nineteenth century Henry James would
nicely allegorize the split between these two worldviews, and literary sen-
sibilities, in his ambivalent portrait of the governess in The Turn of the
Screw: is the evil inside her, or is it outside? The “inside” position would
come to dominate mainstream literature of the following century.
Back on the Gothick low road, however, the next big move toward sub-
jectivizing the supernatural was Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In this novella, aptly dubbed “Stevenson’s
rationalized werewolf tale,” temptation has been downloaded from a su-
pernatural agency to a material drug, a chemical accessed through a char-
acter’s body instead of his soul.6 The male body, while less vulnerable to
dev ilish possession, is open to metamorphosis. Stevenson’s twist on the
Old Goth/Gothick tropes of possession and transformation would be
heavily mined in superhero comics of the next century, in which physical
agents (nuclear radiation, chemical pollution, etc.) are capable of trans-
forming a male character’s physical shape and abilities along with his psy-
chological identity (the Hulk, Spider-Man), sometimes even of elevating
him to a transcendental level of existence (the godlike Dr. Manhattan in
Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Unlike Mr. Hyde, however, the transformed/
deformed twentieth-century superhero is usually on the side of good, not
evil, and works to protect humankind.
The Adversary himself, meanwhile, banished from mainstream intel-
lectual culture along with God, still stayed firmly entrenched in the popu-
lar imagination for the next 200 years. Satan’s pacts with men, and posses-
sion of women, have endured in Gothick entertainments into the present
day in more or less the same form in which they were laid down in the late
Middle Ages. The difference lay in the fact that by the twentieth century
deals with the Dev il were embedded in an imaginary universe where
Dominic’s white dog was absent—that is, they were divorced from any
 kind of religious context in which redemption and absolution were possi-
ble. As Anne Rice’s vampire Armand remarks, “People who cease to be-
lieve in God or goodness altogether still believe in the dev il.”7
In Anglo-American popular entertainments the Dev il reemerged as a
76 quasi-comic figure, a trickster who either outwits or is outwitted by his
human prey. A separate subgenre of comic tales about turning the tables
on the Dev il by finding loopholes in his legal contract, in fact, dates back
G o t h ic k a

to medieval popular storytelling.8 We see this strand of folktale tradition

taken up in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Dev il and Daniel Webster”
(1937–1938), a staple of mid-twentieth-century high school literature
anthologies and clearly modeled on “The Dev il and Tom Walker,” Wash-
ington Irving’s story of a century earlier. Irving’s Dev il, called “Old
Scratch” after local New England slang, appears to the miserly no-account
seeking Captain Kidd’s treasure as a dark, exoticized ruffian “neither Ne-
gro nor Indian.”9 Tom Walker himself is a comic caricature of evil, and
his eventual departure to Hell with attendant thunderbolts has nothing
particularly tragic about it.
Benét’s reworking has Webster, the famed lawyer and statesman of
Irving’s time, helping out an unlucky farmer who makes a vow to sell his
soul to the Dev il merely as an exclamation of despair. The next day “a
soft-spoken, dark-dressed stranger” with eyes that glow like a fox’s shows
up, a deal is struck, and what follows is a balloon mortgage on the man’s
soul that falls due all too soon. Daniel Webster is forced to argue the case
before a judge and jury of American villains chosen by the Dev il himself.
In the end Webster gets both his man and America acquitted by virtue of
sheer oratorical excellence.10
John Collier, a literary writer who published in mainstream glossy mag-
azines such as The Saturday Evening Post rather than the pulps, often used
the Dev il as a comic manipulator of fate in his midcentury cosmopolitan
fantasies. In the story “The Dev il George and Rosie,” the Dev il is a “smart
and saturnine individual . . . who had the repulsive look of a detective
dressed up in evening clothes for the purpose of spying in a nightclub.”11
No scaly hybrid monster, the new Dev il is a trickster figure on the order of
Faust’s Mephisto, well educated and nattily dressed, a master of witty Sha-
vian discourse who often nabs his male victim by exciting greed or lust and
deftly outwitting him (or, in the Irving strand, getting outwitted in turn),
sending him to the flames of that same mock Hell whose gaping mouth
lies under the town of Sunnyside, California, where Buffy the vampire
slayer will later take up residence.
Underneath comedy, of course, lies the time-honored psychological
principle of converting hidden anxiety triggers (such as the physical exis-
tence of a real Satan and a real Hell and/or the prospect of life, or no life, 77
after death) into humor to cushion their impact. Alongside these repre-
sentations is the stark fact, as a 2004 Gallup poll editor states bluntly, that

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
“regardless of political belief, religious inclination, education or region,
most Americans believe that the Dev il exists.”12 Christopher Partridge
notes that the number of those who believe in the Dev il has risen sharply
since 1968 and remains consistently higher in North America than in the
United Kingdom and Continental Europe. Still, he says, “the evidence
suggests that such beliefs are particularly resilient and fascinating to West-
erners” as compared to the rest of the world.13
And so it was left to the far less mainstream fare of Gothick horror to
keep churning out stories of the Dev il’s possession of females— stories
that, unlike male pact stories, are never played for laughs. Until recently,
only women were depicted as possessed, and only the rite of exorcism per-
formed by a Roman Catholic priest could expel the demon/Dev il. After
horror became mainstreamed in best-selling novels and films during the
1960s, this theme played out over and over again in the big-budget Hol-
lywood exorcism films discussed in chapter 2. Even in the post-2000 Para-
normal Activity series, each story so far has located demonic possession in
the woman, not the man. The Rite features two possessed males, a priest
and a little boy, but they remain physically intact and entirely rational while
their female counterpart writhes in stereotypical agony.
Along with exorcism, another twentieth-century wrinkle on the theme
of involuntary demonic possession was the motif of women as unwilling
or unwitting mothers of the new Antichrist. Adapted from the Ira Levin
novel, the Roman Polanski film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), on which the ever
self-publicizing Anton LaVey managed to score “technical advisor” status,
famously combined pact and possession in a tale of a woman impregnated
by the Dev il during a Black Mass as payment for the deal her ambitious
husband has struck with him.14 The Omen (1976), once cleverly dubbed “The
Exorcist for Protestants,” tells the story of a baby switched at birth into the
home of an American ambassador and his wife; various sequels follow this
son of Satan through murder and mayhem on his quest to become president
 of the United States.15 In End of Days (1999) Satan tries to mate with a hu-
man female by the last hour of the last day of the old millennium so that
he may reign over the earth for the next thousand years.16 Fortunately,
thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of a valiant ex-policeman,
78 his plan is foiled.
It was a foregone conclusion, however, that sooner or later this venera-
ble Gothick theme would circumvent the female human vessel entirely and
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jump straight to the twentieth-century transcendent, that is, outer space.

In John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), Satan has undergone the
twentieth-century sci-fi metamorphosis and is now a 7-million-year-old
alien male organism who buried his “son,” a viscous green “prebiotic fluid,”
in a sealed container on earth that Christ, also an extraterrestrial but
from a humanlike race, discovers. Christ’s disciples, and by extension the
Catholic Church, decide to keep the container a secret, choosing to char-
acterize evil as a strictly spiritual phenomenon until science can deal with
Satan and putting the container under permanent guard (that secret de-
partment in the Vatican again). Unfortunately, science can’t deal with
Satan because he lives, it turns out, on the subatomic level, where empirical
laws do not work. “Say goodbye to classic reality,” a professor at the film’s
“University of the Sciences” observes, “because our substance collapses on
the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows.” Satan escapes from his con-
tainer to parasitically possess a female student, who in turn infects other
students; ultimately another female student pushes the possessed woman
through a mirror into antispace, a charged Gothick territory where by
story’s end Satan lurks in a new female body, waiting to wreak havoc on the
world again.17
With all this dev iltry afoot, are there any signs of the other side of the
good-evil equation? It is a direct heritage of the Protestant Gothick that in
supernatural horror films and novels dark energy is vanquished by brute
force, by a spell, or by some other technical means, never (or very rarely)
by Satan’s opposite number.18 On the infrequent occasions when this entity
makes an appearance, it’s never in horror and usually in a big-budget
Hollywood film, where he’s always played for laughs—vide the cutesy God
in innumerable comedy films, from George Burns in Oh God! (1977) to
Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty (2003). (As yet, however, no jokey Jesus
has taken a bow on the big screen, probably because Americans take him
more seriously than they do God.) And as with the pact-with-the-Devil
stories, the plots of these fi lms often turn on a legal contract or promise
the human (always male) must fulfill.
In the meantime witches, the Dev il’s familiars, have turned from bad to
good, thanks in no small part to the surge in Paganism, Wicca, and similar
alternative religions in the second half of the twentieth century. But this 79
shift was also prefigured by such pantheistic fantasy fictions of the early
twentieth century as L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and even E. M. Forster’s

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
strangely prescient, goddess-invoking “Story of the Siren” (1920). Start-
ing with the Bewitched television series (1964–1972), the “good witch” is
now as familiar a trope as the bad witch used to be, and even the bad
witches of Baum’s Oz have turned sympathetic protagonists in the twenty-
first-century revisionist Wicked (2003).
St. Dominic’s dog, aka God’s redemption, also wags its tail in the less
common Gothick subgenre of the female character who learns she is carry-
ing not the Dev il’s spawn but the Messiah and is consequently forced to
fight off the gathering dark “angels” (usually not outright demons) who
don’t want the Second Coming to happen. In The Seventh Sign (1988), Jesus
makes a rare appearance (in this kind of film, that is) to judge mankind in
the midst of apocalyptic signs the world is ending, while a human woman
about to give birth must decide if she is ready to give up her own soul to
stop Armageddon.19 In Legion (2010), a shiftless woman at a desert truck
stop is pregnant with the Messiah just as God is about to end the world; the
archangel Michael, defying God’s orders, defends her and the small group
she is stranded with against the horde of warrior angels, led by Gabriel,
sent to annihilate the baby.20
Perhaps in observance of still-felt taboos, neither dev il babies nor di-
vine ones ever appear on-screen (the infamous yellow eyes at the end of
Rosemary’s Baby being Satan’s, not the child’s). Big-screen birthing of divine
and dev il children, however, was part of a late twentieth-century shift
away from the former principals, Satan and God, to a new generation of
hybrid offspring, incarnate demons and gods in human bodies, that were
busy grabbing center stage.
These half-human babewynes, including Hellboy, Spawn, and assorted
demigods (mostly male and mostly sired by the Dev il), were born in a dif-
ferent medium that has arguably, thanks to its stories’ wholesale conver-
sion into major Hollywood blockbusters, become the major Gothick me-
dium and mythmaking engine of the twenty-first century. Flying under
 the radar of the cultural mainstream for much of the twentieth century,
comic books and graphic novels have now come into their own in contem-
porary American popular culture. Thanks to the deep influence of Ameri-
can comic book culture across all its subgenres, the postmillennial Gothick
80 shows more ambiguous shadings between good and evil, angels have fallen
very hard indeed, demons are well on the way to readopting their pre-
Christian status as morally neutral daimones, and monsters turn out to be
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heroes.

2.

Comic books of the mid-twentieth century had much in common with the
blue-covered Gothick chapbooks hawked on London and New York street
corners 150 years earlier. Aimed at the lower classes, cheap and crudely
printed, blue books and comics alike were crammed with the same lurid
violence deplored by the middle classes of both eras, who feared (in the
same way that generations before them feared servants’ ghost stories) that
their children’s minds would be forever damaged by the contact.21
Historically, the origin of comic books lies in pulp fiction “picture nov-
els” of the early twentieth century. The comics, however, quickly carved
out their own distinct territories, the most famous of which was the unique
alternate universe populated by men and women possessing colossal super-
natural abilities. The comic books of the Golden and Silver Ages (approxi-
mately the late 1930s to the mid-1950s and the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s,
respectively) gave American children and teenagers a rich pantheon of
monstrous and beautiful divine humans—superheroes, superheroines, and
supervillains either transplanted from other worlds (such as Superman’s
planet, Krypton) or alchemically transfigured through trauma linked to
manmade disaster (nuclear radiation, environmental pollution, etc.), all
of whom successfully concealed their demigod natures behind a regular-
citizen persona. As historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal argues, in the comic
book superheroes from Superman to the X-Men “divinity is relocated
squarely in humanity, the miraculous is refigured as the paranormal, and
traditional religion is exposed to a harsh critical light.”22 Unlike the saints
and siddhis of religious tradition, the superheroes of the Golden Age gained
only enhanced physical and mental abilities without the accompanying
spiritual vision; they performed miracles but lacked sanctity, a situation
that would change in the Silver Age of the 1960s and 1970s.
Christopher Knowles has identified Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The
Coming Race (1871), with its race of superhumans residing inside the hollow
earth, together with Theosophy’s Ascended Masters and Nietzsche’s su- 81
perman, as a hybrid template for the comic book superheroes.23 Battling
megafoes using their talismanic powers, however, Superman and his co-

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
horts could equally trace their lineage from the heroes of Old Goth chival-
ric romances, as Laura Miller has noted.24 But the comics were also, as the
psychologist Fredric Wertham’s famous treatise Seduction of the Innocent
(1954) pointed out in damning detail, violently, outrageously lurid, bloody,
and over the top.25 The fifties horror comics in particular, as comic book
historian Jim Trombetta put it delicately, “slap[ped] the raw archetype on
the reader’s plate.”26
In a word, the comics were Gothick.
Like the old Gothick chapbooks, the comics and their graphic novel
successors have byzantine story lines crammed with subplots, backstory
flashbacks, and rambling digressions of the sort Monk Lewis would surely
appreciate. Like the recent TV serials Lost and True Blood, they show what
Linda Williams calls “horizontal suspension,” characteristic of a form of
melodrama in which time and space have been slowed to accommodate the
massive overlapping of stories and characters.27 Alan Moore, the origi-
nating James Joyce of a later generation of graphic novelists, describes the
comics’ crazy-quilt Gothick supernatural universe as “jeweled with alien
races ranging from the transcendentally divine to the loathsomely Love-
craftian, where whole dimensions are populated by anthropomorphic
funny animals. Where Heaven and Hell are demonstrably real and even
accessible, and where angels and demons alike seem to walk the earth with
impunity.”28
A further layer of hybridity was simply the by-product of canny mar-
keting tactics as the principal comics publishers, DC and Marvel, ensured
that all their series characters made promotional appearances in one an-
other’s stories. Moore again: “Try to imagine Dr. Frankenstein kidnap-
ping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments
only to fi nd himself subject to a scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock
Holmes and Hercule Poirot.” Authorship became a moot point as editors
 created story lines, gave assignments, and otherwise erased the lines
demarcating “originality.” As a result, many of these amazingly complex
stories had longer lives than either their human creators or readers: “Any-
one picking up a comic book for the first time is almost certain to fi nd
82 themselves in the middle of a continuum that may have commenced be-
fore the reader’s birth, and will quite possibly continue long after her or
his demise.”29
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Comic books of the Golden and Silver Ages drew from the same well of
Christian demonology and “occulture” that the traditional Gothick did.
As part of the trend already noted, the American comics featured many
more dev ils and demons than their European counterparts.30 Fueled by
New Age metaphysics, however, the increasingly sophisticated Silver Age
comics of the 1960s and 1970s helped give Satan some new and distinc-
tively heterodox forms. In another significant move that was a harbinger
of the new Gothick, they also drew their superhero characters (such as
Spider-Man, Thor, and Dr. Strange) from the monster comics of the 1950s.
In Tomb of Dracula, a Marvel series that ran from 1972 to 1979, Dracula is
usually the conventional antagonist, but sometimes he is not. In one story
he goes up against Satan brandishing a cross even as it burns his hands.
The last line reads: “The dark ones attacked us . . . but there was a good
man here. He told us to believe in the power of God.”31 Batman, likewise,
ensconced in a very Gothick Gotham City, might look like a vampire, but
he is a force for the good.32
By this time many comic writers had become speculative natural phi-
losophers rather on the order of John Dee or Robert Fludd and much pre-
ferred making up new cosmologies to reproducing the orthodox one. The
comic book illustrators, many of whom were sophisticated artists with
training in art history, followed suit. In the creative symbiosis that re-
sulted, medieval Christian images of Hell, the Dev il, demons, and mar-
ginal grotesques epitomized in the works of Dante and Bosch radically
morphed into complex extended multicultural pantheons balancing good
and evil gods, immortal beings, and humans with superpowers.33
Thus, for example, not Satan but “Shathan,” a horned antithesis of God
who lives in a self-created antiuniverse called Dis (named after a level in
Dante’s Hell), makes his appearance in the comic Beyond the Sinister Bar-
rier (1966), by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson.34 In Todd McFarlane’s
Spawn series (1992– ), the master of Hell is not Satan but a demon called
Malebolgia, described as “the supreme master of the dark netherworld
who gathers souls in preparation for Armageddon.”35 Satan is also given a
wide array of demigod children begotten with humans or angels (usually
sons, though with the occasional Satana, Madame Satan, or Lady Satan
thrown in) whose nondemonic half can have a mitigating effect on the 83
Satanic DNA. The pan- Gothick theme of genetic hybridity so rampant
after the year 2000 (human-vampire, human– Olympic god, etc.) started in

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
the comics.
The hero of Marvel’s 1970s Son of Satan series is a character named
Daimon Hellstrom.36 His blond hair combed in hornlike waves, his super-
hero costume emblazoned with a pentangle, Daimon makes his fi rst ap-
pearance brandishing a trident as he drives a fiery chariot across the sky.
He is, we are told in the stylized lettering that so perfectly replicates the
fever-pitch breathlessness of the eighteenth-century Gothick: “more than
man—half-human, half-fallen angel—neither mortal nor immortal—
adversary of evil and sometimes of good.”
Son of Satan and a mortal woman, Daimon must recharge his soulfire in
the fiery lake of Hell at the end of every night and then, vampirelike, re-
treat inside his Gothick Victorian mansion on the family estate in Massa-
chusetts before daybreak. There he morphs into his human form, lament-
ing: “Am I always to be both heir to hell— and—man of god?” (a reference
to his time in a faux Catholic seminary, studying for the priesthood).
Wanting desperately to be free of his “infernal heritage,” Daimon has de-
voted his life to exorcising demons, but he is still branded by the pentangle
on his chest and is subject to fits of infernal rage.
In “The Shadow of the Serpent” episode an Atlantean priestess (replete
with metal cone-cup bra and bikini) summons the astral form of Daimon
and takes him on a “metaphysical junket” outside the universe so that he
can see that natural cataclysms threatening the earth are actually brought
on by men. Sounding eerily like the goddess Philosophia explaining the
universe to the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius in his dream
vision The Consolation of Philosophy, the priestess lays out to Daimon the
Old Goth notion of the animistic universe that was actively being revived
in the New Age metaphysics of the 1960s and 1970s.37 “Few realize it,” she
states, “but the earth itself is highly responsive to the psychic emana-
tions of the creatures that inhabit it. When those vibrations grow overly
violent . . . the planet rebels! And the stress is felt throughout the cosmos
 as a weakening of the bonds of the primal matrix—the ‘model’ on which
the universes are structured.” She shows Daimon the “foundation of all
life,” a pentangle-shaped energy matrix of the universe that is guarded by
Spyros, a giant with a hooded face and a double-edged axe. When Daimon
84 wonders if this matrix is God, she replies that it is “not Valka himself”
(presumably the Atlantean name for God), but Valka’s creation.
Daimon has the choice to stand by and let the cataclysms on earth hap-
G o t h ic k a

pen as a cleansing and purging, but he declares, asserting the constant

theme of self-determination that is the essence of his struggle against his
father (and is the mantra of the comic superheroes generally), “Man must
be free to purge himself!” and steps in to save the city of St. Louis from
the fiery serpent hovering above it. Then he unmasks the giant Spyros to
expose the ravaged face of Adam, the first human and the first human to
sin—the first victim of Daimon’s father, Satan. Daimon spares Adam,
whose axe strikes the serpent and dissipates it. But as Daimon warns Byron,
“Earth has not been truly safe since the day adam was placed upon it.” In a
1990s reincarnation of the series, featuring a twist typical of that decade,
Daimon decides he must fight both Heaven and Hell for humanity’s sake,
and ultimately he assumes the throne of Hell himself.38
Daimon’s last reverse apotheosis took place after the great morphing of
comics into graphic novels that began in the late 1970s. With their larger
format, better paper for reproducing color, and durable binding, graphic
novels could be sold in bookstores and preserved in libraries. As a result,
they shifted into a higher market niche that reached a wider and older
(but initially still primarily male) audience. Early examples such as Will
Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) told real-life stories of ordinary people,
but the wild metaphysical virus of Silver Age comics soon invaded this new
form along with a new crop of English and Scottish writers, notably Alan
Moore, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Jamie Delano, Neil Gaiman, and
Grant Morrison. These story creators injected— as modeled by Moore’s
groundbreaking Watchmen series—a political and apocalyptic edge to their
stories and a noirish tarnish on their superheroes’ souls in the shadow of the
approaching millennium.39 Jettisoning orthodox Christianity in favor of the
same syncretic Theosophist-oriented cosmology favored by Dan Brown
and the Chaos magicians that posits the ability to inhabit divine conscious-
ness while on earth, the 1990s graphic novel renaissance helped shape the
future direction of the commingled realms of the Gothick and alternative
spirituality.
The first thing to notice about the Satan of the post-1980 graphic novel
is that he looks noticeably more glamorous, in a tortured Miltonian sort of
way, than his comic book predecessors. In John Constantine: Hellblazer, Sa- 85
tan first appears as a muscular dark-skinned rock star with long black hair
and a Byronesque shirt who is arbitrating two demons’ argument over

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
which of them possesses Constantine’s soul.40 In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
series he appears as a similarly Romantic fallen angel, Lucifer Morningstar
the Light Bringer, a reference to the literal meaning of Lucifer, echoing the
character’s first appearance in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. A handsome
fellow decked out in a Greek tunic and wings, this Lucifer bears a startling
(and intentional) resemblance to David Bowie.41
More than Satan, it was his male offspring who came to dominate the
graphic novels of this decade. Taking a page from Son of Satan, they are
quite literally a mixed bag: half infernal deity on one hand and half human,
angel, or whatever on the other. Demonic and human elements clash in-
side these half-breed protagonists in a manner congruent to the external
battles they wage against the forces of destruction around them, usually
accompanied by Christian-shaded apocalyptic rumblings about the end
of the world and the ultimate fight between good and evil.
The character John Constantine, a down-and-dirty London magician
whose job description is “to conjure and oppose demons,” was also first
introduced by Alan Moore in the series Swamp Thing in 1985. The spinoff
series, John Constantine: Hellblazer, written first by Jamie Delano (artist
John Ridgeway) and then by others, began in 1988 and became the longest-
running graphic novel to date; a feature film, Constantine, appeared in 2005.
Disillusioned and cynical, Constantine is a classic noir character embed-
ded in the sociopolitics of 1980s Thatcherite England, a morally question-
able man who still suffers guilt over harm he’s (usually unwittingly) caused
others and whose physical appearance was modeled on that of the rock
singer Sting.42 Early on in the series, however, John Constantine becomes
a hybrid man-demon when he is forced to accept a blood infusion from
his nemesis, the demon Nergal, after a failed suicide attempt arising from
his guilt over the death and damnation of a girl child in a cult bust-up in
Newcastle when he was a young man.43
 Following his death, John Constantine reincarnates as an astral body
zooming down from the outer spheres to a city street as he cries, “We are
all gods or demons . . . exerting the energy of will to squeeze the anarchic
creativity of nature into our image.” The astral realms are rendered here in
86 visual puns (an “astral plane” is an airplane) and other surreal images, with
an explanatory note: “All these visuals are constructed by me to rational-
ize the essential world.” There is also an undercurrent, taken up in other
G o t h ic k a

graphic novels, that Heaven and Hell don’t leave a lot to choose from: both
realms are authoritarian and flaky by turns, archaeological remnants of
a fading religion. By averting a ceremony to mate a woman named Zed to
angels in this episode, for example, Constantine further foils a divine at-
tempt whereby “humanity would’ve become the slaves of heaven.”44
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989–1996) features a main character named
Morpheus or Dream, the personification/god of dreams who boasts a bevy
of D-named allegorical sibling gods: Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, and
Delirium. In one episode, Dream must journey to Hell to right the injus-
tice he infl icted on his lover Nada when he sentenced her to 10,000 years
there for defying him. First, however, he sends his red-bearded emissary
Cain to meet with Lucifer, who injects a bit of Christian heterodoxy when
he asks Cain if he has ever heard about his followers the Cainites: “Gnostic
sect, second century, they rejected the books of the New Testament in fa-
vor of the Gospel of Judas . . . They believed that we [Lucifer] created the
heaven and the earth . . . and that the way to heaven and salvation was to
give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of
them turned up [in Hell],” he concludes, “than of any other religion.”45
After 10 billion years, however, Lucifer has gotten bored with ruling
Hell and wants to close it down. “Hell is over,” he says, sending all its resi-
dents away. Giving a hearty French kiss goodbye to a female ghoul with a
face that is half living human, half rotting corpse (yet another hybrid),
Lucifer has Dream cut off his wings and departs for earth, eventually sur-
facing on a beach in Australia. (Later Lucifer would gain his own series
with a different writer chronicling his escapades after leaving Hell.)
Gaiman was not the only graphic novelist to float the notion of Satan
getting bored with ruling Hell. In Kaz’s 1990 graphic story “The Tragedy
of Satan,” the Dev il gets fed up with God for making him administer Hell
and travels to earth to get a heart.46 The comedy film Little Nicky (2000)
picks up the Sandman idea with a Satan bored after 10,000 years and
wanting to pass on the throne to one of his three sons. When the two older
brothers fight over the succession and escape to earth, Satan sends the
youngest, Nicky (another hybrid, this time with a mother who is an angel,
not human), to get them back.47
All this is one way of saying, in sub-Zeitgeist speak, that some people, 87
not Satan, were getting bored after 2,000 years of the same setup— and it
was time for a change. What that change might be gets worked out very

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
directly in a number of 1990s graphic novels. Spawn (short for “Hell-
spawn”), a series created by Todd McFarlane that began in 1992 and is still
running (it was also an animated TV series and a 1997 movie), is the story
of Al Simmons, an African American ex-marine turned CIA operative and
hit man who’s murdered by his CIA director. Sent to Hell because he was a
murderer himself, Al makes a deal with his new boss, the demon Malebol-
gia: his human soul in exchange for the chance to return to earth to see his
wife one last time. Al is double-crossed again, of course, and like Daimon
Hellstrom before him, he struggles—with a metal face mask, a swirly red
Venetian cloak, and gloves to conceal his demon’s body—to stay human
and not demonic in his fights against evildoers. “For someone who didn’t
believe in religion,” Spawn complains, “I sure got thrown into a biblical
nightmare. Demons. Souls. Deals. Lies. that’s what’s in the great beyond,
not some cute old man in a beard.” 48
What he got, of course, was the classic Protestant Gothick supernatural.
But over the course of an impossibly complex story line that I now turn
over to the anonymous wisdom of a Wikipedia summary, the traditional
dark universe turns into something else entirely:

Spawn, now given the powers of a god and the protection of the
Mother, gains the power to recreate Earth, restoring everyone to life,
but leaving humanity every memory of the Rapture. Both God and
Satan have no role in the “new” Earth, because they’re trapped in
their perception of a barren Earth until they cease their seemingly
endless fight, and Spawn, with his last act as a god himself, closes
every door between Hell, Heaven and Earth.49

Following the trajectory of Daimon Hellstrom, Spawn’s mortal hero, Al

Simmons, ends up a man-god: the immortal, morally ambiguous ruler of
the universe.
 In 1994 Mike Mignola created Hellboy, another still-current series fea-
turing a half-human, half-demon hero in a new Gothick hybrid genre
Mignola dubbed “film noir monster detective.”50 (Hellboy’s reincarnation
in film will be taken up in chapter 10.) In many ways a pivotal figure in the
88 Gothick journey from dark to light, Hellboy is the offspring of a dead witch
and a demon, summoned in 1944 by a resurrected Rasputin brought back
from death by the goddess Hecate in league with Nazi occultists. Rasputin
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and the Nazis intend Hellboy, “born of human woman in hell, reborn of
human design on earth,” to be none other than the Great Beast, brought
forth in the world to usher in the Norse era of chaos known as Ragna Rok.51
Instead of manifesting to the evildoers, however, the rebirthed juvenile
Hellboy jumps the fence and appears in a fireball to the good guys chan-
neling him in a ruined abbey elsewhere in England. From this classic faux
Catholic setting, in which medieval sacred murals and a large crucified
Jesus figure prominently, Hellboy is taken to America and raised by his
loving English scientist surrogate father in the secret government Bureau
for Paranormal Research and Defense. Grown to manhood, he’s a bright
red Hulk-sized muscular demon with sawed-off horns, a right hand made
of stone, and a dev il’s tail. Though he can’t rid himself of his great stone
Hand of Doom, he protests, “If I am from Hell, I have no memory of it! I
don’t know what it looks like.”52
Displaying the blurring of traditional boundaries between good and
evil, antagonist and protagonist so prominent in the new Gothick, Hell-
boy is simultaneously inverted Jesus and fighter of evil, son of Satan in
Hell and direct descendant of Arthur, king of Britain, through his human
mother. Bred to be the Beast of the Apocalypse, brought up as a cigar-
smoking, wisecracking American tough guy, he rewrites his destiny to
remain steadfastly on the side of good. A triumph of nurture over nature,
Hellboy is one of many sacred monsters to populate the twenty-first-
century Gothick pantheon of demigods and demigoddesses.
In this magic, shifting world where a mongrel dog transforms from one
frame to the next into the fifty-foot monster-god Anubis, Mignola, like
Gaiman, has folded a syncretic brew of Lovecraft and Norse, Greek and
Egyptian mythologies into his own invented mythos, which has its share
of nonmale dark divinities. His Lovecraftian seven-bodied collective
dragon, Ad-Jahad, is neither male nor female. The witches of Thessaly are
women who “call down the moon” and change into monstrous birds and
animals; their ruler is the “hellish, heavenly, and earthly Hecate, goddess
of crossroads, witch queen, gorgon-eyed terrible dark one . . . thirsty for
blood and the terror of mortal men.”53
The sophisticated, irreverent, and gross-out gorefest series Preacher,
created in the mid-1990s by Garth Ennis, a northern Irish writer who had 89
worked on the Constantine series, and the artist Steve Dillon, is the story
of Jesse Custer, a car thief turned preacher (both occupations thanks to his

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
fraught childhood in the clutches of a demonically Gothick grandmother
in Louisiana). One Sunday, while delivering a scathing sermon in church,
Jesse has the fortune or misfortune to be possessed by Genesis, an infan-
tile hybrid creature, half demon and half angel, just escaped from heaven.
Genesis’s cometlike entry into Jesse’s body obliterates his congregation in
a nuclearlike blast and gives Jesse powers rivaling those of God. The Lord
himself, it turns out, quits Heaven the instant this happens and goes into
hiding on earth, leaving two sets of angels, the administrator Adephi (feck-
less males in blue thermal underwear) and Seraphi (scary warrior angels) in
charge. They immediately send a hit man to destroy Genesis because “it
holds a power like unto that of God almighty. It seeks to join with the spirit
of mortal man: if it succeeds, the two together will know the secret of para-
dise as no other mortal has done.” And, adding the obligatory apocalyptic
note: “together they could end us all.”54
Genesis, Jesse tells his girlfriend Tulip, was “something never happened
before— a mix of demon and angel, a new idea .” When she questions the
possibility of “good and evil together,” Custer answers, “Because Genesis
was a new idea, it was as powerful as either of the old ones [good and
evil]. . . . I think it’s as strong as God almighty.” This new idea now incar-
nated in him is “just as strong as [God’s] old black-and-white bullshit.”
In a plot twist that clearly reveals Ennis’s familiarity with Dan Brown’s
muse Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which came out in England before its U.S.
publication), a secret organization called the Grail, located in a heavily
fortified location in southern France known as Masada, is also interested
in finding Genesis (and Jesse). Why? Because for 2,000 years they have
been protecting the familial line of Jesus—who, as it happens, paid off the
officials, survived crucifixion in a drugged coma, and had three children
with his wife, Mary, before being run over by an offal cart at the age of
forty-eight. (When he hears this, Jesse comments only, “If God can go
missing from heaven, why can’t his son fake the crucifixion?”)55 Meanwhile,
 Jesus’ children were taken to the desert, where they were allowed to mate
only with each other. When the Grail moved to Eu rope in the sixth cen-
tury, Jesus’ descendants came, too.
The last of Jesus’ line, however, shows the unfortunate effects of two
90 millennia of inbreeding: he’s an idiot boy who pisses on the roses and mut-
ters, “Suffer the little children! Humperdumperdoo! . . . Fisher of men!
Humperdom!” and has to be stopped from chugging a gallon of pesticide
G o t h ic k a

while chanting “Changed it into wine! Humperdido!” Or as Jesse suc-

cinctly puts it, “Son of God or son of man. . . . You can’t fuck your sister
and expect much good to come of it.”56
Since God has quit (there’s no mention of Satan here) and Jesus’ idiot
heir is accidentally squashed in a coup to depose the Pope-like Allfather,
Jesse by default becomes the new godhead, a man-god entity combining
the old Christian opposites of good and evil, as the warrior seraph who was
the father of Genesis explains: “The being in your mind joined with your
soul: it knows all that ever came to pass in heaven. Every action. Every
reason . . . It is more than power. It is sentience and instinct and memory.
All it lacks is will.” The last quality, will, is what Jesse, its human host,
provides, along with the resonant name of Jesus’ forefather.57
What does Jesse do in the glory of his ascension? Following his only
mentor and spiritual counselor, John Wayne (who once gave Jesse’s human
father a “Fuck Communism” cigarette lighter), in the best American cow-
boy/superhero tradition he breaks free of society’s constraints and rides off
into the sunset (for the time being, naturally) with his girl in a stolen car.
The saturation of mainstream popu lar culture by radical Gothick
demonologies has had an impact on devout Christians who consume
Gothick works of fiction alongside the Bible, as chapter 11 will explore in
greater detail. Though there is no shortage of Christian comic books (no-
tably those of the prolific fundamentalist author-publisher Jack T. Chick)
proselytizing orthodox doctrine, the ubiquity of decidedly heterodox spins
on Christianity was bound to create some theological confusion. In posts
dated 2002 and 2004 on the Baptist Theology and Bible Study forum, a
message board limited to Baptists only, Ben W. asks on the thread titled
“Does Satan have a son called Mammon?”:

I watched that film by Keanu Reeves—Constantine which loos[e]ly

follows a story about how Mammon the son of Satan leads a rebellion
 and the demons that follow him attempt to enter from the Spiritual
Realm into the earth. In researching the term Mammon, is it [sic]
either a Syrian term for money, or it is suggested that the way it is
rendered in the Bible means that Mammon is a deity who uses lust for
money to ensnare people. Interested in your thoughts. . . . 91

The poster Soulman answers:

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
if Mammon were the son of Satan he certainly would not be d[ei]ty.
Satan is an angel and it is never mentioned in scripture that he had a
son. The movie Constantine is just that. A movie. Entertainment. No
scriptural accuracy or real basis. Garbage. Ben, [i]sn’t it amazing what
folks can come up with?

Sound information, but one wonders if the recipient will be able to erase
from his mind the vivid impression the movie demons left on him. And
another poster, Old Regular, only adds to the problem when he demands
to know, “Just where in Scripture does it say Satan was is an angel?”58
The more interesting social and theological implications, such as they are,
lie in the selective translation of Preacher and stories like it to the big screen.
Starting as early as the late 1980s with Superman and Batman, growing ex-
ponentially and building to a dizzying peak in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, all these characters— Constantine, Hellboy, Spawn,
Preacher, and virtually every other comic and graphic novel superhero and
antihero ever invented—vaulted out of their narrow Gothick niche into
global pop culture via the medium of blockbuster film. What does the
spectacle of these twenty-foot-high men-gods suggest? First off, in the his-
torical context of the war-consumed opening decade of this century, the
exaggerated muscles and armature of superheroes such as Iron Man on the
big screen suggest nothing more than suited-up American combat soldiers
in the Iraq and Afghanistan confl icts. (It may be no coincidence that the
original Iron Man was co-created by Don Heck, the Leonardo of World
War II and Korean War comic book covers.)59
But this big-screen saturation also suggests, in the metaphysics of Ameri-
can sub-Zeitgeist popular culture, that the Christian God and Satan have
both left the building, leaving their half-human, half-supernatural off-
spring poised to take over. The universe, fate, or man-made warping of
 nature in the form of nuclear radiation or environmental pollution has
granted all these human demigods powers equal to or surpassing divine and
demonic ones. Since the new divine humans mostly trace their Gothick
lineage to Satan, not God, and thus partake of his dark nature, good and
92 evil are no longer discrete opposing categories. Good seems to spring not
from a divine source— since most of the angels in these stories are as blasé
and corrupt as the demons (and they’re all muscle-bound warrior-killers)—
G o t h ic k a

but rather from the human, nonsupernatural side of their nature.

In the global setting, finally, the elaborate Gothick cosmologies of comic
books have been added to, hybridized, and transformed by graphic novel-
ists, animators, and filmmakers of other cultures, notably Asia, to produce
an even more wildly syncretic universe of imaginary beings. After 1990,
the pendulum swung from imperial Disney-centric America to Japan,
where writers, animators, and game designers were busy erecting elabo-
rate new fantasy universes on the foundational narratives of U.S. pop
culture. As we have already seen, Japanese manga and anime have enthusi-
astically embraced the faux Catholic in spite of the latter’s cultural incon-
gruence, so it comes as no surprise that the Christian Satan was present in
Japanese manga as early as the 1950s.60 One commentator notes that the
prevalence of the Christian Dev il and many other seemingly indigestible
elements of the Western Gothick in Japa nese manga stems from the cir-
cumstance that “Shinto . . . is polytheistic, which means that gods from
other religions can be accepted and assimilated.”61 Reverse Asian influence
on the Anglo-American Gothick through comics and film will be further
explored in chapter 9.
The paradox remains that even as belief in Satan seems to be on the
increase in the United States, his presence in the Gothick imaginary here
and abroad has become less prominent. In shifting story lines over the last
three decades, Satan looks to be stepping down in favor of half-breed,
morally ambiguous action heroes who ultimately opt for the light. The
Dev il has signed over his territory to others besides his children, however.
We must also take into account the two other dark supernatural figures
whose roles in the Gothick often overlap with his: Death and Dracula.
Together, all three figures— Satan, the vampire, and the zombie—make
up the Gothick black Trinity. By the year 2000, however, the vampire had
almost completely supplanted Satan as the primary Gothick antagonist,
only to brighten curiously into protagonist or heroic lover in the follow-
ing decade (as chapter 6 will explore). Then came Death in the form of
zombies, now vying with vampires for the Gothick World Cup of the
Undead (see chapter 7). Both figure prominently in the new postapoca-
lyptic subgenre of Gothick novels, graphic novels, and movies, where Sa-
tan no longer merits even a walk-on part. 93
What’s been missing so far in all this Thanatos, however, is its opposite
number, Eros. Before there was a Gothick, way back in the Old Goth

de c om m i ssion i ng s ata n
Middle Ages and stretching beyond that into time immemorial, the mythic
role of wooer, of the fatal lover who cannot be resisted, was perversely
reserved for the original guy himself.
Let the Dev il’s son make way for the bride of Death.
Death takes the bride. From Danse macabre des femmes, ms. 995, Bibliothèque Nationale.
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
 five

gothick romance
The Danse Macabre of Women

Death: Take my hand, pretty Bride.

Let’s go take off our clothes;
There’s no more work for you
You will come to bed in another place.
—From Le danse macabre des femmes

“The Age of Romance,” Thomas Carlyle said a long time ago, “has not
ceased; it never ceases; it does not, if we will think of it, so much as very
sensibly decline.”1
I first read Jane Eyre at the age of twelve, in a Signet paperback edition
with a fake sepia cover drawing of a young woman considerably more
beautiful than Charlotte Brontë’s heroine claims to be. It was summer in
Encinitas, north San Diego County, California; I’d already burned through
the paperbacks on the single rack at the town’s Rexall drugstore, so I
mail-ordered it (along with Ivanhoe, which I never got around to reading)
from the publisher in New York for 35 cents plus postage scotch-taped to
a piece of cardboard cut to fit the envelope. Like the twelve-year-old girls
today who gobble up the Twilight series, I devoured Jane Eyre the minute
I got it in my hands. Poleaxed by Romance, I read it again, and again, and
again. Treasured it, kept it. Today the ancient paperback’s fragile yellowed
 pages disengage from the binding as I turn them, calling up a memory of
the tattered Gothick novels in the Hammond Collection.
Brontë’s tale of an unglamorous, independent-minded young woman
who captures the heart of her arrogant, sexually dangerous older employer
96 not only drew a huge and still-growing readership, it also established—
in the year 1847— another major subgenre of the Gothick: the sentimental
romance that is still coming-of-age reading for young women everywhere.
G o t h ic k a

There were sentimental romances before the Gothick, but they were mostly
not written by women. By the same token, the female writers of the classic
Gothick, including Clara Reeve, Charlotte Dacre, Sarah Wilkinson, and
many others besides Radcliffe, exerted an enormous influence on Brontë
and her successors, but their novels do not belong to the Gothick subgenre
we now know as women’s romance.
First, a quick look at that slippery term romance and its kissing cousins
Romance, Romantic, romantic, and roman. All of them, and their historically
linked meanings, derive from the ancient cultural matrix of Rome. Mod-
ern European Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Por-
tuguese, Romanian) are the end products of regionally mutated Latin after
the fall of the Roman empire. In the Middle Ages, romance was the term
for a tale translated from Latin into one of these tongues. Gradually the
category came to include a wide-ranging group of vernacular poetic and
prose narratives glorifying either combat or love, from earlier chivalric ep-
ics such as The Song of Roland to the great French thirteenth-century flow-
ering of literature in dream vision poetry, including The Romance of the Rose
and the legends of King Arthur in the lais of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie
de France. The nostalgia these stories of love and adventure expressed for
an already vanished feudal past—a fond look backward that would surface
again in the later English metrical romances—made the medieval romances
themselves, arguably, the first examples of “medievalism.”
In the early nineteenth century, Gothick and Romantic writers alike
wrote self-styled prose and poetry “romances” of knights and ladies in
Old Goth times, but it was the sensationalistic Gothick writers who fi xed
that term for a wide readership as a prose fiction recounting extraordinary
events set in far-off times. Horace Walpole, as we have seen, described
The Castle of Otranto as “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the
ancient and the modern”—that is, a way of combining the fantastic and
supernatural elements of the medieval form with his own age’s growing
taste for realistically drawn characters.2 Sir Walter Scott’s “historical ro-
mances,” starting with Waverley in 1814, added fact-based regional and
historical detail to the by then familiar Gothick convention of stories set
in the medieval past.
Such tales stood in sharp contrast to the new (hence “novel”) long-form 97
prose fiction that focused on everyday life.3 Since then, the term novel
has replaced romance in the English-speaking world for every kind of long

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
prose narrative save one: today’s literary genre of romance (a love story
geared to women readers), along with the adjective romantic in its narrower
meaning of “amorous.” (To add to the confusion, roman in its simple sense
of “fiction” remains the generic word for “novel” in French, German, and
some other modern European languages.)
In his famous apology for the genre in its oldest and broadest sense, the
critic Northrop Frye declared romance to be an extremely stable literary
form over thousands of years, from the so-called Greek novels of the
Hellenistic world through the kind of prose tale that he saw as constituting
the “bulk of popular literature” in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury. For Frye, the “improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world of ro-
mance” is not inferior to the more realism-oriented world of the main-
stream bourgeois novel; in fact, he argued, most new literary conventions
emerge directly from popular literature, “with romance at its center.”
Tellingly, his defining example is the Gothick novel, which, he noted, had
appeared “just as the eighteenth-century English literary neoclassicism of
Pope and Swift was beginning to ossify.”4 With this assertion Frye implied
that Romantic and Gothick should not be thought of as two separate liter-
ary movements, one high and one low, drawing from the same sources;
rather, the Gothick should be regarded as the foundation of the Romantic.
Given the primacy of the Gothick in the fading sunset of the modernist-
postmodernist twentieth century, Frye might find cause for reflection
about what is coming next in “high” literature if he were alive today.
The road from the classic Gothick to today’s romance genre is not a
perfectly straight one, however. Because of its par tic u lar heritage, the
women’s romance took a par tic u lar direction in the English-speaking
world, and once again there are eighteenth-century Gothick and medieval
Old Goth sources to contend with.
First, the Gothick: Walpole and his male successors liked to pit a help-
less young woman against a dev ilish villain whom she is going to be forced
 to marry (The Castle of Otranto) or who forcibly ravishes her (The Monk).
This role of imperiled young female, furthermore, is often doubled (or even
tripled, in the case of The Monk): one female dies at the hands of an older
man in a position of power, another lives to marry the devoted young man
98 her own age. In the female-authored Gothicks that followed Walpole, in
contrast, the single heroine (whose point of view we usually inhabit) es-
capes the villain’s clutches and marries the young man. Where the early
G o t h ic k a

male Gothick writers, drawing directly from the medieval romance tra-
dition, used a faux medieval aristocratic cast of characters, the women
Gothick writers frequently introduced a bourgeois female protagonist
into the mix.5 Where male authors favored supernatural elements, female
authors—most famously Radcliffe herself—liked to titillate their readers
with ghostly, chill-inducing phenomena before revealing the human agency
behind them.
Using alternating third-person points of view that shifted rapidly be-
tween male and female characters, Walpole and his male heirs cast the fer-
vent emotion of the Gothick in conventionally stylized terms (“How cutting
was the anguish the good man felt, when he perceived this turn in the wily
prince!” etc.).6 In foregrounding a single female protagonist and telling the
story chiefly from her point of view, Ann Radcliffe and the other women
writers who made this genre their own typically displayed a more nuanced
attention to the inner world of their main characters, as in this exchange
from Anna MacKenzie’s Mysteries Elucidated (1795):

“You are melancholy, my beloved Ella,” said Adela, who had remarked
the changes of her ingenuous countenance. She started—it was a wel-
come interruption, and broke the clue of her ideas, which she was
happy to follow no further.7

Radcliffe herself remains the queen of intensely felt subjectivity. Emily,

the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, is sensitive, too sensitive; she inter-
rupts her father’s last words with so much fainting and sobbing that he is
obliged to leave off dying to warn her about her excess of “sensibility.”8
It is just this emphasis on feeling that marks the Gothick female writers’
championing of what would soon be the hallmark of the Romantic move-
ment: internalization and subjectivity. Terry Castle has argued that Rad-
cliffe, like the English Romantic poets, shifted the locus of transcendent
from an external, extradimensional realm to the inner world of human
consciousness, creating a “supernaturalism of mental space” in the intense
love yearnings the more sensitive characters feel for each other. Pointing
out that the word mystery in the title of Radcliffe’s most famous novel rep-
resents that era’s secularization of the word (from the Latin mysterium, 99
“secret rite,” or its Christian sense as the sacred redemptive events in the
life of Jesus), Castle says that for Radcliffe, as for the Romantics to come,

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
“the new mysteries are those of the imagination.”9 The female Gothick
writers, in short, preferred to see their ghostly mysteries elucidated in
the human heart. This displacement of the numinous into consciousness
stands at the beginning of an arc that culminates in the twentieth centu-
ry’s extreme high-art psychologizing of the supernatural, best represented
in Virginia Woolf’s claim that “it is at the ghosts within that we shudder,
and not at the decaying bodies of barons or the subterranean activities of
ghouls.”10
The obvious gender differences in works by Gothick novelists of the
classic period led the critic Ellen Moers to coin the useful term “Female
Gothic” to refer to all works in this genre written by women.11 Many crit-
ics after her, including Castle, Julia Kristeva, and Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick, have examined the gendering of Gothic in different ways.12 Anne
Williams believes that the male Gothick, culminating in its overreaching
hero’s death, is tragic, whereas female Gothick—like the original medi-
eval romance, like folktales, and like Shakespearean comedy—“demands
a happy ending.” The heroine “experiences a rebirth” through marriage,
with the “imagined threat dispelled.” Such gendered patterns still operate
in, for example, Bella’s happy reincarnation as a vampire married to her
vampire love in Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight series and the fiery death of
the camerlengo, “an isolated overreacher punished for his hubris” if ever
there were one, in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, respectively.13
Looking further back to Old Goth times, the roots of these gender dif-
ferences are visible in the historical period the Gothick drew inspiration
from: for the male Gothick, in what Erich Auerbach called the avanture
narratives of chivalric romance (“trial by adventure,” a form that would be
deliberately imitated by medieval scholar Tolkien in his mid-twentieth-
century Gothick Lord of the Rings trilogy); for the female Gothick, in the
twelfth-century fin amor or courtly love traditions unique to European
culture that were absorbed into the allegorical dream vision poetry and
 romances as well as folktale motifs.14 With few exceptions that we know of
(Marie de France being the most notable), authorship of the mostly anony-
mous romances of medieval times was presumably male and so were their
fictive protagonists. This was also mostly true of the Romantic move-
100 ment that revived the form, which makes it an interesting fact that Mary
Shelley, whose husband Percy Shelley and close friend George Gordon,
Lord Byron, made up between them the great second generation of
G o t h ic k a

English Romanticism, popped up on the Gothick side of the fence to write

a quintessentially male Gothick romance—for both the protagonist of
Frankenstein and his monster are male, and the ending is tragic.
If male protagonists and tragic outcomes are the criteria, Anne Rice’s
Vampire Chronicles 150 years later is also male Gothick. Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu’s late Victorian erotic vampire story “Carmilla” (1872), however,
told from the point of view of its female protagonist, is an interesting
hybrid: the heroine escapes death from the female vampire bent on possess-
ing her, but her narrative is interspersed with bits of factual “official” tes-
timony that break the subjective mood. And notwithstanding its frame of
a fireside tale told by a wellborn male, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
(1898)—with its hapless governess heroine operating in the vacuum of a
hoped-for romance with her aristocrat employer that never happens—is
pure female Gothick. The fastest-growing subgenre of women’s romance
today, finally, is “paranormal” romance, which overwhelmingly foregrounds
the supernatural, formerly the provenance of the male Gothick, in a bewil-
dering array of forms. Given these and many more anomalies, the cate-
gory of female Gothick might be modified simply to include any work of
Gothick fiction, by either a male or female writer, with a woman as pro-
tagonist and a plot that conforms to Anne Williams’s useful synthesis.
Female Gothick is most certainly the category to which Jane Eyre be-
longs. Published two generations after Radcliffe, Lewis, and their con-
temporaries, only one generation removed both from the great Romantic
poets Byron and Percy Shelley and from the last of the classic-period Goth-
ick novelists, Charles Maturin and Mary Shelley, Brontë’s work gave the
female Gothick a radical twist, setting a template for the small-r romance
genre that still obtains today.
Jane Eyre has all the classic Gothick elements— a cynical, womanizing,
Byronically wicked nobleman, an impoverished heroine who is at his
economic and erotic mercy, and an ancient family mansion haunted by a
malignant being that is revealed, in the best Radcliffean manner, as no
specter at all but the master’s flesh-and-blood psychotic wife.15 Though
Brontë gives Jane moments of paranormal clairsentience when she “hears”
Rochester calling her from many miles away in a moment of crisis, Rad-
cliffe’s explained supernatural becomes synonymous, in this foundational 101
narrative of the sentimental romance, with explained wickedness.16 And
in the best manner of both male and female Gothick, the cursed ancestral

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
mansion ultimately burns to the ground.
So far, so good. But meanwhile Brontë has been busy transforming the
most crucial Gothick convention of all: the flawed, power-mad male prin-
cipal/antagonist who declines into evil and ultimately dies. In her refash-
ioning, the despot villain of the late eighteenth-century Gothick, though
still arrogant and domineering, is revealed to be an innocent man victim-
ized by his mad wife; Edward Rochester sincerely seeks true love and finds
it in the arms of his dear “mouse,” the governess. Through separation, suf-
fering, and expiation—he is left blinded by the fire set by his wife that
consumes the mansion, a physical injury and psychological humbling that,
along with a convenient inheritance for Jane, helps dismantle the social
and economic barriers between them—the lovers are happily united in
holy matrimony.
This is the classic happy ending of medieval romance oddly grafted onto
the shell of a horror story and thus, we might say, ultimately more Ro-
mantic than Gothick in sensibility. It’s as if Isabella in The Castle of Otranto
found herself against all reason attracted to the tyrant Manfred, learned he
had not done any bad things after all but was merely the victim of jealous
gossip, and dropped the insipid Theodore/Frederic as her dreaded ar-
ranged marriage to Manfred is revealed to be the hoped-for happy ending.
Or that Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho discards her own blandly up-
right Valancourt in favor of the charismatic Montoni. Just this set of plot
twists became, in fact, a favorite stratagem of twentieth- century Regency
romances: a penniless but respectable heroine is forced into marriage with
a cold, insolent aristocrat only to find perfect happiness with him after
their clashing wills find romantic resolution. The darkly attractive char-
acter is always suspected of all sorts of crimes and sexual profl igacies (the
structural echo of his former role as villain), but in the end he is proven
innocent (explained wickedness) and pledges lifelong domestic fealty to
the heroine.
 The deep character on whom this Gothick transformation is enacted
is, of course, the familiar Old Goth figure of Satan. The Dev il, as we have
seen, stayed front and center stage in the male Gothick from The Monk
through late twentieth-century graphic novels. He figures in the female
102 Gothick in a more shadowy but intriguing way. Mario Praz was the fi rst
to point out the strong resemblance of Montoni in Radcliffe’s Udolpho
and the priest Schedoni in her The Italian to Milton’s brooding fallen an-
G o t h ic k a

gel Lucifer in Paradise Lost, on whose face “Deep scars of Thunder had
entrencht . . . under Browes / Of dauntless courage, and considerable
Pride.”17 Lucifer was the template, Praz argued, for the Gothick’s flawed,
hubristic male aristocrat, whom he dubs the homme fatal or fatal man. As
identifying traits of the homme fatal, Praz lists “mysterious (but conjec-
tured to be exalted) origin, suspicion of a ghastly guilt, melancholy habits,
pale face, unforgettable eyes.”18 His less frequent female counterpart, the
Gothick femme fatale or fatal woman, is embodied in Matilda, the demon
temptress of The Monk.
In the Romantic generation that followed Radcliffe, Lord Byron (fa-
mously styled by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb in her diaries as “mad, bad,
and dangerous to know”) self-consciously adopted the homme fatal persona
in his life as well as in his work, even jesting that he had “lifted his scowl”
from Ann Radcliffe’s villains.19 Both Lamb in her Gothick roman à clef
Glenarvon (1816) and Byron’s disillusioned young physician John Polidori
in The Vampyre (1819) used the poet as their model for the villain/fatal lover
who is irresistible to women and brings about their destruction. The out-
line of this hybrid Milton-Byron-Polidori human Lucifer is clearly visible
in Edward Rochester, as Jane Eyre describes him: “He had a dark face, with
stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked
ireful and thwarted. . . . [H]e searched my face with eyes that I saw were
dark, irate, and piercing.”20
Brontë’s sister Emily also flips villain into lover in Wuthering Heights.
This unique and brilliant novel, published the same year as Jane Eyre, be-
longs squarely in the category of male Gothick, not sentimental romance.
As irresistible as he may have been to Cathy, Heathcliff remains an un-
reconstructed demonic figure, a destructive and untamed force of nature.
Compared to this male fury, Charlotte’s misunderstood Edward Rochester
looks puny indeed, especially in his final state of humbled incapacitation.
Emily Brontë, of course, draws even more heavily than her sister on both
the literary Satan and folkloric demon figures in her ever-raging “dark-
skinned gypsy” Heathcliff, as this barely secularized demon is seen
through the eyes of the housekeeper Nelly Dean on his deathbed:

Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to 103
me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin. . . . “Is he a ghoul or a vampire?”
I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him
grow to youth, and followed him almost through his whole course; and
what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. “But where
did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to
his bane?” muttered Superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness.21

Whereas in Wuthering Heights the fatal man retains his wild, death-dealing
nature to the end, in Jane Eyre this figure is redeemed by the woman who
loves him. (Let it be noted that no equivalent literary transformation of a
femme fatale into a loving, faithful helpmate springs immediately to mind.)
Paradoxically, Jane Eyre loses its erotic charge in exact proportion to
Rochester’s transformation from bad to good. Rochester ends up a maimed
and chastened shadow of his former self; Heathcliff’s demonic rage, in
contrast, never diminishes, nor does his perverse charisma. The aura of
danger and evil surrounding the homme fatal is precisely what constitutes
his sexual attraction, and it is a problem romance writers have struggled
with ever since. What is it, exactly, about the lover who promises destruc-
tion, the demon lover who offers the “kiss of death,” that makes him so
irresistible?
The erotic link between sex and death taps into mythic constructs that
stretch much further back in time than medieval Christian demonology
and its secularized echoes in the Gothick. Behind Heathcliff, Rochester,
and Edward Cullen, behind even Satan, stands the older, mightier figure
of Death, Lord of the Underworld. Behind the persecuted woman stands
the bride of Death, Queen of the Underworld, the virgin sacrifice—the
young person whose untouched sexual energy will nourish the god beyond
the grave. These mythico-religious figures were personified as Hades and
Persephone in the ancient Western world; European Old Goth Christian-
ity gives us an immediate forebear in the form of Death personified as the
Lord of the Dance.
 The visual emblem of Death leading people from all walks of life in a
circle dance was introduced by a school of painting in Paris during the
plague years of the late 1400s, and the emblem of the danse macabre spread
rapidly across the Continent and to England. Philippe Ariès comments
104 that for fifteenth-century Eu ropeans the figure of Death was “less an al-
legorical character than a supernatural agent that has taken the place of
the angels and dev ils to execute the decrees of God. . . . He is not alto-
G o t h ic k a

gether on the side of God, whose decrees he executes, nor of Satan, whose
realm he fills. He communicates with a hidden world which, in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, he helped reveal: a world that emerges
from the depths of the earth and from the interior of the body, inhabited
by worms, toads, snakes, hideous monsters.”22
During the plague years, the image of the danse macabre changed from
communal dance to intimate pas-de-deux between Death and individual
men and women from all walks of life. In the celebrated late fifteenth-
century illustrated poem Danse macabre des femmes, Death calls to his dance
not just the bride depicted in the frontispiece to this chapter but thirty-five
other women, including a wet nurse, a bath house attendant, a theologian,
a prostitute, a saleswoman, a shepherdess, a duchess, and a queen. In this
shift we see that, in Ariès’s words, “the former master of ceremonies [in the
dance of death] has become a hunter of humans.”23
Explicit eroticism, however, does not surface until the next century,
when Death taking the bride (along with the nun, the baker, and everyone
else) becomes Death taking a bride. Shakespeare has Romeo exclaim in
disbelief:

Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?24

but by the end of the sixteenth century “Death and the Maiden” had be-
come a familiar visual arts convention throughout western Europe. Made
popular by painters such as Niklaus Manuel and Hans Baldung Grien,
these images of a half-corpse figure or a skeleton embracing or kissing a
beautiful young woman as he drags her off to his tomb would be enthusias-
tically revived two centuries later by Romantic poets, painters, and com-
posers. Sometimes Death is even shown biting the young woman’s neck,
an indigenous western Eu ropean trope that would later transfer seam-
lessly to the Gothick vampire romance.25 By this time, the “lean abhorred
monster” was also arguably more attractive than his worm-eaten fifteenth-
century predecessor. As a consequence of the new scientific study of anat- 105
omy, Death was reimagined as a bare, spotlessly clean skeleton stripped of
all rotting, maggot-infested flesh, a sanitized icon that would reign su-

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
preme for 400 years until the mainstreaming of the zombie in global pop
culture around the year 2000.26
In the sentimental romance as shaped by Charlotte Brontë and her
heirs, the motif of the bride of Death or Satan serves as titillating bait for
readers, but it is not the overarching blueprint. Even as the outlines of the
painted-over dev il are still faintly visible under the gilded angel’s wings,
the apparent villain transforms himself into the true hero. Death is cheated
of his victory and the descent to the underworld is averted. The female
Gothick, Anne Williams argues, is a positive quest genre that involves
Psyche’s search for Eros, not Hades or the Dev il. In contrast to the male
Gothick’s “individuation through violence, conquest, and the establish-
ment of a hierarchy with the conquering hero at the top,” the female hero’s
journey is one of emotional development in order to enter into relation-
ship. Marriage is the “goal of the quest, the establishment of the self that
can exist only in relation to others.” This establishment of self is possible
only at the story’s “blue-sky happy ending,” when the male villain/hero,
thanks in large part to the transformative powers of the love he feels for
the heroine, is revealed as a good man and loyal mate, not (as is always first
feared) a dev il.27 The story structure of women’s romance, contemporary
romance writers Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz further insist, pro-
pels the heroines on their own very active knightly avanture “quests to en-
counter and transform these masculine creatures of darkness.”28 Transfor-
mation happens to the heroine as well because her lover is able in turn to
deliver her to her true self. The integration of the masculine and feminine
that heterosexual marriage represents is also by this account the “integra-
tion of the internal self” both in the heroine and in the female reader.29
Throughout its history, the women’s romance has always embodied a
Gothick-Romantic mix of dark medievalisms transmuting to fairy-tale
brightness. As Williams has pointed out, the genre is very much in the
spirit of Keats’s faux Catholic “Eve of St. Agnes,” which the poet admitted
 was itself influenced by the writings of Ann Radcliffe.30 In this narrative
poem packed with images drawn straight from the Gothick novels—
moldering castle, aged friars, cold winter wind blowing the dead autumn
leaves, et cetera—the homme fatal baron and his guests toss and turn under
106 the pressure of their standard-issue nightmares of witches, demons, and
coffin worms as Porphyro and Madeline flee the charged Gothick space,
heading straight for that blue sky. At heart the women’s romance is not
G o t h ic k a

really about death, even though that is its Gothick departure point. It’s
about love as liberation and rebirth.
Literary critics have not been kind to Gothick romance. Fred Botting
has dubbed contemporary women’s romance “girly-girly Gothic” after
Mark Twain’s label “girly-girly romance” for the identical literature of the
nineteenth century.31 Traditionally, Gothick scholars and literary critics
alike have delivered scathing and condescending critiques, and commenta-
tors have noted the continued low status of the women’s romance in main-
stream culture despite being statistically the most popular literary genre.
(In the year 2010 romances constituted about 21 percent of U.S. retail book
trade, and the figures are comparable elsewhere.)32 Increasingly, however,
younger scholars and its reader-based champions have raised their voices in
protest. “To attack this very old genre, so stable in its form, so joyful in its
celebration of freedom,” complains Pamela Regis, “is to discount, and per-
haps even to deny, the most personal hopes of millions of women around
the world.”33
Forever impervious to bad press in all its subgenres, in this case the
Gothick had mutated Romantic and romantic to produce a hybrid formula
that has proven just as durable as the classic dark Gothick. From Jane Eyre
through the late twentieth century, the formulaic cover illustration of any
1970s Gothick historical romance paperback— a distraught young woman
in a long gown with the dark outline of a castle or ancestral mansion loom-
ing behind her in the moonlight—made a perfect palimpsest for Jane and
Thornfield Manor. Edward Rochester was the prototype for 150 years of
romance novel “devil-heroes” as the secularized demon aristocrat lover
was housebroken over and over again in a ritual mating dance in which
male eyebrows were cocked, arched, and lifted (always ironically) and fe-
male chins were tilted, tipped, and cupped.
All that changed somewhere around the year 1990.
 As part of an unparalleled hybridization of Gothick subgenres during
that decade, women’s romance underwent an explosive growth process,
producing a range of new variants that grafted the female Gothick onto
other previously separate genre categories. In place of the two rigid mid-
century categories “historical” and “contemporary,” new romance story 107
types borrowed the frames of hard-boiled detective, time travel, science
fiction, and fantasy.34 The traditional single first-person voice of the fe-

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
male protagonist was replaced by multiple points of view, particularly that
of the male lead, thereby allowing the reader, in Wendell and Tan’s words,
“to experience the process of falling in love from both [lovers’] perspec-
tives.”35 Most striking of all was the intrusion of two elements formerly
associated only with male Gothick: sex and the supernatural.
The introduction of explicit sex into what had formerly been a virginally
discreet genre was in part a reflection of the major shift in women’s social
roles in the late twentieth century. The shift was foreshadowed during the
1970s and 1980s by a queasy new romance convention licensed by, though
not quite in the spirit of, the sexually liberated 1960s: this was the almost
obligatory rape of the heroine early on in the story by the man she will
eventually fall in love with and marry. Most often featured in historical
romances that allowed a reader to suspend the mores of the times she lived
in (hence the nickname “bodice rippers”), rape became the extreme but
ubiquitous version of the classic romance story arc in which the domineer-
ing male attempts to force his will upon the heroine, only to be conquered
in turn by the depth of love and passion she inspires in him.36
In the pivotal 1990s, however, this dubious trope gave way to sexuality
of all shapes and sizes in the woman’s romance. Not surprisingly, the fi rst
venue devoted solely to erotic romance, Ellora’s Cave, was fan based. It
began as a rogue website in 2000 and grew to become a major online pub-
lishing player. The 2009 Ellora’s Cave website listed its erotic romance
categories as “capture/bondage,” “contemporary,” “historical,” “paranor-
mal,” “romantic suspense,” “time travel,” “western,” “vampire,” “werewolf/
shape-shifter,” and “futuristic/sci-fi”; by 2011, themes and imprints had
multiplied exponentially.37 The new subgenre officially went mainstream
in 2005, when the classic romance publishers Harlequin, Avon, and Pen-
guin created their own erotica imprints.38 Gone now (except in a handful of
subgenres, such as the very popular Amish romances, nicknamed “bonnet
 books”) is the single kiss or passionate embrace between the heroine and
her lover as the sole marker for the consummation of their love.39 In its
place are detailed erotic scenes that can happen almost from the first meet-
ing. These erotic romances carry perhaps a faint echo of the more liber-
108 tinish male Gothick novels of the late eighteenth century, but in the long
history of the women’s romance they are unprecedented.
Even with all the new flavors, however, the structural conventions of
G o t h ic k a

the classic sentimental romance remain so strong that they tend to trump
those of the genres they have blended with: soft-core pornography is es-
sentially framed within a heterosexual relationship that is monogamous
after the first encounter.
In outer space or contemporary Manhattan, in the year 3000 or in Re-
gency London, a charismatic Byronic hero and a strong-willed heroine will
meet, hate, fall in love with, and ultimately pledge eternal loyalty to each
other. Even in highly erotic stories, the spine of the story remains mostly,
and somewhat incongruously, the same: a fiery initial clash between two
indomitable wills violently attracted to each other, a subplot in which the
apparently dubious character or activities of the male lover are gradually
revealed to be good, their reconciliation and his pledge of absolute mo-
nogamy at the end. He dominates, she challenges; he conquers sexually but
in the end is bound by sexual fidelity.
What prompts this unlikely about-face in sexual habits? The conven-
tions of the new Gothick romance demand that the male lover’s (and far
less frequently the heroine’s) promiscuity is permanently quenched by
what the “Smart Bitches,” romance critics Sarah Wendell and Candy
Tan, have wittily dubbed the “Magic Hoo Hoo,” or best sex ever, dispensed
by his new mate.40 It’s like nothing he’s ever experienced before, ever, and
very quickly brings him to his knees, so to speak. It is also a convenient
device for guaranteeing the time-honored status quo of middle-class het-
erosexual marriage in the face of the potential disruptions of unbridled
sexuality.
Stephanie Laurens’s 1998 Regency historical, Devil’s Bride, offers a good
example of a traditional romance writer juggling these old and new erotic
conventions within a hybrid mystery-romance. The heroine—in a mild
twist, an aristocrat of independent means who hires herself out as a govern-
ess only to exercise her skills as a teacher—meets her future mate in a fa-
miliar, if more heated, version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester
on horseback: “A massive black stallion screamed and reared over her,
iron-tipped hooves flailing within inches of her head. On the beast’s back
sat a man to match the horse, black-clad shoulders blocking out the twi-
light, dark mane wild, features harsh— satanic.” 41
The rider’s nickname, appropriately, is “Devil” (his male relatives are 109
Scandal, Demon, Gabriel, and Lucifer), and the novel’s back cover sums up
the classic romance conundrum the story presents: “Was he the husband of

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
her dreams . . . or a dev il in disguise?” When Honoria’s reputation is com-
promised by spending the night with Dev il as they guard the body of a
murder victim in a storm, he insists they marry, mainly because he desires
her so intensely. Honoria refuses, on the surface because she wants her
freedom and wishes to travel to Africa, but in reality because she has been
profoundly traumatized by the deaths of a younger brother and sister.
As the murder mystery subplot works its way through the story, Dev il’s
lust is transmuted into love and his mother tells Honoria he is a “good
man” under all the wild behavior. When Honoria’s own sexual desires are
awakened, he refuses to satisfy her until she has pledged to become his wife
with her full heart. This she is able to do after Dev il’s own life has been put
in jeopardy and she realizes the depth of her feelings for him. Their mar-
riage, which takes place after they have several episodes of perfect initia-
tory sex that relieve Honoria of her virginity, occurs two-thirds of the way
through the story instead of at the end, where the old conventions would
have it. This displacement of the traditional romance climax and resolu-
tion allows the unveiling of the murderer to provide the final plot point
and resolution in this mixed-genre romance-suspense tale.
In other romance subgenres, however, fault lines were rapidly appearing
in the foundational tenet that the story must close in a traditional mono-
gamous relationship between a man and a woman. In the 1990s Laurell K.
Hamilton and Poppy Z. Brite introduced heroines who were not tied
sexually to a single partner; in the latter case the sexual partners were not
necessarily male. Multiple partners, nonconventional “couple units,” and
same-sex romance erotica (with male on male being especially popular
with female readers, a preference that fan slash fiction also demonstrates)
represented a small but growing component of women’s romance as it moved
into the twenty-first century.
The second big change of the 1990s was the ditching, in many of the
new hybrid subgenres, of the Radcliffe “explained supernatural” model.
 As part of the larger post-1960s mainstreaming of supernaturalism out of
its pulp and B movie ghetto, werewolves, vampires, supernatural crea-
tures, and otherworldly phenomena of all sorts have completely overrun
the traditional world of romance. Gone forever are the teasing hints of
110 ghosts but in the end no ghosts at all, only a very human lover. The domi-
nant subgenre of women’s romance is now the paranormal romance. (Para-
normal, of course, is one of those great twentieth-century euphemisms, like
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extradimensional, that gives the old-fashioned supernatural a quasi-scientific

spin.) Editors express surprise at the current ubiquity of the paranormal
romance, vaguely hypothesizing that it taps into “age-old longings” as
they genuflect to a bona fide commercial behemoth.42
As this new trend developed over two decades, the heroine herself, tak-
ing on the male warrior role for the fi rst time, was initially represented
as a foe of the traditional dark-side supernatural. Inevitably, however, this
character began literally and figuratively sleeping with the enemy, and
pretty soon she wound up “Changed” into a new member of the other side,
which suddenly started looking not so dark after all. In the post-2000 para-
normal romances, as Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have pointed out, the
old rape theme plays out on a different level when the heroine, following
the possession trope of demonology, is Changed against her will into a
supernatural creature. After losing her humanity/virginity, she must ad-
just to the consequences of her forever altered, but also weirdly empow-
ered, existence.43 This is the arc traversed, for example, over the numerous
volumes in Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993– ), but it
can also be traced as an overall pattern in new Gothick fictions of all de-
scriptions. (The vampire subcategory of the paranormal romance will be
the subject of the next chapter.)
A precursor of this trend by a literary writer working outside the ro-
mance genre, Hillary Mantel’s Fludd is a late twentieth-century bridge
novel that throws some light on the direction these stories would take.
The Gothick women’s romance always had its high literary satirists, start-
ing with Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey, and many twentieth-century
Anglo-American women writers in the psychological-realist tradition (in-
cluding Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol
Oates) have also tried their hand, seriously as well as satirically, in this
genre. Mantel’s novel Fludd (1989) is something different, however. A
hybrid Gothick supernaturalist satire, it still falls more in the classic ro-
mance category than this author’s other arguably literary Gothick novels
The Giant, O’Brien (1998), and Beyond Black (2005). Featuring a dangerous
stranger and an imperiled woman who are erotically attracted to each
other, Fludd launches an insider’s (not Protestant) faux Catholic attack 111
against (among other targets) shallow attempts to drag a superstitious
flock into the modern era. Mantel replaces the stock figure of Satan as

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
homme fatal with a shadowy transgressive supernatural figure, based on
the sixteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Fludd, who brings the
story to its pre–Vatican II (and pre-Enlightenment) alchemical resolution.
The charged Gothick locus of Mantel’s black supernatural comedy is
St. Thomas Aquinas, a decrepit Gothic Revival Catholic church in the hin-
terlands of 1950s provincial England. The church’s “music-hall medieval-
ism” of mongrel architecture and cheap stained glass still harbors within
it, mysteriously, “aggregations of darkness, with channels of thicker dark-
ness between.” In that haunted space stands a bevy of plaster saints that the
benighted parishioners (who, as their long-suffering priest declares, are
not Christians but “Catholics and heathens”) worship in a haze of tribal
confusion about the magical properties each possesses. The saints’ statues
have attracted the ire of the parish’s ambitious bishop, who brands them as
“idolatry” and—in an eerie echo of the stripping of the altars during the
English Reformation— orders the priest, Father Angewin, to remove these
superstitious relics of the old image-based religion from his church.44 At
the critical moment when the bishop helpfully suggests that Angewin may
need an assistant to help him, footsteps sound in the empty room above
them and the priest feels an invisible hand brush his arm. The very atmo-
sphere itself is materializing to produce what is needed to effect supernatu-
ral Change.
After the priest has the statues buried in shallow graves behind the
church, a Gothick knock on his door late one stormy night reveals “a tall,
dim shape, a man wrapped in a dark cloak, holes for mouth and eyes.” This
shape resolves into “the figure of a young man” in clerical costume who
remains, for the rest of the story, very hard for the other characters to per-
ceive as a physical body. The moment this entity introduces himself as
Fludd and announces he’s come to stay, however, the alchemical process
officially gets under way.
 Alchemy, that amalgam of Old Goth medieval Aristotelian science and
heterodox religiosity, is all about “releasing spirit from matter,” as the
newcomer Fludd puts it. It is both a material and an immaterial process, a
“transformation . . . of body, soul and spirit” all at the same time.45 Accord-
112 ing to its vitalist principles, an adept can transmute materials in the world
outside him—turn lead to gold, find the lapis or philosopher’s stone— only
if he is working a similar moral transmutation inside himself.46 The sham
G o t h ic k a

curate Fludd, an alchemist who has transferred his work from metals
to human beings, rightly declares, “I think I can only help myself,” add-
ing significantly, “And make, perhaps, one or two little adjustments in
the parish.” 47
Make adjustments is exactly what Fludd proceeds to do in all the prin-
cipals, but most especially in Sister Philomena, a young sister from Ire-
land who belongs not in the nunnery but in the world. In a slow seduction
as delicately titillating as one any old-style romance writer could create,
Fludd liberates Philly to her true self, aka Roisin O’Halloran, via sexual
initiation. But it is a very unusual seduction, since the rules of alchemy
demand that the instigator must be Philly herself and not this mysterious
newcomer. Fludd knows he “can’t light the furnace” for her; furthermore,
“the spark must be set” not by Philly herself but rather, in a blasphemous
echo of Mary’s impregnation by the Holy Spirit, “by a shaft of celestial
light” paradoxically experienced from within.
When they first meet secretly in a chilly outdoor shed, then, it is to
have an earnest theological discussion. In the course of their conversa-
tion, Philly feels warmth that builds slowly to a “Mediterranean frenzy of
heat.” Fludd, startled, wonders if the transformative process, the heating
of the vessel, has begun in her. It has, and Fludd in turn feels himself hav-
ing human, fleshly desires for the first time as he lays out for Philly a very
Hermetic interpretation of Christian doctrine. The thing they must both
murder, he tells her, is the past, not the flesh. “I think we must accommo-
date our bodies, you know. I think we must fi nd some good in them. . . .
[G]race perfects nature. It doesn’t destroy it.”48 Later that night, back at
the nunnery, he takes off her cap and the pins in her hair, kisses her, tells
her she knows what she must do.
Like the lovers fleeing the baron’s castle in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Fludd
and Roisin escape from St. Thomas Aquinas and the nunnery straight to
the clean sheets of a good hotel in Manchester. In a total upending of
romance convention, however, Fludd doesn’t stick around to pledge life-
time fealty after taking her virginity. By giving her “Heaven instead of
Hell,” he has indeed delivered Roisin into the journey of her true life, but
as an embodied principle of change, he “cannot travel the route on [her] 113
behalf.”49 This is in fact the covenant of the “Alchymical Wedding,” the
internal union of opposites within the self, that takes the place of real-life

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
marriage for Roisin, née Philomena.
What Fludd also gives her—in a nod to the lead-to-gold prosperity
quest that is equally important in the alchemical process—is a hefty wad of
money to start this new life with. Reflecting on the fact that he has left her
this instead of a love note, Roisin correctly concludes: “This money is like
love. . . . Once you have some, once it has come into being, it can go on
multiplying, each part dividing itself, doubling and doubling like the cells
of an embryo. . . . And they say it’s the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say
that. Catholics know better.”50
Roisin gets her own blue sky happy ending when she walks out of the
hotel alone to fi nd that the leaden city of Manchester has also turned to
gold:

A ground-frost forms a gilded haze over the pavements, and great

buildings, the temples of commerce, shimmer as if their walls were
made of stone. . . . [E]verything about her . . . seemed to her to have
been freshly created—made overnight, manufactured by some new and
ingenious process that left them clean and hard-edged and resplen-
dent, faces immaculate, pavements without a stain.51

In this newly transformed world she can go anywhere, do anything— and

she will. The former bride of God is reborn not as the bride of Death but
as a human woman with her life before her.
Back at St. Thomas Aquinas, Fludd’s catalyzing presence has triggered
the digging up of the buried saints and their restoration in the church, the
turning of alcoholic Father Angewin’s whiskey into healthful water,
and the transfer of a disfiguring wart from the person of his housekeeper
to the dreadful Mother Perpetua, the abbess with “tombstone teeth” who
mysteriously bursts into flames (in place of the church building) before she
 can prevent Philly from making her escape. Even the saints themselves
have been not been spared the alchemical fires; when the statue of Agatha
is unearthed, as a result of her temporary mortifi catio (the alchemical pro-
cess of decomposition prerequisite to rebirth), the formerly saintly ex-
114 pression on her face has turned “sly.”
Though various characters in the story debate this point, Fludd is not
to be confused with the Dev il. He is not the “great rough thing” Sister
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Philomena thought she heard breathing outside her door when she was
seven, nor even the one Mantel herself claims to have seen at the same age
in the family garden.52 The Dev il in this story, as Father Angewin under-
stands better than Fludd himself, is an obsequious tobacconist named Judd
McEvoy, a dangerously ordinary, morally ambiguous fellow who pops up
everywhere and declares himself only an “onlooker” to life’s events. Fludd,
on the other hand, proves an homme fatal only to hidebound orthodoxy,
hypocrites, and fuzzy revisionism. Along with all the chemistry set para-
phernalia, his Art demands “knowledge and faith, gentle speech and good
works.” These are not the Dev il’s tools.
Mantel’s brief epilogue to the story is a curious set piece, a description
of an Italian master’s painting of the Virgin and Child. In the background
outside her chamber a small white dog resonates in the reader’s mind with
the white dog that the children of the benighted village St. Thomas Aqui-
nas serves touch for good luck, not to mention St. Dominic’s stalwart com-
panion. The Virgin is reading the First Psalm “with its message of utter
reassurance: ‘For the Lord knoweth the ways of the just; and the ways of
the wicked shall perish.’ ” Though she looks sad, closer inspection reveals
a  “near-smirk” on her face. These two sly, smirking virgins, Mary and
Agatha, suggest that in Mantel’s Gothick, very heterodox faux Catholic
universe, the categories “good” and “evil” alike are subsumed within the
deeper life principle that expresses itself as transformation into fullness.
Even romance heroines more conventional than Roisin fi nd their true
identity by passing through spiritual death and rebirth in the alchemical
refiner’s fire. As the next chapter will show, the vampire romance writers
of the twenty-first century reinvent this rite of passage when they turn the
vampire homme fatal, portrayed for two hundred years as a ruthless, unre-
deemed killer, into the ethical, committed lover of a heroine whose fate is
to find her true identity by dying and triumphantly joining him on a trans-
formed dark side. In this radical reinvention of the Gothick, not only is the
Lord of the Underworld tamed to enter the domestic world of marriage,
but the young girl enters his world as an equal, assuming his otherworldly
powers and more.
Or as Fludd the alchemist put it, “It is no more surprising to be born
twice than to be born once.” 115

g o t h ic k rom a nc e
The vampire Edward displays his diamond Tantric body. From the movie The Twilight
Saga: New Moon (2009). © Summit Entertainment.
 six

the bright god beckons

The New Vampire Romance

Think of it Lover! I and Thee

Permitted—face to face to be—
After a Life— A Death—We’ll say—
For Death was that—
And this—is Thee—
—Emily Dickinson

Hard though it may be to imagine, vampires at one point were considered

hideous, terrifying creatures.
— Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan

1.

Before they were invited in the open window of Gothick and Romantic
literature slightly more than two centuries ago, vampires barely figured in
the Western Eu ropean record. Unlike the indigenous werewolf, whose
legendary paw prints lead from Greek and Roman antiquity through
twelfth-century French lais and English histories, vampires are exotic
transplants.1 Their story is native not to Hungary or Transylvania, as is
almost universally believed, but rather to a different well-defined eastern
territory that includes Silesia, Bohemia, the southern Slavic regions, and
Greece. Vampires were unknown in Western Eu rope by either name or
 bloodsucking habits until the late sixteenth century, when accounts of rev-
enants climbing out of their graves to attack their own families began to
trickle in from southeast Europe.
Though French newspapers were reporting cases in Poland and Russia
118 in the 1690s, it was early eighteenth-century accounts of vampire “epi-
demics” in south and southeast Eu rope, particularly Serbia, that capti-
vated the imaginations of French and English newspaper readers, so much
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so that vampires quickly became “the Enlightenment’s favorite undead.”2

The object of western European fascination was quickly converted into
a handy political metaphor as well as the subject of moralizing tales and
medical speculations.3 Possibly the most notorious journalistic report of
this period was about a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, one Arnold
Paule, who complained of being attacked by a Turkish vampire and then,
after death, became one himself and menaced his own family until his
body and those of his victims were exhumed. When no signs of decay
were visible, villagers pierced the corpses’ hearts with stakes, burned the
bodies, and threw the ashes back into the graves.4
This widely circulated report of the 1720s came from a Serbian town
near Belgrade, an outlying territory of the Austro-Hungarian empire that
had formerly been part of the Turkish empire. Because that incident, and
others like it, happened in Serbia, and because Serbia lay within the borders
of the greater Hungarian kingdom, Hungary became forever linked to
vampires in the western European imagination even though the Hungar-
ian word vampir, borrowed from Polish and Russian upyr (meaning “rush of
wind” and suggesting swiftness) did not appear in that country until more
than a century after it had spread through the major European languages.5
The link to Austria-Hungary would be permanently cemented at the
end of the next century by Bram Stoker, who located his vampire aris-
tocrat in another outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, Transylvania.
Count Dracula’s fictional lineage, of course, was nominally Romanian,
not Hungarian or Transylvanian, but that distinction was dissolved when a
Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, took the count’s role in the 1936 movie ver-
sion. Now, thanks to its global circulation in Gothick pop culture, a Hun-
garian loanword became the generic label for reanimated corpses of vary-
ing sorts in folklore the world over.
The historian Gábor Klaniczay links western Eu rope’s sudden love
affair with the vampire with the simultaneous decline of the belief in
witches in the early eighteenth century. In England the last execution for
witchcraft took place in 1682, the last trial in 1717. In 1735, the last of a se-
ries of Witchcraft Acts was radically altered to make the “pretence” of
sorcery, rather than sorcery itself, illegal—a real-world move that helped
open wide the door of the imaginary for vampires.6 Though witches were 119
still being burned across central and eastern Europe during this time, the
handful of vampire reports from the southeast regions excited much greater

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
interest in England, France, and Germany, where the great shift in world-
view during the seventeenth century had led, as we have seen, to much
ambivalence around the matter of supernatural agency.7 As God’s heaven
and the natural world were increasingly seen to operate from very separate
rules, it became less and less defensible to use the “witchcraft explanatory
grid” (in Stuart Clark’s words) for inexplicable or catastrophic events in
one’s neighborhood.8 Because witchcraft couldn’t be proven using the ma-
terialist rubric of the new sciences, the idea of witches as a real phenome-
non began to fade in mainstream intellectual thinking even as a nostalgic
attraction to supernaturalism lingered in the popular mind.
In the vacuum left by witches, vampires presented a convenient vehicle
for metaphysical fudging. On one hand, they could be handed over to medi-
cal experts who could expound physical theories about the phenomenon.9
On the other, the ghastly parody of the Christian blood sacrament that
vampires seemed to enact made a seamless replacement for the witches’
Sabbath and its blasphemous reversals of Christian ritual.10 The figure of
the vampire would be denounced by Christian doctrinalists of all denomi-
nations even as it rang a loud, clear bell in the sub-Zeitgeist of the popular
imagination— a bell that would keep on ringing, louder if not more clearly,
for the next three centuries. And on the third hand, vampires as an infec-
tion imported from the exotic east were so very conveniently “not our
kind,” allowing for an easy form of not-so-subliminal ethnic scapegoating.
By the time Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, the real-life tidal wave of immi-
grants from eastern Europe dovetailed all too neatly in the English public’s
imagination with the sinister Russian death schooner Demeter embarking
from Varna, Bulgaria, loaded with the count’s sinister coffin.11
Enlightenment Europe’s appropriation of vampire stories was also made
possible by the lingering presence at home of Old Goth folk beliefs, for-
merly held as true but by this time mostly consigned to the wastebin of su-
perstition. Vampirelike creatures of early medieval Germanic lore included
 witches who could suck out a man’s insides, the Icelandic corpse demons
known as draugrs, and other forms of the undead. Across northern Eu-
rope the bodies of these revenants traditionally required burning to de-
stroy their power.12 In England pounding a stake through the heart of a
120 corpse was already a well-known custom; according to Keith Thomas, it
remained the “legally required method of burial” for suicides until 1823,
presumably to keep the unquiet soul from wandering among the living.13
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As medical interest in the phenomenon waned, poetry and stories about

vampires or vampirelike fairy queens began appearing in Germany (e.g.,
Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth”) and elsewhere on the Continent around
the turn of the nineteenth century. In the Gothick crucible the vampire
quickly shed the coarse behavior of Serbian peasants who simply threw
themselves upon family and neighbors for a convenient feed and rein-
vented himself as a suave, sophisticated homme fatal aristocrat. In what
Christopher Frayling wittily dubbed the “haemosexual” erotic motif, these
transformed vampire characters were not just villains, they were sexual
predators administering the kiss of death to their victims as they stole their
blood.14
The seminal story establishing this new Gothick subgenre was John
William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819), a work that grew indirectly
out of that infamous summer of 1816 when Lord Byron, the poet Percy
Shelley and his wife, Mary, and other guests gathered at the Villa Diodati
near Geneva. Byron had just received a copy of Coleridge’s Gothick poem
“Christabel” and repeated some verses about the malicious fairy Geral-
dine’s breast to Shelley, who (in the words of Polidori, who was Byron’s
youthful attending physician), “suddenly shrieking and putting his hands
to his head, ran out of the room.”15 The group thereupon began a Gothick
conversation about sex and horror that led, later that night, to the famous
storytelling wager proposed by Byron that produced Mary Shelley’s Fran-
kenstein, a fragment of a vampire story from Byron (later incorporated into
“The Giaour”), and a long novel, Ernestus Berchtold, or the Modern Oedipus,
by Polidori that history has long forgotten.
What history does remember is the novella Polidori produced shortly
afterward that borrowed shamelessly from Byron’s fragment even as it
slandered its author, whom Polidori had formerly hero-worshipped, in the
unflattering portrait of the charismatic Lord Ruthven, a revenant aristo-
crat who woos young women and feasts on their blood to give himself
eternal life. Showing greater (if possibly accidental) historical accuracy
than vampire chroniclers before or after, Polidori has his dissolute lordling
undergo his Change in Greece, which was not coincidentally Byron’s own
stomping ground.16
Polidori’s achievement in The Vampyre was to fuse the exotic folklore of 121
the vampire seamlessly with the figure of the Romantic/Satanic homme
fatal in a setup made much more acceptable to western European popular

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
imagination because the main character contracts the supernatural conta-
gion not at home but in a remote corner of Catholic Europe. Lord Ruthven
the vampire, vile seducer and murderer of maidens, was eagerly appropri-
ated by a generation of playwrights working in the new Gothick-linked
genre of melodrama. In the rowdy London theaters a large component of
the audience was thirteen-year-old fanboys, not coincidentally also Hol-
lywood’s current target demographic for horror films.17 Theater produc-
tions that were either direct borrowings from Polidori or later adaptations
of James Malcolm Rymer’s serialized potboiler Varney the Vampire: or, the
Feast of Blood (1845–1847), and other vampire fiction were wildly popular
on the stages of Paris, London, and cities across the United States from
the 1820s through the mid-nineteenth century.18
By this time a new Gothick subgenre, the Victorian ghost story, had also
emerged, foregrounding mostly malevolent spirits of the dead that were
often tied to the classic Gothick castles or mansions dating to the Old Goth
Catholic past. Vampires quickly found a place in these tales, helping to
create a new supernatural imaginary that claimed a territory outside a spe-
cifically Christian context while reinforcing the Protestant Gothick am-
bience of malignant evil. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s daring “Carmilla”
(1872) is the story of a homoerotic female vampire whose exquisitely slow
seduction and attempted murder of a young girl is set in the vampire-
associated region of Styria.19 Writers famous and obscure, including Poe,
Hawthorne, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Gogol, and even Tolstoy, tried their
hand at tales of vampires or closely related supernatural entities over the
course of the nineteenth century.20
Polidori’s work remained the Gothick vampire standard in England and
America until the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which in
turn established a new template that would last another hundred years.21
A Dubliner who became the actor Henry Irving’s longtime stage manager
and confidante, Stoker spent six years researching and writing his novel.
 Originally setting the tale in Styria, the venue of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,”
he switched to Transylvania mainly after reading an article by an En-
glishwoman, Emily Gerard,22 which described the Transylvanian folklore
tradition of strigoi, reanimated corpses, using the vocabulary of the already
122 familiar vampire trope.23 Stoker’s notes show that in his reading of histo-
ries of Romania, his eye was caught by the word dracul, meaning “devil” or
“dragon,” and the fact that one voivode named Dracula waged war against
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the Turks and was defeated by them.24 Not until twentieth-century com-
mentators got to work on Vlad the Impaler and his son Vlad Dracul, how-
ever, did these historical figures (along with the conflation of impalement
as the Turkish-influenced method of executing soldiers with the preferred
way of destroying vampires) become inextricably fused with the fictional
character of Dracula, who Stoker has Van Helsing declare was a “most
wonderful” man while he was still alive.25 There is no evidence that Stoker
knew anything as much about the two Vlads as we do now or ever based
his character on either of them. As with the evolution of the word vampire
itself, several centuries’ worth of mythologizing of individual authors’ cre-
ations has effectively erased the line between fiction and folklore.
Just as the regions native to the upyr tradition gladly embraced the post-
Polidori sexualized aristocratic vampire as their own, regions with no such
indigenous tradition whatever began experiencing vampire outbreaks in
the wake of the European reports followed by Polidori, Varney the Vampire,
and endless productions of vampire melodrama. Most famous of the so-
called New England vampires was Mercy Brown, a young Exeter, Rhode
Island, woman whose body was exhumed and her heart removed in 1892
after rumors of vampirism.26 Found among Stoker’s paper was an Ameri-
can newspaper clipping from 1896 detailing the digging up of numerous
graves in the vicinity of Newport, Rhode Island, for the purpose of burn-
ing the corpses’ hearts. An ethnologist declared the belief in vampires to
be “rampant” in isolated regions of the state.27
The novel Dracula introduced many new elements to the Gothick vam-
pire story, most notably the term undead and the use of the crucifi x as a
faux Catholic charm for warding off vampires. (Stoker’s character Jona-
than Harker dismisses this as a “superstition” of the Transylvanian peas-
antry until he discovers that it actually seems to work.) Other soon-to-be
conventions that Stoker created include the vampire’s aversion to garlic
(from actual Romanian folk beliefs about the strigoi), the coffin filled with
native soil, the vampire’s inability to cast a reflection in the mirror, and its
requirement of an invitation to enter a human household.28 Count Drac-
ula can, however, walk in the daylight; the sun as destroyer of vampires
was a twist added in twentieth-century movie versions. Dracula is, fi nally,
more powerful than previous fictional vampires: he possesses a demigod’s 123
power to change the weather according to his needs and to shape-shift into
a bat, a dog, or a cloud of mist.

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
Like the male Gothick writers Walpole and Monk before him, Stoker
splits his imperiled female character in two: Mina Harker, who survives
the vampire attack, and Lucy Westenra, who does not. Lucy is the first
fictional vampire to be shown before and after her Change, uniting in one
character the innocence and monstrousness previously expressed in such
dualities as Laura and Carmilla in Le Fanu’s story and Jane Eyre and mad
Bertha Rochester before them. In the vampire subgenre Lucy would serve
as a provocative model for many two-in-one hybrids to come.
The charismatic Henry Irving has often been cited as a probable model
for Dracula; what’s intriguing is how much Stoker’s decades-long role as
faithful employee and factotum recalls John Polidori’s much briefer sub-
servient relationship to Byron. Though the count is an aristocrat who goes
after young women (as well as Jonathan Harker himself) in the best homme
fatal manner, he displays a great deal more Thanatos than Eros. Stoker’s
Dracula is a pale, ugly old man unless he’s recently been feeding, a rejuve-
nating activity that improves his complexion and darkens his hair. He has
foul breath and a thick white mustache; unlike Polidori’s Byron-modeled
Lord Ruthven, he’s neither handsome nor inherently attractive to young
women. He works his will on Lucy and Mina not by seduction but rather
by the old Satanic template of involuntary possession: they simply lose their
power to resist in his presence.
Dracula enjoyed considerable success as a novel, but the story did not
become a broad popular culture phenomenon until it made the journey
into film: first by the German filmmaker Friedrich Murnau (Nosferatu,
eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922), then most famously in Tod Browning’s
1931 Dracula, adapted from a hit Broadway stage version of the novel and
starring the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi, who became completely identi-
fied with the role.29 This was followed in Europe by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s
Vampyr— Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932). For the next few decades the
Hollywood version produced a deluge of Dracula-inspired vampire films,
 sequels, and parodies as the opera-cloak-clad Transylvanian vampire
became an iconic image in the sub-Zeitgeist.30 The midcentury comic
parodies especially, starting with movies such as Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein (1948), in which Lugosi appears as a buffoon Dracula, right
124 through to Love at First Bite (1979) and others, served to soften the sinister
Gothick figure and lay the foundations for the appearance of the first
halfway sympathetic media vampire, the tortured but lovable Barnabas of
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the soap opera Dark Shadows (1966–1971).31

The next great tectonic shift in the mythos fl ipped the vampire from
antagonist to protagonist, villain to antihero. Anne Rice’s novel Interview
with the Vampire (1976) was a radical innovation in this subgenre because it
was the first to tell the story from the vampire’s point of view, foreground-
ing him not exactly as a good person but certainly as far more dimensional
and ethical than any vampire character before him. There is no dearth
of the traditional dark Gothick in Rice’s vampire world, which is full of
sadomasochism and scenes of brutal butchery, but Louis, the vampire
who tells his story to a human witness, has moral qualms about murdering
humans, and his involuntary metamorphosis into a killer is rendered with
sympathetic understanding.
Polidori framed his vampire’s murderous need to suck blood in a bogus
courtship and marriage with a young female; whether Lord Ruthven has
intercourse with his doomed brides is left an open question since he seems
to marry and kill them virtually at the same moment, and offstage to boot.
Rice’s vampires do not have intercourse with each other or with humans,
and Louis’s thwarted love for Claudia, whom he has made an eternal six-
year-old, becomes the object of her frustrated scorn. For Rice as for Stoker,
the fatal bite takes the place of sex, creating an atmosphere that is per-
versely erotic by virtue of this displacement. Though they freely kill men,
women, and children, Rice’s male vampires prefer turning their male vic-
tims, a preference that creates a strong homoerotic undercurrent.
Representing vampires as subjects, not objects, was the first of three
new late twentieth-century elements introduced by Rice and others that
would prove crucial in shifting some portions of the vampire subgenre
away from the dark side of traditional Gothick. The second new element
was a more explicit disassociation of vampires from a Christian matrix.
Bram Stoker had repositioned his undead creatures within the classic faux
Catholic Gothick when he made them vulnerable to crucifi xes and holy
water (throwing in a black dog, traditionally the Dev il’s familiar, for good
measure). Rice’s vampires, in contrast, are not frightened by crucifi xes
unless they were devout Catholics in their lifetimes, and her sophisticated
European vampire Armand emphatically tells the newbie Louis that they 125
are not the “children of Satan.” Vampires have no “discourse” with either
God or the Dev il, Armand says; if God doesn’t exist, then vampires have

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
the “highest consciousness” of any being in the world because they have the
perspective to understand the passage of time and the value of human life.32
This leads us to the third important element Rice adds to the legend, the
upgrading of vampires from “undead” to “immortals,” with the strongest
vampires becoming gods over the centuries. As she develops her story in
subsequent volumes, Rice establishes a sacred genealogy of vampires that
stretches back from the “Mother and Father,” Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris,
to the human queen Akasha, who becomes Mother of the vampires; Stok-
er’s Transylvanian vampires figure here only as a shambling subspecies in a
walk-on part.33 In this new representation, the process of becoming a vam-
pire is one of expansion of consciousness leading to divinization: vampires
as transfigured humans, gods incarnated on earth— a theme that will be
taken up again and again in the twenty-first-century versions of the mythos.
The shadow of the old, bad vampires still falls heavily over the first
novels in Rice’s series, however. For Louis, who can’t stomach the acts of
extreme violence he and the other vampires commit, evil remains an “all-
consuming subject . . . obliterating all other concerns,” a focus that may
reflect Rice’s own position as an ex-Catholic as well as a foreshadowing of
her own later shift in spirituality.34 Lestat, who becomes the central charac-
ter in the series, passes through a rock star period (around the same time,
the eighties and early nineties, that Satan is being drawn as David Bowie
and John Constantine as Sting in the graphic novel world). The later nov-
els wax grandiose: in Memnoch the Devil (1995), a kind of latter-day apoc-
ryphal gospel written twenty years into the series, Lestat meets Satan in
the figure of “the Ordinary Man,” who then takes Lestat on a Dantesque
tour of hell and heaven (with a very brief glimpse of God). By the end of
Memnoch, Lestat has foresworn blood drinking, a key step in the ongoing
transfiguration of the vampire; in Blood Canticle (2004) he allies himself
with the Church.35 Shortly thereafter, in a change of heart very much in
 sync with the larger Gothick millennial shift, Rice renounced her Vampire
Chronicles, returned to Catholic Christianity, and began writing novels
about the life of Jesus. (Rice’s subsequent fiction and later repudiation of
Catholicism will be discussed in chapter 11.)
126 The vampire tale underwent the same intense cross-fertilization and
hybridization in the 1980s and 1990s as women’s romance and Gothick
fiction in general did. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was one of many who grafted
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the new story of a partially rehabilitated, non-Satanic vampire onto the

trunk of the traditional historical romance. Yarbro’s series featuring the
elegant, ethical 800-year-old vampire Saint-Germain, Sieur Ragoczy—
aristocrat, protector of impoverished women, progressive agriculturalist,
publisher, and patron of the arts, who feeds without killing—began in
1978 with Hotel Transylvania and still continues. The count’s lengthy life
span allows him to leapfrog through Eu ropean history, alighting in the
midst of famous hot spots such as the Black Plague, the aftermath of
Napoleon’s conquest and defeat, Venice during the Reformation, and so on.
Like Lestat, Saint-Germain (based on a real-life figure, an eighteenth-
century Frenchman and alchemist around whom many esoteric legends
have clustered) has taken advantage of his centuries-long existence to in-
vest wisely and accumulate untold wealth.36 The character of the Wander-
ing Jew popular with classic Gothick writers such as Monk, Maturin, and
Sue— a man who suffers the angst and depredations of immortality while
reaping the benefits of compound interest—made an easy leap into the
vampire subgenre and shows no signs of dying there, either. An important
new twist was that Saint-Germain feeds on his female victims without kill-
ing them and thus is able to engage in actual sex with them, a significant
marker in the growing humanization of these characters.
With his Space Vampires, published the same year as Interview with the
Vampire, Colin Wilson created the fi rst of what would become an ava-
lanche of hybrid vampire horror/sci-fi stories. His extraterrestrial sexual
predators kill humans for their energy, not their blood, and their fifty-
mile-wide derelict spacecraft, whose interior is “vast as a cathedral,”
becomes the new Gothick mansion in a trope that will carry through to
Alien and beyond.37 Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981) introduces a
sympathetic female vampire, an androgynous creature formed by “paral-
lel evolution” with humans and the last of her alien-seeded species, who
shows deep loyalty and love for the humans she has turned even when they
inevitably die before her.38 The character of the ethical extraterrestrial fe-
male vampire would be taken up by Octavia Butler in her 2005 novel Fledg-
ling, which explores themes in power and enslavement in the context of a
benevolent vampire’s deep moral obligation to her human dependents.39
During the 1990s the hybridizing of genres and folkloric borrowings 127
accelerated into a dizzying array of new forms. Because of the stronger
structural DNA of the sentimental romance, most of the women vampire

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
novelists who began building on Rice’s mythos and adding elements of
their own characteristically folded their stories into a framework of ro-
mance, not horror, to create the new subgenre of vampire romance. Where
Yarbro, like Rice, created a male protagonist, others reverted to the female
main character of the women’s romance, though sometimes in a radically
altered form.
Tanya Huff’s Blood series, begun in 1991 and variously labeled as “vam-
pire detective stories” or “urban fantasies,” features Henry Fitzroy, vam-
pire and bastard son of Henry VIII, as a love interest of the female pro-
tagonist, a wisecracking heroine drawn from the groundbreaking feminist
detective stories of the 1980s. In a bold switch from the classic romance
tradition, the main character is a hard-fighting, hard-loving, aggressive
female, but she enjoys a notably more old-fashioned and extended period
of courtship and foreplay with the vampire Henry than she does with her
human partner, a fellow detective with whom she has a contentious, non-
exclusive relationship. When they’re fi nally going to have sex and Henry
tries to “scoop her up in his arms” in classic Harlequin fashion, however,
Huff’s heroine insists on being the aggressor, pulling the vampire down
and kissing him hard.40
Huff, like Yarbro before her, allows her vampires to feed without killing
their human lovers. Her imaginary world also includes demons and a De-
mon Lord, but as in all Gothick entertainments from Otranto through late
twentieth-century horror fiction, no balancing figure of a Bright Lord is
present. Of an Easter ser vice the narrator comments: “Just for that mo-
ment the faith in life everlasting as promised by the Christian God was
enough to raise a shining wall between the world and the forces of dark-
ness. Too bad it wouldn’t last.”41 Nonetheless, learning that there are vam-
pires in the world moves Vicki to visit a Catholic Church she attended as
a child. While she is sitting in a pew looking at a statue of the Madonna,
she sees a historical vision of Henry Fitzroy, who is wearing the “colors of
 the Madonna,” saving the image from destruction by a Puritan Round-
head as he proudly declares, “The Blessed Virgin is under my pro-
tection.” 42 Far from being a foe of the Church, the vampire Henry has
been its protector.
128 In an increasingly popular trope, Huff mixes vampires and werewolves
in the same story. Warm, emotional, impulsive, and social, ruled by an al-
pha male and an alpha female, Huff’s “wer” clan in rural Canada make a nice
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contrast to the cold, solitary vampire Henry. We will see this Apollonian/
Dionysian, hot/cold pairing resurface in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series,
along with the recurring problem of what to do about your underwear once
you change into a wolf and what to do about your nakedness when you fl ip
back into human form— a dilemma Marie de France’s twelfth-century ly-
canthrope also faced, along with the added disadvantage that anyone taking
possession of his cast-off clothes would keep him from turning back into a
human.43
The next big turn of the vampire screw came from its comedy sub-
subgenre. The 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Joss Whedon,
laid the foundational myth for Whedon’s enormously popular television
series, which began in 1997 and ended in 2003. The story follows an arche-
typal Valley girl cheerleader as she moves with her mother from Los An-
geles to a new town, Sunnydale, that just happens to be situated on the lip
of Hellmouth. As a Chosen One, a special hero selected in each generation
to be a “Slayer” of evil spirits, Buffy battles the menacing creatures, mostly
vampires, who pour out of this metaphysical San Andreas fault. In the film
and the early episodes of the TV series, the vampires are very much old-
fashioned pre-Interview antagonists: evil entities with demonic, distorted
mask-faces to complement their fangs. The traditional identification of
vampires with the Dev il is also underscored with echoes of Satanic ritual
in the character of a ruling underworld vampire called the Master whose
ascension to our world is an imminent threat.
Then the series added a new character, a “bridge” vampire much like
Henry Fitzroy of Huff’s series: the significantly named Angel, a vampire
who gets his human soul back as a result of a gypsy curse and becomes
Buffy’s great unattainable love. When he and Buffy try to consummate
their love and experience “perfect happiness,” Angel is fated to lose his soul
again and returns to evil vampire mode, forcing him into a self-imposed
exile. This thwarted outcome belongs not just to the Gothick vampire
tradition but also (as we will see in the Twilight series) to a much older trope
in which sex between humans and supernatural creatures (whether vam-
pires, fairies, or gods) is likely to be fatal to the human. The Angel charac-
ter got a series spinoff of his own (Angel, 1999–2004) in which his hybrid 129
half-human, half-demon sidekick receives visions from unspecified “pow-
ers that be” directing Angel to save people trapped in bad situations. Like

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the assorted sons of Satan in the graphic novels of this decade, vampires
such as Henry and Angel who strive to do good in spite of their inherently
evil nature are markers for the growing shift from the traditional dark
supernatural into a wider and more flexible vocabulary of good and evil.
The most striking new element in the Buffy story, however, was the
transformation of the passive Gothick heroine assaulted by vampires into
an indomitable female warrior who prevails by equal parts force of charac-
ter and athletic prowess. Two influences came to bear in creating this new
figure: first, the sexually liberated characters that Yarbro, Huff, Laurell
K. Hamilton, Poppy Z. Brite, and other postfeminist romance and horror
writers were already incorporating in their work; second and very differ-
ent, the sexy-babe, martial-arts-proficient female action characters created
during those same decades in Japanese anime and transferred to America
mainly via videogame adaptations. (The anime babes, however, were prob-
ably also inspired in turn by the busty female superheroes of American
Silver Age comics.)The female videogame characters and story lines (cre-
ated by and aimed at male gamers exclusively) were translated in turn into
post-2000 blockbuster movies such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Resi-
dent Evil (2002), and their sequels. The kick-ass heroine figure was picked
up in other television and movie franchises such as Xena: Warrior Princess
(1995–2001), the vampire-werewolf saga Underworld (2003) and its sequels,
and many others.44
The main character of Laurell K. Hamilton’s long-running Anita Blake:
Vampire Hunter series (1993– ) inhabits a world where vampires, zombies,
werewolves, and other supernatural creatures are integrated into ordinary
life. Lycanthropy has been officially labeled a disease; federal laws have
been passed protecting vampires’ rights; breath-mint-ingesting vampires
and humans mingle (albeit uneasily) on the evening streets. Anita takes a
master vampire and a werewolf as her lovers and develops telepathic links
 with both of them. As the series progresses, Anita herself makes the post-
2000 Gothick shift and slowly begins to Change into the creatures she
has been hunting.
The conceit of mainstreaming vampires out of the underworld of hor-
130 ror and into “real life” was taken up by Charlaine Harris in her Southern
Vampire novels (2001– ), which reached a global audience when they were
adapted to Alan Ball’s True Blood HBO television series starting in 2008.
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About his guiding vision for the series, Ball articulates the quintessential
post-2000 Gothick position: “Instead of the supernatural being something
that exists outside of nature, I wanted it to be something that was almost
like a deeper manifestation of nature. Deeper and more primeval. Some-
thing that maybe humans, with our brain structures that we’ve created as
a way to filter reality, can’t comprehend or sometimes even pierce.”45 By its
fourth season, True Blood had added werewolves, fairies, witches, and other
supernatural creatures, all of whom, in a mad display of Gothick hybrid-
ity, engage in sex with humans and each other.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, the vampire story had expanded
its territory exponentially across media platforms into any number of odd
pockets of popular culture.46 In the madness of proliferating and cross-
breeding story lines, the characters themselves also became babewyn hy-
brids: half vampire and half human, half werewolf and half human, half
dev il and half human—part of an escalating trend to graft the special pow-
ers of these creatures onto human characters in the same way that comic
book writers had previously created superheroes who were ordinary hu-
mans possessing a second hidden supernatural identity and graphic novel-
ists were fusing their human characters with gods or dev ils. The end result
in all cases was a hero or heroine possessing something not of this world
in his or her deepest biological nature.
At the same time, inevitably, the vampire mythos began to generate its
own fictional theology and cosmology. White Wolf’s role-playing game
Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) and its innumerable offshoots sets up a
Gnostic universe in which vampires are the evil demiurges who rule the
world. Its guiding premise is that all major events in human history are
caused by the manipulations of vampires (known as the Kindred) descended
from the father of vampires, Cain.47 In an interesting blend of the Gnostic
Gospels and the Wandering Jew legend, the movie Dracula 2000 (2000)
reveals the count’s true identity as Judas Iscariot, sentenced to the hell of
eternal life in an undead body for his betrayal of his Lord.48 In Blade, origi-
nally a comic book, then a series of graphic novels and movies boasting
the now-familiar main character who is half human and half vampire, the
vampires are shown as having their own religion, sacred texts, and Blood
God.49 Adding fuel to the fire was a tidal wave of pseudoscholarly com- 131
pendia, encyclopedias, and annotated editions of all things vampire; much
like Wikipedia entries, their lack of factual accuracy is irrelevant in the

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long run, as they stoke the flames of legend creation by further blurring
the boundary between fiction and reality.
In the first novel of her series, Anne Rice had replaced Stoker’s figure of
the aggressive vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, with a
nameless “interviewer,” an initially neutral but gradually fascinated and
ultimately seduced observer who decides by the end of the story that he
wants to be a vampire, too. Readers of the Vampire Chronicles shared his
reaction. Reporting excitedly that “these were beautiful people and they
got such intense passion and feelings for life,” fans flocked to Rice’s na-
tional reading tours and annual New Orleans Halloween extravaganzas.
Closer identification among fans with the vampire figure led to a growing
lifestyle subculture that adopted the new vampire worldview as its own.
Many Rice fans were inspired to adopt a vampire persona, forming their
own substantial brigade in the ranks of the Goth and heavy metal music
movements of the 1980s.50 Father Sebastian and his “Endless Nights” were
a fi xture of the New York club scene, and similar vampire scenes flourished
in big-city subcultures across Europe and North America through the
next decade.
The vast vampire subculture, composed of much larger, more flamboy-
ant, and heterogeneous populations than the plain-Jane Lovecraft fans
and covens, now ranges from fashion (those elegant Goth Lolis of Tokyo
pop) to the pancake makeup and black nail polish of Goth clubbers and
serious costumers; the extremes of tattooing, piercing, and vampire ortho-
dontics (a flourishing industry in the United States); the lifestyle practices
of “psychic vampires” exerting dominance (expressed as “feeding on the
energy” of others) in personal relationships; and, finally, those who actually
do take blood, typically with razor cuts or hypodermic needles. Because of
the emphasis on strength, power, and dominance, the vampire lifestyle cul-
ture has strong ties to the sadomasochistic sex scene. On the endless self-
posted and quasi-documentary videos available online, these Secondary
 Believers, dressed flamboyantly and fanged for the many vampire conven-
tions held in this country and abroad, usually hedge their bets on the ques-
tion of whether vampires are real. “What is reality?” is a common re-
sponse, based on the underlying assumption of personal gnosis that the
132 individual creates his or her own metaphysical/imaginary world. On many
of these sites, one also fi nds the plaintive recurring question: “What does
it say about vampires in the Bible?” (Answer: nothing.)
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Carrying practice into worship are unknown numbers of Primary

Believers, fan-based practitioners of religions founded on the vampire
mythos of Rice and her successors. The Vampire Bible of the Temple of the
Vampire, officially registered as a religion in 1989, states that “we worship
the ancient Sumerian vampire dragon goddess Tiamit, and trace our priest-
hood to the ancient city of Ur.” Its creed runs as follows:

I am a Vampire.
I worship my ego and I worship my life, for I am the only God that is.
I am proud that I am a predatory animal and I honor my animal
instincts.
I exalt my rational mind and hold no belief that is in defiance of
reason.
I recognize the difference between the worlds of truth and fantasy.
I acknowledge the fact that survival is the highest law.
I acknowledge the Powers of Darkness to be hidden natural laws
through which I work my magic.
I know that my beliefs in Ritual are fantasy but the magic is real,
and I respect and acknowledge the results of my magic.
I realize that there is no heaven as there is no hell, and I view death
as the destroyer of life.
Therefore I will make the most of life here and now.
I am a Vampire.
Bow down before me.51

There is no mention of the undead, and here human divinity (“I am the
only God that is”) is simply a metaphor for self-hegemony within a mate-
rialist worldview (there is no heaven or hell, and death is “the destroyer of
life”). The statements “I recognize the difference between the worlds of
truth and fantasy” and “I know my beliefs in Ritual are fantasy but the
magic is real” have built-in caveats. “The magic is real” is a pragmatic
Chaos magick creed holding only the barest hint of supernaturalism.
In contrast, the Order of the Vampire, yet another branch of Michael
Aquino’s Temple of Set that began in the 1990s, “embraces the concepts
of Vampyric Presence as a means to personal power and potential immor- 133
tality.” The Order asserts that “Vampyric powers” including “invisibility,
manipulation, [and] the power of sound and breath” are real and can be

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
accessed by adepts who master such skills as the Posture of Effortless
Power. Acknowledging the “glamour” of vampires, it also promises instruc-
tion in use of cosmetics and techniques of voice and gaze to gain control
over others.52
Why so many, many forms of vampire performativity? Noting that the
earlier Dracula mythos had never given rise to such a phenomenon in the
way the Anne Rice novels did, Katherine Ramsland expressed the chang-
ing sensibility of the 1990s when she wrote: “You might say that the col-
lective cultural subconscious was building toward the day when many of
us would identify with the monster, who in earlier vampire tales had to be
annihilated as the Evil Other. We were beginning to understand that to
take out the vampire with a stake through the heart was to kill a part of
ourselves— a part that might yield some real treasures.”53
What does it mean to become the monster? In part it means identifying
with the dark and rejected aspects of the self that exist in every person,
including the taboo primal energy around violence and sex. That is the
classic Gothick, and by extension Goth, connection. But it also means de-
siring to experience a reality beyond the material world, even if the need
itself is not consciously acknowledged and even if the only vehicles avail-
able are the uniformly dark imaginary supernatural characters that pop
culture presents outside organized religion. Getting to that treasure ulti-
mately requires balancing the scales more evenly between good and evil
supernaturalism and is a prime reason the nature of Gothick monsters,
including vampires, began to change after the turn of the century.
Meanwhile, vampires in their myriad fictive forms keep on serving as
vivid social metaphors much as they did in the eighteenth century. Where
an 1819 American knockoff of Polidori titled The Black Vampyre served
up an uneasy moral about slavery,54 almost two hundred years later vam-
pires are stand-ins for AIDS, racial bigotry, sexual orientation, and “the
terrors of intimacy”;55 for the transition from adolescence to adulthood;56
 for menstruation;57 for power relationships between masters and servants;58
for addiction and abstinence;59 and on and on. Most broadly, vampirism in
the new Gothick seems to function as an emblem of a kind of original sin;
it represents the irresistible impulse to evil the now thoroughly humanized
134 supernatural character must struggle against to stay a moral person. These
characters retain their generic identity (demon, vampire, werewolf ) along
with the innate dark desires connected with that identity (killing humans)
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but are able to rise above their instincts by an act of will that must be tested
again and again.
By the time Stephenie Meyer began publishing her Twilight series in
2005, the big question, not surprisingly, was whether the vampire mythos
had anywhere left to go.

2.

The answer was that it did.

Like all the most successful Gothick novelists, Stephenie Meyer was able
to combine a number of familiar elements in unfamiliar ways that moved
the subgenre in a strikingly new direction. Where most of her predecessor-
contemporaries made (and continue to make) typical late twentieth-century
choices in constructing their evil vampire narratives, Meyer directly taps
into the new Gothick sensibility of the twenty-first century that blends
the monstrous with the divine. And the wild success of her series, which
she conceived in the best Gothick manner from a dream, ramped up the
vampire craze even further.60 Over four novels Meyer tells the story of
sixteen-year-old Bella, a self-described klutz who in the time-honored tra-
dition of Jane Eyre and her “drab merino pelisse” favors sweats over designer
fashions, as she moves back to a small town on Washington’s Olympic
Peninsula when her childlike mother remarries and relocates to Florida.61
Like Buffy, Bella is a mother to her own divorced, feckless Muggle-like
parents, whom she calls by their first names. Despite her low opinion of
herself, Bella attracts boys at her new high school, particularly the wealthy,
devastatingly handsome Edward Cullen, of whom she says, “It was hard to
believe someone so beautiful could be real.” 62
As it turns out, he isn’t, at least not a real human. Edward is a vampire,
frozen in his seventeen-year-old human body for almost a century since
his death during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Edward’s “family” is in fact
a coven run by patriarch Carlisle, an ethical vampire who has foresworn
feeding on humans for the less tasty blood of animals, which he and his
cohorts discreetly seek out at regular intervals in national parks.
Following the old-time women’s romance setup of a bourgeois young
woman of humble means encountering a family of wealthy, mysterious 135
aristocrats, the Cullen family is much higher up on the social ladder than
Bella’s. The “parents” Carlisle and Esme, however, are not only more

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
mature, sophisticated, and attractive, they are also far more emotionally
supportive of Bella than her own human mother and father.63 Family dy-
namics in the Cullen coven are civilized and positive. Their light, airy
McMansion located on an estate outside of town is the striking reverse of
Dracula’s decrepit castle or Rochester’s gloomy Thornfield, though it is
not unlike the ancient vampire Miriam Blaylock’s “fresh and light” Man-
hattan townhouse in Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger. A huge wooden cross,
carved by Carlisle in his pre-vampire days when he was a minister in
seventeenth-century England, hangs in the living room. As is the case with
all Gothick vampires except the wretched Transylvanian throwbacks in
Interview with the Vampire, compound interest keeps the Cullens stagger-
ingly wealthy.
Edward’s first reaction to Bella is fury because he fi xates on her blood:
it’s his heroin, the exact smell he craves most, a fateful circumstance that
forces him to struggle even harder with his vow not to feed on human
blood. Bella the outsider is likewise instinctively drawn to him, and after
Edward uses his vampire’s superhuman speed to save her from being killed
by a runaway truck, their love affair begins.64 To Bella’s suggestion that he
is like Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker, the human alter egos of comic book
superheroes, Edward responds heatedly, “What if I’m not a superhero?
What if I’m the bad guy?” After Bella figures out he’s a vampire, he’s in-
credulous when she tells him that “it doesn’t matter.”65
This is an unusual affair on a number of counts. Most obviously, Ed-
ward must keep his bloodlust for her constantly in check, for when his co-
ven brother Emmett fi xated this same way, it’s implied that he killed the
women. “ ‘You . . . have to risk your life every second you spend with me,”
Edward warns Bella. “You . . . have to turn your back on nature, on human-
ity.” Calling himself “the world’s best predator,” Edward demonstrates his
preternatural strength, ripping thick branches off trees, snorting derisively,
“As if you could fight me off,” as he zooms up to her in an eyeblink. “He’d
 never been less human . . . or more beautiful,” Bella observes. “I sat like a
bird locked in the eyes of a snake.” Even so, somewhat counterintuitively,
she always feels “secure” and “completely safe” in his company.66
What this also means, in terms of a romantic vampire-human relation-
136 ship, is that Edward is physically so strong they can’t have sex because he
might accidentally hurt her or, worse, give into his vampire instincts in
the height of passion and begin feeding. “I can never, never afford to lose
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any kind of control when I’m with you,” he concludes.67 As a result, Bella
and Edward enjoy endless foreplay, a situation that goes a long way to-
ward explaining this series’ enormous popularity among young adoles-
cent girls. That their emotional relationship is foregrounded over sex may
also explain why the mothers of Meyer’s “fanpires” are great enthusiasts of
the books, too. As Laura Miller notes, the vampire romance offers its read-
ers “the opportunity to enjoy an 18th- or 19th-century courtship while
remaining a 21st-century woman.”68 Postponement of sex in favor of an
elaborate wooing staged as a battle of wills was and remains a time-honored
convention of many subcategories of women’s romance, and here it plays
out over the issue of Bella’s determination to become a vampire and Ed-
ward’s resistance to her wish.
Another primal current Meyer taps is the adolescent’s inner world of
emotional extremes, bipolar ups and downs, and black-and-white think-
ing fueled by the feverish dream of absolute, eternal love that is the es-
sence of Romeo and Juliet (one of the classics, along with Wuthering Heights,
she repeatedly references in the series). The same age group that gravi-
tates to horror is also drawn, moth to flame, to the idea of perfect love. As
Bella expresses this dream of first love: “The bond forged between us was
not one that could be broken by absence, distance, or time. . . . As I would
always belong to him, so he would always be mine.”69 The heart of these
books is the romantic interaction between Bella and Edward (and, for a
time, between Bella and the werewolf Jacob). School life is represented in
the most perfunctory way, and other characters are scarcely more than
names; the only reality is the love that Bella and Edward have for each
other. Significantly, both are virgins, physically and emotionally: Edward
died too young ever to have had a human love relationship, so Bella (who
has never had one, either) must show him how.
Miller also notes that the Twilight series hews to the classic Gothick
romance “feminine fantasy,” first laid down in Jane Eyre, “of being deliv-
ered from obscurity by a dazzling, powerful man, of needing to do no more
to prove or fi nd yourself than win his devotion, of being guarded from all
life’s vicissitudes by his boundless strength and wealth.” This, she says, is
itself a kind of vampire sapping women’s strength, exerting a seductive, ir-
resistible pull as it sucks them back into outmoded attitudes about female 137
behavior.70
Meyer is guilty as charged. She presents Edward as the archetypal Har-

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
lequin romance male love object: the well-to-do, sophisticated, dangerous
male lover as dominating father who is forever uttering “low oaths,” who
treats his woman “like a misbehaving child,” tilting Bella’s chin up with his
finger and engaging in other acts of parental control: “He pulled me around
to face him, cradling me in his arms like a small child,” “reached out with
his long arms to pick me up, gripping the tops of my arms like I was a tod-
dler.”71 As Claire Kahane has shown, the underlying hint of father-daughter
romantic love predicated on an absent mother is a central subtext of the
Gothick women’s romance, and (for the first three books, anyway) Bella the
emotional orphan clearly craves this kind of masterful paternal attention.72
The fact that Edward has been to Harvard twice and drives a brand-new
Ferrari does nothing to detract from his charms. She gives up on the idea of
going to college herself because this affair has become her whole life. Con-
tinuing the theme of the old-fashioned Cinderella-style makeover of the
ugly duckling, Edward’s fashionable “sister” Alice gives dowdy Bella beauti-
ful clothes to wear in spite of Bella’s fervent desire to stay a wallflower.
Miller is not the only critic to fi nd Bella “deplorably passive,” but it’s
important to remember that her flaws are self-described: when Bella keeps
insisting that she’s “ordinary,” Edward replies, “You don’t see yourself very
clearly, you know.”73 In her determination to sacrifice her own life to save
her parents, Bella shows enormous bravery and forbearance. In fact, she is
mighty like the Victorian victim heroine identified by Nina Auerbach who
“consecrates herself into a queen.” “Behind the victim’s silence,” Auerbach
says, “lurk mystic powers of control.”74 Bella also resembles the very im-
pressionable Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho: what seems on the surface
her greatest liability, extreme emotional sensitivity, is in fact her greatest
strength—the ability to feel (as opposed to understand) a situation as it
really is.
It would be a mistake, I think, to dismiss the power exchange of the clas-
sic Gothick female romance as one-sided, because the underlying dynamic
 of male sexual and social dominance in these stories is offset, as we saw in
chapter 5, by the woman’s counterassertion of her own values. Bella rights
the lopsided balance of power with Edward by means of a startling deci-
sion: against his violent objections, she wants to become a vampire. Why?
138 Because it will give her the same status Jane Eyre insists on having with
Rochester: parity in the relationship. “A man and woman have to be some-
what equal,” Bella tells Edward,
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as in, one of them can’t always be swooping in and saving the other
one. They have to save each other equally . . . I can’t always be Lois
Lane . . . I want to be Superman, too.75

With this declaration she effectively lays down the conditions for their
relationship.
By the end of the third novel, however, the internal contradictions have
mounted to the point where the story seems destined to hit a dead end. For
many hundreds of pages Bella and the statuelike Edward have been frozen
in their standoff and seem caught in a shadow play of projected desire whose
creepy but inexorable logic is pointing to the next big step in the story:
Bella’s death and transformation into a kind of monster-god in exchange for
sexual consummation and eternal love. Though Bella is fiercely looking
forward to it, readers can’t help feeling a tad apprehensive about this choice
for a young girl. But then Bella herself stops being a real girl in Breaking
Dawn, the last volume in the series, and this is where both the terms and
the feeling tone of the story change drastically. Not only does she get her
wish to be a vampire, she also becomes a demigoddess who engages in
marathon sex and possesses superpowers exceeding even Edward’s.
To bring this transformation about, Meyer pulls various bright threads
from a tapestry of story traditions originating in the folktales, religious
apocrypha, and legends of premodern Western culture, some via the
Gothick and some not. The first of these threads is one we have already
seen: Bella is the bride of Death. She’s in love, after all, with a being whose
deepest instinct is to kill her. In the classic vampire story, the woman who
is seduced by a vampire dies horribly, only to become one of the undead
herself. By the 1990s, the new convention of “feeding without killing” al-
lowed a female protagonist to have a vampire lover without having to die
and become a vampire herself; she could now be the girlfriend of Death,
not the bride, and suffer no fatal consequences. Bella follows Lucy West-
enra’s path through death and out the other side without becoming either
a victim or a monster.
The presence of another ancient trope in the Twilight series helps sub- 139
liminally underscore Bella’s overdetermined role as the bride of Death. It
appears in the two striking physical qualities Meyer’s vampires possess.

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
First, in daylight they don’t turn to dust; rather, they sparkle beautifully,
“like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface.”76 The
sparkling body has immediate associations with the diamond or rainbow
body of Tibetan Buddhism, the normally invisible sheath surrounding the
physical body that connects consciousness to the transcendent realm.77
After death, the diamond body, like the Christian resurrection body or the
Gnostic “radiant” astral body, promises immortality.78 The fact that the
vampires’ diamond bodies are visible to the naked eye in daylight strongly
suggests they belong to some category of the divine, not the demonic.
In  accordance with a number of esoteric religious traditions, they have
reached the highest state of human development on earth, in which, in the
words of a contemporary Theosophist, “enlightenment becomes a literal
fact through the transubstantiation of flesh and blood into an immortal
body of light.”79
Second, building on a convention established by Rice, Meyer’s vam-
pires look and feel like statues.80 Edward’s chiseled beauty does not recall
the sinister figures of Dracula or Lestat but rather the classic outlines of a
Renaissance statue, “carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble,
glittering like crystal”; his body is “hard and cold— and perfect— as an ice
sculpture.” The words marble, statue, and perfect repeat over and over, cre-
ating the sense of a bright and beautiful moving idol (and statues, recall,
are the material doubles of divinities, thought to draw down and possess
their special powers). Bella says cuddling with him feels like “snuggling
with Michelangelo’s David, except that this perfect marble creature
wrapped his arms around me to pull me closer.”81
The motif of loving a statue has been around since Ovid’s story of
Pygmalion and his stone bride, picked up in the Old Goth French dream-
vision poem The Romance of the Rose and circulated in other medieval works
along with myriad popular tales of loving an image of either Venus or Mary,
 the result being the taking of holy vows (if the statue was of Mary) or
death (if it was Venus).82 The nineteenth-century French writer Prosper
Mérimée gave the story a typically Gothick twist in his “Venus d’Ille”
(1837), about a thoughtless bridegroom who puts his wedding ring on the
140 finger of a blackened, recently excavated Roman statue as a joke, only to
find the unamused Goddess of Love crushing him to death ( just as Ed-
ward fears he will do to Bella) in the course of demanding her erotic due.
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As Kenneth Gross puts it, in these stories “certain qualities of the statue
begin to catch hold of those around it. . . . The living statue turns living
persons to stone or brings about their death.”83
A Western storytelling tradition of more than 2,000 years, then, dictates
that loving a statue, getting sucked into its frozen stasis, means you are
going to die. But even as Bella praises Edward’s “stone chest,” his “glass-
smooth lip,” his “sweet breath . . . cold and delicious,” the Twilight scenario
has a major erotic disconnect: in plain human terms, sex with a creature
whose skin is a cold, hard surface is not very sensually enticing, and the
descriptions of their endless foreplay fall understandably flat.84 This is
why readers turn in relief to Bella’s almost–love affair with Jacob, the Na-
tive American who is obliged to become a werewolf when the Cullen vam-
pire family invades his ancestral turf. Jacob is as hot-blooded and emotional
as Edward is cool and distant.
The third link between love and death in Meyer’s story is the ancient
notion of love too passionate and perfect to be experienced in mortal life.
“Fatal passion” is more than simply a function of teenage mood swings; it
was the basis of the Old Goth fin amor or courtly love tradition that began
in the south of France and has deeply impacted Western ideas of romantic
love ever since.85 Provençal trouvères such as William of Poitiers expressed
their undying love, either unrequited or never consummated, for a high-
born lady married to another man: in feudal and religious terms, he is her
obedient vassal, her worshipful supplicant. With its code of secrecy, cor-
rect behavior, and nuanced chastity, fin amor was, as Michael Camille and
many other scholars have described, a form of “pseudo-sacred worship” of
the love object as quasi-divinity.86
By some Old Goth accounts, however, a powerful desire left unfi nished
on earth builds up energies that can ascend to the upper realm to be re-
leased and consummated. This idea was advanced by the Albigensians,
also known as the Cathars, a powerful sect that flourished alongside the
troubadours in the south of France during the twelfth century. A ubiqui-
tous fictional presence in the new Gothick from Dan Brown to scores of
other novels and a cartload of folkloric “nonfiction,” the Cathars were ad-
mired for their renunciation of material goods by no less than St. Dominic 141
himself but were ultimately ruthlessly exterminated by Pope Innocent III’s
crusade of 1209. Their elite group of elect, whom the Inquisition called the

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
perfecti or Pure Ones, practiced sexual abstinence on the grounds that un-
consummated earthly love ensures that the worshipper will be granted a
divine union after death. (Saints, of course, are the orthodox Church’s own
perfecti, divinized virgin humans whose special access to the celestial world
gives them superpowers.)
In his Love in the Western World Denis de Rougemont famously argued
that the troubadours’ unique take on romantic love was based on the he-
retical notions of the Cathars. As an extraordinary time of cultural expan-
sion in France, the twelfth century witnessed, in de Rougemont’s words,
the relaxation of the “patriarchal bond,” the splitting up of the Father deity
into various gods (including, for the Cathars, Lucifer and an unincarnated
Jesus) and the introduction of a feminine principle—both the cult of the
Virgin in the Church itself and Maria, an “immaterial” (not incarnated)
female principle and mother of Jesus who exists outside of our world, for
the Cathars.87 This Manichaean legacy of passionate love that cannot be
fulfilled in a mortal lifetime on a flawed earth ruled by Lucifer, de Rouge-
mont insisted, lived on to exert through the troubadours’ poetry a massive
influence on Western love mores and literature. “The passion which nov-
els and films have now popularized,” he concludes, writing in the 1930s,
“is nothing less than a lawless invasion and fl owing back [his italics] into our
lives of a spiritual heresy the key to which we have lost.” 88
Many strong echoes of Cathar dualism are present in the Twilight se-
ries, from the notion of the perfect realization of love after death—the
medieval Arab poet Al Hallaj’s cry, “In killing me you shall make me live,
because for me to die is to love and to live is but to die,” is something Bella
could easily have uttered—to the imagery of the novel titles as Bella moves
closer to her heart’s desire: the Pure Ones’ opposition of “terrestrial Night
and transcendent Day” is reflected in the sequence Twilight, New Moon,
Eclipse, and the last book, Breaking Dawn, chronicling Bella’s rebirth and
 ascension.89 In the Twilight series, however, the fin amor roles are reversed:
the human supplicant is female, not male, and when Bella dies, she becomes
a perfect immortal being.
Bella’s elect status after death connects her to another set of ancient
142 and pancultural story traditions: those around a human loving a god and
thereby gaining some form of divinity herself. In the Christian matrix of
Western culture, that same great period of cultural flowering during the
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twelfth century also saw, along with Mariolatry, fin amor, and assorted
heresies, the rise of many popular stories about Christ, Krishna-like,
choosing an earthly bride who must (in the manner of a nun’s vow) stay a
virgin until her death, at which time the union will be consummated.90
This, of course, is a distant echo of the widespread practice in older reli-
gions of sacrificing a virgin of either sex to a god to become the god’s lover
after death. In the Western tradition before Christianity there are innu-
merable stories of the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon choosing
human lovers. These stories often feature a competing claim between an
earthly betrothed and the divine one (in Bella’s case, between Jacob and
Edward); sometimes one wins, sometimes the other.91
Various rules and prohibitions are attached to human-god love, one of
which is never to look directly at the god. The mortal Psyche, for exam-
ple, is forbidden to look at Cupid, the god of love, and so they meet only
in darkness; when she breaks the rule and sees him in all his shining (one
wants to say “sparkling”) glory, Psyche is sent into miserable exile until
she completes various acts of contrition imposed by his mother, Venus.92
In the Twilight series the vampires do their best never to show their spar-
kly essence to humans; Bella, like Psyche, must keep her god-lover’s true
identity secret, and she endures an equivalent exile in the second volume,
New Moon, when Edward leaves her in order to ensure her safety.
When a human takes an immortal as a lover in these pre-Christian sto-
ries of antiquity, such a union results in the human’s translation into an-
other plane of existence entirely. If statues infect their human lovers with
their own static natures, gods do this in spades, sucking their mortal con-
sorts into their own extradimensional vortex like an ant down a drain. In
the old stories this fate often amounts to a punishment: the human either
cannot get back (vanishes and is never seen again); can come back, but
only for limited periods (Persephone after she marries Hades, god of the
underworld); or comes back but discovers that three days in that extradi-
mensional place are a hundred years in earthly time and all family and
friends are gone (Celtic folklore). When Bella marries her god, however,
she doesn’t leave the planet; she is translated into a different level of exis-
tence right here on earth after she dies.
This unexpected outcome taps into still another esoteric religious cur- 143
rent of Western culture, if an even more radical one, that appears over and
over again in the new Gothick: that of becoming a god, or at least access-

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
ing godlike powers, while still on earth and in one’s own body. Just like the
man-gods from Hell of the graphic novels, Bella has taken the dark path
to divinity. Unlike them, she fi nds transcendent beauty and peace on the
other side.
To see how Meyer plays out this motif, let us return to the story: Bella
gets that she has to die if she wants to unite as an equal with her immortal
lover. Not yet realizing that sex in her immortal state will be far more won-
derful but knowing that she can only get pregnant as a human, she elects to
have sex with Edward (only when they are married, at his proper insistence)
while she’s still human. So after much negotiation Bella and Edward agree
to marry first, after which Edward will make her a vampire. Following a
trope that encompasses both sex with the Dev il and sex with fairies in Old
Goth times and UFO abductees’ reports of sex with aliens today, Bella’s
body is heavily bruised during their violent lovemaking.93 She does become
pregnant during their honeymoon and, following another folk and popular
culture trope about the Dev il’s spawn, the baby grows in her womb with
alarming and unnatural speed.94 Edward barely has time to inject Bella
with the venom that will make her a vampire when she starts to die giving
birth to their hybrid vampire-human daughter, Renesmee.
Bella’s transition from life to death to immortality is an epic passage.
In effect, she becomes Mary and Christ rolled into one, first birthing her
half-human and half-immortal child, then undergoing a three-day har-
rowing of Hell—an unbearable sensation of endless, excruciatingly painful
burning of her flesh—before she emerges in her new identity (which might
equally be read, Old Goth Catholic style, as the assumption of Mary to
heaven in her intact body). And this is where everything really does change
and the tone of the story radically alters.
When Bella comes to, she finds herself not in Pluto’s Hades nor in the
dank subterranean burial vaults holding the coffins of the undead, nor even
in a dangerously pretty otherworld run by malevolent fairies. Instead, she
 resurfaces in the ordinary world, which now stands revealed as an earthly
paradise thanks to her incredibly heightened vampire senses, which allow
her to penetrate deep into the life energies of the planet: “I could see the
dust motes in the air, the sides the light touched, and the dark sides, distinct
144 and separate. They spun like little planets, moving around each other in a
celestial dance.” Rice’s Louis reports a similar experience after he Changes:
“It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first
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time,” and when Lestat starts laughing at this, he says, “It was confusing,
each sound running into the next sound, and then they overlapped, each
soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter.”95
The language of religious transfiguration continues when Bella tries
calling up the forms of her former “cloudy” human world, “dim human
memories, seen through weak eyes and heard through weak ears,” but it
feels like “trying to squint through muddy water”— another way of saying,
in the language of 1 Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also
I am known.” When she observes herself telepathically in her daughter
Renesmee’s thought images, she sees “both of my faces, hideous human
and glorious immortal.” 96
In the same way, Bella’s own image in the mirror is “flawless,” her body is
“smooth and strong, glistening subtly, luminous as a pearl,” her face “per-
fectly composed, a carving of a goddess.” Edward’s beauty is just as over-
whelming: “For the fi rst time, with the dimming shadows and limiting
weakness of humanity taken off my eyes,” Bella says, she sees its flawless
perfection. His voice is “the most perfect symphony, a symphony in one
instrument, an instrument more profound than any created by man.”
Looking at Edward’s “father,” Carlisle, is like “staring at the sun.”97
These exquisitely beautiful demigods not only sparkle in the sunlight,
they smell like “cinnamon, hyacinth, pear, seawater, rising bread, vanilla,
leather, apple, moss, lavender, chocolate.” In a trope that echoes the X-Men
graphic novels and movies, each has his own special paranormal gift com-
pletely unrelated to traditional vampire traits: Alice can see the future,
Edward can read people’s thoughts, Benjamin can “influence the elements—
earth, wind, water, and fire,” and Zafrina “can make people see what she
wants them to see.” 98 But Bella’s own two superpowers, which no vampire
has ever possessed before, surpass them all: she can control the overwhelm-
ing thirst for human blood a newly turned vampire experiences, and she
can build protective auric shields around her loved ones. In addition, this
former klutz is now stronger than Edward; she runs faster than him, leaps
over rivers, kills a mountain lion. She and the other vampires possess the
miraculous physical powers of saints or siddhis, but (in the terms of what
is present in the novels) they are outside the governing framework of a God 145
or controlling Oneness.99 The vampires answer to no one’s law, human or
divine, but their own.

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
Furthermore, in a significant departure from twentieth-century tropes
of hybrid offspring (recall “Alia the abomination,” the spice-infused mu-
tant child in Frank Herbert’s Dune), Bella’s half-human and half-vampire
daughter Renesmee, who possesses even greater superpowers than her
mother, is not represented as a horror of nature, even though she, like
Rice’s Akasha, is a kind of female monster-god.
Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon faith has often been noted by reviewers,
usually in a faintly scolding reference to conservative social politics
vis-à-vis the story line in which Bella and Edward are sexually abstinent
for three books out of four. Deeper currents of Mormon theology inform
her fictional universe, however, most particularly the doctrine of exalta-
tion, the belief that humans can achieve physical resurrection and godhead
in the afterlife.100 Like the American Spiritualists who came after him,
Joseph Smith took from Emanuel Swedenborg the notion that angels were
humans who evolved into semidivine beings after death, where they keep
their earthly male or female gender and continue having sex (“heavenly
marriage”) with angels of the same level and communities.101 But Mormon
exaltation means that those who lived righteously in life will live eternally
as gods and goddesses, keeping “celestial marriage” with the mate they had
on earth and capable of having spirit children. They will also share the full
“power, glory, dominion, and knowledge” possessed by God the Father
and Jesus Christ.102 In the much quoted words of Latter-day Saints church
president Lorenzo Snow, “As man is, God once was— and as God is, man
may become.”103
Bella’s vampire Change is an apotheosis. Having been granted physical
superpowers, an “infallible vampire mind” with total recall, and above all
immortality, she has become a perfected being. A divine human now, she
walks the earth not with the murderous spawn of Cain or Satan but with
the angels, her vampire peers.104 She has entered the bright shining com-
pany of the immortals, her “true place in the world, the place I fit in, the
 place I shined.”105 Her heightened senses and perfect sexuality match the
conditions both of pre-Fall Paradise and of Swedenborgian-Spiritualist
heaven, where celestial sexuality is an exalted alchemical wedding that re-
unites the world and the two sexes.106
146 And how does this happy consummation of their love play out in the
afterlife, which, for these divine humans Edward and Bella, is right here on
earth? Rather prosaically, Bella tells us what eternal sex means for her and
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Edward: “I was never going to get tired, and neither was he. We didn’t
have to catch our breath or eat or even use the bathroom; we had no more
mundane human needs.” And in this manner, she says, they “continued
blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever.”107
By giving the vampire story the blue sky happy ending of the Romantic-
slanted folktale coupled with various new-old mythic elements about im-
mortality, Meyer has injected a strand of esoteric religious thinking— and
in a much more organic way than Dan Brown’s expository riffs on the
Cathars, the divine feminine, and so on in The Da Vinci Code—into a pop-
ular culture genre that reaches a very wide audience of readers around the
world. It is part of the normalization of the supernatural happening across
many Gothick subgenres: after Bella has undergone her transfiguration, her
supernatural powers now seem completely “natural” to her. “Maybe now
that I was a part of the supernatural myself,” she tells us, “I would never be
a skeptic again.”108
Dubbing the vampire a being in a state of “suspended transcendence,”
Beth McDonald has noted the intense focus on vampires at the turn of the
last three centuries in terms of a century’s-end wrestling with the numi-
nous.109 The quietly subversive shift that Meyer and a few other twenty-
first-century Gothick practitioners have accomplished within the tra-
ditionally dark mold of their genre is a backward version—in effect, a
reversal— of the transition Alexandra Walsham and others have described
taking place in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English rural
congregations as they made the slow adjustment from image-based late
medieval Catholicism to ascetic, idea-based Protestantism.110
Today Anglo-American popular culture is in the midst of a shift in
the other direction, toward an image-based, heterodox, supernaturalism-
embracing religious consciousness that is as gradual but ultimately pro-
found as the one our cultural ancestors underwent 400 years ago. This
time, the theological debate is raging not in a seventeenth-century church
shorn of its trappings (a sacred place where the Catholic royal vampire
Henry Fitzroy or the Protestant minister vampire Carlisle Cullen might
have felt equally at home) but in a ruined Gothick castle undergoing seri-
ous renovation. The blood-spattered walls have been scrubbed down and
receive a fresh coat of white paint as a greasy black bat born of the Refor- 147
mation morphs into a shining heterodox angel.
Meanwhile, much of the Gothick remains very Gothick. In the online

t h e br igh t g od be c kons
world of Second Life, traditional vampires fiercely debate the merits and
legitimacy of their lifestyle with the softer Meyer vampires. Gothick hor-
ror got a boost at the turn of the millennium with a savage new “torture
porn” subgenre. Fans post pornographic Twilight-inspired fiction on the
website Twilighted. In the newest Dracula videogame, a faux Catholic priest
gets sent to Transylvania to investigate claims of sainthood for a female
physician, only to discover she’s a reborn undead in league with the das-
tardly count.111
“We live now in an apocalyptic culture, ripe for revelation about
ourselves,” McDonald says, adding presciently, “Who can truly say
where these vampires will take us in the course of the twenty-fi rst cen-
tury?”112 To this question, let Bella have the last word: “Edward had always
thought that he belonged to the world of horror stories. Of course, I’d
known he was dead wrong. It was obvious that he belonged here. In a
fairy tale.”113
Gwen Dylan, zombie gravedigger and part-time girl detective. From I, Zombie: Dead to
the World (2011). Artist: Michael Allred; Writer: Chris Roberson. © DC Comics. Used with
permission.
 seven

postapocalyptic gothick
That Means Zombies
(and the Occasional Zampire)

Zombie remains a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so

many memories of emotions.
—World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

I mean, isn’t “zombie” a silly name we come up with for a state we don’t
understand?
—Julie in Warm Bodies

Plakanek Valley, Bohemia, sometime in the near future: Under a tree an

Englishman sketches the fourteenth-century Kost Castle as an American
writer interviews him about the crucial role this imposing Old Goth for-
tress, and many others across Eu rope and the British Isles, played during
the great Zombie War of the early twenty-first century. The global epi-
demic, which followed directly on the heels of the Iraq War, has been over
for more than a decade, and the artist is compiling several volumes’ worth
of drawings to commemorate the ser vice these localized fortifications
performed in helping save humanity.
Castles, the Englishman says, as products of more than a thousand
years of “institutional anarchy since the fall of Rome,” proved invaluable
sites of refuge after governments and social organization collapsed. North
America, in contrast, handicapped by its tradition of “standing national
 governments,” offered relatively few fortified hilltop eyries to retreat to.1
When the ammunition ran out, the more fortunate Old World folks had
maces, halberds, claymores, flaming moats, and Molotov cocktails to fall
back on—close-range killing devices that proved far better at staving off
150 the zombie hordes than cumbersome high-tech military weaponry. Not
that the castles were always impregnable: within their battlements disease,
human frailty, and the occasional zombie outbreak were often enough
G o t h ic k a

to finish off the inhabitants with no outside assistance. Queen Elizabeth

elected to stay at Windsor, and it is implied, by her countryman’s silent
emotion, that she did not survive.
Charged Gothick spaces in which the internal mayhem mirrors that of
the larger dysfunctional societies they belong to: Max Brooks’s World
War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War brings us full circle to the founda-
tional tenets of the eighteenth-century Gothick as Walpole’s ur-castle
Otranto gets co-opted in ser vice of the zombie apocalypse. As the second
decade of the new millennium begins, the living dead vie with the undead
as the dominant Gothick monster even though their historical journey in
the genre, if not their gait, has been a little swifter and narrower than the
vampire’s. But as we will see, they traverse a very similar arc from colonial
Object to postcolonial Other to the new Gothick’s rehabilitated Subject.
An African import, the concept of the zombie first surfaced in western
European consciousness through stories told by slaves in the colonized
islands of the Caribbean. Originally designating an African god, the word
zombi mutated in the West Indies to refer to a puppet-corpse animated by
a sorcerer.2 Marina Warner has dubbed the zombie the quintessential
product of the “Imperial Gothic,” illustrating a classic colonial exchange
of “words and images . . . borrowed from the host cultures by the incom-
ers” and co-opted into a primitive, exotic, evil Other.3 Unlike the vampire,
however, the zombie did not make the transition from folkloric import to
homegrown fictional Gothick character in the First World imagination
right away; over the course of the nineteenth century, no reanimated
corpse hopped a cargo ship out of the Caribbean to terrorize the populace
of England or America.
After a lurid best seller of the 1920s had laid the groundwork, zombies
shambled onto the broader stage of American pop culture in the twentieth
century via the movie White Zombie (1932), set in Haiti.4 Starring Bela
Lugosi fresh from his success as Dracula the year before, this screen story
of a bride turned into a zombie (rationalized here as a drug-induced soul-
less coma) to satisfy the lust of a white plantation owner and his facilitator,
the evil Murder Legendre (Lugosi, as a Svengali-style mesmerist), put the
twin ideas of zombie and voodoo permanently on the Gothick map.5
Besides linking the zombie with the figure of the enslaved artificial hu- 151
man worker (a character already floating in the 1920s sub-Zeitgeist) in
scenes showing black zombies robotically grinding sugarcane at night,

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
White Zombie helped lift this creature out of regionalized Afro- Caribbean
folklore into the Western Gothick imaginary by depicting people of Eu ro-
pean origin Changed into zombies.6 It also followed the classic Old Goth/
Gothick trope of dev ilish possession by making its main white zombie
female, with her vulnerability in this soulless state leaving her equally
open to sexual possession.7 The trope of the possessed female was carried
through in Jacques Torneur’s more ethnographically nuanced (and Jane
Eyre–influenced) I Walked with a Zombie (1943).8 The zombie-Caribbean–
Jane Eyre connection was developed more extensively in Jean Rhys’s 1966
novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a revisionist prequel that beautifully imagines
mad Bertha Rochester as a haunted young woman in Dominica (where
Rhys herself was born) who dabbles in voodoo to make her new husband
Edward love her. As Warner has pointed out, Antoinette (rechristened
“Bertha” by her husband, who married her only for her money) in effect
winds up a zombie herself.9
The Gothick territory of zombies, however, remained exoticized in this
and the scattering of other B movie zombie films that followed; white or
black, these puppets of a sorcerer or mad doctor were still ghettoized in
the West Indies,10 a Louisiana plantation,11 and even Cambodia.12 During
World War II, the new white zombies swapped gender to become male
pawns of the Nazis, assuming the same role of worker automata that the
black millworker zombies had played in White Zombie.13 Still in place,
courtesy of the Third Reich, was the role of the evil sorcerer controlling
them. Once they had been represented on Hollywood’s big screen as white
characters, however, zombies were destined to shed their colonial trap-
pings and further assimilate with European folklore of the dead risen to
haunt the living.
The animated dead were abundantly and gruesomely present in 1950s
pre-Code horror comics, often in the form of old-fashioned ghouls come
back to exact retribution on those who sinned against them in life: a man
 who killed pedestrians driving drunk, a fake doctor who did in his patients,
a judge who sentenced prisoners to die. Ghouls of a different sort, now
relabeled “zombies,” also began to appear in comics of this decade whose
mythos was set in World War II, and this time— arguably following the
152 twentieth-century arc of the “revolt of the robots”—the new zombies were
showing more, if not quite total, autonomy. The comics scholar Jim Trom-
betta’s point cited earlier, about war trauma as a motivator of 1950s horror,
G o t h ic k a

is clearly evident in such stories as “The Living Dead” (1954), in which

concentration camp ghouls exact revenge on a Nazi doctor.14
The link between war and zombies is made even more dramatically in
“Corpses Coast to Coast” (1954), the story of an undertaker who dreams
that gravediggers go on strike and corpses come back to life.15 In this dream
he is a high-ranking member of a secret global orga nization called the
United World Zombies; in a clear echo of the Nazi death camp trains, the
UWZ dispatches the newly risen corpse soldiers by train and truck across
the country. In this early Cold War version of the zombie apocalypse, dif-
ferent factions of the organization take over all the countries of the world,
which then proceed to go to war with each other because zombies make
“perfect soldiers”; the U.S. and Russian zombie militaries use atomic bombs
to wipe out each other’s countries, since zombie flesh “doesn’t stand up well
under radiation.” The undertaker wakes up to discover this was all a dream,
and— surprise—he turns out to be a zombie himself.
But zombies were still awaiting their Bram Stoker. This turned out to
be the filmmaker George Romero, who reimagined them in the 1960s as
man-eating corpses possibly animated by radiation from a NASA satellite
or a meteor. In Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, Romero laid
down the foundational conventions for a new Gothick subgenre, con-
ventions that are still in place fifty years later.16 In this framework, zombies
are no longer animated by a sorcerer; typically, they are the accidental result
of a scientific mistake. Once created, significantly, they cannot be com-
manded and stand entirely outside human control. No longer automata
with intact bodies, these creatures who only minutes ago were everyday
folks (your brother, your wife, your local cop) are now the rotting corpses
of the Old Goth plague years.17 Taking a page from vampire stories, Romero
had his killer corpses feed on their prey and infect whomever they killed
with their bite, thereby creating the potential of a zombie population explo-
sion whose Malthusian proportions the vampire Lestat and his descen-
dants could never hope to match.
In the wake of Romero’s films, the new subgenre was carried on by such
Italian gore masters as Lucio Fulci (City of the Living Dead, 1980; The House
by the Cemetery, 1981) but stayed mostly overshadowed by the vampire sub- 153
genre until its revival in Japanese videogames of the 1990s. The first big
zombie videogame was a vast franchise created by Mikami Shinji in 1996

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
called Biohazard that became, in its U.S. and global version, the more
Gothickly resonant Resident Evil and spawned innumerable game sequels
as well as four post-2000 U.S. movie spinoffs.18 Using Western characters,
the game positions players as members of a military unit fighting against
dead scientists who have turned flesh-eaters after a laboratory accident
with hazardous chemicals. The Gothick space is an underground facility
known as the Hive whose controlling artificial intelligence, known as the
Red Queen, has killed all the workers to prevent a deadly “T-virus” from
escaping. The virus, however, resurrects them as zombies, and the con-
tagion quickly spreads to the neighboring city— and the world.
An unexpected phenomenon of the videogaming subgenre, however, one
that mirrors (and may well have influenced) the turn from villain to hero
in the Gothick, was the fact, quickly noted by videogame developers and
marketers, that players chose to be the bad guys (orcs, vampires, zombies)
as often as they chose to be the good guys. Wildly popular games such as
Warcraft and Diablo, accordingly, were redesigned so that a range of roles
was available on both sides of the moral divide. This effect was magnified
when gamers began forming their own online communities, such as Zombie
Nation; videogame companies quickly adapted to these new communities,
making the evolving story lines of their games a complex trade-off between
developers’ marketing needs and gamers’ preferences.19 More recent zom-
bie videogames such as the Left 4 Dead series (2008– ) pit postapocalyptic
survivors more conventionally against zombie hordes; the Dead Space series
(2008– ) moves the action, Alien style, to an abandoned spaceship infested
with zombies.
The man-devil heroes of the graphic novels of the 1990s and earlier
typically had to fight Satanic forces within themselves as well as in their
adversaries to avert an imminent apocalypse (or Armageddon, or Second
Coming). As the century and the millennium turned, these apocalyptic
 visions gave way, appropriately, to an equally dark postapocalyptic one:
Armageddon has come and gone, and it was man-made, in the form of
nuclear or viral destruction. With a nonsupernatural base narrative estab-
lished back in the 1970s by Stephen King in The Stand (to be discussed in
154 chapter 11), which was preceded in turn by many postapocalyptic sci-fi
novels including George Stewart’s great Earth Abides (1949) and Walter J.
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), this scenario did not move into
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mainstream consciousness until after 2000, when it played out widely in

Anglo-American literary novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
(2006), Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2006), and other gritty, naturalistic de-
pictions of ravaged countrysides where evil manifests on the strictly ma-
terial level as marauding and occasionally cannibal humans.
The supernatural vacuum in this new subgenre was not left empty for
long, however, as the two prime monsters of twentieth-century Gothick
moved in to fill the void: the zombie first, followed by the ubiquitous vam-
pire. In scenarios where a virus and not a bomb has wiped out most of hu-
mankind, the piles of human dead make the easy transition from zombies
to vampires in works such as The Strain novels (2009– ) by Chuck Hogan
and Guillermo del Toro, Justin Cronin’s The Passage series (2010– ), and Jim
Mickle’s Depression-flavored movie Stake Land (2011).20 Building on the
escaped-government-virus-that-wipes-out-most-of-humanity template of
King and his predecessors, these works imagine a postapocalyptic Gothick
America overrun by zombiefied, flesh-seeking vampires who are far more
relentless than their garrulous, dandified, seductive forebears. Neck biters
and brain feeders alike are completely powered by the blind instinct to feed
on (and thereby kill) their human prey. Though they retain their frighten-
ing speed (in contrast to typical zombie shuffl ing), the postapocalyptic
vampires, like zombies, have also been stripped of personality, speech, and
individual consciousness (the “virals” of The Passage have telepathic com-
munication with their hive masters), making up a whole new subcategory
that might be called zampires (or vombies?). With antecedents that include
the urban ravishers of Richard Matheson’s seminal I Am Legend (1954), these
new hybrids have triggered endless debates in the online fan base about,
for example, the virtues of fast zombies over slow zombies or the fighting
skills of vampires versus those of zombies.21
So far zombies easily win the head count over vampires and zampires in
the new postapocalyptic subgenre, both in the number of films and novels
they appear in and simply in the sheer number of zombies per story. Zom-
bies, indeed, are all about numbers; until very recently, there was no such
thing as a zombie character, only the shuffling masses. In these survivalist
adventures that pit isolated groups of humans against massive populations
of the hostile undead, the postapocalyptic zombies remain mostly faithful 155
to the conventions laid down by Romero: usually brought back to living
death by whatever disaster produced the end of civilization, they are ir-

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
resistibly drawn to feed on living humans. Zombies typically constitute a
collective Gothick monster that lone individuals must fight and conquer;
further, the zombies quickly become a global menace that can only be
combated locally, because social institutions have collapsed.
Like other creatures real and imaginary, Gothick monsters must eat to
stay alive, but the specific part of the human organism they crave varies
from species to species. The zombie has been given a different, if no less
implacable, lust than the vampire’s: it is for brains, not blood. What is the
ontological difference? The brain itself has taken on greater importance
with late twentieth-century advances in neurology; we are constantly told
in the popular press that all human agency rises either from genetic pat-
terning or from neurological connections in the cerebral cortex. Brains
also have a cooler, more rational (one wants to say “cerebral”) sub-Zeitgeist
vibe than primal red blood.
The paradox is that most twenty-first-century cannibal zombies (the
exceptions will be taken up later) have no consciousness whatever, save for
their overriding drive to find and feed on humans, whether brain matter or
flesh generally (the other hybrid variant). Max Brooks’s zombies have “no
conscious thought, just pure biological instinct,” but the brain is their only
living organ; unlike the human brain, his characters tell us, the zombie
brain doesn’t need the support system of the rest of its body to survive.22
But if they possess a live brain and consume brains to stay alive, why can’t
zombies think? The answer, as we will see later, lies in the link between
loss of consciousness and large numbers of formerly human individuals:
mobs don’t think.
As the century ended, then, a generic scenario of the “zombie apo-
calypse” emerged in a range of novels, graphic novels, videogames, and
films. And despite best-selling novelty items such as Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies (2009), a mash-up interspersing Austen’s original with a Regency
zombie narrative in which the Bennet sisters display their martial arts
 skills against the living dead, the post-2000 sub-Zeitgeist’s fascination
with zombies is all about this apocalypse. In the early part of the decade,
movies such as 28 Days Later (2002) focused on the immediate onset of the
zombie epidemic that has been triggered, in the Gothick bioconvention set
156 in the 1990s, by a mysterious virus.23 This scenario quickly shifted into
postapocalyptic gear in dozens of new novels, graphic novels, and movies
as the zombiefied Gothick world, now stripped of government and all the
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amenities of civilization, becomes the site of an entrenched, never-ending

struggle between a handful of humans and the hordes of living dead that
massively outnumber them. The film’s sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), as-
sumes just this as the contagion spreads from England to the Continent
(and hence the world) at story’s end. 24
On the surface, Robert Kirkman’s postapocalyptic graphic novel series
The Walking Dead (2006– ), also a popular cable television series, seems to
illustrate the back-to-basics appeal of this subgenre for Generation Y and
the Millennials, forced to imagine the horror of living without cell phones,
Facebook, or the Internet. In a world of almost medieval simplicity that is
“ruled by the dead,” with “no government, no grocery stores, no mail de-
livery, no cable TV,” as the back cover blurb on one volume puts it, “we are
forced to finally start living.”25 The irony, of course, is that this pioneer
landscape, stripped of all technology, is displayed and consumed on the
most sophisticated 3-D big screens replete with 12,000-watt Dolby sound,
not to mention all the Xbox consoles, iPads, and iPhones that a still-robust
late capitalist economy can provide.
The obvious metaphor here, and one also laid down by Romero in his
first sequel, the shopping mall allegory Dawn of the Dead (1978), is that the
zombies are the doubles of the survivors’ preapocalyptic selves, all those
shambling human hordes who enjoyed the consumer abundance of bygone
days. Zombies work effectively as alter egos, caricatures of the living, to
the point where, as Kim Paffenroth puts it, “humans and monsters become
very hard to distinguish.”26
On a deeper level, however, Kirkman’s story, rendered in jagged, vio-
lent black-and-white visuals, carries the same current of generalized war
trauma as the horror comics of the 1950s. Kirkman has cited the attack on
the World Trade Center as a “big part” of his inspiration in this ongoing tale
of a handful of humans at war with each other as well as the zombies as one
potential safe harbor after another (a gated community, the abandoned
offices of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, a maximum-security
prison) turns into the charged Gothick space where all things bad con-
gregate.27 In the end, as ever, it’s no safer inside the castle than outside.
The post-2000 zombie apocalypse, in short, carries with it the same
subliminal links with armies, warfare, and mindless (literally) mob instinct 157
that were attached to its twentieth-century incarnation. Even though the
Afghan and Iraq conflicts directly affected far less of the U.S. population

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
than the Vietnam War did, together they make up both the longest ex-
tended period of warfare this country has ever known and the entire politi-
cal memory of most members of the Millennial generation. The zombie
apocalypse and its catastrophic aftermath mark, among other things, the
sub-Zeitgeist’s cathartic working through, in the realm of the imaginary,
of 9/11 and its consequences. Representing, in the words of a scholar of
this generation, “the collapse of a society without a government capable
of keeping its promises,” it also foregrounds the dilemma of a small group
of people pitted against an overwhelming majority who have experienced
a collective loss of identity, consciousness, and soul.28
Nonetheless, humor and social satire remain strong undercurrents in
the post-2000 zombie stories. Taking up the subtext of Dawn of the Dead,
movies such as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009) are hybrid
horror-comedies with happy endings.29 The lackluster hero of Shaun of the
Dead becomes a heroic zombie fighter only to return to his own zombielike
mundane life when the horde has been defeated. The characters in Zom-
bieland call each other by the destroyed cities they hail from (Wichita,
Columbus, Tallahassee), nicely allegorizing the nation’s bereft status. The
hero is a neurotic college kid whose obsessive-compulsive disorder, in the
form of strict adherence to a lengthy numbered list of behavioral rules
around zombies (cast-iron skillets as weapons, Bounty paper towels to soak
up unwanted fluids, etc.), has guaranteed his survival. The list itself is an
obvious play on the avalanche of mock zombie survival guides and tongue-
in-cheek scientific reports over the last decade.30
What is the effect of all this faux vérité documentation around imagi-
nary creatures? Like the Paranormal Activity series and Blair Witch Project
before them, they tease—not always playfully—the boundaries between
imagination and belief, spawning new conventions of Gothick performance
on one hand and Secondary/Primary Belief in the notion of impending
global disaster on the other. In a tradition that started at the beginning of
 the decade and grew exponentially after the mid-2000s, annual Zombie
Walks now take place in major cities across North America, including
Toronto, Seattle, Denver, and Pittsburgh (the last is where Romero’s Night
of the Living Dead was shot, thereby making it the Whitby of the zombie
158 subgenre).31 Wearing disheveled dress and ghoul makeup, participants
move en masse to squares and town centers using the distinctive “slow
death walk” of Romero’s films. Meanwhile, young Secondary Believers
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dutifully stock up on canned goods in anticipation of the apocalypse,

weirdly echoing both the Lovecraft fans who mimic their hero’s frugal diet
and the bomb shelter enthusiasts of the 1950s.
Foremost among these groups is the Zombie Squad, “a zombie sup-
pression task force” (motto: “We make dead things deader”) dedicated to
“educat[ing] the public about the importance of personal preparedness and
self reliance, to increase its readiness to respond to disaster such as Earth-
quakes, Floods, Terrorism or Zombie Outbreaks.”32 This sizeable com-
munity holds its own annual convention and lists twenty-four chapters
across the country, one in Canada, and one in the United Kingdom. Chap-
ters are required to sponsor at least two disaster-oriented charities (such as
blood, canned food, or clothing drives) and, summoning the dire prospect
of zombie police officers or untrained vigilantes, offer zombie survival
seminars to fill in the gaps that official agencies won’t be able to provide.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control climbed aboard the Zombie Squad
bandwagon when Dr. Ali Khan, a rear admiral and assistant surgeon gen-
eral, posted a notice under “Emergency Preparedness and Response” that
playfully merges preparing for a zombie apocalypse with preparing for
other disasters such as hurricanes and pandemics that might require people
to have an emergency kit in the house and a plan for proceeding to an
evacuation center.33 Cities in various countries have issued similar mock
advisories.34
The spirit of the Zombie Squad, as much as one can determine, wavers
somewhere between Secondary and Primary Belief: as one Millennial
member told his older brother about stockpiling canned goods, “You never
know.”35 But these Secondary and Primary Believers alike pride themselves
on being survivalists, not worshippers. With their distinctive documen-
tarian component, most zombie apocalypse narratives are unique among
twenty-first-century Gothick subgenres in actively discounting the super-
natural and any kind of spiritual framework. “The inevitable onslaught
has, of course, nothing to do with the supernatural,” Max Brooks’s mock
survival manual sternly counsels. “Satan’s soldiers are not out to invade
God’s house. Ultimate evil is not doing battle with ultimate good. The
walking dead attack churches for one good reason: It’s where the food is.”36 159
Regarding “religious institutions,” the Zombie Squad site asks pointedly:
“Your soul may be in good hands but wouldn’t you like the training to

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
stick around a little longer in this world when the dead invade your
neighborhood?”37
This position, however, begs the question that man-eating corpses do
not walk in the actual world we live in. What lies behind it, one suspects, is
the desire to remove what is technically “supernatural”—the concept of the
resurrected dead—from a Christian, magical, or even moral framework.
No cross, no Druidic spell, and no pure hero will be able to defeat these
uncanny creatures. Neither will advanced technology, since in the universe
of the zombie apocalypse it has completely evaporated. In the end, only
naked human persistence stands a chance against this Gothick monster.
Some of the authors of the faux manuals went on to write fully devel-
oped serious book-length zombie narratives. Following on the heels of his
Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the
Zombie War (2006) is an impressive novel hiding under the cloak of faux
documentary.38 Much more than a “mockumentary,” it brings an epic
spirit to the late twentieth-century horror movie trope of blurring the line
between the imaginary and the real world. Purporting to be transcripts of
the author’s recorded interviews of survivors of a global zombie war that
ended twelve years previously, the novel features the almost obligatory
blurb from a real-life functionary of the National Center for Disaster Pre-
paredness on its book jacket. But its admirable sweep and convincing real-
istic detail, unspooling in the words of characters from every country and
walk of life, puts this story on a different level than most Gothick narra-
tives. (The gatekeepers of literature have de- Gothicized, but not elevated,
this novel with the Library of Congress subject heading “War–Humor.”)
Brooks’s zombies eat any kind of human flesh, not just brains, though
their blood, following zombie convention, has coagulated to a thick black
fluid. The virus producing them originated in China but nonetheless
quickly gains the label “African rabies.” Meanwhile, China has started a
 war with Taiwan to distract attention from its zombie problem. The United
States also drops the ball, but for a different reason: in democracies “public
support must be husbanded as a fi nite national resource,” and the country,
burned out from the length and cost of the needless Iraq War, fails to
160 back the massive mobilization that defeating the zombie threat requires.39
In detailed, historically convincing scenarios of how each country (mis)
handles the zombie apocalypse, civilian and military leaders alike are dis-
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played almost universally as incompetent, but in different, culture-specific

ways. In the catastrophic Battle of Yonkers, for example, American soldiers
are sent infantry-style against the zombies in body armor and bulky suits
intended for biowarfare, and their missile explosives don’t stop the zombies
the way a simple shot to the head does. Result: they are slaughtered and
turn into zombies themselves. Eventually North America will be overrun
with more than 200 million hostile undead.
Ultimately humans win the Zombie War thanks to a cold-blooded tactic
called the Redeker Plan, originally developed by a South African Boer to
support apartheid, that mandates abandoning large segments of the popu-
lation to the zombies in order to save a small minority. In the wake of this
calculated strategy, adopted in one country after another, a more thought-
ful survivor reflects: “I’ve heard it said that the Holocaust has no survivors,
that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irrepa-
rably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were sup-
posed to be, was gone forever. I’d like to think that’s not true. But if it
is, then no one on Earth survived this war.” 40 Waging the Zombie War,
various characters conclude, has turned the human race itself into zombies
of another kind. This sentiment, one of the major themes of the zombie
apocalypse subgenre, is echoed at the end of one installment of Kirkman’s
series when the hero, a former cop, surveys the carnage he and the others
have wrought against each other and declares, “We are the walking dead.”41
As relative latecomers—and no doubt also because of the seemingly in-
surmountable fact of their repulsive physical appearance—zombies stayed
locked in a nonerotic, antagonist role long after other Gothick monsters
had begun their reverse Change to lovers and heroes. As a substitute for
natural propagation, these celibate zombies were forced to convert others
to their status in the manner of “a cult of cannibalistic Shakers,” in Kim
Paffenroth’s words.42 They were also mute. According to the conventions
set by old-school zombie narratives and faithfully observed in the Zombie
Walks and other areas of zombie fan performativity, the only sound a zom-
bie could legitimately make was “Graah.”
Even so, surveying the field in the early 2000s, one could safely predict
it was only a matter of time before a novel, graphic novel, movie, or video- 161
game surfaced about a sensitive, conflicted undead cannibal fighting his or
her primal instincts— or better, the offspring of the hybrid mating of a

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
zombie and a live human pledging (like any number of Gothick hybrids)
to save humans from his or her own monstrous kind. (The fact that the
“cute” subculture derived from J-Pop has taken up zombies with merchan-
dise such as baseball caps with half-eaten brain matter embossed in felt was
a clear harbinger of this emerging trend.)43 As we have seen in other Goth-
ick subgenres, there is also an irresistible pull in contemporary Gothick to
have the monster tell the story, to let the subjectivizing force of the fi rst-
person voice transform the formerly loathsome collective antagonist into
a sympathetic individual protagonist. (The special interiorizing intimacy
of the first-person voice, it is worth remembering, is possible only in prose
and graphic novel text, not dramatic representation.)
By the end of the decade, in fact, the humanizing and divinizing of the
zombie was well under way. The arc of transfiguration we have already
seen traversed by vampires is neatly embodied in a series and two subse-
quent novels by Stacey Jay. In 2009 she began a series based on a character
called Megan Berry, Zombie Settler, about a Buffy-type human girl who
(since this is the 2000s and not the 1990s) “settles disputes” arising around
zombies rather than slaying them.44 The first in the series, You Are So Un-
dead to Me, a junior high romance novel aimed at tweener girls, is the first-
person account of a perky tweener who has powers to lay the Unsettled (the
risen dead) but must also fight their more dangerous kin, the magic-raised,
flesh-eating kind of zombie. As in some strands of the vampire subgenre
(notably, True Blood), zombies are represented here as a visible, troublesome
minority in a functioning human society with an intact government.45
In Jay’s My So- Called Death (2010), however, the breezy first-person nar-
rator is now a former cheerleader who falls from the top of her fancy pyra-
mid formation to biological death, only to discover she carries a genetic
anomaly from a Cuban ancestor (the persistent exoticizing factor, like a
Transylvanian ancestor in a vampire story) that converts her to Undead,
 subcategory Death Challenged (as opposed, following the convention of
the Megan Berry series, to those raised from the dead by a sorcerer’s spell).
This obliges her to be enrolled in a Harry Potter– style special school
for the Undead, who are technically immortal like vampires but consider-
162 ably more fragile in their body parts. Like the Twilight vampires, they have
sublimated their feeding lust from human to animal brains, served up three
times a day in healthful combinations. By story’s end the heroine, Karen,
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has solved a murder with her handsome zombie classmate Gavin and looks
forward, in the author’s tongue-in-cheek riff on Bella’s prediction about
herself and Edward in Breaking Dawn, to “hundreds of years of blissful yet
argument-filled coupledom.”46
Scott Kenemore’s Zombie, Ohio (2011) is a hybrid mystery-horror story of
a college professor turned zombie in a car accident (in fact, his own sui-
cide), a first-person character who can talk and think, unlike other zom-
bies, but nonetheless loves to kill humans and eat their brains.47 Over the
course of this funny and sophisticated story, the hybrid human-zombie
hero discovers hard truths about his human life, realizes he has been braver
as a zombie, and lies down peacefully at story’s end to die for real. Simi-
larly, the graphic novel I, Zombie introduces a sentient female zombie who
resourcefully becomes a gravedigger so that she can satisfy her need to eat
human brains without killing live people.48 This zombie girl detective,
Gwen Dylan, is represented as beautiful but with “weird colored skin.” Be-
cause she accesses the thoughts of those whose brains she eats, she’s able to
solve, Nancy Drew style, the mysteries of their deaths.
Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) moves zombies much further along
the post-2000 pan-Gothick track from evil dead to sympathetic hero to
transcendent immortal. The first-person account of a nameless young male
zombie “still in the early stages of decay” seamlessly transfers this unprom-
ising creature to the next stage of the process of subjectivizing, humaniz-
ing, and ultimately divinizing.
The narrator lives with a population of his fellow undead in an aban-
doned airport where they enact feeble parodies of human ceremonies
(“marriage,” “praying”) orchestrated by the sinister Boneys, skeletons with
no flesh remaining who seem to act as shadow rulers of the community.
When he and a cohort hunting pack discover a pod of humans in a hospi-
tal, our zombie kills a young man named Perry and is rewarded with
telepathic flashbacks from Perry’s life as he feeds off his brain. This al-
lows him to voyeuristically experience Perry’s love for his girlfriend, Julie,
who’s about to be devoured herself. Struck by atavistic feelings of love and
protection, the narrator saves Julie from his pack and takes her back to
his own lair, an abandoned 747 fuselage at the airport. There, listening to
vinyl records of Frank Sinatra he has scavenged, the two form a tentative 163
bond that is the bridge to this zombie’s burgeoning rehumanization.
Meanwhile, he has saved Perry’s brain in order to eat it slowly, calling up

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
Perry’s memories of Julie so that he can relive their relationship through
Perry’s eyes as human love.
Before long the narrator, whose mind and heart are stirred by the grow-
ing love he feels for Julie, realizes he must take her back to the human
enclave in a heavily fortified stadium nearby. Only the oldest guard of the
zombies, the Boneys (who the author hints are of a different level of real-
ity altogether), try to prevent them from leaving; the other zombies seem
to feel the stirrings of sympathy or longing and refrain from attacking
Julie. When Julie abandons R (the most he now remembers of his human
name), he returns to the airport and begins regressing back to his zombie
existence. But the miracle that has happened between him and Julie has
caused a mysterious “movement” across the entire zombie population back
at the airport. They begin to have dreams and recall memories of their hu-
man life, and a few leave with R when he decides to head for the stadium
regardless.
Slipping into the human compound by passing as live, R fi nds the living
as hidebound and locked in their own shuffl ing hypersecurity routines as
the dead. He is reunited with Julie, and the two grow closer. Even the rev-
elation that he killed her boyfriend and ate his brain is no longer a deterrent
to their love. Rather, the big question in this Beauty and the Beast fable is
whether kissing a zombie will cause Julie to die.
Meanwhile, as he becomes increasingly human, R realizes that his killer
instinct is actually a choice he can manage in consciousness: he can choose
not to feed, and so he does. Reverting to classic Romantic fairy-tale mode,
the story reveals that when he and Julie do kiss, not Julie but R is infected
(the post-2000 Gothick word for “cursed” or “enchanted”), but in a good
way. Unlike Bella, who Changes from human to vampire, R Changes from
zombie back to human: “I feel the death in me stirring, the anti-life surg-
ing toward her glowing cells to darken them. But as it reaches the thresh-
old, I halt it. I hold it back and hammer it down, and I feel Julie doing the
 same. We hold this thrashing monster between us in a relentless grip . . .
and something happens. It changes. . . . It becomes something altogether
different.” 49 This is the Dan Brown moment of intentional personal gno-
sis: accessing his own supernormal, quasi-divine aspect, R chooses to be
164 human, and becomes so.
Afterward, in a Christlike moment, R begins to bleed freely from his
wounds, demonstrating his full return to humanity. At the same time, he
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sees the irises of Julie’s eyes change color to a “brilliant shade of solar yel-
low that I have never seen before on any human being,” and he smells
“something similar to the life energy of the Living but also vastly differ-
ent,” a smell that, significantly, is coming from him and Julie alike.50 With
their exchange of love, Marion suggests, both R and Julie have become
something more than human, and that something is good, not evil. Fol-
lowing the familiar trope, the story suggests that there’s not much to
choose from between humans and zombies. (When R asks Julie if things
will ever return to the way they were, she says, “I hope not.”) Hope resides
instead, as in so many other post-2000 Gothick fantasies, in the divine
humans themselves. Not yet a man-god but with a suggestion of superhu-
man hybridity, R has claimed mastery over his own physical essence and
transformed it, affirming, “We will be the cure because we want it.”51
In The Passage, similarly, Justin Cronin’s zampire heroine Amy, the Cho-
sen One by virtue of being the thirteenth supervampire “viral” created by
the government, is a godlike monster who, like Bella in the Twilight series,
has conquered her need to kill humans. The near-immortal Amy, this first
volume predicts, will live a thousand years and lead humankind out of
their bondage to the virals. (Her destiny, like that of so many new Gothick
heroes, was anticipated in the character of Neo in Larry and Andy
Wachowski’s Matrix series: a godlike human also bearing the title of
Chosen One and predestined to lead humankind out of their bondage to a
race of machines who feed, vampirelike, off the heat their bodies generate.)
In the sequels to the American movie versions of Resident Evil, the hu-
man heroine Alice undergoes a similar mutation: like Amy, she is able to
bond with the virus without being zombiefied, and as a bonus, she gets
superhuman powers. Both these story lines quote Alien 3 (1992), in which
the heroine, Ripley, becomes impregnated with the embryo of the mon-
strous creature she is sworn to destroy.52 At story’s end Ripley kills herself
by leaping into a vat of molten metal, but in Alien Resurrection (1997) she
has been cloned into a being endowed with mixed human and Alien DNA,
enhanced powers, and telepathic communication with the Alien creatures.53
Hybrid, transfigured Ripley has made the classic late twentieth-century
Gothick hero’s journey: half human, half monster or demon, she must 165
fight the forces of evil both out in the world and within herself, and she
must win—which of course she does, while also giving birth to a hybrid

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
human-Alien girl child who joins Ripley on the side of the good by helping
her destroy the Alien Queen. Following the twenty-first-century Gothick
hero’s path forged by Stephenie Meyer’s Bella, however, Cronin’s Amy
and Marion’s ex-zombie R have been moved up to the next Change after
monstrous-to-superhuman: apotheosis.
But how, exactly, does a zombie negotiate ascension when technically
it does not possess a soul? As we have seen, the most salient trait of this
Gothick creature is loss of soul or consciousness. The first step away from
this condition is thus toward becoming human again, as Isaac Marion’s R
does. This restored consciousness and humanity are precisely what allow
him to take the next step up to the “something more” level, though para-
doxically (as with the comic book superheroes) he would not have been
able to do this if he had not first been made a monster.
Even more directly than vampires, zombies are about resurrection, ris-
ing from the grave. Whereas other religions maintain that the soul rises,
leaving the body behind, Christian teaching states that the dead will rise
from their graves with their bodies intact when Christ’s second coming
heralds Armageddon, as laid down in 1 Corinthians 15:

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all
be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised in-
corruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on
incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

In this framework, the zombie represents a spiritual problem, not a social

one. In the zombie apocalypse of the Gothick imaginary, the body rises
without its soul as raw, disintegrating matter fueled by the ghost of its bio-
logical imperative.
 Many in the zombie fan subculture riff on the similarity between Christ
rising from the dead and zombie resurrection (witness a favorite Zombie
Walk tag: “He died for your sins. Now he’s back for your brains”). Like
the drinking of human blood, the eating of human flesh reverberates with
166 the sacrament of communion: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my
blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” ( John 6:54).
Accordingly, a probably not-so-serious online Church of the Resurrec-
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tion, founded in 2008, posts some still-shocking images of, for example,
a zombie Last Supper and a “Sweet Zombie Jesus.”54 All this, of course,
must be subsumed under a now widespread sub-Zeitgeist confusion about
the actual precepts of Christianity, as reflected in the widespread ten-
dency to mistake the tagline to Dawn of the Dead—“When hell is full, the
dead will walk the earth”— as a line from the Bible.55
So what exactly, at the level of spiritual problem, does a zombie apoca-
lypse signify? Like the vampire, the zombie has engendered any number
of social metaphors— soldiering, consumerism, herd instinct, and so on—
but ultimately the grotesquely disfigured corpse with a relentless killer
instinct powerfully revives the Old Goth images of what Death really
looks and acts like, up close and personal. An apocalypse is first of all a rev-
elation, a great discovery as well as a great disaster. The revelation zombies
carry to a culture divorced from many of its ancient life rituals— a revela-
tion about the ultimate state of loss of consciousness, death, and the dread-
ful creature with decaying flesh (not the post-1600 anatomically bared
skeleton)— still carries this ancient and visceral personification. It is no
coincidence that the lurid images of animated rotting corpses the 1950s
comics delighted in presenting are dead ringers for late medieval engrav-
ings.56 (The sheer rawness of these comics, coincidentally, makes one feel
a certain sympathy for the now ridiculed Dr. Fredric Wertham’s desire to
censor them.)
Big-screen images of zombie corpses staggering through ruined cities
in quest of human prey have helped further reify the figure, long dormant
in Protestant Anglo-American consciousness, of Death the hunter. We
have seen how this figure evolved from Old Goth into Gothick and its
long-running presence in the twentieth-century sub-Zeitgeist even as
Death was gradually banished from mainstream Protestant culture. When
the hordes of zombies burst out of their comic book and B-movie ghetto
after 2000, it’s as if those quaint etchings of weeping willows on eighteenth-
century tombstones in old New England graveyards had suddenly been
switched for the grinning skulls gracing the headstones of the century
before.
Mr. Death is back. And so, as the next chapter will show, is his Missus. 167

p os ta p o c a ly p t ic g o t h ic k
Everywoman kneels before Lady Death. From Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood. Image cour-
tesy Antenna Theater.
 eight

the gothick theater

of halloween
Performing Allegory

Goth is Death.
—J. Gordon Melton

Such a beautiful, respectful Lady. . . . There is nobody as beautiful as she.

—Man’s voice in Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood

Until 2006, when street violence by outsiders fi nally closed it down, the
night of October 31 in San Francisco’s Castro district was a bacchanal of
several hundred thousand revelers, gay and straight, cavorting in outrageous
and lascivious costumes more reminiscent of Brazilian Carnival than Hal-
loween. The street celebration still goes on in other urban U.S. centers,
notably Greenwich Village in New York. There is also the Halloween Ball
in New Orleans (originally an Anne Rice vampire fandom event), other
large costume balls, and millions of private parties across the Americas,
Europe, and many parts of the rest of the world.
Halloween, in fact, is such a big deal these days that it is easy to forget
that before the late twentieth century it was not the Dionysian adult cos-
tume party that has spilled over into every corner of North American
society but rather a low-key trick-or-treat event strictly for kids and con-
ducted on the streets of one’s immediate neighborhood. In the current
ubiquitous observance of this strange holiday, ghouls, corpses, vampires,
 and hookers serve you in broad daylight at the dentist’s office, grocery
store, government offices, and other public venues.
The reinvention of Halloween has its immediate origins in the Goth
subculture of the last thirty years, itself self-consciously camp, role-playing,
170 and performative. The only part of the Goth lifestyle to have crossed over
wholesale into mainstream culture, Halloween has become an ecumenical
Carnival, the closest thing to a Gothick religious holy day we have. With
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their white makeup, black nails, black hair, and heavy black eyeliner, often
wearing ankhs, crosses, or other religious amulets, classic Goths embody
a stylized, eroticized vision of Death. For most of its non-Goth celebrants,
the growth of Halloween into the largest group party in North America
and western Eu rope has become an equally intuitive and enthusiastic em-
brace of this figure banished to the margins of the secularized twentieth
century. Along with costuming and concealed identity comes the free-
dom to let go of inhibitions, dress seductively, and act with abandon.
The absence of any equivalently exuberant Protestant Christian cele-
bration in the ser vice of the light—in terms of observance, Christmas and
Easter come nowhere near it—mirrors that same odd overemphasis on the
dark in the Gothick literary tradition. (Some devout Protestants have re-
acted to this lack of proportion by substituting “harvest celebrations” for
Halloween, but these demure observances are all but drowned out by the
raucous din of ghouls and goblins surrounding them.) Since 2000, how-
ever, the sub-Zeitgeist has also registered that there’s more to recognizing
death than just Halloween. Most religions balance the scary bones-and-
ghouls side with some sort of ritual honoring of the dead that also affi rms
the existence of a realm beyond the material world where dead souls go.
Within Christianity, at the stroke of midnight on October 31, Protestant
Gothick Halloween (or All Hallows’ Eve) turns into the Old Goth Catho-
lic All Saints’ Day on November 1, followed by All Souls’ Day November 2.
All three holy days stem most directly from the late medieval Catholic
cult of the dead in western Eu rope, but their roots are now conventionally
traced to the Irish pre- Christian celebration of Samhain, the first day of
Celtic winter, when the doors of the underworld open and the souls of all
who died that year gather to enter just as demons gather on the other side
to pour out. Bearing in mind that the reconstruction of this pagan event
may itself be a nineteenth-century act of nostalgic Gothicizing, trick-or-
treating by this explanation is a performative reenactment of dead souls
collecting food and other gifts on their way to the underworld.1 What
does seem likely is that the very large immigration of the Irish to America
in the nineteenth century accounts for the fact that Halloween became a
major American folk custom.2
The Mexican Day of the Dead, a religious celebration that includes the 171
first two days of November, is not much observed by non- Catholics in
our culture (though we will come across some ecumenical adherents later

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
in the chapter). One Catholic image-based custom of honoring the dead,
however, has been widely adopted in recent years. This is the practice of
roadside memorials to victims of car accidents, utterly unknown in Protes-
tant societies until the 1980s (the same decade that saw the rise of the Goth
subculture and the carnivalization of Halloween). Festooned with baseball
caps, photos, handwritten letters and cards, teddy bears (if the deceased
was a child), and other talismanic objects commemorating the person’s
life, these impromptu retablos represent a deeper and more respectful mode
of acknowledging death than the wound makeup, skulls that change color,
and “sexatary” outfits at your local Halloween superstore. Possibly reflecting
the sharp spike in immigration from Catholic Mexico and Central Amer-
ica to the United States, the observance quickly widened to include public
memorials to any person struck down in an untimely way, from murder
victims to celebrities such as John Kennedy Jr. and Princess Diana. It’s now
ubiquitous in North America, the United Kingdom, and Eu rope, with
offerings left by total strangers as well as family and friends.
Through Halloween and public memorials alike, the idea of death is now
present front and center in the Anglo-American sub-Zeitgeist in a way
it never was fifty years ago— as rotting zombie bodies and pale cold vam-
pires, but most of all as performance, scary Gothick performance. The
primal purpose of modern secularized Halloween, after all, has been mainly
to provoke fright for purposes of entertainment. Back when it was still a
kid event, an energetic mother would round up all the neighborhood kids in
the den, turn out the lights, and pass around bowls of grapes (“eyes”), spa-
ghetti (“intestines”), and calf’s liver (“heart”) to a group of small, squeal-
ing ghouls. Now Halloween haunted houses featuring the same scares in
more sophisticated versions are a multimillion-dollar national business in
the United States that ranges from Halloween theme parks to blockbuster
stage shows. Many of these productions are interactive participatory envi-
ronments choreographed by skilled theater directors. All aim for maximum
 shock effect—monsters jumping out of closets, et cetera—with the excep-
tion of a few relatively high-toned urban productions, which lean toward the
quieter Radcliffean ambience of unseen but anticipated horror.3
This chapter explores two examples of Gothick Halloween per for-
172 mance. The conservative Christian Hell House productions held in many
locations around the United States every October draw deeply both from
the Gothick tradition and from Old Goth sources, chiefly the mystery and
G o t h ic k a

morality plays; so does a contemporary California theater company’s Day

of the Dead performance. On one hand, Antenna Theater reinvents the
late medieval morality play in a site-based performance that follows a sub-
urban matron Everywoman in her journey through life and death. On the
other, the equally site-based and experiential Hell House graphically stages
archetypal situations in life that will catapult a person into the infernal
afterlife. In a feature that immediately sets them apart from the Gothick
literary tradition, both performances, the avant-garde and the Christian,
are didactic in the time-honored manner of Old Goth morality plays. Both
seek to reinvent the Gothick macabre by infusing popular entertainment
with moral edification. Both use allegory and a premodern supernaturalist
worldview to draw very different moral conclusions.
Samuel Johnson once remarked that he would rather see the portrait of
a dog he knew “than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the
world.”4 In this comment the good doctor captured the preference for
representations of the real and tangible that would govern his own cen-
tury’s audience and those of the next two centuries to come. To under-
stand this Old Goth mode properly, however, some serious backstory on
allegory—that is, the aesthetic device of representing ideas, emotions, or
personal qualities as people—is necessary.
Though it endured straight through the nineteenth century as a main-
stay of public monuments, epic painting, political cartoons, and popular
religious instruction (via such perennial texts as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress), allegory was dead in the water in art and literature by the begin-
ning of the modern era. We still recognize, of course, if only ironically,
such stereotypical figures as Mother Nature, Father Time, Justice as a
blindfolded goddess holding a scale, and the Seven Deadly Sins. Some
striking if rather less familiar examples include Opportunity, from Edmund
Spenser’s Faerie Queene, who is a beautiful maiden in flowing garments
when she is coming toward you, but a hideous bald and naked hag from the
back after she’s passed you by. Or the figures of the King and Queen as a
form of scientific notation for gold and silver, respectively, in the Old Goth
science of alchemy. Or the Money Critic, robed in a garment patterned
with fi nancial symbols and nibbling various denominations of world cur-
rency to assess their bouquet, in Will Self’s 1993 novel My Idea of Fun. Or 173
Death as a cute, caring bisexual Goth girl with a philosophical streak in
Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Sandman.5

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
With the exception of Self’s Money Critic and Gaiman’s Death, these
allegories all date from well before the Enlightenment. To the secular
twentieth-century sensibility most of us still inhabit, allegory seems the
hollowest of aesthetic shells because the worldview behind it—based on
the gut conviction, as Peter Kingsley puts it, that “what isn’t there, in front
of our eyes, is usually more real than what is”—isn’t just one we no longer
subscribe to, it is so remote from contemporary ways of perceiving that
our minds resist even trying to imagine it.6 Examining on its own terms
the metaphysical engine that powered this formerly omnipresent rhetori-
cal device can help us understand the tremendous influence allegory—
what Angus Fletcher calls “the authoritarian mode of literature and art
and discourse”— once exerted as a conceptual tool in our culture and is
now beginning to exert again in various popular culture genres.7
Though personification was already a deeply entrenched feature of the
Greco-Roman imagination, the beginnings of allegory in Western art
are usually traced to Rome around the first century c.e., when the custom
of erecting statuary personifying human qualities such as Fidelity (with a
capital F ), Honor, Virtue, and the like flowered during the Augustan age.
The worldview of the Western ancients was refi ned and modified in Chris-
tianity’s Neoplatonic matrix, which recognized at least two realities: the
greater cosmos or macrocosm (for Christians this would become the living
body of God) and the smaller cosmos or microcosm, the physical world
around us that mimicked the forms of the divine world that ruled it.
This belief in a dual reality, filtered through a Christian matrix, domi-
nated Western philosophy up to the seventeenth century. Within its frame-
work of visible/material and invisible/transcendental, an allegory was no
fanciful conceit or even an abstraction from the material world. The exact
reverse of our present-day humancentric formulations, allegory was a way
of giving substance and form, for the benefit of our mortal senses, to the
world we cannot see or hear or touch or taste— the realm of Ideal Forms
 inhabited by gods, ideas, intellect, conditions of life, even emotions. For
medieval Christian Europeans, contemplating an allegory in art or in lit-
erature amounted to considerably more than an edifying aesthetic experi-
ence. The allegorical image, visual or verbal, did not “symbolize” forces
174 in the superior world; it embodied them almost in the way a graven image
does, as a kind of direct manifestation of the holy realm beyond the senses.
As an expression of divine reality, an allegory carried the added theurgic
G o t h ic k a

charge of that world and thus was most correctly experienced as a presence,
the immanence of the transcendent in this world, not just a symbol of it.
The ubiquity of allegory in philosophical argumentation and science as
well as religion, art, and literature during the thousand years between late
antiquity and the Renaissance also greatly influenced the ways in which
both human emotions and the boundaries of personhood were viewed
in Western culture before the Enlightenment. What we now think of as
subjective feelings originating within a person, such as anger and pity with
a small a and p, were viewed in the frame of allegory as impersonal or
transpersonal forces acting from outside upon the individual. In his por-
tion of The Romance of the Rose, Jean de Meun presents a familiar allegori-
cal character, Reason, who expounds, after Cicero: “Youth impels all men
and maids to deeds / That jeopardize their bodies and their souls.”8 Neither
Youth nor Reason are qualities that can be ascribed to a specific person; they
are absolute conditions invading and animating persons under their domin-
ion. Possession by the goddess Venus—in allegorical terms, being pierced
by Cupid’s arrows—is likewise a very different experience, ontologically,
than the contemporary interpersonal event we call “falling in love.”
The act of turning abstract qualities into walking, talking characters
with names as identity markers—a fat man named Greed, a dandy called
Vanity—makes the stage allegory’s most effective vehicle. The Corpus
Christi cycles put on by the English town guilds of the late medieval pe-
riod did not use allegory, but the layering of simultaneous realities, earthly
and heavenly, that allegory suggests did shape the underlying assumptions
of these Old Goth pageant plays that drew their stories from the Old and
New Testaments. When a cart full of amateur guild players paused in the
town square to act out scenes from the Passion, the players—in that dou-
bling of identity so characteristic of allegory—fully inhabited their bibli-
cal characters in the same way that the towns of York, Chester, Towneley,
and Wakefield became, in the moment, Jerusalem. This convergence of
past and present also joined the par ticular and mortal with the holy and
universal, a sensation citizens could savor the rest of the year while they
walked these temporarily transformed streets, rubbing shoulders with
those who had briefly been the mortal simulacra of Joseph, Mary, and 175
Abraham. As Jody Enders puts it, the late medieval mystery play was a
genre that “did something in real life as well as to real life.”9 These Primary

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
Believers were, in effect, the fi rst reenactors.
Allegory found its supreme expression in the secular morality plays of
the fifteenth century. Staged, like the miracle plays before them, in out-
door sites in England and on the continent but performed by traveling
professional players, these dramas typically presented a spiritual biography
of the average person and the war waged between good and evil for his
soul. Their narratives exteriorize this lone man’s inner spiritual struggles
as a series of picaresque encounters with personified qualities or forces in
the course of a journey or pilgrimage. In Everyman, the most famous of
the morality plays and known all across Europe, the character Death, on
God’s instruction, tells Everyman it is time to take his last pilgrimage
(itself an allegorical construct), and Everyman, completely unready, tries
to fi nd companions for the journey.
In this strange abstract landscape where absolutes masquerade as human
characters, the play presents Fellowship and Kindred, external qualities of
social intercourse, side by side with (to our modern way of thinking) inte-
rior qualities of character such as Discretion and Five-Wits. In a complex
winding up that remains completely faithful to the dynamics of human
nature, all these qualities desert Everyman—though Knowledge doesn’t
depart until Everyman knows whether or not he is going to Heaven. After
that moment of revelation Knowledge vanishes, and only Good Deeds
remains to keep Everyman company as he climbs into the grave.
Rather surprisingly, from our perspective, the resolution of this calculated
schematic produces a strong and satisfying emotional effect in its audiences.10
We realize that what allegory loses in nuances of characterization—the
distinguishing marks that separate individuals from each other—it makes
up for in deep identification. Where naturalism emphasizes empirical par-
ticularities (“the portrait of the dog that I know”), allegory shows people
everything they have in common. Moreover, for their original audiences
 the allegorical characters that seem so cartoonishly undeveloped by the
standards of naturalism served another important function: as magical
talismans. In the Old Goth two-world universe that allegory inhabits, the
memorized lines that players uttered functioned as a kind of incantation
176 that activated their characters’ theurgic powers as animated emblems ca-
pable of drawing down the energies of the divine realm.11
Eventually allegory succumbed to “the same great process of Internal-
G o t h ic k a

ization,” as C. S. Lewis once put it, “which has turned Genius from an at-
tendant Daemon into a quality of the mind,” in which “century after cen-
tury, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to
the subject’s.”12 Against the twentieth century’s extremes of subjectivity
and internalization, however, our new century is witnessing a complex
aesthetic move back to objectivity and externalization, a move that includes
a revival of traditional allegory in certain areas of Gothick entertainments
and even computer media. A whole generation has grown up enacting
Pilgrim’s Progress–style allegorical life adventures in role-playing and video-
games. Games routinely include allegorical characters; the popular Dead
Space features Witch (the most powerful), Hunter (a Gen X flake who skate-
boards and puts others at risk), and Boomer (a fat, greedy no-hoper who
keeps throwing up on you, the hapless gamer). Internal qualities external-
ized as characters is a much more familiar device to the generation born in
the 1990s than it is to their parents or grandparents.
For cybertheorists, too—many of whom are naive Neoplatonists with
little awareness of their perspective’s ancient roots—what began as meta-
phor has been transmuted effortlessly into allegory. Thus the reflexive
premise that cyberspace is a “real” territory underlies not just the imagi-
nary of popular film and literature but much theoretical discussion as
well. Typical fictional products of this mind-set are the personified com-
puter programs in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s futuristic Gothick Ma-
trix trilogy (1999–2003): the Oracle, an aboriginal wise woman the hero
consults, is in reality “an intuitive program who complements” the Ar-
chitect, a male character embodying the original program that created
the Matrix. (There is even the suggestion that the hero, Neo, has been
“planned” by the Architect, making us wonder if Neo is human or a pro-
gram that is “humanizing,” in the classic narrative arc of the simulacrum
who becomes human.)
 Along with Everyman and the passion play staged once a decade in
Oberammergau, Bavaria, many of the Old Goth mystery and morality
plays are produced today in revival in the English provincial towns where
they were originally held. In the 1990s, Grant Morrison produced a mar-
velously layered graphic novel, Mystery Play, about one of these revivals.13 177
It’s a subtle Moebius strip of a story that evokes the contradictions be-
tween the all too human players and their exalted roles within the classic

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
Gothick story frame of an escaped asylum inmate and murderer who ends
up crucified in place of the actor playing Jesus. Typical for Morrison, it is
not at all clear that the moral order has been restored by this act.
How exactly do the conventions of medieval Catholic mystery and mo-
rality plays get retranslated in twenty-first-century Protestant evangelical
productions of Hell House? The long shadows of Milton and John Bunyan,
of course, helped allegory remain a vehicle for Protestant religious in-
struction through the nineteenth century generally, going dormant dur-
ing much of the twentieth century only to reemerge in this new kind of
Christian didactic theater. Hell House in its various permutations has played
to literally hundreds of thousands of people in the decades since it began,
making it closer in impact to that of the original mystery and morality
plays than Oberammergau and the other scattered revivals of the Catholic
mystery plays across England and Europe.14
Hell House offers its players and audience something akin to the partici-
patory experience of the mystery cycles and the didacticism of the moral-
ity plays—but minus, in good Gothick fashion, the bright, joyous parts.
Combining the tenets of Protestant fundamentalism with Halloween tra-
ditions in a new/old medium, Hell House draws almost exclusively from dark-
side conventions of the late twentieth-century Gothick. Two cross-fertilizing
trends are evident here: the rise of the Devil in twentieth-century conserva-
tive Protestant theology and the fact that the Anglo-American Gothick
itself is deeply rooted in Christian theology.
By various reports, Hell House was first conceived in the 1960s at a Pen-
tecostal church, the Trinity Assembly of God, in Cedar Hill, Texas. (A
“respectfully presented” production was restaged by an avant-garde the-
ater group in New York using the “Official Hell House Outreach Kit” sold
by a pastor in Colorado.) In 2001 a documentary was made of the tenth
annual performance of a newer Hell House production in this same church,
 but in the decades since it first began the concept has spread to hundreds
of evangelical and fundamentalist churches across the United States.15
Hell House’s creators, of course, had the option of presenting lives of
struggle that end in the Light, the experience Bunyan’s pilgrim Christian
178 has when he reaches the Celestial City. Grasping the Gothick’s vast pop-
ular appeal as well as its implicit religious subtext, however, these con-
servative Christians correctly understood that their potential recruits,
G o t h ic k a

craving the extreme scares of horror movies, would “come to see Hell
House when they’d never walk inside a church,” as one Hell House orga-
nizer put it.16 Underlining the connection with the “haunted house” en-
tertainments of secular Halloween celebrations, Hell House productions
are held in the month of October through Halloween night. Hell itself is
rendered as a Gothick space straight out of Dante via horror movies and
comic books: monster-masked demons torture the damned in a simulated
burning pit. In the best Protestant tradition, only the demonic is visible,
in excruciating detail, and not the divine: Heaven is rendered simply as
a doorway filled with light that we can’t see into. As the presenters them-
selves stress, the purpose of Hell House is to awaken a single emotion—
fear of the consequences of sin— as a motivator for becoming a saved
Christian.
This is not conventional theater presented on a stage with a seated audi-
ence. Instead, “tour groups” of fifteen to twenty people are led from room
to room in a specially constructed Hell House edifice to watch emblematic
scenes of damnation and salvation: A boy mocked by his classmates com-
mits suicide. A young woman dying a bloody death from an abortion ac-
cepts God and is saved. A homosexual dying of AIDS spurns God and goes
to Hell. A girl gets interested in the “other side” by reading the Harry
Potter books, graduates to Gothick role-playing games like Magic: The
Gathering in high school, and then converts to Satanism, only to fi nd she’s
the one who gets to be the blood sacrifice to the Dev il.
The goal of this experiential melodrama, all its participants stress, is
Christian edification, just as it was for the morality plays. Here, though,
the more specifically focused goal is that of saving lost souls. Whereas
Everyman at his death is escorted by an angel with “great joy and melody”
into heaven, in the penultimate scene of the Trinity Hell House a church
member exhorts audience members—under threat of damnation to the
Hell full of suffering sinners they have just shared a room with—to make
a choice: they can enter the last chamber, a prayer room with church
counselors ready to help them be saved, or they can walk off alone into
the Halloween night. (This is doing something in real life and to real life
with a vengeance.) Quintessentially late twentieth century in its Gothick
feeling tone, Hell House evokes Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the 179
Left Behind Christian Rapture saga more than it does the brighter twenty-
first-century Christian allegory The Shack that chapter 11 will explore.

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
In contrast, the performance piece Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood moves us
directly out of the spiritual territory of Halloween into that of the Day of
the Dead. Allegory, puppets, and medieval mystery cycles all fi nd a home
in the works of Antenna Theater, a site-based company located in Marin
County, California, just north of San Francisco. Founded by its artistic
director Chris Hardman in 1980, Antenna produces “experiential art
forms” in which audiences walk from site to site (often outdoors) to witness
silent performances mimed sometimes by puppets, sometimes by human
actors wearing large puppet heads, while listening to interviews with real
people broadcast on individual headsets. During the months of October
and November 1996, Antenna staged a Day of the Dead celebration in the
form of a Gothick morality play that ingeniously reinvented the genre in
its staging and conception while remaining faithful to the aesthetics and
deeper precepts of the original form.
The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century have seen a
flowering of international high-art puppetry and the widespread incorpo-
ration of puppets in both mainstream and avant-garde theater, a trend that
started in the early twentieth century when the Expressionists elevated
puppet theater from a low-end mass entertainment to a high art form.17
Because they are simulacra animated by a human creator, puppets have a
universalizing quality that carries them easily into allegory’s territory of
personification and the animation of objects, pulling us automatically
back into the Old Goth matrix of macrocosm and microcosm, greater
and smaller, invisible and visible worlds.18 Almost a hundred years ago,
E. Gordon Craig expounded on the “religiosity” of puppets and the un-
conscious connection they still possess in our very secular imaginations to
the graven idols of olden days.19 Since then, the sense of the uncanny that
Freud identified with automata fashioned in the likeness of humans has
leaked out into a generic aura of strangeness, with supernatural overtones,
that once gathered around holy objects and saint’s statues.20
 The female main character of Antenna’s Skin & Bones/ Flesh & Blood—
the reversal of the common expression in this title already tilts us away
from the living and toward the macabre—is a Marin County matron we
know only as “the Mrs.” but whom we gradually come to perceive as a multi-
180 voiced Everywoman carry ing all our own readily identifiable human flaws.
Her ruling sins, not directly personified, are clearly Vanity and Greed (with
a helping of Lust and Gluttony); her quest is for Beauty, whom she does
G o t h ic k a

find personified, but not in the form she expects.

Stereotyped in real life as the ultimate affluent California New Age sub-
urb, Marin County easily served as the topos for this allegorical journey.
The physical site, the county’s central recycling center, offered a similarly
charged symbolic space whose double meaning for human life and death
was as perfectly accessible to every member of its present-day audience as
the use of a live lamb for the Christ Child in the Second Shepherd’s Play
would have been for audiences in Wakefield, and the pungent odor wafting
from the center’s adjacent state-of-the-art pig and goat farm underlined
the Old Goth atmosphere of this production.
Hardman has acknowledged the original Everyman, along with medi-
eval roving pageants and cart shows generally, as an inspiration for Skin &
Bones/Flesh & Blood. A second source was Mexican folk culture, in partic-
ular the rich collection of Catholic Christian customs clustered around
the Day of the Dead. With his original group, Snake Theater, Hardman
did an ur-version of Skin & Bones, in conjunction with the Galeria de la
Raza and other Latino organizations, as a Day of the Dead celebration in
the Mission district of San Francisco; he also began the first Day of the
Dead parade in that city, driving an old pickup truck with a fake skeleton
in the back. Over the years this parade has become a huge celebration that
the Latino community itself now organizes. When Hardman moved to
Marin, he started another Day of the Dead parade in that county’s biggest
city, San Rafael. He and his family privately observe the day with a home-
made altar containing the names of everyone they know who died the
previous year. All these observances, he believes, are a way of revitalizing
the meaning of the autumn season, returning the ritual from its juvenil-
ized Halloween version back to a celebration of death that fulfi lls a deep
need in the adult human psyche. Other influences Hardman cites include
the Belgian Expressionist painter James Ensor, in particular his painting
The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, and the Mexican artist José Posada,
whose work, particularly his etchings of the calaveras, the skeletons who
cavort and dance on All Souls’ Day, is permeated with Day of the Dead
imagery.21
A typical Antenna Theater production demands physical participation
from its audience, who must walk from one location to another like the 181
actors did in the old mystery plays, but also in the same way as videogam-
ers traverse a series of simulated landscapes and Hell House participants

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
explore their Gothick space. Hardman usually serves as master of ceremo-
nies and guide, leading his flock from site to site. Antenna’s “Walkmanol-
ogy” aesthetic— still operative in the twenty-first century, though the
technology has upgraded— calls for each “audient” to function as the silent
double of the play’s main character, “experiencing the drama fi rst hand
while listening to their own soundtrack filled with musings about who
they are and what they’re doing.”22
Voices—inside the head, banal, oracular, and hallucinatory— dominate
the Antenna Theater experience. But the voices come only from headsets,
making this a very different playgoing experience than either traditional
theater or the medieval pageants. Listening through a headset is a special
kind of auditory experience located somewhere “between autism and au-
tonomy,” as one commentator has noted.23 Surrounded by other audience
members, one has only the “portable intimacy” of the audio commentary
as a companion; the shared, and often audible, emotional reaction that is
part of theater experience across cultures since time began—fear, laughter,
all of it—is gone. The fact that each person makes the lonely pilgrimage
in the sole company of disembodied voices recorded at another time and
place creates a further distortion in perceptions of space and temporality.
Compared to the shared group experience of the Hell House productions,
it’s an exercise in isolation.
The solipsism of this experience, the uncanny feeling of aloneness that it
engenders, is enhanced by the fact that the taped voices played through the
headset are not interactive dialogues but snippets of overlapping mono-
logues skillfully edited with cutting, fading, panning, echo, and other
sophisticated audio techniques. Never formally identified, the repetitive,
incantatory fragments—words, phrases, full sentences—are typically pre-
sented out of context, often for comic effect. The speakers are not actors
speechifying from a script but real people in the community talking about
their lives and jobs.
 Typically, a single actor (usually the Mrs. herself) serves as a mute me-
dium channeling this often comically mundane babble while pantomim-
ing the stories these voices tell. “My voice is not something that I merely
have, or something that I, if only in part, am,” Steven Connor reminds us.
182 “Rather, it is something that I do. A voice is not a condition, nor yet an
attribute, but an event.”24 As a series of mimed voice events detached from
individual speakers, the continuous oral commentary has the interest-
G o t h ic k a

ing effect of turning the per formance even farther away from the interac-
tive conflict of conventional drama and toward the picaresque journey of
allegory.
So let the performance begin. Imagine you are standing outside the re-
cycling center on a dark October night, plugged into your Walkman and
waiting with a group of fellow audients for the journey to begin. After some
anticipatory static, your ears are filled with the sound of crickets and gen-
tle snoring. The corrugated iron door of the recycling center lifts to reveal
a sleeping woman, the play’s nameless heroine, played by a human actor
wearing a giant puppet head. As she tosses and turns, you deduce from the
speech fragments in your Walkman that she’s in the grip of a nightmare
about growing old. A man’s voice (it belongs to the owner of a modeling
agency, though we don’t know this yet) intones the phrases “Over the hill,”
“Going into the older period,” “She’s full under the chin . . . a double chin,”
followed by a child’s voice gleefully pronouncing: “A long nose . . . a green
face . . . a big wart . . . a big hat . . . a witch!”
The Mrs. wakes up to the sound of a shrill alarm and the loud ticking
of a clock, an important audio motif in the play. To the noise of cars, a
radio traffic report, and a woman saying “I’m late . . . I’m late . . . I really
hate it when I’m running late,” she rushes off to a busy day. Tagging along
after the Mrs., you walk upstairs with your silent headset-wearing group to
scenes set in a modeling agency (where women try to get hired as affir-
mation of their beauty), an aerobics class (figured as dancing silhouettes
behind a curtain), a beauty salon (to color ugly gray hair, various voices sug-
gest), and finally a plastic surgeon’s office, where the central line of this play
is delivered for the first time: “Every single person in this world is con-
cerned about their appearance.” This statement is pronounced by the cool,
self-satisfied voice of a female plastic surgeon given to deadpan asides about
the necessity of “keeping up with the twenty-year-olds.” She is mimed by
an extraordinarily tall puppet-woman, bobbing and simpering, whose face
has movable parts that rotate into various combinations judged to be more
or less pleasing. As another voice says, “The eye region of the face is the
first thing we look at,” a puppet-headed surgeon sharpens his knives.
Our Everywoman disappears offstage for her procedure (voiced, scar- 183
ily, as a whining buzz saw), then reemerges minus two of her three chin
folds and straight-nosed, prancing and preening in front of a mirror: “My

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
face . . . my beautiful face,” a woman’s voice says happily, and the female
surgeon declares, “Plastic surgery just makes you feel so good about your-
self, it really does.” Excitement builds on the soundtrack about the Black
and White Ball, a formerly exclusive San Francisco social event now con-
verted to a fund-raiser open to anyone with the price of a ticket. As your
group walks downstairs, many voices, male and female, chatter: “It is
wild, it is crazy, it is exciting,” “The event of the year,” “Always done really
pretty,” “Everyone gets all dressed up in their best,” “Dance all night and
party and have fun.” And here comes the Mrs., crooning to herself on her
way to the ball: “My beautiful face . . . my skin . . . my hair . . . my eyes.”
Suddenly, to the plaintive refrain of a Mexican folk song and the model-
ing agency owner’s comment “They’re all trying to get in,” two fearsome
twelve-foot-tall apparitions made of shredded newspaper glide out of the
darkness. Your initial terror turns to pity when you hear the poignant
voice of a homeless child describing (in an obvious allusion to Joseph and
Mary) how he and his family were turned away from various houses and
fi nally had to sleep under some stairs. Miming the angry words of a xeno-
phobic activist, the Mrs. rants against these aliens who “illegally cross our
borders,” “displace white American citizens out of their jobs,” and “devalue
real estate values” in San Rafael. “You would not know you were in Amer-
ica,” she concludes, and calls the police.
Another change of scene and rooms and now at last you’re at the Black
and White Ball, where the Mrs. makes her grand entrance. To the butcher’s
itemization of sirloin cuts (“this part is more tender—this is the round,
this is a loin”), the Mrs. poses and preens, then proceeds with other guests
to devour an Expressionist carcass with bestial gusto and loud smacking
of lips. But without warning, her bright, superficial life takes a downward
turn: her precious reconstructed face gets injured, and the Mrs. is rushed
on a stretcher to the hospital, where she’s on the operating table suddenly
 facing the prospect of death. You hear a clock loudly ticking; its hand is
an arrow pointing at Everywoman’s pulsing, glowing heart. A male voice
saying “I haven’t finished what I came here to do” overlaps with the female
activist’s “Illegal,” “Crossing the border,” and “When they say they will
184 overwhelm, they mean it.”
As the spectral homeless gigantonas restlessly circle the operating table,
your ears absorb the layered meanings in the soundtrack. The broken-
G o t h ic k a

record, fetishistic repetition and juxtaposition of key phrases and themes,

disorienting at first, has taken on an almost symphonic logic that becomes
emotionally easy to follow. There is the merging of models and “model
citizens,” or (in a good Shakespearean conflation) the body and the body
politic; there is crossing the boundary from Mexico to the United States,
invading the boundary of the body with surgical knives, and crossing the
border from life to death; there is the conflation of cosmetic surgery,
butchery, and embalming; and finally there is the Black and White Ball
as a social event (a dance of life), an ethnic and class separator, and, in the
ultimate conjunction of opposites, a dance of death.
Now Death makes his first entrance, the familiar Old Goth/Gothick
erotic male predator who’s caught a whiff of his prey. A human actor wear-
ing a huge puppet skull head, a top hat, and a black suit of Mexican folk-
loric tradition, he swoops and hovers around the Mrs. After an interlude
about the “terminal restlessness” of some dying people, Death reappears
and embraces her, and they do a stately tango as a hospice worker describes
the dying person’s state of mind: “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.” As the
Mrs. moves into deeper acceptance, Death gives her one last gallant tango
swoop— and takes her.
A bell tolls ominously; the “Lord is my shepherd” prayer is recited. Ac-
companied by Gothick sounds of thunder and lightning, rain, the creaking
open of a large gate, and low chanting voices, you descend a stairway into
the bowels of the recycling center. It’s dank and cold down here in the
land of the dead. Surrounded by mountainous bales of newspaper, crushed
plastic, and glass, you watch the danse macabre of the calaveras—full-
body puppet skeletons manipulated by humans standing behind them—
to sprightly vibraphone music in our Walkmans. As the voices on the audio
track take up the refrain of “crossing the border” once again, the Mrs. is
rolled in, lying in her coffin. Cackling ghouls help her out and dance her
off to yet another operating table, where they chop off her flesh and be-
head her. Here voices of the butcher, the plastic surgeon, and the modeling
agency owner intertwine (“We trim the flank,” “Saddlebags, droopy chin,”
“Maybe a double chin or a nose that is hulking,” “We use this for ground
meat”), only to be drowned out fi nally by the ghouls’ maniacal laughter. 185
Stripped of her flesh as well as her earthly possessions, the Mrs. has no
personal identity left. A man says in your ears: “That’s a fear of people—

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
that they’re going to lose what they have when they go to the other side.”
The hospice worker says, “Suddenly they’re going to fi nd they’re no dif-
ferent than everyone else.” At this lowest point, another voice (presum-
ably that of a man who survived a near-death experience) breaks in with a
soothing, extended (and, significantly, uninterrupted) monologue:

There was a conscious choice made that it was no longer useful to

have this body/mind. Spontaneously there was a great relaxation that
was felt through the universe and release and a sense of joy, and spon-
taneously at that moment I found myself with no awareness of any
tragedy or any problem in life. I was actually looking up into a night
sky. . . . There was this grand imagination, this open consciousness
that seemed to go out into infi nity. . . . I was this point of conscious-
ness, radiating, and the whole mood was absolute bliss and joy.

A woman’s voice adds, “Most beautiful place . . . don’t bring me back.” The
music swells, and our heroine’s head, now reattached to her skeleton, ele-
vates high overhead in blue light.
The skeletons return, performing their danse macabre, and you under-
stand that this is the ultimate Black and White Ball, the place, many dis-
jointed voices tell us, where you “don’t have to worry about fashion, taxes,”
where “there are people hugging and kissing,” “having fun all day long”—in
short, a rather dubious Paradise. With Hardman’s music soundtrack pro-
viding a good medieval subtext, you understand that Hell is the cacopho-
nous many, Heaven the harmonious one. As the wild dance ends, Death
reappears for the last time bathed in blue light—but this time as a she, not
a he, a towering puppet with a female’s head and a long dress.
As the Mrs. kneels before transfigured Death, the multitude of voices
gives way to one, that of a Latino man: “Such a beautiful, respectful Lady,”
 he tells us, “like the faithful bride” (“Bone structure is very important,”
the plastic surgeon interrupts). “The one who doesn’t have any rivals,” the
man continues. “Death represents this ideal bride, this perfect lover . . .
there is nobody as beautiful as she.” As choral singing voices rise, Lady
186 Death lifts up the Mrs. and cradles her like a baby, the formerly male lover
now a bride-mother reunited with her child. The Mrs.’s quest for physical
beauty has reached its only possible conclusion, and with it comes peace and
G o t h ic k a

completion. In the allegory of Beauty, Death is the perfect Form and the
Mrs.—you, me, all of us— are her pale imitators.
Skin & Bones is over. As the lights go on, you don’t remember the
puppet-headed, formerly triple-chinned lead character’s insufferable van-
ity or her xenophobic hatred of immigrants. You’ve walked with the Mrs.
through the various chambers of the House of Life into the underworld
and seen her stripped to her essence, which is your essence. Because she has
lost the last trace of her individuality and is “no different than everyone
else,” you’ve experienced her death as if it were your own.
What is the nature of the animating force ensouling the Mrs. that
makes her seem an extension of ourselves, some kind of externalized soul
carrier? Absent a metaphysics that allows us, among other things, the con-
solation of a heavenly city resonant with San Rafael, California, it’s our
own shared experience of life as evoked by a Babel of voices channeled into
this half-human, half-papier-mâché entity. Because allegory embodies the
intrahuman experience, not the subjective life of the individual, identify-
ing with the performing object allows us, her ambient doubles, the experi-
ence of many lives at the same time. Even though critical wisdom decrees
that such deindividualizing is psychologically distancing, something curi-
ous happens as we listen to the voices of real people in our headsets and
watch the grotesque main character before us mime their chatty stream of
consciousness. Instead of fragmenting our sense of the Mrs., this acting out
of diverse stories perversely solidifies our sense of her, and our own, living
wholeness. Against the whole postmodern agenda that hybrid technologies
dissolve the unitary boundaries of self, here all the disparate pieces come
together into a satisfying, if most unfashionable, resolution.25
In Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood, multimedia theater techniques conven-
tionally regarded as destabilizing have helped invest the Gothick with the
spirit (if not the dogma) of Old Goth Catholic folk religion to produce a
powerful unitary effect that is also a defining feature of the New Expres-
sionist supernatural melodramas I will discuss in the next chapter. Like
one of those nameless pageant masters of the Towneley or York cycles,
Chris Hardman offers his local community an aesthetic experience deeply
rooted in the details of its everyday reality. It’s also, thanks to the univer-
salizing powers of allegory, an experience capable of moving the rest of us 187
as well.

t h e g o t h ic k t h e at e r of h a l l ow e e n
The female revenant Sadako crawls out of a video into the real world. From Ringu (1998),
directed by Takashi Hideo.
 nine

the ten rules of sitges

Global Gothick Horror and Beyond

“[L’Age D’or] looks like an American movie,” Dalí told me, which was his idea
of a compliment.
—Luis Buñuel

Fifty miles south of Barcelona in the almost autonomous state of Catalu-

nya, Spain, lies the pretty, slightly overpolished resort town of Sitges. In
this former fishing village full of date palms and red tile roofs that is now
completely given over to the tourist trade, you find yourself walking down,
down, down winding narrow cobblestone streets toward that magic patch
of blue framed in an archway—the Mediterranean.
Sitges is home every year to the largest festival devoted to fantasy cinema
in Europe. Besides the kind of film the word fantasy suggests, the festival
features a wide range of formerly B-movie, now big-budget mainstream
genres: thriller, horror, science fiction, noir, martial arts, and animation.
There is also what might be called the metaphysical avant-garde. Most of
these genres belong to, or draw from, the Gothick tradition.
Europeans generally take horror cinema (as opposed to mere movies) a
bit more seriously than American critics do, just as a century and a half
ago they embraced Edgar Allan Poe more enthusiastically than his own
compatriots did. Yet Sitges, with its scaled-down Croisette (the Platje de la
 Ribera) and truncated carpet from the parking lot of the Sitges Meliá to
its hotel-basic front entrance, is still distinctly a step down from Cannes.
Press and fans (including a substantial geek element) come mostly from
Barcelona and other parts of Spain, with a smattering from France, the
190 United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe.
The movies come from all over.
Over ten days midway through the first decade of the twenty-first century,
G o t h ic k a

I viewed eighteen films from Spain, Korea, France, Denmark, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, emerging from each morning’s screening
at the hotel’s cavernous Auditori to greet again and again that pale flat sea
winking in the sunlight. The Mediterranean’s lack of surf, always surprising
to a Californian, brought up an ancient cinematic memory: a Honolulu audi-
ence erupting in heartless laughter during the Woody Allen movie Interiors
as a lead character drowns herself in a one-foot Hamptons shorebreak. As all
present in that Waikiki theater knew, you would practically have to hold
yourself down by the neck to make this happen.
Strolling along the promenade between films, I found myself ruminat-
ing on what the Gothick has become as it traveled around the world in
mostly American films, only to return alchemically transformed in the
crucible of other cultures but still indisputably itself. Out of these random
reflections, and in the spirit of the Dogme doctrine, a plethora of strictures
around “authenticity” irreverently proposed a decade ago by the Danish
director Lars von Trier and his cronies (and officially dissolved in 2005
after being taken all too reverently by disciples around the world), I would
like to propose the Ten Rules of Sitges. I take as my guiding muse for this
manifesto the distinguished son of Spain, great filmmaker, and lover of the
Gothick Luis Buñuel, who—moving as he did from the Surrealist avant-
garde to grinding out B movies in Mexico to a felicitous late blossoming
that lay somewhere between these two extremes— constitutes a little Sit-
ges all by himself.

Rule 1. In the popular culture of commercial genre movies, including the Gothick,
the United States rules like late Rome— that is, shaky but still dominant.
This parallel is a vivid one at Sitges, where first-century Roman sar-
cophagi are still being dug out of the ground. In the same way that the
makers of these artifacts succeeded in imposing their language and culture
on indigenous peoples of the Mediterranean and much of western Europe,
Hollywood imposed its storytelling conventions around the world, creating
a distinct brand of popular film in its own image. For much of the twenti-
eth century we colonized the rest of the globe with our blockbuster movies
dubbed into their languages, and from time to time they gave us back pale
imitations of our crowd-pleasing commercial fare along with unsurpassed 191
treasure troves of art film.
Hollywood has also discovered the lucrative side business of bankrolling

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
“local-language” movies that are produced, shot, and released in their own
countries: Walt Disney has begun making its first Chinese-language films,
and Sony has produced no fewer than twenty-seven such local-language
films since 1995.1 More significant, the Asian martial arts movies produced
since the 1970s and plentifully represented at Sitges demonstrate not only
that the tide is reversing—the colonies often making better product than
the mother country—but also that these new genres and styles have reen-
tered the American-dominated matrix and transformed it in turn.
Even now, many Americans still naively believe that U.S. hegemony in
pop culture products during the twentieth century was a result of something
inherently superior in the essence of the home product, not simple market
domination. But as Buñuel once astutely remarked of this country’s domi-
nance in world literature in his day: “Without the enormous influence of the
canon of American culture, Steinbeck would be unknown, as would Dos
Passos and Hemingway. If they’d been born in Paraguay or Turkey, no one
would ever have read them, which suggests the alarming fact that the great-
ness of a writer is in direct proportion to the power of his country.”2
The same holds for commercial cinema. Despite the many significant
inroads to be discussed under rule 2, our pop culture entertainment em-
pire still wields a mighty clout, and most of its international market re-
mains very much colonized. America still rules in the realm of “tent pole”
blockbuster movies, action-adventure films whose very high-tech special
effects and 3-D capabilities can so far only be bankrolled by U.S. studios.3
At Sitges, big-budget American movies (Serenity and Flight Plan the year I
attended) drew the largest audiences and press conferences, and arrivals of
U.S. stars such as Jodie Foster and Quentin Tarantino were prominent in
the press and on Spanish television almost to the exclusion of fi lm person-
alities from other countries. In contrast, many of the more sophisticated
non-U.S. Sitges entries that year, such as Allegro, Antarctic Journal, and
Lemming, never found a North American distributor.
 Trailing in Hollywood’s exhaust much as Britain’s Hammer Films did
in the 1950s and 1960s, the Barcelona studio Filmax has become a pro-
lific producer of low-budget English-language horror fi lms since the
1990s. These faux American features are aimed at the international mar-
192 ket and usually boast an American star with a recognizable name. Dur-
ing his press conference, Filmax’s president, Julio Fernández, took heat
from the mostly Spanish journalists present about making English-
G o t h ic k a

language movies in Spain. His impassioned response— essentially, that

his movies were always 100 percent Spanish no matter if the language
spoken were English, Spanish, or Chinese— seemed disingenuous in view
of a line uttered by a character from one of Filmax’s more ambitious hor-
ror entries, The Nun, directed by Juan de la Madrid: “Is this supposed to
be ‘I-Know-What-You-Did-18-Summers-Ago’?”
To the rule of ongoing U.S. dominance, my Sitges viewing experience
suggested the following:
Corollary a: Even with the growing importance of global over strictly North
American box offi ce returns, the international Gothick smorgasbord still tastes
like burgers and fries.
Those productions with any hope of international distribution must ide-
ally be in the English language and feature well-known American stars.
Shoehorning the obligatory American lead actor into a story set and shot
outside the United States can lead to some awkward cinematic moments,
however. Take Fragile (2005), the ghost story from Filmax’s best and most
visible director, Jaume Balagueró. It’s set on the Isle of Wight (great tax
breaks) and stars Calista Flockhart (recognizable American star) as a be-
leaguered hospital’s high-strung replacement for a nurse who has mysteri-
ously died. The audience’s unspoken question—what’s an American doing
working temp in the United Kingdom?—is tersely addressed by Flock-
hart’s character as follows: “It’s a long story.” The presence of Elena Anaya
(a readily identifiable star for the home audience in Spain) is similarly
dealt with by having her character declare, during a tough turn of events,
“I wish I were back in Madrid!”
In The Nun (part of a Gothick sub-subgenre Douglas Cowan has dubbed
“nunsploitation”), a very Spanish Gothick Catholic girls’ school setting is
converted into a most unlikely “international boarding school” in order to
accommodate characters who are nominally American.4 The culture gap
between Catholic-majority and Protestant-majority countries (to say nothing
of the rest of the world) widens when the ghost of the crazed, sexually re-
pressed mother superior, murdered in impulsive retaliation by the six school-
girls she tormented, proceeds to finish them off one by one according to the
gruesome death met by the martyred female saint each is named after. To
audiences in the American heartland, this ingenious idea (conceived by 193
Jaume Balagueró) is likely to seem more exotic than the faux Catholic secret-
department-in-the-bowels-of-the-Vatican movies routinely churned out

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
in the United States.5 Balagueró’s later zombie movie Rec (2007), about an
apartment building whose inhabitants are turning into zombies one by one
and staged as TV breaking-news reportage, had breakthrough international
distribution and garnered (the ultimate compliment of a U.S.-centric indus-
try) its own American remake (as Quarantine) the next year.6

Rule 2. Still, most of the new Rome’s colonies are well on their way to pop culture
autonomy and ultimate hegemony.
Out of the indigenous dialects of Latin spoken around the Roman Em-
pire came the rich harvest of modern Romance languages. Two millennia
later, Latin is dead and three of its colonial offshoots, Spanish, Portuguese,
and French, have had their own run as imperial languages imposed in turn
on new colonial populations.
Today the world of Gothick horror film is still in the early stages of post-
colonial transformation. After the imitations came the hybrids (such as
the Filmax products); after the hybrids came a variety of lively indigenous
progeny using the imperial film language as a point of departure but mak-
ing it ineffably their own. All that began to change as early as the 1950s,
when the United Kingdom’s Hammer Films brought out its famous line
of Gothick period horror fi lms (The Masque of the Red Death, spinoffs of
Dracula and Frankenstein) whose lurid Technicolor was especially effective
in showcasing gouts of bright crimson blood. In the 1970s, Italian movie-
makers such as Dario Argento and Mario Bava crafted distinctive horror
movies that upped the gore quotient even higher. In the same decade,
Asian martial arts movies basically killed off and replaced the Hollywood
western, and the Japa nese conquest of American children’s imaginations
inserted new cultural elements that would radically modify the tradition-
ally dark Anglo-American Gothick over the next forty years. The hybrid
conventions of the Asian live-action adult horror films that flowered in the
1990s affected the U.S. horror genre profoundly both in their original
 forms and in the flood of Hollywood remakes that followed in the new
century.
Corollary a: The new Rome of Gothick film is Japan, closely followed by
Korea, with Thailand bringing up the rear.
194 More than any other of these former cultural colonies, Japan has emerged
as the front-runner in the new tide of world pop culture domination.
Japan had its own supernatural high literary tradition independent from
G o t h ic k a

the Anglo-American Gothick, but the works of twentieth-century writers

such as Izumi Kyoka, rooted in indigenous folklore, were given that con-
venient label when they were translated into Western languages. Japanese
ghost stories retold by the Irish-Greek-American expat Lafcadio Hearn
in his hybrid collection Kwaidan (1903), much better known in the West
and also labeled Gothick, were made into the 1964 Japanese movie of the
same name that gained a worldwide following.7 Further down the road,
however, Japanese folklore mutated with Gothick imports from America
to form the brand-new hybrid known as J-Horror.
Japan had begun its first tentative inroads into U.S. popular culture
during the country’s post–World War II recovery by making toys for the
American market, the first being, appropriately, toy U.S. Army jeeps made
from tin cans.8 Over the decades Japanese animators went on to break
Walt Disney’s stranglehold on children’s fantasy culture with everything
from Power Rangers to Pokémon to Yu- Gi-Oh and most of the cartoons
American children watch today on cable TV. The subtle switch in the bal-
ance of cultural hegemony is reflected in the move from total American-
ization of the remade product (for example, converting the Japanese hit
anime/TV show about boy and girl teenage superheroes, Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers, to an all-American cast and setting in the 1990s) to the
Japanese-language signs, rice consumption, and other flagrantly unassimi-
lated artifacts of current anime shown on U.S. TV. Today, tellingly, Japa-
nese manga in English translation are published to be read back to front,
as in the original Japanese.9
Fan culture is a far more intense phenomenon in Japan than it is in the
United States, recognized by government and populace alike as an industry,
a lifestyle, and a distinct kind of social existence. Costuming as a daily prac-
tice is common, particularly such iconic and fetishistic looks as the national
schoolgirl uniform and, in our neck of the woods, the Gothic vampire Loli
costume. Growing out of university hobby clubs in the 1980s, the fan scene
now dominates Akihabara, a whole suburb of Tokyo taken over by otaku
(extreme fan) merchandising that operates as a kind of fan theme park.10
A major subcurrent in otaku culture involves refashioning Gothick gore
into something appealing and childlike. Out of this come “cute” (the word
kawaii, which can also mean “deformed”) Cthulhus, zombies, and other 195
blood-spattered toys rendered in bright colors and a cuddly Hello Kitty–
like style meant to evoke fantasy, fun, and childhood.11 The following

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
description of a forthcoming anime on an English-language otaku site is
typical:

Haiyoru! Nyaruani: Remember My Mr. Lovecraft: A Cthulhu deity has

taken the form of a seemingly harmless silver haired girl. While
wandering around, she comes across a high school boy, Mahiro Yas-
aka, being attacked by aliens and saves him. For those unaware, that’s
never just the end of it when it comes to Cthulhu.12

The concept of cute monsters has traveled the Pacific to capture the sensibil-
ity of young American tweeners in much the way the not-so-cute Japanese
radiation-engendered monsters captured the Western imagination a half
century before. From Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra, Japanese kaiju (trans-
lation: “strange beasts”) morphed into today’s kaleidoscopic menagerie of
misunderstood creatures, everything from animistic water faucets and other
household objects to alien monsters such as the Dimensional Bug Mother,
a creature who sucks the life force out of humans with her tongue.13
Blending Eastern elements with the Western Gothick for a hybrid re-
sult is well illustrated in the work of Japanese anime giant Miyazaki Hayao.
Spirited Away (2001), Miyazaki’s best-known film outside Japan, has a cast
of solidly indigenous supernatural characters, as does the earlier Princess
Mononake (1997). His faithful adaptation of a British fantasy novel by
Diane Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), is a direct homage, like the
novel itself, to Gothick-Romantic Victorian children’s fantasy. (Miyazaki
changed the generic fantasy kingdom setting of the original into Regency
England, making Howl a libertine English lord rather than merely a
wizard.) Of the heroine of his anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
(1984), a postapocalyptic eco-tale that also became a graphic novel series,
Miyazaki has said that he was fascinated by a description of the “Phoeni-
cian princess” in a dictionary of Greek myths but was disappointed by the
 brief mention she gets in The Odyssey. Remembering a Japa nese folk-
tale heroine who loved insects, he blended the two.14 In the giant mutant
Ohmu insects of this story, however, American readers can also see the
influence of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune. Through many of
196 Miyazaki’s works runs a thread of metamorphosis from young girl into
ugly crone, a transition that is also found in western Europe’s Old Goth
“loathly lady” tradition. Widely adopted by the first Gothick and Roman-
G o t h ic k a

tic writers (e.g., Keats’s “Lamia”), the loathly lady figure is far less com-
mon in twentieth-century Anglo-American horror, which has been highly
male-centric.
A series of J-Horror films based loosely on indigenous folk belief but
featuring striking technological twists began to make an impression on the
international market starting in the late 1990s. The best known was Ringu
(“The Ring” [i.e., of the telephone], 1998), which uniquely combined the
traditional Japanese theme of a vengeful female ghost with the high-tech
world of video and telephones: assorted people receive a mysterious video in
the mail, receive a phone call from a silent caller immediately after screening
it, and die within days. The video turns out to be cursed by the spirit of a
murdered girl who crawls out of the television set to kill anyone who watches
it.15 In Kairo (“Pulse,” 2001), ghosts invade the Internet to lure the living to
their website and join them in death.16 Ju-on (“The Grudge,” 2000) is the
story of a curse passed on from a murdered wife to living victims who are
possessed by her rage, commit murder, and die in turn.17
South Korea has produced its own distinctive Gothick brand, K-Horror,
with notable proponents including Park Chan-wook (Thirst, Oldboy, Sym-
pathy for Mr. Vengeance), Bong Joon-ho (The Host), and Kim Ji-wan (A Tale
of Two Sisters).18 Park Chan-wook’s faux Catholic vampire tale Thirst
(2009), written by Park and Jeong Seo-geong and based rather unexpect-
edly on Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (which contains the core story
of a love triangle, minus the vampires), is a classic piece of contemporary
Asian hybrid Gothick filmmaking. In Park’s version, a Korean Catholic
priest working as a missionary in Africa (an unlikely figure to start with,
given that South Korea’s large Christian minority is mostly evangelical
Protestant) falls victim to a virus (a now well-entrenched quasi-scientific
agency for Gothick vampirism) that turns him into a bloodsucker.19 Back
home, the disease transforms the priest from a selfless ascetic into a reck-
less sensualist who converts the wife of his cousin to lover and fellow
vampire. When her bloodlust proves even more out of control than his, he
elects to lock her in a car with him at dawn, waiting for the rays of the ris-
ing sun to vaporize them both.
In a vestige of the old colonialism that is long gone from children’s enter-
tainment, the new wave of Japanese and Korean horror films have been 197
widely remade by Hollywood with American actors and settings, often
resulting—with a great deal of poetic justice—in a poor and culturally indi-

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
gestible imitation of the original. Ringu’s rich cultural matrix was diluted in
its American remake into a pallid pastiche unconvincingly relocated to the
Pacific Northwest, and its gripping plot was rendered incoherent by overed-
iting.20 The trend has continued with every other international horror movie
of any worth being remade (more than a dozen Japanese horror movies as
well as Balagueró’s Rec, the 2007 Spanish horror film The Orphanage, the
2008 Danish vampire movie Let the Right One In, and many others).
It is an interesting circumstance that so far Hollywood has been far
more deeply influenced by filmmakers from other countries at the genre
level, especially horror and martial arts, than in its middlebrow main-
stream, which remains steadfastly parochial and ethnocentric. This cir-
cumstance is partly due to the dramatically lower cost of the genre movies;
the United States still hogs the market in blockbusters, whose budgets as
yet can’t be matched in other countries. Meanwhile, in what one critic has
called “a yearly reminder of the American film establishment’s systematic
marginalization and misapprehension of much of world cinema,” the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences allows exactly five foreign movies
out of hundreds, and only one per country, to be nominated for its annual
Oscar awards.21

Rule 3. As a result of horror movie imports, the supernaturalism of other cultures

has begun to reshape the classic Anglo-American Protestant Gothick.
Not just Asian folk and religious tradition but also the popular beliefs of
non-Protestant-majority countries from Russia to Spain inform the new
Gothick.
Corollary a: Among the many reverse imports from the former colonies, per-
haps the most notable is the supernatural female hero or antagonist who is immor-
tal, undead, or monstrous.
In one of those imponderable marks of cultural difference, the Protes-
tant Gothick literary tradition rarely represented women as menacing
 natural or supernatural figures. Up to the last decade of the twentieth
century the Anglo-American horror film has drawn from a strong tradi-
tion of evil male supernatural creatures (vampires, werewolves, man-made
golems of various sorts) who actively menace a passive imperiled heroine.
198 When women did make a supernatural appearance, it was usually as
benign, often victimized ghosts, the proverbial woman in white wafting
down the corridor of the ancient mansion; female monsters on the order of
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Sheridan Le Fanu’s predatory female vampire Carmilla are the exceptions

to the rule. (Not coincidentally, a touchstone of twentieth-century U.S.
scholarly and popular tradition alike was that the witches of Salem were
innocent scapegoats of social bigotry.)
U.S. horror and sci-fi films have featured a handful of female monsters,
but most have been artificial humans fashioned by the crucial Gothick
figure of the mad scientist, Mary Shelley’s post-Enlightenment update of
the sorcerer/alchemist who makes a pact with the Dev il. Shelley’s own
Victor Frankenstein, significantly, forswore making a female bride for his
monster. From the spinoff movie Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to Attack of
the 50-Foot Woman (1958) to Species (1995) to Splice (2009), the scant handful
of American female monsters have usually been Adam’s rib–type golems
fashioned by men and animated by electricity, nuclear radiation, extrater-
restrial DNA, or animal DNA, a progression that nicely mirrors scientific
advances over the last century.
This kind of gender typing is not as pronounced in Asian and some
European Catholic/Orthodox folk traditions, all of which feature some sort
of female divinities and thus allow more imaginative space for the repre-
sentation of female supernatural power.22 A common thread uniting those
countries whose horror fi lms feature female monsters is that their pre-
dominant religion is not Protestant Christian. Japanese movies have al-
ways foregrounded the folk traditions of female spirits of the dead whose
unnatural deaths keep them restlessly searching the material world for
vengeance. From Kwaidan to Ringu and beyond, they are mostly revenants.
These spirits aren’t the namby-pamby ladies in white of Anglo-American
tradition; a new and scary addition to the Gothick, they are malign, fiercely
aggressive, and out to get you. The long black hair of the silent killer girl-
child ghost of Ringu that completely covers her face, to give only one ex-
ample, is an image that takes up residence in your imagination in a most
unpleasant way. With the globalization of the Gothick, the evil female
entities of these other cultures have been steadily crawling off the screen
much like the Ringu entity to lodge themselves permanently in interna-
tional cinematic consciousness.
Japanese manga and anime have traditionally favored female main char-
acters as well as evil ghosts. The sexy, big-breasted female martial arts fight- 199
ers of early games such as Aeon Flux and Resident Evil migrated to American
videogames; from there, as we have seen, they moved into American TV

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s. Blood: The Last Vampire
(2000), an anime feature film that was remade in English as a 2009 live-
action film of the same name, presents a hero and villain who are both fe-
male and both supernatural: they are also mother and daughter.23 Though
this might be labeled the “Matilda” strand of the male Gothick (from the
female demon in The Monk, who may in fact be only a demon inhabiting a
female body), examples are few and far between in the Anglo-American
Gothick.24
Blood also grafts the bloodsucking habits of the Western vampire onto
a traditional Japa nese demon figure. The hybrid half-human and half-
vampire sword-fighting heroine Saya, conscripted by the U.S. Army on a
military base in Japan right before the Vietnam War, must finally make the
decision to kill her own mother, Onigen, billed as the most ancient, most
evil demon ever. Vampirism here becomes a marker for original sin as Saya
in effect faces the same moral challenge as the men-gods of the Anglo-
American graphic novel: to conquer her most basic instincts in order to live
a moral life. Onigen’s dying taunt to her daughter is that by using violence
Saya is now no different, and no better, than she is.
A very human female monster dominates the Korean-made Thirst. In
Park’s reimagining of the Zola story, the termagant mother-in-law silenced
by a stroke proves a more powerful force of nature than even the vampires.
Forced to watch the lovers incinerate themselves from the backseat of their
car, she turns out to be (in Carol Clover’s immortal term) the Final Girl,
the archetypal last survivor in late twentieth-century horror film.25 Her
mute, contorted face, bulging with apoplectic rage, is the image we leave
the theater with.
The middle-class, middle-aged (and decidedly nonsupernatural) matri-
arch as monster is a familiar character in the literature and film of Catholic
Europe (besides Zola’s mother-in-law, think of the title character of Benito
Peréz Galdós’s 1876 novel Doña Perfecta) as well as Asia. Her opposite
 number in mainstream American movies, in contrast, is more likely to be
an ineffectual people pleaser either dominated by her husband or desper-
ately seeking a boyfriend (vide Buffy and the Twilight series). Yet the char-
acter of Buffy herself and the vampires Victoria and Jane (not to mention
200 Bella herself) in the Twilight series demonstrate that the long-term re-
verse influence of other cultures on the Anglo-American colonial-imperial
Gothick has undeniably contributed in equal measure as social progress
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since the 1990s to a new generation of powerful female heroes and villains
where few were present before.
The female spirits of my season at Sitges were Spanish and French. Dis-
appointed or thwarted in love, seeking total possession or revenge, they
are negative vortices of repressed emotion.26 The ghost of the evil mother
superior haunts The Nun; in a French entry, Dominik Moll’s Lemming
(2005), a dead woman’s pervasive influence possesses the other characters,
possibly even inhabiting the bodies of the living as she seeks revenge on
her hated husband. In Fragile (now being remade in an English-language
version) director Jaume Balagueró and his cowriter Jordi Galceran created
a truly frightening apparition who haunts the handful of children remain-
ing in the pediatric ward of a remote, partially evacuated hospital. Seem-
ingly the ghost of a girl who died forty years earlier of a rare bone disorder,
the demonic spirit turns out to belong to her obsessed nurse, who secretly
injured the girl, fitted her own legs with braces in morbid identification,
then hurled herself down an elevator shaft. The visiting temp must pull
herself together in time to vanquish the nurse’s spirit, who is determined
to keep the remaining children with her in the hospital.
Far-fetched, yes, and it got a terrible review from the hard-nosed Vari-
ety critic, but the rest of the audience and I were squirming in terror every
time we were transported to the hospital’s abandoned second floor for
brief glimpses of the “mechanical girl’s” prosthetic legs.

Rule 4. The Gothick horror film is structured like a folktale.

Writers of the original Gothick-Romantic nexus drew heavily from Old
Goth medieval folktales and romances for their stories. Regardless of their
country of origin, the stories that power the new global Gothick also con-
tain such universal folktale motifs as the demon lover, the house that takes
on the features of its dead owners, and the unquiet dead, especially victims
of murder, who return to haunt the living.
 But Gothick horror movies draw from folktale in form as well as con-
tent. After analyzing a hundred Russian fairy tales, the Russian formalist
Vladimir Propp derived a single narrative structure composed of irreduc-
ible units he called “functions.” Every fairy tale, he asserted in his classic
Morphology of the Folktale (1928), has a total of thirty-one such functions, 201
always in the same sequence. Each tale begins with a misfortune or lack
that forces the hero to leave home, struggle with a villain, return home,

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
and experience transfiguration in the form of a new physical appearance,
a wedding, material gain, or other life change.27
The same is true of genre movies, whose form is governed partly by
rules of folklore, partly by rules of corporate marketing. As we have seen
with many subgenres, what seems like copying in the Gothick is actually a
kind of folkloric repetition, and what seems like commercial formula is, at
a deeper level, folkloric form.28 “All folklore distinguishes itself by a mix-
ture of repetition and innovation,” as the French historian Lucien Febvre
once said.29 Contemporary mass entertainments, of course, do not operate
by the same rules as folklore of preindustrial times; a complex interplay of
market forces with individual authorship is involved. Nonetheless, some of
the same elements are visible at times, especially the elaboration of famil-
iar themes with individual variations, typical of genre building in popular
entertainments across all media.
As we saw in the case of The Da Vinci Code, popular novels and films bor-
row plot and character elements openly from past works in a way con-
temporary high art with its strong modernist heritage frowns on. Form is
the engine that powers the story as themes, subthemes, and motifs travel
from film to film in a way that seems like blatant plagiarism to the high
literary mind (which judges by rules of authorial originality) but is actu-
ally a kind of fractal replication that is deeply satisfying to audiences
steeped in this tradition. Genre fans expect the familiar tropes to show up
again and again, to be either reinforced, extended, or reversed.30
In the United States, folklorist and Jungian Joseph Campbell carried on
the structuralist tradition of the Russian formalists in his Hero with a Thou-
sand Faces, which influenced a whole generation of filmmakers and writers
on film craft.31 A very Proppian theory of storytelling is widely disseminated
today through the popu lar “Story Structure” screenplay writing classes
of Robert McKee, a latter-day Russian formalist disguised in Ralph Lau-
ren sportswear who made a notorious cameo appearance in the movie
 Adaptation.32 In Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screen-
writing, a distillation of McKee’s workshop lectures, Propp’s lack or misfor-
tune becomes the “inciting incident,” otherwise known as the “Quest”:

202 For better or for worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance,
arousing in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that
which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his
G o t h ic k a

Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-

personal). He may or may not achieve it. This is story in a nutshell.33

McKee punctuates his dense but lively discourse with highly complicated
flowcharts of plot development that underline his formalist emphasis on
structure above all other elements. It is, of course, the structure of Auer-
bach’s avanture, the quest of medieval epic, and the basis of the male Goth-
ick as well, but now it applies to female heroes, too.
The old Hollywood movies were pure, unadulterated Propp because
studio bosses knew Americans craved the simple Story of fairy tale. In
one of the great anecdotes of My Last Breath, his memoir as told to Jean-
Claude Carrière, Buñuel exposes the formalist rules of Hollywood moral-
ity, deeply encoded in character and story arc. In his “frequent moments
of idleness while under contract in Los Angeles,” Buñuel recalls, he con-
structed “a bizarre document— a synoptic table of the American cinema”
consisting of several movable columns set up on a large piece of paste-
board; the first one for “ambience” (Parisian, western, gangster, war, tro-
pical, comic, medieval, etc.), the second for “epochs,” the third for “main
characters,” and so on. Altogether, there were four or five categories, each
with a tab for easy maneuverability. The purpose of the table, according to
Buñuel, was to show “that the American cinema was composed along such
precise and standardized lines that, thanks to my system, anyone could
predict the basic plot of a fi lm simply by lining up a given setting with a
particular era, ambience, and character. It also gave particularly exact in-
formation about the fates of heroines.”34
The table became such an obsession with Buñuel and his friends that his
screenwriter friend Eduardo Ugarte, who lived upstairs, had committed it
to memory. When the producer of Josef Sternberg’s Dishonored, a vehicle
for Marlene Dietrich, boasted of the movie’s daring originality— the star,
Dietrich, actually dies at the end—Buñuel retorted that he knew in the
fi rst five minutes that this would happen. To prove his point, he woke
up Ugarte and briefly rattled off the details: ambience–Viennese; epoch–
World War I. After Buñuel mentioned that the movie opens with a whore
(Dietrich) rolling an officer, the sleepy Ugarte “stood up, yawned, waved
his hand in the air, and started back upstairs to bed. ‘Don’t bother with any 203
more,’ he mumbled. ‘They shoot her at the end.’ ”35

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
Rule 5. For fervent consumers of Gothick horror ( films, books, or comics), folk-
loric repetition becomes repetition compulsion.
Following the end of each screening at the Meliá’s cavernous audito-
rium, I found myself in a deep depression. Was it merely a consequence of
watching too many movies in the morning, as real fi lm critics routinely
do? Or did it come from encountering too many buckets of fake blood
slopped over the unacknowledged trauma underlying such films? The in-
your-face cruelty and sadism of the horror genre have always been one of
its most troubling features.
Elsewhere I’ve discussed the psychological dynamic of repetition com-
pulsion as the engine driving the near-addictive attraction fans feel toward
genres such as romance and murder mysteries as well as horror.36 My argu-
ment, briefly, is that the teasing, indirect effect of formulaic storytelling is
to create an endless cycle of desire provoked by lack of gratification. Much
like the symbolic games traumatized children typically like to play, for the
true aficionado reading or watching horror on a regular basis amounts to
a ritual displacement of trauma experienced but never resolved. The very
rigidity of the genre’s structure tends to shield its true addicts from the
deeper experience of identification with suffering. Instead, it shepherds
them safely through a fake reenactment of violent and terrifying events
as stylized as a gavotte, a reenactment that retriggers the feelings of terror
and helplessness without ever actually engaging with the trauma itself.
Seeing the first Saw movie does not engender catharsis; instead, it triggers
the craving to see Saw II and Saw III—to feel the scary feelings over and
over again without having to engage with what lies beneath them.
For that reason it is not surprising that for more than 200 years male
adolescents have remained Gothick horror’s largest single demographic.
The lifelong appeal that the Gothick holds for some still incites the same
chaotic feelings—free-floating panic, anxiety around sexuality and bodily
transformation, extremes of love and hate and rage—that beset young
 people of both sexes at that difficult age. Noel Carroll believes that teenage
boys use horror movies as a rite of passage for achieving mastery of fear
and overall emotional management; Carol Clover believes these same boys
find pleasure in vicariously identifying with the lone female survivor of
204 many of these films.37 My own feeling is that the deeper compulsion pow-
ering the desire to consume horror is by defi nition never fully addressed,
and for that reason—given the very large number of adult horror fanboys
G o t h ic k a

and fangirls—it does not represent a true rite of passage.

Bearing all this in mind, and given numerous exceptions within both
camps, I propose two broad categories of contemporary horror film roughly
corresponding to the classic male and female Gothick: those that appeal to
thirteen-year-old boys and those that appeal to fifteen-year-old girls. Each
category, naturally, has its own rule.

Rule 6. The thirteen-year-old boy’s Gothick rule of horror = torture, blood and
guts, despair, and destruction.
Until recently, American boys enjoyed being scared to death by such
relatively innocuous gorefests as Tales from the Crypt and the Halloween se-
ries. Since the year 2000, however, the stakes of violence in mainstream
American horror films have been substantially raised, thanks in no small
part to the influence of the colonies, where the gore quotient first began
to climb.
The groundbreaking Italian horror movies of the 1960s and 1970s were
quickly one-upped by the Asia Extreme movement that started in the
1990s—including works by Tsukamoto Shinya (whose Tetsuo series fea-
tures a “metals fetishist,” played by Tsukamoto himself, who pushes in-
creasingly larger shards of iron into his body) and Koreans Takashi Miike
(especially Audition, 1999) and Park Chan-wook. Inevitably, elements of
the Extreme movements in various countries began finding their way into
Hollywood. Hostel (2005), screened at Sitges by the film’s writer/director
Eli Roth and executive producer Quentin Tarantino, was one of the fi rst
of a new wave of American horror movies that sought to equal their Asian
and Italian counterparts in bloodthirstiness. (The equally violent Saw
series and Wolf Creek have Australian roots, though the Saw movies are
American made.) The critic David Edelstein, himself a fan of violent hor-
ror, was the first to dub this new subgenre “Torture Porn.”38
 Hostel is the story of two callow American lads and their Icelandic ac-
quaintance who are lured to a remote corner of Slovakia by the prospect of
unlimited sex with beautiful girls, only to become grist for the torture mill
of a mad Dutchman. The sole survivor manages to wreak equivalent ven-
geance on the Dutchman, whom he tortures and murders in a train station 205
toilet before resuming his journey home. In the final shot, the former fun-
loving frat boy now bears the stern features of a hardened combat veteran,

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
a character arc if ever there was one. But the delicacy (if that is the right
word) of this effect stands in striking contrast to the virtually unbearable
violence perpetrated during the story and is perhaps not sufficient to coun-
teract it, given the fact that the main character is now no better than his
tormenter.
One might, of course, simply read Hostel as a larger, Jamesian metaphor
for the whole reverse-import phenomenon of naive American directors fall-
ing under the spell of their worldlier, more decadent counterparts in other
parts of the globe, including but not limited to Europe, where more recent
horror auteurs such as the Dutchman Tom Six (The Human Centipede series,
about a mad doctor who sews living human beings together), the French-
man Pascal Laugier (whose Martyrs sends a young woman and her friend on
a quest for vengeance against her childhood tormentors), and Norwegian
Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow, about reanimated Nazi zombies wreaking
havoc on the world) are reviving the extreme horror tradition of their Ital-
ian predecessors Argento and Bava.39 Back home, Hostel also launched an
“antiglobalization” subgenre about young, privileged First World travelers
getting their comeuppance from the natives or the locals— such as Turistas
(2006) and The Ruins (2008)—with a rich colonial subtext of exoticized evil
that has shown little change since Bram Stoker’s day.40
Another U.S. entry in this sweepstakes, The Devil’s Rejects, director/
writer/rock musician Rob Zombie’s sequel to his 2003 House of 1,000 Corpses,
has the forces of law and order, in the name of justice, commit equivalent
out-of-control sadistic violence on the perps, a family of depraved serial
killers who (I think) are supposed to come across as humorous rednecks.
I skipped this film at Sitges and turned off the DVD after some quick sam-
pling and thus I didn’t get to see, among other moments, the scene where
the family leaves a woman hanging from a motel doorway wearing the
cut-off face of her husband. “Stephen King has written that horror ‘feeds
 the alligators of the mind,’ ” Edelstein comments, “yet it remains an open
question whether those alligators have a little nap after they’re fed or get
busy making more alligators.” 41 Making more alligators is a perfect meta-
phor for the repetition compulsion phenomenon of addictive horror, a
206 beast whose appetite gets doubled, not quenched, when it is fed. The more
realistically that the details of intense scenes of violence are rendered
within the narrow, stylized boundaries of the horror genre, the less real
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the product becomes.

Real horror, of the kind attempted by the Austrian director/writer Mi-
chael Haneke, is another animal entirely. Funny Games (1997), his tale of
two young serial killers who eliminate the members of a young family one
by one (remade in an English-language version in 2007), comes much closer
to the anarchic, authentically hideous spirit of real-life murder for pleasure
than any of the formulaic melodramas that Zombie and most other horror
auteurs are capable of cranking out. What the savage level of faux violence
tends to shield from our awareness is the deeply false sentimentality under-
lying these stories. Torture porn, like the Gothick in general, usually de-
mands some kind of nod to an ersatz moral order even when the vanquished
villain returns for a last-minute shock epilogue that also guarantees a se-
quel, such as the hand bursting through the grave dirt in the film version of
King’s Carrie. In Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977, remade in 2006),
mutant rednecks slay the mother, sister, and father of one family along with
one dog—but another dog, and a baby, survive. The Devil’s Rejects victims,
similarly, are granted eye-for-an-eye revenge in the form of a right-wing
sheriff who administers horrendous retribution to the killers.
The cheerful young murderer of Funny Games, in contrast, offhandedly
kills the couple’s eight-year-old son first. He’s equally lighthearted when,
after a breezy kiss on the cheek, he unexpectedly tips the last survivor, the
bound and hooded mother, over the side of a sailboat on the way to his next
set of victims. Though the actual deaths take place mostly offscreen, the
net result is a deep experience of horror that is far, far more unbearable
than any close-up of fake skinned faces can ever be. Declaring its subject
to be Hollywood’s attitude to violence, Haneke has called his film “anti-
genre” and admits to attempting to “rape the viewer into independence,”
converting the imperiled-heroine passivity of the spectator into a state of
active horrified awareness.42 For that reason a film like Funny Games does
not trigger the old genre-fueled compulsion to see Funny Games II. Because
it has given you something much closer to a real-life experience of sense-
less murder with no cavalry on the horizon, you never want to see it, or
anything like it, again.
That is what real horror looks like.
207
Rule 7. The fifteen-year-old girl’s Gothick rule of horror = romance, terror,
some (but not as much) gore, occasional redemption.

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
I’m not saying girls are nicer than boys, just that there is a bit of a gen-
der divide in the level of mayhem considered palatable in a horror movie.
As a result, these kinds of movies often garner the softer label “supernatu-
ral thriller.”
An example from Sitges: The Dark, a British film with beautiful produc-
tion values shot in Wales and directed by the talented Canadian John Faw-
cett (whose debut feature, Ginger Snaps, cleverly paired lycanthropy with
menstruation and teenage alienation).43 As unsettling in its own way as
Hostel even though it is a female Gothick story entirely lacking in gore, The
Dark chooses the ending of permanent imprisonment inside supernatural
evil. When her daughter dies by drowning, the neglectful mother, Adele,
learns that she can restore her daughter to life if she travels to the under-
water realm and sacrifices herself, which she does. By the iron logic of folk-
tale, since Adele has paid with her own life, her daughter should be allowed
to return to the world of the living. Instead, an evil young girl revenant
comes back in the daughter’s body, fooling the unwitting father, who is
the only survivor of this family.
From the fifteen-year-old girl’s point of view, something fundamental to
the folktale genre has not been respected here even though the film stays
well within the bounds of conventional taste: namely, the natural order has
not been restored. The traditional female Gothick horror movie, though it
is just as much a sentimental melodrama as this one, shows more of a fairy-
tale concern for the meting out of justice—real justice, not the blood-
soaked vengeance of Hostel and The Devil’s Rejects—followed by a return to
normal life.
We find this balance of forces in two supernatural Spanish horror fi lms
that both debuted at Sitges in 2001: Spanish director/writer Alejandro
Amenábar’s The Others and Mexican director/writer Guillermo del Toro’s
The Devil’s Backbone. Even as The Others relies on the same gimmicks as
the Filmax movies—American star (Nicole Kidman), English-language
 production, and an English setting (the Channel Islands, maybe another
tax break?)—Amenábar’s deeply original story of a Gothick mansion in
which subjects and objects, haunters and haunted, are reversed surpasses
in every way its equivalents in Hollywood as well as in his own country.
208 Similarly, del Toro’s Buñuelian ghost story, set in an orphanage during the
Spanish Civil War, exposes in its many layered subtexts the roots of vio-
lence in personal and cultural hauntings. (Del Toro’s work will be explored
G o t h ic k a

in more detail in the next chapter.)

Rule 8. The hero of a supernatural horror film, male or female, must take a trip
to the underworld that corresponds to an inner character arc and results in an
expanded or diminished fate.
“The finest writing,” Robert McKee declares, “not only reveals true
character, but arcs or changes in that inner nature, for better or for worse,
over the course of the telling.”44 Mainstream American movies of all kinds
demand that their principal characters undergo this kind of Proppian de-
velopment, preferably in a positive direction. Despite the traditional folk-
tale’s turn toward a happy ending, however, the modern Gothick horror
narrative, both literary and cinematic, presents a forked path of possibil-
ity at the end of the story: (1) after being very bad, things turn out OK, or
(2) after being very bad, things get even worse (i.e., The Dark).
More specifically, the folkloric dimension of the supernatural horror
film, like that of a Scottish ballad, requires its hero or heroine to risk his or
her life in a perilous journey to an underworld or an otherworldly realm
(or at the least, a fight to the death with otherworldly entities)— and in
the best-case scenario come back again. In the most basic sort of horror
movie it’s usually enough just to get out of the underworld alive. The per-
son breaks free from the spell or the murderous maniac and moves out of
the cobwebs of the dark Gothick space into the sunlight— an exteriorized
character arc, if you will. In the more sophisticated redactions, those who
get out alive are different on the inside, too. But for better or for worse?
Herewith two psychologically nuanced Eu ropean examples from my time
in Sitges.
The expanded fate: In Allegro (2005), Danish director Christoffer Boe’s
tightly wound concert pianist Zetterstrom (rough translation: “jerky
stream,” perhaps an allegorical marker of his compromised creativity) has
jettisoned his emotional life on the road to fame and artistic perfection.
When he finds himself suddenly unable to play, he is forced to journey to
an underworld uniquely conceived as “the Zone,” an urban territory that
springs up spontaneously in Copenhagen and cannot be penetrated (in-
truders simply bounce off its image) except by special dispensation. Zetter-
strom has lost first his memory of all but the last ten years (from the crucial 209
moment when he withdrew from his great love) and then his musical abil-
ity. His psychopomp, a matter-of-fact old bourgeois in a wheelchair named

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
Tom, tells Zetterstrom he left his talent in a small jar in the kitchen, back
in the Zone. To retrieve it, he must wholeheartedly relive the memory of
his lost love, chase her down, and unequivocally acknowledge his love for
her. All these acts Zetterstrom performs, and though it’s too late to win
back his lover, when he fi nally leaves the Zone he is able to deliver the most
heartfelt performance of his career. Viewers of this film were probably not
aware they were watching an allegory and might not have enjoyed it as
much if they had.
The diminished fate: Though well represented in The Dark, this outcome
also dominates Dominik Moll’s Lemming, about a woman who shoots her-
self dead yet seemingly continues to control subsequent events from be-
yond the grave. Played to tortured neurotic perfection by Charlotte Ram-
pling, this character leads the hero even deeper into her web of corruption
and murder after her death midway through the film. Hallucination and
reality merge as he becomes the unwitting means of carry ing out her ur-
gent last wish: to watch her husband die. Though her scheme succeeds, an
ironic if precarious balance is maintained between the forces of good and
evil as the main character resumes his mundane suburban existence in a
state of complete moral ambiguity. Here the transformation of a man’s
inner life from naive happiness to compromised, corrupt sophistication
while everything stays unchanged on the surface has been beautifully and
convincingly represented.
Both expanded and diminished fates unspool in a trio of films about
feckless young heroes romantically bound to a living/dead woman: the
Quay brothers’ Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, and
Terry Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm.45 These three works (two of which pre-
miered at Sitges during my stay) redefine, each in its own way, the classic
folktale life task facing their protagonists, all high-strung, sensitive young
fellows (their collective sensibility is perfectly expressed by the German
word Luftmensch, literally “man aloft”) who must use brute force to get
 out from under the queen of the underworld (allegorized during the twen-
tieth century as the “mother complex”). They must come back to earth
and set their feet firmly on the ground before they can win a flesh-and-
blood woman, and gain their manhood, in the real world.
210 It’s fair to say that Burton, Gilliam (who was the executive producer of
Piano Tuner), and the Quays all feel a bit ambivalent about this trium-
phalist story line. The title character of the playful Corpse Bride (based, by
G o t h ic k a

Burton’s account, on a Russian folktale but with a great deal of Mexican

Day of the Dead lore mixed in) is a much more sympathetic female reve-
nant than her equivalents in Ringu and Lemming. A spurned bride mur-
dered by her lover, she latches onto the hero, a young man who is engaged
to a nice girl but is perhaps not quite ready to get married, and carries him
off with her to the land of the dead. It is one of the better conceits of this
film that whereas the land of the living—a generic mid-nineteenth-century
Victorian Gothick town—is uniformly drab and sterile, the underworld is
a kaleidoscope of brilliant color, music, and gaiety. In what is actually a
subtle and psychologically acute rendering of a fluttery young intellectual’s
rite of passage into adulthood, as the bridegroom of Death young Victor
slowly learns how to forge a differentiated emotional relationship with a
woman, albeit a dead one. Ultimately the corpse bride releases Victor from
his accidental vows so that he may marry his human fiancée. Then she
dissolves into a flock of butterflies spiraling into the light, an image that
neatly cues, and is the transformative end product of, Victor’s own dis-
tanced scrutiny of a butterfly under glass at the beginning of the story.
Fate: expanded.
In The Brothers Grimm, the 500-year-old hag queen (a classic Old Goth
loathly-beautiful lady) is defeated, the abducted village girls are restored to
life, and an earthly woman, the woodsman’s daughter, is attached first to
one brother and then to the other—but they abandon her to carry on their
bachelor adventures even as a fragment of mirror holding the queen’s glar-
ing eye continues to hover over the proceedings, suggesting that her power
is far from broken. (If you recall Brazil and its hero’s attempts to escape
from his ever more surgically enhanced mother, this ambiguity of outcome,
vis-à-vis the mother complex, is pure Gilliam.) The brothers’ fate must be
rated, provisionally, as diminished.
Another pair of brothers, London-based American avant-garde filmmak-
ers Timothy and Stephen Quay, take Gilliam’s regressive move a step fur-
ther. The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes unfolds as a series of overlapping tab-
leaux vivants out of which a story, sad and gentle, gradually surfaces. On
the eve of her wedding to her accompanist Alfonso, the opera singer
Malvina is murdered by a mysterious admirer, Professor Droz. The evil
doctor spirits away her body and revives it into a sort of half-alive zombie 211
state at his secluded island villa, managed by the seductive housekeeper
Assumpta. Wandering around the wonderfully stylized island set (think

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
Max Ernst meets The Island of Dr. Moreau) are the doctor’s seemingly
lobotomized male patients, the “gardeners,” performing sundry synchro-
nized tasks.46 When the piano tuner Felisberto (played by the same actor
who plays Alfonso, in a referencing of the Quays’ real-life identical twin-
ship) is brought to the island to tune up the professor’s seven hydrauli-
cally operated automata cum musical instruments, he falls in love with
the somnambulant Malvina and the interrupted romance seems about to
begin anew.
Deliberately thwarting our expectations, however, the Quays’ Felisberto
doesn’t succeed in freeing either Malvina or himself from the under-
world. The lovers end up trapped in a jerky, repeating film clip inside the
sixth automaton, a miniature stage behind glass (best described as a cross
between a fish tank and an eighteenth-century large-screen television set)
that is a microcosm of the island. Defying the laws of fairy-tale logic but
holding true to the deeply solipsistic ethos of the German Romantic tradi-
tion they belong to, the Quays keep their hero hermetically imprisoned—
along with his true love—inside the imagination of his human creators. As
in The Dark, no one gets out of the underworld here. Fate: diminished.

Rule 9. In the new international vernacular of the Gothick supernatural, the

underworld is located in some surprising places.
Many of the Sitges movies I saw shared a fascination with what is called
in Spanish the más allá, in Catalan the més enilà—the beyond, the other
world, the underworld, the place that is not here and now, the place inside
and outside the mind where, as Tom tells Zetterstrom in Allegro, “infinity
doesn’t reach into the universe, but into the self.” Now Hollywood has
absorbed this concept; the más allá has literally become “the Further,” a
dark realm where evil spirits trap a child’s spirit in the U.S. horror film
Insidious (2011), which, like The Dark, also features the theme of a parent
whose own spirit gets taken in exchange for the return of his child.47
 The films I viewed locate this realm in some very unorthodox spaces.
Besides Allegro’s cordoned-off urban Zone, there is underwater. The Dark
puts the underworld in a spot common to many cultures—under the ocean
directly offshore from a high promontory. In The Nun, the presence of the
212 ghost of the drowned mother superior is announced by sudden floods of
water from nearby appliances (a toilet that erupts like Yellowstone’s Old
Faithful moved the Sitges audience to inappropriate laughter).
G o t h ic k a

The underworld can also be found at the earth’s poles. In Korean direc-
tor Yim Pil-sung’s Antarctic Journal, shown at Sitges, a group of explorers
and their driven leader seek a mythic location known as the “Pole of Inac-
cessibility.” The confection they eat while celebrating Christmas at the
hopeful beginning of their journey contains ice that is far older than any
member of the eager party. As they gleefully consume this ancient frozen
water, we know they have entered the magical territory of the South Pole
romance, in which the journey to the pole down under is also the journey
to the inmost regions of the self— and beyond. We also sense, by the rules
of this subgenre from Coleridge to Poe to Lovecraft, that they are un-
likely to return from this underworld grotto, which is also the Gothick
supernatural realm. Always beneath them lie treacherous chasms that drop
into nothingness. As the camera peers up at them out of the cavernous ice
holes gaping at their feet, it allows us to inhabit, as it were, the underworld’s
“point of view”—the frighteningly impersonal perspective of the void, a
vortex of nothingness that makes these humans look like tiny brightly col-
ored insects, and equally short lived.
More familiarly, the underworld can be entered through dreams. Al-
ways a prominent feature of the traditional Gothick (usually in the form
of warnings of impending doom), dreams have also been claimed as muses
by Gothick writers from Walpole and Shelley to Stephenie Meyer.48 The
classic Gothick dark dream was maintained in such late twentieth-century
horror films as the Nightmare on Elm Street series (the bogeyman erupts
out of the nightmare into real life) but also showed an interesting move
toward the topography of medieval allegory in faux scientific Gothick
movies such as Dreamscape (1984), in which researcher-dreamers enter other
people’s dreams and explore entire interior landscapes replete with mon-
sters and helpful figures.49 At Sitges the fi lm Somne (directed by Isidro
Ortiz) confusingly mixed bad dreams with a device for changing DNA
that produces a malady translated in the subtitles as “Husband O’Brien’s
syndrome”; Oculto (written and directed by Antonio Hernández) seemed
to be leading its audience into a dark underworld of precognitive dreams
but reversed itself to become a complex, well-wrought revenge story.
The “dream researcher” story line gets its most elaborate treatment in
British director/writer Christopher Nolan’s megabudget Inception (2010), 213
an intricately layered story-puzzle about “dream thieves” in search of cor-
porate secrets who invade others’ dreams only to become trapped in the

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
intricate palimpsests of dream limbos and realities they have constructed.
The most interesting new development in this Gothick subgenre, how-
ever, comes from Inception’s immediate predecessor, the Japanese anime
Paprika (2006), directed by Satoshi Kon from a serialized novel by Yas-
utaka Tsutsui.50 In a gender and moral reversal of the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde
doppelgänger of Gothick/Romantic horror, a female psychiatrist and
dream researcher uses a new piece of technology that allows her to invade
the dreams of others in the form of a sprightly, shape-shifting dream ava-
tar named Paprika.
Soon Paprika takes on an exuberant independent existence of her own
as she tracks down a rogue intruder who is prowling the researchers’ own
dreams and pulling them into other people’s waking reality. Just as a cor-
porate male patriarch’s dark mechanical dream is about to consume all
of Tokyo in the story’s climax, little Paprika swells into a gigantic mature
woman overshadowing the city. The menacing body of her antagonist
shrinks to fit her mouth and Paprika swallows him, morphing the pervad-
ing darkness he has created into the blues and whites of the sky and her
own extended macrocosmic body. Paprika’s apocalyptic resolution epito-
mizes the Gothick’s millennial turn away from the demonic to the an-
cient landscape shared by medieval Western dream vision and the folk-
loric traditions of the world’s other cultures.

Rule 10. The territory beyond Gothick has no formula rules. It asks of its audi-
ence only a willingness to surrender to the unknown.
Buñuel himself once said, “A film is like an involuntary imitation of
a dream,” but added that the cinema is almost never used as a medium to
express the “mysterious and fantastic,” the poetry of the subconscious
that emerges in real dreams.51 Instead, he complained, even sophisticated
filmmakers latch onto the clichéd plots of sentimental novels that they
then attempt to dress up with fancy visuals. That charge can be leveled
 against the horror genre and the Gothick generally, whether the story is
rendered as a prose narrative or as a movie. Genre has strict rules of for-
mal composition; what is called art, though it builds on genre’s form and
shares its themes, is a more elusive territory. Finally, the question must be
214 asked: Are there any instances where the Gothick throws off the armor of
its formulas, the solace of pure Story, and enters the territory of art?
Even though they produce work that looks Gothick, the Brothers Quay,
G o t h ic k a

to take one example, aren’t really Goths, old or new. Their work doesn’t
aim to inspire shock or horror. Nor is it Surrealism, though it is often la-
beled so and draws considerable inspiration from that school (most nota-
bly, in Piano Tuner, from the mad inventor Canterel’s allegorical machines
in the Surrealist writer Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus). It’s not postmod-
ern, either. The Quay sensibility is, rather, deeply immersed in Gothick-
Romantic-Symbolist imagery, most notably the still lake waters of Arnold
Böcklin’s painting Island of the Dead, an image that dominates Piano Tuner’s
last scenes. Spurned as kitsch by most contemporary high art painters,
Böcklin, Caspar David Friedrich, and others of this school are quoted in
the works of a handful of film directors, including Burton, Guillermo del
Toro, and Lech Majewski.
To take another example: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) both
employ the device of the twice-told story: one version as dream or personal
fantasy, the other as “real.” Lynch uses familiar Gothick characters and
situations (the imperiled woman pursued by bad guys); Weerasethakul
draws on shamanic folklore to intercut the mundane “real” story of two
men who experience a growing attraction to each other with a mythic sub-
story of a shape-shifting creature in the jungle. Lynch’s “fantasy” story, in
contrast— an aspiring young actress’s hopeful arrival in Hollywood and
her encounters with an array of feel-good eccentric characters—is innocu-
ous and sentimental, whereas the “real” story underlying it—this young
woman, with a different name and identity, is a failed actress who has her
female lover/rival killed by a hit man and then kills herself—is supremely
dark. In both of Lynch’s story lines a black-faced wild-haired wolfman-
looking creature lurks behind the same diner’s dumpster, skewing these
parallel illusions toward the supernatural, as the emcee of the spectral
“Club Silencio” makes some motions toward explaining.
 At first glance, the many Gothick conventions of Lynch’s Janus-faced,
over-the-top melodrama would seem on the surface to bar it from the “art”
category. But Lynch, Weerasethakul, and the Quays belong to the motley
assortment of international filmmakers, theater directors, and writers I
call New Expressionists, artists who build on the formulaic elements of 215
genre to produce something a little stranger and not so immediately acces-
sible.52 They make intricate, nuanced, sophisticated works you must watch

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
a number of times to savor completely, a repetition fueled not by compul-
sion but by an equally visceral aesthetic desire for expanded meaning.
An umbrella sensibility rather than a school or movement, what I call
New Expressionism in the performing arts and literature began in the
1990s, at the tail end of Expressionism’s colorful trawl through the twenti-
eth century.53 New Expressionist writers and filmmakers employ the for-
mula themes of pop culture at the same time as they explore metaphysical
issues. They characteristically collapse the boundary between the inter-
nal and external (thereby “objectifying” internal forces and feelings as
characters and objects in the landscape); depict supernaturalism as a posi-
tive, beneficent force; combine melodrama with characters that are often
explicitly or implicitly allegorical; and employ kitsch, camp, and cliché for
non-ironic effect. This post-postmodern trend in film, theater, and (to a
more limited extent) literature can be linked in the visual arts to a phenom-
enon variously identified as “post-ironic” and, in one region of the United
States, as “LA PostCool”– a sensibility, in one curator’s words, that “deals
openly with such art world taboos as spirituality, commitment, celebratory
decoration and psychological confession.”54
Independently of each other, these New Expressionists have produced
a bevy of what might be called supernatural melodramas. This sensibility
abounds in international theater (including works by groups such as Ma-
bou Mines and Gardzienice; the American novelist Denis Johnson’s less
well-known plays, such as Hellhound and Shoppers Carried by Escalators into
the Flames; and even mainstream productions such as Tony Kushner’s An-
gels in America). Born in the early nineteenth century as the Gothick novel
was peaking as a popular literary mode, melodrama shares many features
with the Gothick, as Peter Brooks has pointed out: both genres, which
ended up cross-fertilizing each other extensively, are “preoccupied with
nightmare states, with claustration and thwarted escape, with innocence
 buried alive and unable to voice its claim to recognition . . . with evil as a
real, irreducible force in the world.”55
In film, we find supernatural melodrama in the work of such diverse fi lm
directors as Guy Maddin and Lars von Trier as well as Weerasethakul and
216 Lynch. Of melodrama, conventionally regarded as a low form, Maddin
has said that it is “not exaggerated feeling but the uninhibited primal feel-
ing of dreams—the truest feeling.”56 And melodrama is, as Brooks has
G o t h ic k a

noted, “an expressionistic form.”57

In Maddin’s self-styled “oneiric portraiture” (The Saddest Music in the
World, Cowards Bend the Knee, Heart of the World, My Winnipeg, Keyhole), his
main characters are anguished fraternal alter egos locked in primal battle
with their fathers and each other for the love of the same woman, who is
also in some way their exteriorized soul or animating spirit. In his New
Expressionistically autobiographical My Winnipeg, the character of Citizen
Girl is the allegorical figure who will restore the “heart of the heart,” the
forks beneath the Forks, the symbolically charged site in downtown Win-
nipeg where the Red and the Assiniboine rivers meet.
Allegorical drama must always be melodrama because the feeling mode
of allegory, as we saw in chapter 8, is identification, not empathy. In the
context of melodrama, allegory exaggerates those qualities of the human
condition we all share, not the qualities that set us apart as individuals.
Like the Antenna Theater production, and echoing the Gothick move to
female heroes, Lars von Trier’s works (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the
Dark, and the allegorical Melancholia) typically center on a woman char-
acter who is both an Everywoman and a Christ figure sacrificed for the
sins of humans. The Polish writer/director Lech Majewski has produced
a series of Hermetic New Expressionist fi lms ranging from The Roe’s Room
(1997), based on his opera of the same name, to Angelus (2000) and The
Garden of Earthly Delights (2004). Northfork (2008), directed by Michael
Polish and written by Michael and Mark Polish, creates an equally phantas-
magoric upper midwestern Gothick space in which angels, possibly dreamed
by a young boy, participate in the evacuation of a town before the area is
flooded for a dam.
With Antarctic Journal, Yim Pil-sung also reveals himself as a budding
New Expressionist master in his powerful rendering of humans over-
whelmed by a natural landscape of transcendent mystery and power. Like
Moby Dick, Antarctic Journey tells a story of a dangerous expedition led by
a madman from which only one person returns to tell the tale. Beyond
this simple frame, however, there is no formula; the fi lm simply reverber-
ates meaning on many levels. Even as they seem to be following a familiar
genre path as they retrace the footsteps of a lost 1922 British expedition
(and come upon such Gothick tokens as a tattered journal buried under a 217
flag and a withered corpse), Yim’s group of explorers are treading virgin
territory artistically. Antarctic Journey’s solemn, assured pace and world-

t h e t e n ru l e s of si t g e s
class cinematography recall the sensibilities of works by two great Russian
directors of the Soviet era—the layered metaphysics of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
1972 Solaris (based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem) and the romantic natu-
ralism of Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1959 Siberian epic The Letter That Was Never
Sent.
At Sitges or anywhere else, enjoying films like these requires neither
great effort nor a sharp intellect. All it takes is the willingness to release
the craving for familiar structure—in this case the coffi n of the Gothick—
and make a real emotional surrender to the particularities of the film’s
imagined world. “The darkness that settles over a movie theater is equiva-
lent to the act of closing the eyes,” Buñuel said simply of this act of surren-
der. “Then, on screen, as within the human being, the nocturnal voyage
into the unconscious begins.” Genre in general, and the Gothick in par-
ticular, takes you on a quick trip to the familiar, wished for but frequently
untrue. If you can relax your defenses and reset your aesthetic register to the
early nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries instead of the modernist-
postmodern prairieland of the century just past, the Gothick’s younger
sibling New Expressionism (which could just as easily be called New
Romanticism) will carry you more slowly to that less familiar but deeply in-
teresting place, the true.
Notebook sketch of the character Cathedral Head for Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
by Guillermo del Toro. © Universal Pictures.
 ten

cathedral head
The Gothick Cosmos of Guillermo del Toro

“The entire world we live in is fabricated.”

—Guillermo del Toro

Among the dizzying array of grotesque entities crowding our vision in

the Troll’s Market scene in Hellboy II, a creature in a fur-trimmed red
velvet robe flashes briefly across the screen. Over its simian eyes and muzzle
where a forehead should be, sits a miniature cathedral complete with dou-
ble towers and decorated archivolts. “Originally the idea was to have little
humans running around the ramparts,” this creature’s only begetter, the
movie’s writer/director Guillermo del Toro, cheerfully reported, “but the
budget wouldn’t allow it.”1
One of about thirty “throwaway” creatures del Toro created for a bra-
vura tableau clearly intended to trump the space cantina scene of George
Lucas’s first Star Wars film, the monster called Cathedral Head is a Goth-
ick emblem of its creator in much the same way the Troll’s Market (described
in the script as a “steamy, medieval nightmare”) sums up the manic whirl-
wind of a story it is embedded in. Hellboy II, cowritten, like the first Hell-
boy, with Mike Mignola from the latter’s graphic novel series and aptly
dubbed “Pan’s Labyrinth on speed” by one of its producers, lacks the emo-
tional coherence of del Toro’s previous work but expands his distinctive
 vocabulary of images in a baroque explosion of forms.2 It’s emblematic of
the larger world of this director’s work, which uniquely infuses Old Goth
elements into the Gothick in a weird and very heterodox re-Catholicizing
of the faux Catholic.
220 Born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, del Toro has often described his
childhood infatuation with monsters and the scandalized reaction of his
devout grandmother, who twice attempted to perform exorcisms on him.
G o t h ic k a

“It’s a spiritual reality as strong as when people say, ‘I accept Jesus in my

heart.’ Well, at a certain age, I accepted monsters into my heart.’ ”3 In his
articulate commentary track on the special edition DVD of an earlier film,
The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro defines the Gothick as a way of seeing that
discovers beauty in the monstrous. Because it “celebrates, embraces, and
cherishes the darkness” we’ve been raised to reject, he asserts, the Gothick
is the “only genre that teaches us to understand otherness.”4 Of Hellboy II
he has said: “I find monstrous things incredibly beautiful, in the way that
the most beautiful carvings in Gothic cathedrals are the grotesque carv-
ings. If I were a mason, I would be carving gargoyles.”5
Del Toro’s insistence that the monstrous is sacred is closer to the spirit
of premodern Catholic Eu rope than his grandmother may have realized.
Especially at the level of popular belief, Christians of the Middle Ages
worshipped a more inclusive pantheon of entities than post-Reformation
and Counter-Reformation Protestants or Catholics do. “There are mon-
sters side by side with angels in cathedrals for a reason,” del Toro explained
to an interviewer. “They occupy the same parcel in the imagination of
mankind that angels occupy.”6 Or as David Williams explains in his fi ne
study of the medieval monstrous and its relation to the sacred: “All mon-
sters are negations whose apophatic function is to raise the mind to a
higher level of reality.”7 By its very denial of the laws of nature, the mon-
ster forces us to consider the existence of other realities besides our own.
As a phenomenon that is above nature, not contrary to it, the monster’s
purpose in sacred art is “to declare truths that do not have their origin in
phenomenal nature.” In this way the grotesque and monstrous

become a sacred language used to reveal a reality in which . . . virile

maiden, serpent angel, or three in one express phenomena that lan-
guage itself cannot. . . . This is the description of the world as symbol,
an allegory to be read and interpreted toward the understanding of
 something beyond the words and signs . . . it is only through [a] mon-
strous combination of contrarieties that the supralogical truths about
divinity and humanity can be communicated.8

One thinks, for instance, of the dog-headed St. Christopher (still depicted 221
this way in the Eastern Orthodox Church) or the virgin martyr St. Wilge-
fortis, who miraculously grew a beard to protest her marriage to a pagan

c at h e dr a l h e a d
king and was promptly crucified by her father. Depicted as a gowned and
bearded being on a cross—in effect, a seditious image of a female or her-
maphroditic Christ—Wilgefortis was a special object of God’s favor and
the very popular patron saint of unhappy wives and happy widows in the
fifteenth century.
Williams, however, has no doubts we are seeing “the representation of
the Godhead as monster” in figures such as Wilgefortis and in Julian of
Norwich’s description of the Trinity as “the property of Fatherhood, and
the property of Motherhood, and the property of Lordship—in one God!”9
Medieval alchemy also used the figure of the hermaphrodite to stand for
the quintessence, and by extension the ineffable, that which cannot be ex-
pressed.10 Late medieval manuscript illustrations not only gave Jesus a bird’s
head, they also gave him three human heads (sometimes Satan got three
heads, too) and a nursing mother’s flowing breasts.11
These deformed entities are of a different order than the gargoyles,
demons, and assorted hybrids the word monster (which derives from Latin
monstrare, “to show or display”) usually suggests. God as a hybrid freak,
babewyn, hermaphrodite, jars the mind sufficiently loose from its moorings,
this thinking goes, to allow us an authentic experience of the sacred. The
later Christian reluctance to link a hybrid or malformed shape with the di-
vine is our cultural inheritance not just of the Protestant Reformation but of
the humancentric Renaissance and the subsequent transfer of the agency
of deformity from God to the material world.12
The ineffability of the monster whose very essence lies beyond our di-
mensional comprehension, an effect oddly echoed in eighteenth-century no-
tions of the secular “sublime,” was well grasped by one of del Toro’s prin-
cipal muses, H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was the first modern to restore the
monster, in the “hideously” deformed shapes of his Great Old Ones, to a
quasi-transcendent status by virtue of just those adjectives he characteristi-
cally used to describe them—unspeakable, unnameable, indescribable— along
 with the permanently mind-altering terror the sight of them engenders
in the human unfortunate enough to behold them.
The first fictional monster of the Gothick-Romantic nexus— a hybrid
resurrected being halfway between the older golem and the later zombie—
222 was the famous one fashioned by Mary Shelley. And what a tragic, poeti-
cal monster the Creature (as Victor calls him) was, a sympathetic charac-
ter now completely obliterated by a grunting, mute Boris Karloff and his
G o t h ic k a

successors on the big screen. (Richard Holmes has shown how the novel
Frankenstein, like the later Dracula, first gained notoriety through dramatic
adaptations, in this case five different stage productions through the 1820s,
all of which muted Shelley’s Creature.)13 In his original incarnation the
Creature grows quickly out of a tabula rasa mental infancy into an articu-
late being who is able to give eloquent voice to his grief and bitterness about
the disgust his appearance inspires and his deep desire for a wife and com-
panion. He becomes the doctor’s antagonist only when Victor, reneging
on his promise, destroys the female Creature he has half completed.
For the rest of the nineteenth century monsters were mostly shelved,
only to be gloriously reborn in twentieth-century comics and movies.
These later monster-antagonists had no interior lives to speak of. John
Gardner’s Grendel (1971) was a literary writer’s retelling of Beowulf, an epic
Old English creature feature sanctified by twelve-odd centuries of high art
transmission, but the novel notably—in a manner that would become
fashionable during the 1980s—retold the story from the point of view of
a minor character, in this case a monster. Anne Rice would apply the same
monster POV technique to her vampire Louis. Though mutant monsters
had become heroes in the comics as early as the 1950s, Mike Mignola’s
post-1990 Hellboy, as we saw in chapter 4, is an archetypal graphic novel
monster hero born of darkness but striving for the good. Shrek (2001),
a book-turned-film with many sequels, presents the twenty-first-century
twist to the traditional fairy-tale universe by presenting a good monster
protagonist whose love, in the story’s happy ending, is revealed to be a
green-skinned ogre just like him and only temporarily disfigured by the
shape of an ordinary human.14
Del Toro, who has his own version of Frankenstein in development,
draws his aesthetics from a mélange of sources, historical and contempo-
rary, including Old Goth architecture and the eighteenth-century en-
graver Giovanni Piranesi. Like his fellow New Expressionists, he’s a fan
of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist painters Arnold Böcklin, Caspar
David Friedrich, and Odilon Redon as well as the twentieth-century Sur-
realists. (The Troll’s Market conceit, of course, is a nod to Christina Ros-
setti.) His monsters, however, follow the conventions laid down in graphic
novels, videogame creature design, and the Lovecraft-influenced Holly- 223
wood horror movie canon. Hellboy II, whose Irish gnome serves as a
Charon-like guide to the underworld, references Greek and Celtic mythol-

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ogy; its Angel of Death as an androgynous female with sphincters for eyes
and eyeballs embedded in her wings turns Death female in the twenty-first
century Gothick manner even as it echoes Old Goth Catholic iconogra-
phy, which frequently featured angels with eyes in their wings. Much like
the way multimedia effects operate in an Antenna Theater production,
these “unified beings” are the paradoxical result of combining digital and
animatronic technologies.15
As a child, del Toro reports in many interviews, he gave his heart equally
to comic books and art books. In this lack of discrimination between “high”
and “low” he shows the same all-embracing sensibility of medieval illumi-
nated devotional texts, whose margins display, for example— among other
images the modern reader finds shocking in conjunction with the sacred—
tiny nuns carry ing bowls of turds or picking penises from a phallus tree,
men defecating eggs or pierced in the anus by arrows.16 Also referencing
the Mexican folk tradition of alejibres, made-up creatures drawn from the
individual artisan’s own imagination, del Toro describes his movies as “my
personal bestiaries of fanciful creatures.”17 The compilations of fantastic
creatures found in medieval bestiaries, he stresses, were important for their
“cosmological, symbolic and spiritual meanings,” and it is this deeper sig-
nificance that he wants his creatures to carry.18
To understand what these deeper meanings were, we must return once
again to the larger worldview shared by western Eu ropeans up to the piv-
otal seventeenth century. These denizens of the premodern era saw them-
selves nested inside concentric dimensions of reality within which they,
their dwellings, their villages and cities, and all the plants, animals, and
natural landscape around them were little worlds that imperfectly mir-
rored the attributes of the larger immortal world and also drew down its
wrath or blessings. This top-down relationship between the macrocosm of
the eternal realm and the microcosm of our finite material world is summed
up in the dictum of medieval alchemy, “As above, so below.” In the Old
 Goth/medieval way of seeing things, our natures down here, our little
worlds, resonate with all the other little worlds around us and the world
above because they are all, large and small, composed of the same elements.
Because the ripples of an unnatural act extend through all of nature, a per-
224 son’s failings or evil acts can show up in withered crops and lightning from
the heavens.
Robert Bly echoes this animistic spirit in his poem “My Father’s
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Wedding”:

If a man, cautious,
Hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
Do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
The car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.19

The difference between Bly’s human-centric Jungian psychological per-

spective and that of a person of the European Middle Ages is that for an
Old Goth, a limp down here on earth is not necessarily always the causal
agent that produces all the other limps. Rather, everything limps by vir-
tue of an acausal principle emanating from a higher level of reality ruled
by harmony and the higher good. C. G. Jung and the many new religious
movements under the New Age label call this effect synchronicity; our
cultural ancestors called it the law of correspondences.20
Distinctly hierarchical, the Old Goth version of this scheme has it that
all things in the physical world are bound up in an invisible web of influ-
ences ruled by forces in that other dimension outside time and space; the
higher world holds the moral and spiritual template that our material
world must conform to. When we mortals do wrong, it throws nature out
of whack and invites retribution from above to restore the template. This
is a conundrum that Shakespeare presented over and over again in his
works (cf. Lear’s invocation of “all the plagues that in the pendulous air /
Hang fated over men’s faults”). An eighteenth-century Gothick revivalist
such as Walpole presents the same effect decoratively, nostalgically, and
apologetically when he destroys his castle of Otranto with an earthquake
for the sins of its inhabitants. A Gothick New Expressionist such as del
Toro uses the law of correspondence in his works both as a convention
and as an expression of his own metaphysics.
Just as it was going out of fashion as a way of explaining phenomena in
the material world during the seventeenth century, the law of correspon-
dence was briefly reinvented as a scientific principle by the Swedish engi- 225
neer and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, then reified as a religious concept
by Jakob Boehme and the early Theosophists. It and other elements of the

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scientifically obsolete Old Goth worldview traveled to the New World via
the Radical Reformation and today— as chapter 1 explored in relation to
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol—they appear in New Age alternative reli-
gious movements and popular self-help psychology works such as The Se-
cret (based on the “law of attraction,” that thinking positive thoughts at-
tracts positive outcomes in the outer world).
The old worldview is also preserved in some sectors of conservative
Christianity, for it is precisely a belief in the law of correspondence that
moves preachers such as Pat Robertson to declare that Hurricane Katrina’s
devastation of New Orleans and the earthquake in Haiti were manifesta-
tions of God’s wrath triggered by the sinful acts of the inhabitants. The law
of correspondence, finally, has also found a new life of sorts in the math-
ematical notion of the fractal, as chapter 11 will examine, though fractals
lack both the hierarchy of degree and the moral framework that informed
the Old Goth worldview.
The twenty-first-century Gothick terrain of del Toro’s films suggests
the top-down moral universe of Shakespeare. The Devil’s Backbone (2001;
written by del Toro and Antonio Trashorras), a ghost story set in a remote
orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, has the look of a classic archi-
tecturally obsessed Gothick romance, which, as del Toro reminds us in his
director’s commentary on the DVD edition, focuses on the Gothick house,
the domicile, as an emblem and warped container of the human self. This
symbolically charged structure, he says, always conceals a “dark secret,”
linked to a treasure and deep passions, “that is buried in the past and af-
fects the people living in it.” At the center of the darkness stands “a very
pure hero—a new set of eyes to explore the secret and through the purity
of his heart unravel the mystery.”21
Looming over a desert wasteland much like the palace of the dead in
Herk Harvey’s 1962 B-movie horror classic Carnival of Souls, the orphanage
 does conceal a secret (the murder of one of its young charges), along with
thwarted love and a hidden treasure in gold ingots. The opening scene
frames the imposing structure’s empty entrance: an unknown voice (be-
longing, we later learn, to its dead physician) asks, “Qué es una fantasma?”
226 (What is a ghost?) as the newly orphaned Carlos, the pure soul of The Dev-
il’s Backbone, arrives at its gates by car. As the story unfolds, the deceased
doctor’s rhetorical question frames our sense that all the characters, living
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and dead, are imprisoned in this edifice—“frozen in time” like “insects in

amber,” a recurring del Toro image.
But when an enormous bomb lands in the orphanage courtyard imme-
diately after a child’s death, our minds connect these two events not by the
genre conventions of post-Enlightenment Gothick storytelling but rather
by the folkloric logic of the old worldview. The two acts have no immedi-
ate cause-and-effect connection. What they do is resonate with each other’s
violence. The war is an evil, unnatural world of violence that is mirrored
in the smaller world of the orphanage. “Like the best fairytales of my child-
hood,” del Toro says, “what’s inside the castle reflects what’s outside.” The
bomb— a nod, the director tells us, to the enigmatic giant’s helmet that
drops out of the sky to land in the castle courtyard at the beginning of The
Castle of Otranto—never does explode, but “all the characters will reenact
the savage nature of the war within the [orphanage’s] walls” and the mur-
dered child’s ghost will penetrate the material realm to exact vengeance.22
In the awards-laden 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth (more precisely, El laberinto
del fauno, “The Faun’s Labyrinth”), set in the aftermath of the Spanish
Civil War during World War II, the pure hero is the young girl Ofelia— a
name resonant with doomed maidens who return to the elements—and the
orphanage is replaced by a rural mill deep in a forest in northern Spain
where Ofelia’s evil stepfather, one Captain Vidal of Franco’s army, has
established his headquarters to fight the last-ditch post– Civil War Repub-
lican guerrillas. Del Toro has described this film— and it was interpreted
by critics and received by international audiences— as a political parable
about the Spanish Civil War. From this perspective, its fantastic elements
(a faun, fairies, other denizens of a supernatural underworld to which the
main character seems to return upon her death) are either figments of the
young heroine’s imagination or simply a secondary set of metaphors for
the violent events that unfold in the story’s “real” world.
 The essence of Pan’s Labyrinth, however, lies in more in Old Goth meta-
physics than modern politics. In this movie the good people are all good
and the bad people are all bad. This was a deliberate decision, according
to del Toro, who declared in a Writers Guild interview that “if you’re going
to deconstruct [a fairy tale], you can’t be crazy enough to deconstruct the 227
structure and characters. Little Red Riding Hood has to be Little Red
Riding Hood. The Big Bad Wolf has to be the Big Bad Wolf. So, up to a

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point, function determines these characters to be not as shaded as in The
Devil’s Backbone.”23
Judged by the standards of psychological realism, Captain Vidal as an
embodiment of Fascism is far less dimensional than Jacinto, the troubled
young villain of The Devil’s Backbone, whose escalating murderous violence
clearly derives from the great lacks and fears of his displaced childhood.
But this absence of shading also means that political-historical shadings
are lost, too, a lack that renders the film’s politics (much like those of Her-
bert Biberman’s 1953 cheer-the-hero, boo-the-villain trade union epic,
Salt of the Earth) secondary rather than essential. No matter how righteous
the cause, rendering political messages as fairy-tale good versus evil can
easily devolve into the us-or-them thinking that autocrats find so useful in
molding public opinion. The Devil’s Backbone mostly walks this tightrope
successfully; the strengths of Pan’s Labyrinth lie more in its dynamic rein-
vention of the Gothick. Because del Toro devised the story himself, it’s the
most comprehensive statement to date of his Old Goth/Gothick personal
mythos.
Pan’s Labyrinth begins literally in darkness with the labored breathing
of the dying Ofelia. She is lying inside the old stone labyrinth behind the
mill, at the edge of a hole in the earth that, we will learn, is the last open
portal to the underworld. As in The Devil’s Backbone, an unknown super-
natural voice (in this case, the Faun’s) speaks first, this time the familiar
words that open a fairy tale: once upon a time, he says, the great Princess
Moanna came to live among humans and forgot she was an immortal being.
As the camera closes on Ofelia’s open eye, the blood running from her nose
reverses its flow, a startling antirealist signal that the story is moving into
a flashback.
After this quick opening frame, incomprehensible until the movie’s
end, the story begins with Ofelia’s own journey by car with her pregnant
 mother to join Captain Vidal in the country. Ofelia discovers a carved
stone eye by the wooded roadside and reinserts it into the crudely carved
trailside stele of a faunlike creature, an act that seems to animate two
magical flying stick bugs who follow the entourage to the mill, which will
228 serve as the dysfunctional Gothick house of self for this story. The mill
reminds us that in the old fairy tales millers are tricky characters who
sell their daughters to the Devil— and that in myth and folklore generally,
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the demonic is often represented by mechanical, endlessly repeating move-

ment that never reaches completion (think Tantalus and Sisyphus).24
The mill’s ancient cog-and-wheel innards, visible in the room where
Captain Vidal is camped, are coequal with the mechanism of the watch he
obsessively repairs, cleans, and rewinds, endlessly resuscitating it from me-
chanical death. The watch’s cracked face in turn is not only coequal with
the captain’s fractured personality—the Old Goth medieval worldview
does not recognize “metaphors,” only equivalents operating at different
levels of reality that mirror or “correspond” to each other—but serves as
a kind of tombstone for his father, a general who deliberately smashed it as
he fell in battle in Morocco so that his son would know the exact moment
of his death.
Like all things mechanical in a del Toro movie, the captain’s watch ex-
erts an irresistible fascination even as it also carries the negative charge of
unredeemed repetition compulsion that is the dark side of the underworld.
The centerpiece of del Toro’s first movie, Cronos (1993), was a micro cog-
and-wheel clockwork device made of gold that houses a magical insect
whose bite inoculates victims with its own blood, bestowing eternal life
and a vampiric need to drink the blood of others; the centerpieces of Hell-
boy and Hellboy II are macro versions of the same device, grinding away in
the underworld realm. As an overarching influence on his obsession, del
Toro cites the grinding mill wheels that kill the evil village doctor in Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr. “I have myself tried to reproduce the beauty of
those gears, incessantly and not very fruitfully,” he says.25
As del Toro reminds us in his commentary to The Devil’s Backbone, the
dark secret of the classic Gothick story is often found underground, in
the basement or crypt of the edifice (castle, mansion, house) that is co-
equal with the human body and psyche. In his universe, however, the re-
gion below ground always opens onto another dimension, the Old Goth/
Gothick supernatural reality of the underworld. In The Devil’s Backbone,
this is the vaulted cellar of the orphanage (a former monastery) haunted
by the ghost of Santi, the murdered child. The underworld of Pan’s Laby-
rinth is located beneath the old stone maze behind the mill, a site Ofelia
is immediately drawn to. At the center of this ancient labyrinth, itself an
emblem of immortality, she fi nds a dried-up stone well containing a 229
winding staircase that she follows to the bottom. Here Ofelia encounters
a fantastical man-goat, Faun, who eagerly welcomes her home as “Prin-

c at h e dr a l h e a d
cess Moanna” and instructs her in three tasks she must complete to re-
gain her status as an immortal.
Beyond the Faun’s antechamber, the underworld of Pan’s Labyrinth un-
folds as a series of vaulted old Gothic corridors and chambers suffused in a
womblike red-gold aura.26 This warmly lit space is a sharp departure from
the Gothick urban grottos and crypts that served as del Toro’s under-
worlds in his earlier movies Mimic (1997), Blade 2 (2002), and Hellboy (2004).
In Mimic, giant man-eating mutated insects and humans mirror each other
in manifold ways in abandoned tunnels of the New York subway, where
the dripping stalactites that are the insects’ enormous turds hang from
rusted-out subway machinery, making this subterranean grotto as anal as
the Pan’s Labyrinth underworld is uterine.27 The portal to the underworld
in the first Hellboy is located in a Gothick staple, a ruined abbey in Scot-
land, but del Toro’s trademark juxtaposition of uncanny organic and un-
canny inorganic plays out more fully in the underworld beneath Rasputin’s
tomb, a Piranesian nightmare where the formidable death-dealing, per-
petually wheeling mechanical devices are paired with giant pulpy, tenta-
cled Lovecraftian entities who seek domination of our world through the
reanimated Russian priest.
More than any other element of the Old Goth worldview, however, the
imagery of alchemy permeates del Toro’s films.28 The frame story of Cronos
concerns a sixteenth-century alchemist (probably modeled on Nicholas
Flamel) who turns into a vampire to sustain his eternal life. The fetus in a
glass jar—an image that references alchemy’s famous homunculus, a micro-
cosmic “little man,” transformed within the alchemical retort into a bringer
of new life and possibilities—is the iconic opening image of The Devil’s
Backbone. As in Cronos, here the crucible imprisons rather than transforms:
the impotent Dr. Casares pickles embryos deformed by spina bifida (the
“dev il’s backbone” of the title) in liquid that he bottles and peddles in town
as an aphrodisiac. Far from carry ing hope of a new life, in the universe of
 this story the dead babies are equivalent to (again, as distinct from meta-
phors for) the lost souls, adults as well as children, trapped in the orphan-
age. These broken characters are the product of a human development
process that del Toro has vividly compared to the deformed beggars of
230 Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, grown inside jars as babies by human
traffickers. “I think that’s what the world does to kids,” he said to an Austra-
lian interviewer. “You are born into your family jar and you grow into the
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shape of it, and the rest of your life you are limping like a motherfucker.”29
Pan’s Labyrinth leavens this classic Gothick darkness with the brighter
atmosphere of fairy tales that is closer to both Romantic and Old Goth
sensibilities. As we saw in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, the alchemist, following
the law of correspondence, seeks moral and physical transformation both
within himself and in the outside world. The prime alchemist in Pan’s
Labyrinth is none other than Ofelia, and most of the transformations in
both worlds, material and supernatural, mirror her own moral develop-
ment toward goodness. When she first encounters the stick bugs, the en-
chanted world is in as much disarray as the human one; it is, in del Toro’s
words, “a magical universe that’s been left out in the rain too long.”30 This
tattered realm perks up as soon as the former immortal enters the picture,
however, thanks to the higher resonating force her presence provides. The
stick bugs obligingly morph into Victorian sprites after Ofelia asks them if
they are fairies like the pictures in her storybook. Though mainstream
audiences are quick to interpret this transformation as Ofelia’s own make-
believe fantasy, it also indicates that she has already gained the magical
ability to change objects in her surroundings simply by focusing her
awareness on them.
Performing the three tasks brings more of the same kind of benefits.
When Ofelia retrieves the golden key from an enormous toad who vomits
up his whole body inside out, she is following two essential principles of
alchemy. The first, unio oppositorum (the attraction and inevitable joining
of opposites), brings her together with the hideous toad. The second, in
stercore invenitur (literally, “it is discovered in the excrement”), involves
finding physical and spiritual treasure in the least likely place. And as
Ofelia completes each task, says del Toro, “the magical universe around
her start[s] healing itself.” Under her powerful gaze, “the fairies become
more and more human and the faun becomes more and more elegant and
beautiful.”31 After Ofelia’s sacrificial death, even the resistance fighters, as
downtrodden in the beginning as the fairies, revive to enjoy a limited vic-
tory: they kill the captain and take the newborn prince with them into the
future.
The lines between inside and outside, subjectivity and objectivity, ordi-
nary life and the supernatural, blur as the two realms of Pan’s Labyrinth, the 231
“real” world and the underworld, begin to mirror and alchemically trans-
form each other. The Faun gives Ofelia a mandrake root homunculus that

c at h e dr a l h e a d
comes to life as a plant-baby when Ofelia bathes it in milk. The mandrake
root baby’s exuberant health calms its human coequal, the unquiet baby
in Ofelia’s mother’s womb. But when the captain discovers the root and it
gets burned in the fi replace, the healing link between the two congruent
life-forms is broken and Ofelia’s baby brother bursts out in a murderous
rush, killing his mother.
Roger Ebert has noted how del Toro transitions between these two di-
mensions of reality in Pan’s Labyrinth with a “moving foreground wipe,”
that is, presenting “an area of darkness, or a wall or a tree that wipes out the
military and wipes in the labyrinth, or vice versa. This technique insists
that his two worlds are not intercut, but live in edges of the same frame.”32
Swapped back and forth between the two realms is the vexing issue of
unquestioning obedience to untrustworthy authority figures: the captain
shoots the village doctor for euthanizing a tortured rebel against his or-
ders; the Faun, an obsequious, morally ambiguous trickster, bars Ofelia’s
return to the underworld when she refuses his command to give him her
baby brother as the blood sacrifice of the fi nal task. Just as the captain’s
soldiers riding horseback up the hill start to look more like centaurs than
men, the captain’s dinner table where he entertains corrupt local function-
aries is the aboveground equivalent of the ghastly cannibal’s table in the
underground lair of the Pale Man.
An archetypal negative father figure and the captain’s underworld co-
equal, the Pale Man is also the Saturnian king who devours his children
in the alchemical process of mortification (melting or “killing”) of metals;
del Toro references the Goya painting of this god swallowing his son as his
inspiration.33 When Ofelia breaks a taboo and eats grapes from the Pale
Man’s table, she brings this hibernating cannibal back to life. Popping his
disarticulated eyes into slits in the palms of his hands (further elaborating
this film’s eye motif, to grotesque and sinister effect), he staggers after her,
devouring one of the unfortunate stick bug fairies on the way. This violent
 act sends an alchemical ripple back into the upper world, where his alter
ego the captain in effect murders his wife by ordering the paramedic to
save the baby over the mother. When he shoots Ofelia in the film’s climax,
her death becomes the paradoxically “blessed” act that fulfills her third
232 task (shedding the blood of an innocent) and frees her to return to the land
of immortals.
Pan’s Labyrinth ends much like Ingmar Bergman’s medieval-folktale-
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inspired The Virgin Spring, along with that film’s hint of local legend: just as
a spring erupts on the spot where Bergman’s maiden was raped and mur-
dered, after Ofelia’s death the dead fig tree in the forest sprouts an incon-
gruous flower. The striking difference between the stories is that the dou-
ble worlds of Pan’s Labyrinth are presexual. Though the figures of Ofelia
and the Faun trigger echoes of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, the Faun
does not woo Ofelia. In del Toro’s vision, this lascivious mythological
figure has no genitals; neither do the Pale Man or the fairies. Even though
the captain is almost exaggeratedly “Vidal”—full of life, sexual energy,
violence—he sleeps downstairs, apart from his pregnant wife, to protect
his unborn heir. When Ofelia crawls out of the hollow under the fig tree
after retrieving the golden key (which is also the key to the storehouse that
the servant Mercedes gives to the rebels), she’s distraught and smeared
with dark mud, suggesting rape.
In the alchemical container of del Toro’s story, however, these markers
of violation indicate that she’s gone through a chthonic initiation in the
underworld that does not include sex. Recalling the toad’s regurgitation,
however, let it be noted that in the Middle Ages one emblem for a woman’s
vagina was a toadskin turned inside out— and that traditionally a votive
toad hung beneath the cross St. Wilgefortis was suspended on.34
After her stepfather shoots her in the maze, Ofelia emerges in the un-
derworld inside a magnificent faux Gothic cathedral decorated with Celtic
symbols (the screenplay says “vast hall,” but the vaulted interior boasts a
spectacular rose window). Here her transformed mother and father sit on
golden thrones perched on spindly, impossibly high Gaudi-esque columns.
To complete this heretical Sagrada Familia, a third empty throne between
the royal pair awaits the newly restored Princess Moanna.35 In this ritual
reunion, as distant emotionally as it is physically, the princess’s parents are
way too far above her for a hug, but of course none of these three immor-
tals is human anymore.
 We return to the dying Ofelia as we saw her at the beginning. The ex-
tended flashback that lasted the entire movie has taken up only a second
in the “real” timeline of this story— a neat demonstration of the collapse
of space and time in the supernatural reality that del Toro has situated
below, not above, the material world. Now the blood is running its natural 233
course from Ofelia’s nose. At the moment of her death the camera closes
once again on the staring eye, signaling either the end of Ofelia’s fantasy

c at h e dr a l h e a d
or the ancient Egyptian belief that the eye is the portal through which a
dead person’s soul escapes into the afterlife. The Faun tells us that the prin-
cess ruled wisely in her realm for many years. And some of her goodness,
he says as the discreet white flower blossoms on the dead fig tree in the
forest, even had a small manifestation in the world above.
So far, the absence of sex in Pan’s Labyrinth is faithful to the tradition
of  children’s stories— and their deep roots in medieval folklore and
romance— even as it avoids the racy Gothick eroticism we moderns are
used to. Where del Toro departs even from fairy-tale convention, how-
ever, is in denying his princess a mate. Pan’s Labyrinth ends regressively
as Ofelia/Moanna’s prince turns out to be her baby brother, just as Mer-
cedes’s beloved partisan is no lover but likewise her own brother. Instead
of marrying a prince in the underworld, Ofelia is reunited with a fairy-
tale “father” (a wise old king with a white beard) and her aboveground
mother, both now revealed as the rulers of the underworld, and ultimately
she makes her baby brother a prince, too— a chaste if vaguely incestuous
family constellation echoed in Hellboy II by the characters of Nuala and
Nuada, the twin fairies (evil brother, good sister) who rule the autumnal
underworld of this film when their father dies.
Ofelia is a virgin sacrifice, but she is not the bride of Death; instead, she
becomes ruler of the underworld herself, an ascension (or reascension) to
the status of immortal. Judged by Sitges rule 5, Ofelia has it both ways:
she never returns from her journey to the underworld (diminished fate),
but when she stays there, she becomes a god (expanded fate).
It’s tempting to insist, because it’s so psychologically authentic, that the
true frame of this story is that of a suffering girl in flight from unbearable
reality who is desperately imagining a happy ending in the last seconds of
her life. Tellingly, when the commentator Terry Gross interviewed del
Toro on National Public Radio, she described Ofelia’s “fantasy life” in just
these terms, passing over the director’s rather astounding statement that
 although the story is set up to allow either of these two positions, he be-
lieves the reverse: that the other world Ofelia sees is “a fully blown reality—
spiritual reality.”36 Gross for her part was expressing the psychologically
oriented assumptions of most older mainstream viewers in the United
234 States, England, and western Europe—namely, the materialist side of the
“Is this real or am I crazy?” conundrum so ubiquitous in genre horror
film. In this equation, when something uncanny happens the main char-
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acter experiences it as a supernatural occurrence, but everyone else thinks

that person is crazy for believing so.
The original model for this archetypal setup, Henry James’s The Turn
of the Screw, left the question open (are the ghosts of the former governess
and her lover real, or is the present governess crazy?), and Radcliffe’s “ex-
plained supernatural” remained a staple of Hollywood B movies well past
midcentury. As yet another marker of the gulf in underlying worldview
separating high and popular culture, however, the typical late twentieth-
century horror film landed squarely on the side of the beleaguered main
character, providing many independent proofs that the supernatural is
real, and he or she (usually she) is not crazy.37
From the origins of the Gothick in the eighteenth century through the
present day, the fact that the supernatural has been acceptable only rarely
in “serious” art may offer one reason, finally, for Pan’s Labyrinth’s favorable
reception by older art house film audiences as well as by horror and fantasy
fans. Because this film allowed The Turn of the Screw’s double possibility—
the underworld is real, or Ofelia is crazy—it could safely be labeled a po-
litical parable rather than that far more troubling and transgressive ani-
mal, a story that positions the supernatural as a more powerful dimension
of reality than ours. As Michael Chabon has so astutely pointed out, “par-
able” is the label that mainstream critics like to apply to a lowly genre work
to justify their favorable attention.38 It also serves to sanitize the super-
natural as part of the parable’s strictly metaphorical universe.
Meanwhile, younger audiences, more comfortable (in movie theaters,
anyway) with accepting the premise of the supernatural as objective real-
ity rather than subjective delusion, were more likely to share del Toro’s
perception—that on her throne in the alternate-world cathedral Ofelia has
become an immortal entity in a realm apart from ours. Like the Twilight
series, Pan’s Labyrinth moves its dark Gothick story to a bright fairy-tale
ending in the afterlife; for both heroines, death brings transfiguration
and demigoddess status.
If Bella more closely resembles Persephone by marrying the equivalent of
the male prince of the underworld, Ofelia eventually becomes its ruler in
her own right. While Bella and her perfecti vampires preside over a heaven 235
on earth periodically menaced by the dark energy of less evolved vampires,
Ofelia, like Persephone, more conventionally sends flowers to the earth in

c at h e dr a l h e a d
the spring as a token of her presence. Within his underworld cathedral
(where grinding cogwheels are notably absent) del Toro, like the twelfth-
century Cathars of Toulouse, has installed an entire parallel divine hierar-
chy, one in which the feminine principle is given equal power. Pan’s Laby-
rinth reimagines the universe of the Old Goth Middle Ages by presenting
a spiritual universe balanced between the forces of light and darkness,
masculine and feminine, and accessed via the monstrous through the mor-
ally ambivalent figure of the Faun.
As a dedicated Lovecraftian, del Toro has also extensively developed
the Providence author’s novella At the Mountains of Madness with a script
cowritten with his Mimic collaborator Matthew Robbins.39 This story
belongs to the venerable Gothick subgenre of South Pole romance, whose
literary proponents range from Coleridge and Poe through the Surrealist
Leonora Carrington (The Hearing Trumpet).40 Besides Yim’s Sitges entry
Antarctic Journey, other filmmakers who have reveled in sending their char-
acters on a dual journey to the ends of the earth and their own psyches in-
clude John Carpenter (The Thing, from a story by John W. Campbell), Ridley
Scott (Alien, script and story by Dan O’Bannon), and Larry Fessenden (The
Last Winter).
At the Mountains of Madness offers one of the most extravagant examples
of the haunted Gothick space in both its architectural and wilderness ver-
sions, embracing edifices, the natural environment, and even the cosmos.
In Lovecraft’s Antarctic, the human explorers are dwarfed by the deserted
“Cyclopean” city they discover hidden in a titanic, Nicholas Roerich–
inspired mountain range, with its “vast aggregations of night-black ma-
sonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws” and subter-
ranean labyrinth of creature-made tunnels deep beneath the polar ice.
For Lovecraft, geological stratigraphy and the human psyche are co-
equivalent. Boring into the earth, the upheaval of ancient Precambrian
 rocks, means that something ancient, monstrous, and catastrophic will
soon erupt, inside and out. The bottom of our souls, the center of the earth,
and outer space are all the same place, the transcendent underworld where
the monsters live and where Lovecraft finds the ultimate horror, the horror
236 vacui, of the Gothick sublime. Del Toro shares Lovecraft’s “Pascalian
horror, the horror of the empty spaces,” which he also fi nds in Piranesi’s
architectural fantasias.41 How this American master’s Mexican heir appar-
G o t h ic k a

ent will translate his grandiose Gothick landscape onto the screen— and
whether del Toro’s new audience of older art house aficionados will follow
him into pop culture Ultima Thule—is a Gothick tale still in the making.
Which brings me back to Cathedral Head. The idea behind it, the di-
rector has said, was of “somebody that, instead of talking about his home
city, carried it around.” I don’t know how closely this creature’s forehead
resembles the main cathedral of Guadalajara, but it’s fair to say the edifice
del Toro carries around in his own head has been permanently molded,
baby-in-a-jar style, by the Catholic Church— and inside its sacred space I
like to imagine there is a tiny chapel dedicated to Wilgefortis. Where his
hero the twentieth-century master Luis Buñuel could proudly proclaim, “I
am an atheist and a Catholic, thank God!” Guillermo del Toro can say,
“I am a heretic and a Catholic, thank God!”— and mean it.42
“The house you build out of your own pain.” Cover illustration for William P. Young’s
The Shack. Used with permission of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
 eleven

the new christian

gothick
The Shack and Other Cathedrals

The shack once again stood old and ugly, doors and windows rusted and
broken. . . . He was back in the real world. Then he smiled to himself. It was
more likely he was back in the un-real world.
—William P. Young, The Shack

For a devout Christian of the twelfth century entering Abbot Suger’s ca-
thedral of St. Denis, the procession from the porch into the luminous
nave was a journey out of darkness into light. The essence of divine radi-
ance is captured in the tinted glass of the rose window, embodying the
soul’s ascent to heaven and reflecting back, as all living things on earth do
according to their capacity, the absolute light of God the Creator.1
We have seen how this upward movement to the light was reversed, in
the post-Enlightenment literary Gothick, into a downward plummet to
darkness and destruction, as the Old Goth sacred spaces of the medieval
church were converted into the Gothick chamber of horrors: the nunnery
crypt in The Monk where murder and rape are enacted by monks and nuns,
the mausoleum under the church at Castle Dracula where vampires nest,
and so on and so on.
The twenty-first-century Gothick, however, is reinscribing brightness
on its dark base in the same alchemical way as Maurice Lévy describes the
process the painter William Turner used to make the engravings in his
 Liber Studiorum, creating “subtle gradations and fi ne variations of light”
from a ground of utter blackness.2 The first shift up was to relocate the
charged Gothick space out of the crypt and into more comfortable con-
temporary venues. Side by side with the Cullens’ airy and immaculate house
240 in the Twilight series is the compound of spacious California country houses
with plenty of built-in bookcases and a fireplace in every room that the
vampire Ina and her utopian coven enjoy in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. In
G o t h ic k a

spite of the big cross in the Cullens’ living room, however, neither of these
vampire residences could quite be considered a sacred space. It was left to
William P. Young’s Christian Gothick novel of 2007 to transform a run-
down shack where a child has been brutally murdered into the heavenly
mansion in the form of a cheerful, quintessentially American log cabin.
The new Gothick is all about framing horror within a larger, sunnier tran-
scendental framework, highly heterodox but Christian at its roots.
This post-2000 shift in a few corners of the Gothick sensibility is nicely
embodied in the career turn taken by Anne Rice. In 1998, after decades of
writing about vampire demigods, she returned to the Catholic Church; in
2004, she abandoned tales of vampires and witches to write two novels
retelling the life of Jesus Christ.3 In a statement posted on her website in
2007 justifying the earlier vampire novels as part of her spiritual journey,
Rice wrote: “The one thing that unites [the Christian and the vampire
novels] is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest,” with a second com-
mon thread being “the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning.”
Louis, the main character of Interview with the Vampire, is miserable
“because he cannot find redemption and does not have the strength to end
the evil of which he knows himself to be a part. . . . It is an expression of
grief for a lost religious heritage that seemed at that time beyond recov-
ery.” She concludes: “For me, the entire body of my earlier work, reflects a
movement towards Jesus Christ.”4
As we have seen, one of Rice’s innovations in the vampire Gothick was
to tell the story in first person from the vampire’s point of view, a significant
late twentieth-century move toward changing the formerly antagonist-
villain-monster-Other into a protagonist who becomes sympathetic by vir-
tue of the primacy of his structural position in the narrative: a subjective
“I” to identify with instead of a repellent “he,” “she,” or “it” to be vanquished
(or not) by the hero. Rice’s early twenty-fi rst-century move, telling the
story of Jesus from this same first-person perspective, has the further effect
of subliminally linking Jesus with Louis and Lestat. The seven-year-old
Jesus’ early exploits in Out of Egypt include turning clay sparrows into real
birds and killing a schoolyard bully, then bringing him back to life. Rice
proceeds to recast these stories from the Apocrypha, which also circulated 241
widely in medieval European folklore, in the terms of the contemporary
Gothick subgenre made familiar by Stephen King (cf. Carrie and Fire-

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
starter) and extended by J. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series: the bil-
dungsroman of the special child with paranormal powers.
The changes in the paranormal bildungsroman over the last forty years
parallel those in the Gothick generally. In King’s fictive world of the 1970s
these children traveled an arc of doom. Put in desperate situations where
their talents were either reviled or exploited, his outcast child superheroes
use their powers as raw, unconscious instruments of their fear and rage,
bringing death and destruction to themselves and others. Some twenty
years later, Rowling situated Harry Potter and his adolescent cohorts in
a much more positive fantasy world where their abilities are carefully nur-
tured and disciplined within the beneficent matrix of a magical fellowship.
Rice’s young Jesus, similarly, learns to stop using his paranormal pow-
ers for personal revenge and harness them instead for the well-being of
others as a demonstration of God’s goodness. His death will not occur as
collateral damage to his own vengeful reaction to a series of personal hu-
miliations like those King’s Carrie endured; it will be instead a conscious
choice to redeem mankind and he will become an immortal of a rather
different order than the vampire Lestat. Still, something in the act of giving
a god incarnate the “I” voice suggests, ultimately, a merging of the personal
and human with the divine in the same way that giving that voice to an evil
supernatural creature suggests an analogous merging, one that also carries
over to the reader’s own congruence with both these entities. The inti-
macy of first-person narrative marries both these transcendental extremes
to our own human identity.
Yet the fact remains that at this moment in cultural history Rice’s Jesus
is a fictional character whose story (excepting its climax, of course) is less
familiar to most of her readers, at home as well as around the world, than
those of Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins. Decades ago Northrop Frye
made the useful point that in the Middle Ages the Bible expanded to become
 “a vast mythological universe” generating hundreds of what might be
called Christian literary romances, including saints’ lives, the story of
the harrowing of Hell, legends of the Virgin, and the like.5 These days the
material of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (not to mention the apoc-
242 ryphal gospels, which are proving a bountiful resource for the new Goth-
ick) has now become what Greek and Roman mythology was for Western
culture through the eighteenth century: a compelling imaginal system of
G o t h ic k a

the distant past to be refashioned to the mythic needs of the present day.
Or, simply put, more great superhero story lines to riff on.
After completing her Jesus novels, Anne Rice began a new series, Songs
of the Seraphim, that reengaged with Gothick elements within a Christian
framework. The first, Angel Time (2009), has a hybrid plot (crime, histori-
cal, supernatural) that allows its author to have her Gothick cake and eat it,
too. After a suitable amount of blood has been shed in luxury hotel settings
(a staple of Rice’s later novels), a suicidal hit man’s guardian angel, Malchiah,
presents him with an opportunity to save his soul. Taking a page from Chel-
sea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain novels, Rice has her hit man given the dis-
pensation to time-travel to various periods of Old Goth Europe to perform
good deeds. In this case, it’s to thirteenth-century England to save Jews from
persecution. Though Toby isn’t totally successful in his mission, by story’s
end he has become a Christian again, performing acts of contrition.
Angel Time’s Gothick/Gothic reconsecrated sacred space is the ruin of
the San Juan Capistrano mission church in California, destroyed in real
life by an earthquake in 1812, only a few years before John Polidori wrote
The Vampyre. The hit man, Toby, likes to attend mass in the restored chapel
next to the ruin; it is his favorite place in the world. “It gave me special
pleasure at Capistrano,” he says, “that the layout of the Mission was an
ancient monastic design to be found in monasteries all over the world. . . .
Through history monks had laid out this plan again and again as if the
very bricks and mortar could somehow stave off an evil world, and keep
them and the books they wrote safe forever.” 6 In the second book of
this series, Of Love and Evil (2010), Toby continues his vow to the angel
Malchiah to expiate his past sins and do good instead of evil, time-traveling
to Renaissance Florence and once again rescuing Jews from their Chris-
tian persecutors. Though the San Juan Capistrano church also figures
here, when his mission in the past is completed Toby finds solace instead in
Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “this vast beautiful space . . . with its
soaring arches and unapologetic grandeur.”7
Rice’s return to Catholic sacred spaces irresistibly recalls the similar
turn taken by J. K. Huysmans, the French Decadent writer of the fi n de
siècle directly preceding hers. Huysmans did not have to grind his fiction- 243
making transmission gears quite as hard as Rice did when she shifted from
the vampire Lestat to Jesus, however. Durtal, the protagonist and authorial

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
stand-in both of A Rebours (1884) and Huysmans’s influential 1890 Goth-
ick novel of decadence and Satanism, Là-Bas, is the same character who
embarks five years later on a retreat in a Trappist monastery in En Route
(the “white book” he wrote to counteract his “black book” Là-Bas), and
devotes himself, appropriately, to a study of the architecture of the great
Gothic cathedral of Chartres in La Cathédral (1898).8 In his journey from
the Gothick back to the original Gothic, Huysmans himself became a lay
member of the Benedictine order. In 2010, however, Rice withdrew from
the Church in protest of its policies on abortion, homosexuality, and sci-
ence research and announced a new religious position. She “quit being a
Christian,” Rice said, while remaining “committed to Christ”—a move to
personal gnosis and an individual relationship to Jesus very much in tune
with twenty-first-century alternative spirituality and the new Gothick.9
We saw in the case of The Da Vinci Code how mainstream Christian be-
lievers are subliminally imbibing nonstandard doctrine directly from pop-
ular Gothick fiction, but this trend is also present in novels by Christian
writers targeted specifically at Christian readers. The unintended result
has been that the powerful Gothick matrix is now shaping contemporary
Christian religious doctrine. Fundamentalist Christian fiction in par tic-
u lar has drawn deeply from the well of the Gothick, a notable example
being the twelve-volume apocalyptic Left Behind series (1995–2007) by
Tim LaHaye and his cowriter Jerry B. Jenkins.
Far from being a literalist version of the Rapture (itself a rather Gothick
creation of nineteenth-century American evangelism), the theology of these
novels, written in the style of male action- conspiracy thrillers, bears the
stamp of the Gothick at every turn. Especially interesting is the authors’
depiction of the Antichrist in the figure of Nicolae Carpathia (his surname
referencing the mountainous territory in Transylvania that Bram Stoker
made Count Dracula’s home). This evil Romanian becomes head of the
 United Nations and preaches a seditious message of religious ecumenism
and global community while secretly plotting the destruction of human-
kind. Nicolae dies but, “resurrected and indwelt by the Dev il himself,”
returns to rule the world briefly before the Second Coming and the thou-
244 sand years of peace on earth take place.10
The Antichrist as a vampire? Given the seditious parody of the Chris-
tian blood sacrament that the vampire subgenre promotes, wrapping the
G o t h ic k a

Antichrist in Dracula’s cloak rather than the other way around— and mak-
ing this character a political cipher as well—might well be the doctrinal
equivalent of letting the fox into the chicken coop. The tremendous sales
of these books (more than 65 million, another 10 million in children’s and
graphic novel versions) suggest that the Gothick formula, and specifically
the ubiquitous figure of the vampire, is so powerful that it tends to over-
ride the conventions of any other genre it mates with, even those of a
2,000-year-old religion.11
The reflexive anti-Catholicism of this story lies in the circumstance that
Nicolae’s principal henchman is the ex-Pope, now styled “Pontifex Maxi-
mus Peter Mathews, Supreme Pontiff of Enigma Babylon One World
Faith,” who has become head of all other religions in the world collapsed
together in one blasphemous ecumenical mess.12 In a wonderful Gothick
about-face, however, the website for the official Left Behind videogames
shows an image of three cowled figures peering into the mouth of a lighted
cave with the caption “Life is a grand mystery waiting to be discovered.”13
They may be Essenes, granted, but those monkish hoods are awfully redo-
lent of The Secret. Even in an appeal to connect to God and not be left be-
hind at the Rapture, a hint of the faux Catholic still makes for spicier bait.
Rather unexpectedly, we find an equivalent end-times Gothick battle
between good and evil in Stephen King’s seminal The Stand (1978), a fat
(more than 1,000 pages) novel about a lethal flu bug that escapes a secret
government facility and within weeks kills most of the U.S. population.
Setting a template for much postapocalyptic fiction to come, The Stand
was made into a television miniseries and a graphic novel and is now being
developed as a feature film. One of this novel’s noteworthy qualities is its
overt Christian morality with supernatural overtones. With the notable
exception of the graphic novels, most Gothick supernatural fiction and
film of the late twentieth century assiduously avoided any explicit links to
Christianity apart from the usual ornamental faux Catholic trappings, a
token Gothick Satan, and an often humorously depicted Hell. One odd-
ball exception was the movie The Rapture (1991), directed and written by
Michael Tolkin, a highly original take on the spiritual journey of a sexual
adventuress who becomes a devout born-again Christian, only to discover
that the sacrifice she makes to impending Armageddon—killing her 245
daughter—leaves her stranded in tragic mortality.
King, however, has explicitly described the spiritual orientation of The

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
Stand as one of “dark Christianity” in his introduction to the 1991 ex-
panded edition.14 In an interview he elaborated on the difficulty of repre-
senting religion in other than cartoon terms within the Gothick, sum-
ming up his own personal gnosis in this way:

Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite,

and that’s about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where some-
one dumps a crucifi x in Count Dracula’s face, and he pulls away and
runs back into his house. That’s not religion. That’s some kind of juju,
like a talisman. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to explore
what that means to be able to rise above adversity by faith, because it’s
something most of us do every day. We may not call it Christianity.
I wanted to do that. I wanted [The Stand] to be a God trip.15

In the story survivors of the superflu congregate around one of two acci-
dental spiritual leaders: either the cowboy “dark man” Randall Flagg, em-
bodiment of evil, who gathers his followers around him in that metonym of
sin, Las Vegas, or “the oldest woman in America,” a 108-year-old African
American woman named Mother Abagail, who is the embodiment of good.
When one of the characters asks whether Satan isn’t just the “scared,
bad part of all of us,”

Abagail recognized this thinking as that of the “new preachers.”

There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil,
and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and get-
ting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without
cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan
was like a jigsaw puzzle— and every man, woman, and child on earth
added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a
good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true.
 And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would
eat him for dinner.16

This dark man, Randall Flagg, has paranormal powers: he can levitate,
246 send his eye out into the wilderness, and control the movements of wolves
and other Gothick dark animals. On occasion, like Stoker’s Dracula and
the Dev il in European folklore before him, he can shape-shift into them.
G o t h ic k a

“He ain’t Satan,” Mother Abagail says, “but he and Satan know of each
other and have kept their councils together of old.”17
Flagg’s paranormal powers derive, as we have seen again and again, from
the still-operative post-Reformation legacy of the Gothick that likes to be-
stow more supernatural powers on the bad guys than the good guys. In
contrast, Mother Abagail’s special strengths (apart from her not inconsider-
able ability to survive for weeks in the wilderness without food and water)
are limited to spiritually directive visions that lead her and her followers to
Boulder and guide their moral and ethical choices. Trashcan Man, the py-
romaniac who ultimately destroys Las Vegas with a nuclear bomb, is able to
intuit the metaphysical essences of these two Manichaean opponents:

He knew this dark man all right, his was the face you could never quite
see, his the hands which dealt all spades from a dead deck, his the eyes
beyond the flames, his the grin from beyond the grave of the world.

Mother Abagail appears to him in a terrifying dream,

as if it wasn’t an old woman at all he was peeking at but at some se-

cret, some barely concealed light that seemed ready to break out all
around her, to play over her with a fiery brilliance that would make
the flaming oil tanks of Gary seem like so many candles in the
wind— a light so bright it would chalk his eyes to cinders.18

During an interlude when Mother Abagail has mysteriously disap-

peared, another character wonders if the dark man is

just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of tech-
nology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something
 much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociol-
ogy or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think
only white magic will do that . . . and our white magician [Mother
Abagail] is out there someplace, wandering and alone.19
247
This is the battle between good and evil framed not in Christian terms
but rather in the Gothick fantasy conventions of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
trilogy and all the innumerable videogames that borrow the same con-
ceit.20 It is also, of course, the much older ubiquitous frame of folktale and
myth: a duel between sorcerers resulting in the victory of light over dark-
ness. King seems to have rejected a direct confrontation between the two
mythic opponents as a resolution for his story, however. Instead, Flagg and
his followers are vaporized in Trashcan Man’s fi nest pyrotechnic moment:
setting off the nuclear warheads Flagg has assembled as weapons against
the other side. In this logic, evil destroys itself through its own tactics and
not through any final Armageddon with the forces of good. (Flagg returns
as a character in King’s The Dark Tower series.)
Whereas King’s Trashcan Man sets off a “holy fire” in which, signifi-
cantly, “the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed,” LaHaye and
Jenkins opt for the traditional, more selective immolation in which Arma-
geddon does involve a literal physical battle between the forces of good
and evil. In the penultimate volume of their series, Glorious Appearing: End
of Days (2004), Christ vanquishes the armies of the Antichrist when he re-
turns to earth. Inaugurating the thousand years of his reign, he sends the
unrighteous screeching into the chasm and brings to life all his martyrs.
These include the two previous wives of one of the characters, Rayford,
who worries about how he is supposed to behave toward them. He’s reas-
sured by another character, who quotes Matthew 22:30 about the resurrec-
tion: “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given
in marriage.” Unlike the domestic arrangements in the realm of Mormon
exaltation conjured in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, the spiritual be-
ings of LaHaye and Jenkins’s imaginary world retain their mortal person-
alities but do not enjoy physical relationships after death.
The bellicose Left Behind series was also representative of a particular
late twentieth-century religio-political perspective that found metaphorical
fulfillment in the early twenty-first-century Iraq War. The videogame
 version of Left Behind: Eternal Forces was shipped to U.S. forces in Iraq in
“Freedom Packets” with U.S. Defense Department approval. The fact
that players were set in violent combat against a United Nations force led
by the Antichrist and given the cry “Praise the Lord!” each time a UN
248 soldier was killed led to a mild uproar that resulted in some hasty repack-
aging emphasizing that prayer, not killing, won the most playing points.21
But even in this context the trickster factor always present in the Gothick
G o t h ic k a

trumped any moral edification the game might provide in the one incon-
trovertible fact of gaming: that players could have just as much fun fight-
ing for the Antichrist as they could for Christ. Since then LaHaye, in
partnership with a new collaborator, Craig Parshall, has kicked off a new
series with the novel Edge of Apocalypse (2010), whose main character has
invented a missile defense system that will defend against a North Korean
strike on New York City as the prophesied apocalypse begins.
In the meantime, Left Behind was to have an unlikely successor in Chris-
tian best-sellerdom: William P. Young’s quietly powerful Gothick allegory
The Shack, the story of a man who loses his daughter to a serial killer and
spends a weekend years later in the wilderness shack where she lost her life.
Here, in a magical moment outside time and space, he finds resolution for
his grief, guilt, and rage in the company of no less than the Trinity itself
personified as a middle-aged African American woman (there are echoes
of King’s Mother Abagail here), an ethereal Asian woman, and a not par-
ticularly good-looking Middle Eastern carpenter.
As we saw in chapter 8, allegory hasn’t been much on view in high lit-
erature since the end of the eighteenth century (the same time that the
Gothick began), but it has lived on in popular Protestant religious homily.
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, was still widely
read across America well into the twentieth century. Young’s novel, which
has elicited admiring comparisons to Bunyan’s work, had been on the New
York Times’s best-seller list for 126 weeks by December 2010, and accord-
ing to the publisher has 10 million copies in print.22 An assured, sophisti-
cated storyteller, Young ably revives this venerable Christian didactic tool
with its suggestions of congruence and interpenetration between the ma-
terial and spiritual world. The shack itself, Young has said, is an allegory
for the soul of a human being, “where you hide your shame and addictions
with a 1⁄4-inch façade”; it is “the house you build out of your own pain.”23
 On a brilliant winter morning, three and a half years after his daughter
was abducted and murdered on a camping trip, Mack, a survivor of child-
hood abuse whose comfort level in church is low, finds a note in his mail-
box from “Papa” (his wife’s private nickname for God) inviting him to
spend a weekend at the “place of his nightmares,” the shack in the Oregon 249
wilderness where Missy’s bloody clothing was found. Since that horrific
event he has been caught up in what he calls a “Great Sadness” toward life

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
and a God who let his daughter suffer a terrible death. Mack wonders to
himself about the heretical possibility of actually meeting God:

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any
overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only
listen and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. . . .
It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclu-
sively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’
access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia.24

But he decides on impulse to make the trip.

The shack itself, when he first arrives, is a traditional dark Gothick space:
it “looked dead and empty, but as he stared it seemed to transform into an
evil face, twisted in some demonic grimace, looking straight back at him
and daring him to approach.” Once he is inside, all his rage and grief ex-
plodes at the sight of the faded stain on the floor where Missy’s bloody
dress was found. After contemplating and rejecting suicide, he slumps to
the floor and, in the best Old Goth dream vision convention of losing con-
sciousness because of a troubled mind, falls asleep. Minutes later, when he
wakes up (he thinks), Mack tears up the note and makes for his car, decid-
ing he will never go looking for God again; God, he decides, will have to
come find him. Just as Mack has this thought, the ice on the trail melts,
wildflowers bloom, birds and small animals emerge, and Mack smells not
just local flowers but “the richness of roses and orchids and other exotic
fragrances” in a “postcard perfect” landscape. In place of the shack he just
left is “a sturdy and beautifully constructed log cabin” with smoke curling
from the chimney and a white picket fence.25
Growing understandably apprehensive about a one-on-one with God,
Mack returns and knocks on the door. Instead of “a really big grandpa
 with a long flowing white beard, sort of like Gandalf in Tolkien’s Lord of
the Rings”— a description reflecting Young’s astute understanding of the
Gothick pop culture overlay that shapes so many people’s perceptions of
their deity— Mack is confronted with “a large beaming African-American
250 woman” smelling of his mother’s perfume who “crossed the distance
between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him off his feet and
spinning him around like a little child. And all the while she was shouting
G o t h ic k a

his name—‘Mackenzie Allen Phillips’—with the ardor of someone seeing

a long-lost and deeply loved relative.” This is Papa, aka Elousia, the “Cre-
ator God who is truly real and the ground of all being.”26
As Mack starts to cry in realization, a small Asian woman enters with a
brush and bottle to collect his tears. Elusive and hard to perceive, given to
humming Gaelic tunes, this is Sarayu or Wind, who is also “Holy Spirit,
Creativity, Action, Breathing of Life, God’s Spirit.” Last but not least en-
ters a Middle Eastern man in jeans and a plaid shirt covered with sawdust.
This is Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua, or Jesse, who, like the women, we discover,
enjoys cooking and gardening.
Faced with this Trinity of “two women and a man and none of them
white,” Mack asks which of them is God. “I am,” they all answer. Papa ex-
plains further: “I am neither male nor female, even though both genders
are derived from my nature.” The form in which God has chosen to appear
to Mack, he is told, is meant to break down paternalistic as well as popular
culture religious stereotypes. Papa in her own way, however, is another
kind of stereotype (at one point she utters the exclamation “Sho ’nuff!”);
though Young’s invocation of an Aunt Jemima–type character was prob-
ably deliberate, it leaves the reader uneasy nonetheless. Mack finds Papa
easier to accept as a personification, we learn, because his own father was
so violent.27
Later that evening, after a multicultural meal seasoned with exotic spices,
Mack and Jesus lie out on the dock looking up at the stars. Faced with this
ordinary-looking Middle Eastern guy, Mack realizes he doesn’t really
know Jesus at all; up to now, he has held in his mind an ideal or icon or
image. Jesus tells Mack about the importance of relationship, how Mack
can be “indwelt” by spiritual life in a dynamic relationship with God. But
even though the Trinity operates as a “circle of relationship, not a chain of
command,” Jesus tells him, humans are irresistibly drawn to power hier-
archies that make it hard for them to experience this kind of true relation-
ship. Later Jesus says, “I don’t want slaves to my will. I want brothers and
sisters who will share life with me.” The Church, Jesus’ bride, is a living
community, not a man-made institution. “I don’t create institutions,”
Jesus tells him.
Just as marriage is a relationship, not an institution, Jesus has come to 251
Mack and everyone else to offer life in relationship. The world is broken
because in Eden humans abandoned relationship with God to take the

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
“ravaged path of independence.” Paradoxically, the illusion of freedom
granted by independence has forced people into unequal power relation-
ships in which men sought their identity in work and women in men, with
the result that men took “power” over women. “We will come and live our
life inside you,” he tells Mack, “if you can kill your independence.”28
Mack, however, is still fighting to suppress his rage toward a God who
allowed his daughter to be brutally murdered. Next morning Papa, in an
African robe and multicolored headdress, tells Mack that God doesn’t pun-
ish people for sin. Mack must learn to believe in the reality of good that is
absolute. If Mack gives up the need to judge good and evil, he will begin to
know the wonder and adventure of living in God. “Just because I work in-
credible good out of unspeakable tragedies,” Papa tells Mack, “doesn’t mean
I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something
means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes.”29
This is a radically different theodicy from that of Stephen King or Tim
LaHaye. In the Left Behind series, Lucifer appears as a golden man-shaped
apparition when he is briefly separated from his human vessel Nicolae. At
the Last Judgment, as per Revelation, Lucifer morphs from lion to dragon
to serpent as Jesus tells him he is responsible for everything evil in the
world, then has Michael fly him, bound in chains, into the bottomless pit
for another thousand years. And sinners here are most defi nitely punished
by “the wrath of the Lamb”: they are hurled into the bottomless pit.
The Shack, in contrast, presents no Satan, either as himself or in alle-
gorical human form. Papa even goes one step further: “Evil is the chaos of
this age that you brought to me,” she tells Mack, concluding, “What you
see as chaos, I see as a fractal.” With this pronouncement she sends him
outside to the kitchen garden, which she dubs “chaos in color,” to help Sa-
rayu uproot one section. Together Mack and Sarayu cut down a whole sec-
tion of plants, and Mack’s task is to dig up all the roots. Later he will learn
that this messy garden is his heart and what he has laboriously uprooted
 is the bitterness that has taken hold there. Sarayu tells Mack the garden
itself is a fractal: “something simple and orderly that is actually composed
of repeated patterns, no matter how magnified. . . . I love fractals, so I put
them everywhere.”30
252 Fractal is the operative word in Young’s allegorical universe, and his use
of the concept recalls the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s post-
Enlightenment version of the Old Goth law of correspondences, in which
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man contains God as an infi nite whole within him just as much as God
contains man.31 A fractal, in mathematics, is a fragmented, infinitely di-
visible shape whose parts mirror each other structurally (or show “self-
similarity,” as mathematicians say) at every level. In fractals, every whole is
composed of similars. (The New Age concept of the “holographic uni-
verse” also resembles this ancient belief, minus the top-down hierarchy of
divine to mortal and recast in scientific metaphor.)32 A fractal organiza-
tion of equivalent levels has recently been identified in the original Gothic
cathedrals, and one can assume from this that the medieval masons and
architects were consciously investing these sacred buildings with the pre-
fractal notion of harmonious correspondence between great and small.33
Mack’s heart, this garden, is thus an infi nite whole that contains God.
And if evil is chaos, and chaos is also a fractal, then chaos also has the power
to replicate itself big and small, within people and in the environment
around them. But Young does not pursue this line of reasoning. Satan is not
an agent in this story; in Young’s theodicy, evil is the absence of good. Evil
is manifest in the brutal act that took Missy’s life, but it does not surface in
any other characters’ actions.
Back at the cabin, Jesus is making a small casket. He asks Mack to travel
with him to the other side of the lake, where Mack finds to his astonish-
ment that, just like the medieval saint Christina Mirabilis we met in chap-
ter 6, in the company of Jesus he is able to cross the lake on the surface of
the water. Unlike Bella, who gains her superpowers by virtue of becoming
an immortal after death, Mack is able to do miraculous things while still in
his body on earth because the power of God is working through him while
he is in full relationship to Jesus. Probably to avoid the charge of heresy,
Young has placed this event, along with everything else that happens at the
cabin, within the framework of a dream; technically Mack doesn’t “really”
walk on water because he is outside of space-time in this allegorical realm.
Readers, however, do not register this fi ne point as much as they recall the
spectacle of Mack as a man-god, a human briefly accessing divine powers
as he strolls across the surface of the water.
Following a trail on the other side of the lake, Mack reaches a solid rock
wall, pushes through it as if it were nothing, and enters a deep tunnel 253
where he encounters “a tall, beautiful, olive-skinned woman with chiseled
Hispanic features” sitting behind an ebony desk. This is Sophia, “a per-

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
sonification of God’s wisdom,” who tells Mack: “You have judged the actions
and even the motivations of others as if you somehow knew what those were
in truth.” She has him sit down in her chair, where his feet barely reach the
ground, and tells him that “judgment is not about destruction but about set-
ting things right.”34
Young presents Sophia as an embodied divine feminine principle like
Papa and Sarayu, and in doing so he has tapped into a venerable tradition.
Worshipped by the Gnostics as a goddess in late antiquity, she was the
muse of the sixth-century Roman writer Boethius, whose Consolation of
Philosophy (philosophy, of course, signifying “love of wisdom”), vastly influ-
ential in the Old Goth Eu ropean Middle Ages, detailed his dream vision
dialogue with this allegorical figure while in his prison cell.
Historically, Sophianic mysticism has been a powerful strand in Ameri-
can alternative religions, especially in Protestant Theosophy, a seventeenth-
century turn to direct spiritual experience and personal gnosis initiated by
Jakob Boehme, the Silesian shoemaker and mystic whose youthful vision
of sunlight glittering on a pewter bowl triggered a vast opus of theological
writings. Like Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg also spoke of the “conjugal
love” that takes place when the human soul marries Sophia or Divine
Wisdom.35 Boehme’s English disciple John Pordage wrote a treatise called
Sophia that declared the existence of a Holy Virgin Sophia, a female di-
vinity who is “co-essential” and “co-eternal” (but not “co-equal”) with
the Trinity.36
Sophianic teachings were disseminated in America by, among others,
an eighteenth-century Theosophical community in colonial Pennsylva-
nia called the Ephrata that practiced astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and
magic.37 Long after science and mainstream intellectual culture aban-
doned it, this image-based tributary of Protestant esotericism retained, as
Arthur Versluis puts it, the “hierarchical medieval Christian cosmology
 as reflected in, say, Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is marked throughout
by astrological symbolism and correspondences.”38
As the nineteenth century began, these beliefs in a female God and in an
animistic universe of living interconnections were still being affirmed by
254 the United Society of Believers, commonly known as the Shakers, who held
that their founder, Ann Lee, embodied the second appearance of Christ,
and later by Mary Baker Eddy, whose Christian Science scripture Science
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and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875–1910) declared equally that “the
mortal body is only an erroneous mortal belief of mind in matter” and that
“in divine Science, we have not as much authority for considering God
Masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the
clearest idea of Deity.”39
Theosophy itself was taken up more prominently in the late nineteenth
century by figures such as Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, and it fed
into any number of alternative New Age spiritual practices in the following
century. Echoes of Theosophical doctrine are present in the “time dimen-
sional coupling” that Sophia grants to Mack, allowing him to enter a kind
of heaven on earth where he and Missy and his other children are together—
even though Sophia tells him, paradoxically, that among them only Missy
is real.
What Sophia means is that Mack is now in a transcendental dimension
of reality that trumps material existence. “All of this is very much real, far
more real than life as you’ve known it,” she says. Later Jesus tells Mack that
heaven is not a place with “pearly gates and streets of gold”; rather, it will
look very much like this ideal version of earth that Mack has just experi-
enced, because heaven represents “a new cleansing of this universe.”40
Heaven as a transformed earth is a Theosophical doctrine as well as a
Swedenborgian one: it is the belief that “heaven is all around us” if we only
permit ourselves to be loved by God, an act of grace that enables us to move
mystically into an experience of that other dimension.
With Sophia’s help Mack is fi nally able to let go of his “Great Sadness.”
When he returns to the cabin, the Holy Ghost Sarayu touches his eyes to
heal them, which causes Mack to experience blinding light followed by
preternatural awareness. Like Bella in the Twilight series when she becomes
a vampire, Mack finds that his heightened senses transport him into a state
of pre-Fall perfection. The cabin has vanished, replaced by a night hillside
under a sky full of stars:
 Even in the darkness of the night everything had clarity and shone
with halos of light in various hues and shades of color. The forest was
itself afire with light and color, yet each tree was distinctly visible,
each branch, each leaf. Birds and bats created a trail of colored fire as
they flew or chased each other. He could even see that in the distance 255
an army of Creation was in attendance: deer, bear, mountain sheep,
and majestic elk near the edges of the forest, and otter and beaver in

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
the lake, each shining in its own colors and blaze. Myriads of little
creatures scampered and darted everywhere, each alive with in its
own glory.41

Out of the forest comes an army of children who surround him, followed
by a circle of adults that includes his own violent father, who embraces
Mack. As part of this process, Mack forgives his father and then extends
his ultimate act of forgiveness to Missy’s murderer.
When he wakes up in the cabin from this dream within a dream, Mack
discovers that the sharing of mutual love and forgiveness with his biologi-
cal father means that the father image has finally lost its fraught associa-
tions for him. As a result, he fi nds that Papa has changed from a woman
into a silver-haired goateed man. Young fi nesses the issue of whether God
has stayed African American (we are only told he “looked a bit like Papa;
dignified, older, and wiry and taller than Mack”), but on the page, at any
rate, in the best Boehmian, Swedenborgian, and even Wilgefortean man-
ner, God has become an alternating male-female divinity.42
In the meantime, Jesus the carpenter has made a most un-Protestant-
looking coffi n for Missy that he has ornately inscribed with scenes from
her life. They bury this Roman-style sarcophagus in the garden of his
heart in the exact place where Mack dug up the bitter roots. On the grave
Sarayu scatters all Mack’s tears that she has carefully been collecting.
Very much in the spirit of Catholic Old Goth religious folklore and mira-
cle stories, flowers bloom where the tears fall. From one special teardrop
the tree of life grows, “young and luxurious and stunning, growing and
maturing until it burst into blossom and bloom.” 43
After this ceremony Mack falls asleep once again in the living room only
to wake up, again following medieval dream vision convention, in the “un-
real real world.” In this case he is back in the original squalid shack with
Missy’s bloodstain still visible on the floor. Events unfold rapidly and not
 as satisfyingly after this awakening. Broadsided by a car as he is driving
home, Mack ends up in a coma in the hospital for four days, an authorial
device that fudges any suggestion of the immanence of the supernatural in
this world and immediately inserts Mack’s experience at the shack into the
256 old-fashioned “Is this real or am I crazy?” default mode of the twentieth-
century Gothick that rationalizes a character’s presumed supernatural ex-
perience as his own subjective delusion.44 When he does regain conscious-
G o t h ic k a

ness, Mack finds that his memories of Papa and the others are fractals no
more, but merely “shards from a broken mirror.” 45 In a too-neat windup
that is the only false note in a powerfully executed story, Missy’s body, the
killer, and the bodies of the killer’s other victims are all located and earthly
justice is served.
In the Left Behind series, people from various faiths convert to Christi-
anity in order to be saved by Christ. Young’s position on salvation, how-
ever, is Theosophist: a person does not have to be Christian to be saved by
Jesus, though it must be Jesus who saves him. “Those who love me,” Jesus
tells Mack,

come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or

Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many
who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious
institutions. . . . I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do
want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of
my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.46

Mack reflects on his church friends who “were also sold out to religious
activity and patriotism.”47 Sarayu replies that religion “is about having the
right answers, and some of their answers are right. But I am about the
process that takes you to the living answer and once you get to him, he will
change you from the inside.” Again and again the three gods in one tell
Mack, “Don’t look for rules and principles; look for relationship—a way
of coming to be with us.”48
Young has been severely criticized by some conservative Christians for
the strands of alternative Christianity he has woven through his narra-
tive. One writer, listing thirteen points of heresy in the novel, concludes,
“For those not trained in orthodox Christian doctrine, this book is very
dangerous.” “Wrongful” concepts include the rejection of traditional
Christianity, the notion that “experience trumps revelation,” the rejection
of scriptural authority, a depiction of the Trinity as three separate bodies,
a view that the Father suffered Christ’s wounds (Papa shows Mack her
crucifi xion scars), denial of hierarchy in the godhead and in human rela-
tionships (including Young’s assertion that women should not submit to 257
men), ignoring the role of the church, a “wrongful inclusive notion of
those who will be saved, and others.”49 Interestingly, this list does not in-

t h e n e w c h r is t i a n g o t h ic k
clude Mack’s assumption of godlike powers as he walks over the lake. But
The Shack’s wild popularity among all kinds of Christians suggests that,
like many of William Blake’s quietly radical poems, this new Gothick
story “win[s] the assent of the heart before their doctrinal implications
become apparent.”50
Young’s emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus fits Harold Bloom’s
template for the “American Religion” all too neatly. This collection of
ostensibly Christian beliefs that foregrounds “a very solitary and personal
American Jesus,” Bloom has argued, “masks itself as Protestant Christian-
ity yet has ceased to be Christian”; “walking alone with Jesus,” he flatly de-
clares, is heresy. As personal gnosis, it is also very much of a piece with Anne
Rice’s declaration of leaving Christianity while remaining committed to
Christ. “The American finds God in herself or himself,” Bloom says:

What makes it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is
that the self already is of God. . . . The American self is not the Adam
of Genesis but is a more primordial Adam. . . . Higher and earlier than
the angels, this Adam is as old as God, older than the Bible, and is free
of time, unstained by mortality.51

We are back in the territory of the divine human. Papa has already told
Mack that God embraced human limitations to embody as Jesus, and thus
Jesus was “fully human” and able to perform miracles “as a dependent,
limited human being . . . only as he rested in his relationship with me, and
in our communion. . . . [W]hat you are actually seeing [embodied as Jesus]
is me; my life in him. That’s how he lives and acts as a true human, how
every human is designed to live— out of my life.”52
“Dependent, limited” human beings such as Jesus— and Mack, by
implication— can perform supernatural miracles if they are in full com-
munion with God, and the last words of The Shack’s narrator, Willie, hold
 out a teasing possibility. Mack, he’s convinced, still goes back to the shack,
“walks out to that old dock, takes off his shoes and socks, and, you know,
puts his feet in the water just to see if . . . well, you know. . . .”53
Out on the lake Bella Swan and Jesse Custer stand on the water, waiting
258 for him.
G o t h ic k a
Daimon Hellstrom debates his dual nature
in Son of Satan. Artist: Jim Mooney. Writer:
Steve Gerber. Son of Satan, TM and © Marvel
Entertainment. Used with permission.
 twelve

epilogue
Questions without Answers

By offering role models whose heroism and transcendental qualities

would once have been haloed and clothed in floaty robes, [comic books]
nurtured in me a sense of the cosmic and ineffable that the turgid,
dogmatically stupid “dad” religions could never match.
—Grant Morrison

In 2009 the New York Times carried a story about a thirteen-year-old boy
who told his ex-Catholic father and nonobservant mother one day that he
wanted to go to church, and he promptly began attending a nearby Prot-
estant chapel that “fit his idea of what a church should look like.”1 One of
his top motivations for doing so was reading fantasy literature, including
works predicting the world would end in 2013. Given that possibility, the
boy reasoned, getting acquainted with God might not be a bad idea.
This is, as we have seen, the familiar “You never know” bet-hedging
stance of a Secondary Believer trembling on the edge of Primary Belief.
In his magisterial work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor mentions aestheti-
cally induced fright as the path some contemporary nonreligious Western-
ers choose in order to reconnect with the “enchanted world” of belief: “So
people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson.
Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can’t get a fris-
son from what is really in fact terrifying you.”2 Though some consumers
 of the Gothick, showing greater or lesser degrees of awareness, have
struggled for a very long time to do exactly this— discover Rudolf Otto’s
mysterium tremendum via a frisson of terror induced by the imaginary—in
the long term Taylor’s statement is profoundly true. In matters of the
262 spirit, darkness cannot hold; sooner or later there must be light. The boy
who headed for church was making just this instinctive choice.
It should be clear from the preceding pages that this is by no means the
G o t h ic k a

only, or even the most common, option for those so inclined, because the
Gothick itself has begun altering in significant ways to accommodate
the spiritual needs of its consumers. For better or for worse, religion and
spirituality are vastly important in this new century and new millennium,
as much so in the West as in any other part of the world. But because it
has been a taboo subject for most of the First World’s secular intellectuals,
they have not much attended to the phenomenon of what might be called
“felt spirituality” in institutional religion, in new religious movements,
and especially in the shadowy realms of popular culture. In part, this
oversight stems from the tendency within this same intellectual culture to
conflate religion with fundamentalism and all its attendant dangers; in
part, it’s simply the bias of a belief system that does not acknowledge itself
as such.
Arriving at the end of my journey with the Gothick strands I have been
following, I find myself stymied when it comes either to drawing a con-
clusion or, worse, to extracting a moral from the single common theme that
has emerged in a range of subgenres— a theme that, given my own biases,
it was perhaps not surprising I found, but one that was unexpected none-
theless: Why human gods and not a set of new invented deities? What is
there in this heterodox idea, imported to America via the sects of the Radical
Reformation and propagated by their diverse descendants, that makes it
so pervasive in the popular culture sub-Zeitgeist at this moment in time?
I do not have the answer to this question. What I do know is that the
ascendance of alpha male superheroes on the big screen, so tied up with
notions of war and the armored body, has already peaked and will soon
begin its decline.3 The superhero movies already in production will come
out, and then this subgenre will begin to lose its prominence.
I do know that Twilight fanpires do not want to worship the vampire
goddess Bella Swan. They want to be her. They want to have Bella’s super-
powers and her perfect, immortal love. That does not necessarily mean
they will get fitted out with prosthetic incisors and join the Temple of the
Vampire. It does mean that the notion of self-deification is somehow in
the metaphysical air surrounding all these various narratives.
Is this a dangerous idea to have floating around in the sub-Zeitgeist? It’s
reflexive for us to think that it is, schooled as so many of us are in the belief 263
that organized religion is a cultural atavism and heterodox religious ideas
come from cults. The Lovecraft magical groups, the Church of Satan, and

e pi l o gu e
Zombie Walks do not provide any particular reassurance on this score. But
the general shift in the imaginary worlds these practices draw from has
been away from the demonic and toward human accountability, something
the representation of human “divinization” in the Gothick puts heavy em-
phasis on. After having an apocalyptic vision of a nuclear winter, the half-
human and half-demon John Constantine exclaims: “Now, if this species
is going to have any chance of survival, we all have to face the demons
inside us. We have to turn inwards and enter the siege perilous— and
wrestle. It’s not those grotesque, tired institutions of heaven and hell
that are the problem—it’s the dev ils we know.”4
Most of the half-human, half-god characters we have met in these pages
struggle to rise above the darkness in their natures, a darkness that is linked
via the Gothick with their supernatural side. Bella must conquer her vam-
pire’s addiction to human blood in order to refrain from killing. Hellboy
must suppress his dev ilish side in order to do good. Jesse Custer must exert
his human will to tame the anarchic demon-angel Genesis that has taken
up residence in his soul. This is where the fright comes in. The super-
natural aspect of their hybrid natures, the exact point where materiality
flips over into something else, is the wild card they must gain control over
or risk forfeiting their human morality.
In all cases it is their own Gothick heritage these characters are at war
with. And in all cases so far, they win the battle by being humans first.
If the locus of goodness and right living in this metaphysics is the human
dimension and not the transcendent one, what does that suggest about
“becoming divine” as the ultimate extension of personal gnosis? In the
subset of alternative spiritualities I have examined here, I think it indicates
a kind of ner vous ambivalence, certainly warranted given the darkness of
the Gothick tradition, about the mysterium tremendum itself. What can
happen to a person in that moment of mystical connection, judging by
these stories, is anybody’s guess. Based sheerly on Gothick precedent, it
 is likely to be unpleasant. Thus human instincts are more trustworthy
than supernatural ones. This trustworthiness means something specific in
the context of supernaturalism. It means that these divine humans must
temper and harness the transcendental in accord with their own human
264 values, not the other way around. Profoundly antitotalitarian, it is a meta-
physics that turns the top-down religions of the past on their heads. At
the same time, the universal distrust of social institutions and organized
G o t h ic k a

religion expressed in these works hands over a troubling amount of moral

authority to the actions, or whims, of the lone visionary individual who
stands apart from society.
What the new Gothick stories and the new alternative spiritual move-
ments share with established religions of the past is their belief in realities
outside our material world, realms austerely rechristened “dimensions” in
the twentieth century. In his memoir Supergods, the graphic novelist Grant
Morrison describes a mystical experience he had in Kathmandu of being
“twisted off the surface of the universe into the fifth dimension,” granting
him a vision of all life on earth stretching from the impossibly distant past
into the future as a single metaorganism. He describes this entity, in terms
very close to those Garth Ennis used for his imaginary creature Genesis
in Preacher, as “an infant god, attached to a placental support system called
Earth.”5 And Morrison was given the responsibility to help this infant god
be born on earth.
For some time after this experience, Morrison recounts, he could “see
the shapes of things and of people as the flat plane surfaces of far more
complex and elaborate processes occurring in a higher dimensional loca-
tion.” Everything, he writes, “was immortal and holy not as a result of some
hidden supernatural essence but as a consequence of its material nature in
time.”6 This kind of revelatory experience, and the sense of responsibility
it instilled in its recipient, is probably the closest approximation to what
being a “divine human” means in real life—not leaping tall buildings in a
single bound, but communicating a startling vision of the universe and
committing to living according to its dictates. Morrison states that this vi-
sionary event, which embodied the sum total of his comic book obsession
and fascination with the occult, “gave me a burst of unshakable faith in a
private religion that satisfactorily explained everything about how things
work.” Citing the fifteenth-century Italian philosopher Pico della Miran-
dola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, he exhorts us to “accept the superhu-
man as an undeniable fact of our nature.”7
At a more everyday level, the Gothick low road to the transcendental can
translate into the conviction, as Jeffrey Kripal writes of his own boyhood
reading the superhero comics, that “anything was possible. We felt immor- 265
tal, like minor gods in the making, and those superhero comics were our
instruction books on how to imagine our own inner superhood into be-

e pi l o gu e
ing.”8 Or as Green Lantern puts it (in a way Mary Baker Eddy would
surely have applauded), “Anything I can imagine, I can create!”9
In this way the lowly Gothick, what Morrison dubs “the swill of
twentieth-century gutter culture . . . where no one but children and illit-
erates were looking,” has been the vehicle for the venerable strand of spiri-
tuality reflected in its narratives and their attendant Secondary and Pri-
mary Believers.10
Next question: Is some great beast already slouching toward Bethlehem,
waiting to be born? Is a major new religion born of these fictions looming
on the horizon?
When Bloom concludes that “there is a shape darkly emergent in much
American Protestantism, the outline of a religion not yet fully evident
among us but stretching like a long shadow beyond us,” the underlying
trajectory of these many small, strange sects based on popular entertain-
ments inclines me to agree—but with qualifications.11 It’s a safe bet that a
new world religion of some sort will emerge during this new century. It’s
not so safe a bet that this new religion will be dark. Nor will it necessarily
come from North America. The Anglo-American Gothick’s long im-
perial run is by no means over, but as a base for religion building, it is
being tempered by other elements, many coming from elsewhere on the
planet.
Will the doctrine of theosis I have traced through various subgenres
here—Alex Owen’s “immanence of the self-referential subject,” in the
secularized language of critical theory—figure in it?12 Judging solely by its
prevalence in the sub-Zeitgeist, my guess would be yes, probably.
What about the Gothick itself? Will this amazingly durable genre just
keep on mutating and adapting to new social and cultural milieus? Or has
it reached the end of its long trajectory at last?
Maybe it has. But probably it hasn’t.
 I do know that right now the Gothick, after 250 years, is in the midst of
an extraordinary flowering. I do know that right now it is firmly entrenched
in supernaturalism. I do know that right now it is giving large portions of
itself back to the Romantic in an aesthetic that is spreading from below
266 into high literary and film culture. I do know that it will always find its
like-minded audience. And that’s about it.
Let me close with a simple wish or two.
G o t h ic k a

May the Gothick never lose its dedication to Story. May it never lose its
outrageousness or its lowbrow ways. And may it never lose its ability to
push us into territories that are totally unexpected.
Long live Gothick.
 notes
acknowledgments
index
 notes

Pr eface

In John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays (New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 372.
1. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” ibid.

1. W h i t e D o g, t h e P r e qu e l

“Terrorist Novel Writing,” letter to the editor, Spirit of the Public Journals for
1797 (London, 1798), 1:223–225, reprinted in E. J. Clery and Robert Miles,
eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), 184.
1. Fred Botting, “Gothic Culture,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy,
eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic (New York: Routledge, 2007), 199.
2. Walpole’s status as the founder of a genre the majority of whose early propo-
nents were women has been attacked as a “patriarchal creation myth” by
Anne Williams in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 10. But in Devendra Varma’s view, Walpole’s bold hic-
cup of originality did not invent the Gothick mode; it “merely outstripped a
gradual accumulation of influences,” chief among them the Graveyard po-
etry school of the 1740s. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel
in England: Its Origins, Effl orescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences
(Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987 [1957]), 41.
3. That is, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The “Gothic” style of sacred
architecture actually spanned the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. The
term “Middle Ages” itself was coined by the fifteenth-century Italian historian
 Flavio Biondo to further downplay the thousand-year period of Eu ropean
history following the Roman empire as a less important cultural gray zone
between two great eras. And if all this isn’t confusing enough, the Tudor-
Elizabethan sixteenth century in England was not dubbed a Renaissance
until the nineteenth century; nowadays, coupled with the fifteenth, it goes
270 by the plain-Jane label “premodern.”
4. Radcliffe herself, curiously, was less dogmatic on the subject in her “On the
Supernatural in Poetry,” set up as an exchange between two travelers and fi rst
published as an essay, then as a prologue to her last novel, Gaston de Blond-
no t e s t o pag e s 3– 6

ville. The more eloquent of the two, Mr. W., avers about the ghost of Ham-
let’s father: “I do not absolutely know that spirits are permitted to become
visible on earth; yet that they may be permitted to appear for very rare and
important purposes . . . cannot be impossible, and, I think, is probable.” New
Monthly Magazine 16, no. 1 (January 1826), reprinted in Clery and Miles,
eds., Gothic Documents, 167.
5. Charlotte Dacre, The Libertine, in Gary Kelly, ed., Varieties of Female Gothic,
vol. 3: Erotic Gothic (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), 264.
6. Since its inception, the Gothick is a genre that has been written by and for
the very young. Matthew Lewis was nineteen when he wrote The Monk, as
was Mary Shelley when she began Frankenstein (the novel was published
three years later); Stephenie Meyer was twenty-four when the fi rst novel of
the Twilight series was published.
7. See, e.g., the last sentence of Otranto: “Theodore’s grief was too fresh to
admit the thought of another love; and it was not until after frequent dis-
courses with Isabella of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could
know no happiness but in the society of one, with whom he could for ever
indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.” Horace
Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer (London: Penguin, 2001),
123.
8. Cf. Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Byron’s “The Giaour,” and Keats’s “Lamia”
and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” among many other examples.
9. Among the many scholars who combine the two sensibilities, see, e.g., Emma
McEvoy, “Gothic and Romantic,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy,
eds., The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), 20, and
Williams, Art of Darkness.
10. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765
to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 25.
11. Just like the terms Gothic, medieval, and Renaissance, the label Romanticism
was applied to this aesthetic sensibility not by its proponents but by critics
and historians well after it had passed its peak.
12. Punter, Literature of Terror, 14.
13. As Robert Bork has shown in his radical studies of cathedral ground plans
in The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawings and the Dynamics of Gothic
Design (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2010).
14. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion,
1959), 47.
15. After Jane Austen’s satire Northanger Abbey (fi nished by 1803; published post-
humously in 1818), the defi nitive Victorian parody of Gothick ghosts re-
mains Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902), which
presents a seemingly supernatural scare (killer ghost animal roaming the
lonely moors) only to expose them as the props of a cunning murderer— a
classic illustration of the “explained supernatural” ploy. 271
16. Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma
McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007),
34. I discuss the displacement of the numinous onto the Divine Machine in

no t e s t o pag e s 6 –11
detail in The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), chaps. 11 and 12.
17. Night of the Werewolf and The Lazarus Plot, respectively, both published by
Grosset and Dunlap.
18. Psychoanalysis as a system, Lévy says, “can be read as a universal Gothic
mechanism, inside which women and men [italics his] have been struggling
since time immemorial: the villain is the super-ego, the victim is the ego en-
trapped in the psyche— an enclosed, nocturnal place, which has the dimen-
sions and haunting quality of a castle. A very gothic castle, peopled with the
ghosts of past traumatic experiences and the suppressed thought or desires
that swarm about the subterranean shadowy regions of the unconscious.”
“FAQ: What Is Gothic?” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 24, 25.
19. Walpole, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Otranto, 9.
20. Among any number of acknowledg ments of this mainstreaming, see, e.g.,
Alexandra Alter, “The Season of the Supernatural,” Wall Street Journal, May 27,
2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576343310
420118894.html?KEYWORDS=summer+books (accessed May 28, 2011).
21. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), 250.
22. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
23. Carol Clover, “The Same Thing— Sort Of,” Representations 100 (2007): 6.
24. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image- Making in Medieval Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 350.
25. Leslie J. Workman, “Medievalism,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 10 (1995):
227.
26. For a study of the huge phenomenon of pan-European medievalism in the
form of fairs, theme parks, and model villages and often linked to nationalism
in the former Soviet- controlled states of eastern and central Eu rope, see
Gábor Klaniczay, Peter Toth, and Peter Erdosi, “The Contagious Middle
Ages,” lecture and exhibit, Townsend Center, University of California Berke-
ley, November 2007.
27. Quoted in Joel Porte, “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in
Gothic Fiction,” in G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in
Dark Romanticism (Pullman: Washington State University, 1974), 43.
28. Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: Macmillan,
1988), xxi–xxii.
 29. Robert F. Geary, The Supernatural in Gothick Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Liter-
ary Change (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 11, 16.
30. For an excellent discussion of the concept of superstitio from Roman times
through the Enlightenment, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the
Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (New York: Cambridge Uni-
272 versity Press, 2012), 156–163.
31. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Modern (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12.
32. Walpole, “Preface to Second Edition,” Otranto, 40.
no t e s t o pag e s 11–15

33. Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European
Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), xviii, xv.
34. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies of Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1971), 587–588.
35. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27; see also D.  P. Walker,
“The Cessation of Miracles,” in Allan Debus and Ingrid Merkel, eds., Hermeti-
cism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Times
(Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 111–124.
36. Along with “Action” and “Family,” the online DVD rental ser vice Netfl ix
offers a major category of movies called “Satanic Stories.”
37. Alain Boureau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval
West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), 3–4.
38. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 14, 19.
39. Ibid., 123–124.
40. Preface, Daemonologie, by King James VI of Scotland, I of England, in the Form
of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Books (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1922 [1597]).
41. Brooke notes the link between the widespread fad for occult treasure hunt-
ing after the American Revolution (the alchemical belief that metals are
alive underlying the assumption that chests of money rise up in the ground
in the summer from the heat; diviners had to be pure, in a state of grace) and
the plates of gold that Joseph Smith discovers buried in the hills of upstate
New York. Smith and his family had previously been diviners and gold seek-
ers. Refiner’s Fire, 30.
42. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 125–126; Alexandra Walsham,
“Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation,” in Peter Marshall and
Alexandra Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006), 159. Stressing the “cautious and incomplete
nature of the English Reformation,” Marshall and Walsham report that “in
practice . . . Protestant attitudes towards miracles were a good deal more
ambiguous. . . . [There were] many reported apparitions” (18).
43. Edmund Burke, “On the Sublime,” in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Harvard Classics, vol. 24 (New York:
P. F. Collier, 1901), http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/ (accessed January 20, 2011).
44. Weiskel describes the new Romantic experience of fear in the presence of the
sublime (as interpreted by Wordsworth and others) as “an exciting and ap-
parently novel moment of heightened or intensified consciousness strangely
allied to anxiety and commonly evoked by the spectacular and wild in nature
or by a vivid impression of supernatural beings such as the ghosts and de-
mons recently banished from the civilized mind.” The Romantic Sublime (Bal- 273
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 13.
45. Ann Radcliffe drew a sharp distinction between terror and horror experi-
enced aesthetically in the plays of Shakespeare. “Elevating” terror, she said,

no t e s t o pag e s 15– 23
“expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life,” whereas
“circumstantial” scare-a-minute lowbrow horror “contracts, freezes and nearly
annihilates them.” “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” 168.
46. Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), 17, 23, 25. This is an extension of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s character-
ization of the Gothick as the “barrier of the unspeakable” between the self
and what rightfully belongs to it. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New
York: Methuen, 1980), 13–19.
47. In The Secret Life of Puppets, 9.
48. As Peter Brooks said of this period: “Of the mysterium tremendum, which Otto
defines as the essence of the Holy, only the tremendum [could] be convinc-
ingly revived.” The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995 [1976]), 16.
49. The Dominicans were known as “the Lord’s hounds” because of the pun re-
sulting from the Latin Domini-canes. Unlike the Spinola Hours dog, who ap-
pears to be all white, the dog in Dominican tradition is black and white, like
their robes, according to a tradition that links the dog to a dream by St. Domi-
nic’s mother that foretold his future. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea [The
Golden Legend], c. 1260, Caxton 1482 edition, reprinted in Temple Classics,
ed. F. S. Ellis, vol. 4 (London, 1900), 82.
50. Ball has made many similar comments about “rooting” the supernatural in
ordinary reality for this show. See, e.g., his notion of retractable vampire fangs
as an expression of “our idea about the supernatural being a deeper more pro-
found manifestation of nature,” www.trueblood-online.com/category/ behind
-the-scenes/page/8 (accessed February 27, 2011).
51. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(New York: Modern Library, 1902), 53.

2. Fau x C at hol ic

Opening lines of Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Louis F. Peck
(New York: Grove Press, 1952), 35.
1. Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 141.
2. The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, written by William Henry Blatty.
3. Directed by Daniel Stamm, written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland.
4. Directed by Mikael Håfström, written by Michael Petroni and Matt Baglio.
 5. The dividing line was never absolute. In alternative strands of radical Protes-
tantism that were also exported to America, there were Protestant exorcists,
Protestant magic, and Protestant sorcerers and witches. In Alexandra Wal-
sham’s words: “Protestantism may have presented itself as a deliberate at-
tempt to remove the magical and miraculous elements from religion, but its
274 overall effect was surely to leave the universe saturated with supernatural
forces and moral significance” in, e.g., the belief in “providences” as God’s
signs. Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 334.
no t e s t o pag e s 24 – 25

6. Henry Bourne, quoted in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic:
Studies of Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 492.
7. Laurie Goodstein, “For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived,” New
York Times, November 12, 2010.
8. Louis F. Peck, “A Note on the Text,” in Lewis, The Monk. Monk Lewis (32)
earnestly declares sources for the story of the Bleeding Nun and a few of the
ballads, ending plaintively, “I have now made a full avowal of all the plagia-
risms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found,
of which I am at present totally unconscious.”
9. The discussion of the modern faux Catholic Gothick does not include the
films of Luis Buñuel, which carry some strong echoes of their eighteenth-
century Protestant counterparts. The Monk was translated into French by An-
tonin Artaud and became an important text for the Surrealists; Buñuel wanted
to make a movie of it (and did write a script, with Jean-Claude Carrière, that
was made into a 1973 movie, Le Moine, directed by Adonis Kyrou). A recent
adaptation of the novel, also titled Le Moine/The Monk (2010–2011), was di-
rected and written by Dominik Moll, whose work is discussed in chapter 9.
10. The legend of the Jewish shoemaker who reviled Jesus on the way to the
crucifi xion and is forced to roam the earth until Christ’s second coming cir-
culated widely in Eu rope during the sixteenth century and also appears as an
episode in The Monk.
11. In a fictional foreshadowing of (or probably inspiration for) Pierre Plantard’s
fraudulent claims of his Merovingian ancestry that form the basis of Brown’s
principal source, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Sue styles a French family as the di-
rect descendants of the Wandering Jew’s sister Herodias.
12. Garibaldi’s Clelia, or Of Government by Priests (1867) and Mussolini’s The Car-
dinal’s Mistress (serialized 1909, published 1929). I am indebted to Massimo
Introvigne for directing me to these two works.
13. The Know-Nothing sentiment lives on in some corners of the American
psyche, as witness this brief excerpt from a lengthy and vituperative reader’s
comment on Amazon.com: “[Maria] Monk was slandered by the Catholic
Church: Any born again Christian recognizes that the Catholic Church is full
of pagan rituals that are evil and satanic. Read the Bible and the truth will set
you free. May God bless Maria Monk for her braveness in telling her story in
the face of evil.” www.amazon.com/gp/product/155753134X/qid=1147716654
 /sr=1–4/ref=sr_1_4/104–4488947–5855938?s=books& v=glance& n=283155,
posted May 12, 2005 (accessed May 15, 2006).
14. The Seville Communion, for example, features computer hackers sending se-
cret messages to the Pope, arcana of the Swiss Guard, and the negative politi-
cal currents of Vatican bureaucracy under Pope John Paul, elements that are
also present in Brown’s Angels and Demons. “Our Holy Mother the church,” a 275
young priest says to the main character, a priest with no beliefs whatsoever.
“So Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman that it’s ended up betraying its original
purpose. In the Reformation it lost half of Europe, and in the eighteenth cen-

no t e s t o pag e s 26 – 31
tury it excommunicated Reason. A hundred years later, it lost the workers,
because they realized it was on the side of the masters and oppressors. And
now, as this century draws to a close, it’s losing the young and the women.
Do you know how this will end? With mice running around empty pews.”
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Seville Communion, trans. Sonia Soto (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1998 [originally published 1995]), 133.
15. Herushingu (1997–2008), written and illustrated by Kouta Hirano, later an
anime series.
16. Modeled after the fantasy works of Michael Moorcock and Tolkien by the
venerable designer Games Workshops.
17. See J. G. Eccarius, The Last Days of Christ the Vampire (Gualala, CA: III Pub-
lishing, 1987) and related vampire lore at http://www.iiipublishing.com
/religion/vampires.html (accessed February 1, 2011).
18. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (New York: Warner
Books, 1997).
19. Dan Brown, Angels and Demons (London: BCA, 2003), 34. Robert Langdon
(and Dan Brown) seriously misdescribes the Illuminati, a Bavarian political-
esoteric society founded by Adam Weishaupt and modeled after the Freema-
sons, which operated between the years 1776 and 1790. See Massimo Intro-
vigne on the Center for the Study of New Religions website, www.cesnur
.org/2005/mi_illuminati.htm, for a useful discussion of conspiracy theory no-
tions about the Illuminati circulating since the mid-nineteenth century. In-
trovigne pinpoints the trilogy of novels collectively titled Illuminatus (1975),
by Robert Joseph Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, as the vehicle for the more
recent mainstreaming of these ideas.
20. Brown, Angels and Demons, 145.
21. Ibid., 35.
22. www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/faqs.html (accessed 5/17/06).
23. First published as The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail in the United Kingdom in
1982.
24. Lewis Perdue was engaged in a long-running plagiarism suit against Brown
(which he ultimately lost) for appropriating material from The Daughter of
God (Seth Mnookin, “The Da Vinci Clone?” Vanity Fair, July 2006, 100ff ).
The novel’s plot points bear little resemblance to the Holy Blood, Holy Grail
thesis, however.
25. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (London: BCA, 2003), 163.
 26. A good summary of the hoax is found in Laura Miller, “The Last Word: The
Da Vinci Con,” New York Times, February 22, 2004 (accessed on cesnur.org,
May 25, 2006). “The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy,”
Miller comments, “is our desire to believe in one.”
27. Among widespread coverage of the case, see www.boston.com/news/ local
276 /new_hampshire/articles/2006/04/07/excerpts _from _ruling _on _the _da
_vinci_code _lawsuit (accessed November 5, 2006).
28. The new wave after Brown included Kathleen McGowan, author of the ini-
tially self-published The Expected One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006),
no t e s t o pag e s 31– 38

who declared herself a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene based
on personal visions and family genealogy research in France. Carol Mem-
mot, “Is This Woman the Living Code?” USA Today, July 18, 2006.
29. Da Vinci Code, 124–125. Theodosius, not Constantine, made Christianity the
official imperial religion.
30. Lisa Rogak, The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code: The Unauthorized Biogra-
phy of Dan Brown (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2005), 110, 138n.
31. David Van Biema, “Hail Mary,” Time, March 14, 2005.
32. “Ruffl ing Religious Feathers,” Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com
/article.aspx?ref=357405 (accessed April 26, 2006).
33. Brown, Da Vinci Code, 267, 262.
34. Rogak, Man behind The Da Vinci Code, 93– 95.
35. Ibid., 98.
36. www.usatoday.com, April 25, 2006 (accessed April 29, 2006).
37. Vit Wagner, “10 Most Important Works of the Decade,” www.thestar.com,
December 30, 2009 (accessed January 1, 2010).
38. Tracy Wilkinson, “Vatican Seeks to Discredit ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” Los
Angeles Times, March 17, 2005.
39. Ian Fisher, “Vatican Official Urges Boycott of ‘Da Vinci’ Film,” New York
Times, April 29, 2006.
40. Thomas Doherty, “The Code before ‘Da Vinci,’ ” Washington Post, May 20,
2006.
41. “Vatican Newspaper Reviews Da Vinci Code,” ReligionNewsBlog.com, May
24, 2006 (accessed May 30, 2006).
42. Quoted in Anita Singh, “Angels and Demons: Vatican Breaks Silence to
Review Film,” Telegraph, May 7, 2009.
43. Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” English Literary History
40 (1973): 249–263.
44. Agence France-Presse, “ ‘Da Vinci Code’ Affects Christians in North Amer-
ica,” www.inq7.net (accessed April 30, 2006).
45. Paul Majendie, “Reading ‘Da Vinci Code’ Does Alter Beliefs: Survey,” Re-
uters, available at www.rhccsmallgroups.com/rhcc _small _groups/2006/05
/reading_da _vinc.html (accessed May 16, 2006).
46. See Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West, vol. 2: Alternative
Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (New York: T. and
T. Clark, 2005), which extensively documents the shift in religious thinking
 to pop “occulture” drawn from esoteric tradition in the United Kingdom
and United States during the later twentieth century.
47. A good example is Brown’s use of England’s Royal Academy. Over the centu-
ries, he says, the scientific discoveries of the members of this “brain trust” and
benign stand-in for the Illuminati of Angels and Demons, “including Einstein,
Hawking, Bohr and Celsius . . . according to some, were the result of their 277
exposure to ancient wisdom hidden within the Invisible College.” The Lost
Symbol (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 128.
48. Brown cites principally Lynne McTaggart’s The Intention Experiment: Using

no t e s t o pag e s 38 – 45
Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World (New York: The Free Press,
2007) and her website, www.theintentionexperiment.com, as well as the Insti-
tute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California.
49. Lost Symbol, 509, 359.
50. Ibid., 56, 468, 499, 507.
51. Mary Baker Eddy, “Christian Science Practice,” Science and Health and Key to
All Scriptures (Boston: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1971), 428.
52. On the “Mind-cure” philosophy, see William James, Varieties of the Religious
Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), lectures IV and V.
53. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
54. “The Making of the Secret,” http://thesecret.tv/making-of.html (accessed
December 7, 2010).
55. Douglas E. Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 11.
56. Maurice Lévy, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, trans. S. T. Joshi (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1988), 115.
57. Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of
American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 11,
505.
58. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in
the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1998), 521.

3. G o t h ic k G ods

“The Secret of the Gothick God of Darkness,” http://www.trapezoid.org

/thought/secret.html (accessed March 24, 2009). GME stands for “Grand-
master Emeritus.”
1. Lovecraft seems to have borrowed the word Aklo from the Welsh fantasist
Arthur Machen’s story “The White People” (1899), “an old, old language
that nobody knows now” and apparently spoken by fairies. This identifica-
tion was made by James Russell, “A Tale of Two Secret Books,” paper deliv-
ered at the “Knowledge to Die For” conference, Free University of Berlin
and Max Planck Institute, May 2011. The sentence is rendered and translated
as “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming” in Lovecraft’s story
 “The Call of Cthulhu” (1927) as part of a rite practiced by “Esquimau wiz-
ards and . . . Louisiana swamp-priests . . . to their kindred idols.” More An-
notated H. P. Lovecraft, annotations by Peter Cannon and S. T. Joshi (New
York: Dell, 1999), 190.
2. The fourteenth-century term for “monster” in illuminated manuscripts was
278 babewyn (Chaucer’s “baboon”)—not “grotesque,” a later Renaissance word.
Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of
Medieval England (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 44. The Oxford English
Dictionary gives thirteenth-century versions in English, Dutch, French, and
no t e s t o pag e s 4 6 – 4 8

Low and High German.

3. See ms 105, Walters Art Galley, Baltimore, reproduced in Michael Camille,
Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 29; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders
and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 28–29; and
J. Paul Getty Museum ms Ludwig IX 18, fol. 26ov, reproduced in Elizabeth
Morrison, Beasts Factual and Fantastic (Los Angeles: Getty Publications,
2007), 94.
4. The quote is from his quintessential Providence story “The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward,” At the Mountains of Madness and Other Stories (Sauk City, WI:
Arkham House, 1964), 112.
5. See William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on
Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1978), 24; Marshall W. Fishwick, Great Awakenings: Popular Reli-
gion and Popular Culture (New York: Haworth Press, 1994); and Robert Fogel,
The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000).
6. See John L. Brooke, The Refi ner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology,
1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58; Arthur Ver-
sluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001); D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World
View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987).
7. Swedenborg’s enormous influence in America by the mid-nineteenth century
on major movements such as Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, mesmerism,
and communalism and on notables such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
elder Henry James is noted variously by Sidney Ahlstrom in A Religious His-
tory of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1:584,
and by R. W. B. Lewis in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Anchor
Doubleday, 1991), 54.
8. The phrase “American heresiarchs” is Harold Bloom’s: The American Religion:
The Emergence of the Post- Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1992), 141.
9. To fi nd broad correspondences in antebellum fantastic literature—between
Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon (1830) and a work such as, say, Poe’s Nar-
rative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837)—would be a fascinating scholarly under-
taking, something like David S. Reynolds’s study of the influence of sensa-
tional fiction on “high” literature in his Beneath the American Renaissance: The
 Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989). For an excellent discussion of Poe’s esoteri-
cism, see Versluis, Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, 72–79.
10. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American En-
lightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 206.
11. Hubbard produced more than 100 books plus audio and videotapes relating to 279
Scientology, making this oeuvre the largest known scripture. Scientology is
now included as a unit in college textbooks on world religions. See, e.g., War-
ren Matthews, World Religions (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010), which classes

no t e s t o pag e s 4 9 – 50
Scientology as well as the Church of Satan and Druids under the category
“New Forms of Old Religions.”
12. “Modern Pelagianism” is Sterling McMurrin’s phrase, quoted in Bloom,
American Religion, 126.
13. John A. Saliba, “Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena,” in James R.
Lewis, ed., The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995). In the 1920s, the Urantia Book
also presented messages from extraterrestrial beings channeled through au-
tomatic writing. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical doctrine of the Ascended
Masters, supernatural entities including beings from other planets who visit
the earth from time to time, may have also helped lay the groundwork for
today’s UFO religions.
14. Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2: Alternative
Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture (London: T. and
T. Clark, 2005), 165–206.
15. See Lewis, Gods Have Landed, and Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, “UFO: A
Science Fiction Tradition,” Christian Century 144, no. 15 (May 7, 1997): 489.
16. For a comprehensive survey of new religious groups of the 1960s, see Camille
Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American
1960s,” Arion 10, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 57–111.
17. In the words of one Wiccan, “Just because you aren’t Egyptian doesn’t mean
you can’t work with their deities.” Quoted in Douglas E. Cowan, Cyberhenge:
Modern Pagans on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2005), 38.
18. Ibid., 7–8. Cowan’s careful study of online new religious movements punc-
tures some of the more grandiose claims regarding the spread of new religion
on the Web by showing that the most viable movements are those with a pri-
mary offl ine presence supplemented by an online one. The Web itself does
not garner large numbers of converts to new religious movements, Cowan
concludes; what it does foster is “syncretism and blending of many different
traditions.” For these groups, the Web remains both an essential communi-
cation tool and a somewhat overblown metaphor of connectivity (15–18, 100).
19. For a full treatment of the history of the invented “Necronomicon” in all
its manifestations, see Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, The
Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind the Legend, rev. ed. (Boston: Weiser Books,
2003).
20. Partly because the social marginalization of these groups makes private
study desirable, as Cowan has pointed out in Cyberhenge, x.
 21. Erik Davis, “The Remains of the Deities: Reading the Return of Paganism,”
www.techgnosis.com/neopaganism.html (accessed December 9, 2010).
22. Bloom, American Religion, 290.
23. Cowan, Cyberhenge, 49. According to its leader, Stephen Flowers, the Love-
craftian Order of the Trapezoid “recognizes the individual Knight as the
280 highest authority for his or her own initiation.” Order of the Trapezoid, “The
Methods,” www.trapezoid.org/missions/methods.html (accessed December
8, 2010).
24. Cf. the word profane, “apart from the temple.” One of H. P. Lovecraft’s many
no t e s t o page s 50 –53

deliberate archaisms was fane for “church.”

25. From A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine
(Paris: Klinsieck, 1967), 216. I am indebted to Maurizio Bettini for this
reference.
26. In a preface to The Champion of Virtue (1777), Gothick novelist Clara Reeve
refers to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a “a book merely fanatical” in the sense
of narrowly sectarian. “Address to the Reader,” in Gary Kelly, ed., Varieties of
Female Gothic, vol. 1: Enlightenment Gothic and Terror Gothic (London: Picker-
ing and Chatto, 2002), 5.
27. Sam Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A Reconstruc-
tion,” in Joe Sanders, ed., Science Fiction Fandom, Contributions to the Study of
Science Fiction and Fantasy, no. 62 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994),
27. According to Moskowitz, in 1928 the editor of the science fiction pulp
magazine Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback, was the first to apply the already
familiar sports and movie term fans to readers who wrote to the magazine.
28. Harry Warner Jr., “A History of Fanzines,” in Sanders, ed., Science Fiction
Fandom, 178. But the romance genre would later spawn fanzines, fan narra-
tive writing, and flamboyant conventions complete with fans dressed as their
favorite romance heroines. Romance fan perfor mance art such as “Regency
dancing” has also spilled over into sci-fi conventions.
29. Ibid., 180.
30. The word fan, of course, carries a further double-edged charge by its associa-
tion with the word fantasy.
31. Moskowitz, “Origins,” 26–27.
32. Bernadette Bosky, “Amateur Press Associations: Intellectual Society and
Social Intellectualism,” in Sanders, ed., Science Fiction Fandom, 183, 185.
33. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schutz, introduction to H. P. Lovecraft, Lord of a
Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press,
2000), vii. About 3,000 of these letters have survived.
34. Moskowitz, “Origins,” 37, 49, 52.
35. Bosky, “Amateur Press Associations,” 181, and Rich Brown, “Post-Sputnik
Fandom (1957–1990),” in Sanders, ed., Science Fiction Fandom, 77.
36. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 280. Echoing Lovecraft, Jenkins adds: “In research-
ing this book, I spoke to many who had discovered skills and abilities that
they had not recognized before entering fandom; they received there the
 encouragement they had found lacking from their interactions with other
institutions.”
37. H. P. Lovecraft, excerpt from United Amateur Journalism: Exponent of Ama-
teur Journalism (1915), in Lord of a Visible World, 40.
38. Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom (Lon-
don: Wallflower Press, 2005), 103–110. 281
39. Brown, “Post-Sputnik Fandom,” 78.
40. Ibid., 77.
41. In “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking: Selections from The Terra Nos-

no t e s t o page s 54 –57
tra Underground and Strange Bedfellows,” Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins,
and Henry Jenkins report that women fan writers say “the male hero is easier
to ‘feel’ the adventure with.” In Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), 146. In the phenomenon of
women identifying with powerful male characters we can see the fl ip side of
the psychological reversal that Carol Clover describes in Men, Women, and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1996): the tendency of adolescent boys, the principal audience of
horror movies, to identify with the “Final Girl,” the powerless female pro-
tagonists of these films.
42. “Bible Slash,” http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/ Bible _slash (accessed July 11,
2011). A sample: “With an exasperated noise, Jesus grabbed him and pulled
him into a fierce, open-mouthed kiss.” There are many angry Christian posts
and even a Christian woman’s defense of slash fiction at www.trickster.org
/symposium/symp165.htm (accessed March 2, 2009).
43. Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (London: Skoob Books, 1991 [1972]), 117.
44. In Tree and Leaf (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1989 [1964]), 36–37.
45. Quoted in an essay by Jenny Turner, “Reasons for Liking Tolkien,” London
Review of Books 23, no. 22 (November 2001): 15.
46. Ted Tschopp, quoted in Erik Davis, “Fellowship of the Ring,” Wired, Octo-
ber 2001, 132.
47. Ibid., 129.
48. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 175. This is a
late twentieth-century critical approach, and Todorov uses James’s The Turn
of the Screw as his template. See the extended discussion in The Secret Life of
Puppets, 164, 170–173.
49. See, e.g., Trekkies, 1997, directed by Roger Nygard, Neo Motion Pictures/
Paramount Classic. Though they are more performers than believers, the
Klingon groups amount to a mild benign quasi-religion. Assuming the Klin-
gon identity means promoting community ser vice, racial diversity, egalitari-
anism, and a philosophy of optimism—like New Age Elks or Moose, but with
a rather more complete adoption of the totem animal’s identity than their
predecessors made.
50. Davis, “Fellowship of the Ring,” 132. According to Davis (personal commu-
nication, n.d.), these fans believe that the playacting “creates an experience
 that is valid in itself, without the full commitment of belief.” They have, he
says, a strangely acute awareness of “cracks” in the Secondary World— an
obsession with plot flaws that reflects this sharp awareness of the “invented
construction” of their fictive world.
51. “Na’vi ’Kin Community,” http://community.livejournal.com/tothehometree
282 /492.html (accessed December 8, 2010).
52. Tirl Windtree, “What Are Otherkin?” www.otherkin.net/articles/what
.html (accessed December 8, 2010).
53. The Church of All Worlds bills itself as “one of the oldest incorporated Neo-
no t e s t o pag e s 58 – 62

Pagan churches in the United States.” See their website, www.caw.org (ac-
cessed May 5, 2009).
54. The hybrid story features a group of real-life local eminences, including
ex-governor Stephen Hopkins, all four Brown brothers, and a fictitious “priva-
teersman of phenomenal boldness,” one Captain “Abraham Whipple” (a Love-
craft family name), who join forces to rid the city of the fictional warlock
Joseph Curwen.
55. Amateur Lovecraftiana is an even vaster territory. Examples abound every-
where from online sites and a battery of publications both serious and whim-
sical to unpublished efforts by entirely respectable people such as a professor
friend of mine, an Iranologist (and not the subject of this chapter’s opening
anecdote), who composed a story about a student who tries to buy a mysteri-
ous record in a secondhand store in Red Hook, Brooklyn (immortalized in
Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”), only to meet with unexpected resis-
tance from the Arab owner (“No, young Jewish student, you must not ask me
to buy that record!” etc.).
56. Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, et al., Call of Cthulhu: Horror Roleplaying in the
Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft, 5th ed. (Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1994), 46.
57. See, e.g., G. W. Thomas, “Your Elder Sign Is in My Eye: or, Advice for Writ-
ers of Cthulhu Mythos Fiction,” www.toddalan.com/~berglund/ns9nf2.htm;
“The Cthulhu Lexicon,” http://netherreal.de/ library/ lexicon/ lexnfrm.htm,
which gives references by story name and character or book title; Mythos-
Web, www.bass.org/~cthulhu/index/.html (“your online guide to the fiction
of the Cthulhu Mythos”); E. P. Berglund’s Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos,
http://www.epberglund.com/ RGttCM/ (accessed October 30, 2011); and
Daniel Harms’s Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: A Guide to Lovecraftian Horror (Call of
Cthulhu)(Oakland, CA: Chaosium Press, 2004). See also alt.horror.cthulhu.
58. Alien was written by the late Dan O’Bannon, an avowed Lovecraft fan, and
Ronald Shusett. For a wide-ranging survey of Lovecraft in film, see Andrew
Migliore and John Strysik, Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P.
Lovecraft, rev. ed. (Portland, OR: Nightshade Books, 2006).
59. Written by Mack Carter and Jeff Blitz.
60. Erik Davis, “Pop Arcana (3),” http://hilobrow.com/2010/05/03/cthulhu-is
-not-cute (accessed January 17, 2011).
61. Jason Thompson, personal communication, April 2002.
62. Brett Rutherford, personal communication, February 2002.
63. Providence Journal, December 4, 1997. The intruders left a hole three feet
deep, not far enough to reach the grave, in a Swan Point functionary’s esti-
mation, and a single footprint. The intactness of Lovecraft’s grave is a touchy
issue if only because it is far and away the most visited site in that cemetery,
the only one with its own map available in the front office.
64. Also Blood Ritual, a “death/black metal band,” has an album called At the 283
Mountains of Madness; Cradle of Filth has a track called “Cthulhu Dawn” on
their album Midian; The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, a “Vancouver
‘punky surf’ band” saturated in Lovecraftiana, has tracks such as “Yog So-

no t e s t o pag e s 62– 65
thoth,” on the album Cthulhuriffomania; there is “Shoggoths Away” and “Goin’
Down to Dunwich” on Cthulhu Strikes Back; Forma Tadre, a German “indus-
trial ambient” band, has a track called “Dagon”; and Shub-Niggurath, a “black/
death/speed/thrash metal” band from Mexico, has an album Evil and Darkness
Prevails. Drawn from www.hplovecraft.com/popcult/music.htm (accessed July
6, 2007).
65. See, e.g., Martin Wainwright, “Whitby Festival Draws a Black- Clad Crowd,”
Guardian, October 29, 2010. Also see Wikipedia, “Goth Subculture,” http://en
.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth _subculture (accessed February 2, 2011).
66. Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls (New York: Dell, 1992), 5.
67. Mick Mercer’s compendia Hex Files: The Goth Bible (New York: Overlook
Press, 1996) and 21st Century Goth (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2002) are
useful directories to everything from music groups to clothing stores to the
scene through the early 2000s.
68. Kerry Acker, Everything You Need to Know about the Goth Scene (New York:
Rosen Publishing Group, 2000), 19, 23.
69. Quoted in Katherine Ramsland, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vam-
pires in America Today (New York: Harper Prism, 1998), 91.
70. According to one former Goth, Columbine was “instrumental in disman-
tling the attitude and exclusivity of goth cliques,” along with 9/11 and “the
onset of a lighter consciousness.” After these events “people became uncom-
fortable identifying with evil and a life driven by hate.” Kristi Gansworth,
personal communication, February 17, 2011.
71. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1994), and Alex Owen, The Place of Enchant-
ment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), for a full discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century esotericism in England and North America.
72. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 182.
73. In another link to the Radical Reformation, Crowley was the son of devout
Quakers of the Plymouth Brethren branch whose obsessive emphasis on the
blood of Christ is weirdly mirrored in Crowley’s own adoption of blood sac-
rifice in his rites. See Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister
Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 7, 23.
74. Did they know each other’s work? S.  T. Joshi, the preeminent Lovecraft
scholar and biographer, does not mention Crowley in H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
 (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996). As for Crowley, his bio-
grapher Lawrence Sutin says: “Crowley did read Algernon Blackwood but
deprecated him, & Crowley was not in America when Lovecraft was being
published in Weird Tales. Lovecraft is Grant’s enthusiasm, and the Ameri-
can OTO (Hymenaeus Beta) rejects Grant’s work in this & most other re-
284 gards.” Personal communication, December 13, 2010.
75. Grant, Magical Revival. In “Calling Cthulhu: H.  P. Lovecraft’s Magickal
Realism,” Erik Davis correctly draws the parallel between the “fascist and
racist dimensions of 20th century occultism” and Lovecraft’s writing. Nomad
no t e s t o pag e s 65– 6 6

Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Portland, OR: Yeti/Verse Chorus Press,

2010), 122.
76. The phrase “Lovecraft/Crowley Axis” is from Kenneth Grant, Hecate’s Foun-
tain, quoted in Harms and Gonce, Necronomicon Files, 122.
77. Discussed in Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Love-
craft’s Cthulhu Mythos,” Aries 7 (2007), 85–109.
78. See Michael Aquino, The Church of Satan, 6th ed. (San Francisco: Michael A.
Aquino, 2009), 240–241, at www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/COS.pdf (accessed
February 20, 2009). Aquino states that he wrote both the ceremonies and the
accompanying essay, “The Metaphysics of Satan.”
79. Anton Szandor LaVey [Michael Aquino], “The Metaphysics of Lovecraft,”
The Satanic Rituals (New York, Avon Books, 1972), 177, 178. Large portions
of LaVey’s Satanic Bible, to which this book is a companion volume, were
plagiarized. See “Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality,” compiled by his daugh-
ter Zeena and Nikolas Schreck, February 2, 1998, www.churchofsatan.org
/aslv.html (accessed September 10, 2005). This statement also asserts that the
Satanic Bible “was conceived as a commercial vehicle by [paperback publisher]
Avon Books . . . to cash in on the Satanism & witchcraft craze of the late
1960s.” LaVey’s presumed stature as a New Age religious thinker, as well as
author of the books that bear his name, has been accepted uncritically by
mainstream academic scholars.
80. A glossary is included. Umberto Eco in turn satirically cribs from the LaVey/
Aquino version of Aklo (“I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’tat’n!”) in his anti-occult Foucault’s
Pendulum (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 493. An entry on “Yuggoth”
in that compendium of sub-Zeitgeist folklore known as Wikipedia makes the
following astounding statement: “Other writers claim that [Yuggoth] is ac-
tually an enormous, trans-Neptunian world that orbits perpendicular to the
ecliptic of the solar system.” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Yuggoth (accessed
April 6, 2009).
81. Michael Aquino, “Temple of Set General information and Admissions Poli-
cies,” www.xeper.org/pub/org/xp_FS _pyl.htm (accessed December 10, 2010).
82. Aquino’s version in his appendix 71, “The Metaphysics of Lovecraft,” reads:
“The time shall come when the hounds will bow before us, and apes shall
speak with the tongues of hornless ones.” Church of Satan, 681.
83. Dame Patricia Hardy, “When the Stars Come Right Again.” www.trapezoid
.org/thought/when.html (accessed January 19, 2009).
84. www.trapezoid.org (accessed January 19, 2009). The Shining Trapezohedron,
which “translates” the primal reality of the invisible world for those who look
into it, is reminiscent of Joseph Smith’s magic stones Urim and Thummim.
Joseph Smith testifies that he found the golden tablets and the “breastplate”
lying on top of these stones. The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1950), chap. 9, 478, and “Origin of the Book 285
of Mormon,” n.p. In the name of the real-life “Burned-over District” of cen-
tral New York State (so dubbed after the religious fervor of the Second Great
Awakening that swept this area) where Joseph Smith uncovered the golden

no t e s t o pag e s 6 6 – 6 9
plates of Moroni, there is an unintentional but wonderful echo of Lovecraft’s
New England countryside, typically a ravaged landscape populated by degen-
erate inbred locals.
85. The appellations Knight/Dame and Frater/Soror come from the early
twentieth-century occult groups, which drew them in turn from Masonic
ritual.
86. www.trapezoid.org (accessed January 19, 2009).
87. Flowers, “The Secret of the Gothick God of Darkness,” www.trapezoid.org
/thought/secret.html (accessed March 24, 2009).
88. See the “Chaos Magick” manifesto online at www.sfmoma.org/espace/rsub
/project/disinfo/cc_orgtron _chaos.html. Also see Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos:
An Introduction to Chaos Magic (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1995).
89. For a genealogy that distinguishes between the Crowley line and that of the
breakaways, see Gonce, “The Evolution of Sorcery: A Brief History of Mod-
ern Magick,” in Harms and Gonce, Necronomicon Files, 80.
90. Davis maintains that Chaos magicians would insist that what they do has
nothing to do with a specific set of beliefs, just whatever works to get the prac-
titioner to the otherworldly experience or other dimension, which they do
believe in. “Calling Cthulhu,” 127.
91. http://w3.iac.net/~moonweb/AboutBate.html (accessed August 16, 2011). The
site has not been recently updated. As with all the online groups, numbers
and activity are difficult to determine.
92. Petersen, Willis, et al., Call of Cthulhu, 126.
93. Davis notes that The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game stages the clash of
conscious and unconscious minds, objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and
whatever, to produce the same “cognitive dissonance” evoked by the Chaos
magicians and by Lovecraft’s stories themselves. “Calling Cthulhu,” 130.
94. Quoted in Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sa-
cred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 67.
95. Posted in an archived statement entitled “Fungi from Yuggoth The Gnosis
of Fear,” http://w3.iac.net/~moonweb/archives/ EOD/ FungiYuggoth.htm
(accessed August 16, 2011). “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1936) is a sonnet cycle com-
posed by Lovecraft and the only specimen of the large quantity of poetry he
wrote that is still widely read.
96. www.philhine.org/ick/index _mine.html (accessed March 26, 2009).
97. www.kiva.net/~julianus/staronyx.html (accessed January 19, 2009).
 98. “Lovecraftian Banishing Ritual,” by Phoenix and Runa Dragon. www.setii
shadim.wordpress.com/2007/01/31/ lovecraftian-banishing-ritual (accessed
January 19, 2009).
99. See, e.g., Lord of a Visible World, 81.
100. http://w3.iac.net/~moonweb/archives/ FT13/AeonCthulhuRising.htm (ac-
286 cessed September 9, 2005).
101. Grant, Magical Revival, 117.
102. According to Golden Dawn initiate Dion Fortune [Viola E. Firth], “Protes-
tant Christianity threw away its occult aspect at the Reformation. All the
no t e s t o pag e s 6 9 – 74

pagan pantheons have gross aspects of divinities as well as ethereal ones. We

need to search the refuse heap of history for the lost parts of our tradition if
our faith is to be complete, and the most profitable line of search is in the
Qaballah and the Gnostic literature.” Psychic Self-Defense (York Beach, ME:
Samuel Weiser, 1996 [1930]), 127.
103. This plaintive note of “why?” is also sounded by Gonce: “It doesn’t make
good sense! Why on earth would the magician want to invoke terrifying
alien beings who yearn to reconquer the planet and destroy it by remaking it
in their own terrifying image?” As one answer he cites Phil Hine, who sees
Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones not as “demonic entities to whom he must en-
slave himself with a Faustian pact, but as personifications of natural forces
whose energies can be tapped.” Harms and Gonce, Necronomicon Files, 120,
121.
104. Patt Morrison, “Guillermo Del Toro: Monster Mash,” Los Angeles Times,
October 30, 2010.
105. Kirk J. Schneider, Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale
(Chicago: Open Court, 1993), xii.

4. Decom m ission i ng Sata n

Neil Gaiman, The Anansi Boys (New York: HarperTorch, 2006). The novel
tells the story of two half-human sons of the trickster spider god Anansi, one
who uses his supernatural powers and the other who doesn’t. The brothers
discover by story’s end that they were born as one being but were split apart
by sorcery.
1. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft,
annotations by Peter Cannon and S. T. Joshi (New York: Dell, 1999), 188.
2. Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk: A Romance (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 412.
3. Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2: Alternative
Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (London: T. and
T. Clark, 2005), 208.
4. Anton LaVey, The Satanic Rituals (New York: Avon Books, 1972), 177.
5. This fairy double or “co-walker” is described in the minister Robert Kirk’s
The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (New York: New York
Review Books, 2007), transcribed in the late seventeenth century from ac-
counts by his Scottish Highland parishioners. In her introduction Marina
 Warner notes Hogg’s skillful balancing of the tension “between hallucination
and truth, between diabolical possession and mental derangement” (xxix).
6. The quote is from Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, an-
notated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller
(Jefferson, NC: McFarlane, 2008), Appendix VI, 312.
7. Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 235. 287
8. See, e.g., P. M. Zall, ed., A Hundred Merry Tales and Other Jestbooks of the Fif-
teenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).
9. This very American Dev il tells his client Tom Walker: “I am he to whom the

no t e s t o pag e s 75– 8 0
red men devoted this spot, and now and then roasted a white man by way of
sweet smelling sacrifice. Since the red men have been exterminated by you
white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at the persecutions of quakers and
anabaptists; I am the great patron and prompter of slave dealers, and the
grand master of the Salem witches.” Washington Irving, “The Dev il and
Tom Walker,” http://classiclit.about.com/od/devilandtomwalker/a/aa_devil
tomwalker_2.htm (accessed June 21, 2010).
10. Stephen Vincent Benét, “The Dev il and Daniel Webster,” http://gutenberg
.net.au/ebooks06/0602901.txt (accessed June 21, 2010).
11. In John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights (New York: Bantam, 1953), 140.
12. Jennifer Robison, on the results of a 2004 poll, quoted in Partridge, Re-
enchantment of the West, 2:217.
13. Ibid.
14. To the Devil a Daughter (1976), aka Child of Satan, directed by Peter Sykes from
the novel by Dennis Wheatley, is the story of a father who wants to sign his
daughter over to the Dev il (male pact) so that she will be the Dev il’s represen-
tative on earth (female possession). Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999),
written by John Brownjohn and Enrique Urbizu, taken from a novel by Ar-
turo Pérez-Reverte, features a man who makes a pact with the Dev il by sleep-
ing with a nicely Monk-like demon incarnated as a seductive female.
15. Darryl Jones, quoted in Partridge, Re-Enchantment of the West, 2:240.
16. Directed by Peter Hyams, written by Andrew W. Marlowe.
17. Directed by John Carpenter, written by Martin Quatermass [John Carpenter].
18. See Stephen King’s comment about God as the big “juju” in pop culture,
quoted in chapter 11.
19. Directed by Carl Schultz, written by Clifford Green and Ellen Green.
20. Directed by Scott Charles Stewart, written by Peter Schink and Scott
Charles Stewart.
21. These same fears were voiced about Gothick novels by the anonymous writer
of a letter to the editor titled “Terrorist Novel Writing” in Spirit of the Public
Journals for 1797 (London, 1798), 1:223–225, reprinted in E.  J. Clery and
Robert Miles, eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 184.
22. This quote was taken from the unedited manuscript version of Jeffrey Kri-
pal’s Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kripal’s study traces a secret
history of the religious imagination in the complex historical interaction
 between American popular culture and paranormal-mystical experience over
the twentieth century.
23. In Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes (San Fran-
cisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2007), 45–49.
24. Laura Miller, “Chivalry and Superheroes,” blog entry, September 20, 2008,
288 lauramiller.typepad.com (accessed October 2, 2008).
25. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954).
Wertham’s book provoked a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing that estab-
lished a Comics Code Authority in 1955 banning certain sexual and violent
no t e s t o pag e s 81– 83

content.
26. Jim Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t
Want You to Read! (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010), 32.
27. Linda Williams, “Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of
the ‘Classical,’ ” 98th annual Faculty Research Lecture, University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, April 4, 2011. “Vertical suspension,” in contrast, is a character-
istic of the single-story stand-alone feature film in which “villains fall, heroes
hang by a thread, superheroes fly.” See also Kristen Whissel, “Tales of Up-
ward Mobility: The New Verticality and Digital Special Effects,” Film Quar-
terly 54 (Summer 2006): 23–40.
28. Alan Moore, introduction, Swamp Thing: The Saga of the Swamp Thing, writ-
ten by Alan Moore, artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben (New York: DC
Comics/Warner Bros., 1987) [reprint of Saga of the Swamp Thing 21–27], n.p.
29. Ibid.
30. Frederick Strömberg, The Comics Go to Hell: A Visual History of the Devil in
Comic Books (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2005), 285.
31. Quoted in Christopher Farnsworth, “ ‘Twilight’ to ‘True Blood’: Why We
Suck the Evil out of Vampires,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2011.
32. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 244–250.
33. The comic book artists “often employed neo-medieval allegories (one reason
the covers are so ‘readable’),” Jim Trombetta notes, “and enjoyed introducing
motifs like the pietà or the deposition of Christ’s body from the cross into
bizarre and even sacrilegious settings.” The Horror! The Horror!, 32.
34. Cited in Strömberg, Comics Go to Hell, 193. Comic book and graphic novel
writers routinely use ellipses as pauses within their word balloons and so the
three little dots in the passages that follow do not indicate excised material,
as they do in standard text quotation. All quotes in this chapter from comics
or graphic novels feature ellipses used in this way.
35. Spawn Collection, vol. 1, created and written by Todd McFarlane, coloring by
Steve Oliff, Reuben Rude, and Olyoptics (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2006),
front matter. [Originally published 1992–1993 as nos. 1–12.]
36. Reprinted in Essential Marvel Horror, vol. 1 (New York: Marvel, 2006). All
quotes from this edition. Series writers include Steve Gerber and John War-
ner; principal artists were Jim Mooney and Sal Buscema. Series editor Roy
Thomas, who created the story line, states that he realized later that a 1962
comic written by Bill Joe (aka Biljo) White in the fanzine Komix Illustrated
 was probably his unconscious inspiration for the series. Thomas, personal
communication, June 29, 2010.
37. Or the view of the universe the soldier Scipio is shown by his grandfather in
Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.
38. Hellstorm—Prince of Lies, written by Warren Ellis, cited in Strömberg, Com-
ics Go to Hell, 201. 289
39. In The Secret Life of Puppets I misidentified the Watchmen series as The Night
Watchmen, to well-deserved Internet opprobrium.
40. “Rake at the Gates of Hell,” John Constantine: Hellblazer, written by Garth

no t e s t o pag e s 83– 88
Ennis, artist Steve Dillon (New York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 2003).
[Originally published as Hellblazer no. 78.]
41. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Season of Mists, characters created by Neil
Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg; illustrated by Kelley Jones, Mike
Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Matt Wagner, Dick Giordano, George
Pratt, and P. Craig Russell (New York: DC Comics, 1992), panel 11. The
Bowie reference was acknowledged by Gaiman in numerous interviews. See,
e.g., www.bowiewonderworld.com/chats/dbchatng0601.htm (accessed March
3, 2011).
42. Alan Moore, quoted in “John Constantine,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/ John _Constantine (accessed September 20, 2010).
43. “Newcastle: A Taste of Things to Come,” John Constantine: Hellblazer, writ-
ten by Jamie Delano, artists Richard Piers Raynor and Mark Buckingham
(New York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 2003). [Originally published as Hell-
blazer no. 11.]
44. “Sex and Death,” John Constantine: Hellblazer, written by Jamie Delano, art-
ists Richard Piers Raynor and Mark Buckingham (New York: DC Comics/
Warner Bros., 2003). [Originally published as Hellblazer no. 10.]
45. Gaiman, Sandman: Season of Mists, panel 11.
46. Kaz [Kazimieras G. Prapuolenis], “The Tragedy of Satan,” in Sidetrack City,
cited in Strömberg, Comics Go to Hell, 151.
47. Directed by Steven Brill, written by Tim Herlihy, Adam Sandler, and Steven
Brill.
48. Spawn Collection, vol. 1, n.p.
49. “Spawn,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn (comics) (accessed
September 15, 2010). The summary (much, much longer than the extract
quoted here) may not be entirely accurate to the story, but that’s not really
the point of Wikipedia, whose casual misinformation often assumes its own
Gothick authority as it seeps into the sub-Zeitgeist.
50. As described on the official site, www.hellboy.com (accessed January 10, 2011).
51. Hellboy: Wake the Devil, written and drawn by Mike Mignola, colored by
James Sinclair (Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1997), n.p. [Originally
published as nos. 1–5, 1995–1996.]
52. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, by Mike Mignola, script by John Byrne, colored
by Mark Chiarello (Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1997), n.p. [Origi-
nally published as nos. 1–5, 1995–1996.]
 53. Hellboy: Wake the Devil, n.p.
54. “The Time of the Preacher,” in Preacher: Gone to Texas, written by Garth Ennis,
artist Steve Dillon (New York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 1996), n.p. [Orig-
inally published as Preacher nos. 1–7, 1995.]
55. “Miracle Man,” in Preacher: Until the End of the World, written by Garth Ennis,
290 artist Steve Dillon (New York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 1997). [Originally
published as Preacher nos. 8–17, 1995–1996.]
56. “Stormbringers,” in Preacher: Proud Americans, written by Garth Ennis, artist
Steve Dillon (New York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 1997). [Originally pub-
no t e s t o pag e s 8 9 – 9 8

lished as Preacher nos. 18–26, 1996–1997.]

57. “Revelations,” in Preacher: Proud Americans.
58. www.baptistboard.com/showthread.php?t=1497 (accessed July 30, 2010).
59. Trombetta argues that war trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder shaped
a great deal of the content of the spectacularly violent 1950s American horror
comics. The Horror! The Horror!, 140.
60. From, e.g., Tezuka Osamu’s Princess Knight (1953), which features a Western
muscular Satan in spandex briefs, cloak, and pointy goatee, to Toriyama
Akira’s goateed lord in Sand Land (2000). Strömberg, Comics Go to Hell, 135.
61. Ibid., 137. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story line, after Satan’s abdication Hell
is briefly inhabited by a highly syncretic crew of gods including the Shinto
god of storms and the sea, Susano-o-no-mikoto, who points out correctly
that the Japanese “are expanding . . . assimilating other pantheons, later gods,
new altars and icons. Marilyn Monroe is ours now, as are King Kong and
Lady Liberty.” Gaiman, Sandman: Season of Mists, panel 8.

5. G o t h ic k R om a n c e

Ann Tukey Harrison, ed. and trans., The Danse Macabre of Women (Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 112.
1. Thomas Carlyle, “The Diamond Necklace,” Frazier’s Magazine 85, 86 [1837],
reprinted in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Collected and Republished by
Thomas Carlyle (New York: Belford Clarke and Co., 1890?), 4:1.
2. Horace Walpole, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Castle of Otranto, ed.
Michael Gamer (London: Penguin, 2001), 9.
3. At the time the terms romance and novel were often used interchangeably; then
as now, their defi nitions have been endlessly disputed. For the origins of the
debate, see the Gothick novelist Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through
Times, Countries, and Manners [1785], 1:111, quoted in E. J. Clery and Robert
Miles, eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 2000), 179–180, and Walter Scott, “An Essay on Romance,”
in Miscellaneous Prose Works [1852] www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk /etexts/prose
.html (accessed November 10, 2010).
4. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 3–4, 23, 61, 28–29.
5. As noted by Maurice Lévy in “FAQ: What Is Gothic?” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 23.
 6. Walpole, Castle of Otranto, 85.
7. Anna MacKenzie, Mysteries Elucidated (London: Minerva Press, 1795), 1:90.
8. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance Interspersed with Some
Pieces of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1794]), 79.
9. Terry Castle, introduction to Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, xxii–xxiv. Castle
elaborates here on Harold Bloom’s idea of “internalized romance” in “The 291
Internalization of the Quest-Romance,” in Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Con-
sciousness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 3–24. Radcliffe’s use of the word
mystery in the title of her immensely popu lar novel probably helped pave the

no t e s t o pag e s 9 8 –101
way for the emergence of the Anglo-American secular murder mystery genre
in the nineteenth century, fostered by Edgar Allan Poe and Julian Haw-
thorne, son of Nathaniel.
10. Virginia Woolf, review of Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), quoted in
Catherine Spooner, “Gothic in the Twentieth Century,” in Catherine Spooner
and Emma McEvoy, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge,
2007), 38.
11. Moers defi nes “Female Gothic” as any work of fiction “that women writers
have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have
called the ‘Gothic’ ”; her category thus includes Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Ellen Moers, Literary Women
(New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 90. Gary Kelly’s
six-volume edition of little-known early female Gothic works, Varieties of
Female Gothic (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002– ), has helped canonize
this category in the classic Gothick.
12. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the In-
vention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Julia Kristeva,
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1982); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic
Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986).
13. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 102–103.
14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture, trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1953]), 134.
15. Marina Warner has described the zombiefication of mad Bertha Rochester
as the twentieth-century writer Jean Rhys beautifully reimagined this char-
acter as the heroine of her Dominica-set novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). See
the discussion in chapter 7 and Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 154–159. As a radical female Goth-
ick recasting of Brontë’s tale, Rhys’s novel helped lay the groundwork for
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic feminist rereading of Victorian
literature, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth
Century Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
16. In Wuthering Heights the visitor Lockwood dreams of dead Cathy, and a little boy
sees Heathcliff and “a woman” after he is dead, but these supernatural intrusions
are smoothed over or explained by Lockwood as “mental perturbations.” www
.online-literature.com/bronte/wuthering, chap. 34 (accessed August 25, 2010).
 17. Paradise Lost, book 1, ll.589– 604.
18. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1951), 155–158, 61.
19. Quoted in Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula
(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991), 6.
292 20. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 108, 113–114.
21. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chap. 34. Both sisters had formed a tem-
plate for their heroes in the fictional heroes and villains of their childhood
writings set in the imaginary kingdom of Angria, an apt allegorical name for
no t e s t o pag e s 102–10 7

the womb of a character with Heathcliff’s temperament.

22. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death [Essais sur l’histoire de la
mort en Occident], trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1975), 157. Where earlier scholars had long regarded the danse
macabre as a reaction to the devastation caused by the plague, Ariès believed
that the iconic image represented instead “an excessive attachment to life”
(158). Denis de Rougemont likewise found it to be an expression of heterodox
populist religion; the folklore of death, he observes, admits all kinds of non-
orthodox beliefs, including a “nocturnal universe of demons.” Love in the
Western World, rev. ed., trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 242–243.
23. Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, 180.
24. Romeo and Juliet V:iii, 102–105.
25. Gábor Klaniczay links the “erotic fantasies” of the “Death and the Maiden”
trope to the later sexualization of vampire folklore in Western Eu rope. The
Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval
and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 183.
26. Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, 176.
27. Williams, Art of Darkness, 140–147.
28. Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz, “Beneath the Surface: The Hidden
Codes of Romance,” in Jayne Ann Krentz, ed., Dangerous Men and Adventur-
ous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 19.
29. Ibid.
30. Quoted in Williams, Art of Darkness, 227.
31. Fred Botting, “Gothic Culture,” in Spooner and McEvoy, Routledge Compan-
ion to Gothic, 207.
32. Jane Litte, “Dear Author,” http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/11/26/kindle
-pricing-so-low-that-amazon-is-no-longer-discounting-paperbacks (accessed
April 27, 2009).
33. Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 206–207.
34. The Romance Writers of America recognizes nine official subgenres: con-
temporary series romance, contemporary single title romance, historical ro-
mance, inspirational romance, novels with strong romantic elements, paranor-
 mal romance, Regency romance, romantic suspense, and young adult romance.
www.rwa.org/cs/romance _literature _subgenres (accessed August 23, 2008).
35. Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’
Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 13.
36. See, for example, Victoria Holt, The Demon Lover (Garden City, NY: Double-
day, 1982) and many more from that period. The scathing reviews by post- 293
2000 readers of this book on Amazon.com are a vivid testimony to the change
of attitude over thirty years. For an excellent discussion of the rape issue in
women’s romance, see Wendell and Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, 136–147.

no t e s t o pag e s 10 7 –112
37. www.ellorascave.com (accessed April 30, 2009). Themes on the 2011 website
(each with its own icon) include “19th century, 20th century, BDSM Ele-
ments, Christmas, Comedy, Female/Female, Interracial Element, Medieval,
Menage or more, Male/Male, Paranormal Elements, Regency, Rubenesque,
Shapeshifter, Steampunk, Urban Fantasy, Valentine’s Day, Vampire.” http://
www.jasminejade.com/default.aspx?skinid=11 (accessed October 29, 2011).
38. “Erotica—Fanning the Flames,” Publisher’s Weekly, www.publishersweekly
.com 8/2/10 (accessed August 2, 2010).
39. See Alexandra Alter, “They’re No Bodice Rippers, but Amish Romances Are
Hot,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2009.
40. Wendell and Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, 148–167.
41. Stephanie Laurens, Devil’s Bride (New York: Avon, 1998), 7.
42. Lucinda Dyer, “P Is for Paranormal— Still,” Publishers Weekly, May 24, 2010.
Among a slate of new books, the article mentions a new paranormal romance
heroine in the form of a “tough-talking but vulnerable succubus.”
43. Wendell and Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, 25. The authors also cite the the-
ory of the blogger Lilith Saintcrow “that the ‘changing’ or ‘turning’ motif of
paranormal romances is the new virginity.” The fact that the hero is able to
see who the heroine really is, an important romance turning point, also
works in the paranormal frame as another way of possessing or owning her:
“That traffic of ownership and experience, be it piercing the hymen or see-
ing her highlights or slurping on her neck, is a constant undercurrent to the
creation of any heroine, and the hero who defi nes her, deflowers her, or de-
vours her” (53).
44. “Under the influence of the Calvinist Methodist preacher and missionary
George Whitefield,” Alexandra Walsham recounts, “the carved figures that
adorned the medieval hammer-beam roof on the church of Bidleston in Suf-
folk were cut down by a carpenter acting on the orders of the churchwardens
and burnt as abominable idols.” “Angels and Idols in England’s Long Refor-
mation,” in Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Angels in the Early
Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167.
45. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in
Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), 199n.
46. Hanegraaff makes an important caveat about alchemy as contemporary “me-
dievalism”: “The idea that alchemy is essentially a spiritual pursuit, not a scien-
tific one, had first been proposed by Mary Atwood in 1850, from a perspective
 permeated by German Romantic mesmerism and Boehmian theosophy.”
Popu larized by Jung’s alchemical metaphors for the transformation of the
psyche, alchemy is often regarded now as an exclusively spiritual discipline,
but in medieval times “it was both laboratory science and esoteric pursuit.”
Ibid., 289.
294 47. Hilary Mantel, Fludd (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 80.
48. Ibid., 103.
49. Ibid., 173.
50. Ibid., 176.
no t e s t o pag e s 112–118

51. Ibid., 178.

52. The Dev il manifested as an invisible “spiral” among the weeds to the young
Hilary, who had been, according to her own child’s reasoning, looking where
she had no business looking. She did not see it, she says, but rather sensed it by
its “insolent motion”: “It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen
inches. . . . It has no edges, no mass, no dimension except the formless. . . .
Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance
within my bones and in all the cavities of my body. . . . [I]t is a body inside my
body, an amphibian shape, budding and malign.” Hilary Mantel, Giving Up
the Ghost (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 93, 97.

6. T he Br igh t God Beckons

“Think of it Lover”: from “If I May Have It When It’s Dead,” The Complete
Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown,
1960), J #577; whether these lines refer to the afterlife has been a subject of
debate, however. “Hard though it may be”: from Sarah Wendell and Candy
Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 112.
1. From Ovid’s Lycaon in the Metamorphoses to Marie de France’s lai Bisclavret,
featuring a man who turns into a werewolf, to accounts by the English historian
William of Malmesbury to the Middle English metrical romance “William of
Palerne,” belief in werewolves as real entities, previously prohibited by the
Church, became part of the same doctrine of demonology that revived Satan in
the sixteenth century, when suspected werewolves were burned along with
witches. See Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Shape and Story: Metamorphosis in the
Western Tradition,” Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, March 22, 1999,
www.neh.gov/new/archive/199990322b.html (accessed December 18, 2007).
2. Fernando Vidal, “Extraordinary Bodies and the Physicotheological Imagi-
nation,” preprint 188 (2001), Max Planck Institute, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg
.de/ Preprints/ P188.PDF (accessed March 3, 2011).
3. Voltaire wrote satirically of vampires in his Philosophical Dictionary (1768),
and the Benedictine abbot Augustin Calmet recorded more than 500 cases of
vampirism in his 1746 study Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons
et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie,
et de Silésie (Isère, France: J. Millon, 1986). Though his own position was
 ambivalent, Calmet’s accounts of unquiet spirits became an important source-
book for western Eu ropean tales of the supernatural.
4. From “Visum et Repertum,” the official report by Austrian physicians con-
ducted five years after the incident, translated and quoted in Paul Barber,
Vampires, Burial and Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 16.
This report gives his name as “Arnod Paole”; in other accounts it is rendered 295
as Arnold Paul and Arnaut Paule.
5. Katharina M. Wilson, “The History of the Word ‘Vampire,’ ” Journal of the
History of Ideas, 46:4 (1985): 578. This comprehensive linguistic study corrects

no t e s t o pag e s 118 –121

many misconceptions about the term and its introduction into various lan-
guages. Wilson, 579, cites first appearances of the word vampire in English
also in the late seventeenth century.
6. This act was not repealed until 1951. Up to that year people could still be
prosecuted for “fraudulently” (this is the key modernizing term) claiming the
ability to cast spells, talk to spirits, and so on. Marion Gibson, Witchcraft and
Society in England and America, 1550–1750 (New York: Continuum, 2006), 6, 9.
7. Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of the Supernatural: The Transformation of Popular
Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 179–180.
8. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.
9. Ibid., 186–187.
10. The Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijóo joked that if all the reports of
vampires were true, “it would mean that more resurrections took place in
Central Eu rope in the late seventeenth century than in the whole of Chris-
tendom since the birth of Christ.” Vidal, “Extraordinary Bodies,” 17.
11. For a comprehensive discussion, see Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern
Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century (Bas-
ingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
12. See, e.g., William of Newburgh’s blood-sucking ghost sanguisaga in his Histo-
ria Rerum Anglicorum and the “Ghost of Anant,” reprinted in Andrew Jones,
comp. and ed., Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and
Prodigies (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 88, 100–102.
13. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies of Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 595.
14. Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber
and Faber, 1991), 5.
15. According to Coleridge’s biographer Richard Holmes, “Shelley later told
Mary that the poem had conjured a vision of a woman ‘who had eyes instead
of nipples.’ ” Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1998), 437.
16. Polidori took the name Ruthven (pronounced “Rivven”) from a character
based on Byron in the latter’s ex-paramour Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glena-
rvon (1816). Polidori’s publisher listed Byron as the author of The Vampyre in
its first edition; this claim even appeared in several editions of Byron’s works,
much to the latter’s frustration. For a full account, see Franklin Charles
 Bishop, introduction, in Polidori, “The Vampyre” and Other Writings (Man-
chester, UK: Carcanet, 2005).
17. Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from
Bram Stoker to Buffy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 94.
18. For a thorough survey, see Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-
296 Century Stage (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press,
1994).
19. Robert Tracy in his introduction to Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), xxi, suggests that Le Fanu changed the location from
no t e s t o pag e s 121–123

Ireland to Styria because his publisher didn’t think Irish stories would sell.
20. I am following Frayling’s comprehensive table, “A Vampire Mosaic: Vam-
pires in Folklore, Prose, and Poetry 1687–1913,” in Vampyres, 42– 63.
21. “Dracula’s Guest,” a deleted portion of Dracula published later by his widow
as a separate story, has echoes of “Carmilla” in the figure of the female vam-
pire Countess Dollingen.
22. Gerard gives the indigenous word for “vampire” as nosferatu, which Stoker
also adopts, but it is unknown in Romanian or any other language. Robert
Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A
Facsimile Edition (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane & Company, 2008), 284.
23. For ethnographic studies of the folklore of strigoi, see Agnes Murgoci, “The
Vampire in Roumania,” and Jan Louis Perkowski, “The Romanian Folkloric
Vampire,” both in Alan Dundes, ed., The Vampire: A Casebook (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
24. Bram Stoker’s Notes, 245.
25. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1997), 263.
26. In Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (New York: Car-
roll and Graf, 2001), however, Michael Bell notes the fi rst New England in-
stance in 1793, with one or two reported in upstate New York and Chicago.
Bell noted that in the local tradition the word vampire is not used. Lovecraft
references Mercy Brown in his story “The Shunned House.”
27. Reproduced in Bram Stoker’s Notes, 186–187.
28. J. Gordon Melton itemizes a number of these innovations in his introduction
to The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Detroit: Visible Ink Press,
1999), xiii. Frayling notes a late seventeenth-century account, Valvassor’s
Ehre des Herzogstum Krains, that reports a male peasant vampire who “likes
to be invited across the threshold, after knocking on the door.” “A Vampire
Mosaic,” in Vampyres, 42.
29. Stoker’s widow had copies of the 1922 fi lm confiscated on grounds of copy-
right infringement, resulting in the loss of all but a few prints of the German
Expressionist classic. After the movie version of Dracula appeared, the stage
adaptation it was closely taken from has stayed in “almost continuous per for-
mance” around the world in venues large and small. David J. Skal, “Theatri-
cal Adaptations of Dracula,” in Stoker, Dracula, 378–379. This adaptation
was revived on Broadway in 2011.
30. Wikipedia cites a plausible if enormous figure: “more than 200 films” featur-
ing Count Dracula and “several hundred more that have vampires as their
subject . . . more than 1,000 novels . . . about Dracula or vampires along with
a plethora of cartoons, comics, and television programs.” http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/ Dracula _in _popular_culture (accessed May 6, 2009).
31. Milly Williamson asserts that vampires as sympathetic figures have been 297
around since the nineteenth century, especially in their role as “bohemian
outsider.” Lure of the Vampire, 35.
32. At the same time, Rice implicitly undermines this assertion by setting the

no t e s t o pag e s 124 –129

scene in a room in Paris dominated by a “medieval woodcut” of the Dev il.
Interview with the Vampire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 235–236, 238.
33. Bette Roberts has pointed out Rice’s debt to an earlier Gothick novel in her
character of Akasha, mother of vampires. “The Mother Goddess in H. Rider
Haggard’s She and Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned,” in James Craig
Holte, ed., The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night, Selected
Essays from the 18th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 103–109.
34. Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 239.
35. Williamson identifies the abstinence trope as starting as early as 1945, when
Dracula tries to fi nd a cure for his need to feed in the movie House of Dracula.
Lure of the Vampire, 43.
36. The same Saint- Germain was dubbed a “Master of Wisdom” and a “great
Theosophist” by Helena Blavatsky and other Theosophists, who declared he
was still alive in Tibet as a master of the “Great White Lodge of the Himala-
yas,” attending to the development of Western civilization. See, e.g., The Key
to Theosophy (1887), www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ key/ key-hp.htm and www
.blavatsky.net/magazine/theosophy/ww/setting/germain.html (both accessed
March 3, 2011).
37. Colin Wilson, The Space Vampires (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), 17.
38. Whitley Strieber, The Hunger (New York: William Morrow, 1981).
39. Octavia Butler, Fledgling (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
40. Tanya Huff, The Blood Books, Volume I: Blood Price and Blood Trail (New York:
2006), 406. The main character, named Victoria Nelson, is not me, though
she’s sufficiently well known that my ID card gave a reference librarian at a
university interlibrary loan ser vice a visible shock when I arrived to pick up a
stack of vampire books.
41. Ibid., 162.
42. Ibid., 110.
43. “The Lay of the Werewolf” [Bisclavret], Lays of Marie de France and Other
French Legends, trans. Eugene Mason (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library,
1964), 85.
44. Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, directed by Simon West, story by Sara B. Cooper,
Mike Werb, Michael Colleary, adaptation by Simon West, screenplay by
Patrick Massett and John Zinman; Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), cre-
ated by John Schulian and Robert G. Tapert; Underworld (2003), directed by
 Len Wiseman, screenplay by Danny McBride, story credited to Kevin Gre-
vioux and Len Wiseman (also the director).
45. Joy Press, “Vampires That Don’t Suck,” Salon, www.salon.com/entertainment
/tv/int/2008/09/03/ ball (accessed December 14, 2010).
46. J. Gordon Melton, Massimo Introvigne, and Robert Eighteen-Bisang have
298 compiled an ever-growing bibliography of more than 11,000 English-language
vampire comic books from 1935 to 2000. www.cesnur.org/2008/vampire
_comics.htm (accessed April 27, 2009).
47. Created by Mark Rein-Hagen. See www.whitewolf.com and https://vampire
no t e s t o pag e s 130 –134

masquerade.webs.com (accessed October 5, 2010).

48. Directed by Patrick Lussier, written by Joel Soisson and Patrick Lussier.
49. Comic and graphic novel by various writers and illustrators; fi rst movie
(1998) directed by Stephen Norrington, written by David S. Goyer.
50. “[K.] Gelder suggests that the interviewer’s desire to be a vampire at the end is
a perfect representation of fandom.” Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 44, 63.
51. Taken from www.subgenius.com/ bigfist/ bulldada/ X0045_VAMPIRE .TXT
.html (accessed December 17, 2010). Also see the discussion in Katherine
Ramsland, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 125.
52. www.xeper.org/ovampyre (accessed December 17, 2010).
53. Ramsland, Piercing the Darkness, 21.
54. The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (New York, 1819), a self-published
pamphlet by Uriah Derick D’Arcy [anagrammatic pen name of the Rev. Rich-
ard Varick Dey], went through two editions the same year that Polidori’s work
appeared in the United States. It’s the story of a ten-year-old slave who is
drowned by his master and returns for revenge as a Moorish vampire prince
who turns the master, his widow, and their son into vampires. The son be-
comes the prince’s servant boy and the prince marries the widow, producing
a mulatto son “of Vampyrish propensities.” Though the master and his fam-
ily are turned back into humans by a magic potion, the author implies that a
certain resident of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, by the name of Anthony Gib-
bons is the black vampire’s direct descendant. Drawing the moral that dandies,
embezzlers, brokers, country bank directors, plagiarists, critics, and corpse-
dissecting doctors are also a kind of vampire, the author ends by confessing
that he is one, too. Author identification courtesy Norbert Besch.
55. All from Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series True Blood (2008– ). Joe Rhodes,
“After All the Funerals, Prime Time Auteur Digs Up the Dead,” New York
Times, August 3, 2008.
56. P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast, the House of Night YA novels (2007– ).
57. The Japanese anime Karin (1993–1994, 2005–2006).
58. Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling (2005).
59. Matt Haig’s novel The Radleys (2010).
60. Meyer recounts this story at www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html (ac-
cessed October 5, 2010).
61. Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. Meyer wrote a fifth novel,
Midnight Sun, from the vampire Edward’s point of view, but withdrew it from
 publication when a draft was leaked on a fan website in 2008. www.stephe
niemeyer.com/midnightsun.html (accessed October 22, 2011).
62. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 85.
63. Bella’s father, Charlie, with typical naïveté, likes the Cullens because “they
stick together the way a family should— camping trips every other weekend”
(Meyer, Twilight, 23). Bella notes constantly, with admiration, the Cullens’ 299
“intense family binding,” “the peaceful character of this life of sacrifice.”
Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 718.
64. “I didn’t relate well to people my age,” Bella confesses. “Maybe the truth was

no t e s t o pag e s 134 –139

that I didn’t relate well to people, period” (Meyer, Twilight, 10).
65. Ibid., 92, 184.
66. Ibid., 305, 263–264, 162.
67. Ibid., 310.
68. Laura Miller, “Real Man Have Fangs,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2008.
69. Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 327.
70. Laura Miller, “Touched by a Vampire,” Salon.com, www.salon.com/ books
/review/2008/07/30/ Twilight/index1.html (accessed August 20, 2008). One
might note what the Victorian Gothick writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu has
his hero flatly declare in the story “The Room in the Dragon Volant”: “Supe-
riority of rank is a powerful and genuine influence in love. The idea of supe-
rior refi nement is associated with it.” In a Glass Darkly (London: Oxford
World Classics, 1993), 121.
71. Meyer, Twilight, 58; Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (New York: Little, Brown, 2007),
56; Twilight, 280, 278.
72. Kahane sees “the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and
all-encompassing,” filling the empty interior of the Gothick castle as well as
haunting this father-daughter relationship. See her “Gothic Mirrors and
Feminine Identity,” Centennial Review 24 (1980): 43– 64.
73. Meyer, Twilight, 210.
74. The trance states that characters such as Trilby (Svengali’s victims in George
du Maurier’s Trilby), Lucy (in Dracula), and others fall into, says Auerbach,
represent “not passivity but an ominous gathering of power as she transfig-
ures herself from humanity to beatitude.” Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 35, 40.
75. Meyer, Twilight, 473–474.
76. Ibid., 260.
77. Tantric Buddhism features practices that are intended to produce “an im-
mortal yet concrete diamond body that transcends the laws of nature.” David
Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 71. I am grateful to Maja D’aout
for initially pointing out this association.
78. These various terms for the subtle body are not exactly synonymous, de-
pending on the tradition.
79. John White, “Resurrection and the Body of Light,” Quest 97, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 11.
80. Rice’s vampire Louis is “utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted
from bleached bone, and his face was as seemingly inanimate as a statue”;
 Interview with the Vampire, 2. The transsexual vampire in Whitley Strieber’s
The Hunger (New York: Morrow, 1981) has skin that at times feels “hard as
stone” (188). In the White Wolf videogame Vampire: The Masquerade (created
by Mark Rein-Hagen, first published in 1991, and billed as a “modern Gothic
storytelling game”), vampire skin, though flexible, is also described as “hard as
300 stone”; http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Vampire:
_The _Masquerade (accessed February 3, 2010).
81. Meyer, New Moon, 17; Eclipse, 439.
82. Paull Franklin Baum, “Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” PMLA 34, no. 4
no t e s t o pag e s 139 –143

[n.s. 27, 4] (1919): 556. Venus was generally denounced as demonic in the Mid-
dle Ages. The tradition stretches as far back as William of Malmesbury and
Vincent de Beauvais.
83. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1992), 115.
84. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 25.
85. “Courtly love” was a Victorian label fi rst used by Gaston Paris (1883), then
taken up by C. S. Lewis and other twentieth-century critics.
86. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 337.
87. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, rev. ed., trans. Montgomery
Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 82, 112.
88. Ibid., 66, 105–106, 137. De Rougemont’s reading of the Cathars has long since
been deconstructed, but contemporary critics such as Simon Gaunt still ac-
knowledge his perception in identifying the Cathar–fin amor connection and
“the extraordinary power and emotional appeal of the courtly tradition over
the last 800 years.” Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan
Courtly Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–20.
89. Quoted in de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 67. De Rougemont
glosses this as follows: “Life is indeed the terrestrial day of beings in a contin-
gent world, in the whirl of matter; but death is the Night of Illumination . . .
the Soul’s Union with the Beloved, a communion with Absolute Being.”
90. Baum, “Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” 565.
91. Before he stops being human himself, Jacob cries, “I’m exactly right for you,
Bella. . . . I was the natural path your life would have taken . . . [if] the world
was the way it was supposed to be; if there were no monsters and no magic”
(Eclipse, 599).
92. Anne Williams, who sees the Psyche-Eros story as the prototype for wom-
en’s romance generally, notes that Emily in Mysteries of Udolpho “performs
Psyche’s task and gradually discerns an orderly world.” Art of Darkness, 170.
93. For “fairy bruising” as an outcome of human intercourse with the Dev il, see
Peter Marshall, Mother Leakey and the Bishop (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 40; with extraterrestrials, see, e.g., www.alien-ufo-pictures
.com/abduction _check _list.html (accessed December 28, 2010). In the latter
field, the most reliable guide is Brenda Denzler’s The Lure of the Edge: Scientifi c
Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2001).
94. In The Kingdom (1994–1997), the TV series directed and scripted by Lars von
Trier, a female doctor who is impregnated by the spirit of a serial killer swells
up and delivers an enormous baby in a matter of weeks. In Dean Koontz’s
novel Demon Seed (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), which also became a film,
a woman impregnated by a supercomputer gives birth in twenty-eight days.
95. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 387; Rice, Interview, 20. 301
96. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 753, 469. Bella’s perception of “both of my faces, hideous
human and glorious immortal,” recalls the title of C. S. Lewis’s retelling of the
Cupid and Psyche story, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), which expresses

no t e s t o pag e s 143–145
the same Christian perception about drab mortal life and brilliant immortal af-
terlife. In Lewis’s version, Psyche becomes the goddess Istra after she dies.
97. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 389, 390, 395. Compare Psyche seeing her god-lover
Cupid’s “divine beauty” for the first time: his golden hair is “so bright that the
flame of the lamp winked in the radiant light reflected from it.” The Transfor-
mations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998), 117.
98. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 388, 610, 614. Anne Rice’s vampires also develop su-
perpowers (telepathy, enhanced senses and speed, setting things on fire, im-
mortality) after several hundred years of undead existence.
99. See especially Christina Mirabilis (1150–1224), who after being resurrected
from death possessed the ability to fly through the air, survive burning and
drowning, and walk on the water like Christ. See “The Life of Christina the
Astonishing,” trans. Margot H. King and Barbara Newman, in Thomas of
Cantimpré, The Collected Saints’ Lives (Tournhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008),
127–157. I am indebted to Claire Fanger for pointing me to this source.
100. See, e.g., the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Doctrine and Cov-
enants 132:20: “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore
shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then
shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall
they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto
them.” http://scriptures.lds.org/dc/132 (accessed October 7, 2010).
101. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: Drawn from Things
Heard and Seen, trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foun-
dation, 2000), 294.
102. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Gospel Principles—Exaltation,”
http:// lds.org/ ldsorg/v/index (accessed October 7, 2010).
103. Quoted in, e.g., Bill McKeever, “As God Is Man May Be?” Mormon Research
Ministry, http://mrm.org/ lorenzo-snow-couplet (accessed October 6, 2010).
Human godhood is claimed in this article as a teaching exclusive to the Mor-
mon faith. Other Mormon commentators stress the similarities with main-
stream Christian theology across time. See, e.g., Edward T. Jones, “Mor-
monism and the Christian Doctrine of Deification,” http://manbecomegod
.blogspot.com/2009/06/mormonism-and-christian-doctrine-of.html (accessed
December 20, 2010).
104. Even the Puritan Cotton Mather saw a bright angel clothed in white “whose
face shone like the noonday sun.” Diary of Cotton Mather, quoted in Elizabeth
 Reis, “Angels in Elite and Popu lar Magic,” in Peter Marshall and Alexandra
Walsham, eds., Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 285.
105. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 534.
106. See Arthur Versluis, “Sexual Mysticisms in Nineteenth- Century America,”
302 and Cathy Gutierrez, “Deadly Dates: Bodies and Sex in Spiritualist Heavens,”
both in Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse:
Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
309–332, 331–354. John L. Brooke maintains that Mormon celestial marriage,
no t e s t o pag e s 14 6 –150

after Swedenborg, is likewise an alchemical union to regain lost perfection,

creating a dual-gendered being that is one entity. The Refiner’s Fire: The Mak-
ing of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 257.
107. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 754.
108. Ibid., 465.
109. Beth McDonald, The Vampire as Numinous Experience: Spiritual Journeys with
the Undead in British and American Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2004), 2, 36.
110. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 331. Within the shells of the old churches, “traditional
attitudes were gradually invested with different values until the original frame-
work for understanding was shattered” and the new, more austere religion of
ideas prevailed. “Beliefs, by this means,” she adds, “were slowly but thoroughly
transformed.”
111. Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon (Kheops Studio, 2008).
112. McDonald, Vampire as Numinous Experience, 10, 182.
113. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 479.

7. P o s t a p o c a l y p t i c G o t h i c k

“Zombie remains a devastating word”: Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral

History of the Zombie War (New York: Crown, 2006), 10; “isn’t ‘zombie’ a silly
name”: Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies (New York: Atria Books, 2011), 127.
1. Brooks, World War Z, 188.
2. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 118–160, Marina Warner traces the history of the word in English,
from its first mention in the poet Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, where he
advances the “Deity” meaning over a Portuguese historian’s “Dev il,” and his
brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s glossing of this word in his copy of
the book with the notation that the entity was “a” god or dev il in a pantheon,
not “the” God and Dev il of Western monotheistic religion.
3. Ibid., 142–145.
4. The best seller was W. B. Seacliff’s Magic Island (1929); see the comprehensive
discussion of the historical background in Gary D. Rhodes’s White Zombie:
 Anatomy of a Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane, 2001). White Zombie was
directed by Victor Halperin and written by Garnett Weston; it was probably
inspired by the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 as well as by
Seacliff’s travel memoir. See Rhodes, White Zombie, and Shawn McIntosh,
“The Evolution of the Zombie: The Monster That Keeps Coming Back,” in
Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette, eds., Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the 303
Living Dead (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 4–5.
5. Halperin was later successfully sued by the movie’s fi nanciers, Amusement
Securities Corporation, because he had signed over rights to the word zombie.

no t e s t o pag e s 151–152
See Rhodes, White Zombie, 171–174.
6. A motif probably drawn from Seacliff, according to Rhodes, White Zombie, 32.
7. Murder Legendre has also turned various of his white enemies into a zombie
retinue. Beaumont, the white plantation owner, enters into a classic male
pact with the satanic Legendre and dies for his sins after having almost been
turned into a zombie himself. Rhodes, White Zombie, 48, notes that the inte-
riors of Murder’s castle were leftover sets from Dracula.
8. Written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray and remade in 2011 in the wake of
the zombie craze. Michael Koven describes Siodmak’s script, in contrast to
almost every other U.S.-made work on the zombie, fiction or nonfiction, as a
“strong anticolonial discourse about the white presence and exploitation of
Haiti.” “The Folklore of the Zombie Film,” in McIntosh and Leverette, eds.,
Zombie Culture, 29.
9. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 156.
10. King of the Zombies (1941), directed by Jean Yarbrough, story by Edmond
Kelso.
11. Revenge of the Zombies (1943), directed by Steve Sekely, written by Edmond
Kelso and Van Norcross.
12. Victor Halperin’s follow-up zombie film Revolt of the Zombies (1936).
13. E.g., in King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies. See McIntosh, “Evolu-
tion,” 6–7.
14. In Dark Mysteries, no. 20 (October 1954), writer unknown, reproduced in Jim
Trombetta, The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want
You to Read (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2010), 178–183.
15. Voodoo, no. 14 (March-April 1954), writer unknown, reproduced in Trom-
betta, The Horror! The Horror!, 192–199.
16. Most notably Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), though he
has directed three more in the wake of the post-2000 zombie craze. Wes Cra-
ven’s 1985 The Serpent and the Rainbow, based on another sensationalistic eth-
nographic study by Wade Davis, was a throwback to the subgenre’s earlier
colonial roots.
17. McIntosh notes that zombies were fi rst represented as decomposing corpses
in the 1966 Hammer film Plague of the Zombies. “Evolution,” 8. But the rot-
ting ghouls of the 1950s comics almost certainly helped lay the foundations
for this new filmic image.
 18. Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction
(2007), and Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), all directed and written by Paul
W. S. Anderson.
19. For an in-depth discussion of this effect, see Ron Scott, “ ‘Now I’m Feeling
Zombified’: Playing the Zombie Online,” in McIntosh and Leverette, eds.,
304 Zombie Culture, 169–184.
20. Stake Land, written by Mickle and Nick Damici.
21. One of innumerable posts can be found at http://thisorthat.com/fast-zom
bies-vs-slow-zombies (accessed August 13, 2011) and “The Federal Vampire
no t e s t o pag e s 153–158

and Zombie Agency,” www.fvza.org/vandz.html (accessed August 13, 2011),

which states: “In ancient times zombies and vampires were frequently pitted
against each other for the enjoyment of bloodthirsty spectators. So which is
more formidable? It’s a question I’m frequently asked.”
22. The U.S. president says the zombies “have robbed us of our confidence as the
dominant life form.” Brooks, World War Z, 260, 267.
23. Directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland.
24. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, written by Rowan Joffe and Juan Carlos
Fresnadillo.
25. The Walking Dead, vol. 2: Miles Behind Us, created, written. and lettered
by  Robert Kirkland, penciler/inker Charlie Adlard, gray tones by Cliff
Rathburn (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2006). [Originally published as
nos. 7–12, n.d.]
26. Dawn of the Dead was remade in 2004 by Zack Snyder, written by James Gunn
from Romero’s screenplay. The quote is from Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the
Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Waco, TX: Baylor Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 10.
27. Quoted in Alex Pappademas, “Dead Reckoning: Robert Kirkman Brings
Zombies to Don Draper’s Backyard,” GQ, August 2, 2010.
28. Kyle Stephens, “American Nightmare: Reconciling Post 9/11 Anxieties within
the New Zombie Aesthetic,” thesis proposal, University of California, Berkeley,
Department of Film Studies, personal communication, May 25, 2011.
29. Shaun of the Dead, directed by Edgar Wright, written by Simon Pegg and
Edgar Wright; Zombieland, directed by Ruben Fleischer, written by Rhett
Reese and Paul Wernick.
30. Max Brooks’s best-selling The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from
the Living Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003) is the gold standard
here, but see also, e.g., Steven C. Schlozman’s copiously illustrated The Zombie
Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse (New York: Grand Central Pub-
lishing, 2011).
31. The first Zombie Walk is listed by Wikipedia as occurring in Sacramento,
California, in 2001. “Zombie Walk,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie
_walk (accessed May 31, 2011).
32. “What Is Zombie Squad?” http://zombiehunters.org/whatiszs.php (accessed
August 13, 2011).
33. Ali S. Khan, “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse,” Public Health Mat-
ters blog, Centers for Disease Control, May 16, 2011, http:// blogs.cdc.gov
 /publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse (accessed
May 19, 2011).
34. Including Wellington, New Zealand; Bristol, United Kingdom; and
Okeechobee County, Florida, among many others.
35. Daniel Levy, personal communication, February 15, 2011.
36. Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 82. 305
37. “Ser vices,” http://zombiehunters.org/services/consult.php (accessed August
13, 2011).
38. It was followed in turn by a graphic novel, illustrated by Ibraim Roberson,

no t e s t o pag e s 158 –16 4

called Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (New York: Three Rivers
Press, 2009), a faux history in which zombies are traced through key periods
all the way back to prehistoric times.
39. Brooks, World War Z, 52.
40. Ibid., 340.
41. The Walking Dead, Book 2, Chapter 3, “Safety Behind Bars”; Robert Kirk-
man, creator, writer, letterer, and Charlie Adlard, penciler, inker (Berkeley,
CA: Image Comics, 2009).
42. Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead, 13. So far the Christian-centric Goth-
ick has not introduced shava-sadhana, Tantric necrophilia or “practice with
corpses.”
43. See, e.g., http://www.buyzombie.com/2010/10/13/zombie-clothing/zombie
-hats/cute-zombie-hat/ (accessed February 24, 2011).
44. Stacey Jay, You Are So Undead to Me (New York: Razorbill/Penguin Group,
2009).
45. Cf. Awakening, a projected TV series in which two sisters, one a lawyer, deal
with the legal and social ramifications of the zombiefication of America.
46. Stacey Jay, My So- Called Death (Woodbury, MN: Flux, 2010), 207. This au-
thor’s forthcoming novel Juliet Immortal follows closely the arc set by Meyer:
“Juliet Capulet didn’t take her own life. She was murdered by the person she
trusted most, her new husband, Romeo Montague, a sacrifice made to ensure
his own immortality. But Romeo didn’t anticipate that Juliet would be granted
eternal life, as well, and would become an agent for the Ambassadors of Light.
For 700 years, Juliet has struggled to preserve romantic love and the lives of
the innocent, while Romeo has fought for the dark side, seeking to destroy
the human heart. Until now. Now Juliet has found her own forbidden love,
and Romeo, oh Romeo, will do everything in his power to destroy their hap-
piness.” http://www.staceyjay.com/juliet-immortal (accessed May 31, 2011).
47. Scott Kenemore, Zombie, Ohio: A Tale of the Undead (New York: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2011).
48. I, Zombie, vol. 1: Dead to the World, written by Chris Roberson, illustrated by
Michael Allred, colorist Laura Allred (New York; Vertigo, 2010).
49. Marion, Warm Bodies, 223.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 236.
52. Directed by David Fincher, written by Vincent Ward (story), David Giler,
Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson.
 53. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunot, written by Joss Whedon.
54. http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Church_of_the_Resurrection (accessed
August 17, 2011).
55. See, e.g., http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080921050007
AAt51ww (accessed June 23, 2011).
306 56. As noted in chapter 4, comic book illustrators often skillfully and deliber-
ately imitated medieval Christian iconography.
no t e s t o pag e s 165–174

8. T h e G o t h ick T h e at er of H a l l ow e e n

“Goth is Death”: Interview in True Blood promotional trailer, season 1 (HBO

Productions, 2006).
1. Sir James Frazer’s classic work of social anthropology The Golden Bough (1890)
was the template for the widespread late nineteenth-century reinterpretation
of folk custom as pagan survival.
2. See, e.g., Jack Santino, ed., Halloween (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1994), cited in Noel Carroll, “The Fear of Fear Itself: The Philosophy
of Halloween,” in Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds., Zombies,
Vampires and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead, Popular Culture and Philos-
ophy, vol. 49 (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 234.
3. See Jason Zinoman, “Haunted Houses Profit by Going to Extremes,” New
York Times, October 21, 2010. More than five of these productions were being
staged in Manhattan during October 2010.
4. Quoted in Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
during the Last Twenty Years of His Life (London: T. Alman, 1822 [1786]), n.p.
As a demonstration of how utterly allegory has faded from mainstream con-
sciousness, this thinly veiled insult to dogs is proudly posted on literally
scores of animal lovers’ sites on the Web.
5. See especially Death: The Time of Your Life (New York: DC/Time Warner,
1997). [Originally published as issues no. 1–3, 1993, 1994, 1996.]
6. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi
Center, 1999), 33. Modernist and postmodern commentators on allegory—
from Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem to Paul de Man and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick—reinterpret allegory essentially on their own terms, out-
side its original metaphysical context. Even the Romantic critique of allegory
(Coleridge’s “counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding”) does not
take into account its talismanic dependence on a two-worlds cosmogony. But
as David Williams has said of medieval allegory, “the integrity of the literal
level is seen as the guarantee of the meaningfulness of the more abstract
levels.” Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought
and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 73.
7. Angus Fletcher, “Allegory without Ideas,” boundary 2 33, no. 1 (2006), 88.
8. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry
W. Robbins (New York: Dutton, 1962), 22, 11, 4–5.
 9. Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 11.
10. In the dour words of A. C. Cawley, “[Everyman’s] lenten austerity can hardly
fail to impress any but the most spiritually torpid.” Everyman and Medieval
Miracle Plays (New York: Dutton, 1965), xxvi.
11. William Howard Engel, “Theurgic Elements and the Memory Arts in Later 307
Medieval Drama,” lecture, Modern Language Association, New York, De-
cember 28, 2002.
12. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

no t e s t o pag e s 175–18 6
1964), 214.
13. Written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Jon J. Muth (New York: Vertigo/
DC Comics, 1994).
14. This information comes from Hell House, dir. George Ratliff. 2001. DVD ©
Plexigroup, 2003.
15. Cited in Hell House.
16. Quoted in ibid.
17. For an excellent historical overview, see Harold B. Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny:
Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant- Garde
Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
18. In Peter Arnott’s 1955 staging of Everyman, the character Worldly Goods was
portrayed by an ironbound chest whose lid opened to ventriloquize the char-
acter’s lines. When Everyman makes his last-ditch appeal in the face of death,
the lid snaps defi nitively shut. Peter Arnott, Plays Without People: Puppetry
and Serious Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 71.
19. Edward Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette,” in On the Art
of the Theater (Chicago: Browne’s Bookstore, 1913), 84– 85.
20. See The Secret Life of Puppets for the full discussion of this topic.
21. Chris Hardman, personal communication, March 24, 2003. An important
and immediate influence on Hardman’s ecumenical religiosity and his populist
political advocacy was the famous Bread and Puppets theater company of
Vermont. Hardman worked briefly with its founder, the sculptor Peter
Schumann, on various productions, including a Totentanz inspired by the
etchings of Hans Holbein as well as this artist’s depictions of the Seven
Deadly Sins.
22. Program notes, “A Body of Water,” Antenna Theater, June 6–25, 2005.
“Walkmanology” has remained intact through the twenty-first century.
Chris Hardman, personal communication, January 28, 2011.
23. Iain Chambers, quoted in Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and
the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 89.
24. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.
25. See chapter 11 for a discussion of the same, equally paradoxical result of
combining digital and analogue special effects to create a single holistic on-
screen monster.
 9. The Ten Ru les of Sitges

Epigraph from Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel (London:
Flamingo, 1984).
1. Laura M. Hobson, “Hollywood’s Road Trip: The Search for Hits at a Foreign
308 Box Office,” New York Times, April 3, 2006.
2. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 222.
3. As Patrick Goldstein, the movie columnist for the Los Angeles Times, states,
“The epic scope of [Hollywood’s] Big Event movies can’t be achieved in other
no t e s t o pag e s 18 9 –19 6

countries, which is why some of the most striking overseas box-office successes
have been achieved by 3-D movies or special-effects driven animated films.”
“The Strange Trajectory of Hollywood Movies,” LATimes.com, http:// lat
imesblogs .latimes .com/the _big _picture/2011/01/the -strange -trajectory
-of-hollywood-movies-fizzling-in-us-but-skyrocketing-overseas.html (accessed
January 25, 2011).
4. Douglas Cowan, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (Waco:
Baylor University Press, 2008), 9.
5. La Monja (The Nun, 2009), directed by Luis de la Madrid, written by Manu
Diez and Julio Fernández.
6. Written by Balagueró, Luis Berdejo, and Paco Plaza.
7. Directed by Kobayashi Masaki, written by Mizuki Yoko.
8. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 39.
9. Japanese animators and their audiences alike insist that the time-honored
tradition of round eyes for all anime characters, so suggestive of assimilation
to Western norms of beauty, is a device that only suggests a fantasy or unreal
world to the Japanese viewer.
10. Thomas LaMarre, “Otaku: Kiyoka [Gothic] Activism and Fan Media in
Japan,” lecture, University of California, Berkeley, April 28, 2009.
11. Allison reports that the kawaii sensibility extends even to such merchandise
as the “Kitty-chan” dildo; Millennial Monsters, 18. Erik Davis argues that the
“cute Cthulhu” phenomenon demonstrates that “the very cutification of
Cthulhu renders the monster truly horrible. Why? . . . Having exhausted the
vectors of conventional horror fandom, perhaps Cute Cthulhu has become
[the Great Old Ones’] ultimate strategy, a self-replicating code of gibbering
madness from the depths of space genetically implanted in a cuddly retrovi-
rus.” In “Pop Arcana (3),” http:// hilobrow.com/2010/05/03/cthulhu-is-not
-cute (accessed January 17, 2011).
12. http://www.otakureview.net/?p=8321 (accessed January 17, 2011).
13. “Dimensional Beasts,” episodes 1– 9, as described on http://www.supersentai
.com/database/1991_jetman/vi-dbeasts.html (accessed March 17, 2011).
14. Miyazuki Mayao, endnote, “On Nausicaä,” Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind
(San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1995), n.p.
15. Directed by Nakata Hideo, screenplay by Takahashi Hiroshi and Suzuki
Koji from the novel by Suzuki.
16. Directed and written by Kurosawa Kiyoshi.
17. Directed and written by Takashi Shimizu, who also directed the 2004 Amer-
ican remake.
18. To the question, “Is there such a thing as C- (as in China) horror?” East
Asian film scholar Dan Cuong O’Neill replies that the short answer is no.
“This is not because there hasn’t been interesting horror. But ‘Chinese’ 309
cinema is such a big and unwieldy category as it encompasses: Hong Kong
cinema, Taiwan cinema, films coming out of China, Singapore, and other dia-
sporic iterations of Chinese cinema. So the category of C-Horror would be

no t e s t o pag e s 19 6 – 20 0
difficult to sustain without any attention to regional inflections of the term.
That being said, lots of interesting stuff coming out of Hong Kong and some
from Taiwan that directly deal with horror borrow from the iconography of
J-Horror. Not much from China because of the stronghold of social realism
in film/literature, though we might detect cracks in the socialist and post-
socialist cinema of China where the uncanny can be made legible.” Personal
communication, October 10, 2011.
19. In The Soul Guardians (1998), directed by Park Kwang-chun and written
by Park from a novel series by Lee Woo-hyuck, Korean Catholic priests try
to stop a young woman born in a satanic cult from delivering the Dev il’s
baby.
20. Directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Ehren Kruger.
21. A. O. Scott, “A Golden Age of Foreign Films, Mostly Unseen,” The New York
Times, January 25, 2011.
22. Think, for example, of the fiendish witch of Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday
(original title La maschera del demonio), from a story by Nikolai Gogol.
23. The anime Rasuto burrado (2001) was directed by Kitakubo Hiroyoki,
screenplay by Maeda Shigeji. (Burrado is the loanword for English blood.)
Blood: The Last Vampire (2009) was directed by Chris Nahon and written by
Kamiyama Kenji. A manga series and videogame were spun off the original
movie.
24. I would argue that graphic novel female characters of the 1990s, such as An-
gela, the scary warrior angel created by Neil Gaiman for the Spawn series,
are already showing the influence of Asian anime, manga, and videogame
story lines and characters, drawn in turn from American comic book female
superheroes such as Wonder Woman and Supergirl.
25. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35.
26. In a blog post on Asian Correspondent titled “Why Do Korean Horror Movies
Only Have Female Ghosts?” (June 21, 2009), Nathan Schwartzman quotes
an unnamed figure in the Korean movie world: “In the past women were
systematically repre[ss]ed and invisible. . . . I think that as that insurmount-
able repression continued on and on and on, they entered a freakish state and
the result was for them to take care of their grudge through vengeance. The
preval[e]nce of women ghosts in so many horror movies so far can be seen as
due to that freakish state brought on by repression.” http://asiancorrespon
 dent .com/23554/ why-do -korean -horror -movies -have -only-female -ghosts
(accessed January 10, 2011).
27. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis
A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).
28. See also Julia George, “The Horror Film: An Investigation of Traditional
310 Narrative Elements,” Folklore Forum 15 (1980): 159–179, which situates the
genre within Stith Thompson’s structural classification of folklore types.
29. Quoted in Catherine Velay-Vallantin, “From ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to
‘The Beast of Gevaudan’: The Tale in the Long-Term Continuum,” trans.
no t e s t o pag e s 201– 20 7

Binita Mehta, in Francesca Canade Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe

Carlo Di Scipio, eds., Telling Tales: Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 269.
30. In terms of the Gothick, Douglas Cowan calls this effect the “metataxis” of
modern horror genres. Sacred Terror, 7.
31. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: World Publish-
ing Company, 1956).
32. Directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.
33. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screen-
writing (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 196–197.
34. Buñuel, My Last Breath, 131–132.
35. Ibid., 133.
36. See full discussion in The Secret Life of Puppets, chap. 5, 131–137.
37. See Carroll, “Fear of Fear Itself,” 234–237, but especially his full treatment
found in The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990); Clover, Men,
Women, and Chainsaws, 35 and passim.
38. David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Cineplex: Torture Porn,” New
York Magazine, January 28, 2006.
39. Alan Jones, a British horror festival director, attributes the rise in new Eu ro-
pean horror to the declining fortunes of Euro art films and the ready avenues
of international distribution for horror films (“with horror a European direc-
tor can reach an international audience. A horror fan doesn’t mind reading
subtitles”). Scott Roxborough, “Sicker, Darker, and More Twisted: The New
European Horror Film at Berlin,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 8, 2011,
www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ human -centipede -director -fi lm -pony
-95389 (accessed February 8, 2011).
40. The quote is from Maximilian Forte, “The Revenge of the Local, the Hor-
ror of the Provincial, and Western Cosmopolitanism at Risk,” Open
Anthropology blog, December 1, 2008, http://zeroanthropology.net/2008
/12/01/the -revenge -of-the -local-the -horror-of-the -provincial-and-western
-cosmopolitanism-at-risk/ (accessed December 16, 2008).
41. Ibid.
42. “A movie is always a manipulation, regardless of whether it’s a biopic or a
romantic comedy, and ‘Funny Games’ takes this manipulation as its primary
subject,” Haneke told a New York Times interviewer. John Wray, “Minister of
Fear,” New York Times, September 23, 2007.
43. Written by Stephen Massicotte from a novel by Simon McGinn.
44. McKee, Story Structure, 104–105.
45. These three films were fi rst thematically linked by Marina Warner in “Dark
Arts,” Guardian, October 14, 2005. Piano Tuner was written by the Quays
and Alan Passes; The Corpse Bride was directed by Burton and Mike Johnson,
written by Burton and Carlos Rangel (characters), screenplay by John Au-
gust, Caroline Thompson, and Pamela Pettler; Brothers Grimm was written 311
by Ehren Kruger.
46. Constructed by the Quays when budgetary problems prevented them from
shooting in a real villa in Portugal.

no t e s t o pag e s 20 8 – 216
47. Directed by James Wan and written by Leigh Whanell, cocreators of the
Saw series.
48. Elizabeth Miller refutes the widespread story that Bram Stoker got the idea
for Dracula from a nightmare. “Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and
Dracula,” in The Gothic: From Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, no. 44 (November
2006), www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2006/v/n44/014002ar.html (accessed
October 4, 2010). In her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary
Shelley testifies that her inspirational vision, though it came to her at night
while she was in bed, was a “waking dream.” www.rc.umd.edu/editions/fran
kenstein/1831v1/intro.html (accessed October 30, 2011).
49. Directed by Joseph Ruben, written by David Loughery, Chuck Russell, and
Joseph Ruben.
50. Screenplay by Seishi Minakami and Satoshi Kon.
51. Luis Buñuel, “Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry,” in An Unspeakable Be-
trayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, trans. Garrett White (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2000), 139.
52. See the full discussion of New Expressionism in chapter 9 of The Secret Life
of Puppets.
53. See the discussion in chapters 8 and 9 of The Secret Life of Puppets.
54. The title of an exhibition held at the San Jose Museum of Art in December
2002, curated by Michael Duncan. Artists included were Ed Ruscha, John
Baldessari, John McCracken, Robert Irwin, and James Hayward. Duncan
says: “This is art that suggests routes back to direct expression and away
from buzzwords and ironic art-about-art.” www.sjmusart.org/content/about
Us/press/press _info.phtml?itemID=39 (accessed March 4, 2003).
55. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995 [1976]), 20.
Brooks adds that melodrama “tends to diverge from the Gothic novel in its
optimism, its claim that the moral imagination can open up the angelic
spheres as well as the demonic depths and can allay the threat of moral chaos.”
56. Guy Maddin, lecture, October 9, 2004, Berkeley, California, Pacific Film
Archive premiere of Cowards Bend the Knee. See also Maddin’s From the Ate-
lier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003).
57. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 56.
 10 . C at h e d r a l H e a d

Guillermo del Toro, interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, National Pub-
lic Radio, January 24, 2007.
1. Guillermo del Toro, “How I Made Hellboy in My Image,” Observer, www
312 .guardian.co.uk, July 27, 2008.
2. Lloyd Levin, quoted in John Horn, “Thinking Small to Dream Big on ‘Hell-
boy,’ ” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2008.
3. Del Toro interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air.
no t e s t o pag e s 219 – 224

4. Director’s commentary, The Devil’s Backbone, special edition DVD (Sony

Pictures Classics, 2003).
5. Del Toro, “How I Made Hellboy in My Image.”
6. David S. Cohen, “Del Toro’s ‘Golden Army’ of Creatures,” Variety, July 10,
2008.
7. David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval
Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 16.
8. David Williams, “Wilgefortis, Patron Saint of Monsters,” in Robert A. Col-
lins and Howard D. Pearce, eds., Scope of the Fantastic (Westport, CT: Green-
wood Press, 1985), 176–177. She was also known as Uncumber, Liberata, and
Viergeforte, among other names.
9. Ibid., 176.
10. Leah DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Pre-
modern Eu rope,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 193–219.
11. Robert Mills, “Jesus as Monster,” in Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds.,
The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 31,
37, 48.
12. See Williams, Deformed Discourse, 322, 329.
13. These five productions were quickly followed by fourteen more, all different,
in England, France, and the United States. Richard Holmes, The Age of Won-
der: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
(New York: Pantheon, 2008), 334.
14. From the children’s story by William Steig; directed by Andrew Adamson
and Vicky Jenson, screenplay by Ted Elliott and others.
15. Kristen Whissel, “Vital Figures: The Life and Death of Digital Creatures,”
Digital Effects Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, in press), chap.
3. In the stories where they appear, Whissel notes, these hybrid digital-analog
monsters are typically extremely difficult to kill, suggesting that technologi-
cal hybridity itself lends them extra powers of “lethal vitality” in the minds
of both their creators and their audiences.
16. See Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21, 55, 114, 148.
17. Rick Bentley, “Hellboy Director Guillermo del Toro Credits Mexican Heri-
tage for His Artistic Vision,” Fresno Bee, July 8, 2008.
18. Del Toro, “How I Made Hellboy in My Image.”
19. Robert Bly, “My Father’s Wedding,” ll. 25–30 (New York: HarperCollins,
1981).
20. Of Jung’s theory of synchronicity, Wouter Hanegraaff says: “Presented
explicitly as an alternative to instrumental ‘causality,’ it questioned the most
fundamental assumptions of post- Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian
physics, replacing them by a psychological re-formulation of analogy and
‘correspondences’: the very thing that positivist anthropology had rejected
as the epitome of ‘magical superstition.’ ” Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected 313
Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
294.
21. Director’s commentary, The Devil’s Backbone.

no t e s t o pag e s 224 – 229

22. In a London interview with Mark Kermode, del Toro discusses both Devil’s
Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth as “microcosms” of the Spanish Civil War, which
he describes as “a household war. People that shared beds, shared dining ta-
bles and shared lives ultimately killed each other.” He deliberately paired
them structurally: “Devil’s Backbone is the boy’s movie. It’s the brother movie.
But Pan’s Labyrinth is the sister movie, the female energy to that other one. I
wanted to make it because fascism is defi nitely a male concern and a boy’s
game, so I wanted to oppose that with an 11-year-old girl’s universe.” “Guill-
ermo del Toro,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/nov/21/guardianinter
viewsatbfisouthbank, November 21, 2006 (accessed January 27, 2007).
23. Denis Faye, “In the Garden of Good and Evil,” http://www.wga.org/content
/default.aspx?id=3076 (accessed January 18, 2007).
24. See Marie Louise von Franz’s Jungian commentary on this and the archetype
of the miller’s daughter in Problems of the Feminine in Fairy Tales (New York:
Spring Publications, 1972), 113–115, 70–78. Von Franz believes the meaning-
lessness of the repeating motion that never quite reaches its goal “express[es]
the idea of not having been redeemed” and for this reason is traditionally
“attributed to demons or cursed beings.”
25. Commentary on Vampyr, Criterion 2008 British edition, quoted in www
.davidbordwell .net/ blog/2009/11/19/ i -am -not-carl -dreyer -and -I -should
-shut-up/ (accessed November 19, 2009).
26. Del Toro has consistently described the Pan’s Labyrinth underworld as a
womb. In the Guardian interview he says: “I very deliberately designed the
idea of the fantasy world to be extremely uterine. We used a fallopian palette
of colours: we used crimsons and golds, and everything in the fantasy world
is very rounded while everything the real world is cold and straight. . . . This
girl’s idea of heaven, ultimately is to go back into her mother’s belly.”
27. Cowritten with Matthew Robbins from a story by Donald Wolheim, a fi lm
removed from the director’s full control in its released form.
28. After centuries of inflation and deflation by opposing sides in the scholarly
debate about alchemy, the most trustworthy defi nition to date belongs to
Hanegraaff: “Alchemy is a complex historical and cultural phenomenon that
does not have a conceptual core or essence (whether scientific, rational, reli-
gious, spiritual or psychological) but is characterized by basic procedures of
transmutation that can be pursued in laboratory settings and function as
narratives in religious or philosophical discourse.” Esotericism and the Acad-
emy, 197.
 29. Philippa Hawker, “Unraveling the Entrails of the Mind,” The Age, www.theage
.com.au, April 4, 2005 (accessed April 8, 2007). Another example of child mu-
tilation from the Hugo novel was cutting smiles into the mouths of children.
This in effect happens to Captain Vidal when the servant Mercedes slashes his
face with a knife. The captain sews up the slit himself with a needle and thread.
314 30. Director’s commentary, Pan’s Labyrinth, special edition DVD (Sony Pictures
Classics, 2004).
31. Faye, “Garden of Good and Evil.”
32. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” August 25, 2007, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps
no t e s t o pag e s 230 – 24 0

/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070825/REVIEWS08/70825002/1023 December 29,

2006 (accessed May 5, 2008).
33. Commentary to Pan’s Labyrinth DVD.
34. Williams, Deformed Discourse, 174, 311.
35. Over the years an alternative religion has formed around Gaudi’s Gothick
fantasia, the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona.
36. Del Toro interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air.
37. Early interpretations of this tale as a straightforward ghost story (echoing
James’s own view) gave way, in deference to its author’s high literary reputa-
tion and in keeping with the predilections of the twentieth century, to revi-
sionist readings as a case study in female hysteria. See the extended discussion
of the real-versus-crazy debate in The Secret Life of Puppets, chap. 7.
38. Michael Chabon, “Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” in
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (San Francisco:
McSweeney’s Books, 2008), 108.
39. Currently on hold after production was abruptly canceled in 2011.
40. For a full discussion, see TheSecret Life of Puppets, chap. 5.
41. “Madness Tops Del Toro’s List,” Sci Fi Wire, http://www.cinemablend.com
/new/ Del-Toro-Eyes-The-Mountains-Of-Madness-7282.html (accessed De-
cember 24, 2007).
42. Luis Buñuel, “Pessimism,” in An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of
Luis Buñuel, trans. Garrett White (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), 263.

11 . T h e N e w C h r i s t i a n G o t h i c k

William P. Young in collaboration with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings,

The Shack (Los Angeles: Windblown Media, 2007), 237. Young credits his
publishers as cowriters in his revision of the novel.
1. As interpreted by Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–
1420, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
99–102.
2. Maurice Lévy, “Mountains, Mezzotints, and Gothic Imagery,” in Francoise
Besson, ed., Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English- Speaking World
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 303.
 3. Anne Rice, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (New York: Random House, 2005),
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (New York: Random House, 2008).
4. Anne Rice, “Essay on Earlier Works,” August 15, 2007, www.annerice.com
/ Bookshelf-EarlierWorks.html (accessed August 4, 2008).
5. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 13–14. 315
6. Anne Rice, Angel Time: The Song of the Seraphim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2009), 8.
7. Anne Rice, Of Love and Evil: Songs of the Seraphim (New York: Alfred A.

no t e s t o pag e s 24 0 – 24 8
Knopf, 2010), 168–169.
8. Quoted by Huysmans scholar and translator Brendan King on his website,
http://homepage.mac.com/brendanking/huysmans.org/en/biog.htm (accessed
December 23, 2010).
9. On her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/annericefanpage?v=wall&story
_fbid=113868381998571&ref=mf (accessed July 30, 2010).
10. Cf. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Nicolae: The Rise of the Antichrist
(Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1997), 380.
11. As reported on the series’ official website, www.leftbehind.com (accessed
December 22, 2010).
12. LaHaye and Jenkins, Nicolae, 358.
13. Inspired Media Entertainment, www.leftbehindgames.com/index.php (ac-
cessed December 22, 2010).
14. Stephen King, “A Preface in Two Parts,” The Stand: The Complete Uncut Edi-
tion (New York: Signet, 1991), xi.
15. Quoted in John Marks, “Stephen King’s God Trip,” Salon.com, www.salon
.com/ books/int/2008/10/23/stephen _king/index1.html (accessed April 28,
2009).
16. All page references to Stephen King, The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edi-
tion (New York: Signet, 1991), 504. Mother Abagail herself is the token black
woman in this 1970s Euro-American vision of a United States consisting of
99 percent white people with strangely fabricated WASP names (Alberta
Edmonton, etc.), no Asians, and no Latinos.
17. Ibid., 503–504.
18. Ibid., 569, 573.
19. Ibid., 730–731.
20. King himself has stated that his original intention was to write a “fantasy
epic like Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting.” www.stephenking
.com/ library/novel/stand: _the _complete _ _uncut _edition _the _inspiration
.html (accessed February 11, 2011).
21. See Max Blumenthal, “Kill or Convert, Brought to You By the Pentagon,”
Nation, August 7, 2007, www.thenation.com/ blog/ kill-or-convert-brought
-you-pentagon (accessed December 23, 2010).
22. http://windblownmedia.com/news/ html (accessed December 22, 2010). Ac-
cording to the book’s website, it is currently being translated into thirty
languages; www.theshackbook.com/news.html (accessed October 31, 2009).
 23. First quote from William P. Young, lecture sponsored by North Valley Cal-
vary Chapel, Riverton School, Yuba City, California, September 19, 2008;
second phrase quoted in Motoko Rich, “Christian Novel Is Surprise Best
Seller,” New York Times, June 24, 2008.
24. Young, The Shack, 64– 65.
316 25. Ibid., 73, 81.
26. Ibid., 73, 111.
27. Ibid., 106, 82, 93.
28. Ibid., 146.
no t e s t o pag e s 24 8 – 255

29. Ibid., 185.

30. Ibid., 128.
31. As parsed by Kathleen Raine in “The Human Face of God,” in Testimony to
the Invisible: Essays on Swedenborg (West Chester, PA: Chrysalis Books, 1995),
63, 67.
32. See the discussion of David Bohm’s theory of the “holographic paradigm” in
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the
Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998),
67– 68: “Holography has the peculiar characteristic that each fragment of
intermediate frequency pattern contains the information of the whole object.
Bohm’s theory suggests that, in a similar way, the whole of the universe is
implicit in each of its parts.”
33. See the work of Robert Bork in The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Draw-
ings and the Dynamics of Gothic Design (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2010).
34. Ibid., 158.
35. Arthur Versluis has traced the Sophia/Wisdom tradition in America in Wis-
dom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: State University of New
York, 1999) and Wisdom’s Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul, MN: Paragon
House, 2000). Also see Arthur Versluis, “Sexual Mysticisms in Nineteenth-
Century America: John Humphrey Noyes, Thomas Lake Harris, and Alice
Bunker Stockham,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hid-
den Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Leiden:
Brill, 2008), 339.
36. In private diaries dated 1675, later disseminated by Pordage’s followers. Ver-
sluis, Wisdom’s Children, 19, 51.
37. Ibid., 103–111. See also Versluis’s Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) for the influence of these groups
on nineteenth-century American literature.
38. Ibid., 271.
39. Jean M. Humez, Mother’s Firstborn Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women
and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 47; Mary Baker
Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: First Church of
Christ, Scientist, 1971), “Christian Science Practice,” 372 and “Genesis,” 517.
40. Young, Shack, 172, 177.
41. Ibid., 210.
42. Ibid., 218.
43. Ibid., 233–234.
44. The fact that this ending is inserted on top of the dream frame suggests that
it may have been an afterthought. Essentially it serves as a double qualifier of
the “reality” of the story.
45. Young, Shack, 237, 240.
46. Ibid., 182.
47. Ibid., 181. In his public lecture in Yuba City, Young remarked, “I’m a Cana- 317
dian, not a Republican.”
48. Ibid., 198.
49. “The Shack: Helpful or Heretical? A Critical Review by Norman L. Geisler

no t e s t o pag e s 256 – 265

and Bill Roach,” www.normangeisler.net/theshack.html (accessed December
4, 2009). The New York Times also notes that some conservative Christian
leaders, including the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
have found the novel heretical. Rich, “Christian Novel.”
50. Raine, “Human Face of God,” 53.
51. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post- Christian Na-
tion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 32, 40, 15.
52. Young, Shack, 99.
53. Ibid., 248.

12. E pi l o gu e

Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and

a Sun God from Smallvile Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spie-
gel and Grau, 2011), 416.
1. Michael Winerip, “A Child Turns to the Fold,” New York Times, June 14, 2009.
2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 38.
3. Trade journals indicate sharply falling ticket sales for this subgenre. See, e.g.,
Brian Lowry, “Second-Tier Heroes Face a Dose of Reality,” Variety, June 22,
2011, http://www.variety.com/article/ VR1118038916?refCatId=13 (accessed
August 17, 2011).
4. “Newcastle: A Taste of Things to Come,” John Constantine: Hellblazer, written
by Jamie Delano, artist Richard Piers Raynor and Mark Buckingham (New
York: DC Comics/Warner Bros., 2003). [Originally published as Hellblazer
no. 11.]
5. Morrison, Supergods, 272–273.
6. Ibid., 273.
7. Ibid., 276.
8. Jeffrey Kripal, “How We Got to Super: Grant Morrison’s Visionary Gnosti-
cism,” Religion Dispatches, August 20, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org
/ books/culture/4883/ how_we _got _to _super: _grant _morrison’s _visionary
_gnosticism/ (accessed August 22, 2011). I’m indebted to Kripal’s review for
first steering me to Morrison’s book.
9. From the movie Green Lantern (2011), directed by Martin Campbell, written
by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, and Michael Golden-
berg, from the DC comic book.
 10. Morrison, Supergods, 29.
11. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post- Christian
Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 35.
12. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the
Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147.
318
no t e s t o pag e 265
 acknowledgments

Knowledge transmission, for me, comes through friendships as much as

books, and much of the direction my ideas have taken I owe to colleagues
and friends who have generously shared their ideas me, along with an
ever-growing matrix of institutions that have supported my work. First
on the list must be the amazing Lindsay Waters, everything an editor and
loyal friend should be, along with his assistant Shanshan Wang and every-
one at Harvard University Press responsible for producing this book.
Special thanks to my copyeditor, Sue Warga, for her outstanding work on
a challenging project, to my proofreader, Megan Roberts, and to Melody
Negron, for her fine oversight on the project. I am also grateful to my
four peer reviewers for their insightful comments and their extended en-
gagement with the book’s premises.
I wish to thank the institutions and private individuals who provided
both support and venues for presenting papers on which portions of this
book were based: the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellow-
ship taken in 2008–2009; Joyce Botelho and the John Nicholas Brown
Center for the Humanities, Brown University; Arthur Versluis and the As-
sociation for the Study of Esotericism; Aura Satz and the Association of
Art Historians; Angus Fletcher and the Getty Museum; Michael Murphy
and the Esalen Institute; Rosalie Basten and the Château de Taurenne; Gauri
Viswanathan and Columbia University; and fi nally the University of
 California, Berkeley, Rhetoric Department and the exceptional students
of my Rhetoric 178 class at UC Berkeley in fall 2009.
Librarians and libraries vital to my research included Arevig Capri-
elian, for assistance above and beyond the call of duty, and also Laura
320 O’Keefe at the New York Society Library; Elizabeth Denzinger and
Charles Carter at the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public
Library; the British Library; and the University of California, Berkeley,
ac k now l e d g m e n t s

Doe Library. Last but not least, I am indebted to the Berkeley and Albany,
California, public libraries, with their extensive collections of graphic
novels and many other popular fictions beneath the radar of university
collections.
I am further indebted to the following friends, colleagues, and stu-
dents: Maurizio Bettini, Harold Bloom, Simon Ditchfield, Claire Fanger,
Kristi Gansworth, Robert Geary, Gayle Greene, Robert and Ted Grudin,
Wouter Hanegraaff, Diane Hoeveler, Jay Hyatt, Bruce Ingram, Massimo
Introvigne, Claire Kahane, Gábor Klaniczay, Cariel and Tadea Klein,
Danielle Klenak, Christopher Knowles, Jeffrey Kripal, Daniel Levy,
Maurice Lévy, David and Mary Alice Lowenthal, Michael Mascuch,
J. Gordon Melton, Frank Muniz, Dan Cuong O’Neill, Theodore and Betty
Roszak, Paul Selig, Kyle Stephens, Paul Strohm, Lawrence Sutin, Gary
Ungar, and Marina Warner.
Special thanks to Erik Davis for his trailblazing work on the Lovecraft
cults and to the indefatigable Roy Thomas and his comicologist colleagues
Mike Conroy, Ofer Berenstein, Jim Van Dore, Stephen Rowe, Juan Gon-
zalez, Brian Saner Lamkin, Bruce Mason, and Bill Schelly for sharing
with me their deep knowledge of comic book lore.
All errors in this and other areas of discussion are solely mine.
Portions of Chapter 2 first appeared as part of “Faux Catholic: A Gothic
Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown” in boundary 2; some parts of
Chapter 8 as part of “A Postcool Everywoman” in Articulate Objects: Voice,
Sculpture, and Performance (Peter Lang, 2009), edited by Aura Satz and Jon
Wood; portions of Chapter 9 as part of “The Ten Rules of Sitges” in Rari-
tan; and portions of Chapter 10 as part of “Cathedral Head: The Gothick
Cosmos of Guillermo del Toro” in The Believer; all are reprinted here with
permission.
 index

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 124 Allen, Woody, Interiors, 190
Adaptation, 202 All Souls’ Day. See under Halloween.
Aeon Flux (videogame), 199 All Worlds, Church of, 58
afterlife: in Christian theology, 301n96; in Amenábar, Alejandro, The Others, 207–208
Hell House, 172; in Mormon theology, American Gothic, xii, 6, 112
145–146; in Pan’s Labyrinth, 233, 235; American Religion. See under Bloom,
in Twilight series, 143–146 Harold
Aklo language. See under Lovecraft, H. P. Angel (TV series), 129. See also Buffy the
Albanese, Catherine, 42 Vampire Slayer
Albigensians. See Cathars (Perfecti, Pure angels, 12, 13, 22, 58, 89, 92, 147, 215, 220,
Ones) 301n104; angel-demon hybrid, 72,
alchemy, 13, 47, 272n41; “Alchymical 89– 90, 256; angel-human hybrid, 83,
Wedding,” 113; allegory in, 173; in del 85– 87; of Death, 223; fallen, 24, 26, 74,
Toro’s fi lms, 229–232; essential 79– 80, 85, 91, 102 (see also Satan); in
principles of, 230; hermaphrodite in, the Gothick, 147, 216, 242; Gothick
221; in Mantel’s Fludd, 111–115; as monsters as, 61; language of, 69; in
medievalism, 293n46; as moral Mormon theology, 145; as Otherkin,
transfiguration, 112, 223; in Protestant 58; replaced by Death, 104–105
sects, 253. See also under transforma- Angels and Demons. See Brown, Dan
tion, alchemical animated dead. See zombies
Alfred, Michael, I, Zombie: Dead to the anime, 92, 194–195, 199
World, 148, 162 Antenna Theater, 168, 172, 179–181,
Alien (fi lm series), 164–165; Alien, 61, 126, 223. See also Skin & Bones/Flesh &
153, 235; Alien 3, 164; Alien Resurrec- Blood
tion, 165 apocalypse: in American culture, 42, 147;
allegory, 36, 156; in fi lm, 209, 216; in as Armageddon, 79, 83, 153, 154, 165,
Gothick per for mance, 172, 177–187; 245, 247; in Christian Gothick,
history of, 172–177; in medieval 243–245, 247, 248; in comics, 84, 85,
theater, 174–175; and melodrama, 216; 88, 89, 153–154, 263; as Ragna Rok,
and modern critics, 306n6; and 88; zombie, 150, 152, 155–160,
monsters, 220; in The Shack, 248, 165–166. See also Gothick subgenres:
251, 253 postapocalyptic
 apotheosis: in Breaking Dawn, 140; in Son B movies, x; emergence of, 6, 18; “ex-
of Satan, 84; in Warm Bodies, 165. plained supernatural” in, 234;
See also divine human mainstreaming of, 6, 54, 110, 166, 189
Aquino, Michael, 65– 66, 69, 74, 133. Böcklin, Arnold, 214, 223
See also Temple of Set Boe, Christoffer, 208; Allegro, 208–209, 212
Argento, Dario, 193, 205 Boehme, Jakob, 40, 253; and law of
322 Ariès, Philippe, 104, 292n22 correspondences, 225
Armageddon. See apocalypse Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 83,
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, 198 253
attraction, law of. See correspondences, Botting, Fred, 2, 106
I n de x

law of Brazil (Gilliam), 210

Atwood, Margaret, 110 Breaking the Waves (von Trier), 216
Audition (Takashi), 204 Bride of Frankenstein, 198
Auerbach, Erich, 9, 99 Brite, Poppy Z., 109, 129; Lost Souls, 63
Auerbach, Nina, 137 Brontë, Charlotte, 105; as founder of
Austen, Jane, 1, 155; Northanger Abbey, 110 women’s romance subgenre, 100–102;
Avatar, 58. See also under fandom Jane Eyre, 95– 96, 100–103, 105, 106,
136, 138, 151. See also Gothick
babewyn (hybrid monster), 46, 53, 60, 74, subgenres: women’s romance; super-
79, 130, 221, 278n2. See also hybridity: natural, explained
of fictional species Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 102–103,
Baigent, Michael. See Holy Blood, Holy 163; Dev il in, 103; as male Gothick,
Grail (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln) 102
Balagueró, Jaume, 192–193, 197, 200 Brooke, John L., 47, 272, 302n106
Ball, Alan, 18, 130 Brooks, Max, 155, 159; World War Z: An
Balzac, Honoré de, and Séraphita, 42 Oral History of the Zombie Wars,
Baptists, 47, 256; Southern, 50, 90 149–150, 159–160; Zombie Survival
Barlow, Linda, 105, 107 Guide, 159
Bate Cabal, 1, 68 Brooks, Peter, 36, 215–216
Batman (as vampire), 82 Brothers Grimm, The (Gilliam), 209–210
Baudelaire, Charles, 121 Brothers Quay, 209–211, 214–215
Baum, L. Frank, Oz books, 79 Brown, Charles Brockden, 6
Bava, Mario, 193, 205 Brown, Dan, 1, 23–24, 26, 28–32, 34,
Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau), 232 36–39, 41–42, 141
Benedict XVI, Pope, 35 —Angels and Demons, 27–30, 33; fi lm,
Benét, Stephen Vincent, “The Dev il and 35–36; and The Monk, 27–28, 99
Daniel Webster,” 76 —The Da Vinci Code, The, 1, 24, 26–38,
Beowulf, 222 42, 201; A&D similarities, 29;
Bergman, Ingmar, Virgin Spring, 232 antecedents, 30; fi lm, 34–35; impact
Bertone, Tarcisio, 35 on spirituality, 36–38, 243; influences
Bewitched (TV series), 79 on, 29–32; lawsuits about, 31–32;
Beyond the Sinister Barrier (comic book; Fox marketing of, 34; and The Monk, 24;
and Anderson), 82 sacred feminine in, 32–33, 36; and
Biohazard (videogame), 153. See also Twilight, 146. See also Catholicism,
Resident Evil: videogame Roman: reaction to Da Vinci Code;
Black Vampyre, The (D’Arcy), 133, 298n54 Gothick subgenres: faux Catholic;
Blade (film series): Blade, 8, 131; Blade 2, 229 sacred feminine
Blair Witch Project, The, 57, 157 —The Lost Symbol, 27, 29–30, 36, 37–42;
Blake, William, 257 divine human in, 39–40, 225; and New
Blatty, William Henry, 22 Thought, 40–41; and personal gnosis,
Blood: The Last Vampire (fi lm), 8, 199 42; and The Secret, 41, 225. See also
BloodRayne (videogame), 54 under New Age spirituality; New
Bloom, Harold, 278n8, 291n9; and Thought
American Religion, 50, 70, 257, 265 Brown, Rich, 54
Bly, Robert, “My Father’s Wedding,” 224 Browning, Todd, 123
Bruno, Giordano, 40 145, 221, 245, 252, 301n99. See also
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 77; character, as Gothick (genre): anticlericalism in;
female warrior, 129, 199–200; fi lm, 77; Gothick subgenres: faux Catholic;
TV series, 77, 128–129, 167, 199–200; medievalism
and Twilight, 134. See also Angel (TV Celestine Prophecy, The (Redfield), 26, 42
series) Chabon, Michael, xii, 234
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, The Coming Race, Change (from human to supernatural 323
81 creature), 110–111, 121, 123, 130, 144,
Buñuel, Luis, 189–191, 208, 216–217, 236; 145, 160–163, 165, 240
and Hollywood plots, 202–203; and Chaos magick, 67, 69, 84, 133

I n de x
The Monk, 274n9 Chesterton, G. K., “A Defence of Penny
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 172, Dreadfuls,” ix, xiii
176–178, 248 Chick, Jack T., 90
Burke, Edmund, 15 Christian Science, 18, 40, 42, 47, 254.
Butler, Octavia, Fledgling, 127, 240 See also Eddy, Mary Baker
Byrne, Rhonda, The Secret, 41–42, 225, 244. Christina Mirabilis, 252, 301n99
See also Brown, Dan: The Lost Symbol; Clark, Stuart, 119
New Thought Clover, Carol, 9; and “Final Girl” theory,
Byron, Lord [George Gordon], 4, 100, 102, 199, 204, 281n41
120–121, 123; attributed as author of Cocteau, Jean, 33
The Vampyre, 295n16; “The Giaour,” Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4, 57, 212, 235;
120; model for The Vampyre, 102 “Christabel,” 120
Collier, John, “The Dev il George and
Call of Cthulhu, The: Lovecraft story, 73, Rosie,” 76
278n1; role-playing game, 60, 68, comic books and graphic novels, iv, 6, 54,
285n93 80– 93, 178, 223, 261, 288, 298, 303;
Camille, Michael, 9, 140, 278n2 Golden Age, 80– 82; influence on
Campbell, John W., The Thing, 235 Christianity, 90– 93; links to Gothick,
Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand 80– 93; Silver Age, 80– 82, 84, 129.
Faces, 201 See also under Satan
Carlyle, Thomas, 95 Connor, Steven, 182
Carnival of Souls (Harvey), 225 Constantine (Lawrence), 85
Carpenter, John: Prince of Darkness, 78; The Corpse Bride, The (Burton), 209–210
Thing, 235 Corpus Christi cycles. See under mystery
Carrière, Jean- Claude, 202 plays
Carrington, Leonora, The Hearing correspondences, law of, 41, 224–225, 230,
Trumpet, 235 252
Carroll, Noel, 204 Course of Miracles, 48
Carroll, Peter, 67 courtly love. See fi n amor
Castle, Terry, 98, 291n9, 291n12 Cowan, Douglas E., 41, 51, 192, 279n18
Castlevania (videogame), 54 Crace, Jim, The Pesthouse, 154
Cathars (Perfecti, Pure Ones), 141, 146, 235 Craig, E. Gordon, 179
cathedrals, 243, 252; in del Toro’s films, Craven, Wes, 206
219–223, 232, 234–235, 236; Gothic Cronin, Justin, The Passage, 154, 164
(medieval), 5, 239, 243, 252; in Rice Crowley, Aleister, 56, 64, 69; influence on
novels, 243. See also under Gothic Church of Satan, 65– 67; Thelema
(medieval cultural period) creed, 64. See also Golden Dawn,
Catholicism, Roman: elements in Hermetic Order of the; Ordo Templis
Protestant sects, 15; female principle Orientis (OTO)
in, 33; folk traditions, 198, 255; cult of the dead. See under Catholicism,
mainstreamed customs, 170–171, 180; Roman
and medieval cult of the dead, 170;
nostalgia for, xii, 11; reaction to Da Dacre, Charlotte, 96; The Libertine, 3
Vinci Code, 34–36; role in Gothick, Dagon, Esoteric Order of, 68
2, 11, 21–24; saints, 9, 12, 52, 80, 141, Danse macabre des femmes, 94, 95, 104
 Dante, 178; The Divine Comedy, 254 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 123, 228
Dark, The (Fawcett), 207–209, 211–212 Dungeons & Dragons (role-playing game), 54
Dark Shadows (TV series), 124
Da Vinci Code, The. See Brown, Dan Ebert, Roger, 231
Davis, Erik, 50, 57, 61, 67– 68, 280n21, Eddy, Mary Baker, 40, 48–49, 265; Science
281n46, 281n50, 282n60, 284n75, and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
324 285n90, 285n95, 308n11 254. See also Christian Science
Day of the Dead. See under Halloween Edelstein, David, 204, 206
Dead Snow (Wirkola), 205 Ellis, Warren, 84
Dead Space (videogame), 176 Ellora’s Cave (erotic romance publisher), 107
I n de x

Death: allegorical figure, 92– 93, 94, 95, End of Days, 78

167, 223; bride of, 93, 103, 105, 113, Ennis, Garth, Preacher series, 72, 84,
138–140, 233; bridegroom of, 210; and 89– 91, 264
eroticism, 103–105, 120, 138–142, 170; Ensor, James, 180
as Lord of the Dance, 103–104; as Ephrata. See Theosophy
Lord of the Underworld, 103; and the Everyman, 175, 177–178, 180. See also
Maiden, 104–105; in morality plays, morality plays
175; in the Sandman series, xx, 173; in exorcism, 23–24, 77, 220
Skin & Bones, 168, 184–186; and Exorcism of Emily Rose, The, 22
zombies, 166 Exorcist, The: fi lm, 22, 77; novel, 22
Dee, John, 69, 82
Delano, Jamie, 84– 85. See also John fandom, 57; and Avatar, 57; “faaanfiction,”
Constantine: Hellblazer (graphic novel) 53–54; female fans, 55; history of,
del Toro, Guillermo, 61, 71, 207–208, 51–56; and horror subculture, 51–58,
218–235, 312n1, 312n3; Cronos 203–204; and H. P. Lovecraft, 59– 63;
228–229; The Devil’s Backbone, 207, in Japan, 194–195; and J. R. R. Tolkien,
220, 225–229; Hellboy, 219, 222, 229, 57; and religion building, 56–58,
263; Hellboy II, 218–220, 223, 228, 233; 64–71; “slash” fiction, 55–56; and Star
influence of Catholic Church, 236; Trek, 57–58; and zombie subculture,
Mimic, 229, 235; as New Expressionist, 157–159, 161, 166. See also Primary
214; Pan’s Labyrinth, 40, 219, 226–235; Believers; Secondary Believers
The Strain, 154. See also under afterlife; faux Catholic. See under Gothick subgenres
alchemy; cathedrals; divine human; Febvre, Lucien, 201
sacred feminine; underworld female Gothick. See under Gothick (genre)
demon lover, 103, 200 Fernández, Julio, 192
Derleth, August, 53 Fiedler, Leslie, 6
de Rougemont, Denis, Love in the Western Filmax studio, 192–193
World, 141, 292n22 fi n amor, 99, 140, 142, 300n85
Dev il. See Satan Flamel, Nicholas. See alchemy
Devil’s Rejects, The (Zombie), 205–206 Fletcher, Angus, 173
Diablo (videogame), 153 Flowers, Stephen E., 45, 67
Dick, Philip K., 18 Fludd, Robert, 82; in Mantel’s Fludd,
Dillon, Steve, Preacher: Proud American, 72, 110–113
89– 91 folktales, 6; about Satan, 76; and the female
Dishonored (von Sternberg), 202 Gothick, 99; and Gothick horror,
Disney, Walt, 34, 191, 194 200–201, 208, 209; medieval, 100, 138,
divine human, 10, 41, 48, 263–264; in 200; and the Romantic movement, 6,
comics, 80, 92; in The Lost Symbol, 38; 146; as source of Corpse Bride, 210; as
in Pan’s Labyrinth, 40; in The Shack, source of Nausicaä, 196; as source of
257; in Twilight series, 40, 145–146, Virgin Spring, 232; structure of, 200,
165, 247, 254; in Warm Bodies, 164 207, 247. See also Propp, Vladimir
Dracula, fi lm, 147, 193; videogame, 147; Forster, E. M., “The Story of the Siren,” 79
novel (see under Stoker, Bram) Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco), 28, 30
Dracula 2000, 130 fractals, 201, 225; in Gothic cathedrals, 5;
Dreamscape, 212 in The Shack, 251–252
Fragile (Balagueró), 192, 200 102, 105, 107, 199, 202, 204; new
France, Marie de, 96, 100, 128 Gothick, xi, 8, 19, 82, 88, 121, 134,
Frankenstein: fi lm, 193; novel (see under 141, 143, 150, 153, 197, 213–217, 240,
Shelley, Mary) 242–243, 262–266; and Romanticism,
Franklin, Benjamin, 48 2, 4–5, 96– 97, 200, 213–214, 222, 266;
Freemasons, 38, 40, 48, 64 as shaper of Christian doctrine,
Freud, Sigmund, 7, 179 90– 91, 243, 248. See also Gothick 325
Friedrich, Caspar David, 214, 223 subgenres; Romanticism; supernatu-
Frye, Northrop, 18, 97, 241 ral, explained; supernaturalism
Fulci, Lucio, 153 Gothick subgenres:

I n de x
Funny Games (Haneke), 206–207, 310n42 —faux Catholic, 22–39, 83, 88, 105, 122,
147, 244, 274n9; in global Gothick, 92,
Gaiman, Neil: American Gods, xii; The 196; re- Catholicizing of, 111, 114, 193,
Anansi Boys, 73; Sandman series, 220
84– 86, 88, 173 —horror, x, xi, 5, 7– 8, 51–52, 62, 77–78,
Galceran, Jordi, 200 126–127, 223; comics, 81, 151, 156;
Galdós, Benito Peréz, Doña Perfecta, 199 global, 189–217; in new Gothick, 147;
Gardner, Gerald, Book of Shadows, 50 repetition compulsion in, 203–204;
Gardner, John, Grendel, 222 and romance, 101; and spirituality, 56,
Garibaldi, Guiseppe, as Gothick writer, 25 71; torture porn, 147, 204–206
genre noir, le. See under Gothick (genre) —postapocalyptic, 93, 149–167, 244
Gerard, Emily, 122 —science fi ction, 6, 50; “explained
Gerber, Steve, Son of Satan, 260 supernatural” in, 6; as scripture, 49
Giger, H. R., 61 —women’s romance, 6, 64, 70, 83, 96– 97,
Gilliam, Terry: Brazil, 210; Brothers 100, 105–110, 120, 126–127, 136;
Grimm, 209–210 critical reception of, 106; Gothick-
Ginger Snaps (Fawcett), 207 Romantic elements in, 105–106;
Gnostic Gospels, 32, 130 history, 96–115; hybridity in, 107–110;
Goethe, Wolfgang von, “The Bride of paranormal, 100, 110; post-1990
Corinth,” 120 sexuality, 107–109; post-1990
Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of the, 48, supernatural, 109; Regency, 101, 155,
64, 69. See also Crowley, Aleister; 195; vampire, 10, 105, 114, 117–148
Ordo Templis Orientis (OTO) Goth subculture, 1, 62– 64, 131, 170–171
Gothic (medieval cultural period), 2–3, 8, Grahame-Smith, Seth, Pride and Prejudice
139–142, 149–150, 239; cathedrals, 5, and Zombies, 155
239, 243, 252; cosmology, 14, 41–42, Grant, Kenneth, 56, 65, 70
59, 83, 112, 173–174, 176, 179, 223–225, graphic novels. See comic books and
227–229; folk beliefs, 119–120, 138, graphic novels
140, 142, 143; Gothic Revival, 5; as Graves, Robert, 50
label in this book, 2–3; literature, 59, Graveyard school of poetry, 2, 63
81, 96, 99–100, 139–140, 174, 177; Old Gray, Thomas, 2, 63
Goth as label for, 2–3; theater, 172, Great Awakenings, 41, 47, 49
174–177, 180. See also cathedrals; fi n Grien, Hans Baldung, 104
amor Gross, Kenneth, 140
Gothic (videogame), 54 Gross, Terry, 233–234
Gothick (genre), 2–4, 11, 81, 97–103, 114, Grudge, The. See Ju- on (Takashi)
117, 147, 220, 243, 262–266; anticleri- GWAR, 63
calism in, 4–5, 21–29, 32, 34, 38; as
“dark Romanticism,” 4; female Hades, 103, 105, 142–143. See also
Gothick, 98–102, 105, 107, 204, 207; underworld
as le genre noir, 2, 11; global, 8, 26, Hallaj, Al, 141
189–213; high literary exemplars, xii; Halloween: and All Souls Day, 181; and
history of, 4, 19; “imperial,” 150; as Day of the Dead, 171–172, 179–180,
label in this book, 2; main features of, 210; medieval cult of the dead, 170
7– 9, 17–19; male Gothick, 98–100, Halloween (fi lm series; Carpenter), 204
 Hamilton, Laurell K., 109–110, 129 hybridity: of comic books, 81–82; of fictional
Hammer Films, 192–193 species, 8, 46, 79, 83, 85–88, 129–130,
Hammond, James, ix; Hammond 143, 145, 161–162, 164–165, 199; of
Collection, ix, 96 films, 193, 195–196; of Gothick
Hanegraaff, Wouter, 42, 272n30, 293n46, subgenres, 8, 42, 53, 100, 123, 126–127,
313n20, 313n28, 316n32 242
326 Haneke, Michael, Funny Games, 206–207,
310n42 I, Zombie: Dead to the World (Roberson),
Hardman, Chris, 179–181, 185, 187. See also 148, 162
Antenna Theater; Skin & Bones/Flesh I Am Legend (Matheson), 154
I n de x

& Blood Immortalists, 40, 47

Hardy, Patricia, 66 Inception (Nolan), 213
Harris, Charlaine, Southern Vampire Innocent III, Pope, 141
series, 130. See also True Blood Insidious (Wan), 211
Harry Potter series. See Rowling, J. K. Irving, Washington, “The Dev il and Tom
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6; House of the Walker,” 76
Seven Gables, 1; The Scarlet Letter, 50 Isis, 33, 51; as ancestress of vampires, 125
Hearn, Lafcadio, Kwaidan, 194 I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur), 151
Heinlein, Robert E., Stranger in a Strange Izumi Kyoka, 194
Land, 58
Hellboy: character, 17, 79, 88, 91, 222; fi lm James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw, x, 75,
series (see del Toro, Guillermo); 100, 234
graphic novel, 88– 89 (see also Mignola, James, Montague Rhodes (M. R.), 5, 17
Mike) Jay, Stacey: My So- Called Death, 161; You
Hell House (Christian per for mance), 172, Are So Undead To Me, 161
177–179, 181 Jenkins, Henry, 53
Hellsing (comic book series), 26 Jenkins, Jerry B. (with Tim LaHaye):
Herbert, Frank, Dune, 145, 196 Glorious Appearing: End of Days, 247;
heresy. See heterodoxy Left Behind, 243–247, 251, 256
Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, 64 Jeong Seo-geong, 196
heterodoxy, 25, 27, 41, 82, 90, 263 J-Horror, 194, 196
Hills Have Eyes, The (Craven), 206 John Constantine: Hellblazer (graphic novel),
Hine, Phil, Pseudonomicon, 69 84– 85, 263. See also Constantine
Hoeveler, Diane Long, 12 (Lawrence)
Hogan, Chuck, The Strain, 154 Johnson, Denis: Hellhound, 215; Shoppers
Hogg, James, Private Memoirs and Carried by Escalators into the Flames, 215
Confessions of a Justifi ed Sinner, 74 Johnson, Samuel, 172
Holmes, Richard, 222, 295n15 Jones, Diane Wynne, Howl’s Moving Castle,
Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh, 195
Lincoln), 29–31, 33, 89, 275n24 Julian of Norwich, 221
homme fatal, 102, 106, 120; in Dracula, Jung, C. G., 224
123; in Fludd, 111, 114; in Jane Eyre, Ju- on (Takashi), 196
103; in the vampire romance, 114; in
The Vampyre, 120, 121 Kahane, Claire, 137
horror. See under Gothick subgenres kaiju, 195
Host, The (Bong), 24, 196 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 217
Hostel (Roth), 204–205, 207 Karloff, Boris, 222
House of 1,000 Corpses (Zombie), 205 Kaz (Kazimieras G. Prapuolenis), “The
Hubbard, Ron L., 18, 49. See also Tragedy of Satan,” 86
Scientology Kazantzakis, Nikos, The Last Temptation
Huff, Tanya, Blood (fiction series), 127–129 of Christ, 33–34
Hugo, Victor, 33; The Man Who Laughs, 230 Keats, John, 4; “Eve of St. Agnes,” 105;
Human Centipede, The (Six), 205 “Lamia,” 196
Huysmans, J. K.: Lá-Bas, 243; La Cáthedral, Kellner, Carl, 64
243; A Rebours, 243 Kenemore, Scott, Zombie Ohio, 162
Khan, Ali, 158 Levey, Howard Stanton. See LaVey, Anton
K-Horror, 196 (Howard Stanton Levey)
King, Karen, 32 Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby, 77
King, Stephen, xii, 4, 141, 205–206, 241, Lévy, Maurice, 7, 11, 42, 239
247, 251; Carrie, 206, 241; The Dark Lewis, C. S., 176
Tower, 247; Fire- starter, 241; The Stand, Lewis, Matthew G., 12, 100; The Monk, x,
154, 244–248 3, 20, 24–27, 36, 45, 73–74, 98, 102, 327
Kingsley, Peter, 173 123, 199, 239. See also Brown, Dan:
Kirkman, Robert, The Walking Dead, 156, Angels and Demons; The Da Vinci Code
160 Lincoln, Henry. See Holy Blood, Holy Grail

I n de x
Klaniczay, Gábor, 118 (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln)
Knowles, Christopher, 81 Little Nicky, 86
Kostova, Elizabeth, The Historian, 22, 24 living dead. See zombies
Krentz, Jayne Ann, 105 Lord Howl’s Moving Castle. See under
Kripal, Jeffrey, 80, 265, 287n22 Miyazaki Hayao
Kristeva, Julia, 99 Lost, 2, 81
Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, 215 Lost Symbol, The. See Brown, Dan
Kwaidan, 198 Love at First Bite, 124
Lovecraft, H. P., x–xi, 6, 42, 45–71, 73–74,
LaHaye, Tim (with Jerry B. Jenkins): Edge 88, 158, 195, 263; and A. Crowley, 65;
of Apocalypse, 248; Glorious Appearing: Aklo language, 45, 65, 69, 71, 277n1;
End of Days, 247; Left Behind, 243–244, At The Mountains of Madness, 212,
247, 251, 256 235–236; “The Call of Cthulhu,” 73;
Lamb, Lady Caroline, Glenarvon, 102 “The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward,”
Laney, Francis T., 52 59, 62; and Christian demonology, 73;
Lang, Andrew, 5 Cthulhu mythos, 45–46, 59– 60, 65;
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (videogame), 129 fans, 59– 63; influence on comics, 81,
Last Days of Christ the Vampire, The (novel), 88; influence on fi lmmakers, 61, 221,
26 223, 235; magic sects, 66–71, 263;
Last Exorcism, The, 22 Necronomicon, 50, 60, 279n19; and
Last Temptation of Christ, The (Scorsese), 33 Providence, 46, 59, 62, 235; “Super-
Last Winter, The (Fessenden), 235 natural Horror in Literature,” 52. See
Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ also Chaos magick; fandom: H. P.
of the, 18, 40, 47, 49–50, 145, 278n9; Lovecraft; Primary Believers;
doctrine of exaltation, 145 Secondary Believers; supernaturalism
Laugier, Pascal, 205 Lucifer. See Satan
Laurens, Stephanie, Devil’s Bride, 108–109 Ludlum, Robert, 29
LaVey, Anton (Howard Stanton Levey), 65, Lugosi, Bela, 118, 123, 124, 150–151
74, 77; The Satanic Rituals, 65. See also Luther, Martin, 14
Order of the Trapezoid; Satan, Lynch, David, 214–216
Church of
Lee, Ann, 254. See also United Society of Mabou Mines (theater company), 215
Believers MacDonald, George, 5
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, “Carmilla,” 100, Maddin, Guy, 216; as New Expressionist,
121–122, 198 216
Left Behind: Eternal Forces (videogame), 248 Madrid, Juan de la, 192
Left Behind (fiction series). See Jenkins, Magic: The Gathering (role-playing game),
Jerry B.; LaHaye, Tim 178
Left 4 Dead (videogame), 154 Majewski, Lech, 214; Angelus, 216; Garden
Legion, 79 of Earthly Delights, 216; Roe’s Room, 216
Leigh, Richard. See Holy Blood, Holy Grail male Gothick. See under Gothick (genre)
(Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln) Mammon, 91– 92
Lem, Stanislaw, Solaris, 217 manga, 8, 199
Lemming (Moll), 191, 200, 209–210 man-god, 39–40, 87– 88, 90, 143, 164, 253,
Let the Right One In (Alfredson), 197 262–264. See also divine human
 Mantel, Hilary, 111, 114; Beyond Black, 111; Mishra, Vijay, 15
Fludd, 110–114, 230; The Giant, Miyazaki Hayao, 195–196; and cultural
O’Brien, 111. See also under alchemy hybridity, 195–196; Lord Howl’s Moving
Manuel, Niklaus, 104 Castle, 195; Nausicaä of the Valley of the
Marion, Isaac, Warm Bodies, 162, 164–165. Wind, 195; Princess Mononake, 195;
See also under apotheosis; divine Spirited Away, 195
328 human; personal gnosis; zombies Moers, Ellen, 99
Martyrs (Laugier), 205 Moll, Dominick, 200, 209, 274n9
Masque of the Red Death, The (fi lm), 193 Monk, Maria, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel
Matrix, The (Wachowski brothers), 164, 176 Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, 25
I n de x

Maturin, Charles, 3, 25, 100, 126; Melmoth Monk, The. See Lewis, Matthew G.
the Wanderer, 2, 25, 45 monsters, 219–236; female, 196, 98–199;
Maupassant, Guy de, 121 good, 17, 19, 60– 61, 80, 88, 133, 138,
McCarthy, Cormac, The Road, 154 145, 161, 195; Gothick, 8, 17, 46, 59,
McDonald, Beth, 146 65, 73, 82, 100, 133, 150, 154–155, 160,
McFarlane, Todd, Spawn, 87 164; kaiju, 195; medieval, 9, 17, 19, 46,
McKee, Robert, 201–202, 208; Story: 71, 220–221
Substance, Structure, Style and the Moore, Alan, 81, 84; Swamp Thing, 85;
Principles of Screenwriting, 202 Watchmen, 61, 75, 84
McKenzie, Anna, Mysteries Elucidated, 98 morality plays, 172, 175, 177–179. See also
McLoughlin, William, 47 Everyman
medievalism, 8, 10, 42, 96, 111, 271n26; in Mormonism. See Latter-day Saints,
women’s romance, 105 Church of Jesus Christ of the
melodrama, 81, 121, 178, 187, 207, 215–216 Morrell, David, Fraternity of the Stone, 30
Melton, J. Gordon, 169, 296n28 Morrison, Grant: Mystery Play, 177, 264;
Memnoch the Devil. See under Rice, Anne Supergods, 84, 261, 264–265
Mérimée, Prosper, 5; “Venus d’Ille,” 140 Mulholland Drive (Lynch), 214
Meyer, Stephenie, Twilight series, xii, 31, Murdoch, Iris, xii, 110
40, 95, 99, 128–129, 134–147, 165, 200, Murphy, Blair, 64
234, 240; Breaking Dawn, 138, 141, Mussolini, Benito, as Gothick writer, 25
162; and the divine human, 40, Myers, Frederic, 68
145–146, 165, 247, 254; Eclipse, 141; mysterium tremendum, 262–263
fans, 136, 262–263; and fi n amor, mystery plays, 177, 179; Corpus Christi
140–142; Mormon influences on, 145, cycles, 174–175
147; and new Gothick, 10, 17; New
Moon, 141–142; and sacred feminine, Necronomicon. See under Lovecraft, H. P.
40; and Tantric bodies, 116, 139, Neopagans, 48, 70
299n77; Twilight, 141; and vampires as New Age spirituality, 6, 26, 32, 42–43,
statues, 139–140. See also under 48–50, 74, 82– 83, 252, 254; and the
afterlife; Brown, Dan; Death, bride of; law of correspondences, 224–225;
divine human; Gothick subgenres: in The Lost Symbol, 42; migration of
women’s romance; Latter-day Saints, orga nized religion to, 43. See also new
Church of Jesus Christ of the; sacred religious movements (NRMs);
feminine; werewolves spirituality
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, 194 New Expressionism, 5, 186, 214–216, 222,
Mignola, Mike, 88, 219, 222. See also del 224
Toro, Guillermo; Hellboy (graphic New Isis Lodge, 65
novel, fi lm series) new religious movements (NRMs), xii,
Mikami Shinji, Biohazard, 153 18, 38, 46, 49–51, 67, 70, 224, 262;
Miller, Laura, 81, 136–137 on the Internet, 279n18; literary
Miller, Walter J., A Canticle for Leibowitz, origins of, 50; personal gnosis in, 51.
154 See also New Age spirituality;
Milton, John, 12, 177; Paradise Lost, 102 spirituality
Mirandola, Pico della, Oration on the New Thought, 40–42; and The Lost Symbol,
Dignity of Man, 264 40; and The Secret, 41
Nietz sche, Friedrich, 81 religions, 42, 48–51; and Otherkin, 58;
Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven), 212 in The Shack, 253, 257; and Stephen
Nodier, Charles, 5 King, 245; in Theosophy, 253; and
Northfork (Polish), 216 vampire subculture, 132; in Warm
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens Bodies, 165. See also New Age
(Murnau), 123 spirituality; new religious movements
NRMs. See new religious movements (NRMs); spirituality 329
(NRMs) Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, The (Brothers
Nun, The (Madrid), 192, 200, 212 Quay), 210–211, 214
Pietists, 47

I n de x
Oates, Joyce Carol, xii, 6, 110 Pilgrim’s Progress, The. See Bunyan, John
O’Bannon, Dan, Alien, 235 Piranesi, Giovanni, 222
occulture, 38, 82 Pirates of the Caribbean, 61
Oculto (Hernández), 213 Plato, 41
Old Goth. See Gothic (medieval cultural Poe, Edgar Allan, 6–7, 23, 45, 121, 189,
period) 212, 235
Omen, The, 77 Polidori, John William, 102, 120; Ernestus
Order of the Trapezoid (OTr), 65– 67. Berchtold, 120; The Vampyre, 120–124,
See also LaVey, Anton (Howard 242. See also Vampyre, The (Polidori)
Stanton Levey); Satan, Church of Pordage, John, Sophia, 253
Order of the Vampire, 133 Posada, José, 180
Ordo Templis Orientis (OTO), 64. See also Praz, Mario, 102
Crowley, Aleister; Golden Dawn, Preacher (graphic novel series; Ennis), 72,
Hermetic Order of the 84, 89– 91, 264
Orphanage, The, 197 Priest (manga series; Hyung Min-woo), 26
Osiris, as ancestor of vampires, 125 Primary Believers, 58, 258, 261, 265;
Otherkin (online community), 58, 282n52 defi nition, 58; Lovecraftian, 61, 64,
Otto, Rudolf, 262 68; in medieval mystery plays, 175; in
Owen, Alex, 64, 265 vampire subculture, 132–133; in
zombie subculture, 157–158. See also
Paffenroth, Kim, 156, 160 Secondary Believers
paganism, 51, 79, 170, 122 Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale,
Pan’s Labyrinth, 40, 219, 226–227, 229–235. 201–202, 208. See also folktales
See also under alchemy; del Toro, Protestant Reformation, 48; and super-
Guillermo; sacred feminine naturalism, xi, 12, 15, 74, 221. See also
Paprika (Satoshi), ii, 213 Radical Reformation
Paranormal Activity (fi lm series), 57, 77, 157 Providence (city). See under Lovecraft, H. P.
Park Chan-wook, 196, 199, 204; Oldboy, Pulse. See Kairo
196; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 196; Punter, David, 5
Thirst, 196–197, 199 puppets, 179, 183, 186
Partridge, Christopher, 38, 49, 77 Pure Ones. See Cathars (Perfecti, Pure
Passage, The (Cronin), 154 Ones)
Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson), 35 Puritan revolution, 47. See also Radical
Paule, Arnold, 118 Reformation
Peale, Norman Vincent, The Power of
Positive Thinking, 41 Quake (videogame), 60
Pentecostalists, 50 Quakers. See Society of Friends (Quakers)
Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, 26; The Flanders Quay, Stephen. See Brothers Quay
Panel, 30; The Seville Communion, Quay, Timothy. See Brothers Quay
275n14 Quinn, D. Michael, 47
Perfecti. See Cathars (Perfecti, Pure Ones)
Perfectionists, 48 Radcliffe, Ann, 2, 3, 7, 23, 24, 45, 96; and
Persephone, 103, 142, 235 “explained supernatural,” 2–3, 101,
personal gnosis, 42, 48–49, 51, 263, 243; 106, 109, 234, 270n4; and female
and Anne Rice, 243; in New Age Gothick, 99; influence on Keats, 106;
 Radcliffe, Ann (continued) romance: as label for classic Gothick, 2, 8,
influence on women’s romance genre, 96– 97; linguistic origins, 96; as
7, 96, 102, 106; The Italian, 102; medieval literary genre, 8, 96, 101;
Mysteries of Udolpho, 2, 28, 45, 98– 99, women’s romance. See also Gothick
101–102, 137, 291n9; “On the subgenres: women’s romance
Supernatural in Poetry,” 270n4, romance, sentimental. See Gothick
330 273n45. See also supernatural, subgenres: women’s romance
explained: in Mysteries of Udolpho Romance of the Rose, The, 96, 139, 174, 306n8
Radical Reformation: and fan-based Romanticism, 2, 4– 6, 8, 11, 15, 85, 96– 97,
spiritual groups, 70; role in preserving 99, 101, 104, 121, 266; and Gothick, 2,
I n de x

esoteric beliefs, 14–15, 40, 45–47, 225, 4–5, 48, 97– 99, 100–101, 105–106, 117,
262. See also Protestant Reformation 195, 200, 213–214, 222; and New
Ragna Rok. See under apocalypse Expressionism, 217; and new Gothick,
Ramsland, Katherine, 133 xii, 17, 146, 163, 230, 266. See also
Rapture, the, 37, 87, 243–245 Gothick (genre)
Rapture, The (Tolkin), 245 Romero, George, 152; Dawn of the Dead,
Rec (Balagueró), 193, 197 156–157, 166; innovations in Gothick,
Recluse, The (sci-fi fan mag), 52 152; Night of the Living Dead, 152–153,
Redfield, James, The Celestine Prophecy, 158
26, 42 Roth, Eli, 204
Redon, Odilon, 223 Roussel, Raymond, Locus Solus, 214
Reeve, Clara, 10, 96, 280n26 Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series, 5, 7,
Regis, Pamela, 106 54, 178, 241
religion building, 18, 41–42, 45–71, 265; Ruins, The, 205
foundations of, 47–51 Rymer, James Malcolm, Varney the
Religious Science Church, 40 Vampire, 121
repetition compulsion. See under Gothick
subgenres, horror sacred feminine: in The Da Vinci Code, 29,
Resident Evil: fi lm series, 129, 153, 164; 32–33; in Pan’s Labyrinth, 40; in The
videogame, 153, 199 Shack, 36, 253; in Twilight series, 40
resurrected dead. See zombies St. Christopher, 221
Resurrection, Church of the, 166 St. Dominic, xiv, 16–17, 19, 79, 114, 141,
Reuss, Theodor, 64 273
Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 151, 291n15 St. Wilgefortis, 221, 232, 236, 255
Rice, Anne, 4, 31, 76, 100, 179; Angel Time, Salt of the Earth (Biberman), 227
242; and Catholic Church, 126, 240; Samhain. See Halloween
innovations in Gothick, 124–125, 222; Satan, 90– 93, 104–105, 111, 129, 145, 221,
Interview with the Vampire, 124–126, 260, 263, 287n14; as alien organism,
131–132, 135, 139, 169, 222, 240–243, 78; belief in, 92; change in attributes,
243, 257; as male Gothick writer, 100; 74, 79, 82, 92; in Christian Gothick,
Memnoch the Devil, 125; Of Love and 245–246, 251–252; in comic books and
Evil, 242–243; Out of Egypt, 241–242; graphic novels, 73, 80– 93, 125; in
and vampire subculture, 131, 133, 169. Gothick fiction and fi lm, 24–25,
See also under cathedrals; personal 76–79, 125, 228, 245; history of, 22–24,
gnosis; vampires 28, 73–76; as homme fatal, 102–103,
Ridgeway, John, John Constantine: 111, 121; human spawn of, 22, 79,
Hellblazer, 85– 86, 125 83– 84, 87– 89; importance to the
Ringu (The Ring; Takashi), 188, 196–199, 210 Gothick, 12–14; involuntary
Rite, The, 22, 23, 77 possession (female) by, 13, 21, 24–25,
Robbins, Matthew, 235 75–78, 110, 123, 151; in Lovecraft
Roberson, Chris, I, Zombie: Dead to the sects, 63, 65, 67, 73; voluntary pact
World, 148, 162 (male) with, 13, 24–25, 75–78, 198,
Robertson, Pat, 225 286n103, 287n14, 303n7; in women’s
Roerich, Nicholas, 235 romance, 102–103, 106, 109. See also
Roe’s Room, The (Majewski), 216 Satan, Church of
Satan, Church of, 65– 66, 263; doctrine of, Somne (Ortiz), 212
74. See also LaVey, Anton (Howard Song of Roland, The, 96
Stanton Levey); Order of the Son of Satan (comic book), 83– 85, 260
Trapezoid Southern Gothic. See American Gothic
Satoshi Kon, ii, 213 Spare, Austin Osman, 67
Saw (film series): Saw, 203–204; Saw III, 203 Species, 198
Schneider, Kirk J., 71 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 172 331
science fiction. See under Gothick Spinola Book of Hours, xiv, 16–17, 19, 46,
subgenres 273n49
Scientology, 18, 48–49; largest known Spirited Away. See Miyazaki Hayao

I n de x
scripture, 279n11; Operating Thetan Spiritualism, 47, 64, 145
as divine human, 48. See also Hubbard, spirituality, 26, 38–42, 51, 54, 262–263; in
L. Ron New Expressionism, 215; in the new
Scott, Ridley, 235 Gothick, 6, 8, 15, 73, 74, 85, 243, 265.
Scott, Walter, Waverley, 49, 97 See also New Age spirituality; new
scripture, 18, 55, 91, 242, 279n11; Gothick religious movements (NRMs);
fiction as, 18, 46, 49; as mass media, 48; personal gnosis
in NRMs, 50; shaped by Gothick Splice (Natali), 198
fiction, 48 Stake Land (Mickle), 154
Secondary Believers, 56, 261, 265; Starry Wisdom, 66
defi nition, 56–58; in Goth subculture, Star Trek, 54–55, 57–58; “Treklit,” 55. See
63; links to Primary Believers, 58, also under fandom
61– 62, 261; Lovecraftian, 62, 68; in Star Wars (Lucas), 54, 219
vampire subculture, 131–132; in Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case
zombie subculture, 157–158. See also of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 75
Primary Believers Stewart, George, Earth Abides, 154
Secondary World, 56, 59 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 5, 45, 63, 118–119,
Second Life, 147 121–124, 131, 205, 222, 243, 246,
Secret, The. See Byrne, Rhonda 296n22, 296n28, 311n48; innovations in
Secret Life of Puppets, The, x–xii Gothick, 5, 121–123; theatrical
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 99, 273n46, adaptations, 123, 222
306n6 Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft, The
Self, Will, My Idea of Fun, 173 (graphic novel), 61
Seventh Sign, The, 79 Strieber, Whitley, The Hunger, 126, 135
Shack, The. See Young, William P. strigoi. See vampires
Shakers. See United Society of Believers sublime, 15, 221, 236; Gothick sublime,
Shakespeare, William, 3, 41, 99, 104, 184, 15–16, 236
225; and the law of correspondences, sub-Zeitgeist, xi, 18, 38, 41–42, 74, 87, 119,
224; Romeo and Juliet, 136 124, 151, 155–157, 166, 170–171,
Shaun of the Dead, 157 262–263, 265
Shelley, Mary, 4, 6; Frankenstein, 4, 6, 36, Sue, Eugène, The Wandering Jew, 25, 126,
100, 120, 198, 311n48; as male 274n11
Gothick writer, 100; theatrical superheroes (comic book), 7, 75, 84, 265; as
adaptation, 222 divine humans, 80– 81, 130; female,
Shelley, Percy, 4, 100, 120, 295n15 129; in global Gothick, 91, 194, 262; as
Shrek (fi lm, book), 222 monsters, 82, 165
Sitges (fantasy cinema festival), 189–217 Superman, 80– 81, 91, 138
Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood, 168, 169, supernatural, explained, 6, 78, 109; in Jane
179–187. See also Antenna Theater Eyre, 101; in Mysteries of Udolpho, 28,
Smith, John L., 69 98, 234; in science fiction, 3, 6–7, 33,
Smith, Joseph, 48, 145, 272n41 49, 78. See also Radcliffe, Ann
Snow, Lorenzo, 145 supernaturalism, 5, 11, 16, 133, 264; global,
Society for Creative Anachronism, 10, 55 197; in H. P. Lovecraft, 61; “Is this
Society of Friends (Quakers), 47–48 real or am I crazy?” trope, 234, 256;
Solaris (Tarkovsky), 217 mainstreaming of, xi–xii, 46, 6– 8,
 supernaturalism (continued) True Blood, 81, 130, 161
17–18, 110, 146, 266; in medieval Turistas, 205
romances, 96; in New Expressionism, Turner, William, 239–240
215; in North America, 6; nostalgia Twain, Mark, 106
for, 23, 119; in paranormal romance, 28 Days Later, 156
100; subjectivizing of, 74– 75, 99; in 28 Weeks Later, 156
332 Victorian children’s literature, 5–7 Twilight series. See under Meyer, Stephenie
Surrealism, 190, 214, 223 Twilight Zone, The, 54
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 42, 145–146, 225,
252–253; Heaven and Hell, 49 Ugarte, Eduardo, 202–203
I n de x

Swedenborgianism, 42, 48, 146, 254–255 undead. See vampires; zombies

Swift, Jonathan, 97 underworld, 105, 130, 170–171, 186; in del
synchronicity, 224, 313n20 Toro’s fi lms, 223, 227–229, 231–236; in
global Gothick, 208–212; Lord of, 103,
Tale of Two Sisters, A (Kim), 196 115, 142; Queen of, 103
Tales from the Crypt, 204 Underworld (fi lm series), 129
Tan, Candy, 107, 108, 110, 117 United Amateur Press Association, 53
Tantric body. See under Meyer, Stephenie United Society of Believers (Shakers),
Tarantino, Quentin, 191, 204 47–48, 254
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 217 Unity Church, 40
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, 261
Temple of Set, 66, 133. See also Aquino, Vampire: The Masquerade (videogame),
Michael 130
Temple of the Vampire, 263 Vampire Bible, 132
Tetsuo (Tsukamoto), 204 vampire romance. See under Gothick
theosis, 265. See also divine human subgenres: women’s romance
Theosophy, 47, 64, 225, 253–254, 256; vampires, 22, 58, 63, 71, 92– 93, 99–100,
Ascended Masters, 81; in New Age 107, 110, 116, 117–147, 150, 153–155,
spirituality, 39, 42, 254 161–163, 165–166, 169, 196–199, 229,
Thing, The (Carpenter), 235 262; and Christianity, 5, 26, 119, 122,
Thirst. See under Park Chan-wook 125, 240, 244 301n99; in comic books,
Thomas, Keith, 15, 120 82, 298n46; as divine humans, 10, 40,
Todorov, Tzvetan, 57, 281n48 74, 125, 138, 143–146, 235, 254; in fi lm,
Tolkien, J. R. R., 5, 56–57; The Lord 124, 130, 297n30; folklore of, 31,
of the Rings, 54, 56, 99, 250; “On 117–120; as heroes, 61, 82, 114, 124,
Fairy-Stories,” 56; Secondary World, 126, 128, 297n31; hybridity in, 83, 126,
56–57. See also under fandom 130; literary history, 117–134;
Tolstoy, Leo, 121 mainstreaming of, 110, 129–130,
Tomb of Dracula (comic book series), 82 273n50; as metaphor, 133–134, 298n54;
torture porn, 147, 204, 206 in the new Gothick, 7– 8, 134, 240; as
Transcendentalism, 42, 47 replacement for witches, 118–119; as
transformation, alchemical, 111–114, 146, statues, 31, 139–140, 299n80; as strigoi,
230–231; as Gothick trope, 75, 138, 122, 296, 296n23; subculture, 63– 64,
209, 230; in superhero comics, 75; in 131–133, 169, 263; in theater, 121, 123;
women’s romance, 105. See also as zampires, 154, 163. See also under
alchemy; Change (from human to fandom; Meyer, Stephenie; Polidori,
supernatural creature) John William; Primary Believers;
Trapezoid, Order of the, 66, 280 Rice, Anne; Secondary Believers;
Trashorras, Antonio, 225 Stoker, Bram
Trier, Lars von: Dogme doctrine, 170, 190; Vampyr (Dreyer), 228
The Kingdom, 301n94; as New Vampyre, The (Polidori), 102; Byron
Expressionist, 216 attributed as author of, 295n16; Byron
Trombetta, Jim, 81, 152 as model for main character, 102; as
Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul), 214 seminal vampire story, 120–121
Troyes, Chretien de, 96 Versluis, Arthur, 47, 253, 316n35
videogames, xii, 26, 31, 53–55, 60, 129, 147, Wilson, Edmund, x
155, 199, 223, 247, 309n24; Christian, Witches, 79, 119–120; replaced by
244, 248; as Gothick narrative, 4, 10, vampires, 118–119; and Witchcraft
153, 176, 181, 300n80 Acts, 119
Virgin Spring, The (Bergman), 232 Wolf Creek, 204
vombies. See Zampires women’s romance. See under Gothick
voodoo, 151 subgenres 333
Woolf, Virginia, 99
Wachowski, Andy and Larry, 164, 176
Walpole, Horace: and beginning of the Xena: Warrior Princess, 129

I n de x
Gothick, 2, 24, 269n2; The Castle of X-Men, 80, 144
Otranto, 2, 7, 24, 101, 137, 150, 212,
226; and Gothick hybridity, 8, 96; and Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn, 127, 242; Hotel
the male Gothick, 97– 98, 123; Transylvania, 126
nostalgia for medieval, 2–3, 224; and Yasutaka Tsutsui, 213
the supernatural, 2–3, 11, 96, 224 Yeats, W. B., 64
Walsham, Alexandra, 146, 272n42, 274n5, Yim Pil-sung: Antarctic Journal, 191, 212,
293n44, 302n110 216–217; as New Expressionist, 216
Wandering Jew, legend of, 25, 126, 130 Young, Edward, 2
Warcraft (videogame), 1, 53 Young, William P., The Shack, 238,
Warhammer (videogame), 26 239–258; as allegory, 17, 36, 254;
Warner, Marina, 150–151, 286–287n5, divine human in, 257–258; and the
291n15 new Gothick, 240, 257. See also under
Warwick, Alexandra, 6 alchemy; allegory; divine human;
Wattles, Wallace, The Science of Getting fractals; personal gnosis; sacred
Rich, 41 feminine
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 214–215,
216; as New Expressionist, 214–215 Za Frumi, 57
Wells, H. G., 6 zampires, 154
Wendell, Sarah, 107, 108, 110, 117 Zola, Emile, Thérèse Raquin, as source of
werewolves, 7– 8, 75, 107, 110, 128–130, Thirst, 196, 199
134, 198; in Christian demonology, Zombie, Rob, 205, 206
294n1; literary history of, 117, 294n1; Zombieland, 157
and Otherkin, 58; in Twilight, 136, 140 zombies, 92– 93, 105, 129, 148, 149–167,
Wertham, Frederic, 166; Seduction of the 193, 205, 291n15 222; apocalypse, 150,
Innocent, 81 152, 155, 157–160, 165–166; in comics,
Whedon, Joss, 128 152–153; as divine humans, 161,
Whissel, Kristen, 288n27, 312n15 162–165; history of, 150, 302n2;
White Zombie, 150–151 mainstreaming of, 105, 129, 161; as
Wicca, 48–49, 67, 79 social metaphor, 166; subculture, 153,
Wilkinson, Sarah, 96 157–159, 161, 166, 171, 195, 263. See
Williams, Anne, 99–100, 105, 300n92 also under Death: allegorical figure;
Williams, David, 220–221, 306n6 fandom; Gothick subgenres:
Williams, Linda, 81 postapocalyptic; Primary Believers;
Wilson, Colin, Space Vampires, 126 Romero, George; Secondary Believers