Contemporary Gothic Horror Cinema: The Imagined Pasts and Traumatic Ghosts of Crimson Peak (2015) and The Woman in Black (2012)

Among the hundreds of horror films produced so far in the twenty-first century, there have been quite a few prominent trends, many of which are explored elsewhere in this special journal issue: found footage horror, “torture porn,” zombie films, possession films, and so-called “post-horror” or “elevated horror.” Overwhelmingly, these horror strands set events in the present or near future. The most industrious of these strands, found footage, is characterized by its foregrounding of modern video recording and telecommunication technologies (Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil” 124; Turner 54–78), most recently of immersive, diegetic laptop screens and mobile phones. The second, torture porn, best exemplified by Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), and The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), emphasizes spectacles of torture and gruesome murder reminiscent of online execution videos. The third, the zombie film, has been associated with post-9/11 terrorist fears, capitalism, apocalypticism, and posthumanism (Wetmore 159–64; Keetley). The twenty-first century has also seen contemporary updates of the possession film that rose to fame in the 1970s, best represented by Paranormal Activity (2009) and The Last Exorcism (2010). As for post-horror, some of the most commercially and critically successful films of the 2010s, such as Get Out (2017), Midsommar (2019), and Candyman (2021), tackle head on very timely socio-political issues like racial tension in the U.S. or toxic masculinity. In short, post-millennial horror has its finger firmly on the pulse of the here and now. In this article, I place the focus on a different manifestation of contemporary horror cinema that, despite being less dominant than in the 1930s and 1960s, still commands considerable audience and critical interest: Gothic horror. Sleepy Hollow (1999), The Wyvern Mystery (2000), The Others (2001), Dorian Gray (2009), The Awakening (2011), The Lodgers (2017), The Little Stranger (2018), The Wrath (2018), Rebecca (2020), and Eight for Silver (2021) are only some of the many films that have been labeled “Gothic” by reviewers and critics since the turn of the millennium. Despite its modern fragmentation and dispersion (Punter 145–46), the Gothic mode has thrived in the twenty-