Key research themes
1. How do Gothic films engage with cultural identity and socio-political contexts across diverse global cinemas?
This theme explores how Gothic cinema reflects, refracts, and shapes cultural identity by engaging with regional histories, social issues, and politics. It examines adaptations and reinterpretations of the Gothic in various national contexts, showing how the genre transcends its European literary origins to become a vehicle for commentary on local cultural anxieties, identity struggles, and historical traumas. It matters for scholars tracing the globalization of Gothic sensibilities and their intersections with cultural specificity and politics.
2. What aesthetic and narrative strategies distinguish contemporary Gothic films, especially in their treatment of monsters, identity, and hybridity?
Contemporary Gothic cinema employs a range of specific stylistic and narrative devices to interrogate identity, alterity, and monstrosity, often intersecting with post-anthropocentric perspectives and hybrid genre forms. This theme examines how modern Gothic films use cinematography, character complexity, intertextuality, and affective mode to both uphold and subvert traditional Gothic conventions, incorporating critiques of social norms and exploring new representational modes of the monstrous and the uncanny.
3. How do Gothic films intersect with and transform other genres and media forms, creating hybrid cinematic expressions?
Gothic cinema often functions through hybridization, blending elements with thriller, horror, techno-noir, eco-Gothic, and even music video formats, thus expanding its conceptual boundaries. This theme focuses on the cross-genre pollination and media-specific adaptations of Gothic aesthetics and narratives. It explores how Gothic tropes are reworked to critique technological modernity, ecological crises, gender, and media representation, reflecting a continually evolving cultural form mediated across cinematic and audiovisual transformations.