EditorĪlthough the history of the ancient Germanic tribes called the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths occupied a very small portion of world history texts, their culture has influenced Western civilization more than people may understand. Rachel Fischer has ably put together an excellent resource for anyone wanting to build a collection from the ground-up, or add some new and interesting resources. She can be reached at concerning this column should be addressed to Mark Shores e-mail: How did we get from warlike Germanic tribes sacking Rome, to an aesthetic or subculture imbued with “the dark and melancholy, a hint of horror tinged with romance.” 1 This column will show you how widely this aesthetic is represented in art, architecture, film, literature and more, and along the way you will undoubtedly find some great resources to add to your collections, from music CD, to academic journals, reference works and the usual popular and academic books. She has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Dominican University, a Master of Science in Management degree from Minot State University, and a BFA in Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Fischer is a Metadata Librarian at the University of Alabama. Psychic investigator stories place a group of people, both amateur and professional, into an uninhabited haunted house to do research on supernatural phenomena, while family stories normally start with a family-father, mother, multiple children-moving into a new house only to.The Gothic Aesthetic: From the Ancient Germanic Tribes to the Contemporary Goth Subculture Of the major patterns of haunted house films, one puts psychic investigators in the center, and another puts a family. (1) Either way, the long-term popularity of haunted house films must convince anyone that they are a solid subgenre, although there are not many academic discussions. Mark Jancovich notes that horror films in the 1950s and 1960s were remade in the 1970s and 1980s, and there is a wave of remakes of 1970s and 1980s haunted house films in the twenty-first century. Yet one can detect some regularity or cycles not only in horror films but also in haunted house films. Kim Newman mentions that the popularity of haunted house films is "perennial rather than cyclical" (217), and claims that haunted house films never come in cascades and do not fall into excess like other horror subgenres. I shall also refer to The Amityville Horror (1979), and Burnt Offerings (1976) and The Shining (1980)-the prototype of haunted house films-as well as new movies such as The Possession (2012) and Haunter (2013) to illuminate changes in the concept of the American family. In order to clarify the current changes in haunted house films, my argument will focus on a comparison between the old and the new Poltergeist (1982/2015). Newer films depart from long-held assumptions regarding the family structure and suggest that the power of patriarchy is not taken for granted anymore. The haunted house films in the 1970s and 1980s question and confirm the nuclear family structure that was perceived to be threatened during this period by a worsening economy and the changing social conditions that gave rise to second-wave feminism. New developments in recent years, however, suggest that the concept of family is going through a minor change. I will argue that the heyday of American haunted house films in the late 1970s and early 1980s established the subgenre as an exploration of the American family from a male perspective. Then I will delineate the thematic changes in haunted house films through an analysis of the films today in comparison to the films in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to understand their significance in terms of Gothic criticism.
In this paper, I will first attempt to define the American haunted house film as an established genre rooted in the formulas of Gothic fiction. One of the most commercially successful haunted house films in the 1980s, Poltergeist, was remade in 2015, and its reworking reflects the changes in one of the most important themes of haunted house films, family. Every year we see new haunted house films, and many directors and writers are taking pains to offer the audience new twists, not just to follow and recreate old tricks.
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