This paper examines a strand in British television historical drama that presents what I term a “Gothicised” version of history. This actively engages with historical trauma as returning to confront its originating society, as the classic Gothic text represents the returning or ongoing effects of a traumatic past in the narrative present. In Peaky…[Read more]

This paper considers the 2018 television adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock as an example of Gothicised historical television drama, which uses the Gothic mode to present a past in a way that challenges our expectations of what prestige historical drama should be like, and to emphasise historical traumas and the way that they are still relevant…[Read more]

Keynote paper.
This paper examines the connections between the winter season and Gothic historical television dramas. It defines Gothic historical television dramas as dramas with a historical setting that take on a Gothic aesthetic and emphasise themes of trauma which are active in the past and continue to be active in the present. It also…[Read more]

The Gothic clings to Irish and Welsh coasts and finds voice through strange stories. Centuries of accumulated death and tragedy forms a dense web of sorrow with particularly prolific roots in the literature, songs, and stories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These traditions resonate within the longer history of lives and vessels lost…[Read more]

This paper draws on the letters and messages and newspaper clipping held by the BBC Written Archives Centre in relation to the 1954 adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a case study for considering how we understand the historical reception of programming. This production is particularly useful in this regard because it achieved a certain…[Read more]

‘Folk horror’ has often been considered, following Mark Gatiss’ description of the genre, as centrally focused on a particular ‘obsession with the British landscape, its folklore, and superstitions’. While these elements are clearly significant, they become more problematic when opening up the genre to include texts from beyond Britain. Not only…[Read more]

This paper considers the use of Boym’s formulations of reflective and restorative nostalgia as a productive lens for viewing the tensions within folk horror texts and their appeals. Considering folk horror texts such as The Wicker Man, Midsommar and The Living and the Dead, the paper will demonstrate that Boym’s two conceptions help to draw out…[Read more]

This paper examines the responses to the 1954 BBC adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as held by the BBC Written Archives Centre, in the light of the British Horror Comics campaign of the mid-1950s.

Keynote presentation at the UK’s first academic folk horror conference.

Invited research presentation given at the University of Reading, 8 October 2015.

It has become a standard approach when considering screen presentations that incorporate the country house to examine them in the light of Andrew Higson’s formulation of the heritage drama, which presented an essentially conservative, depoliticised spectacle of grandeur, safely distanced from the reality of the majority of viewers. However, the c…[Read more]

Today’s academia is obsessed about writing and speaking gobbledygook. It has little time in sitting still and actually reading fiction, poetry and say, Wittgenstein. One pretends to say fancy things about these authors but one does not actually read books anymore. COVID 19 Lockdown prompted this author to answer queries from students and peers…[Read more]

While there has been a growing acknowledgement of the existence of earlier examples of television science fiction, the typical history of the genre still privileges Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953) as foundational. This was a significant production, and an effective piece of television drama, but it was not the first piece of B…[Read more]

Each Christmas during his tenure as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, M.R.James would take part in a ritual celebration of Christmas with students and colleagues which invariably culminated with the reading of a ghost story. This tradition drew on a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas that can be traced back through the l…[Read more]

There is a long tradition in the UK, in England in particular, of the Christmas ghost story. The most famous is probably Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, but close behind are the ghost stories of M.R.James. James wrote many of his stories as Christmas entertainments, but this link was reinforced in the 1970s w…[Read more]

This paper focuses on UK and US traditions of seasonal horror at Christmas and Halloween to consider how they provide opportunities for reflection on the causes of fear at liminal times in the calendar. These liminal times contain numerous traditions dedicated to looking back and forward, such as end of year reviews, or addresses from heads of…[Read more]

You are cordially invited to a special event to celebrate ten years of the Open Graves, Open Minds project and to launch our new book In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children.
In the Company of Wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety…[Read more]

This essay explores the ecoGothic resonances of Tales of the Black Freighter, a dark
pirate tale embedded within Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986-87
postmodern DC graphic novel. By providing a grim prism for themes such as nuclear
paranoia, the monstrous transformation of the self, and the horrifying possibilities of
scientific…[Read more]

This is the syllabus I’ve designed for my Fall 2019 undergraduate-level Introduction to Film course. I focused the course as a genre study of American horror films. I want my students to be able to consider the socio-political contexts of popular films and to detect and explain the arguments and worldviews produced by film.