Afterword: Uncanny Transformations in Film

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

“…While the connection between the gothic and the fairy tale seems unexpected at first, "the fairy-tale and the gothic are not as disparate as we might assume, particularly in terms of structure and plot, and many of the tales teeter on the brink of the gothic, with only a change in 'sensibility' needed to tip their almost identical plots into the other mode" (Hirst 2018, p. 3). Connections between the fairy tale and the gothic have been made by Lucy Armitt ([1998Armitt ([ ] 2009 in her entry "Gothic Fairy-Tale" in The Handbook of the Gothic, by Laura Hubner (2018) in Fairytale and Gothic Horror: Uncanny Transformations in Film, and, from a feminist point of view, Gilbert and Gubar's ([2000] 2020) deconstructivist reading of fairy tales as gothic in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Early connections between fairy tales and gothic horror can be established, as the two have been interwoven from their roots in oral traditions and were first recorded during the late romantic movement, originating in Europe and traceable to Germany (Rothmann [1978(Rothmann [ ] 2014.…”

“…Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart" (p. 16). Laura Hubner (2018) states that the "bringing together of different fairy tales and fairy-tale versions creates new meanings that the fusion with gothic adds to in complex and magical ways" (p. 39), reminiscent of the narrator's comment of stories running together "like raindrops". Fusing both gothic and fairytale conventions in "The Husband Stitch", as well as combining fiction with non-fiction in Dream House, are two more instances of "running together" that are worth examining in Machado's boundary-blurring writing.…”

The ambiguities of ancestry: antiquity, ruins and converging traditions of Australian Gothic Cinema

“…The pervasive aesthetics of Gothic are seen as dominant or in ascendance in the twentyfirst century by various critics (for instance, Hubner 2018;Spooner 2017). Prone to divergent and contradictory discourses (Spooner 2017;Ng 2008), the transnational taste for Gothic offers a challenge in thinking about the domestic traditions in Australian cinema.…”

Introduction: Fairy Tales and Other Horrors

“…The relationship between horror and the fairy tale has thus largely been explored through the critical lens of the Gothic, with the aim of tracing Gothic motifs in fairy-tale narratives or, contrarily, fairy-tale elements in Gothic literature and locating differences and similarities. Various works have been dedicated to establishing a theoretical framework for Gothic readings or reworkings of canonical fairy tales, including Armitt's ([1998] 2009), Hart's (2020) andHubner's (2018). The latter text in particular considers the fairy tale and the Gothic as interweaving modes of creating horror in films, such as del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.…”