Toward the second half of the eighteenth century things began to change. Just as the reign of classicism in poetry was slowly but surely undermined by an interest in medieval ballads; in the world of architecture, it gradually became acceptable to admit that Gothic buildings had a sort of primitive appeal. The first significant stirring of this new feeling can be found in a letter written by Horace Walpole, the fourth Earl of Orford, to the Honorable H S Conway in June 1747. Walpole was writing to tell his friend that he’d just moved house:
You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges…9
Walpole’s ‘bauble’ was a country house near Twickenham on the outskirts of London. For several years after he wrote this letter, he continued to commute between Strawberry Hill and London, where he sat as a member of Parliament. But Walpole was never that interested in politics — his appearances in the House grew more and more sporadic and by 1768 he had stopped showing up for good. He had plenty of other, better ways to amuse himself — he entertained at the drop of a hat, played cards till two in the morning, and wrote stories and poems which he published with his own press. But the majority of Walpole’s time was taken up with his two greatest passions: renovating and decorating, and it was Strawberry Hill itself that would become his life’s work. When he wasn’t supervising construction work or poring over sketches and architect’s drawings, the future fourth Earl of Orford could be found hanging around the auction houses of the greater London area, looking for bargains. As to what it was exactly that he was looking for, his letters give us a pretty good idea. Writing to Horace Mann, he described the state of Strawberry Hill in 1753:
The bow-window below leads into a little parlour hung with a stone-colour Gothic paper and Jackson’s Venetian prints… From hence, under two gloomy arches, you come to the hall and staircase, which it is impossible to describe to you, as it is the most particular and chief beauty of the castle. Imagine the walls covered with (I call it paper, but it is really paper painted in perspective to represent) Gothic fretwork: the lightest Gothic balustrade to the staircase, adorned with antelopes…10
Gothic, gothic, gothic. Walpole’s passion for all things medieval led him, over the next thirty years, to transform Strawberry Hill, both inside and out, into a strange hybrid of medieval castle and gothic cathedral. Its growth was entirely improvised — Walpole would return from a walking tour of the countryside or a trip to the Continent with a head full of ideas, and would quickly have his architects and builders incorporate what he’d seen into extensions for his rapidly growing country mansion and its grounds. By the time its owner died, Strawberry Hill had grown from its original five acres to forty-six, and the house itself had become an eccentric, ad-hoc tribute from a wealthy and slightly eccentric English gent to what, in his lifetime had been an almost universally reviled form of architecture. By 1763 it was a much-visited and much-discussed tourist attraction.
What no-one could have suspected, was that even as Walpole had been transforming Strawberry Hill, Strawberry Hill had begun to transform its owner. One morning in June 1764 Walpole woke from a nightmare.
… I thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.11
That night Walpole sat down at his desk to write, ‘without knowing in the least what I intended to say’, and before he knew it, a novel had appeared: a tale of medieval intrigue laced with family curses and underground passageways. The Castle of Otranto is generally regarded as the very first gothic horror novel, although in Walpole’s day, that would not have been considered a compliment. Walpole knew as much when he wrote it. It was, as he explained to a friend, a book out of time. ‘It was not written for this age, which wants nothing but cold reason.’12
Walpole, aware of the difficult proposition he had on his hands, decided to publish Otranto anonymously, and to further cover his tracks by not using his own press. He then concocted an intricate ruse to explain the appearance of this superstitious tale in his age of reason. In the book’s preface Walpole introduces himself as the anonymous translator of a sixteenth-century text based on a story written during the crusades. This did the trick. As British literary historian Michael Gamer points out, Walpole’s conceit allowed the eighteenth-century reader to swallow the impossible events in his story, because the reader could accept that people in medieval times would believe such things.13 The Monthly Review praised it as an entirely worthy historical curiosity. Unfortunately, Walpole blew it by revealing himself as the true author in the preface to the book’s second edition, after which the reviewers changed their tune entirely:
While we considered it as a translation, we could readily excuse its preposterous phenomena, and consider them as sacrifices to a gross and unenlightened age. But when, as in this edition, The Castle of Otranto is revealed to be a modern performance, that indulgence we afforded to the foibles of supposed antiquity we can by no means extend to the singularity of a false taste in a cultivated period of learning. It is, indeed, more than strange that an author of a refined and polished genius, should be an advocate for re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism!14
Walpole had the last laugh. In 1781 Otranto was adapted for the stage as The Count of Narbonne. Its run would last for the next two decades, during which time Otranto itself became a bestseller. Walpole’s story inspired a whole new genre of literature, the gothic novel, whose popularity would last well into the next century.
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto exploited a chink in the armour of Enlightenment culture which would eventually bring the whole edifice crashing down. His story gently tricked his readers into admitting that there is beauty in terror and darkness, and that there are things in the universe that can never be explained. These tendencies — our desire to be frightened and our need to believe — are irrational, but undeniably human. The Age of Reason could not, for all its efforts, suppress them forever.
As historian Norman Davies has observed it seems deeply strange to us now that an entire culture could have been built around the veneration of a single human quality — reason — to the exclusion of all else.15 But ‘Enlightenment’ can only be understood in terms of the ‘darkness’ it was meant to illuminate. The irrational was deeply troubling to Enlightenment thinkers because it was believed that mankind’s surrender to the irrational — to superstition, belief in magic and dogma — had created the horrors of the Middle Ages. The reaction to Walpole’s novel from critics was symptomatic of the widespread feeling that if the guard was let down even for a moment, the horror might return. Walpole snuck horror in by the backdoor in a way that allowed the eighteenth-century reader to feel virtuous (following the exploits of the hero) while secretly enjoying terror, mystery, blood lust, and a variety of other unreasonable feelings.
Rocky Horror
EVEN AFTER THE popularity of the original craze for gothic fiction died down, its conventions survived in other literary forms. William Beckford’s Vathek, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the historical romances of Walter Scott are all directly indebted to Otranto. But so, less directly, are Stoker’s Dracula and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. And closer to our own time, Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project and the Harry Potter films still make use of the conventions Walpole established. The most crucial of these, as American academic Michael Gamer points out, is his re-imagining of the medieval castle, ‘transformed in Walpole’s handling from a locus of safety into a place of sexual transgression and supernatural visitation, of secret passageways and political intrigue… It is a place that harbours guilty secrets and unlawful desires’.1
If Gamer’s description sounds a bit like a plot summary of The Rocky Horror Show, it’s with goo
d reason. The props of the gothic story — the dark and stormy night, the horror in the dungeon and, of course, the castle itself — were already clichés by the nineteenth century, which makes them perfect materials for satire. Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell Brad and Janet. In blissful ignorance of the conventions of over two centuries of gothic fiction the squeaky-clean pair shows up at Frank-N-Furter’s castle expecting a locus of safety. What they get is a whole lot of sexual transgression and supernatural visitation. The castle, as Gamer puts it, has become a fortress — not for keeping people out, but for keeping people in.2 Not that we really want Brad and Janet to escape. In Frank-N-Furter’s world, conventional morality has been turned on its head, and that’s the way we like it. Outside it’s the 1950s — a world of white picket fences, high-school hops and the missionary position. In the castle civilisation has disappeared, and Frank-N-Furter instigates a sort of pan-sexual freakout in which Brad and Janet blissfully surrender to the power of the irrational. The lyric Frank-N-Furter sings at this point, ‘Don’t dream it, be it’, was actually used as an epigram for the NME’s very first story on the rising Goth scene.3 That line, as Little Nell (who played Columbia in the film) later recalled, ‘hit a nerve’ at the time. Rocky Horror tied up a number of ideas that were floating around in the ’70s, linking the sexual transgression of glam rock to the androgynous threat of the vampire and other movie fiends. (Richard O’Brien’s make up and costume for Riff Raff was modelled on stills of Max Schreck in Nosferatu.) The transsexual from Transylvania became — along with Alice Cooper and David Bowie — one of the spiritual forefathers of goth.
Rocky Horror still changes lives. Davey Havok remembers being fascinated ‘at a very young age’ by his mother’s copy of the soundtrack album.4 Sixteen-year-old Gerard Way first tried on his mother’s lipstick after he got dumped by a girl, but he knew he liked it when he looked in the mirror and realised he looked like Frank-N-Furter. ‘It definitely reminded me of Rocky Horror and I was definitely into it,’ Gerard later recalled, ‘and then, uh…then came the clothes, you know?’5
For both AFI and My Chemical Romance, horror — rocky or otherwise — is an important ingredient. Their undead aesthetic connects the dots from tortured romantic poet, to blood-sucking fiend, to darkly attractive rock star. This explains the appeal, for both Gerard Way and Davey Havok, of The Misfits — the legendary US punk band formed in New Jersey by Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only in 1977. After seeing The Damned play later that same year, Danzig and Only knew where their future lay — in the unholy union of punk rock and fake blood. Danzig let his love of old horror movies run riot over songs like ‘Horror Business’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’. By the following year, they looked like a punk band fronted by extras from a zombie movie — Only had hollowed his eyes out into black holes, Danzig had transformed himself into a living skeleton using nothing more than a black shirt and a bucket of white house paint. Videos of Misfits shows from around this time look like dispatches from the more forbidding regions of hell. Monsters lurch around on some sort of primitive altar, sending ear-splitting noises into the darkness, while an army of zombies lift their arms and their voices in worship. ‘Muhs-fuhts! Muhs-fuhts!’6 Watching over it all is the image of a horrible grinning skull. This is The Misfits ‘Fiend’ logo, which the band found on a poster for an old horror movie and had stencilled onto their gear and printed on T-shirts. These continue to outsell the band’s records by a considerable margin.
My Chemical Romance has performed The Misfits’ ‘Astro Zombies’, as well as paying the band the more significant tribute of adapting Danzig’s ‘Corpse Paint’ for its Black Parade uniforms. For Gerard Way, The Misfits provided a crucial alternative to the political statements that dominated punk when he was growing up. While other punk bands were speaking up about injustice, oppression and social inequality, The Misfits were creating a world in which these things simply didn’t exist.
The Misfits inhabited the reversed moral world of the gothic, a world where despair, torment, darkness and even death are sublime. The appeal of the gothic, for romantics, is part of the same impulse to escape the world as it is that sends them running out of the city into the forest. But where Wordsworth’s or Rousseau’s was largely a flight through space, for the lover of the gothic, it’s a flight back in time — to a world that existed long before civilisation, and never fails to creep back in wherever reason lets its guard down. This, for the romantic, is where we find the things that really connect us all to one another — the sight of blood, the eye-sockets of a skull, the elemental power expressed in a dark and stormy night.
Vincent
Vincent Malloy is seven years old
He’s always polite and does what he’s told
For a boy his age he’s considerate and nice
But he wants to be just like Vincent Price!1
VINCENT MALLOY, WITH his sunken cheeks and shock of black hair, is the claymation star of director Tim Burton’s first short film, made while he was working at Disney in 1979.
Young Vincent’s imagination is steeped in horror movie imagery. When his aunt comes to visit, he smiles indulgently as she pats him on the head. But in his mind, he’s Vincent Price slowly lowering her into a vat of hot wax. His mother sees him playing nicely with his dog, Abercrombie. How is she to know that in his imagination he’s Dr Frankenstein hooking Abercrombie up to some infernal electrical machine? He throws the switch, and the dog is zombie-fied. Later:
He and his horrible zombie dog
Can go searching for victims in the London fog.2
No tale of gothic horror would be complete without the ghost of a dead lover and a scene in a graveyard at midnight. So Vincent, despite the fact that he is seven years old, convinces himself that he has a beautiful wife who has been buried alive, and promptly rushes out into the gloom with a shovel:
He dug up her grave to make sure she was dead
Unaware that her grave…was his mother’s flower-bed.3
Vincent’s mother is not so much upset about the flower-bed as by her son’s insistence that he is cursed and alone, condemned — like some tiny Lord Byron — to ‘wander dark hallways alone and tormented’. It’s not like she’s grounded him or locked him in the attic, in fact, she’d much rather he went out and kicked a ball around with the other kids. But young Vincent feels distant and aloof from other people. For this, he has sound philosophical reasons. Vincent, like Byron, has no time for the idea of human perfectibility. Staying indoors wrapped in morbid thoughts of doom and horror might seem unhealthy, but Vincent refuses to ‘get better’ because it implies that his inner torment can be affected, even extinguished by reason, whereas he knows it cannot.
Little Vincent strongly resembles his creator — and not just in the hair. As a kid, Burton spent a lot of time alone. ‘I didn’t have a lot of friends,’ he recalled in 1994, ‘but there’s enough weird movies out there so you can go a long time without friends and see something every day that kind of speaks to you.’4 He grew up physically close enough to Hollywood to be able to see at an early age where these weird movies came from. He took a tour of Universal Studios and saw the streets where they shot Dracula and Frankenstein. ‘It was a powerful feeling,’ he said.5
He wasn’t much interested in school, in fact, one of his very first efforts behind a camera was a film made in response to an essay question on psychology. Burton handed in a montage of shots of schoolbooks shown to the accompaniment of Alice Cooper’s ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’. Art school wasn’t much better. Here, Burton came to the same conclusions as Vincent on the subject of Empiricism, the same ones William Blake had reached as he’d angrily flipped through Joshua Reynolds’s discourses on art education over two hundred years earlier. Man comes into the world with something unique, and society, with its rules and systems, does its best to rationalise that something out of existence.
I remember going through art school, and you’ve got to take life drawing, and it was a real struggle. Instead of encourag
ing you to express yourself and draw like you did when you were a child, they start going by the rules of society. They say, ‘No. No. No. You can’t draw like this.’6
Growing up in the California town of Burbank, Burton made important links between the horror movies he loved watching, and the suburban conformity he saw all around him. As a kid, he dreamed of being the actor who played Godzilla so that he could enjoy the thrill of smashing the grown-up world beneath his scaly feet. He already felt that society needed to be destroyed, and nothing he learned as he grew older changed that feeling to any significant degree. That’s why when he watched horror movies Tim Burton always sympathised with the monster. Of these, the one to make the biggest impression on him was James Whale’s 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein. Images from Whale’s film have turned up in a number of Burton’s, though he insists that the similarities are usually not so much a matter of homage as of his ideas and Whale’s coming from the same place, meaning that they tend to be expressed in the same way. Burton instinctively connected the monster’s rage with his own, and recognised his need to destroy as the necessary flip-side of his need to be loved.
The Bride of Frankenstein: ‘More capacity for love then earth/bestows on most of mortal mould and birth…’
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 13