In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children – out in paperback August 2023

Posted on 1st August 2023 by Sam George

We are delighted to announce that the OGOM publication In the Company of Wolves is out in paperback from MUP this month priced at £20.00. The book connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres.

We begin with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children ­- often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals – and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the transition from animal to human in contemporary art, poetry and fashion.

Contents:

Preface – Sam George
Introduction: from preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance – Sam George and Bill Hughes
Part I : Cultural images of the wolf, the werewolf and the wolf-child
1 Wolves and lies: a writer’s perspective -Marcus Sedgwick
2 ‘Man is a wolf to man’: wolf behaviour becoming wolfish nature – Garry Marvin
3 When wolves cry: wolf-children, storytelling and the state of nature – Sam George
4 ‘Children of the night. What music they make!’: the sound of the cinematic werewolf – Stacey Abbott
Part II: Innocence and experience: brute creation, wild beast or child of nature
5 Wild sanctuary: running into the forest in Russian fairy tales – Shannon Scott
6 ‘No more than a brute or a wild beast’: Wagner the Werewolf, Sweeney Todd, and the limits of human responsibility – Joseph Crawford
7 The inner beast: scientific experimentation in George MacDonald’s ‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ – Rebecca Langworthy
8 Werewolves and white trash: brutishness, discrimination and the lower-class wolfman from The Wolf Man to True Blood – Victoria Amador
Part III: Re-inventing the wolf: intertextual and metafictional manifestations
9 ‘The price of flesh is love’: commodification, corporeality, and paranormal romance in Angela Carter’s beast tales – Bill Hughes
10 Growing pains of the teenage werewolf: Young Adult literature and the metaphorical wolf – Kaja Franck
11 ‘I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself’: the metafictional meanings of lycanthropic transformation in Doctor Who – Ivan Phillips
Part IV: Animal selves: becoming wolf
12 A running wolf and other grey animals: the various shapes of Marcus Coates -Sarah Wade
13 ‘Stinking of me’: transformations and animal selves in contemporary women’s poetry – Polly Atkin
14 Wearing the wolf: fur, fashion and species transvestism – Catherine Spooner

I have a deep fondness for this book as it developed from the legendary OGOM Werewolf conference (above), which was probably the best fun I’ve ever had at an academic conference. The conference web page is here, and you can check out the PDF programme here (click on arrows at the bottom of the first page to turn the pages). This event was a fantastic 3-day wolf extravaganza, there were lively papers, compelling keynotes & contributors, a visit to the grave of Peter the Wild Boy (reputed to be raised by wolves), encounters with real life wolves at our visit to the UK Wolf Trust, and a Lycanthropic Lantern of Fear or Magic Lantern Show (featuring werewolves), oh and wolf cupcakes!!

The plenary panel on wolf children, or children raised by wolves saw me in conversation with novelist and long-term friend of OGOM Marcus Sedgwick, who sadly passed unexpectedly in 2022 (we shared a fascination with wolf children myths). Mouse from Marcus’s novel The Dark Horse is one of the most compelling ‘wolf children’ I have ever encountered in fiction; it was very special for me to share this stage with him.

The hardback of the book coincided with COVID and so we never really got to promote it beyond the gothtastic book launch at the Odyssey in St Albans before lockdowns took hold. Maybe now it will finally have the opportunity to send a HOWL out into the world (there are two supermoons this month, plus a rare blue moon, so it seems fitting).

We hope those who have an interest will purchase a copy and support the project. We will be putting together a new online event to celebrate the paperback publication in October to tie in with Halloween and offering a 30% discount to all our attendees (details to follow soon).  

***Follow the link to book for our special online In the Company of Wolves event on 20 October ***

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CFPs and Events: Consuming Gothic, Scottish literature, folk horror, Frankenstein, fungal Gothic, monsters

Posted on 27th July 2023 by William the Bloody

Some forthcoming CFPs (conferences and edited collection) and events:

1. CFP: ‘Consuming the Gothic’ Conference

University of Sheffield and online, 29 November 2023.
Deadline 21 August 2023.

How is consumption reflected in Gothic literature, film, and art? Is it always monstrous, or can the way we consume forge a sense of community? What does consuming in relation to the Gothic mean to us today?

This conference will feature panels and talks, as well as a creative writing workshop, run by Leonie Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan University). If you’d like to engage with the conference theme from new perspectives and try your hand at producing a short creative piece, then this is for you.

2. CFP: World Congress of Scottish Literatures

University of Nottingham, 3-7 July 2024
Deadline: 31 October 2023

While the fourth World Congress does not have a specific theme, our scope is transnational, and we would especially welcome papers on subjects that reflect the specific context of the Congress in Nottingham: the relationship between Scotland and England from earliest times to the present, a relationship which has had profound implications for the entire world, and which is a significant relationship in literatures in Scots, Gaelic, English, French and Latin from earliest evidence to contemporary production. 

3. CFP: ‘Don’t keep the Wicker Man waiting’: Folk horror 50 years after The Wicker Man

Dukes Theatre/Lancaster University, 27 October 2023
Deadline: 31 August 2023.

2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most influential folk horror film of all time, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Long regarded as a cult curiosity, Hardy’s iconic film changed the template for British horror, and fifty years later is finally achieving the scholarly attention it deserves. This symposium, timed to coincide with the Dukes Theatre’s annual Dark Dukes festival, aims to assess the film’s legacy, from the rise of folk horror in the 1970s to the so-called folk horror revival in the 2010s and beyond. It will examine The Wicker Man within its broader intellectual, social and historical contexts, asking why this particular film made such a mark on the cinematic landscape and how it continues to inspire filmmakers, writers, artists and musicians.

4. CFP (edited collection): American folk horrors

Deadline: 29 October 2023.

This collection of essays will join the scattered critical essays that address American folk horror and will enter the conversation about distinctive ‘American’ folk horror traditions.[1] Crucially, ‘American’ will be interpreted as broadly as possible, to consider the variegated traditions of folk horrors in the Americas (Canada, Mexico and Central and South America). The collection will also take up the ways in which ‘American’ folk horror inevitably has global tentacles, as other national folk horror productions become critical to the American tradition and the American culture industry shapes other national folk horror productions. 

5. Event: Shifting Realities: Myth and landscape in Alan Garner’s novels

The Bell, London, 7.30 pm BST, 29 August 2023.

Alan Garner has been exploring creatively the landscape of his native Cheshire for over 60 years; his fictional landscape is a country in which fantastic creatures from mythology erupt into the mundane world, communication between dimensions is possible in a supernatural multiverse and events proceed through the operation of repeated actions played out across generations, articulated through folktale, myth and story, as Garner takes his cue from the quantum universe and the overarching constellations above Alderley Edge. Sue Terry, who lives 40 minutes away from Alderley Edge and is working on a book on Garner’s fiction, explores the shifting nature of reality that emerges through the interplay of history, folklore and landscape within Garner’s early novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor and Red Shift.

6. Event: Vindication for Mary: 200 years Frankenstein

People’s Museum, Somers Town, London (and on line), 11 August 2023. 19:00 – 21:00 BST

Celebrate the Publication of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s own name with a special evening – celebrating online across countries and with a walk to atmospheric St Pancras old churchyard.
A Friday evening to remember from Somers Town birthplace of Mary Shelley to Mary’s tomb in the beautiful old St Pancras Churchyard.

Event is in person and online in collaboration with Clair Obscur Theatre company whose play CONCEPTION: Mary Shelley – The Making of a Monster is currently touring.

Professor Esther Leslie of the People’s Museum will give a short reading online, as will the performers.

7. Event: Visual Aesthetics of Folk Horror, Tanya Krzywinska

The Viktor Wynd Museum, Zoom lecture (on line), 26 October 2023, 8:00 pm – 09:30 pm BST

Character, theme and narrative are often centralised in the literature on Folk Horror; but what of its visual aesthetics? Can we trace Folk Horror aesthetics within older painting traditions and styles? The concern of this talk is to explore relationships between the Folk Horror of film, TV and videogames, and landscape painting. I will focus most intently on Gustav Courbet’s late landscapes and Andrew Wyeth’s work; along the way other forms of painting will provide touchpoints within this investigation of the way that folk horror translates its anti-pastoralism and pessimism into its visual sightlines. I will focus therefore on Folk Horror’s concern with the otherness of the landscape, nature, failed/misguided agency, and rural culture, arguing that an inherent pessimism drives Folk Horror’s ‘jamming’ of normative bucolic representations and therein subverting man’s surety of sovereignty over nature. In seeing Courbet’s anti-human animism and Wyeth’s rural othering backwards through the lens of Folk Horror, I seek to widen the scope of what we now regard as Folk Horror.

8. Event: Mushroom Language: A Fungal Gothic

The Lowry, Salford, 25-26 October 2023

MUSHROOM LANGUAGE: A FUNGAL GOTHIC is about the cycles that shape us – eruption, reproduction and decay. It’s about role-playing the lichen love stories, spore shoot-outs and truffle siren songs found in our forests.

In an eerie and funny homage to folk horror, two human performers absorb and mimic ‘mushroom language’ through ritual and power dynamics. Who are these creatures, and what are the mushrooms trying to tell them? Dreamlike conversations and movement sequences are underpinned by original music from composer Hannah Miller (of the Moulettes) and playful design by Rūta Irbīte.

9. Event: Monsters in the Nineteenth Century

Durham University, Free online event via Zoom, 31 October 2023, 9:45 am – 5:00 pm CET

With the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), monsters became a staple of nineteenth-century literature. But their hold on the nineteenth-century imagination runs far deeper. [. . .] This online workshop, co-hosted by CNCSI and the Dark Arts Research Group at the University of Copenhagen, will feature a series of talks exploring the role played by monsters in the nineteenth century, investigating how their uncanny corporeality subverts dominant discourses and how therefore we might understand the monster as a valuable tool in uncovering hidden epistemologies in the study of the nineteenth century and its legacies.

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Haunted Landscapes Conference: Sam George Keynote ‘This Spectred Isle: Werewolves and the English Eerie in Contemporary UK Myth’, 6 July 2023

Posted on 28th June 2023 by Sam George

Delighted to reveal that I have been invited to give a keynote at Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature, and Global Environments Conference: Falmouth University, 4-6 July 2023. The event is produced in Association with Falmouth University’s Dark Economies Research Group. I am looking forward to meeting everyone and hope to see some of our OGOM followers there! If you haven’t caught up with this event yet you will find below the details of the conference and an abstract of my plenary talk.

Conference summary

Literature, art, and film have always explored concepts of the supernatural and the landscape and environment – places and spaces haunted by spectres, memory, or history. Landscapes can be haunted by echoes and memories of colonization, violence done, and irrevocable acts committed. Places may be marked indelibly by the past and by the people who populated and shaped the environment in an infinite variety of ways. Layers of memory and action can be embedded in the landscape alongside the layering of history in stone and soil. Encounters with the landscape reverberate through the ages as well as through the rocks, trees, hills, and streams that are still present today. Ghosts can shade the atmosphere of a place and some things never leave. The environment bears witness as places across the globe bear the brunt of human action. This conference will explore haunted landscapes of all sorts – from environments teetering on collapse due to climate emergency, to landscapes steeped in blood, dripping in nostalgia, or haunted by spectral memories or supernatural entities.

Programme Link

Keynote Abstract:

Sam George, ‘This Spectred Isle: Werewolves and the English Eerie in Contemporary UK Myth

British folklore is unique in representing a history of werewolf sightings in places in Britain where there were once wolves. UK werewolves differ from their European counterparts in that they often inhabit haunted landscapes, manifesting as wolf phantoms. In this paper, I interrogate the werewolf as spectre wolf, bringing it within the realms of the weird and the eerie, erupting from the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. I depart from studies which tie the werewolf to the ‘beast within’, positing a theory of unsettlement, deriving from landscape and absence in the present.  

The English eerie, or the ‘skull beneath the skin of the countryside’ (Macfarlane), is characterised by a landscape constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried memories and contested knowledge. This is the climate in which the spectre of the UK werewolf has re-emerged (rising from the ashes of the last flesh and blood wolf). In examining werewolf hauntings in contemporary UK myth, I put forward the suggestion that these spectres go beyond our belief in phantoms, they represent our collective guilt at the extinction of an entire indigenous species of wolf. Viewed in this way, they reawaken the memory of what humans did to wolves, redeeming the Big Bad Wolf of our childhood nightmares.

Biog

Sam George is Associate Professor in Research and the Convenor of the popular Open Graves, Open Minds Project at the University of Hertfordshire. She is affectionately known on social media as The Coffin Boffin (@DrSamGeorge1 30K followers). Inspired by the eighteenth-century botanist Tournefort, who voyaged in search of plants and found instead a plague of vampires on the island of Mykonos (1702), Sam George’s natural history research has taken a gothic turn. Following the publication of Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing (2007), her contribution to New York Botanical Garden’s Poetic Botany exhibition and the co-editorship of Women and Botany (2011); she founded with Dr Bill Hughes the gothic research group Open Graves, Open Minds. She now researches botany alongside the gothic, unearthing depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, embracing werewolves (and representations of wolves and wild children), dark fairies, and other supernatural beings and their worlds.

Following OGOM’s international conference on vampires in 2010, Sam developed the first postgraduate module on vampire studies in the UK, exciting the interest of the national and international press. She is now a leading spokesperson for the literary vampire. Her interviews have appeared in newspapers from The Guardian and The Independent to The Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Post, and the Wall Street Journal. She recently recorded an obituary of Gothic writer Anne Rice for BBC Radio 4’s The Last Word and appeared on an episode of BBC 3’s Freethinking on ‘Varney the Vampire’. She was also a guest on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 with Melvyn Bragg (on John Polidori’s Vampyre). She’s a regular contributor to The Conversation, amassing over 300K reads for her articles on vampires, werewolves and fairies.

Her work with OGOM has led to a number of co-edited publications with Dr Bill Hughes: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2012); In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (2020: out in paper this July); The Legacy of John William Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (forthcoming 2024) and the in progress collection ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture. Sam also co-edited the first ever issue of Gothic Studies on ‘Vampires’ with Bill Hughes in 2013 (15.1) and ‘Werewolves’ in 2019 (21.1).

Having written on British werewolves in the journal of Gothic Studies and Japanese mermaids in the Critical Quarterly (the journal’s most downloaded article), she is focussing her new research on the intersection between folklore and the gothic. She is completing a monograph on the folklore and cultural history of the shadow; planning Gothic Fairies: A History for Bloomsbury and editing The Cambridge Companion to the Vampire.

Elsewhere she is leading an impact case study on ethical gothic. Shifting away from horror, the ethical gothic seeks to cultivate a sense of moral agency, employing gothic narratives to create empathy for the marginalised, monstrous or othered, including the natural world. She has increased public awareness of how Gothic narratives can challenge perceptions of otherness and difference, helping to combat prejudice and hate crime through her work with the Sophie Lancaster Foundation and used her research into folklore and myth to promote ecological conservation, working with the UK Wolf Conservation Trust to help inform public perceptions of wolves.

She is continuing to host international symposia on vampires, werewolves, dark fairies and with OGOM, researching supernatural beings and their worlds (together with a new strand on botanical gothic). The Project extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, and the magical, emphasising that sense of Gothic as enchantment rather than simply horror

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Events: Alice in science, Flower Fairies

Posted on 24th June 2023 by William the Bloody

1. Through the Wonderglass: Alice in Science and Medicine, in the Victorian Age and Beyond

On line via Zoom, 12 August 2023, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT (11AM Pacific/ 2PM Eastern/ 7PM UK)

This talk will take you on a journey through the scientific cultural history of the Alice books. Re-examining Carroll’s own engagement with science, from his childhood reading to his engagement with microscopy, alongside his literary writing, one will cast a fresh light on the other. The whistle-stop tour will spotlight tea-parties and their role within the Victorian history of psychiatry, the presence of microscopes, magic lanterns and photography in Carroll’s works through Victorian optical culture, in education and childhood culture. And it will explain the perhaps surprising connections between the centrality of ecology and entomology in Through the Looking-Glass, and Victorian theories on the science and theology of acting, in the light of Alice’s stage adaptations

2. Flower Fairies: Enchanting illustrations by Cicely Mary Barker

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool, 15 April 2023—05 November 2023

To mark the 100 year anniversary of her first book, Flower Fairies of the Spring, this exhibition will feature around 45 original illustrations, with digital projections and costumes inspired by the fairies, designed by Vin Burnham.

Explore the inspirations behind Barker’s paintings, as well as the flora and fauna featured in the work through National Museum Liverpool’s botanical collections.

First published in 1923, there were originally 170 drawings – accurate depictions of flowering plants and trees, into which are incorporated, caricature figures of fairies, designed to accompany the species drawn. The Fairies were often based on real children, from Barker’s sister’s nursery.

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CFPs and Conferences: MAPACA & IGA Gothic, Haunted Landscapes, crime, poison, magic

Posted on 24th June 2023 by William the Bloody

Some forthcoming CFPs, conferences and other events:

1. CFP: MAPACA 2023: The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference

* Deadline close, so hurry!!

Sonesta Hotel Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, 9-11 November 2023.
Deadline: 30 June 2023.

The Gothic Studies area invites proposals which engage with the genre and culture of the Gothic as it is represented in film, television, literature, art, and society. We are especially interested in ways that the Gothic aesthetic defines itself against other predominate modes, or genres, of storytelling or culture. We also invite proposals concerned with subgenres of the Gothic across media, like the American Gothic, southern Gothic, feminine Gothic, the “weird tale,” and the ecoGothic as represented film, television, literature, music, fashion, art, and culture.

2. CFP: Gothic Trans/iterations: 17th Biannual Conference of the International Gothic Association

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 30 July-2 August 2024.
Deadline: 31 January 2024.

The Gothic has been historically, and continues to be, a mode that is shaped by the potentialities, ruptures, instabilities, anxieties and uncertainties that are encoded in the idea of “trans”. The Gothic transcends traditional disciplines, aesthetic categories, periodisation, identities, bodies, genres, media, national and cultural borders, often rejecting the tyranny of traditionally delineated categories, [. . .] We invite proposals for papers, or panels of three connected papers, that explore any aspect of Gothic’s engagement with and investment in the concept of “trans” in any/all aspects of cultural production.

3. Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature, and Global Environments

Falmouth University, 4-6 July 2023.

The CFP has closed but you can still attend this exciting conference! Sam is a plenary speaker (more news soon) and Bill will be presenting too.

Literature, art, and film have always explored concepts of the supernatural and the landscape and environment – places and spaces haunted by spectres, memory, or history. Landscapes can be haunted by echoes and memories of colonization, violence done, and irrevocable acts committed. [. . .] This conference will explore haunted landscapes of all sorts – from environments teetering on collapse due to climate emergency, to landscapes steeped in blood, dripping in nostalgia, or haunted by spectral memories or supernatural entities.

4. Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society

University of Nottingham, University Park Campus and Nottingham city centre (and on line), 14-17 September 2023

Again, the CFP has closed but you can still attend.

The conference features papers on multiple aspects of the expression and representation of law-making and law-breaking in North American literary, cultural, and intellectual life between 1691 and 1830. [. . .] Panel sessions include discussions of early American captivity narratives, role-playing and confidence games, the Orientalist spy genre, piracy, urban policing, intersections between science and race, the global circuits of enslavement, indentured servitude, and financial crime.

5. CFP: Poison in Popular Culture: Representations, Aesthetics, and Meanings

Call for chapters for edited collection.

Deadline: 5 November 2023.

This book understands poison not only as a physical entity, but also as an idea, connected to our identities. Poison will be explored in its metaphorical uses, and as a matter of cultural psychology as well. While bearing in mind historical connections and influences, the focus of this collection is on Twentieth- and Twenty-first century popular culture.

6. CFP: Special issue on ‘Magic’, M/C Journal

Call for articles for special journal issue.

Deadline: 4 August 2023.

In his book The History of Magic (2020), Chris Gosden contends that magic is a product of human connection with the universe, offering answers to questions of meaning and reality, and surviving for centuries because of its capacity for constant renewal. Furthermore, magic has been, and continues to be, tied to the activities and beliefs of a myriad of cultural groups, guiding their understandings of, for example, transcendence, transformation, and transactions, cultural, social, political, or otherwise. [. . .] It is against this backdrop that the aim of this issue of M/C Journal is to consider the place of magic in contemporary media and society, to explore how recent media offerings shape our understandings of magic, conjuring and the supernatural, as well as cultural depictions of the everyday.

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Review: Catherine Spooner on Renfield

Posted on 29th April 2023 by William the Bloody

Prof. Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, has been a regular contributor at OGOM events and in our books. Here, she reviews the recent reworking of Dracula in the film Renfield (2023) (from The Conversation, 18 April 2023).

Renfield: Nicolas Cage’s reimagining of Dracula pulls the vampire film into the 21st century

Catherine Spooner, Lancaster University

“Don’t make it a sexual thing!” Nicolas Cage’s Dracula tells Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield in this new interpretation of the classic vampire movie. “I eat boys … I eat girls.”

In a line, the film deftly dismisses a century of post-Freudian interpretations of Bram Stoker’s vampire story – and with justification. Renfield is not about sex, but about power.

The trailer for Renfield (2023).

This is most obvious when Renfield, Dracula’s servant or “familiar”, attends a support group for codependent people. When the group facilitator, Mark (Brandon Scott Jones), asks Renfield what would happen if he were to stop focusing on his boss’s needs, he responds: “He won’t grow to full power.”

The group finds this apparent metaphor weird, but resonant. In its recognition that gaslighting and emotional abuse are about control rather than desire, the film provides a version of the vampire myth in tune with contemporary debates. There is more than a whiff of #TimesUp about Renfield’s mission to distance himself from his abusive employer.

The film’s most striking power move, however, is on behalf of its production company, Universal. In its latest attempt to reboot its “Dark Universe” franchise – a collection of movies based on the iconic horror film characters the studio established in the 1930s – the production company is aggressively laying claim to the Dracula story.

Citational vampires

Vampire films are, according to critic Ken Gelder, “citational”. This means that they compulsively reference other vampire films, playfully reworking the conventions of the genre. The vampire film talks endlessly about itself.

In Renfield, an eye-catching sequence transposes Cage and Hoult’s faces onto footage from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). This was the film that forever identified Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi with the iconic vampire.

Renfield wants to draw our attention to the “original” (itself an adaptation of a stage version of Stoker’s novel) even as, almost 100 years later, it wants to remodel the vampire movie to 21st century specifications.

Recasting Cage in the image of Lugosi repurposes Browning’s film as an origin story for what is ultimately a kind of superhero movie. Renfield eats insects in order to stimulate turbocharged combat skills reminiscent of Marvel characters.

It also, however, evokes the lawsuit that Lugosi’s heirs brought against Universal Pictures in 1966. They accused the studio of profiting from Lugosi’s image after his death through merchandising, initiating a protracted case they eventually lost. It was a landmark ruling, determining that celebrities do not own their own images after their death.

In Renfield, the retrospective adjustment of the original film to star Cage rather than Lugosi is not only a canny joke that plays on the extreme recognition value of both actors. It is also a strategic move intended to bolster Universal’s association with the Dracula brand, as the Browning film’s copyright is due to expire this decade.

Action versus comedy

Renfield has the feel of the first instalment in an action franchise. But unlike previous attempts to hybridise the vampire and action genres, such as the Blade and Underworld series of the early 2000s, it does not take itself too seriously.

Stars Cage, Hoult and Awkwafina deliver their lines as if with permanently arched eyebrows. Indeed, at one point, Cage rapidly raises both eyebrows twice in such an exaggerated manner that it almost breaks the fourth wall.

Elsewhere, extreme gore is exploited for its slapstick potential. In the screening I attended, a scene in which Renfield tears off a villain’s arms with his bare hands and uses them to whack other opponents had some audience members in stitches.

There is a long tradition of vampire comedy. Stoker’s novel has vampire hunter Van Helsing break down in hysterical laughter, blaming “King Laugh”, a grinning skeleton who combines hilarity and death in the manner of the medieval danse macabre.

The self-referential nature of vampire cinema gives rise to comedy. Appreciation of Renfield’s visual gags and snappy one liners is enriched by familiarity with previous vampire films. Cage’s characteristically over-the-top interpretation of his role inevitably recalls any number of his previous performances.

He even seems comparatively restrained besides his extraordinarily unhinged appearance in the 1988 black comedy Vampire’s Kiss – another film that uses vampirism as a metaphor for gaslighting and abusive relationships.

The film never quite delivers what it promises, however. While comparable contemporary vampire film What We Do in the Shadows and its spin-off TV series allow emotional insights to surface through the comedy, in Renfield any potential profundity is deflected into action stunts.

The gleeful lashings of ultraviolence result in a kind of moral murkiness, in which audiences are never sure whether they are rooting for the underdog or the violent enabler of a centuries-old serial killer.

A film less determined to please its audience might lean into this ambiguity and allow genuine complexity to emerge. Here, however, an uneven tone betrays an uncertainty of purpose. Ultimately, Renfield’s witty attempt to reframe a familiar story is compromised by its corporate brief: to shore up an unstable cinematic empire.

Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Review: Stacey Abbott, Phantome Der Nacht: 100 Jahre Nosferatu/Phantom of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu

Posted on 27th April 2023 by William the Bloody

Stacey Abbott has long been a friend of, and collaborator with, OGOM, presenting inspiring keynotes at our conferences and contributing excellent chapters to our books. Here, she reviews the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection’s recent exhibition in Berlin celebrating 100 years of F. W. Murneau’s classic 1922 vampire film, Nosferatu. (OGOM hosted our own tribute to Nosferatu, where Stacey was one of the presenters; this was a significant event in what we celebrated as the Year of the Vampire .)

Phantome Der Nacht: 100 Jahre Nosferatu/Phantom of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu - exhibit image

Phantome Der Nacht: 100 Jahre Nosferatu/Phantom of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu

16 December 2022 – 23 April 2023, Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, Berlin

2022 marked the centenary of the much-loved master vampire film by F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). A landmark of German Expressionist and horror cinema, as well as being the earliest surviving adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this anniversary was met with numerous celebration screenings and publications, marking its significance and influence.  These symposia included an in-person day event at City Lit in London, the online Horror Reverie Event hosted by the Monstrum Society of Montreal, and of course OGOM’s own online symposium: Nosferatu at 100: The Vampire as Contagion and Monstrous Outsider. Each of these events and publications brought together a diverse range of scholars, programmers, writers, filmmakers, and critics to discuss and reflect on the film’s influence on cinema language, developments in the horror and gothic genres, and its legacy on the vampire in film, literature, and television.

To conclude these centenary celebrations, the Nationalgalerie of Berlin hosted an exhibition on the film at the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, which ran from 16 December 2022 to the 23rd April 2023 and was curated by Jürgen Müller, Frank Schmidt, and Kyllikki Zacharias.  I was able to close my own celebrations of the film by visiting this exhibit in April.  Walking into the atmospheric and cavernous space at the Sharf-Gerstenberg Collection, I felt a bit like Hutter as he crossed the bridge and entered the land of the shadows. It is a haunting place and an ideal location for this exhibition. For instance, in one room a reflective beaded curtain was hung from an arched passageway between rooms, onto which the image of Orlok, appearing from and then retreating into the shadows, was projected. Patrons were then invited to follow Orlok into the darkness as they passed through the curtain. This was an inspired and chilling use of the space and a reminder of how important Murnau’s use of mise-en-scene and real locations was to his re-conception of the German Expressionist aesthetic.  The horrors of the vampire were literally projected onto the walls.

In terms of the content of the exhibit, I was delighted to discover that there is much still to discover about this often-discussed masterpiece.  The exhibit was structured as a journey through the film’s narrative from the idyllic representation of family and home in Wisborg to the spreading of the vampire plague and the eventual destruction of Orlok in the sunlight. Each room projected key images and scenes from the film onto the walls alongside paintings by artists from which director Murnau and producer/art director Albin Grau drew inspiration, including Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, Félicien Rops, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Francisco de Goya, and Henry Fuseli.  This juxtaposition enabled me to see these familiar images with fresh eyes, highlighting the dynamic play with light and shadow in F.A Wagner’s cinematography; the baroque and Gothic qualities of Grau’s set design; and the beauty and richness of Murnau’s compositions. The monstrous appearance of Max Schreck as Count Orlok was richly presented alongside Hugo Steiner Prag’s haunting illustrations for the manuscript of Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1916) as well as Franz Sedlacek’s  Der Träumer (1912) and Stefan Eggeler’s The Plague of Pestilence (1921), putting Schrek’s depiction of the master vampire into a broader context of images of monsters and faces of death. These images, as noted in the programme, provided ‘visual inspiration for Nosferatu’s darkly triumphant entry into the streets of Wisborg’. Through references to André Breton and Salvador Dali, the exhibition also highlighted the film’s influence on the Surrealists, in particular the dream-like reverie of Count Orlok’s land of shadows. Through the juxtaposition of vast array of imagery, including paintings, illustrations, engravings, frame shots, lobby cards, and promotional material from the film’s original release, the curators have drawn together a range of material that demonstrates that Nosferatu is not only an important milestone of cinema and horror history but is part of a rich and varied heritage of European visual art.

One of the key discoveries for me was the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin whose work is interwoven throughout the exhibit. The curators argue that Kubin’s style and subject matter was an important influence on Grau’s designs for the film, in particular his depiction of the dominion of the vampire. His paintings, illustrations, and designs are macabre and brooding, featuring depictions of lonely, isolated landscapes, predatory beasts, plague, and death; an ideal expressionist model for the film. The curators note that Kubin was at one point meant to design the sets for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and while this did not happen, they convincingly demonstrate through this exhibition that his work is a significant visual referent for the depiction of Stoker’s master vampire.  The juxtaposition of Orlok raising from his coffin and Kubin’s Der Kardinal [The Cardinal] (1919) reclining in prayer offers a clear demonstration of the visual similarities and expressionist influences, while Kubin’s paintings Das Rattenhaus (1902) and Seuche [Epidemic] (1902), provide visual context for the film’s preoccupation with rats and plague contamination, particularly as the film was made so soon after the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.  The funnel through which Kubin’s work bled into Nosferatu is of course Albin Grau. Grau’s contribution to the film as a set designer is highlighted throughout the exhibit. The display of his previous design work, company logo, set illustrations, and promotional material, showcase his keen eye and expressionist vision for the film. His illustrations of the monstrous and rat-like Count Orlok have becoming increasingly available through recent DVD and Bluray releases of the film by the British Film Institute and Eureka. But seeing a full collection of these illustrations all together on display alongside the film highlighted the visceral power of Orlok’s monstrosity and the significance of Grau’s contribution to the film’s legacy.  A full collection of images from the exhibit can be found through the lengthy programme published to coincide with the exhibition. It is a beautiful publication.

Phantome Der Nacht was a wonderful conclusion to Nosferatu’s centenary celebrations and served as a reminder of the richness of this masterful film and the visual synergies between Expressionist Art and Gothic and Horror Cinema.

Stacey Abbott is the author of Celluloid Vampires (University of Texas Press 2007), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and the BFI Film Classic on Near Dark (Bloomsbury 2021).

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Review: Holly Black, The Stolen Heir (2023)

Posted on 12th April 2023 by William the Bloody

We’ve been meaning for some time to post regular reviews of books and such that have attracted our interest yet always seem be too busy! I had to share this one, though, and I hope we can do more reviews.

The Stolen Heir is another wonderful Elfhame novel from Holly Black, continuing from the series The Folk of the Air and related to her earlier Modern Faerie trilogy and The Darkest Part of the Forest. Black takes the changeling plot from traditional fairy lore, already Gothically dark, and gives it new life as a dramatisation of such themes as being outcast, of family love, trust, and betrayal. As in her other fairy novels, she juxtaposes the realism of the familiar, contemporary world with the fantastic, often sinister, glamour of Faerie and with a convincing sense of interiority and characterisation. She employs familiar fairytale motifs such as the ambiguous bargain and the fairy banquet and also embeds miniature narratives which feel like authentic fairy tales.

Saren, or Wren, finds herself abandoned in the human world, living feral like a wild child, fleeing her cruel mother Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth and threatened by the vicious hag Bogdana. She encounters Prince Oak, the heir to Elfhame, and they embark in an uneasy alliance on a quest. Oak has a dangerous allure and the now familiar ambivalent attraction/repulsion of paranormal romance develops between them (though, strictly speaking, the novel is a mutation of paranormal romance in that neither lover is human). Their relationship is distrustful and conflicted, and unresolved at the end of the novel—luckily there will be a sequel, which I eagerly anticipate!

This is a deliciously rich novel from one of my favourite YA fantasists. There’s a pleasurable interplay between the matter-of-fact human world and the dangerous but tempting possibilities of enchantment that the best of this genre is so good at revealing.

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CFPs and Events: Gothic world literature, C. S. Lewis, Gothic summer school, magic, monsters, folklore, Hallowe’en

Posted on 30th March 2023 by William the Bloody

1. CFP: Progression, Regression, and Transgression in Gothic World Literature & Film: New Approaches to the Ethics of Difference Conference

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, 29 September-2 October 2023 [on line]. Deadline: 15 May 2023.

this conference will underline the global comparative framework of World Literary discourses. We will entertain proposals from a wide range of  media including Gothic literature, drama, film, television, cyberspace or other art-forms.  In addition, the conference will explore how Gothic-themed productions in all of these modes can augment recent efforts to decolonize, ethnicize, indigenize, and degender academic fields of study. 

2. CFP: Narnia 2023 : Sons & Daughters of Narnia: Tracing CS Lewis’s Literary Influence into the 21st Century

Ulster University Coleraine (Northern Ireland), 13-14 November 2023 [in person]. Deadline 4 September 2023.

This two-day, public-facing academic symposium aims to examine CS Lewis in the light of his influence upon 20th & 21st century writers— those working in genres as varied as children’s fiction, sci-fi, literary and cultural criticism, popular apologetics, and even poetry. The central organising metaphor for the event is that of genealogy—the passing down to successive generations of the essences, qualities and characteristics which one inherits. Drawing upon this central metaphor, we will examine both the way in which Lewis was shaped by his own set of literary influences, and how he transmitted (and transmuted) these influences, through his own work, to writers throughout the world.

3. International Gothic Summer School

Manchester Metropolitan University, 6–9 June 2023. Deadline for papers: 22 May 2023.

The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies is delighted to open registration for the International Gothic Summer School, an exciting series of lectures, workshops and seminars to be held at Manchester Metropolitan University from Tuesday 6–Friday 9 June 2023.

Over four intensive days, participants will explore selected aspects of the Gothic imagination, from the eighteenth century through to the present day.

Day one: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century Gothic
Day two: Twentieth-century Gothic
Day three: Post-millennial Gothic
Day four: Professional Gothic Development

4. CFP: ‘Magic’ – special journal issue

M/C Journal. Deadline: 4 August 2023

 the aim of this issue of M/C Journal is to consider the place of magic in contemporary media and society, to explore how recent media offerings shape our understandings of magic, conjuring and the supernatural, as well as cultural depictions of the everyday.

5. CFP: Transmedia Monsters and Villains

Transmedia Monsters and Villains series: Edited collections and monographs. Deadline: 15 September 2023.

This new series aims to cover the fascinating subject of monsters and villains through an interdisciplinary perspective represented by fields as different as literary, film, religious, gender and art studies as much as philosophy and sociological and ecocritical approaches. Each volume will focus on a single figure (or group of figures) and examine it in its multiple incarnations, from their origins in myth, folklore and history as well as in a literary text, to their various adaptations in different media, including comics, graphic novels, cinema, TV, exhibitions, the visual arts, merchandise and tourist attractions. Most welcome will also be an approach to the subject that transcends genres and thus examine the single monsters and villains as they are presented in horror fiction, thriller, science fiction, etc.

6. Folklore Podcast Lectures

The 2023 Folklore Podcast Lectures season is a programme of 15 talks with world-class speakers, followed by audience Q&A sessions. Ticket holders receive a link to attend live via Zoom, and access to a video replay of any talk they book for after the event, to watch again or catch up on anything they missed.

7. The History of Halloween

Prof. Ronald Hutton, The Folklore Society, 18 July 2023, 18:00 BST. On line.

Halloween is usually regarded as the creepiest festival of the modern year, a celebration of witchcraft, phantoms and images of fear which comes down to us from a remote a murky pagan past. This talk addresses the following questions about this tradition. How old and how pagan is Halloween? Was it the ancient pagan feast of the dead, and the Celtic New Year? What role does it play in the modern world, and should it still be celebrated?

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CFPs: Gothic folklore, chimeras, fairy-tale horror, Dracula and vampires

Posted on 3rd March 2023 by William the Bloody

Some CFPs for articles and a conference–deadlines approaching!

1. FOGO Conference 2023: Folklore and Gothic: Supernatural Presences and Environments in Europe and the Americas

Universidad de León (España), 5-7 July 2023. Deadline: 1 April 2023.

This conference aims to open a space of dialogue to analyze the intersections of Gothic and folklore, focusing on fairy tales, the representation of nature, and the treatment of horror. What is the relevance of the ghosts, cemeteries and stormy nights that remain in our subconscious as images and spaces of fear? How can fictional horror represent the climate emergency? How can we explore literature, film and other media through the lens of the monster and the ghost? Ultimately, what is the interaction between folklore, horror and the Gothic?

2. Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture

Academic anthology edited by Samantha Baugus and Ayanni Cooper. Deadline: 31 March 2023.

This collection aims to combine the meanings of chimera in our own chimerical creation–monster, animal, mythological, fantastical–to propose a “neither this nor that,” but an “all of the above.” Though we look to center fictional representations of chimera, we encourage writers to think broadly about the figure and what she could be or represent across genres and time.

Through this collection, we look to investigate junctions, crossings, and mixtures of creatures that push, challenge, and distort the boundaries of the human in numerous ways. What the human is, has been, or could be is a question that possesses serious and highly relevant implications in our contemporary moment. How does the chimera’s inherent hybridity complicate our understanding of the familiar and the other? We seek analyses that center the idea of the chimera in fictional texts of any medium, genre, place, or time period.

3. Special Issue ‘Severed Limbs and Monstrous Appetites: (Re)Defining Fairy-Tale Horror from the Seventeenth Century to the Present’

Special issue of Literature journal. Deadline: 30 April 2023.

If horror and the fairy tale are so easily intermingled, can horror then be considered as a distinctive feature of the literary fairy tale? In ‘Bluebeard’ (1697), after all, Perrault creates an atmosphere of mystery and expectation of violence before describing Bluebeard’s closet, which contains the numerous corpses of his murdered wives, whose clotted blood covers the floor. Blood, bodily mutilation, and body parts are in fact extensively represented in fairy tales. Before Disney’s sanitized film adaptations, tales such as the Grimm’s versions of ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ (1812) depicted horrific images, such as severed limbs, cannibalism, and other types of bodily violence. As far as cannibalism is concerned, the Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and Perrault’s ‘Le Petit Poucet’ are among the most famous stories, but cannibalistic acts or desires are also central in lesser-known tales, such as Perrault’s version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or the Grimm’s ‘The Juniper Tree’.

What are the roles, functions, and meanings of horror in a fairy-tale narrative? This Special Issue of Literature aims to answer this question.

4. Journal of Dracula Studies

Call for scholarly articles. Deadline: 1 May 2023.

We invite manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) on any of the following: Bram Stoker, the novel Dracula, the historical Dracula, the vampire in folklore, fiction, film, popular culture, and related topics.

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