Papers by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
Gothic Studies, 2021
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Horror Studies, Oct 1, 2022
Sublime Ambition: The Gothic in Literature & Art will now continue until Saturday 6th February. F... more Sublime Ambition: The Gothic in Literature & Art will now continue until Saturday 6th February. Featuring contemporary artworks by Jonathan Hargreaves, Julianne French and Marion Kuit, books from our collection, original film artefacts from Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, and essay contributions from Bryan Haworth and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)'s Sorcha Ni Fhlainn.
Postmodern Vampires, 2019
The Obama presidency suffused the undead with pluralist hope, bringing forth a sustained celebrat... more The Obama presidency suffused the undead with pluralist hope, bringing forth a sustained celebration of undead diversity. In Twilight and True Blood in particular, the undead find sexual politics to be a site for explicit contestation, including the relaxation of sexual and social mores, as vampires become part of our daily lives, and articulate intense social and sexual desires. This profusion of undead narratives also hosts other areas of cultural unease: Twilight’s consumerist excess and sparkly surfaces privilege conservative values, while True Blood and Daybreakers respectively consolidate the undead as metaphors for all that ‘went wrong’ in American popular culture since the 1970s, and that vampires signal future ecological disaster. Vampires also return to rewrite their own narrative origins, be it through the lens of female agency or Hollywood reboots and sequelisation, and choose embrace a new parallel existence alongside our commercial world. Concluding with the Trump pres...
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jul 1, 2019
REDEN, May 15, 2022
Anna Marta Marini: Given your body of work, I would like to start by asking you: how has the Goth... more Anna Marta Marini: Given your body of work, I would like to start by asking you: how has the Gothic used bodies to express the crossing of boundaries, to express othering, abjection, fantasy, repulsion, mores, urges, and all sorts of anxieties related to corporal reality? Do you think there is an element of fascination as well, intrinsic to the Gothic exploitation of bodyrelated topics? Sorcha Ní Fhlainn: It's a really interesting question, I think that the body is a text to be negotiated in the Gothic on a macro level, in terms of gender, sexuality, identity, all of these things and then also at a micro level-whether it's a microscopic disease, the terror of the unknown, abjection and transformation-everything from the kind of violent sense of othering that we see in the Gothic, all the way through to the transformational aspects of it through fantasy, sexuality, things like that which we see in authors such as Barker for example... so we see this throughout the Gothic in a way that documents the body as text, and the transformation of the body. The body is never really complete especially in the sense of the Gothic because we find that transformations are occurring all the time, whether it's psychological,
Gothic Studies
The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that return... more The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that returns to the decade through the lens of cultural nostalgia. Recalling and resituating its viewers in the Reagan era, the series presents a contemporary Gothic narrative by returning to the 1980s as a period of profound cultural importance, setting its secondary Gothic space, The Upside Down, as a Gothic neoliberal shadow world that conveys profound implications for a terrifying future. Examining the 1980s as a nexus point for socio-political anxieties and nostalgic recall, which has dominated the economic landscape and many Hollywood films and shows in the twenty-first century, this article argues that Stranger Things situates its characters at the precipice of a wrong turn in history, a period in which its youthful band of heroes, like their 1980s counterparts in its science fiction and fantasy cinema before them, must chase down their own futures to prevent a terrible fate. Through ‘reflec...
Gothic Studies
This special issue of Gothic Studies is concerned with the Gothic significance and legacy of the ... more This special issue of Gothic Studies is concerned with the Gothic significance and legacy of the 1980s, a decade that remains a site of contemporary fascination in the twenty-first century. While many disparage the decade as a period of soulless commercialism, avid consumerism, and a distinct period in time that fashion forgot, the 1980s introduced new modes of communication, new commercial appreciation for Gothic and horror texts, and is now, in the twenty-first century, suffused with nostalgic appropriation and returns. The seeds of discontent in our contentious and fractured present were largely sown in the 1980s, making it an important, if divisive, (and richly Gothic) period. We find ourselves haunted by the 1980s in this volume. Cultural decades such as the 1980s are malleable periods of time by virtue of their sociocultural shifts and legacies; as opposed to strict chronometry, cultural decades, like Hobsbawm's 'short twentieth century' in his seminal study, Age of Extremes, can be long, short, turbulent, excessive, give rise to clusters of activity, or become revisited sites and periods that continue to draw scholarly fascination, much like the fin-de-siècle. 1 Their strict beginnings and endings may be contested in scholarly circles, but the cultural artefacts, ideas, anxieties, and styles of the decade or period under examination can be readily identified. The 1980s is a cultural decade and functions as a site of creation and cultural upheaval in the texts and crises considered herein, and, as a nexus point in the growing adoption and consolidation of neoliberal policies in the accumulation of global capital. Since its inception, the Gothic erupts at times of crisis to articulate that which is deemed utterly repressed and unspeakable: in the 1980s, we locate the seeds of the upsurge in contemporary Gothic expressions and anxieties, particularly in still unfolding twenty-first-century socio-cultural upheavals about racial and class inequalities. This informs a shared unease and growing recognition that the legacy of the 1980s is mirrored and amplified in the Gothic present-including ideological and border wars, the resurgence of nationalism, economic precarity, and climate change-and renders the prospect of a meaningful future asunder without intervention. The 1980s is also a rich site for scholarly consideration and is succinctly described by critic David Sirota as a period rife with contradictions and curiosities. 2 These shifts demonstrate the nature of the period's darker edges, with socio-political, cultural, and artistic expressions enabling a Gothic counter-narrative that openly challenges the dismissal of the period and its artefacts. The decade bore witness to seismic socio-political shifts in the advent of the Conservative Thatcher Government in the United Kingdom in 1979, and the near-coeval inception of Reaganism in early 1981 in the United States. The Cold War raged on, with the US boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980, and the Soviets, in turn, boycotting the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Following the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in March 1979, the rising terror of nuclear catastrophes was palpable, in circulating pamphlets ('Protect and Survive'), onscreen horrors (Threads [1984], The Day After [1983]), and NATO's Able Archer exercise (1983), only to be partially realised in the fallout and disinformation following the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986. By the end of the decade, under Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, the gradual erosion of centralised Soviet power ultimately led, in a quick chain of events, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in
Twenty-First-Century Gothic
This chapter tracks the trends of the contemporary vampire in the twenty-first century, from the ... more This chapter tracks the trends of the contemporary vampire in the twenty-first century, from the vampire’s popular representation as an outsider and anti-hero, a carrier of a fatal plague, through to an idealised figure of desire in Gothic romance. Vampires in literature, film and television evidence their continued struggle as displaced figures caught between the ancient and the modern while remaining perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. This chapter analyses the cultural assimilation and aggressive marketisation of the vampire narrative into separate strands for multiple audiences and generic configurations (from the Gothic romance to the action film), exposing the plurality of vampiric representation in the twenty-first century, including the tamed Gothic lover of the Twilight saga (2008–12), the ubiquitous and the synthetic nature of contemporary vampire society (HBO’s True Blood(2008–14)), and the persistent updating of popular twentieth-century vampire narratives, including B...
Investigating Stranger Things, 2021
Routledge eBooks, Nov 18, 2021
Postmodern Vampires, 2019
Beginning with Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, this chapter documents the shift in vampi... more Beginning with Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, this chapter documents the shift in vampiric representation throughout the 1970s. As vampires move into the centre of popular culture, gathering momentum from their increased literary and televisual presence, we find an array of Draculas who morph according to their domesticity, and in turn embolden new voices to emerge. New vampires also emerge, such as Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, George Romero’s Martin, and Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, and expose the political and social fractures of the 1970s, from the resignation of President Nixon in the shadow of Watergate to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. These vampires collectively explore the limits of undeath in a period of intense self-scrutiny and political uncertainty, and find it an ample environment in which to thrive.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
American Gothic Culture, 2016
This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema and TV by exploring the distinctly ... more This chapter situates the American gothic in post-1960 cinema and TV by exploring the distinctly American lineage of the modern serial killer. Landmark films chart seismic shifts in post-classical American cinema after the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), American Psycho (2000), and Dexter (2006-13). This Drawing upon the influence of real/reel American serial killers (Ed Gein, Ted Bundy), this chapter argues that the serial killer embodies the counter-narrative American Dream: the consumerist and consumption-driven American nightmare.
Postmodern Vampires, 2019
In the final years of the Cold War, from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the di... more In the final years of the Cold War, from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, American political culture seemed, on the surface, to continue broadly along the same ideological principles that had defined the Reagan era. President George H. Bush, previously serving as vice-president for both of Reagan's terms of office, promised a continuance of these self-same 'business as usual' principles during his administration that had, in one cultural decade, shifted American belief from the corrosive decay of 'stagflation' and a national lack of confidence following the Vietnam War in the late 1970s, to a position of (outward) economic and political might by the late 1980s. In his final address to the nation on 11 January 1989, President Reagan reflected on his period in office and concluded that 'what [critics and naysayers] called "radical" was really "right." What they called "dangerous" was just "desperately needed"'. In this reassessment, Reagan sought to emphasise 'the recovery of [American] morale […] respected again in the world and looked to for leadership' and in so doing, offered a homely, feel-good version of 'the American miracle' of economic recovery and symbolic renewal on the world stage; the American people under Reagan collectively 'meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world' (Reagan 1989). Such rhetoric was commonplace in many of President Reagan's speeches, in which he asserted his particular brand of patriotism and openly lamented a desire to return to the 1950s conservatism and values; at the end of the 1980s, he also recognised that the questioning of these CHAPTER 4 Gothic Double Vision at the Fin-de-Millennium
This article evaluates the importance of the TV vampire onscreen in science fiction, gothic, and ... more This article evaluates the importance of the TV vampire onscreen in science fiction, gothic, and horror-based cult TV series from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. The inclusion of the vampire as a peripheral character in series including Quantum Leap, The X-Files, Tales from the Crypt and Friday the 13: The Series indicates, in light of postmodern cultural turns, that there exists an imperative to re-evaluate, satirize and reflexively explore the vampire as a necessary and evolving stock gothic character within the narrative and generic frameworks of each show. In looking at these postmodern vampiric evaluations in their own right, where the vampire is featured as the ‘monster of the week’, this article argues that these understudied yet apposite representations of the television vampire, prior to and following on from the success of Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), documents a distinct cultural shift and maturation in representing vampires in non-vampire based gothic televi...
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Papers by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn