It’s that wonderful time of year again – Romancing the Gothic, run by the inimitable Doctor Sam Hirst, is raising money for Magic Breakfast, a UK-based charity that provides free breakfasts for hungry school kids across England and Scotland.
I am privileged to be a part of the incredible line-up for tomorrow, where you can choose your ticket price to donate as much as you’re able to the cause – and don’t worry if your Saturday is already booked and you’re not able to join online, as all the non-interactive sessions will be recorded and available to peruse afterwards.
Here’s the line-up:
9am – KJ Charles – Writing Workshop – “Fashioned Creatures, But Half Made Up” : A Workshop on Building Character through Your Text’
10am – Artemis Writers – Writing Workshop – ‘The Secret Language of Flowers’
11am – Nicole Wolverton – ‘Horror, Hospitality, and the Social Risk of Saying No’
12 noon – Evan Hayles Gledhill – ‘Consumption and Identity: The Cultural Significance of the Cannibal Queer Trope’
1pm – Alessandra Pino – Cooking Workshop – ‘A Shock to the System: Frankenstein in the Kitchen: Villain or Vermicelli’?
2pm – Siân Pearce – ‘All of Us Renfield: The Gothic Solicitor’
3pm – Cat Irving – ‘The Sack ’em Up Men on Screen: Body-Snatching Goes to the Movies’
4pm – Dan Pietersen – ‘Follow Me, and I Will be Thy Guide: A Day-Trip to Dante’s Inferno’
5pm – Johannes Evans – ‘Buttoned Up Tight: Gothic Themes in Costume Design’
6pm – Raquel Souza – ‘Latin Final Girls’
7pm – Sam Hirst – Reimagining Jane: The (Queer) Afterlives of Jane Eyre
8pm – B. Rae Grosz – Writing Workshop – ‘Limnal Spaces; or, Lakes and How To Haunt Them’
9 pm – Paul Riddell – Meat-Eating Greenery: An Overview of Carnivorous Plants
Ahead of my own presentation at 5pm GMT tomorrow, here are my slides.
As we know, you can put literally any film in front of me and I can talk about costume choices and design for hours, and the hardest part about this talk for me is actually going to be keeping my scope decently narrow because it’s SUCH a rich topic and there are so many details!
In order to make it as useful and applicable to people’s TV and film viewing as possible, I’m gonna give a very loose overview of:
- gothic fiction as we know it
- how that gothic fiction was initially developed for the screen in terms of costuming and design
- how that visual language is used today and how it’s developed and evolved (or not)
- how costume designers today attempt to evoke certain period aesthetics, ostensibly accurate to the period or not
Basically, my plan is to give you certain visual cues to look for and notice when you engage with gothic horror or romance in TV and film, and the idea is for those cues and details to serve as nice grabbing points for more detailed deconstruction and analysis if you want to dig in.
Because the world is Awful right now, we’re seeing a big resurgence in adaptations of both classic gothic works and engagement with new gothic stuff, as many of the themes that gothic fiction delves with are extremely prescient, especially with how exhausting a lot of moral panic is, and hopefully this presentation will be a nice conversational primer to seeing how a lot of these themes are condensed and communicated in effective costume design.
If you’ve just got this email and you can’t possibly wait 13 hours to hear me ramble adoringly about corset lacing and leather button boot fastenings and how much they tell us about sexual repression, class dynamics, and the respectability of white supremacy of the British imperial core, you can check out my talk with RTG last year about Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak as a gothic romance and adoring pastiche of the gothic, here:
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