Psychosexual Uber Gothic: Turn of the Screw (BBC 2009)

Not sure about that title? Neither am I, but I’ll give it a shot.

In 1999, I went to my first opera, Benjamin Britten’s 1954 version of The Turn of the Screw. Even though the opera was sung in English, I couldn’t understand a word of it. I know the story of The Turn of the Screw like the back of my hand, but as I quickly came to understand, with opera it’s not so much the words, but everything else… the sets, the costume, and the direction.

I remember very little of the opera except that the stage production was jaw dropping. Ghosts appeared from inside the walls of the grand mansion and descended to the stage on a lift, Quint writhed on top of the piano while the Governess sang her aria… and the whole thing was infused with a hyper-sexuality that left no room for misinterpretation. There was nothing subtle about the opera.

There’s nothing subtle about the BBC’s 2009 reinterpretation of the perennial classic, either. This version is beautifully photographed at Somerset’s Brympton d’evercy, the production drips with Gothic imagery at every turn, and the performances by the cast are all first rate (Sue Johnston as Mrs. Gross was particularly outstanding). All of this, for me anyway, saves what is an otherwise curious mess. I didn’t mind the story being reset in the 1920s. I didn’t mind the script overstating the obvious, that Ann was sexually frustrated and that Peter Quint boffed every woman at Bly. I doubt even Mrs. Gross got off Scott-free.

It starts to get a little bizarre (okay, really bizarre) when there is a quick-cut flashback showing Miles, cocktail glass and cigar in hand, feet propped up, watching Quint and Miss Jessel go at it hot and heavy. There were a number of scenes like this, stripping the story of all its subtlety and driving home the psycho-sexual elements.

The film’s ultimate failing is in later scenes when the children become “possessed” by the spirits of the former governess and the valet. The producers chose to take a cue from The Exorcist and have demonic voices come spewing out of Miles’ and Flora’s mouths. It was a bit much. No, it was way too much. First I laughed, and then I groaned. Such a cheap gimmick threw the entire affair into the rubbish bin.

So it’s probably with good reason that the film has not yet made it to American audiences. If you know where to look, like I do, you can acquire a copy by nefarious means. You can even watch it in multiple parts on YouTube.

Or you can be smart, and leave well enough alone. 

Jonathan Frid, Exit Stage Left

I’m not certain how it began, but I imagine it went something like this:

It was late afternoon on a sunny, spring day and I had gone to another fourth-grade friend’s house to play after school. His mama was sitting in the recliner in the living room, smoking, watching a soap opera on the color TV. In those days, that’s what moms did. They stayed home all day. At my house, we didn’t have a color TV, my parents didn’t smoke, and my mother didn’t watch soap operas. Spooky music rattled out of the tinny TV speaker and people with anxious faces moped glumly around the living room of an immense, old mansion. And who was the scary guy with the weird haircut and the wolf’s head cane? Some people on the show were afraid of him. Others seemed to love him. His name was Barnabas Collins. What kind of name was that?

More than anything else, Dark Shadows was a product of its time. It was the mid-to-late 1960s. The Viet Nam War was in full sway, with gore being broadcast into living rooms on the evening news with frightening regularity. There was unrest on the home front as well in the form of race riots and campus rebellions. Teenagers, much to the horror of their parents, were tuning in, dropping out, and turning on. “What’s your sign?” was a common pick-up line and indicative of a movement where everyone seemed to be into Astrology and other more insidious manifestations of the occult.

It’s no small wonder that in the midst of all the madness, Dark Shadows became a runaway phenomenon with grade-schoolers and their moms. Who else would be found glued to the TV at 4:00 on even the sunniest of days, the curtains drawn, being sucked into the gloomy world of Collinwood? Today, ask anyone over the age of fifty about Dark Shadows and the first words out of their mouth will be, “I used to run home from school…” and once I was hooked, so did I.

Dark Shadows fans know this story well, but it bears repeating. Dark Shadows went on the air in June 1966, but despite being a Gothic novelty act on daytime TV, the ratings flagged. The story began as a television retread of the popular Gothic Romance novels of the time with a governess, Victoria Winters, taking a post at mysterious Collinwood which had no more menace than any other old house with creaky floorboards and drafts near the windows that sometimes made the curtains billow inexplicably. But about six months into the first year, with the threat of cancellation looming, producer Dan Curtis decided to shift the focus from Jane Eyre to Dracula.

Enter Jonathan Frid, a classically trained Shakespearean actor who had one prior TV credit as a psychiatrist on another soap opera. The cousin from England, Barnabas Collins, was only meant to be in the series for a month of weekday afternoons, but once he started sneaking into bedrooms and biting the necks of the female members of the cast, the ratings soared.

And soared, and soared. Looking back at the craggy face of Jonathan Frid in makeup, it is somewhat hard to believe that Frid became a sex symbol, but consider that in his day, Bela Lugosi was a sex symbol as well. And given the continued success of Barnabas’ grandchildren, Lestat de Lioncourt and Edward the Sparkler, it is clear that women are eternally and irresistibly drawn to a bloodsucker.

But what about the boys? At my school, other little boys on the playground played at being Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock during recess. I played Barnabas and bit the little girls on the neck. Who do you think had his priorities in the right place?

It is no secret that Dark Shadows has had a lasting influence on my life and art. I proudly display all 33 of the vintage Dark Shadows paperbacks in an old fashioned wire bookrack. I have all 1,125 episodes on VHS and DVD, I have the Robert Cobert soundtrack CDs, and I have autographs from three of the show’s stars, including Frid’s, from book signings.

My early experiences with Dark Shadows eventually led to harder things. I discovered Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. In my teen years I discovered Hammer Films and began to read Gothic writers such as Shirley Jackson, Lovecraft, and Poe. Today I am a writing a style of Gothic fiction which has its roots in the stories which inspired the plot arcs on Dark Shadows.

Jonathan Frid passed away quietly at the age of 87 on Friday, April 13^th. There was no funeral, and there is no memorial service planned by the family. The news was withheld from the media for seven days, breaking on the internet early this morning, Thursday, April 19^th.

Tonight, fans across the country will be lighting candles, holding séances, donning their vampire capes, popping tapes in the VCR, and remembering one of the 1960s quintessential pop icons.

Thank you, Jonathan Frid, for a lifetime of terror, intrigue, and a boat load of unintentional laughs. You had a good run.

What could possibly be scary about a yellow scarf?

I feel I've been neglecting my readers lately. It hasn't been because of a lack of interest. I'm feeling full bore Gothic these days, trying to find something really great to read and review (I tried Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, but that wasn't it). I finished another draft of my forthcoming Gothic Romance, The Haunting at Blackwood Hall, in February and wrote Black Valentines in about three weeks time, turned around and cranked out another shocker, this one called The Yellow Scarf. My early beta readers reported variously that it creeped them out, and it was really scary. I'll let you be the judge of that.

I've read interviews with Stephen King for years where people always ask him where he gets his ideas and he has some down-home comeback about getting them at the corner drugstore. I've started hearing a variation, "How do you come up with this stuff?"


The Yellow Scarf is three things that converged together. I can identify two of them. A few months ago I was reading some old Les Daniels paperbacks, one of them was No Blood Spilled, which alluded to the murderous Indian cult of the early 19th century known as Thugs. If you know anything about these followers of Kali Ma, you will understand the title reference going in.

The second source was some reviews of two Shirley Jackson novels, including The Sundial, which involves an extended family holed up in a decaying country estate waiting for the end of the world. The Yellow Scarf is not about the end of the world, but two thirds of it takes place in a decaying country mansion, a very lovely decaying country mansion if you're into that sort of thing.

Somehow (and for the life of me I can't remember how it happened) the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park in London in 1969 got thrown into the mix. True story. The Yellow Scarf is not. It's fiction. I hope you enjoy it, and let me know what you think. Below is the opening:

The house waited.

The rains were heavy that spring. The grounds around Hampton Close were sodden, the canopy of trees so lush and full that swollen limbs prohibited any hope of sunlight from ever reaching the floor of the forest primeval. To walk the wood surrounding Hampton Close was a hazard to the traveler. The flora had rotted into a cesspool of rank detritus leaving the ground a morass of wet leaves and rotten undergrowth. Beneath, benighted creatures roiled and squirmed, thriving on the sustenance of warm decay which enfolded them in its womb.

With the coming of summer, and the heat, the house became a breeding ground for that which thrives in darkness. Not tangible organisms with defined shape and form and measurable weight, but those things which grow just across the border of consciousness in that twilight area accessible only through dreams and precognition, creativity and madness. The house was alone with itself and in its loneliness it turned within and beheld its own living darkness.

The house smiled.

Gothic Eye Candy: Jane Eyre (1943)

Jane Eyre is unquestionably the grandmother of the modern Gothic Romance. I have at least four film versions, and have room on my shelves for more in the future. My favorite is the 2008 BBC miniseries, but by far the best looking is the 1943 classic starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. One of my favorite blogs is The Obscure Hollow, a blog dedicated to posting screen grabs from Gothic films, mostly focusing on the set designs. No commentary, just frame after frame of Gothic eye candy. So,to avoid being accused of ripping off a great idea, my version will feature the occasional commentary. 

Without further ado, 20th Century Fox's Jane Eyre, cinematography by George Barnes.

Jane prepares to enter the Midnight Room.

Echoes of the Macabre: the short stories of Daphne du Maurier

The past few months I’ve found myself in an uncomfortable spot creatively. I am putting the finishing touches on my second novel, which involves lots of reading and editing and reworking and reading and editing and…well, you get the picture. It’s hard to get another novel under way when one is still in the birth canal, so to keep the juices flowing I’ve turned to shorter forms, and managed to eek out a novella and a short story as the novel nears its publication date.

For inspiration I turned to one of the twentieth century masters of the novella and short story, Daphne du Maurier, whose collections Kiss Me Again, Stranger, and Don’t Look Now occupy a shelf of honor above my computer next to other literary favorites such as Dickens, Shirley Jackson, and Tennessee Williams. These paperbacks have been in my collection for nearly forty years. They look it, and they smell it. So without further ado, let’s start with the title story, Kiss Me Again, Stranger.

This story deals with one of my favorite themes, obsessive love. Our unnamed narrator is a garage mechanic in post World War 2 England, aimlessly buffeted about by life until he becomes enamored of a beautiful cinema usherette and takes a late night bus ride with his new love to…a cemetery. One of the best things about du Maurier’s short stories are the endings. They tend to sneak up on the reader and smack you right in the face. Kiss Me Again, Stranger has a knockout ending and is a perfect start to this collection of masterpieces.

The centerpiece to the collection is the long novella, Monte Verita. I remembered it as being my favorite in this book, and re-reading it again after many years it’s easy to see why. This is the kind of old fashioned British storytelling that we don’t see much of these days. Today’s reader is accustomed to a more involved style of writing, what writers and readers refer to as “showing” as opposed to “telling”. A good two thirds of Monte Verita could be considered “telling”, but du Maurier’s command of language here is at its very best. Every sentence is a gem. We feel every arduous step of the many trips our mountain climbers take, especially up the titular mountain which is home to a mysterious sect of people who were once referred to sarcastically as moon worshippers. But again, the ending to this story reveals something altogether different. In the world of du Maurier’s macabre short pieces, you may think you know what’s going on, but you don’t.

Except in the case of The Birds, which might be the most famous short horror story of the twentieth century second only to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. If you are only familiar with The Birds through Hitchcock’s film version, drop everything and read it now. The Birds is straight forward. Seen through the eyes of a Cornish farmer and his family, the birds are taking over the world. There are no glamorous blond babes in fur coats, no questionable mother-son relationships, there are only the birds and a farmer and his family in a boarded up house in Cornwall, cut off from a world that may no longer exist. There is no ending this time, and the lack of catharsis is, to say the very least, chilling.

Don’t Look Now was filmed as a motion picture almost as famous to horror fans as the Hitchcock movie. Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film is a nearly perfect reproduction of the story on film. For the unfamiliar, this is a puzzling tale involving a husband and wife, grieving over the death of their young daughter, who encounter a pair of sisters while on holiday in Venice, and become entangled in a mysterious web of psychic visions and premonitions. The ending is a shocker, one that viewers of the film will never forget. While du Maurier’s story and the film are virtually identical, the ending in the short story is a bit abrupt. If you blink, you might miss it. In the film, the imagery is driven home until it becomes indelible and will haunt you for years afterward.

Both these volumes are currently out of print, but were major best sellers in their day and any library would have copies available. Du Maurier’s stories are often mixed and matched in various collections that pop up on book store shelves every few years. If you only know du Maurier for her Gothic Romance, Rebecca, and if you have a taste for Gothic tales with a macabre twist, do yourself a favor and track some of these down. 

Why Gothic? Conversations With Lisa Greer Part 2

In which Lisa and I continue our discussion about why we write what we write.

I, too, find that Victoria Holt's work lacks in spooky atmosphere, but the story lines are interesting and even controversial at times. I do like that aspect of her work. I can also relate to what you say about archetypes and journeys in Gothic Romance, and perhaps the introverted and cerebral nature of the heroine's journey is what appeals to me as well. I was quiet, studious, and a bit melancholy in my pre-teen and teen years, and so were many of the heroines that Phyllis A. Whitney, Barbara Michaels, Victoria Holt, and other masters of the genre wrote about. The innocent heroines are definitely thrust into frightening situations at the point where they are coming of age or are at some great turning point in life. Their isolation only adds to the fear factor and stakes for them. The journeys they take are often ones where they survive by their intelligence and wits, rather than by their great beauty which also is quite attractive to many women, I'd wager.

And yes, I do like the Wicked Mother archetype, don't I? I didn't realize it until after I'd written each work, but it does show up in my books quite often. In some of my upcoming works, I've explored the Wicked Father a bit which was fun. Other types that show up often in gothic romance--at least when I write it now-- are the Satanic figure (perhaps also the Wicked Father), the Wise Old Man and the Seer (gypsies and such). I know that I've seen the Trickster in your work as well. I'm thinking of The Haunting at Blackwood Hall and Banoub Bahktu, the creepy charlatan character.

As far as your writing, Barrymore, where do you think it falls on the spectrum of Gothic Romance to Gothic to Gothic horror and why?

That’s a tough question and one that I struggled with as I pitched Night of the Pentagram to agents. But once I had Black Valentines and The Haunting at Blackwood Hall under my belt, I’ve come to a better understanding of what is emerging in my work. In one respect they are Gothic Romance, because of the template they follow. From a marketing standpoint, I don’t think readers who pursue Gothic Romances for the romantic element will be satisfied, because in my stories the romantic relationship is doomed from the start. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a satisfying romantic subplot in a future work, but my own world view is far too cynical. There are so many psycho-emotional nuances to real world relationships that happy endings in fiction just don’t work for me. Look at two of the greatest contributions to the pantheon of Gothic literature, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. What emotional turmoil! And what do we have when we’ve reached the end of these stories? In Wuthering Heights everybody dies, only to continue their co-dependant relationship beyond the grave, and our fair Jane may have gotten her man, but at what a terrible price for everyone involved.

So I lean toward viewing my books as Gothic Horror, in part because they are trussed up with so much supernatural window dressing, which makes them horror, but they are more about the psychological experience of the characters than the sort of Grand Guignol horror that we have come to expect from Stephen King and Clive Barker and their descendants. I’ve been fascinated for years with psychology in general, and personality types as they appear in Jungian thought and Tarot work in specific, all of which has been a major influence on the characters I create.

Doomed relationships have always been a major theme in Gothic fiction, but social taboos also play a large part in the early Gothics and even some of those today. Wuthering Heights comes to mind in terms of these taboo themes. Heathcliff and Catherine as "siblings" who are in love and who have a romance as pre-teens and teens, even though he is adopted, is an interesting theme in its own right. All one has to do to see that such non-genetic sibling or familial relationships are considered incest or incest-lite and thrilling or forbidden is take a look at the bestsellers list for erotic romance. Of course, Poe's Fall of the House of Usher is an extreme example of the taboo of incest in the Gothic genre.

Another theme that comes into play in Wuthering Heights and other novels is that of falling in love with "The Other." Heathcliff is a dirty gypsy, or The Other, a dangerous outsider who upsets polite society. Catherine's unraveling and Heathcliff's too is that they ever meet and fall in love. The whole course of things is changed for them and for many of the characters in the novel.

Finally, another taboo theme from that novel and many others since is that of necrophilia. It is hinted at when Heathcliff digs up Catherine's body and tells others of it. Though he does not embrace her, he is obsessed with how she looks the same even in death. An interesting aspect of the taboos in this novel is the lengths that many fans and critics will go to deny that they exist. This website, for example, put together by a fan of the novel, is adamant about how incest and necrophilia are not part of the work.

However, I would argue that Bronte meant to shock readers and raise these themes. There are too many of them to ignore.

What do you think, Barrymore? I know in your novels, incest plays a role. In my second Gothic Romance, Moonlight on the Palms, it does as well when the heroine's own mother sleeps with the hero. It is sordid and meant to make the audience squirm and question what lies beneath polite society and why we fear the things we do.

My strict Christian upbringing forbade so many things that it is no wonder my writing is filled with characters with unhealthy obsessions. Not only were many things taboo for me as a child and teenager, as an adult I learned that some of those things that were preached against were actually occurring under our own roof. I think one of the most shocking moments in television history was the revelation of relationships in the Palmer family in the cult hit Twin Peaks. I think that was a major turning point in popular entertainment. Incest is a dirty subject, but it has happened to more families than we will ever really know.

In one of my books, a character that was abused by her father not only grows up to marry a man who reminds her of him, but winds up murdering them both! A tragic crime to be sure, but who can blame her. I think it is cathartic for people to read or watch stories where this type of deplorable crime is avenged. And there we have yet another theme in Gothic fiction, vengeance and revenge for crimes from the past.

To be continued...

Lisa Greer has four contemporary Gothic Romance novels under her belt including the just released Secrets of Summerspelle, available from Musa Publishing, as well as numerous short stories and novellas available for the Kindle through Amazon. My second novel, The Haunting at Blackwood Hall, will be released in June, 2012.

Something Burton This Way Comes

In the late 1990s, when we were all just learning to crawl around the Internet, I got involved with an online group of Dark Shadows fans. One of our favorite discussions was to pick our dream cast for a big screen remake. I chose Tim Burton to direct, Johnny Depp to play Barnabas, Christina Ricci as Angelique, and Helen Bonham Carter as Dr. Hoffman. I'll settle for two out of three. Tim Burton's Dark Shadows arrives in theaters Friday, May 11.