My First Encounter with the Gothic, by Barbara Hughes-Moore
My love for the Gothic began in childhood with The Addams Family, Beetlejuice, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. They were in me by osmosis. Dracula, meanwhile, had to be invited in.
As a child I was terribly afraid of ghosts (I still am) – although, perplexingly, I did have an imaginary friend that my mum was worried was an unquiet spirit loosed from the grave. I made sure to set a place for him at every table, and she was very relieved when he didn’t come to tea anymore. Whoever, or whatever, he was, he would be only the first in a long line of fictional ghosts, ghouls, and other gribbly things for whom I would make a home in my heart. After all, in the words of one such ‘monster’, ‘there is much to be learned from beasts’.
Back to Drac. When I was in high school, my mum sat me down and showed me a single scene from her favourite movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). After that, everything changed. It’s the scene where Gary Oldman’s elegant Count, refuelled and de-aged, meets Winona Ryder’s buttoned-up Mina Murray on the streets of London, and a spark flickers between them. For Mina, the connection is new, unexpected, and a little thrilling – after all, she is happily affianced to the handsome but hapless Jonathan Harker who, unbeknownst to her, is making a harrowing escape from Dracula’s castle at the very moment that the Count is making eyes at his missus-to-be.
For Dracula, though, there is more at stake – pun intended – because it turns out that Mina is the reincarnation of his wife Elisabeta, much loved and long-dead, who threw herself into the river when Vlad’s enemies sent report of his (greatly exaggerated) demise. When the high priests claim that suicide has damned her soul, Dracula vows to forever wage war against the church and against God Himself. The magnificent scene in which the inconsolable prince destroys the chapel, upturning holy fonts and stabbing crucifixes until they pour with blood, would not find me until much later – even now, ‘I have crossed oceans of time to find you’ remains, for my money, the most romantic declaration that a human being has ever made.
Dracula had opened the gateway to all things Gothic, and for me there was no going back. Gothic stories and aesthetics dominated my angsty teenage years, gave shape to my busy twenties. Dracula was my portal into Twilight and Frankenstein, to Tanith Lee and Tim Burton (not to mention Evanescence and My Chemical Romance!). Gothic became the bedrock of my PhD, in which I consulted with ‘monsters’ like Frankenstein’s creature, Dorian Gray, and Mr Hyde to learn more about how (and why) we categorise certain people as ‘criminals’ in law.
When I turned the PhD into a book, I invited Dracula back in. He never really left, because he knows I’ll come back. I always do.
