I read The Monk in my first year of university. Studying English Literature, I was prepared to encounter unfamiliar fiction. But nothing could have prepared me for The Monk.

I learned quickly that the novel’s haunted convents, angelic heroines and impossibly evil villains were stock standard features of the Gothic mode, but starting with The Monk was like missing a step on a staircase and stumbling directly into the supernatural madness of an entire new world.

Twenty pages in, I was immersed in a dark unreality of barbaric madness encased safely in the moonlit gardens and deep stone walls of the novel’s convent. Lewis’ currency is Catholicism, the sanctity of which is traded for supernatural horror that squeezes shock and disgust from the reader like oil from a rag. Nothing about the novel was familiar. The characters were too vivid, the setting removed just far enough from the rationality of English society to allow any number of transgressive supernaturalisms to slip in. One character became another, then another. A pious Monk breaks his vows, the devil dashes him over the rocks. A convent burns down and order is restored to the wild novel.

I felt so far from home, filled with such excitement, shock and awe I could hardly believe the world of the Gothic was real; not only, real but possessing such a rich history of absurd and uncanny horror, the likes of which are hardly matched by our media today.

The Gothic mode is exciting —particularly to encounter for the first time— because it is entirely new; an outlet from the rationality of normalcy. The mode subverts the modern reader’s expectation of the rigid inaccessibility of classic literature. Rather, The Monk and the Gothic mode more broadly reflect a desperate desire to incite chaos. Lewis’ novel feels alive because it is so unreal, so bent on the Gothic mission to subvert reality that it never rests; striving to welcome us back to barbarity, the Gothic dances with horror and fear to outdo even its fellow preceding fictions. To disrupt society beyond the point of recognition, creating a world more insane than the last.

There is nothing quite like one’s first Gothic read. To this day, nothing I encounter beats the shock of The Monk’s horror. Such excitement is perhaps only matched by knowing that the rest of such a brilliant mode lies at my fingertips, guarded by ghosts and promises of hellish delights.

My first scholarly encounter with the Gothic was through my study of the 1999 independent VHS horror cult hit The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. The basis for my intrigue concerned how the film “performed reality”, or how it presented itself as actual documentary evidence of strange occurrences in a forest in Burkittsville, Maryland.

The film itself, with a modest runtime of 81 minutes, is but one piece of “evidence” (quite literally “found footage”) that forms part of a larger network of information relating to the Blair witch mythology. Myrick and Sánchez also produced a made-for-TV documentary film, Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), alongside a website displaying other mysterious “artefacts” (audio logs and photographs) that revealed more about the disturbing legend. In fact, actual newspaper articles were taken out to further infer the film’s authenticity. Therefore, much of the hype surrounding the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 centred around one question: “Is it real?” Of course, it’s not real, yet audiences at the time seemingly fell for it, or at least (as my research suggested) many willingly leaned into the idea that it could be real (quite the opposite of suspending one’s disbelief, rather reinvoking one’s belief to become involved in the hysteria).

To me, this is one of the most fascinating examples of a horror film’s reception by American society. It also reveals more about the influence of the internet (and media generally) during the 1990s, when we hadn’t fully become immersed in media culture, at least to extent that we are today. The information that audiences were presented with, either online or on-screen, still had the authority to invoke a sense of real-world superstition and mystery, whereas nowadays we probably know too much to be so subtly lulled into believing a story about three unsuspecting film students encountering a supernatural entity.

The alternate, fictional reality created by Myrick and Sánchez – might I suggest we call it the Blair Witch-verse? – was perhaps a once-off cultural phenomenon in terms of horror world-building. Fictional universes are the norm these days, and in the horror space, we welcome (or indeed become fatigued of) prequels, sequels and spin-offs that take place within a shared aesthetic space or fictional “reality” (The Conjuring universe, for example). Of course, there is the Texas Chainsaw series, Evil Dead and others that have done something similar before, yet what sets The Blair Witch Project apart is that it tries to occupy our world, the legend performs itself in our reality. The fact that the film never reinvokes its own fictionality (except for the credit sequences), while presenting raw, point-of-view footage from consumer-grade cameras, certainly makes for intoxicating viewing.

I have argued in my research that such a departure from cinematic conventions during this period must have felt invigorating for the audience, given the big-budget, visually arresting blockbusters that were being released throughout the late 1990s (The Matrix, among others). I believe that The Blair Witch Project is a true, modern techno-Gothic story that exploited a certain cultural naivety that perhaps we no longer possess in a media-saturated world. Having said that, the reach of the internet and social media platforms today has given us the ability to routinely create or present alternate realities of our own, whether tethered to perceivable reality or not. This begs the question: are we all similarly leaning into a sort of performed, shared reality not all too different from the one that surrounded the Blair Witch phenomenon?

Finally, we could surmise that the film’s legacy is one that reveals an uncomfortable truth about our modern condition: that reality itself is not experienced; rather, indeed, it is performed.

Since completing my undergraduate thesis concerning the performance of authenticity and The Blair Witch Project, I’m currently transferring to PhD and expanding my postgraduate research that examines the relationship between real-world anxiety and Korean horror-thriller TV and cinema. Many of the themes mentioned in this blog post relating to how horror can mirror or indeed shape our reality are among those of most interest in my research as a postgraduate at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. If you enjoyed this post and would like to reach out or connect, please e-mail me at D00127562@student.dkit.ie

Ever since seeing this provocation, I’ve been giving my first Gothic encounter some serious thought. What was it? Might it have been watching The Exorcist in the 80s, with two older brothers who were always happy to traumatise me, and a Catholic mother who probably didn’t mind me feeling the weight of Father Damien’s guilt? That felt a little late for my first Gothic encounter, even though I can’t pinpoint how far into the 80s we were when I first saw the film.

Or was it the one Sunday morning when my brothers—again!—plonked me in front of the TV to watch Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981) while my parents were out working? I can distinctly recall the sublime mythic confrontation between Damien and Christ—and, more pragmatically, that this was the last chance we had to see the movie before the Betamax video had to be returned to the local video rental store. This latter detail places this experience and memory at least a few years after the film was first released. The video must’ve been a weekly, rather than a new release. No, there had to be something earlier than these.

It struck me—viscerally—as I was driving to work one dreary morning, listening to local community radio in suburban Adelaide. I first heard the quiet haunting sound of a cold wind, not quite hushed, coming through the speakers that surrounded me in my cosy sanctuary. This was very shortly overlaid with tinkling bells, of fairytales and infant dreams. It was a strange, unnerving juxtaposition, but one that seemed familiar. My heart felt like it skipped a beat. My stomach began to churn. My arms, prickling with goosebumps, felt just a little weaker as I held on to the steering wheel. My body was recognising something, remembering something, that my mind had yet to register. It was a classic corporeal response to the uncanny, a sense of déjà vu, but I hadn’t yet had time to rationalise it. Next, a male voice, softly singing, lulling me… to sleep, to somewhere, I’m not sure which:

Stars in your eyes, little one
Where do you go to dream
To a place, we all know…

An electronic pulse started beating. Eurosynth melodies are soon overlaid. I finally knew what I was hearing: Bucks Fizz’s 1982 chart-topper, The Land of Make Believe.

Bucks Fizz might induce a different kind of horror for some, but I recall being a five-year-old who adored and dreaded this song in equal measure. (I also recall frequently dancing to Bucks Fizz’s Eurovision winner, Making Your Mind Up, for my grandmother in exchange for extra pocket money. I am grateful that this did not lead to a darker, more disturbing career choice.) The Land of Make Believe is the perfect musical blend of the joyful innocence and sinister undertones you might find in the best fairy tales, and I felt both in full measure as a child. I would sway and dance and sing along to Bobby G and Mike Nolan’s vocals, delivered in such sweet, kindly tones, while somehow trying to reconcile this happiness and pleasure with the lyrics of the first verse:

Shadows, tapping at your window

Ghostly voices whisper, ‘Will you come and play?’

And then the girls—Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston—in response:

Not for all the tea in China

Or the corn in Carolina

Never, never ever

They’re running after you babe

Who was running after me? And where are they coming from? The dose is repeated after the jubilant chorus, in the second verse:

Something nasty in your garden’s waiting

Patiently, ‘til it can have your heart

Try to go but it won’t let you

Don’t you know it’s out to get you

Running, keep on running

They’re running after you babe

Another reprisal of the chorus, a bridge, a key change, more of the chorus—the rest is pretty standard 80s pop fare. But as the music fades to nothing, an eleven-year-old girl recites a nursery rhyme to see us out, to leave the likes of poor little me in an indeterminate state of suspense:

I’ve got a friend who comes to tea

And no-one else can see but me

He came today

But had to go

To visit you

You never know

Just what on earth was this song about, and what was it trying to do? And what was that at the end of my bed?

The song was written by Pete Sinfield, previously of King Crimson, an English prog rock band of the late 60s and early 70s. In an interview for a retrospective BBC documentary, The Story of Top of the Pops: 1982, Cheryl Baker guesses that Sinfield ‘probably wrote [the song] with a spliff in his hand, playing the guitar’. But there was a serious political intent behind Sinfield’s song. Sinfield and the band were aiming to be no. 1 at Christmas in 1981 but hit the top a little late in 1982. In the same documentary, Sinfield says that he wanted to write a song that suggested ‘the spooky, scary side of Christmas’, but he also recalls that ‘it was just at the beginning of the Thatcher era. There was a lot of greed in the air, and it was quite an evil atmosphere.’ He also admits that he had Thatcher in mind when he wrote about ‘something nasty in your garden,’ waiting to have your heart. As Baker quips, for every spooky fairy tale, ‘there’s always a wicked witch’.

I had no idea who Thatcher was in 1982. Nor did I understand this strange, psychosomatic sensation of glee tinged with fear. I couldn’t describe it, and struggle to articulate it still. And I guess it is this sense of the ineffable that keeps drawing me back to the Gothic, a mode that keeps challenging the limits of my rationality and understanding—whether as eschatological horrors played out on my TV screen, or in eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, or the revived memory of a song catching me, now a mid-mannered middle-aged academic, unawares as I drive to work. Sinfield wanted to write ‘something that gets you between the shoulders’. That he certainly did.

The International Gothic Association is pleased to invite submissions to their biennial Postgraduate Student Essay Prize.

The essay competition is open to postgraduate students or postdoctoral scholars who are currently in good standing as IGA members. A postgraduate may be a current or recent Masters’ student (within two years of graduation) or a PhD candidate; a postdoctoral scholar is defined as someone who holds a PhD but does not hold a permanent academic post – this includes independent scholars.

Entries must offer an original contribution to the field of Gothic Studies and not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

The winning essay will be published in Gothic Studies (with revisions guided by the editors, as appropriate), the official journal of the International Gothic Association published by Edinburgh University Press. Its author will receive £50 from the International Gothic Association, and a year’s paid subscription to Gothic Studies. The publication issue for the winning article will be 28/1 (March 2026).

Essays should be formatted as a .doc or a .docx. and be between 5000 and 7000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes and bibliography, and should adhere to the Gothic Studies style guide.
The guide is available for download here:

https://www.euppublishing.com/page/gothic/submissions

To enter, email the following to Dr Jen Baker: J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk

Email Subject should be “IGA Postgraduate Essay Prize”

Attach a copy of your essay (as a .doc or .docx). This should be anonymised for blind review.

In the body of the email you should lists the following details:

• your name and the title of your essay;
• a current email address;
• your present and past academic affiliations (University or similar);
• If you are a current postgraduate, the name of the qualification for which you are studying andthe expected date of completion
• For postdoctoral / independent entrants, the title of your submitted PhD andthe date of your submission;
• a statement confirming the essay is your own original work, completed in the course of your study for the listed qualification.

The closing date for receipt of entries is 1st March 2025.  Late entries will not be considered. Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal editorial board / IGA exec. The judges are not able to provide individual feedback on the essays.

Please direct any queries to J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk

Entrants will be informed of the outcome by June 2025.

We are delighted to announce the short lists for this year’s two IGA Book Prizes: the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for the monograph best advancing the field of Gothic studies and the inaugural Justin D. Edwards Prize for the edited collection best advancing the field of Gothic studies.

This year we had 28 books long listed across the two prizes. This is our largest ever field, and a clear testament to the thriving scholarship of Gothic studies. The panel members generously dedicated weeks of their summer to reading the 14 (or, in some cases, 28) books: a significant time commitment, for which we sincerely thank them all.

The Monographs prize committee, in alphabetical order, comprised Professor Carol Davison, Professor Marie Mulvey Roberts, Professor Catherine Spooner, and Dr Sara-Patricia Wasson (Chair). The Edited Collections committee comprised Dr Joseph Crawford, Professor Carol Davison, Professor Jason Haslam, Dr Tim Jones, and Dr Sara-Patricia Wasson (Chair). Huge thanks are also due to Dr Matthew Foley for careful and meticulous work as Secretary of the prize and liaison with publishers.

Before announcing the shortlists, we would like to congratulate every single author on the long list. It was a privilege to read your work, and every panellist had a very difficult task to narrow down the works to be shortlisted. We hope that every long-listed author feels proud of their achievement.

The shortlisted works in each prize are as follows.

Shortlist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2024 for a monograph best advancing the field of gothic studies, in alphabetical order:

• Chloé Germaine, The Dark Matter of Children’s ‘Fantastika’ Literature: Speculative Entanglements (Bloomsbury)
• Sam Hirst, Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764-1834 (Anthem)
• Laura Kremmel, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (University of Wales Press)
• Bernice Murphy, The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press)
• Jamil Mustafa, The Blaxploitation Horror Film: Adaptation, Appropriation and the Gothic (University of Wales Press)
• Joan Passey, Cornish Gothic 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press)
• Andrew Smith, Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (Edinburgh University Press)
• Jeffrey Weinstock, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (Fordham University Press)

Shortlist for the Justin D. Edwards Prize 2024 for an edited collection best advancing the field of gothic studies, in alphabetical order:

• Rebecca Duncan (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (Edinburgh University Press)
• Justin Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan Hoglund (eds.), Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (Minnesota University Press)
• Sam George and Bill Hughes (eds.), In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (Manchester University Press)
• Karen Grumberg (ed.), Middle Eastern Gothic (University of Wales Press)
• Ardel Haefele-Thomas (ed.), Queer Gothic (Edinburgh University Press)
• Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Bernice M. Murphy (eds.), Twentieth-Century Gothic (Edinburgh University Press)
• Dale Townshend, Angela Wright and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Gothic (Cambridge University Press)

The Prizes will be announced at the IGA Conference at Mount-Saint Vincent University in Halifax in late July. If a prize winner is not present at the conference, the Chair will contact them by email after the awards announcement. After the conference has ended, a blog post will also celebrate the prize winners.

Congratulations to all the short-listed authors!

You can find the Postgraduate Student Bursary Application form here.

The full job description and person spec is below and you can also find it here.

Editor (Gothic Studies)

Role Description

Person Specification

Please see this post for the rationale around the short extension period. All nominations were longlisted. Warm thanks are due to Matt Foley for his work as Secretary to the Prize Committees. The following nominations were received in each category: 

Longlist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for Best Monograph 2024

Amy Bride, Financial Gothic: Monsterized Capitalism in American Gothic Fiction (University of Wales Press, 2023)

Renée Fox, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2023)

Chloé Germaine, The Dark Matter of Children’s ‘Fantastika’ Literature: Speculative Entanglements (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Ruth Heholt and Tanya Krzywinska, Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction (Anthem Press 2022)

Sam Hirst, Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764-1834 (Anthem Press, 2023)

William Hughes, The Dome of Thought: Phrenology and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester University Press, 2022)

Laura Kremmel, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (University of Wales Press, 2022)

Bernice Murphy, The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

Jamil Mustafa, The Blaxploitation Horror Film: Adaptation, Appropriation and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2023)

Joan Passey, Cornish Gothic 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023)

Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear (University of Wales Press, 2023)

Faye Ringel, The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead (Anthem, 2022)

Andrew Smith, Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

Jeffrey Weinstock, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (Fordham University Press, 2023)

Longlist for the Justin D. Edwards Prize for Best Edited Collection 2024

Simon Bacon (ed.), Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

Simon Bacon (ed.), The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2023) 

Louis Bayman and Kevin Donnelly (eds.), Folk Horror On Film: The Return of the British Repressed (Manchester University Press, 2023)

Rebecca Duncan (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Sue Edney (ed.), EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2020)

Justin Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan Hoglund (eds.), Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (Minnesota University Press, 2022)

Sam George and Bill Hughes (eds.), In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (Manchester University Press, 2020)

Karen Grumberg (ed.), Middle Eastern Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2023)

Ardel Haefele-Thomas (ed.), Queer Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Tina Morin and Jarlath Killeen (ed.), Irish Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Arts of Angela Carter: A Cabinet of Curiosities (Manchester University Press, 2019) 

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Bernice M. Murphy (eds.), Twentieth-Century Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

Dale Townshend, Angela Wright and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Gothic, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020-2021)

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

A panel of past Presidents and winners will assess the nominations. The Chair for the prize panels is Sara Wasson. The Secretary for the prize is Matt Foley. A shortlist will be published on the IGA website by the middle of July. The prizes will be presented (or, if a winning author is not present, announced) during the conference which, this year, is hosted at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada, in late July.

Congratulations to all nominees!

For me, it was a plethora of encounters from illicit Friday night viewings of Hammer Horrors, Hitchcocks, creature features, and curiosity shows about drinking blood on the tiny TV bracketed on my bedroom wall. The morbidity of Michael Burke’s 999 held the power to entice me back indoors in the long summer nights of the nineties. I was that child in primary school propagating rumours of the murderous ‘Blue Lady’ haunting the toilets – terrified, and loving it. Trips to the London, York, and Edinburgh Dungeons and ‘Chamber of Horrors’, with their creepy waxwork depictions of tortured criminals, fuelled my fire for the fiendish. It was in this chilling chamber’s gift shop that, aged nine, I began my ever-growing Gothic library, with a book by George Riley Scott, full of disturbing medieval woodcuts, entitled The History of Torture.  

As a teenager and young adult, I graduated to horror cult classics: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and relished the death trap depravity of James Wan’s Saw (2004) at the cinema. I surrounded myself with others who delighted in the dark: a budding horror film maker and Rocky Horror obsessive, a zombie aficionado, a special effects make-up artist, and a flat mate prankster who planted eyeless doll heads under the covers and Cousin Itts in the cupboard. Alongside this, I was devouring Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), Dracula (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Woman in White (1860), In a Glass Darkly (1872), Victorian ghost stories, and everything by Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson. I decided to make it my life’s work to devour the entire canon, so a PhD on the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier was inevitable. 

I fell in love with Gothic literature because it takes us beyond the daylight rigidity of defined categories, inviting us to revel in ambiguity, heightened states of emotion and passion, the frowned-upon recesses of humanity. Even if the Gothic novel winds up containing all this safely within a box, the Gothic is where the darkness is given a day out to parade in full, unashamed glory. Re-reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde recently reinforces my conviction that Gothic is a necessary life-force for the soul; however ‘wicked’ its leanings, one must need ‘strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty’. Gothic is transgressive, subversive, and liminal; it flouts in the face of the stuffy, stifling rules of ‘reality’. The Gothic’s interpretation of what ‘reality’ is – that it is multifarious, elliptical, contingent, and unstable – is, for me, the genre’s most alluring and powerful aspect. The death-obsessed Gothic taught me how to live. For that, I’ll never give up on the Gothic. 

By Helena Habibi

In my early teenage years, I avidly watched American crime solving TV series NCIS and one of the characters, forensic Abby Sciuto, struck my imagination with her spider web tattoos, black pigtails, chokers, knee-high platform boots and her taste for industrial artists Android Lust and Nitzer Ebb she would blast in her lab. The 13-year-old I was had never encountered someone like this in real life or even on screen. Abby was also smart, eccentric, upbeat, compassionate, optimistic and dedicated to her work. I was left with one consequential and significant first impression: goth was a positive thing. It went down as the first time I encountered something I knew was ‘gothic’.

What truly made me dive into the rabbit hole of gothic was a mainstream TV show about the investigation service of the U. S. Navy. I know. How ungoth. But the fact remained Abby had opened my mind. Curious in nature, I progressively began searching on what gothic meant. I wanted to know more. From high school to university, I was given opportunities to satisfy that thirst. It started with the poems of Baudelaire and Prosper Mérimée’s 1837 fantastic novel La Vénus d’Ille in literature class. One year in English class, we read a collection of short gothic novels. It is the only English school books I kept after high school.

As I always do when I discover works of art that resonate with me, I dig deeper to know more about the genius(es) behind them. My encounter with Edgar Allan Poe (both the man and his work) was a huge step in my addiction. For those who are wandering, yes, it is possible to be hooked to writers who master the English language via French translations, even more so when translators are poets like Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. This was particularly true about The Raven, for beyond its rhymes and hypnotic rhythm addressed universal themes, such as the sinister creeping of despair caused by mourning, ultimately morphing into madness.

The gothic had infiltrated my fiction writing, my photographs, and even my academic research. My decision to complete a master’s degree and my choice of master thesis subject was practically based on the fact I wanted to talk about goths’ representation in the media. So, I conciliated that with my interest for the sociological aspect of violence and spent a couple of years researching about the instrumentalization of the Columbine High School shooting. But by that time, I had figured out what my real first encounter with the gothic really was. 

A film I watched repeatedly back in my preschool years was Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, its beautiful drawings and its larger-than-life orchestra music. In Fantasia, one segment used to scare me more than others: the one with the bat-winged demon on top of a mountain, calling for the ghostly skeletons to come out of their graves. The Night on the Bald Mountain by Modeste Mussorgsky which accompanied the animation was frightening in itself. Cold shades of blue and purple contrasting with the bright orange of Hell’s fire, emphasized by the dark minor scale and the musical arrangement made the segment gothic for eyes and ears. It later became my favorite part. 

A classic case of ‘It was there all along’.

Not long after I had discovered Fantasia, I received the 1949 Disney’s adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on VHS that became our family’s Halloween classic. Was I scared? Due to my very young age, maybe a little. But the fascination for the last scene’s gloomy settings — a Halloween party, an old cemetery, a chase through a creepy forest, and a hefty dose of dark secondary colors — overshadowed the fear. To a 5–6-year-old’s eyes, these images were uncommon, uncanny, unreal, so different from everything else. Those images had something magical. Fear went away quickly.

By Léon Isabelle