I was eight years old, wide-eyed and innocent, when I first encountered the Gothic. My family were on summer vacation, staying in a little family-owned motel at Myrtle Beach that we’d frequented for years. Our annual beach trip was significant for many reasons, but one thing that I especially looked forward to was the blissful promise of 24/7 access to the Disney Channel, since we didn’t have cable television at home.

One night, my parents fell asleep early, no doubt exhausted from a long day of managing my boundless vacation-enhanced energy. Left to consume pre-teen TV programming to my heart’s content, I gobbled up network staples—Hannah Montana, Good Luck Charlie, The Suite Life on Deck, Sonny with a Chance—until 10:30pm, when an unfamiliar title flashed across the television screen.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire: “No parents. No rules. No pulse.”

Lights out, volume turned low, I watched as teenage vampires and their mortal friends battled the spirit of an ancient, vengeful, sentient tree that once served as a site for druid rituals. Furious at having been chopped down, the tree sought its revenge by growing infectious weeds into the local high school’s computer system until a rag-tag group of two nerdy boys and their vampire “babysitter” defeated it by uploading a virus to the network.

My heart pounded wildly in my chest for nearly thirty minutes straight, slowing only during the episode’s requisite commercial breaks. I remember quietly getting up from the queen-sized bed that I shared with my mother, grabbing a hard-backed chair from the breakfast table, and plopping down directly in front of the television set to catch as much of the action as possible. I felt almost naughty—as if I was doing something illicit, watching something that my parents wouldn’t approve of if they’d been awake.

But one episode and I was hooked. My Babysitter’s a Vampire was all I could think about the next day, and I stayed up late that night, too, to experience the thrill again. Faced with the loss of my newfound obsession as we prepared to leave Myrtle Beach, I resolved to use my hard-earned odd-jobs money (I never received a weekly allowance) to buy the series on DVD. By some odd stroke of luck, I managed to find it a week later at Target.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire soon became an integral part of my childhood media experience and certainly played a role in shaping my fondness for all things monstrous and grotesque. After graduating to “adult” horror as a teenager and developing a particular taste for Elvira’s Movie Macabre and anything starring Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci, I completed multiple courses on horror literature while pursuing my undergraduate degree and won a fellowship to study American Gothic fiction writer Shirley Jackson (best-known for “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House) in North Bennington, Vermont in 2023.

But regardless of where the Gothic takes me next—whether I continue to examine horror literature in my graduate studies or elect to turn my attention elsewhere—My Babysitter’s a Vampire will always enjoy its place of honor on my DVD shelf, where it reminds me never to fear the shadows, but instead to relish the stories best shared in the

My first encounter with “the Gothic” was probably when I watched The Addams Family and The Munsters on television in the early 1960s. I enjoyed their macabre lifestyle, especially how they portrayed it as so “normal”. The way other people acted and reacted to contact with members of either family was entertaining each time for me.

Later in the 1960s, Dark Shadows was airing on television. At school I was listening to other school children who were talking about a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, and a ghost child as characters in a television show. I was reading about vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. I was looking for the show on the ABC network when it was airing after a soap opera, The Secret Storm. I was watching the show in 1966 or ‘67.

During that time, I saw the Star Trek episode “Cat’s Paw”. There were witches, spooky castles, a dungeon, skeletons, magic, and a black cat. However Gothic that episode was, I became more of a fan of science fiction the more I watched other episodes of the show.

The Sixth Sense and Night Gallery television shows brought me back to Gothic storylines that involved ghosts and all manner of horrors, both surreal and imaginary. However, an episode of The Snoop Sisters that featured Alice Cooper brought me into the world of shock rock.

Sometime after an Alice Cooper concert (Richmond, Virginia) took me further into the world of shock rock, goth came to America. Puck rock left me uninspired. However, the gothic music and lifestyle that came to America spoke to me in remarkably familiar terms. Those terms were vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. Local and national horror movie hosts played old films that showed me many of these same supernatural creatures played by actors. Barbara Steele was an actor who played characters in some older horror films and a character in a revival of the original Dark Shadows television series. Those films showed characters like Dracula, Frankenstein, witches, and werewolves. Authors drafted stories about such characters and the characters showed up in movies.

The Dunwich Horror movie introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft. This author’s stories represented a different kind of invasion. This alien invasion of Earth came without spaceships in modern times. These aliens came long ago and appeared after a long time from somewhere under the sea or in a mountain. The idea of an alien that appeared so unlike anything people had seen before was not new in fiction. However, their appearance caused the loss of sanity in people who looked at them in some cases. These creatures were the stuff that nightmares were made of.

Compilations of songs on Cleopatra Records gave me an idea of what goth music was. Local bands Valentine Wolfe and Bella Morte gave me an idea of what goth music was in their performances at a local Edgar Allan Poe-inspired convention called RavenCon.

As a student of electronic music, I listen to music with the intent of a performance of it someday. I believe listening to gothic music is the main thing to a gothic lifestyle. Whether the performance of gothic music covers turns me into a musician is anyone’s guess.

Growing up on a small reservation in the States, it was almost impossible to pinpoint when I first encountered the Gothic. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly encountered it at my university, where I took an independent ‘Gothic Literature’ course; however, upon reading works like The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, and A Sicilian Romance, I realized that perhaps I had been far more familiar with that eerie and anxiety-inducing affect than I had initially thought.

Spending all of my childhood and teenage years on a rez (Indian reservation) that stretches 4,267 mi² (11,051 km²), I always had a childlike curiosity about what lay in wait on the dark plains, and sometimes my own imagination ran amok with what could be watching and waiting.

On the rez, one becomes accustomed to marking out distances for survival but also for potential help; for example, being bitten by a poisonous rattlesnake when the nearest hospital is 40 miles (64 km) away and the closest thing to cell service reception is 20 miles (32 km).

The rules and regulations of the land bend for no one, and while having a landline can certainly aid the hospital in preparing the serum, your quickest way to get there is not by ambulance but through your own rez-beater (a rusty car, often found on the rez, with many dents and an unmentionable amount of rust and dirt, as well as missing numerous key elements like a license plate and tags). One just has to make sure your trusty rez-beater can hightail it on the dirt roads without running into a deer, hitchhiker, cow, or something else.

But driving on the rez isn’t just about practicality—it is also about navigating the land’s unseen forces. There’s an unspoken awareness that the land holds memories, and that not every presence you encounter is entirely human. The isolation of the rez stretches beyond physical distances; it carries an eerie quietness, a sense that something lingers just beyond your headlights.  Given that the reservation is so vast and isolated, driving becomes second nature wherein an 80-mile (128km) drive can seem like nothing to most. Herein, lies my perception of where I can first remember encountering something akin to the Gothic.

On a long night drive home from town, my aunt shared with me and my sister the complications of driving alone and to never stop for a hitchhiker we did not know. On the rez, everyone knows everyone. It is unlikely you’ll encounter someone you are not related to or someone your family does not know, thus encountering a stranger is often unheard of. She warned us early to not pick up hitchhikers, but she also inspired a sense of awe in us when she revealed that we as young women should expect to be protected by the spirit of Deer Woman.

Deer Woman’s origins are often drawn to the Great Plains of North America, but her story stretches farther than most realize and can be found in various forms of Indigenous storytelling. My aunt then recounted that a young man, a bad one at that, once drove the same road as we were driving when he spotted an old woman walking on the shoulder at night. He pulled over and questioned if she needed a lift, to which she gave no response other than simply opening the car door and stepping in.

The man continued his drive, attempting to conversate with her, but she gave no responses. He tried to look at her features but a shroud was covering her head and much of her face. Continually peeking at her, he then noticed to his horror that where her feet should have been were in fact deer hooves. Jerking his eyes back to the road, he barely had time to stop the car when a herd of deer crossed over the road. The animals began running down the barbed wire fence line, and when he turned to look at the old woman—she was gone. He was all more horrified when the end of the herd came by and the woman’s face was on one of the deer’s, her eyes looking straight into his.

Make no mistake, Deer Woman is no monster. It is here where I see a separation between the Gothic and what could be horror. Instead, Deer Woman is an entity of protection and restorative justice, specifically for women and children.

“So, what happened to the man?” I remember questioning my aunt.

She laughed and said that the man who had often targeted young women traveling alone never did again after his encounter with Deer Woman.

Stories vary when it comes to people’s individual encounters with her, with some being bloodier than the next, as can be seen in the Hulu series Reservation Dogs. However, it can be said that even on the isolated, dark frontier of the Great Plains, one is far from ever truly alone.

A meadow, sunset.

YOU

(Reading aloud from a journal)

‘Slowly, slowly we find what haunts us. That is the way of the world…’

Enter DEATH, disguised as a beggar. He stands close to YOU, but their shadows don’t meet.

DEATH

For you?

YOU

For those who grow into it. They become as a small, white aster, unfurling to rot.

DEATH

Death finds them through wild words, fictitious conventions brimming with ghosts.

YOU

That’s the Gothic.

DEATH

The Brontës, The Shelleys, Stoker and Wilde.

YOU

Their fantasies or biographies?

DEATH
Their readers or lack-thereof?

YOU

Perhaps, stories are agreements between both. I was found. Once, long ago… In the place between sleep and light.

DEATH

Who found you?

YOU

A dark shadow that loomed over my whole life. A man in the shape of a scythe, the beam of a weird, gaunt moon descending upon my soft curls. He was taller than myself, a man before I was even born. He was centuries old, older than the century itself. He laid at the side of every speared doe and drank its blood. When he came over me, I knew I would not make it out alive. Still, I looked at him, in the spirits of winking candles, the dancing flames of the wind, the filaments burning through the gloam-hushed cosmos of nature; the passion of each sweeping rainstorm, foxgloves and belladonna, red-eyed wolves and razor-toothed whales, the smoke of tumultuous waves, crashing upwards, over and over… As he trembled.

DEATH

Don’t you mean you looked for him?

YOU

No. At him. I tilted my head back that night to receive a kiss from the most loving, universal father I ever could.

DEATH

You weren’t afraid?

YOU
He made me. I unmade him. There’s a difference— He trembled. As he stood over my cradle that night, he shook juniper pins from their boughs and the foam from each ebb. Every dark fairy has a blessing to bestow—

DEATH
Don’t you mean a curse? Don’t you blame him?

YOU
For cradling me as I lay dying? I was a child. I saw my death in all because it had already come. These years were a gift to me, a waking afterlife where I was no longer alone with false guides through infernal circles. Mothers and fathers may have rushed to that primordial cradle, sisters and brothers trying to affix any orientation to my untameable soul, but they failed. They weren’t first. (pause) Still, I am haunted by one thing.

DEATH

What is that?

YOU
Why he trembled. I was only a child then.

DEATH takes off his silly disguise. His shadow now makes a perfect crescent moon over the boy. In the deepening sunset, their shadows merge, heart-like.

DEATH

Because you were my whole world then. And you haunted me b-because you existed. You were sick and I was helpless to stop it. So I kept you as my own boy. I could not love you any less. I  never could.

They kiss, and drift out into the evening as a pair of ghosts. FIN.

The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) is pleased to announce the theme of-and call for contributions to-their 2025 conference, which will be held online, accessibly, and hosted by Athabasca University, on August 14-16, 2025.

Romanticism’s Commons names a field for which we hope to solicit contributions to current studies in Romanticism from a transdisciplinary array of scholarly approaches and perspectives. This theme also resonates with and builds on those of previous NASSR conferences, like those focusing on mediations, openness, and technology, among others.

In everyday speech, “common” connotes something of sharing, and something of averageness; in the everyday speech of the long 19th century, the word also familiarly confers pejorative judgment on sharing or averageness deemed crude, inappropriate, promiscuous, and/or conspicuously gender-coded (as in patriarchy’s figure of a “common woman”). In legal discourse, the commons names territory or space that is publicly shared and accessed, de-propertized, or otherwise not privately enclosed. During the Romantic period, common lands continued to be enclosed or privatized by the ever-encroaching and -expanding private interests of industrial capital. Analogously, scholars and critics of intellectual property (IP) in the digital age argue that a new wave of enclosures now proceeds by way of increasingly strict and punitive copyright and other IP laws; these new enclosures threaten other kinds of cultural and archival commons, like the “public domain”–the cultural commons comprised of works whose copyrights have expired, forming a shared heritage and repertoire for new cultural production.

“Common” also means a myriad things for other discourses, etymologically, historically, and interculturally. NASSR invites scholars of Romantic-period literature and culture to consider our theme’s keywords in relation to your own researches, and to come together for a conversation about Romanticism’s commons, however theorized or reimagined.

Understood in the broadest terms possible, research on “Romanticism’s commons” can encompass topics like (but not limited to) the following:

·         Romanticism’s digital commons(es)

·         speaking in common tongues

·         “commonties” (Hogg): etymologies, discourses, genealogies

·         gendering, classing, and/or sexing what’s “common”

·         common Romanticism in pop culture

·         law, property, intellectual property: from enclosures to new enclosures

·         Romantic literature(s) and public domain(s)

·         common grounds: discourses and praxis of solidarity discourses

·         common knowledge(s), (un)common sense

Conference organizers are open to various forms of proposal:

Traditional proposals for 15-20-minute papers (250-word abstracts) submitted by individual NASSR members to the conference organizers.

Proposals for complete panels, special sessions, caucus sessions (with the roster of committed speakers and affiliations) for three 20-minute or four 15-minute papers (250-word abstracts for each paper accompanied by a cover letter describing the aims of the panel as a whole). All papers are subject to vetting by the organizing committee.

If you are interested in proposing a panel but are looking for participants, we encourage you to advertise your topic by sending an email to NASSR2025@proton.me or nassr.news@gmail.com.

Proposals for roundtables: please provide a description of the roundtable topic, including a title, with a list of committed panellists (with affiliations). Please note that the maximum number of roundtable members, including the chair, is six (6).

The deadline for all submissions (paper proposals, complete panels/special sessions/caucus sessions, and roundtables) is February 14, 2025.

Please send all submissions, together with a one-page CV — and/or direct questions — to the NASSR 2025 conference committee, chaired by Mark A. McCutcheon, at NASSR2025@proton.me

All submissions must include your name, academic affiliation, and preferred email address.

For further details i.e. keynotes, see the conference website: https://landing.athabascau.ca/pages/revision/25302637

Sea changes: The fairytale Gothic of mermaids, selkies, and enchanted hybrids of ocean and river

Venue: The British Library, London, UK (and online) Date: 5–6 September 2025

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

(The Tempest, i. 2. 400–07)

Fabulous, enchanted beings, hybridly human and other, populate the expanses of water of myth and folklore, whether oceans, rivers, and lakes or their boundaries. Such locations swarm with merfolk, nereids and other water nymphs, nixies, merrows, selkies, finfolk, kelpies, rusalkas. We want also, however, to give attention to and arouse discussion around their non-European counterparts: Mami Wata (West Africa), yawkyawk (Australia), iara (Brazil), ningyo (Japan), mondao (Zimbabwe), siyokoy (Philippines) and many more. All these beings are often alluring, frequently dangerous.

In the West, oceanic beings take the form of merfolk, haunting the seas and luring humans into the depths. Rivers and lakes swim with nymphs, nixies, kelpies, and more. In regions such as the Shetlands and Orkneys selkies – hybrids between seal and human – are found on the shorelines.

The fluidity of water itself mirrors the tendency for such beings to be themselves shifting and protean; their hybridity through metamorphosis is dynamic. It suggests the quality of those who are both terrestrial and aquatic, those conscious beings embodied in a fluid medium, the substance from wherein life itself originates.

Hybridity and genre

The hybrid form of the mermaid, both piscine and mammalian, corresponds to the liminal quality of where these beings are most frequently encountered – the ambivalent border between land and sea of the shoreline. Selkies, metamorphosing between seal and human, are in the traditional tales perhaps even more associated with the shore.

The hybridity of these creatures is easily accommodated by the hybridity of genres that contemporary narratives employ. For example, in Melanie Golding’s The Replacement (2023), selkie folklore encounters the procedural detective genre in an unsettlingly ambiguous way. The commingling of Gothic horror, folklore, and analytical crime thriller subverts the rationalist mode of the latter by generating the mode of the Fantastic. Here, the vulnerability of motherhood, outsider communities, and mental illness come into focus. More generic cross-fertilisation comes with the presence of mermaids in Gothic-tinged Neo-Victorian novels such as Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (2018), and Jess Kidd’s merrow fantasy, Things in Jars (2020).

There are mermaids in science fiction, which are often monstrous (thus involving horror and thriller genres): Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep (2017), for example, results in the scenario of humanity pitted against the aquatic as Otherness, but also revealing a nature wounded by instrumental reason in this climate change thriller, and an ambiguity about the centrality of the human. A recurring theme concerning communication plays against the absoluteness of the Other, too. The collapse of a love affair between two women, one a deep-sea explorer, is figured poignantly as SF with overtones of Cosmic Horror in Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022).

Dangerous seduction

The allure of the mermaid is most often dangerous. It is disruptive of social norms and even the natural coherence of the self and the boundaries between human and animal. This danger may be concealed in comic mode as in H. G. Well’s The Sea-Lady (1902) or the films with the enchanting Glynis Johns, Miranda (1948) and its sequel Mad About Men (1954).  But this may also hold more inviting, enchanting prospects, including the pleasures and pitfalls of romantic fantasy, as from La Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811) to the forlorn heroine of Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837), then present-day paranormal romance. This latter genre frequently reworks Andersen’s tale. Related examples are the more gently innocuous Splash (1984), a Romcom with hints, like many of these works, of utopian freedom, and other romantic variants such as The Shape of Water (2017) (loosely based, like paranormal romance, on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (1740). More sinister variants emerge such as Clemence Dane’s The Moon is Feminine (1938), even to overt horror like The Lure (2015). In a more sensational vein, there are many low-budget horror films where the mermaid is simply monstrous, as Mamula [Nymph] (2014).

In the early twentieth century, the darker, Gothic aspect appears in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan narratives. The mermaids represent death and oblivion. In the scene on Marooner’s Rock (a place where sailors were tied up and drowned), Wendy is dragged by her feet into the water by mermaids. For the first time Peter is afraid, a drum is beating within him, and it is saying ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’.

The dangerously seductive sexuality of the mermaid is frequently associated with music – they sing with irresistible glamour, dance, or play the harp. In Thomas Moore’s ‘The origin of the harp’ from Irish Melodies (1845), the tragic sea maiden, singing under the sea for her lost lover, is transformed into a harp; there are associations with Irish Nationalism here. The harp as siren or mermaid is also explored in Henry Jones Thaddeus’s painting The Origin of the Harp of Elfin (1890). The harp is prominent in Scandinavian lore as the instrument of the Danish river spirit, the Neck (Nökke). He sits on the water and plays his golden harp, the harmony of which operates on all of nature.

The Lorelei is one famous incarnation of these sinister songstresses. In Kafka’s paradoxical tale, it is the silence of the Sirens that is dangerous. (The Sirens – who were originally birdlike – become identified with mermaids in the early Christian era; the overwhelming glamour of their song is notorious.) The piscine may also overlap with the serpentine as in the legend of Melusine; we are interested not just in mermaids and selkies but less-known creatures, especially the more monstrous such as kelpies, merrows and Jenny Greenteeth.

Avatars and adaptation

Mermaids and their kin are depicted in many ways, from medieval romance and the ballad to Romantic poetry (as in Thomas Moore) and beyond. They flourished in the Victorian period, too, with painting and the poetry of George Darley, Thomas Hood, Tennyson and Arnold. Thus, we are keen to hear from scholars of these periods, which produced some key mermaid narratives.

For example, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul’ (1891) is a complex working out of the conflicts of the spirit and the flesh, earth and heaven. The fisherman lives happily with the mermaid until his rejected soul returns. Corrupted without heart or conscience, it claims the fisherman’s life in a manner similar to Dorian Gray, written in the same year.

Adaptations, of folklore and of such archetypal tales as ‘The Little Mermaid’ are of especial interest. These might include sympathetic revisions of the monstrous Sea Witch from ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Sarah Henning, Sea Witch (2018)), along with the many reworkings and expansions of that tale itself, often as paranormal romance, usually with a contemporary feminist slant (for example, the YA novel Fathomless (2013) by Jackson Pearce, Christina Henry’s The Mermaid (2018) and Louise O’Neill’s The Surface Breaks (2018)). We would note the rich tradition of folkloric adaptation in Eastern European filmmaking, especially in animation (in particular, with ‘The Little Mermaid’); a gorgeous animated example is the Russian Rusalochka [The Little Mermaid] (1968).

Mermaids in art

The mermaid is an enduring and widespread image in paintings from the classical period to the present. Mermaids appear in the work of Ancient Greek vase painters and medieval miniaturists, and in the paintings of Rubens and Raphael, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites (notably Burne-Jones and Waterhouse). They fascinated the symbolists (Moreau, Bocklin, Klimt) and surrealists (Magritte and Delvaux) alike and lurk in the enchanting book illustrations of Rackham’s Undine (1909) and Peter Pan (1906), Dulac’s The Little Mermaid (1911) and Heath-Robinson’s ‘Sultan and the Mer-Kid’ from Bill the Minder (1912).

In the nineteenth century, paintings (mainly by men) of sirens and mermaids were depicted as sexually alluring and predatory in contrast to the ‘ondines’, who were the cultured pearls of modern passive femininity (as shown in the paintings of Pierre Dupuis). Mermaids at Play is a series of orgiastic marine fantasies painted by Arnold Böcklin in the 1880s.

Mermaids in late Victorian art are murderous, preying on adventurers, fishermen, sailors and poets. Waterhouse showed a doomed sailor drowning under the haughty gaze of his seductress in The Siren (1900) whilst Edvard Munch’s The Lady from the Sea (1896) crawls threateningly towards us. The siren in Gustave Moreau’s The Poet and the Siren (1895) pushes the boy poet, who clamours for mercy, into the primal mud from which she emanates. In Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1885) a mermaid with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth is carrying her male prey downwards into oblivion.

Freudian thought exposed the fish-tailed seductress as the personification of hidden desires of the sexually subconscious; the legacy of this is shown in the twentieth century, when the mermaid abandoned her marine habitat to re-emerge in the irrational dream settings of the surrealist imagination. Magritte’s stranded inverted mermaid, The Collective Invention (1934) humorously undermines the perverse eroticism of her original.

The global mermaid

Not all of these beings originate in Europe and our colloquy will be much enriched by fishing off further shores. We seek to include explorations of global sea people in folklore and contemporary reworkings, such as Japanese ningyo, Mami Wata and Afro-Caribbean mermaids (Natasha Bowen, Skin of the Sea (2021) and Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story (2020)). Many of these facilitate a postcolonial reading of the mermaid and kindred beings.

Ningyō, 人魚 [human fish], have been part of Japanese myth since the year 619 ce (when they appeared in Nihonshoki in Osaka). Whilst the term Ningyō is often translated as mermaid, this is misleading as the Japanese term is not gendered and Ningyō are more varied in shape and often monstrous in appearance. When caught, these piscine-humanoid beings are treated as sacred objects, thought to bring good fortune and immortality. Ningyō fakes or grotesque caricatures appeared from the 1860s onwards. In his 1876 account, Nichols Belfield Denny recounts seeing the circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum’s celebrated purchase (allegedly from Japanese sailors) which became known as the Fiji Mermaid.

Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ was translated into Japanese in the 1910s. Its popularity contributed to what Philip Hayward has termed the ‘mermaidisation of the Ningyō’ (evolving into western-like mermaids). In the twentieth century, Kurahashi Yumiko’s parodic rewriting of ‘The Little Mermaid’, translated as ‘A Mermaid’s Tears’, has led to comparisons with Angela Carter.

This global approach includes recent novels reworking ‘The Little Mermaid’ from a non-Western perspective, such as Rosa Guy, My Love, My Love: Or The Peasant Girl (1985), made into a Broadway musical. Thus, other media are of interest too – Dvorák’s opera Rusalka, drawing on Slavic folklore, stands out.

Selkies

Selkie narratives tend to be more purely romantic and frequently tragic as are the original tales and ballads themselves. One early transformation of selkie folklore into novel is The Secret of Ron-Mor-Skerry by Rosalin K. Fry, filmed as The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), which draws on the selkie to explore feral children and animal parent narratives. Selkie novels often address feminist concerns as in Margo Lanagan’s Margo, The Brides of Rollrock Island (2013).

Both selkies and mermaids have been enlisted to dramatise the fluidity of the self, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender. Examples are Betsy Cornwell’s excellent YA selkie novel, Tides (2014) and Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea (2020). They have been taken up as a metaphor for transgender teens: ‘the secret me is a boy; he takes his girliness off like a sealskin’ (Rachael Plummer, ‘Selkie’ (2019)).

Many of these narratives place the love element foremost, allowing a space for female-centred erotic and gay romance; these forms flourish especially in the recent explosion of self-publishing and on-line texts.

These creatures facilitate the interaction between humanity and nature (both inner and outer). In their Gothic aspect and engagement with darkness, they may adumbrate a reenchantment of the disenchanted world (following Weber and Adorno); reconciliation with Otherness; and new relationships with the natural world. We are looking for presentations that look at narratives of merfolk and their kin in the light of their Gothic aspects and that highlight their connection with folklore, dwelling on the enchantment of their strange fluidity. We invite contributors to create a dialogue amidst these sea changes into something rich and strange.

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University; on mermaid ambiguity in new creative fiction

Dr Monique Roffey Novelist, Manchester Metropolitan University; as author of The Mermaid of Black Conch on Caribbean mermaids

Dr Sam George Associate Professor, University of Hertfordshire, Co-Convenor of the OGOM Project; on Japanese Ningyo: human-fish hybrids and the rise of the fake museum mermaid

Dr Katie Garner, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of St Andrews; on ‘Forging the Mermaid’ – Scottish mermaid project

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Aquatic beings and dis/re-enchantment
Liquid bodies and fluid sexuality
Destiny, agency, and biological determinism
Tragedy, comedy, and RomCom
The natural world and environmental issues
Global and postcolonial merfolk
Musicality and the Siren’s song
Film, TV, and new media
Adaptation of folklore and fiction
YA and children’s literature
Paranormal Romance
The Gothic and the monstrous in the depths
Hybrid bodies, hybrid genres
Kelpies and water-bulls, merrows and other less-known creatures of the depths
Relationships with the Other
Borders and shorelines
Animality/culture
The merfolk of medieval Romance
Retellings of ‘The Little Mermaid’
Disneyfication of ‘The Little Mermaid’ and its controversies
Retellings of selkie stories
Blue Humanities and aquatic bodies
Eastern European folklore, fiction, and film
Mami Wata and her kin
Aquatic dissolution of the self
Merfolk and selkie ballads
The mermaid in Victorian poetry and painting
Fake mermaids/sacred objects from the sea

Submission:

Abstracts (200–300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for panels, together with a short biography (150 words), should be submitted by 7 February 2025 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to ogomproject@gmail.com

Please prefix the document title with your surname. The abstract should be in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) 5–10 keywords (6) Abstract.

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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.