This image of “popular fireside stories or winter’s tales” exchanged in communal settings had, as the late Catherine Belsey explained, a “long vernacular tradition” (2010). Furthermore, it was, she argues, a practice that often-challenged orthodox institutional discourse about, for example, the “true meaning” of Christmas or the origins of ghosts and tapped into secular and “pagan” rituals and practices. The later transference of this hearth-side image into textual and visual print, not only as content, but as collective reading activities has helped immortalise Winter and/or Christmas and the Gothic as ideal bedfellows, not only in Western cultures but in the wider global imagination. Periodicals of the nineteenth-century such as Household Words, Belgravia, and The Strand capitalised on the wider Christmas market and the desire for ghost stories in their specific Christmas Numbers including accompanying illustrations, while an increasing number of collections and anthologies began to emerge and have remained extremely popular gifts, from collections of Dickens’s Christmas ghost stories, to Edward Wagenknecht’s 1947 anthology The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories, to the recent British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season and Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings. Televisual/cinematic and radio adaptations of traditional tales have transformed the communal experience of terror at Christmas and utilise the oral and the visual in different ways: such as the BBC’s televisual series “Ghost Stories for Christmas”, TV Christmas specials such as Inside No. 9: The Devil of Christmas and podcasts such as “Ghost Tales by the Fireside – True Ghost Stories Podcast”. The Gothic-Horror film has twisted and co-opted the form of the fireside tale of terror and its seasonal trappings to bring us horrifying delights such as Black Christmas (1974); Krampus (2015) and its sequels; apocalyptic Christmas comedy Silent Night (2021), and many more. Even the seemingly twee Christmas film can send chills and invite horror – Home Alone, anyone?

So too, the collective-experience, not in the home but amongst strangers in public forums are offered with watching the aforementioned in the cinema, or attending theatre shows such a Robert Lloyd Parry’s “The M.R. James Project” which use the allure of a one-man show set by a fireside as a story-teller in a wing-backed armchair recites some old favourites, or The Theatre of Dark Encounters who incorporate ghost walks as well as shows in-theatre to seasonal delights. The horror of the life-sized Mouse King in the traditional Nutcracker ballet based on E.T.A Hoffman’s story or the Cute Gothic of Matthew Bourne’s ballet adaptation of Edward Scissorhands also offer interesting perspectives on what Gothic is and how it is expressed. The mash-up of Winter/Christmas and Gothic can be further enjoyed in media and ephemera such as board games – a staple component of the Christmas season – like Christmas Murder Mystery and Clue: Nightmare Before Christmas Edition, while vintage postcards of children being terrorised by the Krampus blend nostalgia and dark humour, and gothic-Christmas decorations (such as the lights Will Byers communicates with from the Upside Down), all revel, like Jack Skellington, in the fusion of Halloween and Christmas. Julia Briggs writes that ‘The telling of tales around the fireside makes explicit a particular aspect of the ghost story which depends upon a tension between the cosy familiar world of life (associated with Heim and heimisch – home and the domestic) and the mysterious and unknowable world of death (unheimlich, or uncanny)’ (180-1), inviting us to think about the spaces and places of Winter Gothic; often juxtaposed against the chilling and deadly atmosphere and dark nights of the “outside” which the narrator of the “Fireside Horrors” piece insists make the conjunction of tale of terror and the winter period so ideal. In fact, many other Gothic works use that setting of snow, ice, and long shadowy nights outside of the Christmas period as they explore the horrors hidden in isolated arctic landscapes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel The Terror which was adapted to television and released in 2018 and based on a real failed expedition, Michelle Paver’s speculative ghost fiction Dark Matter (2010), and the various stories collected in the forthcoming British Library Tales of the Weird anthology, Polar Horrors. So too, do works such as vampire horror film 30 Days of Night (2007) which play on meteorological phenomena such as Polar Night. Yet, what happens to, and what does Winter/Christmas Gothic mean, in a global context and in regions where that season is hot and dry?

This two-day conference at the University of Warwick, UK, 15-16th December 2022, will explore the connection between the Gothic and Winter in its various guises and topics.

The call for papers deadline has now passed, but for registration details and further information please see: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/conferences/talesofterror/

Follow us on Twitter: @TerrorTalesof

Horror was not a genre favoured by my parents, and I even had a recurring nightmare that signals how vigilant of anything remotely scary I once was. I’d be sitting in front of a TV set playing a film with a witch in it – perhaps Anne de Chantraine, from the Atmosfear games – so I’d close my eyes to avoid the spectacle, but my eyelids would offer no protection… They were see-through! I even had to have a serious chat with my dad about purchasing Say Cheese and Die! (in its 1996 Spanish translation) because he was worried it would keep me awake at night. Everyone at school was reading R. L. Stine, so I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. The Goosebumps books were safe, though, as they were really horror-inflected suspense stories and hardly anyone ever died in them. But at some point, for some reason, I outgrew them and wanted to try something ‘stronger’. It was around this time I graduated to Stephen King. His The Green Mile was originally serialised, so that each of its six parts could be purchased separately from local kiosks. The novel horrified me, but it also comforted me and made me cry. I fell in love with King, who introduced to a number of staples of US horror fiction and their adaptations. Many of his books stayed with me (Carrie, Misery, The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary, Two and Four Past Midnight and so many more), but the one that affected me the most was, without a doubt, It. I couldn’t shake off the thought of Pennywise the clown, this juggernaut of all childhood fears, and when I eventually watched the 1990 mini-series adapted from it, Tim Curry’s amazing performance terrified me. In fact, little else has ever scared me as much as the iconic Georgie gutter scene. The amount of times I must have looked under the bed, terrified that a globed hand would be quietly waiting for me to expose a vulnerable limb!

Around the same time, and through a close childhood friend who was one of my gateways to horror fiction, I discovered other authors with whom I became utterly obsessed. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood was the most visceral thing I had read up until that point and remains one of my favourite collections of short stories. John Farris’ unique meandering style and eclectic topics captivated me. His novels Fiends, All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By and Son of the Endless Night had been published in beautiful Spanish editions that I feverishly tracked down in the Mercat de Sant Antoni, which once a month turned into a second-hand book market. And Poppy Z. Brite’s unique queer lens opened my eyes to the power of representation. Reading Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse, I realised that queer sensibilities could find a fertile place in what could sometimes feel like a straight boys club. A schoolteacher also introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft, and thus sparked my fascination with cosmic horror. When, much later, I eventually edited an anthology of Lovecraft’s tales for the British Library, I took special delight in dedicating the book to him. Before the days when you could find everything on Wikipedia, I also relied a lot for recommendations on specialised bookshops – a favourite was Librería Gigamesh, still standing in the heart of Barcelona – but my literature teachers always proved invaluable sources of inspiration. A particular influence was Dr Sara Martín Alegre, who taught me during my BA studies, and whose knowledge of genre fiction was and continues to be encyclopaedic. It was during my time at UAB that I also discovered writers like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Daphne du Maurier and Iain Banks, among many others. These authors solidified my interest in Anglophone literature and made me decide I wanted to study it in the original.

It was also through another teacher that I came to learn about the Gothic as a concept (the Gothic romance) and as a critical tool (through which to read all manner of dark cultural manifestations). Prof Adriana Craciun’s ‘Gothic Bodies, Foreign Bodies’ unit, which I took at Birkbeck College in London, was a real eye-opener. I was introduced to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, among others texts, and the unit helped me completely rethink classics like Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Suddenly, everything made sense. All my interests, which had gradually but steadily shifted from a reluctance to an embrace of the scary and the grisly, solidified under this label that harkened back to at least 1764 and acted as connective tissue for all the texts I had been reading and watching since my early teens. The English and American literary and filmic traditions are quite unique in that many of their classics belong to the horror and fantastic genres, so it is perhaps inevitable that I gravitated towards literature written in English. In my academic life, I have tried to apply my learning to the Spanish tradition, which has not been internationally recognised as a significant Gothic force despite producing many brilliant fantastic and horrific texts.

During my MA studies, which included a thesis on the contemporary Gothic, I read Catherine Spooner’s work. Her Contemporary Gothic, in particular, convinced me that I wanted to pursue further study on how the Gothic mode has persisted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My PhD developed in a slightly different direction, however, as around that time Hostel and Saw had changed the landscape of horror again. Moved by their visceral scenarios, which in some cases gave me nightmares for the first time in years, I decided to embrace my anxieties and write about them. Why did this new graphic turn affect me so much? What was the connection between the film and viewer’s bodies? And how did the ethical intermingle with the representational? I ended up writing a thesis primarily on film and theatre – the grand guignol French tradition – but the project was driven by the same questions I had been asking myself since I started reading horror: why do we find things scary? What are my personal limits and what social or biological primers affect them? These very same questions also animated my subsequent books Body Gothic and Horror Film and Affect. In fact, you could say that my academic career is still partly shaped by those initial points of contact with the descendants of the Gothic literary tradition. In many ways, recent research on the aesthetics of Gothic Cinema is still responding to similar questions about affect and aesthetics.

Having said all this, it’s sobering to realise I have never tried writing about Stephen King’s It. I keep telling myself it’s because the occasion just hasn’t arisen yet, but perhaps it’s really a deep-seated self-preservation mechanism. In any case, I’m very grateful there isn’t enough room for pesky clowns under my bed!

I remember, too, catching the tail end of a black and white film adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, probably the 1931 version directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March.

I recall being frightened by the ape-like monster the ‘good’ doctor turned into when he drank the fatal potion. It stayed with me for a long time, and I remember it again when, the same year, a man dressed up in a gorilla costume scared me during the carnival week. When my mum – reassuringly – told me ‘don’t worry, it’s a man, not a real gorilla!’, I was not reassured at all, because I knew men who turn into monsters can be quite dangerous.

It was only in the summer after my final school exams that I finally chose to study Modern Languages and Literatures. I must confess I was a little suspicious of literature, but I was very keen to learn English, particularly because I was interested in music and wanted to travel. I felt English was going to open many doors for me. And it did!

My main reading list was Victorian, and it included Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and George Elliott’s Middlemarch, all to be read in English.

We were allowed to read a few more ‘secondary’ texts, Jane Austen’s Emma and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in Italian. Even with this allowance, when I got my books from the Anglo American bookshop in Rome, my heart sank: I had never read a novel in English before, and the number of pages was stupefying. More worryingly, the programme I had chosen did not start at beginner’s level and after the initial pre-screening, I was advised to drop English!

If there’s one trait of my personality that can both work for and against me is my tenacity. I rarely give up on things and I still approach challenges with the stubbornness of my two-year-old self – I was, apparently, very persistent in my demands, as well as a ‘keen’ reader from a young age!

After working out how many pages I needed to read every day to meet my deadlines, I looked at the list again, and then pulled a volume out of my shelf. That heavily annotated paperback is still one of my most treasured possessions.

From that day, Wuthering Heights and I would not be seen without one another for the following four months! Over breakfast, on the bus, sitting at the back of the class in the useless German tutorials where our teacher refused to speak German, in my lunch break, before and after the gym, and, of course on my bedside table.

Emily and I became inseparable.

I remember being spellbound by the landscape, and the ways in which it became both a character in its own right, and an extension, or perhaps even the embodiment of Cathy’s identity and desire (I was very pleased to see this is captured in Frances O’ Connor’s bold biopic Emily recently premiered at the BFI’s London Film Festival).

The supernatural was not straightforward fantasy, because the voice of the literal ghost also alluded to the figurative haunting of desire and loss. More than anything, perhaps, what captured my 19-year old self was the sense of a boundless self, and the realisation – tantalising and terrifying all at once – that those boundaries between who we are/are not and what we want/don’t want, which had appeared so stable before, gradually became blurred, slippery and even, at times, invisible.

Bridget M. Marshall, Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021)

James Uden, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Sara Wasson, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film, and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)