Flows, Bloodline and Fluidity: Modernity and the Contemporary Gothic Film

Focusing on contemporary transnational filmmakers, this research argues that Gothic film constitutes a thriving but uncategorised genre, defined by its emphasis on flows and fluidity, as well as medievalism. Gothic film updates nineteenth-century Gothic tropes to express utterly contemporary concerns with the haunting past, spectacular excess and paranoid fear. Through close film analysesin the context of theories of modernity, this interdisciplinary dissertation shows how much we can gain from defining the Gothic as the product of modern culture defined by the liquidity of social forms and of fears about the return of the premodern past.