The Gothic Film: From Classic to "Blockbuster"

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The core elements of the gothic film and its imagery have been transformed with the onset of the late twentieth century's "Hollywood blockbuster".

The genre of the gothic film originated in the early 1900s, with Thomas Alva Edison's adaptation of Frankenstein, and had one of its first successes in Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. From its origination as the black and white, silent film, to the technologically enhanced "Hollywood blockbuster", the major gothic elements still remain, yet are modernized along with the technology that shows them. The villain, the heroine, and the hero are the qualifications for the genre's form, yet are the cause for visible discrepancy through the decades of its existence. In his analysis of the film narrative, Berger emphasizes the obligation of films to reflect the dominant beliefs in society; the general idea of these conventional characterizations have remained, yet have reformed to accommodate modern societal values. The gothic film has gone from a style of genre to a stylized effect within other genres.

The gothic, due to its form as a film, "has a visual impact that goes beyond what the intellect makes of things, and that is because the power of images…Images are resonant and call up in us all kinds of unrecognized and suppressed feelings" (Berger 149). The gothic film relies on imagery to establish a feeling of anxiety, dread, and the unknown, yet these images have changed to develop a sense of confusion and parrallelism. From the black and white classic of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to such a high budget film as Underworld (2003), the elemental imagery of the classic gothic film still exists in form, but has been comparably modified in regard to style. As proposed by Vladimir Propp, "the functions of characters are independent of the characters' fulfilling their functions and are the fundamental elements of a story" (Berger 24). The characters in recent gothic film narrative have retained their original functions as the villain, the heroine, and the hero, yet have gained the characteristics to mix their functions together. The forms of the villain, heroine, and hero are used, but their characterization and their action within the film, have been adapted to modern society, therefore adapting the gothic film to other genres.

Jelena Momirov