Elliott, Kamilla (2008) Gothic—film—parody. Adaptation, 1 (1). pp. 24-43. ISSN 1755-0637
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Abstract
Gothic, film, and parody are all erstwhile devalued aesthetic forms recuperated by various late twentieth-century humanities theories, serving in return as proof-texts for these theories in their battles against formalism, high-art humanism, and right-wing politics. Gothic film parodies parody these theories as well as Gothic fiction and films. As they redouble Gothic doubles, refake Gothic fakeries, and critique Gothic criticism, they go beyond simple mockery to reveal inconsistencies, incongruities, and problems in Gothic criticism: boundaries that it has been unwilling or unable to blur, binary oppositions it has refused to deconstruct, like those between left- and right-wing politics, and points at which a radical, innovative, subversive discourse manifests as its own hegemonic, dogmatic, and clichéd double, as in critical manipulations of Gothic (dis)belief. The discussion engages Gothic film parodies spanning a range of decades (from the 1930s to the 2000s) and genres (from feature films to cartoons to pornographic parodies)