Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Three

Like I said last time, I don't know when what I have called the Gothic revival began, but in the 1960s there were Hammer films from England and horror films and gialli from Italy. In 1966, Dark Shadows, a Gothic soap opera, made its debut. Many Gothic revival stories consist of two main elements, a girl and a house. A commenter on this blog called the Gothic Romance a story of girl meets house. Dark Shadows begins that way, with Victoria Winters being the girl and Collinwood the house. (She is engaged in a Gothic quest, which is a search for origins.) These houses are Gothic in that they are old, dark, gloomy, isolated, and seemingly abandoned or barely inhabited. There are secret and mysterious family histories and curses, galleries of family portraits, secret passageways and stairways, secret or sealed rooms, long, dark hallways, deep, dark cellars, high towers and turrets, and so on. If you go there, be sure to take with you a flashlight and plenty of batteries because the candles are sure to be blown out by a sudden draft.

The original Gothic Romances of the 1700s have Scooby-Doo-type endings in which all of their seemingly weird and supernatural events have naturalistic explanations. That wasn't always true with the Gothic revival. For example, in Dark Shadows, there are vampires, ghosts, werewolves, witches, and even time travel. There are plenty of those things in Hammer films and Italian horror films, too. I guess the Gothic revival combined the original Gothic Romance with tales of supernatural horror and weird fiction.

Dark Shadows came to an end in 1971. By then there had come along a revival of Regency-style fashions, with long, loose dresses, tighter busts, high waists, and dipping necklines. Women put their hair up, in contrast to the natural look of the late 1960s. You can still see the Regency look on TV shows from the early 1970s, such as Night Gallery (1970-1973), which was the Gothic counterpart to the more science-fictional Twilight Zone (1959-1964). Suzanne Pleshette often wore the look in early episodes of the The Bob Newhart Show. There were of course Regency-style fashions in Dark Shadows, too.

I don't know what connection there might have been between the Gothic revival and the return of Regency-style fashions, but some of the original Gothic Romances were published during the original Regency era, including Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon (1816), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and Jane Austen's comic Northanger Abbey (1818). I think Regency-style fashion and of course the Gothic Romance came both before and after the official dates of the British Regency, 1811 to 1820. The Regency era is supposed to have spanned from the 1790s to 1837 and to have ended with the accession of Queen Victoria. After that it was nearly sixty-four years of a different kind of culture that bore her name. Even so, Gothic fiction continued to be written, published, and read by an eager public.

To be concluded . . .

Mansion of Golden Windows (1966) by Elsie Lee (1912-1987), with a typical girl-meets-house cover. In this case the girl looks like Joan Collins. Notice the single lit upper window. It is one of the conventions of Gothic illustration. I don't know the name of the artist.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley