Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.3 The Gothic Romance
87
And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten window, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh — but smile no more. 20
The Gothic romance was a type of novel which originated in late eighteenthcentury
England. As a genre, it is claimed that the author Horace Walpole invented it with
his book called The Castle of Otranto written in 1764. Walpole’s work was tremendously
popular with its supernatural happenings and mysterious ambiance which became widely
emulated in fiction. The Gothic features accounts of terrifying and horrific experiences in
ancient castles, most of them connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways
and locked rooms containing dark secrets, flickering lamps, screams and moans, bloody
hands, ghosts and graveyards, and so forth.
The Gothic settings showed a taste for the wild and the morbid, given form in old
mansions and castles in ruin. It migrated to the United States by the end of the eighteenth
century and was further “Gothicised” in the hands of authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Edgar Allan Poe. Both writers laid the groundwork for the film noir style of dark themes
with horrid plot twists. Hawthorne has perhaps not seen his works well served by the
cinema but those by Poe have been most appreciated. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe has had
many of his works, with their Gothic and obsessive themes, turned into film productions.
His book The Fall of the House of Usher has been made into various film versions but I
will only mention a silent one back in 1928 by James Watson and Melville Weber. 21
20 Verses from the poem The Haunted Palace (1839) inserted into the narrative of The Fall of the House of
Usher. The text is by Edgar Allan Poe and it illustrates the ending paradox of Roderick’s essential downfall,
which is simultaneously his transcendence.
21 Not to be confused with Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel’s version, also filmed as a silent movie in 1928. In
this version, the plot also occurs in a sinister house, inhabited by Roderick Usher and his young wife,
Madeline. For censorship reasons, Epstein had to cut off the scenes which implied the incestuous relations
between the brother-sister couple. This, in my opinion, takes away Poe’s main intention or vision.