Gothic Horror in Popular Culture

Monsters represent radical alterations to our sense of normality, they tend to embrace ideologies, rituals, traits, and behaviours that are forbidden or considered taboo in our society. That is, the public discussion and analysis of these cultural and ideological issues are often considered to be off-limits to an open debate. As such, these creatures have been used by socially conscious filmmakers and authors to explore the reactions of society towards different customs, looks, and practices. Therefore, the inherent otherness of a monster is what transforms it into a plastic entity that revises relevant cultural issues regarding gender, sexual, social, and racial anxieties. In this context, horror films have an important cultural function: they are partially sanctioned public venues where we can safely negotiate and articulate our fascination and/or dread of difference.

Contagion is the dominant horror of the 21st century, an era marked by epidemics of terror, war, and economic crisis. Just as atomic anxiety infused Cold War-era pop culture, fear of contagion dominates recent pop culture in the form of apocalyptic zombie plagues, viral pandemics, infectious vampires, parasitised bodies, and microbe-caused mutations.

Our cultural obsession with contagion is inspired by viral disease and infectious dangers: AIDS, bio-terrorism, West Nile virus, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, and most recently an E. coli outbreak. Contagious disease regularly dominates the news, sometimes suggesting a world on the brink of apocalyptic crisis. A new or mutated epidemic threatens each year, one that might be “the coming plague”: the species-threatening event forecast by scientists and journalists and dramatised in fiction, games, and film. 

“Contagion” is both flesh and metaphor. Prior to the 19th century discovery that microbes cause and spread disease, people accounted for biological contagion by turning to occult and spiritual forces. Witches and demons were blamed for the Black Death. The mystery of contagion made it useful in describing inexplicable, unexpected chains of epidemic transmission, such as the hysteria of crowds, the corruption of sin, or the wildfire spread of religious or political ideology. The capacity of “contagion” to function simultaneously as a visceral infection and as a deeply resonant metaphor for the circulation of social, moral, or political dangers helps explain its cultural resonance.

References:

• Dan Dinello. (2011). The Contagious Age: Overwhelmed by Vampires, Viruses, and Zombies in the 21st Century. [11^th March] Available: http://www.popmatters.com/feature/148166-the-contagious-age-overwhelmed-by-vampires-viruses-and-zombies/
• Marco Lanzagorta. (2008). A Closet Full of Monsters. [11^th March] Available: http://www.popmatters.com/column/horrors-in-the-closet/