Candyman and Saw: Reimagining the Slasher Film through Urban Gothic

Abstract

Describing Gothic literature as a ‘writing of excess’ (1996, 1), Fred Botting argues that the genre has historically been replete with ‘gloomy and mysterious’ atmospheres, stock supernatural features and desolate and alienating landscapes, signifying ‘an overabundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by conventional eighteenth-century demands for simplicity, realism or probability’ (3). It is through excess that the emotional affect of the Gothic takes hold. Kristin Thompson argues that excess within the cinema emerges when there is a ‘conflict between materiality of a film and the unifying structures within it’, namely narrative and character motivation (1986, 132). She suggests that ‘the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning’ (132). This is particularly significant with regard to horror cinema, wherein the emotional affect often generated by the aesthetic excess is, in fact, the central purpose of the film, with story and style working together to incite an emotional response. It is precisely at the point where style spills out over the requirements of narrative that affect is generated, whether that be fear, terror, disgust or laughter.