#1 Carmilla Scholar

"These feelings of dread and panic, paired with the desperate hope that the deluded crowd will snap out of it and come to its senses, lie at the heart of what makes Shirley Jackson’s work unforgettable. Tapping into her own frustrations and agonies, she painted one exquisite portrait after another of that precise juncture where blustery confidence yields to helplessness and terror. The sinister forces the heroine perceives are real, but they’re just ephemeral enough, by design, to make her doubt herself repeatedly. In the end, the self-possessed woman becomes the possessed."

All sacred creatures partake of monstrosity, whether overtly or covertly.

There are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form - the monster - that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption. Furthermore, just as the detective character appears across genres in many different kinds of fiction (in the sensation novel, in Dickens), so Gothic infiltrates the Victorian novel as a symptomatic moment in which boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself.

Van Sant’s confusion about the larger cultural and philosophical issues at issue in this regard becomes apparent in [My Own Private Idaho]’s ending, which, as a number of critics have pointed out, differs dramatically from the ending published in the screenplay. In the film, Mike finds himself alone again in Idaho, standing on the road that earlier in the film reminded him of a ‘fucked-up face.’ He says, ‘I’m a connoisseur of roads. I’ve been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world.’ At which point he collapses, only to be robbed by a couple of passersby and then pulled into yet another car by someone we cannot identify, while ‘America the Beautiful,’ in a slide guitar version, plays elegiacally in the background. In the screenplay, standing on a road in the country, Mike thinks about his failed quest to find his mother, to return home, and about his longing for a normal family, which he had earlier described to Scott as one, ‘you know, with a mom and a dad and a dog and shit like that’.

At a mere thirty-eight seconds, the actual dinner party scene consists of little more than a tilting shot of the elaborate dishes Hannibal has prepared, followed by his toast to his guests: “Before we begin, you must all be warned—nothing here is vegetarian.” The guests’ laughter at this condescending quip reveals that the true purpose of this lavish dinner is a ritual of conspicuous consumption in which the participants celebrate the assumed cultural superiority that makes them too aloof to bother with the mundane concerns behind the vegetarian lifestyle (e.g., animal rights, bodily health, environmental awareness). In fact, their reaction begs the question of whether the diners would even object if they knew the secret ingredient in the dishes before them, thereby tapping into the modern brewing discontent with the growing economic disparities of the world. Indeed, while Jennifer Brown recently concluded that “[t]he cannibal has become the reviled image of overindulgence, overspending, and overexploitation of resources,” Hannibal turns the tables, for the show highlights these traits in the non-cannibals at the party, thus calling into question the presumed bonds of affection that unite humanity.

Vampires were seen as pure evil creatures that were driven by an outstanding force to extend their lives by drinking the blood of the living. Le Fanu shows us that Carmilla is not the two-dimensional beast that the majority of vampire fiction of the time describes. There are a few scenes where Carmilla seems to be aware of her nocturnal life and despairing of her terrible plight. Carmilla only feeds because she must in order to continue her existence and does not wish to infect others with her curse or kill them with her nightly feeding. This seems evident in the attachment Carmilla makes with each of her victims. Some may think that she sees only her victims as preys. However, some may think that she really loves them.

Primarily, though, the story of the monster is a subconscious acknowledgment of something that we, as a culture, have difficulty accepting, ‘a truth about [humanity] that we would rather deny, but which the [monster] brings to the fore.’ We have been taught to believe that, as Seneca said, ‘Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.’ ‘That which does not kill us’, we are repeatedly told, ‘can only make us stronger.’ For every struggle, then, we believe that there is an ultimate payoff, an increase in happiness that is the natural result of surviving adversity. ‘We want the future to ‘redeem’ the past to make it part of a life story which has sense of purpose.’ We believe, innately, that all suffering results in redemption, that all stories have a happy ending. The possibility that this might not be true may be the most horrifying thing that we as human beings could be made to face. We don’t want to believe that suffering is just suffering, that there is no greater meaning behind it, that sometimes things, sometimes people, are just broken and they can’t be fixed. We don’t want to believe that sometimes the end of the victim, bloody as its beginning, is a sad and a purposeless one.

"Monsters are fictional creatures, without personal agency or a will of their own. ‘[They] are our children’, they do what we tell them to do. In this respect monsters are doubly victims. They are victims of both the traumatic incident and the author who created them, and both condemn the monster to a lifetime of trial and an almost always unavoidable and grizzly end. The pen seals their fate even as it writes them into existence. But, despite the fact that we have, in most cases, refused them a voice of their own, the monster still speaks. It asks us what we are so afraid of. ‘[It] asks why we have created [it].’"