Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture 1670-1910

In Gothic Machine, David Jones reveals the intriguing relationships between Gothic literature, film, and the media existing prior to the advent of the cinema. Jones tracks the Gothic horror genre from its earliest days as literature, through phantasmagoria and the magic lantern shows of the Victorian period, to the early films of the 1890s, and finally to the first motion picture adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1910. Among the numerous personalities that appear in Jones’s study are the Marquis de Sade; Étienne-Gaspard Robert, or “Robertson”; Friedrich Schiller, and the Lumière brothers.