Group 4: How Does Fear Change in the Gothic and Horror Genres?

Project Overview:

For our part of the project, our group focused on the overarching question: How does fear change in the Gothic and Horror genres?

 

In trying to answer this question, we first researched information about fear in general, and some common tropes for the Gothic and Horror genres. From this research, we were able to generate a list of words that we thought would be interesting to look up the frequencies of within different time periods of the corpus. We also used the topic modeling tool to generate some of these words as well.

 

We started with a corpus of about 200 works. Our group decided to split this up into five smaller sections. We created mini corpora by year: 1810-1840, 1841-1860, 1866-1894, 1895-1910, and 1911-1928.  Each of our group members was then responsible for running their respective corpus through AntConc and writing up their findings.

 

The words we decided to pay particular attention to were: Alarm, Creep, Curse, Darkness, Dread, Evil, Fear, Fright, Ghost, Lost, Monster, Monstrosity, Murder, Mystery, Pain, Panic, Paralyze, Phantom, Plague, Secret, Soul, Spirit, Stranger, Supernatural, Terror, Torment, Torture, Souls, Spirits, Decay, Vampire, Sin, Unknown, and Death.

 

Our group was curious to find out how these words relating to the feelings and causes of fear may have changed throughout the years as the Gothic and Horror genres developed.

 

Below, we have placed our individual findings.

 

Raelyn Fate: 1810-1840

For my part of the assignment, I focused on the works in the corpus that were published within 1810-1840. This ended up being about 21 texts.

 

The first thing I did was run the texts through the Topic Modeling Tool to look for topics. I choose to generate 30 topics with 10 words each. This is what I found (this is also how we decided on some of the keywords we wanted to explore collectively):

The topics themselves were not really helpful for the purpose of what we were looking for (How fear changes in the Gothic and Horror genres throughout the years), but I did find it helpful in finding words that we could all search and find the frequencies of by using AntConc.

 

Once we established the words we wanted to explore (shown above in the overview) I ran my corpus through AntConc. I looked up the frequencies of these words throughout my corpus and got these results that I put in an excel spreadsheet so they could be easily visualized. My other group mates would add their data later as well.

 

The words that occurred most often with the highest frequencies in my selected corpus (1810-1840) were the following:

Soul: 406

Death: 329

Lost: 201

Fear: 200

Spirit: 196

Stranger: 170

Terror: 140

Secret: 125

Evil: 112

Mystery: 105

 

 

I found these words with the highest frequencies very interesting.  Fear, Terror, Evil, and Death I think were to be expected, but I was really shocked by the prevalence of Lost, Stranger, Mystery, and especially the huge amount of Soul. I am excited to compare these results with those of my teammates to see how the frequencies have changed as the years have progressed.

After finding these frequencies, I looked at some collocates for these words to try to see what topics and themes went along with them. I set the minimum frequency to 10, so that the results would be more significant. The most interesting results I found were with Soul and Death.

 

For Soul, I found that the top two collocates were Passions and Body. I found this interesting. Perhaps those words could be related to a fear of what happens to your body after death. For me, it seemed reminiscent to the older emphasis, especially in Europe (where most of our corpus is from) of religious ideologies that focused on living a good life so that your soul could be sent to heaven when you die. Passions could go along with that as well. In older religions, they discouraged earthly passions as they could be potentially damaging to the soul. It’s something interesting to think about.

 

For Death, the top two collocates were Life and After. This I thought was really interesting, and like the above example with Soul_,_ I think it suggests a worry about life after death.

 

Conversely, these were the least frequent words that I found from the list:

Paralyze: 0

Monstrosity: 0

Creep: 4

Plague: 7

Fright: 8

Panic: 14

Phantom: 15

Supernatural: 16

Torment: 19

Ghost: 27

I found the lack of use of these words to be even more interesting. Creep, Plague, Panic, Phantom, Supernatural, and especially Ghost surprised me the most. I’m wondering what my other group members will find and if in the later dates they will have a higher prevalence of these kinds of words.

In just looking at my data, it seemed that topics in the gothic and horror genres in the early period focused more on psychological fears rather than physical ones. The prevalence of Soul, Lost, Spirit, Stranger, Terror, Secret, and even Death seem to me to suggest for psychological, personal experiences and fears rather than Paralyze, Monstrosity, Creep, Plague, Phantom, and Ghost which seem to be more physical representations of fear and pain.

 

 

Dallas Childers: 1841-1860

The years of focus in my findings from our compiled corpus of text that belong to the Horror or Gothic genre, was the time period of 1841-1860. I used AntConc to explore these texts further, and I found various interesting patterns or uses of word choice. In relation to the two genres and the findings in our group from other time periods. I had 26 files of published texts from my time period to use in AntConc.

As mentioned, our group established a shared list of words, that we would like to research further as we look for notable things that could be relevant, when answering the question: How does fear change in the Horror and Gothic genre?

Notable words with high frequencies from 1841-1860:

Fear: 254

Dark: 518

Soul: 342

Lost: 269

Death: 459

Secret: 273

 

Notable words with low frequencies from 1841-1860:

Panic: 8

Plague: 7

Torment: 15

Paralyze: 5

Vampire: 2

My findings produced from AntConc, were both anticipated and non-anticipated results. As Raelyn mentions in her section of findings, words like Death, Darkness, and Fear are the type of words we can typically expect in the two genres. However, in our group’s entire corpus of texts, the word “Dark” has the highest frequency during my time period of 1841-1860. This finding did not surprise me much, considering my corpus contained works from writers like Edgar Allen Poe. Who had many prolific works published during this time period and is no stranger to the word, Dark.

I also noticed that Raelyn’s time period and my time period (1810-1860) contained the word “Stranger” the most in our group’s entire corpus as well. However, what really struck me as interesting about this finding is the erosion that occurs after the years 1810-1866. The complete domination with the word Stranger, in terms of frequency, and then its large drop down in frequency is something to consider. I am compelled to know more about why this occurs. Especially how it influences fear and the words change in the genre during our corpus time frames. Perhaps this speaks to the genre’s erosion with identity?

1866 to 1894: Lauren Craig

My portion of the corpus was from 1866 to 1894 and included about 26 texts. I put the same 29 words through AntConc and these were my findings.

Most Frequently Used Words:

Soul: 168

Lost: 141

Fear: 119

Terror: 101

Pain: 97

Secret: 88

Darkness: 77

Evil: 62

Spirit: 55

Mystery: 42

There was a weird split between 1-5 and 6-10. The first five are very human. A soul is something only a human has. Fear, Terror, and Pain are all human emotions. Lost isn’t exactly an emotion, but it can be seen as a state of mind.

Numbers 6-10 are more what I thought I would find. They are far vaguer terms that show fear instead of saying that the reader should be afraid. It’s a far more literary move.

Least Frequently Used Words:

Monstrosity: 1

Paralyze: 1

Panic: 3

Phantom: 3

Supernatural: 3

Torment: 8

Torture: 9

Curse: 10

Fright: 12

Plague: 13

There are elements of the same pattern in the least used words as well. Many of them have a supernatural base, including Curse, Phantom, Monstrosity, and of course Supernatural.  Since these are only four out of 10 it isn’t exactly the same, but the similarity is interesting nonetheless.

Some of the clusters and collocates are interesting as well.  There are a lot of feeling words associated with fear: Sensation, Sense, Feeling, and Felt. This makes sense since fear is feeling, but there are also some more psychological ones too. Death refers to the fear of death. Horrible/horror relate to how can refer to what our fears look like. Strange is in relation to how irrational fear can be. Cold is often how fear can make us feel “frozen in our tracks.”

 

The clusters around torture are less about external torture and more how people torture themselves, which lends itself to the human theme I talked about with the frequency list.

 

There are even some that seem to make no sense at all. These range from the absurd to the oddly specific. What is a “little murder?”

 

How can a canto be lost?

 

Who is Neville and why is he a stranger to everyone?

Change from earlier periods

Even though there were more texts in my time period than Raelyn’s, my numbers are almost uniformly lower. Exceptions are Pain (79 versus 97) and Paralyze and Monstrosity (0 to 1).

Kate Thomas: 1895-1910

After putting my sub corpus into AntConc, I searched for the word fear to get an idea of the types of things that fear looked like or was caused by in my 15 years of the Gothic/Horror corpus. When I looked up fear, I was in the “Concordance” tab. In this tab of AntConc, it shows you the word in the actual text; the entire sentence. With this I was able to look around the word “fear” and see what words surrounded it and what was going on within the text when this particular word was used.

Here are some of the most interesting words and phrases that I came across in this tab surrounding the word, “fear.”

 

• ghostly traditions
• agonized wailing
• strange things
• se of wonders
• horrible place
• no escape
• panic
• alone
• save me
• blood of ghosts and demons
• that monster
• dreams
• water rose and rose
• murder my father
• mummy
• danger from violence
• so much lonesomeness
• some evil thing
• cry
• abandon Christianity
• melancholy smile
• grows treacherous
• betray
• in the dark
• we’re lost

 

Then on the next tab, which is the “Concordance Plot” tab, I was able to see how many times the word “fear” showed up in each file in my corpus. The highest number was “Dracula” with fear showing up 137 times while the lowest number was three texts with only fear showing up once.

 

After looking up “fear” in AntConc, my group and I decided on some words that we thought related to fear and so I looked up these words in my corpus too.

 

• Fear-366
• Ghost-247
• Supernatural -14
• Haunting – 17
• Terror- 134
• Spirit- 93
• Curse-17
• Murder-15
• Plague -5
• Lost-215
• Soul-221
• Evil-113
• Stranger-96
• Souls-33
• Creep-11
• Phantom-17
• Devil-84
• Alarm-59
• Darkness-264
• Dread-68
• Fright-25
• Monster-90
• Monstrosity-3
• Mystery-93
• Pain-128
• Panic-13
• Paralyze-1
• Secret-206
• Torment-5
• Torture-54
• Decay-7
• Vampire-50
• Sin-24
• Unknown-80
• Death-367

 

From this list, we can see that in my corpus, there were a significant presence of Ghosts, people getting Lost and the idea of the Soul was an important one.

 

Here are some screenshots of the AntConc research with these words:

 

 

 

Lissa Milano: 1911-1928

Horror Literature:

Horror can trace its roots back to Inquisition (which was “a period of prolonged and intensive questioning or investigation” (Dictionary.com) and involved the Roman Catholic Church) starting in 1235. The Roman Catholic Church wanted to reestablish the orthodoxy of faith and charge those of heresy of witchcraft. This was a new obsession with witchcraft until the seventeenth century. Starting in 1307, horror was closely tied to religion with Dante’s Inferno being a horrific piece of literature in the fact that it involved the devil and hell.

Gothic Literature:

Gothic literature came around in 1790 to 1830 and is placed in the Romantic literature genre. Trances can be found in the Middle Ages even. Gothic novels usually involve a “fallen world” in the plot, setting, characterization, and or themes. This fallen world setting is very influential to place the reader in an atmosphere of dread and despair, creating a horrific feeling. Something about the setting is usually decaying like the landscape or a castle. There’s a kind of shell or husk left behind from a once living and whole world. The hero or protagonist has a certain pattern in characterization in Gothic literature. The protagonist is usually isolated, either on his own accord or by force. The villain is usually the epitome of evil and has fallen from some form of power.

Fear in Horror Literature:

Starting around the late 1800s horror began to take off. The horror genre started with ghost stories as well as War of the Worlds with presenting a new form of fear and anxiety. Horror films started around this time as well. The short story had replaced the novel for the majority of horror writers, giving them short ghost stories to work with. This shows that horror is more centered around the supernatural concerning ghosts and spirits. Horror focuses on the repulsive and dread elements that are expressed in the supernatural. There are more sinister elements and a sense of brooding on the gloomy.

Fun fact, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass influenced horror in the 1980’s with the poem “The Jabberwocky,” which mixes the ridiculous with the horrifying.

Fear in Gothic Literature:

Gothic literature deals with the fear of humanistic terror. The fear of murder, rape, sin, and the unknown are common fear elements in Gothic literature because these elements can happen in everyday life. This shows that Gothic terror is more centered around worldly fear and less around the supernatural, although there are elements of ghosts in Gothic literature, but not as much as later on in Horror.

Data found:

I used AntConc and looked for sets of words that I thought would benefit the group as well as the words we decided on as a whole.

The least amount of shown:

Monstrosity: 4

Torment: 12

Creep: 23

Panic: 25

Vampire: 3

The most amount of shown:

Fear: 309

Evil: 200

Lost: 244

Spirit: 337

Soul: 246

AntConc screenshots:

The word “vampire” showed up only three times out of over fifty Gothic and Horror texts. This number appeared less than I would have thought for 1911-1928. Gothic literature is defined as being more humanistic in the terms that the genre focuses more around horror that could happen in real life such as rape, sin, and murder. Gothic literature also focuses around the supernatural, but I would have thought that the classic monsters such as the vampire would have surfaced more in the 1900s with the raise in curiosity in the supernatural later on.

This image is a little fuzzy but it shows the texts where the word “spirit” shows up the most in the corpus. The word showed up 31 times in “Animal Ghosts.” The use of “spirit” here indicates spirit as in ghost or apparition. I guessed this because of the title of the text that has the most repetition of the word. “Ghosts” are quite common with the use of “spirit” and therefore we can place the word as supernatural meaning and not as a religious term. This text was published in 1913, which indicates that around that time period, the fear of the supernatural was starting to return.

Metadata found:

The use of “ghost” decreased then increased over these set years. I found this interesting because ghost is more supernatural and I would have thought that Ghost would show up more around 1810 instead of around 1910. This, again, shows that the supernatural is more feared closer to the 1900s.

Findings:

I would have thought that the fear of the supernatural would be more around Raelyn’s years of 1810-1840 and not around mine of 1911-1928, which is more on the turning over to modern texts side. Instead of humanistic fears of murder and sin, more modern texts are returning to the supernatural and “what goes bump in the night.” This can also be seen in literature of the present, which seems to be romanticizing horror with the classic monsters of vampire, werewolf, and even ghosts with novels such as Twilight and movies like Hotel Transylvania.

Another thing I found interesting is that you don’t see the term “zombie” through these time periods. The zombie monster started in 1932 in a silent film. Zombies take up a large amount of horror in today’s society with apocalyptic settings and the fear of being chased by a corpse in isolation. I found it interesting that after 1928, fear took a turn into a supernatural monster similar to the fear of vampires and ghosts. This indicates that the fear of the supernatural remains and almost seems to have gotten stronger towards present day.

The kind of fear that horror instills is more on the supernatural side whereas Gothic fear is in humanistic terror and isolation in a decaying mindset or atmosphere. I found this to be an interesting find because as I’ve mentioned before I would have thought that the fear of the supernatural would be more in the 1800s and not in the 1900s as much. The role of what inspires fear in people surprisingly switched places in my mind. I started this project thinking that the 1900s feared the idea of murder more than ghosts and that the supernatural was dominate more in the 1800s, however, my research shows otherwise, shaping a whole new meaning of fear for me.

 

 

 

Conclusion:

After doing our individual research, we came together collectively to discuss our results and try to come up with some conclusions. Here are our collective frequencies:

 

 

 

In concluding our research, we found that the words Terror, Death, and Pain all stayed pretty consistent throughout the century. Sin was the only one that consistently decreased. What we found especially interesting was that Phantom, Souls, Evil, Spirits, and Terror all started out pretty strong, drifted off in the middle years, and then made a comeback toward the end of the century. By looking at these trends, this is one of the hypotheses we have generated: Fear in the early Gothic and Horror genres seems to be focused on spiritual concerns with the soul and what might happen after death. This can be seen in many of the findings from the early 1810-1840 section, as well as the consistent drift off of Sin throughout the century. It then changed to a more humanistic terror of what could happen in real life, concerning elements of murder, and more recently has moved back towards a supernatural increase. This is seen through words such as Spirit, Phantom, and especially the word Ghost increasing and decreasing over the timeline.

We never would have found any of this out without the AntConc tool. Doing this by hand would have taken much longer, but with AntConc it took mere seconds. With this kind of technology, the humanities are less limited by time constraints and can look more broadly at a genre or a technique across a larger time period. As we continue toward a steadily growing digital age, more humanities scholars should take the chance to get to know word tools to help find sets and patterns of words and make better observations in their research over long time periods if needed.  

 

 

Sources:

Bowen, John. “Gothic Motifs – British Library.” Gothic Motifs. Web. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs.

 

Masters, Kristin. “A Brief History of Horror Literature.” A Brief History of Horror Literature. 24 Oct. 2013. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. http://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/-a-brief-history-of-horror-literature.

 

Prendergast, Kathy. “Gothtrad.” Gothtrad. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. https://www.usask.ca/english/frank/gothtrad.htm.

 

“Terror vs. Horror.” Terror vs. Horror. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/terror_horror.html.

 

“Zombies.” Zombies. Web. 22 Apr. 2016. http://umich.edu/~engl415/zombies/zombie.html.