Southern Gothic

It is the time of year for spirits and ghosts, fog and hanging moss. The veil is thin, they say. Growing up in the north as I did, it would be expected that I would miss the vibrantly colored leaves crunching under foot, the snap of cool weather and the smell of woodsmoke on the air. There are many times in autumn that I do miss those things, but not at Halloween. No where is as creepy at Halloween as the Deep South.

In a city where the dead dwell upon the land rather than beneath it, where entire cities are constructed to house them and where we a day each year is set aside to celebrate them, they’re with us all the time. When the fog rolls in and the days grow short, they’re very close.

The dead are so close they can hear us, she thought. “Ah, but you see,” said Ryan, as if he’d read her mind, “in New Orleans, we never really leave them out.”

Anne Rice

As a genre, Southern Gothic arose as a style of literature derivative of Gothic and American Gothic traditions where the paranoid, the macabre and the taboo are highlighted. William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor are exemplary practitioners of the Southern Gothic literary style.

Allan Lloyd Smith, a British scholar specializing in Gothic literature describes it like this:

…the return of the past, of the repressed and the denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself.

In cinema, the Southern Gothic tradition is expressed in films like “Night of the Hunter” (1955) and “To Kill A Mockingbird” (1962). Director Elia Kazan represented the Southern Gothic sensibility in films like “Baby Doll” (1956) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) as Robert Aldrich did with “Hush…hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964).

Visually, in the Southern Gothic style, there is a thing that lurks but is not seen in photos and paintings. There is a sense of the malevolent, the macabre or the chaotic hiding behind the seemingly bucolic and well ordered.

I felt this very keenly from my first trip to New Orleans back in the late ’90’s. A strange, amorphous quality reticent of heavy drapery, rich perfume and fetid air, a slow and measured pace of life and a reluctance to change exists here like a specter just outside a picture frame. It’s rich and real and chock full of ghosts.