So You Say You're a Goth: "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
One night a few years back, I went to a screening of the 2018 Panos Cosmatos action horror acid trip movie Mandy. In the onstage Q&A afterwards, Kevin Smith (who was there for some reason I'm still not sure about) interviewed Nicolas Cage, who stars in the film.
Cage told a story about bonding with Elijah Wood – who helped produce Mandy – over their love of horror movies. When they got together, Wood talked about his obsession with contemporary horror, and Cage effused about his love for the sumptuous-but-cheap mid-century horror productions of the English studio Hammer Films, famous for their gothic sensibility.
It was a fun night. Cage wore rose-tinted sunglasses and a shimmering gold sports jacket. And it popped back into my head recently, because of late I've been wondering about one of those strange questions that at times come to obsess me: what the hell do we mean when we say a movie is "gothic"? We hear it all the time, but what does it actually mean?
I was thinking about this the other day when an image of Cage in his golden ensemble appeared in front of me and I had a small revelation: "Ah-ha! That's exactly right! If you can imagine Nicolas Cage, glass of red wine in hand, absolutely enraptured by an old film, then there's a pretty good chance you could call it gothic!"
This is, of course, definition not by analysis, but by analogy; or rather, it's definition by creating a mental image of Nicholas Cage. But I think it holds, at least to a degree.
For, like so much of Cage's work (which I have a great respect for, incidentally), gothic films luxuriate in their over-the-top quality, they investigate madness and debauchery and out-of-control states, they are campy, they run to overstatement…and yet, precisely because of those exuberant qualities, they also contain an undeniably powerful emotional appeal and a unique understanding of certain sides of human nature.
And they delight me. Roger Corman made a wonderful series of them, and I will watch virtually anything that that goth-master Vincent Price was ever in. And there are, of course, all the old Hammer Films, The Hound of the Baskervilles from 1959 – which many folks consider the best Sherlock Holmes adaptation ever put on film – being one.
So I watched it again the other night, with our old friend Cage in mind, to see what I could see. (And, again incidentally, is there another contemporary actor who works better as a modern analogy to someone like Price? Is there another who would fit as perfectly into a classic Corman or Hammer production? I think not.)
The Hound of the Baskervilles – based, of course, on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel from 1902 – finds Sherlock Holmes (here played by Peter Cushing) doing battle with supernatural forces.
In a brief prelude, we're given the origin of these forces: long ago, Sir Hugo Baskerville, a wealthy landowner, murdered an innocent woman on the moors and for this sin was dispatched by some sort of supernatural hound. In the wake of this, each Baskerville heir has been haunted by this terrifying monster, with many of them being killed by it. (The cause of death is often heart failure brought on by terror.)
Now, a new Baskerville, named Sir Henry (Christopher Lee) has inherited the estate, and Holmes is hired to investigate the curse before it kills him. What follows is a galloping mystery of the kind that Doyle was a master at creating. Holmes and his sturdy friend Watson (André Morell) journey out to the moors. They do battle with a poisonous spider, encounter quicksand, explore an abandoned mine, try to comprehend why someone has stolen only one of Sir Henry's boots, and wrestle with the riddle of why the portrait of Sir Hugo is missing from the wall of the Baskerville manse. Meanwhile, Sir Henry falls in love with the daughter of a local farmer, and discovers that someone, or something, really is trying to kill him. Is it all connected? Absolutely!
In the end, of course, it's revealed that there is no supernatural hound lying in wait for Sir Henry; there is just a plot to steal his land and fortune. Holmes triumphs, reaching the truth through his powers of rationality, deduction, and observation. "Remarkable!" exclaims Watson after one such demonstration of these powers. "Superficial," sniffs Holmes. "There is nothing remarkable about using one's eyes."
The delights here mirror those of many of the really good Hammer productions. The storytelling and direction (by longtime Hammer warhorse Terence Fisher) are crisp. The sets and decoration are slightly campy, the lighting a touch lurid, and yet beautifully evocative exactly because of, rather than despite, their artificiality. And the whole is suffused with an air of overripe menace, of dark terrible things lurking just out of site, of human drives that partake in evil…of, in other words, it is suffused with the gothic.
Words, words, words! as Hamlet, no mean goth himself, cried. It's easy to throw language at something like this, coming up with florid adjectives and dancing linguistically around. But can we move past descriptions of "terrible things lurking just out of site" and try to get into the heart of the matter? Can we try to be specific about what the hell we're really talking about?
Let's move back closer to the beginning, or as much closer as my rather ragtag education in these matters will allow. The word "gothic" as applied to narrative originated as a description of a style of old architecture that you would surely recognize if not be able to name: those buildings, often cathedrals, full of pointed arches, stained glass, slender spires, and complicated stonework sprouting pokey protuberances. (Chartres Cathedral in France is often invoked as the epitome.) These buildings, and this architecture, are frequently used to invoke creepiness in movies: think of a scene in which a sudden flicker of lighting illuminates a leering stone gargoyle. But they are not simply eerie: they also have a sense of engaging with something just a bit more cosmic than is human life; it's no coincidence that many of the most famous gothic structures are religious buildings, for the grand complexity of the architecture stirs in us feelings of awe.
And what Arthur Conan Doyle – following, like so many others, in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe – managed to do in his stories was to highlight this sense of coming into contact with the other. In gothic architecture, that other thing is often, as I noted, a kind of religious awareness; in the literature of Doyle and writers like him, it is that same psychic sensation, but shaded into darkness, danger, evil. This frequently manifests as the mysterious occurrences that Sherlock Holmes comes up against. They are malignant, rational in some sense and yet warped, like his arch-nemesis Moriarty, or having their basis in ghost-story-like eeriness, like the Hound that pursues the Baskervilles.
Importantly, in Doyle's work, this gothic evil is highlighted by contrast. It is set over and against Holmes's pure rationality, which inevitably defeats it. But that defeat does not dispel it. It cannot dispel it. This is because Holmes can never defeat the generality of evildoing, only the instances of it that he confronts. He never wins an ultimate victory for rationality, because he's bound by his own method: he can only deal with the particulars set out before him. Ask him to disprove the existence of a ghoul he has never investigated, or ghouls in general, and he would tell you that it's impossible, because to work he needs the specific instances of a specific case.
The gothic as expressed in the Sherlock Holmes story is thus that thing which is opposed to his rationality, that thing that would do evil and get away with it, that thing that would very much like to stay hidden from the probing daylight eyes of logic. In some sense, then, at least in Doyle, the rational and the gothic need one another if they are to have definition. The one lurks, the other discovers, but without that lucking, there is nothing to discover. They are thus two necessary sides of human existence. They lean on one another like two tall stones: move one, and the other will fall flat. And what makes The Hound of The Baskervilles so entertaining to me is that it absolutely nails both sides of this equation.
It's filled with delicious moments of terror and unease. The Sir Hugo Baskerville of the opening is monstrous, psychotic. He throws a man out the window and then tortures that man by holding his head over the flames of the fireplace; he then threatens the man's daughter, and when she escapes onto the moors he releases a pack of hounds after her, only to eventually find her himself and kill her with a carved dagger. He is the opposite of reason and rationality, an extension of the human impulses into their darkest realms. And the sense of dread created by him infuses the whole film.
Some of this is symbolic: Watson at one point falls into a quicksand-like bog, only to barely survive. Later, another character falls into this bog and is never seen again. There is also the descent into the mine that I mentioned, as well as the sequence in which Lee's character is nearly killed by a spider. These moments are all played big, in the Hammer style, at the edge of being over the top, which lends them the feeling of primal fears being expressed, of falling into inescapable traps, exploring the dark, uncanny places of the world, of the creepy-crawlies that give us the shivers.
Against this, we have Cushing's impeccable portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, armed only with the force of rationality. He is arrogant in some ways, can be condescending to people who do not share the acuteness of his vision (including the viewer): when he finds out in the second act of the film that the painting of Sir Hugo has disappeared, for example, he says, "Yes, of course. It had to. How stupid of me." He knows why it's missing, in other words, but sees no reason to reveal that to Watson or the viewer until the end of the film, when he has his triumph. And yet despite this, for all his confidence, Holmes is terrified when the specter of the Hound finally does make its appearance. For until he disproves its supernatural qualities, those may indeed exist.
This mutual dependency of rationality and the eerie infuses not only Doyle's stories, but a good number of the Hammer films. The darker, wilder sides of human nature – violence, sexuality, madness – are set loose, and the question is whether or not they can be contained. And – exactly in the way that Holmes's defeat of any particular instance of evil only raises the question of how much more evil is out there – frequently in the Hammer films, regardless of the victory of the protagonist, our sense is that the wilder sides of human nature cannot ultimately be contained. This is not because of the movement of the plot, but because of the qualities of the film itself: the way it looks, the way it feels, the way the actors work. The gothic aura stays with us, long after the hero wins out.
Which is to say that in this contest of rationality and excess, rationality is very frequently the lesser combatant, despite its triumphs. (Which is, incidentally, not a terrible description for what Nicolas Cage is frequently after with his acting: throw away your rational reservations, you little people, he seems to be saying, and let's have a look at the powerful, scary things that can possess us.)
One last note. It's also worth mentioning that that this sensation of the gothic has tremendous value, and that it seems to have faded somewhat from our world. I think this may be due, at least in part, to two things. The first is that we are increasingly becoming an almost exclusively science-oriented society that believes (rightly or wrongly – I tend to think wrongly) that we've overcome superstition. The second is that we now mostly subscribe to an essentially materialistic notion of human psychology. Vagaries of human action, in the view of a great number of people, come from two things, and only two things: chemical difference, or the experience of trauma.
Almost entirely gone are the ideas that someone can fall into an inexplicable fit of madness, or that someone can be under the sway of some dark force (that is not reducible, as it is in so much of our contemporary horror, to a sociological allegory), or that certain people are simply destructive, reveling in pain and disorder. And thus, also fading is a terror of ourselves, for one of the signal elements of the gothic is that it pertains to human perversion, and if a darkness can lodge in someone else, it can lodge in you. Which is something that Sherlock Holmes – with his terrible bouts of melancholy and his agonized violin playing and his self-injections of that famous seven-percent solution of cocaine – seems to have known quite well.
And in some sense, a terror of ourselves is vital to our existence. It is at least as true as rationality, because to be human is to be faced with the inexplicable, whether that is the reason we are here in the first place, or the beauty of the world around us. (Even the scientists, as Curtis White noted, fall back on the inexplicable: every time they talk about the "elegance" of an equation or the "magnificence" of a nebula, they are falling away from rationality, appealing to something beyond logic.)
This other thing is the wilder, more untamable, more dangerous, more terrifying side of us. The gothic forces us to face it, to launch our puny rationality at it again and again. Which is a real, and extraordinary, thing to experience.
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