“Gothic represents a ruined or fractured realism, excessive because its desire carries it beyond the ego and social convention; postmodern horror belongs to an epoch in which horror itself has become conventional, and so must be suitably self-ironising. It is the culture of an era too calloused and streetwise to be shocked, and so reaps its wry humour from the pointlessness of any such attempt. Gothic, by contrast, is funny in the way all excessive intensity is, as well as in the manner of an obscene joke. It allows us to indulge our repressed fantasies so unashamedly that we laugh at its very barefacedness, quite independently of its content.” – Terry Eagleton
