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This is a paper about the cinematic as spectacle and the construction of the sublime. It is concerned with gendered constructions of desire and construes the object of desire in this case as a sublime object. At the same time, the paper is about decadence and falling, falling away. Therefore, this piece of writing attempts to deal with some thoughts on the relationship between decadence and mortification. So this paper is also about distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the distance that is described by falling from the constructed sublime and its associated melancholy. These ideas are explored via an examination of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most powerful films, Vertigo (1958), and a notion of the tragic sublime. Taken together, the concept of the sublime and the narrative of the film provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representations in the obsessive‐compulsive pursuit of organisational idealisation.

Pre-existing music has been used to underscore the moving image since the days of ‘silent’ film, and this practice is still commonplace today in Hollywood and beyond. Such music may be ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ and can feature within the narrative of a movie diegetically, non-diegetically, or both. With regard to art music in film, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often the composer of choice, given the popularity and familiarity of many of his compositions. However, his music is employed cinematically in a range of different situations and for a variety of purposes.

In this chapter, I focus on ways in which compositions by Mozart are used to manifest the music and death nexus present in the narrative of three films that were released in different decades. ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni (1787) features in the first film I analyse, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945), with the aria being linked to the symbolic death of the moral compass of the protagonist. I then consider the inclusion of music from one of Mozart's symphonies in the storyline of the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), the narrative of which includes the themes of deception and murder. The final film I examine is I am David (Paul Feig, 2003), in which one of the characters sacrifices his life to save that of his friend. Each example encapsulates death as embodied affect, with Mozart's music specifically impacting upon the emotions of the protagonists.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho stunned both the cinema-going public and critics alike. Its tale of a young, genial, likeable and mother-fixated hotel proprietor – Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) – whose psychotic tendencies and fractured personality tapped into the zeitgeist of an America changing in a post-World War II world, was very much the antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll rebels like Elvis Presley and James Dean. Norman Bates was Anthony Perkins and Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates.

In 2013, Norman resurfaced from numerous remakes in Bates Motel. With its nod to the past, and a look to the future of how Norman’s story pans out, the series’ narratives, characters and situations showed there was life for him, his mother and the motel beyond cinema.

This chapter examines how Creed’s ideas of ‘Monstrous’ can be overlaid onto Norman, his mother Norman and Bates Motel.

This chapter investigates the recent surge of social media (mis)use in horror films including The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Unfriended (2015) and #Horror (2015) and how young women’s relationship to social media in these films often pillories females for existing under, and delighting in, an anonymous, ubiquitous gaze. In these narratives, women are slut shamed both in the plot and through the threat of social media’s panoply of screens, sur- and selfveillance. In my discussion, I will utilize feminist film theory including the writings of Laura Mulvey, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed, while also including contemporary cultural criticism from writers and journalists like Nancy Jo Sales and Leora Tanenbaum to explore the horror genre from a more contemporary, multi-discourse perspective. The technology in these films serve as harbingers, intimating the figurative and literal dangers to come for their female protagonists, ultimately suggesting that the horror in these films is the medium itself and the patriarchal social media culture that these devices cultivate.

David Punter and Glennis Byron note how the Gothic novel has been divided into two categories: the ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Gothic. Where the former emphasizes violence and ghosts, the latter focuses on female representation and the disavowal of the supernatural. The Hollywood Gothic films of the 1940s can be said to translate this aspect of the Female Gothic onto the cinema screen: Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) all feature narratives stressing the haunting nature of domestic spaces but there are no actual ghosts present. Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath (2000) breaks this convention. The film clearly draws on the Female Gothic lineage, situating Claire as a Gothic heroine, and yet there is an important difference: the supernatural is now an integral – and acknowledged – part of the story. This chapter explores this twenty-first century change, arguing that whilst the inclusion of the supernatural can be said to break with previous definitions of the Female Gothic, What Lies Beneath’s depiction of a ghost actually re-imagines and re-emphasizes the concerns at the centre of this tradition: the dramatization of marital and domestic experiences; an interrogation of feminine perception; and the reality of male violence against women.