A Film Canon

The Castle Of Otranto would be underwhelming, were it not for Walpole's delightfully articulate, genuinely modest preface, in which he characterises the work as concisely as any critic; generally, as a gesture of originality, rather than genius and, specifically, as an attempt to fuse the romance tradition with the novel's greater focus on psychological realism, elaborating the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary events in a way that effectively sets the stage for all subsequent horror literature. To this end, Walpole draws particular attention to his comic use of 'lower' characters - and his invocation of Shakespeare seems less a claim for his own canonicity than a tacit acknowledgment of the inherent theatricality of the work which, organised around five act-like chapters, largely composed of dialogue, and preoccupied with the kinds of spectacles that might render a playhouse incredulous, frequently feels like little more than a script, or transcript, in keeping with Walpole's playful speculations about its origins. For this reason, his transformation of a series of prototypical romantic spaces - the castle, convent, woods, caves - into a Gothic register is more rudimentary than their foundational status might suggest, while his intricate, incestual family drama is a little too mechanical to exploit the logical, tortuous conclusion of feminine 'sympathy' that will subsequently suffuse the genre.