This chapter discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts influenced the American popular Gothic during the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s were what Nathan G. Hale has described as the ‘Golden Age of Popularization’ for psychoanalytic thought in the United States. The historical underpinnings of this psychoanalytic ‘boom’ period are discussed, with a focus upon the prominent place occupied by American ego psychology during this period. As argued, this influence soon permeated the ‘popular Gothic’ fiction of the era, which was characterised by texts which revolved around tensions rooted in the dysfunctional nuclear family, sexual and emotional repression, and unresolved childhood trauma. The work of authors such as Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, William March and Ira Levin is considered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the late 1970s ‘Satanic Panic’ scare, which drew upon both core psychoanalytic principles and the most lurid elements found in works of horror fiction such as Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971), severely damaged the movement’s reputation in the United States.

This chapter examines Gothic versions of apocalypse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Apocalypse in its biblical forms is associated both with divine revelation and with the imagining of social and political transformation. Gothic apocalypses adopt the visionary and revelatory aspects of biblical apocalypse, but do so in order to imagine bleak futures, whether in the cosmic chaos of Weird fiction or in the more secular-materialist anxieties of political corruption, nuclear destruction, or economic and environmental collapse. The returned dead of Gothic fictions hint at the resurrected body in Christian eschatology, but here emptied of redemptive possibility: the body returns not in the likeness of the risen Christ, but in the monstrous form of the zombie, vampire or revenant. Yet if Gothic apocalypses often depict the dehumanisation of the human and the collapse of the modern political and economic order, their visions of catastrophe also open space for the exploration of new ways of being on the other side of the end. Confronting contemporary anxieties around ecological destruction and economic crisis, Gothic apocalypses in the twenty-first century offer tentative glimpses of renewal in a remade world.

From the turn of the twentieth century forward, movie makers, fiction writers, and journalists have increasingly pushed into view bodies mangled by agricultural machinery, workers drowning in silos filled with grain, and lands laden with synthetic toxins. Farms have frequently appeared not only as ideal homesteads near picturesque villages but also as cogs in the brutality of corporate agribusiness, or as isolated and alien outposts struggling for economic survival in depopulated landscapes. The farm has even grown into a privileged setting for stories of supernatural horror bound to the rise of agriculture’s industrialization. Tangled with images of terror and mutilated bodies, Thomas Jefferson’s once idyllic “labor in the earth” now often takes place on a threatening, quasi-industrial, vast and lonely landscape of corn. Texts examined include Frank Norris' The Octopus, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn.”