know far more about the subject of this book than I do and would have written a much better one on the subject than I have. Bernice Murphy occupies the office opposite my own and has not only had to suffer my constant attention-seeking for the last few years, graciously guiding me towards not only ever-more horrific viewing material and invaluable critical reading, but has also cheered me up when the going got tough. Darryl Jones, as usual, was a friend, colleague and wise guide and spent far more time talking to me about the book than either it or I deserved. Students in my classes on Literary Monsters had to endure my first public airing of many of the ideas that found their way in here and often patiently explained to me how misguided I am about such things Acknowledgements vii-so I thank them too. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who made very good suggestions which I tried to address as best I could. Some material from the Introduction and Chapter 1 first appeared in two articles published in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2006 and 2008) and is reprinted here with permission. To my wife, Mary Lawlor, and our daughter, Eilís, I owe the most gratitude. I offer them my love and dedicate the book to them both. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction Gothic trope of the past violently erupting into the present connect this minor horror film to a much longer cultural tradition which figures Ireland as a zone of weirdness, the supernatural and the pathological. At the time of shooting, Coppola was working for the veteran horror maestro Roger Corman, who had just wrapped up The Young Racers (a charmingly terrible film about racing car drivers and the women who love them), which he filmed all around Europe, finishing up in Ireland, and Dementia 13 was basically made with the left-over budget from Corman's film, with some of its actors thrown in, supplemented by additional players brought in from the Abbey Theatre. The Irish setting was, then, purely happenstance, since, as Kim Newman points out, Coppola would have filmed in Texas had he been there at the time. 2 Coppola got the most out of the location, however, and while naming the dead daughter Kathleen was probably simply a matter of invoking something suitably 'Oirish' for an American audience, it (un)happily results in the personal history of the Halorans becoming (unintentionally) emblematic of a national history in which the Irish are haunted by the ghost of a different Kathleen (ni Houlihan) and young men are led into perpetuating murderous deeds on her behalf. Concerning a ritual commemoration of death, and released three years before the Irish state celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising with tremendous pomp and circumstance, the film implicates such commemorative events in a cycle of madness and murder and suggestively anticipates the blame that would later be heaped on the anniversary festivities for the renewed campaign of the Irish Republican Army in 1969. Moreover, the IRA's Border Campaign had just finished in 1962...

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“Irish Gothic” is a nebulous term that covers a very large amount of writing emanating from, relating to, written in and/or about Ireland in the modern period. There is much debate over when Irish Gothic “emerged” (if that is the right word – see McCormack 1991, Backus 1999, Killeen 2005 for different approaches to the question of beginnings); what texts should be included in an examination of the area; and even whether Irish Gothic is a “tradition,” “genre,” or “mode” (see McCormack, 1991; Killeen 2006; Haslam 2007a, 2007b). Irish literary history is still a rather underdeveloped field. Although the masterpieces of Irish modernism (see modernism ) have received a great deal of critical attention, the fame of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett have rather distracted consideration away from other writers and areas in serious need of detailed socioliterary mapping. Irish realism has, perhaps, suffered most seriously from neglect (see John Wilson Foster 2008 for a rectifying of this gap; for a good indication of the amount of realism published in this period, see Loeber and Loeber 2006). In tandem with – and probably contributing to – the disregard of Irish realism, there has been a relatively strong interest in Irish “nonrealism,” of which tradition the Gothic is a major component, although this attention has mostly been directed toward a few major practitioners such as Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (see le fanu, joseph sheridan ), Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker (see stoker, bram ), ignoring “minor” figures such as Regina Maria Roche, Stephen Cullen, or Anne Fuller. In fact, Irish Gothic may be the one area of Irish fiction, besides modernism, to have received due attention, and this needs some explaining.

Dr. G. S. Kirk suggested (C.Q.xiii [1963], 51–2) that the last line here referred to ‘a fantastically ithyphallic bridegroom’. Professor Lloyd-Jones (C.Q,. xvii [1967], 168), while professing uncertainty as to the rightness of this suggestion, thought it ‘quite likely’, and adduced in support of it a story from Tzetzes on Lycophron 1378 (ed. Scheer, ii. 381 f.), a story told also, but in different words, in the Etymologicum Magnum s.v. (ed. Gaisford, 153, If.), and containing in this second version the words ‘used in just the sense which Dr. Kirk ascribed to it in Sappho’.

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