Gothic Romance:Only Lovers Left Alive (Dir Jim Jarmusch, 2h3m, 2013)
Perhaps the ultimate Gothic Romance is that of the vampire. Small wonder: the creature enters literature on the same bank of Lake Geneva as the other great figure of 19th Century Gothic literature, and its genesis, as Lord Ruthven, is a thinly veiled jab at the same Lord Bryon who would influence and act as template for so many Gothic (anti)-heroes. Ever since, the Vampire has dwelt in the realms of sex, blood and death, between sexualised predator (see, for example, the equally seminal "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1871), the multiple Christopher Lee-starring Hammer Horror incarnations of the Count, most notably Dracula, (1958), and Gary Oldman's gentleman-cum-creep in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula ), and tortured romantic outsiders; Tom Cruise's Lestat, Keifer Sutherland's band of vampiric goths in The Lost Boys (1987) and David Bowie's elegant sophisticate in The Hunger . (1983) Cinema of the late 2000s and earl...
.jpeg)
