Overview
Examines Gothic realism in documentary and horror cinema, highlighting how films evoke archival anxiety and unsettling realities, from gothumentaries exploring ineffable subjects to mockumentaries and found-footage films addressing modernity's overwhelming and mediated nature. This study concerns a Gothic realism in the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary horror cinema, the films examined here express generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic's unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bringing Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Sickhouse, and We Are All Going to the World's Fair turn to Gothic reflexivity as a way of expressing the subject's relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability.
Full Product Details
Author: Kristopher Woofter
Publisher: Anthem Press
Imprint: Anthem Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.30cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.544kg
ISBN: 9781839995880
ISBN 10: 1839995882
Pages: 278
Publication Date: 07 April 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Not yet available, will be POD
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon it's release. This is a print on demand item which is still yet to be released.
Reviews
“This is truly adventurous, wonderfully teachable scholarship. Woofter’s selection of case studies is as innovative as his desire to reframe the relationship between horror and documentary films. In artful prose, Woofter demonstrates how his new concept of ‘Gothumentary’ structures cinema from its beginnings and continues to shape its transformations today.” —Adam Lowenstein, author of Horror Film and Otherness, Director of the Horror Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Author Information
Kristopher Woofter, PhD, is a faculty member of the English Department at Dawson College, Montreal. His recent publications include the collections Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021), American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021) and The Weird: A Companion (2025). He is editor of the journal Monstrum.
