2.  Make sure your name is on your padlet site

3.  Post a link to your individual padlet on this class Gothic Connections Archive padlet. 

4.  Visit two of your peers' padlet sites.  Read and comment on their connections.  

5. ATTN: Posts and/or comments without names will not be able to receive credit.

Film: Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo del Toro)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2554274/

This series mirrors the existential and spiritual reflections in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” through its portrayal of grief, death, and interconnected souls. Each character faces their own version of the uncanny — not just ghosts, but memories that refuse to rest. The show’s use of the haunted house as a living being represents the self, filled with multitudes of love, fear, and loss. A deeply Gothic meditation on mortality and the persistence of the human spirit.

TV Series: The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018)

https://www.netflix.com/title/80189221

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” explores death and self-awareness, suggesting that identity continues even after death. The show Black Mirror, especially episodes like “San Junipero” and “Be Right Back,” mirrors this gothic idea by showing technology as a modern form of haunting, people living through digital ghosts and memories. Both explore what it means to exist beyond life and how humanity confronts mortality in unsettling ways.
https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888

2. “No Name Woman” (Kingston) + The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix series)

Kingston’s story focuses on family secrets, shame, and how the past continues to haunt future generations. The Haunting of Hill House also centers on a family literally and emotionally haunted by their home and their memories. Both works use ghosts as symbols for guilt, silence, and trauma, showing how buried truths never really disappear.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80189221

Link: Netflix page for The Haunting of Hill House

Poe’s story defines American Gothic through decay, of the mind, the home, and the family line. Flanagan’s 2023 series modernizes Poe’s Gothic world, transforming the Ushers into a wealthy pharmaceutical dynasty whose empire literally rots from within. The family mansion becomes a metaphor for moral decay, greed, and the consequences of exploitation. Both versions use Gothic horror to critique social corruption and capitalist excess, showing that the “house” both family and business collapses under the weight of its sins.

Link: Netflix page for The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

Coraline (2009), directed by Henry Selick, is a modern take on the gothic genre. Coraline's discovery of the "Other World" recalls Poe's chamber and Kingston's buried family story, spaces where repression manifests itself literally. The Other Mother's beautiful life transforms into a nightmare of control and possession, employing classic gothic tropes such as the double, the haunted mansion, and the return of the repressed. Under its fantastical exterior, the film criticizes emotional neglect and the myth of the "perfect" family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlv4yzsmwyI

Taylor Swift's "My Tears Ricochet" (2020) similarly turns sorrow into haunting. Like Kingston's aunt, Swift's narrator has been silenced and betrayed, but she returns to confront those who have mistreated her. The ghostly imagery, "If I'm dead to you, why are you at the wake?", transforms pain into power. Together, these works demonstrate that the gothic endures because it transforms sorrow and repression into reality: what we bury always finds its way back to us.

https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-my-tears-ricochet-lyrics

The video game Elden Ring puts players inside the world of the “Tarnished” a purgatory referred to as the Land Between; a world torn between life and death. By nature, Elden Ring is gothic and the story is quite tragic which reminds me of Section 49 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. In the story Whitman views death not as an end but a harmonious continuation of life’s natural cycle. Contrarily, Elden Ring defies human arrogance and allows players to transcend mortality through chaos and dominance. These stories share Gothic tropes like death, but Whitman’s world seems to embrace death in hopes of eternal life, whereas Elden Ring’s world becomes cursed and therefore denies the Tarnished their ending. Death.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_03kFqWfqs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eqxXqJDmcY

In “No Name Woman,” Kingston tells the story of a woman erased by her family’s shame, becoming a kind of ghost in their memory. The gothic comes through in the haunting silence and family secret that can’t stay buried. Crimson Peak also centers on women trapped by patriarchy, where ghosts reveal hidden violence and secrets of the past. Both show how women’s suffering becomes a haunting presence, turning social judgment into something dark and gothic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oquZifON8Eg

Link: Netflix page "The Haunting of Hill House"

Kingston’s "No Name Woman" is a story of how silence and shame can come back to haunt generations. This is evident in the character of the unnamed aunt in Kingston’s story whose ghost is a symbol of family secrets and the punishment of those women who overstep the bounds of what is expected of them. This is also evident in "Coco" (2017), where the story is one of remembering, family secrets, and spirits of the dead. Here, even as "Coco" looks positive and inspiring, the negative aspect of the story is one of ghosts and the afterlife.

Link: Disney/Pixar page for Coco