Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

The Gothic tradition is about secrets, dark secrets, awful secrets, hidden just behind the façade of normality. Modern horror is still heavily influenced by this tradition. But it’s not creepy old castles that hold these secrets anymore. The Gothic has invaded our everyday lives. The old farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The suburban Japanese home in The Grudge. Even a videotape in The Ring. The infectious evil that used to be confined to crumbling ruins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, like Lewis’s The Monk, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer has spread to our cities, our small towns, our homes. And that makes it even scarier, doesn’t it?”