Scary Monsters, (And Super Creeps)

• In Event: Constructing 'the Criminal' in TV and Film

Abstract

This paper analyzes the prison as a haunted, haunting, hell-like space where those who have been judged monstrous and no longer fit to live amongst us are exiled and hidden from view. To render the monstrous beings created inside prison as authentic and believable characters an appropriate setting is required – the alienating place that they inhabit corresponds with the characters they must become. Sight and understanding is obscured, bars and netting limit sight, fogging the view. Deaths occur and blood is spilled. With high levels of mental health problems, substance misuse needs and experiences of violence and neglect, prisoners themselves must live with the demons of their own past, along with those of others. Gothic speaks of ghosts and spectres, takes place in dungeons and invokes the uncanny. Indeed there is something gothic, grotesque and carvinalesque that in the process of controlling people, of locking men up and taking away their liberty, that these bodies are put into places of violence; and one of the responses to this situation is to work upon the body, to make it bigger and more ready for violence.

Author

• Finola Farrant, University of Roehampton