Profs & Pints Nashville: Southern Gothic Horror

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Photo by Ron Cogswell / Creative Commons.

A family grave site at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia.

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Southern Gothic Horror,” on regional tales that keep us awake at night, with Stephanie A. Graves, scholar of horror and lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

From the AMC series Interview with a Vampire to the enormously popular film Sinners, works aptly classified as Southern Gothic horror grip the popular imagination like a hand thrust up from a moss-covered grave.

But what exactly makes film or literature Southern Gothic, and what makes horror that intersects with it so unsettling?

Learn the answers to such questions by venturing into this dark realm of the imagination with Stephanie Graves, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on sex and the horror film and on Christmas frights.

We’ll explore the Southern Gothic as a stylistic mode that has influenced broader horror traditions. We’ll also look at how it amplifies horror’s ability to unsettle by rooting fear in familiar soil, using the landscape of the South as both setting and spectral presence.

Graves will discuss how the classic Gothic literature that arose around in the castles and abbeys of Europe found its way across the Atlantic and adapted to the haunted landscapes of the American South. Part genre, part style, and part setting, the Southern Gothic flourished here by drawing from the inescapable presence of what lies buried, whether literally in the grave or figuratively in cultural memory.

Southern Gothic horror highlights horror’s preoccupation with fear, dread, and the supernatural. It uses ghost stories, monstrous figures, and eerie rituals not only to entertain but also to expose deeper cultural anxieties related to class, race, gender, violence, and place. It continues to thrive as a cultural space where the spooky and supernatural entwine with history, memory, and dread. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)