Something Wicked This Way Comes: How the Horror Genre Revitalizes Macbeth

Abstract

This project examines Rupert Goold’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in terms of the horror genre. Using filmic elements of the horror genre, touchstone horror texts, and Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, this project examines the Witches and Lady Macbeth as they are situated in the horror genre using various filmic elements. This project examines the character tropes of the horror genre – the monster, the victim, and the hero, and the ways in which the Witches and Lady Macbeth are at various points all three of these characters – an impossibility, within the horror genre. This adaptation, this project finds, disrupts the tropes of horror characterization, in order to illustrate the ways in which these still used tropes are problematic and damaging in terms of gender identity.