Black Spider: horror made in Switzerland
Jeremias Gotthelf’s 1842 novella The Black Spider is a classic of Swiss literature – and a rare example of horror made in Switzerland. Cinema and literary critic Alan Mattli questions whether a new cinematic adaptation can help it break through internationally.
This content was published on April 19, 2022 - 08:35 April 19, 2022 - 08:35
Did you know that Switzerland is the birthplace of the horror genre as we know it today? It may have come by this honour somewhat passively, in part through climatological happenstance, but it is a story worth telling. It was here, on the shores of Lake Geneva, that a young MaryExternal link and Percy ShelleyExternal link spent the summer months of 1816, hosted by the poet Lord ByronExternal link and his friend John Polidori.
Kept from outdoor activities by bad weather – the result of a volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora the year before – the quartet took to telling ghost stories: Mary Shelley presented the rudiments of her seminal science-fiction novel Frankenstein, while Byron’s musings about vampires would later serve as inspiration for Polidori’s 1819 story The Vampyre, itself a future touchstone of 19th-century vampire lore, including Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece Dracula.
Much of Switzerland’s place in the annals of horror, then, is owed to the fact that both Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are Swiss-born, so to speak. Horrific writing, meanwhile, was done elsewhere, at least in the popular consciousness – by Shelley and Ann RadcliffeExternal link in England, by Edgar Allan PoeExternal link in the United States, by E. T. A. HoffmannExternal link in the German lands, by the Marquis de SadeExternal link in France, among other 19th-century so-called gothic and horror writers.
Swiss literature in the 19th century, by contrast, was dominated by the more sober realist mode; by the slice-of-life tales of Gottfried KellerExternal link and the historical narratives of Conrad Ferdinand MeyerExternal link. But just as Switzerland seems an unlikely place of origin for two staples of Halloween iconography, there is a Gothic underbelly to that supposedly quaint Swiss-German realism – one that is rarely appreciated beyond the borders of German-speaking Europe.
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