“It Fixates": Indie Quiets and the New Gothic

Abstract

The article attempts to make several interventions. Following Jamie Sexton’s work on Independent Horror, it revisits the vexed status of horror within American Inde- pendent Cinema. Not only is indie horror frequently omitted from discussion of American Independent Cinema, but low budget, direct-to-DVD and video-on-demand indie horror titles are frequently omitted from academic discussions of horror. This has the effect of skewing our understanding of the genre. From there the article moves to consider a specific subgenre of indie horror that has been gaining in popularity: the Quiet Horror film—a category that contains the sub-genre of indie-Gothic films. Lastly, the paper moves on to a close reading of a specific low budget indie Gothic title, Absentia.