Digital Gothic: An Interview with Xavier Aldana Reyes

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader/Associate Professor in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is author of Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014), and editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester, 2019), Horror: A Literary History (2016) and Digital Horror (with Linnie Blake, 2015). Xavier is chief editor of the Horror Studies book series at the University of Wales Press, and has edited anthologies of Gothic and horror fiction for the British Library. One of Xavier's research interests is the optical dynamics of found footage horror films. On this topic, he has published an article on narrative framing for Gothic Studies, and chapters on affective immersion in the film [REC] (2007) and viewer involvement and guilt in The Last Horror Movie (2003). More recently, he wrote a chapter on 'Online Gothic' that considers social media found footage horror for the collection The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2022).