Abstract
This chapter explores how monstrous figures from 19th-century Gothic and horror literature recur in contemporary video games. Drawing on theories of transmedia studies and adaptation, the chapter argues that there is a kind of metatextual haunting that occurs in video games that reanimate and reinterpret various urtexts of the Gothic genre, such as those by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley, among others. In their specifically neo-Gothic transformations, their narrative and aesthetic structures become interactive gameplay experiences shaped by choices that position players to “play with” and “play as” such monstrous figures, creating uncanny doublings that foreground questions of authorship and agency. This chapter begins with a broad overview of ludic representations of literary monsters of 19th-century Gothic and horror in video games that adapt these works, before narrowing its focus to two case studies: The Dark Eye (Inscape 1995), and The Wanderer: Frankenstein’s Creature (La Belle Games & ARTE France 2019). Through the video games discussed, this chapter demonstrates that this adaptation of Gothic and horror tropes into neo-Victorian frameworks of cultural reference creates opportunities for metatextual narratives and gameplay that shape the player’s experience of monstrosity. These adaptive practices reveal how video games can function as uncanny spaces of recurrence in which 19th-century Gothic narratives are repeated, their monsters reimagined, and thus their cultural afterlives extended in contemporary popular imagination.