The Daughters of Fire: Walter Hugo Khouri's female gothic

Daniel Serravalle de Sá

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2012n62p293

Authors

Daniel Serravalle de Sá Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2012n62p293

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the connections between WalterHugo Khouri’s film As Filhas do Fogo (1978) and the Gothicstressing matters of gender, race and nationality. More than asimple re-classification, this Gothic framework of study seeks todemonstrate that the representation of necromancy, mysteriousdeaths and female imprisonment in a tropical manor suggest issueslinked to Brazilian cultural identity and concerns. By associatingKhouri’s film to a form that is representative of popularentertainment this article seeks to establish a case in point ofhow the notion of Gothic can be a useful concept in the investigationof Brazilian film history.

Author Biography

Daniel Serravalle de Sá, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Daniel Serravalle de Sá holds a licenciatura em inglês (UFSC 2001), an MA in Studies in Fiction (UEA 2005) and a second MA in Estudos Linguísticos e Literários em Inglês (USP 2006). Between 2007 and 2009 he was Leitor brasileiro at the University of Manchester, where he taught Portuguese language and Brazilian culture, and read for his PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies with a thesis on the horror films of José Mojica Marins (Manchester 2010). He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês (UFSC). In recent years, Daniel has written about the gothic and its manifestations in different cultural contexts. He is the author of the books Tropical Gothic (Aracne 2010) and Gótico Tropical: o sublime e o demoníaco em O Guarani (Edufba 2010).