The ghostly, mysterious, mighty and shady presence of madness, or insanity, throughout history has been acquiring, in fact, a large amount of diverse meanings.

Insanity, paranoia, and psychology have long been a staple of American film noir thrillers. These motion pictures provide insight into an evolving American popular culture landscape from World War II through the postwar era and function as cultural, industrial, and aesthetic products of Hollywood’s classical studio system during a fascinating period of the American film industry.

The historical record shows that personal experience of bewitchment was multifarious, concerning livestock, goods, chattels, and agricultural processes. However, over the last five centuries the majority of those experiences that were deemed severe enough to lead to the formal accusation, prosecution, or physical assault of supposed witches, concerned people suffering from ill health, or some other form of physical or mental discomfort.

Upon approaching the subject of the American Gothic short story, one encounters diverse places in which the narratives take place: different geographies, cartographies and spaces that define the atmosphere of the stories themselves.

Readdressing the value and impact of the controversial “libertine” writings of Donatien Alphonse Fran François, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is the subject of this investigation. While the term “Sadean” is now common in the cultural imagination, conjuring the grotesque — freakish, bizarre, abhorrent — and extreme images of sex and violence, the man himself was an especially confounding and controversial figure — even by the standards of the eighteenth-century French aristocratic elite.

Depression and self-harm are major public health concerns in teenagers, with at least 10% of teenagers in developed countries reporting self-harm by the age of 16 years. The rates of emotional problems in adolescence might also be increasing.

To investigate this assertion, we explore three texts in which mental health is represented in order to foreground the Gothic images and tropes they contain, proposing that this can help viewers to be more aware of how a sense of fear and stigma can be developed and established in such representation.