Pernicious Properties: From Haunted to Horror Houses: An Interview with Evert Jan van Leeuwen

Abstract

Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language literature at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. He researches fantastic fictions and counter cultures from the eighteenth century to the present. He is also interested in the international, intertextual dimensions of genres like Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction, and explores how they manifest in the British Isles, the Low Countries, and North America. He has recently co-edited the volume Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media (2019) with Michael Newton and has written articles and chapters about American gothic authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, amongst others. In relation to this, Evert has also published House of Usher (2019) a book analyzing Poe’s famous story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Richard Matheson’s related film script and the cinematic adaptation by Roger Corman in the context of the 1960s counter-culture.