Introduction

Summary

Writing in 1753 to his friend Horace Mann, an incredulous-sounding Horace Walpole, the soon-to-be-father of the Gothic, shared the surprising ways he was spending his time:

You will scarce guess how I employ my time; chiefly at present in the guardianship of embryos and cockleshells. Sir Hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds to the King, the Parliament, the royal acadamies [sic] of Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and Madrid. He valued it at fourscore thousand, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese! […] You may believe that those, who think money the most valuable of all curiosities, will not be purchasers. (358–59)

Walpole was entrusted with safeguarding the taxidermy specimens belonging to the collection of the late Sir Hans Sloane. Yet taxidermy is absent from Walpole's own fantasy Gothic house-cum-museum, Strawberry Hill, particularly surprising given his professional proximity to stuffed hippopotamuses, one-eared sharks, and freakishly large spiders and his view of museums as “hospitals” for unique singularities including “Monstrous births, hermaphrodites, petrifactions” (Walpole, Fugitive Pieces 49). Walpole also had a penchant for collecting items we might consider the sister arts and objects of taxidermy, including wax models, books on embalming, objects made from animal hides (e.g., shields made from rhinoceros skin), and prints that depict taxidermy. While taxidermy is a strange absence at Strawberry Hill, in the Gothic tradition that Walpole would go on to inspire, taxidermy's uncanny presence—from its origins to our present day—looms large.

One need only grab the remote to find evidence of taxidermy's ubiquitous presence in Gothic horror: in hallmark horror films like Psycho, Evil Dead (I and II), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1 and 2), and Silence of the Lambs to the more recent Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods, Taxidermia, Get Out, and A Classic Horror Story; in television and streaming series like Penny Dreadful, Bates Motel, Tell Me Your Secrets, and Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities; and even in horror video games like Heavy Rain Chronicles: Episode 1—The Taxidermist and Taxidermy. Let's look a little closer at a few of these examples.