Taboo (2017) and Cultural Haunting Through the Gothic Historical Television Drama

This article considers Tom Hardy’s Taboo (2017) as an example of ‘Gothic historical television drama’, particularly in relation to ideas of the Regency Gothic romance. The central character, Hardy’s James Delaney, does suffer from what appear to be psychological hauntings, because he was responsible for the deaths of people being illegally traded as slaves by the British East India Company. However, more important to the conception of the ‘Gothic historical television drama’ is that the Gothic is used as a mode to indicate that the traumas presented are not just those of the individual characters portrayed, tucked safely away in the fictionalised past, but that they are wider social and cultural historic traumas which continue to be active in the present. This article argues that the use of the Gothic mode in the serial, exemplified by its themes, style, use of violence, and disruption of our expectations of historical dramas (particularly Regency dramas), works to indicate this continued resonance to the audience. Rather than just being the story of a haunted individual, it is the story of how we as a culture are still haunted by that imperial capitalist past, still suffering from its traumas.