Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have identified the neo-Victorian Gothic as a mode particularly suited to political and ethical cultural engagement, precisely for the way in which it disrupts any “uniform” contemporary iteration of the Gothic; by returning to the past, the neo-Gothic “rekindle[s] an intensely disturbing desire that unsettles norms and redefines boundaries once more” (2012, 2). Indeed, the Gothic more generally attends to the social and cultural problems faced in the contemporary moment, precisely through its interest in the strange, the abject and the Other. This chapter examines the dinosaur narrative as a particular kind of neo-Gothic uniquely positioned to address the collapse of moral, spatial and historical boundaries. Addressing a selection of early dinosaur narratives, as well as the range of films in the Jurassic Park series (1993–2018), this chapter will explore the dinosaur as a figure of the limit of our Gothic imagination, that is, the point at which the known world reaches the boundaries of the unknown or other. In particular, however, the chapter will focus on the specific engagement with Gothic tropes in the most recent Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): the isolated mansion, the rich benefactor, the orphan child, the presence of family secrets and the haunting or stalking figure. In the embedding of the conventional Gothic within a contemporary context concerned with environmental collapse, the dinosaur and its impossible presence is reinvigorated as a problem exceeding our capacity for conservative solution.

The Jurassic Park films, and in particular Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, are perhaps most commonly and readily recognised (and marketed) as works of science fiction, rather than Gothic or neo-Gothic works; however, in their focus on the moral and ethical questions raised by scientific research, and particularly with the moral problems associated with creating (and destroying) artificial, unnatural or hybridised life, these works harken back to a long-standing narrative tradition in which the Gothic and science fiction intermingle.

Perhaps the most obvious precursor of this intermingling of the Gothic and science fiction is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which the scientific research of the eponymous character results in the creation of an unnamed (and perhaps unnameable) monster who threatens the integrity of Frankenstein's mind, body and family.