Another century; other cities; other mediums; new technologies. Well into the twentieth century the convulsive figure given literary presence by Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson continued to thrive in literature. Visual representations of the seizure-prone body migrate from medical photographic and film projects to mainstream cinema. Films as diverse as The Big Sleep, The Andromeda Strain, Romper Stomper and Deceiver, as well as television shows such as American Gothic and The X Files, all draw upon the metaphorical capital of the epileptic or convulsing body to evoke the threat of chaos lurking beneath a patina of late twentieth-century order.