A series where, like Catherine Morland, I read everything through a Gothic lens. Reply to this email to suggest other movies I could watch Gothic-ly.  

Because no good Gothic story would be complete without them, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) is full of ghosts. Not Catherine Earnshaw-style ghosts, but rather the spectres we, as viewers, project onto the screen. Nearly 70 years after the story starts, we are still defining Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) through her relationship with Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and Graceland. As reactions to the movie suggest, both will haunt her for the rest of her life and way into her grave.

Priscilla features other key elements of the Gothic genre: the heroine begins the story as a beautiful (teenage) virgin who will then become a dutiful, abandoned wife waiting for Elvis in Graceland, all the while embodying the persecuted maiden subject to a coercive boyfriend. The supernatural is present through scenes of the Presleys taking drugs, and there are elements of religiosity in Elvis’ fascination with a new-age guru. There are even ridiculous servants in the form of the Memphis Mafia, a group of yes-men living on Elvis’ good graces. Graceland is the mansion looming large throughout the story, the one Priscilla needs to lose to write the next chapter of her life.

Priscilla Presley, on whose memoir Elvis & Me the film is based and who was an executive producer, is the unreliable narrator – think Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights or the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca. The film is putting her story forward to show her as more than “the wife of.” The fact that her version differs from the official legend of Elvis doesn’t mean she’s making it all up, just that it hasn’t been replayed as much. Priscilla has a vested, financial and likely psychological interest in both keeping the public persona of Elvis alive while also sharing how she experienced him.  

The Gothic is a genre that interrogates systems – the patriarchy, the institution of marriage, gendered imbalances of power. Through the eyes of its titular heroine, Priscilla goes against official narratives of fame and the iconisation of Elvis. It’s hard to leave the movie theatre and not think that the man was a piece of work – something their daughter Lisa-Marie Presley was concerned about as she criticised the script as one-sided. Priscilla interrogates the institution of fame in a way only Coppola, with her insider POV and her obsession with white girlhood, could.

Elvis as a Byronic monster

Priscilla starts in Germany in 1959 as Elvis, then 22, is completing his military service. Aged just 14, Priscilla finds herself invited to a party at his house. She is blown away by the glamour and the fact that Elvis, already famous, is interested in little her.

The scene sets their dynamic. Elvis is a monster in the etymological meaning of the term. Monstrum is “something that exists outside the unnatural order … exceeds categorisation, that resists nature and naming”. Is there anything more out of categories than the ultra-famous?

Elvis enjoys the kind of fame that allows him to get away with most things. He is one of many celebrities with rumours of paedophilia and grooming attached to him, rumours that never affected him in his lifetime and to this day are not that widely known. 

Coppola’s Elvis is something of a Byronic (anti)hero in the way many of the Brontë sisters’ love interests were. I first thought to apply a Gothic lens to Priscilla after seeing Elordi loom over Isabella at the end of Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights, with sideburns that reminded me of Elvis. Here, Elvis is fiercely independent, at least from Priscilla, though he relies on a coterie of people, including the Memphis Mafia, his manager, the Colonel, who is noticeable by his absence, etc. He leaves Graceland as he wants and decides whether she can join him (no). Like The Corsair in Byron’s poem, his fame places him above his group. He is a transgressive object of desire for Priscilla as she is underage, something her parents keep pointing out, whereas Elvis’ people are non-plussed about her age because what is monstrous for the normies is shrugged off when the famous do it.

The height difference between Spaeny and Elordi, much bigger than the one between their characters, is one of the ways Coppola visualises the power imbalance. Spaeny acted on a crate at times so they could be in the same shot, but sometimes Coppola uses the discrepancy to make Elvis an omniscient presence as he becomes a disembodied voice, too tall to fit in the frame yet always there in the margin of our consciousness.

Graceland, the house that won’t burn down

The House, Graceland, is another way Coppola showcases the imbalance.

Priscilla ends with the title character driving away from Graceland to the sound of Dolly Parton, I Will Always Love You – presumably referencing Elvis, but it could be the house. In the great tradition of Gothic heroines, she loses Graceland, although her departure is in no way as dramatic as Manderley or Thornfield burning down. The house was there before her, built by Elvis for his mother, and it will be there long after their divorce. 

That permanence is one of the creepy things about Graceland. Priscilla leaves, but the house never leaves her. It’s still there, in no small part because after Elvis’ death, Priscilla turned it into a shrine to her ex, giving her more power over the house than she had when she lived there. As the “official” girlfriend, you expect Priscilla to run Graceland. Yet, much like the second Mrs de Winter, everything is already set up by the time she turns up. She can’t exert any power over Graceland; it only exerts its power over her. The house runs in ways we are never privy to. Food trays appear outside Elvis’ bedroom, are eaten by the lovers and then disappear. Coppola’s Graceland never comes to life the way the house in The Haunting (Jan de Bont, 1999) does, but it is still an efficient gilded cage. 

Elvis’ coercion and Priscilla’s unhappiness are contained within the white columns of Graceland. Elvis never lets Priscilla forget he could kick her out, demanding she pack her bags when he’s displeased, threatening the loss of a paradise where she isn’t even that happy.

She will be exiled at his will and must stay at his will. She is only allowed to leave if he’s sanctioned it, for instance, to go to school. When she joins him on a film set because she’s read about his affair in the paper, he gets angry and violent. Elvis forbids Priscilla from getting a job in town because he needs her available whenever he wants. With little company outside of his influence, she is isolated in a frozen house, where the air feels stale through the screen. Shot after shot, Coppola frames a bored Priscilla between heavy curtains, French doors, etc, the outside world within reach but forbidden. 

When Elvis and his Memphis Mafia come back from a tour or movie shoot, Priscilla is surrounded by older white men - another kind of isolation. Aside from Elvis’ grandmother and stepmother, the women are in service positions, including the wives and girlfriends of the Memphis Mafia, who are there only because their partners are part of Elvis’ entourage. When Priscilla tries to make friends with the women who reply to fan mail, Elvis’ father tells her off.

Graceland isn’t geographically isolated the way Wuthering Heights or Thornfield are isolated. There are always people at the fence, waiting for their idol to exit. Yet their presence is part of the reason why Priscilla can’t do anything; another way, as the audience, we are led to question our role in the dynamics on screen. When Priscilla plays on the lawn with her dog, Elvis’ stepmother tells her off because of how many people are waiting on the other side with cameras.

Doll Priscilla

In fact, everyone is always telling Priscilla what to do. The only ones who gave in were her parents, though they probably shouldn’t have let their teenage daughter leave with an international star – but really, it was Elvis’ desire they were bending to rather than Priscilla’s.

Elvis’ coercive control isn’t limited to selecting her activities and travel. He dresses her up like a doll. In a creepy version of the makeover montage, he takes her shopping to a local fashion boutique, Memphis Mafia in tow. What should be a private moment becomes yet another display where everyone tries to figure out what Elvis thinks before voicing an opinion. When Elvis rejects patterned dresses, even though Priscilla likes them, the sales assistants hurry to find clothing more to his taste. At the end of the fitting, he tells her to dye her hair black – cut to dark water running through a sink. 

Contrast this with Priscilla expressing doubt over one of Elvis's bejewelled jumpsuits, which angers him. In a later scene, she knows to tell him that it looks very nice on him to keep the peace, even though he looks ridiculous.

We don’t see many shots of pregnant Priscilla, but we do see her stepping on a scale with a large belly and perfectly painted toes and later applying fake eyelashes as she prepares to give birth. Her body is always under scrutiny, and therefore she is forever seeking to control it. Getting pregnant further isolates Priscilla, stopping her from going on a promised tour with her new husband.

Motherhood is only present through fractured touches – Priscilla with a crib, Priscilla playing with a baby, an awkward parents-and-daughter photoshoot. Motherhood in the Gothic is never a state of bliss – there is something menacing lurking in the corner, a suspicion that it will affect the mother’s psyche like The Yellow Wallpaper, when the narrator probably has some form of post-natal depression. Priscilla subverts these expectations; rather than a trap, motherhood becomes the impetus for her to take greater control of her life. 

By having a child with Elvis, Priscilla fulfils the role of dutiful wife and girlfriend he cast her in from her teens. Yet none of this delivers on the happiness she expected. Shortly after Lisa-Marie’s birth, Priscilla moves to California on her own. In Las Vegas, before an Elvis concert, she has lunch with her girlfriends, the first such scene in the movie – not only is she now geographically remote, but she has also made her own friends. Then, she leaves him.

Two years after Priscilla’s release, Priscilla Presley published a second memoir about her life after Elvis – yet the cover still features a black-and-white photo of her in front of the white columns of Graceland. Is it still a ghost if you own its place in your life and profit from it?

Priscilla is currently available in the UK on Netflix and Mubi.

PS: I reviewed Alice Winocour’s Couture (2025) for Obscurae. Read it here.