Exploring the Origins of Gothic Horror
Gothic Horror fiction grips readers with a blend of horrified fascination and fear, the macabre and the supernatural and has been popular since the 1700s.
Key features
This style of literature arose from the mysterious allure of Gothic architecture –medieval buildings with sweeping spires, hidden passages, arches and buttresses, grotesque statuary and stained-glass windows. Think castles and monasteries.
Nature came to the fore, riddled with looming forests, dark woods, raging rivers, unseen movement of animals, the spine-tingling call of circling birds. The people who inhabited said nature were mysterious, often untrustworthy, sometimes not human at all!
Birth of a genre - the origins of Gothic Horror
The genre started in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s, The Castle of Otranto. Since then, horror fiction has boomed. People love frights!
Many of what we now recognise as stereotypes were innovations that captured the reading public's imagination. Radcliffe and her husband were able to stop work and start travelliing on the sales of "Udolpho" alone. Remarkable for the time and especially so for a female author.
Themes
As a genre, the first stories were laden with morality and religion. Villains flung temptations into the path of every tormented hero and heroine. Romance was riddled with dire hurdles and the settings brimmed with bleakness. Tragedies and evil abounded.
Trends shifted as science was introduced to the mix (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s, Frankenstein, 1818) and villains became evermore villainous (Robert Louis Stevenson’s, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886, and Bram Stroker’s, Dracula, 1897).
While authors gradually moved away from haunted castles and crumbling ruins toward haunted houses and apartment buildings, the undercurrent of unease, terror, and the supernatural continue to give us the frights!
New audiences
With the advent of film, the old classics were re-invigorated, and even more frights were to be had. Versions and interpretations of the earliest novels continue to be created while the genre has birthed countless sub-genres. Horror has infiltrated the most popular contemporary genres - romance and fantasy, which often rely on "damsels in distress", spurned love, supernatural beings and mysterious settings.
Humanity has a weird imagination!
Coming up
Over the course of 2025, I’m exploring the origins of Gothic Horror from the start with authors, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe and ending with a very Gothic Christmas classic, Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol.
Sources
New York Public Library
English with Watson
Image 1 created by Patricia Leslie from original images by Peter H from Pixabay and Pete Linforth from Pixabay
Image 2 created by Patricia Leslie. Original images by Image by Amy Art-Dreams from Pixabay and Image by Angelo Scarcella from Pixabay
Comments