Genre Research: Gothic Horror

The Gothic horror genre creates feelings of gloom, mystery, and suspense and tends to be dramatic and includes the sensational such as incest, diabolism, and nameless terrors. The majority of an audience would immediately recognize the genre when one encounters it in novels, poetry, plays, movies, and TV series. For some of us the prospect of safely experiencing dread or horror is thrilling and enjoyable. 

Gothicism's origin is attributed to the English author Horace Walpole, in his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, which was subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Another important literary work attributed to Gothic fiction/horror is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, also entitled A Modern Prometheus. 
Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere.

The ruins of Gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations — thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic institutions such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain).