Scooby-Doo, Crimson Peak, and Midsommar
Which one isn't Gothic? With diagrams!
Gothic and horror can be hard to distinguish from one another. As you can see in the diagram below, not all Gothic is horror and not all horror is Gothic. How can you tell the difference? Read on to find out.
A history lesson
In order to answer this question, we need to go back to the beginning. The first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published in 1764, but it wasn’t until the 1790s that the genre really took off. During that time, author Ann Radcliffe — the “Queen of Terror” — published a slew of genre-defining Gothic novels. Radcliffe’s books were so popular that she was the highest paid writer, male or female, of the 1790s.
(Side note: if you want to read one of Radcliffe’s books, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the most famous, and the one that Jane Austen is spoofing in Northanger Abbey, but at over 700 pages you may prefer something shorter. Might I suggest the 200-page Sicilian Romance instead? It has all the classic Radcliffean elements, including one of my favorite scenes where the heroine, Julia, faints off of a galloping horse. Lots of fainting in Radcliffe. To be clear, I’m not exactly suggesting that you read Radcliffe — it’s kind of all plot, no character development, loooooong descriptions of nature — but if you’re curious, those are my recs.)
Radcliffe’s novels are paradigmatically Gothic, with crumbling castles and abbeys, tyrannical patriarchs, mothers held captive in subterranean chambers, evil monks, dark passageways, etc. But crucially, Radcliffe’s books do not include any supernatural elements. Although she often hints at the presence of ghosts or supernatural phenomena, Radcliffe always resolves the mystery with a perfectly logical, natural explanation. From its inception, then, the Gothic novel has been split into two categories: those that have supernatural elements (like Frankenstein) and those that don’t (like Radcliffe).
Terror Gothic and horror Gothic
These two categories are called “terror Gothic” and “horror Gothic.” Terror Gothic is what Radcliffe wrote: stories driven by anticipation, anxiety, and dread, where you imagine what might be lurking in the dark but you never see it. In terror Gothic fear is mostly psychological, but in horror Gothic fear comes from what you actually witness: the ghost that appears to you, the monster that chases you across the Alps, the bloody corpse of your husband’s previous wife, etc. If terror Gothic is all about anticipation and dread, horror Gothic is all about shock and disgust. These two kinds of Gothic existed side by side throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Non-Gothic horror, at least as I’m defining it here, is more of a 20th-century development — you’ll notice that all my examples of non-Gothic horror are film.
To go back to our initial question, we might think of Gothic and horror as existing on a spectrum: the bloodier, more violent, and more explicit a story becomes, the more it moves toward horror and away from Gothic.
Tell it to me in film/television
Looking at the chart, let’s think about Scooby-Doo. “What a Night for a Knight” (1969) begins with the classic dark and spooky Gothic mood: “What a nervous night to be walking home from the movies!” Shaggy says. We see a suit of armor emerge from a crate in the back of a truck, and the gang hears the legend of a knight who comes to life during the full moon. Sounds supernatural, right? Nope — it turns out the curator of the museum is the one in the suit of armor, deceiving the gang for his own nefarious purposes. Classic Radcliffean Gothic. What about blood? There’s a moment where Daphne and Fred think they see blood…but it turns out it’s only paint.
Crimson Peak (2015) is in the middle: we get a typical Gothic haunted house, but instead of a naturalistic explanation for the many spooky occurrences, we’ve got actual ghosts (and, incidentally, lots of blood). Gothic horror.
Midsommar (2019) moves us to the other end of the spectrum: the characteristic dark and gloomy Gothic setting is absent — the film takes place in broad daylight — but there’s plenty of blood and violence. Horror, but not Gothic.
Let me know in the comments whether these distinctions hold up for you! Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Many horror films have Gothic elements or moments, even if you wouldn’t categorize them as “Gothic horror.” But hopefully this explainer clarifies things a little bit.
Stay tuned for vampire reading recs on Friday 🩸 🧛
I enjoyed reading your explanations. They have clarified that my reading preference in this genre falls solidly on the "Gothic" end of the spectrum. I've seen the work of both Stephen King and Peter Straub described as "Gothic Horror", with King's "The Shining" held up as a classic example. I read it years ago and was left with no desire to see the movie. Bring on the vampires! :-)
I remember that episode of Scooby-Doo. I would set my alarm so I wouldn't miss the show, the first in my Saturday morning line-up of cartoons. When gothic and horror come up in my literary genre classes, we sometimes read Clive Bloom's intro to Gothic Horror -- which I now realize is really only about kinds of horror and not about the gothic. One question: is Frankenstein supernatural? If so, is science fiction generally supernatural in that expansive sense?