Gothic horror is atmosphere as architecture: decaying houses, buried secrets, and dread that seeps from the walls. This tag collects reviews of gothic horror in film and fiction, and the mood the tradition perfected.
Gothic HorrorRice wrote 37 books that sold over 150 million copies, and the reason she matters to anyone studying craft comes down to one decision made in a short story around 1968. She moved the camera and gave the vampire the…
AdaptationStoker managed a London theater for twenty-seven years and wrote Dracula in the evenings. It became the most adapted novel in the language, and almost nobody who invokes it has read it, which means almost nobody knows its central technique…
Gothic HorrorStevenson wrote a pirate adventure that fixed the shape of every pirate story since, produced a psychological horror novella in days whose title became a figure of speech, and was dismissed as a children's writer for most of a century.…
AugustMary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18 and published it in 1818, often called the first real science fiction. The deepest thing about it: the monster was never the villain. A look at sympathy, creation, and responsibility.
Crime FictionPoe invented the modern detective story and helped build modern horror, and wrote the poems every American kid gets assigned. I'm living proof that school can't kill a great writer, even when it tries.
1980sThe film looks extraordinary. The Hunger earns its 6.5 the way a fashion shoot earns a magazine cover.
2000sWhat if the actor in Nosferatu was a real vampire? The conceit is irresistible.
1920sMurnau's 1922 Nosferatu invented vampire cinema and still frightens a century later. The estate sued anyway and won, and a court ordered every copy destroyed.
1970sWerner Herzog remakes Murnau as a tragedy, and Klaus Kinski's Dracula is the genre's saddest monster. The vampire here is not merely frightening.
1960sRoman Polanski's affectionate Hammer parody is more gorgeous gothic fairy tale than laugh-out-loud comedy. The Fearless Vampire Killers earns its 6.5 as a beautiful, uneven oddity, a horror comedy that is more interested in atmosphere than in jokes and lands…
1950sHammer's 1958 Dracula made the vampire physical, sexual, and bloody. Christopher Lee plays Dracula, and the performance redefined the role.
1930sCharacters appear and vanish. Vampyr earns its 8 as the strangest, dreamiest, and most genuinely uncanny vampire film ever made, a 1932 work by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer that abandons plot and logic in favor of pure nightmare.
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