Horror films as we know them today emerged in the early 1920s. Director Lon Chaney made silent horror films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925), both based on classic gothic fiction (Spratford et al. 5). While many horror films are not direct adaptations of gothic literature, the themes, styles, plots, and characters in those novels have built and defined the horror genre as a whole. Characters that audiences already loved and feared, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and Quasimodo, were brought to the silver screen in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Quickly, horror became the genre of adaptation, but more than just the plotlines of gothic novels carried over into film. With the adaptation of plots, came the adaptation of tropes, themes, and iconography (Friedman et al.). Richard Hand and Jay McRoy write that the term gothic is used to describe a “stylized approach to depicting location, desire, and action” (1). The gothic style invokes macabre images and melancholic aesthetics. The genre uses dark colors to create a sense of unease and the decaying scenery conveys dread (Hand and McRoy 2; Neibaur 14). Hubner describes gothic thinking as shedding light on “the wild sensations that drive us and the pull between rational and irrational forces, asking us to reconsider the securities of home, our sense of self and our beliefs” (2).  

The most defining aspect of the gothic genre, both in film and literature, is the uncanny. The uncanny is a sense of anxiety and disturbance via the unusual and different. Ernst Jentsch, German psychiatrist, wrote in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” that the uncanny makes viewers feel “not quite ‘at home’ or ‘at ease’” (217). Interestingly, being at home is part of the iconography of the genre. Setting is especially important to the gothic genre because it helps establish the mood of the film. Many stories take place in remote, dark, and decaying domestic settings, where things have gone awry. The normality of common life and safety is at risk and it triggers a fearful emotional response in the audience (Sobchack 173). Hubner also describes the genre by saying “[t]he ‘homely’ becomes terrifying, as a familiar domain for the repressed, hidden and dangerous, stimulating the haunting return of something that should have remained private” (6).  

Yang and Healey write about the importance of landscape in the gothic horror genre. Through the use of the landscape, an ambiance of uncertainty, delusion, isolation, and instability elicits a frightened response to domestic settings from audiences (Yang and Healey 5). In gothic narratives, the landscape is personified, viewed not just as a setting but as a character to fear and overcome. Yang and Healey argue that the gothic landscape is used as a vehicle for social commentary. They write, "[d]isordered landscapes in the Gothic represent the chaos of a culture in transition or the violence of passions seething beneath the veneer of civilized society. Gothic landscapes are a lens by which cultures reflect their darkness hidden from the light of consciousness...Gothic unearths the ‘moral darkness’ that the cultural elite seeks to hide, whether that darkness is of a political, historical, cultural, or social nature" (Yang and Healey 5).

Haunting landscapes and uncanny homes are important aspects of the gothic genre that are continuously repeated and recreated throughout horror film history. While these settings always have meaning, the meaning they convey changes over time as filmmakers, audiences, and cultural context evolve. This is the case for all motifs of the gothic horror film genre. Changing trends and opinions reevaluate the meaning of gothic iconography and thematic devices. New cultural critiques emerge each decade, but the iconic characteristics of the horror genre remain present throughout film history.  

Limited by the technologies of silent films, early horror filmmakers created representations of iconic gothic elements visually. This put a great deal of emphasis on the physical appearance of the monsters and the settings they were in, as they needed to be over the top and eye-catching to be fully seen (Friedman et al.). More artistic liberties came with the invention of full-length narrative cinema, and thus German expressionism took off in the 1920s. Expressionism developed as a gothic cinematic art form based on extreme shapes and intense colors, particularly black and other dark shades. The film style challenges what is normal and aims to be antirealist and uncanny, just like its gothic origins (Neibaur; Friedman et al.). Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) are two of the most famous expressionist horror films. These films feature uncanny humanoid figures that do not fit into the audience’s understanding of real life. They exist somewhere outside of normalcy and therefore disrupt it, just like gothic narratives (Kerr; Neibaur). Expressionism adapted 19th-century gothic literature by visualizing the uncanny. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are examples of transnational horror films because they were wildly popular outside of Germany (Neibaur). Darren Kerr argues that gothic-horror films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, have an inherent ability to become understood and enjoyed transnationally because of the relationship between the uncanny and the genre. He states that fear and recognition of the uncanny is a universal experience, therefore, gothic-horror films have great potential to become transnational texts (156). Today, contemporary Western horror cinema as well as contemporary Southeast Asian horror cinema is in constant intertextual dialogue with gothic expressionism (Ng). The transnational success and legacy of early German expressionist horror films launched the establishment of the horror genre that we know today.