The Ghosts of Grief: An Exploration of Gothic Influence in 2010s Horror Cinema

History of the Horror Film Genre

Every culture has tales of terror and the unknown, which are as old as storytelling itself. In the late eighteenth century, the horror genre was established through the popularization of gothic novels eventually leading to the cinematic horror genre we know today (Friedman et al. 369). Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole is considered the first gothic novel (Spratford et al. 2). The popularity of the novel’s style took off, thus sparking the recurrence of narratives that David Punter characterizes as having an “emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense” (1). It could be argued that Punter’s statement describes horror films as well. Gothic novels were a part of popular culture in the same way that horror movies are today. Horror films took the themes and characters from gothic novels and adapted them into what we now understand as the horror film genre.  

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