I. Elements of Horror Fiction:

Source: William C. Robinson, University of Tennessee.

  • Highly improbable and unexpected sequences of events that usually begin in ordinary situations and involve supernatural elements
  • Contrast the oddness of these events with the minutiae of daily life so readers identify with the characters
  • Explores the dark, malevolent side of humanity
  • Main characters are people we can understand and perhaps identify with although often these are haunted, estranged individuals
  • Lives depends on the success of the protagonist
  • Mood is dark, foreboding, menacing, bleak and creates an immediate response by the reader
  • Setting may be described in some detail if much of the story takes place in one location
  • Plot contains frightening and unexpected incidents
  • Violence, often graphic, occurs and may be accompanied by explicit sexuality
  • Most stories are told in the third person
  • The style is plain
  • The key ingredient in horror fiction is its ability to provoke fear or terror in readers, usually via something demonic. There should be a sense of dread, unease, anxiety, or foreboding. Some critics have noted that experiencing horror fiction is like reading about your worst nightmares.
  • There is some debate as to whether "horror" is a genre or, like "adventure," an aspect that may be found in several genres. Horror is a certain mood or atmosphere that might be found in a variety of places. Traditionally, horror was associated with certain archetypes such as demons, witches, ghosts, vampires and the like. However, this can be found in other genres, especially fantasy. If horror is a genre, then it deals with a protagonist dealing with overwhelming dark and evil forces.

Gothic Horror

GOTHIC is a term sometimes used instead of HORROR. As Grolier says, "The earliest Gothic romance, a class of novel dealing in the mysterious and supernatural, which emerged shortly after the establishment of the novel form itself, was Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). Reacting against the literalism and confined domesticity of Samuel Richardson, Walpole indulged a contemporary taste for the "Gothic," which for the 18th-century reader conjured up a medieval world of barbarous passions enacted in picturesque melodramatic settings of ruined castles, ancient monasteries, and wild landscapes. Within a plot designed for suspense, a delicate feminine sensibility is subjected to the onslaught of elemental forces of good and evil. Sanity and chastity are constantly threatened, and over all looms the suggestion that evil and irrationality will destroy civilization."

Atmosphere

The dark, brooding, threatening atmosphere becomes the main character in many horror stories. Thus, mood and setting are as or more important than plot and characters. The atmosphere is often portrayed in considerable detail so it becomes alive and immediately threatening.

Very Brief History

While horror stories are well rooted in myth and legend, particularly in some of the fairy tales collected in the 19th Century, Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque published in 1840 was a notable landmark. Even earlier was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1765. Ghost stories were popular in the early 20th Century. M.R. James is an example. H.P. Lovecraft added his unique blend of fantasy and horror in the 1930s. Rosemary's Baby, probably the film more than the book, made horror popular. Stephen King soon followed with a series of increasingly popular novels and horror fiction boomed and has become the "benchmark" author. R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series made mild horror popular with children and younger teens. The 1970s and 1980s were a boom time for horror. Interest receded in the 1990s and publishers reduced their horror lists. In the last few years, horror has become more popular and publishing output has increased.

While horror fiction has been placed in a marginalized position within genre fiction which is itself marginalized from "real" literature, horror has long been part of real literature. Beowulf is a good example.

Myth and Legend

Many of the myths and legends associated with various cultures feature stories of supernatural creatures. Greek mythology is a good example in our own culture. There is a long tradition of such stories and the belief by many that events don't just happen but that something is responsible. Supernatural events and creatures are often encountered in myth, legend, and folklore.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker'sDracula (1897) have become legends of their own.

II. Gothic Romance

Source:T. M. Harwell (4 vol., 1985) and D. P. Varma (1987).

A type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th century in England. Gothic romances were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was the forerunner of the type, which included the works of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles R. Maturin, and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey satirizes Gothic romances. The influence of the genre can be found in some works of Coleridge, Le Fanu, Poe, and the Brontës. During the 1960s so-called Gothic novels became enormously popular in England and the United States. Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Popular practitioners of this genre are Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Catherine Cookson, and Dorothy Eden.

III. Gothic Novel

Source: Wikipedia.com

The gothic novel is an English literary genre, which can be said to have been born with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. It is the predecessor to modern horror fiction and it above all has led to the common definition of gothic as being connected to the dark and horrific.

Prominent features of gothic novels included terror, mystery, the supernatural, doom, death, decay, old buildings with ghosts, madness, hereditary curses and so on.

Origins of the Gothic Novel

The term 'gothic' was originally a disparaging term applied to a style of medieval architecture (Gothic architecture) and art (Gothic art). The opprobrious term "Gothick" was embraced by the 18th-century proponents of the Gothic revival, a forerunner of the Romantic genres. The Gothic in architecture was a reaction to the classical architecture that was a hallmark of the Age of Reason. The revived Gothic architectural style enjoyed popularity in the nineteenth century.

In a way similar to the Neo-gothic rejection of the aesthetics of the neoclassical it became linked with a rejection of the reason and logic associated with said style in the form of appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion and the sublime. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to these emotions by indicating the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations, thus the craze for building fake ruined churches on English country estates as part of landscape architecture. These feelings were also connected to the anti-catholicism created by the Reformation. Good Protestants were supposed to associate medieval buildings with a dark and terrifying period, envisioning the Catholic Church oppressing people with harsh laws, torture and superstitious rituals.

The first gothic novels

'Gothic' came to be applied to the literary genre precisely because the genre dealt with such emotional extremes and dark themes, and because it found its most natural settings in the buildings of this style: Castles, Mansions and Monasteries, often remote, crumbling and ruined. It was a fascination with this architecture and its related art, poetry (see Graveyard poets) and even landscape gardening that inspired the first wave of gothic novelists: Horace Walpole, whose seminal The Castle of Otranto is often regarded as the first true gothic novel, was obsessed with fake medieval gothic architecture and built his own house Strawberry Hill in that form, sparking off a fashion for gothic revival.

Walpole's novel arose out of this obsession with the medieval. Here rather than a fake building he originally claimed it was a real medieval romance he had discovered and republished. Thus was born the gothic novel's association with fake documentation to increase its effect. The Castle of Otranto was originally titled a Romance – a literary form which was held by educated taste to be tawdry and not even fit for children due to its superstitious elements, but Walpole revived some of the elements of the medieval romance in a new form. The basic plot created many other the gothic staples including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings: hidden passages, oft-fainting heroines, etc. It was however Ann Radcliffe who created the gothic novel in its standard form. Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero. Unlike Walpole's, her novels were best-sellers and virtually everyone in English society was reading them. Radcliffe created a craze and had many imitators; the results were parodied in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey by setting up the atmosphere of doom in which one of the characters sits awake late at night imagining the noises she hears to portend all sorts of horrors owing to the gothic novels she has been reading and sweeping it away with hearty common sense and normalcy. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 1818 is undoubtedly the greatest literary triumph of the gothic novel in this its classical period.

Later Developments

In England, the gothic novel as a genre had largely played itself out by 1840. This was largely helped by the over-saturation of the genre by cheap 'pulp' writers (works that would later morph into cheap horror fiction in the form of Penny dreadfuls as well as a reduction in the genres respectability since the turn of the century caused by the publication of works such as Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk in(1796, a shocking (particularly at the time) tale of sex, violence and debauchery that almost bordered on the pornographic. However it had a lasting effect on the development of literary form in the Victorian period. It led to the Victorian craze for short ghost stories and the short shocking macabre tale mastered by Edgar Allan Poe. It also was a heavy influence on Charles Dickens who read gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, but shifting them to a more modern period. The mood and themes of the gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, Mementos, and mortality in general, which led to them becoming a widespread literary influence.

Post-Victorian Legacy

By the 1880s it was time for revival as a gothic as a semi-respectable literary form. This was the period of the gothic works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen and Oscar Wilde, and the most famous gothic villain ever appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1897. From these, the gothic genre strictly considered gave way to modern horror fiction though many literary critics use the term to cover the entire genre: though many modern writers of horror or indeed other fiction extend considerable gothic sensibilities: Anne Rice being one example, as well as some of the less sensationalist works of Stephen King. The gothic tradition has also expanded its boundaries to films and music, as well as the new media forms of the internet.