For Fans of Gothic Horror

Bram Stoker got there first with the vampire and Mary Shelley with the monster, but Shirley Jackson understood something both of them circled without landing on: the house is not haunted by a ghost, it is haunted by the people inside it. The Haunting of Hill House is the novel that every gothic horror creator since has been trying to write. Its opening paragraph alone has more dread per sentence than most entire novels. Mike Flanagan's adaptation for Netflix understood this, expanding the metaphor of the house-as-trauma across a family rather than a lone protagonist. The lesson is that the best gothic horror is always psychological, always about inheritance and the impossibility of leaving.

FromSoftware's Bloodborne strips away Soulsborne's medieval fantasy and replaces it with something far more specific: the gothic horror aesthetic of Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft, and late-Victorian body horror. Yharnam is one of gaming's great spaces, a city whose architecture alone communicates a civilization's catastrophic pride. The game understands that gothic horror is about forbidden knowledge (what the old blood unlocks, what the cosmos contains) and the irreversibility of looking. It belongs in any gothic horror curriculum alongside Dracula and Rebecca, not just alongside Dark Souls.

The common mistake with gothic horror is to strip out the elegance and keep only the decay. Guillermo del Toro understood this in Crimson Peak: the house needs to be gorgeous for the horror to register. The same principle runs through Penny Dreadful (Victorian London as a kind of voluptuous nightmare), through Anne Rice's New Orleans, through the ornate horror of Suspiria. Gothic horror is a genre of excess, of gilded things gone wrong. When productions cut the budget on the beauty, they always lose something irreplaceable.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's 2020 novel does what the best genre reinventions do: it takes the apparatus (the mysterious house, the sinister family, the outsider protagonist drawn into their world) and plants it firmly in a specific history and geography that recontextualizes everything. Setting gothic horror in 1950s Mexico, in a British-transplant family whose English ancestry is itself a form of colonial rot, makes the genre's usual themes of inheritance and decay into something with real political stakes. It is a reminder that gothic horror is not a fixed period piece but a structure that can be dropped into any history where power has curdled.