The spookiness, at least for Americans, came like so:
1. Gilded Age upper classes built the fanciest mansions they could afford, in the Neo-Gothic style which was fashionable at the time
2. Like the English country houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_...), eventually these rich owners couldn't afford the upkeep of these massively oversized and ornate dwellings. And nobody would buy them. So they moved out and left the mansions to become ruins
3. Now lots of people know about the old abandoned mansion on the hill. Gothic! Spooky! That includes Charles Addams, who starts making jolly cartoons in the New Yorker about the odd family that live in a big spooky mansion, and it includes Alfred Hitchcock who thinks a run-down mansion is a great setting for Psycho
Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.
I'm not sure how they figure into the local lore of various neighborhood kid-groups, but that kind of place does make a showing in certain online media spooky stuff.
Each server a coffin, each byte a hushed plea, Faint remnants of laughter drift through stale air, The hum of despair thickens the darkness, In the heart of the circuitry, the forgotten lie still.
Ambitions once bright now rust in the gloom, Swallowed by silence, entangled in wires, Here, life’s echoes retreat, fading into dust, A digital graveyard where the living drift away.
Death weaves itself into this circuitry, A glitch in the fabric, a cruel testament, Spectres of data bound in metal chains, Whispering reminders of lives left behind.
Wander this labyrinth of silicon dreams, Where shadows linger and nothing feels whole, For here in the stillness, a truth to confront: In the heart of the data, we leave our selves behind.
Credit: GPT + me
A dead mall here in Louisiana was purchased by Amazon and turned into their second largest robotic warehouse in the US.
In the UK a neogothic wasn't even a thing when the first horror novels were made 1765 (Palladian style was all the rage)
around 1870 "high gothic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Victorian_Gothic was the equivalent of glass and steel construction for us, or possible more like Bauhaus, a homage to an earlier age, but with a modern twist.
either way, it was uber modern.
They always look quite nice, but the downside of course is that they're next to tracks (and if the tracks are disused, then they're outrageously expensive).
I think that is mainly a christian thing. Buddhist and Hindu temples for example are rather colorful. And I have not been in a Mosque yet, but I do think they are also rather bright and oval instead of spiky and dark.
Compared to those I think of gothic cathedrals as more light and airy and open.
The fact that gothic houses happened to be in that state when cameras became widespread Hollywood was inventing tropes probably influenced things quite a bit!
The new scary settings are run down Chuck E. Cheese’s and empty office buildings.
Personally I liked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) whose setting was largely inspired by imagining what goes on inside the windowless skyscraper at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
control was amazing but had never really connected it to backrooms, but it makes sense. that final set piece synced up to the song was one of the best things i've experienced in a video game.
i didn't know it was explicitly inspired by that building, for some reason i kept thinking of this brutalist beauty that houses the FBI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building)
Office building are an interesting one because, of course, a ton of people can imagine working in an office building (having done so).
Small colleges recently had a rough time of things, and also could be a place that is likely to generate a horror script writer, I bet we’ll get a good college horror story.
That's... not a lot of detail.
The narrative I like comes from Walt Hickey's You Are What you Watch. Basically, there was wealth in the 1870s and 1880s during the Gilded Age, and those people built homes in the Victorian/Gothic/Queen Anne style. Their kids grow up in those homes, and suddenly books are becoming movies (early successes like Dracula in 1897 as a book and eventually movies), and horror is a big hit, and the kids who grew up in those homes are writing things that take place there. Meanwhile, the stock market crashes, those homes are abandoned and unmaintained and derided. "When a boring colonial-style home deteriorates with age, it looks distinguishing. When a fantabulous, whimsical home deteriorates with age, it starts to look spooky."
That makes sense. Those abandoned theme parks with knock-off cartoon characters with smiles slowly peeling off are very unsettling. I hadn’t thought of it, but it makes sense that same principal applies to other grand displays.
This is kind of like how trench coats are associated with detectives, because they were regular clothing for anyone around the time of early detective films.
The article contains photos, movie posters, and embedded videos, but not a single quote from a single Gothic novel, even though readers first experienced Gothic horror through imagination stoked by words on the page.
The room I came into was very large and high. The windows were high, and pointed at the top, and so far above the black floor that they were quite out of reach. Only a little light, red in color, made its way through the glass, and served to lighten the nearer and larger objects. My eyes, however, tried and failed to see into the far, high corners of the room.
I'll contribute to the answer: In the larger world, when it's serious about knowledge, the difference is evidence, primarily, and also expertise. In HN comments, how do we evaluate these different sources and claims ...?
Is this a glimpse of what the internet looks like without an ad-blocker?
Try disabling it for this website. It's incredible. The content is difficult to see between all the various ad surfaces. My browser came to a screeching halt.
Medieval art is really dark, especially depictions of hell and death, which were common. That subject reached its height with Hieronymus Bosch.
Bloodborne is another one that plays with surreal gothic verticality in 3D.
Also, I wonder to what extent this is an American perspective. Of course, American culture is omnipresent in Europe, so the association of Gothic buildings with horror movies has been hammered into our minds as well. But still, I don't think any European would look at Cologne Cathedral and be reminded of Ghostbusters of all things. I think unfamiliarity plays a role here.
It's just a photo on a day and time with particularly dramatic clouds. There's no "borderline fraud" here.
And of course it does have a lot to do with weather and lighting. Gothic horror is set in these environments at dusk and at night, in moonlight and in storms. Gothic horror doesn't generally utilize bright sunny days, so your photo isn't helping to illustrate the concept.
A building can be simultaneously majestic and inspiring during a warm sunny day, and become spooky and creepy in low light amidst the fog and cold damp.
See here, for an example: https://imagemagick.org/script/clahe.php
On the other hand there is not much Gothics left except for few cathedrals. Everything has been reconstructed in Baroque here.
[1] https://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2017/05/chartres-restoratio...
I'd assume Gothic architecture and religious design of the era reflects that grim aspect of life in that period, which is something relatively few families suffer today due to modern medicine. Looking back it's not surprising it seems spooky and dark.
I think the corollary is interesting, which is the answer to this question: what does this say about modern architecture? Sterile, bleak, chaotic, unfriendly, hostile, alien, ugly, pretentious. Which is to say, while the gothic transcends (but benevolently includes) humanity and the natural order in the signified transcendence, much of modern architecture does the opposite. By contradicting the immanent and the human, it doesn't lead to transcendence, but dehumanization and vulgarization, mockery. So, while the classical respects the merely human, and the gothic includes the human and the natural and expands the horizon and domain within which they can be understood, modern architecture negates the human, reduces it, corrupts it, and ultimate hates it. Since art is mimetic, this could rightly be called demonic architecture. Where classical architecture is made in the image of the natural order, and where gothic architecture reflects the divine and the heavenly order (which includes the nature order, restored), modern architecture is the image of hell.
> aesthetic theories generally classify the sublime as work that showcases greatness beyond measurement, comprehension, or experience; its magnitude is both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Which is the way in which God is described in the Christian tradition, hence "loving fear" or "fear of God". This fear arises from awe of something sublime in its power, beauty, goodness, truth, and magnificence. God is the most sublime, naturally, and you could expect that an encounter with the unmediated divine, if you were to survive it, would blow your mind and put you and everything else in a new perspective. In Scripture, angels--powerful, but finite--contrary to most Western art, are also described as "terrifying" when they make themselves known, but not in a malicious way (this famously occurs in the New Testament when Gabriel tells Mary not to fear him).
I might also speculate about one reason why this transformation of the gothic from awe-inspiring to haunted and terrifying might have taken place from a psycho-theological point of view. Note that evil often involves mockery or inversion of the good. Evil as such is absence of the good, and thus absence of being. So, qua evil, it cannot do anything but appropriate the good. A cliche example might be the black mass, which mocks the Catholic mass. Pornography is another example rife with mockery and defilement (Al Goldstein's infamous words "Christ sucks" and "Catholicism sucks" is all I intend to quote here). Drugs still another, a kind of mock transcendental experience that involves not the authentic elevation or expansion of one's faculties of reason, but their corruption and diminishment.
Another reason why the gothic may have become haunted at around the time of the Enlightenment has to do with how the beautiful is received by the beholder, that is, that it will depend on the mode of the beholder. You can see this perhaps most often in how a man sees or reacts to a beautiful woman. A man with a vicious and evil heart will dehumanize her in his mind and wish to use her for his selfish gratification; a prideful man with an insecure or guilty heart may hate her and project onto her faults and slander, scapegoating her for his own defects and inferiority; a man with bad intentions but an active enough conscience may become anxious around her as intention meets conscience; a man corrupted by a life of debauchery and a sordid past but beginning to see the light may be saddened by his impurity and his inability to relate to her fully like a human being. But the humble man of pure and good intentions receives beauty with joy, ease, and gratitude. So, here, the Enlightenment was a direct assault on the Church (as was the Protestant revolt before that). These cathedrals were now, in their eyes, like corpses, dead, relics of the past, and not only dead, but dead by the beholder's own hands (or his forefather's hands; the deed and the guilt now institutionalized and infused into the culture). A certain guilt or sorrow might haunt such a person. The haunting is in the beholder who is shut out of the beauty of the gothic by his own guilty conscience or the culture he was shaped by that resulted from the guilty consciences of his forefathers. Similar analyses have been done on the nature of the horror genre (e.g., "Alien" as an expression of horror and guilt in the wake of the sexual revolution, or "Frankenstein" as a sublimation of Shelley's guilt and painful past and the horrors of the Enlightenment worldview).
Worth noting - all that "Godly" Gothic architecture was built in an age when Christianity was the religion in Europe. And Christianity's #1 message-to-the-masses during that time amounted to "Do exactly as you are told, or God will condemn you to the fires of Hell for all of eternity".
The gargoyles are not to create fear, they are simply reminding people that as you enter the church you are going (symbolically) from chaos into the Kingdom of God, which is the process of the life of the Christian.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gorgon_a...
It does hint at a book that maybe just maybe started the association (Castle of Otranto) from someone who slept in a Gothic revived house, but really doesn't tie the book or cinema together and they could have been independent events.
I think the conclusion is: try sleeping in one, they're inherently scary, which I feel is a weak takeaway.
That assertion is easy to check. Go in the Amazonian jungle, find a person who never saw western buildings and show him a picture of a gothic building and one of a neoclassical building. Ask him which one looks scary and which one doesn't.
These things are called "tropes", they are a form of fiction and there is a whole wiki dedicated to them:
>The Gothic architectural style was initially met with derision and contempt by some who wanted to revive the Grecian orders of architecture. The term "Gothic" was used to describe the style as barbarous and rude, and was attributed to the Gothic tribes who destroyed the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
And form was following function. The church from the 12th century to the 16th century was something to be very afraid of. The Inquisition started in the 12th century.
Oddly, I don’t get these vibes when I am actually visiting one of these buildings.
Many more died at Hiroshima than over the centuries of the Inquisition.
"Gothic architecture" and "spooky" is basically synonymous -> "Spooky!"
Why use word when emoji do trick? -> U+1F47B
Having grown up in Cologne, it never seemed evil. As the article alludes to when pointing out the architectural differences in LOTR with the endorsement of Roman architecture for the "good guys" and the gothic architecture for Mordor, it's obviously an artifact of American culture.
Fascination with America as a Roman empire offspring, very cartoonish ideas about the middle ages and a very saccharine offshoots of Christianity compared to continental Catholicism. It's sort of like asking "why does British sound evil?" Because the studios made all the evil geniuses British (or sometimes German or Russian).
I was so impressed that I purchased a number of architectural drawings that I still have on the walls of our house!
Did they really believe that strongly? Or were they the best master craftsmen in the whole region, who were getting paid handsomely to work on a project that was pretty close to no-expense-spared?
It also gave my hometown 'interesting' acoustics, because of this:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennert#/media/Datei:Bad_Godesb... & https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabenlay which reflected the sounds of ships on the Rhine, trains on both sides of it, right to where this picture was taken, and a little bit behind. All the times.
Why? Because they took the stones from there. And from all around it. But the Romans did it first.
Ejal. Kölle Alaaf! Schweinheim Wutz, Wutz! (Carnival thing, doesn't really matter)
Gothic does convey a sense of age, which helps with spooky, but feeling an association with evil sounds like an very individual reaction.
This may be fading, because it clearly originated in 1940s and 50s Westerns from Hollywood. But whenever I’ve encountered it I’ve felt like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror.