>Other important literature that was published during this time was work by Watpole himself. His novel, Castle of Otranto, was reportedly inspired by a dream he had while living at Strawberry Hill. Set in a castle in the Middle Ages, the epic details a lord and his family living in a haunted mansion. “In the late 18th and 19th century, Gothic became associated with spookiness, which got wound into ideas of the exotic and sublime,” Dr. Bork says. “By the 20th century, you have movies and mass media that start using this.”
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."
This article is way off base, warped by architectural déformation professionnelle. The association of Gothic architecture with eeriness dates back at least to Gothic fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries. 18th and 19th century readers devoured these popular prose depiction of Gothic horror. However, architects are obsessed with visual images, so the article quickly glosses over Gothic fiction and moves on to film depictions in the 20th century, even including a quote that implies the connection started with film, which is wrong by over a century.
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.
I have uBlock Origin and uMatrix, didn't show me anything. (yes, I know it's no longer supported, but so far it still works great; probably too fussy for most, but makes me very happy)
For a different but related take on this, check the video game Blasphemous. It made me realise how dark the Baroque style and Catholic iconography can be when presented out of context.
>Throughout the room were pictures of Cologne Cathedral, an 1880 church in Germany and one of Dr. Bork’s favorite buildings. The images, seemingly, caught the student’s attention. “Dr. Bork,” he said. “Why does it look so evil?”
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).
Having visited Cologne for the first time about 35 years ago while inter-railing I was completely in awe of the building - I am a atheist but my impression was very much "The people who built this really believed".
I was so impressed that I purchased a number of architectural drawings that I still have on the walls of our house!
It was more like not believing wasn't an option to express publicly in a feudal society partially managed from Rome, in the country that became the extension of the Roman empire after the fall.
It seems an odd reaction and not entirely explained by American culture - most gothic buildings in Europe attract tourists, including lots of Americans, who visit them because they find the beautiful. I have not heard that reaction from any American i know, nor from other people from multiple cultures (who all watch American media, of course!).
Gothic does convey a sense of age, which helps with spooky, but feeling an association with evil sounds like an very individual reaction.
Showing a picture of Notre Dame photoshopped against unsettling clouds to make a point about the psychological effect of its architecture is borderline fraud. Any actual photo makes the building look a lot more majestic rather than scary: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Notre-Da...
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.
Where's your evidence it's photoshopped? It's credited to "Pete Douglass/Getty Images" and Getty has a policy against photoshopped images.
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.
> Though perhaps intimidating in their grandeur, they weren’t intended to inspire fear. “It was supposed to be positive, transcendent, and godly, not scary,” Dr. Bork explains. However, ...
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 article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess yourself: repeated association in cinema.
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.
>The article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess yourself: repeated association in cinema.
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.
It did offer the idea that the strength of the association is boosted by the architects' intent to evoke a feeling of the supernatural or unearthly. That I wouldn't have guessed.
I think the page you link to explains ti very well: its a combination of the existence of Gothic ruins, a negative view of the Middle Ages, and the association with the Catholic church in the context of anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain (and other Anglophone countries).
I think there is more to it than the cinema association. I think the Gothic era architects went too far in associating it with a higher authority and power until it was oppressive and scary. Even the google AI result hints at it.
>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.
I tend to agree - not only the inquisition (which I tend to associate more with Romanesque) but the apparent preoccupation with death, damnation, martyrdom and relics (though I realize this is probably a simplistic view coming from my ignorance.)
Oddly, I don’t get these vibes when I am actually visiting one of these buildings.
Thinking that you can just edit any title by applying a regex is a sign of hubris, doing it automatically and silently is an arrogant affront. Not to mention it contradicts HN's own guideline that says you should keep original titles intact. It's a title mutilator.
>Other important literature that was published during this time was work by Watpole himself. His novel, Castle of Otranto, was reportedly inspired by a dream he had while living at Strawberry Hill. Set in a castle in the Middle Ages, the epic details a lord and his family living in a haunted mansion. “In the late 18th and 19th century, Gothic became associated with spookiness, which got wound into ideas of the exotic and sublime,” Dr. Bork says. “By the 20th century, you have movies and mass media that start using this.”
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."
This article is way off base, warped by architectural déformation professionnelle. The association of Gothic architecture with eeriness dates back at least to Gothic fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries. 18th and 19th century readers devoured these popular prose depiction of Gothic horror. However, architects are obsessed with visual images, so the article quickly glosses over Gothic fiction and moves on to film depictions in the 20th century, even including a quote that implies the connection started with film, which is wrong by over a century.
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.
Zero mention of gargoyles in an entire article about gothic architecture and horror?
Yeah, I was wondering too. I mean those are meant to look scary.
Why is there a video called Margot Robbie Takes You Inside The Barbie Dreamhouse after three paragraphs? Is that nu-gothic architecture?
Is this a glimpse of what the internet looks like without an ad-blocker?
I have uBlock origin and it still showed me the video. I'm never visiting the website again.
I'm waiting for a Pi-Hole that is powerful enough to put in my HDMI connection and just filter out the ads using AI.
I have uBlock Origin and uMatrix, didn't show me anything. (yes, I know it's no longer supported, but so far it still works great; probably too fussy for most, but makes me very happy)
I only see a couple ads for Architectural Digest itself - using just NoScript, and defaulting to distrust all 3rd-party js.
For a different but related take on this, check the video game Blasphemous. It made me realise how dark the Baroque style and Catholic iconography can be when presented out of context.
As someone who grew up Catholic I'd say it's dark within context as well.
Great indie series indeed. I'd just contend that the source material is already dark in context? If only to create contrast to heavenly transcendence?
Bloodborne is another one that plays with surreal gothic verticality in 3D.
Down the rabbithole you go: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror
https://archive.is/zPTuA
>Throughout the room were pictures of Cologne Cathedral, an 1880 church in Germany and one of Dr. Bork’s favorite buildings. The images, seemingly, caught the student’s attention. “Dr. Bork,” he said. “Why does it look so evil?”
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).
Describing LOTR as "obviously an artifact of American culture" is a bit odd: it was written by a Brit and directed by a New Zealander.
Having visited Cologne for the first time about 35 years ago while inter-railing I was completely in awe of the building - I am a atheist but my impression was very much "The people who built this really believed".
I was so impressed that I purchased a number of architectural drawings that I still have on the walls of our house!
It was more like not believing wasn't an option to express publicly in a feudal society partially managed from Rome, in the country that became the extension of the Roman empire after the fall.
It seems an odd reaction and not entirely explained by American culture - most gothic buildings in Europe attract tourists, including lots of Americans, who visit them because they find the beautiful. I have not heard that reaction from any American i know, nor from other people from multiple cultures (who all watch American media, of course!).
Gothic does convey a sense of age, which helps with spooky, but feeling an association with evil sounds like an very individual reaction.
Showing a picture of Notre Dame photoshopped against unsettling clouds to make a point about the psychological effect of its architecture is borderline fraud. Any actual photo makes the building look a lot more majestic rather than scary: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Notre-Da...
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.
Where's your evidence it's photoshopped? It's credited to "Pete Douglass/Getty Images" and Getty has a policy against photoshopped images.
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.
I wonder if people think Milan cathedral also looks scary?
> Though perhaps intimidating in their grandeur, they weren’t intended to inspire fear. “It was supposed to be positive, transcendent, and godly, not scary,” Dr. Bork explains. However, ...
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 article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess yourself: repeated association in cinema.
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.
>The article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess yourself: repeated association in cinema.
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.
It did offer the idea that the strength of the association is boosted by the architects' intent to evoke a feeling of the supernatural or unearthly. That I wouldn't have guessed.
> repeated association in cinema.
These things are called "tropes", they are a form of fiction and there is a whole wiki dedicated to them:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror
I think the page you link to explains ti very well: its a combination of the existence of Gothic ruins, a negative view of the Middle Ages, and the association with the Catholic church in the context of anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain (and other Anglophone countries).
I think there is more to it than the cinema association. I think the Gothic era architects went too far in associating it with a higher authority and power until it was oppressive and scary. Even the google AI result hints at it.
>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.
I tend to agree - not only the inquisition (which I tend to associate more with Romanesque) but the apparent preoccupation with death, damnation, martyrdom and relics (though I realize this is probably a simplistic view coming from my ignorance.)
Oddly, I don’t get these vibes when I am actually visiting one of these buildings.
I really hate it that HN automatically deletes words like "How" in titles.
"Became" doesn't add much -> "Gothic architecture spooky"
"Gothic architecture" and "spooky" is basically synonymous -> "Spooky!"
Why use word when emoji do trick? -> U+1F47B
Could be worse. At one point SomethingAwful would ban/probate you if you made a thread where the subject started with the word "So".
Usually it’s a good move for articles but for this title, it’s a bit distortive to the point of HN selfparody
Thinking that you can just edit any title by applying a regex is a sign of hubris, doing it automatically and silently is an arrogant affront. Not to mention it contradicts HN's own guideline that says you should keep original titles intact. It's a title mutilator.
Do you have examples where it's good to cut out "how" from the title? I can't believe that it's helpful.
This is intended to hobble clickbite titles and not to help anyone else. Not always ideal, but I actually like it for the most part.
I know I've been on HN too long when I prefix "How" to titles automatically.
Just waiting for someone to post To Kill a Mockingbird.