Gothic literature influence on XXI century horror films

Abstract

It is believed that when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, he marked a milestone in British literature leading to a new literary genre, Gothic fiction, a genre characterised by providing the reader with a lugubrious atmosphere of the story. Since it was published, it has influenced numerous later works not only in literature but also in other arts such as cinema, which is the focus of this study. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyse how Gothic features influence movies through history and especially three horror films from Hollywood, pertaining to the twenty-first century, Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak and Evil Dead . After deep analysis, the results of this project were obtained and various Gothic features were found, such as the bad weather, the decaying architecture and the prototypical characters of Gothic literature, although they differ in some aspects.