How Gothic architecture became spooky

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

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."

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.

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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.

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.

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".

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).

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.

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).