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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Gothic architecture ever drove the plots of Gothic romance or horror, apart from a few choice novels. It was mostly used as a setting.

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

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You see a similar trend again with "abandoned mental hospitals" as settings for horror in TV and movies. The trend of "deinstitutionalization" started in the 50s and 60s, meant that by the 80s and 90s many psychiatric hospitals had been defunded and shut down. As a result, it was a surprisingly common childhood experience for people of a certain age to have an "old abandoned mental hospital two towns over". Every kid "knew someone who knew someone with an older brother who had spent all night in one", and there were a ton of them around to use as settings.

Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.

The way people were regularly 'treated' at these hospitals probably also figured into it.

In retrospect, we should probably bring back institutionalism of individuals and try to have more psychiatric hospitals ran by the state. Some people just cant be helped but need to be shoved somewhere for the rest of their lives away from society. Hopefully though we could raise standards so they are all treated fairly and have no lobotomizations.

This is one of those ideas that gets brought up often in the 50s-lionizing, "return to traditionalism" discourse, and one easily discredited by thinking even briefly about the way government funding influences economic activity in the US. To wit: administrators start looking for more opportunities for "business". When the hammer is, "being forcibly institutionalized," and the nails are, "whoever could conceivably pad our numbers," I would rather just not give Home Depot the building permit.

No, a thousand times no. That thinking has rightfully been placed in the waste bin of history. How about we deal with systemic inequality and raise the standard of living for everyone, so folks don't grow up in desperate situations, and families and communities have enough resources to take care of themselves

Why did it take so long for them to be demolished/change ownership after they were abandoned?

A lot of sites require substantial environmental cleanup before they can be redeveloped. Things like underground fuel oil tanks for boilers can be costly to remediate.

The estate may have been abandoned for the city and as long as the taxes got paid it could Rot.

In twenty years, we'll probably see the same phenomenon with 'abandoned Data Centers.' Teenagers will head to these old buildings in small groups, looking for the ghostly Sysadmin who killed his family because the AI in his neural link told him to.

If we don't want to wait 20 years, perhaps abandoned strip-malls?

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.

The Last of Us show already had an abandoned mall as a spooky place.

In the husk of a city where shadows coil, A graveyard of circuits sprawls under a bruised sky, Tomb of cold echoes, fragments of voices lost, Dreams flicker and die, swallowed by silence.

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

My bet is on malls, provided any of the structures survive.

Already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall and enjoyed by 'urban explorers'. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_exploration )

A lot of them are being turned into other things.

A dead mall here in Louisiana was purchased by Amazon and turned into their second largest robotic warehouse in the US.

For hospitals in general, there would also have been stories of the vivisections and general human experimentation that began around the turn of the century and (probably?) saw its gruesome peak at war-time (one or the other). Likewise, abandoned after the wars or the burden of scrutiny became too great.

I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about evil things happening in an old house where one might find a mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house, but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor, Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.

And the (perhaps unintentionally spooky) 1925 Edward Hopper painting House by the Railroad depicting one of these Gilded Age houses, which is said to have inspired the fictional houses in the Addams Family and in Psycho.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_by_the_Railroad

One town over from my own hometown is Westfield, NJ where Charles Addams is from, and there's a house on Elm Street that looks a lot like the Addams Family house -- especially the one he drew in New Yorker cartoons. The town has a festival in his honor every year around Halloween and the house in particular features proudly as _the_ Addams Family house.

That looks straight out of Beetlejuice lol

It doesn't look spooky at all to me, it looks instead like many of the decommissioned small town train stations (often they were tram stations, from an era when the countryside tramway network around here was very expansive before being replaced by buses) that have been turned into houses.

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 suspect its fairly location specific.

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.

I don't disagree with as your points, but I also think a structure made of spikes and points is inherently more evil feeling than something round or oval. Also, religious structures and religion veer towards the dark and ominous. Catholics and christians depict a guy nailed to a cross with a crown of thorns on his head in their cathedrals so that doesn't help.

"Also, religious structures and religion veer towards the dark and ominous."

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.

For Catholic churches, it depends on the period (for example roman-style churches have smaller windows because the architect of the time didn't really knew how to build bigger windows) and in how it got maintained since stone darkens a lot when exposed to the polluted air of our cities. But churches with big windows and that have been restored within the last 50 years can be very bright, especially once you add modern lighting in the mix.

Apart from static reasons some romanic churches also were fortified and look a little bit like a medieval bunker with very small windows. That's because it was.

Compared to those I think of gothic cathedrals as more light and airy and open.

I wonder to what extent our conception of spookiness is driven by what big buildings happened to be slightly but not overwhelmingly run down, and available for cheap sets.

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!

Interesting connection here to modern creepy settings leaning on liminal spaces and run-down early 90s stuff in analog horror.

The new scary settings are run down Chuck E. Cheese’s and empty office buildings.

Yeah. Malls are another good one, although that seems to be a bit of a boom and bust field or something… and we’ve already had plenty of zombie movies set in malls.

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.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms ?

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

exactly.

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)

Perhaps this is what you were alluding to, but immensely popular survival horror video game Five Nights at Freddy's is set in a thinly veiled Chuck E. Cheese.

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