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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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."
> 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 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 went looking for a quote that explicitly references gothic architectural details, and quickly found one in Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, from 1839.
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.
Also, even if we are focusing purely on visuals, it is interesting that they didn't discuss the effect of these buildings becoming darker over time as the ornate details are hard to keep clean, which was exasperated by air pollution. I imagine a bright white marble building would have looked much more "heavenly and transcendent".
I'm sure most readers here are using an adblocker.
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.
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.
I always thought gothic buildings were designed to look like forests from within. The Catholic paraphernalia like relics and candles are what's really spooky, but a well-lit gothic interior is not spooky to me.
Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" is a ridiculously fun book. Very short, and stuffed with melodrama. My copy has an excellent introduction to Gothic architecture, literature, and politics by Nick Groom, which goes much deeper than this article.
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.
the Duomo is a weird kind of gothic, most notably missing the tall proportions of most gothic cathedrals. I've never seen it described as scary, but it has its creepy details, like the statue depicting San Bartholomew after being skinned, wearing his own skin.
Even if I agree that Gothic architecture is the most appropriate setting for horror action, and I also agree with many of the arguments of the Italian Renaissance against what they have called as "Gothic", I still consider the great Gothic cathedrals as the most beautiful buildings that have ever been built.
The article doesn't mention that death, especially childhood dead, was far more common in the medieval and Victorian European era than it is today. A couple with six children could expect half those children to die of infectious disease before reaching puberty, and there was also a significant probability of the mother dying due to pregnancy-related issues over that period.
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.
> This forebear was uniform and symmetrical, regulated by harmony, ratios, and scale. In fact, each order of Greek design—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—was based on the human body, and therefore felt safe, approachable, and familiar.
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).
> 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".
>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.
If you’d like to experience the reverse effect, look around at how the American Wild West has been depicted in Europe. It’s a fantastical, cartoonish view of a period which is already fetishized in the US but when taken out of context it becomes (to my American eyes) bizarre.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The way people were regularly 'treated' at these hospitals probably also figured into it.
Why did it take so long for them to be demolished/change ownership after they were abandoned?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
>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."
> 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 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 went looking for a quote that explicitly references gothic architectural details, and quickly found one in Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, from 1839.
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.
Also, even if we are focusing purely on visuals, it is interesting that they didn't discuss the effect of these buildings becoming darker over time as the ornate details are hard to keep clean, which was exasperated by air pollution. I imagine a bright white marble building would have looked much more "heavenly and transcendent".
I'm sure most readers here are using an adblocker.
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.
It’s amazing how much we rely on ad blockers to make websites usable without even realizing it
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 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'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 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.
The Baroque style was supposed to lighten things up.
Medieval art is really dark, especially depictions of hell and death, which were common. That subject reached its height with Hieronymus Bosch.
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.
I always thought gothic buildings were designed to look like forests from within. The Catholic paraphernalia like relics and candles are what's really spooky, but a well-lit gothic interior is not spooky to me.
Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" is a ridiculously fun book. Very short, and stuffed with melodrama. My copy has an excellent introduction to Gothic architecture, literature, and politics by Nick Groom, which goes much deeper than this article.
Down the rabbithole you go: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror
https://archive.is/zPTuA
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?
the Duomo is a weird kind of gothic, most notably missing the tall proportions of most gothic cathedrals. I've never seen it described as scary, but it has its creepy details, like the statue depicting San Bartholomew after being skinned, wearing his own skin.
That statue is a vivid memory for me ever since I saw it 30 years ago.
Even if I agree that Gothic architecture is the most appropriate setting for horror action, and I also agree with many of the arguments of the Italian Renaissance against what they have called as "Gothic", I still consider the great Gothic cathedrals as the most beautiful buildings that have ever been built.
The article doesn't mention that death, especially childhood dead, was far more common in the medieval and Victorian European era than it is today. A couple with six children could expect half those children to die of infectious disease before reaching puberty, and there was also a significant probability of the mother dying due to pregnancy-related issues over that period.
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.
> This forebear was uniform and symmetrical, regulated by harmony, ratios, and scale. In fact, each order of Greek design—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—was based on the human body, and therefore felt safe, approachable, and familiar.
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).
> 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".
>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.
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.
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.
America even has a couple of its own gothic cathedrals: St. John the Divine, in New York, is a particularly awe-inspiring bit of architecture.
If you’d like to experience the reverse effect, look around at how the American Wild West has been depicted in Europe. It’s a fantastical, cartoonish view of a period which is already fetishized in the US but when taken out of context it becomes (to my American eyes) bizarre.
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.
Zero mention of gargoyles in an entire article about gothic architecture and horror?
That was my first reaction too. Gargoyles are here to inspire fear. Associate that to pointy stuff and yes a building becomes less welcoming.
Yeah, I was wondering too. I mean those are meant to look scary.
Apotropaic architecture has a long history before Gothic architecture, though. See: the Gorgons on the Temple of Artemis at Corfu:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gorgon_a...
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 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.
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".
Glad to hear I'm not the only one with that pet peeve. It's the paragraph-starting equivalent to sprinkling in "like" everywhere in spoken language.
Or chose the hot tag
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.