'Twas a Dark and Stormy Night: The Gothic Style of the Arts

The Gothic style of the arts carries with it a specific charm and allure that breaks from the darkness, the repulsion of some of its more amoral subjects and twists then into mystifying shadows that swallow the shallow subconscious - consume it with the intrigue of mystery and suspense of constructed horror. Though visions of the true Gothic nature have fallen out of fashion in more recents years, with the rise of teen subgenres in writing and popcorn flicks to appease the masses in the theatres that threaten to consume the popular mindset - it cannot be said that the fascination with certain Gothic elements have been bushed from center stage. Rather, even as the Gothic art-piece, the novel, the film, in its purest of forms has become a thing harder and harder to seek, the fingerprints of the genre still ghost across pages and through each still frame, hidden in a hundred small touches on the surface.

Mood, the drawing temptation of atmosphere, sets a scene with its spell, curves finely tuned instruments to the senses that draws or repels those who seek to observe. Horror, whether in novelette or on a silver screen, must create these moments of tension in order to provide a wanted experience. In Gothic literature, the words crafted moments of intense feeling, darkened corridors flickering with candlelight, casting leaping shadows onto dim stone, set apart by a deep, penetrating cold that could be felt down to the bones. Scenes began with storms, shows of power, of nature, immediately filling the reader with a cold dread and a level of fright - the characteristic strike of the lightning behind a looming castle upon a hill, cliche now to use - but then! - oh what a staple to the Gothic art. Moods taken from such novels, however, ca...

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... theme of protagonist and antagonist truly being one and the same rather than seperate, despite surface observations.

Telling tensions and dismal darknesses aside, the Gothic conventions in the art-pieces as a whole are powerfully alluring, drawing to reader and viewer alike, able to capture with the hooks of shadow all the while being more than just the roots. Even as the purest forms disappear into the modern meetings of the age, the murky waters of the themes still pour through new veins, though usually under new guise. Without the Gothic novel, there would be no modern horror, a gap within the words as well as the images alike - a void, vacuum, to which the subconscious would know not with which to fill. More than darkness, more than that strike of lightning, or the spark of a candle in the dark - the strands of a modern age, just woven into spans of new cloth.