The Gothic novel was born in 1764, but people have been telling stories to frighten each other for as long as there have been stories. This is the family tree: the ghosts, monsters and haunted houses the Gothic inherited, and everything it has given birth to since, from Poe to the Southern Gothic, modern horror and film.
Long before the word "Gothic", stories brought back the dead, haunted houses, and turned men into beasts.
A monster guarding a forest, and a dream of the underworld as a house of dust where the dead sit in darkness. Fear of death is the oldest story we have.
Odysseus pours blood into a pit and the ghosts of the dead crowd up to drink and speak, including his own mother, whom he cannot hold.
The Furies, hideous spirits of vengeance, hunt a son who killed his mother, and her ghost urges them on. Guilt that will not stay buried.
Ghosts open the plays, crimes are unspeakable and revenge is bloody. Seneca was read in Elizabethan schools and shaped the revenge tragedy.
At a dinner party a guest tells how his companion stripped by moonlight among the tombs and became a wolf: one of the earliest werewolf stories in Western fiction.
An Athens house where a chained, wasted ghost appears at night. A philosopher rents it, follows the ghost, and finds bones in the yard; once they are buried, the haunting stops. The first haunted-house story, with the plot ghost stories still use.
A dead girl, Philinnion, secretly visits a young man at night in her parents' house. Goethe turned it into "The Bride of Corinth" (1797), a forerunner of the vampire.
Christian Europe added the devil, the damned, and corpses that would not rest.
Grendel stalks out of the fens at night to carry men off from the hall: a monster defined by darkness and exile.
A monk records English stories of dead men who left their graves to attack the living, until their bodies were dug up and burned: early revenant tales, long before the word "vampire".
A guided descent through Hell, circle by circle, with punishments to fit each sin. Its images of torment fed centuries of horror.
A green giant is beheaded in King Arthur's hall, picks up his head, and tells Gawain to find him in a year to take the return blow.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre filled the stage with ghosts, witches and damnation.
A ghost and the spirit of Revenge watch the whole play: the model for the revenge tragedy.
A scholar sells his soul for knowledge and power, then waits for the devils to come for him at midnight. Victor Frankenstein is his descendant.
A ghost walks the battlements at midnight and demands revenge. Walpole borrowed openly from Shakespeare for Otranto.
Witches, prophecy, a dagger in the air, a murdered friend's ghost at the feast, and a queen who sleepwalks with blood on her hands.
Imprisonment, madness, torture and a murderer who comes to believe he is a wolf.
The fallen angel as a magnificent rebel. Frankenstein's creature reads it and sees himself in both Adam and Satan.
Eighteenth-century writers made gloom fashionable and gave terror a theory.
A long poem of night, death and the grave: one of the "graveyard poets".
Another graveyard poem, all tombs, yews and midnight.
Walpole's school friend Gray made the churchyard at dusk a place for brooding on death. Walpole's own press printed Gray's poems.
Burke argued that terror, darkness, vastness and power produce the strongest feeling the mind can have: the sublime. Gothic writers took him at his word.
The first novel to call itself "A Gothic Story" (on its second edition). Walpole said it began with a dream of a gigantic hand in armour on a staircase.
For fifty years the Gothic was the most popular fiction in Britain, and the most mocked.
Reeve called it the "literary offspring" of Otranto, but kept its supernatural within the bounds of what readers could believe.
An Oriental tale of a caliph who sells himself to evil and ends in the Hall of Eblis, a palace of the damned.
A heroine trapped in a mountain castle, a black veil, terrors at every turn, and a natural explanation for almost all of them: the "explained supernatural".
Radcliffe's opposite: real demons, real crimes, and nothing explained away. It caused a scandal.
A curse, a ship of the dead, Death and Life-in-Death dicing for the crew. Walton quotes it in Frankenstein.
Often called the first American Gothic novel: voices in the dark drive a man to murder his family.
A comic heroine who has read too much Radcliffe, and suspects a perfectly ordinary household of dark crimes.
One rainy fortnight on Lake Geneva produced the two monsters that have never left us.
Byron proposes that each of them write a ghost story. The whole story.
The story that came out of it: science as the new necromancy, and the creator who abandons what he made.
Built from Byron's abandoned fragment and first printed as Byron's: the first modern vampire, Lord Ruthven, a cold aristocrat who moves through society. The ancestor of Dracula.
A man who sold his soul for long life searches the world for someone to take the bargain off him.
A schoolmaster, a lonely road and a headless horseman.
A young man, sure he is saved, is led to murder by a stranger who may be the devil, or himself.
Edgar Allan Poe moved horror inside the mind, and made the short story its natural home.
A Puritan walks into the forest at night and finds his whole town at a witches' meeting.
A sick man, a sister buried alive, and a house that dies with its family.
A prince shuts his court away from a plague, and holds a masked ball.
A prisoner of the Inquisition in total darkness, and the blade descending.
A murderer insists he is sane, and cannot stop hearing his victim's heart.
Cruelty, drink, a walled-up corpse, and the cat that gives him away.
A grieving student, a midnight visitor and one word, "Nevermore". In the Library with 27 more of Poe's poems and his essay on how he wrote it.
Revenge in the catacombs, brick by brick.
The Gothic moved from ruined abbeys into ordinary houses, London streets, the laboratory and the divided self.
The most famous ghost story in English, told as a moral fable.
A governess at Thornfield Hall, a strange laugh in the night, and a secret locked in the attic.
Gothic passion on the Yorkshire moors, and a ghost at the window begging to be let in.
A female vampire and a lonely girl in a Styrian castle. Stoker knew it well.
A respectable doctor and the monster he lets out of himself.
A portrait ages and decays so that its subject never has to.
A woman confined to a room as a rest cure begins to see a figure behind the wallpaper: the Gothic as a story about how women were treated.
A scientist operates on a young woman's brain to let her see the god Pan, with consequences that spread through London society.
Frankenstein's question again: a scientist on a remote island turns animals into men.
Polidori's aristocratic vampire, grown into a legend, invades modern London.
A governess, two children and two ghosts who may not be there at all.
Early twentieth-century writers perfected the short ghost story, then looked past ghosts to something larger and colder.
Three wishes on a withered paw, each granted in the worst possible way. One of the most anthologised horror stories in English.
Scholars disturb old things that should have been left alone: the classic English ghost story. Its "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" is in the Library.
Two travellers camp on a Danube island and sense they have strayed into a place not meant for humans.
Cosmic horror: the terror is not a ghost but the discovery that humanity is tiny in an ancient, indifferent universe.
American writers found their haunted houses in the decaying South, where the past of slavery and the Civil War will not stay buried.
A town's recluse, a locked upstairs room, and what is found there after her funeral.
A family carries its mother's coffin across flood and fire to bury her: grotesque, darkly comic and deeply Southern Gothic.
Stories of violence and grace in the rural South, full of grotesque characters and sudden moral shocks.
Not a horror novel, but its shuttered Radley house and the children's terror of Boo carry the Southern Gothic into a story about justice.
Mid-century writers took the Gothic indoors again, into marriages, small towns and the mind.
A young second wife, a great house called Manderley, and the dead first wife who still seems to rule it.
An ordinary village holds its annual drawing. The horror is the community itself.
The last man alive in a world of vampires: the novel that turned the vampire into a plague.
Four people spend a summer in a house that seems to want one of them: the model for the modern haunted-house story.
A dark carnival arrives in a small town in autumn, offering everyone what they most desire.
From the 1970s horror became one of the best-selling kinds of fiction, and the Gothic's old machinery moved to the suburbs.
A bullied girl with terrible power, Dracula brought to a small Maine town, and a haunted hotel in the snow.
The vampire tells his own story, sympathetic and tormented: the monster as narrator, as Frankenstein's creature was.
Fairy tales retold as Gothic stories of desire and danger, often from the woman's side.
A young solicitor, a lonely house on the marshes, and a ghost: a deliberate return to the Victorian ghost story.
Recent writers use the Gothic to confront history, race, class and family, the things a culture would rather keep locked away.
A formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the daughter she lost. A ghost story about the memory of slavery; it won the Pulitzer Prize.
A girl finds a door to a copy of her home, and a second mother who wants to keep her: a Gothic tale for younger readers.
A crumbling English country house after the Second World War, and a family that may be haunted, or may simply be falling apart.
A young woman travels to a decaying mansion in the Mexican mountains, and the Gothic meets the history of colonialism.
Film gave the Gothic its most famous images, many of them nowhere in the books.
An unauthorised German silent version of Dracula, and the first great vampire film.
Bela Lugosi's cape and Boris Karloff's flat-headed creature with bolts in his neck: the images everyone knows came from these films, not the novels.
The British studio brought the Gothic back in colour, with Christopher Lee as the Count.
A Gothic house on a hill above a motel, and a son who cannot escape his mother.
A weekend with a girlfriend's family turns into horror about race in America: proof the Gothic still says what a society is afraid of.