Henry James saw a ready comparison between architecture and literature. In his preface to the New York Edition of Portrait of a Lady, he compared reading literature to a house, from which each window offered a different view of the same subject.
There’s a similar type of architectural typecasting at the core of Gothic horror– it’s a genre named after a building style – or, more specifically, a feeling evoked by a type of building and what it signified.
It’s generally agreed that Horace Walpole’s 1764 Christmas Eve ghost novella The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story is the first true horror tale. A story about an unlucky and brooding aristocrat, the most surprising aspect of the yarn is how many of the traditional horror trappings are present in this initial offering– the walking dead, nightmares, secret passages and the supernatural all make an appearance.
But perhaps most elemental of all is the cold and haunted castle at the center of the story.