I often feel like I'm the only person who has ever really understood the point of horror . I mean a lot of people watch horror and read horror, but nobody seems to understand why I think they're so incredibly important to the way we express ourselves. Horror and gothic are the way we express the fears that we can't express in a literal manner. It's no accident that much of the literature of the fantastic comes from authors who have lived through troubled times politically or personally (many gothic writers are Irish or South American, there was a rise in the gothic artforms just prior to the French Revolution, in the first stages of the industrial revolution) Historically it often starts to appear in times of uncertainty, many gothic novels written during the Long Nineteenth Century allude to uncertainty regarding science, and the loss of God in the public conciousness. Issues such as evolution, man's increasing power over his environment would have been unbelievably frightening for someone alive at that time. The certainty of the relationship between God and Man needed to be re-examined, even questioned in the light of such advances- and for a society who had always taken the Bible as the absolute historical truth without challenge, this would have been fairly terrifying. But its so terrifying that it was almost too frightening to even discuss, so instead of the unknown wild-card power of science lurking in the corner we have Frankenstein's monster. The dark undercurrents of a puritanical society were also a taboo subject. Instead of Jack the Ripper we have Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, instead of the disgruntled working classes we have the Morlock's of The Time Machine. German Expressionism was on the rise in pre-war Berlin where the feeling of decadence and a perceptible but incoherent sense of impending doom found its way into films such as Metropolis. During the early years of the Cold War Communism was often dealt with (rather clummsily in my view) as a sort of bogey man under the stair in American B-Movies. Sex has also often been dealt with through the Gothic. Dracula is a fine example- at the time it would have been read as the triumph of the virtuous woman (Mina Harker) who is drawn in by the dark, sexual power of the Count, whereas the weak willed flightly Lucy allows herself to succumb. In the book the count is a tempestuous, ugly and monstrous old man. The vampire in Nosferatu is even uglier, and more inhuman. (Its interesting to note that Bram Stoker's death certificate reads "exhaustion" often used as a euphemism for syphilis at the time- chances are his distaste for sex had a lot to do with its unpleasant consequences for him) Its no accident that in subsequent adaptations, the sexual side of the Count has been emphasised more and more over time, to the point where he has become a rather safe sort of undead James Bond type figure. Female sexuality is more palatable these days, not a dangerous monster, lurking in a foreign land threatening to undo the prim and proper businesslike British society. One of the reasons I loved the recent "KingKong" remake so much was that it played with the metaphor of a woman getting in touch with the untamed bestial side of herself (the ape) full of sex and violence and trueness to herself. She sacrifices this when she is "saved" by her future husband. You can see these metaphors in everything from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Edgar Allen Poe's short stories ("The Masque of The Red Death" by the way works as a perfect metaphor for the AIDS epidemic that hit during the decadent early-eighties) to more modern horror such as Buffy The Vampir Slayer (which towards the end got rather too obvious in its use of demon-slaying as a metaphor for the battle against teenage angst) and Sleepy Hollow- which tells su perfectly how the answers to universal questions often lie neither in logic, nor emootion, but somewhere in between the two. Anyway, this is why I love gothic horror and why its so much more than a lot of the popular media gives it credit for.