Goth Girl In Trees

The gothic novel of the late 18th century, a genre founded by Horace Walpole with the 1764 publication of The Castle of Otranto, was accountable for the more modern connotations of the term gothic. He originally claimed the book was an actual medieval romance he discovered and republished. Thus was born the gothic novel's association with fake documentation to increase its effect. Henceforth, the term was associated with a mood of horror, morbidity, darkness and the supernatural, as well as camp and self-parody.
The gothic novel established much of the iconography of later horror literature and cinema, such as graveyards, ruined castles or churches, ghosts, vampires, nightmares, cursed families, being buried alive and melodramatic plots. An additional notable element was the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which foreshadowed the Byronic hero. The most famous gothic villain, the vampire, is a folklore legend of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, best known from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and the horror movies it influenced.
Certain elements in the dark, atmospheric music and dress of the post-punk scene were clearly gothic in this sense. The use of gothic as an adjective in describing this music and its followers led to the term goth.