Gothic horror expanded Romantic vilification of Muslims into monstrousness as an anti-Enlightenment reaction.

Evidence

Romantic literature contributed to the creation of Muslim monsters through its depiction of Arabs, Moors, Turks, and Persians as depraved, violent, and cruel. In Gothic horror, which emerges from the Romantic genre, representations of Muslim men as villains are expanded to characters that can only be described as monsters. Gothic horror, “the fiction of the haunted castle, the blackly lowering villain… ghosts, vampires,” is a reaction to the Enlightenment. It challenged the “rational project” of the Enlightenment, proposing instead a world of passion, terror, and horror, rejecting order and reasonableness. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 424

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Romans/Beowulf-era monstrous figures and later crusade images from earlier in the book — the genre machinery shifts but the Muslim-monster figure is carried forward.
• ADDENDUM: This genealogy of where ‘monsters’ come from in literature parallels the manufactured-image thesis I am building; the genre-specific mechanics of how villains escalated into monsters is directly useful.