Gothic
A literary and aesthetic mode (and broader cultural sensibility) originating in Gothic fiction, characterized by settings and narratives of terror, ruin, the supernatural, and psychological entrapment. It has been widely analyzed as a genre framework that structures horror and expresses cultural anxieties, including fears of degeneration and social decay. Note that the term also appears referring to the historical Goths (e.g., the Gothic king Theodoric), an unrelated meaning; the concept worth defining here is the literary/aesthetic mode.