Diavola

The presence of a frightening, ominous house (often old, isolated, and sprawling in size) has become an almost-ubiquitous feature of the horror genre in literature and film. The haunted house in English-language literature can be traced back to a novel often considered the first work of Gothic literature: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764). The novel centers around a crumbling, eerie castle where strange and frightening events take place. Throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, other works of Gothic fiction, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), utilized forbidding, remote castles as settings in which sheltered heroines encountered danger. These Gothic settings were typically located outside of England in places considered “exotic”—often Italy—as a way of exploring impulses, desires, and psychological states at odds with the “rational” and “civilized.” In the later 19th century and into the 20th, British and American authors began to utilize more domestic settings, depicting frightening events and mysterious secrets located in isolated mansions and manor houses in England and America.

In many early Gothic works, particularly the novels of Ann Radcliffe, seemingly supernatural events are explained away in the denouement.