[HN Gopher] How Gothic architecture became spooky
___________________________________________________________________
How Gothic architecture became spooky
Author : teleforce
Score : 155 points
Date : 2024-10-28 10:53 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.architecturaldigest.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.architecturaldigest.com)
| skylurk wrote:
| I know I've been on HN too long when I prefix "How" to titles
| automatically.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Just waiting for someone to post To Kill a Mockingbird.
| tetris11 wrote:
| The article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess
| yourself: repeated association in cinema.
|
| It does hint at a book that maybe _just maybe_ started the
| association ( _Castle of Otranto_ ) from someone who slept in a
| Gothic revived house, but really doesn't tie the book or cinema
| together and they could have been independent events.
|
| I think the conclusion is: try sleeping in one, they're
| inherently scary, which I feel is a weak takeaway.
| Bjartr wrote:
| It did offer the idea that the strength of the association is
| boosted by the architects' intent to evoke a feeling of the
| supernatural or unearthly. That I wouldn't have guessed.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >The article didn't really say anything you wouldnt guess
| yourself: repeated association in cinema.
|
| That assertion is easy to check. Go in the Amazonian jungle,
| find a person who never saw western buildings and show him a
| picture of a gothic building and one of a neoclassical
| building. Ask him which one looks scary and which one doesn't.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I think there is more to it than the cinema association. I
| think the Gothic era architects went too far in associating it
| with a higher authority and power until it was oppressive and
| scary. Even the google AI result hints at it.
|
| >The Gothic architectural style was initially met with derision
| and contempt by some who wanted to revive the Grecian orders of
| architecture. The term "Gothic" was used to describe the style
| as barbarous and rude, and was attributed to the Gothic tribes
| who destroyed the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
|
| And form was following function. The church from the 12th
| century to the 16th century was something to be very afraid of.
| The Inquisition started in the 12th century.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I tend to agree - not only the inquisition (which I tend to
| associate more with Romanesque) but the apparent
| preoccupation with death, damnation, martyrdom and relics
| (though I realize this is probably a simplistic view coming
| from my ignorance.)
|
| Oddly, I don't get these vibes when I am actually visiting
| one of these buildings.
| geye1234 wrote:
| The Spanish Inquisition killed approximately the same number
| of people every year as the State of Texas. The Roman
| Inquisition killed far fewer. It was child's play compared to
| 20th-century regimes.
|
| Many more died at Hiroshima than over the centuries of the
| Inquisition.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It gets easier to kill a lot of people when you have a lot
| more people to kill. Texas has 4-6 times the population of
| Spain 1400-1800. I mean, there is a reason you hear sayings
| like "I'll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas
| Executes One". This will stick with Texas for a long time.
| blueflow wrote:
| > repeated association in cinema.
|
| These things are called "tropes", they are a form of fiction
| and there is a whole wiki dedicated to them:
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror
| graemep wrote:
| I think the page you link to explains ti very well: its a
| combination of the existence of Gothic ruins, a negative view
| of the Middle Ages, and the association with the Catholic
| church in the context of anti-Catholic prejudice in Britain
| (and other Anglophone countries).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Throughout the room were pictures of Cologne Cathedral, an 1880
| church in Germany and one of Dr. Bork's favorite buildings. The
| images, seemingly, caught the student's attention. "Dr. Bork," he
| said. "Why does it look so evil?"
|
| Having grown up in Cologne, it never seemed evil. As the article
| alludes to when pointing out the architectural differences in
| LOTR with the endorsement of Roman architecture for the "good
| guys" and the gothic architecture for Mordor, it's obviously an
| artifact of American culture.
|
| Fascination with America as a Roman empire offspring, very
| cartoonish ideas about the middle ages and a very saccharine
| offshoots of Christianity compared to continental Catholicism.
| It's sort of like asking "why does British sound evil?" Because
| the studios made all the evil geniuses British (or sometimes
| German or Russian).
| arethuza wrote:
| Having visited Cologne for the first time about 35 years ago
| while inter-railing I was completely in awe of the building - I
| am a atheist but my impression was very much "The people who
| built this _really_ believed ".
|
| I was so impressed that I purchased a number of architectural
| drawings that I still have on the walls of our house!
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was more like not believing wasn't an option to express
| publicly in a feudal society partially managed from Rome, in
| the country that became the extension of the Roman empire
| after the fall.
| graemep wrote:
| It seems an odd reaction and not entirely explained by American
| culture - most gothic buildings in Europe attract tourists,
| including lots of Americans, who visit them because they find
| the beautiful. I have not heard that reaction from any American
| i know, nor from other people from multiple cultures (who all
| watch American media, of course!).
|
| Gothic does convey a sense of age, which helps with spooky, but
| feeling an association with evil sounds like an very individual
| reaction.
| marssaxman wrote:
| America even has a couple of its own gothic cathedrals: St.
| John the Divine, in New York, is a particularly awe-inspiring
| bit of architecture.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Describing LOTR as "obviously an artifact of American culture"
| is a bit odd: it was written by a Brit and directed by a New
| Zealander.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| If you'd like to experience the reverse effect, look around at
| how the American Wild West has been depicted in Europe. It's a
| fantastical, cartoonish view of a period which is already
| fetishized in the US but when taken out of context it becomes
| (to my American eyes) bizarre.
|
| This may be fading, because it clearly originated in 1940s and
| 50s Westerns from Hollywood. But whenever I've encountered it
| I've felt like I'm looking into a funhouse mirror.
| codeflo wrote:
| Showing a picture of Notre Dame photoshopped against unsettling
| clouds to make a point about the psychological effect of its
| architecture is borderline fraud. Any actual photo makes the
| building look a lot more majestic rather than scary:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Notre-Da...
|
| Also, I wonder to what extent this is an American perspective. Of
| course, American culture is omnipresent in Europe, so the
| association of Gothic buildings with horror movies has been
| hammered into our minds as well. But still, I don't think any
| European would look at Cologne Cathedral and be reminded of
| _Ghostbusters_ of all things. I think unfamiliarity plays a role
| here.
| arethuza wrote:
| I wonder if people think Milan cathedral also looks scary?
| agos wrote:
| the Duomo is a weird kind of gothic, most notably missing the
| tall proportions of most gothic cathedrals. I've never seen
| it described as scary, but it has its creepy details, like
| the statue depicting San Bartholomew after being skinned,
| wearing his own skin.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That statue is a vivid memory for me ever since I saw it 30
| years ago.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Even if I agree that Gothic architecture is the most
| appropriate setting for horror action, and I also agree with
| many of the arguments of the Italian Renaissance against what
| they have called as "Gothic", I still consider the great
| Gothic cathedrals as the most beautiful buildings that have
| ever been built.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Where's your evidence it's photoshopped? It's credited to "Pete
| Douglass/Getty Images" and Getty has a policy against
| photoshopped images.
|
| It's just a photo on a day and time with particularly dramatic
| clouds. There's no "borderline fraud" here.
|
| And of course it _does_ have a lot to do with weather and
| lighting. Gothic horror is set in these environments at dusk
| and at night, in moonlight and in storms. Gothic horror doesn
| 't generally utilize bright sunny days, so your photo isn't
| helping to illustrate the concept.
|
| A building can be simultaneously majestic and inspiring during
| a warm sunny day, and become spooky and creepy in low light
| amidst the fog and cold damp.
| a_e_k wrote:
| My first thought when I read the article was that that image
| must have been run through something like a contrast-limited
| adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) process.
|
| See here, for an example:
| https://imagemagick.org/script/clahe.php
| orblivion wrote:
| Your photo still looks spooky to me.
| doener wrote:
| I really hate it that HN automatically deletes words like "How"
| in titles.
| vincvinc wrote:
| Usually it's a good move for articles but for this title, it's
| a bit distortive to the point of HN selfparody
| brettermeier wrote:
| Do you have examples where it's good to cut out "how" from
| the title? I can't believe that it's helpful.
| gostsamo wrote:
| This is intended to hobble clickbite titles and not to help
| anyone else. Not always ideal, but I actually like it for
| the most part.
| elpocko wrote:
| Thinking that you can just edit any title by applying a regex
| is a sign of hubris, doing it automatically and silently is
| an arrogant affront. Not to mention it contradicts HN's own
| guideline that says you should keep original titles intact.
| It's a title mutilator.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| "Became" doesn't add much -> "Gothic architecture spooky"
|
| "Gothic architecture" and "spooky" is basically synonymous ->
| "Spooky!"
|
| Why use word when emoji do trick? -> U+1F47B
| bluedino wrote:
| Could be worse. At one point SomethingAwful would ban/probate
| you if you made a thread where the subject started with the
| word "So".
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Or chose the hot tag
| seanw444 wrote:
| Glad to hear I'm not the only one with that pet peeve. It's
| the paragraph-starting equivalent to sprinkling in "like"
| everywhere in spoken language.
| stnderror wrote:
| For a different but related take on this, check the video game
| Blasphemous. It made me realise how dark the Baroque style and
| Catholic iconography can be when presented out of context.
| fmdragon wrote:
| As someone who grew up Catholic I'd say it's dark within
| context as well.
| musha68k wrote:
| Great indie series indeed. I'd just contend that the source
| material is already dark in context? If only to create contrast
| to heavenly transcendence?
|
| Bloodborne is another one that plays with surreal gothic
| verticality in 3D.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The Baroque style was supposed to lighten things up.
|
| Medieval art is really dark, especially depictions of hell and
| death, which were common. That subject reached its height with
| Hieronymus Bosch.
| blueflow wrote:
| Down the rabbithole you go:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror
| coldfoundry wrote:
| https://archive.is/zPTuA
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| >Other important literature that was published during this time
| was work by Watpole himself. His novel, Castle of Otranto, was
| reportedly inspired by a dream he had while living at Strawberry
| Hill. Set in a castle in the Middle Ages, the epic details a lord
| and his family living in a haunted mansion. "In the late 18th and
| 19th century, Gothic became associated with spookiness, which got
| wound into ideas of the exotic and sublime," Dr. Bork says. "By
| the 20th century, you have movies and mass media that start using
| this."
|
| That's... not a lot of detail.
|
| The narrative I like comes from Walt Hickey's _You Are What you
| Watch_. Basically, there was wealth in the 1870s and 1880s during
| the Gilded Age, and those people built homes in the Victorian
| /Gothic/Queen Anne style. Their kids grow up in those homes, and
| suddenly books are becoming movies (early successes like
| _Dracula_ in 1897 as a book and eventually movies), and horror is
| a big hit, and the kids who grew up in those homes are writing
| things that take place there. Meanwhile, the stock market
| crashes, those homes are abandoned and unmaintained and derided.
| "When a boring colonial-style home deteriorates with age, it
| looks distinguishing. When a fantabulous, whimsical home
| deteriorates with age, it starts to look spooky."
| schneems wrote:
| > When a fantabulous, whimsical home deteriorates with age, it
| starts to look spooky."
|
| That makes sense. Those abandoned theme parks with knock-off
| cartoon characters with smiles slowly peeling off are very
| unsettling. I hadn't thought of it, but it makes sense that
| same principal applies to other grand displays.
| jkarneges wrote:
| > the kids who grew up in those homes are writing things that
| take place there
|
| This is kind of like how trench coats are associated with
| detectives, because they were regular clothing for anyone
| around the time of early detective films.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Why is there a video called _Margot Robbie Takes You Inside The
| Barbie Dreamhouse_ after three paragraphs? Is that nu-gothic
| architecture?
|
| Is this a glimpse of what the internet looks like without an ad-
| blocker?
| shrx wrote:
| I have uBlock origin and it still showed me the video. I'm
| never visiting the website again.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I have uBlock Origin and uMatrix, didn't show me anything.
| (yes, I know it's no longer supported, but so far it still
| works great; probably too fussy for most, but makes me very
| happy)
| amelius wrote:
| I'm waiting for a Pi-Hole that is powerful enough to put in
| my HDMI connection and just filter out the ads using AI.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| You're holding it(uBo) wrong. Or it's location/client/os-
| dependent?
| bell-cot wrote:
| I only see a couple ads for Architectural Digest itself - using
| just NoScript, and defaulting to distrust all 3rd-party js.
| paxys wrote:
| Zero mention of gargoyles in an entire article about gothic
| architecture and horror?
| chromanoid wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering too. I mean those are meant to look
| scary.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Apotropaic architecture has a long history before Gothic
| architecture, though. See: the Gorgons on the Temple of
| Artemis at Corfu:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gorgon_a.
| ..
| prmoustache wrote:
| That was my first reaction too. Gargoyles are here to inspire
| fear. Associate that to pointy stuff and yes a building becomes
| less welcoming.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Though perhaps intimidating in their grandeur, they weren't
| intended to inspire fear. "It was supposed to be positive,
| transcendent, and godly, not scary," Dr. Bork explains. However,
| ...
|
| Worth noting - all that "Godly" Gothic architecture was built in
| an age when Christianity was _the_ religion in Europe. And
| Christianity 's #1 message-to-the-masses during that time
| amounted to "Do _exactly_ as you are told, or God will condemn
| you to the fires of Hell for all of eternity ".
| dkarl wrote:
| This article is way off base, warped by architectural
| _deformation professionnelle_. The association of Gothic
| architecture with eeriness dates back at least to Gothic fiction
| in the 18th and 19th centuries. 18th and 19th century readers
| devoured these popular prose depiction of Gothic horror. However,
| architects are obsessed with visual images, so the article
| quickly glosses over Gothic fiction and moves on to film
| depictions in the 20th century, even including a quote that
| implies the connection _started_ with film, which is wrong by
| over a century.
|
| The article contains photos, movie posters, and embedded videos,
| but not a single quote from a single Gothic novel, even though
| readers first experienced Gothic horror through imagination
| stoked by words on the page.
| akamaka wrote:
| I went looking for a quote that explicitly references gothic
| architectural details, and quickly found one in Edgar Allen
| Poe's _Fall of the House of Usher_ , from 1839.
|
| _The room I came into was very large and high. The windows
| were high, and pointed at the top, and so far above the black
| floor that they were quite out of reach. Only a little light,
| red in color, made its way through the glass, and served to
| lighten the nearer and larger objects. My eyes, however, tried
| and failed to see into the far, high corners of the room._
| pavon wrote:
| Also, even if we are focusing purely on visuals, it is
| interesting that they didn't discuss the effect of these
| buildings becoming darker over time as the ornate details are
| hard to keep clean, which was exasperated by air pollution. I
| imagine a bright white marble building would have looked much
| more "heavenly and transcendent".
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I went to the article expecting pollution was going to be the
| answer to how the "became spooky". I remember seeing a
| display at the cologne cathedral as a child that showed one
| of the new replacement parts before installation. I was
| shocked seeing how the replacement are a so much brighter
| color than the cathedral itself is now. If these buildings
| were brighter, I think it would be totally different.
| Especially the interior of the Sagrada Familia which is very
| bright and feels very positive is a good example here.
| mmooss wrote:
| An epistemological issue: Why shouldn't someone write about
| your comment, "This ... is way off base", just as you write it
| about the article? What makes your writing better? How could a
| reader know?
|
| I'll contribute to the answer: In the larger world, when it's
| serious about knowledge, the difference is _evidence_ ,
| primarily, and also expertise. In HN comments, how do we
| evaluate these different sources and claims ...?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > This forebear was uniform and symmetrical, regulated by
| harmony, ratios, and scale. In fact, each order of Greek design--
| Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian--was based on the human body, and
| therefore felt safe, approachable, and familiar.
|
| I think the corollary is interesting, which is the answer to this
| question: what does this say about modern architecture? Sterile,
| bleak, chaotic, unfriendly, hostile, alien, ugly, pretentious.
| Which is to say, while the gothic transcends (but benevolently
| includes) humanity and the natural order in the signified
| transcendence, much of modern architecture does the opposite. By
| contradicting the immanent and the human, it doesn't lead to
| transcendence, but dehumanization and vulgarization, mockery. So,
| while the classical respects the merely human, and the gothic
| includes the human and the natural and expands the horizon and
| domain within which they can be understood, modern architecture
| negates the human, reduces it, corrupts it, and ultimate hates
| it. Since art is mimetic, this could rightly be called demonic
| architecture. Where classical architecture is made in the image
| of the natural order, and where gothic architecture reflects the
| divine and the heavenly order (which includes the nature order,
| restored), modern architecture is the image of hell.
|
| > aesthetic theories generally classify the sublime as work that
| showcases greatness beyond measurement, comprehension, or
| experience; its magnitude is both awe-inspiring and terrifying.
|
| Which is the way in which God is described in the Christian
| tradition, hence "loving fear" or "fear of God". This fear arises
| from awe of something sublime in its power, beauty, goodness,
| truth, and magnificence. God is the most sublime, naturally, and
| you could expect that an encounter with the unmediated divine, if
| you were to survive it, would blow your mind and put you and
| everything else in a new perspective. In Scripture, angels--
| powerful, but finite--contrary to most Western art, are also
| described as "terrifying" when they make themselves known, but
| not in a malicious way (this famously occurs in the New Testament
| when Gabriel tells Mary not to fear him).
|
| I might also speculate about one reason why this transformation
| of the gothic from awe-inspiring to haunted and terrifying might
| have taken place from a psycho-theological point of view. Note
| that evil often involves mockery or inversion of the good. Evil
| as such is absence of the good, and thus absence of being. So,
| qua evil, it cannot do anything but appropriate the good. A
| cliche example might be the black mass, which mocks the Catholic
| mass. Pornography is another example rife with mockery and
| defilement (Al Goldstein's infamous words "Christ sucks" and
| "Catholicism sucks" is all I intend to quote here). Drugs still
| another, a kind of mock transcendental experience that involves
| not the authentic elevation or expansion of one's faculties of
| reason, but their corruption and diminishment.
|
| Another reason why the gothic may have become haunted at around
| the time of the Enlightenment has to do with how the beautiful is
| received by the beholder, that is, that it will depend on the
| mode of the beholder. You can see this perhaps most often in how
| a man sees or reacts to a beautiful woman. A man with a vicious
| and evil heart will dehumanize her in his mind and wish to use
| her for his selfish gratification; a prideful man with an
| insecure or guilty heart may hate her and project onto her faults
| and slander, scapegoating her for his own defects and
| inferiority; a man with bad intentions but an active enough
| conscience may become anxious around her as intention meets
| conscience; a man corrupted by a life of debauchery and a sordid
| past but beginning to see the light may be saddened by his
| impurity and his inability to relate to her fully like a human
| being. But the humble man of pure and good intentions receives
| beauty with joy, ease, and gratitude. So, here, the Enlightenment
| was a direct assault on the Church (as was the Protestant revolt
| before that). These cathedrals were now, in their eyes, like
| corpses, dead, relics of the past, and not only dead, but dead by
| the beholder's own hands (or his forefather's hands; the deed and
| the guilt now institutionalized and infused into the culture). A
| certain guilt or sorrow might haunt such a person. The haunting
| is in the beholder who is shut out of the beauty of the gothic by
| his own guilty conscience or the culture he was shaped by that
| resulted from the guilty consciences of his forefathers. Similar
| analyses have been done on the nature of the horror genre (e.g.,
| "Alien" as an expression of horror and guilt in the wake of the
| sexual revolution, or "Frankenstein" as a sublimation of
| Shelley's guilt and painful past and the horrors of the
| Enlightenment worldview).
| bonthron wrote:
| Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" is a ridiculously fun
| book. Very short, and stuffed with melodrama. My copy has an
| excellent introduction to Gothic architecture, literature, and
| politics by Nick Groom, which goes much deeper than this article.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The article doesn't mention that death, especially childhood
| dead, was far more common in the medieval and Victorian European
| era than it is today. A couple with six children could expect
| half those children to die of infectious disease before reaching
| puberty, and there was also a significant probability of the
| mother dying due to pregnancy-related issues over that period.
|
| I'd assume Gothic architecture and religious design of the era
| reflects that grim aspect of life in that period, which is
| something relatively few families suffer today due to modern
| medicine. Looking back it's not surprising it seems spooky and
| dark.
| chairhairair wrote:
| I'm sure most readers here are using an adblocker.
|
| Try disabling it for this website. It's incredible. The content
| is difficult to see between all the various ad surfaces. My
| browser came to a screeching halt.
| consf wrote:
| It's amazing how much we rely on ad blockers to make websites
| usable without even realizing it
| amiga386 wrote:
| I don't think Gothic architecture ever drove the plots of Gothic
| romance or horror, apart from a few choice novels. It was mostly
| used as a setting.
|
| The _spookiness_ , at least for Americans, came like so:
|
| 1. Gilded Age upper classes built the fanciest mansions they
| could afford, in the Neo-Gothic style which was fashionable at
| the time
|
| 2. Like the English country houses (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_...),
| eventually these rich owners couldn't afford the upkeep of these
| massively oversized and ornate dwellings. And nobody would buy
| them. So they moved out and left the mansions to become ruins
|
| 3. Now lots of people know about the old abandoned mansion on the
| hill. Gothic! Spooky! That includes Charles Addams, who starts
| making jolly cartoons in the _New Yorker_ about the odd family
| that live in a big spooky mansion, and it includes Alfred
| Hitchcock who thinks a run-down mansion is a great setting for
| _Psycho_
| jhbadger wrote:
| And the (perhaps unintentionally spooky) 1925 Edward Hopper
| painting _House by the Railroad_ depicting one of these Gilded
| Age houses, which is said to have inspired the fictional houses
| in the Addams Family and in _Psycho_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_by_the_Railroad
| stvswn wrote:
| One town over from my own hometown is Westfield, NJ where
| Charles Addams is from, and there's a house on Elm Street
| that looks a lot like the Addams Family house -- especially
| the one he drew in New Yorker cartoons. The town has a
| festival in his honor every year around Halloween and the
| house in particular features proudly as _the_ Addams Family
| house.
| nilamo wrote:
| That looks straight out of Beetlejuice lol
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder to what extent our conception of spookiness is driven
| by what big buildings happened to be slightly but not
| overwhelmingly run down, and available for cheap sets.
|
| The fact that gothic houses happened to be in that state when
| cameras became widespread Hollywood was inventing tropes
| probably influenced things quite a bit!
| parpfish wrote:
| Interesting connection here to modern creepy settings leaning
| on liminal spaces and run-down early 90s stuff in analog
| horror.
|
| The new scary settings are run down Chuck E. Cheese's and
| empty office buildings.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah. Malls are another good one, although that seems to be
| a bit of a boom and bust field or something... and we've
| already had plenty of zombie movies set in malls.
|
| Office building are an interesting one because, of course,
| a ton of people can imagine working in an office building
| (having done so).
|
| Small colleges recently had a rough time of things, and
| also could be a place that is likely to generate a horror
| script writer, I bet we'll get a good college horror story.
| amiga386 wrote:
| e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms ?
|
| Personally I liked
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) whose
| setting was largely inspired by imagining what goes on
| inside the windowless skyscraper at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
| parpfish wrote:
| exactly.
|
| control was amazing but had never really connected it to
| backrooms, but it makes sense. that final set piece
| synced up to the song was one of the best things i've
| experienced in a video game.
|
| i didn't know it was explicitly inspired by that
| building, for some reason i kept thinking of this
| brutalist beauty that houses the FBI
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building)
| twic wrote:
| Perhaps this is what you were alluding to, but immensely
| popular survival horror video game Five Nights at Freddy's
| is set in a thinly veiled Chuck E. Cheese.
| lancesells wrote:
| I don't disagree with as your points, but I also think a
| structure made of spikes and points is inherently more evil
| feeling than something round or oval. Also, religious
| structures and religion veer towards the dark and ominous.
| Catholics and christians depict a guy nailed to a cross with a
| crown of thorns on his head in their cathedrals so that doesn't
| help.
| lukan wrote:
| "Also, religious structures and religion veer towards the
| dark and ominous."
|
| I think that is mainly a christian thing. Buddhist and Hindu
| temples for example are rather colorful. And I have not been
| in a Mosque yet, but I do think they are also rather bright
| and oval instead of spiky and dark.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And all the dark and ominous child raping and protecting
| rapist priests and the evil Popes who enable it and cover it
| all up that the Catholic Church is so infamous for is pretty
| creepy and doesn't help either.
| rockfishroll wrote:
| You see a similar trend again with "abandoned mental hospitals"
| as settings for horror in TV and movies. The trend of
| "deinstitutionalization" started in the 50s and 60s, meant that
| by the 80s and 90s many psychiatric hospitals had been defunded
| and shut down. As a result, it was a surprisingly common
| childhood experience for people of a certain age to have an
| "old abandoned mental hospital two towns over". Every kid "knew
| someone who knew someone with an older brother who had spent
| all night in one", and there were a ton of them around to use
| as settings.
|
| Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned
| cup cake stores.
| mercer wrote:
| The way people were regularly 'treated' at these hospitals
| probably also figured into it.
| edm0nd wrote:
| In retrospect, we should probably bring back
| institutionalism of individuals and try to have more
| psychiatric hospitals ran by the state. Some people just
| cant be helped but need to be shoved somewhere for the rest
| of their lives away from society. Hopefully though we could
| raise standards so they are all treated fairly and have no
| lobotomizations.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why did it take so long for them to be demolished/change
| ownership after they were abandoned?
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| A lot of sites require substantial environmental cleanup
| before they can be redeveloped. Things like underground
| fuel oil tanks for boilers can be costly to remediate.
| detourdog wrote:
| The estate may have been abandoned for the city and as long
| as the taxes got paid it could Rot.
| theshaper wrote:
| In twenty years, we'll probably see the same phenomenon with
| 'abandoned Data Centers.' Teenagers will head to these old
| buildings in small groups, looking for the ghostly Sysadmin
| who killed his family because the AI in his neural link told
| him to.
| Tade0 wrote:
| My bet is on malls, provided any of the structures survive.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall
| and enjoyed by 'urban explorers'. (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_exploration )
| edm0nd wrote:
| A lot of them are being turned into other things.
|
| A dead mall here in Louisiana was purchased by Amazon and
| turned into their second largest robotic warehouse in the
| US.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I suspect its fairly location specific.
|
| In the UK a neogothic wasn't even a thing when the first horror
| novels were made 1765 (Palladian style was all the rage)
|
| around 1870 "high gothic"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Victorian_Gothic was the
| equivalent of glass and steel construction for us, or possible
| more like Bauhaus, a homage to an earlier age, but with a
| modern twist.
|
| either way, it was uber modern.
| stvswn wrote:
| I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about
| evil things happening in an old house where one might find a
| mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme
| goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial
| revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going
| broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the
| old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might
| find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house,
| but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor,
| Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as
| a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited
| the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time
| to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where
| Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of
| a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped
| off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The
| Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram
| Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of
| Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of
| creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just
| because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I always thought gothic buildings were designed to look like
| forests from within. The Catholic paraphernalia like relics and
| candles are what's really spooky, but a well-lit gothic interior
| is not spooky to me.
| mmooss wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sagrada+Fam%C3%ADlia+interior+pill...
| Rexxar wrote:
| Is it specific to English speaking countries (or maybe just USA)
| ? I never saw gothic buildings as spooky.
| 4star3star wrote:
| I think if the stone were kept exceptionally clean, it would go a
| long way. The dark stained look adds a lot to the sinister vibes,
| IMO.
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