Kwaidan

Kwaidan was an interesting and entertaining experience in non-western horror, and though it was composed of several short stories, there were noticeable consistencies and parallels between each. A crucial point made by a number of the stories was the importance of honesty and faith to others and one's own promises. The story of The Black Hair, for example, follows a swordsman who divorces his first wife, a weaver, for a woman from a much more powerful family, only to find unhappiness in the arrangement. He eventually leaves her as well, returning to his first wife, who seems the same as he left her, and who forgives him as well. However, he awakens the next day besides her corpse, and finds himself trapped within the house. A story with a similar theme is The Woman of the Snow, in which a young woodcutter sees a Yuki-onna, a winter spirit, who kills his master but elects to spare him, so long as he tells nobody that he saw her. He later meets a woman named Yuki, who he later marries, fathers two children with, and recounts his meeting with the Yuki-onna to. Yuki reveals herself to be the Yuki-onna, but spares him once more for the sake of the children. She disappears into the snow once more, however. These stories take a much more unassuming approach than many western tales tend to in that the punishing force is neither stated nor even implied to be in the wrong, or "evil", rather, they simply carry power with them and ought to be respected, similar to forces of nature. This natural concept is, however, somewhat inline with gothic and romantic attitudes towards nature and the sublime.

Interview With The Vampire

Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is an interesting novel, one of the earliest to take classic horror tropes in the direction of romantic intrigue common in contemporary young adult novels such as Twilight. However, Anne Rice's debut was noteworthy not only for its suggestiveness, but for the values at play. The chief point the novel appears to make is that one's drive to survive is much more potent than one's morality. Despite Louis desiring death when he Lestat first meets him, he quickly begins killing other human beings to preserve his own well-being, starting with the slaves on his plantation. He then goes on to feed on a young girl in New Orleans, further showing that mortal needs win out over moral choices. This point is most clear towards the end of the novel, however, when "the boy" interviewing Louis sees only the power in vampirism, and asks that Louis turn him into on as well. Louis is angered by the boy's failure to grasp the point he has been attempting to make: that he has lost his humanity, literally and figuratively, in the name of mindless self-preservation.

Frankenstein (Reupload)

 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's most well-known novel, conceived during her stay with Lord Byron and John William Polidori, fittingly displays a plethora of gothic literature attributes. The first and most central gothic feature of Frankenstein is the tragedy of man's hubris. Doctor Frankenstein attempts to play God by reanimating dead tissue, but only brings ruination upon himself. Secondly, the element of the supernatural figures heavily into the story of Frankenstein. The reanimation of dead tissue was obviously not a possibility in Shelley's day, but the idea served many purposes in the novel, including but not limited to the aforementioned hubris of man and the elements of horror that was also common to Gothic literature. Furthermore, Shelley's exploration into explanation of the supernatural elements is a trend found within many examples of Female Gothic specifically. Finally, the setting of Frankenstein is heavily gothic as well. The Bavarian backdrop of Ingolstadt and Frankenstein's hometown of Geneva are both framed by the massive Alps, suggesting the grandness and power of nature. In addition, the frozen north where Walton discovers the monster and Frankenstein himself only reinforces the power of nature over man.