Urban Gothic is a sub-genre of Gothic fiction, film horror, and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, before being developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the sub-genres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic was revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).[1]
- ^ S. Macek, Urban Nightmares: the Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 240–1.