page_title: Urban Gothic
section_title: Modern interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Urban Gothic / History / Modern interpretations
caption_attribution_description: A dark alley in the French Quarter at night. (Cabildo Alley) 03-20-2005 @ 3:45AM
context_page_description: Urban Gothic is a subgenre 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 and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic 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, The Crow and From Hell, as well as influencing films like Seven.
context_section_description: From the twentieth century urban Gothic helped to spawn other subgenres, including Southern Gothic, using the Southern United States as a location, and later Suburban Gothic, which shifted the focus from the urban centre to the residential periphery of modern society. Since the 1980s Gothic horror fiction and urban Gothic in particular has revived as a genre, with series of novels like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, both making New Orleans a key centre of Gothic fantasy. Urban Gothic themes and images were also used in comics and graphic novels, including Frank Miller's Daredevil (from 1979), Batman (from 1986) and Sin City series (from 1991), James O'Barr's The Crow, beside Alan Moore's From Hell (from 1991) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999).
caption: A dark alley in the French Quarter of New Orleans at night, part of the distinctive architecture that made it the centre of Gothic novels by authors including Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite
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