The English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a recognizable genre. To most modern readers, however, The Castle of Otranto is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the supernatural manifestations and a young maiden's flight through dark vaults. But contemporary readers found the novel electrifyingly original and thrillingly suspenseful, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly imitated that they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name from Otranto's medieval–or Gothic–setting; early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like the Middle Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis's The Monk, 1796) or the Middle East (William Beckford's Vathek, 1786).
What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at least some of these elements:
a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel),
ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics,
labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs,
shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or, today, an electric failure),
extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather,
omens and ancestral curses,
magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural,
a passion-driven, wilful villain-hero or villain,
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