Urban Gothic

"[5] Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores traditional debates about the nature of good and evil through motifs from folklore while incorporating a modern, scientific explanation.

[6] Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) similarly revisits the concept of a Faustian Pact in a modern social context.

[7] Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) presents the eastern fringes of Europe in Transylvania as a point of origin for the arrival in modern provincial and then metropolitan London society of a creature from folklore.

[12] Urban Gothic themes and images were also used in comics and graphic novels, including Frank Miller's Daredevil (from 1979), Batman (from 1986), the Sin City series (from 1991), James O'Barr's The Crow, Alan Moore's From Hell (from 1991) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999).

[13] Urban Gothic aesthetics and themes are also explored in video games by presenting the city as a threat, often as its own character, as in Silent Hill (1999).

Urban Gothic novels were among the earliest and most influential works adapted for the cinema, helping to form the genre of horror film.

[19] After World War II, emphasis shifted to films that more often drew inspiration from the insecurities of life, utilizing new technology and dividing into the three sub-genres of horror-of-personality, the horror-of-Armageddon and the horror-of-the-demonic.

Poster for an 1880s dramatization of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
An illustration from Charles Dickens ' Bleak House of Tom All Alones, the urban slum credited as a major influence on the development of the genre
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