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Published Feb 5, 2026, 3:29 PM EST
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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Gothic fiction is all about fear and hauntings, with an aesthetic defined by fog-drenched mansions and tortured souls. They tend to be stories of love and horror entwined, exploring themes of obsession, madness, beauty, and decay. The genre got its start with 18th-century novels, but went on to produce many classic films as well.
With that in mind, this list looks at the Gothic novels that became true movie masterpieces. They took challenging source material and turned it into immortal cinema, films with timeless plots and immersive atmosphere. The best of them remain haunting many decades on from their release, living up to the standard of their iconic source material.
9 ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) – 'Frankenstein' (1931)
Image via Universal Pictures"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change." Frankenstein is the urtext of modern sci-fi horror, a story born from Romantic imagination and scientific anxiety. All the more impressively, its author was about 21 at the time it was published. In it, Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious young scientist, assembles life from death, only to recoil from his creation and unleash a cycle of rejection and revenge. Through him, the novel wrestles with creation, guilt, and the isolation of intellect untempered by compassion.
The story is truly iconic and has been translated to the screen many times, most recently by Guillermo Del Toro. That said, the definitive adaptation remains James Whale’s 1931 film, starring Boris Karloff as the creature. It turns Mary Shelley’s philosophical terror into eternally famous imagery, including the laboratory lightning, the stitched face, and the bolts in the neck. Though simplified, the adaptation captures the tragedy at the heart of the book: man’s attempt to play God, and the pain of the child he abandons.
8 ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847) – 'Wuthering Heights' (1939)
Image via MGM Studios"Oh, God! It is unutterable." This one's back in the conversation thanks to the upcoming Emerald Fennell adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Emily Brontë’s only novel remains one of literature’s most tempestuous love stories. Set on the storm-battered Yorkshire moors, it follows Heathcliff, a foundling consumed by his obsession with Catherine Earnshaw, a passion so violent it transcends life and death. The book is gothic in its claustrophobia and psychological intensity, delving deep into revenge, class, and the self-destructive power of love.
William Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine, powerfully captures the tale’s doomed romanticism and elemental fury. It's a faithful reproduction of the novel's tone, if not all its narrative beats. The Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography transforms the moors into a landscape of emotional chaos, while Olivier’s brooding performance brings the character vividly to life.
7 ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) – 'Jane Eyre' (2011)
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me." Emily's sister Charlotte revolutionized Gothic romance in her own way with this morally serious, psychologically complex tale. The novel follows orphaned Jane from a brutal childhood to her position as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls for the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, only to discover his terrible secret. Beneath these Gothic trappings is a moving story of integrity, independence, and female selfhood.
Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, restores the novel’s eerie sensuality and feminist fire. It’s one of the most emotionally authentic versions of the book, with less melodrama and more moral clarity. Fukunaga frames Brontë’s world not as fantasy, but as realism touched by ghosts of memory, trauma, and forbidden love. The film's muted palette and candlelit interiors evoke both repression and longing, while strong lead performances (from Wasikowska, especially) do the rest of the heavy lifting.
6 ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1890) – 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1945)
Image via MGM Studios"I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel is a parable of vanity, morality, and decadence. Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, wishes that his portrait would age instead of him... and the wish is granted. While he remains outwardly perfect, the painting records every sin and corruption he commits. It's the kind of archetypal, thematically rich story that has inspired countless books and movies since (most recently, Coralie Fargeat's The Substance bears strong traces of it).
Albert Lewin’s 1945 adaptation, starring Hurd Hatfield as Dorian and George Sanders as the cynical Lord Henry, translates Wilde’s wit and horror into luminous black-and-white, along with one shocking flash of color that reveals the grotesque painting in full. It’s one of the most visually stunning Gothic films ever made, restrained yet venomous, its beauty concealing rot. The highlight is the Oscar-nominated supporting performance from a young Angela Lansbury.
5 ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) – 'The Innocents' (1961)
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Image via 20th Century Studios"We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." The Turn of the Screw is one of the defining works by Henry James, and it's widely regarded as a masterpiece of ambiguity. Its central mystery is the question of whether or not the ghosts are real or imagined. The story focuses on a young governess sent to care for two children at an isolated estate, where she becomes convinced the ghosts of former servants are possessing them. Or perhaps she’s just losing her mind.
Jack Clayton turned the novella into the classic 1961 movie The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr. Shot in striking black-and-white CinemaScope, the film’s beauty becomes its weapon; elegant surfaces mask rot and fear. The storytelling is fittingly sophisticated and layered, anchored by Kerr's performance. Here, she turns repression into terror; her every glance trembles with fear and guilt. There are no jump scares, only whispers, silences, and faces seen just out of frame.
4 ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (1959) – 'The Haunting' (1963)
Image via MGM"Whatever walked there, walked alone." Shirley Jackson’s 1959 book The Haunting of Hill House is the cornerstone of haunted-house fiction. (It was a big influence on Stephen King, for example.) It centers on Eleanor Vance, a lonely, fragile woman invited to participate in a paranormal investigation at Hill House, a mansion that seems alive with malice. As Eleanor’s isolation deepens, the line between haunting and madness dissolves.
The book served as the basis for Mike Flanagan's great TV series of the same name, yet the best version is probably Robert Wise's 1963 film, frequently ranked among the greatest horror movies of all time. In it, Julie Harris gives a devastating performance as Eleanor. She's totally convincing as a woman unraveling in the face of unseen forces: perhaps the house, perhaps herself. On the directing side, Wise’s restraint (no ghosts shown, only implied) makes everything even more chilling.
3 ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (1909-1910) – 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1925)
Image via Universal Pictures“If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so." The Phantom of the Opera is one of the most famous musicals of all time (literally the longest-running show in Broadway history), to the point that it's easy to forget it was actually a book first, and that the first movie adaptations predated the stage production by decades. The plot is iconic: a disfigured musical genius haunts the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House, obsessed with the young soprano Christine Daaé.
Director Rupert Julian took that premise and crafted it into one of the strongest horrors of the 1920s, a landmark of silent cinema. Lon Chaney plays The Phantom, succeeding in making him complex and interesting rather than simply monstrous or absurd. The character's makeup was also fantastic for the time, leading to a shocking and now-iconic reveal. It makes for an emotional statement on isolation and desire, the horror of being seen, and the longing to be loved anyway.
2 ‘Rebecca’ (1938) – 'Rebecca' (1940)
Image via United Artists"We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end." Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca deftly melds mystery, romance, and psychological horror. It's about a shy young woman who marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and moves into his estate, Manderley, only to find herself haunted by the memory of his first wife, Rebecca. While Rebecca is dead, her presence dominates every room, every silence.
Alfred Hitchcock perfectly captures that "absence as presence" in his 1940 adaptation, which was his first Hollywood film and his only one to win Best Picture. He never shows Rebecca, and that’s the point: she’s an idea, a ghost of perfection no one can escape. The Master of Suspense is assisted in this by a strong cast. Joan Fontaine’s fragile performance contrasts perfectly with Judith Anderson’s icy menace as Mrs. Danvers, one of cinema’s great villains, making for one of the very best movies of the 1940s.
1 ‘Dracula’ (1897) – 'Nosferatu' (1922)
Image via Film Arts Guild"For the dead travel fast." Bram Stoker's Dracula is the progenitor of practically the entire vampire subgenre and served as the direct basis for some of its finest movies, including the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi, Francis Ford Coppola's operatic 1992 take on the material, and Robert Eggers' 2022 Nosferatu remake. That said, the most important and influential is the original Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau and held together by an unforgettably menacing performance from Max Schreck.
Stoker's book is a tale of plague, seduction, and the monstrous fear of the "other." Its themes of repression, contagion, and erotic dread became foundational to Gothic fiction. But since Murnau could not legally adapt the novel, he reshaped its bones into something feral and feverish. Dracula became Count Orlok; Jonathan and Mina became Hutter and Ellen; and the novel’s eroticism transformed into a nightmare of shadows, superstition, and disease. More than a century later, the movie is still creepy and striking.
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