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Before there were romance novels about heroes in kilts and

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heroines with unlikely relationship problems there were romantic novels and [Woman hanging onto the edge of a cliff]

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no the two are not the same. You're probably familiar with a number of

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writers from the Romantic era, there's Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and poets [Picture of Jane Austen]

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like Byron, Wordsworth and Keats. You've also probably noticed that all of these

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guys and gals were English. Yeah England's a romantic place you know [English flag]

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must be all the bangers and mash. (Laughing) While there were romantics on the other [Man wearing a bowler hat holding plates of bangers and mash]

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side of the pond the most famous American authors of this genre were

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different from their English brethren in that they liked to paint their [Weirdly dressed man in front of the US flag]

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fingernails black and brood to the tunes of My Chemical Romance. [Someone painting their fingernails black in front of a typewriter]

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See these guys weren't just romantics, they were Gothic romantics.

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Well how is Gothic Romanticism different from Romanticism?

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Well romanticism was a movement that rebelled against the enlightenment and [A couple bungee jumping together]

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its tendency to value reason above all else. Emotion was the name of the game

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for the romantics and horror and dread in particular were the emotional

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bread-and-butter of the Gothic romantics. Well why not, fear is an emotion. The [Gothic man holding a loaf of bread that says horror and butter that says dread]

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gothic novels of American writers like Edgar Allan Poe were essentially scary

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stories replete with creepy settings and supernatural murder mad forces. [Ghost of a woman holding a bloody knife floating around]

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In fact Gothic Romantic authors paid so much attention to their

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settings that the settings tended to become characters in their own right, [Gothic house looking angry]

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which explains why we feel the way we do about the House of Usher. In short we're

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not going to do a book weekend getaway there. Yeah, different Usher... [The singer 'Usher' stood in front of the house of Usher]

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You've probably read a gothic romantic story or two and not realized it [Boy reading a book]

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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yeah well it's got the Headless Horseman a ghost who likes to show up out of

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nowhere and scare the bejesus out of skinny schoolteachers and it's set in a [Scared looking woman]

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secluded village with a long history of witches, wizards and ghosts. [A wizard a witch and a ghost]

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And what about Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter well in that novel we

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have a minister Arthur Dimmesdale who's so tortured by the fact that he slept [Minister pacing around a church]

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with Hester Prynne yeah sorry that was a spoiler alert, that he

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essentially dies of guilt, poor guy. Getting annihilated by your darker [Minister falls over and dies]

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emotions is a clear hallmark of a good gothic romantic tale or a bad Lars von [The Grim Reaper chasing after a man]

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Trier film all right pal just keepin it real.

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We've already mentioned Edgar Allan Poe but really he was so good at his

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genre that he's worth mentioning again. Poe poe poe poe poe! He wrote the Cask of [Picture of Poe]

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Amontillado, where the narrator walled the guy off in a dungeon. [Man disappears behind a wall]

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He wrote the mask of the Red Death where a ton of people at a party drop dead of

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the plague, he wrote the tell-tale heart where a murderer confesses because he

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thinks he can still hear his victims heart beating, turns out it was just the [Man confessing to a police officer and rocking back and forth]

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ringtone on his iPhone, how embarrassing. Anyway so grab your candle, a spare pair

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of undies and your sense of self-preservation it's about to get [Woman looking scared holding a candle and pants]

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gloomy up in here. [Scary looking skeleton face]

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