The Castle of Otranto

On the morning of his wedding, Conrad, the sickly heir of Otranto, is crushed in the courtyard by a black-plumed helmet a hundred times too vast for any living man, fallen from nowhere. His father Manfred, more furious at losing an heir than grieving a son, resolves within the hour to marry the terrified bride himself, chasing her by candlelight through the castle's vaults, past a portrait that sighs and steps from its frame, until she vanishes through a trapdoor into the dark. Horace Walpole dreamed the giant armored hand on a staircase at his own gothic house, Strawberry Hill, then wrote the whole feverish thing in a matter of weeks. Every hinge of the genre we now call Gothic creaks open first here: the tyrant father, the persecuted maiden, an ancestral curse arriving piece by piece as an actual, walking giant. It is lurid and unashamed of it, and Manfred's last act, a dagger driven into his own daughter in the dark, mistaking her for someone else, is the moment two centuries of nightmares learned to open their eyes.