Our Gothic Obsession

'Weird, freak, spookwild' -  teenage language is still replete with the Gothic

But why does the Gothic still hold our interest?

Terry Eagleton point out that argues the Gothic obsession with the deviant, exotic and grotesque and its origins he goes on to argue that our obsession with the Gothic is partly an inheritance from Modernism itself. 

Modernism tends to find ordinary life tediously suburban, and sees the truth as disclosing itself only at an extreme. A tragic hero is anyone scooped off the bus going to work  and pushed to the limit. The acte gratuit, the existential gesture, are among Modernism’s myths of extremity.