The very notion of an ‘Online Gothic’ may come across as a contradiction in terms. After all, the literary tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, generally seen to have birthed the mode and best represented by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin, was primarily concerned with looking back at a fantasised version of foregone times. The gothic is associated with the return of the past, with the pervasiveness of hauntings, with archaic and ruinous buildings and barbaric codes of conduct that contrast starkly with the modern times of the reader. Online Gothic is thus a development, rather than a direct aesthetic descendant, of an artistic lineage that has operated as a cultural response to specific social anxieties – a movement mirrored by the simultaneous broadening of the academic understanding of the basic parameters of the gothic (Chaplin 2011, 4).1 In this light, Online Gothic does not look to the medieval, Victorian or Edwardian eras to stage tensions between new and ossified moral attitudes, but rather channels contemporary fears propounded by tremendous and exponential technological advances whose truly transformative nature has been hard to assimilate due to the speed with which they have become enmeshed in the fabric of human life and the circulation of capital. As I use the term in this chapter, Online Gothic can be considered part of a wider category Linnie Blake and I have called ‘digital horror’: the ‘type of horror that actively purports to explore the dark side of contemporary life in a digital age governed by informational flows, rhizomatic public networks, virtual simulation and visual hyper-stimulation’ (2016, 3).

Online Gothic, as its name suggests, is concerned with the nightmares arising from the use of the internet, a global infrastructure of computers that provides information and allows companies, businesses and governments to communicate with one another. These connections are themselves facilitated by the World Wide Web, the services or information accessed via the internet which became publicly available in 1991 (Gillies and Cailliau 2000, 221). Even though access to broadband is largely a basic necessity in the twenty-first century, it is wrong to assume that online experiences are democratic or homogenic.