Gothic films are at once very easy and very difficult to categorise. Within the wider context of the “horror” genre, gothic films are linked directly to the literary gothic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Horror film fans would counter that the Goth genre bravely faces issues such as death, mortality, mystery, cruelty, violence, insecurity, guilt and loneliness head on. Films from the post punk moment in the 1980s and 1990s include Edward Sissorhands, The Hunger and The Howling. Following a long tradition of Romantic art and literature,melodrama, phantasmagoric theatre and expressionism, gothic films have a recognisable mise-en-scène based around characters, settings, familiar visual signifiers. The common characteristics include