Gothic is the term used to describe things pertaining to the Gothic people, traditionally thought to have originated in northern Europe and moved south towards the borders of the Roman Empire in the second century. Eventually they occupied territories in modern Germany, Spain and Italy. They became a byword for northern barbarism and from the sixteenth century their name was given to the dominant architectural and artistic style of the late medieval period, which had originated in France in the twelfth century.

The style became idealised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries within Romanticism, leading to the architectural Gothic revival, beginning in Britain but spreading to continental Europe and North America, by which medieval buildings were restored and large numbers of civil, ecclesiastical and educational buildings built in a medieval style. The creation of literary works that employed such late medieval backdrops to explore dark aspects of human nature and the supernatural led to the creation of Gothic fiction, which was the origin of the modern horror genre in books, film, T.V. and more recently video games. From the 1980s these works provided the visual and atmospheric inspiration for the Gothic subculture, producing Gothic music, as well as fashions, fiction and events.