11 Gothic Horrors for a Rainy Night

Haunted houses, doomed romances, family secrets, and beautifully unsettling stories for nights best spent cozy and indoors.

There is something about rainy nights that makes gothic horror even better.

I think it's because gothic stories were practically made for cozy nights in. They are best experienced when the rain is pattering against the windows, there is fog hanging over the trees, and there is a light chill in the air.

They are even better on nights when the house seems lonelier and much larger after dark.

Gothic horror isn't always the bloodiest, or even the scariest, corner of the horror genre. Its power comes from atmosphere. Old houses. Family secrets. Isolation. Grief. Ghosts who may or may not actually be ghosts.

So, if the forecast is calling for some much-needed rain and you are looking for something beautifully unsettling to watch, here are eleven gothic horrors worth disappearing into for the night.

These are best experienced with something warm to drink, underneath a blanket.

And an animal companion is always a welcome addition.

Crimson Peak

If someone asked me to explain gothic horror using one movie, Crimson Peak would probably be my first choice. It's one of the films I watch every year, at the beginning of fall.

The house alone deserves a spot on this list.

Allerdale Hall is enormous, beautiful, decaying, and deeply wrong. Leaves fall through the open roof. Red clay seems to bleed through the ground. Every hallway looks like it has witnessed something terrible that it refuses to forget.

But then, there are the ghosts.

Crimson Peak isn't simply a haunted-house movie. At its center is a gothic romance wrapped around family secrets, obsession and the uncomfortable realization that sometimes the living inhabitants of a haunted house are considerably more dangerous than the dead ones.

The Gothic Feeling: Lavish, creepy, dreamlike.

The Haunting of Bly Manor

If Crimson Peak gives us the magnificent decaying mansion version of gothic horror, Bly Manor gives us something quieter and considerably sadder.

A young au pair arrives at an English country estate to care for two orphaned children. Naturally, because this is gothic horror, the beautiful old manor has some unresolved trauma.

I just recently rewatched this series and only just picked up the tragic, deeper subtext. And that is what makes Bly Manor linger. There are ghosts, for sure. But a lot of the horror is not about being chased through a dark hallway. The horror is in what happens when memories begin to disappear, repeat or become prisons of their own.

The Gothic Feeling: Rainy, slow-burn, melancholy.

The Haunting of Hill House

The series follows the Crain family across two timelines: their childhood inside Hill House and their adult lives after leaving it.

But does anyone actually ever leave Hill House?

This is haunted house horror at its best because the house isn't merely a setting. It becomes tangled in the family's grief, trauma, and memories until separating the supernatural from everything else becomes nearly impossible.

It also rewards paying attention to the background. Once you realize that, you'll start examining every dark doorway.

You're welcome.

The Gothic Feeling: Dark, atmospheric, creepy.

Rebecca

Not every gothic horror story needs a visible ghost.

Sometimes, a dead woman can haunt an entire house perfectly well without appearing in it.

Rebecca follows a young newlywed who arrives at Manderley, the enormous estate belonging to her new husband. She quickly discovers that his first wife still seems to occupy every room. The result is psychological gothic horror built around jealousy and the terrible feeling of living in someone else's shadow.

Whether you choose Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 adaptation or the newer 2020 version, the heart of the story remains wonderfully gothic.

The Gothic Feeling: Moody, character-driven, haunting.

The Others

Few movies understand the power of a dark room quite like The Others.

Grace lives with her two children in an isolated house where the curtains must remain closed because the children suffer from an extreme sensitivity to sunlight.

Then strange things begin happening. Footsteps. Voices. Doors opening. The unsettling possibility that they may not be alone.

The Others doesn't need constant scares because its atmosphere does most of the work. The enormous house feels claustrophobic despite its size, and every dim hallway seems to hold a horror just out of reach.

Turn off the lights for maximum effect.

The Gothic Feeling: Claustrophobic, full of dread, isolated.

Sleepy Hollow

Sometimes, the mood does not call for subtle, atmospheric gothic horror. Sometimes you want living, breathing October in the form of a headless horseman, fog, murder, and autumn atmosphere aplenty.

Sleepy Hollow is the movie that delivers that.

Ichabod Crane arrives in the small village of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of brutal murders supposedly committed by the Headless Horseman.

Visually, the movie is pure gothic indulgence: gloomy woods, candlelit rooms, old graveyards, mist-covered roads, and a town overflowing with secrets. It is creepy without being relentlessly bleak, which makes it particularly good for those rainy nights when you want something exciting and eerie, but still strangely comforting and nostalgic.

The Gothic Feeling: Autumnal, lush, spooky.

The Orphanage

The Orphanage begins with a premise gothic horror has repeatedly warned us against: moving into an old building where something terrible happened.

Laura returns with her family to the orphanage where she grew up, hoping to reopen it as a home for children.

Then her son begins talking about an invisible friend. Nothing to worry about, (un)naturally. What follows is a beautiful and sad atmospheric ghost story built around childhood, loss, and the pieces of the past that refuse to remain buried.

The Gothic Feeling: Bleak, melancholy, tragic.

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Winter gothic deserves representation too.

The Blackcoat's Daughter follows two girls left behind at their isolated boarding school over winter break while another mysterious young woman travels toward the school.

That's about as much as I should tell you without giving too much away.

It is slow, cold and deeply unsettling. Rather than relying on jump scares, it creates the persistent feeling that something is profoundly wrong. The empty boarding school is particularly effective at creating the atmosphere of dread. Places built to contain hundreds of people feel unnatural when almost everyone has disappeared. Add snow, isolation, and something sinister lurking underneath the quiet, and you have an excellent choice for a miserable-weather horror night.

The Gothic Feeling: Cold, melancholy, oppressive.

Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro directing Frankenstein almost feels inevitable.

Mary Shelley's original novel helped shape gothic horror, and del Toro's adaptation embraces the tragedy at the heart of the story: Victor Frankenstein creates life and then discovers that creation comes with consequences he is catastrophically unprepared to face.

The film is visually extravagant, darkly romantic, and just beautifully done. It examines the themes of creation and abandonment, of personal responsibility, and the true nature of a monster in a beautifully profound way.

I really can't say enough good things about this film. My cold gothic heart might have wept a bit while watching this. It is one I plan to add to my annual fall rotation.

The Gothic Feeling: Dark, masterful, thought-provoking.

The Skeleton Key

Now we're heading south.

The Skeleton Key trades the English manor for an isolated Louisiana plantation house, but the gothic ingredients remain wonderfully intact.

Caroline takes a job caring for an elderly man living in an old home outside New Orleans. She is given a skeleton key capable of opening the rooms throughout the house.

Well, almost all of them.

Everyone who has ever consumed horror media knows that a mysterious locked room is essentially an engraved invitation to make a catastrophic decision. And the deeper Caroline digs into the history of the house, the stranger the situation becomes.

This one brings Southern Gothic atmosphere into the mix: old secrets, superstition, decaying spaces, and a past that has found some particularly unpleasant ways of surviving into the present.

The Gothic Feeling: Sinister, Southern Gothic, historical.

The Night House

And finally, the movie that temporarily escaped my memory despite creeping me out tremendously: The Night House.

Beth is grieving the sudden death of her husband while living alone in the lakeside home he built for her. Soon, she begins experiencing strange occurrences inside the house and starts digging through the things her husband left behind. And true to the horror genre, she finds things she wasn't expecting.

And then there is the house across the lake.

What makes The Night House such an interesting addition to this list is that its gothic architecture isn't centuries old. The house is modern, but the haunting isn't.

The movie takes familiar gothic ideas, such as grief, secrets, doubles, forbidden knowledge and the dead continuing to exert power over the living, and places them somewhere that initially looks far too contemporary to belong in a traditional ghost story. The film proves that effective gothic horror doesn't require a Victorian mansion. It just needs elements true to the genre: grief, isolation, and a house with something very wrong with it.

The Gothic Feeling: Unusual, unsettling, melancholy.

To me, this list really reinforces why gothic horror is so perfect for a cold and rainy night: it gives us permission to cozily escape a little further into an unsettling world. It reminds us that we are safe and warm, not actually part of the horror on screen, and sheltered from the weather outside.

And I think we can all agree, watching a gothic horror in Allerdale Hall, warm blanket and animal companion or not, would decidedly not be cozy.

I hope you enjoy this list of horrors, and that your evening is creepy and cozy.

Stay scary.