Writing in The Guardian to preview the drama before it aired, Mark Lawson said that: " Transmuting different genres like wine made from water — comedy into romance into thriller — Eccleston, Sharp, Davies and his director Adrian Shergold have created a world in which it soon ceases to seem odd that God chose Manchester.

Transmuting several of her children to this new form, the Regis decides that all Invid shall be transmuted in this matter.

The lyric: " Portrait of the Dead Countess " in the track " A Gothic Romance " could be in reference to the portrait found in the novel of the Countess Mircalla.

* Two Witches, a Finnish Gothic rock band, created a song in the early 1990s called " Mircalla ", inspired by the novel.

Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled " A Gothic Story ".

The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel.

The Castle of Otranto ( 1764 ) is usually regarded as the first Gothic novel.

Radcliffe made the Gothic novel socially acceptable.

Contemporaneously to English Gothic, parallel Romantic literary movements developed in continental Europe: the roman noir (" black novel ") in France, by such writers as François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Gaston Leroux, Baculard d ' Arnaud, and Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, Madame de Genlis and the Schauerroman (" shudder novel ") in Germany by such writers as Friedrich Schiller, author of The Ghost-Seer ( 1789 ) and Christian Heinrich Spiess, author of Das Petermännchen ( 1791 / 92 ).

These works were often more horrific and violent than the English Gothic novel.

Though Lewis's novel could be read as a pastiche of the emerging genre, self-parody was a constituent part of the Gothic from the time of the genre's inception with Walpole's Otranto.

Sade critiqued the genre in the preface of his Reflections on the novel ( 1800 ) which is widely accepted today, stating that the Gothic is " the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded ".

However, since the mid-1980s, the Russian gothic fiction was discussed in a books like „ The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature “, „ European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960 “ and „ The Russian Gothic novel and its British antecedents “.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's first published work was the Gothic novel Zastrozzi ( 1810 ), about an outlaw obsessed with revenge against his father and half-brother.

Shelley published a second Gothic novel in 1811, St. Irvyne ; or, The Rosicrucian, about an alchemist who seeks to impart the secret of immortality.

Byron features, under the codename of ' Lord Ruthven ', in Lady Caroline's own Gothic novel: Glenarvon ( 1816 ).

Mary Shelley's novel, though clearly influenced by the Gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the omission in the novel of any scientific explanation of the monster's animation and the focus instead on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation.

Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film ( Mighall 2007 ).

His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood ( 1870 ).

The mood and themes of the Gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, mementos, and mortality in general.

The most famous Gothic villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula ( 1897 ).

The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey ( 1818 ) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic.

The necromantic change from the palace at Sparta to Faust's Gothic castle directs us to the aesthetic meaning of the myth -- the translation of antique drama into Shakespearean and romantic guise.

And by a skillful and unobtrusive use of imagery ( the enclosure is called a `` Roman-camp stockade '', the hastily erected lean-to is a `` Babylonian hovel '', the men begin to look like `` Peruvian mummies '' and to acquire `` Gothic faces '' ), Malraux projects a fresco of human endurance -- which is also the endurance of the human -- stretching backward into the dark abyss of time.

He starts, despite of shortages, raids against the Gothic camps and Vitiges is forced into a stalemate.

Although this culture has conventionally been identified with the migration of the Gothic ethnos into the region from the Northwest, Todd argues that its most important origin is Scytho-Sarmatian.

After the Huns in the 4th century invaded the territories of the Gothic King Ermanaric, which at its peak stretched between the Danube and the Volga river, and from the Black to the Baltic Sea, thousands of Goths fled into the Balkans, defeating the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople and sacking Rome in 410, while thousands of Germans were crossing the Rhine.

Meanwhile, several Germanic tribes were converted to Arian Christianity by the missionary Wulfila, who devised an alphabet to translate the Bible into the Gothic language.

Among other elements, Ann Radcliffe also introduced the brooding figure of the Gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero.

The genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers, such as Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, including Oliver Twist ( 1837-8 ), Bleak House ( 1854 ) ( Mighall 2003 ) and Great Expectations ( 1860 – 61 ).

The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft who also wrote an excellent conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature ( 1936 ) as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century.

The themes of the literary Gothic have been translated into other media.

This setting of the novel, a castle or religious building, often one fallen into disrepair, was an essential element of the Gothic novel.

Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, the Female Gothic permitted the introduction of feminine societal and sexual desires into Gothic texts.

The decision of Female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing.

Support for the Gothic chieftains diminished as refugees headed into Thrace and towards the safety of the Roman garrisons.

The continued spread of Christianity, and the foundation of national churches, led to the translation of the Bible — often beginning with books from the New Testament — into a variety of other languages at a relatively early date: Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Persian, Soghdian, and eventually Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Arabic, and Nubian.

He witnessed Belisarius ' entry into the Gothic capital, Ravenna, in 540.

By one of Athalaric's own additions to the decree, it was decided that if a disputed election was carried before the Gothic officials of Ravenna by the Roman clergy and people, three thousand solidi would have to be paid into court.

His Gothic name Þiudareiks translates into " people-king " or " ruler of the people ".

There, Ulfilas translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language.

After Alaric's death, Visigothic nobles spirited his heir, the child-king Amalaric, first to Narbonne, which was the last Gothic outpost in Gaul, and further across the Pyrenees into Hispania.