Gothic literature was a popular writing tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is still used today. Gothic literature explores the wicked, perverse and dark desires. Gothic conventions can include burial alive, ghosts, hysteria, ruined bodies, tales within tales, undead characters, underground spaces, and more. Gothic themes are guilt, sex, violence, death, and cosmic struggle. Gothic stories or poems should inspire terror or horror. Edgar Allen Poe was one of the many well-known Gothic writers. In his stories he uses a variety of themes to carry out the gothic theme.

In the story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe uses a psychological approach to gothic. "I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him." Simply, the narrator tried to make the victim think he liked him. He did this so the man would have absolutely no suspicion he was going to...