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, films, T.V. shows and more recently video games.

The Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century is a genre founded by Horace Walpole with the 1764 publication of The Castle of Otranto. It was accounted for the more modern connotation of the term Gothic. Walpole originally claimed the book as an actual medieval romance he discovered and republished. Thus was born the Gothic novel’s association with fake documentation to increase its effect. Hereafter, the term was associated with a mood of morbidity, horror, darkness and the supernatural, as well as self-parody.

The Gothic novel established much of the iconography of  later horror literature and cinema, such as ruined castles, graveyards or churches, nightmares, ghosts, cursed families, being buried alive and melodramatic plots. For instance, the Riddle’s house in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where a big conspiracy was made; the nightmares in the Twilight that perplexed Belle for a long time; the ghosts in the Originals that troubled everyone. An additional notable element was the brooding figure of the Gothic villain, which foreshadowed the Byronic hero. The most famous Gothic villain, the vampire, is a folklore legend of Eastern Europe, best known from Bram Stoker’ s novel Dracula and the horror movies it influenced. At the present times, the most famous vampires must be those in the Vampire Diaries, which have drawn lots of people’s attention to Gothic novels. It possesses all the  necessary elements of a Gothic novel. Moreover, from L.Andrew Cooper’s definition of Gothic fiction, “a Gothic fiction is a fiction that primarily represents fear, the fearful, and the abject, even if the representation is comic”(Cooper 2010:17),we can easily find another feature of the Gothic. That is fearful. Obviously, where there is ghost, there is fear. So it is undoubted that fearful is one of the features of Gothic as well.

1.2 Introduction of Harry Potter Series and the Author

Harry Potter is a series of fantasy novels written by a British author whose name is J.K.Rowling. She began writing stories when she was six years old and started working on the Harry Potter sequence in 1990, when, she says, “the idea...simply fell into my head.” The first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was published in the United Kingdom  in 1997 and the United States in 1998. Since then, books in the Harry Potter series have been honored with many prizes, such as the Anthony Award, the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Whitbread Children’ s Book Award, the Nestle Smarties Book Prize, and the British Book Awards Children’ s book of the Year, as well as New York Times Notable Book, ALA Notable Children’ s Book, and ALA Best Book for Young Adults citations. Rowling has also been named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. But not long before the publication of the Harry Potter series, Rowling was just a single mother who could hardly support her family unless relying on the government. She said that the idea of writing this novel came to her when she was on a train. She saw a little boy  with a pair of round glasses smiling at her outside of the train’s window. That’s when her life has totally changed.