One picture can hold most of this word: a tall stone church from the European Middle Ages. Everything about it goes up and comes to a point — the arches, the windows, the thin columns. It is dark inside, heavy, and not at all like the calm, rounded buildings of ancient Greece and Rome. That contrast is the key. People who admired the classical world used Gothic as their name for everything medieval and un-classical: buildings like this, the thick black letters in medieval books, and later the frightening stories set in places like this. The modern black-clothes style keeps the same mood — dark, dramatic, a little grand.