The art of telling scary stories has been improved over the centuries, gradually forming a vast layer of Western European culture, represented by a wide range of genres and forms, from folk tales to mystical thrillers. In “Four Lectures on Horror Literature,” Oksana Razumovskaya, a specialist in English literature, summarizes the material of her special course on Gothic literature and traces the evolution of this movement from its inception to its transformation into one of the ideological and aesthetic foundations of modern mass culture.