With all that Hegel and similar  stuff doing the rounds, at a baser level, the two tone Gothic times must have been ripe for exploring the darker side during  the Gothic revival. On one side of it there was the looking back to the glories of the middle ages and then another of exploring  darker fears, horrors and also the  possibilities of scientific discovery. All good stuff for the creative mind to explore - and still is a useful and easy standby  muse and mode for some. I don't think Snoopy in Peanuts ever got beyond , 'It was a dark and stormy night........'  
This subject may well be linked to the German philosophy thread but those waters are too deep for me to  venture into again. So let's have some opinion on 19th Century Gothic stuff..... or later, if that's what shivers yer timbers.

Hmmm, Frankenstein, a Gothic novel or Science Fiction or a bit of both?

One of the signal proponents of the Gothic Revival (particularly in England) was architect and designer Augustus Welby Pugin. In his book Contrasts; or a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day (1836) Pugin saw things in confessional terms. For him the period from the Reformation until his own time was one of destruction (i.e the dissolution of the monasteries) followed by poor attempts at replacing what had been lost. He pointed to the reign of Henry VII as being a period when, in both ecclesiastical and secular terms:

‘Architecture had attained a most extraordinary degree of excellence in this country … joiners’ work and wood carving had, indeed, attained a degree of excellence previously unknown; and all descriptions of chasing and metal ornaments were executed with a delicacy, taste, and sentiment that had never since been equalled. The art of glass painting and enamelling had also arrived at its greatest perfection; and the miniatures and illuminations of manuscripts of this period are deserving of the highest admiration.'

He then went on to bemoan the ‘pillage and destruction’ under Henry VIII and also the ‘ravages’ suffered under Edward VI. He dismissed the 17th and 18th centuries and a wasteland in terms of architecture and interior design and viewed the Neoclassical style with contempt and particularly so when Neoclassicism intruded on surviving Gothic buildings:
     
'Westminster Abbey itself, by far the finest edifice in the metropolis, if cleared of its incongruous and detestable monuments, is in a lamentable state of neglect and is continually being disfigured by the erection of more vile masses of marble.' 

Pugin, however, was no lone voice railing in the wilderness but was expressing widely held views of the time. Following the publication of Contrasts he was awarded the contract to assist Sir Charles Barry (another Gothic Revivalist) in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster which had burned down in 1834.