A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss

In a Gothic tale, a kiss is never just a kiss.

It might damn you. Or wake you from the dead. It might carry longing, lust, hunger, warning. Maybe all at once. From the ghosts of Wuthering Heights to the fevered nightwalkers of Dracula, and now to the snowbound wilderness of Mademoiselle Frankenstein, a kiss can tilt the story off its axis. What looks like desire might be fear. What seems like comfort might carry poison.

Classic Gothic Kisses

Catherine and Heathcliff – Wuthering Heights
Their kiss isn’t sweet. It’s a storm. A collision. It’s the wild moor cracking open. When Catherine touches Heathcliff, she’s touching part of her soul—rage and ruin included.

Lucy and Dracula – Dracula
When Lucy bares her throat, it’s more than seduction—it’s surrender. His kiss isn’t about love. It’s transformation. Her softness becomes something feral. She floats between innocence and monstrosity from that moment forward.

Jane and Rochester – Jane Eyre
They kiss in a garden that’s about to burn. Jane knows better. But her lips meet his anyway—fire under frost. He’s still lying. Still hiding his mad wife in the attic. And yet that kiss contains all the ache and rebellion the book has been holding back.

Laura and Carmilla – Carmilla
The kisses come gently—soft and strange. Carmilla doesn’t need fangs to seduce. Her mouth brushes Laura’s skin like a prayer or a warning. Or both. Nothing is simple after that.

Modern Twists

Noemí and Howard – Mexican Gothic
There’s a moment in the decaying gloom of High Place when Noemí is kissed without consent—and it’s no ordinary horror. Something ancient is passed between their mouths. The kiss sets something loose. From that point on, the story pulses with rot and power.

Mabel and the Spirits – The Little Stranger
A kiss in a crumbling hallway. Not passionate, but desperate. Two people trying to feel something alive inside a house that seems determined to swallow everything human.

Mademoiselle Frankenstein: The Kiss as Creation

As a child, Océane sees a doctor lean down and press his mouth to another man’s—something the others whisper about later. But the man lives. It wasn’t passion. It was breath. It was life delivered mouth to mouth.

Years later, she remembers. And misremembers.

When she touches her Creature’s lips—not once but twice—it’s not for love. Not exactly. It’s to call something into being and then, to unravel everything, One gesture, two meanings. Familiar. Unfamiliar. A kiss that gives life. A kiss that destroys life.

A kiss, in the Gothic tradition, can bless or ruin. It lingers long after the lips have parted.

What about you? Which Gothic kiss has stayed with you the longest? The one that thrilled you—or unsettled you?

                           Enjoy “When Time Goes By” in the movie Casablanca. The final word on kisses.