This work dissects popular examples from the gothic literary and cinematic canon, exposing the inverted comic paradigm within each text. Rooting his study in comedy as theoretically conceived by Suzanne Langer, C.L. Barber and Mikhail Bakhtin, Morgan analyses the physical and mythological nature of horror in inverted comic terms, identifying a biologically grounded mythos of horror. Motifs such as sinister loci, languishment, masquerade, and subversion of sensual perception are contextualized here as embedded in an organic reality, resonating with biological motives and consequences.