Cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic can be effectively investigated using the heuristic tool provided by the category of the Gothic. The Gothic provides a research umbrella under which scholars from a range of humanities and social science disciplines can marshal their resources in an international and interdisciplinary effort to understand the current crisis and its manifold cultural dimensions. This is possible because the Gothic is more than a mere literary genre. It is a category that crosses boundaries of time and culture, for it both captures and allows us to express a viscerally felt and unavoidable dimension of human experience that otherwise often eludes articulation in intellectual form.