In her essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826), Ann Radcliffe draws on Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in order to posit a distinction between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’. As Radcliffe's famous differentiation between the two terms goes:

Burke had argued that ‘To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary’ (Burke 1990: 54), and, following this, Radcliffe asks ‘where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?’ (Radcliffe 2004: 47). She presents the ghost scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth as an example of the transient ‘thrill’ that horror provides, while she praises the ghost scene of Hamlet as an example of the sublime ‘tranquility tinged with terror’ commended by Burke (Radcliffe 2004: 47), describing how in Hamlet ‘[e]very minute circumstance’ leading up to the appearance of the ghost on stage contributes to the success of the scene:

Although Radcliffe does not explicitly address the role of language here, I would argue that it is central to her account of the scene in two ways. First, language itself acts as an instrument of Gothic terror.