The central and indispensable element of gothic horror is fear. Gothic horror explodes what we know to be certain and true so that anything imaginable may happen. This chapter looks at three aspects of gothic horror. It begins with Freud's notion of the 'Uncanny' and its relationship with what Freud calls 'common reality'. Using extracts from two texts, Dennis Wheatley's The Satanist (1960) and James Herbert's Moon (1985), the chapter examines the importance of 'reality-frames' in establishing the conventions that the gothic throws into doubt. It moves on to a reading of Stephen King's Carrie (1974), where horror is looked as a kind of excess which transgresses and overthrows the borders of convention. Finally, in a reading of Complicity (1993), Iain Banks' tale in the tradition of the masculine gothic, the chapter looks at the role of the double in generating multiple, new 'posthuman' social identities.