Why do you like Gothic Romance? Please help me with my project!

[Charybdis]

I think the keyword we shouldn't forget is "romance". The main type is the gothic "novel", or even gothic "literature", which clearly Dracula belongs to, but bianca_notte's question was about the appeal of gothic romances.

While looking up the differences in the various gothic subgenres, I came across several interesting quotes which I'd like to share here.

The Encyclopedia of gothic literature in an excerpt from the chapter "female Gothic":

Female Gothic romance is a major strand of Gothic literature that expresses sympathy for a female protagonist who is oppressed by a VILLAIN or patriarchal authority figure through STALKING, abusive relationships, or outright persecution.

The Free Dictionary says:

Gothic romance, type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th cent. in England. Gothic romances were mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they were usually set against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was the forerunner of the type, which included the works of Ann Radcliffe Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis and Charles R. Maturin, and the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey satirizes Gothic romances. The influence of the genre can be found in some works of Coleridge, Le Fanu, Poe, and the Brontës. During the 1960s so-called Gothic novels became enormously popular in England and the United States. Seemingly modeled on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, these novels usually concern spirited young women, either governesses or new brides, who go to live in large gloomy mansions populated by peculiar servants and precocious children and presided over by darkly handsome men with mysterious pasts. Popular practitioners of this genre are Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Catherine Cookson, and Dorothy Eden.

A companion to the gothic sums up the Gothic romance conventions:

Those conventions involve not just allusions to, or interventions by, supernatural agencies, but a formal repertoire, which includes plot (labyrinthine, mysterious, driven by a traumatic or secret past), setting (castles and monasteries, ruins, tombs, sublime natural scenery), psychology (‘feminine’, passive, intensely inward and susceptible, versus a masculine, aristocratic will to power) and textuality (embedded poetic fragments, found manuscripts, the narrative's devolution onto its own cultural and material conditions.

I also read something interesting about the "damsel in distress" vs. "femme fatale" issue. It seems femme fatale have no place as protagonists in the female gothic romance, though I assume they could be in the male gothic romance genre. Here's what the Encyclopedia says:

The heroines tend to be powerless, either motherless or orphaned, sometimes low-born, and usually penniless. [...] Facing imprecise threats to body, sanity, and/or life, heroines of female Gothic works suffer extremes of cruelty and menace or enclosure in fetters, traps, slave quarters, female Gothic prisons, towers, asylums, cloisters, or premature burial. Typically, the weaklings cower and survive until they can be rescued from confinement. More motivated females seize the initiative to explore their cells and work out ways of freeing themselves.

And finally a quote from the Encyclopedia that I liked a lot myself, explaining the importance of the setting:

Female Gothic stories develop ATMOSPHERE by setting action within intricate architecture or over perplexing terrain

This confirms my belief, which was unfounded hitherto, that the house, in whatever shape or form, is in fact one of the main ingredients of the gothic romance. Wikipedia says "Romantic suspense involves an intrigue or mystery for the protagonists to solve." So if you add the main influence of the house and change "protagonists" into "female protagonist", you have a romantic gothic.

Now, I should quit before this post gets even longer...