There’s a kind of building you want to walk into and don’t, a cathedral at the top of the stairs with the doors open and nothing inside you can name, and you stand there a second too long because some part of you wants to go in anyway. Bloodborne is a whole city of those. FromSoftware made it for the PlayStation 4 in 2015, with Hidetaka Miyazaki directing, and set it in Yharnam, a Gothic city run by a church that heals people with blood.
So what is Bloodborne’s architecture based on? Victorian Gothic, with a twist built into it. The developers said as much on the record, and the Victorian Gothic they meant is a real thing with real pictures, so here it is as the Victorians drew it, next to their words.
What is Bloodborne’s architecture based on?
The first thing came from Masaaki Yamagiwa, a producer on the game from Sony’s Japan Studio. At GameStart in Singapore in October 2014, PlayStation LifeStyle reported, he said the Victorian setting was “inspired partly by classic versions of the story of Dracula.”
The second came in March 2015, just before launch, when Giuseppe Nelva of DualShockers visited FromSoftware in Tokyo. Masanori Waragai, the level designer who had made Anor Londo in Dark Souls, told him the map design “includes real architecture with a sort of twist that fits the game’s environment,” and that the team hoped the twist would make players curious about what was around every corner.
The city took three years to design, with Miyazaki giving the team keywords for each area and working almost like an art director. And the lead character designer described the setting as Victorian, a time of a lot of economic expansion with “a lot of anger and suffering” underneath it.
Critics saw the same city. Kevin VanOrd’s GameSpot review that March said Yharnam and the land around it “resemble 19th-century London more than they do the Souls games’ dark medieval locales.”
Victorian London, as Gustave Doré engraved it
The pictures of that London, by someone who walked it, are Gustave Doré’s. In 1868 the journalist Blanchard Jerrold proposed a portrait of London, the publisher Grant & Co signed Doré to come over from Paris for three months a year, and the two walked it together, often with plain-clothes policemen beside them, from the docks to Whitechapel. It came out in 1872 as London: A Pilgrimage, Doré’s drawings cut into wood by a team of engravers.
Over London by Rail is the plate to set beside Yharnam. You’re up on a railway viaduct, looking through one of its arches and down into the backs of a row of brick houses, every yard walled and full of people, washing on the lines, chimneys stacked all the way up, and a train crossing another viaduct at the top. Doré keeps almost all of it dark and puts the light on the long strip of yards running away from you, and on the people in them.
That is the character designer’s line in one frame: the expansion riding over everything on its arches, and the anger and suffering packed into the yards underneath.
Gothic Revival: Pugin’s town in 1440 and 1840
The other half of Victorian Gothic is the Gothic, and some Victorians argued about it like religion, because for them it was. In 1836, at twenty-four, the Catholic convert Augustus Pugin published Contrasts, etched plates setting a fifteenth-century building beside the same kind of building in his own day, the old one winning every time. His biographer Rosemary Hill says it “redefined architecture as a moral force,” and she’s blunt about the method: “The drawings were all calculatedly unfair.”
For the second edition in 1841 he did it to a whole town. In 1440 it’s a walled town on a river, a chapel on the bridge, and sixteen places in the key, nearly every one a church, chapel or religious house. In 1840 the abbey is a ruin next to an iron works, a jail laid out like a wheel fills the foreground, factory chimneys stand where the spires were, and the key runs from the Gas Works and the Lunatic Asylum to the Socialist Hall of Science.
For Pugin a skyline of spires was a town that prayed, and a skyline of chimneys was a town that had stopped. Yharnam keeps his equation and turns it over. It’s a city of spires run by its church, and the horror of it is finding out what that church has been doing.
The twist: Mannerism and the fractured mountain
Waragai’s word for what happens to that real architecture was a twist, and the clearest description of the twist is Ario Barzan’s, in an essay for Kill Screen in July 2015, “Understanding the sublime architecture of Bloodborne.” He calls Yharnam Mannerist, the word art historians use for Michelangelo and the sixteenth-century artists who bent the classical rules. His example is Michelangelo’s vestibule for the Laurentian Library in Florence, where the consoles, brackets that normally sit high up and carry weight, have been pushed down into the corners and hold up nothing. Every piece is right and in the wrong place.
In Yharnam, Barzan writes, that small principle “has exploded into a dense, fractured mountain of anomalies,” and he names them. Gothic spires on the railing of a great bridge, where you’d expect them on the pinnacles of a church. A clock tower that “lurches further out the higher up it goes, as if its foundation has been inverted.” An ornate gable rising out of the ground. And then everything at once, “as spires are piled onto innumerable balustrades, arches, and buttresses.”
The most famous Victorian Gothic clock tower, the one everyone calls Big Ben, was Pugin’s last design, and he drew it to stand straight. Here is a plain Gothic church on a bridge, given Barzan’s twists one at a time.
What the twist does to you is the point of it. Barzan ties it to the sublime, Edmund Burke’s “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” and to Kant on walking into St Peter’s in Rome and feeling the imagination reach its limit. The city he describes is a whole skyline of the sublime, reaching for the sky and looking ready to collapse under its own weight. He traces the appetite back to the 1700s, when artists “lusted after an irregular and fanciful past, to the extent that artificial ruins were erected.” The Romantic painters painted real ones.
The ruin under the moon: Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oakwood
Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood in 1809 and 1810, from studies of a real ruin, Eldena Abbey near Greifswald. It hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin beside his Monk by the Sea.
It’s a funeral. A line of monks carries a coffin through the snow toward the doorway of a ruined Gothic church, two candles to see by, past a grave that’s just been dug, a few crosses faint in the snow around it. The bottom third of the painting is already night. Only the top of the ruin and the tips of the bare oaks still catch the last of the setting sun, and a thin crescent moon has come up over all of it. It’s the Gothic as a grave, a church with no roof still being used for what churches are for. Seventy years later a draped coffin crosses still water toward an island of graves in Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.
In Bloodborne the city comes undone under a moon too, the Blood Moon. Friedrich shows how little of that dread needs the game at all: a ruined church, the light going, and people carrying their dead toward it anyway.
Dracula, Cainhurst Castle and the Vilebloods
Yamagiwa’s word was Dracula. Bram Stoker published it in 1897, a novel told in diaries, letters and newspaper cuttings. In the second chapter the young solicitor Jonathan Harker, a guest at the Count’s castle in Transylvania, finds a library of English books, the London Directory, the almanacs, the Army and Navy Lists. The Count walks in and says what he wants.
“I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”
Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897, chapter II
That’s Victorian Gothic in one sentence, something ancient and hungry looking at the modern city and wanting in, and the crowded streets he’s talking about are the ones Doré drew twenty-five years earlier.
The novel is full of blood used as medicine, too. When the Count starts on Lucy Westenra, Van Helsing fights to keep her alive with transfusion after transfusion from the men around her, and in the end Harker joins a group of men led by Van Helsing who hunt the Count down. Put that beside a city whose church heals people with blood, where the one you play is a hunter, and the Dracula in it isn’t hard to find.
Then the game hands you an invitation. The Cainhurst Summons, found in Iosefka’s Clinic, is “an old blood-stained summons, inviting an honored guest to the forsaken Castle Cainhurst. Rather bafflingly, it is addressed to you. Do not hesitate; the stagecoach leaves from Hemwick crossing.” Stoker’s Count writes to Harker the same way: “At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me.” Take it to Hemwick Charnel Lane and a horse-drawn carriage comes for you, a parallel Cian Maher laid out for Bloody Disgusting in 2018. At the end of the ride is a frozen castle of nobles who drink blood, and on its throne a masked queen who introduces herself as “Annalise, Queen of Castle Cainhurst. Ruler of the Vilebloods, and sworn enemy of the church.”
The Vilebloods hunt hunters, because the blood dregs they prize turn up in a hunter’s blood, and the queen takes those dregs as offerings, the item text says, “so that she may one day bear the Child of Blood, the next Vileblood heir.” The church answered with its Executioners under Martyr Logarius, and their wheel was “used to slaughter the Vilebloods in Cainhurst. Bathed in pools of their blood, and forever steeped in their ire.” A blood-drinking noble house in a castle you reach by coach, hunted by men who serve a church: that is Stoker’s plot, with the hunters’ church holding the bloodier record of the two.
Why a church built over horror feels holy
In 1917 the German theologian Rudolf Otto published Das Heilige, The Idea of the Holy. He wanted a word for the part of holiness that has nothing to do with being good, the part you feel before you understand it, and he made one from the Latin numen, divine power. He called the numinous “wholly other,” and he described it as a mystery that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. He also said you can’t really teach it, only wake it up in someone.
Otto’s word fits the cathedral at the top of the stairs. The numinous is different from awe, because awe can be clean, a mountain or a night sky, and the numinous always has the fear left in it. The Gothic is built to produce it, all that height pulling your eye up while the dark at the bottom keeps you where you are, and Yharnam piles it up until it tips over. Its beasts are its own people, and Barzan gives the sharpest case of the place playing on you: the statues of Yahar’gul with their mouths open in silent screams, which “as the player may come to suspect” might be petrified civilians.
OBSERVATION, The Audience of My Decisions puts that feeling on paper. A single blue eye opens across a whole sky of stars above a black silhouette in profile, with fire coming up from below. Yharnam’s scholars prayed for exactly that, Micolash calling out “grant us eyes, grant us eyes” in the Nightmare of Mensis, and the print shows Otto’s numinous from the figure’s side: something enormous is watching, and it isn’t going to say what it thinks.
Frequently asked questions
What is Bloodborne’s architecture based on?
Victorian Gothic. The producer Masaaki Yamagiwa tied the setting partly to Dracula, and the level designer Masanori Waragai called the map real architecture with a sort of twist: Gothic spires, balustrades and buttresses piled up in the wrong places.
Is Bloodborne based on Dracula?
Partly. Yamagiwa said its Victorian setting was inspired partly by classic versions of the story of Dracula, and the game has its own Castle Dracula: Cainhurst, home of the blood-drinking Vilebloods and Queen Annalise, reached by a carriage the way Jonathan Harker reaches the Count.
Is Bloodborne gothic or cosmic horror?
Both. The setting and the architecture are Victorian Gothic, and from launch critics also read it as Lovecraftian. Eurogamer’s Jeffrey Matulef wrote in April 2015 that “it’s clear that Bloodborne owes a lot to cult horror author H.P. Lovecraft.” The Victorian Gothic is the city you arrive in, and the cosmic horror is what’s waiting deeper in.
Is Yharnam based on a real city?
Not one city. GameSpot’s review said Yharnam resembles 19th-century London, the London Doré engraved in 1872 and Stoker’s Count longed for in 1897.
Read next
- The paintings inside Elden Ring, Bosch’s hell panel, Doré’s giants and Friedrich’s lonely tree.
- Why Isle of the Dead feels haunted, Böcklin’s five islands, from Rachmaninoff to Alien.
- Fuseli’s The Nightmare, sleep paralysis, the word, and Frankenstein.
- Chiaroscuro in film, the hard light and deep shadow you see in Doré, traced from painting to the screen.
References
- Gerard Cueto, “GameStart 2014: Bloodborne Interview With Masaaki Yamagiwa,” PlayStation LifeStyle, October 29, 2014: web.archive.org
- Giuseppe Nelva, “Bloodborne: Lots of Info on Gameplay, Design, World Size, PS4 Development and More from Tokyo Event,” DualShockers, March 16, 2015: dualshockers.com
- Ario Barzan, “Understanding the sublime architecture of Bloodborne,” Kill Screen, July 29, 2015: killscreen.com
- Kevin VanOrd, “Bloodborne Review,” GameSpot, March 23, 2015: web.archive.org
- Jeffrey Matulef, “How Bloodborne honours the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft,” Eurogamer, April 10, 2015: eurogamer.net
- Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage, Grant & Co, 1872; Over London by Rail, engraved by Adolphe Pannemaker, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection: collections.britishart.yale.edu
- A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, first edition 1836 (archive.org) and second edition, London, Charles Dolman, 1841, with the plate “Catholic town in 1440” and “The same town in 1840” (archive.org). Rosemary Hill, “Pugin, God’s architect,” The Guardian, February 24, 2012: theguardian.com
- Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1809 to 1810, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: commons.wikimedia.org
- Bram Stoker, Dracula, Archibald Constable and Company, 1897: gutenberg.org
- Cainhurst Summons, Blood Dreg, Logarius’ Wheel and Annalise, Queen of the Vilebloods, Bloodborne Wiki (item and dialogue text): Cainhurst Summons, Blood Dreg, Logarius’ Wheel, Annalise, Micolash
- Cian Maher, “The Influence of Bram Stoker on ‘Bloodborne’,” Bloody Disgusting, October 4, 2018: bloody-disgusting.com
- Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, 1917; The Idea of the Holy, translated by John W. Harvey, Oxford University Press, 1923: archive.org
