From Karl Marx’s vampire to Warren Buffett’s moat, the crumbling gothic castle has been capitalism’s favorite metaphor for 250 years

Markets are ushering in a particularly gothic Halloween as the AI trade exposes a crumbling aristocratic pile of early 21st century capitalism. Wall Street has been describing itself in castle-adjacent terms for years.

Jamie Dimon has long talked to JPMorgan shareholders about the bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” His 2015 letter set aside a section to answer the question of what the phrase even meant. By 2021, he’d added a second castle word, warning that “the moats that protect this company are not particularly deep.”

The moat came from Warren Buffett. In a 1999 Fortune article with Carol Loomis, he argued that the key to investing is a company’s competitive advantage and how durable it is, and that the businesses worth owning have wide moats around them.

The gothic novel’s favorite picture of danger is a castle falling apart, and for about 250 years the two have traded images: the castle and the moat, the vampire, the creature built in a lab. This Halloween season has them rushing to the front of the conversation, with a two-day rout in tech stocks on Thursday and Friday turning on whether the AI giants’ moats will hold, as gothic horror booms on bookshelves and movie screens.

Horror took 15.5% of the domestic box office in 2025, according to The Numbers, and U.S. horror book sales rose 7% through the first nine months of 2025, per Circana BookScan, while adult fiction overall grew just 1%. The New York Times asked Friday why every book is gothic now, with publishers putting the label on everything from family sagas to space operas, and several film critics commenting that Nathan Fielder’s smash-hit business-scandal documentaryYou Can See Everything is a twisted, even gothic romance in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock.

The moats get tested

The selling started with Alphabet. The stock fell 12.6% Thursday, wiping out roughly half a trillion dollars in market value, after the Google parent’s quarterly report. Revenue from the core search unit fell short, partly because of the popularity of less-profitable “AI mode” searches and the company burning cash faster than expected. Its free cash flow came in at negative $9.1 billion, against the negative $2.23 billion analysts expected, per FactSet.

The S&P 500’s worst performer was software giant ServiceNow, which dropped 27% the same day on slowing revenue growth and disappointing guidance. By Friday morning, it was Amazon’s and Intel’s turn, with Intel down roughly 25% before the opening bell. Big Tech lost nearly $900 billion in market value after another sharp rise in AI spending in the third quarter, the Financial Times calculated. Reddit, whose shares fell more than 22% premarket Friday, is pulling up the drawbridge: it’s moving to a logged-in experience as AI eats search.

The irony is spooking investors. AI is eating into the businesses that throw off the cash, and the cash is going into AI anyway. The hyperscalers have raised $326 billion in stock and bonds this year to pay for the build-out, more than triple 2025, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.

The question underneath it is the one Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok put to clients the morning Alphabet fell. “With AI disruption potentially around the corner, there is a lot of discussion about moats at the moment,” he wrote in his Daily Spark note Thursday.

He built on finance professor Aswath Damodaran, the “dean of valuation,” who compiled a list of sources of competitive advantage, including brand strength, switching costs, network effects, cost advantages and legal protection. Then he boiled it down to an AI moat checklist of three questions: does the company own data its rivals can’t get, is its product part of how customers do their jobs every day, and can it charge more without customers walking away?

Judging by that third test, the companies selling AI don’t seem to measure up. OpenAI’s new GPT-6.1 Terra model costs up to half as much per token as the version before it. An index from expense-management firm Ramp, which looked at what companies actually pay Anthropic and OpenAI, shows token prices down roughly 35% since the end of June, in what Axios called a price war.

The companies paying for AI aren’t getting much back yet, either. In an Oct. 24 note, Slok sent a tremor through Wall Street terminals with an argument that AI “has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.” Revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the Magnificent Seven and flat for the rest of the S&P 500, he noted, and mainstream companies are starting to treat token spending as a cost center that weighs on margins rather than a source of growth.

The first castle was a fake

Xavier Aldana Reyes, a researcher at the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, told the Times that interest in the gothic tends to surge during periods of social anxiety and political turmoil. Literary agent Mary C. Moore put the genre’s subject more bluntly, telling the paper that “Gothics are all about exposing what is rotten at the core of something shiny/wealthy.”

The genre was invented by a scion of wealth who knew the old order from inside and drew a salary without working at all. Horace Walpole was the son of UK Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and hisThe Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. 

He passed it off as a translation of an obscure Italian work, found in the library of an old Catholic family in northern England and printed at Naples in 1529. But it was really his dramatization of the aristocratic system being usurped by the “greedy” new bourgeoisie, per a 2014 paper by Çankaya University’s Ertuğrul Koç and Neslihan Atcan Altan. The literary historian Robert Miles has written that the modern novel itself was understood to have been revolutionized by print technology, which made the circulating library possible, and explains Walpole’s pre-modern faux origin story.

We all know which gothic tales came next. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley said the idea came to her in June 1816 after she overheard Lord Byron and Percy Shelley discussing galvanic experiments. A 2018 piece republished by Live Science made the comparison directly: electrical life stirred up the same range of arguments then that AI does now.

Karl Marx made the trade official. In Capital, in 1867, he wrote that capital is “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour,” an image that turns up across 30 years of his writing. Bram Stoker’s Dracula created the great modern vampire myth in 1897, landing as a depression in agriculture threatened the fortunes and estates of Britain’s noblemen, even as a cheap agricultural products flooded in from booming American farms.

The literary critic Franco Moretti read the count as a businessman. In a 1982 essay in New Left Review, he described Stoker’s Dracula as a rational entrepreneur who invests his gold to expand his dominion and conquer the City of London.

The undead on Wall Street

In more recent times, Matt Taibbi’s 2009 Rolling Stone story “The Great American Bubble Machine” called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” The line stuck well enough that then-Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein conceded in August of that year that the article had “tapped into something.”

Economists got their own monster: zombie firms. Bank for International Settlements researchers Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hofmann define them as companies at least 10 years old whose earnings haven’t covered their interest payments for three straight years. Across 14 advanced economies, the zombie share of listed non-financial companies rose from 4% in the late 1980s to 15% in 2017. The researchers found that weak banks that roll over loans instead of writing them off keep zombie companies on life support, and that lower interest rates tend to push the zombie share up.

The newest candidates are in software. PitchBook counted $131 billion of leveraged loans priced below 80 cents on the dollar, a common threshold for distress and the most since May 2020. Software companies account for 32% of those distressed loans while making up just 12% of the index, and 84% of stressed software companies are backed by private equity. These are castles that can’t pay their own upkeep, kept standing by somebody else’s money, the dollar-princess arrangement with a credit line instead of a dowry.

The anxiety is big business for the haunted boom of 2026. Book publisher Zando launched a horror imprint, Evil Twin, planning six to eight titles a year. In Hollywood, Warner Bros.’ R-rated body-horror film Clayface opened No. 1 the weekend of Oct. 23 with about $24 million, according to The Numbers.

The machines are writing the stuff now, too. Inkfluence AI, a fiction-writing platform, says 3,929 horror books were started on it in the 180 days to Sept. 12, with haunted-house and ghost premises leading at about a third.

Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com