Gothic haunted house at night: fog, moonlight, warm windows
Prompt for Midjourney: a gothic mansion exterior at night with ground fog, moonlight and warm-lit windows. No photo needed.
The prompt
Exterior wide shot of a [ARCHITECTURE STYLE: Victorian Gothic] mansion standing alone on a low hill, seen from the end of a wet gravel driveway. Structure: three stories, steep gables, a corner tower with a cracked spire, a sagging iron fence in the foreground. Light: full moon behind thin cloud is the only key light, cold blue on the roof slates and on the fog; the windows [WINDOW POSITION: on the top floor, left of the tower] are lit from inside with warm candle light near 2000K and are the single warm accent in the frame. Air: knee-high ground fog drifting left to right, bare [TREE TYPE: oak] branches crossing the roofline, [WEATHER DETAIL: light drizzle] in the moonlight. Camera: 35mm lens, eye level, house centered, upper third of the frame is sky. Grade: desaturated blue-gray, low key, most of the frame in shadow, fine texture in wet stone and peeling wood. --ar 16:9 --no people, text, watermark
What you get
The frame is mostly dark. A three-story mansion sits on a rise about 120 feet away, its roofline black against a gray-blue sky, and the moon reads as a pale disc behind cloud rather than a light source you can see. Ground fog sits at knee height and hides the bottom of the driveway, so the house looks like it is floating. Two or three windows glow warm amber and are the only color in the image; everything else is blue-gray. Wet slate and peeling paint hold visible texture.
What breaks. First, the model lifts the night into blue daylight: the fog glows, shadows go flat and the moon looks like a low sun. Fix: keep "low key, most of the frame in shadow" in the prompt and delete any word like "bright", "glowing" or "cinematic" you added on top. Second, the count of lit windows is ignored and the whole facade lights up like a hotel. Fix: replace [WINDOW POSITION] with a position, not a number — "on the top floor, left of the tower" works, "three windows" does not. Third, the tower multiplies: you get two or three spires and the house drifts toward a church. Fix: drop the gables from the Structure line, name the tower once, and do not add plural words like spires or turrets.
Use it as a blog header, a party invitation background, a video thumbnail or a looping video still. At 16:9 there is dark space on the left for text.
