The term gothic can be understood in very abstract or particular ways. It connotes something dark, ancient, and dangerous, but the contemporary term “goth” has to do more with style or appearance. To some people, a person simply dressed in black would be goth, whereas to others, goths take oppositional darkness to an over the top extreme with high contrast makeup, frills, fishnets and other deviant flare. Gothic can be presented as flawlessly beautiful or include decadent, campy trashiness. It thrives on contradiction. Goths are simultaneously serious as timeless death and as ridiculous as a clumsy teenager trying to find themself. In the right dim, foggy settings they could be horrifying, but by the light of day on a suburban street or shopping mall, goths retain a clownish quality. What makes goths and The Gothic that much more complicated is an enduring tradition that has stayed with us for about 1,600 years.
To briefly go into the history, in the fourth century, a civilisation of northern Europeans called The Goths laid waste to The Roman Empire, establishing control of what is now Italy and Spain for hundreds of years. They were known for being terrifying, brutal, and perhaps most of all Other. The ethnic connotations related to The Goths suggested a racial otherness initially, which has become far more abstract, but still persists today. The Gothic is something different from mainstream, cultural norms--this can clearly still be applied in terms of race, but also in perceiving other identity groups that do not fit in neatly anywhere.
About a thousand years later, the term gothic was applied to European architecture, most commonly seen in churches. Although these religious spaces are innocuous now, in the twelfth century they were cutting edge. Gothic came to be defined by massive, imposing heights, complex engineering, decorative detail, and the wonder of god. The style is still associated with architecture in imagery of grand estates and spooky bell towers. A movie like The Haunting (1963), which is based on a Shirley Jackson novel, is a definitive example of fiction that fuses gothic specifically into a place. Hill House is an imposing architectural design that appears to be a living--or undead--being.
The eighteenth century brought the term into the realm of literature, which is nearing the purpose for why I am writing about The Gothic today. Shirley Jackson descends from a line of authors that began with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, etc. They wrote long, brooding novels full of existential anxiety and religious doubt. A florid pornographer like The Marquis de Sade associated gothic with sexuality and extreme corporeal acts, be they actual or fantastic. This focus on the body continued a few decades later with Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley’s mad science resurrection novel. It has since been adapted countless times for the stage and screen. Frankenstein is still one of the most popular pieces of writing to be taught in classrooms, from elementary to doctoral programs. It is one of many gothic tales that continued to proliferate from the nineteenth century to present day. The genre tends to deal in extremes of both the emotional and physical variety. In his book Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin, Richard Davenport-Hines writes, “Goths unfortunately seldom rank sanity or calm among the highest aesthetic achievements… They like carefully staged extremism, and vicarious or strictly ritualized experiences of the dreadful Other. This taste connects with sado-masochism… Despite its interest in unbridled or extreme passions, revival gothic’s central focus was power relationships.” (8) Gothic deals with unhinged desires and the pressures they cause, often in a power struggle, be it gendered, familial, racial, class-based or otherwise.
We see this extremity in cinema from very early on, and it is frequently influenced by the literature leading up to it. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the endless cinematic renewal of the story, is another iconic mark on the genre. Universal Pictures’ rendition of Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi allowed for audiences to see a highly stylized performance of suave, menacing seduction, although the graphic nature of it remained a fantasy. The vampire is a figure that is intimidating and hypnotically attractive. Davenport-Hines’ inclusion of “excess” in his book title is appropriate for The Gothic. Lugosi’s bizarre, Eastern European version of irresistible masculinity is one example of this. Dracula equates sex, love, and desire with horror, murder, and death.
This continued down a particularly feminine path with films of the 1940s like Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944), and Dragonwyck (1946). The controlling man in these stories is often a patriarch, or a fatherly spouse, but his urgent brooding is often unpredictable and surprising. Rebecca tells the story of a working class girl (Joan Fontaine) who suddenly gets married to Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), a moody, ultra-rich man, who compels her to move to Manderley, a massive estate. He spends a lot of time thinking about his former wife Rebecca, who died at sea. To provide an example of extreme emotion in the form of a spoiler, it turns out that Maxim hated Rebecca, although his new, young wife thought just the opposite until that revelation. Sometimes hate draws us to people just as much as love does, consuming our thoughts and potential actions.
If there is a definitive gothic work of cinema it may well be Ken Russell’s 1986 film that uses the genre as its very name. Gothic is significant because it displays so many of the tropes and related preoccupations, while also literally telling the story of Mary Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein. By now it is a mythologised tale that Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband Percy Shelley went to visit their friend Lord George Byron one night to party and tell ghost stories. Mary’s story ended up turning into Frankenstein, which had enormous influence and staying power. To say nothing of the film’s plot, it ends with a tourist boat in the contemporary 1980s, sailing past Byron’s estate, a guide telling the group of people the tale of the novel’s invention. The events of that infamous night are the subject of Russell’s film which is presented in a surreal and decadent manner.
Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) is a wealthy, anarchic libertine who leads a relatively outrageous life, considering the time period. His excesses are drug-fuelled, intellectual, and sexual. His bourgeois friends The Shelleys (Natasha Richardson and Julian Sands) come to visit with their friend Claire (Myriam Cyr), and after ingesting some wine and opium, things get a bit crazy. Surreal animal imagery keeps turning up, possibly evoking Luis Buñuel for some viewers--a goat inside the house, a fish flopping around in an empty bird feeder, a random snake, baboons in a cage, a pig head that turns into that of the attendant Doctor Polidori (Timothy Spall). Percy asks Polidori, “Do you believe that dreams can explain and illustrate the waking state of the mind?” Russell is clearly equating The Gothic with abstract mental states inside the characters, just as much as the mansion. Cinematographer Michael Southon’s camera drips with mischievous eroticism, bordering on goofiness. We get an orgy, and homosexual desire between Byron and Percy--“poets are for each other.” Later on, Polidori is shamed because of his queerness, showing how acceptable sexuality is all part of a hypocritical powerplay that somehow makes sense from a libertine’s perspective. Gothic is an early-nineteenth century party movie about the glorious and hazardous terrain of sex, drugs, and violence.
The excess of these vices were still very much a part of our culture when the movie was made in the 1980s. That era had a whole gothic revival of its own, which was present in contemporary music and cinema. The attention to history (through the eyes of ancient vampires) can be seen in something like Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) which updates all the goth style--leather, latex, sunglasses indoors, and Bauhaus on stage. David Bowie easily shifted from glam to goth for the part, across from Catherine Deneuve in her best role since Belle de Jour (1967). The relation of cinematic style to popular music continues in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (aka Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987), with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds serenading our lovers in an ornate Berlin club. It tells a story of melancholy angels which feels both timeless and very specifically set in the divided city at that era. Ken Russell continued with similar themes after Gothic in a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story Lair of the White Worm (1988). It contrasts the prevailing mood with Irish jigs, but the goth style of the time, which very much took from BDSM subcultures, is still there in the form of Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe), a dominant, serpentine, femme fatale. By the mid-1990s, the commodification and saturation of goth culture reached a memorable stage with The Crow (1994). It is certainly not the best gothic (or just “goth”) movie ever made, but it tends to stay in people’s minds just as much for the soundtrack as for the visuals. It mixed dark rock and industrial, like The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Machines of Loving Grace, with more generally popular alternative rock of the time like The Stone Temple Pilots and Rage Against the Machine. The marketing of the soundtrack made the movie just as iconic as the gloomy and sordid comic book aesthetics.
The Crow tells the story of Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), a murdered rock musician who comes back to life to avenge the death of himself and his girlfriend Shelley (Sofia Shinas). This time the gothic extremity of the movie has to do with love rather than sex. Only people who feel the purest and most devoted love for someone else can come back with the unexpected help of a supernatural crow familiar. Unlike many gothic tales that stew in ambivalence, there are specific polarities of good and evil. Instead of having the hedonistic qualities of Lord Byron, Draven is a haunting model of virtue and moderation--no morphine or tobacco under The Crow’s watch! Meanwhile, the ensemble of villains are very bad, swallowing bullets with whiskey chasers in between raping and killing sprees. Michael Wincott plays Top Dollar, a master villain so effective that he basically played the same role the next year in Strange Days (1995). As he says at one point, “Disorder, chaos, anarchy--now that’s fun!” He could easily add the subjects of Davenport-Hines’ book: excess, horror, evil, and ruin.
Watching The Crow now, as opposed to during childhood, the movie is easily identifiable as a piece of torrid, pulpy trash. This is evident from the very first shot of computer generated fires blazing across Detroit on Devil’s Night. This is not meant as a slight on director Alex Proyas or anyone else who worked on the movie. The Crow succeeds on mood, especially through the lens of nostalgic sentiment. But as Davenport-Hines says, “Schlock has always been a part of gothic too.” (5) The movie is not necessarily low budget, but does exploit current fashion and stylistic trends. To use a mass generalization, it is Gothsploitation. Later on, he continues, “Even in the direst extremities of the gothic imagination the evasiveness of burlesque and parody is never far away.” (21) In order to succeed, The Crow is by nature campy and formulaic. This can be seen in the polarities of the dramatic conflict, as well as the one-liners that Lee, Wincott, and many other performers get to say. We see this when Draven lays out the opening monologue of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” as he walks into a pawnshop. If you couldn’t tell by The Cure and Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack, or by our hero’s shirt fortified by bondage tape, Poe is here to let us know that what we are watching is undeniably goth. We even see the burlesque irony in the name of Draven’s band, Hangman’s Joke. Regardless of the serious or tongue-in-cheek qualities of The Crow, the film has longevity because of the real life gothic qualities during shooting. Brandon Lee was accidentally killed by a bullet from one of the prop guns on set. He has become an immortal figure defined by this character he played.
This atmospheric mixture of high and low art is present in a variety of films from the late twentieth century. Tim Burton made a whole career of it, by taking elements of German Expressionist art of the 1920s and diluting it into Hollywood strictures to create Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and a variety of other increasingly gaudy productions. There are other great examples from the time period like Julie Taymor’s magnificent Shakespeare adaptation of Titus (1999). It goes back to the literal root of subject with a story about competing families of Romans and Goths. The chaos and glamor of that early time period is filtered through the decadent influence of Fellini and the inclusion of modern, anachronistic technologies and aesthetics. But still, there are so many ways to interpret gothic cinema. Gilda Williams writes, “Gothic remains non-, anti- and counter- by definition, always asserting that the conventional values of life and enlightenment are actually less instructive than darkness and death. The Gothic returns, in sum, as an enduring term particularly serviceable in periods of crisis--today as it did in the late eighteenth century, as an escape valve for the political, artistic and technological crises underway.” (19) The term is infinitely renewable, and can be applied across all cultures. The twentieth century continued to give us particularly gothic tales that deal with individual perception, and how mental turmoil casts a shadow over that perception. The second part of my writing will cover a number of films, but in particular the exterminating gothic force seen in Walerian Borowczyk’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981) and Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn (2023).
Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. New York: North Point Press, 1998.
Williams, Gilda “Introduction//How Deep Is Your Goth? Gothic Art in the Contemporary.” The Gothic. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007.