Anyone out in Britain’s city centres over the weekend will have noted a copious amount of black eyeliner and dark lipstick on some deathly-pale young faces. The association of Halloween with ghosts, monsters and ghouls has long provided an opportunity for goth culture and its morbid preoccupations to briefly go mainstream. Each October since 1994, Whitby’s links to Bram Stoker’s Dracula have seen it play host to a benign invasion of black-clad gloomsters for a music festival.
This time round, however, there are signs that the goth aesthetic – musically and visually embodied by 1980s bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus – is enjoying a more substantial revival. Wednesday, last year’s Tim Burton-directed Addams Family reboot, enjoyed surprising viral success on TikTok. This year, publishers have put out a series of hefty volumes examining a subculture that became home for thousands of sensitive, small-town misfits with a taste for melancholy.
John Robb, a former singer with the post-punk band the Membranes, has delivered The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth, which is more than 500 pages long. The novelist Cathi Unsworth has written the well-received Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth. Most recently Lol Tolhurst, a founding member of the Cure, has navigated his way through the ruins and unquiet graves of late 20th-century popular culture to produce the more straightforwardly titled Goth.In truth, the genre’s lugubrious influence seems to have been resurgent for some time in the night-time economy. It is highly visible, for example, in fashionable clubs such as London’s Wraith and Monster Queen. But there may be wider reasons why a fascination with the darker side of life is speaking to the zeitgeist.
In his study, Tolhurst quotes the Irish academic Tracy Fahey, who argues that “Gothic as a mode never existed in a vacuum”. The traumatic upheaval and unrest entailed by the Industrial Revolution and its new technologies gave us Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The bleak social landscape of early 1980s Britain engendered an alternative music scene in which goth groups plumbed the depths of existential angst. Today, the deepening climate emergency, dystopian fears regarding the rise of artificial intelligence and a wave of geopolitical crises are giving new generations reasons to view the future with trepidation.
On Halloween, though, it seems appropriate to dwell on another dimension of a style that rejoices in theatre and melodrama. Goth has always offered outstanding opportunities to glam it up, albeit in a saturnine kind of way. Images contained in yet another new history – this one devoted to the legendary 80s goth haunt the Batcave – record an unmistakable joie de vivre among clubgoers. Readers of a certain vintage will recall witnessing the angular, handsome menace of Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy singing Bela Lugosi’s Dead in the early 80s film The Hunger. Generation Z goths may gaze admiringly at the Essex alt-rock singer, Cassyette, who boasts a “massive neo-goth futuristic bat-wing situation” tattooed on her back. If goth ever makes a major comeback, it’s going to be worth watching.