Out of Crypts and Cobwebs

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to recent adaptations of Nosferatu, the 21st century has had little rest from vampires and other gothic monsters. This obsession shows no signs of slowing. However, it’s based on more than just a romanticization of the past. It reflects the unresolved feelings of the present.

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Following the release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein in 2025 and with Robert Eggers’ Werwulf set to release later this year, cinema is experiencing a growing gothic revival.

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Within this resurgence of monsters and the macabre, folkloric fear parallels real contemporary anxieties concerning gender roles, political unrest, and emerging technologies. These issues, which have persisted in varying forms throughout history, have similarly resulted in a continual interest in the gothic since its inception. 

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Gothic fiction, often characterized by the melancholy, grotesque, supernatural, and somewhat frightening, relies on the contrast within dichotomies to subvert oppressive ways of thinking and bring attention to issues within an idealized society. By combining love with terror, life with death, the beautiful with the grotesque, the gothic creates a tension that allows artists to confront existential fears. 

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It is much easier to direct emotions towards something physical, plainly observable, rather than something conceptual, moral, or otherwise intangible. The monster in gothic fiction serves as the incarnation of these fears, providing both the subject and viewers with somewhere to direct their anxieties. In much of gothic literature, the monster’s creator has the supernatural power to give new life, but doing so corrupts and defiles, causing the creator to become monstrous as well. Consequently, the victimizer becomes victimized, and the creator rejects his creation. Initially, the monster appears to take the form of man, but whether through physical or behavioral grotesqueries, the monster is subsequently understood to be “other.”

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The counterpart to the monster is often female, typically the only one to truly understand the complexities that drive the monster. While the monster and woman act as physical opposites, their inner conflicts mirror one another. Thus, the creation finds a new creator. This relationship between woman and monster, creator and creation, is based on a mutual helplessness to be seen as anything but “other.” For the woman, the monster is an embodiment of her view of self and the fears that come from a feminine experience of the world: decay, disgust, desire, and desolation.

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Despite the centuries that have passed since gothic fiction’s introduction and, with it, an expanding definition of womanhood, these worries persist. While we’ve attempted to mow down these fears time and time again, the roots remain, and the weeds regrow. Given the issues surrounding bodily autonomy, sexual violence, gender expression, and other gender-based inequalities that have come to light in recent years, this feeling of otherness is still present in our society. 

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Though we’ve donned the term modern and, with it, an idyllic sense of societal advancement, the conflicts that inspired gothic fiction three centuries ago are eerily similar to the ones we face today. As such, gothic cinema’s popularity, specifically amongst women and other marginalized groups, lends to the idea that the gothic can be a safe space to provide genuine critiques of exclusionary and restrictive social structures. 

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Vampire cinema in particular has historically been connected to women and the queer community through its use of the monster as a metaphor for nonconformative and repressed sexuality. Even Twilight, a largely heteronormative film including many principles of conservative Christianity, has amassed a substantial queer fanbase in recent years. Conversely, these same conservative ideals have seen a resurgence amongst young men.

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What makes the current gothic resurgence significant is not simply that these themes return, but that they return within new institutional and cultural contexts. Today, gothic motifs appear not only in cinema but across contemporary art. Dirty Looks, an exhibition led by Barbican Art Gallery curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven, exemplifies gothic themes of metabolisation, regeneration, the feminine experience, and the beauty of the grotesque by visualizing these concepts through fashion. Similarly, contemporary artists like Sophie Mei Birkin, Berlinde De Bruyckere and Helen Chadwick have developed multimedia practices that use materiality, mythology, scientific processes, and bodily distortions to explore similar ideas. 

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The accessibility of the gothic, both on-screen and in contemporary art galleries, facilitates a deeper understanding of the feelings and fears that have led to its perpetual fascination. It’s difficult to know for certain whether film directors understand what drives gothic cinema’s popularity or whether they are simply seizing on the genre’s current growing interest. However, until we've addressed why the inevitability of destruction and tragedy feels so hauntingly relevant today, the undead will undoubtedly continue to rise.

 

Perhaps this time we will heed the warnings of those ghosts.