In these dark times of Charlie-xcx-Jacob-Elordi-Dubai-Chocolate-Labubu-Wuthering-Heights it would be oh so easy to claim gothic is dead and has finally met its dawn.
Our world is haunted perhaps now more than ever.
Every decade declares the death of the Gothic, and every decade it rises, paler, prettier and sometimes perhaps a little skinnier. The Victorians had séances. We have algorithms. Both summon that weird situationship you thought you got rid of years ago in your parents’ backyard.
This isn’t death: it’s transformation.
The Gothic has always been a reaction (a recoil, really) from whatever its present moment insists is progress. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it rose from the smog of industrial modernity, a fever-dream response to the age of steam, empire, and reason. While Britain was busy quantifying everything (land, labor, people) the Gothic whispered, “Ah, but what of the soul?” Empires built railways through graveyards and called it progress. The Gothic was the whisper that asked who was buried beneath. The ghost was always the colonised, the consumed, the disappeared.
In Dublin, where Stoker was born, graves weren’t metaphorical. The famine still haunted the soil, and the empire’s ghosts were not safely locked in castles: they walked the streets in daylight. Ireland has always known that the supernatural is political: banshees wailing for the dispossessed, revenants standing in for the unburied dead. Stoker didn’t invent the Gothic; he translated an Irish sense of haunting into an English genre.
Dracula isn’t a monster from elsewhere; he’s a reflection of our systems : economic, erotic, imperial — taken to their logical conclusion.
Those castles and crypts weren’t just spooky décor; they were metaphors for everything repressed by the modern world: faith, desire, madness, decay, the theys and gays. The supernatural was the secret the Enlightenment couldn’t quite rationalise away. And it’s hard not to look around now and think: sound familiar, folks? Feeding off others’ vitality, endlessly remade, impossible to kill. Would it not be the most on brand thing for Dracula to have a luxury candle scent line called Sage Moonblood? —which by the way is not in fact a candle scent but very much the name Sylvester Stallone picked for his son, yikes. If someone told me the Kardashians had a little sip of blood here and there (for wellness, for the brand) would I be surprised? Not even slightly. They’ve already mastered the Gothic art of resurrection: new face, new body, new season, same hunger. Like the Count himself, they sustain themselves on visibility : immortal through replication, transformation, and a team of very good publicists.
The Gothic never really retreated to its castles. It just changed costumes: from Shelley’s ruins to Burton’s suburbia, from the graveyards of Victorian novels to the smoky clubs of the 1980’s goth scene. Every generation re-dresses the same anxiety: that modernity kills something vital, and beauty blooms in the rot. The Gothic persists because it exposes the infrastructures of power that ordinary perception obscures. It registers the violence of economies that render some lives disposable, of states that decide whose deaths are mournable, and whose suffering is irrelevant. Necropolitics, in this sense, is Gothic: the architecture of life and death, of who may live and who is abandoned.
We pretend the Gothic was about fear, but it was always about desire — the thrill of transgression, the beauty of what’s forbidden, the glamour of decay. What Stoker understood (and what we keep forgetting) is that the supernatural isn’t an escape from reality; its reality made visible. Dracula isn’t a monster from elsewhere; he’s a reflection of our systems: economic, erotic, imperial — taken to their logical conclusion.
We love to monetise someone else’s blood. Those are the same forces driving today’s culture: curated imperfection, performative suffering, the aestheticisation of breakdown. Both are rituals of attention. Both feed on a wicked sense of belief. The Gothic used to shock. Now it soothes. We play horror podcasts to sleep. We stream serial killers while we fold laundry. Somewhere between irony and exhaustion, the scream became background noise.
Monsters always belonged to the modern world. What the Gothic reminds us of is that horror is not evenly distributed. Some lives haunt us visibly; others vanish silently. The structures that make suffering legible are selective: whose trauma is recorded, whose absence becomes a cautionary tale, and whose loss remains uncounted. To confront the Gothic today is to confront the inequities of attention itself, and the political choices embedded in what society allows to haunt. The forests burn, the oceans rise, and the skies darken—nature itself has become Gothic, its wrath both familiar and uncanny. The specter of climate collapse is no metaphor: it reminds us that horror can arrive in silence, in loss, in slow, creeping entropy.
Perhaps the Gothic survives because it speaks to what we still fear: collapse, loneliness, the uncanny return of the repressed. But if the Gothic is about return, then what do we do with all the returns we will never get to see? The disappeared women, the murdered trans people, the silenced protestors, the children of war sick lands — they haunt the world we go through but never mourn.
Maybe the Gothic isn’t dead at all. Maybe it just stopped being fiction.
Our world is haunted perhaps now more than ever. The metaphors are writing themselves, but do we care enough to still have to hide them behind paler skin and dimmer lighting? When our oppressed meet death they have no way of coming back. We’ve grown fluent in horror. Our screens feed us blood, rubble, and algorithmic grief until even genocide feels like just another grim storyline we can send away. We skim past Gaza as if the dead there are characters in someone else’s mythology; too real to look at, yet too distant to feel. The Gothic once asked what it meant to be haunted; now the question is, who gets to be seen as human enough to haunt us? There was a time when horror was a mirror; now it’s a window we look through without blinking. We scroll through ruins and call it content. If the Gothic is dead, it’s only because it died doing what it loved most: coming back.
Maybe the Gothic isn’t dead at all. Maybe it just stopped being fiction.