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Gothic style, from churches
How Gothic fashion crept from churches to vampires to pop groups. By Roger Luckhurst
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It used to be easy to define the Gothic.
A castle on a precipice, silhouetted against a gibbous moon. Next door, a ruined church with arched windows, the gravestones at crazy angles. Something unholy and transgressive stirring in the shadows under the twisted yew tree. The mist would be optional, but the bats and screech owl compulsory.
This makes the Gothic a product of northern European climes: the Alpine heights where Frankenstein’s monster roams; the wild forests of Scandinavia; the bleak cemeteries of London or Edinburgh, where bodysnatchers lurk.
But if these are some of its places of origin, it has since exploded across the planet. The Gothic now speaks in many languages. In a single evening, one might play a level of a Japanese survival horror game while plugged into a doomy 1980s soundtrack from the Sisters of Mercy or the Cure, then stream an episode of any number of horror series from America, France or Egypt, while flicking through a few stanzas of ‘graveyard poetry’ from the 1740s, before hitting the streets in unglad rags to watch the latest Korean, Italian, Thai or Australian horror film at the cinema.
The global spread of the Gothic has been swift and overwhelming – as uncontainable as a zombie virus.
Some complain that the original meaning of the term ‘Gothic’ – now ubiquitous – has been entirely hollowed out. But I prefer to see it as a collection of ‘travelling tropes’ that, while they originate in a narrow set of European cultures with distinct meanings, have embarked on a journey in which they are both transmitted and utterly transformed as they move across different cultures.
Sometimes the Gothic keeps a recognisable shape but more often it merges with local folklore or beliefs in the supernatural to become a weird, wonderful, new hybrid.
The pointed arch that defines Gothic architecture maintains its distinctive shape, yet transforms in meaning and significance as it passes from Islamic to northern European to American settings, to the ‘Bombay Gothic’ of buildings in colonial India or the white-settler churches of Australia and New Zealand.
The vampire, meanwhile, starts in rumours of foul, undead things unearthed on the borders of eastern Europe. But, as it travels by print from Prague to Vienna, and on to Paris and London, it is transformed and translated from place to place.
Dracula emerges from the very specific context of late-Victorian London, but Bram Stoker’s masterpiece quickly reappeared in very free adaptations in Turkey and Iceland, the meaning moulded to local contexts.
The vampire has since become a
Blood Count: Christopher Lee’s Dracula, king of Gothic baddies Darkness visible: The Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich
recognisable trope, wildly redrawn as it arrives in Spain or Italy or West Africa or South Korea.
Since the origins of Gothicism arose with the northern Goths and Visigoths, we have become familiar with a ‘Southern Gothic’, whether in horrific projections of what lies in the unknown terrain of the Antarctic, or in the American South, steeped in genocidal history.
An ‘Eastern Gothic’ has also emerged, where the hordes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ haunt the colonial imagination.
Cosmic horror brings us glimpses of the vast, incomprehensible terrors in which the whole of our fragile planet bathes. Here the Gothic achieves escape velocity: in space, no one can hear you scream.
Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst is published on 21st October (Thames and Hudson, £25)
