Gothic Horror is Making a Resurgence Because We All Live In It

If you’re a fan of slow build horror, why not take a look around us?

Decaying ruins, untrustworthy people, and a slowly building sense of tension — is it the newest Netflix hit, or just 2021?

Much like The Haunting of Bly Manor was less about ghosts and more about lesbians, Midnight Mass isn’t about the otherworldly; it’s about blind faith and religion.

Similarly, reality as we know it isn’t about our daily struggles, it’s about what happens when we enter late-stage capitalism.

Horror, as a genre, explores and exposes what we most deeply fear in our everyday lives. Gothic horror, in particular, exposes a specific type of fear: incremental decay.

In Gothic horror, the environment has a mind and personality of its own, uncontrollable and willful. Often, the environment is inhabited by capricious, half-formed, or malicious spirits. Our protagonists perhaps begin the tale uneasy, but with little foreknowledge of what they’re about to go through. Instead, clues are doled out in small pieces, like a mystery.

And if that sense of unease that fills you feels familiar, it’s because it’s a world in which we live. We have an environment constantly decaying. We’re surrounded by people who are apathetic at best, malicious at worst.

And every day, in the news, we pick up additional pieces of this tremendous, clattering puzzle, a capitalist dynamo that seeks to consume us.

The world has become gothic horror, but without the attractive set pieces, clothes, jewelry, and dire romance. Everyone chugs along with their day-to-day, 9–to-5 lives, trying to ignore a pervasive, societal PTSD. So, we doomscroll down Facebook and ignore the fact that our friends can’t buy houses because of Zillow, just as we might shrug at the briefest glance of a looming specter in a mirror.

At the end of a long day, my friends collapse into their chairs, mentally and physically exhausted. They stare at nothing or they stare at their phones. They’ve lived through a shared trauma— but they still need to pay their bills. They’ve lost jobs, they’ve lost housing, they’ve lost people — but they still need to turn on a computer every day to perform abstract labor that, likely, benefits no one, least of all themselves.

We love horror because it reveals ourselves. But it also provides a sense of release. At the end of a gothic horror tale, our protagonists escape. Perhaps not forever. Perhaps not unscarred. But they get out. Their story is over.

What would that look like for us?