Back in April, Professors Christine Ferguson and Catherine Spooner co-hosted a talk alongside FRSE Jeremy Brown Smith titled ‘From Goths to Gothicism: A word’s evolution’ at the University of Glasgow.
This wonderful event detailed the evolution of the terms ‘Goth’ and ‘Gothic’, from their initial use, which referenced the ancient Goth people who sacked Rome, how the terms were changed by the rise of Gothic literature and their contemporary use referencing the diverse, modern subculture which we know today.
Professor Ferguson explained the development of the Gothic as a literary genre, describing how it emerged within and influenced the development of broader social changes such as religious, architectural and feminist movements from the 17th century to the 20th century.
Meanwhile, Professor Spooner traced the Gothic’s modern development from an often-sidelined genre of literature and film to an omnipresent feature of contemporary culture, highly visible in fashion, music and media. Both professors were kind enough to catch up with TMP literature editor, Shaun McLaren, to answer some more questions in informative and engaging depth.
Shaun: Christine, you discussed how the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764 is often considered the birth of the Gothic as a literary genre, but which other Gothic texts have been particularly important in developing the Gothic into its current forms?
Christine: Just as crucial—if arguably not more— to the early Gothic are two remarkable novels that appeared three decades after Otranto; Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1795). Each fascinating, labyrinthine tales that rework Otranto’s supernatural seemings, threats of patriarchal violence, virgin-in-peril tropes, they also initiate two separate strands of the Gothic that arguably still persist today: the terror and the horror Gothic.
Not Radcliffe’s first, but by far her most popular novel, Udolpho focuses on the anxious torment of its young heroine Emily St Aubert as she faces peril in the gloomy North Italian castle owned by her aunt’s husband Count Montoni. Spectral forms do manifest from time to time, but they are eventually rationalized as the products of mistaken perception rather than actual phantasms. This approach would seal Radcliffe’s reputation as the Queen of the explained supernatural. The Monk is a much bloodier and more pornographic affair; in the place of Radcliffe’s implicit threats of sexual menace and ghostly visitation, we actually see Lewis’s protagonist, the dastardly monk Ambrosio, drug, rape, and murder the beautiful young Antonia, who turns out to be his half-sister. In the novel’s finale, Ambrosio is dropped into hell by Lucifer himself. It is heady stuff and caused an outcry at the time of its publication.
I think we can see the legacy of the subtler strand of Radcliffean terror Gothic in those modern works of psychological horror and domestic noir that speak particularly to women’s fears about patriarchal entrapment— Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), for example, or, with a considerable twist, in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012. The Lewisite tradition lives on in those more visceral works of horror where supernatural or non-human threats remain shudderingly real, and bodies are ripped apart in harrowing detail— Stephen King’s It (1986) or Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (2000).
Shaun: Catherine, you spoke about how the Gothic’s Romantic attitude and aesthetics of death, such as memento mori, were a significant influence on the Goth subculture. Are there any texts that you would say were critically important in shaping either the subculture’s attitudes or aesthetics?
Catherine: Bram Stoker’s Dracula was an especially big influence, but perhaps as much through film adaptations as through the book itself – obviously, Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ pays tribute to the 1931 Dracula directed by Tod Browning, and Bauhaus then performed the song in Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire film The Hunger, based on the novel by Whitley Strieber and starring David Bowie! Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have also been a huge influence in the way that they distil the dandyism and decadence found in the writing of nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire into a palatable modern form. But it’s worth pointing out that Goth is a highly literate subculture – many Goths are fans of horror film and literature as well as Goth music and style, and bring a huge range of influences to bear on their aesthetics.
Shaun: Although ‘Goth’ really emerged as a subculture in the 1970s, what kind of social or cultural impact did the Gothic genre create among its readers before then, Christine?
Christine: In its early years, Gothic fiction was frequently attacked by conservative critics who feared that it would contaminate those impressionable young readers with the leisure time and requisite literacy—if not the educated rationality— to consume it on tap: young girls. Although not the genre’s only readers, they formed the most frequent topic of the social panic it induced. Would the future wives of Britain pick up unclean lusts, or lose the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, by reading works like Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) or Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)? These fears are satirized deliciously in what remains my favourite of all Gothic parodies, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), in which the naïve teenage heroine Catherine Morland first bonds with, and then nearly loses, her perfectly normal and good-hearted lover Henry Tilney over her love of the Gothic. When she visits his family’s home, her Gothic imagination leads her to erroneously suspect Henry’s father of being a wife-murderer; Henry then brings her down to earth with a bang when he asks in shock, “Miss Morland, what thoughts have you been admitting?” But for Austen, getting carried away with the Gothic is never a fatal error—she is too loyal to her craft to stigmatize her heroine for being an avid novel reader. Henry and Catherine are allowed to recover from this misunderstanding and marry in the novel’s conclusion. Austen’s gentle and generous account of the Gothic’s impact on its readers—of its ability to connect people and create excitement in lives that sometimes sorely need it— remains to me far more compelling than the recurring moral panics around its allegedly contaminating perversity.
Shaun: Similarly, Catherine, now that the Goth subculture is firmly embedded in modern society, in what ways has the subculture begun to influence the creation of contemporary Gothic literature?
Catherine: Since the 1980s, writers who grew up with Goth or who were attracted to Goth style and culture have inevitably been shaped by their own tastes and experiences, which in turn shape their writing. One of the earliest and most celebrated of these is Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, a vampire novel set in the Goth community, published in 1992 (although it was purportedly written a few years earlier). Goths aren’t confined to writing about Goth subculture, though; often they explore the literary Gothic in new and surprising ways. For example, Rosie Garland, a member of first-gen Goth band The March Violets, has become a celebrated poet and a writer of queer historical fiction with a distinctly Gothic sensibility – her first novel, The Cabinet of Curiosities, told the story of two Victorian ‘freakshow’ performers.
Shaun: Christine, you mentioned that your area of expertise lies in Victorian era Gothic literature, particularly in occultism. In what ways do modern iterations of the genre continue to represent the occult? And to your knowledge, how do these impact the subculture?
Christine: This is a huge question! If by occult we refer, as Wouter Hanegraaff would suggest, to forms of knowledge rejected by the Enlightenment and in the contemporary academy— philosophical and spiritual currents like alchemy, ceremonial magic, mesmerism, necromancy, and spiritualism, etc.—then these topics and their associated phenomena certainly remain at the centre of contemporary Gothic fiction. Ghosts, devils, unholy rituals, and the undead, even extraterrestrials, have continued to saturate the Gothic from the first wave forward. Think of the best-selling erotic vampire fictions of Anne Rice, themselves inspired by Bram Stoker’s foundational anti-hero Count Dracula— who is described in the 1897 text as having gained his blood-sucker status through illicit occult study at the Scholomance, a satanic university of sorts. Some of my favourite recent occult horror novels include Philip Frascati’s The Boys in the Valley (2023), Marianna Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (2019), and Gemma Files’s Experimental Film (2015). The difference between these more recent works of occult gothic and their first-wave counterparts is the socio-cultural water in which they swim: we tend to think of ourselves as living in more secular times now, where religion has less authority over and explanatory force for terrifying and unexplained phenomena than it did in the late eighteenth century. As such, a lot of today’s occult Gothic fictions tend to use their supernatural entities as metaphors for other types of all-too-real anxieties around, for example, sexuality, adolescence and aging, class exploitation, or late-stage capitalism. That said, there are important exceptions to this metaphorizing tendency, most notably in works of horror fiction being produced for proselytizing purposes within the American Evangelical movement— think of Tim La Haye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, or the new form of Nephilim demonology circulated by the likes of Thomas R. Horn. Given the sway of these authors and their ideas on the global Christian right, I think we ignore them at our peril. I would love to see more Gothic studies projects on evangelical Gothic in the future! I will have to pass on the subculture aspect of this question, as it’s not really something I know anything about!
Shaun: Catherine, you discussed how adaptable the Goth subculture is, mentioning that in the 21st century, it has borrowed from and influenced a variety of mediums like fashion and music. Can you predict how its aesthetic might continue to influence, adapt or respond to media in the future?
Catherine: There’s a book called Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce, which argues that each time a new technology arises, it is made uncanny in literature and popular culture until it is supplanted by the next new thing – he shows how this happened with the telegraph, the telephone, radio, cinema and television, and the next step is implicitly digital media. So that’s one answer. Another answer might be that if we view Gothic as a mode rather than a genre – that is, as a way of doing/representing/understanding things rather than as a fixed set of conventions – then what’s remarkable about it is that it can constantly shift and adapt and combine with other things to fit the times. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we can be pretty sure that there will be writers and artists and film-makers and other creatives who will Gothicise it.
Shaun: During the talk, you both discussed how the Gothic genre and the Goth subculture have traditionally been progressive spaces, both politically and socially. In what ways do you think that their mutual influence will allow both to be welcoming and empowering environments in the future?
Catherine: Gothic literature often challenges the status quo and, for that reason, has often been progressive, but I would hesitate to say that it is inherently so – as Robert Miles and Emma Clery have shown, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gothic could be both politically progressive and conservative, sometimes within the same text! The same goes for Goth subculture – while Goth has traditionally been a space of greater tolerance in the UK, that can change in different local or national contexts. There were minor but alarming strands of far-right extremism in the East German Goth community in the 2010s, for example, while in the US, Goths of colour have critiqued their own exclusion from the scene. What Goth is can only ever be determined by its participants, and if we want Goth to be welcoming and empowering to all, we need to remain vigilant, listen to others’ needs and call out prejudice of all kinds when we see it.
Shaun: As professors who talk about the Gothic genre and subculture on both a professional and academic basis, you both obviously possess a great degree of passion for them, respectively. What was your first encounter with the Gothic that enamoured you to pursue it as a vocation?
Christine: As a child growing up in the West of Scotland in the 1970s, the Gothic was inescapable. My mum was a massive horror fan, and she used to let us, at far too young an age, sit up with her and watch Hammer films (and the even more terrifying Hammer House of Horror TV series). Carry On Screaming (1966) did a real number on my young psyche, for which I will always be grateful. I was an early and devoted reader of anthology series like the Fontana Book of Great Ghosts. This was also the era of post-punk and dark synth wave, sounds that my older sister introduced me to when she abandoned a brief flirtation with heavy rock for bands like Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. If the culture immersed me in Gothic, it was my mother who taught me to analyse it. Although not a university-educated woman herself, she had a distinct fascination with the ways in which on-screen thrills were produced; when we sat together, peeking through our fingers at some ridiculous on-screen monster, she would ask us what we thought the fake blood might taste like, or how many takes it took to do the scene without the actors breaking into laughter. These experiences, in some way, launched my entire critical career, showing me that you can enhance your enjoyment of the artistic works you love by thinking about how they are crafted.
Catherine: I think I’ve always had an attraction to Gothic imagery, but reading Wuthering Heights around the age of 12 or 13 made a huge impression on me. Then hearing The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’ for the first time on the Radio 1 Chart Show in my bedroom on a Sunday night just before my fifteenth birthday was a revelatory moment – it crystallised everything I was thinking and feeling at that time – a few weeks later I dyed my hair black, and my future path was set.
Shaun: Similarly, what are your personal experiences within academic spheres? How do people respond or treat you according to your career as a ‘professional gothicist’? Have you managed to find community within the field, either subcultural or in study?
Christine: By the time I became a PhD student, Gothic studies was a well-established academic sub-discipline thanks to the pioneering efforts of scholars like Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David Punter in the 1970s and 80s. I presented my first ever paper at the International Gothic Association conference at the University of Stirling in 1995, so you could say that from the start of my career, I have been surrounded by a rich Gothic community. The other sub-discipline in which I work, the more religious-studies-oriented esotericism, is a slightly younger field, but nonetheless has a wide international network of scholarly organizations, peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and programmes at institutions like the University of Amsterdam, the University of Exeter, and Malmö University. I’ve been very lucky to learn from and study around a wide variety of scholars, writers, and creative and spiritual practitioners both within and outside the academy. When I tell people what I work on, they are normally more interested than disapproving; let’s face it, in today’s political moment, it is not difficult to see why it might be useful to study the relationship between popular literature and forms of extraordinary belief, whether those be about who controls society, what happens to us after death, or how bodies might be preternaturally rejuvenated in an increasingly contaminated environment.
Catherine: The academic Gothic community is wonderfully welcoming. At Gothic conferences, everyone is there with the same purpose – to talk about their weird passions – and there is a huge sense of camaraderie and shared endeavour. I have made life-long friends all over the world in Goth academia. Responses in the wider academic community can be more mixed. Especially in the early days of my career, there was sometimes hesitation about how ‘serious’ my scholarship was. I remember one senior academic asking me why the word ‘Gothic’ was in the title of all my publications – implying a narrow focus – no one had ever asked him why the word ‘Shakespeare’ was in the title of all of his! This is despite the fact that Gothic covers over 250 years of literature, not to mention film and other media. Gothic has become much more acceptable as an object of study these days and features on most English Literature degrees – it’s even on some A-level syllabuses – and I am rarely asked to justify what I do, but at a time when universities are cutting back on their humanities provision, being a Gothicist can still feel precarious.
Shaun: Lastly, if you could recommend any single piece of Gothic media, either a book, film, album etc, to anyone reading TMP who engages in, or is just beginning to engage, with either the Gothic genre or the Gothic culture, what would it be and why should they read, watch or listen to it?
Christine: Gahhhhhh, this question makes my head want to explode! How is it possible to pick just one from all my precious darlings! With the caveat that my answers here would likely change anytime you asked me, here is what I think today: if you are going to understand post-Victorian Gothic literature, you cannot do without Stoker’s Dracula. For film, you will want to watch Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) [based on Shirley Jackson’s phenomenal novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), if your interests lie in the psychological Gothic. If you are drawn more to the body horror tradition that comes from Lewis, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) is mandatory viewing!
Catherine: Just one! OK – book, Chris Baldick’s The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. The selection is beautifully judged, and contains some of the great classics of Gothic literature – ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – as well as some deep cuts, including my own personal all-time favourites, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Olalla’, Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ and Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Secret Observations on the Goat Girl’. The introduction is the best short explanation of Gothic as a literary tradition that I have read and includes a famous definition of Gothic that critics keep coming back to. It’s a book that will send you off in a dozen new directions.
If I can have an album too – Danielle Dax’s Dark Adapted Eye. Goth is a subculture that’s particularly hospitable to women, yet still the majority of its most celebrated music artists (with the honourable exception of Siouxsie Sioux) are men. Dax was one of the great innovators on the 1980s UK Goth scene, and this compilation combines most of the songs from her 1987 album Inky Bloaters with some other singles and B-sides. Dax was weird and experimental and sexy and not quite like anyone else – she deserves to be better known.
Professor Bios:
Professor Christine Ferguson (she/her) teaches English Studies at the University of Stirling where she specialises in Victorian era Gothic literature. Her major publications include the books Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848-1930 (2012) and Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (2006); she is the editor of Spiritualism, Health, Race, and Human Variation (2014), a volume in Routledge’s Spiritualism 1840-1930 facsimile edition series, and, with Andrew Radford, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (Routledge 2018). She has recently published Open Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain’s Occult Revival, 1842-1936 (Oxford University Press: 2025)
Professor Catherine Spooner (she/her) is professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University and has published several academic works regarding the Gothic genre, as well as the gothic subculture, such as Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017). Catherine’s recent work focusses on creative works including poetry, prose and creative non-fiction, she was won several accolades such as Northern Writers’ Avon Award (2022) for her short fiction, was shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize Discoveries Award (2023), the Magma Poetry Competition Editor’s Prize (2024) and has featured in Sidekick Books’ Ten Posts series (2025).
