There is no goth revival – the spooky subculture never died

Liisa Ladouceur is the author of Encyclopedia Gothica and creator of the 40 Years of Goth Style video series.

There was a lot of black in the nightclub: Black clothes, black hair, black lipstick, black boots. It’s what I expect at a goth dance party – a night dedicated to the dark and heavy music that attracts people who are sometimes mistaken for wearing Halloween costumes year-round. What surprised me was how many of the velvet-and-PVC-clad crowd at Toronto’s Ground Control bar last month at the regular eighties and nineties Spellbound night were Gen Z.

So many young faces (“baby bats,” in goth slang) rapturously singing every word to deep album cuts by The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, songs I know came out before they were born. Shouting over the heavy bass of a Joy Division classic, I asked a couple of them – international students from Mexico, it turns out – how they know this music. “Our parents,” they responded.

Goth music changed my life. And it wasn’t a teenage phase. So when I see headlines about a “goth revival,” I cock a heavily painted, arched brow. Recently, I’ve witnessed more than just twentysomethings packing my local retro night. Pop culture is awash with goth influence.

Creepy and kooky Wednesday Addams is back for season two of her Netflix hit, with star Jenna Ortega rocking goth-glam couture on a worldwide press tour (and a “Meal of Misfortune” fast-food tie-in at Wendy’s). Both Ms. Ortega and the original Goth It Girl Winona Ryder showed up as mother-daughter in a recent Beetlejuice movie.

Lady Gaga dropped a Victorian haunted doll-themed music video directed by Tim Burton, from an album the singer claims was inspired by nineties goth-industrial music.

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Meanwhile, resale tickets to see Nine Inch Nails, one of the biggest bands to break out of the subculture, reached nearly Taylor Swift-level prices in Toronto.

What in the name of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven (to reference the 19th century gothic poet) is going on here?

The truth is goth is immortal, and it’s never truly gone away. Not only is there always a fresh generation of misfits to discover its allure, goth survives because beneath the vampire shtick is an embrace of timeless, deeper themes like beauty, romance and death.

The culture allows its participants to express their most esoteric, gloomy side, but it’s still silly and fun enough to appreciate skull throw pillows from Winners. (Halloween season is truly our time to shine – and shop.) Goth might sound similar to other offbeat lifestyle trends, like dark academia or steampunk, but it’s a unique and fully formed subculture.

The idea of gothic culture goes back centuries. And while modern goths do appreciate the drama of Gothic architecture and the eerie romance of 18th-century Gothic literature, their story really begins with a music scene in the 1970s.

The subculture emerged in England when bands like Joy Division, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus cleaved from punk’s raw fury and started making records combining romanticism, malaise and musical experiments as their own “post-punk” scene.

Who exactly first called this “gothic rock” is a question that’s still up for debate, although the consensus is that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead, a nine-minute expressionist howl about the Hungarian actor who played Dracula, is ground zero for the genre.

Early fashion was mostly DIY and designed to shock, with inspiration as disparate as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Queen Victoria’s mourning period, until a more codified “goth look” appeared: pasty white face makeup, heavy black eyeliner, all-black clothes, big boots and bigger hair. A moody ad for Maxell cassettes starring Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy notwithstanding, goths were still considered freaks and not yet being used to sell chicken nuggets.

Then came the 1990s, when goth first went mainstream. The Cure’s melancholic masterpiece Disintegration topped the charts and sold millions.

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At the cinema, Hollywood pumped out Edward Scissorhands, The Crow, The Craft, Interview with the Vampire, Batman Returns, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Matrix, and three Addams Family movies (two of them good) in quick succession. These sumptuous, magical films celebrating misfits empowered weirdos and spread the joy of wearing shiny, tight pants, frilly pirate shirts and blood-red ball gowns beyond the nightclubs and into suburbia and small towns. It seems every high school had a token goth kid.

On Toronto’s Queen Street West, the goth scene thrived. There were independently owned specialty shops with names like Siren, Heretic and Fashion Crimes, and clubs where local bands and DJs built loyal followings. Bouncers policed outsiders who came to gawk. Politically, the most controversial debate was whether you’d really want to be a vampire.

If it sounds like I’m romanticizing the nineties goth scene, that’s because it’s where I discovered a safe place to be myself. As a young, white woman who loved punk rock and protesting but also pre-Raphaelite poets and Shakespearean tragedies, goth provided an opportunity to reject a world I saw as unjust and boring, but do it in a pretty dress with a book in my hand. Wearing a latex corset to the university library felt transgressive at a time when fellow students were plotting their entry to the corporate world. (They say to dress for the job you want; the job I wanted was to become the horror hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.)

Outsiders tend to assume goths are obsessed with death. So, on April 20, 1999, when two disturbed teens loaded with firearms murdered 13 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado wearing black trench coats, some media quickly linked them to the subculture.

They weren’t goths at all, but the damage was done. Like the violence and murder at Altamont that struck a death knell to the feel-good sixties, Columbine signalled the end of an era.

These days, everything 1990s is hot again. So it’s not really a surprise to find goth trending (or a hybrid style called “goth grunge”). The black-on-black fashions on the runway or spooky TV characters have very little to do with the subculture, however, which has continued to exist outside of mainstream attention this entire time.

And in all the talk of goth revival, there’s not much mention of the music. For most of its existence, the easiest definition of goth was “a person who listens to goth music.” YouTube is now awash with goth influencers from Gen X and Y debating whether that’s still true, or should be. Without an emphasis on the music, it makes it hard for goth gathering places to survive – Toronto’s Velvet Underground will soon be added to the list of shuttered goth-friendly clubs and bars.

As an old-timer – an “elder” in goth parlance – I have toned down on the fishnet shirts over the years, but never stopped seeking my next favourite band. Today, it couldn’t be easier to discover new music, and the entire alternative canon is available for streaming in seconds.

It pains me a bit to think that the youth may want the style, but not the soundtrack. I’m reminded of the Wednesday Addams prom dance trend from last year, and how the clip didn’t go viral with the original track from the show (Goo Goo Muck from psychobilly pioneers The Cramps, an actual goth club classic) until a fan remixed the scene using a Lady Gaga pop song.

Gatekeeping is passé, and far be it from me to judge what turns anyone else on to counterculture, or to culture in general. If I had Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan as eclectic role models growing up, maybe I wouldn’t have needed a Siouxsie Sioux.

It does beg the question though: If anyone can be called goth just for showing up in all black, regardless of what they listen to, what does being goth even mean any more?

I went looking for an answer in the clubs. The band Vision Video played last month at The Garrison in Toronto. Formed in 2018 in Athens, Ga., they play high-energy post-punk goth music with a blunt political message and attract a young crowd – no doubt boosted by singer Dusty Gannon’s profile as “Goth Dad” on TikTok.

There are a few familiar faces from the 1990s Queen West scene, but it seems most people here are just old enough to legally drink. Some wear dark sunglasses indoors and black leather trench coats, like Columbine never happened. When I asked one suburban 24-year-old how she got into this music, she cracked a big smile and pulled out her phone to show me a photo of her with her alternative-looking mom.

The diversity of this crowd also feels new. Vision Video fans are a mix of Black, white, Asian, South Asian. I can count on one hand the number of BIPOC people I remember in the clubs when I was younger. However, in terms of gender-bending and body positivity, the original scene was before its time. Androgyny ruled. Lean bodies and bigger bodies intermingled on the dance floor without judgment.

Since then, goth has gone global, no longer the exclusive domain of Brits and their devotees. In Los Angeles, the hottest underground scene is Gothicumbia, created by and for Latinos. In Delhi, a small but proud “desi goth” community is emerging. At the Vision Video show, I chatted with a 22-year-old hijabi from a conservative family in Mississauga who told me that they like coming to goth and metal gigs because it feels safe and everybody is so nice.

Toronto used to have a goth dive bar called Sanctuary. I used to go there to dance with other people who shared my taste in music. But surveying the scene at the Vision Video show that night, I’m reminded how subculture can be an actual sanctuary.

An assembly of goths looks like a murder of crows but functions like a phalanx, offering collective protection against bullies and bleak times (like, say, the threat of actual fascists or imminent ecological collapse).

Creating and consuming art that confronts dread is not new. In the Middle Ages, Dance Macabre paintings depicting morbid scenes like the living and skeletons dancing merrily atop decaying corpses were popular, a shocking, satirical reminder of death.

Modern horror allows us to confront our deepest fears in a safe place. Goth is a stylish and worthy addition to this pursuit, and these tensions are the real reason it endures, regardless of trendiness. These weirdos in their funereal garb and elaborate ghostlike makeup aren’t just beautiful to look at, but are a living memento mori – a reminder that we must die, and that the pleasures of life are fleeting. Death comes for us all. Let’s dance.