Why Is Everyone Suddenly Interested In All Things Gothic? 

Not too long ago, Emerald Fennell’s controversial take on Wuthering Heights hit the big screens – and its Gothic-adjacent sensibilities don’t exist as an anomaly. The past few years, it seems, was the era of the Gothic, with films like Poor Things (2023), Nosferatu (2024) and more recently Frankenstein (2025). Sinners, the highest-grossing original film not only in 2025 but in the past fifteen years, is also Gothic in its aesthetic – not in the traditional, Victorian-era kind, but reimagined in the Mississippi Delta in the thirties, with vampires that crone out Irish folk songs and the blues. The Gothic is somehow in every cinema and on every screen.

When it was nearing the decade’s turn, perhaps many of us had anticipated the return of the Roaring Twenties. 2020 did come with a bang – no thanks to the pandemic – but it seemed that people had since abandoned the idea of a Great Gatsby party and instead gravitated towards a different, more harrowing, period instead.

Gothic cinema is nothing new, though. The Gothic aesthetic has remained in the periphery of society’s cinematic imaginations since its 18th Century beginnings, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula being the most portrayed literary character in film history. But it is only more recently that this has clawed its way into the mainstream. Whilst directors like Tim Burton have long been architects of the modern Gothic in cinema, today’s revival feels less esoteric and more accessible. The existence of the Gothic on Netflix for instance – with shows like The Haunting of Hill House (2018), its successor The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), and Wednesday (2022) – makes evident a true thirst for the Gothic today, whether in the form of horror or something more family-friendly.

Gothic literature emerged in a time of immense uncertainty and fear of change. Often set within the typical castle or domestic space crumbling under dark secrets, with the main characters haunted by ghastly monsters and grim ghosts of their pasts, the Gothic mode presented an alternative to the usual happy-ever-afters – in a time where people were not getting many happy-ever-afters. In fact, it seems to be a little pop culture joke that the renaissance of vampire films is some form of a recession indicator. 

In any case, Gothic as a genre exists as a means to explore contemporary sociopolitical anxieties through the vastly improbable. For example, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) revolves around a Transylvanian vampire – or rather, a foreign man from a strange Eastern European country – who hunts down an English solicitor in his bloodthirst; reflecting late-British Empire fears about outsiders and the destabilisation of national identity and race. This anxiety around the “other” also seems to have re-emerged today, with debates about immigration, borders and cultural belonging continuing to shape discourse.

Another Gothic favourite, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), was written amidst a tide of technological revolution and changes in scientific findings, imagining the utmost horrors of Science gone wrong; this feels almost obvious to have the story revitalised by director Guillermo del Toro amidst the current era of AI. The comeback of the Gothic in mainstream media now too signifies an underlying worry of the present generation – though we doubt a haunted house would scare any of us off; With the current housing crisis, we’d take any roommate we can get. 

Somehow, in a world that seems increasingly unsteady and anxiety-ridden, Gothic cinema provides something paradoxically comforting: the permission to exist within the abject. If the hear-me-outs about Nosferatu reflect anything, it’s that modern audiences seem to find more affinity with the morally complicated, misunderstood yearner than a Mr. Perfect. Or rather, people are tired of the fairytale, and want the opportunity to take off their rose-tinted glasses and embrace what’s before them.

Despite it all, there is something inherently beautiful and romantic about the Gothic: The human ability to embrace the darkness and shadows, to enter a strange murky void and discover that underneath it all, there is still a beating heart. What appears grotesque then becomes intimate; what seems damned reveals itself as desperately human. This darkness is never empty – it is crowded with memory, desire, grief, and hope. And perhaps that is the most romantic thing of all: that we dare to look into the abyss and, instead of finding nothing, we find ourselves.

Besides the obvious Gothic releases of 2025 and the upcoming ones for 2026, here are some recommendations for the best Gothic and Gothic-adjacent films:

BEST GOTHIC MOVIES TO CHECK OUT

1. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) directed by Jim Jarmusch

Vampirism meets the ennui that plagues modern society in this film, which follows a married vampire couple in the 21^st Century (also played by the most vampire-looking humans to exist, Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston). Vampires are portrayed not as vicious bloodthirsty monsters but decadent, nocturnal creatures dripping with weariness and analogue cool. 

2. Corpse Bride (2005) directed by Tim Burton

This stop-motion fairy tale reimagines death as an afterlife of its own. Its skeletal aesthetics and undead bride are Gothic in essence, but at its heart it makes the macabre beautiful (and family-friendly).

3. Wuthering Heights (1988) directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

Here’s an Eastern adaptation of Emily Bronte’s beloved Wuthering Heights novel, staged in the Muromachi period of medieval Japan. Interestingly, it is also one of the rarer adaptations that covers both halves of the novel, unlike others.

4. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

Marketed as “the first Iranian vampire Western”, the film follows a lonely vampire who doesn’t don a cape but a chador. The gruesome expected outcome of a girl walking alone in the streets at night is subverted when it is this very girl who is the vampire and femme fatale; exposing the gender roles within society.

5. Interview with the Vampire (2022)

Based on the book by Anne Rice, this TV show adaptation presents a more profound exploration of queer desire, race and toxic relationships that the 1994 adaptation shied away from. Immortal love triangles, racial politics and centuries of unresolved trauma—this has something in store for everyone.

6. Thirst (2009) directed by Park Chan Wook 

Screened at Filmhouse recently; the film follows a Catholic priest-turned-vampire and his feverish moral spiral battling his Catholic guilt, erotic obsession and vampirism. Temptation, here, is Gothic—blood-soaked, intimate, and spiritually tormented. 

7. Blue Velvet (1986) directed by David Lynch

Here ancient castles and hallways are ditched for the American suburbs, where the rot exists beneath white picket fences and in the hollows of the American dream. Its Gothic quality lies within the uncanny—the sense that something perverse is lurking just beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday life.