Welcome to Pop Culture’s Curiously Defanged Goth Girl Autumn

Autumn may be the most atmospheric season, tantalizing the senses with soft sweaters and warm beverages and the crunch of colorful leaves underfoot. But, as we all suddenly remember once Sept. 30 gives way to Oct. 1, it isn’t all flannel-swaddled, pumpkin-spice ASMR. This is a time charged with the contradictions inherent in the end of the calendar—cozy and eerie, Thanksgiving and Halloween, harvest and decay. The entertainment industry offers up its own autumnal cornucopia of contrasts. Sandwiched between chummy fall baking competitions and the anodyne made-for-TV Christmas movies that arrive earlier each year is a dollop of bloody, gory, nightmare-inducing horror on screens big and small.

Falling somewhere between the two is a third spooky-season sensibility—one epitomized this year by the reunion of Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton in a blockbuster sequel to their classic undead comedy Beetlejuice: goth. With aesthetic roots in pre-Victorian Gothic fiction, goth was adapted into a black-shrouded subculture by fans of melancholic 1980s British rock bands like the Cure and Cocteau Twins and has, since then, been sliced, diced, and spliced into dozens of divergent factions. I’m using it here in the broadest sense. It’s dark, it’s spooky, it’s romantic, it’s death-obsessed. It’s velvet and lace and vampires and witches and black cats and dripping candles and séances conducted by Ouija board. It has the trappings of horror but no interest in jump scares. And more often than not, especially as it approaches a half-century of existence, goth has a campy sense of humor about its own melodrama.

Goth’s mainstream profile tends to ebb and surge, and the past few years have seen a new wave of macabre media that seems to be cresting this fall. (What says goth revival more than the Cure releasing its first new song in 16 years, a few days after the autumnal equinox?) In a recent Vogue
essay trumpeting fashion’s rediscovery of morbid beauty, Tish Weinstock—whose forthcoming book How to Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style is itself a bellwether—identifies a “full-blown gothic resurrection” and proclaims: “welcome to the season of the witch.” Weinstock is right to name witches as the supreme goth signifier of 2024. Every retro movement gets repackaged to suit the era into which it’s reborn. And from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to Agatha All Along, this year’s extra-comforting model has an aspirational girl-power quality grounded in nostalgia for the goth-pop artifacts of the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

Tracing the origins of the goth aesthetic is a fool’s errand. While the subculture coalesced within a music scene transitioning from ’70s punk to ’80s new wave, the sensibility has no discrete genesis. It predates proto-goth touchstones like Rocky Horror, the droning decadence of The Velvet Underground and Nico, silent-film vamp Theda Bara, the chilling fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, Dracula and Frankenstein. Goth did not even begin with the eponymous Germanic tribes that raided the waning Roman Empire. Insofar as it is entails the romanticization of death and the occult, the goth worldview might be as old as human society—a Freudian, death-drive fixation that’s as apparent in the funereal traditions of Ancient Egypt as it is in Chappell Roan’s velvet, chainmail, and crucifix VMAs ensemble.

Goth as we know it today can, however, be loosely sorted into eras. If the early scene was predominantly about music and nightlife, then by the late ’80s goth had become a full-on pop phenomenon, spawning superstars like filmmaker Burton and author Anne Rice, with Marilyn Manson and Hot Topic mass-producing PVC-clad rebellion for the ’90s mallrat. A binary of sorts emerged, with such aggressively masculine variations as the industrial rock of Manson and his mentor at the time, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, on one side and a witchier, female-driven vibe on the other. This was a decade bookended by riot grrrl’s feminist-punk energy and the neopagan, earth mother ethos of Lilith Fair; goth girls synthesized aspects of both movements, white magic and white-hot rage.

In 1988, Burton gave that audience an icon in Ryder’s Beetlejuice heroine, Lydia Deetz, who dressed like a miniature Siouxsie Sioux and moved into a country house where only she had the ability to see the ghosts of its previous owners. Ryder grew into an offbeat romantic lead with Burton’s 1990 cult classic Edward Scissorhands, the teen black comedy Heathers, and Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Dracula. Following in her combat-booted footsteps, Christina Ricci broke out by reviving the deadpan ’60s proto-goth icon Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, romanced a friendly ghost in Casper, and entered the Burton-sphere with 1999’s Sleepy Hollow. By then the witchy girl was everywhere, forming outcast covens in The Craft, fighting supernatural baddies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, all grown up and empowered to destroy abusive boyfriends in Practical Magic.

While there have been short-lived resurgences in the 21st century (see: Twilight), it’s primarily this strain of goth that is driving the current nostalgia fest. September’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gives Lydia a brooding teenage daughter of her own in Ryder’s closest Gen Z analog, Jenna Ortega. Ortega also plays the title role in Burton’s incredibly popular teen-drama twist on the Addams Family, Netflix’s Wednesday. An adult Ricci (who has also been revisiting her ’90s weird-girl persona in Showtime’s Yellowjackets), appears appears as one of Wednesday’s teachers. Those who crave a more tactile connection with the actor’s dark brand can shop Ricci's recent West Elm collab, which features tarot cards. A musical adaptation of Death Becomes Her, the 1992 goth-camp comedy that pit Meryl Streep against Goldie Hawn in an orgy of cartoon violence, is about to open on Broadway; Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste” video, also starring Ortega, pays homage to the same movie. And if you just want to watch vintage Ryder, Criterion Channel is honoring her with an October retrospective.

Sequels and reboots and rereleases may be the linchpins of Hollywood’s nostalgia-industrial complex, but goth’s comeback goes beyond the reanimation of dormant titles. The new Disney+ series Agatha All Along is about as original as Marvel shows get. A once-fearsome witch, Kathryn Hahn’s WandaVision villain Agatha Harkness convenes a makeshift coven to flank her on a perilous journey that might restore her lost powers. The show celebrates and sends up all sorts of witchy archetypes, writing into its lore a ’70s singer à la Stevie Nicks and a wellness influencer mixing up toxic potions. Eighties-set teen comedy Lisa Frankenstein, released this past winter, finds a misfit girl falling for the gentle Victorian zombie who follows her home from the cemetery. Soundtracked by period-appropriate indie rock, the movie is itself a Frankenstein’s monster of influences, from Beetlejuice to the 1992 B-movie that kicked off the Buffy franchise. Its very existence confirms the longevity of a previous generation’s dark teen tropes.

What are we looking for when we flock to these paradoxically pleasurable paeans to monsters and magic, mortality and the afterlife? In an interview with the Guardian, Weinstock, the How to Be a Goth author, ventured that “there’s so much sadness and violence in the world that it’s beginning to seep into and shape the culture…. It’s a form of escapism but it’s also a reality check that reminds us we’re living through scary, uncertain times.”

I’m not so sure about that. The girly goth talismans we’re clinging to now are relics of a more upbeat era, when the economy was coasting and the Cold War was ending and the daughters of second-wave feminists were inventing new ways to inhabit their power. While some of us will always feel the temptation to immerse ourselves in the gloomy and supernatural, the more potent form of escapism at play in this revival is nostalgia for the recent past. One perennial lure of the goth subculture, with its Victorian wardrobe and Expressionist makeup, is its ability to untether adherents from the present. “Goth’s interest in the timeless,” writes the critic Simon Reynolds in his post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again, “could be seen as precisely that—a refusal of the timely, the topical, the urgent issues of the day.” It supplants the sadness and violence we know with dark fairy tales too remote from reality to demand our engagement with real-world problems.

Goth ca. 2024 may not visually resemble the cardigan-core of Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore era, but, like a certain seasonal latte, it’s delivering pure comfort. You might notice that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels cozier than its predecessor; while both have the same rural idyll as a backdrop, the sequel de-emphasizes the original’s uncomfortable framing of Lydia as a child bride to the titular ghoul in favor of a plot that repairs broken bonds between generations of Deetz women. Or that Wednesday is set at a boarding school for outcasts, monsters, and practitioners of magic—shades of Harry Potter. Or that Agatha eases its underworld odyssey with camp-savvy faces: Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone. Meanwhile, one recent Gen X goth IP revival that bombed was a convoluted, self-serious reboot of the 1994 revenge fantasy The Crow, which earned $9 million at the domestic
box office to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s $266 million and counting.

Maybe that’s why the most successful of these titles have been hitting like any other fall-sploitation trifle, enjoyable but forgettable, Hallmark Christmas specials for viewers who prefer
Halloween. Just as we line up in autumn for an annual round of virus-season vaccines, we might seek out these morbid fantasies, each its own plush sensory overload, as an inoculation against the pain of processing war, misogyny, political upheaval. The entertainment itself is surprisingly benign. Scarier by far is the impulse that drives us to it.