Anyone out in Britain’s city centres over the weekend will have noted a copious amount of black eyeliner and dark lipstick on some deathly-pale young faces. The association of Halloween with ghosts, monsters and ghouls has long provided an opportunity for goth culture and its morbid preoccupations to briefly go mainstream. Each October since 1994, Whitby’s links to Bram Stoker’s Dracula have seen it play host to a benign invasion of black-clad gloomsters for a music festival.
This time round, however, there are signs that the goth aesthetic – musically and visually embodied by 1980s bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus – is enjoying a more substantial revival. Wednesday, last year’s Tim Burton-directed Addams Family reboot, enjoyed surprising viral success on TikTok. This year, publishers have put out a series of hefty volumes examining a subculture that became home for thousands of sensitive, small-town misfits with a taste for melancholy.
