The thing that wouldn’t die: why Gothic endures in visual culture

Gothic is having a moment that goes far beyond seasonal marketing, though. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! are forthcoming on Netflix and in cinemas. Simone Rocha staged her Spring 2025 show inside London’s historic Central Criminal Court, sending punk-Goth-priestess ballerinas down a runway typically reserved for murder trials. Warner Bros. is projecting gothic typography across global billboards for Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights remake. The Cure – the defining goth band – enlisted producers like Four Tet to turn Songs of a Lost World into club bangers. Major brands like Wendy’s and Booking.com are world-building with Morticia Addams as a main character in their campaigns and Victorian manor aesthetics to make the drive-thru order experience more memorable. MoMA is displaying 50th-anniversary limited edition posters for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

This isn’t just about nostalgia or another “mall goth” Pinterest board. Gothic has always haunted us – in literature, music, subcultures, and artist communities. What’s different is the cultural urgency. We’re living in the moment that a 2021 Pew Research Centre study predicted: people are “more dependent on technology, but trust it less”, exhausted by “cutting through the noise”, experiencing technology as a negative force. Gothic is resurging because it gives shape to anxieties that digital life creates but can’t visualise.

So how did we get here?

When brands go dark

Gothic keeps showing up in unexpected commercial contexts. Wendy’s 2024 Halloween campaign rebranded a California location as “Wednesday’s” with the tagline “Misfortune awaits lucky you” – complete with a Victorian manor-inspired drive-thru and mystery sauces called Grave Mistake and Nowhere to Woe. It’s Gothic as seasonal marketing: darkness you opt into in October, gone by November.

Booking.com’s 2025 campaign went further. Catherine Zeta-Jones reprised her role as Morticia Addams in a spot shot by Tim Burton’s original cinematographers, complete with appearances from Venus flytraps and a gold-and-black ornate hardback titled How to Bury Your Family – the perfect beach read. The narrative positions Gothic taste as the ultimate customer service challenge – if Booking.com can keep Morticia Addams happy, it can accommodate anyone.

Collectibles company Mutant, launched in 2024, shows how the Gothic archive stays alive through artistic reinterpretation. It commissions artists worldwide to create limited-edition screenprints of horror and Gothic films – often decades old – for a new generation of pop culture fans.

For the 50th anniversary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sonny & Biddy’s psychedelic collage aesthetic layers halftone patterns and bold colour blocks over skull and cattle imagery, transforming 1974’s cult horror classic into a contemporary art object now displayed at MoMA. The poster becomes a cultural gateway: someone in their 20s this year can discover a 1970s horror through Sonny & Biddy’s visual language, even if they weren’t around for the original theatrical release. Murugiah’s The Shining poster uses a ten-colour screenprint with spot UV gloss over illustrative blood spilling from Jack’s typewriter – making Kubrick’s 1980 violence feel tactile.

Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort, whose A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night poster was Mutant’s first release (limited edition of 215, now sold out), demonstrates a different Gothic approach: restraint through suggestion.

“I've never done explicitly violent imagery for a movie poster, even for a film like Jaws,” they explain. “I played with suggestion and foreshadowing.”

Nico works in Claybord – a white surface they ink themselves before scratching out lines with a knife. The process is subtractive: removing ink to reveal light beneath. Working area by area, they build contrast through line variation – thicker, spaced lines in the foreground to create focus; thinner, condensed lines in the background to suggest atmospheric recession. “It’s an illusion that can be quite effective,” they note. The technique gives their work its particular quality of patient accumulation. Darkness isn’t painted on; it’s carved around.

For The Hunger Games: Illustrated Edition, this restraint carried political weight. “You have to keep in mind these are children being killed in the arena, so of course, we had to avoid explicit violence,” Nico explains. “For that particular scene, I focused more on the emotion and the fact that this is one of the moments in the story that lights the spark that will become the revolution in books two and three.”

Nico’s archive mixes literary illustration (Gustave Doré’s Idylls of the King forest scenes), Depression-era documentary photography (Dorothea Lange, Appalachian mining towns), and cinematic grammar. For The Hunger Games, they pulled from these sources to identify the Gothic sensibility beneath the dystopian premise: “the descriptions of District 12, Snow’s looming presence, the menace of technology wielded by the Capitol.” Gothic patterns – oppressive architecture, surveillance, class horror – appearing in material not typically marketed as Gothic.

Where Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film shows the vampire girl, Nico foregrounds what we don’t see – the oil jacks as a hostile presence, the desolate industrial landscape dwarfing solitary figures. “The characters’ environment being a hostile, ominous presence is a common element in Gothic art and literature… that’s why I chose to feature the oil jacks so predominantly,” they explain. Using their scratching technique, the oil jacks become stark forms built through patient mark-making – an approach that defines their broader methodology: “When I do movie posters, I try not to draw a scene taken straight from the movie, but try to imagine the moments we don’t see, what’s between the cuts.”

Making desire public: Wuthering Heights

Teddy Blanks of Chips began his process for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights logo with research. His source material included every edition of the Brontë novel he could find, old type specimens, the film’s production design, and Fennell’s screenplay. His starting point was a 1920s film poster for an earlier adaptation (“a lost film”). The original lettering used elaborate lowercase ‘g’s with flourishing tails, random letter weight variations, theatrical spacing – pure silent film excess.

Teddy compressed the letterforms until serifs kissed – tight enough to demand you lean in, but not so crushed they became illegible. “That subtle change gave it the feel of a vintage, trashy romance paperback, which felt exactly right” for Fennell's interpretation. Then came the move that makes desire explicit: lace texture over condensed gothic capitals. When Blanks showed the typeface to his wife, writer Molly Young, she suggested leaning into the sexy vibe by incorporating lace. “Not wanting to deal with stock licensing, I asked if she’d lend me some lingerie. I ended up scanning one of her bras, and that’s where the lace texture comes from.”

The lace creates intimacy that holds, conceals, and reveals. Teddy could have gone full goth – blood-dripping Carrie titles, metal band logo brutality – but the lace disrupts that expectation. The delicate texture hints at Brontë’s obsessive desire sublimated into emotional intensity. Teddy’s typography makes that private longing public – projecting the lettering billboard-scale across major cities with taglines like “Drive me mad” and “Come undone”. “Making something nostalgic feel new is all about creating surprising juxtapositions,” Teddy adds.

The final typography layers three distinct time periods: 1920s silent film posters (letterform structure), 1970s trashy romance paperbacks (aesthetic feel), 2020s intimate apparel (textural overlay). Each period contributes specific visual qualities without dominating. The result reads as contemporary exactly because it refuses to commit to any single era – and because it makes longing visible rather than hiding it behind polite typography.

Teddy is aware of generational distance. “I’m 40, and self-aware enough to know that my sense of what’s cool to young people is probably skewed and out of date,” he reflects. “Trying to chase trends would almost certainly backfire.”

Refusing to soften: Florence + the Machine

Los Angeles-based Thunderwing, co-founded by Nic and J.B. Taylor, approaches visibility through refusal to explain. But its connection to gothic runs deeper than professional interest. J.B. was a goth teen in the storied LA scene of the 1990s – going to legendary clubs like Helter Skelter, hanging out in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, researching the history of gothic literature and art. “It’s not just an aesthetic style we’re exploring, but something very deep in my blood,” she explains. “I still consider myself to be goth. Embracing the beauty of our brief mortality is something we make sure to connect with as much as possible.”

This lived experience shapes the studio’s approach. “When deep and contemplative projects come to us – like The Library of Esoterica, Everybody Scream, Nosferatu, or Nick Cave’s Wild God – we feel so content in our existential element.”

For Florence + the Machine’s album Everybody Scream, Thunderwing eliminated cover typography entirely – unusual for major labels where brand visibility dominates. The cover shows only a fisheye-lens photograph by Autumn de Wilde: Florence seated in a wrought-iron chair, body folded inward, draped in layers of cream fabric against black clothing. The fisheye distortion curves the wooden paneling behind her while compressing her figure at the centre, creating claustrophobic intimacy. Her contemplative posture – head tilted, hand resting on the curved iron frame – suggests vulnerability. The curved perspective makes space feel like it’s collapsing inward.

“Once we saw the photography, and Florence and Autumn had selected the cover image, we all felt that it worked best with no typography at all,” Nic and J.B. explain. “The image is iconic. We have no arrogance about our work product. We are an open channel for the right thing to emerge, which was just the image.” Autumn’s calligraphy (which Thunderwing digitised) was also used across some visuals in the tracklist reveal.

The studio also created a circular sigil for retail identification – a geometric seal with mystical undertones that functions as a removable sticker. It’s deliberately ambiguous: not quite a logo, more like an occult marking from a medieval text.

Thunderwing’s Gothic methodology penetrates deeper than what’s visible. Working with Autumn de Wilde on Everybody Scream, the studio developed custom names for vinyl variants – Bloodwood (vivid translucent red), Dead Bluebell, Dead Ballet Slipper; picture discs became The Witch’s Window. Even functional product identifiers get reimagined as incantations.

This collaborative naming reflects months of shared research. Thunderwing has built what it calls its “Temple of Typography” over two decades – a physical library of rare specimens from 12th-century manuscripts to 1970s pulp novels.

Nic and J.B. design The Library of Esoterica series for art book publisher Taschen – ongoing work that continuously feeds their practice. “Those books and all the art within influence us all the time,” they explain. Their volume on witchcraft, edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman, contains numerous images that inspired Everybody Scream, particularly Manuel Orazi’s Calendrier Magique – an 1896 occultist calendar combining Art Nouveau lithographs with tarot and ceremonial magic. Florence independently discovered the same Orazi imagery at the Warburg Foundation in London. The convergence reveals they weren’t just client and designers – they were co-researchers working from a shared historical archive.

For Nosferatu’s logo – created with Teddy Blanks – Thunderwing pulled from 12th-century church manuscripts: elaborate blackletter with sharp, angular strokes and ornamental flourishes, the kind of historically accurate letterforms found in medieval prayer books and Bibles.

The poster Thunderwing designed with Brooklyn-based designer and art director Mark McGillivray extends this historical precision: Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) in profile, head tilted back, Nosferatu’s elongated skeletal fingers reaching toward her as she holds purple flowers – the young bride and the ancient predator captured in stark monochrome. Even commercial materials received this treatment: the Certificate of Authenticity for limited-edition merchandise features eight occult sigils and formal archival language, elevating movie collectibles into a ritual object.

“Robert Eggers has an eccentric but very studious approach to historical fiction,” Nic and J.B. explain. The difference shows in the typography and design approach: Nosferatu’s work grounds itself in medieval precision and historical authenticity, while Everybody Scream layers Victorian romance with contemporary witchcraft symbolism.

For Everybody Scream, Thunderwing spent months pulling references with Florence and Autumn —old films, rare photographs, cultural movements – until the creative team “were all speaking the same visual language”. This research extended beyond typography into a holistic aesthetic system: “graphic, typographic, colour story, all born from a narrative that also informs the wardrobe, location, hair and makeup, and photography style. Nothing is seen as separate.”

Contemporary gothic creates space for emotional honesty rather than mystery – not ‘I’m mysterious and unknowable’, but ‘here’s what I’m actually feeling’, wrapped in visual language that makes it bearable to express.

Blood as power: Vampons

Montreal-based brand and design studio As We Proceed, co-founded by creative directors Mariane Vaillancourt and Emanuel Cohen, makes staying invisible impossible with the packaging for Vampons, an applicator tampon brand founded by Bri Cochran and Liv Williams. Walk through a North American drugstore menstrual care aisle today, and the Vampons box stands out immediately – matte black where every other brand glows pink, purple, or whispers in muted pastels.

The matte black isn’t just dark, it absorbs light completely, refusing the sheen typical of glossy competitors. Under drugstore fluorescents, where other brands gleam and reflect, Vampons stays flat, velvety. The tactile quality mimics premium finishes: luxury car paint, high-end credit cards, matte surfaces that read as intentionally expensive.

​​The research process mixed playful subversion with body horror: moodboards layering black hands with claw-like nails, distorted identity imagery, analogue ephemera colliding with digital graphics. The final packaging uses this vocabulary – white circular sticker reading “cruelty-free / discreet / certified to suck / dare to bleed” arranged around a simple vampire symbol, with graphic black hands flanking the box in promotional imagery.

“Tampons have famously – and shamelessly – been containing chemicals that can seriously harm the body (lead, arsenic, mercury, dioxins, PFAS and more), yet have always been sold in a stereotypical aesthetic of the female gender social construct: pink florals and bright, happy colours,” explains Mariane Vaillancourt, As We Proceed’s co-founder and creative director.

Where Gothic goes next

Gothic’s disruptive power depends on staying just ahead of commercial absorption. Once Wendy’s can rebrand as “Wednesday’s” for Halloween, when Booking.com can cast Morticia Addams as a tongue-in-cheek customer service metaphor, those specific interpretations of darkness have been domesticated – made harmless, corporate-friendly, safe for family consumption. The darkness no longer challenges – it entertains and sells.

The cultural cycle then demands designers find what’s still too uncomfortable for brands to touch. Not to be contrarian, but because certain truths remain invisible unless we have formal strategies that make them acceptable to face directly.

“I don’t think Gothic stories or the aesthetic associated with them have ever been unpopular,” observes Nico Delort, pointing to films like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak that “have long been cult classics in artist circles”, and video game Bloodborne, which centres around an endemic disease in Victorian-era Europe. The creative community has always valued gothic; what’s changed is that brands and institutions now want access to what those artists built.

“When times are dark,” Teddy Blanks reflects, “art that reflects that darkness can be deeply comforting. When you infuse that darkness with romance and big emotion, it becomes catharsis.”

The next generation of designers working with Gothic’s visual language won’t repeat what they’ve seen. They might scan error messages structured like fortune cookies and terms-of-service agreements no one reads, layer ephemera from physical and digital rubbish bins, and confront the loss of agency in how technology and invisible systems shape our lives. The cultural archive continues to expand because the territory of what can’t be said out loud keeps shifting.

Gothic doesn’t exhaust itself. It moves toward the dark corners where discomfort still exists.