Jennifer’s Body, Ethel Cain, and Tituba: A Resurgence of the Gothic from New (and Old) Perspectives
By ZOE CURTIS ‘25
Goth is back, but not in the way you think. Input gothic into the Pinterest search bar, and recommended queries come by the dozen: Midwestern gothic, Southern gothic, coquette gothic, fairy gothic, mermaid gothic, witch gothic, whimsigothic, New England gothic — it’s a far cry from the Bela Lugosi, Bauhausian, bat-nested goth of the 1980s. In fact, today’s gothic encompasses more than the movement ever has before. “Gothic” is not just Jennifer Check swimming in a murky lake. It’s the lake itself. It’s weeping on the fire escape, pink ribbons tied in bows, a haunted church in Nebraska, antique teacups and the long-lost phenomenon of cable television. Gothic is simultaneously the blood we bleed and the blood we drink, and today’s internet culture has no qualms with admitting to that grotesqueness.
Maybe it’s an effect of economic recession, a reaction to our generation’s post-COVID isolationist tendencies, or the existentialism created by American political controversy, but the revival seems to have come about at mysteriously opportune timing. For reasons unknown, goth culture seems to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of Gen Z’s developing adolescence: one that promotes inclusivity as much as it does self-deprecating humor or overexposed photography.
Goth has seemed, from the start, to have a tacit hold on the idea of obscuring femininity. Whether it be the bondage trousers, spikey collars, or adherence to black, the Gothicism established in the ‘80s always tended to veer back to the masculine. The 2009 American horror comedy film Jennifer’s Body seems the antithesis of that. Jennifer Check is hyper-femininity personified. She wears pink vinyl heart earrings; she cheers; she wants to be a groupie. She’s the type of girl to order an appletini and gab about Dolce’s newest collection with her friends, and yet, she’s undeniably goth: a literal maneater. With the return to early aughts media, the film has experienced a renaissance of sorts, but this one concerns itself more with Jennifer’s duality than the satire of the movie as a whole.
Jennifer’s Body plays with gender expression very elegantly. For each moment Megan Fox’s character applies lip gloss or sucks on a lollipop, there’s one of her inflicting harm and (to spare my readers the graphics) engaging in the aforementioned man-eating. This contrast between feminine and masculine stereotypes makes the movie all the more relevant today: she is not gothic in spite of her femininity; she’s gothic because of it.
Music has leaned towards goth as well. Olivia Rodrigo released an album entitled “Guts,” Taylor Swift is hinting at “Reputation (Taylor’s Version),” and Doja Cat is rumored to have been possessed by the devil. But the queen of them all? Hayden Silas Anhedönia, a.k.a. Ethel Cain. Cain uses gothic themes to express unique personal experiences: growing up in the rural south, a troubled relationship with her father, and reconciling femininity as a trans woman.
Cain’s melodies are haunting and dissonant, more reminiscent of dirges than the professionally produced EPs they are. Cain is Lana Del Rey without idealism or hope, and goth culture eats it up. Cain has become, indisputably, a goth icon. She can almost singularly be attributed to the rise of Southern gothic as an aesthetic, one that champions lace dresses and desecrated chapels, as well as stereotypical Southern women. Her music has provided a platform for discussing the experiences of trans individuals and the challenges they face, including discrimination and prejudice, especially as they intersect with religion and Southern societal conventions.
Nothing comes without racial interplay, and goth is surely no stranger to it. It’s hard to ignore the culture’s white-washed origins: face paint and the romanticization of pale corpses, frontmen like Joy Division’s Ian Curtis or Robert Smith of The Cure, a nearly all-white cast in the film adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Until rather recently, there’s always been an implicit notion that goth required some element of whiteness to truly exist.
Today’s revivalist gothic begs to differ with that sentiment. “Tituba core” is a thing now, turning a story of racially motivated witch accusations into something that has become gorgeous and empowering, something that can be seen in Afrogoth, a subculture based on promoting inclusivity for Black goths, or heard in Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” as it rings from a speaker at your neighbor’s Halloween party. Black culture and goth are not mutually exclusive. The Venn diagram of the two is rife with overlap.
In any and all of these cases, it seems that the new goth has taken a turn for the better: it’s become inclusive. From its very origins, the culture has always been about empowering the pariahs, the dark, and the misunderstood. Today’s goths deserve a movement that is accepting of them, and slowly but surely, Gen Z is facilitating that change. Though it might be forever until Alice Cooper’s pallid face is replaced with Ethel Cain’s, Jennifer Check becomes an icon outside of being a cute Halloween costume or Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière becomes required reading, goth is back, and it is heading in the direction it needs to go: forward.
Zoe Curtis / The Exonian
