Skeletons in your local pharmacy. Bad horror remakes on TV. “This Is My Costume” t-shirts at Hot Topic. Let’s face it: the only thing scary about Halloween these days is how commercial it’s gotten. When will goths rise up and take back our holiday?
These days, a plague of indifference has consumed the goth community when it comes to Halloween. Even when I was a wee kindergoth, we had respect for the true meaning of All Hallow’s Eve. It wasn’t all Nightmare Before Christmas screenings and weirding people out at the mall. Sure, it had pagan origins or something, but at least we knew it didn’t belong to the posers in the storebought witch costumes. Goths these days couldn’t care less about the holiday. They’re more concerned with their Tumblr reblogs and sideways cross jewelry than with protecting the history of their people.
Welcome to the fallout of a post-Twilight America. The undead teenagers of my generation’s movies were in sexy gangs, while today’s drive SUVs to baseball games. Where goth kids were once respected, or at least ignored, now they’ve become a joke thanks to South Park. Tim Burton’s movies aren’t even watchable anymore. Where did all the goth icons go? We worshipped Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci, but who do these kids have to look up to? The starlets of Pretty Little Liars? Avril Lavigne’s black wedding dress? Taylor Momsen? The devil save us.
It doesn’t help that Hollywood has made a mockery of our culture. Sons of Anarchy proved that wearing all-black, smoking, and reading on rooftops is for biker guys now. How many cool relationships did Marilyn Manson screw up? Even horror isn’t bringing it. Bates Motel, Sleepy Hollow, and American Horror Story raised our hopes, only to dash them time and again with weak plot development and campy acting. The Following had a goddamn Edgar Allen Poe cult, how could that go wrong? But no, they put Kevin Bacon in it and it’s terrible, just terrible. I can’t say it enough: terrible.
I fear that “goth” is becoming nothing more than a fashion trend. Glamour used the word to describe Khloe Kardashian’s dark lipstick, as if that’s all it takes. Mattel stole kindergoth girl style for their Monster High dolls. Rihanna coined the term “ghetto goth” for her new chokerheavy look. Worst of all, repeat offender Katy Perry slapped on goth drag for a freakin’ PopChips ad. Can you think of anyone less tortured than Katy Perry? You don’t wear cupcakes on your tits if you feel the anguish of existence. She must be stopped.
My fellow elder goths, we have only ourselves to blame. It is our job to instill in the youth the values of creativity, nonconformity, and smoking cloves in the woods, and on all three counts we have failed. And if not us, who will sponsor their poetry clubs? Who will frame their black and white photography? Who will help them craft prom dresses from duct tape and garbage bags?
Goths today face more challenges than ever. Last summer, cyber bullies hacked the Bats Day in the Fun Park website, spewing homophobia and anti-Disney sentiments. The rise of Juggalos and Bronies have given teens tons of new subculture options. Kat Von D exists. As if that weren’t bad enough, Nine Inch Nails put out a new album. It’s great, but people still can’t decide if they’re goth or not, and I’m tired of having that conversation at parties.

Still, there is hope. Today’s goths have resources that we didn’t: namely, the Internet. Online communities have been bastions of darkness for goth leaders. Due to effective online organizing, everyone has recognized May 22nd as World Goth Day. People have met the loves of their lives on Gothic Match, the #1 goth singles site, and to a lesser extent, Goth Passions. The community has become more inclusive with the rise of niche sites like ChristianGoth.com. Most impressively, goth porn has really taken off. I mean, who hasn’t heard of Suicide Girls?
So, what does all of this mean for Halloween? In my day, Halloween was about confronting the realities of death, getting drunk in cemeteries at midnight, and holding séances for Harry Houdini. Am I just an old fool to think it could be that again? I admit that the world has changed, gotten smaller, put a few more Treehouses of Horrors under its belt. I have gotten older, too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time on this earth, it’s that goths will survive. To be different is to be strong, and to be strong is to let people know that you will not be mocked, like Trent Reznor when he wears sleeveless shirts.
Goth teens of today, you must go out on Halloween. You must wear your spiky dog collars to your afterschool jobs at the ShopRite. You must watch Donnie Darko and relate to it deeply. You must lie to Vice Principal Jeffries when he asks who drew the pentagram on your locker, but you must draw that pentagram. And you must

stare down anyone who tries to tell you your identity is just a phase, until they get uncomfortable and ask how school is going.
I write to you now a reluctant but natural leader, like Robin Tunney’s character in The Craft. We must fight to end the commercialization of Halloween, because it is the only way we can survive. If we do not seize Halloween from those that would sell it to us, what is to become of our rich gothic subculture? Why avoid the sun and dye our hair black (red, green, purple)? Why pretend to understand Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari? Why read Poppy Z. Brite over Charlaine Harris? We might as well give up and name our dogs Bella.
I stand here today, a proud gothic American, and I pledge to stand with you and fight. For if we do not reclaim Halloween for goths, then like Bela Lugosi, we are dead.
Tags: costumes, everything is better with goths, goth kids off my lawn, goths, halloween, liz galvao
Were you goths? We love goths.
GOTHS. No. We’re witches, check the other thread. Goth is insufficiently rebellious. I’m doing a thesis on arts-based office work to reaaaaally stick it to them.
I was sort of a goth for about two years. I really wish I knew where my lovingly altered leather biker jacket went.
Wait, is having seances for Houdini a thing? Because he HATED seances.
That was the weird thing! He was against all that shit but he made his wife promise to hold a seance for him every year on Halloween, which she did for ten years after his death, “long enough to wait for any man.” There was a great Drunk History on this recently.
I think it’s generally conceded that Houdini believed there was an afterlife, and potentially a way to communicate from it, but he hated con artists who used grieving families as a way to make money by pretending to communicate with the dead.
but he DID have H.P. Lovecraft write him a rad story about weird a$$ $hit. so there’s that. 🙂
I’m going to get on alt.gothic and see who’s going to Convergence this year
I vote for the Convergence location every year, but I, sadly, have not been since Boston (Convergence 2). I hear great stories from the Goth Cruise, though.
I have a love/hate relationship with the commercialization of Halloween. On one hand, I am easily (very easily) scared and watering everything down means I can actually enjoy it. While everyone goes out and watches genuinely scary movies I can watch the Pretty Little Liars Halloween episodes with my cousins and be absolutely terrified but not to the point where I cry myself to sleep/have nightmares for a month.
On the other hand every single drugstore has horrible terrifying Halloween costumes hanging in the window. I also have to avoid an entire street (a busy main street) in my neighborhood because there is a nightclub has giant floor to ceiling posters of evil fanged clowns out front. I really want them to go back to the giant posters of shirtless men, they never gave me heart attacks while turning a corner in the middle of the night.
Also my birthday was yesterday so growing up I always had Halloween/costume birthday parties so I am 100% more Halloween for everyone.
I missed being born ON Halloween by 32 minutes and am a November 1st baby, but I have the damn party on Halloween every year all the same. All Hallows’ Birthdays 4 lyfe
Me too! Well, my birthday’s on the 26th, but definitely all Halloween-themed birthday parties throughout my childhood. Best party theme!
“Goth never truly dies,” said Lauren M.E. Goodlad, a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and an expert on goth culture.
Guys I am kind of appalled to learn that my taxes are funding “an expert on goth culture.”
More than one. You may also wish to examine the work of Monica Sklar, who writes about how aging alt-culturererers survive by signalling alt at work.
Hint: Fluevogs.
Hint Two: Call not attention to their shoes, they will become _instantly terrified and defensive._ Mistakes! Mistakes made repeatedly over years.
Well, as far as I can tell, it looks like Minnesotans are paying for Sklar, so I think I’m off the hook there.
And if it is serious, It’s prolly a good thing folks around here don’t need a whole lot of validation that what they like is worth liking and of interest from you. Because there sure is a lot of goth-thusiasm going on in this thread, and it is a thread of nerds who like to learn. So.
GOTHS FOREVER.
Well, it does seem COINCIDENTAL that GOTHS FOREVER are frequently associated with VAMPIRES.
Oh my, sorry! I thought the phrasing of “kind of appalled” would indicate that I’m mostly joking! I’m not anti-goth! Some of my best friends are goths? (Sadly, not really true for the last decade or so..)
I’ve been toast-absent and my irony meter is broken lately, so I have to say this.
Please tell me this is some kind of humorous Halloween jest jabbing at the anti-liberal arts and anti-intellectual chow chow of mainstream America.
The woman’s bio at UofI says she is a specialist in Victorian literature, which makes a conteporary goth culture interest not much of a stretch and hugely logical as a scholarly focus.
Also the study of sub-cultures built around things like goth-ery is a long established and cross-disciplinary thing.
If anyone need’s a money-based reason for this kind of thing, goth-subculture study= good for marketing.
So yeah. It’s a joke, right?
This is Mamacita con Pistoles btw, I just can’t remember my login info.
no. this is the most serious thing we have ever published. im coming over to your house to write it out in a quill pen be right there
She’s also a professor of Victorian Literature. I don’t think there’s anything appalling about tax dollars going to public educators with broad metiers of cultural expertise.
“our people” DYING
which of course you goths would LOVE
I, for one, am thrilled that black nail polish and colorful hair dye can now be bought basically year round. No more dicking about with Kool Aid or nursing your one or two Halloween drug store purchased black nail polishes through the entire year!
I had a weird rush of nostalgia this week, walking down a long aisle of Halloween makeup and suddenly remembering what it was like, the heady scramble to buy as much black and gray nail polish and lipstick as I could before it disappeared for another year, to find that secret balance between campy and quality, to take advantage of the market’s one yearly excursion into makeup that I wanted to wear all the time.
Suddenly, I really appreciate that I can toddle down to the drugstore and buy pewter or black or green nail polish any ol’ time. I’d forgotten, and now I remember.
Oh yeah! I remember when basically the only nail polish options were red, pink, coral, etc. Now you can get orange, green, brown, purple, pretty much whenever you want. In high school I had a bottle of deep plummy purple nail polish and every time I wore it I had to weigh lookin’ fab versus using it and using it up eventually. And, of course, if you don’t use it, it eventually separates/dries out. Remember when colored eye liner hit? Oh man, the 1990s were an explosion of awesome make up.
I was a sort of post-punk proto-goth in the ’80s in Texas, if that helps you imagine how very limited my options were. Even the alt-shop/head shop that sold rubber dresses and spiked wristbands and light bondage gear only had a few colors of nail polish.
Also, you have succinctly and brilliantly explained a habit I didn’t even consciously wonder about. My stinginess with nail polish is a hangover from my teenaged years of scarcity, when it was entirely possible I’d never find another bottle of [deep plum/alien green/pewter] so I had to make it last.
So Goth might be dying and Punk long gone but now the rebel kids at art school are wearing kigurumi all year ’round so I assume Furry is fine.
I definitely heard Richmond from The IT Crowd’s voice reading this in my head.
I actually love it a bit because EVERY WINTER at least one place does a ‘glam goth is in this season!’ thing and EVERY WINTER a load of people buy it an never wear it and EVERY SPRING it’s all discounted and in charity shops and I run laughing through the streets, my arms aching with the weight of black lace skirts, the marks of a dozen lipsticks called things like ‘black cherry’ and ‘New Black’ and ‘Blood Red’ on the back of my hand.
These days I’m aiming for my fashion sense to say ‘darkly romantic, dangerous witch transplanted into the modern age’.
brb taking this master plan and executing it for myself
I had a bit of an emo stage a couple years ago (I WAS YOUNG, DO NOT JUDGE) and now try to channel the black obsession into ‘could possibly put curse on your cow if you cross me’ rather than ‘I own three garments, one of which is this never-been-washed black coat’
Plus a thousand for this:
You don’t wear cupcakes on your tits if you feel the anguish of existence.
Maybe one wears cupcakes on one’s tits because one feels the anguish of existence…
I would eat the cupcakes on my tits because I felt the anguish of existence.
Or hopefully, maybe eat cupcakes off someone else’s tits. That would probably be okay, too.
I like the cut of your jib, Mamacita.
Lemoncurd is an underused accessory in the contemplation of the emptiness and woe that is the human condition.
I LOVE LEMON CURD
I see my vision of the world of gothy angst and tea cakes suits your needs, Nicole. Excellent. Excellent.
I’m on your wavelength, girl.
I mean, if nothing matters, you might as well.
I got in so many fights in high school with people who incorrectly referred to me as a goth when I did not think I was gothy enough to deserve the title. Just because I wore a lot of black and Taylor Momsen-esque eyeliner and dark red lipstick every day and was super angry about life and hated most people didn’t make me GOTH, guys; I didn’t own nearly enough lace and I never participated in a seance and I spent my Halloween blowing up rotten pumpkins with black powder instead of smoking cloves in a graveyard. It’s like my stupid classmates didn’t even know what a goth was, GOD.
When I grew up, a million billion years ago, we didn’t even know to call ourselves Goth. We said we were Death Rock, but kind of sarcastic-like? I wasn’t angst-ridden enough, nor did I like lace or corsets enough, but we were a small enough group that my mish-mash of mod and ’40s style fit in and we were a merry, motley bunch.
Judging by Facebook, however, we have not aged well.
I don’t think this author has been to a Goth Club in a long time. Goth has shrunk by at least 95% in Los Angeles since 2003 when I moved here at 18 years old and it has always had the biggest scene in North America. In the last two years I have seen a new under current of kids in their late teens picking up old school early 80s goth/deathrock with punk DYI ethics and vinyl records that are really cool.
Although a lot of things that appear goth have gone mainstream true goth has shrunk down to 1/20 it’s size. I’m glad black lipstick is easier to find, latex clothing is cheaper and music easier to find. I disagree with her, good some things are main stream so they are easier, cheaper and more abundant. I like things because I like them not because they appear rare or “Special”.
I mentioned this on another site that has a fair bit of reader overlap with this one, but my colleague and I celebrate October as “Gothtober” every year. We wear all black, or if we must wear color, sufficiently dark colors like dark purple. We have passionate arguments over whether gray counts, and criticize and belittle each other’s choices as the domain of poseurs. We wear our gothest gothcessories. We sneak Bauhaus onto the work playlist. This year, I bleached my eyebrows into oblivion, which is remarkably effective at making me look super weird, especially if I pair it with a black lip. Gothtober is my favorite holiday! I am wearing a choker right now.
I was more into shitty pop-punk as a Teen but I used to go to the goth club in Tampa a lot. In Central Florida all the alternative scenes kind of mash together and you take what you can get.
I totally smoked a clove outside a bar a month ago or so and some twenty something lady was totally giggling about me with her friends!!!!!!!!!!!
I went to a “goth dance party” here in Philly over the summer and me and my 4 friends who I had dragged along with me who weren’t even goth but I made them dress up WERE THE ONLY ONES THERE.
I miss being a goth. I still totally wear a black blazer/jacket with sewn on black lace accouterments THAT I AUGMENTED MYSELF BECAUSE NO ONE UNDERSTAAAANDS MEEEEEEE. I don’t even care that Goth is Dead. I feel like “steampunk” is the new “goth” and I am just so sad about it.
LET SHE AMONG US WHO HAS NEVER SMOKED CLOVES THROW THE FIRST STONE.
I don’t know, the assimilation of goth-y aesthetics into mainstream culture is better than it disappearing entirely, to me. But I live and grew up* in a 99% sunny land of old people and gay clubs and golf, so it’s only in october that stores warm my heart with ridiculous commercialized gothery.
*(I was the saddest little goth wilting in sunscreen you ever did see.)
Oh, hi. I went to see Love & Rockets in Mesa in August back in the Time before Time, and what did I pack in my little lunchbox purse? Not water or rehydration salts, oh, no. I packed an extra pair of black backseamed thigh-highs, a travel container of my matte white powder, and three different lipsticks. Reader, I died then.
I named my dog Bella.
In my defense, I named her Bella Luna, after the children’s book bat, Stella Luna. She looks like a bat, but I am too Streetcar-Named-Desire-sensitive to think that naming a dog Stella is a good idea, because you will yell your dog’s name many, many, many times, and you will feel like Stanley Kowalski. Every. Single. Time.
Back to Bella. Only after I named her did I become painfully aware of a certain series that shall not be named. “Oh, did you name her after Tw…” “NO!”
Now, mostly, I call her Belly. *sigh*
My horse is named Bella.
Goth Christmas will see me once again as a perfectly made up Lisbeth Salander, and I am going to win the office (I work at a museum) Halloween costume contest and all will be beautiful and glorious. :3
Oh, hi. I went to see Love & Rockets in Mesa in August back in the Time before Time, and what did I pack in my little lunchbox purse? Not water or rehydration salts, oh, no. I packed an extra pair of black backseamed thigh-highs, a travel container of my matte white powder, and three different lipsticks. Reader, I died then.
When I grew up, a million billion years ago, we were too backwards and backwoods to even call ourselves Goth. We said we were Death Rock, kind of sarcastic-like. And I was never angsty enough or into lace or corsets enough to really own that, but there were few enough of us, wearing black in the desert summer, that my mish-mash of mod and ’40s and men’s suit jackets stolen from the drama costume room fit in well enough. We were a pathetic, merry, motley bunch.
Judging by Facebook, though, we did not age well.
When I grew up, a million billion years ago, we were too backwards and backwoods to even call ourselves Goth. We said we were Death Rock, kind of sarcastic-like. And I was never angsty enough or into lace or corsets enough to really own that, but there were few enough of us, wearing black in the desert summer, that my mish-mash of mod and '40s and men's suit jackets stolen from the drama costume room fit in well enough. We were a pathetic, merry, motley bunch.
Judging by Facebook, though, we did not age well.
Halloween was commercialized long before Goths came along. Also, I don’t associate the holiday with Goths as the apparently the author does. I don’t know anyone who does.