Hollywood Has Suddenly Gone Dark

We make no apologies for loving a bit of darkness. Give us a crumbling manor, a cursed love story, and a man in a cloak staring mournfully out a rain-streaked window, and we’re happy.

If you’ve noticed that movies have started looking a bit more… haunted lately, it’s not your imagination. Gothic cinema is back and not in a shy, hiding-in-the-shadows way. It’s striding down the hallway in leather boots with a candle in hand, unapologetically moody, and more stylish than it has any right to be.

Let’s start with the most obvious blood-dripping-from-the-fangs moment: Nosferatu (2024). Robert Eggers, who clearly hasn’t met a forest he couldn’t make terrifying, has resurrected the iconic German vampire tale, and it’s a full-on gothic feast.

Bill Skarsgård is your new favourite nightmare, slinking through cobbled alleys with a smirk, and the whole thing plays like a fever dream written in candle smoke. It’s not just a horror film and it’s a mood! The constant sense that something beautiful and terrible is coming for you exists in this one.

But Eggers isn’t alone in leaning into the shadows. Sinners (2025), Ryan Coogler’s unexpected pivot into Southern Gothic territory, has stormed onto the scene with gospel choirs, rotting churches, and enough religious guilt to fill a confession box twice over.

It's the kind of film where every character is either running from their sins or dancing with them and we love it for that. There’s heat, there’s sweat, there’s a man shouting into a storm, which, frankly, should be a requirement in any self-respecting gothic drama.

Of course, no conversation about the current gothic moment is complete without Wednesday. Tim Burton took the world’s favourite goth girl, handed her a cello and a sardonic one-liner, and made her the icon of a new generation. Jenna Ortega’s performance is pure deadpan brilliance, and the series looks like someone dared Netflix to make a teen show that also doubles as a Victorian murder mystery set in a cursed boarding school.

What we’re seeing is a full-scale mood shift. Hollywood has spent years polishing everything to a high-gloss sheen, giving us clean-cut heroes, quippy dialogue, and CGI battles with the emotional depth of a teaspoon. But lately? We’ve had enough of the light. We want something with texture. With feeling. With fog.

Gothic cinema offers that in spades. It's romantic and grotesque, beautiful and brutal. It lets characters cry over graves, fall in love with ghosts, or lose their minds in a haunted estate. It’s all a bit much and that’s the point.

Even the upcoming Wuthering Heights remake, helmed by Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell, is leaning into the madness. Expect obsession. Expect mud. Expect high-fashion moors and characters so emotionally damaged they make Hamlet look well-adjusted. And frankly, we’re here for it.

And if you need more to establish the dark, brooding mood that the gothic brings along, wait for Frankenstein to hit the theatres. The film that is adapted from the original works of British writer Mary Shelly is currently the most anticipated projects directed by Guillermo del Toro.

No gothic revival would be complete without a fresh take on Mary Shelley's misunderstood monster. And right on cue, Hollywood is dusting off the lightning rods.

This isn’t limited to film either. Gothic energy is bleeding into music, fashion, interiors, and the ever-powerful moodboard. TikTok’s whimsigoth trend is proof enough: it's part cottagecore, part coven, all vibes. Long sleeves, dark florals, vintage lace, and a healthy dose of mystery. Suddenly, everyone wants their home to look like a Victorian séance and their wardrobe to whisper, “I might have a dark secret.”

But this wave of gothic storytelling isn’t just style over substance. It’s coming at a time when we’re all feeling a bit emotionally unhinged. The world’s noisy, fast, and a little bit broken. Gothic cinema, in all its candlelit weirdness, gives us space to feel messy things to sit with grief, guilt, desire, decay. It reminds us that beauty can be found in sadness, that stories don’t need to be tidy, and that sometimes the monster isn’t the worst thing in the room.

So no, this isn’t just a passing trend. It’s a correction. A much-needed, gorgeously dramatic detour from Hollywood’s obsession with clean lines and happy endings. We say that gothic is back, baby.

Light a candle. Draw the curtains. This one’s going to be deliciously dark.