Get the latest gossip
25 Movies That Define the Goth-Cinema Canon
We’re all living in one, big, dark room; might as well put a movie on.
The tricky thing about goth is that because it’s a movement birthed from Gothic literature, horror, mythology, baroque art, and ’70s and ’80s bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Joy Division, and Bauhaus, it often feels in conversation with other genres, overlapping with everything from vampires and haunted houses to sci-fi space operas and cannibal romances. Winona Ryder is going to be all over this canon as Gen X’s goth princess (and yes, Heathers was on our short list), but her work as Mina Harker might be her best performance of this time; those huge eyes and her gasping breaths perfectly express her character’s restraint and sexual repression, and explain how easily she’s drawn under Count Dracula’s (Gary Oldman) spell. After winning the Best Costume Design Oscar for her work on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she delivered another set of iconic outfits for Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, a psychological thriller in which a child psychologist played by Jennifer Lopez agrees to an experimental virtual-reality process by which she’ll enter a serial killer’s mind (Vincent D’Onofrio) in order to find his latest victim.
Or read this on VULTURE