Have you ever wondered how closet-goths came to be? Are they born or made? What is UP with halloween mania?! As a first-person participant, I’ve put some thought into this and here are my ideas.

YOUTH:

Are you born with a spooky gene that predisposes you to this morbid fascination? Maybe, but clearly no one has done any studies in this arena. More likely it is an attitude bent that gets met at the right time and place with something influential.

It could be as simple as a very youthful appreciation of the moody, melancholy light of Fall. The smell of leaves walking to school. You start to favour a season. You look forward to halloween crafts at school - cardboard silhouettes of pumpkins and witches and cats. Even the thanksgiving cornucopia and ideas of Puritans. The Headless Horseman. The wonder, the mystery, the hygge. All of this sparks joy for you. My parents were the diametric opposite of goths, so they were not grooming me for gloom. Then entertainment comes to you. Maybe first it was a creepy bedtime story, some Brothers Grimm perhaps. For me, it definitely has something to do with this:

THE HILARIOUS HOUSE OF FRIGHTENSTEIN

THHF was a low budget children’s show, produced in Hamilton for a Canadian market in 1971. I was born in ’75 so it must have syndicated all through the 70s. I can picture a rapt four year old version of myself, quietly thrilling to the cheap, dumb, gothic vibes and bad vampire/werewolf jokes. Why was this the chosen flavour that ignited my interest? We DON’T KNOW. But the flavour worked for me. Cut to:

LABYRINTH (1986)

Let’s talk about villains. You love them or you don’t - you know which. There is danger, there is transgression, there is romance! This handsome, horrible person could dispose of other people like so much weekday trash, but with you… no. You alone have the power to change this horrible person because they are so much in love with you. This sums up the Goblin King’s (David Bowie) relationship with Sarah in this beloved Jim Henson masterpiece. There is a masquerade scene which further enforces the identity-switching allure of the halloween season. Costumes, villains, love that bridges known time and space… it’s a dizzying fantasy. It’s perfect.

COOLNESS:

Hot on Labyrinth’s heels you have something come out called The Lost Boys (1987). Suddenly you’re breaking out of Sarah’s idyllic children’s bedroom into the seedy rock ’n roll seaside social scene of some very Hair Metal vampires. They wear leather, they take any risk, they laugh in the face of the preppy straightness that Corey Haim personifies. What’s this, you start to wonder? Vampires are nocturnal, they’re sexy, they can seduce anyone… they’re Cool. Cue morphing childhood entertainment bents into full-fledged lifestyle aspiration. And then you’re a teenager.

We can cut through a few decades of manic consumption of all dark, scary, spooky, supernatural, goth-leaning artistic products. You spend months planning a halloween costume, you go to Venice to make sure you see a real masquerade ball in this lifetime, you take dramatic sunset photos in cemeteries. This is all kind of covert, because you never don the leather, lace, and black lipstick. But you’re there, living your best elevated closet-goth life.

FEAR:

Some people get thrills from a solid paddle-boarding session. And some peoples’ systems make them thrill to the idea of danger and fear. I believe this is a chemical process. Like rollercoasters, you want to get NEXT TO danger, but you want to be totally safe and protected and be able to laugh it off moments later. Horror lovers don’t want a serial killer in their house. They want the endorphin rush of imagining what that would be like, but living to tell the tale. Rushes come to people in a million different ways, but from the sheer body of work catering to the fear-factor, it’s safe to assume a lot of people really get something out of the elevated heart rate of being chased up the stairs.

The Hollywood Museum (@HollywoodMuseum) _ X.jpeg

THE ALLURE OF THE WITCH:

It’s a match made in heaven: magic + feminine power. There is so much to say on this topic that it’s kind of hard to broach it in a succinct way. The witch has ever-represented the concept of a woman living free of suffocating repression. Living right or wrong, on her own terms, and scaring the bejesus out of people in the process. It’s a harnessing of dangerous, sexy, intelligent power, that we all know is latent in all of us. I’m all for it, and it blends so nicely with the halloween season.

Side note: harken back to The Clash of the Titans - Medusa’s head made of snakes!

THE NOW:

How does this pan out for a full grown adult, you ask? I’ll tell ya. You wait all year for October 1st. Every year you can rely on the trusty euphoric burst of nostalgia and belief-suspension. The light hits, the kids make cardboard witch cutouts, the movies go into rotation. You troll Spirit Halloween for the next best thing to the Michael Myers string lights you got last year. You go to Salem on vacation. You idolize Winona Ryder. Some people like Christmas, sure it’s fine, but Christmas is not laden with DARK. There are no fangs and fishnets at Christmas dinner. For the true closet-goth, those other holidays are a bit of yawn.

If dark is wrong, we don’t wanna be right.