I Wasn’t Even A Goth In 2003-4 And Yet… – A Ramble « PekoeBlaze

Well, I want to talk about something cool which happened with pop culture in about 2003-4. Namely how goth-infused and goth-adjacent media was actually sort of popular for a while. Yes, this happens every now and then – with the massive popularity of the first season of the excellent comedy/horror/mystery/thriller show “Wednesday” in 2022 being a good modern example. But, in about 2003-4, it was a lot more widespread.

In 2003-4, I was in my mid-teens and I wasn’t a goth. Even these days, I’m maybe only like 20%-30% goth at most. But, because I liked heavy metal music and the horror genre, I stumbled across so much cool media back then which at least had some vague visual, emotional, thematic and/or atmospheric connection to the goth subculture. Because it was popular. Because, whilst more traditionalist goths might sneer at this period of history, or complain about how the subculture was being “watered down by the mainstream”, these things actually gave the subculture a bit more reach and presence.

Case in point, back in 2003-4, not only could you go to the cinema and watch a gloomy urban fantasy action movie about vampires – “Underworld” (2003) – or perhaps two sci-fi action movies where the main characters dressed like goths (eg: the second and third “Matrix” films). But atmospheric ghost stories were actually sort of popular too. Yes, I’m talking about the trend of US studios remaking more subtle and ghost-based Japanese horror movies, in order to get the lucrative “PG-13” rating (due to the lack of gruesomeness), which technically started in 2002 with Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring”.

On a side-note: This film didn’t reach British cinemas until spring 2003 and it also got a higher age-rating here as well (which certainly didn’t stop my fourteen-year old self from “acting older” at the ticket booth and getting scared senseless by this film...). It is also a film which, when I re-watched it a few years ago, still holds up surprisingly well too.

Thanks to the popularity of this film, there were at least a couple of other ghost-based Hollywood films in the cinemas at the time – like “The Grudge” (2004) and, a few months outside of the time range, “The Ring Two” (2005) as well. Apart from the eerie blue-green colour grading and desolate landscapes in “The Ring” (2002), these films often weren’t overtly gothic. The main characters were often fairly “mainstream” people and jump scares were often over-used as well. Yet, this was a time in history when ghost stories were a popular genre in the cinemas. Haunting, eerie and unsettling films were actually a popular genre that teenagers eagerly watched. And this is at least vaguely goth.

There’s also music as well. One interesting thing about 2003-4 was that there was this cool overlap between the metal and goth genres. Yes, this often gave people an incorrect impression of what traditional “goth music” is actually like – seriously, I was surprised when I first listened to Bauhaus, The Cure and The Sisters Of Mercy in 2008 – but it gave the subculture a bit more prominence. For starters, there was the worldwide popularity of Evanescence’s goth-infused nu metal song “Bring Me To Life” in 2003-4.

Or there’s how I probably wasn’t the only metalhead to be tricked into buying HIM’s gloriously moody 2003 gothic rock album “Love Metal” via a combination of the title, the “golden pentagram on a black background” cover art and the fact that one of the songs from the album (either “The Funeral Of Hearts” or “Buried Alive By Love“) ended up on a Metal Hammer magazine cover disc at the time. And, although the metal band Cradle Of Filth are very much a metal band, their popular 2004 album “Nymphetamine” included the sort of “Edgy absinthe-drinking Victorian vampire” type of gothic atmosphere which often led people to mistake the band for a goth band.

And then there are videogames too. No, I didn’t play the amazing horror-infused role-playing game “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines” (2004), a goth classic, back in 2004. Although this was probably for the best, given that the game was apparently released in a glitchy unfinished state and only truly became a classic because of all of the unofficial patches that the fan community made to repair it during the years that followed.

Still, if you had a Playstation 2 in 2003-4, then there was no shortage of amazing survival horror games with gothic elements. I remember playing a demo version of the utterly terrifying “Forbidden Siren”/”Siren” (2003) back then. It’s a gloomy game set in an eerie village in rural Japan where you sneak around and use psychic powers to avoid the undead. And there was also “Silent Hill 3” (2003) too. Yes, the main character of the game – Heather Mason – is as far from “a goth” as you can get (she wears white/orange/green clothes and literally has an early precursor of the “Karen” hairstyle...) but it’s this gloomy and atmospheric game with strong themes of introspection and angst.

Also, I’m SURE that I played at least part of the second “Project Zero”/”Fatal Frame” game from 2003 (albeit later, since it was only released here in 2005), but can’t find my copy of it anywhere. Don’t tell me I traded it in during the mid-late 2000s! This was a ghost-story based game set in an eerie old abandoned village in Japan and the game has at least a mildly gothic sensibility to it. Again, none of these classic PS2 survival horror games were overtly “goth” but they had a lot of focus on atmosphere, on gloomy lighting, on slow pacing, on eerie paranormal stuff and things like that. They were a far cry from the more bombastic first-person shooter and action-platformer games which were also popular at the time.

Again, a lot of what I’ve described in this article wasn’t overtly “goth” – it was media in other genres and/or or featuring more “mainstream” characters, which was infused with a more gothic sensibility in some way or another. Even so, it’s still amazing to look back on a time that I remember when – whilst more traditional gothic media was fairly uncommon – the genre inspired or blended itself with so many other things. Yes, it probably gave people a slightly false impression of what “goth” is, but it kept the subculture relevant and was a surprisingly good form of “outreach” as well.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂