To celebrate the greatest subculture in the world on World Goth Day, we’re exploring some of our favourite gothic characters from the silver screen. If you haven’t been inspired by at least one of these wardrobes, are you even goth?
Fairuza Balk as Nancy Downs in The Craft / Image credit: Columbia Pictures
Nancy Downs (The Craft)
Classic line: We are the weirdos, mister.
Fairuza Balk was the star of this 1996 teen witch drama, playing an out of control sorceress whose powers drive her insane. Her various dark looks from her messy mop to her PVC trench coat have been major fashion inspo for goth witches ever since.
Elvira (Elvira: Mistress of the Dark)
Classic line: If they ever ask about me, tell them I was more than just a great set of boobs. I was also an incredible pair of legs.
Without doubt Cassandra Peterson’s most well known role - so much so that she often appears in the guise of Elvira for various showbiz events. In the 1988 movie, Elvira is a curvy horror hostess who finds herself unable to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours when she inherits an old mansion. She’s the ultimate glamour goth.
Morticia Addams (The Addams Family)
Classic line: Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job.
Morticia and Gomez Addams have one of the most loving partnerships in movie history, united by their love for pain and death. The entire Addams family is the perfect goth family, but Morticia - especially played by Anjelica Huston in the 1991 film is darkness and beauty personified.
Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice)
Classic line: I've read through that handbook for the recently deceased. It says: 'Live people ignore the strange and unusual". I myself am strange and unusual.
Tim Burton’s iconic 1988 film stars Winona Ryder as teen goth Lydia Deetz, who is initially the only one weird enough to be able to see the ghosts in the house her family has just moved into. Throughout the film, Lydia is deeply depressed and rather keen on the idea of becoming a ghost like her new friends.
Eric Draven (The Crow)
Classic line: Can't rain all the time.
Based on the comic of the same name, this 1998 movie stars Brandon Lee in his final film appearance. He’s an undead vigilante hellbent on revenge against those who killed him and his wife, and takes on the appearance of a kind of goth Joker. To make it all the more morbid, this was the film in which Brandon Lee was accidentally shot dead on set.
Gary King (The World's End)
Classic line: What the f**k does WTF mean?
We’ve all got that one friend who hasn’t changed a bit since school - and it’s really rather uncanny. Simon Pegg’s character Gary King has been stuck as his teenage self for more than twenty years in the 2013 final film of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy; including wearing his self-same long black jacket and Sisters of Mercy T-shirt.
MORE: Seven misconceptions you may have had about goths
Ginger Fitzgerald (Ginger Snaps)
Classic line: I get this ache... And I, I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to f**king pieces.
In 2000’s Ginger Snaps, Ginger Fitzgerald and her sister Brigitte are obsessed with death. Ginger may not be the most gothic looking character in the world, but she turns into a freaking werewolf - what’s more goth than that? (Don’t say “vampire”).
Tagged in The Addams Family Beetlejuice