Goths
The Connection to Whitby

The Whitby Gothic Weekend is a twice-yearly festival for Goths, in Whitby, North Yorkshire, England.

The first festival was held in 1994, and it was held annually until 1997, when it became a twice-yearly event - generally held in April and October/November. Whitby was chosen in part because it features in Bram Stoker's Dracula as well as inspiring it.

It has now grown into one of the most popular gothic events in the world, attracting attendees from across the UK and around the world. Most of the events are held at the town's 1,000 capacity Spa Pavilion, however, other venues such as The Metropole Hotel are used for overspill and unofficial events.  Accommodation is normally fully booked up well in advance.

Although referred to as a "weekend" it includes events during the day on Friday and fringe events on the Thursday and Monday. The event always sells out and many more people attend than there are tickets available, resulting in booming business for Whitby pubs such as The Angel and The Elsinore.

 

What is Goth?

The word goth can be used as a noun. For example, one may say, "My best friend is a goth." Plurally, an s is added, as in, "At the club there were many goths." Gothic and goth can also be used interchangeably as adjectives, as is the case with, "She was wearing a gothic necklace", or, "He is goth." The word gothic is sometimes used as a noun in non-English speaking countries, as in, "I saw a gothic!" This use is comparatively rare, and grammatically incorrect in English.

Goth cannot be used as a singular name for a group of people or the subculture in general. "A member of goth", for example, is incorrect, because goth is not the name of an organized group. To refer correctly to the entire group of people, one may use the terms goths, the goth subculture, or the gothic subculture. Gothic, when used as an adjective, can potentially refer to anything dark or horrifying, or something influenced by medieval Gothic art, and not necessarily to something associated with modern gothic subculture.

 

 

Original subculture

By the late 1970s, there were a few post-punk bands in the United Kingdom labelled "gothic." However, it was not until the early 1980s that gothic rock became its own subgenre within post-punk and that followers of these bands started to come together as a distinctly recognizable group. The opening of the Batcave in London's Soho in July 1982 provided a prominent meeting point for the emerging scene, which had briefly been labelled positive punk by the New Musical Express. The term "Batcaver" was later used to describe old-school goths.

Independent of the British scene, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw death rock branch off from American punk. In Germany, members of the emerging goth subculture were called Grufties (engl. "vault creatures" or "tomb creatures") in the '80s and early '90s. They represented generally a fusion between the goth subculture and the New wave movement and were forming the early part of the "dark culture."

 

 

Goth after post-punk

After the demise of post-punk, goth continued to evolve, both musically and visually. This caused variations in style ("types" of goth). Local scenes also contributed to this variation. By the 1990s, Victorian fashion saw a renewed popularity in the goth scene, drawing on the mid-19th century gothic revival and the more morbid aspects of Victorian culture. The 2003 Victoria and Albert Museum Gothic exhibition in London furthered a tenuous connection between modern goth and the medieval gothic period.

Over time, the gothic subculture has developed its own "goth slang", with regional variations.

 

 

The original Goths and gothic horror

The original Goths were a Germanic tribe who played an important role in the fall of the western Roman Empire. The name "goth" later became pejorative: synonymous with "barbarian" and being uncultured (a similar fate befell the name of another such tribe, the Vandals). During the Renaissance period in Europe, medieval architecture was retrospectively labelled gothic architecture, and was considered ugly and barbaric in contrast to the pure lines of classical architecture. In the United Kingdom, by the late 1700s, however, nostalgia for the medieval period destroyed by the Reformation led people to become fascinated with medieval gothic ruins. This sometimes went to the extent of building fake ruins. This fascination was often combined with an interest in medieval romances, Roman Catholic religion, and the supernatural. Enthusiasts for gothic revival architecture in the United Kingdom were led by Horace Walpole, and were sometimes nicknamed "goths", the first positive use of the term in the modern period.

The gothic novel of the late eighteenth century, a genre founded by Horace Walpole with the 1764 publication of The Castle of Otranto, was responsible for the more modern connotations of the term gothic. Henceforth, the term was associated with a mood of horror, morbidity, darkness and the supernatural. The gothic novel established much of the iconography of later horror literature and cinema, such as graveyards, ruined castles or churches, ghosts, vampires, nightmares, cursed families, being buried alive and melodramatic plots. Another notable element was the brooding figure of the gothic villain, which developed into the Byronic hero. The most famous gothic villain is the vampire, Dracula, originally depicted in a novel by Bram Stoker, then made more famous through the medium of horror movies.


Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the "Gothic revival" style, built by seminal Gothic writer Horace Walpole

 


The Addams Family - Main Title

 

The powerful imagery of horror movies began in German expressionist cinema in the twenties then passed onto the Universal Studios films of the thirties, then to camp horror B films such as Plan 9 From Outer Space and then to Hammer Horror films. By the 1960s, TV series, such as The Addams Family and The Munsters, used these stereotypes for camp comedy.

Certain elements in the dark, atmospheric music and dress of the post punk scene were clearly "gothic" in this sense, exemplified by the names of such post punk bands as UK Decay and Southern Death Cult. The use of "gothic" as an adjective in describing this music and its followers led to the term "goth".

 

Music, Literature and Fashion

The influence of the gothic novel on the goth subculture can be seen in numerous examples of the subculture's poetry and music, though this influence sometimes came second hand, through the popular imagery of horror films and television. In particular, the imagery surrounding male and female vampires, witches, sorcerers, and spies, had a significant influence on the evolution of gothic fashion. The Byronic hero, in particular, was a key precursor to the male goth image, while Dracula's iconic portrayal by Bela Lugosi appealed powerfully to early goths. They were attracted by Lugosi's aura of camp menace, elegance and mystique. Some people even credit the band Bauhaus' first single "Bela Lugosi's Dead", with the start of the goth subculture, though many prior art house movements also influenced gothic fashion and style. A notable early example was Siouxsie Sioux, of the musical group Siouxsie and the Banshees. Some members of Bauhaus were, themselves, fine art students and/or active artists.

The concept of the femme fatale, which appeared in Romantic literature, film noir, as well as in the gothic novel, went on to become a vital image for female goths. In cinema, the femme fatale style adopted by silent movie actress Theda Bara exerted a lasting influence. Bara was nicknamed the vamp, and her first name was an anagram for "death"). She established the look for pale predatory women in later films, which ultimately influenced the goth subculture.

Some of the early gothic rock and death rock artists adopted traditional horror movie images, and also drew on horror movie soundtracks for inspiration. Their audiences responded in kind by further adopting appropriate dress and props. Use of standard horror film props like swirling smoke, rubber bats, and cobwebs were used as gothic club décor from the beginning in The Batcave. Such references in their music and image were originally tongue-in-cheek, but as time went on, bands and members of the subculture took the connection more seriously. As a result, morbid, supernatural, and occult themes became a more noticeably serious element in the subculture. The interconnection between horror and goth was highlighted in its early days by The Hunger, a 1983 vampire film, which starred David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon. The movie featured gothic rock group Bauhaus performing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in a nightclub. In 1993, Whitby became the location for what became the UK's biggest goth festival as a direct result of being featured in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Throughout the evolution of the goth subculture, familiarity with gothic literature became a significant for many goths. Poe, Lovecraft, Shelley, Dante and the other heralding names became just as symbolic of the subculture as dressing all in black, wearing the hair dramatically stylised and dyed black, adorning oneself with dark jewellery (similar to Jet jewellery from Whitby) and body art, and carrying around a decorated tin lunchbox.

A newer literary influence on the gothic scene was Anne Rice's re-imagining of the idea of the vampire. Rice's characters were depicted as struggling with eternity and loneliness, this with their ambivalent or tragic sexuality had deep attractions for many goth readers, making her works very popular in the eighties through the nineties. Movies based on her books have been filmed in recent years - notably Interview with the Vampire, which starred Brad Pitt, and the more recent Queen of the Damned, in which goths appear directly and indirectly. The first film, in particular, helped further encourage the spread of Victorian style fashions in the subculture (although period inspired clothing has been a recurrent trend in the gothic subculture). Rice's novels influenced Poppy Z. Brite's vampire novels. Brite, who is familiar with the gothic scene, distinctively refers to it in her novels as the location of where her vampires hunt. Both Brite and Rice are connected to New Orleans, often seen as a gothic mecca.

 

Later media influences

As the subculture became well-established the connection between goth and horror fiction became almost a cliché, with goths quite likely to appear as characters in horror novels and film. Movies such as The Crow drew directly on goth music and style, and the movies of Tim Burton, especially Beetlejuice, featuring a goth teen, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride are all significant. In turn they drew new people into the gothic scene. Anne Rice's book series "The Vampire Chronicles" and the popular World of Darkness roleplaying games, especially Vampire: The Masquerade, also referred directly to gothic music and culture and encouraged an interest in the scene. In these pop-culture depictions of vampires, vampires are depicted as suave, gothic sophisticates, with naturally darkened eyes and pallid skin. Influences from anime as well as cyberpunk fiction such as The Matrix have also crept into the goth scene, which helped give rise to a new subculture and a new label, Cyber subculture, or the Industrial/goth offshoot, cybergoth; they also added to the popularity of Industrial music.

 

Content taken from Wikipedia.org

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