Sometimes you want some mood music and thanks to music streaming sites? You can can get it in all the colors of the rainbow. If music came in colors.
But what if you wanted mood music that would fit a particular sub-genre of Gothic horror? Well normally neither I nor the streaming service of your choice would be of much help, but someone who can is Jack W. Shear. While no longer available, he did a deep dive into the Gothic in his Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque which included a detailed breakdown of Gothic sub-genres, including suggested playlists.
Entirely for my own benefit, I took those suggestions and converted them into Spotify playlists, but there's no reason I should have all the fun. Besides there's some good tracks on there so you should check them out. Also sort by title since the default is by the name of the artists as I added them.
The playlist for the Macabre Dozen, along with a short description of the environment they are trying to invoke is below.
The Gothic is about mood as much as anything, and nothing generates mood like the environment. Decrepit castles and windswept moors? You probably are already conjuring an image of a virtuous heroine in a nightdress. But what if the environment was further north, into the icy wasteland of the arctic where the grip of the encroaching ice is only eclipsed by the encroaching grip of madness?
The Gothic leans heavily on the medieval as a symbol of dark superstitions and passions that are not as forgotten as we would like to believe. Why not cut out the middleman and plunge your PCs directly into the medieval era, and not the sanitized D&D version. There's no shining armor, just dirt, blood, fear and death. It's 1183 and everyone has knives because you are all barbarians
This is practically cheating. The Gothic is all about buried secrets and here it is in 2023 and the State of Florida wants schoolkids to believe that slavery wasn't all that bad. You can't throw a goblet or elaborate candelabra in the American South without knocking over a Gothic trope.
You guessed it. This is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and all of Lovecraft's referencers. There's a reason for this. Not only is it a great story, and the linchpin of Delta Green? It's also about every conflict between locals and tourists (or town and gown if you prefer) dialed up to eleven.
Did you ever read
The Crucible by Arthur Miller and think “Those poor, poor pilgrims.” No? Imagine yourself a sinner in the hand of an angry god, fleeing from the licentiousness and immorality of a continent wracked by war and strife. You and a small group of the righteous make it to a pristine, new land. Only to face a dark and implacable wilderness. And then you learn, to your dawning horror, that your own colony is rife with sin and corruption.
I was pleased to see
Dark City on this list, and if you haven't seen it you should totally watch it and fast-forward past the first minute. It's an opening monologue that tells too much. You don't need ancient crypts and lonely castles to invoke the Gothic. There are plenty of dark secrets down unlit alleyways and in dusty record halls. Help is also far away when you are just another nobody among the teeming masses. Be careful though that you don't veer into Noir territory.
There's been an unusual resurgence of Folk Horror lately and I'm not sure where it's coming from. I really need to see
Midsommar because that's the only thing I can think of that could be causing it. The big influence here is the amazing
The Wicker Man which was remade with Nicholas Cage. He was in enough good movies that
we will give him a pass on this.
Shear defines this as the peak of Gothic popularity in the late 18th - early 19th centuries with a focus on taking the disturbing elements of the Gothic and placing them in a conveniently backwards, European locale. This suited the prejudices of UK and American readers just fine and also played well with the dawn of Romanticism. The end result was Vincent Price hamming it up in low-budget Edgar Allan Poe flicks, so all's well that ends well.
Bleak landscapes? Check. Stagecoaches carrying innocents through dangerous wilderness? Check. Fiery passions barely held in check? Double check. The Spaghetti Westerns with their intense atmospherics paved the way for a Gothic take on the Old West but the 1990s Western revival, including the release of
horror RPG Deadlands really showed how flexible the setting could be.
Abandoned castles and isolated mansions feature prominently in Gothic fiction, but what if you take the entire setting and condense it down to a single building? Mike Flanagan's adaption of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix showed that such a location can be both sprawling, claustrophobic and filled with terrible secrets just waiting to be uncovered.
Enough with the harpsichord recitals and vague feelings of dread. Let's bust out the fake blood, fire up the motorized gardening implements and fight some cannibalistic slashers. This setting is pitched as a high-action interlude in a regular campaign and is a clear homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all its imitators. The idea of a seeming refuge turning into a desperate struggle for survival may not be Gothic, but it has its antecedents in The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells and The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell with
obligatory SMBC comic link.
Like The Pit Stop In Hell, this is pitched as a way to introduce a tonal shift to give a new perspective in an ongoing game. Perhaps after defeating the Big Bad Evil Guy the PCs now discover that the world wasn't as simple as they thought. The normal becomes strange, up becomes down, and beans become peas in a surrealistic shout-out to Lewis Carroll. L. Frank Baum, and David Lynch. One influence that Shear cites is the highly underrated
JAGS Wonderland which is definitely worth a read.
