The Return of the Gothic Monster Boyfriend
By Dread Central
8 min readFrom ‘The Bride!’ to ‘Dracula: A Love Tale’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, why women are drawn to the obsessive romance of gothic horror
From ‘The Bride!’ to ‘Dracula: A Love Tale’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, why women are drawn to the obsessive romance of gothic horror
I’m on the train back to my apartment after watching Emerald Fennell’s controversial, maximalist take on Wuthering Heights, a film the director was inspired to make partially because of Jacob Elordi’s sideburns on the set of Saltburn. In an interview with Fandango, Fennell realized he looked “exactly like the Heathcliff on [her]…well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights.” Like the girl sitting on her floor on TikTok and all the young women in her comments, Fennell mentioned that she was “destroyed” when she first read the novel as a teenager.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the gothic horror resurgence we’ve been seeing in the 2020s, about the ongoing discussions about how fewer Americans are dating and having sex, about the popularity of romantasy, and what it is that women actually want. I could’ve said that I’ve been thinking of the male loneliness crisis as well, and I’ve definitely thought of it, but I don’t think there’s anything left to say that hasn’t been said before. The truth is that the loneliness crisis isn’t just affecting men. So far, the 2020s have been a profoundly lonely decade for everybody. In 2024, The Atlantic published a feature examining why we stopped hanging out. Friendship apps like 222 are becoming increasingly popular. On the vaguely exploitative TLC show My Strange Addiction, a woman gets a tattoo for her AI boyfriend. As viewers point out online, it seems as though the AI boyfriend has been programmed to be “abusive and possessive.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as some kind of kink or fetish, or simply a cry for help, but I’d argue that’s not necessarily the case. When I scrolled through the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI sub-Reddit (which became the subject of a viral piece on The Cut late last year), I found that a good majority of the women have trained their AI companions to be dominant, intensely passionate, present, and, most interestingly, unapologetically masculine–all the traits the heroes in your mom’s well-worn bodice-rippers from the 80s had, and all the traits the modern man doesn’t seem to have, including their real life, flesh-and-blood partners.
With the sudden resurgence of Gothic horror, it’s no surprise, then, that the monsters at the center of these films have been just as appealing to women. After all, the gothic has always understood something about sexuality, romance, and desire that our culture tends to repress and men tend to misunderstand. As writer Lauren Loudermilk pointed out in her essay, “My Monster, Myself” on Substack, “The gothic, a genre created for and by women, understands [that] romance in abjection. For men, desiring women becomes a public spectacle. But for a woman, to want to f*ck a man is a private horror.”
This is a good time to go through a quick history of the genre for those who might not be aware. The eighteenth century saw an “unprecedented increase in female literacy across class boundaries” in Britain, with many of them becoming professional writers and journalists themselves. Although Horace Walpole is widely credited with writing the first Gothic novel in 1764, Ann Radcliffe was responsible for popularizing the genre.
But reading novels wasn’t “considered a particularly intellectual pursuit” by critics of the time, and because gothic novels were mostly written by women for women featuring young women as the main characters, they were “derided more than any other genre of fiction.”
In her novels, Radcliffe allowed women to explore sexuality and desire in a way that was still respectable, even if the genre itself wasn’t taken seriously. She would be followed by Jane Austen with her parody Northanger Abbey in 1817 (published posthumously), Mary Shelley with Frankenstein the following year, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in 1847.
Of course, this isn’t to say that men writing in the genre didn’t touch on sexuality and desire. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is full of “voluptuous” female vampires whose need to feed on everyone–including children–resembles sexual desire; Dracula himself appears to have some homoerotic tendencies (this is especially apparent in 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a movie that also happens to be full of very, very hot people).
Two centuries later, it’s striking how little has changed. Although fiction-reading has declined significantly since 2017 (I hate saying this, but guys–it’s the phones), women still read more than men, and female authors tend to dominate The New York Times Best Sellers list. My neighborhood bookstore has a table full of different editions of Wuthering Heights, including an admittedly adorable board book that uses illustrations of Cathy and Heathcliff on the moors to teach small children about different kinds of weather. The last time I visited, two young women were discussing whether or not they’d have enough time to finish Brontë’s novel before the release of the film.
But even if a woman doesn’t exactly consider herself a reader, she for sure has seen one of these gothic monsters on film sometime in the past six years and found herself feeling something she didn’t quite expect. Who among us can say that they didn’t find themselves fantasizing about the rancid, decaying, obsessive Count Orlok after seeing Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu? Who wasn’t moved by the gentleness and rage radiating from the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein? Even before its US release earlier this year, I’ve been bombarded with TikToks made by girls who managed to see Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale and fell in love with Caleb Landy Jones as the titular prince-turned-bloodsucker. Just hours ago in the Alamo Drafthouse in FiDi, groups of girls–including me and my best friend–watched Jacob Elordi emerge from the fog with a mullet, a cane, and a little gold earring, eager to torture Cathy for marrying Edgar Linton forever. Later this month, we’ll be treated to yet another version of Frankenstein with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!. And though the story is being told from the point of view of the Creature’s companion, I have no doubt that someone will walk out of the theater desperate to find their own Frank (yes, he has a name in this version).
One of the Gothic’s greatest strengths is its ability to be a form of escapism. Like the novels of the eighteenth century, all of these films are indulgent, thrilling, and offer audiences the chance to lose themselves in another world, even if only for a few hours. And like your mom’s Harlequin Romance novels, they offer a kind of wish-fulfillment in a world that feels increasingly sterile, unromantic, and anxiety-inducing (it’s interesting to note the the Harlequin Romance novels became popular at a time when women were entering the workforce in droves, securing high-powered, high-paying positions, and were finally able to open their own credit cards without a husband’s or male co-signer’s signature–in a 1985 study, researchers found that throughout discussions of these books, “there was evidence of a desire for the idealized, perfect, romantic life, without the constraints of daily chores and schedules” and “fantasies” of being “taken care of by others,” as well as a desire for a “strong, wealthy, domineering” lover).
In other words, the appeal of the gothic monster isn’t so different from the appeal of the Harlequin hero in the 80s or the controlling AI chatbot boyfriend. Dracula waits 400 years to be reunited with his beloved Elisabeta. The Creature, chained in the cellar and draped in medical gauze, gently removes Elizabeth’s glove in a small act of intimacy. Count Orlok might have threatened to kill everyone Ellen loves, but at least he insisted that she must submit to him–and by extension, her own desire–willingly. These figures are all frightening in the intensity of their longing and devotion, but that, of course, is exactly what makes them so irresistible.