My First Encounter with the Gothic, by Phoenix Guqing Wang
Unlike fear, my earliest encounters with the Gothic were marked by a sense of inscrutable sadness.
Long before I knew the term “gothic,” I was immersed in stories of monsters, ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural beings. As a child, I watched television adaptations of Journey to the West at my grandparents’ house, where the Monkey King battled shapeshifting monsters seeking the monk’s flesh to attain immortality. During middle and high school, I read incomplete online translations of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and searched obsessively for vampire films, from Nosferatu and Dracula to Interview with the Vampire and Van Helsing. I borrowed books by Edgar Allan Poe from the local library and listened to friends’ stories about haunted mansions, abandoned amusement parks, and ghosts lingering in rural landscapes where I grew up.
Yet what puzzled me was that these stories rarely frightened me. Instead, they filled me with sorrow. Rather than accepting the narratives that doomed monstrous beings to destruction, I found myself imagining alternatives. While drawing the spider sisters, snake lady, and ox-elephant brothers from Journey to the West, I wondered why they desired the monk’s flesh and whether they had other choices. What histories shaped them? What suffering had they endured? Would immortality truly make them happy?
These questions haunted me. I felt an increasing sadness for creatures whose destinies seemed predetermined by erasure. As I became fascinated with vampires, that feeling deepened. Watching Nosferatu as a teenager, I felt drawn not to the heroes but to the lonely vampire inhabiting a decaying castle. The dilapidated architecture, the faded history, the longing for connection, and the film’s melancholic atmosphere all seemed profoundly sorrowful. In Interview with the Vampire, I wept for Lestat rather than Louis. In Van Helsing, I imagined a happy ending for Dracula and his brides. The nameless ghosts of rural folklore also inspired more sympathy than fear. If they truly existed, I wondered, could they somehow be helped? Was being a ghost inseparable from loss, solitude, and despair?
It was not until I began formally studying the Gothic that I came to terms with this recurring emotion. It dwelled on me that the sorrow might reveal something fundamental about the gothic mode itself. Gothic narratives stage decline, vulnerability, and tragedy while probing questions about existence, mortality, and meaning. Amid darkness, they illuminate truths that resist simple moral divisions.
That sorrow remains with me, but I no longer try to explain it away. Instead, I recognize it as a generative force behind my interest in gothic horror. It taught me that the value of the Gothic lies not only in comprehending what is fearful but also in exploring ethical relationships with radical alterity. Gothic narratives invite us to feel for beings deemed monstrous, to imagine alternatives to their destruction, and to challenge anthropocentric forms of justice grounded in exclusion and erasure. Rather than affirming violence, the Gothic has taught me a form of attentiveness that feels urgently relevant today: the capacity to extend tenderness toward beings radically different from ourselves.
