My First Encounter with the Gothic, by Éile Rasmussen
I didn’t stumble upon the Gothic. I was raised by it.
I lived with the uncanny long before I read Dracula or wandered the echoing halls of theory. Cosied up on the couch as a child of the late 80s and early 90s, I was mesmerised by the soft horrors of The Addams Family, The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie. Some might call them monster-coms or paranormal sitcoms, but to me, they were family albums.
It wasn’t the fright that drew me in. It was the familiarity.
The Gothic has always felt like home, even in its laugh-track form: a space where strangeness was ordinary, where death wasn’t feared but invited to dinner, where affect ran thick and weirdness was not a flaw but a form of love. The Addamses weren’t monstrous to me – they were kind, devoted, delightfully odd. In a world that often punished difference, they celebrated it with joy. And in that celebration, I felt recognised.
No one told me this was the Gothic. I had to grow into the word, but the sensibility was always already in me: the hauntings, the yearning, the sense that beauty could be twisted and the twisted, beautiful. As I aged, the shadows deepened. I began to trace the aesthetic’s darker roots – abandonment, loss, power. I started to notice what lay beneath the surface of the laughter: the way these shows carved out space for otherness, for melancholy, for critique.
Looking back, those early monster-coms were my first lessons in Radical Gothic Relationality – long before I gave my theory a name. They modelled relationality in resistance, where love took strange forms and community wasn’t built through sameness but through acceptance of the spectral, the grotesque, the uncontainable.
For me, the Gothic has never been about fear alone. It has always been about recognition – of the parts of ourselves that don’t quite fit the frame, of the ghosts that trail behind us, of the systems that haunt our lives in ways we are taught not to name. The Gothic taught me not just how to see the world, but how to feel it differently.
I still carry those first hauntings with me as a cultural philosopher and theorist. They echo in every footnote, flicker through every lecture, and linger in the questions I ask about power, affect and recognition. That old black-and-white screen glowed with more than nostalgia – it gave me my first glimpse into the uncanny kinship of a world that felt, finally, like it had room for me.
The Gothic didn’t frighten me. It found me.
And I’ve never left.
