For the majority of children of my generation, cartoon villainy was the early-years introduction to the Gothic. However, I was, for a long time and no discernable reason, dead against the cinema. My first introduction to the Gothic was therefore not film, but television.

No genre or mode offered more to the fare of animated children’s television in the early noughties than the Gothic. At a time of relative global safety and prosperity, we found ourselves attracted to the safe degeneracy of animated baddies – they gave us a way to act out our desire to push the boundaries with such exaggeration that it posed no threat, real or imagined, and I loved every second of it.

Of the animated series which introduced me to the colourful possibilities of the Gothic, The Care Bears Family (1986-1988) was the first to strike a chord. Its second episode introduces Lord No Heart, the misanthropic wizard who acts as an antagonist throughout the series, and every bit the animated Goth. He even lives in a castle inside a storm cloud!

Is that a little on the nose? Perhaps, but that’s the beauty of children’s Gothic, particularly on television when settings and characters can change week by week. Animation, too, gave this series and others after it limitless possibilities to employ monstrosity and the supernatural to Gothic effect. In short, we can do away with subtlety in favour of dramatic images of isolated castles and dreams of world domination.

My early obsession did not stop there, however. Once I saw how engaging the ‘dark side’ of animated TV could be, I saw it everywhere, from Scooby-Doo (1969 – present) to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1999).

The Gothic witch as a stock figure became a particular source of fascination for my young self. While Sabrina leaned more towards camp as an aesthetic, the Gothic really came into its own in a series which, arguably, is far more camp and ‘cosy’: My Little Pony (1986-1987).

The witch Hydia first appears in the series’ first ten episodes, a powerful woman who transgresses boundaries of this gendered world, in which its protagonists (almost all female) advance a soft-spoken, community-based femininity. Her ultimate goal is to make the world ‘dark and dreary’ to match her home and tastes, turning Hydia from a stock antagonist into a Gothic-inspired shadow in this otherwise pastel-perfect world.

Now, as an early-career researcher in the Gothic, this first introduction to what would become a professional interest has stuck with me. I can trace the writing I am now fascinated by – women’s Gothic and folk and fairy tales, as well as the literature of traditional witchcraft – to the witches and sorcerers and scoundrels of children’s television.

I was no older than five when I came across the Gothic for the first time, but even then, it caught my attention like nothing else. It remains a hugely fruitful field that speaks to a child’s sense of adventure and discovery – and a desire to be a little bit wicked.