A Year of Gothic - August 2026

August's A Year in Gothic live theatrical performance around which the month's films and fiction spun was Death Note The Musical at the Barbican Centre, bringing the Gothic into the realm of moral certainty, surveillance and absolute power. At its centre is Light, a student who discovers a supernatural notebook capable of killing anyone whose name is written within it. What begins as an attempt to create a better world rapidly becomes an exercise in control, as the power to decide who deserves to live turns justice into personal authority. Pursued by the elusive detective L, Light becomes caught in a duel of intellects in which morality is repeatedly redefined by whoever believes they have the right to enforce it.

The stage musical brings the supernatural elements of the story into sharper theatrical focus. The gods are much more prominent than in the 2006 film version, particularly Ryuk, whose presence makes the supernatural source of Light's power impossible to ignore. Rather than simply functioning as an explanation for the notebook, the gods become part of the spectacle and remind us that Light's apparent authority ultimately depends upon forces beyond his control. It also integrates the Misa Amane and Rem character, which are more heavily featured in the 2007 follow up. Through this, the pop-music dimension is expanded considerably, with full-scale diegetic pop concert sequences, as well as non-diegetic musical ensemble and songs becoming part of the show's dramatic language.

Yet the theatricality does not soften the story's moral darkness. If anything, the combination of spectacle, music and supernatural intervention makes Light's transformation more striking. The central Gothic horror is not that an ordinary person encounters an extraordinary object, but that an ordinary person is given extraordinary power and becomes increasingly convinced that using it makes him morally superior. The notebook turns an abstract idea of justice into an individual act of judgement, with each name written becoming both a death sentence and a justification of Light's own authority.

Death Note therefore represents a Gothic of systems rather than castles. Surveillance, investigation, bureaucracy and ideological certainty replace haunted houses and ancient ruins. L's pursuit of Light creates a world in which everyone is potentially being watched and every action becomes evidence, while Light constructs an increasingly elaborate system around himself to conceal his actions. The supernatural object may be fantastical, but the mechanisms of control it produces are recognisably human.

The four films...

This concern with the relationship between crime, justice and surveillance began with M (1931, Fritz Lang), where a city becomes consumed by the search for a child murderer. Lang's film turns the urban environment into a network of observation, suspicion and collective judgement. As the police investigation intensifies, so does the pressure exerted by the criminal underworld, creating an unsettling parallel between legal justice and mob justice. The Gothic emerges from the possibility that the desire to identify and punish evil can itself become frighteningly authoritarian.

Death Note (2006, Shūsuke Kaneko) provides a direct cinematic counterpart to the stage musical, following Light's transformation from student to self-appointed arbiter of life and death. The supernatural notebook gives physical form to an essentially moral fantasy: the ability to remove those considered undesirable from society. Yet the more Light uses it, the less distinguishable justice becomes from personal revenge and self-preservation. The Gothic horror lies in the gradual corruption of an apparently rational system.

Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg) shifts the question from punishing crimes that have happened to preventing crimes that have not yet occurred. Its system of predictive justice promises a world without murder, but at the cost of individual freedom and uncertainty. Like Death Note, it asks what happens when the desire for perfect justice becomes more important than the possibility of human fallibility. The Gothic unease comes from living within a system that claims to know what you will do before you have done it.

Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker) moves the theme into a more explicitly supernatural and noir-inflected Gothic. Private investigator Harry Angel's search for a missing man gradually becomes a journey into his own hidden past, as the distinction between investigation and self-discovery collapses. At the heart of the mystery lies a Faustian pact, with supernatural power purchased at a price that Angel has tried to escape. Knowledge here is not liberating: the closer Angel comes to the truth, the more dangerous that truth becomes, suggesting that there are some forms of knowledge, and some bargains, from which the self cannot safely escape.

The two novels...

The month's reading continues the fascination with individuals who acquire powers beyond ordinary human limits, and as a nod to Death Note's Manga origins, both were graphic novels. The Wicked + The Divine: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie transforms the Faustian bargain into a world of celebrity, performance and divine power. Gods return to the world and become pop stars, worshipped as cultural icons while knowing that their existence is temporary. The connection to Death Note lies in the seductive relationship between power and public identity: extraordinary abilities become inseparable from performance, image and the desire to be recognised.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in the graphic adaptation by Ian Edginton and I.N.J. Culbard, returns to the more traditional Faustian structure. Dorian is granted the preservation of his youth while the consequences of his corruption are transferred elsewhere. As in Death Note, the Gothic emerges through the separation between action and consequence. Dorian can continue to behave as though he is untouched by his choices, while the portrait records what he refuses to acknowledge. The supernatural object becomes a physical embodiment of moral responsibility that the character is determined to evade.

Across August's films, fiction and performance, the Gothic becomes a way of examining what happens when justice is removed from the imperfect structures of human society and placed in the hands of an individual, an institution or an apparently infallible system. Death Note makes this literal through a supernatural notebook, but the same anxiety runs through surveillance, predictive policing, mob justice, celebrity power and Faustian bargains. The Gothic horror is ultimately not the existence of supernatural authority but the human desire to possess it. Once someone believes they alone can determine what is right, the distinction between justice and corruption becomes dangerously easy to erase.