A Year of Gothic - June 2026

June's A Year in Gothic live theatrical performance around which the the month's films and fiction spun, was Beetlejuice: The Musical which reframes death not as solemn inevitability but as meta-theatrical spectacle shaped by grief, family and disruption.

At the Prince Edward Theatre, Beetlejuice establishes its tone immediately through its opening number “Being Dead”, which playfully undercuts mortality itself. Everyone dies, it suggests, regardless of effort, discipline or aspiration. Yet, this inevitability is delivered with infectious energy and humour rather than dread. The result is carnivalesque rather than nihilistic: death becomes something communal, absurd and oddly familiar.

Beneath the meta-theatrical humour, the musical repeatedly returns to questions of loss and emotional realignment. Lydia’s relationship with her dead mother is given a greater emphasis than in the film, and gives the show its emotional anchor, shifting the afterlife into a space of unresolved grief rather than simple chaos. Equally significant is the quieter domestic thread of Lydia’s father’s remarriage, and the gradual process of accepting his girlfriend (rather than step-mother) as part of a reconfigured family unit.

The production remains in constant dialogue with Tim Burton’s 1988 film, but also insists on its divergence from it. Beetlejuice’s repeated reminders that “this is not the film” foreground adaptation itself as unstable, self-aware performance rather than faithful repetition. But yes, they do recreate the two calypso numbers!

The four films...

This sense of grotesque system and controlled absurdity finds a clear counterpart in Beetlejuice (1988, Terry Gilliam), where the afterlife is rendered as bureaucratic, rule-bound and absurd, populated by waiting rooms, manuals and administrative limbo. Even in death, nothing escapes procedure. Horror arises not from the supernatural itself but from the mundane logic imposed upon it, where haunting becomes entangled with paperwork, regulation and miscommunication.

By contrast, Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam) deepens this vision of institutional breakdown, where bureaucracy becomes a nightmarish, self-perpetuating structure. Gilliam constructs a world in which individuals are trapped within systems that no longer function but cannot be escaped, and where delay, error and misrecognition become the dominant modes of existence.

House (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi) offers a radically different model of instability. Its exuberant refusal of tonal consistency, shifting between comedy, horror, fantasy and musicality, creates a world where narrative logic repeatedly collapses. The haunted house becomes a space of constant transformation, where image and sensation override coherence, and where excess replaces structure as the organising principle.

Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis) extends these Gothic preoccupations into the body itself. Here, immortality is rendered grotesque rather than triumphant: the promise of eternal youth collapses into bodily fragmentation, artificiality and decay that refuses to stay hidden. The film’s dark comedy turns transformation into spectacle, aligning it with the carnivalesque logic running through the month, where the body is not stable identity but unstable surface, endlessly manipulated and ultimately beyond repair.

The two novels...

The month’s reading turns towards Gothic adolescence and inherited disturbance, to tie in with Lydia's central role in Beetlejuice. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle centres on an isolated teenage girl whose withdrawal from society becomes both protective ritual and unsettling control. Alongside this, The Amazing Mr Blunden by Antonia Barber combines haunting with time travel, transforming the ghost story into a structure of temporal permeability. Two children encounter a mysterious figure who enables movement between past and present, in order two help two other children. As a consequence, turning the haunted house into a site where history is not fixed but accessible.

Across these diverse texts, the Gothic emerges not as a fixed set of conventions but as a means of unsettling the structures that organise everyday life. Whether through haunted memories, impossible bodies, bureaucratic labyrinths, unstable narratives or the persistence of the past, June’s Gothic repeatedly reveals that what appears secure or permanent is always vulnerable to disruption.