A Year of Gothic - September 2026

September's A Year of Gothic moved away from the supernatural Gothic of earlier months and towards something more psychological. Across opera, film and fiction, desire, isolation and identity became sources of unease, with the most unsettling transformations taking place within the mind rather than the body.

September's central production was The Seven Deadly Sins / The Human Voice at the Charing Cross Theatre. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins follows Anna as she travels through America earning money for her family, while Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice confines an unnamed woman to a single telephone conversation as a relationship comes to an end. In director Alejandro Bonatto's production, soprano Katherine McIndoe plays both women, turning the two operas into chapters in the life of the same character.

That connection brings the psychological Gothic to the forefront. Anna repeatedly sacrifices herself in pursuit of survival, while the woman of The Human Voice is left confronting what remains when the relationship around which she has built her life disappears. The stripped-back production reinforces this sense of confinement, particularly in the second opera, as the physical world contracts around its increasingly isolated central character. The review of the production I did for The Spy in the Stalls is here.

The four films watched explored similar territory from very different directions. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) confines its characters within Petra's apartment, where desire and emotional dependence become struggles for power and control. Its theatrical construction makes the emotional claustrophobia particularly intense.

Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) takes identity itself as its subject. As actress Elisabet Vogler and nurse Alma become increasingly entangled, the distinction between the two women begins to dissolve. Faces, voices and personalities become unreliable, creating a sense of unease without the need for any conventional supernatural threat.

Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) similarly explores identity through imitation and projection. Millie and Pinky's relationship gradually becomes stranger and more difficult to define, while the film's dreamlike atmosphere makes their transformations feel almost uncanny.

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) brings the Gothic into a familiar London flat. As Carol becomes increasingly isolated, the walls crack, hands appear from surfaces and the physical environment seems to respond to her fears. The film's horror comes from the uncertainty over where psychological experience ends and external reality begins.

Together, the films suggested different forms of psychological entrapment. Petra is caught within destructive relationships, Persona questions the boundaries between two selves, 3 Women turns fascination into transformation and Repulsion makes an ordinary domestic space reflect a disturbed state of mind.

The month's fiction offered two very different approaches to women whose perceptions are challenged or dismissed by those around them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper remains one of the clearest examples of psychological Gothic. Its narrator is confined to a room by her husband as part of a supposed treatment and becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, gradually seeing a woman trapped behind its pattern. The domestic space intended to protect her becomes a prison, while the supernatural possibility of the woman behind the wallpaper becomes inseparable from the very real control imposed upon her.

Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet takes confinement in a much more surreal and playful direction. Marian Leatherby is sent away by her family and finds herself drawn into a strange world of institutions, mysteries and hidden knowledge. Where Gilman's narrator becomes increasingly trapped within the reality imposed upon her, Carrington gives her protagonist an opportunity to question the rules of that reality altogether.

September's Gothic therefore became less about monsters and more about the fragile boundaries of the self. Whether through opera, film or fiction, the month's works repeatedly returned to women negotiating desire, dependence, isolation and the expectations of others. What made them Gothic was not necessarily the presence of anything supernatural, but the growing sense that the familiar could no longer be trusted: a relationship, a room, another person or even your own mind.