Make sure you have paid your dues before the devil comes for you

Oh yes, we're talking Southern Gothicism. And Jamie Campbell Bower and American Horror Story, among other things.

Hello Folks,

I hope you are well. This week I officially began graduate school to pursue my M.A. in Folklore, where I will be investigating American Mythologies, narrative representations of the South, and mobilizing arts communities in and around rural areas. Specifically, I plan to hone in on Southern Gothic as an aesthetic representation of the rural South, and the ways in which those mythologies influence and perpetuate our larger Southern myths.

I think I need a disclaimer before we dig into this about how much I love Southern Gothicism. I’m so obsessed with it that I’m literally getting a degree in it. When I had no other way to imagine myself back South, Southern Gothicism gave me a pathway to write the first story that would lead me back home. It was a piece that also led me to joy, giving me the narrative environment to process trauma, depression, loss— things that didn’t always seem to make sense in the structured world around me, but could easily slot in to a world of the strange. Now that I’m writing it out, I’m realizing that is also the framework for the Southern Gothic-inspired novel I’ve been working on: it is through entrance into the uncanny that we gain the language to seek joy, connection, and community. Southern Gothic— and specifically, the subset of Appalachian Gothic— gave me the framework to write about the South as a place that did not make sense to me, but drew me back to it in ways I couldn’t explain. It is a place where things have happened that should never have happened in the so-called “real world”, or at least a world that makes ethical sense. But they happened here.

I return often to this quote from Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s first novel and a classic hallmark of Southern Gothic fiction:

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

The book is described by its present day publisher, Macmillan, as a tale of “redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom”. What more could you want in a Southern Gothic? A quick Google search describes the genre as an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film, and television influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Britannica describes it as writing set in the Southern region containing grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents, with the best-known authors being O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers.

It feels important to me here to note two things: 1) while, sure, these books do sometimes have a focus on “fantastic incidents”, they also lean into and draw from the real, lived suffering of non-white people in the region— those elements of the “grotesque and macabre” in Southern Gothic are often just actual trauma stolen and profited on by the authors, whether intentionally or not; and 2) many of the most known voices of the genre are dead white people.

Look, one day I too will be a dead white person, so I’m not going to critique the authors themselves solely on that (I really do love Flannery O’Connor). What is more interesting to me here is the way that a genre that tends to get conflated with representation of the South as a whole, both historically and modern, gives little way to contemporary voices, and especially voices of non-white Southerners. This place, more than anywhere else I have ever been, is so stuck in the past, and sometimes I fear we might never get out.

Because there are incredible artists and musicians and storytellers working in a Southern Gothic vein today. I turn to the work of Genevieve Hudson, writing about queer love and magic in rural Alabama; Lauren Groff’s Florida, which places a state that we never know whether to call Southern or not clearly in the genre; Allison Janae Hamilton’s incredible photography, which really exemplifies the genre better than I could ever explain it; Adia Victoria’s music, and in particular, her album A Southern Gothic. And of course, we can’t leave out Beyoncé, and what Lemonade did in terms of the genre (this is still the best music video I have ever seen).

There’s plenty more where that list comes from, but one thing all of these storytellers have in common is their Southern roots. They’re not from elsewhere, but making art about places they call home. There’s a different type of work that comes out of that reflection, and I would go so far as to say that this kind of work often isn’t something creators seek out, but instead work that calls you to it until you finally just shut up, sit down, and create it. It’s not because it’s cool or trendy or even that it might sell well; we make this work because we have to, because there is something within us that will never still or settle until we do.

I’m not sure exactly when Southern Gothicism became trendy in the pop-culture sphere, but for Gen-Z, I’d place a solid bet on the rise of American Horror Story, and specifically season three, which premiered in 2014 and followed a coven of young witches in New Orleans. Now, you could also argue that this began even earlier, with The Vampire Diaries, which ran from 2009 to 2017, following the town of Mystic Falls, Virginia, and eventually made its way to New Orleans, leading to a series of spin-offs around another mythical, vampiric family in the French Quarter. There’s an entire newsletter waiting to be written about the strange way the civil war is brought into the show, but I want to focus in on the way both shows here aestheticize and romanticize the South as a place of the fantastical and strange, the same way Southern Gothic authors of old did. The region in these stories takes on a new life, becoming a breeding ground for the mysterious— and often leaving out the true traditions associated with the practices and histories the shows profit on.

Sure, they’re fun television. I watched and enjoyed both of them. I love anything with moody teenagers and places where strange things happen. But unlike the creators I listed above, neither of these shows really seem to investigate the genre— or even the region— in any meaningful way, and instead reduce it to largely fantastical, horrific elements, leaning into shock value to keep viewers hanging on until the next episode. In turn, this also turns it into an aesthetic. And let’s do a quick time check here: it’s 2014, peak era of Tumblr, when every teenager online was being told that the most interesting thing about them was their sadness, apathy, and trauma. If you were on the internet in 2014, you’ve seen the photo— or better yet, gif— from American Horror Story: Coven, which showcases all of the young witches, led by their coven leader, parading through the French Quarter in head-to-toe black outfits. They seem powerful, and careless, and cool in a way that was informed by both their supernatural powers and the way the show leaned into what had already long been considered desirable: thinness, whiteness, privilege. And while, sure, the whole cast was not white, the ones who gained the most cultural attention were the ones who fit this ideal the closest: Emma Roberts, Taissa Farmiga, Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe. Even Stevie Nicks, the queen of the modern witch aesthetic, who made an appearance in the show. It also feels important to mention here that the show is created by two white men, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck, neither of whom are from the South.

The argument here is that these types of characters come to represent the aesthetic which has come to represent the genre, and lately, the larger South as a whole. And it’s an aesthetic that’s become quite popular, taking root on TikTok and Pinterest and Instagram, in film and music and photography. There are many things that seem to conflate with Southern Gothicism these days: we have dark folk and neofolk now; we have Hozier, who, despite having no relation to the South at all, always seems to end up on Southern Gothic playlists; we have tweets romanticizing the lone highway diner, the abandoned church, the black snakes in the grass, and the swamp moss on the magnolia trees. Typing “Southern Gothic” into Pinterest will lend you images of dirty nightgowns and children gathered at the murky banks of swamps and foggy front porches and animal skulls and illuminated crosses and plenty of ominous gravestones. And of course, we always have the Hell Is Real signs, the true hallmark of modern Southern Gothicism.

As a writer, I have to admit I do love all this stuff. I even have my own Pinterest board that is more or less full of it. But it really does seem to be everywhere these days, and the more it expands, the further away from this place it actually seems to get. An abandoned church could be an abandoned church anywhere, cornfields really speak more to the Midwest, and you don’t even want to get me started on the weird thing going on with cowboy culture and desert aestheticization.

That being said, I’m also pretty entrenched in this world, and I really thought I knew everything at the forefront of modern Southern Gothicism. So you can imagine my surprise when I came across a clip of Jamie Bower— aka Jamie Campbell Bower of recent Stranger Things fame— going full Southern Gothic as a church preacher and forlorn wanderer in his newest music video. Before I say anything else, just watch:

I can’t lie that I do actually think the video is fun. It’s well-shot, and I like the song. But on my 2022 “I work in Southern Studies” bingo card, I really did not have Jamie Campbell Bower, English actor and musician who resides in L.A., making Southern Gothic music on my list. The bio for his artist profile on Spotify says simply “Witch King”, and includes a photo of a man— presumably Jamie himself— standing on the porch of a white, windowless church, framed by oak trees and a forlorn cross, the whole photo washed in a haunting blood-red light. It’s an image that would fit in well under the Southern Gothic side of Pinterest.

Under the video, commenters talk about how thrilled they are to see him doing “dark folk”, how it gives Peaky Blinders vibes (another show that has become synonymous with the genre, despite the vast difference in geographical setting), that this is the kind of song that should be sung in the middle of the night in the woods, that Jamie, who acts in the video, has the vibe of a Southern preacher who wants to burn you on the stake for witchcraft. All of these things are true, and nearly all the comments on the video are positive, appreciative— which I do think is well-deserved.

When I went to write this, I turned to the Spotify Southern Gothic playlist for inspiration, to which the first song that came on was a dark rendition of Johnny Cash’s classic God’s Gonna Cut You Down, sung by none other than Jamie Bower himself. It feels made for television, made to play in the background while the iconography of burning churches and raging preachers and empty, dusty highways flashes by. Both the video and the song feed into this aesthetic of Southern Gothic, making it popular online— making it a style of dress, a genre of music, an entire digital personality that is both dependent on the South for its existence and yet feels separate and distant, accepted and appreciated in a way that other Southern identities often are not, often capitalized upon by creators with no relation to the region.

For the pop culture attuned, there are two main narratives lately of the South that are emerging: the old, conservative, largely-Republican, redneck South, and the young, hip, cool South that roots itself in the haunted, historic cities of Savannah, New Orleans, and Charleston, or else along the Appalachian Mountains, home to arts-driven cities like Asheville, and which have recently been going viral on TikTok with a slew of legends— and plenty of shock value— about what goes on at night there. Both narratives are rooted in tradition; but one clings too heavily to the past, and the other one can’t seem to get any deeper than surface level mythologies.

But these two stories are not always the truth. They glamorize, on both sides. They reduce to aesthetic facets that have come to speak for entire identities, whether that be a confederate flag or wearing flowing black chiffon in the dead of July. We think that behind these things there is some kind of universal understanding, some kind of true South that will emerge. I’ll return to Wise Blood on this one: “There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

There are all kinds of truths we tell ourselves about what it means to be from this place. But if we are ever going to move past them, we have to let go of all the understandings we have. And as much as I love the emergence of Southern Gothic iconography as a trend, I do worry about its removal from the region and people from the region, the way it gets twisted into something almost purely aesthetic rather than a tool, a lens through which to investigate our deeper Southern myths, the ones which we must rewrite if we are to move forward. That’s a new story I hope to be a part of. Though, in the meantime, I will still be singing along.

Thoughts? Would love to hear them. What represents Southern Gothic to you? What are the other myths of the South you think define the region?