David Panos: Gothic Revival review – a restless walk on the dark side of … Northampton?

NN Contemporary Art, Northampton
Panos’s intoxicating film explores the spooky side of the Midlands town through a spectral montage of choirs, architecture and pub bands playing Bauhaus songs

The gothic is an unkillable vampire. The pointy, buttressed architectural style of great medieval cathedrals was named after the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated into the Roman empire. That style in turn was revived in the 18th century: the aesthete Horace Walpole built himself one of the first gothic revival houses, Strawberry Hill in London, which inspired him to write the first horror novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was then revived far more thoroughly by spectacular Victorian architects including Augustus Pugin and George Gilbert Scott.

And then there was Bauhaus. The pioneering goth band came together in Northampton in 1978, taking its name from Weimar Germany’s famous art and design school where Klee and Kandinsky worked. There wasn’t anything “gothic” at all about the Bauhaus school, but presumably the German term for “house of building” sounded spookily central European to the band members. Their 1979 single Bela Lugosi’s Dead hits the horror mainline, its rhythmic dirge a mesmerising tribute to the Hungarian-born star of Dracula.

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