Is it just fashion? No, it’s an attitude, a lifestyle. And a beloved character type. The goth girl is the lovable-yet-scary outcast whose grim and ghastly exterior belies wit, smarts and a dry sense of humor that never fails to cast an honest light on the disappointing world around her. As “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” brings together two generations of legendary goth girls — Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega — we look at some of the actresses and roles that have defined the archetype since the original “Beetlejuice” in 1988.
1988
Winona Ryder Sets the Standard
“My whole life is a dark room. One big dark room.”
When Lydia Deetz appears in her family’s new Connecticut home early in “Beetlejuice,” she glances around curiously, her eyes wandering beneath her short, spiky black bangs, stopping at the sight of a spider in a web along the stairwell. Unlike her shallow, distracted parents, Lydia is clued in to the supernatural happenings of her new surroundings and has no trouble befriending the undead residents of the house.
The role was one of Winona Ryder’s earliest in a career largely defined by goth girls and dark-attired outsiders. In the black comedy “Heathers,” Ryder played Veronica Sawyer, the reluctant friend to the popular girls, who prance around in bright matching outfits. Veronica, however, dresses in blacks and grays and gets drawn into a string of homicides that leaves multiple teenagers dead.
Ryder came full circle with her role in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” where she plays Joyce Byers, an eccentric mom who gets entangled in the spooky occurrences in her town.
1991
A Wednesday for a New Generation
“I’m a homicidal maniac; they look just like everyone else.”
There’s deadpan, and then there’s Wednesday Addams’s deadpan. In the 1960s “Addams Family” series, Wednesday (played by Lisa Loring) is a cheery but macabre young girl, but the Wednesday in the “The Addams Family” is a few years older, doesn’t smile and has developed a love for torture and destruction.
Though Christina Ricci is forever associated with the pigtailed sociopathic member of the Addams family, she has built a reputation for thriving in gothic roles even beyond Wednesday. Her other characters have befriended the undead (“Casper”), faced headless horsemen (“Sleepy Hollow”), joined satanic cults (“Bless the Child”), fought werewolves (“Cursed”) and gotten away with a double homicide so famous it inspired nursery rhymes (“Lizzie Borden Took an Ax,” “The Lizzie Borden Chronicles”). And in 2022 Ricci appeared as Marilyn Thornhill, the secret evil mastermind in “Wednesday,” hearkening back to her own tenure as the titular character.
1996
An Instant Cult Favorite
“We are the weirdos, mister.”
An essential entry in the grand tradition of goth-girl cinema, “The Craft” is a cult favorite in the vein of “Heathers” for its bleak portrayal of teenage brutality — but with the addition of dark magic. Of this junior coven of witches, who each have their own goth moments, Nancy Downs, played by Fairuza Balk, is the epitome of anarchic doom-and-gloom goth energy. There are the usual telltale signs of her role as goth queen — the heavy eyeliner and severe lipstick, religious accessories like cross pendants and rosaries — but her story arc, which includes her megalomaniacal ascension to god-level powers, ends with her left powerless and in a straitjacket.
1997
The Difference Between Alt and Goth
“I’m here, but where are you?/Sure, I see your body./Anybody home in that rotting bag of flesh?”
Sure, Daria Morgendorfer and Jane Lane, the leading ladies of “Daria,” the bone-dry, peak-MTV-era animated satirical comedy series, are prime examples of alt girls, but it’s Andrea (that’s pronounced An-DRAY-uh) who’s the actual goth girl outsider of the show. Black hair, black makeup, fishnet accessories and an ankh necklace — Andrea certainly has the goth look but mostly serves as a background character in a series that parodies every imaginable teen stereotype. But in the fourth episode of Season 1, Andrea shows just how goth she can be by reciting a grim Emily Dickinson-esque poem at a coffeehouse open mic.
2003
Prime-time TV’s Happiest Goth
“Never forget: I am one of the few people in the world who can murder you and leave no forensic evidence.”
Abby Sciuto’s outfits — girlie, preppy goth style with skulls, spikes and platform combat boots — and her job, on the “NCIS” forensics team, may seem morbid, but this upbeat science nerd’s demeanor is far from it. This girl with a spider web tattoo loves her job as much as she loves thinking about death, gruesome biological incidents and the supernatural, and is described as “the happiest goth you’ll ever meet.” The character, portrayed by Pauly Perrette, was on the show for 15 seasons, and given the popularity of the long-running and much-beloved procedural drama, she became one of the defining goth girls of the 2000s — and one of the best known goths on television, period.
2009
She Wasn’t Always a Prom Queen
“Even though I’m painfully shy and obsessed with death, I’m a really effervescent person.”
She ended up a prom queen, but Tina Cohen-Chang of “Glee” certainly didn’t start out that way. An original member of McKinley High School’s glee club, Tina, played by Jenna Ushkowitz, was first introduced as a mall goth with a love for arm warmers and a fake speech impediment. Her goth wardrobe is so prominent that in one episode, the principal even bans Tina’s dark attire because he fears she’s a wannabe vampire.
2009
Revenge of the Eurogoth
“Do you doubt what’s in the reports that have followed me around all my life? What do they say, if you had to sum it up? They say I’m insane.”
Lisbeth Salander, the no-nonsense antiheroine of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, is an asocial computer hacker and assault survivor who serves as a kind of vengeful reaper for men who abuse women.
While each adaptation of Lisbeth’s character shares the same underground goth look, each of the three actresses who’ve embodied her gives her own variation on it: Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth pulls off a more hardened heavy-metal vibe, with dramatic sweeping bangs in the Swedish version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Rooney Mara’s is a wispy uber-chic punk with shaved eyebrows, geometric haircuts and a vast collection of piercings in the American version from two years later, far-flung from Claire Foy’s comparatively clean-cut and conservative Lisbeth in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” (2018).
2017
Dark Humor
“I would like my body dragged out to a dimly lit field by jackals and left there to rot.”
Goths are just like us! Kind of. Mundane-meets-macabre is the joke behind the goth skits in “Portlandia,” where a performatively gothic couple played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein gets on with normal daily tasks, like shopping or renting a car, but with unusual twists. Jacqueline loves midnight, hearses, lace gloves, her collection of tears from a Scottish deerhound and her pet bat, Bella. She does not, however, love the dust left from the disintegrating animal skeletons in their apartment — and unfortunately, as she finds out, her witches’ brooms are really just ornamental.
2022
Scream Queen Becomes Goth Queen
“If you hear me screaming bloody murder, there’s a good chance I’m just enjoying myself.”
Jenna Ortega was christened with the name “scream queen” after appearing as the character Tara Carpenter in the 2022 and 2023 “Scream” movie sequels, along with roles in horror-thrillers like “X” and “American Carnage.”
She soon became most associated with the titular role in the much-loved Netflix series “Wednesday,” where a teenage Wednesday Addams enrolls in the eldritch Nevermore Academy and solves mysteries while dealing with adolescent dramas. Ortega’s deadpan rivals Ricci’s in the role, with Ortega’s rendering of Wednesday updated with some contemporary flair. Wednesday’s famous dance scene in the series — choreographed by Ortega, and inspired by actual goth dance moves — in a Victorian black dress provoked an endless flurry of internet memes and impersonators. Now Ortega adds another entry into goth girl history with her role as Astrid Deetz in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
The post From Winona to Jenna, the Goth Girls of Our Time appeared first on New York Times.
