Why the Gothic Romance Trend Is Having a Moment

Dear reader,

When Warner Bros scheduled Wuthering Heights for Valentine’s weekend in 2026, the choice looked almost perverse if you remembered Emily Brontë’s novel and entirely logical if you looked at the way romance was being marketed.

The campaign presented Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the visual language of erotic longing: bodies close, fabric expensive, ruin implied. Nobody involved appeared worried that the source material is a novel about obsession, revenge, class violence, cruelty, and damage passed down through a family. The dangerous parts had not been removed from the proposition. They had become part of its attraction.

That decision interests me more than the perennial argument about whether Wuthering Heights is really a love story. One film does not prove a publishing trend, and I would not pretend that it does. What it does show is how little explanation a large audience now seems to need when romance and danger arrive together. The combination is already familiar.

That is where I think the current gothic romance moment begins: not with a single category suddenly exploding, but with several neighbouring forms moving close enough together that an old gothic proposition has become easy to recognise again. Desire may be sincere while the object of desire is dangerous. A place may be beautiful while the power attached to it is restrictive. Belonging may be deeply wanted even when the institution offering it is compromised. Gothic fiction has always been comfortable holding those contradictions at the same time, and a broad commercial audience has spent the last few years becoming unusually fluent in them.

One film does not make a trend

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights opened in the United States on 13 February 2026, very deliberately inside the Valentine’s corridor. Its three-day domestic opening was about $32.8 million, and the film ultimately reached roughly $241.7 million worldwide against a reported $80 million production budget.

The critical split was predictable. Reviewers who measured the film against Brontë’s novel found much of the novel missing: the social cruelty, Heathcliff’s racial othering, the second generation, the long reckoning after Catherine’s death. Viewers who approached it through the campaign were being offered something else: glamour, erotic intensity, doomed attachment, and the fantasy of two people wanting one another with catastrophic force.

I am less interested in deciding which audience was correct than in noticing that both audiences knew exactly what they were arguing about. The marketing did not need to teach people how to read danger as part of romantic fantasy. It assumed they already could.

That assumption is commercially important, but it is still only one signal. There is no wonderfully convenient graph labelled Gothic Romance that suddenly turns upward in 2026 and allows us all to go home early. What we can see instead is convergence. Romance remains a major commercial force. Romantasy has normalised powerful, secretive, morally compromised love interests on an enormous scale. Dark romance has made readers comfortable distinguishing page fantasy from real-world recommendation. Gothic horror and dark academia remain conspicuous in publishing and bookselling. Meanwhile classic gothic texts are repeatedly reissued, adapted, and discussed through the language of desire as much as through the language of fear.

Put those developments beside one another and the interesting question changes. We no longer have to ask why a reader would want romance complicated by danger. A very large number of readers have already demonstrated that they do.

Romantasy made the combination familiar

Romantasy matters here because it has trained adjacent readers to accept a relationship in which attraction, secrecy, power, and danger are all active at once. UK fantasy and science-fiction sales rose by just over 41 percent in 2024, to around £83 million, with romantic fantasy contributing heavily to that growth. The scale matters, but the reading habits it encouraged matter more.

A heroine enters a world whose rules she does not fully understand. A powerful man knows more than she does and controls access to something she wants. His protection may also restrict her. His secrets may be understandable without becoming harmless. The relationship becomes compelling partly because she has to discover what kind of danger he actually represents, what power she has in return, and whether wanting him changes what she is willing to risk.

None of this is uniquely gothic, and I would not collapse romantasy into gothic romance simply because both enjoy an inconveniently attractive man with secrets. The overlap lies in the reader’s fluency. Romantasy has made millions of readers comfortable with the idea that romance need not begin in a safe emotional environment and that danger does not automatically cancel desire. The important question is what the story eventually does with that danger.

That last point is where gothic romance becomes more precise. A dangerous hero cannot remain dangerous in every possible way and still function as a satisfying romantic lead. A threatening house cannot merely be a decorative backdrop. A family secret has to change the heroine’s choices, not simply improve the atmosphere. The genre becomes interesting when attraction and threat repeatedly alter one another rather than occupying separate chapters.

Dark academia kept the gothic structure visible

Dark academia offers a different kind of bridge. Its internet aesthetic may involve tweed, Latin, candlelight, old libraries, and young people behaving badly near expensive stonework, but the reason the mode has lasted is not the tweed. The deeper arrangement is recognisably gothic.

The manor becomes the institution. The inherited family secret becomes the founding crime. The locked room becomes the archive. The beautiful inheritance may be a college, a language, a canon, a class position, or simply admission into a world the protagonist has wanted for years.

What matters is that the desire for entry remains legitimate. The protagonist is not foolish for wanting the scholarship, the fellowship, the intellectual community, the beauty, the recognition, or the sense of belonging. Those things may be genuinely valuable. The trouble begins because the institution can offer something real and still demand too much in return.

That is a very gothic problem, and it is one contemporary readers already understand without needing a ruined abbey to explain it. A person can love the institution that exploits her. A career can be meaningful and damaging. A home can provide safety while limiting choices. Ambition can enlarge a life and still extract a price that becomes impossible to ignore. Gothic fiction has always been unusually good at allowing both statements to remain true.

The appeal is contradiction, not gloom

The current gothic romance moment is interesting because the genre does not require desire to become foolish once danger has been named. Nor does it require danger to become imaginary once desire becomes sincere. The heroine may be right to want the house and right to fear what ownership would cost her. She may be right to desire the man and right to refuse the version of love he first offers. She may long to belong to a family, institution, or place while gradually understanding the conditions attached to admission.

That combination feels emotionally credible because adult life is full of valuable things with difficult terms. Work can be meaningful and exploitative. Family can offer love and obligation in the same conversation. Home can be shelter and constraint. Ambition can give a life direction while consuming more of that life than a person intended to surrender.

The gothic gives writers a way to make those tensions visible without turning them into a lecture. Property, inheritance, secrecy, marriage, family reputation, physical isolation, money, class, supernatural rules, and sexual attraction can all place practical limits on what a character is free to do. The dread comes from those limits becoming clearer. The romance comes from what the lovers choose once they understand them.

This is why I am wary of explaining the current interest in gothic romance as a rejection of comfort. Cozy fiction, Christmas romance, and uplifting stories are not suddenly inadequate because readers have also developed an appetite for darker material. Readers are perfectly capable of wanting a bakery on Tuesday and a cursed estate on Thursday. The useful distinction is not between sophisticated darkness and naïve comfort, but between different emotional experiences, each of which has to know what it is offering. Gothic romance offers the pleasure of wanting something whose danger has not been politely removed for the reader’s convenience.

What this means if you write gothic romance

If you write in this space, the lesson is not to add fog, a crumbling house, a raven, or a hero who communicates exclusively through glowering. Those things may appear, and I am fond of several of them, but none will give a weak premise the emotional tension the genre requires.

The stronger question is always more practical. What does the heroine genuinely want from the dangerous thing? What would she lose by walking away? What exactly makes the hero frightening, and which parts of that danger must change before he can become a credible romantic partner? What does the house, family, inheritance, institution, or supernatural rule prevent her from doing? When does attraction make her more vulnerable, and when does it make her more perceptive? When does love ask for compromise, and when must she refuse?

Those questions produce scenes. They also keep the darkness connected to the romance instead of allowing one to decorate the other.

A gothic novel that contains only dread may be excellent horror. A romance that contains only desire may be excellent romance. Gothic romance has the more difficult job of allowing desire to survive after danger is understood and requiring danger to have consequences even after desire is mutual.

That, I think, is why the form feels so legible at the moment. The audience does not need to be persuaded that attraction can coexist with fear, or that belonging can become dangerous without becoming meaningless. Readers have been rehearsing those ideas across romantasy, dark romance, dark academia, horror, and renewed interest in classic gothic texts for years.

The opportunity for a writer is therefore more demanding than simply joining a trend. The familiar imagery may get a reader to look twice. The book still has to know exactly why its heroine wants what she wants, why that desire is dangerous, and what has to change before the ending can honestly call itself romantic.

If you would like to take those choices into your own novel, my Gothic Romance Masterclass works through the genre from premise and character to atmosphere, revision, and positioning.