I am a self-professed spooky girl and lover of all things gothic. If you’ve been here a while, you already know this.
And if you know this, then you’ll have known that at some point, it was inevitable that I bring up the fact that the genre (and A24) have presented us with something new and exciting.
The traditional gothic genre has always known exactly how to both scare and seduce me. It relies on predictable, blood-and-flesh ingredients: crumbling stone castles, damp graveyards, religious guilt, and aristocrats with fangs that would have me fooled in 0.5 seconds.
But if you look at what is capturing consumer attention right now, the haunted house has undergone a massive architectural renovation. The monsters have changed. They don’t howl in the woods right now. Instead, they send calendar invites.
"Institutional Gothic"
It's a term coined by cultural theorist Shira Chess in the MIT Press Reader. It describes an emerging subgenre where the terrifying, otherworldly supernatural is completely replaced by the crushing mundanity of modern bureaucracy. The ultimate execution of this in A24’s massive new Backrooms movie, which turns a viral, user-generated creepypasta about endless, mono-yellow office spaces into a mainstream cinematic event, is f*cking phenomenal.
But it doesn’t stop there. It’s not just a niche film trend. From the clinical corporate hellscape of Apple TV+’s Severance to the shifting, brutalist filing rooms of the video game Control, institutional dread is kind of dominating pop culture right now.
As content creators, marketers, and brand builders, we have to ask:
Why is a generation of consumers suddenly obsessed with the horror of the office cubicle?
The answers reveal a profound shift in consumer psychology, and the rules of engagement for capturing attention in 2026.
1. The death of the hustle culture aesthetic
For nearly a whole god forsaken decade, internet marketing fed consumers a glossy, hyper-aspirational lie: the "girlboss," the 5 AM morning routine, and the polished corporate baddie aesthetic. We were told that self-actualisation lived at the top of the corporate ladder.
Institutional Gothic is the violent cultural whiplash to that era. When your audience watches The Backrooms or Severance, they are watching a physical manifestation of burnout. The endless, fluorescent-lit hallways represent a generation that views the corporate machine not as a vehicle for success, but as a trap that squeezes out human identity.
If your brand imagery or messaging still relies on clinical, hyper-polished perfection, you are accidentally coding your brand as the villain. Audiences want the messy, unpolished antidote to the flawless corporate machine. Give it to them.
2. The deep desire for hyper-human voices
In traditional horror, the villain has a name, a vulnerability, or a tragic backstory. You can stab a vampire through the heart. But in Institutional Gothic, the horror comes from total indifference.
You cannot reason with a spreadsheet. You cannot argue with a non-negotiable terms-of-service update. The dread comes from knowing that if you disappear into the system, the machinery will simply keep running without you. And that puts the fear of God into me like no other.
Because we literally face this faceless, automated indifference every single day, whether dealing with algorithm changes or automated AI customer service bots. That’s why it hits so hard for consumers: because they feel automated and ignored by massive institutions, they are starved for visceral, radical human connection.
This is why highly sanitised, corporate brand voices are completely tanking, while brands that allow their social media managers to speak like actual, chaotic humans are winning. To stand out in this sick, cold world, you must be stubbornly human.
3. Lean into radical world-building
What makes internet phenomena like the SCP Foundation (a fictional, deeply bureaucratic government database of monsters) or The Backrooms so addictive is how they tell stories.
They don’t hand audiences a neat, linear narrative. Instead, they drop them into a mysterious world filled with fragmented logs, redacted files, and empty spaces, forcing the community to piece the puzzle together themselves. Modern audiences want to be investigators, participators in a campaign, not passive consumers.
Stop spoon-feeding your audience boring, direct-response ads that sound painfully like a corporate memo. Build an ecosystem, create multi-part TikTok narratives, leave Easter eggs in your email campaigns, and let your community participate in the story of your brand.
The rise of Institutional Gothic proves that consumers are utterly exhausted.
They're tired of being treated like metrics on a dashboard within the architecture of hyper-capitalism.
If your content strategy feels like a cold, unrelenting bureaucratic system, your audience will run the other way and into the arms of the real, messy monsters, with a voice and a heart (did you even watch Del Toro’s Frankenstein??? Hello???)
-Sophie Randell, Writer
