When you hear the term “gothic”, your mind likely wanders towards films like Dracula and Sleepy Hollow and their adjacent ideas and themes like dark forests, crumbling castles and overgrown graveyards. But through the mesh of hyper-capitalist soullessness, eye-straining fluorescent lights and glossy, corporate perfection, a new kind of horror has emerged: ”Institutional Gothic”.

- Devin Pike, Guest Editor

(btw - If you’re already using Claude Code or Cowork daily, scroll on by bc this isn’t for you)

But if you’ve just dabbled in using AI, maybe you’re using ChatGPT to help you look up recipes, write basic emails, or attempt to diagnose that insect bite you just got, stay with me for a sec.

When it comes to AI, there’s a lot of “bro you’re so behind” messaging out there. When, in reality, within just a couple hours, you can learn how to use AI better than 95% of people you know. And this why we put together the Beginner’s Guide to Claude AI course.

It’s a 4-week cohort where you learn how to go from using AI as a glorified Google to getting it to actually help you with the sh*tty admin (life or work) you hate doing every day.

We kick off our second cohort on 22 June, so if you want to go from feeling behind to using AI to make your life better, this is for you 👇

Social media seems to be having a tantrum about her truthful spiel at a Cannes Press conference, in which she said fighting AI is a battle we would lose.

I mean. DID SHE LIE? It's everywhere. And it's not slowing down. Do I think there are ways we should mitigate the risks and regulations that should be in place? Absolutely. But y’all are delulu if you think we can stop the train. Baby, it left the station yonks ago.

Just look at how deeply integrated this tech already is. Case in point: a wild report from 404 Media exposed that sneaky marketing companies are actively using Reddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search. They are planting fake, organic-looking conversations on Reddit threads solely because they know AI scrapers will swallow it whole and spit it out as "expert advice" to unsuspecting users. Everything is fake, nothing is real, and the bots are learning from marketing interns.

But hey, if the digital world is a lost cause, at least local street culture is making a comeback. Kareem Rahma, the brilliant chaotic soul you probably know from your TikTok feed for interviewing strangers on the New York subway, just announced in his Substack newsletter that he is officially rebooting his iconic series ‘Keep the Meter Running’ for YouTube. If you haven't seen it, he basically hops into a NYC taxi and tells the driver to take them to their favourite location in the city while they chat about life. It is the exact dose of wholesome, unfiltered, beautifully human connection we desperately need right now.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

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.

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:

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.

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

I watched Obsession last weekend and I am, well... obsessed.

The Youtuber-directed horror film that's been terrorising cinemas since May follows Nikki, played by my new Instagram crush Inde Navarrette in one of the most unhinged performances I've seen in years, a girl who gets supernaturally cursed into obsessive love and loses control of herself.

The scene the internet stole comes from a dinner date gone wrong, where her date dares to ruin the vibe and Nikki stands up and delivers a full meltdown: "No, no, NO, NO, NO, don't do that, I thought we were having a nice date." Terrifying in cinema. Deeply relatable out of it.

People are either green screening Nikki into their scenario or just lip-syncing the audio themselves:

Use the audio reacting to your vibe-ruining situation, or green screen Nikki in and put the context on screen.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😂Yap’s funniest home videos - boneka
❤How wholesome - Mom Im ...
😊Soooo satisfying - Baby water toy
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight - Tomato Recipe

Hey Kieran!

The truth is your great ideas aren't doing you a whole lot of good if they are only becoming one-off videos. A truly good idea will be something you can repeat over and over because it hits on a core human truth that speaks to your audience. So rather than thinking about something that would just be cool to post, you need to come up with a concept you can return to again and again. Then, you need to just get your reps in rather than trying to make each video perfect.

Most successful creators are only good at what they do because they have created thousands of pieces of content. They've failed, learned from that failure, and continued to improve every day. So don't worry about getting everything just right. The most important thing is to keep creating, keep experimenting, and build your content muscle over time. Even if you make some videos that aren't amazing, you're still learning and improving with every piece of content you create.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.