Did you know? Rizal's novels were Gothic all along

Gothic is back in fashion, at least in pop culture.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has stirred excitement among horror and literary fans, while Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is bringing one of literature’s stormiest love stories back to the screen. Suddenly, darkness, decay, obsession, revenge, and ruin feel current again.

But Filipino readers should know this: we have never really been far from the Gothic.

For many people, the word still brings to mind old castles, candlelit corridors, vampires, ghosts in white gowns, and thunder crashing over some distant European estate. But Gothic literature has never been limited to that imagery. At its heart, Gothic is about what refuses to stay buried. It is about the past intruding on the present, about guilt, repression, old wounds, uncanny doubles, haunted places, and histories that keep finding ways to return.

Seen that way, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo begin to look different.

They are usually taught as historical and political novels, which they are. But they can also be read as Gothic novels: stories haunted by buried violence, moral rot, loss, disguise, dread, and the long afterlife of colonial rule. Once that lens is opened, the Gothic in Rizal becomes difficult to ignore.

One of the clearest examples is the transformation of Crisostomo Ibarra into Simoun in El Filibusterismo. In one sense, it is the story of a man changed by history and injustice. In another, it is one of the eeriest doubles in Philippine literature. Ibarra returns as both himself and not himself, carrying a former life like a shadow he cannot escape. That is one of Gothic literature’s oldest and most powerful devices: the double, the self split open by trauma, secrecy, or revenge.

Rizal’s settings deepen that feeling. His churches, convents, cemeteries, family homes, and town streets do more than place the story in colonial society. They hold tension. They store shame. They become spaces where power, fear, and memory gather. In Gothic fiction, places are never just scenery. They keep secrets. They remember what happened inside them. Rizal understood that long before anyone was calling his novels Gothic.

That idea becomes even clearer when placed beside later Filipino writing. Nick Joaquin’s fiction has long been described as tropical Gothic, with its old houses, decaying families, religious guilt, and heavy sense of time pressing in on the present. But the tradition may go back even earlier than many readers realize.

Filipino writer and literary scholar Genevieve Asenjo has used the term “archipelagothic” to describe a Philippine Gothic shaped by the realities of the islands: colonial haunting, folk memory, violence, migration, ruins, homecoming, and the uncanny feeling that history never truly ends here. Under that framework, Rizal’s novels do not sit outside the Gothic tradition. They stand near its Philippine roots.

That feels right. After all, what is more Gothic than a country still being haunted by its past?

In the Philippines, horror has never been only about monsters in the dark. It has also lived in class division, inherited violence, religious hypocrisy, family secrecy, and the lingering damage of colonization. Our Gothic does not need castles because it has convents, ancestral homes, cemeteries, sugar lands, ruined mansions, and towns full of memory. It does not need imported ghosts because our literature already knows how to be haunted.

I first learned to think about Rizal this way through Dr. Asenjo, who was my mentor and thesis adviser when I was crafting my own Gothic novel. That conversation changed the way I read Philippine literature. It made Rizal, Joaquin, and other Filipino writers feel connected by a darker current running beneath the surface of our books, one made of longing, fear, repression, desire, history, and things lost but never gone.

That same current runs through my novel, I Sacrifice, Therefore I Am, a Gothic work that follows Maria Espiritu, an unloved daughter in the 21st century whose life becomes entangled with a 19th-century past marked by desire, violence, sacrifice, and a curse that refuses to loosen its grip. Readers who want to follow that thread from Rizal, to Joaquin, to newer Filipino Gothic fiction may find something familiar there. The book is available through Ukiyoto Philippines, and signed copies may also be bought directly from me.

So yes, enjoy the new Gothic revival in film and pop culture. Watch the monsters, the moors, the lightning, and the beautiful decay.

But remember that Philippine literature has long had its own shadows.

Some of them wear friars’ robes. Some linger in old houses. Some return under another name. And some have been with us since Rizal, waiting for readers to finally recognize them for what they are.