Witch house (also known asdrag,[2]screwgaze[3] andhaunted house[4]) is amicrogenre ofelectronic music that is musically characterized by high-pitched keyboard effects, heavily layered basslines andtrap-style drum loops. Aesthetically, it employsoccult- andgothic-inspired themes.[5][6]
The easiest way I can find to describe witch house comes from this scene that takes place early in the movieBlade (you know, the one with thevampires), where there are a bunch of vampires in a club among humans. Suddenly, in the middle of the dancing, the film slows down and blood spurts from the ceiling, much to the delight of the vampires and the horror of the humans. Like a heavy, pulsing blood-beat.
Artworks by witch house visual artists have incorporated imagery from horror films such asThe Blair Witch Project,[13] the television seriesTwin Peaks,[14] and the fantasy showCharmed,[15] as well as mainstreampop culture celebrities of the 2000s. Common typographic elements in titles, such as bySalem andWhite Ring, include triangles, crosses andUnicode symbols, which are consideredgatekeeping mechanisms, in an effort to keep the sceneunderground and harder to search for online.[16][17]
In the late 2000s, witch house's stylistic sound and aesthetic was pioneered by Salem, who formed in 2006, inTraverse City, Michigan.[18] The term "witch house" was later coined in 2009 as a joke by Travis Egedy, professionally known asPictureplane, as Egedy explained:[19][20][21]
Myself and my friend Shams... were joking about the sort ofhouse music we make, [calling it] witch house because it's, like, occult-based house music [...] I did this best-of-the-year thing withPitchfork about witch house [...] I was saying that we were witch house bands, and 2010 was going to be the year of witch house [...] It took off from there. [...] But, at the time, when I said witch house, it didn't even really exist.
Additionally, "rape gaze"[27] which was coined by Brooklyn-based duoCreep was briefly associated with the genre, labelled on the band'sMyspace page and used in theNew York Press.[28] However, after being featured in aPitchfork article in 2010, the term quickly drew heavy backlash and controversy, with editors rewording the article and Creep later issuing a statement disavowing the label, "we would never want to advocatesexual violence against any human being. It was a play on words which we never expected to be used as an actual genre."[29][30][31]
By the early to mid-2010s, witch house began to fall out of prominence online. In 2013, New York-based electronic duoCreep, originally associated with the scene, commented on the genre's status in an interview withVice, stating, "we're glad witch house is dead."[32] In 2021,Pitchfork cited Salem's unconventional live performances as a contributing factor to the decline of the movement.[17] Subsequently, Mike Lesuer ofFlood magazine wrote retrospectively in 2023, claiming that of the many "subgenres that define the early-’10s, many of them can only be stumbled upon in 2023 by finding aTumblr account that hasn’t seen activity since the height ofseapunk—which, like witch house, likely faded from memory because no one could think of a cooler name for it".[33]
^Watson, William Cody (September 12, 2010)."Slow Motion Music".Impose Magazine.Archived from the original on August 22, 2010. RetrievedAugust 24, 2010.
^Huston, Johnny Ray (January 6, 2011)."Weird Emergence". San Francisco Bay Guardian. Archived fromthe original on January 21, 2020. RetrievedJuly 20, 2011.
