A young Syrian boy sits in an orange ambulance chair, covered in blood and dust: the image of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh became one of the most iconic photographs of the Syrian war. Articles covering it used language one would associate with Gothic horror – he was described, repeatedly, as a ghost. The New York Times went further, telling readers: "We should all feel haunted by our inaction."
Was this just evocative writing, or something more systematic? What if Western media coverage of the Syrian war wasn't just documenting reality, but channelling centuries-old Gothic horror traditions, transforming Aleppo into a haunted place?
"It's a curious thing. It was curious for us as well," says Frederik Carl Windfeld, a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences who co-authored a study examining Western media's coverage of Aleppo. His work with Marius Hauge Hvithamar and Lene Hansen, published in the Review of International Studies, started with that iconic image of Omran. "While this image was important on its own, this made us wonder: Was this a one-off, or were Gothic tropes shaping Western media's broader coverage of the Syrian war?"
They collected and coded images from 500 news stories covering Aleppo in Western outlets. A pattern emerged: Western media constructed Aleppo through Gothic tropes – ghost towns, spectres, monsters, hauntings – all situated within Assad's regime of death and blood.
The researchers identified what they call "uncanny generic icons": three recurring visual motifs. Images of Aleppo's decayed, abandoned historic cityscape "echo the Gothic tradition's use of ruins to signify social and psychological collapse, even when these spaces remain inhabited," Windfeld notes. Children like Omran were described as ghosts, given what he calls "an uncanny power to transcend Aleppo's physical boundaries and haunt Western viewers." Assad himself, though rarely shown directly, "appeared as a relentless, inescapable force, visible through posters bearing his image or through the military agents enacting his authority."
This creates what they call an "abjective encounter". "Aleppo becomes a space saturated with horror yet intimately connected to ‘the West’, which sees itself as inheriting Aleppo's cultural legacy and sharing in the loss of its heritage," Windfeld explains. The destruction feels personal – a shared civilisation's past burning. "At the same time, ‘the West’ is partly responsible for what has happened in a place it owes a great debt to, most notably in its inability to protect children, as symbols of innocence, and is consequently haunted by its own inaction,” he says.
To explore this dynamic more deeply, Windfeld and his co-authors added an unconventional element to their methodology: They created a comic (an excerpt from which is featured in the banner above). Drawing scenes of Aleppo allowed them to work through the city's visual representation differently than content coding and discourse analysis could.
"This wasn't easy, ethically speaking," Windfeld admits. "We certainly didn't want to create a graphic, horrifying depiction that simply amplified the Gothic tropes – monsters, graves, corpses, grotesque violence – used textually to describe the war. Nor did we want to do the classic 'ventriloquist' move of speaking on behalf of Syrians." Instead, the comic attempts to suggest a more empowered representation of those living and dying in Aleppo – and, importantly, to implicate Western viewers in these horrifying scenes. "It was important for us to show that this isn't some far-removed, almost fictional place. It's both a living hell and a place of familiarity,” he adds. To his knowledge, this is the first time this approach was attempted in international relations.
But why does it matter that media uses Gothic aesthetics rather than simply depicting horror? The distinction is crucial, Windfeld argues. "Images of horrible suffering, like corpses or obscene bodily harm, don't necessarily invoke the Gothic." The Gothic, which the researchers conceptualise through the abject and the uncanny, represents a particular "species of the frightening." While horrific imagery can be cast off as radically different from us, the Gothic is distinguished by its ability to haunt the viewer. "Within a Gothic register, you cannot neatly separate 'us' from 'them'. Syrians are not radically different but eerily familiar. In fact, the distinction between the two collapses."
The Gothic tradition, Windfeld explains, has long explored the relationship between the “Self” and the “Other” and sometimes even blurs the line between the two. In Gothic stories, the viewer isn’t completely separated from what seems distant or foreign. Instead, there’s a sense of closeness. But that closeness isn’t necessarily a good thing. “There's something disturbing in the Gothic's play on revulsion and morbid curiosity," he adds. As Windfeld notes, this disturbing tension keeps us watching, even when we feel we should look away. As The Wall Street Journal put it in its coverage of Omran, “you can’t stop watching.”
The researchers looked at both kinds of Gothic representations: those that encourage viewers to sit with sadness – simply watching and mourning – and those that more clearly urge people to take action. “The impact of Gothic representations varies. There’s no simple cause-and-effect relationship,” Windfeld explains. “What they share, however, is that Syrians cannot be dismissed as distant or completely different. Through this sense of haunting, a connection – however distant – is formed.”
These Gothic visual patterns aren't limited to Syria. Looking at contemporary coverage of Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, Windfeld identifies some of the same motifs being deployed: haunted ruins, ghostly children, and spectral dictators. Beyond the sheer scale of destruction and mass killings of civilians in Gaza, specific cases appeal very explicitly to the Gothic. The killing of young Palestinian girl Hind Rajab was attributed to the "Vampire Company", and her voice was described as a "haunting emblem of the war" – just to mention one out of too many examples. In Sudan, some militias have been represented as Frankenstein's monster, with reports saying the army cannot "control their own creatures". There's the iconic "Ghost of Kyiv" myth which circulated early after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which Windfeld examines extensively in his doctoral research.
But Windfeld is careful to note that the Gothic isn't some device attached exclusively to places outside "the West", however it's defined. Recent depictions of masked, faceless ICE agents in the US have similarly invoked the Gothic. "For example, officials from US Customs and Border Protection reportedly refer to the border patrol as 'the Green Monster', referencing the patrol's historic use of dark green uniforms."
In terms of shifts in how these representations circulate and their political effects, Windfeld is cautious about drawing definitive conclusions. "What I can say is that in this time of ongoing wars, humanitarian disasters, genocides, and creeping or blatant authoritarianism, the Gothic tradition is still very much alive. It's mobilised in media coverage today and travels well beyond the case of the Syrian war."
Now AI-generated conflict imagery is adding troubling new dimensions to this Gothic aesthetic and raising new questions about the concept of the "uncanny" itself. "AI in general is really a Pandora's box," Windfeld says. It's something he works on heavily in his doctoral research on autonomous weapons – also referred to as killer robots – which "in themselves possess a Gothic quality." But in terms of AI-generated imagery specifically, he thinks this offers an expansive and, frankly, terrifying terrain for future work on how we visualise war.
First, there's the uncanny quality of such generated imagery, he explains. In popular discourse, you often hear about the uncanny valley – something that looks almost real but not quite. We might see this in AI-generated imagery through details like a hand lacking a finger or a missing or distorted face. "The more foundational uncanniness, at least to me, however, comes from the idea of the training data that makes the generation of these images possible in the first place. The very idea of treating images of war victims as data points in such a process – I find rather disturbing. How they might be used alongside fictional depictions from movies to satisfy some prompt (...) It all seems very grotesque: this erasure, for lack of a better word, of people who experienced horror firsthand into mere data points."
Second, there's the question of the authenticity of images, Windfeld notes. “I think the sheer volume of AI-generated imagery, and the speed by which it circulates, especially on social media, raises completely new questions about otherwise old discussions about the ‘virtual battlefield.’” Windfeld links here to work by scholars like James Der Derian on the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. “AI-generated imagery brings a whole new layer to the study of what we call, now, the ‘generated battlefield.’”
"It's important, however, not to say that previously we had a 'real' portrayal of war 'as it actually was' and now we have a fake one. There's always an element of mediation and curation at work in the coverage of war," Windfeld points out. However, the work of professional photojournalists did – and arguably still does even more so today – carry a form of authenticity attributed to it - one Windfeld thinks will be crucial in terms of dealing with and contesting the proliferation of AI-generated content. This, he notes, assumes that photojournalists are granted access to the conflicts they seek to report on and does not, by any means, imply that their coverage is beyond reproach.
Windfeld’s research raises uncomfortable questions about how we consume images of distant suffering. Western media's Gothic framing of Aleppo and recent wars creates a paradox: These representations make conflicts feel intimately connected to us, yet that very closeness may be built on a disturbing aesthetic that trades in revulsion and morbid curiosity. According to Windfeld, we're haunted by conflicts we watch unfold, and kept watching by the very aesthetic designed to move us.
Photo credits: Marius Hauge Hvithamar, from the comic Aleppo Man: A Gothic Tale for IR.
Read the full article, ‘Gothic visibilities and international relations : uncanny icons, critical comics, and the politics of abjection in Aleppo’, published in Review of International Studies.
Frederik Carl Windfeld is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. His PhD thesis, ‘Artificial Agency and International Security: The Case of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems’, is supervised by Prof. Stephanie Hofmann and co-supervised by Prof. Stefano Guzzini.