A show of unfamiliar works by the pioneers of modern art shows that they weren’t immune to the allure of darkness and horror – and explains why the gothic style will never die

You might laugh off Halloween as little more than kids dressed as ghouls demanding sweets and leaving sticky fingerprints on doorbells. But we’re all susceptible to the spine-tingling embrace of the supernatural, at least when it comes for us in the seductive guise of the gothic. We never seem to weary of it. Indeed, as a major exhibition, Gothic Modern, opens in Helsinki before visiting other European capitals, it may be time we recognised this idiom for what it is: the style that won’t die.

Gothic began as the architectural pattern-book that furnished the great medieval cathedrals and churches of Europe, all flying buttresses and pointed arches. But it fell out of favour after the Reformation, when it was seen as an idolatrous efflorescence of popery. Henry VIII ransacked the churches and monasteries and these “bare ruined choirs”, as Shakespeare called them, became the setting for tales of sex and death and the occult, by the Bard himself and other hands.