After it blazed through England and New York in the 1970s, the first wave of punk rock left a whole lot of darkness in its wake. As the decade rolled to a close, young musicians struck by punk’s ferocity and lawlessness picked up its ashes, lit a few candles, and invited the world to a séance. Their songs were marked by echoes, distortion, minimal guitar lines, and an arch taste for the macabre; their electroshocked hair, smears of black eyeliner, and dark clothes only reinforced the vibe. Goth offered music what horror had given movies: a chance to lean into the void without quite falling in, to sneak close to death while still very much alive.

Recorded in 1979 in Northamptonshire, England, Bauhaus’ nine-minute vampire ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is widely accepted as goth’s wellspring. Soon after their frontman Peter Murphy sang about the undead over an uneasy, descending bassline, fellow Brits Joy Division found transcendent melancholy in simple chord progressions and staccato baritone vocals, and Killing Joke reveled in menacing drum fills and overdriven guitars. Their sounds proved infectious: In the early 1980s, the Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees melted down their early post-punk into lush and eerie fantasias, folding in synthesizers and slowing their tempos to a gloomy gait. Up in Scotland, Cocteau Twins started etching out songs that sounded like initiation rituals to arcane death cults. Something was in the water in the UK, but the sonic desolation wasn’t confined there: In New York, Suicide were immersing their synthesizers in waves of static while screeching about domestic murder.

At the end of the ’80s, the goth aesthetic seeped into industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, who placed less emphasis on guitars and more on drum machines and caustic synths. Goth lay mostly below ground during the 1990s grunge movement, in which anger and sarcasm were the fashion instead of despondency; it burst back up into the mainstream with a fury by the mid-2000s, when My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco threw a pop spin on the melodrama of their forebears. Singing about death in full Victorian regalia might not have sounded like a chart-winning strategy, but MCR’s Gerard Way knew his history: The kids love a good spook. Today, artists like Jenny Hval, Makthaverskan, and Zola Jesus keep the goth torch lit; black clothes and loose drapes dot designer runways; even Justin Bieber rocks a Marilyn Manson tee on occasion. Once a riotous underbelly of society, goth’s tendrils have risen from the grave into the mainstream.

Just in time for Halloween, we’ve traced the dark history of goth, from the earliest songs that hinted at its spirit to the ominous artists keeping the genre alive today. Before we take the plunge, though, here’s a transmission from the reluctant Godfather of Goth himself. We spoke to Peter Murphy via telephone from Istanbul, his home for the last two decades.