Sandbox / Dark Academia

The "dark" in "Dark Academia" is because it's about the dark sides of academia.

—Leonie Christel

Dark Academia is a subgenre focused on a nostalgic view of a type of academia lost to the recent past.

The focus is old schools with a gothic flair — Oxbridge most of all. In the US nothing is half so old, but they do what they can, focusing on comparatively old schools in New England. Regardless of the country, we're not really talking about these schools as they are today. Dark Academia books are always set at least a decade in the past, and in a setting that's somewhat old fashioned even for its day.

This is not academia which prepares a student for a future job, nor is it academia that produces new and important research. This is liberal arts and the humanities, A Degree in Useless, and studying for its own sake. It involves a lot of ruminating, navel gazing, and coming to weird conclusions.

Dark Academia frames its type of academia as dangerous but magnetic. It is both critical and romanticizing. This form of education results in student getting too in their heads, too intense, and coming to dangerous conclusions. But it's also magnetic, compelling. Going to a beautiful old school, have a tight knit group of friends, studying obscure and enigmatic subject matter and feeling really smart for doing so — these aspects are compelling, both to the characters and the viewer.

Tropes

• The school is elite, selective. Elitism is bad — but also, being one of the chosen few makes you feel very special.
• The school is old. Oxbridge and Ivy League are popular templates. If it's not actually a university, then it's an Elaborate University High or Boarding School.
• An education that involves impractical fields of study and navel gazing.
• Professor Mentor Archetype (often morally ambiguous)
• The student body are The Proud Elite, often with a Penny Among Diamonds Scholarship Student among them.
• An all-boys' school, or if not, a mostly-male group of friends. We can find the rare Gender Inversion with an all-girls' school, but this is not typically a genre of Gender-Equal Ensemble. This sex ratio sets the stage for homoeroticism (from subtext all the way up to outright relationships), though this is usually framed as actual homo- and bisexuality, not Situational Sexuality.
• A close-knit group of friends — True Companions — although their closeness may be subverted over the course of the story.
• Murder (usually structured as a Reverse Whodunnit) and/or Driven to Suicide
• Conflicts that emerge from characters Driven by Envy or themes of Ambition Is Evil.
• Shades of Conflict with or without Moral Disambiguation or An Aesop
• Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic as some are mundane murder mysteries that include "ghosts" at most as metaphors for the murderer's guilt, whereas other works are outright high fantasy, and others something in between.

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Examples

Fiction Podcasts

• The Magnus Archives (2016 to 2021) a rare professional field work setting for Dark Academia, centering around a series of case studies of cryptid and cult encounters by a professional archivist for a paranormal research institute, some of which are linked to the suspicious death (that is, the murder) of his predecessor. The dark side of archival science is this work is in the archival institute's service of elitist surveillance, represented by the creation of the Panopticon.

Film

• Rope (1929 stage play; 1948 film) is the Ur-Example. The visuals that later came to be associated with the genre aren't there yet, but the themes are very much present. Two college boys decide to strangle their old school friend to death as an intellectual exercise — they want to prove their superiority by committing The Perfect Crime. This is inspired by their former professor's teachings of Nietzsche's Übermensch. The murder boys have Homoerotic Subtext with each other.
• The Children's Hour (1962) there's a "schoolmarmie" aesthetic and somebody dies from societal pressure, although it isn't an obsession with academic prestige that drove that character to it...so this movie might be disqualified from Dark Academia on those grounds. The dark side of academia in this work is in how rumors among the students and reactionary parents ruin the teachers' lives and reputations.
• Dead Poets Society (1989) is set in 1959 at the prestigious, all-boys' Welton Academy in Vermont. The dark side of academia in this work is represented by the victory of tradition and repression over personal exploration and artistic expression.
• School Ties (1992) Set in 1959 While David technically studies sports and nobody dies, usually traits of Light academia, the antisemitic vandalism is very dark and serious. The dark side of academia in this work is in the conditional inclusion and conformity demanded by the gentile elite majority.
• "O" (2001) In a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Othello, Odin studies sports and his girlfriend so intensely that he reenacts a Shakespearean tragedy. There is conspiracy and murder that qualify this movie for Dark Academia, even if the stylist and architecture doesn't. The dark side of academia in this work is in the competitiveness, manipulativeness, and systematic racism leveraged by Hugo (originally Iago) against Odin (originally Othello).
• Like Minds (2006) set at a contemporary time to the film's release, describes the folie-à-deux between two boarding school boys and their obsession with the history of the Templar Knights that convince them to make human sacrifices.
• Agora (2009) Set in the year 391 CE at the beginning, a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician by the name of Hypatia tries to navigate the teaching venue and library during a divisive anti-intellectual era.
• Cracks (2009) the book sets it in 1960s South Africa while the movie changed it to 1930s England, Boarding School of Horrors with a Creepy Gym Coach.
• The Moth Diaries (2011) a cinematic flagship for Dark Academia for the pleated plaid skirts and matched cardigan tops of their uniforms with the school crest on it. They stay at a boarding school with neoclassical architecture. For the academia portion, these teenaged boarding-school girls study Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu and—consequent darkness—start murdering each other because they can't handle their sapphic energy constructively.
• The Falling (2015) a highly conceptual, thematic film set at an all-girls school in 1969. It's an exploration of indirect misogyny and repression, and its impact on the central character as she grieves the loss of her best friend and discovers the unsavory history of her own family.
• Kill Your Darlings (2013) is set in 1944 at Columbia University in New York City. While the central cast rebel against the restrictions of the university, the dark side of academia in this work is in their Muse Abuse towards one another.
• The Riot Club (2014) while it begins with an exclusive school club at Oxford that was founded in the 18th century and gone on for generations until the modern day, the importance of school only occasionally comes up. It's more about one restaurant dinner party that lively, wealthy brats enable one another to be their worst selves and rationalize their entitlement as justified frustrations because they are "legends". The situation dovetails into vandalism and at least two assaults, which they use their connections to escape consequences for.

Literature

• The Time of the Ghost (1981) the Melford family runs a boarding school for boys to get a classical education. The Melford daughters, much-neglected and abused, study witchcraft and summon something they can't banish.
• The Secret History (1992) is the Trope Codifier. Set in the 1980s at Hampton College, a liberal arts college in Vermont, it's focused on an insular clique of six Classics students. They get so into their studies—and the heady teachings of their enigmatic professor—that they reenact a bacchanal (ritual violent orgy to Dionysus), which ultimately results in multiple murders. The Secret History is well known for being beautifully evocative. This is not just its trappings, it's a major theme — the narrator describes his "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" as his Fatal Flaw.
• Never Let Me Go (2005) an organ donor who has graduated from a prestigiously "humane" boarding school regales other organ donors with stories of her childhood. The ones that ran the school taught them art while knowing each and every student's fate was to have their organs harvested.
• If We Were Villains (2017) set in 1997 at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. The central group of seven students are Shakespearean actors. A murder happens when they identify way too closely with the Shakespearean character type that they're always cast as.
• The Atlas Series (2020): I don't know much about it but as I understand it, it's a riff of the Murder Clique theme, telling the protangonists they have to kill one of their number?
• Fraternity (2022) is set in 1991 at a boarding school, with Penny Among Diamonds characters trying to make their way...and then there's secret societies on campus, of a murder club that manages to do a murder. There isn't really a subject of study that drives them to it, but it's more about how systems of social power (with a metaphor of magic power) combined with ignorance of how power operates, can lead to tragedy if there is no commitment to understand it and use that power responsibly.
• Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (2022) takes place in the early 19th century at Oxford so the aesthetic is more Steampunk. There is a central cast of characters that get so obsessed with studying linguistics that they murder someone...and then try to cover it up because they're all friends. The dark side of academia in this work is in the conditional inclusion and conformity demanded by the colonialist, classist people who run the place.

Theatre

• Cleansed (1998) according to the script, this play takes place at a university, but rather than any study the play presents a surrealist exploration of the human condition through Symbolic Mutilation in the Poetic Serial Killer's Death Trap of a campus. The dark side of academia criticized in this work is in the brutal lack of sentimentality.
• Bare: A Pop Opera (1999) takes place at a Catholic boarding school in Vermont (originally Vermont; sometimes the script changes it to Massachusetts) and the characters study Romeo & Juliet until even The Ace becomes a Broken Ace and ends up Driven to Suicide. The dark side of academia criticized in this work is the church's tradition of homophobia.
• The History Boys (2004) set in the mid to late 1980s, students of Cutlers Grammar School in Sheffield prepare for Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations. Over the course of a series of conversations, the class learns to criticize sexism and ethnic discrimination in academia at the same time as leverage the cultural capital inherent in studying these issues.

Web Series

• Carmilla the Series is set at Silas University somewhere in continental Europe

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cut works that don't really fit

• Picnic at Hanging Rock aesthetic and dark but not necessarily much studying, unless a forensic investigation counts

• A Separate Peace (published 1958; set in 1942)
  • Not really academic rivalry or obsession of a murder club friend group.

• Maurice (written 1914; published posthumously in 1971) involves studying at Cambridge in The Edwardian Era.
  • Dark academia needs to be dark; it can't merely be gay

• Fires of the Faithful in fantasy Renaissance Italy, the Inquisition purges a conservatory of music where the main characters study the violin.
  • Too much on the mini-Dystopia adventure side, high fantasy, no clear metaphorical criticism of academia itself—mostly a climate crisis religious persecution adventure Played Straight.

• Legally Blonde takes place at Harvard University and involves a courtroom-drama murder mystery of the Fair-Play Whodunnit variety.
  • Subject matter such as murder or workplace sexual harrassment might be dark, but the film does not frame it so gravely.

• The History Boys (2004 award-winning stageplay by Alan Bennett) set in the mid to late 1980s, students of Cutlers Grammar School in Sheffield prepare for Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations.
  • A variety of issues going on that the film frames as zany, quirky, or morally ambiguous and open-ended. Death is incidental.

• Cruel Intentions (1999) While an adaptation of the classic Dangerous Liaisons the intrigue does not translate to anything nearly as ruinous or deadly as the original or as "O" that is included above.

• Handsome Devil
  • Academic, brightly light and wholesome hopepunk. Get out of here.

• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
  • Academic, not very dark

• Picasso At The Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
  • Academic, not dark at all

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Dark, no academia. This is Gothic Horror.

• The Covenant 2006, no criticism of academia, no central subject of study.

• Harry Potter
  • If Fires of the Faithful doesn't make the cut, then Harry Potter shouldn't get to make the cut.