*Contains spoilers* “Of all the melancholy themes, the one universally recognised by mankind as the saddest of all is the most obvious one: Death. And that most melancholy theme becomes the most poetic of all, when coupled with the theme ...
Read More »A Trip Down Gothic Lane: ‘Silhouettes & Statues’
For those who think Goth signifies a group of emo music fans in black lipstick who swan around in velvet capes and fantasize about vampires, the Silhouettes & Statues: A Gothic Revolution 1978-86 box set is here to set the ...
Read More »Fantasia 2017: The Laplace’s Demon
A group of people are invited to a deserted island. They’ve never met the owner. One by one, each person turns up dead. Il Demone di Laplace (The Laplace’s Demon, Giordano Giulivi, 2017) isn’t a remake of Agatha Christie’s And ...
Read More »Comic Review: Penny Dreadful – The Awakening #1
WARNING: As this comic is a sequel to the television series, it contains some minor spoilers from the show. Sometimes the best things aren’t meant to be, and a Victorian period TV series rooted in Gothic horror drama featuring iconic characters from ...
Read More »Monster Fest: An Interview on Made-for-TV Horror with Dean Brandum, Jodi McAlister, and Andrew Nette
This year’s Monster Fest in Australia put an unusual focus on one of my favorite horror themes: made-for-TV films and television shows. While a wealth of these were produced in the ‘70s — everything from Dark Shadows and Kolchak the ...
Read More »Conjuring Sublime Shadows: Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires
One word that is often synonymous with “Gothic”, especially when it comes to the literary form of the tradition, is the “sublime”. Writers such as Ann Radcliffe established this concept early on, introducing readers to the idea of overwhelming, breath-taking ...
Read More »Music to Get Your Spook On!: The Album Edition
90% of everything I love about life, nature and the arts (and please make sure to pronounce that last one really posh, as in the aaartsss) is encapsulated all within the greatest holiday ever. Halloween. Pumpkins, ghouls, masks, the smell ...
Read More »Compromising the Position of Giallo Cinema: The Gothic Journeys of Cattet & Forzani: Chapter Three, The Erotic Cutting of Gazes
About mid-way through Amer, Cattet & Forzani stage what is perhaps the most awkwardly dramatic taxi ride in cinematic history. Travis Bickle may have a number of adventures in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), but most of what occurs in his ...
Read More »Compromising the Position of Giallo Cinema: The Gothic Journeys of Cattet & Forzani, Chapter One
“The first concern, the concern of naïve realists, involves what might be called a perversion of cinema—that is, a simple misuse of the natural (to Bazin, noble) realism of the medium. The second concern is more complex: it addresses cinema ...
Read More »A Ken Russell Retrospective: The Debussy Film
“Pleasure is the law.” -Claude Debussy Though it was technically an episode made for the BBC’s Monitor program, a series primarily comprised of art documentaries, Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film (1965) is a feature length film, and though Russell had ...
Read More »