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Author: Sue Granquist

Goth Chick News: ‘Tis the Season for Scary Stories

Goth Chick News: ‘Tis the Season for Scary Stories

The Scary Book of Christmas Lore: 50 Terrifying Yuletide Tales from
Around the World by Tim Rayborn (Cider Mill Press, November 14, 2023)

Anyone who has ever read, or watched a screen-version of, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) knows that the tradition of telling ghost stories during the holidays goes back to the early Victorian era. In the 19th century, the celebration of Christmas underwent a transformation, influenced in part by the works of writers such as Charles Dickens and Washington Irving. These authors, among others, painted romantic visions of the season as a time for festive gatherings, family reunions, and acts of kindness, playing a large role in the Christmas images we have today.

However, alongside the cheerful and heartwarming aspects of Christmas, the Victorians had a lingering fascination with the supernatural. This interest in ghost stories and the macabre was likely influenced by earlier traditions and folklore associated with the winter season, particularly the ancient pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead were thin.

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Goth Chick News: Saying Farewell to Another ‘Season’ at Days of the Dead

Goth Chick News: Saying Farewell to Another ‘Season’ at Days of the Dead

That time of year has once again rolled around and another official spooky season is in the rearview mirror. Black Gate photog Chris Z has thrown a tarp over the Hummer and sent his kilt to the dry cleaners. We’ve emptied the final airplane-sized bottles of Fireball and filed our last expense report with BG’s financial fun police. As it has been for the past 11 years, the weekend before Thanksgiving means we attend the final convention of our annual show circuit, Days of the Dead.

It certainly doesn’t feel like that long since we attended our first DotD convention at its sophomore outing in the Chicago suburbs. I readily admit that Chicago isn’t Los Angeles or even New Orleans when it comes to subcultures, though the elements that do exist are certainly worth wading into if you know where to look. But when DotD came to Chicago for the first time in 2011, its home was the Schaumburg Marriott of all places.

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Goth Chick News: In Praise of Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Goth Chick News: In Praise of Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Having fallen behind on my normal planned October activities, I am admittedly a bit late to the party when it comes to Mike Flannigan’s latest outing for Netflix, The Fall of the House of Usher, which debuted on October 12th. Flannigan is batting about 500 on the Goth Chick News stats board of directorial successes, so I was holding my breath in hopes he wouldn’t butcher one of my beloved Edgar’s properties.

On the plus side Flannigan helmed The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manner and Midnight Mass, all for Netflix and all in my top ten fav series list. On the downside, and this is a huge one for me, he is personally responsible for completely hosing the big screen version of one of my favorite Stephen King books, Doctor Sleep, for which I am hard pressed to forgive him. But perhaps Netflix is his true medium. So, with this in mind, I queued up The Fall of the House of Usher.

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Goth Chick News: Things Are Looking Bad in Jerusalem’s Lot

Goth Chick News: Things Are Looking Bad in Jerusalem’s Lot

The juggernaut that is Stephen King material being made and remade for big and small screens continues to plow forward with varying degrees of quality and success: thumbs up for IT (Part 1; 2017), thumbs down for Part 2 (2019), up for Mr. Mercedes (2017), down for the remake of Carrie (2013), up for The Shining (1980) and way WAY down for Doctor Sleep (2019), and on and on we’ve gone since the original Carrie in 1976.

A quick online perusal turned up no less than thirty-two King adaptations in the works, including additional runs at Carrie and Christine. Honestly, as my admiration for King’s source material is equally split between love it and hate it, I only pay attention to production news on the books I really liked, though that has been far more heartbreaking than not.

One of King’s stories which I regularly revisit is Salem’s Lot, which as vampire stories go, is a classic. Though the 1979 made-for-TV miniseries with David Soul was pretty cool for its time, and the miniseries remake in 2004 starring Rob Lowe was its own kind of hell sans Rutger Hauer as a far sexier vampire Barlow, I always thought this story was screaming for a big-screen (and big budget) take. I was therefore initially excited when in 2019, New Line Cinema announced Gary Dauberman was set to write a Salem’s Lot screenplay and Executive Produce the movie.

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Goth Chick News: Something To Sooth My Halloween Hangover…

Goth Chick News: Something To Sooth My Halloween Hangover…

Fresh off my extended holiday, along with an unwanted souvenir in the form of Covid, I tested negative just in time to greet the trick-or-treaters, most of whom rightly decided not to brave an early Chicago snowstorm. So, here I sit with approximately two pounds of fun-size candy bars and a serious case of the blues. Never in my history have I been away from home for most of my favorite month of the year, missed out on nearly all the local haunted attractions, and attended zero parties dressed in an elaborate costume. Yes I did it to myself, and I agree that boo-hoo’ing over three weeks in Europe is probably downright evil (and not in the good way). But though every day is Halloween around here, October is the centrum around which the entire Goth Chick News year revolves, and that said, there is only one thing to do.

Start counting down to next year of course.

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Goth Chick News: The Ultimate October Watchlist from Peacock

Goth Chick News: The Ultimate October Watchlist from Peacock

Spooky season is upon us and that means it’s time to binge watch everything scary. From episodic favorites like American Horror Story and True Blood, to perennial films like Halloween (the original) and The Shining, the only thing better than filling up the month of October with all sorts of video goodness, is getting off the couch long enough to attend some haunted attractions. Though most streaming services pay some sort of homage to Halloween, I have to say I’m pretty darn impressed with the lineup being offered by Peacock TV for the month of October.

Now, the good news is that if you don’t have Peacock, you can purchase it for one month only (I checked), without cutting into your PSL budget. The channel is offering a month of unlimited watching that includes ads, for $5.99 and an ad-free version for $11.99, which is cheap when you see the lineup of films the channel has teed up especially for us horror fans.

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Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

September means one thing here at GCN – haunted attractions grand openings. The result is that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I usually spend most if not all September weekends getting early looks at the latest upgrades to the Chicagoland haunts. I am proud to brag that several entries on any list of “the nation’s best haunted attractions” are local to us, which means the bar around here is set pretty darn high.

This year, Chris Z’s long-suffering spouse had enough of his haunted house nonsense and booked an extended vacation abroad during the month of September. Though I understand not wanting to try to organize one’s wedding anniversary celebration around a Hell’s Gate press night, Chris Z’s absence left me feeling kind of pathetic. I mean, in the very early days of GCN I used to cover all the events on my own, but I had to admit that I’d grown accustomed to his rolling commentary and snarky asides.

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Goth Chick News: No to Sociopath Training Films, But Yes to Guerilla Marketing

Goth Chick News: No to Sociopath Training Films, But Yes to Guerilla Marketing

Nicole Kidman can’t catch a break. The Academy Award-winning actress has become a meme queen with behavior that has made her the unintentional darling of social media. It probably started in 2001 when Kidman was photographed leaving her lawyer’s office after finalizing her divorce from Tom Cruise. There was the famous “seal clap” at the 2017 Oscars which was supposedly her trying to protect her rings, but which just looked downright weird. Then there was her reaction to Will Smith slugging Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. But it was Kidman’s ad for AMC which began running on TV and prior to the theaters’ main feature in September 2021 that has probably garnered the most snark.

The dramatic ode to cinema narrated by Kidman was meant to inspire audiences to return to theaters following Covid. In the ad, Kidman enters and sits alone in an empty AMC theater while delivering a monologue describing the pleasures of the moviegoing experience, such as the “indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before.”

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Goth Chick News: Kicking Off Spooky Season with a Ghost Story

Goth Chick News: Kicking Off Spooky Season with a Ghost Story


Ghost Story (Pocket Books paperback reprint, September 1, 1989)

When fall finally starts descending on Chicagoland there are a few rituals which are essential to getting me in the mood for Spooky Season. Granted, this time of year isn’t dramatically different from the rest of the year around here, considering. But there are certain things that ramp up the countdown to October 31st.

For example, a more than average quantity of gothic elements appears in the décor, the sweatshirts come out, and the scent of pumpkin candles permeates every room along with the music of Midnight Syndicate. September also finds me revisiting quite a few literary favorites as nothing sets the fall tone better than a good ghost story, and in this case, I mean that literally. Ghost Story by Peter Straub remains to this day, the only novel that scares the snot out of me every time I read it.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: How Did I Miss This Fab Vamp Film??

Goth Chick News Reviews: How Did I Miss This Fab Vamp Film??

Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Pictures Classics, April 11, 2014)

Last week as I did research for my article about the upcoming reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein, I stumbled across a vampire movie I had not only never seen but had never heard of, and the rarity of this occurrence cannot be understated. Vampires are my favs and though my crappy memory for names and dates means I’ll never consider myself an expert in the genre, I am proud to say that my experience of them in literature, movies, and folklore is pretty darn comprehensive. So, when I found the movie Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), there was nothing for it but to cancel all plans for the evening, order Door Dash, and tuck in to stream this title which had somehow eluded me for ten years.

The first thing to love is that the film cast was comprised of some incredible actors. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play the two main characters Eve and Adam. But then there is Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland), the late great Anton Yelchin (Star Trek and Fright Night), Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), and the extraordinary John Hurt. The writer/director is Jim Jarmusch, who was also responsible for the zombie spoof movie The Dead Don’t Die (2019), which also starred Swinton, and who according to Jarmusch’s bio, is a bit of a muse of his.

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