Black Gate

As 2009 comes to an end I find the events of the last twelve months firing past my sub-conscious like the recap sequence before one of those lame “it was all a dream” mini-series endings. 

Unfortunately any list of highlights from 2009, besides proving that reality is far more frightening than fiction, would also be intensely boring.  I’ll leave that to CNN and NPR. 

Instead, here are a few random thoughts – on Dacre Stoker’s Dracula the Un-Dead,  the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures show, HBO’s True Blood and the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, the upcoming film version of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, the return of the Halloween, Costume and Party Show to Chicago, and more.

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Mr. Goth Chick is a civil war buff and two summers ago on a road trip, we stopped off to tour the battlefield at Shiloh, spending the night at a gorgeous old southern mansion a few towns away, called Magnolia Manor. I found the place on a web search by Googling “haunted hotel Shiloh” (would you expect any less?). When I called for the reservations, the owner informed me that we would need to stay in the guest house behind the main building as the main house was reserved by a ghost hunting group filming a documentary.

Of course through a series of particularly smarmy tactics, I negotiated an invitation for us to join the ghost hunt.

On this trip we were already armed with some of our own equipment such as a digital voice recorder and a high speed video camera, but the leader of the group called Memphis Mid-South Ghost Hunters, was kind enough to provide me with an EMF detector as well.

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So last time I was describing the weird way I spend my vacations; namely freezing or roasting my extremities in damp places with puddles, while simultaneously holding a variety of electrical equipment, all in the name of provoking a paranormal occurrence. Real smart.  And did this ever pay off with some scream-worthy-TV-reality-show moments?

A couple, actually.

Creepy experience number one happened in New Orleans in Le Petit Theatre located in the heart of the French Quarter.  We were told the theater was haunted by several restless spirits, the most active of which were children who perished during one the many bouts of the plague which swept through the Louisiana swamps.  Le Petit had often been pressed into service as a temporary hospital and quarantine zone for children and many of them died there.

Our facilitator told us the spirits of the children were as mischievous as they had been in life, often playing tricks on both actors and patrons in the theater.  They also liked to touch the living, tugging on the purse straps or hair of ladies in particular.  The facilitator speculated the children were drawn to women, probably because they missed their mothers.

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I’ll bet you’ve noticed a rather interesting trend on your cable channels lately. Namely, ghost hunting reality shows.
 
I’ve counted no less than seven without even trying: The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted, The SyFy Networks’ Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, and Ghost Hunters Academy, The Discovery Channel’s Paranormal State, and one of my personal favorites, A&E’s A Haunting. 
 
Now, I could whip out my psychology degree and tell you that this saturation of fascination with the dead stems from a need to dodge the harsh reality of plunging stock markets and home foreclosures by indulging our primal attraction to the unknown, but that wouldn’t be entirely the whole story. 
 
I think it has way more to do with the fact that we’re all just closet adrenaline junkies, and at least some of these shows offer a few moments of genuine spine-tingling escapism. 

Then again, an equal number are train wrecks of over-acting we just can’t look away from.
 
But either way, it’s an addiction.  I can say this without compunction, as I’ve been addicted for years.
 

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In my favorite month of October, I spent an inordinate amount of time away from my beloved book stores opting for movies and TV instead.  Though I rarely pass on a horror flick in either venue, it’s equally rare for me to stumble across an offering that comes close to the entertainment value and overall creepiness of the vintage black and white, Universal Studio classics. 

Contemporary horror movies of late seem to be less about giving the audience a good scare and lean more toward what my friends and I refer to as “psychopath training films.”  Films like Saw and Hostel are bloodbaths that rely on their gross-out shock factor far more than actual scares. 

They do stay with you, but in my opinion, for entirely the wrong reasons.  Apparently theater goers have become so hard to impress that movie makers must resort to ever-more-realistic intestine-spilling, and must literally wire-snip our fingers off to get to our $10. 

Then came the month of October and a decidedly fresh, if perhaps a bit fetid, breath of air. 

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As far as I’m concerned, Christmas just came early.

Let’s be honest.  In my house, Christmas always comes early; usually on October 31st to be exact, and everything after that is just commercial fall-out.  However, I truly got a  horror-movie-opening-night, new-season-of-True-Blood-sized surprise to find that on October 13th the literary event of the century had slipped past me.  But I’m sure it’s because I was busy installing my life-sized, automated Specter of Death in the front yard to scare the crap out of the neighbor kids.  One can only multi-task so much.

One-hundred and twelve years after the original novel, Dracula the Un-Dead, just released in the United States, is a sequel to Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic.   Written by Dacre Stoker, the original author’s great-grandnephew, and co-written by Dracula historian Ian Holt, the book picks up 25 years after the Victorian-era monster was supposedly killed in the original.

Dracula the Un-Dead is based in part on 125 pages of handwritten notes left by Bram Stoker.  Of all the books, movies and other tales to use Dracula’s name throughout the decades, this is the first since the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie to have the Stoker family’s endorsement and input.

Needless to say, I violated several traffic laws and took out a couple of skate boarders getting to my local book store. It was a bit anti-climatic to find there was no Dracula the Un-Dead display up front, but it was prominently displayed in the horror section, and like Golem with his “precious” I clutched it in one hand (and clutched the steering wheel in the other) to get back here. 

And I thought the tickets I just bought to Adams Family – the Musical were going to be the pinnacle of the holiday season.  Oh please, PLEASE let it live up to the hype! 

Stay tuned!