Uh-oh: The Bride!
Sue Granquist, Black Gate’s own incomparable Goth Chick, died not quite seven months ago, and the hole she left here is impossible to fill. I don’t know about you, but my Thursdays just haven’t been the same.
Sue’s beat was horror in all of its manifestations (well, maybe not all of them — I never remember her saying anything about politics), and she was especially keen on horror movies and television shows. Next to her husband Terry, the genre was the great love of her life.
Sue was always up to date; the avant-garde held no surprises for her, but she was really passionate about the good old stuff. Karloff and Lugosi, Jekyll and Hyde, the Mummy and the Wolfman, all those late-night or Saturday afternoon, black and white television terrors that begin with the little airplane circling the Universal globe — those classics put her in her happy place, if a fog-shrouded moor or cobwebbed crypt are places that foster happiness. For Sue, they were.
The Goth Chick was especially attentive to any new versions of those old stories and characters; any new Mummy or Dracula or Wolfman movie drew her instant attention, and her attitude was always a finely-balanced blend of hope and skepticism, at once generous and jaded. She was prepared to like anything if it was good, but she always had a torch and pitchfork at hand to storm the castle of the shoddy or slapdash.
Which brings us to the most recent “updating” or “reimagining” of one of the Universal Studios classics, The Bride!, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaall’s take on the 1935 Boris Karloff-Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein.
