The summer sun may still be baking us alive, but the haunt world clearly didn’t get the memo, because my inbox just lit up with juicy updates from none other than Edward Douglas of Midnight Syndicate. If you’ve ever wandered through a haunted attraction worth its cobwebs or spent any amount of time here at GCN, then you’ve heard of their work. Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka have been crafting the gothic, orchestral soundtracks of our nightmares for nearly three decades, and this month, they’re unveiling something truly historic.
For the very first time in their career, Midnight Syndicate has composed a “custom score for a haunted attraction,” and not just any attraction. They’re the sonic architects behind Universal Horror Unleashed, Universal’s first permanent horror experience, which opened earlier this month in Las Vegas at AREA15.
A friend and I have been watching The Wheel of Time adaptation on Amazon. Both of us expressed surprise not at the open casting, which we agree is wonderful, but at how that production choice plays out in small hamlets like Rand al’Thor’s “home town” of Two Rivers. After observing that every possible racial group is represented in this isolated, insular mountain community, my friend had an epiphany.
“I had to remind myself,” said my friend, “that if I suspend disbelief to accept that there’s magic in this world, then I might also have to suspend my disbelief in genetics.”
If you’ve been coming here for a while, then you’re likely aware of my deep admiration for the musical duo of Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka, known as Midnight Syndicate. In perusing the GCN articles which have featured them going back to 2009, I can see I often referred to Midnight Syndicate as my goth-boy-band crush, but I won’t apologize for fan-girling over moody musicians in black capes.
Beyond their aesthetic, it’s their talent for creating music to match your imagination that makes them fan favorites from Universal Studio’s Horror Nights to Cedar Point’s Halloweekends. To put it another way, Midnight Syndicate’s show is the only concert Black Gate photo Chris Z and I made a 12-hour round trip to see, and if you could imagine the two of us stuck in a car together for that long, then you know how great this music is.
So, it is a bit of an understatement to say I’m excited about their newest release, just in time for my favorite time of year.
Skallagrim – In the Vales of Pagarna (Hidden Crown Press, 373 pages; Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, March 2022). Cover by Walking of Sky TreeFrazetta – Against the Gods
Experience Skallagrim – In the Vales of Pagarna by Stephen R. Babb in all its forms. This post covers everything to get you hooked, from a summary, review, excerpts, and links to the complementing albums from Glass Hammer. Reading Skallagrim feels like you are a witness to the live version of Frazetta’s “Against the Gods” painting! You actually witness a hero grab a sword from the sky.
The opening scene poses a set of mysteries as the titular protagonist is brutally attacked in the streets of Archon, the Dreaming City. He loses his memory during the struggle, by wounds or sorcery, so the hero and the reader want to know: Why Skallagrim in a melee? Who is he, really? Why does he feel protective over a maiden kidnapped during the conflict? Why are multiple sorcerers after him? Why the hell can he grab a sentient, screaming sword that materializes from a sudden storm?
The rest of the book unravels these questions, as Skallagrim races against time to save the mystery maiden. He’ll wrestle with eldritch, chthonic creatures, a herd of ghouls, a few necromancers, and an assassin. As Skallagrim unearths the weird history of Andorath’s Southern Region, we get to learn about it as he battles. The book stands alone, but did you know that Stephen R. Babb has been a progressive rocker and theatrical-album-leader for thirty years (more on Glass Hammer below!). Poems and lyrics infuse the prose. For the full effect, readers should listen to the complementary Skallagrim albums. These are not Audio Books. These are thematic rock sets chronicling Skallagrim’s heroic journey. Embedded below are the opening songs to (1) and (2). Listen to these! Babb is creating a rich world here.
Anyone who has perused Goth Chick News regularly, knows that if Ed or Gavin (aka Midnight Syndicate) ever come knocking on my chamber door – I’m home. In fact, they were the very first professional interview I conducted for Black Gate following the release of their fourth album, Gates of Delirium, in 2001. From that point forward, they were and are the one and only goth boy-band that can still make me fangirl squee.
If you have managed to miss their many appearances in Goth Chick News, then allow me to catch you up. Midnight Syndicate has been working primarily in the genre of gothic music since 1997 and is based in Ohio. The band refers to their CDs as “soundtracks for the imagination” and their songs are characterized by a blend of instrumental music and sound effects. Midnight Syndicate music is commonly used to provide atmosphere during the Halloween season in haunted attractions, retail stores and theme parks. However, they have also done movie sound tracks, and rumor has it, were the preferred background music at the notoriously famous Halloween parties held at a certain LA mansion, which may or may not have been associated with bunnies.
The Storyteller’s Voice: Arch Oboler’s Drop Dead! or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Chicken Heart that Devoured the World but Were Afraid to Ask
As anyone who reads old comic books can tell you, the cheesy ads in the back pages are often more fun than the actual stories. Warren magazines like Creepy and Eerie were especially good in this regard, aimed as they were at a slightly more adult audience than comics like The Flash or Sub-Mariner were – or if Warren readers weren’t that much more mature, they probably at least had a little more money in their pockets than their slightly younger, allowance-dependent brethren did.
For instance, the last fifteen pages of my copy of Creepy #59 (January, 1974) consist of nothing but ads for such treasures as Planet of the Apes Hobby Kits (“TEN MILLION FANS ASKED FOR IT!”), Vinyl Movie Monster Masks (“NEW! FROM HOLLYWOOD!”), 8MM reels of stop-motion action scenes from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (“A FEAST OF FEARFUL IMAGINATION!”), EC Comics reprints, and pages and pages of paperback books and “Monsterific LP Record Albums!” The latter were mostly a mixed bag of ancient radio shows, “spoken word” renditions of Poe and Bierce stories, movie soundtracks, and those compilations of haunted house sounds that the copywriters assured us would be “great fun for parties!”
The album that always caught my eye (and that’s all it caught – $5.98 wasn’t easy for me to come by in those days) was called Drop Dead!
For this article, we’re going to be shining the virtual spotlight on a fairly recent and intriguing addition to the Avex music label roster in Japan, the singer Kalen Anzai. Although she’s definitely not part of the popular trend of ‘virtual idols’, for a time there was some debate on that — not about whether she was an idol (as she’s clearly not, at least not in the strict genre sense), but whether she was actually real or virtual…!
A few weeks ago, actually probably a couple of months ago, now that I think about it, an artist I have been following for a while dropped a music video. Ordinarily, I’d not really mention it here, though I do think the artist in question is extraordinary and the song is a bop, as the kids say. It wasn’t the song that kept me watching, however. Most times with music videos, I open them on my YouTube, then go to a different tab to do work.
Not this time.
What I watched wasn’t really a music video. I mean, it was a video and it did feature a single song, and was created for the specific purpose of presenting the song to the world. However, the video itself was a story – a short film. It had an inciting incident, the hero’s lowest point, and a satisfying conclusion. This tale was specifically, it was a short cyber-punk Robin Hood tale. The visuals were spectacular, the acting quite good (if somewhat melodramatic), and the story compelling.
I’m doing something different this time around, a mini-concert of music videos to help ring in a new and hopefully better year. You don’t need me to tell you how all-around lousy 2020 was, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel and hopefully the tunnel is not too much longer. All these videos are for one reason or another, important to me. Some are well-known, with millions of views, some are obscure. Some are both. (You’ll see.) I hope you all enjoy some of them as much as I have.
First up, BRRRUUUUCCCEE, with a fantastic live performance of NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER as kind a defiant send-off to last year, and also a hopeful anthem for the year to come. With some completely unexpected on-stage guest performers.
Next is a pair of videos that are in the way of public service announcements for fairly recent projects which should be called to your attention. One of the first movie posts I did mentioned a film called STREETS OF FIRE that I guess you’d say is something of a cult film. Shout Factory has done a recent Bluray release that has unsurpassed in clarity and quality. See for yourself.
The Mexican horror film is definitely an under-served genre when it comes to availability in the U.S. market. Many of these movies are hard to impossible to find subtitled (my preferred format) or even dubbed, which I usually find more problematical than subtitling. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I thought it might be useful to briefly cover a few titles you might not be familiar with. The following films are grouped chronologically rather than by quality.
