Black Gate

Here at the Black Gate offices we’ve sent the entire gaggle of lazy summer interns to the local Hot Topics store to camp out in the 100% humidity of a Chicago summer to wait for tomorrow’s release of Midnight Syndicate’s movie The Dead Matter. We could have let them stay in the air conditioning and buy it off Amazon.com, but what fun would that be?

Wonder how long it will be before the interns realize there is mayonnaise in their sunscreen bottles? Oh well…

Back here in the 70-degree underground bunker that is the Goth Chick offices, I’m putting the finishing touches on tomorrow’s interview with Ed Douglas about this long anticipated gothic flick while listening to Midnight Syndicate’s 13^th anniversary CD The Halloween Music Collection. Oh the bliss!

Tomorrow’s the big day! Stay tuned!

The Dead Matter, Midnight Syndicate’s first leap from music to movies, is available to add to your gothic collection starting July 30^th.

However, as I have been shameless stalking Ed Douglas since first meeting him at the Halloween, Costume and Party Show back in 2003, he gave up an advance copy of the movie and the music; probably thinking he’d get me to stop reading angst-y poetry into the Midnight Syndicate office answering machine.

Hah! No such luck!

I spent last weekend combing over the release that combines the movie with two music CD’s meaning another I haven’t seen daylight in 72 hours. And if that doesn’t seem all that unusual for me, well then let me tell you that it is. Normally when I sit in the dark for days on end it’s with my voodoo dolls and I’m…well… meditating over something important, like my exes or my last boss. So if I’m doing it because of The Dead Matter, then it’s definitely worth it, trust me.

Only two days to go!

No seriously, I can’t believe I’m writing this. But here goes.

I live next door to a twenty-something, just out of college couple I’ve referred to here before as “Mr. and Mrs. Disney.” Though you probably wouldn’t immediately come to this conclusion, I am truly fond of them; I just think they’re a little too cute together, and they think I’m personally responsible for knocking out Sleeping Beauty and Snow White (with a spindle and an apple, respectively).

That being said, they are generally pretty tuned into pop culture — they even attended last year’s Chicago ComicCon, along with several movie and sci-fi conventions. It is in this context that I plan to couch my mortification.

A week ago Mr. and Mrs. Disney showed up on my doorstep in a driving rain to return some borrowed items. Side-by-side as always, they stood there on the stoop sharing an open newspaper as a makeshift umbrella, and when I opened the door I couldn’t help myself. I broke out into the first verse of “There’s A Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place)” and Mr. and Mrs. Disney’s starred at me like I had bats crawling out of my ears. They asked me why I was singing to them; was it like a “Singing in the Rain” thing?

The reality of what I was facing started sinking in, but slowly.

“No, it’s just that the two of you standing there under an open piece of newspaper in the rain made you look like Brad and Janet.”

Blank stares. This can’t be happening.

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In the name of journalistic integrity, with stomach fortified by a hearty breakfast, I took myself to a Sunday morning matinee of Eclipse. I mean in all good faith I couldn’t hack on something I hadn’t seen.

But now thankfully, I can.

The theater was empty sans me and some guys sitting a couple of rows behind. In the minutes leading up to the start of the film, I overheard their conversation which helped explain why four, twenty-something men were about to sit through the third installment of the Twilight saga.

Apparently they were there solve the mystery of their girlfriends’ collective mania which had, until now, completely eluded them.

And from what I understand, they pretty much agreed they all hated Robert Pattinson just on principal.

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“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Back in March I wrote about quotable movie lines and at least in my circles, Chief Brody’s ironic statement to Captain Sam Quint ranks near the top. If you’re under the age of twenty-five you truly may not recognize it, but if you’ve made it through life this far without having seen most of Jaws, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step away from your computer screen and go out for some fresh air.

And once you’ve done that, immediately put Jaws in the number one spot in your Netflix queue.

Thirty-five years ago, on fourth-of-July weekend, movies and the movie-going public were changed forever by a hot-shot young director and his mechanical shark.

That’s right kids, no CGI, no green-screen magic, not even a little forced-perspective puppetry. The shark was a life-sized monster, tooling around in the ocean instead of a water tank, and the actors really got wet.

Back in 1975 no one had really heard of Steven Spielberg. Besides a string of television episodes, he had only one movie under his belt: Sugarland Express, which he both wrote and directed.

However, that movie did well enough for him to be taken seriously when he asked to direct the movie adaptation of Peter Benchley’s number one best seller, Jaws.

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“Clowns, without a doubt.”

A few days ago I walked into a lunch conversation between my co-workers, who apparently started out discussing irrational fears their young children had.

This topic then morphed into the seemingly ridiculous fears that had followed these seemingly rational grown-ups into adulthood; not phobias per se, but “gives-me-nightmares” terrors.

The guy talking was a 30-something software engineer, and I could tell by the look on his face that he was in no way joking.

“Ronald McDonald and Pennywise are the absolute worst.”

Now, I totally get the whole “fear of clowns” thing, because clowns show up in quite a few horror movies such as IT and Poltergeist, and though the Pennywise reference did remind me that the best scenes of the otherwise fairly cheesey movie IT were indeed the ones with the murderous clown, I’m not particularly freaked out by them on the whole.

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