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Goth Chick News: Do the Dead Really Matter In the Movies? Thirteen Questions for Midnight Syndicate’s Edward Douglas

Goth Chick News: Do the Dead Really Matter In the Movies? Thirteen Questions for Midnight Syndicate’s Edward Douglas

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dead-matter1All right movie fans, its here! We’ve been telling you about it for months and today is finally the day when Midnight Syndicate’s new horror flick The Dead Matter goes on sale nationwide at Hot Topics stores and on Amazon.com.

As I may have mentioned once or twice at most, Ed Douglas and the gang gave me a sneak peek at their creation last week and as a fan of the drive-in-horror-movie genre, I can tell you The Dead Matter is quite an amazingly fun ride. If that’s not enough, the DVD comes packaged with two new Midnight Syndicate music creations; the original motion picture soundtrack and the Halloween Music Collection.

For me, it’s like Christmas Halloween in July…

And for those of you who may be entertaining the idea that I’m just a hopeless sycophant with an ongoing crush on a bunch of bad-boy musicians, PIFFLE I say to you! They’re not at all bad boys; they’re actually nice and highly articulate, and have a lot of really entertaining things to tell us about.

See for yourself in the interview below.

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Goth Chick News Mini Blog: The Dead Matter in Stores Tomorrow

Goth Chick News Mini Blog: The Dead Matter in Stores Tomorrow

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dead-matter21Here 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 13th anniversary CD The Halloween Music Collection. Oh the bliss!

Tomorrow’s the big day! Stay tuned!

Goth Chick News Mini Blog: The Dead Matter Lurching Toward You in Two Days

Goth Chick News Mini Blog: The Dead Matter Lurching Toward You in Two Days

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dead-matter2The Dead Matter, Midnight Syndicate’s first leap from music to movies, is available to add to your gothic collection starting July 30th.

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!

Goth Chick News Mini blog: Midnight Syndicate’s movie The Dead Matter coming July 30th

Goth Chick News Mini blog: Midnight Syndicate’s movie The Dead Matter coming July 30th

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image002I’ve been telling you about this one for quite awhile and now it’s finally here!

Our favorite gothic musician crushes at Midnight Syndicate are finally unleashing their original movie The Dead Matter at Hot Topics stores and on Amazon.com, available July 30th.

The media package retailing for around $20 will include the movie, the original motion picture soundtrack, and Midnight Syndicate’s 13th anniversary greatest hits CD entitled Halloween Music Collection.

Ed and the boys made good on their promise and sent me a screener (or should I say screamer?) so I got an advance look.

Stay tuned for updates all week leading up to the big release date!

Goth Chick News: I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This, But…

Goth Chick News: I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This, But…

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rocky-horror2No 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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This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

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inception-city-posterInception (2010)
Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger.

You expected a review of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, didn’t you? I respect Dukas and Goethe too much for that. As apparently does the rest of the nation, since over the weekend the film made roughly the amount of change found in the lint catcher of the dryer.

Inception right now is the movie conversation. No matter what else occurs in cinema during 2010 (Tron Legacy! So hyped for that), this will known as the year of Inception. Even if We Make Contact. Inception is guaranteed to become a speculative-fiction classic that will sit on the same shelf with Metropolis, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, et al.

What? Did you think I was going to go against the grain of critical and viewer opinion that has almost cased and mounted Inception in the Hall of Fame?

I’m not. I can’t. The movie deserves every accolade it has received. I don’t even think there can possibly be a fan-backlash against it like there was with Avatar. Inception is as good as you’ve heard it is, and for many of you, it might even be far better.

But don’t walk into the theater with expectations, or even that much knowledge about it. Writer-director Christopher Nolan remained closed-mouth about the film in the build toward its premiere, which was the perfect approach. Inception isn’t exactly a “twist” movie (Bruce Willis was dead all along!), but it is a film of the constant escalation of surprise. Its story continues to plunge deeper and deeper, turning more complex with each passing scene, where the stories of most movie strip away complications as they head toward their finales. It’s a reversal that recalls Nolan’s second movie, the breakthrough Memento, but Inception is much more intricate in design. Hell, it makes Memento seem linear! Therefore, even though Inception can’t be spoiled with a single sentence the way you might spoil The Crying Game, it’s still best if you know as few details about the plot as possible or any of the specific scenes before you go in.

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Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

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marvel-supers-4John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.

I didn’t play Nova, the game he and many of his friends played as a sort of long-form creative wargaming campaign. I did play, and in one case referee, long-running role-playing campaigns that gave everybody who took part a special vocabulary, a shared set of touchstones and references that (I think) acquired a particular power from being our own: our own stories, independent from the culture at large, shaped by us and our choices.

I was about seventeen when I met a group of role-playing gamers who’d created their own world for the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing system. I think the game had been going on for something like eight years at the point I met them, and it’s still going today. (Jeff Grubb has a thoughtful reminiscence on the secret origins of MSH here.)

The world, as such, was not and is not stable; it has been re-invented several times over, as campaigns and storylines begin and end (and, this being a super-hero game, occasionally lead to a reboot of the timeline in the course of play), sometimes incorporating actual comic-book characters and sometimes not, but always using many of the same heroes and villains created by our group of gamers.

The characters were, are, the essence of the game; not their histories, but their concepts, and if you played in that world you could add something to it that would become a part of the ongoing tale.

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Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

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echo-small-image

So Echo Bazaar, the free browser game set in the Fallen London, “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell,” is a fantastic diversion. (I’ve mentioned it before.)

One of the things I love about it is that, despite its pseudohistorical goth neo-Victorian/steampunk setting (it’s like what might happen if steampunks discovered black), it’s not all that hateful about sex.

Which is a fine line with historical or pseudohistorical fantasy, right? You don’t want to be intolerably oppressive with your historical attitudes, and you don’t want to be irritatingly anachronistic by jamming in progressiveness where it doesn’t go.

And with history, at least you can rely on being accurate: with fantasy there’s a whole nother element where you have to be plausible, which basically means subscribing to historical fanon. There were black people living in Victorian London, but if what you know about it comes from seeing fifteen different versions of A Christmas Carol, you’ll probably think that the Repentant Forger is an example of unrealistic political correctness.

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Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

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theharm3TTA Press, publishers of Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave magazines as well as a few books, has launched a (potential) new line of exclusive novellas, beginning with Gary McMahon’s The Harm:

We hope that this will be the first of many TTA Press novellas, stories that you’d expect to see in Black Static and Interzone but are just too long for the magazines. They will be of varying lengths, and many we expect will be much longer than The Harm, but each one will be priced the same, just £5. In time, we hope to offer subscriptions to these novellas and offer significant savings.

The Harm is aimed at the Black Static audience, i.e., horror.  The story depicts the not unpredictable intertwined fates of three now grown up victims of particularly gruesome (though the adjective may be a redundancy) child molestation, as well as that of a sister of one of the casualties.  

The title intends to convey not just the horror of physical and sexual abuse of children (and, actually, the narrative is not, thankfully, directly concerned with detailing this) but the harm to all those who survive.

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Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

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let-the-right-oneIn 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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