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Author: Sue Granquist

Goth Chick News: A Year of Weird; Hitting the Road with Goth Chick News

Goth Chick News: A Year of Weird; Hitting the Road with Goth Chick News

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You’d think that, as we approach the 2-year anniversary of the division between “BC” (before Covid) and everything else, nothing would seem strange anymore. Yet here we are less than 8 weeks into the new year, and 2022 is shaping up to be a doozy. We’ve already experienced cars that can change colors, exercise bikes in McDonalds, French-fry-scented perfume, and a once-in-a-millennium palindrome day, and we’re not even through February yet.

In this brave new world where pillow-fighting has become a legit combat sport, it might be easy for Black Gate photog Chris Z and I to decide to remain in our subterranean offices until October. I mean, covering the horror industry might seem scary until you consider that this is the year that avatars of the group ABBA will be in concert in London for six months and the event is basically sold out.

Seriously. WTF?

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Goth Chick News: The Dead Travel Fast in Branko Tomovic’s Vampir

Goth Chick News: The Dead Travel Fast in Branko Tomovic’s Vampir

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Color me old fashioned, but there is something intriguing about a vampire story which comes straight from the region around the Carpathian Mountains. Granted, Serbia isn’t the original Transylvania. But due to the many regional conflicts dating back to the Middle Ages and their eventual land-locked status, Serbia shares quite a lot of folklore and traditions with its neighbors Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, and of course Romania.

Maybe because unlike Seattle, Serbia looks like a place where vampires would hang out; or maybe it’s the accent. But when I had the pleasure of visiting Hungary and Croatia, it seemed supremely likely that every local cemetery had a resident undead. It’s therefore no surprise that a new independent film from Serbia did so well at the Sitges International Film Festival, followed by Trieste Science+Fiction, and Raindance that it got snagged by Alarm Pictures for distribution in the US and UK.

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Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage Back from the Dead…? Maybe

Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage Back from the Dead…? Maybe

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Sometime in the mid-90’s I was headed into one of my favorite shops for contraband Cuban cigars, located on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, when who holds the door for me but Nicolas Cage. I had literally loved him in everything he had done up to that point including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cotton Club and Racing with the Moon. This wasn’t too long after Cage had appeared in Wild at Heart which was intensely sexy in the weird David Lynch kind of way. And though I desperately wanted to stop Cage (was he single at that time? I don’t remember), if you don’t want to look like an obnoxious tourist in NOLA, you let people go about their business. So, I said “thanks” while looking at him as long as I dared, and went on in the shop.

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Goth Chick News: The Cursed, a Werewolf Tale Coming in February

Goth Chick News: The Cursed, a Werewolf Tale Coming in February

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The Cursed (LD Entertainment, February 18, 2022)

Trust the Brits to create nightmares from nursery rhymes. You’re probably familiar with “Ring Around the Rosie” and its reference to the Black Death of the mid-seventeenth century. When children on the playground fall down laughing at the end of this rhyme, they are reenacting the plague in which a quarter of London’s population dropped dead. The “ring-a-rosie” referred to the circular rash appearing on the infected, and the pocket full of posies were the floral sachets people carried with them to mask the ever-present smell of death.

Charming.

However, I recently became acquainted with one I children’s rhyme I hadn’t heard previously. “One for Sorrow” is a well-known, traditional children’s nursery rhyme that relates to magpies. It describes a superstition regarding the number of birds seen at a single time and whether that number means good or ill.

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Goth Chick News: The Scary Games I Can’t Wait to Play in 2022

Goth Chick News: The Scary Games I Can’t Wait to Play in 2022

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I realize that persons of a certain age have literally been witness to dramatic (and drastic) evolutions. Consider the term “gamer.” Webster’s online dictionary defines this term as, “a person who plays video games or participates in role-playing games.” However, until the early 1990’s the definition stated only, “a person who plays or participates in role-playing games.” Literally, the term “gamer” immerged along with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970’s, but now encompasses previously unimaginable experiences like VR.

Given the current Webster’s definition, I myself am a gamer and have been for… well… awhile, though there are younger gamers who might scoff at my saying so. However, when one has amassed enough expendable income to commission the building of a water-cooled supercomputer called “Winston” whose primary function is to run the mother of all VR gaming systems, I’m pretty comfortable with the label. And though I would likely be brutalized in the Warcraft waiting room, I have a significant talent in a certain type of gaming environment, most of which involve… wait for it… horror storylines.

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Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

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Road of Bones by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Press, January 25, 2022). Cover artist unknown

I have recently been entertained by a Facebook group called View from My Window. People from around the world post pictures of just that; the view they see outside their windows. The fascinating bit is seeing postings from people in the farthest-flung corners of the globe, including Siberia. I didn’t know much about Siberia before, other than Russian dissidents being banished there, but seeing the pictures made me do a little research. I now know that Siberia is home to 33.7 million people, but that number is a little rough since there is no single precise definition of Siberia’s territorial borders. That population occupies 5 million square miles, so my concept of “sparsely populated” is mostly true. And boy is it cold. The average temperature in January −13 °F (no wind chill factored in) and warmest temps averaging around 50 °F.

So why am I telling you this and what does it have to do with horror?

Because my recent fascination with Siberia coincides nicely with a recent horror release from St. Martin’s Press, titled Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

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Goth Chick News: Keanu as The Devil in the White City?

Goth Chick News: Keanu as The Devil in the White City?

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As a lifelong Chicagoan I have always enjoyed stories of my city’s colorful history. From its Blues connection to New Orleans, to the Gilded Age of Marshall Field and Parker Palmer, to the seedier stories like that of the Everleigh Sisters, the building of Chicago reads like a naughty version of Downton Abbey. Of course, as entertaining as its early history can be, Chicago was a tough, crime-ridden place. It was dirty, both literally and figuratively, and violent in every sense of the word. The city was and still is, associated with a lot of unsavory activity that we unsuccessfully try to distance ourselves from. For instance, we’d love for the world to stop thinking of Al Capone every time someone brings up Chicago. Ironically, the one name most people don’t associate with our city is H. H. Holmes, at least up to now.

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Goth Chick News Classics: Ray Bradbury’s “The Wish” Brings New Magic to the Holidays

Goth Chick News Classics: Ray Bradbury’s “The Wish” Brings New Magic to the Holidays

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The Book

In 2019 I finally got around to writing about my first encounter with Ray Bradbury and his story “The Wish.” It isn’t one of his most famous or well known, but when it appeared in the December issue of Woman’s Day magazine in 1973, it touched my 9-year-old self in a deeply personal way. Following its appearance in Woman’s Day, “The Wish” only appeared twice more; once in a compilation called Long After Midnight, which I discovered in my subsequent youthful pursuit of all things Bradbury, and once in a format I only just discovered.

Here is where the magic comes in…

Back in October, 2020 I received an unusual voicemail on my “day job” phone. The gentleman introduced himself and asked if I was the Sue Granquist who writes for Black Gate. If so, he had something for me. If not, he apologized for bothering me and then left his number for me to call. What was exceptionally strange about this is that I don’t even know my office phone number, not to mention my very strict policy of separation of church and state – no one at the day job knows about my gig at Black Gate. So how, exactly, did this gentleman track me down there?

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Goth Chick News: Days of the Dead – Season Greetings from Our Family to Yours

Goth Chick News: Days of the Dead – Season Greetings from Our Family to Yours

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That time of year has once again rolled around. “The Season” is officially over. Black Gate photog Chris Z has thrown a tarp over the Hummer and sent his kilt to the dry cleaners. We’ve emptied the final airplane-sized bottles of Fireball, and filed our last expense report with BG’s financial fun police. Because on the weekend before Thanksgiving we attended the final convention of our annual show circuit, Days of the Dead.

It certainly doesn’t feel like nearly ten years since we attended our first DotD convention at its sophomore outing in the Chicago suburbs. I readily admit that Chicago isn’t Los Angeles or even New Orleans when it comes to sub-cultures, though the elements that do exist are certainly worth wading into — if you know where to look. But when DotD came to Chicago for the first time in 2011, its home was the Schaumburg Marriot of all places.

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Goth Chick News: Showtime’s New All-Girl Survival Drama Yellowjackets Promises to Be a Wild Ride

Goth Chick News: Showtime’s New All-Girl Survival Drama Yellowjackets Promises to Be a Wild Ride

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Mike Bockoven’s book Fantasticland is one of my favorites. It takes the concept of Lord of the Flies and plops is right down in an imagined Disney World competitor theme park whose employees get cut off from civilization due to a hurricane. It explores what happens when once normal college-aged kids divide into Mad Max-esque factions to fight for survival. I’ve long thought that, in the right hands, this story would make for an incredible movie. But though an ambitious theater company in California took it on as a play earlier this year, there have been no murmurs about Fantasticland making it to the big screen.

However, it seems like Showtime is going to take up the concept with their new series Yellowjackets, and it looks like this could be the savage girl thriller we all need.

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