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Author: Sue Granquist

Goth Chick News: First Up on the Show Circuit – Days of the Dead

Goth Chick News: First Up on the Show Circuit – Days of the Dead

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As signs of life begin to emerge following the zombie apocalypse that was 2020, our thoughts naturally turn to the fate of the many trade shows and live events we normally cover for Black Gate. Earlier this year I posted a list of tentative in-person conventions which hopeful organizers were busy planning. Now this week I am nearly giddy to report that the first one, Day of the Dead Chicago, which we have been covering for nine years, successfully occurred last weekend.

As you would expect, things were a little different in this brave new world, but let’s start with what was the same.

Days of the Dead is a horror and pop culture convention that has been around since 2011. That makes 2021 a big tenth-anniversary year for the event which began here in Chicago, and has since expanded to Las Vegas, Indianapolis and Atlanta. This year, DotD was hosted at the same suburban-Chicago hotel where it moved to in 2019. It had far outgrown its previous location where vendor booths and even some celebrity tables had been relegated to the hallways between banquet rooms, making Black Gate photog Chris Z and I repeatedly wonder what would happen if someone yelled “fire!” The new hotel is far better equipped to host the show which in past years has drawn upwards of 4000 guests over the weekend it occurs. But, if you can believe it, the very-scaled-back hotel bar was bereft of Fireball, depriving us of our customary pre-convention shot.

Bloody hell.

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Goth Chick News: Save the Headstone and Go Out Like a Viking

Goth Chick News: Save the Headstone and Go Out Like a Viking

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Creative disposal of earthly remains is nothing new. There have been countless examples, especially in the last ten years, as new generations seek ways to distinguish themselves from the mundane-ness of the past. We’ve seen furniture that converts to a coffin (“Chic design for life and death”), an option for turning your loved-one’s remains into a precious stone which is set into jewelry (“One-of-a-kind, just like them”), and organic burial “eggs” out of which grows an oak tree (“Life never stops”). And now there’s a way you can go out in a blaze of glory.

Literally.

The legislative assembly of Maine is currently contemplating a bill which would allow Viking-style funerals.

History tells us that in the days of Viking warriors, dead heroes were laid out in a wooden boat along with their belongings. The vessel was also filled with hay and other flammables, and then put to sea. An archer (whom you hoped had infallable aim) then lobbed a burning arrow at the boat causing it to go up into an impressive pyre which consumed everything, before the charred remains were taken by the sea. An non-profit undertaker service organization in Maine called Good Ground Great Beyond, which is sponsoring said bill, owns 63 acres of property in the state, upon which they hope to offer “open air cremations” including a Viking-style funeral service.

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Goth Chick News: Finally – The Girls Get to Howl…

Goth Chick News: Finally – The Girls Get to Howl…

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All the wonderful film fests in the US and Canada have been forced to go virtual over the last year, but that hasn’t stopped them from showcasing a very creative run of new films; and this one might be my favorite.

Fantastic Fest, which normally takes place in Austin, TX, is the largest genre film festival in the US. Specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi and action movies from around the globe, the festival is dedicated to showcasing challenging and though-provoking cinema from new voices in the industry. Like other film fests, the best of the movies which premier here, get picked up for wider distribution.

The virtual version of Fantastic Fest 2020 was home to a new werewolf movie, written by Wendy Hill-Tout along with her daughter, Elizabeth Lowell Boland, known by stage name Lowell, a Canadian singer, songwriter and producer. Admittedly, I had never heard of Lowell until now, though she has released two full-length albums, and her song Palm Trees featured as soundtrack in EA Sports game, FIFA 15. I wish I could say differently about her Mom, Hill-Tout, but alas, I cannot. She has primarily been a producer throughout her career, according to IMDB. But as a writing team, Hill-Tout and Lowell seem to have created cinematic magic in the form of the film Bloodthirsty.

Newbie director Amelia Moses of course gets credit here, as does the acting of star Lauren Beatty (Jigsaw), but to me, all really great monster movies start with a great script. And this one is a doozy.

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Humans Are the Real Horror; GCN Interviews Lt. Joe Kenda, Star of Homicide Hunter and Author of New Release, Killer Triggers

Humans Are the Real Horror; GCN Interviews Lt. Joe Kenda, Star of Homicide Hunter and Author of New Release, Killer Triggers

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When the crew at one of my favorite publishing houses, Wunderkind, contacted me about interviewing a former homicide detective about his new book, I had to give it some thought. Long before Black Gate and my current day job, I was working on a master’s degree in criminal psychology with a view to become a criminal profiler. As an undergraduate I became fascinated with the question of what happens in the human mind that tips a person from contemplating violence to committing violence? I wanted to look for patterns and to discover if violent behavior could by typecast.

At the master’s degree level, the weight of what I was studying started to hit me – hard. This was no longer theory, but a pursuit that was bringing me eyeball to eyeball with real violence. As a 22-year-old from a very small Midwestern town, I was in no way mentally prepared for what I was seeing and learning about. I left the program for what I thought was a brief break, but I never went back, changing careers entirely. I feel lucky to have made that decision before my interest in ghosts and made-up monsters was forever ruined by real horrors.

So, when Wunderkind reached out, sending me an advanced copy of Lt. Joe Kenda’s new book Killer Triggers, I thought about whether I wanted these two worlds to cross again. I decided I would read a couple chapters of the book before making a decision. Hours later, with the Killer Triggers completely consumed, the decision was made. Yes, this is a departure from the pretend worlds I normally write about, but the book is just – well – very good. It’s not uncomfortably graphic and Lt. Kendra has a sense of humor that I couldn’t help but fall in love with a little.

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Goth Chick News: That Time Disney Tried Its Hand at Horror

Goth Chick News: That Time Disney Tried Its Hand at Horror

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As we well know, Disney is currently focusing a lot of energy on “live action” versions of its animated films, as well as family-friendly live action movies. We’ve seen the likes of Cinderella, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty (aka Malficent), along with Pirates of the Caribbean and the upcoming Jungle Cruise. But what you might not know, is that Disney has visited this strategy before. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, in an attempt to attract a young-adult audience, Disney also produced several live-action movies, though not ones based on previous stories. The Black Hole, Tron and my personal favorite, Something Wicked This Way Comes all harken back to this era in the Walt Disney Productions timeline.

It’s not that Disney had never done live-action movies before. In fact, from its inception in 1937 through the end of 1979, Walt Disney Productions delivered no less than 106 films with real actors. However, these stories pretty much defined the term “family friendly,” with titles such as Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, and The Shaggy D.A. Which is why Disney’s departure in 1979 caused such a kerfuffle.

In that year, British film and television director John Hough, who had already worked with Disney directing Escape to Witch Mountain and its sequel, was tapped to lead an idea first pitched by Disney producer Ron Miller. He proposed turning a 1979 novel by Florence Engel Randall, entitled The Watcher in the Woods, into one of Disney’s live-action films.

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Goth Chick News: Fill Up the Gas Tank and Break Out the Fireball, or Hitting the 2021 Show Circuit Hard…

Goth Chick News: Fill Up the Gas Tank and Break Out the Fireball, or Hitting the 2021 Show Circuit Hard…

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GC, masked up and ready to go…

Now that the dumpster fire that was 2020 is in the rearview mirror, and tiny pin lights of normality are beginning to appear, it is only natural that we here at GCN begin the annual countdown to “the season.”

Now, before I start getting messages reminding me it is only March, allow me to remind you that the event around which the entire GCN year revolves was a sad specter of itself last year. Haunted attractions were closed, parties were cancelled, and even Hollywood closed up shop, leaving us bereft of new fall screen screams.

Though the Halloween pop up stores were picked vulture-clean by mid-September by the masses trying to capture the seasonal spirit at home, those same stores were simply emptying out their 2019 warehouses of old props. Why? Because the trade shows that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I normally haunt in the early part of the year, where retail buyers find all the latest and greatest merchandise, were also cancelled.

So, it’s not without significant giddiness that Chris Z has sent his kilt to the dry cleaners and taken the canned air to his camera collection, while I stock the company Hummer with the usual inventory of road trip goodies. You see, in the last month, many of the events we normally cover each year have cautiously begun announcing 2021 dates.

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Goth Chick News: Devolution Gets Picked Up by Legendary – Let’s Hope They Get It Right

Goth Chick News: Devolution Gets Picked Up by Legendary – Let’s Hope They Get It Right

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First, let me apologize for not telling you about this last summer. Max Brooks, son of Mel and writer of one of my favorite zombie tales ever, World War Z, dropped another excellent story last year, called Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. I was certain I had written about it until I just went to look for the article and found I did not.

So, let’s start there.

I didn’t grab Devolution the moment it hit the shelves. Why? Because when I read “sasquatch massacre” I pondered the likelihood I could take this book seriously. I mean, come on. Big foot, in most of his iterations, cannot help but evoke images of bad reality TV, insurance commercials and debunked mythos. I wasn’t sure I could set these images aside and willingly go with Brooks into a tale where the words “sasquatch” and “massacre” were used in the same sentence while keeping a straight face.

Having met Brooks on a couple of occasions, I know how seriously he researches his subject matter. We discussed how much of what he describes in World War Z is based in actual science, and how many scientists and doctors he interviewed to get everything just right. So, I should have known better than to think he wouldn’t do exactly the same thing with his topic in Devolution.

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Goth Chick News: The Horror of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures

Goth Chick News: The Horror of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures

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In 1991, Peter Jackson was a wee New Zealand lad of thirty-three who was embarking on what would become a very lucrative film career. He was still seven years away from becoming a near household name with the release of Lord or the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and was on the hunt for film project that would get him recognized.

Having grown up in country with roughly the same population as the state of Alabama, he was well aware of the nation’s most infamous murder. Earlier that year fellow New Zealander Fran Walsh, with whom Jackson had worked on Meet the Freebles, suggested they tackle the tale in the form of a movie drama. The Parker-Hulme murder took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 22 June 1954, when Honorah Parker was killed by her teenage daughter, Pauline Parker, and Pauline’s close friend, Juliet Hulme. Parker was 16 at the time, while Hulme was 15. On that June afternoon, Honorah took Pauline and Juliet for tea and then for a walk in Victoria Park. In a wooded area about 400ft from the tea shop, Pauline and Juliet bludgeoned Pauline’s mother to death with half of a brick enclosed in an old stocking.

The murder itself was shocking enough, but as Jackson began his research into the circumstances surrounding it, what emerged read like Hollywood fiction. It was a tale of fantasy, forbidden sexuality and obsessive love which ended in violence and death, all involving two teenaged girls. Over the next year, Jackson dug deep into the story of Pauline and Juliet. In addition to reading Pauline’s diary, Jackson undertook a nationwide search for anyone who had known the girls and interviewed them to get a closer look at their lives.

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Goth Chick News: Just in Time for Mardi Gras: The LaLaurie Mansion Series

Goth Chick News: Just in Time for Mardi Gras: The LaLaurie Mansion Series

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An illustration of the fire at the LaLaurie mansion

As you all know, I fancy myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the paranormal. Over the years I’ve told you about some personal experiences (both real and imagined), some that others have experienced, and a few that are little more than unsubstantiated folk tales. But every once in a while, there comes a time and place where something so disturbing has occurred that the stories of hauntings associated with it morph into anecdotes that even a hardened skeptic could make room for.

Such is the LaLaurie Mansion located in New Orleans’ French Quarter which ranks near the very top of the “give me nightmares” scale.

If you haven’t heard of Marie Delphine LaLaurie, she was a New Orleans socialite who built a two-story mansion at 1140 Royal Street upon the event of her third marriage in 1825, to physician Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie. Long before this, NOLA was a unique place, not the least of which due to its Code Noir, or laws governing the treatment of slaves. Unlike the rest of the south there was at least the expectation in NOLA, that slave owners would treat their slaves well, and NOLA had the largest population of free people of color of any major southern city.

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Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

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Final Girls

Back in 1992, medieval history researcher Carol J. Clover wrote Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Fascinated by film as just another iteration of the ancient art of oral storytelling, she theorized that horror fans are not closet sadists who relate to the violence and terror of the films. Instead, Clover argued the reverse: that horror films are designed to align spectators not with the (most often) male tormentor, but with the tormented female’s suffering, pain, and anguish. The “final girl,” as Clover calls the victim-hero, endures before finally rising up to vanquish her oppressor, with horror fans cheering her on.

Enter one of my favorite authors Grady Hendrix and his upcoming new novel The Final Girl Support Group. If you’re trying to place the name you’ve definitely read about him before, here at GCN, when I talked about his previous releases, Paperbacks from Hell, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, to name a few. As he often does, Hendrix recognized a trend, as horror franchises went back to visit their “final girls” with characters such as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the latest Halloween installment, and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream. When you think about it, nearly ever horror movie has a version of a “final girl,” and Hendrix decided to tell us a story about what happened to them “after.”

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