Black Gate

Having fallen behind on my normal planned October activities, I am admittedly a bit late to the party when it comes to Mike Flannigan’s latest outing for Netflix, The Fall of the House of Usher, which debuted on October 12th. Flannigan is batting about 500 on the Goth Chick News stats board of directorial successes, so I was holding my breath in hopes he wouldn’t butcher one of my beloved Edgar’s properties.

On the plus side Flannigan helmed The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manner and Midnight Mass, all for Netflix and all in my top ten fav series list. On the downside, and this is a huge one for me, he is personally responsible for completely hosing the big screen version of one of my favorite Stephen King books, Doctor Sleep, for which I am hard pressed to forgive him. But perhaps Netflix is his true medium. So, with this in mind, I queued up The Fall of the House of Usher.

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The juggernaut that is Stephen King material being made and remade for big and small screens continues to plow forward with varying degrees of quality and success: thumbs up for IT (Part 1; 2017), thumbs down for Part 2 (2019), up for Mr. Mercedes (2017), down for the remake of Carrie (2013), up for The Shining (1980) and way WAY down for Doctor Sleep (2019), and on and on we’ve gone since the original Carrie in 1976.

A quick online perusal turned up no less than thirty-two King adaptations in the works, including additional runs at Carrie and Christine. Honestly, as my admiration for King’s source material is equally split between love it and hate it, I only pay attention to production news on the books I really liked, though that has been far more heartbreaking than not.

One of King’s stories which I regularly revisit is Salem’s Lot, which as vampire stories go, is a classic. Though the 1979 made-for-TV miniseries with David Soul was pretty cool for its time, and the miniseries remake in 2004 starring Rob Lowe was its own kind of hell sans Rutger Hauer as a far sexier vampire Barlow, I always thought this story was screaming for a big-screen (and big budget) take. I was therefore initially excited when in 2019, New Line Cinema announced Gary Dauberman was set to write a Salem’s Lot screenplay and Executive Produce the movie.

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Fresh off my extended holiday, along with an unwanted souvenir in the form of Covid, I tested negative just in time to greet the trick-or-treaters, most of whom rightly decided not to brave an early Chicago snowstorm. So, here I sit with approximately two pounds of fun-size candy bars and a serious case of the blues. Never in my history have I been away from home for most of my favorite month of the year, missed out on nearly all the local haunted attractions, and attended zero parties dressed in an elaborate costume. Yes I did it to myself, and I agree that boo-hoo’ing over three weeks in Europe is probably downright evil (and not in the good way). But though every day is Halloween around here, October is the centrum around which the entire Goth Chick News year revolves, and that said, there is only one thing to do.

Start counting down to next year of course.

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Spooky season is upon us and that means it’s time to binge watch everything scary. From episodic favorites like American Horror Story and True Blood, to perennial films like Halloween (the original) and The Shining, the only thing better than filling up the month of October with all sorts of video goodness, is getting off the couch long enough to attend some haunted attractions. Though most streaming services pay some sort of homage to Halloween, I have to say I’m pretty darn impressed with the lineup being offered by Peacock TV for the month of October.

Now, the good news is that if you don’t have Peacock, you can purchase it for one month only (I checked), without cutting into your PSL budget. The channel is offering a month of unlimited watching that includes ads, for $5.99 and an ad-free version for $11.99, which is cheap when you see the lineup of films the channel has teed up especially for us horror fans.

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Nicole Kidman can’t catch a break. The Academy Award-winning actress has become a meme queen with behavior that has made her the unintentional darling of social media. It probably started in 2001 when Kidman was photographed leaving her lawyer’s office after finalizing her divorce from Tom Cruise. There was the famous “seal clap” at the 2017 Oscars which was supposedly her trying to protect her rings, but which just looked downright weird. Then there was her reaction to Will Smith slugging Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. But it was Kidman’s ad for AMC which began running on TV and prior to the theaters’ main feature in September 2021 that has probably garnered the most snark.

The dramatic ode to cinema narrated by Kidman was meant to inspire audiences to return to theaters following Covid. In the ad, Kidman enters and sits alone in an empty AMC theater while delivering a monologue describing the pleasures of the moviegoing experience, such as the “indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before.”

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Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Pictures Classics, April 11, 2014)

Last week as I did research for my article about the upcoming reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein, I stumbled across a vampire movie I had not only never seen but had never heard of, and the rarity of this occurrence cannot be understated. Vampires are my favs and though my crappy memory for names and dates means I’ll never consider myself an expert in the genre, I am proud to say that my experience of them in literature, movies, and folklore is pretty darn comprehensive. So, when I found the movie Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), there was nothing for it but to cancel all plans for the evening, order Door Dash, and tuck in to stream this title which had somehow eluded me for ten years.

The first thing to love is that the film cast was comprised of some incredible actors. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play the two main characters Eve and Adam. But then there is Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland), the late great Anton Yelchin (Star Trek and Fright Night), Jeffrey Wright (Westworld), and the extraordinary John Hurt. The writer/director is Jim Jarmusch, who was also responsible for the zombie spoof movie The Dead Don’t Die (2019), which also starred Swinton, and who according to Jarmusch’s bio, is a bit of a muse of his.

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Much like fashion, movie themes come in repeatable waves, and if you wait long enough everything that was called “classic” will eventually come back around. Such seems to be the case with the classic movie monsters, originally made famous in the 1930’s and 40’s by Universal Studios. Recently we’ve seen The Invitation and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (Dracula), The Cursed (werewolf), and Birth/Rebirth (Frankenstein), but frankly, there are a whole list of projects currently in production which pay homage to the originals. Of late there have been industry announcements around titles such as Frankenstein vs Dracula, This Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, and Feed to name a few. So, if you’re wondering if the bride of Frankenstein’s monster is going to get any love in the modern age, I’m here to tell you that she is.

A couple weeks back MovieWeb announced that Maggie Gyllenhaal was set to step behind the camera as the director of a remake of Bride of Frankenstein. Christian Bale was announced to be playing Victor Frankenstein, alongside Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s hubby) in a yet-to-be named starring role. There are rumors that in addition to directing, Gyllenhaal herself might play Elsa Lanchester’s iconic character, but I can’t find anything to substantiate this. The project, which is said to be titled The Bride, is set up at Netflix.

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