Canadian Gothic - who knew?!

>7 frahealee:

Rather tempting story - a sort of latter-day M. R. James. Writing for a physically-present audience all those years must be some sort of guarantee of quality.

I'd love to know the story of how the two series came to be made at the same time and released within days of each other. I assume someone pinched somebody's idea and there was a race to production - but which was the original and which the rip-off? Until looking on IMDb a few minutes ago, I'd always thought that The Munsters was a rip-off of The Addams Family, but I suspect the latter came to British telly first and thus gave me that idea. Having written that, I have a vague memory that The Addams Family was based on a cartoon strip, which would make it the original - IMDb doesn't mention that, though.

ETA - As a teenager I watched both, avidly.

>10 alaudacorax: I apologize for this off-topic post but I just had to give Charles (or Chas, as he signed his work) Addams, the cartoonist who inspired The Addams Family, his due. I loved his stuff growing up. Much of his work was published in The New Yorker, beginning, I think, in the 1940s, and he also had a comic strip called Out of This World. It's possible his series of cartoons about a ghoulish family was given a kickstart by an illustration he did of a Ray Bradbury story, "Homecoming," that was published in Mademoiselle.

Oh wow. I don't have the time to read through all of this but Gothic Lit is something I'm interested in and I've never thought about Gothic with a Canadian element to it. My first thought is the general lack of impressive castles and old mansions, primarily because they aren't what we really have over here (west coast Native, live in BC). Instead, we have dark forests, massive trees, rivers, and old, decrepit homesteads. Grand, stony architecture is something more urban than the bulk of what is still mostly underpopulated land.

I am something of a horror buff, and I know that Canada does have something of a reputation for horror in film circles, with movies like Ginger Snaps, Slither (original), Black Christmas, etc., and David Kronenberg's contributions, naturally. ;) Canadian horror is apparently more likely than American horror to display things like moral ambiguity, internal conflict, man versus nature or man versus himself rather than man versus monster.

On the literary end, (though I've only got on college course and some basic reading behind me) we tend to have a rather fatalistic streak, and when it comes to man vs. nature, nature tends to win. These seem like decent ingredients for a Canadian Gothic spin.

I know of Room magazine, but I don't think I've read or encountered any of the books and authors you mentioned in your early posts.

I still think about what makes a work "Gothic" and I think that an element of supernatural is a given, and that there needs to be at least some ominous element to it, or something dark, but it doesn't necessarily have to be actual horror. Atmosphere is more important than visuals, I would say.

I know of those but haven't really seen them. Cronenberg took some getting used to. I think it took me a couple tries to get through Videodrome, and now I want to see some of his other stuff.

I like b-grade and slasher horror films, so I did venture into Hellraiser, four of the films and the two books. Less Goth, and more gory though. Barker is much more the toss the corpse in your face style rather than caress you with a dead hand. I LOVED reading my Lovecraft collection, and am utterly saddened by the fact that there won't be any more coming! I actually read it because I wanted to understand what "Lovecraftian" really meant, and I find now I see a number of people getting it wrong. Interestingly, I was less fond of his Cthullu stuff than I was of his Dream Quest writings (can't recall the character's name). My favourite work of his is "The Shadow out of Time."

Reading some things first is the way to go in some cases. I was drawn less into Shadow over Insmouth, because I had already seen the film Dagon, as well as played a video game level that was entirely based on the story though I didn't really know it at the time. Unintentional spoilers! Alas!

>15 WeeTurtle: - My first thought is the general lack of impressive castles and old mansions, primarily because they aren't what we really have over here (west coast Native, live in BC). Instead, we have dark forests, massive trees, rivers, and old, decrepit homesteads. Grand, stony architecture is something more urban than the bulk of what is still mostly underpopulated land.

There's the start of a great story right there! WeeTurtle goes on a hiking trip way out in untouched forest, comes across a totally unsuspected, unmarked-on-any-map, decaying, European-style fortified mansion someone must have built way back in the 1700s ...

Welcome to the group.

>19 alaudacorax:

That is a neat thought, though I suspect it might find it's way into one of my DnD campaigns. ;)

Just thinking about it now, there might be something to that term "concrete jungle." The setting I made for my gothic short story was basically worked around the idea of a hidden piece of "old" among modern skyscrapers, plus the usual dark and stormy night. ;)

Perhaps it came from driving through downtown Vancouver when I lived closer to that area. There are old heritage buildings like churches that are still made of old stone sitting right next to fancy, glassed paneled skyscrapers and such. Things like this:

>22 frahealee: - I found this link while looking for something else (of course) ...

I had to give a rueful laugh at your parenthesis--you pretty much summed up the internet for me. I've just lost an hour--started out to check on the progress of an Amazon order and somehow found myself reading up on Whistler and Ruskin's court case and hunting up images of numerous paintings. The internet--a blessing and a curse!

I love that last paragraph of yours, by the way--a gorgeous piece of writing.

I still haven't made even a start on Canadian Gothic, though, so I really have nothing pertinent to say. Margaret Atwood seems to have been in my sights for years and I really should get round to her at least.

>24 alaudacorax:

What? Ruskin had a court case?

QED

>23 frahealee:

Is that the one where Watson gets angry when a man slaps a young girl and then Holmes sticks up for the man? It's stuck in my mind because it made me uncomfortable--couldn't quite get my head around what the director was trying to say, there--or what he was inadvertently saying ...

>28 frahealee: - ... after a family business had failed ...

There could be a lot of weight to that phrase. I don't pretend to understand the mentality, but business was strongly tied up with the Nonconformist chapels. Bankrupty was a great disgrace. My mother's family originally came from another valley, but her grandfather was a shopkeeper who went bankrupt and such was the shame of it that he moved his family from that valley to ours (a pretty thorough uprooting in those days). This would have been roughly about the same time Davies senior's family business failed. We can surmise it was a spectacular failure to move him all the way to Canada; probably material for a novel, there ...

>30 frahealee: I don't know the life show but I know the film, and Topol is apparently in that as well. Took me a minute to remember who the tailor was. Took me about three run throughs to figure out the fiddler and the whole tradition angle, but I think I get it now. It's the fiddler that I like, but he plays off Tevye nicely.

I just started reading Gaiman with Coraline. I have The Graveyard Book as well and want to pick up American Gods. The upcoming movie looks really cool, visually. I read a little of Anansi Boys. Didn't really catch my interest at the time, but the writing was really good.

>32 frahealee: I think I may have heard the title in passing but haven't looked at it. I'm not doing my kid's program anymore but I'm still poking around the younger end of literature. It's fun. :)

I've been more into Weird fiction than Gothic lately, and flat out horror.