Dark Entries faces The Horror of The Red Room!

Dark Entries finds itself honoured by guesting on the Ruminations from the Red Room podcast for the fourth time! This installment surprised us with the completely unannounced subject of The Horror! Luckily our Gothic background finds us excessively overprepared.



Listen to us here.

Host Mitch, co-guest Mike, and I discuss the whyfors of the genre, the psychological versus the outré, the lowbrow slasher against the classic aesthetic, why book to film translations have to jump a high hurdle to even get close to print, what was that first moment where The Horror crept into your childhood, personal paranormal incursions, and more blood dipped beastliness.



While I had suggested the title Rötschreck in the Red Room, Rötschreck being the "Red Fear" of fire or sunlight from Vampire: the Masquerade, I find that this word doesn't actually seem to exist outside the tabletop gaming world, so Mitch prudently went with Recoil instead. So much for my faux-German vocabulary.


Hear about my encounter with a chupacabra, a poetic waxing on the Vincent Price/Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films, extrapolate as to the amorphous nature of what a ghost might be, ooooh Kate Beckinsale moments, the monster as protagonist, and other Dark Entries-styled fare. And yes, my blog is calling from inside your house, and your children are already dead. Spooked? You should be.

[Vincent Price smolders under the shadow of the bat.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Into the Velvet Darkness: Vincent Price & The Masque of the Red Death.

During the mid-1960s aspiring director Roger Corman was wrangled by producers into making a series of films loosely based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, most starring Vincent Price. Unforeseen by anyone, it would be this unlikely congruence of resourceful auteur, gothic progenitor, and incomparable leading man which resulted in the dark miracle that is "The Masque of the Red Death".



Set in early renaissance Europe, a plague known as The Red Death makes everyone it touches bleed from every pore of their body -- an excruciating end to the lives of millions. Yet safely within the sealed keep of tyrannical nobleman Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) an endless party of sinful delight and decadence goes on. Three peasants are also trapped with them whom Prospero plans to use as both fodder for his court's entertainment and object lessons to spread his satanic gospel.



As inhuman as Price's Prospero seems, he's also potently charismatic, and slowly convinces and compromises peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher), whose life and faith (and the lives of her fiancee and father in the dungeon below) hangs in the balance, towards her first tentative steps to a darker illumination. At the same time his courtship of the naive Francesca destabilizes his relationship with fetching princess and disciple Juliana (Hazel Court), making for poisonously royal intrigue.

[It almost looks like they've been caught doing something ... .]

While much of this plot is not in the original 30-page short story, Corman integrates Poe's "Hop-Toad" too, and adds fitting elements to flesh out a top-notch hour and a half. And a viewer would never know Corman worked on a less than shoestring budget, with only five weeks to deliver it. Early Universal monster films aside, there are few other horror offerings more classic than this parade of costumed revelers, garishly gorgeous path color splash, and soul-stirring dialogue.



So put on your best Venetian mask and listen as Prince Prospero mellifluously intones, "The way is not easy, I know, but I will take you by the hand and lead you through the cruel light into the velvet darkness." Thank you for the soirée, sweet prince.

[Francesca listens to Prospero!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.