Vampire Con Panel and Photography

written by Amelia G

It is no secret that I love the vampire genre. I received Honors at Wesleyan University for my thesis on vampire legends as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality. And I would like the record to show that I will be speaking on exactly that topic this weekend at Vampire Con in Hollywood. I’ll be taking part in the panel programming Sunday afternoon, after the movie nights, and before Vampirella’s Ball (more on this in a moment.) I’m excited that Wendi Mirabella and Lotti Pharriss Knowles have put Vampire-Con together.

The panel I am on is called Hot-Blooded: Vampires & Sexuality and is at 1pm at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd. It will be moderated by David J. Skal, Author of Hollywood Gothic and V Is For Vampire: The A-Z Guide Of Everything Undead. I’m especially excited that Pam Keesey, who I’m looking forward to catching up with will be on the panel. She is the editor of multiple anthologies of lesbian vampire tales, Women Who Run with the Werewolves: Tales of Blood, Lust, and Metamorphosis, and Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale. Pam Keesey has a very engaging personality, has published yours truly, and once gave me a tour of Forrest Ackerman’s memorabilia collection. Other panelists are Hal Bodner, author of Bite Club: A West Hollywood Vampire Tale, filmmaker Fred . . .

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Win Sisters of Mercy Tickets in Los Angeles

written by Amelia G

The Sisters of Mercy will be playing The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. Read on to find out how you can win tickets courtesy of GoldenVoice and Blue Blood by posting on Gothic.net.

In the same way perhaps that Guns n’ Roses is essentially Axl Rose at this point, Sisters of Mercy is essentially Andrew Eldritch. Having different collaborators on different Sisters albums gave different ones slightly different feels, but I personally enjoy the music on all of them. I even liked Vision Thing when all my unsavory pals derisively referred to it as the “Sisters Metal Album”. (I maintained that the Egyptian iconography on the cover made it totally gothic, but whatever.)

My friend Jeanne has been emailing me nostalgic photos recently and this made me think of of an amusing related anecdote. Uncomfortable with the goth label, Sisters of Mercy has tended to tour with potentially incongruous acts. So Jeanne and I were at some stadium show. I don’t recall all the acts on the bill, but the arena was probably the New Haven Coliseum or the Hardford Civic Center. This was pre-internet, so she and I were really enjoying the people watching and deconstructing the different tribes which had come out for the various bands playing. And looking for cute boys. So Jeanne spots this totally hot guy with dark hair and pale skin, a type we both favored, and she grabs me to point him out (I’m the forward one), only the guy disappears into some door and we can’t figure out quite where.

Eventually Jeanne figured out that she had been scoping out Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. Apparently he had managed to walk around the arena hallways . . .

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Doomsday First Person Shooter

written by Amelia G

As part of the run-up to Doomsday, which opens in theatres on March 14, the Doomsday team has created an online video game called the Marauder Massacre Game. The Doomsday game is a first person shooter reminiscent of Quake with the lights off. I’ve never been particularly good at Quake, so you can probably easily kick the ass of my high score of 56. Play and let me know how you do!

Incidentally, I’ve been getting a lot of messages on MySpace pointing out that Doomsday has some similarities to the movie Escape from New York. Writer/director Neil Marshall said, in an interview with the New York Daily News, “Our heroine, Eden Sinclair, was sort of inspired by Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken in ‘Escape from New York.’ And, by the way, we do have a cage match, a gladiator fight, with Rhona Mitra using lots of weapons.” Ya gotta respect anyone who can make something cool and acknowledge their inspirations at the same time.

Don’t forget to check out the Blue Blood Doomsday article and Doomsday movie gallery. Now get shooting.

Want to Win a Rob Zombie Halloween Screening

written by Amelia G

Gothic.net and Blue Blood would like to bring you all the opportunity to win a screening of the Rob Zombie re-imagining of one of the original gangsters of slasher flicks, Halloween. The grand prize is a screening of the film for the winner and twenty of their most intimate friends, as well as a Rob Zombie grab bag including a limited edition T-shirt, CD’s, the Devil’s Rejects DVD, and the House of 1000 Corpses DVD. Four runners up will also win their own grab bags.

You know how sometimes you and your friends like to smear yourselves with vanilla-flavored corn syrup with a lot of red food coloring in it and take pictures? Well, if you are familiar with the Halloween series, go ahead, bust out those mask and knife collectibles, and take the most Halloween iconic shots you can and submit them over at the Rob Zombie’s Halloween Contest site to win.

Fine print: real murders void eligibility to participate.

Sunrise in Venice by Amelia G

written by Amelia G

He wasn’t the sort of guy I normally saw at The Probe, not the sort who would normally be there on a gay night. Maybe for their Gothic or industrial nights, but not for hip-hop and not for gay. I’d actually checked out the Probe’s Gothic night a couple of times because I’d heard some positively supernatural stuff goes on there. Didn’t see much of anything. Mostly I just felt as out of place on those nights as this guy looked on my night. Well, my night or not, the DJ was doing that interminable techno remix style which makes every song sound exactly the same as the one before it. As a result, I was developing a splitting headache and I was bored of dancing. Normally I love to dance and I’m pretty athlet ic. I guess maybe I was more upset about the whole thing with Skip than I wanted to be. More…