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| Dracula, you seductive, beckoning rouge, you. Also, really need to find the belt that goes with this coat. |
Oh, and for the shop, she was very keen on visiting the gift shop. There were moments where I wondered if she was more interested in this than the actual exhibition items. Myself, I could not stop smiling like a child at Disneyland.
I can't say I was terrified, but I did feel the wonder.
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| Genuine, Victorian, vampire, slaying, kit. |
While I definitely have known for a long time that I like gothic literature and film I didn't realise quite how much until today. It was a bit like a tour of my dream book collection, and I owned or had read (I'm including audiobooks) a great deal of the books on show. Others, I was aware of from my degree, I had written essays on these books...and the illustrations...the play posters, the clip of Neil Gaiman which I pointed out and was told by my friend, immediately;
'Will you stop talking about Neil Gaiman.'
'But, but I love Neil Gaiman.'
'You do not love Neil Gaiman, you have never met Neil Gaiman.'
'I love his books.'
Which to me, might as well be the same thing.
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| I might have done a bit of a dance when I saw these and A Series of Unfortunate Events in the same display cabinet, which is a bit strange, as I don't do this when I see them together on my bookshelves. |
I was the only person taking photographs, I checked very carefully for signs which might forbid this, but there were no signs. I'm just a huge book geek.
Okay, so more than just a book geek, there were film posters, too. I spent a lot of my childhood watching black and white monster movies. I have a deep appreciation for Hammer Horror, and women in white nightdresses running screaming into the night, for all my beliefs in feminism. When first getting to know with my best friend I explained how as a child I wanted to be Claudette from the film An Interview with the Vampire, or Wednesday Adams (who I dressed as a few times for Halloween). One of the reasons we are such good friends is that she did not find this odd.
My cousins and I used to come up with plays based on horror and scifi movies. Often, they'd involve werewolves. My cousin Bryony was big on werewolves, and had an imaginary friend who was one, and who lived in her wardrobe, and under her bed (he eat the unfriendly monsters). Like me, she is dyslexic, and we'd force our creative vision for a werewolf musical onto our non-dyslexic siblings.
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| The Book of Werewolves |
I recall making an old tissue box into a werewolf muzzel for Bryony to wear when she transformed, or when my grandmother's dog was not up to the challenge of a dance number. Heather, the youngest, who I am sure didn't understand what was going on, used to dress up in my grandmother's old white nightdress, cover her face in her old lipstick (because she was too young to be able to just put in on her lips), and then Bryony and I would say she had to put ketchup on her hands and rub them on my grandparent's summer house, which she was hesitant to do, even though it was for art.
Eventually, I saved up for a video camera, and we started playing games were we ran a film company, called, 'Me, Bryony, Heather, and You,' the you being my brother Alex, and the me being, well, me.
We made our own posters, wrote scripts (which we never followed), designed costumes (that we couldn't make), and had a wonderful time running about in the local woods, screaming and giggling.
Bryony said she wanted to be a horror movie director when she grew up, I wanted to write books were terrible, supernatural things, happened.
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| I'm the one at the back, with the stick. |
Sadly, the only surviving relics of our exploits are from our radio wing (we decided to try to record a fake radio show so convincing we could put it on and our parents would think it was real. - It didn't work, although it does include Heather discribing a make up you rub on both your face and arms, after screaming she was old enough to make up a commercial), and the unfinished future cult classic, Killer Pound Monster; which my dvd cover tells me is 'never coming to a cinema near you,' and that it is the winner of 9 'acedemie' awards.
All the film posters brought back the most wonderful memories of these times together, as well as with my mother.
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| So many incredible things are happening in this poster. |
My mother's bedtime stories were often re-tellings of films based on Stephen King novels.
My favorite bed time reads to listen to were the origional Brother's Grimm and Hans Christan Anderson tales, which other students in my Victorian literature module at university found quite strange, especially when I said, 'when I was young the original Little Mermaid was my favorite, where she feels knives in her feet when she walks and commits suicide at the end, but it's sort of a happy ending because she doesn't murder anyone, and God grants her a soul.'
Let's not get into The Book of Gypsy Folk Tales, where there are devils living in trees, and werewolf princesses (arguably, the best sort of princess).
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| I love everything about this poster, especially that my guide to the exhibit opens out into it. |
To this day, the greatest peice of writing criticism/praise I have ever had is from an ex-creative writing tutor who said;
'You don't read Stephen King do you? Because you write a lot like him.'
She was relived when I said I had not. I had been forbidden to read his books, once I learnt to read and I was reading everything I could find. My mother only read books by Stephen King and regency romances. I was banned from reading his books because of the swearing, I knew most of the plots.
I didn't tell her that.
If you are after some dark and delightful reads for Halloween my recommended audiobooks for October are out via The Codpast, in both audio and written form.
Terror and Wonder; The Gothic Imagination will run until 20th Jan 2015, at The British Library.
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