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Gothic vibe: Vancouver perfect for dark, haunting movies and TV series

For a few hours next Sunday, Vancouver will be home to the world’s blackest beach. At least 300 local goths will lollygag at Stanley Park’s Third Beach to swim, eat and perhaps listen to mournful goth tunes.
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Nancy Amenti is a Vancouver fashion designer and goth who loves cemeteries. "They're gorgeous," she says. "They're a great place to have a picnic."

For a few hours next Sunday, Vancouver will be home to the world’s blackest beach.

At least 300 local goths will lollygag at Stanley Park’s Third Beach to swim, eat and perhaps listen to mournful goth tunes.

Passersby can expect a sea of black beachwear and mountains of high-octane SPF on pale bodies.

But they won’t see much mascara or black lipstick — overheated July is the cruellest month for makeup-loving goths.

“It isn’t such a good idea to wear a lot of makeup to the beach since you’re going to get sweaty anyway,” says Nancy Amenti, a Vancouver goth and fashion designer.

On July 28, the city will play host to a slightly more austere gothic gathering of about 150 academics from across the globe for the International Gothic Association’s 2015 conference. These gothic geeks will huddle in the city for five days to discuss blood, death and undeath in books, movies and music.

It’s no coincidence the beach and academic get-togethers are taking place in Vancouver. Experts say Metro Vancouver has become one of the world s great gothic factories, thanks to the dozens of horror and science-fiction films and TV series the region spits out.

Forget about Transylvania and the monstrous wilds of Stephen King’s Maine. Penned between glowering mountains, grim forests and unforgiving ocean, Vancouver is a goth paradise.

For goths, a city that is usually so overcast it’s as dark as Halloween at least six months a year qualifies as supernaturally beautiful.

“Vancouver punches over its weight class,”  says Michael Barrick, a Vancouver photographer and longtime goth who also goes by the name Atratus, which means mourning clothes.

 Vancouver’s goth scene holds its own against much larger cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Toronto.

Barrick understates Vancouver’s goth allure. Not only has Vancouver held its own in the present, but it may hold a key to the future of worldwide goth culture. That success as a cultural force isn t so much about the number of pure  local goths who will continue to wear black and idolize Dracula and Frankenstein.

It has much more to do with how goths  love of dark, scary stuff has infected the rest of the population, experts say.

 GOTHIC IS ALL AROUND US

The sheer volume of gothic-flavoured films and TV series produced in Vancouver acts as a magnet for people who develop a casual or occasional interest in the gothic as well as those who embrace it as a lifestyle, experts say.

Catherine Spooner, a professor of English at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, refers to the gothic invasion of the mainstream carried out by Vancouver’s writers and filmmakers as stealth gothic.

People who would never be caught dead  or undead  wearing black lipstick have come to share goths’ fascination with how love, terror and death intertwine.

Those emotions are played out in stories ranging from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels to the Vancouver-made The X-Files to the Twilight novels and their movie versions, says Spooner, who is co-president of the International Gothic Association.

“Gothic is all around us,” Spooner says. “It’s unlikely that there are many people in Western culture who haven’t engaged with it on some level, even if it’s just dressing up and dancing to Monster Mash on Halloween.”

Painter Emily Carr was one of the first artists to capture the gothic vibe inherent in B.C.’s haunting mountains and claustrophobic forests, says Karen Budra, a Langara College English instructor and fan of things gothic.

Filmmakers soon followed in Carr’s footsteps as they learned to squeeze the spookiness of the Pacific Northwest for all it’s worth.

But aren’t gothic movies and books obsessed with the dark underbelly of human life, including grotty dungeons, decaying castles and dark, twisting corridors? Vancouver isn’t exactly famous for gothic architecture.

“The mountains and trees stand in for those castles,”  Budra says. “Vancouver also has the Downtown Eastside. We have incredible horror living beside shiny vegan yoga people. It’s a dark underbelly that shocks people who come from other countries.”

 NO LONGER JUST A NICHE

Vancouver productions that make a virtue of the eerie range from what Budra calls hard-core goth films such as Kissed, The Wicker Man and The Scarlet Letter to mainstream TV series such as Supernatural, The X-Files and Sanctuary.

Fear The Walking Dead, a Gothic companion series to The Walking Dead, was mostly filmed in Vancouver earlier this year and premieres on AMC next month.

“The gothic elements of B.C.-made films (contain) brooding, dark atmosphere, disintegration of sanity, entrapment, and what Freud calls the uncanny  or something that seems familiar but is just a little off,”  says Budra, who will deliver a paper on northern noir cinema at the Gothic conference.

Vancouver’s gothic identity reaches beyond its horror films and menacing mountains to encompass writers, musicians and chic gothwear makers. Vancouver science-fiction writer William Gibson’s novels reflect a strong gothic influence, experts say.

At the Gothic association gathering, Simon Fraser University English professor David Chariandy will read from his novel Soucouyant, whose title refers to a Caribbean vampire-like being.

Vancouver scores two entries in a list of five great Canadian goths compiled by Liisa Ladouceur, a Toronto goth journalist and author of Encyclopedia Gothica.

Vancouver-based footwear designer John Fluevog makes the grade for a boot with a cloven-hoof-shaped heel. Vancouver’s other top-five goth presence is Skinny Puppy, a pioneering industrial band, formed in the city in 1982, which specializes in electronic noise layered with sinister horror movie samples and disturbing, distorted vocals,  Ladouceur says.

When goth evolved from punk into a distinct sub-culture in the late 1970s and early 80s, most people were drawn to it by bands such as The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ladouceur says.

“Now, people don’t necessarily get interested that way. They may discover it through fashion or horror films and literature,”  she says.

The public’s increasing appetite for movies and books with a gothic touch reflects the anxiety many people feel about their lives, Budra says. Gothic fiction and films flourish during times of anxiety, she says.

“It is no longer just a niche or cult interest but has become a huge force within the mainstream,”  says Spooner, who will give a talk on director Jim Jarmusch s vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive at the conference.

“Look at the way that Twilight has been such a massive box-office phenomenon or the way that TV shows like True Blood, Hannibal and American Horror Story command devoted fan audiences.”

MISUNDERSTOOD AS MORBID

Fashion designer Nancy Amenti, 26, will be spared the agony of colour choices when she dresses for the July 19 goth beach event. She has only dark colours in her wardrobe  mostly shades of black in different fabrics.

“I will be sporting a black 1940s-style bikini,”  she says. “I don’t have anything against colours but when I go to a store to try on clothes and look in a mirror I feel confused. I don’t see the person inside.”

Amenti uses gothic elements in her fashion designs but in no way sees herself as a goth evangelist.

“I do use colour in my design work,”  she says. “I always listen to my clients  wants and needs, recognizing that their taste might be different from mine. Black, however, is used more often than any other colour.”

One of her tastes Amenti doesn’t expect her clients to share is her love of cemeteries.

“They’re gorgeous,”  she says. “They’re a great place to have a picnic.”

Despite gothic’s infiltration of mainstream culture, many people still misunderstand the goths themselves — the zealots who pursue it as a central pillar of their identities, observers say.

One of the worst mistakes people make is to see all goths as the same  miserable, moody and morbid, says Barrick, who also runs a goth website at gothic.bc.ca.

“Goth is not a homogeneous group,”  Ladouceur says. “It’s not a hive mind.”

Goth, Barrick says, has fragmented into various sects  steam punk, cold wave, cyber-punk. Unlike the goth community in some larger cities, Vancouver s goth factions mingle and get along, Barrick says.

What unites most of the goth tribes is a perception of beauty in life s darker side, a soft spot for 19th-century gothic fiction and careful attention to dress.

“You never find a poorly dressed goth,” Budra says. “It just doesn’t exist.”

Still, she adds, not all goths even feel compelled to wear black as a brand.

The other shared trait among goths may be the last thing an outsider would expect: a terrific sense of humour  especially when it comes to themselves, Barrick says.

Spooner is in the midst of writing a book to be called Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic.

Barrick knows about gothic romance. He met his wife, Elaine, a fellow goth, while hanging out at goth music nights.

And he knows about goths’ good-natured sense of the absurd.

“Goth beach day is that completely self-conscious awareness that this is a ridiculous thing for goths to do, so let’s go out and be ridiculous,” Barrick says.

 That permeates goth culture.

THE ROOTS OF GOTH

The Brits gave birth to gothic fiction in 1764 and to gothic rock and the goth sub-culture 215 years later.

Lancaster University professor Catherine Spooner says that to qualify as gothic, a written or filmed story needs three things: the past returning, a sense of claustrophobia, and psychic disintegration.

Gothic fiction is said to have started with the 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The book introduced the persistent gothic blend of terror, romance and the supernatural.

Gothic fiction flowered in 19th-century Britain with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

But the Americans were already grabbing a piece of the gothic action with the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the short stories and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Gothic fiction also took root in Germany, France and Russia.

More recently, Asia has been producing its own versions of gothic. Examples include Korean director Chan-wook Park’s film Thirst and the Japanese horror film Ringu.

Gothic historian Liisa Ladouceur says British pop band Bauhaus launched Gothic pop with the song Bela Lugosi’s Dead in 1979.

MOVIES AND TV GOTH-STYLE

Fifty Shades of Grey, which was shot in Vancouver, may not sound much like a gothic film but experts insist that it is.

Langara College English instructor Karen Budra says the strain of sado-masochism in Fifty Shades dates back to British novels of the 19th century.

Fifty Shades keeps alive the tradition of the tyrannical but irresistible lover  that can be traced back to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, says Lancaster University professor Catherine Spooner.

Sanctuary, a TV series also shot in Vancouver, is more obviously gothic, Budra says.

“Lycanthropes, vials of vampire blood and Jack the Ripper? My kind of story,”  she says.

Here are other gothic-infused movies and TV series shot in B.C:

 

Movies

30 Days of Night: Dark Days

Bad Moon

The Crush

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

The Fog

The Invisible

The Scarlet Letter

The Twilight Saga

Underworld

The Wicker Man

Blade

 

TV series

The Crow: Stairway to Heaven

Dark Angel

The Dead Zone

The Killing

Once Upon A Time

R.L. Stine s The Haunting Hour

Kissed

The Secret Circle

Supernatural

Witches of East End

Wolf Lake

The X-Files