Goth Girls' Detective Club

You have no idea how much it pained me to mutilate the English language in that title. Damn you, Slade! When From Midnight With Love's The Mike challenged his Midnight Warriors to pay tribute to the mums of horror I was totally down with that plan. Hell yeah, mums! Mums rock! Mums in horror do generally get a bad press; it kind of sucks to be a horror mum because basically everything is your fault, you’re either absent, psychotic/evil, abusive, neglectful or uninvolved to the point of blindness. Now while I could drone on in a pseudo intellectual manner about the implications of this for a very long time (oh, I really could), I’m instead going to restrain myself and let the mums speak for themselves. A while ago I did a picture meme in which I chose to celebrate the daddies of horror so for the sake symmetry (and the blessed relief of less talking on my part) I’m going to present the mummies of horror in the same format. So here they are in all their glory; the beautiful, c...

Brian Blessed Prince Vultan Flash Gordon (1980) and just generally, in everything, in life, always Brian Blessed is quite definitely one of my absolute favourite actors, no people, on the planet ever. My husband and I quite often in everyday life spontaneously decide to have ‘Talk Like Brian Blessed Hours’. The man is a clearly a great big, mountainous, booming bloody genius, and that’s before we get anywhere near the beard. Brian is a beard devotee. Brian’s beard is a constant, it’s a life choice, it’s a personality all of its very own, and, frankly, it’s the kind of beard that you could trap bears in. Flash Gordon epitomises everything I love; it’s brash, it’s camp, it’s kitsch, it’s bright and colourful and it’s full of British character actors and pervy costumes. It’s pretty much exactly how I see the world and how I want it to be. It’s also soundtracked by the pantomime dames of rock, Queen. As Prince Vultan leader of the Hawk People Brian steals the show. He is a winged...

Psychomania is one of those movies that I first saw long, long ago in childhood and never forgot. It clung to the recesses of my mind like an odd, deranged dream, a better calibre dream, but an odd and deranged one nonetheless and I always remembered it. A lot later I met my husband and, disturbingly frequently, I would mention Psychomania in conversation and recall all its little oddities to him; zombie bikers, Beryl Reid, frogs and incongruous folk singing, and he quite honestly thought I’d made it up. He genuinely believed I was the flavour of crazy that invents bizarre, low budget British B-Movies and is so utterly convinced by the delusion that I try force other people of their existence too. He married me anyway, and finally after all these years I got to sit him down and make him watch it, so I got the last laugh. Who’s crazy now, husband? Hmmm?! Tom (Nicky Henson) has pretty much got life in the 70s sorted, he’s a child of privilege with a big fancy house, George Sanders as...

Firstly, I’m just going to put it out there, I like Andreas Schnaas. He is an unashamed purveyor of gore and sleaze and his low budget, badly dubbed gorefests are big and brazen and delicious, and they’re also unapologetic and I appreciate that honesty. And how can you not appreciate a filmmaker who merrily names his first feature Violent Shit? And follows it up with a sequel. So this brings us to Demonium , Schnaas’ first ‘proper’, ‘grown-up’ film, made with ‘proper’ actors and in filmed in the ‘English’ language’ to reach a wider market, well, wider as in us, the UK. Demonium begins with successful businessman Rasmus Bentley and his lover, Maria, having some largely unattractive sex. This goes on for quite a while. Quite a while. His lover Maria happens to be blind, this probably helps with the largely unattractive sex, generally that is, not with the longevity I wouldn’t imagine. When they finally tire of this messy enterprise businessman Rasmus sets out to negotiate some man...

John Constantine: The Beginning John Constantine is arguably one of the greatest and most loved characters in modern comic history. He is a magician, an exorcist, a demon hunter, a con-artist, a consummate cynic, an acerbic wit, a scouser, a complex loner and an inexorable chainsmoker. Although lacking in any of the characteristics that would traditionally define a hero, John is driven by a deep desire for redemption and the need to do some good with his life. The chain smoking trenchcoat wearing John Constantine was created by Steve Bissette, John Totleben and the legendary comic book genius Alan Moore, and reportedly, Alan Moore created the character after the artists expressed an interest in drawing a character that looked like Sting. Later Jamie Delano became responsible for Hellblazer and its subsequent popularity as he took John into a real world environment aging in real time and defined the character into the loveable, flawed anti-hero. Constantine made his first appearance...