AMERICAN GOTHIC:
an Englishman's View
The Munsters was an American television sitcom depicting
the home life of a family of benign monsters. It stared Fred Gwynne as
Herman Munster and Yvonne De Carlo as his wife, Lily Munster. The
series was a satire of both traditional monster movies and the
wholesome family fare of the era
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| UNFAIR COMPETITION?: The Munsters TV show was a big hit in the UK for the BBC. The alternative channel ITV (yes we had only two in the 1960s) rather unfairly scheduled The Addams Family at the same Sunday evening slot! My sister and I would squabble over which channel should be chosen!  According to the television series, the Addams Family live in a gloomy mansion adjacent to a cemetery and a swamp at 0001 Cemetery Lane. In the The Addams Family musical, first shown in Chicago in 2009, the house is located in Central Park 
Charles Addams was first inspired by his home town of Westfield,
New Jersey, an area full of ornate Victorian mansions and archaic graveyards.
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The Addamses were a satirical inversion of the ideal American family; an eccentric,
wealthy clan who delight in the macabre and are unaware that people find them
bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150
single panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New
Yorker between 1938 and creator Charles Addams's 1988 death.
The cartoons were little known in the UK. You might be lucky to come across
them on occassion amongst the well thumbed magazines at your local barber shop.
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The Addams Family comedy film based on the characters from the
cartoon of the same name eventually became the seventh highest grossing film of 1991.
It was followed by a sequel, Addams Family Values, in 1993
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 CREEP SHOW |
| Pumpkins are now part of the UK Halloween season, one now repleat with USA imported "horror" paraphanalia. Yet they were unknown to us in the fifties and 1960s when we made do with home-grown traditions including carving a Jack-o-Lantern from a turnip! Here blood-splattered, the pumpkin featuring in the film Sleepy Hollow, seems to conjure up everything that is to my mind "American Gothic", a theme that has its source in Edgar Allan Poe and weaves its way through Roger Corman, Coco Rosie, Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, Batman, David Lynch, Tim Burton's oeuvre, and to the weird world of Edward Gorey.... |
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| The young scientist at the centre of this extraordinarily early photo of an American museum has been identified as Edgar Allan Poe. |
Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world
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| Harry Clarke's take on Poe: Harry Clarke (March 17, 1889 – January 6, 1931) was an Irish stained glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. |
Sleepy Hollow
Sleepy Hollow is a 1999 American horror film directed by Tim Burton. It is a film adaptation loosely inspired by the 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving and stars Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short story by Washington Irving contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. With Irving's companion piece "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is among the earliest examples of American fiction still read today.
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| Ichabod Crane goes in search of the headless horseman |
EDWARD GOREY
Edward St. John Gorey (1925 – 2000) was an American
writer and artist noted for his playfully macabre illustrated books
In response to being called gothic, Gorey stated, "If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either."
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| Edward St. John Gorey (1925 – 2000) |
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| Cover art-work by Edward Gorey |
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