FAMOUS MONSTERS: GOTHIC USA

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

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.

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.

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

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....

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

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.

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."