Halloween is nigh young ones... and while places like Transylvania, Amityville, and Norway are high on the list of gothic places in the world, Canada can hold its severed head high too. To better educate you in the dark arts of the Great White North, we enlisted the help of Liisa Ladouceur, the author of Encyclopedia Gothica, to compile a list of 5 Great Canadian Goths.
JOHN FLUEVOGVancouver-based footwear designer who has been crafting outrageous shoes and boots since 1985. Extreme pointy toes. Impossibly high heels. Corset lacing or shiny metallic. A honking plat-form shoe called the Munster. And always secretly comfortable, even the famed, much-coveted Grand National — a boot with a cloven hoof-shaped heel. And don’t forget even the inconspicuous Mary Janes have soles that resist “alkali, water, acid, fatigue . . .
and Satan.” A mainstream, hippie company, sure, but still to die for.
Canadian photographer and filmmaker (b. 1965), whose freakish, hyper-kinetic,
gorgeously grotesque style established in “The Beautiful People” music video for Marilyn Manson has been ripped off by thousands of people who want to look
dark and “edgy.”
Canadian capital-G Goth group formed and led by singer/guitarist Mitch Krol in Toronto in the late 1980s. A diabolical sonic concoction of blasphemy, poetry, S/M and nihilism over minimalist beats and grinding guitars, MR was often compared to Christian Death but had a much better sense of humour about it all. Their first record was called . . . And From This Broken Cross . . . Our Misery;1997 album The Litanies of Satan was based on the writ- ings of Charles Baudelaire; their performance at Convergence in Toronto saw Krol emerge from a coffin and set a Bible on fire. Most shocking: the guy moved to Montreal, bleached his hair blond and started a country music project.
Writer and editor of dark fantasy, horror, fantasy and mystery (b. May 6, 1899) now based in Montreal and known as Canada’s Queen of vampire Fiction for her many, many short stories, novels and general expertise on the nosferatu, most recently exhibited in the anthology Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead. (Under the pen names Amarantha Knight and Desirée Knight, also authored horror-themed erotica.) A genuine ElderGoth, lover of cemeteries and black cats, she is also an expert on children of the night, having penned Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined.
Canadian industrial group, formed in Vancouver in 1982 by cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre. Pioneers of a danceable evolution of European-style avant garde electronic noise layered with sinister horror movie samples and disturbing, distorted vocals, often with a political sloganeering bent. If that sounds like rather standard fare for industrial now, remember that it wasn’t in the 1980s: it’s Skinny Puppy who popularized industrial music in North America back then, also drenching it with gory, Grand Guignol visual presentation that perfected the long simmering Goth/industrial fusion. Had a tragic end in 1995, when long-time member Dwayne Goettel died of a drug overdose while a tension-plagued recording of the big-budget album The Process tore them apart. In their absence, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails grabbed the industrial baton and ran with it to the top of the MTV charts, but Puppy was there first. In 2000, band
reunited for the Doomsday Festival, so the next generation of Goths could see how it’s done. Key tracks: “Dig It,” “Testure,” “Worlock,” “Killing Game.”
Excerpted from the book ENCYCLOPEDIA GOTHICA by Liisa Ladouceur, with illustrations by Gary Pullin. Copyright © Liisa Ladouceur 2011. Published by ECW Press. Used with permission.