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February is the month of love – or so the Hallmark-hijacked Christian festival would have you believe

Fans of Gothic cinema have been left salivating at the prospect of a toothsome new horror film from Guillermo del Toro,

Valentina Stanescu never had any luck when it came to love. She always fell in love with the wrong men while the men that she wasn’t interested in always persisted in courting her.
The celebration of Valentine’s Day in Romania is not only dedicated to lovers but also to people who are named Valentin or Valentina. So, every Valentine’s Day Valentina also celebrated her name day.And every year she made a wish for her true love to finally show up and make her feel the way she had always dreamed of. But every year her wish remained a painful desire and every year Valentina ended up alone, crying of a broken heart or of unanswered love.

I’ve been fascinated by Ancient Egypt ever since I was a child. I used to nag my parents to take me to the British Museum and the Ashmolean where I could stare at mummified objects and ogle at tomb paintings; I even had a pencil case based on Tutankhamun’s famous death mask! So imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that I’d been walking past a museum that housed one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts without ever realising it was there! I decided it was about time I paid a visit to the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.

There can be few people better qualified to document California’s Deathrock scene than Amelia G and her partner Forrest Black. Lifelong devotees of the dark side, Amelia and Forrest’s long association with the West Coast’s most ghoulishly glamorous subculture has recently borne fruitin the shape of an arresting, new full-colour photobook.

When I was human I wanted…no, I dreamed of becoming something extraordinary. I dreamed of becoming strong, tough, feared, possess super powers and live an exciting life outside my little apartment.

We’re well and truly in the midst of winter now but don’t let the colder weather cramp your dark style. Here are my top five essential alternative beauty buys and what’s more, they’re all cruelty-free so no ravens, bats or spiders were harmed in their creation!

Christmas is a time of joy, love, generosity, forgiveness… bla bla bla.

No milkmaids, doves or partridges in fruit trees here. The tiresomely cheerful “12 Days of Christmas” makes way for our infinitely better value and more entertaining “13 Days of Gothmas”!

The holiday season is almost here but if you’ve left things a little tight this year, here are some tips for a very gothic festive period!

The British Library’s exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’ has been enjoying justified praise – indeed we visited it recently and were very impressed.

October saw the biannual Whitby Gothic Weekend descend upon the coastal Yorkshire town with the countryside dressed in its autumnal finest and the promise of All Hallows Eve delights.

Damnation came hot on the heels of the warmest Halloween on record. Buried deep in the labyrinthine depths of England’s Leeds University, and in its tenth year, the festival’s now firmly established as a red letter day in the heavy metal calendar. Particularly for fans of the genre’s more extreme bands, as Damnation concentrates on less overtly commercial sounds, from the most whip-crack fast and vicious, to the eerily experimental and atmospheric.

One moment I’m getting advice from M-Schmink Michelle on how to paint my face into a sugar skull, and the next I’m marching among 15.000 people in a parade, together taking over Amsterdam’s city centre. El dia de los Muertos was this year’s Fox Amsterdam Halloween Parade and Party theme.

What could be better than combining the two best things in the world, which is exactly what they’ve done at Cakeageddon, a ghoulish synthesis of cakes and Halloween. Billed as ‘the world’s first edible horror farm’, Cakeageddon is a scary visitors’ attraction on a farm near the English city of Letchworth. Haunted houses – or even haunted farms – that promise to terrify the paying public are nothing new this time of year. What makes this special is that all of the grisly props and spooky settings are lovingly sculpted from cake, and hence edible. If you dare…