Aric Cushing | |
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 Aric Cushing. Amsterdam. 2019 | |
| Born | September 26, 1973 |
| Occupation(s) | Actor, writer |
| Years active | 1992–present |
Aric Cushing (born September 26, 1973) is an American actor and writer. He is the co-founder of the Los Angeles Fear and Fantasy Film Festival. [1]
A native of California, Aric grew up in the town of Boulder Creek. As a child he performed in numerous local productions such as This One Thing I Do, a feminist play about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony [2] [3] , Girl Crazy, [4] [5] [6] The Diary of Anne Frank, [7] and Arsenic and Old Lace, [8] and at 12 years old in A Chorus Line. [9] For his performance in Hats Off: A Tribute to Broadway Musicals in 1986, at 13 years old, he told the Valley Press, "I'm excited. I can't wait to get back out there." [10] A recipient of numerous speech awards, [11] [12] he received a college grant from Hewlett-Packard, attended both the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the London Court Theater in England, and afterwards toured the Pacific Northwest in a 2-person travelling theater company. Upon moving to Hollywood, he worked at a talent agency before producing and starring in the film Broken and Bleeding, later renamed Shot to the Heart. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] In 2019, he won Best Actor at the Prison City Film Festival in Huntsville, Texas for his role in Shot to the Heart. [19] [20] [21] After producing and starring in The Yellow Wallpaper feature film, he appeared in America's Most Wanted, Renegade, and a variety of other TV shows and music videos. In 2016, his middle grade book Vampire Boy [22] was published, and won the Readers' View award, the Purple Dragonfly Award, a Pinnacle Award, first place for the Gertrude Lawrence Middle Grade Reader Award, [23] and a Reader's Favorite medal. Also in 2020, he starred in There's No Such Thing as Vampires [24] [25] and in 2021 received a Best Supporting Actor Nomination at the FilmQuest Film Festival for his portrayal of the lead villain. [26]
The co-founder of the Los Angeles Fear and Fantasy Film Festival. The festival began in 2012 and was established by director Logan Thomas and Aric Cushing. Festival awards include Best Actor, Best Picture, Best Actress, and others, as well as a screenwriting competition. [27] The festival was first held in Burbank, California. [28] [29] The festival also released a Horror Shorts Vol. 1 DVD with selections from the festival of fear and fantasy short films from around the world.
Aric Cushing's relationship to Charlotte Perkins Gilman is varied. Gilman's most famous story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen, most recently in 2011 for a film starring Aric Cushing." [30] The Yellow Wallpaper feature film ( ISBN 978-0615-769639) [31] [32] was directed by Logan Thomas. [33]
He also wrote a corresponding collection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's work, titled "The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories: The Complete Gothic Collection" ( ISBN 978-0-615-56839-3). "Aric Cushing's introductory essay 'Is the Yellow-Wallpaper a Gothic story?' nails the subject; especially since the original feminist take on Gilman's works often skated over the Gothic feel of her works to focus on underlying feminist interpretations alone." [34] Previously, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's work as a novelist, short story writer, poet, and public speaker was mostly regarded from the feminist viewpoint, especially when her feminist work was used as a platform in the 1960s feminist movement. The introduction contends that before Gilman launched into her socialist themes, and during the time she wrote 'The Yellow Wall-paper" story, she focused on Gothic stories for a short period of time (mostly between 1890 and 1895). The story is sometimes polarized between people who believe it to be only a Gothic story and those that only believe it to be a women's rights tale. Aric Cushing is the first to discover two previously 'lost' works that surrounded her short and brief period writing Gothic and ghost fiction, which are included in the compilation, and were never re-published after their original publication dates in the 1890s. The stories are "The Unwatched Door" and "Clifford's Tower". In 2014, Aric edited and published "Lost Essays" ( ISBN 978-1-929-73000-1), a collection of Gilman's commentaries.
Peter Wilton Cushing was an English actor. His acting career spanned over six decades and included appearances in more than 100 films, as well as many television, stage and radio roles. He achieved recognition for his leading performances in the Hammer Productions horror films from the 1950s to 1970s, and as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977).
Hammer Film Productions Ltd. is a British film production company based in London. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic horror and fantasy films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Many of these involve classic horror characters such as Baron Victor Frankenstein, Count Dracula, and the Mummy, which Hammer reintroduced to audiences by filming them in vivid colour for the first time. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies, as well as, in later years, television series.
Dracula is a 1958 British gothic horror film directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel of the same name. The first in the series of Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, the film also features Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, along with Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, and John Van Eyssen. In the United States, the film was retitled Horror of Dracula to avoid confusion with the U.S. original by Universal Pictures, 1931's Dracula.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.
Dracula: Prince of Darkness is a 1966 British gothic supernatural horror film directed by Terence Fisher. The film was produced by Hammer Film Productions, and is the third entry in Hammer's Dracula series, as well as the second to feature Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, the titular vampire. It also stars Andrew Keir, Francis Matthews, and Barbara Shelley.
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is a 1974 martial arts horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker. The film opens in 1804, when seven vampires clad in gold masks are resurrected by Count Dracula, played by John Forbes-Robertson. A century later, Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing, known in the world for his exploits with Dracula, is recruited by a man and his seven siblings after giving a lecture at a Chinese university to take on the vampires. The film is a British-Hong Kong co-production between Hammer Film Productions and Shaw Brothers Studio.
The Vampire Lovers is a 1970 British Gothic horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Ingrid Pitt, Peter Cushing, George Cole, Kate O'Mara, Madeline Smith, Dawn Addams and Jon Finch. It was produced by Hammer Film Productions. It is based on the 1872 Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla and is the first film in the Karnstein Trilogy, the other two films being Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971). The three films were somewhat daring for the time in explicitly depicting lesbian themes.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula is a 1973 British horror film directed by Alan Gibson and produced by Hammer Film Productions. It is the eighth film in Hammer's Dracula series, and the seventh and final one to feature Christopher Lee as Dracula. The film was also the third to unite Peter Cushing as Van Helsing with Lee, following Dracula (1958) and Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).
Taste the Blood of Dracula is a 1970 British supernatural horror film produced by Hammer Film Productions. Directed by Peter Sasdy from a script by Anthony Hinds, it is the fifth installment in Hammer's Dracula series, and the fourth to star Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, the titular vampire. The film also features Geoffrey Keen and Gwen Watford.
Dracula A.D. 1972 is a 1972 British horror film, directed by Alan Gibson and produced by Hammer Film Productions. It was written by Don Houghton and stars Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Stephanie Beacham. Unlike earlier films in Hammer's Dracula series, Dracula A.D. 1972 had a contemporary setting in an attempt to update the Dracula story for modern audiences. Dracula is brought back to life in modern London and preys on a group of young partygoers that includes the descendant of his nemesis, Van Helsing.
The Gothic double is a literary motif which refers to the divided personality of a character. Closely linked to the Doppelgänger, which first appeared in the 1796 novel Siebenkäs by Johann Paul Richter, the double figure emerged in Gothic literature in the late 18th century due to a resurgence of interest in mythology and folklore which explored notions of duality, such as the fetch in Irish folklore which is a double figure of a family member, often signifying an impending death.
The character of Count Dracula from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, has remained popular over the years, and many forms of media have adopted the character in various forms. In their book Dracula in Visual Media, authors John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart declared that no other horror character or vampire has been emulated more times than Count Dracula. Most variations of Dracula across film, comics, television and documentaries predominantly explore the character of Dracula as he was first portrayed in film, with only a few adapting Stoker's original narrative more closely. These including borrowing the look of Count Dracula in both the Universal's series of Dracula and Hammer's series of Dracula, including include the characters clothing, mannerisms, physical features hair style and his motivations such as wanting to be in a home away from Europe.
Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland and the United States and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).
The Yellow Wallpaper is a 2011 direct-to-video Gothic thriller film directed by Logan Thomas. It is based on the 1892 short story of the same name written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is an American literature, film, and media scholar who has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University since 2001. He has authored or edited twenty-nine books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music. He is the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Dracula is the title of several horror film series centered on Count Dracula, who is accidentally resurrected, bringing with him a plague of vampirism, and the ensuing efforts of the heroic Van Helsing family to stop him.
There's No Such Thing as Vampires is a 2020 horror film that was directed by Logan Thomas. It is based on a script written by Thomas and Aric Cushing, who also starred.
Logan Thomas is an American film director.
The history of horror films is one that was described by author Siegbert Solomon Prawer as difficult to read as a linear historical path, with the genre changing throughout the decades, based on the state of cinema, audience tastes and contemporary world events.
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