An Architect of Endless Night: Alexis Pharae, Steward of Old-World Decadence
When folklore becomes culture, somebody has to build the ballroom
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
In 2026, the concept of a grand ball seems like something borrowed from the pages of a storybook. We imagine gowns sweeping across polished floors beneath the glitter of chandeliers, every guest dressed magnificently for the occasion. An extravagance from another age, preserved in old novels and period films, but absent from modern day life.
And yet, once a year, such a night awaits those fortunate enough to cross the threshold of Endless Night New England.
Several hundred guests arrive having spent months preparing for the occasion. Corsets are laced. Fangs catch the low light. Music spills across a ballroom transformed so completely that, until morning, the outside world feels centuries away.
An initiated Vampyre Priestess and the co-producer of the iconic Endless Night New England Vampire Ball, Alexis Pharae spends much of the year creating the elaborate gatherings that bring this international subculture together. In Salem, she and business partner Benjamin Addam are also proprietors of Vampfangs, the storied and beloved Salem institution that has been fitting fangs since 1993, now serving a broader culture through fashion and events.
Long before any of this became her profession, she was the girl fascinated by Victorian history and haunted houses who eventually discovered an entire community speaking a language she already understood. The fashion came naturally. So did the darkness. Finding her people simply meant she no longer had to explain why.
Perhaps that is what makes Pharae such a compelling creative force in the community. She isn't dressing for a world she wishes existed; she’s is cultivating the one in which she already feels at home.
We has the pleasure of speaking with Pharae about finding her place within Vampire culture and the role she now plays in shaping its future.
Admit One: Gothic Guide to TIFF 2026
12 screenings and experiences to make the most of Toronto’s biggest celebration of cinema
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
For nearly two weeks each September, Toronto becomes one of the most exciting places in the world for cinephiles. TIFF may be famous for red carpets and awards-season premieres, but its programme reaches much further, bringing television to the big screen and experimental filmmaking into the conversation alongside horror that demands a midnight audience. Add live discussions with the people shaping what we watch next and a city that enthusiastically joins the party, and there are countless ways to experience the festival beyond chasing its biggest ticket.
To help you plan accordingly, we’ve curated a gothic guide to some of the festival’s most compelling dark storytelling, with a few appropriately cinematic ways to spend the hours between screenings.
From the Festival Archives: Where Iconic Dark Cinema Made Its Debut
20 films that left the festival circuit destined for cult status
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There’s a special kind of thrill in seeing a band in a tiny venue before the rest of the world catches on. Film festivals offer cinephiles their own version of that feeling. Every year, audiences take their seats without knowing that the film about to begin could become a future classic—or that the actor on screen might be giving the performance everyone will soon be talking about. Looking back through festival history makes those first screenings even more fascinating.
These 20 films arrived on the circuit before finding a much larger audience and earning their place in the dark cinema canon.
Scene Stealers: 10 Underrated On-Screen Dark Feminine Badasses
The formidable actresses we should all be talking about
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There is something compelling about watching an actress disappear into a character we’re not entirely sure we should root for. These are the disrupters: actresses willing to inhabit characters who are damaged without making them helpless; dangerous without stripping away their humanity. They find beauty inside ugly stories without sanding down the edges that made them uncomfortable in the first place.
Their work makes space for women to be contradictory and occasionally difficult to love—and infinitely more interesting because of it.
From established actresses whose range deserves greater recognition to emerging talent already pushing at the boundaries, these are 10 dark feminine badasses we cannot shut up about.
Dark Feminine Travel Guide: A Long Weekend in Toronto
Where to stay, wander and misbehave for three days in the city
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Toronto is so much more than Blue Jays games and Steam Whistle beneath the CN Tower. Look beyond the postcard version and you’ll find a city shaped by Gothic architecture, storied institutions and a creative culture that rewards a little curiosity.
For a long weekend worthy of your darker inclinations, we’ve curated a lux long weekend that sways between the city’s gothic heritage and its more decadent pleasures, making time for art, fashion and a few wonderfully strange discoveries along the way. Pack something black. You’re going to want options.
Reel Keepers: Inside Toronto’s Revue Cinema
How Toronto's historic movie house is carrying film nostalgia into a new era of immersive cinema
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There was a time when seeing a movie was a proper night on the town. You bought the ticket. Chose your seat. Sat among friends and strangers. The lights went down, and for the next two hours, everyone experienced the same thing at the same time.
Streaming has made film almost infinitely accessible, putting more than a century of cinema within reach from the comfort of our couch. But convenience changed our relationship with watching it. The destination disappeared. So did much of the anticipation, occasion and collective experience that once came with going to the movies.
At Toronto's Revue Cinema, those things are very much alive.
More than a century after audiences first began filing into the Roncesvalles theatre, the Revue has become a cinephile's paradise, with programming that stretches from cult oddities and filmmaker retrospectives to audience-participation screenings and Saturday mornings fuelled by classic cartoons and unlimited cereal.
The Revue isn't simply putting old movies back on the big screen. It's finding increasingly imaginative reasons for audiences to experience them together. Here, film history is something you participate in.
Top of the Class: Dark Academia on Screen
Where intellectual obsession meets a wardrobe worthy of study
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
September has a habit of making students of us all. As classrooms fill again and the leaves begin to turn, old academic daydreams begin their annual return too. There are books to be carried, corridors to disappear down and an entire wardrobe waiting for colder weather.
In the world of fashion, Dark Academia is often sharply defined by a predictable uniform of dark tweed and severe pleated skirts against a backdrop of antique libraries. Fair play. Thankfully, cinema offers a broader education, showcasing how the aesthetic can belong to the brilliant professor coming apart at the seams or the young writer determined to put something incendiary on the page. It can be romantic, decadent or dressed in candy colours designed to disarm you.
In the right hands, a sharply tailored suit can suggest a lifetime spent collecting knowledge—and deciding exactly what to do with it. The final cut proves just how far that visual language can travel, from Mary Shelley and The Imitation Game to the pastel vengeance of Do Revenge.
So, in the spirit of back-to-school season, we went back to film school. The syllabus spans centuries and several highly questionable educational environments, studying the characters who have given Dark Academia its many cinematic lives.
Class is in session.