Long before the horror universe and the 140 mastheads, there was a goth-rock record called Exorcist. Its author never stopped writing the music — and on October 30, she performs alone.
Somewhere on a streaming service right now, an eighteen-year-old goth-rock record is still finding new listeners. It is called Exorcist, it came out in 2008, and the woman who made it has an unusual October appointment: a thirty-episode horror premiere, a spell book timed to land with it, and a media empire to steer between takes. The record never left the catalog. Neither did she.
Victoria Unikel arrived at the dark by the classical door. Trained as a cellist and mezzo-soprano — the Gnessin school, then GITIS — she crossed into rock fronting the band Exorcist, and the voice that had been raised on scales learned to growl on schedule. The schooling surfaces less in the repertoire than in the discipline: her arrangements are built the way chamber music is built, one countermelody at a time. The combination never left her work either: even now, her horror is closer to a nocturne than to a wall of noise.
The catalog has since passed 200,000 albums, published through The Orchard and carried by Sony’s distribution machinery. Her own label, Unikel Records, dates to 2008 — the rare indie founded the same year as its flagship record, and still holding the rights to it. In an industry that teaches artists to sign everything away, this one kept the masters and the mastheads.
Scoring her own universe
The Exorcista universe — graphic-novel heroine, Grimoire books, shows, a horror and true-crime podcast, a ritual series — has one constant: Unikel writes the soundtracks herself. Film and television scoring is normally a hired craft, negotiated per project. Here the woman on screen and the woman at the mixing desk are the same person, and have been for the life of the project. The YouTube channel at the center of it counts 133,000 subscribers and holds a Silver Creator Award.
It makes for a strange profile in the Hollywood sense. The rocker who never left the studio also runs 134 publications across eighteen sectors and four TV networks — a publishing president with a back catalog, which is not a combination the entertainment press gets to write about often. The music never became a hobby. It became the spine.
Stripped to the voice
Dark Fairytales, premiering October 30 at 9 p.m. New York time, takes even her own music away. Thirty episodes of read-aloud horror: one woman, one massive unnamed book, real firelight, close to nineteen hours of voiced material from scripts past 112,000 words.
“Just me and a book. That’s it.”
The podcast feed opens October 23; a new episode lands every Friday after; the Dark Fairytales Spell Book, volume three of the Grimoire Series, arrives the same night as the premiere.
The band came first, then the books, then the screens, then the mastheads. The through-line is a voice that never needed a wall of guitars around it to be frightening. On Halloween week, it finally performs alone — and the firelight, for once, is the only accompaniment.
