Aurelio Voltaire
Voltaire Credit: Roberto Beltran

Gothic renaissance man Aurelio Voltaire has tried his hand at a bit of everything — musician, writer, artist, actor, director, stop-motion animator, dark lifestyle guide and (ahem) the “Martha Stewart of macabre homemakers” — with no small degree of success. But it’s his feature film The Demonatrix that he’s currently turned his fearsome focus on.

Voltaire’s touring the film on the horror convention and film festival circuit. And because he’s an inveterate multi-tasker, hey, why not play his “spooky ditties” later the same evening? So it is that Voltaire will be at local horror con Spooky Empire on Friday night to host a screening of The Demonatrix complete with Q&A. Then on Saturday, he plays a show at the Abbey. He seems unfazed by burning the candle at both ends this week.

“If I wasn’t contractually obligated to be on a stage singing songs about monsters, or making movies and showing them at horror conventions, I’d be at both places anyway,” he tells OW.

The Demonatrix, released last year, is a passion project for Voltaire, who co-wrote, co-directed and even played a priest (there’s a joke in there somewhere) in it. The film tells the tale of a dominatrix who accidentally summons a demon, with her friendly neighborhood priest (played by Voltaire) and his demonologist mentor (plays by Hellraiser’s Doug Bradley) mobilizing to — hopefully — save the day.

This is a project that consumed a decade of his life, and one that sees him drop his usual mask of wry amusement when he speaks about it.

“This was my first feature film I’ve directed. I directed TV commercials for about 20 years. I did a lot of stuff for MTV, Sci-Fi Channel, Nickelodeon, etc. I always dreamed I was going to grow up to make monster movies, and somehow, well, I specialized in stop-motion animation. At some point in the late 1990s, the bottom fell out of the stop-motion business and I found myself obsolete, so I decided to take up a more reliable career, and I became a musician,” Voltaire explains with deadpan comic timing. 

“A friend of mine, Jeff Ferrell, who opened for me in Seattle about 10 years ago, is a filmmaker, and he told me when I was ready to make my first feature to reach out to him, that he would help me. So he co-wrote, co-directed, co-starred in this film. From the time we started writing the script until the time the film was done was about 10 years, so it took many, many, many years of dreaming about it and working on it, and then a couple of really intense years of raising the money and going out there and filming it. So yes, it is a passion project. It had been a dream of mine to make a feature-length ‘monster movie’ since I was 10. It took roughly 50 years, but apparently your patient dreams come true.”

Despite having all the elements in place to result in a pulpy gory and gonzo grindhouse frenzy, The Demonatrix is not the film you’d think it is by the poster, prosthetics or personnel involved. Voltaire takes glee in reciting reviews lamenting that the film is “not horny enough,” or the poetry that is the comment “Why no boobs?”

“It’s a surprisingly respectful take on a priest and a dominatrix, despite the fact that the title sounds like the setup for a joke: ‘a priest, a dominatrix, and a demon walk into a bedroom.’ You would expect it to be really tongue-in-cheek, and while there are elements of camp, people have walked away saying, ‘Wow, I think that was one of the most honest and respectful portrayals of a sex worker I’ve ever seen in a film,’” he says. “I’ve also had people tell me that they did not expect for the priest to be portrayed in a way that was as sincere. … I wanted to make a film about two human beings who were so different and on completely different ends of the sociological spectrum, and could still find their way to being friends, or at the very least, good neighbors.”

Voltaire is an artist who has been consistently confounding expectations — with a sly wink — for nearly three decades. He’s a study in harmonious contrasts: He’s been signed to tastemaking gothic label Projekt since the 1990s but also been likened to Martha Stewart for his YouTube show on home decor for the darkly inclined. He even just published the handsome tome Gothic Life, which both dispels misconceptions around the subculture and instructs you on how to throw a diabolically great dinner party. For him the throughline for all of these endeavors is his own enthusiasm, not the hope of a big paycheck.

“David Bowie very famously said, ‘Never play to the gallery.’ I will be very, very frank with you, and tell you that the one or two times in my career, particularly my music career, when I did something because I thought that’s what would be successful, it’s always been a miserable failure,” he says.

What is not a miserable failure is Voltaire’s carefully cultivated and sizable fanbase in Florida. He has been darkening the door of the Sunshine State for many years, going from playing comic book stores to comfortably selling out much more spacious venues. We ask how he endures the heat and humidity and got some surprising answers.

“Well, first of all, I should tell you that I’m Cuban,” he explains. “So you could say I’m a tropical goth. I love the tropics. In my downtime, you might think that I dress in three layers of black velvet and sit in a dark room, but you’re more likely to find me in the jungles of Indonesia or the jungles of Malaysia, or on a beach in Costa Rica. I love the heat,” he says.

So inevitably we ask this tropi-goth what he’s going to do with his precious free time in Orlando. Go to Disney World, of course, but gothic-style.

“We love to go to the parks. I am one of those — I’m going to put this in air quotes because I don’t say this, but other people have said this to me — ‘insufferable Disney adults’ who loves to go to Disney World. My fiancée and I, half the time we go to Orlando, will make a trip to Disney World to go on the Haunted Mansion ride a couple times,” he says, also confessing to a hankering for Dark Universe.  “Come to Orlando for the sun and beautiful weather, and stick around for the macabre tourist attractions!”

7 p.m. Saturday, May 30,  The Abbey, 100 S. Eola Drive, abbeyorlando.com, $20-$25

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This article appears in May 27-June 2, 2026.