Table of contents for Issue 201 Jul/Aug 2021 in RUE MORGUE

Once upon a time, in a reality that couldn’t be further from the one I now occupy, I strapped on a helmet, elbow pads, and a pair of quads to roller skate in counter-clockwise circles while other skaters tried to turn me into a skid mark on the track. I played roller derby, in other words – that post-third wave/riot grrl movement that took a “sports entertainment” cultural curio from the 1970s and repurposed it into something grassroots and punk rock with an emphasis on feminine agency. For me, it was a great way to get some exercise, meet rad folx, and vent some frustrations through my derby alter ego – “Hellbat” (so dubbed by my teammates because I skated as quick as the proverbial winged mammal loosed from the…

WHEN GEORGE A. ROMERO DEPARTED THIS MORTAL COIL IN JULY 2017, HE LEFT BEHIND A LEGACY THAT IS ARGUABLY UNPARALLELED IN THE REALM OF HORROR. It’s safe to say that without Night of the Living Dead, the genre as we know it today wouldn’t exist; echoes of Romero’s 1968 masterpiece are everywhere, in subject matter, thematic approach, and practical inspiration. Yet despite this and the success of his 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead, Romero struggled throughout his career to get his visions on screen, never finding the acceptance of a Hollywood that, particularly in the last two decades, cannibalized his oeuvre much like one of his hungry ghouls. Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, who was married to the filmmaker from 2011 until his passing, recalls one eye-opening moment from their time together.…

THERE COMES A TIME IN EVERY HORROR FAN’S LIFE WHEN THEY START ASKING QUESTIONS. Didn’t David Cronenberg take out a full page ad in Variety trying to get a Frankenstein adaptation off the ground? Is Bubba Nosferatu ever going to get made? What about that William Gibson-penned Alien 3 script? Will that ever see the light of day? Against the current, the ghosts of horror movies never made linger on, borne ceaselessly from the past. For these inquiring minds, a new book on the greatest unmade, half made, and perpetually in development genre films has arrived, rich with visuals and packing remarkable depth of research. Out August 17 from Dark Horse Books, Untold Horror spans ten decades, at least four continents, and countless seasons of this industry oubliette across its…

GOODBYE 8:06 mins/Alter on YouTube The fear of death is a pretty reliable well to pull from when it comes to horror, but what’s truly terrifying about Tyler Russo’s short film is that it posits a universe where our anxieties are only amplified when we reach the other side. When a man dies in a car crash, he moves on to something of an antechamber for the next life, where his essence is imbued in a monitor (voiced by Kevan Brighting) so that he can be questioned by a series of rotating mechanical faces (voiced by Brighting and Wendy White). The interview becomes relentless interrogation as he’s forced to confront the darkest moments in his life so his inquisitors can determine his next plane of existence. Russo blends sci-fi and…

Auntie Dearest “Did I miss something?” It’s a phrase we’ve all muttered from time to time. It’s one you’ll find yourself muttering again – or perhaps shouting hysterically – during the whiplash-inducing WTF-fest that is Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981). Well, at least during the first half-hour; after that, I slipped into some kind of numbly-mad, logic-boycotting Stockholm Syndrome. A little bit slasher and a little bit more giallo (albeit thoroughly American), BBNM has also drawn comparisons (from the few who’ve seen it) to everything from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? to Oedipus Rex. Issued at various times in various territories as Night Warning, Evil Protégé, and Thrilled to Death (none of which have any more connection to the content than the title in question here), our story kicks off…

https://www.stitcher.com/show/haunted-talks HAUNTED TALKS THEME: Paranormal Discussion FREQUENCY: Several times per month The folks behind the Haunted Walk – a ghost tour company in Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, Ontario – are really into spooky stuff. So much so, they’ve created a podcast to encompass all the stories that don’t fit into their thematic walks. Hosted by creative director Jim Dean, the Haunted Talks podcast doesn’t stick to basic hauntings, but dabbles in mysterious happenings, historical events, and interviews with professionals in the paranormal realm as well. Ranging from about 30 to 45 minutes, each episode typically features Dean as a single narrator supported by sparse and subdued sound effects. While the Haunted Walk may be an Ontario-centric venture, the podcast covers stories from around the globe, including the ghosts of Maine’s…

I GREATLY ENJOY the content of each issue, but felt you took the chintzy way out by not having your last anniversary issue and milestone issue RM#200 square-bound. I am hoping they will return soon! JEFF PUBAL – ADDRESS WITHHELD We blame the pandemic and hope to be able to bring back perfect binding soon! - Ed I ALWAYS SAVE Bowen’s Basement till the end. It’s my favourite, and this time it hit home in a special way. My folks saw Gargoyles on a date night when they were first married. They thought it was the bee’s knees. They saw it again in the ’90s and thought it sucked, now it’s one of my mother’s go-to stories. “When your father and I were first married, we saw Gargoyles. We thought…

SOME ESPECIALLY EXCITING NEWS FROM THE GEORGE A. ROMERO FOUNDATION: a previously unrealized movie project called Twilight of the Dead, intended to close out the director’s undead saga and originated by Romero himself, is moving closer to production. Seeking backing and a filmmaker to helm it at press time, Twilight has its origins in a conversation between Romero and author/filmmaker Paolo Zelati, who got to know the zombie master while interviewing him for his book American Nightmares. “I was on holiday in Florida with George and Suzanne [Desrocher-Romero],” Zelati recalls. “One evening, after dinner, I was discussing George’s Dead saga with him and, as a fan, brought up my need to see more. I asked him, ‘Where do the zombies go at the end of Land of the Dead?’ George…

SLEEPING WITH THE ENTITY THE NIGHT HOUSE Starring Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg and Evan Jonigkeit Directed by David Bruckner Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski Searchlight Pictures Dealing with death is challenging, and it doesn’t help that the omnipresent subject is as taboo as it is terrifying. Following up his well-received Netflix film The Ritual, director David Bruckner teams up with the screenwriting duo behind 2017’s Super Dark Times for The Night House, which sets a bitter, grief-stricken protagonist against a foe she has no hope of defeating. https://youtu.be/40ub6aBk4fo High school teacher Beth (Rebecca Hall, Godzilla vs. Kong) is grieving her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) as best she can – packing up the stunning lakefront house he built for them and watching their home videos while working through a…

BLEEDING SKULL! A 1990s TRASH-HORROR ODYSSEY Joseph A. Ziemba, Annie Choi, and Zack Carlson Fantagraphics By the 1990s, video had almost completely taken over the horror market, with countless movies that might have played theatres in the previous decade going straight to VHS, and an endless string of made-for-tape sequels issuing from the studios and major independents. But beneath that wave, down on the genre’s murky seabed, dwelled a species of lower-rent shockers that would never have hit the big screen. Often shot on video, or sometimes 16mm or even Super-8 film, these low-rent, disreputable fright feasts were a subculture unto themselves. The gang at bleedingskull.com have been extolling their questionable virtues for years, and after covering the ’80s in their first tome, they’re back with a dissection of the…

Not too long ago, there were some heavy conversations taking place within the genre fiction community about how so many tables of contents were still dominated by cis white men and conventional horror narratives, despite us being more than a decade into the new millennium. Where it could have become another discussion with little active mobilization, something much more interesting happened: a noticeable shift to more diverse stories and storytellers. This has been reflected both in the small press and the wider horror fiction world (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians both hit shelves last year) as well as in the review copies that find their way to me. In the first four RM issues of 2021 alone, I’ve not only read scary…

https://cleorecs.com/store/product-category/record-label/cleopatra-entertainment/ SCAVENGER SOUNDTRACK Various CLEOPATRA RECORDS Genre fans tend to expect a certain style of music to accompany a film about a post-apocalyptic world where an organ-dealing assassin exacts bloody revenge, and as far as the Argentinian action/horror Scavenger is concerned, this soundtrack is right on the money. It starts on a high note with Rosetta Stone’s aptly titled “Adrenaline,” followed by rockabilly pieces by The Meteors and The 69 Cats before the good vibes are interrupted by several dissonant, industrial noise tracks. Listeners will be drawn back in by The Coffin Daggers’ surf hit “Chidori No Kyoku,” only to be subsequently bounced around in a mixed bag of goth, alt-rock, psych, and pop punk – as if you’re on a road trip and the person with the shortest attention…

1 BLOODY ZOMBIE BOOKENDS $39.95 USD Keep your undead library in check with a pair of hand-painted resin zombie bookends. Measuring 7 inches high and 11 inches wide (combined), they’re the perfect complement to your collection of zombie survival guides. Cardio not included! Designtoscano.com 2 CORPSE PAINT FACE MASKS 6€ Pamper your mortal coil with death metal with these corpse paint mask packs from Finnish skincare brand Kaamos Cosmetics. Available in soothing green tea and moisturizing rice bran formulas, they may be vegan and cruelty-free but the original artwork by J.P. Ahonen is nothing short of brutal! Kaamos.co 3 HELLO KIDDIES SWIMSUIT $60 - 65 USD Summertime means haunting the lagoon like the creature that you are, so Poltergeists and Paramours has you covered (the important bits, anyway) with this…

While most of the world was in a nosedive as COVID-19 spread, uncontrolled, across the planet, Rob Jabbaz was gearing up to make his first feature film. The Mississauga-born Canadian expat was given a rare opportunity by Taiwan, the place he’s called home for more than a decade, due to its aggressive response to the virus; in a country where patriotism equals responsibility to one’s own community and doing your part for the collective good, the disease took much longer to gain a foothold. While the Hollywood machine shut down, Jabbaz shot The Sadness – an ultra-violent, sexually disturbed shocker in which a mysterious infection unshackles humanity’s basest, most vile impulses, and threatens the lives of two young lovers (Berant Zhu and Regina Lei) as they struggle to fight their…

In June 2020, almost a month into intense, widespread social unrest against anti-Black racism and violence sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, director Nia DaCosta published a tweet: “Candyman, at the intersection of white violence and black pain, is about unwilling martyrs. The people they were, the symbols we turn them into, the monsters we are told they must have been." As film promo often does, the tweet linked to a trailer for DaCosta’s 2021 “reimagining” of Bernard Rose’s 1992 supernatural slasher Candyman – co-written by Jordan Peele, DaCosta, and Win Rosenfeld – which is finally getting its painfully delayed release this August (after you know what) with Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. But this video clip was far from a recut of the original theatrical trailer…

BYO FACEMASK https://koaalohamedia.com/social-distance/ SOCIAL DISTANCE Koa Aloha Media I love a good conspiracy theory – whether it’s Elvis kidnapped by aliens from Area 51, JFK shot by Bigfoot, or those pesky microchips that Bill Gates wants to lodge into everyone’s brains. In fact, as COVID-19 spread across planet Earth, I admit I revelled in the rampant speculation that seemed to overflow on people’s social feeds like so much backed-up sewage. That’s why I almost peed with glee at the sight of Social Distance sticking out of the RMHQ delete bin; a film that tells about the owners of a cruise ship line who learn that their boats might be responsible for unleashing the plague of the century. Though it looks like it was shot via Zoom, Social Distance does boast…

BRINGING THE KINDRED BACK INTO THE WORLD “If you’re in the cult/indie-film disc distribution business, when you get the rights to a movie, it’s like, ‘Okay, who’s going to come out of the woodwork and tell us that they actually own it?’” says Synapse Films president Don May Jr., who’s been in that field as long as anyone. “You can do a lot of work and amass quite a few thousand dollars in expenses, only to find, whoops, there’s a legal problem and you have to stop until it’s taken care of. It happens quite a bit, especially with the older, classic films from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s – not so much the newer stuff, obviously. I’m kind of used to it, and I’ve had a lot of practice, and…

Even if you’ve never heard of Ed Gein, you’re definitely aware of his notorious influence on pop culture thanks to iconic films such as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, Gein spent part of his adult life exhuming corpses from local graveyards, and harvesting their bones, organs, and skin for furniture and assorted trophies. Infamously, Gein attempted to create a “woman suit” out of flayed human flesh, in the hopes of wearing it to better impersonate his dead mother. By the time he was arrested in 1957, he was also charged with the grisly murders of two local women. Despite the many examinations of Gein’s atrocities, both fictional and biographical, legendary comic book creator Eric Powell (The Goon) felt there…

THE QUEEN OF THE CICADAS V. Castro Flame Tree Press Mexican-American author Violet Castro delivers a powerhouse horror novel with The Queen of the Cicadas, which utilizes Mexican folklore and ancient beliefs to tell an unconventional revenge tale born from the tragic and horrifying plight of undocumented workers in America. Divorcee Belinda first heard the tale of Milagros – a migrant worker who was tied to a tree, tortured, and killed in the 1950s – when she was a child. It terrified her and stuck with her until adulthood, when her best friend unknowingly books the now-rehabilitated estate where the murder occurred for her wedding. This kickstarts Belinda’s obsession with the crime anew, along with a desire to make things right, as much as she can anyway. In conducting her…

Carla Yeatts creates amazing one-of-a-kind sculptures of our favourite monsters and madmen. From sideshow oddities and silver screen spooks to modern-day maniacs, Yeatts’ stylized and whimsical approach to these terrifying creatures is completely original! HOMETOWN “I was born and raised in North Carolina, and am currently living in Phoenix, Arizona.” WEAPON OF CHOICE “I sculpt predominantly in polymer clay and my sculptures are usually mixed media pieces. After brainstorming and gathering reference material, I start with a rough size/proportion sketch and then jump right into sculpting a head/face. Then comes building the armature or base for the rest of the piece, and then sculpting the rest of the body for a sculpture, or hands and feet for an art doll. Then paint, varnish, adding hair and creating a soft body,…

If you weren’t an active player of video games in the ’90s, it’s possible that you missed out on an odd yet incredibly charming subgenre: the wonderful, wacky, and occasionally woeful world of full-motion video (FMV) horror games. Back then, utilizing pre-recorded video for cinematic cut scenes entailed hours of hard drive-hogging high-definition video, but thanks to titles like The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker and Erica, the format is currently experiencing an unlikely resurgence in gaming, and many of these newer horror entries boast truly unsettling levels of terror. Recently funded through Kickstarter and buzzing loudly through the horror gaming community online, GHOSTS from developer Visible Games is poised to be the next great FMV horror title. Written and directed by Jed Shepard (who co-wrote last year’s breakout indie…