Table of contents for Issue 115 September 2011 in RUE MORGUE

Old Hank Rollins may have written those lyrics for the song “Disconnect” back in 1994, but man, are they ever relevant today in the age of social networking and internet celebrity. I spend much of an average workday immersed in people trying to get attention for themselves and their projects and sometimes I really do feel like everything’s moving a thousand miles an hour going nowhere fast. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, the’net has allowed a lot of great artists to find an audience. A few examples in the horror genre: author David Wellington won a publishing contract after being one of the first horror novelists to serialize his work online; the hilariously gory, animated Happy Tree Friends began as internet Flash cartoons; Jason Eisener made Hobo…

Few of us want to think about it, but there’s one thing we all have in common: someday, each and every one of us will slink, slide or shuffle off this mortal coil. Grim as the prospect seems, though, ruminating about our own funerals shouldn’t be the exclusive province of the elderly and the emo. The folks behind a new website called mysendoff.com are hoping that, by bringing aspects of social networking to the funerary industry, they’ll get you thinking outside the pine box when it comes to your own final exit. “We’re ultimately like Facebook for funerals,” says Colin Firth, founder of the site. “We’re trying to bring death out of the closet and get people talking about it. Most people don’t want to call their friends up and…

1 RUE MORGUE MUSICSKINS $15-$20 Make your gadgets ghastlier with a little help from Rue Morgue and MusicSkins. These gel skins will protect your electronics from werewolf scratches, vampire bites and whatever it is that lurks in the damp corner of Bowen’s Basement. Choose from the classic logo or the iconic House of Horror. Try us on for size at musicskins.com. 2 CTHULHU LOLLIPOPS $5 each Get a taste of the outer dimensions with these lollipops bearing images from the demented imagination of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, one of the Deep Ones and the Elder Sign are all rendered in cherry- or raspberry-flavoured hard candy for your deviant delectation. Lick your fear at cryptocurium.com. 3 3-D ZOMBIE FRIDGE MAGNETS $14.95 If you wanna keep the meat on the outside of…

RISE OF NIGHTMARES Xbox 360 Kinect Sega Zombie titles have long stalked the console systems, but up until now the Xbox Kinect – the system add-on that makes your body the controller – has been a bastion of more family-friendly fare. That all ends on September 6 with the release of Rise of Nightmares, a first-person zombie game that allows players to eviscerate the undead with their own two hands. The basic premise sees gamers dismembering skinbags and other deviant creations as they take on the role of a man who is desperately trying to save the life of his wife, who has been kidnapped by a mad scientist. Since all motion and combat is controlled solely by your movements, this game – which promises to deliver both gore and…

BURKE AND HARE – USA John Landis It’s been almost twenty years since John Landis made his last feature-length horror film. His take on the story of ne’er-do-well grave robbers Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (a deliciously scummy Andy Serkis) is primarily a romantic comedy, but given that the opening ten minutes include hanging, dismemberment, arterial spray and a maggoty corpse, not to mention cameos from Ray Harryhausen, Christopher Lee and Jenny Agutter, rest assured there’s plenty of gore to accompany the giggles.AM DETENTION – USA Joseph Kahn Ah, post-postmodernism – there’s a term we could all do without. But how else to describe a film in which cultural references are cribbed from already derivative works such as Scream, Clueless and Scott Pilgrim vs the World? Detention depicts time-travelling high-schoolers…

Orgy of the Dead I AM VIRGIN IMD Films When Richard Matheson wrote his classic apocalyptic vampire thriller I Am Legend, it probably never crossed his mind that somebody would fuck with it as much as this film does. Director Sean Skelding sets this brutal homage three years after a virus sweeps across the world, turning women into nubile young vampire vixens, with tattoos and nipple piercings, who want to drink blood and have sex all day. They’re all after Robby, the last virgin on Earth, who’s desperately trying to stay alive and protect his purity, which he accomplishes by spying on numerous bouts of softcore lesbian sex and running away with his tail between his legs. Not even a funny cameo by Ron Jeremy can help jack up…

DEATH RIDES OUT THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE (1921) Blu-ray/DVD Starring Basil Rathbone, Herbert Rudley and Lon Chaney Jr. Directed by Reginald Le Borg Written by Gerald Drayson Adams and John C. Higgins MGM That cover image says it all. Notably diverting from the expressionistic, artfully achieved terror of Germany’s silent horror cinema, the 1921 Swedish classic The Phantom Carriage is a sombre and restrained meditation on death that relies more on symbolism, iconic imagery and intimately human themes. With effective use of double exposure shots, director Victor Sjöström’s powerful and influential morality tale follows a dead man who is forced to reconsider the tragic path of his life as he spends an evening collecting souls alongside Death himself. Passing a bottle around in a cemetery on a bleak New Year’s Eve,…

JUST AS HISTORY IS PRIMARILY WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS, IN HORROR FICTION, STORIES ARE GENERALLY TOLD FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE HEROES, LEAVING MONSTERS TO BE THE ONE-DIMENSIONAL VILLAINS STALKING THE SHADOWS OR SPARRING WITH THE GOOD GUYS UNTIL THEIR INEVITABLE, PREDICTABLE DEFEATS. But not so in The Monster’s Corner, a new collection of horror stories edited by prolific genre author Christopher Golden (When Rose Wakes, Wildwood Road), which puts the Big Bads in the driver’s seat – and even allows them to come out on top. Like many a lifelong genre fan, Golden has monsters on the brain, but the idea of creatures inhabiting non-traditional roles in fiction has been a particular fascination since his college years, when he wrote a paper proposing that Moby Dick is the true…

There hasn’t been a year in recent memory where I’ve been as surprised at the column-worthy material I’ve found on the random discs that have oozed into my possession. Sometimes they’re even just laying there on our editor-in-chief’s desk, such as the screener for Kevin Tenney’s Brain Dead! I’ve never seen Tenney’s most notable film, Night of the Demons (1988). I understand the cult cachet it has, but it’s never been my idea of a Halloween party. After watching Brain Dead, though, I’m perplexed as to why Tenney’s biggest hit was remade by someone else in 2009 instead of just giving him a decent budget to do it, because Brain Dead is about the most mindlessly entertaining and unselfconsciously ’80s film I’ve seen since, well, the ’80s. Granted, this is…

He has nothing against horror, but Stephen Coates admits he’s not particularly a fan. The fact that he and his ambitious pop band The Real Tuesday Weld have released an album called The Last Werewolf (Six Degrees Records) is mainly because the record is a soundtrack (of sorts) to British writer Glen Duncan’s book of the same name. That doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy writing music about a flesh-hunting shape-shifter, though. “In a way it’s about a werewolf, but really it’s about a man who turns into a wolf once a month and has to do all these vile things!” explains Coates. “It was fun, actually, and there are some songs on the record that are meant to be his werewolf side. But a lot of it is really…

DEAR MR. BOWEN, thank you so much for calling bullshit on the It’s-Not-Really-Horror crowd in RM#113. I have noticed recently, on making-of shorts and commentaries of DVDs, a lot of back-slapping and proud sniffing from the directors, writers and actors that think their movie is “more” than just a horror movie. Their stories are more complex, more involved, more this or more that, and they have actors that are true dramatic actors and give so much more that elevates their film above a “simple genre movie.” I am sick of hearing horror fans patronized like this – like we are some cultural Jethros, rope belt and all. What would we basement-dwelling ghouls know about good storytelling? What would we graveyard skippers know about real art? We’re the ones who make…

Like a spider sucking out the liquefied innards of a big, tasty insect, English-language cinema has made a habit of luring promising new foreign horror directors to its fold, only to trap them into making cliché films that feed the Hollywood behemoth. It’s a fate that Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, the French directors of 2007’s nail-biter Inside (a.k.a. A l’interieur, RM#78), have dodged twice now, first by famously walking away from the Hellraiser reboot, and now with their second feature, Livid (Livide). Originally planned as an English-language release shot in Ireland for $8.5 million, Livid was ultimately lensed in French Brittany, and financed by Inside’s producers for less than a quarter of the original budget. Despite boasting more locations than Inside, it was given less than that movie’s 35…

THE ZOMBIES STUMBLE TOWARD YOU – RELENTLESS, HUNGRY, SINGLE-MINDED. You have come here seeking rest and relaxation, but now your sand-and-sun-soaked tropical island getaway has turned into a waking hell and you’re woefully unprepared to defend yourself against the undead horde that’s closing in. Still clad in their beachwear, these empty husks of humanity are slick with blood and grime, and replete with festering bites on their diseased, desiccated flesh. Worse still, you can’t tell how many there are; the torrential downpour limits your field of vision. You glance down at your weapon, an electrified machete constructed with wire, batteries and duct tape you scavenged, but after sinking it into the skulls of countless rotters, it’s failing–fast. The zombies are closer now. Your odds are diminishing. All that’s left is…

IT’S RARE THAT A 28-YEAR-OLD FILMMAKER WOULD BE GIVEN A RETROSPECTIVE AT A MAJOR FILM FESTIVAL. Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find a 28-year-old filmmaker that has a style that’s as unique, and a filmography as large, as Adam Wingard. This year’s FanTasia film festival in Montreal featured Medicated Monsters: A Spotlight on Filmmaker Adam Wingard, which was comprised of three of his shorts and three of his features, including his artfully constructed debut full-length, the drugaddled ghost story Pop Skull (2007), and his latest, a take on the serial killer subgenre, A Horrible Way to Die. Side-stepping both Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’s cold-blooded lack of conscience and the faux realism of Man Bites Dog, Wingard immerses the viewer in a dream-like haze, slowly unravelling the story…

“I remember reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and really enjoying it, but with only a few exceptions like Carrie and The Exorcist, it didn’t involve any of the movies I grew up loving. So I covered some of the same bases.” With this opening remark during our recent interview, author Jason Zinoman quickly established that he and I are very much on the same page, as it were, about horror cinema’s last golden age. Okay, but first things first. If you’re interested in film of any kind and haven’t read Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998, Simon and Schuster), you really need to. The auteur period in American cinema – roughly spanning the 1960s and early ’70s – has been chronicled and critiqued exhaustively, but never with such insight…

GENERATION ZOMBIE: ESSAYS ON THE LIVING DEAD IN MODERN CULTURE Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, eds. McFarland Books about zombies just keep on coming. Some of these tomes (like the rotters that inspire them) are dry, dusty and devoid of anything fresh, while others are vibrant enough to give off some definite signs of life. Luckily, Generation Zombie falls into the latter category, with eighteen essays examining everything from the subgenre’s roots in Haiti, to recent video games such as Left 4 Dead, and the 9-11 attacks and their similarities to Romero’s original Dead trilogy. While there are some extremely obvious inclusions – do we really need to be told what the zombies in Dawn of the Dead represent for the 100th time? – readers typically won’t find themselves bogged…

On August 2, horror fiction lost Laurie Esdaile Banks (1959-2011), who died after a ba ttle with latestage adrenal cancer. Banks was best known to horror fans as L.A. Banks, the pseudonym under which she wrote the majority of her genre output, including her popular long-running Vampire Huntress Legend series and the six-book Crimson Moon series. By her death, she had written more than 40 novels spanning multiple genres (horror, paranormal, romance and crime/suspense), numerous short stories (appearing in such cool collections as the Dark Dreams anthologies, Dark Delicacies 2 and Hotter Than Hell) and even some non-fiction. Banks may have been felled by a rare form of cancer, but in life she was quite a rare individual as well. Let me put it this way: name ten horror authors.…

SCREAM SOUNDTRACK Marco Beltrami VARESE SARABANDE It’s taken eons for Marco Beltrami’s complete Scream score to receive a legal commercial release (albeit limited to 2000 copies), and fans will be pleased to discover the score glows with a peculiar purity. Drawing from old clichés (stabs, stingers, breathy voices and wild dynamics), Beltrami’s approach moves in tandem with the film’s deliberate shifts from satire to clean, lean terror. But the music never ridicules the central character of Sidney – a motherless and soon-to-be fatherless virgin whose iconoclastic theme is the ’90s equivalent of the spinetingling descant from Rosemary’s Baby. Whether played on tender piano, grungy fuzz guitar or as a mordant lament, “Sidney’s Theme” also reflects Beltrami’s ability to drift organically between orchestral modernism and electro-rock. The score’s complexity remains striking,…

CREEPY APPS by Marie-Ève Larin The iTunes store is brimming with horror shoot-’em-ups for iDevices, but this month we hunt down some genre apps that offer players a different type of gameplay experience. PAPA SANGRE Somethin’ Else $4.99 Papa Sangre is a video game with almost no video. Rather, you walk around in the dark by tapping the foot-shaped icons and a semi-circle that turns you left or right. It’s a first-person thriller based entirely on sounds, so good earphones and a quiet place to play are essential. The game finds you in Papa Sangre’s Palace in the Land of the Dead. Someone you love desperately needs your help, and the goal is to survive every level in order to save their soul. To accomplish this, you’ll have to find…

MONTCALM PUBLISHING. USA. 1981-1969 Thirty years ago, supermarket shelves were glutted with novels from the likes of Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon and many others. Seeing an opportunity to make a quick buck, skin magazine company Montcalm Publishing launched Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1981. It went on to become one of the most widely read contemporary publications devoted exclusively to horror and fantasy fiction and film. Inadvertently, it also jump-started the careers of fledgling horror fiction writers, and exposed a whole new generation to veterans of the genre. Carol Serling, widow of TZ series creator Rod Serling, who died in 1975, was brought on board as associate publisher and consulting editor, tackling everything from choosing the fiction the magazine published, to the quality of the paper it…

In May, three residents of Cyprus were jailed after they were found guilty of stealing former President Tassos Papadopoulos’ body from his grave back in 2009. The men took the corpse as part of an elaborate extortion plot to have a convicted multiple murderer released from prison. During his 2003 murder trial, Scotsman Allan Menzies testified that the Queen Akasha character from the 2002 Anne Rice adaptation Queen of the Damned had instructed him to kill and eat one of his friends. He had apparently watched the movie around 100 times before committing the crime. A 76-year-old man was recently exhumed in Tennessee after he was buried with another man’s dentures by accident. Parts of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) were shot on sets previously used for Orson Welles’ The…

IF ZOMBIE STORIES ARE GOING TO SURVIVE IN POP CULTURE, THEY MUST EVOLVE OR SUFFER the death of stagnation. So, while Dead Island is going for an even more visceral, violent and immersive gaming experience, Telltale Games’ upcoming adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic book series is taking a very different, new approach. “The game is about walking around and talking to people, and working with people when the shit goes down,” explains creative lead Sean Vanaman, while doing press for the game at this year’s San Diego Comic Con. “The zombies are omnipresent, obviously, but they’re not the main antagonist.” The game – expected to be out early next year – is structured around the events of the comic series (not the TV version). Players take on…

IF IT WASN’T FOR BOB EZRIN, TOILING IN OBSCURITY MAY IHAVE BEEN THE EXTENT OF ALICE COOPER’S NIGHTMARES. It was September 8, 1970, when the rookie producer – then only 22 and living in Toronto – was sent to New York by famed Canadian producer Jack Richardson to see the Alice Cooper Group play at a popular glam and punk club called Max’s Kansas City. The band had been hoping the rock vet would helm its next record but the group was ultimately too edgy and androgynous for Richardson, who had but one charge for his young understudy: get rid of’em. Fortunately, things didn’t go exactly as planned. “What I saw was the most incredible rock show I’d ever seen,” Ezrin enthuses. “It was the theatre of the absurd, it…

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING VARMINTS COWBOYS & ALIENS Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde Directed by Jon Favreau Written by Mark Fergus, Steve Oedekerk, Hawk Ostby, et al. Universal Movies such as Cowboys & Aliens aren’t born, they’re hatched – like a scheme. In this case, the egg was a concept pitched to Universal Studios in 1997 by film and television producer/comic book publisher Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. As it entered development hell and was being fertilized by scores of writers, Rosenberg put out a graphic novel version of the tale in 2006. Now the Hollywood blockbuster has arrived, after being sat on by many a chicken. The result is exactly what you’d expect: plenty of sci-fi eye candy, every western cliché in the book, thin characters and a bunch of…

LOOKS WHO’S STALKING BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981) DVD Starring Lori Lethin, Melinda Cordell and Julie Brown Directed by Ed Hunt Written by Ed Hunt and Barry Pearson Severin Bloody Birthday, a near-forgotten entry in the early ’80s slasher boom, is a great example of the power of the killer kid subgenre. Despite being an awkward descendent of similarly themed films such as The Bad Seed or Who Can Kill A Child?, the movie’s unsettling images of kids engaged in acts of violence are still disturbing. Three babies (two boys and a girl) are born during a lunar eclipse caused by Saturn, the planet that allegedly regulates emotion. As a result, the three little buggers grow up to be murderous sociopaths who celebrate their tenth birthdays by offing a teenage couple making…

A spiring author – and would-be vampire – Sebastian Malpur is brutally murdered one evening in his apartment, wooden stake appropriately driven through his heart. His murderer is one Shannon Wade, an editor at a large publishing house who has seen one too many vampire manuscripts. Disgusted with genre clichés and trite writing, Wade has decided to take matters into her own hands and deal with unsolicited submissions in her own unique fashion, as poor Malpur finds out the hard way. And so begins Done to Death by Andrew Foley and Fiona Staples, a wicked satire that takes a bite out of modern vampire lore and its obsessive followers. The title’s sordid tale actually began back in 2006 when the book hit shelves as a five-issue miniseries by UK-based indie…

AWFUL/RESILIENT: THE ART OF ALEX PARDEE Alex Pardee Ginko Press Watch hours of Saturday morning cartoons while eating Count Chocula laced with brown acid, and your world might become an Alex Pardee illustration. From a Steve Urkel demon to the Brundlefly high-fiving the original Fly, Awful/Resilient is a sick buffet of Day-Glo, pop-culture creatures that melt and morph like The Thing caught in a Crayola factory fire. Hideous and awesome. DAVE ALEXANDER ATTACK OF THE VAMPIRE WEENIES David Lubar Starscape Ravenous bookworms and creepy critters alike will plough right through David Lubar’s latest collection of short stories. With over 30 original tales of ghosts, vampires, terrifying teachers and even dangerous mimes, this popcorn book delivers an entertaining read for kids aged seven to nine, without ever being overly frightening…

Driving through the sleepy town of Wicklow, twenty minutes south of Dublin, one would never guess that it’s home to one of the worst prisons in history – let alone one of the most haunted places in Ireland. When Wicklow Gaol (pronounced “jail”) opened in 1702, the warden – or “gaoler” – answered to no governing body and was the corrupt judge, jury and executioner to anyone unlucky enough to end up behind its walls. Popular offenses that could put you there included speaking Gaelic (the only language some people knew at the time) or stealing food for survival, even during the Great Famine of 1740 when people were starving to death. While under sentence, prisoners and their families were extorted for every fathomable commodity in the gaol, from food…

“It’s a psychobilly freakout!”– REVEREND HORTON HEAT Far be it for me to definitively declare when psychobilly got its proper start. The Cramps? The Meteors? Fair to say though, that Nekromantix have been around long enough to be considered old school. Formed in Denmark in 1989, the band, led by bassist Kim Nekroman, was a big part of the European psychobilly wave. And since relocating to LA and signing to Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat Records around a decade ago, the trio has done much to keep the genre alive in North America. This also means they’re veteran enough to have generated some haters. The new Nekromantix album, What Happens in Hell Stays in Hell, arrived this summer with the awesomely titled debut single “Bats in my Pants.” It’s a highspeed chase…

PS3, Xbox 360 D3Publisher Break out the Raid, fly strips and Roach Motels because the bugs are back. Insect Armageddon follows 2007’s moderately successful, arcade-style shoot’em up Earth Defense Force: 2017, in which the planet is attacked by a race of evil aliens with colossal insect minions. This new outing finds players dropped into the middle of a city teeming with oversized creepy crawlies, malevolent robots and fleets of flying saucers. Your mission is simple: kill anything with more than two legs! This includes gigantic spiders, wasps, praying mantises and everything else that’s ever ruined your picnic. Players select a character based on four different armour classes, each boasting a unique set of abilities. For example, Jet has a super-cool jetpack that you can use to attack enemies from above,…

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