Table of contents for Issue 131 March 2013 in RUE MORGUE

Physics students from the University of Manchester recently found a new way to make zombies exciting: the God particle. Armed with virtually no film experience, writer/director Luke Thompson, along with a group of scientists, set about making a film underneath CERN, the place the Higgs boson particle (a.k.a. “the God particle” – named because it is posited to be responsible for all the mass in the universe) was thought to be discovered last year. (Scientists are still working to prove conclusively that it is what they think it is.) Decay is centred around a group of graduate students at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (a.k.a. the European Organization for Nuclear Research). While in the control room during routine maintenance on the accelerator, an accident traps them underground and,…

🌙The third Human Centipede film is set to film in May, and Dieter Laser, star of the first HC movie, is making a surprise return. Laser was sued by the film’s production company after he refused to reprise his role as mad scientist Dr. Heiter due to creative differences, but the lawsuit has been dropped and he’s back on board. He will not be playing the same character, however, but instead will join HC II star Laurence R. Harvey, as part of a new villainous duo. Writer/director Tom Six has promised to up the ante considerably with a 500-person-long centipede. 🌙Over the holidays, genre icon Christopher Lee released the two track Heavy Metal Christmas EP, featuring “Silent Night” and “Little Drummer Boy.” The 90-year-old is no stranger to the world…

“OF LIVING CREATORS OF COSMIC FEAR RAISED TO ITS MOST ARTISTIC PITCH. FEW IF ANY CAN HOPE TO EQUAL THE VERSATILE ARTHUR MACHEN, AUTHOR OF SOME DOZEN TALES LONG AND SHORT, IN WHICH ELEMENTS OF HIDDEN HORRER AND BROODING FRIGHT ATTAIN AN ALMOST INCOMPARABLE SUBSTANCE AND ACUTENESS.”H.L. Lovecraft GLORIFIED IN LATER LIFE AS “THE APOSTLE OF WONDER,” Arthur Machen was born somewhat incongruously Arthur Llewelyn Jones on March 3, 1863, in the relic-strewn village of Caerleon, Wales (the site 2000 years earlier of the Roman settlement of Isca Silurum). The son of an Anglican clergyman, Machen was deeply influenced by his solitary childhood, the beautiful Welsh landscape and the abundance of folklore that has always thrived in that misty, rain-soaked corner of the world. Leaving Wales for London in 1881,…

LOVE OR HATE HIS MOVIES, ROB ZOMBIE HAS A VERY PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON FILMMAKING. DEPRAVED, DEMONIC DOCTORS? CHECK. A MANIACAL FAMILY OF MURDER ENTHUSIASTS? CHECK. THE BOOGEYMAN HIMSELF? DOUBLE CHECK. After writing and directing five feature films, Zombie has demonstrated a love for the grittiest, darkest and most boorish end of the cinematic playground as he allows audiences further into the nightmares that have filled his head from early childhood. A native of Haverhill, Massachusetts, Zombie has come a long way since his poverty-stricken art school days on the mean streets of 1980s New York City. Whether through his pioneering ’90s shock-rock band White Zombie or as a solo artist and filmmaker, a distinct hellbilly horror aesthetic has de-fined his work from day one. And while that approach may have…

No Beast Like Snowbeast I enjoy cryptozoo horror flicks as much as the next guy – providing the next guy isn’t Lyle Blackburn – and there’s a bitch of a bastard of a beast of an Ontario winter wind howling outside the basement’s filthy storm windows as I write, so there’s really only one reasonable choice for tonight’s viewing pleasure: 1977’s Snowbeast. Between the cult success of Charles B. Pierce’s lo-fi oddity The Legend of Boggy Creek in 1972 and the bad animal movie craze that followed the unprecedented success of Jaws several years later, a minor avalanche of downmarket’squatch-sploitation movies was kind of inevitable in the latter part of the decade. Made-for-TV yeti-fest Snowbeast is neither the best nor worst of the bunch, but its picayune charms –…

Language is constantly changing; it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts that evolves as slang becomes vernacular and things that have never existed before are dreamed into being. And so too does the written word adapt. Writers are mad scientists, ever using and exploiting the tools of the digital age to tell stories in innovative and experimental ways. Being a computer geek with a particular fetish for emerging technologies – and an avid reader – it’s been fascinating to watch the world of fiction find a new forum, from the earliest eBooks (on floppy disks!), to authors such as David Wellington (RM#55) and David Wong (RM#130) pioneering the online serial novel, to the creation of creepypasta (next-gen social folklore, see RM#128) and, now… Twitter monster stories. This past November, YA authors…

DMC: DEVIL MAY CRY PS3, Xbox 360, PC Capcom When it comes to franchises, gamers don’t always react well to change. This explains the online furor when Capcom brought developers Ninja Theory (Heavenly Sword, Enslaved) on board to reboot their Devil May Cry series. Long-time fans were concerned about the cosmetic changes to hero Dante, and claimed it would kill the series. Well, lay those fears to rest: the DMC reboot shakes the dust off the franchise and kick-starts it hard. Now, about those aforementioned changes: characters and mythology have been given a ground-up overhaul. No longer a suave, white-haired human/devil hybrid, Dante’s been reworked into a black-haired, smart-ass punk born of angel and demon (a.k.a. Nephilim). In moving away from the campier aspects of its predecessors, DMC’s story also…

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the first Loch Ness Monster sighting in modern times. To commemorate this milestone, a special symposium will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, on April 6. A variety of authorities, including long-time researcher Adrian Shine, will speak on various aspects of the Loch Ness mystery, concluding with a panel discussion on what the Loch Ness Monster is and is not. A team of researchers from Japan’s National Science Museum and the Discovery Channel have captured the first-ever live video of a giant squid in its natural habitat. The creatures, which can grow up to thirteen metres long and are believed to be the inspiration for the Kraken, have long been pursued by scientists. The team used a submersible craft to record the squid 900…

"I’LL DO ANYTHING TIM WANTS ME TO DO.” As you might infer from that quote, Jason Eisener is a big fan of Austin, Texas-based film programmer-turned-producer Tim League. So the Hobo with a Shotgun director was on board when League asked him to contribute to The ABCs of Death, a horror anthology he was spearheading with Ant Timpson, League’s Kiwi counterpart in counterculture cinematic programming. League is the founder of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, an annual genre movie festival which, in recent years, has hosted the world premieres of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, Frankenweenie and [REC] 2. Timpson, meanwhile, is the New Zealand-based founder of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival and a renowned film collector, with a personal library of more than 1000 prints. They have been fans of…

’ROO GRUE WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971) DVD/Blu-ray Starring Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond and Sylvia Kay Directed by Ted Kotcheff Written by Evan Jones Drafthouse Films Widely considered to be one of the greatest Australian thrillers ever concocted, this cult classic (based on the novel by Kenneth Cook) very nearly slipped into the irretrievable mists of time. Directed by genre-hopping Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff (First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s), it was released in the US under the title Outback where it did middling box office before fading into obscurity. The movie stars British actor Gary Bond as John Grant, a schoolteacher working in the remote Australian town of Tiboonda. With six weeks of Christmas vacation to kill during a massive heat wave, he longs for the civilized realms of Sydney and…

The last couple of years have seen a number of pulp-inspired comics on the stands, ranging from relaunches of classic characters, including Dynamite’s Shadow and Spider titles, to brand-new spins such as Dark Horse’s Black Beetle. The genre’s fusion of action, adventure, mystery and suspense has proven to be a draw both for readers and creators. For the horror fan, pulp fiction has its share of dark elements: sadistic villains, dangerous secrets, gruesome deaths and plenty of supernatural goings-on, such as ancient curses and demonic cults. Image Comics’ new miniseries Five Ghosts: The Haunting of Fabian Gray is the latest homage to those rollicking romps of yesteryear, but with a rather unique horror twist. Fabian Gray is a roguish treasure hunter seeking adventure in the 1930s, in the same vein…

THE WICKED James Newman Shock Totem Publications This brash, frothy homage to pulpy ’80s pious-small-town-succumbs-to-evil novels revels in its own sprawling excess as it details the travails of a damaged New York City couple who relocate to rural North Carolina seeking peace and security, only to wind up neighbours with a vindictive Canaanite demon. Think Footloose minus Kenny Loggins, plus several dozen eviscerated corpses. Highly recommended for those who believe Footloose could have really used such a change. SHAWN MACOMBER DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS John Burke BearManor Media Don’t be surprised if this reprint of the rare 1965 tie-in novelization of this classic Amicus anthology film makes you want to revisit the movie. Our tale sees five men on a train given glimpses into their futures – which involve…

How would you describe your excitement level for Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem? Fucking ecstatic!!! GERM T RIPPER Minimal. Not a fan of redneck horror. I like his aesthetic, but he needs a better writer… CRAIG BLAMER I’m excited enough to ignore porn. NAP BISHOP The expression on the poster sums it up for me. EVERETT DUDGEON I don’t like anything after House of a 1000 Corpses. But I’m like a fly on shit with horror moves, I have to see them. JONATHAN WINTERMOON Can’t wait!!! Zombie is a much better filmmaker than musician. Everything he has filmed has been interesting, and somewhat demented. ED WITHROW…

A group of young filmmakers are finding that zombie hordes are nothing compared to a bit of righteous indignation from your disgruntled employer. When the Zombies Come – a short film that sees employees of Ace Hardware in Lawrenceville, Georgia, combing their store for weapons and supplies that might prove useful in the event of a rotter apocalypse – earned a coveted spot in this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but at least one of its stars might be out of a job because of his participation. The film, a nine-minute mockumentary shot on the sly at the Atlanta-area store, began as a class project by then Georgia State University student Jon Hurst. The short was inspired by Hurst’s friend and Ace employee Alex Warner’s downtime habit of speculating on the…

Necrophilia was not a crime in California until 2004. In 2006, Gerald Georgettis, a sound engineer who’d worked with Pink Floyd and other top acts, hanged himself in an airplane bathroom mid-flight; the noise of the screaming baby seated beside him allegedly pushed him over the edge. A three-year-old Australian boy survived after his “egg collection,” which he’d gathered from his backyard and kept in a take-out container in his closet, hatched, revealing seven deadly eastern brown snakes. When Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was first optioned (more than fifteen years before the film adaptation was made), Rutger Hauer was the author’s first choice to play the vampire Lestat. In 1700s Germany, menstrual blood was believed to be an aphrodisiac when added to food and drink. While filmmaker William…

(Usborne Publishing Ltd., 1997) Fondly remembered by youngsters of the 1970s and ’80s, The World of the Unknown was a series of three children’s books (All About Ghosts, All About Monsters and All About UFO’s [sic]) devoted to exploring paranormal subject matter, cryptids such as the Loch Ness Monster and alleged encounters with extraterrestrials. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, the volumes were later republished with different cover art, and then together as one larger book titled Mysteries of the Unknown. Relatively easy to find, volumes occasionally turn up on eBay for between $5 and $10 each. MORE CRYPTIC COLLECTIBLES AT RUE-MORGUE.COM…

IN PARADISE LOST, WHEN THE PEASANT STUMBLES ACROSS the elves at their midnight revels, Milton describes how “at once with joy and fear his heart rebounds” and it is with the reconciliation of these two conflicting, yet paradoxically complementary emotions, that the Welsh poet and mystic Arthur Machen principally concerned himself. Born in 1863, he came of age amidst the wild green hills and shadowy backwoods of rural Gwent. Initially earmarked for a career in the clergy, he spent his formative years at the remote Llandewi Rectory, where one solitary summer afternoon he took an unfamiliar path through the hills and encountered something that he struggled for the rest of his life to put into words, something that chafed against his Christian upbringing and touched his pagan soul. Later, adrift…

Sure it creeps, glides and slides across the floor, but was the Blob, that most gelatinous of 1950s screen monsters, more than just a throbbing mass of jelly? Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, thinks so. In his 2009 book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Sharlet alleges that The Blob, which makes its Blu-ray debut from Criterion this month, was created by members of the Fellowship, a shadowy Christian cabal that pull the strings on world events. He claims they used the film to smuggle their fundamentalist message into pop culture. But could anything with a theme song that catchy have sinister intentions? While Sharlet makes some valid points about director Irvin Yeaworth Jr.’s connections with Na-tional Prayer Meetings, an annual event…

When a rabid and somewhat stupid “patriot” resurrects all of the dead Presidents of the United States (yes, all of them!), it’s up to Deadpool to track down the zombie leaders and un-undead them before they wreak havoc across the country (turns out they’re not all that pleased with America’s progress). This issue of Deadpool sees our hero tussle with JFK and some of the less popular presidents before his big smackdown with Lincoln. Being a Deadpool comic, there’s plenty of gratuitous violence, gore and carnage. There’s also plenty of laughs with many one-liners and quirky art by Tony Moore. His depiction of’pool made up as Marilyn Monroe is a highlight of the issue – and also incredibly disturbing. If nothing else, it’s a unique way to brush up on…