Table of contents for Issue 132 April 2013 in RUE MORGUE

Does your chest feel tight when someone mentions the words “horror remake?” Do you have a chronic, uncontrollable urge to go online and write in ALL CAPS about how Hollywood has ruined your favourite genre films/childhood memories/life? Have you ever started a Facebook page dedicated to how much you hate a certain re-imagined movie, filmmaker or trend? If so, you may be one of millions of fans suffering from a heart-stressing condition known as fangina, that, if left unmanaged, can lead to an acute horrorcardial infarction, or worse. The good news is your condition is manageable thanks to a new pill called Chillaxenol that relieves symptoms of remake angst… Ah, if only it were that simple to not care so much about remakes, but such is the nature of fan…

“We don’t care if you had a $25-million budget or shot it on your iPhone for nothing: if your film will make us uncomfortable or get our brains ticking or scare us shitless, we want to see it,” says award-winning true crime author Corey Mitchell of the upcoming horror film festival he created with heavy metal legend Philip H. Anselmo. This October, the Housecore Horror Film Festival hits Austin, Texas, rock club Emo’s for a three-day run of more than 70 films (the plan is to have seven screens running at once, sometimes while bands are playing, making for more of a multimedia experience), with appearances by underground filmmakers such as Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik) and Jim Van Bebber (The Manson Family), a selection of new films culled from an open…

1 ZOMBIE BOBBLEHEAD $24.98 Get an eyeful of this bobblehead version of the infamous rotter from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. It’s seven inches tall, and detailed enough that you’d swear those maggots are moving. And you won’t even have to fight a shark to get your paws on one. Instead, just bounce over to aggronautix.com. 2 WALL TORCH $74.95 Straight out of every Scooby-Doo episode ever comes this demonic wallmounted lamp, handily providing a light for the darker corners of your abode. Those with aversions to flaming torches will be happy to know that it takes a perfectly safe 40-watt bulb. Dignify your dungeon at designtoscano.com. 3 HAMMER DRACULA BUST $79.99 The newest figurine in the Hammer Horror Masterpiece Collection features Christopher Lee in his seminal role as Dracula. Standing eight…

Not every veteran actor is eager to talk about projects that have, over time, migrated into that area of film fandom known as “cult.” But Steve Railsback, 67, is more than happy to talk about Lifeforce (1985), a bizarre sci-fi/horror hybrid directed by Tobe Hooper, which casts him as an American astronaut telepathically linked to a space vampire. “That’s one of the things that excited me – the script!” Railsback says, during a recent phone interview in anticipation of the film’s June 18 release from Scream Factory. “It was different. It was big-budgeted and took a lot of risks. Tobe is not afraid of risks, and we were all with it.” Co-written by the late Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Return of the Living Dead) and based on British writer Colin Wilson’s…

THE DEMONOLOGIST Andrew Pyper Simon and Schuster Finally, a book to answer that infernal, question posed by John Milton’s classic Paradise Lost: why exactly should we bother studying a 350-year-old epic poem in the 21st century? Well, because if the story of Satan’s fall from grace ends up being true, and if demons do indeed exist today, the book might actually prove to be a rather handy guide to fighting them. Andrew Pyper, an award-winning writer of crime and thrillers, has penned his first-ever horror novel, about an English professor from NYC, David Ullman, whose specialization in Paradise Lost draws the attention of some rather shadowy forces. Called to Italy to consult on a mysterious “phenomenon,” by a rather persuasive yet strange Thin Woman, the man who admits to having…

Don’t judge a book by its cover.” We’ve heard that old adage a million times, but how many of you actually follow its advice? Judging by some of the books that routinely land on my desk, it seems that some publishers are foolishly counting on that. It’s something I’ve never understood, since it’s no secret that human beings are incredibly visual creatures. And horror may be the most visually oriented genre of them all. What I’m talking about here goes well beyond cliche mass-market horror novel artwork, which often features repetitive imagery of spooky houses, creepy eyes, bloody items or ominous toys – or if it’s a horror-fantasy hybrid, serves up some sexy monster-hunter half swung around and looking over her shoulder with a smouldering stare. While painful for the…

SOUNDTRACK MAMA Fernando Velázquez QUARTET RECORDS The gifted Fernando Velázquez (Devil) channels his inner John Williams and draws from his own experience as a cellist to create this taut, intricately plotted narrative of a menacing presence worming its way into an idyllic family. Velázquez’s score consists of grungy bass lines, gnashing brass and piercing tones for the malevolent entity, while the sanctity of family love is covered by a gentle lullaby, performed by a children’s choir, with enriched strings. The two forces occasionally amalgamate into chilling mercurial cues and Velázquez often takes specific theme elements and warps them in whole or fleeting, flaring brass permutations. A rhythmic motor increasingly recurs to add urgency near the end, but the real attraction within Mama is the gorgeous classical/modernist style of this full…

ALIENS: COLONIAL MARINES PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Sega There aren’t many games that got me pumping my pulse rifle in anticipation more than the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines did. After all, it spent over six years in development and, at times, looked as if it might never see the light of day. Unfortunately, after playing it, I can’t help but think that might have been a good thing. The game picks up sometime between the events of the films Aliens and Alien 3, with a new batch of colonial marines sent to investigate the loss of the USS Sulaco and the destruction of the atmospheric processor on LV-426. In this first-person shooter, you play a grunt who has to remove fuel tubes and power cells, and switch on…

ARTHUR MACHEN? Your horror fan credentials are definitely in order. DAN BAILEY, VIA FACEBOOK RM #131: GOOD ARTWORK. Good cover. And who wouldn’t want to read about The Lords of Salem? JOSHUA MILLER, VIA FACEBOOK HEY @RUEMORGUE, TELL this “Pete-Address Withheld” [RM#131] chone to sod off! “Deep six that Sick Top Six column.”?! GTFO, buddy! I love that section. @JAYSOTKOWY, VIA TWITTER READING @RUEMORGUE 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See – great stuff, much added to Netflix! @WBARLEDGE, VIA TWITTER KIND OF @RUEMORGUE to include The New Daughter in its list of 200 Alt Horror Movies You Need To See. “Criminally under appreciated,” it says. @JCONNOLLYBOOKS, VIA TWITTER WHAT GIVES, I’ve been looking forward to “Would you rather? Wednesday,” yet it’s not here!??? JOSEPH DZENCELOWCZ, VIA FACEBOOK [We…

Few films are shrouded in as much mystery as The Shining, and the biggest curiosity about it among fans has been the lost ending. Until recently the contents of the final scene that Kubrick cut was just a matter of speculation, but now the script of a hospital epilogue has been discovered by none other than Toy Story 3 director, Lee Unkrich. The script was tracked down by Unkrich while he was promoting the release of Toy Story 3 in London. He arranged a visit to the Kubrick Archive where, after Kubrick’s death in 1999, the filmmaker’s extensive collection of papers was donated to the London College of Communications. It was in a Taschen coffee-table book that Unkrich got his first glimpse of the excised hospital material, which ignited his…

When an innocent man is sent to the electric chair, and the former prison guard who framed him becomes the newly re-opened prison’s warden, don’t expect that angry spirit to rest for very long. That’s the premise of Prison – Finnish director Renny Harlin’s haunting 1988 American feature debut that’s since become a cult classic. While bringing the long-dormant prison back to life, Warden Eaton Sharpe (Lane Smith) orders Burke (Viggo Mortensen in his first starring role) and several prisoners to break down the brick wall to the execution room. Little does Sharpe know that doing so will unleash the vengeful spirit of aforementioned innocent man, Charles Forsyth, sending (literal) shockwaves throughout the entire prison. The spirit’s wrath includes burning prisoners alive in solitary and possessing pipes and barbed wire,…

UNCLE CREEPY STOKER Starring Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode and Nicole Kidman Directed by Chan-wook Park Written by Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson Fox Searchlight Chan-wook Park’s admiration for Hitchcock isn’t exactly a secret, so when he saw the chance to direct a script wherein the intriguing Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) arrives out of nowhere to arouse the suspicions – and perhaps more – of his teenage niece, India (Mia Wasikowska)… well, the echoes of Shadow of a Doubt were probably too tempting to pass up. Of course, many horror fans are more familiar with a latter-day offshoot, 1987’s The Stepfather, which upped the violence and made the father-surrogate deal more explicit. Stoker retains that franchise’s body count and psychosexual shenanigans, but does away with the simplistic “good vs. bad”…

Conclusive proof of such strange phenomenon as UFOs, Bigfoot, Atlantis and ESP has always been maddeningly elusive, but that didn’t deter NBC’s pioneering 1976 TV show, In Search Of…, which sought out almost every arcane mystery on the books over its six-season run. Of course, the show’s light-hearted approach didn’t bring viewers any closer to lost Incan treasure or the true location of Amelia Earhart, but it did provide hours of entertainment for armchair theorists who liked to speculate on whether such outlandish and otherworldly claims were true or simple hoaxes. One of the pop-culture forces that helped drive interest in paranormal subjects in the 1970s, In Search Of… has recently been released as a mammoth 21-disc DVD set by Visual Entertainment, Inc. that comprises all of its 144 episodes…

Self-publishing a horror comic is no easy task, but it does offer its creators a level of freedom rarely available from mainstream publishers. Without editorial constraints, writers and artists can flex their unique muscles without fear of censorship. For horror fans, this often means works that are hard-hitting, uncompromising and well worth seeking out. Enter London Horror Comic, an anthology book from writer/creator John-Paul Kamath, now celebrating its sixth year in print and the recent publication of its fifth issue. One comic per year may not sound like much, but self-publishing a highquality book that belies its indie status is no small endeavour, and it’s clearly a labour of love for Kamath. “The advantage of being an indie title is that I’m free to tell the stories I want to…

THE ZOMBOOK Allan Graves Graffito It’s only natural that an artist named Allan Graves should mount a 250+ page hardcover collection of zombie images. He gathered scores of artists working in a variety of mediums – from traditional painting to digital portraits, resin models to effects-heavy photography – to show off their most righteous rotters. Behold zombies from Mitch O’Connell, The Pizz, Jason Edmiston and some RM regulars. A wondrous feast of fetid flesh. DAVE ALEXANDER TILL DEATH: A GUIDE TO LOVE AND LOSS Jeremy Saffer and Ash Costello Self-published In theory, this 70-page hardcover sounds wonderfully morbid. Unfortunately, it’s misleading, as there’s no particular insight into love and loss offered, just gory tongue-in-cheek photos. Coming off like a well-funded vanity project, the book features a single pair of models…

I can’t help but feel I’ve been transported back to the 1930s era of horror when viewing M. Fersner’s artwork. Her shadowy style draws from the well of art deco, to form images of classic, gothic horror. As the Knoxville, Tennessee, artist explains, she’s all about mood. “I tend to put a lot of thought into light sources and shadows when I am sketching and preparing for inking, something that came from watching film noir and spaghetti westerns, and being inspired by the moods one could set with lighting. With art deco, I really love clean, bold, structural lines and love pairing them with my illustrations.” A horror fan for as long as she can remember, she cites the work of preeminent American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, dark artist Dave McKean,…

WHEN IS A REMAKE MORE THAN SIMPLY ANOTHER LACKLUSTRE HOLLYWOOD CASH GRAB? WHEN IT’S EVIL DEAD… HOPEFULLY. When news of the reworking initially hit the web in summer of 2011, horror-loving netizens kicked up their usual doom-and-glooming straight away. And one can hardly blame them. After all, the evidence mostly supports their fears. Money-hungry studios have built a cottage industry around remaking, and usually soiling, the horror classics of ’70s and ’80s, be it by giving Leatherface a humanizing back story in the latest Texas Chainsaw, to the unwatchably two-dimensional cast of Friday the 13th, to the entirety of Rob Zombie’s deplorable Halloween reboot. But there’s one important distinction that may have been missed during those early knee-jerk reactions: Evil Dead is not a traditional studio picture – its fate…

TILEM FOR MURDER STRIP MAHJONG: BATTLE ROYALE Danger After Dark Films The only things I know about mahjong I learned from the ladies at the nail salon down the street while getting my pedicure: in China and Japan, it’s more popular than poker and many get addicted to it and run up exorbitant debts. In this silly flick, a group of women obsessed with playing online mahjong are kidnapped by a crazy game show host, his sexy assistant and a guy wearing only a gimp mask and a banana hammock. Locked in an underground prison, the girls are forced to play strip mahjong for a pay-per-view audience until naked. The winner gets ten million yen, the losers get electrocuted. The dialogue is rude, the sets are crude and the girls…

Velvet Underground singer/guitarist Lou Reed once said that although his group’s albums didn’t sell many copies, it seemed like everyone who did buy them started their own bands. If the Velvet Underground’s shambling, D.I.Y. style convinced thousands of guitar-wielding teenagers that they too could make music just as competently as Reed, the same could be said for Psycho (1960), in which Alfred Hitchcock proved to budding filmmakers that you didn’t need a lot of money to make an incredibly effective horror film. From Hitch’s stark tale of domineering familial relations and brutal killings sprung dozens of imitations that tried to reassemble the movie’s basic plot elements into something just as interesting. Of course, few of those filmmakers had the well-honed directorial talent of Hitchcock, and aside from a few notable…

Critics like to call Laird Barron’s prose “Lovecraftian,” although the author’s vision is rooted not so much in literary tradition as in personal experience. He grew up in Alaska and worked as a fisherman on the icy sea, which brought him into close contact with the sort of vast, hostile environments that figure so prominently in H.P. Lovecraft’s work. Perhaps that’s why Barron’s tales of cosmic horror are so powerful – that, and a first-rate talent for storytelling. “I count Lovecraft as a strong influence,” he acknowledges, “but no stronger than that exerted by Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein or Cormac McCarthy. At the top of his game, [Lovecraft] was a much better stylist than his detractors will admit. Before I found my own voice, and that was an age and…

Bloody Earth Films is one of the tentacles of independent distributor Alternative Cinema, whose numerous sub-labels include Camp Motion Pictures, Shock-O-Rama and Seduction Cinema – how’s that for a batch of catchy titles? The Bloody Earth banner exclusively houses “new releases inspired by classic exploitation films,” unlike the older no-budget films released under sister imprint Camp Motion Pictures. This is just splitting skulls, however, as all the films under both labels share the same common denominator: crass gore! The sub-label’s latest release is Chris Sun’s grim Ozploitation shocker Come and Get Me (2011). The plot is tried and true – four attractive young women from the suburbs head to Brisbane for a boozy girls’ night out and cross paths at the end of it with a trio of misogynistic bogans…

1950s They say shock rock was born when Screamin’ Jay Hawkins emerged from a coffin onstage. It probably had something to do with donning makeup and sticking a bone through his nose, as well. 1960s England’s Arthur Brown took rock’n’ roll theatrics to the next level when he appeared in black and white corpse paint on stage (sometimes with a flaming hat!), setting up the look of generations of shockers to come. 1970s Alice Cooper always wore makeup on stage to go along with his ladylike name, but with the release of his breakthrough album Love it to Death (1971), it became more gothic and scary, as his onstage shifted from mere cross-dresser to a more villainous character. Then KISS glammed it up with Gene Simmons’ “The…

When old-time country duo Those Poor Bastards emerged from the Wisconsin badlands in 2004, they charted new territory in gothic music with unholy acoustic dirges that seemed to draw as much inspiration from Ed Gein as Hank Williams. Since then, guitarist Lonesome Wyatt has found additional avenues to tell his grim stories, including the western horror novel The Terrible Tale of Edgar Switchblade (RM#128) and a solo career steeped in sorrowful traditional music under the name Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks. Wyatt’s latest effort, Ghost Ballads, offers thirteen tracks that spin some of the most bone-chilling musical yarns ever heard this side of the grave. Though you might expect one half of a two-man band to sound much like his better-known project, Wyatt’s solo work is a stylistic departure…