Table of contents for Issue 133 May 2013 The British Horror Movie Issue in RUE MORGUE

Keep Calm and Carry On. That WWII poster slogan has become a catch-phrase phenomenon because it represents such a fundamental British virtue of being able to endure anything – something that’s particularly comforting in an age of such real-world terror, when the enemy isn’t so clearly defined as something like the Nazis. (Now the threat can come from long-range missiles that cross borders, terrorism from within the borders or even a biological source that manifests within the body itself – yikes!) In the late ’60s and early ’70s, however, after WWII and before AIDS, something new shook British society: the Sexual Revolution. Birth control, a second wave of feminism and the birth of hardcore pornographic movies were helping to shape freer attitudes toward our naughty bits. Landmark bedroom guide The…

Forty-five years after its initial release, George A. Romero’s seminal 1968 zombie classic is being resurrected yet again – this time as a stage production. Night of the Living Dead Live runs until May 19 at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, and the show’s creators hope to take the production on the road after its initial three-week run. While there have been numerous stage adaptations of NotLD over the years, this is the first to be officially sanctioned by the film’s creators. Romero, along with original co-writer John Russo and producer Russ Streiner, is executive producing the new project, which is being spearheaded by Christopher Harrison and Phil Pattison of Ontario-based Nictophobia Films. “Over a 45-year history, we’ve fielded all kinds of requests; most of them fell short in one way…

1 BLACULA FIGURE $79.99 At that price, it may seem like they’re takin’ a bite out of you, but this 1/6 scale figure of William Marshall as Blacula is highly detailed, dressed in screen-accurate cloth duds and limited to 500. Certificate of authenticity included. Soul and black satin at amoktime.com. 2 HERSHEL’S FARM T-SHIRT $9 Nothing’ll make you more popular during the z-bag apocalypse than knowing where to find shelter. This Walking Dead-themed tee comes with a zombie-head graphic on the inside, so you can transform yourself into a walker by pulling the hem over your head. Sport your stronghold at crazydogtshirts.com. 3 CITIZEN BRICK LEGO ZOMBIE HUNTER MINIFIG $20 Lego survivors of the zombie apocalypse have a champion: Citizen Brick’s Zombie-Hunting Enthusiast. This familiar-looking l’il badass sports a crossbow,…

THE WICKER MAN IS NOW CONSIDERED ONE OF BRITAIN’S greatest horror films, but upon its initial release in 1973, it was hacked to bits by distributor British Lion and sent to the US, where it quickly slipped into obscurity. Three years later, a 25-year-old film critic from New Orleans named John Alan Simon and television presenter Stirling Smith came to the rescue. “The film had been shelved by Warner Brothers after a brief appearance in the Atlanta area, mostly playing at crummy drive-ins,” explains Simon. “Even to novices in distribution, this didn’t seem like the right handling for another literate, provocative thriller from the author of Sleuth [screenwriter Anthony Shaffer].” For a mere $5000, they secured the distribution rights, formed a company called Abraxas to release it, and set about…

From lurking serial killers to stalking werewolves, the gloomy streets of London have been a backdrop to many cinematic nightmares. And just when you think that every tale to emerge from the FBig Smoke has been told, something altogether unique and, well, fantastic creeps out from its fog A Fantastic Fear of Everything, from first-time feature director Crispian Mills, adds a whole new dimension of weird to the city. Based on the 1998 novella Paranoia in the Laundrette, by Bruce Robinson (an actor/director who also penned the screenplays for In Dreams, How to Get Ahead in Advertising and Withnail and I), it’s a horror comedy that delves deep into the unravelling mind of a children’s-novelist-turned-true-crime-writer who’s struggling with a severe case of paranoia. After intensely researching Victorian serial killers for…

ROOT JOB EVIL DEAD Starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez and Lou Taylor Pucci Directed by Fede Alvarez Written by Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues and Diablo Cody Tri Star I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t mind remakes – in theory, at least. I like the idea of dusting off old monsters for a new generation. True, it typically means having to sit through dreck like the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street redos, but every now and then we get an Evil Dead. Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez doesn’t just wrestle Sam Raimi’s sacred cow off its pedestal, he guts it and slings its innards all over the cabin so many of us grew up visiting. This new iteration isn’t perfect – it suffers from some…

THREE WITH CUSHING AND LEE HAMMER HORROR FEATURE FILM SET DVD DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966) Starring Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley and Andrew Keir Directed by Terence Fisher Written by Jimmy Sangster (as John Sansom) THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974) Starring Peter Cushing, David Chiang and Julie Ege Directed by Roy Ward Baker Written by Don Houghton FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967) Starring Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg and Thorley Walters Directed by Terence Fisher Written by Anthony Hinds (as John Elder) Millennium Entertainment Back in the late ’90s, fans began to see some of their favourite Hammer classics released to DVD, from labels such as Anchor Bay and Warner Brothers. But while there always seemed to be plenty of Warner DVDs, several of the Anchor Bay offerings soon…

Regardless of your religious beliefs, there’s no denying the stories in the Bible have plenty to offer even the most diehard horror fan. From global cataclysms, to the wholesale slaughter of babies, to the entire Book of Revelation, many horror authors have used biblical themes and imagery as a catalyst for their tales High on the list is Clive Barker, whose body of work has drawn heavily on religious iconography. It’s a theme he has continued with his recent Hellraiser comics (see RM#132) and is set to revisit, along with co-writer Mark Miller, in a new twelve-issue series for Boom! called New Genesis (the first issue hits stores in May). “You know those books of the Bible where all the really terrible things happen?” says Miller. “Put them all into…

THE MAD SCIENTIST’S GUIDE TO WORLD DOMINATION John Joseph Adams, ed. Tor Whether they’re trying to build a better monster or plotting world domination, mad scientists never get the respect they deserve. This anthology seeks to change that, with a mixture of sci-fi, pulp and comic book villain shenanigans that range from leading a Martian invasion of Earth to manipulating the powers-that-be at the White House. There’s a pleasant variety to the stories, albeit with an emphasis on comedy over chills. Anybody looking for straightup horror will be disappointed, but those with broader tastes will find something interesting brewing in the lab. RON MCKENZIE ODDS & ENDS: AN ASSORTMENT OF SORTS Dustin LaValley Raw Dog Screaming Relentless provocateur Dustin LaValley sets aside the vivid viscera of his excellent…

FrightFest film festival, the UK’s biggest genre event, recently launched a poster arm called FrightFest Originals (FFO). Operated by the festival’s founding director, Ian Rattray, and long-time festival goer and diehard art collector Alex Chambers, the company made a splash with its poster for the Maniac remake – a UK-style quad print by AniHeads that sold out almost immediately. Along with the fest’s organizers, Chambers recognized the insatiable demand for film-inspired poster art and wanted to give something back to festival fans while at the same time, offer something truly special. “I’ve been going to FrightFest for a long time and…it occurred to me, sometime around early 2011, that the one thing it didn’t have were genuinely unique goodies to offer our hardcore fans. Many FrightFesters travel everywhere the festival…

ALFRED HITCHCOCK UK–1927 While Hitchcock’s debut feature, The Pleasure Garden (1925), plays with some of the elements of his classic films (romance, jealousy, murder), it’s his third effort that sees the director fully dabbling in the suspense genre, with which he will forever be associated. It’s also a work that should rightfully be considered his first horror feature. Based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes and largely inspired by the exploits of Jack the Ripper, The Lodger (1927) is widely considered to be the first “true” Hitchcock film, even in the director’s own estimation. British matinee idol Ivor Novello (above) stars as the title character, who emerges from the fog one night to rent a room on the top floor of the Bunting house. Not long after he settles…

CONGRATS TO @RueMorgue for their 2012 Rondo Award for Best Magazine! (And to my friend @monicaskuebler for helping to make the mag great!) @THEKAUFMANN, VIA TWITTER [And a big thank you to everyone who voted for us, and congrats to John Bowen, for Best Magazine Column! – Ed.] LET ME JUST START OFF by saying that I hate Rue Morgue magazine and every pompous one of ya that has anything to do with it. From the editor all the way down to the guy that scrapes shit off the toilets. With that said, I found myself looking through the entertainment section of the mag rack at Barnes and Noble and saw RM#131. I love the work of Arthur Machen and Rob Zombie’s movies so I said, “What the hell, give…

Proving that even the most seemingly innocuous things can inspire terror, a new short documentary called The S from Hell investigates the phenomenon of the fear-inspiring Screen Gems logo from the 1960s. Made by Rodney Ascher, one of the creators of Room 237 (RM#123), the feature-length documentary about perceived hidden meanings in The Shining, it’s another work about viewer obsession. Currently available to view on YouTube, the subject of the film, the infamous 1964 logo that appeared at the end of such classic TV shows as Bewitched and The Flintstones, has always been somewhat of a mystery. This five-second branding, accompanied by an ominous eight-note synthesized melody by pioneering electro-acoustic composer Eric Siday, traumatized an entire generation of children before being pulled by Columbia Television after a decade. Ascher’s own…

The precursor to the harder-edged horror film publications of the 1980s, British-produced Monster Mag featured articles on late-’60s/early-’70s fright flicks, replete with gory colour photos and an emphasis on Amicus and Hammer output. Seventeen issues were printed, and each volume was able to fold out into a 2’ x 3’ poster. Due to gruesome content, the magazine sported a “For Sale to Adults Only” disclaimer, and one issue – number 2 – was even deemed obscene; it was seized and destroyed by the government when it arrived from the printing house in Italy. Volumes can usually be found on eBay for between $15 to $25 apiece. MORE CRYPTIC COLLECTIBLES AT RUE-MORGUE.COM…

SIR CHRISTOPHER LEE WAS DRACULA. HE WAS ALSO FRANKENSTEIN’S Monster, the Mummy and Doctor Fu Manchu. He was Sir Henry Baskerville and Rasputin; he was Lucifer, Sherlock Holmes, Saruman and Count Dooku, among many others. Yet, the role of Lord Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man remains his favourite, something the renowned British actor has proudly repeated in numerous interviews over the decades. In fact, he considers it the best movie he’s ever made. “It is a good story,” Lee says during an interview at the Grossmann Festival of Film and Wine in Ljutomer, Slovenia, where he received a lifetime achievement award. “It is not what the audience is expecting to see. The ending is very frightening, yet it’s completely logical, because we are pagans and it has to…

WITH A TITLE LIKE HAROLD’S GOING STIFF, YOU’D BE FORGIVEN FOR ASSUMING WTHE FILM MAY BE SOMETHING RISQUÉ, BUT HOLD YOUR DIRTY THOUGHTS. This is actually a clever little zombie flick from England that has been wowing festival audiences on both sides of the pond with its endearing, humorous and sometimes shockingly brutal take on a current hot-button issue in the UK: elder care and treatment. Meet Harold Gimble (Stan Rowe), pensioner and the first person to suffer from a new neurological disease that renders the inflicted zombie-like. His world gets further turned upside down when he meets his new nurse, Penny (Sarah Spencer). Over time, the two become close friends and she supports him as he starts a treatment to cure his illness, but the procedure isn’t all that…

THE HOUNDS Maurizio del Piccolo, Roberto del Piccolo and Trevor Gittings thehounds-themovie.com For the first 45 minutes or so, you might mistake The Hounds for a stale drama that bounces between two seemingly unrelated plotlines: one about a group of lovable English pals on a camping trip, and the other about a troubled detective tracking down a vicious gang. Midway through, however, the plots start to link up when the campers find a dead body and things quickly turn from humdrum to horrifying. If you were to compare the beginning of The Hounds to a Roman Polanski-like slow burn, the second half would be more like a Sam Raimi-style gore fest, with some pretty swell-looking effects and nary a trace of computer graphics. There’s even some fun, Evil Deadish camera…

FORGET SCARY STORIES. IN TODAY’S WORLD OF PUBLISHER BANKRUPTCIES AND GENERAL PRINT DOWNSIZING, starting a new magazine can be scarier than anything subsequently printed within it – unless you’re John Joseph Adams. He’s channelled his decade of working as an assistant at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and editing popular genre anthologies (Wastelands and The Living Dead, both 2008) into a springboard for launching his own online magazine, the sci-fi monthly Lightspeed. After seeing its business model succeed, Adams turned his attention to editing and publishing original dark fiction, something his reprint anthologies had not afforded him the opportunity to do. “Launching [Nightmare], a magazine devoted to horror, seemed like the best way to make that happen,” he notes. “Of course, the real inspiration, I suppose, is all…

Before the manufactured moral panic that vilified the “video nasty” and led to the censorious Video Recordings Act of 1984 in the UK, British filmmakers were getting away with some fairly saucy stuff. By the early ’70s, preeminent studio Hammer Films were putting blood and softcore lesbian sex in productions such as The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Vampire Circus (1972). Transplanted Spaniard José Ramón Larraz made a bona fide sex-and-splatter classic in the British coproduction Vampyres (1974) and exploitation maverick Pete Walker got his Argento on in films such as Schizo (1976) and The Comeback (1978). Norman J. Warren is a less noted British director who made a number of horror films in the late ’70s; his best known is the enjoyable and occasionally shocking Satan’s Slave (1976). Just as…

The spectre of Rozz Williams, a true father of goth rock who founded seminal act Christian Death, continues to haunt us fifteen years after he hanged himself in his West Hollywood apartment on April 1, 1998. Christian Death’s debut album, Only Theatre of Pain (1979), essentially gave birth to the American deathrock scene with its jagged rhythms and pained poetic lyrics about religion and mortality, influencing everything from UK post-punks Killing Joke to the entire London Batcave scene. Take your pick of household goth names – Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, eventually all roads lead back to Williams and Christian Death. The musician, who struggled with alcohol and heroin addictions and, reportedly, his bisexuality, lived and breathed darkness. Beyond his work as a vocalist he was known for his painting, collage…

A pet dog in Oklahoma City returned home in March with the corpse of a newborn baby boy clenched in its jaws. Police are attempting to determine where the canine found the body. The Munsters’ house on Colonial Street was originally built for the 1946 comedy-drama So Goes My Love. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago has launched a new area on its website where photos of unclaimed corpses will be posted; it hopes the effort will help identification of the deceased and give the affected families some closure. In the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, actor David Tennant used the skull of professional pianist Andre Tchaikowsky, who died in 1982 and donated his body to science and his cranium to the company…

THE DEVIL’S BUSINESS (2011) Sean Hogan North American release TBA The Devil’s Business is a testament to how the challenges of zero-budget filmmaking can be overcome through sheer talent and determination. Like so many independent films, Business was shot digitally in one location, with the main core of the narrative centring on two characters. Billy Clarke and Jack Gordon play a pair of hit men who put a bullet in the head of a Satanist who then returns from the dead to talk over old times. What remains is a gripping, doom-laden scenario that benefits from razor-sharp dialogue by writer/director Sean Hogan. A ten-minute monologue is expertly scripted and brilliantly performed by Clarke, and the finale cranks up a gear when the true nature of one character is revealed and…

IT’S NOT HARD TO FIND THE CINEMATIC LEY LINES CONNECTING BEN WHEATLEY’S LATEST FILM, A GORY ROMANTIC COMEDY CALLED SIGHTSEERS, TO HIS LAST FEATURE, THE PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING KILL LIST. In both films, seemingly mild-mannered, middle-class Brits resort to acts of merciless violence, often involving graphic skull bashings. Both draw from the long tradition of so-called folk horror that produced movies such as The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw. And both are utterly, unmistakably English. “That stuff is just in England,” Wheatley says of the familiar British horror elements that pop up in the two films. “It’s not necessarily taken from other movies; it’s taken from our culture. That stuff – the stone circles, the pagan influences – is just there.” While those elements were key plot points in…

LARPERS MEET LURKERS HUMANS VS. ZOMBIES Hannover House When the zombie apocalypse comes, certain people will do just fine: soldiers, cops, boy scouts and just about anyone who has ever rolled a twenty-sided dice. That’s the gist of Humans vs. Zombies, in which a parasite, originally created to eat oil spills, wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting group of co-eds at a college campus. While the jocks and cheerleaders quickly become zombie chow, it’s a psycho security guard and a group of LARPers (Live Action Role Players) who rise to the occasion in an effort to quell the gory skinbag shindig with their nerd skills. Though plagued with some uneven acting and a pretty boring storyline, there’s plenty of gore to help keep you interested right until the end. Game…

DOMINO FALLS Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due Atria Books Welcome back to the world of Devil’s Wake. Husband-and-wife writing duo Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due follow up their post-apocalyptic zombie novel with Domino Falls. Even if you haven’t read the original, you can take this one as a standalone book; Barnes and Due give all the necessary background information as the story progresses, without ever overburdening new readers with extraneous detail. If you are already familiar with the colourful crew of characters from Devil’s Wake, this story picks up shortly after where the first book left off, with a world that’s been turned into a battleground between humans and flesh-eating zombies (a.k.a. “freaks”) following a devastating viral outbreak. Tracking a series of radio signals, the survivors find a bustling human-occupied…

Horror literature lost another titan on March 20 when James Herbert passed away at home at age 69. Herbert was the award-winning author of some 23 novels, which were translated into 34 languages, sold tens of millions of copies, and were adapted several times for film and television. But you can read this in any of the dozens of obits that have run since his passing. Instead, I’d like to celebrate his life and career by telling a story of how one of his books affected me. The first two horror novels I purchased were Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and Herbert’s debut The Rats, in that order. After those books, my lifetime of book buying becomes a haze, but I still remember the day I stumbled onto The Rats as…

POLTERGEIST Jerry Goldsmith MONDO TEES SOUNDTRACK Jerry Goldsmith’s music for the classic 1982 shocker was a major peak in horror scoring, due in part to its epic and dramatic turns, and the composer’s virtual avoidance of using any electronic ingredients to craft the ultimate portrait of doomed suburbia. Mondo Tees’ limited 2-LP set almost replicates the enveloping sonics of the 1997 Rhino CD master, but as with that release, low frequency oomph was dialled down to make room for more mid-range details. Only Film Score Monthly’s 2010 disc came close to the robust sound engineering crafted by Bruce Botnick for the original, near-audiophile LP. Within his huge instrumental palette, Goldsmith’s deliberately saccharine Carol Anne theme was chillingly contrasted by bass rumbles, increasingly furious (and sometimes grunting) brass and teasing strings,…

Horror of Dracula (1958) James Bernard (Re-recorded Suites Released by Silva Screen Records) A perfect amalgam of Universal horror and British gothic, James Bernard applied shrill dissonance and repetition to capture Dracula’s feral behaviour, and drew from his classical training to craft sometimes lush romantic themes. Bernard also gave the studio its instantly recognizable gothic sound, and he established a scoring standard that would influence subsequent Hammer Film composers, and ultimately distinguish Britain’s horror scores. Children of the Damned (1963) Ron Goodwin (Unreleased) Versatile in any genre, Ron Goodwin actually scored a trio of John Wyndham classics (including Day of the Triffids), but this sequel to Village of the Damned embraced a little tonal modernism, and lent a slightly futuristic ambiance to create a musical cautionary tale of human cruelty.…

THE WALKING DEAD: SURVIVAL INSTINCT Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U, PC Terminal Reality As a fan of The Walking Dead, I cracked open this tie-in video game with enthusiasm and fed the disc into my Xbox. That initial excitement was quickly replaced by dismay and confusion, then flat-out disappointment. The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a first-person shooter that takes the form of a prequel to the popular TV show. You’re Daryl Dixon (voiced by Norman Reedus, who reprises his role from AMC’s series), who must make his way out of the backwoods, find his brother Meryl and get to the bottom of what’s going on with all these rotters. The controls are relatively basic and the level maps are mostly comprised of zombie-packed corridors, with an objective to complete…