Table of contents for Issue 150 November 2014 in RUE MORGUE

There’s a rite of passage that I suspect is being lost to the Information Age: getting the bejesus scared out of you by a book. As a tot, I had plenty of kid-friendly monster titles that I loved (anyone else have the Dracula’s Castle pop-up book?), but they were always age-appropriate – I don’t mean those books. I’m referring to that time in every kid’s life when he or she is exposed to an illustration or a photo that immediately instills fear in a way that nothing else had before that moment. I’ve been pondering it because of our cover story on The Babadook, and the terrifying, mysterious wouldbe kids’ book, Mr. Babadook, which unleashes the monster in the film. Magical/forbidden/evil tomes are commonplace in horror narratives, but something as…

If all goes as planned, Canadian horror fans will soon be able to get their fix around the clock with a 24-hour cable television channel devoted exclusively to genre programming. Montrealbased Callisto Television Corp. is planning a laten-2014 launch for Terror TV, a high-definition channel that will broadcast both contemporary and classic horror films along with TV series, short films and original programming. Terror TV is being spearheaded by Callisto General Manager Sylvain Gagné, who hopes the channel will fill a void left by the demise of Scream, a Canadian horror channel that was launched in 2001. After eight years on the air, Scream was re-branded as a more mainstream channel called Dusk, before finally signing off in 2012 to make room for the family-oriented ABC Spark. “I’ve been part…

IT’S A REAL DRAG BEING THE TOWN PARIAH – JUST ASK HORNS’ IG PERRISH. HIS GIRLFRIEND MERRIN IS DEAD AND EVERYONE BELIEVES HE MURDERED HER, MAKING HIS LIFE A NIGHTMARE. He’s drowning in his sorrows – and alcohol – until one morning when a pair of horns mysteriously sprouts out of his head. They have the power to make people reveal their deepest, darkest thoughts to him, and Ig quickly surmises that they can also help him discover the identity of Merrin’s real killer – along with a whole host of other ugly truths along the way. Horns (which just opened in theatres and on VOD from VVS Films in Canada, and RADiUS-TWC in the US) is adapted from the 2010 novel by Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box, Locke & Key).…

I KINDA, SORTA WANT TO BELIEVE AMERICA’S ALIEN INVASION Reality Films Personal disclosure: I totally believe in UFOs. I also believe that we’ve been visited by aliens and a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Also, I believe that my morning glass of milk comes from cats. Ahem. That’s why I was excited to see this documentary that examines the “evidence” that purports to show that the US government has known about UFOs since the late 1800s and how the mainstream media and the Vatican are in on the cover-up. Though America’s Alien Invasion plays loose with the “facts”‘and uses enough stock footage to rival an Ed Wood matinee, it’s still a sort-of unnerving look at what might happen if we were to learn the truth is that…

HAVING THAT HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA IN HAND MAY MAKE SOME WANT TO CELEBRATE, BUT IT CAN ALSO BE A VULNERABLE, SCARY TIME AS TEENS ARE FACED WITH IMPORTANT CHOICES THAT WILL AFFECT THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. Little surprise that slasher filmmakers, usually content to set machete-wielding killers loose on national holidays, soon turned their attention to this important cultural milestone as another opportunity for bloodshed. Two favourite 1980s graduating class classics, Prom Night (1980) and Graduation Day (1981), have now hit Blu-ray to help put a little fear in the hearts of valedictorians everywhere. That’s not to say that the Canadian-lensed Prom Night is a particularly frightening film, unless you happen to be afflicted with a crippling fear of disco lights, custom vans or pantsuits. This light-hearted effort isn’t…

SLEEPY HOLLOW Marguerite Bennett and Jorge Coelho BOOM! EMPIRE OF THE DEAD: ACT TWO #1 George Romero and Dalibor Talajic ALIENS: FIRE AND STONE #1 Chris Roberson and Patric Reynolds ’68: HOMEFRONT #1 OF 4 Mark Kidwell and Kyle Charles Image CRIMINAL MACABRE: THE THIRD CHILD #1 Steve Niles and Christopher Mitten Dark Horse PIROUETTE #1 Mark L. Miller and Carlos Granda Black Mask Studios Fox’s Sleepy Hollow proved to be a surprise hit when it debuted on television last fall. A reimagining of Washington Irving’s classic tale, the series documents the adventures of Ichabod Crane, a Revolutionary War soldier who finds himself transported in time to present-day Sleepy Hollow, where he befriends policewoman Abbie Mills. Their mission: to prevent Armageddon, heralded by the notorious Headless Horseman who just happens…

THE CUTTING ROOM: DARK REFLECTIONS OF THE SILVER SCREEN Ellen Datlow (Ed.) Tachyon Publications Acclaimed editor Ellen Datlow’s latest anthology assembles 23 filminspired tales from both sides of the camera. The cinematic stories (almost all reprinted) gathered from well-known genre authors, including Gary McMahon, F. Paul Wilson and Gary A. Braunbeck, provide more novel interest than actual scares, but will definitely entertain film geeks and meta-media enthusiasts. JESSA SOBCZUK THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS Dave Zeltserman Overlook Press The Boy Who Killed Demons is your typical coming-of-age story: awkward teen sex, bullies and… the occasional demon or two. In this latest novel by horror/mystery master Dave Zeltserman, fifteen year-old Henry Dudlow is fated with the ability to see demons and discovers there’s one living next door to him.…

How does one contain an imagination as vast and enigmatic as that of Clive Barker? Century Guild was up to the task and, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the publisher has unleashed the first in a series of comprehensive volumes of dark art from the hand of one of horror’s true geniuses. Titled Clive Barker: IMAGINER Paintings and Drawings Volume 1, it features a gold debossed cover with over 200 pages of all new images and ultra-high resolution scans of never-before-seen drawings and paintings. The book will be released in two different formats, an elegant hardbound limited edition of 1000 copies and a signed bookplate edition with a clamshell-boxed faux leather cover, limited to 100. Barker’s art agent and owner of Century Guild, Thomas Negovan, elaborates on the compendium: “The…

COMMENTS QUESTIONS CRITICISM IN APRIL OF THIS YEAR, my mom passed away after a five-month fight with brain cancer. As I prepared her eulogy, I kept coming back to what she loved the most. It was, simply, all things horror. It was a love that both she and I shared. My earliest memories are of watching The Last House on the Left, The Exorcist and Halloween with her. I remember her taking me to a double-feature at the drive-in of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare. She was scared that they wouldn’t let us in, since I was only thirteen years old. Her solution was to take ash from the cigarette lighter and give me a mustache so I would look older. As I got into high school, she began…

EVER SINCE MEDEA KNIFED HER KIDDIES TO DEATH TO GET BACK AT HER UNFAITHFUL HUSBAND, STORYTELLERS HAVE KNELT AT THE BLOODY ALTAR OF THE MONSTROUS MOTHER. What only a few filmmakers have done, though, is approach the story from the perspective of the mother in question, and to wonder what’s driven her to such wicked measures. Enter The Babadook, the remarkably effective feature debut from Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent. Out this month from IFC Midnight, it’s a rare female-centric take on the motheras-monster trope that turns a seemingly straightforward spookshow into a complex and disturbing psychological horror story. It’s not really about the boogeyman that lurks under the bed, but the demons that lurk beneath our own skin. In its early scenes, The Babadook seems to belong to an entirely…

COMPUTER GAME GENRES ARE USUALLY DEFINED BY THEIR BASIC MECHANICS – A PLATFORM GAME, A FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER, MMORPG (MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAME), ETC. – EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO SURVIVAL HORROR. As a genre, survival horror is unique in that it’s largely defined by its non-gameplay elements such as mood, storyline and psychological aspects, making it harder to pinpoint. The label itself didn’t exist until the arrival of Resident Evil in the mid-’90s, but games designed around surviving in frightening environments have existed long before that. Going back to 1982, Haunted House for the Atari 2600 is considered by many to be the first example of a true survival horror video game. In it, the player is tasked with collecting three pieces of an urn hidden within a dark…

REVIEWS BY DAVE ALESANDER ARIEL FISHER PHIL BROWN AND SEAN PLUMMER Alleluia (France/Belgium) Fabrice Du Welz Seven years after Vinyan, writer/director Fabrice Du Welz returns with a loose remake of The Honeymoon Killers. Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas (Calvaire) star as a couple who meet online and find love seducing and murdering rich old biddies. It’s another of Du Welz’s twisted character studies charting a relationship that turns psychotic. The director shoots in a loose, almost French New Wave, style packed with references and stylistic diversions (including, oddly, a musical sequence), yet never loses sight of the gruesome tale and tragically lost souls at the center. It’s a nasty little love story for the blackhearted curmudgeon in us all. PB Cub (Belgium) Jonas Govaerts As the tagline says, “Be…

WITH A TALENT FOR CREATING AN AMBIANCE THAT RECAPTURES THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING ONE’S FIRST HORROR FILM, WATCHING A SOSKA SISTERS PRODUCTION IS TO REMEMBER WHY ONE LOVES HORROR IN THE FIRST PLACE. For Jen and Sylvia’s latest, See No Evil 2 (just released by Lionsgate), they eschew the tropes of modern fright cinema to deliver a fantastic, phantasmagoric ode to’80s horror, perfectly suited for Friday-night video fare. The film picks up where the 2006 original left off, continuing the story of Jacob Goodnight (Glenn “Kane” Jacobs), a traumatized recluse whose mother moulded him into a serial killer to satisfy her religious mania. Mortally wounded at the climax of a brutal killing spree, Jacob is taken to the local morgue, where hospital attendant Mary (Danielle Harris) is called in to…

FILE: No Vacancies The French have been known to refer to an orgasm as a “little death” but, when looking at horror movies, it may be more appropriate to say that death can be a little orgasm. The history of sex and horror has long been intertwined, from Dracula’s deadly charisma and murderous manifestations of sexual repression movies to the slasher morality plays of the 1980s. Ultimately, horror films often use a moment or two of violence to stand in for the physical act itself, partially because North American film censors have long preferred any acts of onscreen penetration to involve a knife rather than flesh. But few films exploit horror cinema’s sexual stand-in as readily and overtly as Fernando Di Leo’s Slaughter Hotel, a notably sleazy 1971 giallo about…

The second arc of Empire of the Dead begins with a casual check-in on the major players introduced in the initial act: Penny Jones, scientist and would-be zombie tamer; Mayor Chandrake, ruler of New York City and head of a secret cabal of vampires; Melody, the survivor of a vampire attack; a band of Southern rebels looking to overtake NY; and Xavier, a female zombie who has managed to ignore her baser, undead instincts and has taken a young girl, Jo, under her wing. There’s little gore on display here. Instead, we’re given solid character work and a look into character dynamics on par with the best of Romero’s films, and Dalibor Talajic’s art is compelling enough that – despite the lack of action – the visuals hold the reader’s…

“IN BOOKS LIKE THE AMITYVILLE HORROR AND THE SHINING, FAMILIES ARE DRIVEN CRAZY by ghosts and end up at each other’s throats; I wanted to do something slightly different,” explains Kim Newman. “I wanted to do the idea that the family would drive the ghosts mad. That was something that I wanted to explore, how living people can affect magic, can turn good things bad…” The English critic and author is probably best known to genre fans for his Anno Dracula series of novels and short stories (in which a victorious Dracula marries Queen Victoria), or his nonfiction tome Nightmare Movies, which maps the landscape of horror cinema from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to the present. His latest is An English Ghost Story, a novel he describes as…

Way back in RM#14, I waxed enthusiastically about Matt Jaissle’s delightfully depraved The Necro Files (1997), a tongue-in-cheek underground classic about a cannibalistic serial rapist and murderer who is shot dead (while eating a nipple!) by a pair of inept homicide detectives only to be resurrected by a satanic coven. The zombie promptly kills the cultists and wanders the streets, giant boner in the breeze, randomly raping women while the cops who killed him follow the trail of eviscerated hotties. I revisited The Necro Files – it still ranks as one of my all-time favourite underground flicks for gore and guffaws – after Jaissle popped up in a Facebook group for underground horror fans, advertising copies of it and his later films for sale through his Storenvy shop, VidEvil Video.…

NOW PLAYING OCULUS RIFT OCULUS RIFT Windows, Mac, OS and Linux Oculus Virtual reality is upon us at last, and the good news is you don’t have to install a jack into the back of your neck or plug into an eXistenZ–style alien pod. Oculus Rift, a 3D headset, might be the next big thing in horror gaming if the developers can get the virtual reality element right. Also referred to as simply “the Rift,” it has noise-cancelling headphones built into a pair of futuristic-looking goggles designed to block out any outside light. You hook the device up to your compatible gaming platform and the motion-tracking technology allows your character to move his, her or its head as you do in real time. You can look around a room, lean…

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS HORROR HAPPENINGS Horror cinema is increasingly stepping out from the shadows for appreciation as an appropriate art form for cultural analysis, and the three members of Broadcast Thought are among a number of academics who have recently risen to meet that need. Comprised of three physicians specializing in psychiatry, the team offers consultancy on creating credible characters with mental health issues for film and TV. They also do regular media appearances, such as a panel at this year’s San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) titled “Freddy vs. Jason vs. Michael! Inside the Minds of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, & Michael Myers.” H. Eric Bender, Praveen R. Kambam and Vasilis K. Pozios are all practicing physicians who were initially brought together at an academic conference where a lunch break between…

1 ANATOMICAL HEART VASE $85 They say that flowers speak from the heart. Now you can display your blooms in the superior vena cava or interventricular artery of this vase sculpted to look like a human heart. Available in blood red or perfectly preserved pewter, it’ll look amazing in any chamber or atrium. Get it in a heartbeat at shanalogic.com. 2 EDGAR ALLAN POE PORTRAIT CUFF $38 No one knows that literature and elegance go hand-in-wrist better than the Phoenixbased artisan shop Accessoreads, which specializes in lit-inspired jewelry. Each adjustable cuff is hand-découpaged onto stainless steel before being sealed with museum-quality wax. Unadorned wrists? Nevermore! Quoth Rue Morgue: “Buy it at: Etsy.com/shop/accessoreads.” 3 BLASPHEMOUS AIR FRESHENER $5 Should your chapel of ritual smell of human sacrifices, freshen’er up with an…

EARLY IN THE PROCESS OF BRINGING THE BABADOOK TO THE SCREEN, WRITERDIRECTOR JENNIFER KENT REALIZED THAT HER HORRIFIC CREATION WOULDN’T BE CONFINED TO THE REALM OF MOVING IMAGES. To get the effect she wanted – an unnerving blend of live-action film, stop-motion animation and popup storybooks – she would need to actually create the book that serves as a catalyst for the nightmare that unfolds onscreen. To that end, Kent and her creative team turned to American illustrator and stopmotion animator Alex Juhasz, whose work they discovered in the Emmy Award-winning opening credit sequence of Showtime’s United States of Tara. Juhasz says he was initially skeptical about tackling the project when the filmmakers contacted him. He’s been doing stop-motion animation for years, but The Babadook represented a big departure for…

FLIM + DVD + REISSUES WHAT A DOLL ANNABELLE Starring Ward Horton, Annabelle Wallis and Alfre Woodard Directed by John Leonetti Written by Gary Dauberman Warner When The Conjuring brought home over $300 million for Warner Brothers, it was inevitable that the studio would try spin a franchise out of the project. Too bad the studio’s creepy doll franchise kickstarter Annabelle is just as impersonal and predictable as the project’s origin story suggests. Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton star as a Ken and Barbie couple expecting a baby whose’60s suburban dream house existence is disrupted by the film’s only genuinely unnerving sequence; when their neighbors’ prodigal daughter returns home with a Charlie Mansonesque cult leader of a boyfriend. The neighbours are killed, the pregnant Wallis is stabbed, and her doll…

DRIVE-INS, DELETE BINS AND OTHER SINS Hi. I’m back. I’ll not deluge you with details of the near-death experience that sidelined me in recent months; suffice to say I’m mostly recovered, and I’m delighted that no one committed the grievous sin of cleaning this place in my absence. The mess and mildew have welcomed me like an old friend, and my treasured collection of laminated restraining orders from Angela Bettis remains unmolested. For my first column back, I bring you a discovery – make that a rediscovery – I made during this wretched summer. Maybe it’s because I think of Deadly Blessing (1981) as the dark horse among Wes Craven’s early(ish) ouvre, or maybe because I watched it on YouTube with Greek subtitles while lying in a hospital bed one…

CONSUMED David Cronenberg Hamish Hamilton When David Cronenberg stopped making horror movies, the genre lost a unique voice and a visionary when it came to the topics of transgressive sex and squicky body horror. Since then, no one has taken up the director’s commitment to making audiences feel so uncomfortable in their skin. If you miss his style of horror, there’s good news for you: his first novel, Consumed, is classic Cronenberg. In it, he focuses on a pair of journalists and lovers, Nathan and Naomi, who specialize in strange and sensational stories. Naomi has found a juicy lead: philosopher Aristide Arosteguy has fled France under suspicion of murdering and eating his wife Célestine. Naomi chases him to Japan, seeking at least an interview – but she’s ready in case…

THE DOLL SOUNDTRACK Dante Tomaselli ELITE/MVD AUDIO Writer-director Dante Tomaselli takes a unique approach by releasing a soundtrack to The Doll, a film that is still in development. This first sonic draft offers an impressionistic narrative with free-flowing drones, processed and reprocessed effects, mangled remnants of dialogue, and looped music fragments which collectively seem to drag the listener into a murky chamber for 65 minutes. Unlike his prior CD, Scream in the Dark, The Doll isn’t a concept album but an organic creature that breathes, and the density of material should provoke some intriguing responses, especially in the dark. It doesn’t matter what The Doll is ultimately about, but how the transformative sonics never rest, shifting and occasionally colliding and morphing into rather hypnotic sound sculptures. The lurid quality of…

After the demise of the Michale Graves-era Misfits in 2000, the underground responded with a new genre called horror punk, an aggressive, genre movie-obsessed style which has also retroactively been applied to the ‘fits. Since its official inception nearly fifteen years ago, arguably no one has afforded it more style, creativity and insanity than Vancouver’s Chris Kirkham, a.k.a. Nim Vind. After a couple of gothy, Misfits-y releases in his band Mr. Underhill, Vind joined the more successful dark pop act The Vincent Black Shadow on bass, before starting a career under his pseudonym. Last month Vind released his third solo album, Saturday Night Séance, on his own House of Vind label. It’s the latest in the evolution of what the singer/songwriter views as the Nim Vind character. “I see my…