Table of contents for Issue 156 June 2015 in RUE MORGUE

Some of my favourite horror movies are made by dermestid beetles. Okay, not literal ones… Actual dermestid beetles are industrious little critters used to strip dead flesh from bones without chemicals, and a robust colony can clean a skull in a matter of days. They leave behind morbid works of art full of beautiful contours and unusual textures. I have a fireplace mantel lined with (ethically sourced) animal skulls, own photography books featuring ones from all over the world and have several images of them tattooed on me. All of us grow works of fine art beneath our flesh, just waiting to be revealed after our deaths. Similarly, I think a few industrious filmmakers out there are finding a strange, sublime beauty in places of decay. I reviewed the film…

Thanks in part to a successful Indiegogo campaign, a remake of the 1980 Italian zombie flick Nightmare City is headed into production later this year – with rotter-gore guru Tom Savini at the helm. The original film, directed by Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive!) and centring on a city overrun by bloodthirsty ghouls, arrived on the decomposing heels of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1979’s Zombie. Its munchers aren’t zombies in the strictest sense of the word – Lenzi himself has bristled at the term, preferring to call his creations simply “infected people” – but the film has been embraced as part of the late ’70s/early ’80s deader-cinema cycle. Notable for being one of the first movies to feature hordes of fast-moving zombies rather than their shambling counterparts,…

IT’S NOT EASY TO SHOCK HORROR AUDIENCES THESE DAYS. WHILE FILMMAKERS ARE SEEKING TO REINVENT CLASSIC THEMES WITH GNARLIER KILLS, MORE EXTREME SPECIAL EFFECTS, AND REBOOT AFTER ENDLESS REBOOT, IT’S TEMPTING TO THINK THAT AT LONG LAST, WE’VE FINALLY SEEN IT ALL. Then Tom Six comes along with a spin on the conventional mad scientist trope that’s so simple and grotesque even the most desensitized horror fans had to see it to believe it: three human beings sewn together, ass to mouth, to share a digestive tract: a human centipede. The Human Centipede (First Sequence) – written and directed by then-unknown Dutch filmmaker Tom Six (I Love Dries, Gay in Amsterdam) and co-produced by Six and his sister Ilona – began with twentysomething American tourists Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and…

IF NEW YORK IS THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS, BROOKLYN’S MORBID ANATOMY MUSEUM IS QUICKLY BECOMING A REPOSITORY FOR ALL THOSE UNUSED NIGHTMARES. Couched in the Gowanus neighborhood between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, the 4200-square-foot museum has become a Mecca for the morbidly inclined. You can ponder the terrible weight of mortality in the expansive research library, attend a lecture to brush up on US necrophilia laws, and learn how to properly preserve your dearly departed tarantula. But if you can’t make the trek to Brooklyn, don’t drag out your fainting couch quite yet; filmmaker Ronni Thomas is working to bring the experience into whatever passes for your parlour. With a series of short documentaries called Morbid Anatomy Museum Present – the follow-up to a similarly formatted series known…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE IS CONFINED TO QUARTERS LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS CLAUSTROFOBIA MVD Visual Cleithrophobia is the fear of being trapped or locked in an enclosed space and is far more debilitating than claustrophobia, which is the fear of being enclosed in small spaces. It’s a shame the makers of this Dutch film didn’t look up the definition when they named their movie, which is about a university student who wakes up handcuffed to a bed in a dingy cellar where a mysterious abductor harvests her blood and organs. An interesting premise, but the early reveal of the abductor’s identity and the fact that she’s able to escape her locked prison repeatedly make Claustrofobia a chore to watch. Not even a hilarious bludgeoning with an iPad can save this…

Despite still being a major source of anxiety and tension in North America, themes of racism are not often explored in horror, even though the genre is not exactly known for shying away from controversial topics. But there are some exceptions – a product of the superfly 1970s blaxploitation boom, Sugar Hill is a zombie film that diverged from fashionable depictions of the undead to conjure up feelings about the lingering shadow of slavery. Making its debut on Blu-ray courtesy Kino, the film is a revisionist take on screen zombies from the 1930s and ‘40s that transcends its dated fashion and slang to remain poignant today. Like most blaxploitation films, the movie is named after its hero, Diana “Sugar” Hill, played with aplomb by relative newcomer Marki Bey. Sugar’s boyfriend…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ HANSEL AND GRETEL TO KNOW THAT FEW FEARS ARE OLDER OR RUN DEEPER THAN BEING LOST IN THE WOODS. While some of our fears change as we grow older, there will always be those bedrock phobias, and the best horror stories know how to make them feel fresh. Author (and former Rue Morgue contributor) James Grainger does just that with his debut novel, Harmless (out now from McClelland & Stewart). “My first love is horror fiction: Stephen King, Clive Barker, Shirley Jackson,” he explains. “I’ve always been interested in going under the surface of things. In this particular case, I had written a bunch of short stories about educated young men stuck in adolescence, and then, later, I wrote about a reunion of those types…

Piracy is a pernicious and pervasive problem not restricted to illicit torrent trackers and sketchy streaming sites. Poke around YouTube and you’ll find plenty of unauthorized uploads of gore films such as Blood Feast (1963), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Zombie (1979), Maniac (1980) and Bad Taste (1987). While these videos violate the site’s Terms of Service, some of them have been on YouTube for years. There’s also a lot of legal gore content on the site. Some independent and underground filmmakers are “beating the boots” and making their films available for free. This month, I shine a spotlight on two of them. “As filmmakers we have to ask the question – do we want to be rich or be famous?” explains Robert J. Sebold, one of the producers of…

WHILE GRINDCORE’S ROOTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FIRMLY PLANTED IN THE SOIL FERTILIZED BY ANARCHO-PUNK BANDS SUCH AS DISCHARGE AND CRASS, ITS CLOSEST MUSICAL RELATIVE, DEATH METAL, REMAINS PERHAPS THE MOST HORROR-OBSESSED SUBGENRE – GORE, DEMONS AND ZOMBIES ARE ALL ESTABLISHED LYRICAL STAPLES. First published in 2004 by Feral House, Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore was another hit for the company who’d previously scored big with American Hardcore and the black metal history book Lords of Chaos. Opening with chapters on the origins of various local scenes (Birmingham, Tampa, Stockholm), then expanding to show how those bands inspired acts in other cities and countries – who, in turn, influenced others – the book is structured like a literary family tree. Throughout this liberally illustrated…

IT’S AN IRONY, I know, but for the first time I was a bit surprised when I began to read The Gore-met’s current column (RM#154). As I read on, however, that surprise slowly ended up turning into that awful sensation you get in the middle of your chest when your feelings are hurt. By putting his heartfelt, painful thoughts on paper for all to see, The Gore-met has, in my opinion, proven that the horror community is the most thoughtful, intelligent and empathetic fanbase there is and I was deeply touched. I was also struck by the dignity and tone of the column–reverence as opposed to bitterness. Thank you, Gore-met, you humanize us all and I pray for only the very best for you and your loved ones. JASON BYARS…

Forget flying saucers; the real Martian invasion came in wax packs, and it’s still going strong. Fifty-three years after Topps delighted kids and horrified their parents with the gory Mars Attacks! trading cards, the company is gearing up for an expansion of the MA universe with a new card set called Mars Attacks: Occupation. Occupation will pick up where 2013’s Mars Attacks: Invasion cards left off: with the big-brained aliens flexing their muscles as Earth’s new overlords. “We wanted to do something new, but still full of the familiar,” says Adam Levine, head of outbound licensing for Topps. “This time, the Martians have conquered the Earth and act as an occupying force. We’ll be showing all of the horrible atrocities they commit during this alien occupation. That means lots of…

1 CANNIBAL STAG NECKLACE $48 This morbid pendant makes a delicious accoutrement for the neck meat of discerning Hannibal fans. Featuring a metal stag measuring 4.5” X 5” and a brain image under a glass cameo measuring 1” X 1.2”, this cannibal jewellery also comes decorated with alloy cutlery so there’s no mistaking where your culinary preferences lie. 2 DOLL HEAD CANDLE HOLDER WITH GLOWING EYES $20 Nothing’s prettier than a dead doll with its eyes gouged out… except when its empty sockets glow with candlelight. A perfect addition to any cabinet of curiosities, these cute monstrosities by GloomMatter feature a decay finish of aged, pitted and worn stone. Candle and lost soul not included. 3 BLOOD VIAL EARRINGS $15 per set Calling all vamps! Dress to kill with jewellery…

THE MAD SCIENTIST IS ALIVE AND WELL IN HORROR TODAY, AND WE CAN ADD THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE MOVIES’ RETIRED SURGEON DR. HEITER AND DERANGED SUPER FAN MARTIN LOMAX TO THAT LIST. Both roles boast unflinchingly deadpan performances that made unlikely stars of Dieter Laser (pictured below in THC3) and Laurence R. Harvey (pictured above in THC2). For The Human Centipede (First Sequence), finding the perfect actor to play Dr. Heiter was essential to the film. Writer/director Tom Six set his sights on Laser after seeing Fuhrer Ex, one of the actor’s many German-language films. Six’s passion for the story and his vivid description of his vision for the film impressed the veteran actor, who immediately saw a connection to real-life Nazi horrors. He did, however, have a brief moment of…

IF TIME PERMITS, THERE WILL ALSO BE A DEMONSTRATION OF HOW TO PROPERLY EVISCERATE A CHICKEN.” That statement is taken from the course description of the Fancy Chicken Taxidermy class being offered this month at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and it could almost serve as an abstract manifesto for the Brooklyn institution: to educate and enlighten with an eye to the past, a delight in the macabre and a sly sense of humour. Since it opened its doors in June 2014, the museum has offered an ambitious slate of exhibitions, lectures, classes and other events, all geared toward its mission statement: “Exploring the intersections of death, beauty and that which falls between the cracks.” The museum, now a three-storey brick-and-mortar entity that looms over a street corner in the borough’s…

IF YOU LOOK FOR A LONG TIME INTO THE WOODS, THE WOODS START LOOKING BACK AT YOU. Jakob (Michel Diercks) is a rather meek young police officer in a German village who leaves bloody meat for the wolves in the forest in order to keep them away from local pets and livestock. One night, a blond man in drag (Pit Bukowski) emerges from the forest with a huge katana sword in his hand and starts killing. Is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a figment of Jakob’s imagination, a doppelganger, or some other mystical entity? In his efforts to find out, Jakob is caught in the middle of a surreal bloodbath at the edge of the stranger’s blade. Such is the truly unusual plot of Till Kleinert’s award-winning feature debut,…

AFTER CREATING THE SAW FRANCHISE, DEAD SILENCE AND THE INSIDIOUS MOVIES, DIRECTOR JAMES WAN AND WRITER LEIGH WHANNELL SEEMED INSEPARABLE. After all, Saw is the most profitable horror franchise of all time, and Insidious earned nearly $100 million on a reported $800,000 budget. The Australian filmmakers, who have been friends since film school, essentially became their own cottage industry. “Even our agents would call us Wan-Whannell,” says the 38-year-old Whannell. “It was like we were one person.” But then Universal Studios offered Wan Furious 7, the latest in the Fast & Furious franchise that gave the director a working budget of $250 million. It would be by far his biggest film to date and meant he was out for the next Insidious movie. “I was so used to being one-half…

The Devil Rides Out… West It’s a sad fact, Ravaged Reader, that only a select few of the films that creeped us out as kids can still put the hoogly-booglies in us as grownups. And while I’d be happy to testify that a certain made-for-TV Mephisto-fest called Black Noon (1971) is one of them, it well and truly ain’t. But like so many of its ilk, it put a big old nostalgic smirk on the front of my head when I revisited it recently for the first time since childhood. There are no malfunctioning robot gunslingers or T-Rex-wranglin’ cowpokes (can you name those two flicks?) in Black Noon, but it’s very much a denizen of that picayune subgenre we know as the horror western. We first meet our protagonists, Reverend…

GIALLO FANTASTIQUE Ross E. Lockhart, ed. Word Horde Giallo – the typically Italian mix of sex and violence, thriller and horror, pulp and art – gets a mostly Americanized tribute in this new anthology from editor Ross E. Lockhart. With the recent resurgence of giallo movie homages (Amer, Berberian Sound Studio, Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, The Editor), the time is right for the book world to go back to the subgenre’s (sub)literary roots. The concept, therefore, is great; the results, alas, are mostly middling Some of the stories are decent but have little or nothing to do with giallo, such as “The Communion of Saints” by John Langan, an above-average police procedural about a series of horror-film-inspired killings that is spoiled by a lazy finale. Cameron Pierce’s “Balch…

SOUNDTRACK IT FOLLOWS Disasterpeace MILAN RECORDS David Robert Mitchell’s ’80s throwback horror It Follows is well-matched with this moody electronic score by Disasterpeace (a.k.a. Rich Vreeland). The movie was reportedly temp tracked with music by John Carpenter and Krzysztof Penderecki (whose music was used in The Shining and The Exorcist), and Vreeland’s score comes across as a nifty fusion of both. The pulsating synthesizer strains most clearly evoke Carpenter’s horror scores, particularly in the many relentless chase sequences, and Vreeland deftly balances the dissonance with moments of calm that recall the work of Tangerine Dream. Best of all, is the eerie, melodic theme that’s almost a riff on Charles Bernstein’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. The score is near-perfect in the movie, imbuing the hypnotic imagery with a sense…

Two heads are better than one, even if they’re not severed – and especially if they belong to horror stalwarts Wes Craven and Steve Niles, who are teaming up to develop a television adaptation of Niles’ new sci-fi horror comic The Disciples. It’s the second collaboration for the pair, who also worked together on the 2014 Liquid Comics miniseries Coming of Rage. “I’ve become a huge fan of astronomy and things like that, and that has led to me wanting to write some science fiction,” Niles says of the title, which is out via Black Mask Studios. “I’m finally getting a chance to do that with [Disciples artist] Chris Mitten.” The new project has found a home with Universal Cable Productions (UCP), whose credits include TV’s 12 Monkeys and Defiance.…

EVER QUESTION YOURSELF FOR AGREEING TO BE IN THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE SERIES? Ashlynn Yennie (TCH1 and 2): I never questioned being part of the films. I was super excited to be a part of the films. It was such a crazy experience filming Part One and it becoming as big as it did and then got even bigger with Part Two. It has been a crazy fun ride. Ashley C. Williams (THC1): Definitely. I still question it! [Laughs] But when I look back on it, it really is the film that launched my career and in a way I am proud to be a part of such an iconic film, however people look at. Akihiro Kitamura (THC1 and 3): I am very proud that I decided to be in this…

ONCE UPON A TIME, THE LATE ’80S TO BE PRECISE, ANONYMOUSLY PACKAGED VHS TAPES CONTAINING A LITTLE-KNOWN GERMAN FILM CIRCULATED THROUGH A NEBULOUS NETWORK OF TAPE TRADERS AND MAIL-ORDER BOOTLEG OUTFITS. The quality was usually terrible, as the tape had been duped many times, but it was nevertheless coveted for its content: a couple having graphic sex with a rotting corpse! The film was called Nekromantik (1987). Nearly 30 years later, a once-grubby bootleg traded by people who wouldn’t openly admit to owning a copy is available in gorgeous high-definition from the world’s largest online retailer, and the director, Jörg Buttgereit, is a revered cult figure. The underground is dead. The Internet killed it. Cult Epics released a definitive transfer of Buttgereit’s first horror film on Blu-ray last November, and…

UNCHARTED WATERS LOST RIVER Starring Christina Hendricks, Eva Mendes and Iain De Caestaeker Written and directed by Ryan Gosling Warner Bros. When he’s not starring in Hollywood films or giving female fans a severe case of puddle pants, Ryan Gosling indulges his shadowy side with the creepy Halloween-influenced band Dead Man’s Bones or by writing and directing his own indie cult film projects. You can bet that when those laconic eyes aren’t being photographed for magazine covers, they’re watching flicks by David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terrence Mallick or Herschell Gordon Lewis. The influences of those filmmakers flow mightily through Gosling’s first film behind the camera, the surreal, twisted fairy tale Lost River. Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks plays Billy, a single mom with two boys, a toddler and teenager named Bones…

Writer and artist Josh Simmons had a dream – literally. “In 2010, I had a dream about a group of women wandering through a post-apocalyptic land,” he recalls. “Eight or so women, caked with filth to the degree that you couldn’t tell how old they were – they could be anywhere from seventeen to 70. They were wasted, exhausted, and there was a sense that they had been walking for years upon years.” Simmons spent the next few years fine-tuning that dream into Black River, a very bleak survival story, out this month from Fantagraphics. In it, the cause of the apocalypse is long-forgotten, and the only thing that matters is survival. A ragtag team of women – and one man – wander aimlessly across the devastated, snowy land, constantly…

THIS MONTH: TERRORGRAMS Bubbling over with eye-popping pulp art, terror tattoos, fearsome photography, cool curios, twisted toys and all manner of dark imagery, Instagram has quickly become the most effective social media platform to promote your horror art, discover new talent or simply get a daily dose of inspiration. There are a lot of fantastic pages out there that keep me coming back, so I’ve rounded up ten of my favourites. @astron Posting an endless barrage of horror and sci-fi pulp covers and ghastly illustrations of yesteryear, Jeremy Gillespie (screenwriter of upcoming feature The Void and member of Astron-6) keeps it thrilling and bizarre. Some of this imagery could easily have come from one of Astron’s films. Where does he find this stuff? @closedcaskettattoos Hailing from Ajax, Ontario, the trio…

So far, 2015 has been the year the masters of the horror score return to their craft. First up was Lost Themes, John Carpenter’s debut solo album, and now there is Four of a Kind, Goblin’s first new album in nearly ten years. The Italian quartet is, of course, the prog rock band that created several unique scores to a number of splatter films in the ’70s and ’80s, most famously the witchy theme to Dario Argento’s Suspiria. However, Goblin never actually set out to be a band that would score horror movies. Originally, it was a typical prog rock outfit called Cherry Five, until the group was called in to provide music for Argento’s Deep Red in 1975, which kicked off a career as the sound of the giallo.…

MORTAL KOMBAT X Xbox One, PS4, PC NetherRealm Studios Are you ready to pulp your opponents? Mortal Kombat X, the latest installment in the 23-year-old franchise delivers the goods with new player variants, gut-churning finishing moves and all the inter-fighter drama we’ve grown to love – in glorious 1080p. And though it brings much of the campy emotional heft the series is famous for, it also boasts a maturity beyond the “M” rating slapped on the box by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board – the organization the original MK helped bring into existence after its spine-ripping fatalities proved to be too much for concerned parents. Technically the eighteenth MK game (but written as a sequel to the 2011 incarnation), its story takes place twenty years after the events of…