Table of contents for RM#181 in RUE MORGUE

Do you believe in ghosts? It’s one of my least favourite questions to be asked, right up there with “What’s your favourite movie?” (impossible to answer) and “What do your tattoos mean?” (frankly, pretty rude). I cringe from it because it’s not a quick-and-dirty one to answer. A ‘no’ seems too rigid, too closed-minded and arrogant – I certainly don’t believe that the entire universe is empirically knowable. But a ‘yes’ tends toward the extreme opposite of the spectrum – you won’t catch me pouring salt into the corners of my home to ward off evil spirits or avoiding cracks in the sidewalk for the sake of my mother’s back. Fundamentally, I think I dislike the question because I feel like it’s not the right question to be asking to…

1 COFFIN CURIO SHELF $25 USD Colour your crypt with decor to die for, like this creepy cool coffin-shaped curio shelf from the fine minds at Sourpuss. Features a total of nineteen compartments for all manner of morbid odds and ends. With a sawtooth hanger on the back, this one’s ready to hang! sourpussclothing.com 2 EVIL DEAD 2 CLASSIC LOUNGE PANTS $27 USD Never get caught dead by dawn with these casual and comfy lounge pants, featuring a pattern of leering skulls from Sam Raimi’s classic cult flick. Made from a polyester/spandex blend, these moisture-wicking, two-pocket pants will ensure you stay groovy through the inevitable bloodbath. fright-rags.com 3 STEPHEN KING SOUNDTRACK COLLECTION $89.98 USD A night of uneasy listening awaits you with this fearful foursome of classic soundtracks, featuring James…

“There is within each of us a twin destiny: the natural and the supernatural. The cards are attracted to the supernatural part of our destiny, as one pole of a magnet attracts an opposite pole. This deck can forewarn us. I call it my house of horrors.”Dr. Terror, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors The aforementioned 1965 Amicus Production is probably the closest Tarot cards ever came to horror movie stardom but, if you care to look, you’ll find them in a few other likely (and unlikely) places. The eerie deck had a recurring role in Carnivale, made regular appearances on Dark Shadows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and reared its spooky head on The X-Files, natch. You can also catch whispers of Tarot lore in the surreal cult films of…

THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT WINCHESTER Starring Helen Mirren, Sarah Snook and Jason Clarke Written and directed by Tom Vaughan, Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig VVS Films Now a tourist attraction in California, the legendary Winchester mansion is famous for its sprawling, nonsensical layout – with over a hundred rooms, seven storeys, and doorways and staircases to nowhere – it’s an architectural wonder with an equally compelling back story. Sarah Winchester, widow of firearms tycoon William Wirt Winchester, oversaw endless expansion of the manor to appease the ghosts of those murdered with Winchester rifles, which she believed to be haunting her family. Were the Winchesters truly cursed, or was lady Winchester a few bullets short of a clip? Enter the Spierig brothers (Daybreakers, Predestination) to bring her story to the…

A WOLF IN LAMB�S CLOTHING THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) Blu-ray Starring Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Scott Glenn Directed by Jonathan Demme Written by Ted Talley Criterion Like having an old friend over for dinner, Criterion’s The Silence of the Lambs Blu-ray reissue is a welcome addition to any movie collection, even if it is a familiar dish with only a few new ingredients. The plot of director Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the 1988 Thomas Harris bestseller hardly needs to be re-encapsulated here. FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), Hannibal “the cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), and Buffalo “I’d fuck me” Bill (Ted Levine) are characters many of us revisit often, whether it be on Criterion’s original laserdisc (spine number 13!) or various MGM/20th Century Fox DVDs and Blurays.…

COME INTO ME Lonnie Nadler, Zac Thompson and Piotr Kowalski Black Mask WINNEBAGO GRAVEYARD Steve Niles and Alison Sampson Image THERE’S NOTHING THERE Patrick Kindlon and Maria Llovet Black Mask BABY TEETH VOLUME 1 Donny Cates and Garry Brown Aftershock ANNO DRACULA - 1895: SEVEN DAYS IN MAYHEM Kim Newman and Paul McCaffrey Titan Comics CHILLING ADVENTURES IN SORCERY VOLUME 1 Various Archie Love it or hate it, social media has permeated our global culture and affected our everyday lives in unprecedented ways. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon has been steadily creeping its way into horror fiction narratives. “I think horror has always been best employed when it is addressing contemporary societal fears,” says Lonnie Nadler, co-writer of Come Into Me, a new comic series that uses social networking as a…

THE MAGICIAN Clive Barker The Clive Barker Archive Quick history lesson: Commedia dell’arte was an improvisational form of theatre, popular from the 16th to 18th centuries. This mode used scripted dialogue, with actions and scenes often created and improvised by the actors. Got that? Good. Moving on. The Magician is a farce in the style of Commedia dell’arte written and mounted by Clive Barker and The Dog Company in 1978. It is now being published by The Clive Barker Archive for the first time, along with photos from the original production and its poster art. In the author’s note, Barker states, “These plays are not finished things, they’re invitations to collective work… these are blueprints, not houses,” which encapsulates the difficulty in reviewing plays in book form: there is so…

WITH ALL OF the recent changes to the mag, it’s still a thrill for me to get the latest issue in my mailbox after fifteen years. Announcing the slashing of your print output hit me pretty hard, the thoughts went through my head… perhaps this was signalling a cruel end for the Rue. Thankfully this doesn’t seem to be the case, and so thank you Andrea for carrying the torch! Bring on the new columns and keep revamping! The new website is fantastic and is totally bookmark worthy (it wasn’t always the case for me in the past). One thing I’ve always wondered, why don’t you post all of your film reviews as an online database? ADAM VESELISIN – BURLINGTON, ONTARIO RE: R.I.P. 2017 Always interesting to see what I…

FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS AND OVER SEVERAL THEATRICAL RUNS BEGINNING IN FEBRUARY 2010, AN 80-MINUTE PLAY CALLED GHOST STORIES SCARED THE PANTS OFF BRITISH AUDIENCES. The brainchild of Jeremy Dyson (a TV writer best known for the BBC cult favourite The League of Gentleman) and Andy Nyman (whose acting roles range from Christopher Smith’s Severance and Black Death to Star Wars: The Last Jedi), it offered an immersive theatrical experience that induced serious chills along with a number of laughs. The show also terrorized audiences in Toronto, Moscow, Lima, Shanghai and Sydney, and now a film version written and directed by the duo bids to frighten viewers worldwide. Opening on Friday, April 13 in the UK from Lionsgate and April 20 via IFC Midnight in the U.S., the big-screen…

THERE’S AN OLD JOKE THAT SAYS THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ART AND PORNOGRAPHY IS A MUSEUM. And while there is certainly a lot of truth to that statement, it must be admitted that even the art establishment has its limits, limits that were tested by photographer Joel-Peter Witkin almost four decades ago. To observe Witkin’s work is to be placed in a dilemma: they’re hard to look at but equally hard to look away from. The Brooklyn-born artist, now 78, has made a long career of controversy and left a lasting influence on the modern world (see sidebar) with his morbid photographic tableaux and still-lifes, often involving deformed subjects and outsiders. More notorious, though, are photos that involve corpses. Or pieces of them anyway. Exhibit A: The Kiss. Shot in…

IN STILL/BORN, NEW MOTHER MARY (CHRISTIE BURKE) SEEMS TO HAVE IT ALL; A SPACIOUS HOME IN AN AFFLUENT NEIGHBOURHOOD, A SUPPORTIVE MOM (SHEILA MCCARTHY), AND A DEVOTED AND SUCCESSFUL HUSBAND (Jesse Moss: Ginger Snaps, Tucker and Dale vs Evil). Beneath the glossy veneer of her suburban life, however, she is beset by both postpartum and postnatal depression, following the still birth of one of her twins – a dual-pronged trauma that Mary bears largely on her own, as her mother lives far away and husband Jack is often called away to work. Soon, Mary’s demons come knocking, one in particular lurks in the shadows of her vast home, seemingly always present but always out of sight. Or could it just be her emotional veneer cracking? Whatever the case, one thing…

OVERLOOKED, FORGOTTEN AND DISMISSED THIS ISSUE: LANCE HOWLS AT THE MOON THE WOLF IS A TRAMP LYCAN MVD Visual Unlike other movie monsters, werewolves are dependent on the makeup department to make them either believable or laughable. Set in 1986, Lycan focuses on a group of college students who decide to tackle the Talbot County Werewolf, a local legend about a wolfman who terrorized a farming community 100 years prior. They figure the best way to do it is to go camping in the woods where they’re picked off one by one by a creature whose talons look like a cross between Wolverine’s adamantium claws and Freddy’s razor glove. Does Lycan have bite? If you can look past the cardboard acting, atrocious music and amateur camerawork, you might enjoy…

Channelling ’70s Satanic Panic films like Race With the Devil, Steve Niles brings us Winnebago Graveyard, the tale of a vacationing family terrorized by a bloodthirsty cult in backwoods America. Hoping to use the trip as a means of bonding with his new thirteen-year-old stepson Bobby, Dan takes the boy and his mother to a bizarre, out-of-the-way carnival. But when their Winnebago is stolen, the trio become the target of Satanists hoping to add them to a long string of human sacrifices to their pagan gods. It’s a bloody nightmare filled with monsters, both human and demonic, that barely takes the time to explore its surroundings. Instead, Niles throws his characters directly into the deep end, making for a fast-paced read. Luckily, artist Alison Sampson fills each panel with enough…

MOST OF US ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE ALLEGED CRIMES OF LIZZIE BORDEN, THANKS TO AN EERIE CHILDREN’S RHYME DOCUMENTED IN AN 1894 NEWSPAPER. According to the most enduring version of the chant, Borden killed her mother (actually her stepmother) with 40 axe blows before doling out 41 to her father. That’s 81 whacks, if anyone’s counting – about 50 more than the killer actually dealt, but enough to forever cement Borden’s status as one of America’s most notorious accused murderesses. The unsolved killings have inspired dozens of works over the years, including an upcoming film by director Craig William Macneill (The Boy, TV’s Channel Zero), but Canadian author Dawn Ius’ new novel puts a fresh twist on the case: not only does Lizzie (out April 10 from Simon Pulse) reframe…

ISSUE #181 On the first day of filming Blood of Dracula, Udo Kier was so debilitated from having lost twenty pounds in a week that he was at one point unable to stand. When Pakistani bride Aasia Bibi, 21, was forced to marry against her will, she tried to poison her husband with a yoghurt drink that inadvertently killed seventeen of her extended family members. Italian gore god Lucio Fulci passed away at his home on March 13, 1996 at the age of 68 after failing to take his insulin, causing some to speculate that his death was a suicide. In 2001, Michael Rooker unofficially reprised his role from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for the music video “All Wrapped Up,” by the heavy metal band American Head Charge.…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, FRANCE HELD A RELATIVELY LOW PROFILE ON THE WORLD STAGE WHEN IT CAME TO GENRE CINEMA. The country’s output since then, however, has traumatized the global psyche with what critic and programmer James Quandt called the “New French Extremity,” a wave of bloodsoaked philosophical French horror that emerged in the early 2000s. And while Fabien Delage’s multilingual Cold Ground doesn’t neatly fit into that movement’s mould, his latest movie succeeds at merging French brutality with a found-footage creature feature that’s in a league all its own. Out this month from Wild Eye Releasing, Cold Ground opens with an intertitle stating that, in 1976, two filmmakers went to the French/Swiss border and never returned. Thirty years later, their footage was recovered and it revealed that Daniel (Fabrice Pierre)…

Producer/director William Castle always seemed to be living the dream in his heyday, pushing the scare factor beyond the screen in ’50s flicks such as The Tingler (1959) and House on Haunted Hill (1959) with zip-lining plastic skeletons and electric shock-delivering theatre seats. Though it lacks a similar dime-store gimmick, Castle’s effective 1964 shocker The Night Walker delivers equally lurid horror fare, in which the savvy director matches feverish dream sequences with delirious plot twists. Recently released by Shout Factory on Blu-ray, the film plays with the line between nightmares and reality long before Wes Craven perfected the approach in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). More than that, Castle also delves into the sinister way that aspirations and desires can be undermined, as screen icon Barbara Stanwyck plays a…

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AMERICAN GOTHIC Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed. Cambridge University Press Gothic may have been born in Britain, but it was America that gave it its darker and more horrific shades, thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, who singlehandedly invented the genre of fiction we know and love. Still, there is much more – both before and after Poe – that the young nation brought to the bloody table, as demonstrated by this selection of sixteen scholarly essays, plus introduction. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with gothic in various historical periods: early America (puritan and newly republican), the ages of romanticism, realism, naturalism, and modernism, plus the contemporary period. The second covers identities (racial, female, queer) and locations (frontier, urban, and the South). The…

LIKE MUCH OF THAT DECADE, 1988 WAS A PROLIFIC YEAR FOR HORROR FILMS. It saw the long-awaited return of Michael Myers in Halloween 4, the birth of a new horror movie icon, Chucky, with Child’s Play, and new works from some of the most beloved masters of the macabre, including John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Lamberto Bava. Released on March 4, 1988, Renny (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4) Harlin’s American directorial debut, Prison, is another gem from that year that unfortunately slipped through the cracks after a limited theatrical run, although it was resurrected in 2013 by Scream Factory in a Collector’s Edition. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Prison tells the story of a man executed for a crime he did not commit, and whose angry ghost exacts revenge when the…

BEHOLDER: COMPLETE EDITION PS4, Xbox One Warm Lamp Games Every decision has a consequence: whether the outcome is good, middling, or results in the death of an entire family, it’s impossible for any of us to break free of the vicious cycle of cause and effect. Siberian developer Warm Lamp Games seems to know this well, and with the long-awaited console release of their 2016 PC and mobile hit Beholder (bundled here with its Blissful Sleep DLC), they mostly succeed in pushing players’ moralistic buttons to great effect. n the world of Beholder, totalitarianism’s the flavour of the foreseeable future, and players assume the role of Carl, a landlord appointed by the state. Tasked with spying, reporting on, and, in some instances, straight up murdering tenants, it’s Carl’s job…