Table of contents for RM#182 in RUE MORGUE

I have my mother’s brown eyes and massively thick hair. I also inherited her high risk of breast cancer, osteoporosis and depression. I have my father’s wit and tenacious work ethic, as well as his varicose veins and his tendency to ruminate. These are all part and parcel of the genomic typhoon that is Andrea Subissati, whether I choose to acknowledge it or not. And I don’t mean that with any self-effacing fatalism, either – the way I see it, we’re all dealt a genetic hand and it’s up to us to play our cards right. And so, I check for lumps regularly, I manage my mental health as best I can, and I direct my obsessive energy into my career. It’s served me pretty well thus far and I’m…

1 MASK COMMERCIAL BUTTON-UP SHIRT $39.99 USD Let your love of Halloween ring at the highest decibels with this hard-to-miss button-up shirt bedecked with masks from Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Wears better if you can break out into the “Happy Halloween Silver Shamrock” song at a moment’s notice. creepycompany.com 2 CRYPT MAKEUP BRUSHES $40.72 USD Glamour ghouls need to check out this set of nylon-hair cosmetic brushes featuring metallic handles designed around a bat, cross, scythe, skull and claw. Available individually or as a fivepiece set with a handmade faux-leather coffin case, this morbid makeup kit will be the highlight of your boudoir noir. cookiedoughdeco.com 3 GODZILLA HUMIDIFIER $127 USD Add some kaiju breath to your digs with this unique humidifier that blows mist through a blue LED…

IS EVIL THE PRODUCT OF GENETICS OR UPBRINGING? It’s an old question that’s been hotly debated for centuries, from ancient Greeks who questioned the idea of free will, to racist eugenics movements that nearly wiped out entire ethnicities, and current discourses surrounding education and justice. As popular opinion oscillated over time, horror narratives have reflected both sides of the coin. Arguably the most iconic example of this can be found in the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of a surgeon with a god complex who creates a man from the dead plays strongly on the nurture side of the debate. Frankenstein’s monster possesses great strength naturally, but learns malice and wrath from the intolerant people he encounters. Far from a slave to his biology,…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE IS PLACED UNDER ARREST meanest streets DOBERMAN COP Arrow Films My girlfriend has been a cop for over twenty years. I’ve got a lot of respect for her profession, but just like with every other trade, there are always a couple of idiots who make the rest look bad. That’s exactly the case in this Japanese film by director Kinji (Battle Royale) Fukasaku, which stars Shin’ichi ‘Sonny’ Chiba (Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2) as a cop working the mean streets of Tokyo investigating some prostitute murders. Filled with wicked martial arts fights, high octane shoot-outs, spurting geysers of blood, and some strange scenes of supernatural soothsaying and striptease, this 1977 throwback is finally available for you to watch, gasp and gag over. And say what…

The One About the Travelling Salesman “Authentically nightmarish.” Oh sure – how many times have you heard that one? As tired-ass critical boilerplates go, it’s practically lost all meaning. But maybe if Sam Was Here (2016) eventually finds the audience it deserves, “authentically nightmarish” will get some rehabilitation. First released to mixed reviews in Europe in 2016 and more recently plopped onto Shudder with little fanfare in North America, Sam Was Here – a.k.a. Nemesis – seems like what might have ensued had Franz Kafka, Stephen King and David Lynch all missed that same left turn at Albuquerque and run out of gas together at a creepy abandoned diner in the Twilight Zone. But hey, maybe instead I’ll just give credit where it’s genuinely due: French director/co-writer Christophe Deroo, American…

Weird FIction has an even weirder cousin known as bizarro. It’s been bubbling up from the fringes of horror for years now, thanks in large part to the efforts of publisher Eraserhead Press, and its tales of possessed sexual organs (Carlton Mellick III’s Haunted Vagina), machines that dream of being soap opera stars (Kevin L. Donihe’s Washer Mouth), and killers that chase their victims through multiple afterlives (Tiffany Scandal’s Shit Luck). The result? A deep cult following and sizable back catalogue that spans some 400 hundred titles by 150 authors. This spring, the company was honoured with the Specialty Press Award at the Bram Stoker Awards, bringing the subgenre even further out from the shadows. “Bizarro fiction is a genre for people who seek out ‘weird stuff’ in the same…

THEY SAY THE QUICKEST WAY TO SOMEONE’S HEART IS THROUGH THEIR STOMACH, and a cold beer paired with these soft pretzel fingers, served with a blood-red cheese sauce spiked with your favourite brew, is the ultimate way to get there! Making your own soft pretzels and cheese sauce is far easier than one might think. It’s one of my go-to appetizers when enjoying beers and horror flicks with friends. The sauce is also delicious served with cubed bread, meats and vegetables, and goes perfectly alongside a flight or pint. Did you make this recipe? Share your photo, and remember to tag #ruemorgue and #homicidalhomemaker on Instagram or Twitter to share your creations! GET MORE RECIPES FROM WWW.THEHOMICIDALHOMEMAKER.COM SEVERED SOFT PRETZEL FINGERS WITH BLOODY BEER CHEESE SAUCE YEILDS 24 FINGERS FOR…

Cadabra Records has seemingly cornered the market on spoken word horror, with increasingly high-end dramatizations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and more on vinyl. Yet given that the running time of a 12-inch at 33 RPM only amounts to about 22 minutes, vinyl isn’t necessarily the ideal format for telling an in-depth story. Enter Bafflegab, a UK-based audio production company who released an audio remake of Hammer’s classic The Blood on Satan’s Claw on Audible last winter, with a digital download and CD slated for June. While not a horror-specific label, much of Bafflegab’s output focuses on the genre, including adaptations of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, some works by legendary ghost story author M.R. James, and even a comedy called Baker’s End, featuring Tom (Doctor Who)…

TESLA VS LOVECRAFT It’s unlikely that inventor Nikola Tesla and horror author H.P. Lovecraft ever met face-toface. It’s also unlikely that Tesla built a mech suit to kill gangs of freaky fish-folk and tentacle-waving eyesores straight out of the astral plane, but thankfully, that hasn’t stopped developer 10tons Ltd. (Crimsonland, Neon Chrome) from conjuring up this thoroughly rewarding dual-stick shooter that challenges and delights in equal measure. Wielding a sizable assortment of lethal electric weaponry and gadgets, players blast away the grotesque legions of Lovecraftian monstrosities the author conjures up to put a stop to Tesla’s scientific endeavours. It’s a totally bonkers concept and one that pairs nicely with the game’s cartoonish style and manic pace. As with many titles in the genre, much of the fun comes from…

I AM A LONG-TIME devoted human of RM. Throughout these times, most of the girlfriends I had thought I was kind of perverted to read such a mag. That would make me sad, because horror is such a passion for me and RM is the place to be. Then I got this new girlfriend who, by herself, starts to read all my back issues… wanting more! Last week was my birthday, and she got me a two-year subscription to RM! I don’t have words to describe how happy I am right now. Miss Witch Rose, would you marry me? JOËL CARON, VIA EMAIL WITH ANDREA Subissati coming on board as Executive Editor last year, I knew the content of Rue Morgue would improve drastically. However, I have to also mention…

MODERN SOCIETY HOLDS DEAR TO THE IDEA THAT FAMILIAL TIES ARE INVULNERABLE, BUT IF THERE’S ONE THING HORROR SEEKS TO ACCOMPLISH, IT’S TO QUESTION AND OCCASIONALLY DISMANTLE SOCIETY’S MOST CHERISHED TRUTHS. In spite of this, many genre films take a fairly conservative tack on the subject, where the family unit either comes together to vanquish evil (as in The Conjuring and Poltergeist franchises) or to dish it out (House of 1000 Corpses, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). This is perhaps why movies such as The Shining and Pet Sematary weigh so heavily in our collective cinematic psyches – familicide is a taboo that gnaws at the very core of our cultural DNA. No doubt this is one of the reasons why Hereditary, the masterful feature debut of writer/director Ari Aster, has…

IN THE ANNALS OF HORROR-THEMED TOY LINES, AURORA’S CLASSIC UNIVERSAL MONSTERS MODEL KITS – MADE POPULAR IN THE 1960S – HOLD A SPECIAL PLACE, as do McFarlane Toys’ Movie Maniacs line of the late ’90s, and NECA’s Cult Classics series of the late 2000s. All of these great collectibles were children of their time, having come and gone with much acclaim and fanfare. Against them stands an unlikely series which, no pun intended, simply refuses to die: the Living Dead Dolls, released continually since 1998 by New York-based company Mezco Toyz. The creation of two lifelong horror fans with the right idea at the right time, the 10-inch-tall plastic dolls with their rooted hair, fabric outfits and miniature cardboard coffin box packaging are the stuff collector culture is made of.…

I’M NO STRANGER TO INTERNATIONAL FILM MARKETS, having attended the annual AFM over twenty times, but I’m a relative newbie at the 30-year-old European Film Market (EFM), which blows its lagging US counterpart away in number of screenings, movie quality, theatres, overall usefulness and scope. Not to mention endlessly flowing cheap beer and watermelon-sized pretzels. This past February 15th to 23rd in chilly Berlin’s sleek Potsdamer Platz area, the EFM kept me busy morning, noon and night. In conjunction with EFM, the welcoming German city also runs its esteemed Berlinale International Film Festival at the same time, so my screening schedule was jam-packed with selections from both. This year marked my fifth Berlin jaunt, where, suffering from jetlag and insomnia, I plowed through 25 genre movies from all over the…

THE FUTURE IS ALMOST NOW IN LEIGH WHANNELL’S UPGRADE. Inspired by ’80s sci-fi/horror hybrids such as The Terminator, Scanners, and RoboCop, Whannell (co-creator of the Saw and Insidious movie franchises) channels their spirit with the story of a quadriplegic implanted with a computer chip that restores his mobility at a terrible price. It’s a small-budget genre effort with big ambition that should resonate in a society where almost everyone carries a high-powered computer in their back pocket. “It’s not about projecting forward into a future where Terminator-like robot soldiers are stalking humanity and we’re all huddled in a ditch underground eating rat meat,” says Whannell of Upgrade’s take on the shape of things to come. “That is something that makes for a great science fiction film. But what I’m talking…

Blast from the Past The idea that past traumas inevitably re-emerge is central to many horror films. From every freshly dead body that claws out of a grave, every slasher film that flashes forward “ten years later,” to ancient Egyptian curses that stretch over centuries, horror has an enthusiastic faith in historical recurrence. That’s certainly the case with Daughters of Satan, a decent 1972 Philippines-shot shocker about vengeful occultists that recently made the jump to Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory. Though it takes a few liberties with the usual approach, the film’s portrayal of doomed characters trapped by the inescapable depravities of the past keeps it relevant more than 40 years later, especially given the recent rise of extreme ideologies that were considered unquestionably evil not so long ago. A…

THE HUNGER Alma Katsu G.P Putnam’s Sons What if starvation and bad luck weren’t the only things to threaten the Donner Party? The Hunger ponders this idea by way of its highly successful mix of historical fiction and horror tale. In real life, the Donner Party was a group of families travelling by horse and wagon to California in 1846-47. After a series of mishaps and tragedies, they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the dead of winter; only 45 of 90 survived. The stories that came from those who did told of countless struggles and included accusations of cannibalism. Now, in author Alma Katsu’s imaginative recounting, their misfortunes also come with a supernatural component. How the party ultimately met its doom confounds the imagination. First: poor trails,…

DER TODESKING SOUNDTRACK Hermann Kopp, Daktari Lorenz and John Boy Walton ONE WAY STATIC RECORDS Jörg Buttgereit will forever be known as the man behind the ’80s gross-out shocker Nekromantik and while his follow-up experimental film Der Todesking (The Death King) is much less talked about, it’s no less depressing. Using the same team of composers behind Nekromantik, the backdrop to this death/suicide-themed feature is Daktari Lorenz’s “Die Fahrt ins Reich der Menschentrummer” and all four versions are included here. It's a minimalist but majestic masterpiece that utilizes lo-fi synthesizers and sounds like it could be from an epic fantasy. Hermann Kopp plays a winding, repetitive strain, complete with choir vocals on “Poison” before things get pitch-black weird on “Fish,” a segment that actually sounds like being submerged underwater. Haunting,…

ISSUE #182 Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton are the only two actors to face off against a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator on screen. Last October, 21-year-old Cheung was killed by the Buried Alive ride at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park amusement park. He was hit by a mechanical part after wandering into an operational area. In 1983, British pop duo Soft Cell (known for their hit “Tainted Love”), released the song “Martin,” inspired by George A. Romero’s classic movie. After Mary Cerruti, 61, went missing in 2015, her Harris County home was sold at a foreclosure auction, but the new homeowners found her skeleton inside a wall. Authorities believe Cerruti fell through the attic floor and became trapped. Star Christopher Lee has only thirteen lines and seven minutes of…

YOUNG GIRLS AREN’T ALL SUGAR AND SPICE AND EVERYTHING NICE. Take Hereditary’s Charlie Graham, who prefers amateur taxidermy and making toys out of found objects over playing with Barbies and Pokémon. Played by fifteen-year-old Milly Shapiro in her big-screen debut, the creative, reclusive and introspective Charlie can often be found holing up in the family treehouse to work on her crafts or exploring the nearby countryside without concern for proper footwear. When her grandmother dies, it’s Charlie who takes it the hardest, retreating even deeper into her unusual world and away from her mom’s attempts to comfort her. Her strangeness and complexity are a welcome departure from the typical “creepy kid in a horror movie” trope, and while Hereditary continues to collect accolades for its powerful performances, it’s Shapiro’s Charlie…

I REMEMBER THE DAY I MET GARY PULLIN. It was a fateful fall day in Toronto, the only year that Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival ever made it to our city. I was manning a merch table in the theatre lobby when an unassuming and friendly guy lumbered up, pored over the magazine with keen interest, and pressed a business card into my hand. His name was Gary Pullin and it was obvious from the card that he had some serious design chops. As it turned out, he also had a deep love of horror that extended from The Hilarious House of Frightenstein (a show we both loved as kids) to Deep Red magazine and the glorious days of home video, where European horror first broke into North America. I’ve told…

FEAR THE FERAL WILDLIN Starring Bel Powley, Liv Tyler and Brad Dourif Directed by Fritz Böhm Written by Fritz Böhm and Florian Eder IFC Midnight A coincidentally common theme in genre fare this year is youngsters being sequestered in remote houses, hidden away allegedly for their own protection. It’s the central premise of both The Lodgers and Marrowbone, and also seen in the thirteen-minute prologue of Wildling. Gabriel (Brad Dourif) keeps little Anna a virtual prisoner in his home in the forest, telling her tales of the voracious titular creature that dwells amidst the surrounding trees. Years later, Anna – now a child in a teenager’s body, and played by Bel Powley – is finally extracted from captivity and taken in by local sheriff Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler). Powley, who…

NEEDS MORE MIIKE ICHI THE KILLER (2001) Blu-ray Starring Tadanobu Asano, Nao Ohmori and Shin’ya Tsukamoto Directed by Takashi Miike Written by Sakichi Satô Well Go USA Entertainment Some say there’s no love in violence; that’s more or less the case with Well Go’s Definitive Remastered Edition of Ichi the Killer. Back in 2001, one filmmaker was on the tip of just about every bloodthirsty genre fan’s tongue: Japanese director Takashi Miike. Long before Martyrs, Antichrist, and others challenged the boundaries of representation, Miike pushed his audience’s thresholds for mayhem with his blend of extreme violence, blunt sexuality, and dark comedy. His adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto’s manga Ichi the Killer remains among the most influential pieces of genre filmmaking of the last two decades, garnering a substantial cult following. Now,…

WAYWARD SISTERS Allison O’Toole, ed. TO Comix Press HEROES OF HOMEROOM C Anthony Ruttgaizer and Carlos Granda Aristocrats Comics FOUKE Ken Kaniel Qualify Comics PESTILENCE VOLUME 1 Frank Tieri and Oleg Okunev Aftershock GHOUL SQUAD #1 Brandon Rhiness and Carlos Trigo Insane Comics KIM REAPER VOLUME 1: GRIM BEGINNINGS Sarah Graley ONI Press Diversity continues to be a hot topic in the comics industry. Though horror fares better than most genres when it comes to equal representation between ethnicities and genders, there is certainly room for improvement – especially behind the scenes. It’s a topic that Allison O’Toole was eager to address; a horror fan and comics editor, O’Toole devised an anthology project that would allow female-identifying and gender-nonconforming creators the opportunity to tell monster stories from a perspective she…

FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD Ahmed Saadawi Penguin Originally published in Arabic in 2013, Frankenstein in Baghdad subsequently won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Now available in English, courtesy of a new translation by Jonathan Wright, the novel explores the horror, chaos, and mass death that has visited the residents of Baghdad since the U.S. occupation. Framed as a reinterpretation of the gothic Frankenstein, it delivers raw, horrific truths with the blackest of humour. In trying times, the only constant is the rising tide of the dead and missing. In war-torn Baghdad, those left behind to grieve aren’t always granted a body to lay to rest, as sometimes their loved ones only turn up in pieces. The novel follows a wide cast of characters, including the elderly Elishva who grieves for…

THE TERM “HORROR PUNK” MIGHT DESCRIBE ANY NUMBER OF BANDS WITH A PENCHANT FOR B-MOVIES AND PUTTING FISTS IN THE AIR, but mostly it refers to those bands that use the look and sound of the Misfits as a template. That formula is simple enough: take a soaring melody, add lyrics about a horror movie plot, and punctuate with a whoa-oh chorus. So when anyone decides to break out of that hardened horror mould, we take notice, and we’ve taken notice of the charmingly named The Dahmers, a band out of Bromölla, Sweden, with the moniker of North America’s notorious cannibal. The Dahmers are horror punk all the way, but take influence in the pre-punk days of ’60s garage rock, when bands often wrote fun, monster-themed novelty tunes. For added…