Table of contents for RM#186 Women In Horror Special Issue in RUE MORGUE

As I write this editorial in December 2018, I’m still basking in the glow of October’s Frightmare in the Falls convention. If you’ve never been to a horror convention, I strongly recommend it – in fact, there’s a handy guide to some of the biggest and best in this very issue. If, like me, you were the Misfits-loving, horror shirt-wearing weirdo at your high school who couldn’t possibly conceive of a conference centre packed with these same such weirdos, then you might be missing out on a surprisingly eye-opening experience. It’s hard to describe feeling like you’re home among strangers, but horror love has that effect on people. Living in Toronto where film thrives (both mainstream and indie) and working at Rue Morgue where I’m constantly surrounded by the genre’s…

BAPHOMET DOOR KNOCKER $29.99 USD Knock knock! Who’s there? It’s your old friend Baphomet the Sabbatic Goat, and he’s sure to keep those pesky Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses off your porch with his pentacle-emblazoned visage. Made of steel, just like your commitment to privacy! luciferianapotheca.com 2 HORROR VALENTINEA DAY CARDS $3.57 USD Your love letters will be legendary… even in Hell! Tell the one you love what a special “Thing” you’ve got going with these 5 x 7 inch Valentine’s Day cards by DoodleDojo, printed in matte finish with a blank interior. Whether it’s a cranial embrace from a facehugger or a squeeze from your favourite Cenobite, there’s a card for your every bad intention.etsy.com/shop/doodledojo 3 MACABRE MANSION JIGSAW PUZZLE $35 USD If your idea of a perfect winter evening…

WHEN SUSAN FALUDI'S BACKLASE: THE UNDECLARED WAR AGAINST AMERICAN WOMEN WAS PUBLISED IN 1991, no one could have predicted that its title would prove so prophetic for ’90s horror cinema. Backlash dealt with the fallout of the demands of second wave feminism, which saw a steady stream of mainstream media articles opining the new place of women in the workforce. With increased participation in the public realm came a crisis in the eyes of the more traditionally minded populace, and this anxiety once again shone through in films featuring women who kill. Among the watershed moments for Faludi was Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, which sees the career-driven Alex (Glenn Close) have an affair with married family man Dan (Michael Douglas) and go over the edge when he refuses…

LARS HOUSE ON THE LEFT THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT Starring Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz and Uma Thurman Written and directed by Lars von Trier IFC Films Lars von Trier’s latest cinematic outing may have signalled his return to Cannes after being declared persona non grata in 2011, but that’s not to say the auteur has cleaned up his act. Involving a serial killer’s journey through a metaphor that’s pretty obvious (but I still won’t reveal), The House That Jack Built saw over a hundred walkouts at its world premiere, yet also garnered a six-minute standing ovation from the audience members who remained. That the movie is divisive is an understatement, but for our purposes the real question is: does cinema’s enfant terrible deliver the scares along with the shock?…

If you’ve read The Damnation Game – and damn you to Hell if you haven’t – you’ll doubtless recall Clive Barker observing (in one of my alltime fave passages) that “Hell is reimagined by each generation, its terrain surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold.” He probably wasn’t thinking specifically of the Hell depicted in Poor Devil, a 1973 made-for-TV Faustian fantasy/comedy starring (seriously!) Sammy Davis Jr., Christopher Lee, Jack Klugman and Adam West. Or… was he? In Poor Devil, Hell is an overcaffeinated yet underwhelming polyester maelstrom of receptionists, technicians, bean counters, janitors and middle-management types. Davis plays Sammy (yes, that’s the character’s name too – perhaps they were worried that we’d get confused), an ambitious bottom-feeder minion who dreams of someday rising above his station; understandable,…

Sadly, with each new year, the horror community loses some of its greats. It was at the beginning of our favourite season, on October 1, 2018, that Italian soundtrack composing legend Stelvio Cipriani lost his battle with ischaemia at age 81. Cipriani broke into film music with the soundtrack to spaghetti western The Bounty Killer (1966) and soon found himself scoring all manner of westerns and poliziottesco (violent Italian cop films) before working on gialli and forming a close association with Mario Bava. It wasn’t long before the composer became one of the genre’s most revered and respected maestros. Here’s a small selection of Cipriani’s finest horror soundtrack contributions. A Bay of Blood(1971) Also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, this giallo-esque horror film from Mario Bava is suspected…

OVER THE YEARS I’ve had many articles written about me and my work from publications all over the world, but the article that you’ve just published is the single most special thing ever written about what I do. The review brought my partners to tears of joy. Seriously. Thank you all for what you do for our genre. Filmmaking is an increasingly hard business but people like yourselves make it worth the journey! With great admiration and affection, ADAM MARCUS (DIRECTOR, JASON GOES TO HELL), VIA EMAIL WORDS CAN’T describe how honoured I am to be in a Rue Morgue magazine! Thank you so much Chris Hammond for the awesome interview and getting my work in such a cool magazine, greatly appreciated brother! I’m still waiting for my issues to…

NICOLE ANGEMI Pathology Assistant Instagram has expanded traditional definitions of what social media can become with certain personalities curating accounts with oddball, original content that’s more accessible than a typical blog. Take pathology assistant Nicole Angemi (@mrs_angemi), whose account features graphic images of organs, excised ringworms and reconstructive surgeries, and boasts 1.7 million followers and counting. The visuals are ultra gory but Angemi’s commentary is educational and fascinating, with a conversational tone in everyday vernacular that explains how a patient can survive in spite of arriving at the emergency room with his exposed guts in his hands. Not for the faint of heart! JEX BLACKMORE Activist, Performance Artist, Writer Horror and politics are unlikely bedfellows, but Jex Blackmore, activist and former spokesperson for The Satanic Temple, has set her dark…

CONVENTIONS JANUARY 5-6 WALKER STALKER CON Portland, Oregon walkerstalkercon.com/portland JANUARY 25-27 HAUNTCON New Orleans, Louisiana hauntcon.com FEBRUARY 22-24 MAD MONSTER PARTY Charlotte, North Carolina madmonster.com MARCH 8-10 MONSTER-MANIA CON Cherry Hill, New Jersey monstermania.net MARCH 15-17 HORRORHOUND WEEKEND Cincinnati, Ohio horrorhoundweekend.com MARCH 21-24 TRANSWORLD'S HALLOWEEN & ATTRACTIONS SHOW St. Louis, Missouri haashow.com MARCH 22-24 SPOOKY EMPIRE Orlando, Florida spookyempire.com MARCH 29-31 NEW JERSEY HORROR CON AND FILM FESTIVAL Atlantic City, New Jersey newjerseyhorrorcon.com APRIL 5-7 CINEMA WASTELAND Strongsville, Ohio cinemawasteland.com APRIL 12-14 MONSTERPALOOZA Pasadena, California monsterpalooza.com/spring APRIL 19-21 WALKER STALKER CON Chicago, Illinois walkerstalkercon.com/chicago APRIL 25-28 CALGARY COMIC AND ENTERTAINMENT EXPO Calgary, Alberta calgaryexpo.com APRIL 26-28 MOTOR CITY NIGHTMARES Novi, Michigan motorcitynightmares.com MAY 3-5 CRYPTICON Seattle, Washington crypticonseattle.com MAY 3-5 TEXAS FRIGHTMARE WEEKEND Dallas, Texas texasfrightmareweekend.com MAY 9-12 STOKERCON Grand…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE HIRES A HITMAN PUTS THE ASS IN ASSASSIN A DAY OF VIOLENCE MVD Visual When I was a kid in school and someone would say that his dad could beat up mine, I always used to reply, “Yeah? How much would that cost me?” Seriously, though, the life of a hitman isn’t all champagne and caviar – just ask Mitchell, the protagonist of this hard-boiled British flick who is on the run after he whacks a crackhead who owes his boss a lot of money… and then takes off with the ill-gotten gains. Though camerawork and sound quality are a wee bit clumsy, there’s lots of good gore here, including a scene where a guy gets emasculated with a pair of garden shears and his teeth…

The Rest is History KISS OF THE TARANTULA HELPS ILLUSTRATE WHY HORROR FILMS AND TV SHOWS ARE BEST CONSIDERED WITHIN THEIR CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS It seems impossible to escape the breathless hype that seems to dominate so much of online discourse. Though we’re all guilty of rooting for a horror movie or franchise as if it’s a beloved sports team battling for a playoff spot, it’s important to keep in mind that you can’t really “win” at art and storytelling. Personal taste notwithstanding, this rush to crown the latest horror entertainment as the “best ever” does a disservice to a genre that’s better appreciated as part of a historical tradition. Horror is – and always has been – an intricate web in which filmmakers spin something new out of…

THE ART OF WRITING GENRE FICTION Michael Knost and Tim Waggoner Maddog Press It’s nice to see the word “art” in this book’s title right alongside “genre fiction,” because writing is indeed an art, even if you choose to populate your stories with monsters, serial killers and indescribable somethings that groan and bump in the night. Both Michael Knost and Tim Waggoner come to The Art of Writing Genre Fiction with a wealth of experience not only as authors, but also as teachers and, in the case of Knost, as an editor. That said, the content within is not new, but rather a collection of essays and articles that the pair has penned on the topic and published elsewhere, largely online. They cover everything from finding the time to write,…

CHOICE CUTS FROM “PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE” SOUNDTRACK Andrey Iskanov and Alexander Shevchenko SPIKEROT RECORDS Ten years ago, Rue Morgue covered Philosophy of a Knife, a four-hour shockumentary depicting human experiments carried out by the Japanese during WWII. The soundtrack focuses on darkness, dissonance and madness in an attempt to capture the onscreen atrocities sonically. A jarring mix of industrial and ambience, Andrey Iskanov and Alexander Shevchenko’s score only occasionally dips to something approaching orchestral melody, as it’s mostly characterized by thumping beats, metallic chugging, and metal scraping steel effects. Recorded using digital versions of analog synths and simulators, there’s a crude, low-budget sound to the whole affair. That, combined with the score’s complete lack of narrative coherence, makes Philosophy of a Knife a tough listen at best, but its…

ISSUE # 186 After hearing of Edgar Allan Poe’s death on Sunday, October 7, 1849, his mother-in-law discovered that his beloved tortoiseshell feline Catterina had also just died. Ekaterina Fedyaeva, 27, died in agony after paramedics put her on a drip filled with embalming fluid instead of saline, following routine surgery. She fell into a coma for days before dying of organ failure. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, apparently loved the much-maligned Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, calling it “a handsome, classy, elegant piece of work.” Amanda Teague, a divorced mother of four, married the ghost of an 18th-century Haitian pirate on July 16, 2016. Teague claimed their spiritual relationship began in 2014 when she was home in bed in Drogheda, Ireland, and felt his presence. During the…

WHAT SCARES US ON THE SILVER SCREEN SAYS A LOT ABOUT WHO WE ARE AS A SOCIETY. From Lon Chaney’s physical transformations inspired by wounded WWI veterans to the vice-grip that “torture porn” had on audiences in the wake of 9/11, horror has always been about exorcising our cultural demons by projecting them 30 feet high. This is no less true of the slasher flick, whose dubious pleasures are married to the decade in which they ruled the box office: the 1980s. Though these films were tailored to teenaged boys and largely featured muscle-bound killers butchering busty co-eds and camp counsellors, they also offered up a handful of female maniacs who exposed the unease with which men of the era viewed their wives and daughters – women who had been…

WHILE BLUMHOUSE'S HALLOWEEN REMAKE NUKED EXPECTATIONS AT THE BOX OFFICE LAST YEAR, recent hot-take headlines have begged the question of what makes a banner year for horror. Here at Rue Morgue, we know that success rests in the eyes of the community, who now have more avenues than ever to find the good stuff, and more outlets than ever to spread the word about it. Blasting box office records is great, but as this year’s list of winners shows, there’s much more to great horror than dollar signs, and there was no shortage of material to celebrate in 2018. Bring on 2019! BEST FEATURE Hereditary Ari Aster A24 BEST SCARE Satan's Slaves Spectre revealed by bedsheet FESTIVAL FAVOURITE Tigers Are Not Afraid Issa López Videocine BEST TELEVISION The Haunting of…

AMONG THE MORE THAN 100 FEATURES THAT PLAYED LAST YEAR’S FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IN MONTREAL, one of the most talked-about was a 70-minute, tiny-budget German production that began as its writer/director/producer’s student thesis project. Tilman Singer’s Luz came out of nowhere and so impressed the audience at its first screening, word of mouth saw its second attracting a way-above-capacity crowd. It was part of a scorching fest tour that led Luz to be picked up for North American distribution by Screen Media, which (as of press time) plans a February 2019 release. On the surface, the story is simple: the wacked-out title character (Luana Velis) turns up one rainy night at a police station, and a psychiatrist (Jan Bluthardt) is called in to interrogate her. He uses hypnosis in…

MARILYN’S MONSTERS Tommy Redolfi Life Drawn/Humanoids KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck Dark Horse ISOLA VOLUME 1 Brenden Fletcher and Karl Kerschl Image FRANKENSTEIN Junji Ito VIZ Media DEVILMAN THE CLASSIC COLLECTION VOLUME 1 Go Nagai Seven Seas Entertainment MALEVOLENTS CLICK CLICK SPECIAL EDITION Thom Burgess and Joe Becci manoghosts.com Marilyn Monroe’s life has been the subject of countless stories, both fictional and real, that attempt to piece together the turbulent life of an iconic celebrity. This recent effort offers possibly the most unique perspective of the notorious star; one that brings her personal demons to life, quite literally. Marilyn’s Monsters is a dark and twisted look at Monroe's meteoric rise, with disturbing glimpses into her troubled marriages, history of abuse, and struggles with anxiety and depression. Part…

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE Thomas Ligotti Penguin Books What if I told you that the memorable nihilistic utterances spouted by Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) in the first season of True Detective were inspired by – or, depending on the source, plagiarized from – this book? Originally published by a small press (Hippocampus) and nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2010, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is now being brought to the masses, thanks to the new Penguin edition, to spread the gospel that “Life is MALIGNANTLY USELESS.” The reclusive and mysterious Thomas Ligotti has been lauded by many as one of the major horror authors of the end of the 20th century, thanks to collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (both recently reissued by…

CALL OF CTHULHU: THE OFFICIAL VIDEO GAME PS4, Xbox One, PC Cyanide There’s little that scares more than the prospect of losing your mind completely. Worse still is willfully participating in the erosion of your sanity, helpless to bring about any modicum of resolution to your mounting plight. It’s a motif that author H.P. Lovecraft explored in each of his most celebrated stories, rendering his protagonists in a state of utter insanity by the tale’s conclusion. This mythos inspired Chaosium’s esteemed pen-and-paper RPG Call of Cthulhu, now adapted by French developer Cyanide Studio for consoles and PC. Despite a few minor bumps along its corkscrewing descent into lunacy, Call of Cthulhu proves to be a gritty, atmospheric realization of its tabletop predecessor. Assuming the role of Edward Pierce, a…