Table of contents for #2: Horror Movie Heroes in RUE MORGUE

“WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE HORROR MOVIE?” It’s that question. The one horror fans get asked – most often by non-horror fans, in my experience – as a way to gauge just what kind of terrible things make us tick. My response to it is usually, “It depends on the hour,” because horror is a genre so rich in style, substance, and subjective affect that it can’t be encapsulated in a single movie. I can easily find “horror” films that scare the hell out of me, thrill me with special effects, bend my brain in surreal directions, make me laugh with outrageous gore gags, deliver pulse-racing tension, soothe the animal brain with depictions of orgiastic violence, excite the academic mind with bigger questions about our relationship to fear, or just unleash cool-ass…

FOR SOME, DARIO ARGENTO IS THE ITALIAN HITCHCOCK – a baroque visionary whose best films are a delirious alchemy of riotous colour, bravura camera movement, nerve-shredding music and stylized violence. For others, his movies are empty, excessive and barely coherent – the vile and lurid products of an unrepentant misogynist. Whatever your view, one cannot deny that Argento’s influence on horror cinema has been profound. Suspiria (1977), his classic tale of witchcraft at a German dance academy, is a breathtaking assault on the visual and aural senses that stands as one of the genre’s enduring triumphs. His other arresting masterworks include The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982) and Opera (1987), which all effectively marry high art, rigorous technical skill and crass exploitation…

“PEOPLE GET WRAPPED UP IN TECHNOLOGY AND GET LOST IN IT. THE TECHNOLOGY GETS IN FRONT OF THE ART AND STORYTELLING, WHICH IS A HUGE MISTAKE. Our business and what makes films successful and wonderful is storytelling, and storytellers who are directors who tell wonderful stories. The storyteller, the director, has all this technology at his hands in order to help him tell these stories. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell a wonderful story and have it be completely animated, like Finding Nemo, Shrek or Toy Story. Those are wonderful movies. The confusion happens when you’re doing a movie that is grounded in reality and when you’re dealing with human characters you expect an audience to buy into. You must give everyone the tools that they need to be the…

Tell me about assisting Dick Smith on Altered States. I’d known Dick through a very fortunate connection I made as early as 1968 after I’d seen his address. He’d invited me to correspond with him, which was the furthest thing from my expectation. It was like a dream. I so admired Dick’s unique and advanced notions in makeup – both his technological mastery and his idiosyncratic take on design and conceptualization. Altered States required of him all that he’d become known for in that regard. His ideas transformed to some extent what was latent in [author/screenwriter] Paddy Chayefsky’s script. This is the most that any makeup artist can do – understand and translate the written material and enhance and convey it in visual terms to an audience. To see Dick’s…

Five iconic scenes from Tobe Hooper’s filmography demonstrate why he’s a master of horror. 1. INTRODUCING LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE Hooper sears the image of the towering maniac Leatherface into the minds of generations to come when poor Kirk is bludgeoned with a sledgehammer and left twitching. I’ll never forget the sound of his legs knocking against the floor and the loud swoosh of that metal door. No corny scare chords or protracted build up, just shock and awe. 2. PAM’S DEMISE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE As Pam wanders deeper into the cannibal house she stumbles upon human remains and then Leatherface himself. No soundtrack other than her screams of panic as she’s hoisted over the villain’s shoulder, carried into the kitchen and impaled on a meat hook. Visceral,…

WHILE CAROL J. CLOVER’S 1992 BOOK MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAINSAWS: GENDER IN THE MODERN HORROR FILM gave birth to the notion of the feminist protagonist (the “Final Girl”) in the era’s slasher cycle, it has never been a level playing field. After all, you only get to be the Final Girl after the first girl, the penultimate girl, and all the girls in between have ended up on the business end of a power tool. Of course, we all know the rules the Final Girl must live by: she can dress, talk and fight like a man with impunity, but to make love like one or imbibe like one has long remained off limits. Yet, filmmakers have subverted the trope for decades. Long before Scream earned critical kudos and box-office…

OF ALL PURVEYORS OF 1950S ATOMIC SCHLOCK, THE MOST LUDICROUSLY INGENIOUS WAS UNDOUBTEDLY RAY KELLOGG (1905-1976). Beginning his career as a cameraman in the US Army, Kellogg later provided special photographic effects for a number of A-list Hollywood movies before teaming up with producer Ken Curtis to fulfil his directorial ambitions. Together they breathed life into the magnified menaces of The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews. Shot back-to-back in Texas, in 1959, the former is a cherished classic of irradiated horror; the latter infamous for its titular creatures being nothing more than dogs with fake fangs and shaggy carpets strapped to their backs. Halloween III director Tommy Lee Wallace pays tribute to Kellogg. What is it that you love about The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews?…

How have you seen the genre change during your career? When I first started, if I had a meeting with studio heads they would give me this look that said, “What kind of horrible thoughts are in that guy’s head? He must be crazy, but maybe we can make some money with him.” Then, about midway through my career, I started having meetings with people who were working for the studio heads who were big fans. Now, it’s the actual heads of studio who are the fans! I get much less of a feeling from people that I’m a sick individual! [Laughs.] I think horror has penetrated the culture in a way that has given it more credibility. It certainly needs to take itself more seriously to the point where…

ASK ANY HORROR FAN TO THINK OF THE MOST UNIQUE, OUTRAGEOUS, CONTROVERSIAL, ABSURD, BALLS-TO-THE-WALL, batshit-crazy indie film and he’s likely to name a Troma title. Founded in 1974, the fiercely independent New York City-based film studio has produced and distributed over 40 films that range from raunchy sex comedies to dark superhero satires that fly in the face of cinematic convention and are more often than not dripping with slime and rotten with mutants. Not surprisingly, aspiring filmmakers with an unorthodox vision turned to Troma to learn the ropes. The company that brought us unforgettable horror-comedy classics including Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986) and The Toxic Avenger (1984) also helped launch the careers of Hollywood heavyweights Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone and James Gunn. But moviemaking is only part of…

How do you approach remaking a cult classic like The Hills Have Eyes? It was mainly finding what’s going to make the difference. First of all, to come up with the idea of the back story of the hill dwellers, something that justifies their presence and their rage, the way they act toward the travellers crossing their area. That’s why we came up with the nuclear testing history. What do you feel your obligations are in a remake? There are no obligations, because I feel for that kind of movie from the ’70s with my heart, for those Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven kind of films. The difference is that I think if someone proposed to me a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I would pass because The Texas Chainsaw…

Why do you guys love haunted house movies? James Wan: To me there’s nothing creepier, nothing scarier than a really well done haunted house movie. I look at all the films that really scared me and they’re all pretty much haunted house films, like The Haunting, Poltergeist or even The Exorcist, which basically plays out inside a house, specifically a bedroom, with this possessed person. I’m a big fan of that subgenre. Leigh and I really wanted to make movies in that world but bring a new twist to it. Leigh Whannell: After film school, James and I would hang out a lot and talk about this mystery film we were going to make one day. There was a lot of pie-in-the-sky talk as we discussed what we might be…

“I ALWAYS WANT THINGS TO BE BETTER. I NEVER THINK ANYTHING IS GOOD ENOUGH. It’s only as the years go by, when you’re so far away from it where you can hear a record or see a movie and think, ‘That’s pretty cool!’ I never think that at the time. It’s always ‘I could’ve done more’ or ‘That could’ve been better,’ even though there are all these limitations set upon you. Even though I know I made those choices, it’s very easy to play demented mind games with yourself, saying, ‘I wish my movie was better’ or ‘I wish it was more like that movie’ but then I go, ‘Well… we shot for 30 days, and they shot for 500 days!’ It’s understandable that they have more complex camera moves!…

With his overpowering images, mystical concepts and scathing satirical sense, it’s easy to forget that Jodorowsky is also a brilliant composer. His eccentric music conjuring up a range of complex emotions. Here are five of his more memorable pieces… 1. “BURIAL OF THE FIRST TOY” In El Topo, the title character rides out of the desert with his naked, seven-year-old-son. As a rite of passage, the boy is told to bury his first toy with a picture of his mother whilst El Topo plays this curious melody on a flute, which soon flourishes into a dizzying swell of woodwinds and strings. 2. “UNDER THE EARTH” A sombre trumpet, mariachi rhythms and nostalgic sentiment convey the classic feel of a spaghetti western theme. It lulls us into a false sense of…

WHEN JAWS SPLASHED ITS WAY ACROSS MOVIE SCREENS IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, MOVIEGOERS HAD NO IDEA OF THE ROLLER-COASTER THRILL RIDE THEY WERE EMBARKING UPON, nor that they were witnessing the birth of a new breed of cinema: the Hollywood summer blockbuster. But before it took a tremendous bite out of the box office and made its director, 27-year-old wunderkind Steven Spielberg (below), into a household name, Jaws started out as a novel by a struggling young journalist and writer named Peter Benchley. Upon learning of the novel, producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights for a reported $150,000. While sales for the book rose (it would eventually spend more than 40 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and move more than 20…

SHE’S FOUGHT OFF THE MIST-SHROUDED GHOSTS OF LEPROUS MARINERS in 1980’s The Fog, was the object of affection of a half-plant, half-man being in 1982’s Swamp Thing, was made lunch of by a ravenous, hairy monster in Creepshow (also released in ’82), presided over a colony of man-eating rats in the 1995 TV movie Burial of the Rats and was a gun-toting, motorcycle-riding slayer of demonic nuns in 2000’s The Convent. But though she’s perhaps best known by audiences around the world for her work in horror movies, Adrienne Barbeau never set out to be a scream queen. Born in Sacramento, California, on June 11, 1945, she took singing lessons while in school, and later joined the San Jose Light Opera in 1963, where she performed in a musical revue…

THE PLACE: GREAT BRITAIN, CIRCA THE END OF THE ’80S, WHERE RECESSION AND THE ELIMINATION OF A GOVERNMENT TAX BREAK HAD TAKEN THEIR TOLL. It was the beginning of the end for the UK film industry as the world had known it. From this climate of shifting sands emerged Richard Stanley’s Hardware, an extraordinary post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror adrenaline blast that was at once a throwback to beloved homicidal robot thrillers while also an emotionally riveting, politically charged cyberpunk death trip unlike anything seen before. Darkly witty and poetic, the film is bursting with not just explosive ultra-violence, but also breathtaking visuals. Set in a radiation-rotted future world, Hardware’s plot is, on the surface, relatively straightforward: Mo’ (Dylan McDermott) buys the remains of a freakish-looking robot and gives it to his sculptor…

DUBBED “THE LON CHANEY OF SPAIN,” JACINTO MOLINA (1934–2009), BEST KNOWN TO CULT FILM FANS AS PAUL NASCHY – actor, writer, producer and director – is the single greatest figure of the Spanish horror boom of the 1970s. After working as an extra in a variety of movies and penning a number of western novels, the champion bodybuilder sold his first script, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, in 1968. When the producers were unable to find a suitable actor to star as the wolf man, they approached Molina for the role and thus launched the career of one of the world’s greatest proponents of fantastic cinema. Molina’s love for the Universal monster movies of the ’40s resulted in the classic The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, which became an international success as The…

SERGIO STIVALETTI HAS CREATED GRISLY EFFECTS FOR SOME OF ITALY’S MOST INFLUENTIAL HORROR DIRECTORS. His career began in earnest in 1985, when he worked as a makeup artist on Dario Argento’s Phenomena and Lamberto Bava’s Demons; since then, Stivaletti has created makeup, creature and animatronic effects for such Italian genre classics as Opera and Dellamorte Dellamore. He dishes on decades of slinging the red sauce. Your career is closely connected to that of Dario Argento. Beginning with Phenomena, you worked on all of his films that were shot in Italy. How did you get involved with him? I worked with Angelo Mattei, who made the cadavers for Inferno [1980]. The one floating underwater – I worked on that, though I was not on the set. I did it at my…

What are your thoughts on Michael Powell as a filmmaker? Michael Powell is my man. I love his movies. The guy was a genius. The guy was a journeyman. He made beautiful, artistic films, such as Black Narcissus. And he made these propagandist war movies [including] One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. And he did his duty. He never should have gotten left out of the mix. He was just a wonderful filmmaker. Peeping Tom effectively destroyed his career. He blames it for destroying his career. I think they didn’t give him a break. They came out and said the most vicious things about it. Someone said the best way to handle this film is to take all the prints and throw them into the sewers. It was just dreadful.…

THE 2011 HOME-INVASION THRILLER YOU’RE NEXT WAS MORE THAN A CALLING CARD FOR DIRECTOR ADAM WINGARD and his troupe of “mumblegore” cohorts – it also heralded a return to bloody form for fan favourite Barbara Crampton. The Long Island native, best known in the horror world for her performances in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, From Beyond and Castle Freak, had more or less retired from acting when she was offered the role of matriarch Aubrey Davison in Wingard’s gory slasher send-up. Since then, Crampton has appeared in a growing list of genre projects, and has enthusiastically rejoined the horror community. Unlike many actresses who fleshed out their early filmographies with roles in horror movies, the actress, now 55, has never distanced herself from the genre. In fact, she says it was…

The Evil Dead series went from cult oddity to a mainstream success with all the toys, T-shirts, and the musical. What has it been like to see that happen? It’s been incredibly surprising. It still continues to amaze and baffle me. It really speaks volumes about the degradation of our society. [Laughs.] Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert and myself had no idea that Evil Dead would still be around today. We were just trying to make a film of a high enough quality that it could be shown at the drive-in theatres in Michigan at the time. If it survived that two-month play date from June to August in 1982, we would have been very happy. We had no idea that it would still be playing 30 years later. You’ve always…

Despite a large and diverse filmography, most people know you best from your roles in horror movies such as Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein and their Dracula films. How do you feel about that? I’d been an actor for ten years and I was learning – going to different countries, saying a few lines, very small parts – and then I did A Tale of Two Cities, which was a very big and famous part. At that time, Hammer Films was starting work on its Frankenstein film. They wanted a very tall man. I had problems before because I was taller than the stars. If I were born an American, it would’ve been a different matter, but British stars were mostly smaller than me. I couldn’t get a job, so I…

Your films were obviously greatly affected by growing up in New York during the grindhouse era. What was that like? I’m very grateful to have grown up in the New York of the 1970s. I was in my teens, and it was a really amazing period in the city’s history. The city was virtually bankrupt, crime was rampant and it was a totally different place than it is today. People who grew up around this time will never forget it; it was a period unlike any in the city’s history. You had serial killers on the loose like the Son of Sam, there were a couple of blackouts, a garbage strike…you name it, it was going on. Prostitution was way out in the open. Where I live today in New…

How were you granted an audience with Alfred Hitchcock? I’d met a guy named Mike Ludmer, who at the time was head of the story department at Universal. I told Mike an idea I’d concocted for a thriller called Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting [about a woman who is stalked by her former lover after he learns she aborted their baby] and he thought it would make an interesting movie for Hitchcock. I was thrilled beyond words to hear this. Mike then arranged for me to meet with Hitchcock at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Naturally, I was very nervous about meeting my hero, but Hitchcock was charming and friendly. We talked for three and a half hours, and the first three hours of our conversation was Hitchcock regaling me…

EVEN IN THE AGE OF BREATHLESS FANBOY HYPERBOLE, IT’S DIFFICULT TO OVERSTATE THE INFLUENCE OF STAN WINSTON (1946-2008) ON THE WORLD OF SPECIAL EFFECTS. Winston’s filmography reads like a checklist of genre staples; he lent his talents to The Thing, Predator, Monster Squad and Jurassic Park, to name only a few. Lance Henriksen, who worked with Winston on The Terminator, Aliens and Pumpkinhead (which Winston also directed), remembers the FX legend as an innovator, a consummate professional and an artist of nearly unparalleled ability. How would you describe Stan Winston? Oh, man, he was probably the nicest and most vivid, excited guy you could ever work with. His enthusiasm was boundless and he was also really skilled. He couldn’t wait to shoot a scene, he couldn’t wait to solve all…

I WAS BORN ON HALLOWEEN SO IT ONLY SEEMED NATURAL TO BE OBSESSED WITH GHOULS, GHOSTS, GOBLINS, DEMONS AND THE ABSURDLY MACABRE. Growing up in a small town in corn country, Indiana, I indulged in the escape of horror films, and eventually found myself drawn to more artistic foreign horror from the likes of Italians Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Michele Soavi. Then, one day, a friend introduced me to Jean Rollin’s 1979 lesbian vampire movie Fascination and I was hooked on the French filmmaker. Rollin, who died December 15, 2010, at age 73, was inspired by the serials he watched as a boy, and themes of childhood innocence are persistent in his work. His films involve adventures, fantasy, castles and gothic horror. And of course the naked…

What did you do before playing the Gillman? I was an underwater diver. The first movie I worked on was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There was a company called Grantland Rice which did a bunch of sports films, the majority [of which] were about swimming. After those I did the Gillman. Three different actors played the Gillman on land, but you donned the monster suit for the underwater scenes in all three Creature movies. How did you get the role? I was attending Florida State and a friend of mine who was a general manager at a hotel called Wakulla Springs was going out of town and said, “There’s some people coming from California to look at the springs for a location for a movie. Could you pick ’em…

There’s much to adore about writer/director Joss Whedon and his body of work – beyond his reverent respect for his fans and the near-perfect balance of humour, pathos and monsters in his genre projects. These are the three things that hooked me on the storyteller. GIRL POWER Women don’t get second billing in a Whedon story, and they never feel as if they’ve simply been shoehorned in to attract female viewers. They get to fight and kick ass (like Buffy herself), be computer and mechanical geniuses (Buffy’s Willow and Firefly’s Kaylee, respectively), and, most importantly, drive entire storylines as both heroes and villains. MONSTER CREATIVITY Whether he’s toying around with the standard vampire, werewolf and witch tropes, as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel or creating original monsters (much…

IN HIS LENGTHY CAREER AS A GENRE MOVIE MAVERICK, STUART GORDON HAS taken on censors, producers and financiers in his struggle to preserve the integrity of his vision. The uncompromising filmmaker’s work is known just as much for its outrageous gore gags as being informed by the works of two giants of horror fiction: Edgar Allan Poe (The Pit and the Pendulum, 1991; Masters of Horror: “The Black Cat,” 2007) and H.P. Lovecraft (Re-Animator, 1985; From Beyond, 1986; Castle Freak, 1995; Dagon, 2001; Masters of Horror: “Dreams in the Witch House,” 2005). Rue Morgue caught up with Gordon at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal to talk about his lifelong love of horror and a career built on seeing just how far an audience will go. Has horror always been…

NEW YORK-BASED FILMMAKER/ACTOR LARRY FESSENDEN HAS BECOME AN ART HOUSE ANSWER TO ROGER CORMAN. Fessenden’s own films – including his disturbing 1991 animal rights opus No Telling; the 1995 vampirism-as-addiction fable Habit; and his icy 2006 environmental horror tale The Last Winter – are thought-provoking, extremely powerful works in their own right, but the famously scruffy auteur is perhaps even better known for mentoring some of horror’s most formidable new voices. Ti West (The House of the Devil; The Sacrament), Jim Mickle (Stake Land; We Are What We Are) and Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead; V/H/S) have all done stints behind the camera for Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix production company. Fessenden is also the co-creator (along with McQuaid) of the popular audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale,…

Even some ardent Phans are unaware that you started making films at a very early age. Do you think that getting such an early start and being largely self-taught were determining factors in your fierce independence as a filmmaker? I did get an early start. In my naïve and youthful exuberance I swore that I’d make a feature film while I was still in my teens and to my amazement I actually pulled it off [with Jim The World’s Greatest]. Universal Studios even bought it for distribution. I never went to film school; my first year at UCLA they told me I’d have to wait two years to enter the film program. I’d been making small movies, documentaries and even TV commercials with my neighbourhood gang of friends all through…

What’s the nature of the horror in Tetsuo? What happens within this movie is this: sometimes, within the world, there are things that come from outside to get you and they change you, but here I’m more afraid of something that comes from your insides. The inside of the main character in Tetsuo starts to change into iron. What I’m telling you I’m afraid of is that there are certain things that are inside you that can change into something else. Where does this fear come from? The time that I grew up in is known as a high-development era, so all of a sudden buildings were growing all over while I was also growing. And buildings were made of iron, but at the same time they stirred some kind…

WILLIAM GIRDLER USED TO TELL PEOPLE THAT, SINCE HE WASN’T GOING TO LIVE PAST 30, HE THOUGHT SCHOOL WAS A WASTE OF TIME. Girdler never went to film school, but he did manage to outlive his grim prediction, if only by one year. For Girdler, rolling up his sleeves and making nine movies in six years was his film school. It was a brave choice, as he endured knock after knock from critics who considered him a joke. He never hid the fact that he was a work in progress – that his audience got to see him develop as a filmmaker, warts and all. Though his films, including 1973’s Three on a Meathook and the following year’s Abby, are often unfairly lumped in with the output of Ed Wood,…

Although she’s appeared in numerous genre films, Adrienne Barbeau is not a “scream queen” – or at least, I’ve never considered her to be one. A title bestowed upon her contemporary, Jamie Lee Curtis (and many others), the term scream queen brings to mind someone who is victimized onscreen, but Barbeau rarely allowed herself to be the victim. Maybe that’s because the actress – who has been directed by three of the biggest names in horror: John Carpenter, George A. Romero and Wes Craven – was more than a decade older than Curtis and other “final girls,” which helped imbue her roles with an added maturity, capability and strength. And while she certainly did a bit of screaming, Barbeau holds her own against the antagonists in her films. No, she’s…

“WHAT’S PROBABLY MOST PERTINENT [TO MY LOVE OF HORROR] IS BEING FIVE YEARS OLD AND SEEING DRACULA ON TELEVISION ON WEEKENDS. Our local LA station was playing those great old Universal Monster movies, just like every other local station back then, and if it wasn’t Dracula, it was The Wolfman, and if it wasn’t that, it was The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I think it’s a genetic predisposition – you either love this stuff or ya don’t, and I loved it from my earliest memories. Whatever work I’ve done in life, I’ve always followed things I feel I could get most excited about. Whether it’s something with Tom Hanks in it or whether it’s television with zombies in it, it’s the gig I want to get most excited about.…

To what extent would you say that Children was influenced by Night of the Living Dead? I had seen Night of the Living Dead and admired it immensely, and indeed we based Children on it. We didn’t want to copy it, though. We saw Children as a satirical version of Night of the Living Dead. We wanted to have fun with the idea of it. It certainly has a different look than George A. Romero’s film. We purposely tried to bring a look that was a bit different than Night of the Living Dead. Alan Ormsby would come to the set a few hours early to do the makeup effects, even though neither he nor or his assistant had any schooling about makeup other than teaching themselves. After Alan finished…

IMDb currently lists 27 credits for David Cronenberg as an actor, stretching all the way back to his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Shivers as “Infected in the crowd.” Here are my picks for Cronenberg’s top five turns in front of the camera. NIGHTBREED (1990): Clive Barker’s film boasts Cronenberg’s most prominent acting role, as well as arguably his most assured performance. Third-billed behind Craig Scheffer and Anne Bobby, the Baron of Blood essays the role of serial killer Dr. Decker, a psychopathic psychotherapist who wishes to destroy the misunderstood monsters of Midian. JASON X (2001): Although he is summarily dispatched within seven minutes of the futuristic tenth entry in the Friday the 13th saga, Cronenberg’s professorial presence as scientist “Dr. Wimmer” provides a welcome diversion. A mentor and friend to the…

AFTER A LONG AND FRUITFUL LIFE, A TRUE VISIONARY OF FANTASTIC CINEMA DEPARTED OUR MORTAL REALM ON MAY 7, 2013. One of the greatest practitioners of stop-motion animation in the history of the medium, Ray Harryhausen’s obsession with the art form began at the tender age of thirteen with multiple viewings of King Kong (1933). After conjuring up a number of 16mm creations, he went to work alongside Kong’s stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young (1949) before breaking out on his own with The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1952). In 1955, Harryhausen joined forces with producer Charles H. Schneer and for the next few decades they carved out an unforgettable legacy of fantasy films with the likes of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts…

IN A WORLD OF TRENDS AND FADS, ENDLESS COPYCATS AND BLATANT RIP-OFFS, there is only one Herschell Gordon Lewis. Lewis’ claim on history is simple: he invented the gore film. That was back in 1963 – an age when the attitudes and ideas of the ’50s were just starting to undergo public scrutiny. In that time of waning optimism and yielding family values, Lewis spurted out Blood Feast, a film that nixed all chances at polite discussion by showing a woman’s leg getting hacked off and her tongue carved out – all in glorious, blood-red colour and all within minutes of the opening credits. The notoriety of Blood Feast allowed Lewis and production partner David Friedman to launch the genre’s first franchise. In time, they expanded their film into a…

THESE DAYS IT’S HARD TO FIND A MORE PRODUCTIVE FIGURE IN CINEMA THAN WRITER/DIRECTOR GUILLERMO DEL TORO. Flush from the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy series and Pacific Rim, del Toro currently has more horror films in various stages of development than some studios. It’s a position that most genre directors can only dream of being in. Del Toro announced his presence on the international horror scene with his 1993 debut feature, Cronos. It’s the tale of Jesus Gris, an antiques dealer who discovers the rare Cronos device – a golden, scarab-shaped artifact built centuries earlier by an alchemist, which contains a live insect trapped within it. The device infects him with a form of vampirism that gradually transforms the kindly grandfather into a ghoulish blood-drinker. Relentlessly pursued by…

WHILE HE’S BEST KNOWN FOR THE 1971 CLASSIC THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, HORROR ENTHUSIASTS MAY THINK MORE fondly of Peter Bogdanovich for his 1968 debut feature Targets, starring Boris Karloff in what was not only his last great performance on screen but one of the most fascinating roles of his career. And the story behind the film is as compelling as the film itself. Appearing as a thinly veiled version of himself, Karloff plays Byron Orlok, an embittered horror star who’s ready to hang up his cape after realizing his antiquated films can’t compete with the real terrors of modern life. He then comes face to face with these horrors when he attends the drive-in premiere of his latest fright flick where a psychotic sniper proceeds to shoot the patrons.…

FORTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE TOBE HOOPER’S FEROCIOUS TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ROARED ONTO SCREENS IN OCTOBER 1974. TCM would join films such as Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) in the American New Wave as celluloid reflections of a troubled national landscape – a time when the freelove hippie movement was brought to an ugly end by the Manson Family murders of August 1969. For audiences, it was no longer safe anywhere, thanks in part to a crossdressing, chainsaw-wielding maniac with a penchant for wearing masks fashioned from human skin. Before there was Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger, there was Leatherface. Partly inspired by the heinous crimes of real-life murderer Ed Gein, TCM tore through the psyches of shocked audiences, bringing a new…

Is it true that during your college years you wore a button with the name “Roger Corman” emblazoned on it in response to other students who were wearing pins reading “Jean Luc Goddard”? The button fad was popular, so I had a bunch of Corman buttons made up, just to spread the word. What was the reaction of your fellow students to seeing that? A surprising number of people already knew who he was. How did you become involved with New World Pictures? After Jonathan Kaplan and Jon Davison came out to LA, having been recommended by their NYU teacher Martin Scorsese, I got a call from Jon. Roger had exhausted the talent pool from the California schools and had turned to the east coast, since New World had been…

JAUME BALAGUERÓ MADE A NAME FOR HIMSELF WITH HIS 1999 DEBUT FEATURE THE NAMELESS (Los sin nombre), an adaptation of Ramsey Campbell’s novel about a woman whose search for her missing daughter leads her to a satanic cult. The Spanish filmmaker’s talent for creating an intense atmosphere of dread was evident in his next two films, but due to problems with distributors, neither Darkness (2002) nor Fragile (2005) brought him the success many genre fans felt he deserved. Balagueró finally scored an international hit with 2007’s [REC], a stunningly suspenseful found-footage movie that put a surprising religious twist on zombie tropes. He also directed the second and fourth installments of the [REC] franchise, and recently switched gears from supernatural horror to psycho-thriller with Sleep Tight (2011). Rue Morgue ran into…

These are my five picks that prove Jean Rollin was one of the most original directors in the history of film – he made movies that are lushly atmospheric, well executed, horrific, sensual and often very surreal. 1. FASCINATION (1979) This story of a thief who hides out in the castle home of two seductive, bisexual, blood-drinking aristocrats remains his best film. It’s his most political, most polished, best phot-graphed and most entertaining work, with an amazing score. 2. THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1971) Fairy-tale surrealism, lesbian vampires and abandoned chateaus and castles abound in this story of newlyweds arriving at a castle to visit the wife’s cousins, only to find that they’ve become vampires with a plan for her. Rollin’s best early vamp film, it best displays the…

What were your first thoughts when Universal offered you the role of Kay Lawrence in Creature from the Black Lagoon? My first thought was, the creature from what? What is this? I actually thought about turning it down, but then I thought, “Gosh, if I turn it down, they’ll put me on suspension and I won’t get paid.” I read the script and it wasn’t bad, so I thought, well, what the hey? It might be fun. So I didn’t make any fuss and I did the movie. Are you glad you did? Yes, I am. It was fun. We had a good director and good actors, so I had a perfectly fine time making the movie. … It was a very happy shoot, and I’m delighted that I can…

How would you assess Carpenter’s strengths as a director? John has an incredible command of the vocabulary of cinema. He knows the technical, film school aspects of filmmaking and has an incredible knowledge of film history, but his sets are also very low-key and encouraging. He has a good time on the set, knows what he wants quite clearly and can respond to the questions of cast and crew with authority on the spur of the moment. He makes you think that this taxing and difficult job is easy. His use of widescreen imagery is masterful and his stamp is always apparent. He really likes to provoke the intellect of the audience. He loves the powerful moments. Which of his films is your particular favourite? I love The Thing. Apart…

1. No one mixes sex, horror and humour quite like Stuart Gordon. Case in point: the legendary, much-censored scene from Re-Animator, in which the decapitated and reanimated Dr. Hill is “giving head” to a naked and strapped-down Barbara Crampton. 2. No one does the body horror quite so fleshy, gory and gooey. Just think of the unrestrained insanity of From Beyond, with its flying creatures, the mutated lecherous doctor, the protruding pineal gland, the sadomasochism, the eels from beyond… and more! 3. No one ever used Jeffrey Combs to his full potential the way Gordon has in his films. He inspired not only his comic genius (in the career-defining Re-Animator) but also his dramatic potential, first in Castle Freak, then as Poe himself in the Masters of Horror installment The…

THE WINNER OF EIGHT ACADEMY AWARDS – INCLUDING THE FIRST COMPETITIVE MAKEUP OSCAR FOR 1981’S AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON – Rick Baker belongs to the generation of makeup artists weaned on the pages of Famous Monsters. A protégé of Dick Smith, he assisted the master on The Exorcist, before creating a startling array of illusions for such films as Star Wars, The Fury, Gremlins 2, Ed Wood and Wolf. FX legend Mark Shostrom (Phantasm II, Evil Dead II) submits his warm – and rather wet – reminiscences of toiling with Baker on 1983’s Videodrome. Videodrome must have been a blast to work on. Oh, it was wonderful. I think about that time of my life quite often, actually. Rick’s crew on Videodrome was the same one he’d had on…

These Paul Verhoeven films prove that the filmmaker has an excellent understanding of the genre. THE FOURTH MAN (1984): Verhoeven regular Jeroen Krabbé plays Gerard Reve, a neurotic bisexual writer afflicted with bizarre visions of impending doom, who meets the beautiful Christine (Reneé Soutendijk) and her boyfriend, Herman (Thom Hoffman), whilst attending a speaking engagement. Gerard romances Christine as a ruse to seduce Herman, but discovers that her three previous husbands – who all met with tragic deaths – were in fact murdered and that he may be the fourth victim. A symbolist horror film punctuated with Verhoeven’s characteristic wit and intensity, The Fourth Man confidently strides the line between seedy Euro-horror and resplendent art cinema. BASIC INSTINCT (1992): Routinely grouped with Fatal Attraction as an example of the mainstream…

“EL TOPO IS NOT A WESTERN. IT GOES FAR BEYOND ANY WESTERN. El Topo is not a religious film. It contains all religions. El Topo is bloody. It is sexual. El Topo is miraculous. And terrible. El Topo is monstrous. And cruel. El Topo is more than spectacle. It is an experience for all of your life.” So declares the theatrical trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 mystical western. It’s one of the rare instances where such bold hyperbole is on point. Devoid of any self-censoring timidity, the Chilean born surrealist belongs to an elite group of filmmakers that includes Georges Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Jan Svankmajer who forcibly reshaped the medium to conform to their unique visions. Jodorowsky himself stars as a black-leather-clad figure who rides…

IN RECENT YEARS, WE’VE SEEN A GREAT EXPLOSION OF LATIN TALENT IN HOLLYWOOD. FILMMAKERS SUCH AS GUILLERMO DEL TORO AND ALFONSO CUARÓN HAVE MADE big waves in the US, and Latin horror has become a hot trend in the genre. Yet long before all this, there was a family of filmmakers who helped launch the cinema industry in Mexico, who also made some outrageous horror films along the way. René Cardona Sr. and his son, René Jr., made more than 200 movies together, working in every genre imaginable. But they’re best remembered for their horror films, including Wrestling Women Vs. the Aztec Mummy, Night of the Bloody Apes, Night of a Thousand Cats, Survive!, Tintorera and Guyana: Cult of the Damned. “I really didn’t get a sense of the scope…

“THIS IS MY INTERPRETATION: FREDDY EXISTS IN A NIGHTMARE, Freddy’s not at 7-11, Freddy’s not seeing a counsellor about being an only child or that he was beaten as a kid. Freddy is a spectre that exists now only as a fantasy in someone’s nightmare. So the way I chose to play Freddy was larger than life. If I was doing a prequel for Nightmare on Elm Street, I’d be extremely involved in Freddy Krueger before he got burned and what made him tick, and playing him very real and very matter-of-fact and very psychologically defined. But that was not my interpretation – Freddy is part of a victim’s imagination, so he’s coloured by that victim’s fears, and what tantalizes and excites that victim, and he’s manifest in all those…

ROMAN POLANSKI WAS BORN IN PARIS, IN 1933, OF POLISH-JEWISH PARENTS WHO RETURNED TO POLAND RATHER INOPPORTUNELY – just two years before the Nazis occupied the country. Surviving the death of his mother in a concentration camp when he was eight years old, Polanski endured the horrors of the Krakow ghetto, hiding out for eighteen months as a “child outlaw” and, according to the director himself, passing himself off as Aryan with the aid of “a wax foreskin.” Such ingenuity and guile would serve Polanski well in his moviemaking career, which took him from film school in Lodz and the constraints of an austere post-war communist regime to the hedonism of swinging London and late ’60s Hollywood. During this period, Polanski created a series of diverse masterworks beginning with his…

“IT WAS A FASCINATING PLACE TO BE AND I KNEW THAT THE ATMOSPHERE, MOOD, COLOURS AND TEXTURES OF IRAQ COULD NOT BE REPRODUCED ON A SOUNDSTAGE – not to my satisfaction anyway. It just wouldn’t have the same authenticity. There was so much history there. We had brought over this fourteen-foot-high fibreglass statue of the demon Pazuzu that [Father] Merrin encounters in the desert. It was built in Los Angeles – a perfect replica that had been recreated from actual photographs in the British Museum and then shipped to Iraq. … Actually, the arrival of the statue was delayed and we later learned this was because the customs agents were disturbed by it. They did not want to be handling this thing. Shortly after we arrived, rumours quickly circulated that…