Table of contents for Issue 84 November 2008 in RUE MORGUE

TOFU THE VEGAN ZOMBIE $24.99 Undead animal rights activists of the world, unite! Tofu the Vegan Zombie is a reanimated corpse with no taste for human flesh or animal products, and a lump of fermented soybean product for a brain. Eight inches tall and poseable, he’ll fit right in to any zombie-friendly kitchen. Eat graaaains at tofutheveganzombie.com. VAMPIRE TEETH PLACE CARD HOLDERS $20 Every demon hostess dreads the embarrassment of having one’s dinner guests bite, stake or eat one another; fortunately, you can lower your risk of social leprosy with this set of four place card holders. Vampire entrepreneurs can also use them to add a little bite to their business cards as well. Chew on that at potterybarn.com. ALFRED HITCHCOCK BIRDS BARBIE DOLL $44.99 Hitchcock and Barbie, together at…

COUNTLESS FILMS AND NOVELS HAVE FEATURED vampires of every size, shape and temperament, each presenting a unique take on their mythos. Sometimes it seems as though there’s one for everyone – even teens. They’ve been envisioned as hungry, evil, violent, misunderstood, drop-dead gorgeous, repentant, power-mad and, increasingly, even as great romantics, making them perhaps the most versatile classic monster of them all. In recent years, vampires have taken something of a backseat to the zombie craze, but now with Let the Right One In, HBO series True Blood (see p.29), 30 Days of Night and the hugely popular Twilight franchise, they’re back – with a bloody vengeance. “[Vampires are] beautiful and sexy,” muses Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg about their enduring appeal. “But it’s interesting, there’s an inner demon in them,…

EVERY VERY GENERATION OF HORROR FILM FANS HAS A COMING-OF-AGE STORY. Depending on how old you are, you might remember the day your dad brought a VCR into the living room, and how soon after you would spend your weekends scanning the horror sections of early 1980s video stores, all while carrying the rental tag for Escape to Witch Mountain because – let’s face it – your parents weren’t going to let you see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In this era of immediate accessibility to media, it’s important to remember that before the ’80s you couldn’t just head to the video store and buy or rent a copy of the film you wanted to see. “The concept of watching movies at home, anytime you wanted to, seemed like something H.G.…

PATHOLOGY Starring Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Weston and Lauren Lee Smith Directed by Marc Schölerman Written by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor Seville Most of us have had enough encounters with the medical establishment to know that the Hippocratic Oath often comes with a certain amount of hypocrisy; doctors are sworn to heal, but, let’s face it, there’s a reason why malpractice insurance exists. Pathology is a nasty little medical thriller that does an effective job of showing how having the power of life and death can corrupt even the most virtuous. Milo Ventimiglia (TV’s Heroes) stars as Ben Grey, a brilliant young doctor accepted into a prestigious pathology internship. Ben seems to have it all: a beautiful fiancée, rich in-laws and a high-profile job waiting for him after graduation. But…

PENNY DREADFUL cinemaimages.net 30 mins. With slightly higher production values and a cheesy celebrity cameo, Penny Dreadful could easily have been a great episode of Tales From the Crypt. That’s a compliment, as it’s a contemporary haunted house story with a surprisingly effective twist ending. As an indie short, it still works pretty damn well, however. Though obviously limited by time and budget, the movie is incredibly well crafted with some impressively moody cinematography, effectively staged suspense sequences and a handful of great scares. The story is very simple and traditional – a young couple inherits a large house that comes with a multimillion dollar inheritance tax and a collection of ghosts – but that’s kind of the point. Writer/director Bryan Norton starts with expected genre conventions then toys with…

Taboo Breakers Calum Waddell Telos Frankenstein, Psycho, Peeping Tom, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Last Tango in Paris, Taxi Driver, Pink Flamingos, Pretty Baby, Blue Velvet, Romper Stomper, American Psycho and Boys Don’t Cry all have two things in common: they all broke taboos, and they’ve all been excluded from a book called Taboo Breakers. Granted, prolific genre scribe Calum Waddell states in his introduction that the availability of interview subjects was a deciding factor in which films made the final cut, but this criteria has resulted in many sins of both omission and inclusion. It’s hardly surprising that twelve of the eighteen titles examined here are horror films, and one could scarcely argue with the inclusion of…

Long before director M. Night Shyamalan staked out his filmic claim to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh area at the opposite end of the state was firmly George A. Romero territory. And man, was it creepy. Clumsy teenagers with vampire complexes, homicide-inducing biological weapons with stripper code names, quadriplegic-torturing experimental monkeys and, of course, carnivorous reanimated corpses all peopled the place that Romero called both home and filming location. In the midst of all that world-gone-madness, one of the more dominant features of Romero’s Pennsylvania landscape: The Monroeville Mall. The iconic horror movie location is a twostorey indoor shopping centre located in the town of Monroeville, just east of Pittsburgh on Rt. 22 (Exit 57 off the Pennsylvania Turnpike). It was built in 1969, and a decade later Romero found it…

DEADLY DANGEROUS DECENT DULL DRIVEL DEAD ON ARRIVAL DEATH RACE Soundtrack Paul Haslinger INTRADA Although Paul Haslinger’s score never really evolves into anything beyond a roughhouse package of fat electric bass, thudding percussion, plenty of peripheral synth fuzz and electric guitar, it’s still an alluring blend of oily attitude that transcends another utterly unnecessary genre remake. The pinched stylistic scope makes this album dramatically narrow, and the handful of dumb dialogue samples bring its flow to a screeching halt, but Haslinger does know how to stir up toughness, machismo and sadism through the use of his own patented style of rock and electronica. Death Race is a meaner variation on his punchy Shoot ’Em Up score, with Goblinesque keyboards and occasional synth strings that add gravitas to cues signalling moments…

HIGHEST RATING IS THREE. MONSTERPOCALYPSE Board Game Privateer Press Kaiju fans, stomp your feet and smile! Finally there’s a game that lets you live out your fantasies of becoming a giant monster and levelling your hometown. Monsterpocalypse is a new collectible miniatures board game featuring malevolent monsters (obviously), rampaging robots, scary spaceships and devastating dinosaurs that you control during gameplay. Use them to execute strategic military attacks and a few of your favourite wrestling moves. Depending on which side you select, you battle to either protect or destroy the Earth. Players choose from six different factions, including a group of friendly dinosaurs (Terrasaurs), Lovecraftian monstrosities (the Lords of Cthul), an armada of giant robots (the G.U.A.R.D.), a fleet of Martian warships or even a group of huge Japanese ninja cyborg…

WHILE I APPRECIATE Alice Cooper’s contribution to the history of shock rock and enjoyed the concept-album career retrospective, I can’t help but feel that your interviewer missed a prime opportunity to discuss one of the more sinister multiple personalities of Mr. Vincent Furnier: that of the born-again Christian Republican golf enthusiast. I was shocked to read these facts about him in the article’s lead-in, but even more shocked to see that these issues were never followed up in the interview. I realize your focus is horror in entertainment, but you had a chance to pursue some real meaty journalism here, and your readers end up being treated to what is largely just a puff-piece promoting the new album. Perhaps you feel Rue Morgue isn’t the place to pursue a political…

At the end of this past summer, five industry vets went live with fewdio.com, a new kind of web destination for the horror community. Devoted exclusively to short films, the site features the work of this California-based filmmaking collective, which first gained attention on YouTube. “YouTube was amazing as a leaping-off point,” admits writer/director David Schneider. “But it quickly became clear that we needed more control over our material and how it was presented. For instance, although most of our films hover around the five-minute mark, we do have a few that break YouTube’s ten-minute limit. This got us thinking of all the possibilities we could offer our fanbase on our own website… higher quality video, Easter eggs, and a host of other features coming soon.” Such enthusiasm belies Fewdio’s…

IT’S A STRANGE WORLD. Earthquakes can cause rivers to flow backwards. The Liberty Bell was made in England. And a veteran Swedish art house director with no previous experience in the genre has created one of the greatest vampire films ever made. Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) is an instant classic in every sense – one of the very few contemporary fantastic films that will without a doubt retain its significance 50 years from now. It’s also, in the opinion of many, the best vampire film since Near Dark. Right One (out this month from Magnolia) is actually Sweden’s second vampire film made in recent years, following Anders Bankes’ Frostbitten (2006), before which time the country had never seen a local production that…

IT’S NO SECRET THAT CROSS-POLLINATION EXISTS all over the musical map, but nowhere are the progenitors so clearly defined as in the history of shock rock. This lineage is widely acknowledged as beginning with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his pet skull Henry in 1956; but although Screamin’ Jay is the pioneer of theatrical performance in popular music, shock rock as we know it is more directly indebted to Arthur Brown. One can easily see how Genesis-era Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, KISS and Marilyn Manson owe a debt to Brown and his wild vocal style, proto-corpsepaint and theatricality, in use as early as 1965. The English singer, now 66, is even considered by many to be the father of all satanic rockers; his first single 1967’s “The…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE ROTS ON THE RANGE RIDERS OF THE WORM UNDEAD OR ALIVE Image Ravenous and Uninvited aside, we’re seldom treated to the fusion of the horror and western genres; and it’s even rarer to see one that’s a zombie comedy to boot! When a deserter from the US Army (James Denton) teams up with a lovesick cowboy (Chris Kattan) to break out of a prison lorded over by a corrupt sheriff, they’re caught up in a zombie epidemic and have to run for their lives from a hungry undead posse. With an explosive soundtrack featuring psychobilly tunes from Three Bad Jacks and Slick Pelt, Undead or Alive succeeds on many levels – the gore is plentiful and well executed, the dialogue hilarious and the performances first-rate. As far…

PASOLINI’S PUTREFACTION SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1976) Starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi and Umberto P. Quintavalle Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini Criterion In 1998 the initial Criterion DVD release of Salò, or The 120 days of Sodom quickly became “the rarest DVD in the world” after it was pulled from store shelves due to licensing issues. Collectors were willing to pay upwards of 500 dollars for an authentic “white-ringed” copy of the disc. Fuelling the inflated prices was the notoriety of the film, considered by many to be perverse pornography and the most offensive film ever committed to celluloid. At present, Salò is still banned in many countries. Controversial Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini based Salò on Marquis de Sade’s treatise on sadism, 120 Days…

IN THIS ISSUE A TREASURY OF 20th CENTURY MURDER: THE LINDBERGH CHILD Rick Geary Image THE EC ARCHIVES: TALES FROM THE CRYPT VOLUME 3 Al Feldstein, Graham Ingels, Jack Davis et al. Gemstone Publishing THE HOLE: CONSUMER CULTURE VOL. ONE Damian Duffy and John Jennings Front Forty Press TALES FROM THE CRYPT #4 Various Papercutz So here I am, writing my first column for Rue Morgue in over seven years, and it’s turning out to be quite the trip down memory lane. When the magazine launched in 1997, I was fortunate enough to be the lead writer of Blood in Four Colours, a task I relished for more than three years before personal commitments yanked me away. And now, having quietly disposed of Gary Butler after an impromptu lunch, I’m…

TOLERANCE: THE ART OF CHRIS MARS Chris Mars Last Gasp/La Luz de Jesus If you don’t already love Chris Mars’ nightmarish visages of grotesquely distorted figures populating impossible landscapes, this book will convert you. The paintings are frequently accompanied by text that reveals a touch of the (typically) socially conscious meaning behind his work, which is often inspired by his brother’s struggle with schizophrenia. Decadently disturbing. Jovanka Vuckovic THE SHOW THAT SMELLS Derek McCormack ECW Press Absolutely drenched in perfume, puns and plasma, The Show That Smells is the delightfully twisted tale of a dying country music singer and his very desperate wife, who sells her soul to a sexy, fashion-designing vampiress. McCormack delivers a quick atypical read that’ll have you reeling with laughter and gasping with horror at the…

While in the alternate universe of Romero’s Pittsburgh, you’re also going to want to check out Evans City Cemetery, the setting for the first scene in Night of the Living Dead. Located about half an hour north of Monroeville Mall, just outside of Evans City on Franklin Road, Evans City Cemetery is a humble graveyard that was incorporated in 1891. When you visit, keep in mind that it’s sacred ground; not just because therein lies the consecrated dead but because it was here that we were first introduced to the concept of the modern zombie in the iconic movie that transitioned the horror genre into contemporary times. Other than losing a few trees and gaining a few monuments, the cemetery has actually changed little in the 40 years since the…

LIKE THE EXPERIMENT AT THE HEART OF DAVID Cronenberg’s 1986 Fly remake, the L.A. Opera’s six-night production of The Fly: The Opera (also directed by Cronenberg) at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion this past September was, ultimately, a failed experiment. Like Brundlefly, this project represents the melding of two not particularly compatible things, and the result was a hideous monstrosity, albeit one from which we cannot look away. There is a lot to hate about the production for fans of the movie. The overall structure is problematic: Brundle (played by Daniel Okulitch) doesn’t get into the telepod until the end of Act I, so Act II begins with him starting to become Brundlefly. As such, the expert pacing established in the film is absent. The second half leaves too little time…

Although there were fewer horror selections at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival than in previous installments, the genre titles that did play – particularly in the Midnight Madness programme – showcased international films intent on breaking conventions and pushing boundaries. Films from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Spain and the US came in the form of everything from genre documentaries to a horror-western mash-up, art house zombies and – in the case of Martyrs – enough gore to make at least one audience member vomit in the aisle. Besides seven Midnight Madness titles, three additional films (Sauna, Vinyan and Pontypool) played outside the late-night programme, exposing us to ten new genre entries at this year’s TIFF. ACOLYTES Jon Hewitt/Australia Loosely influenced by the real-life crimes of 1970s-era suburban killers…

+ Thirteen-year-old Twinkle Dwivedi has a medical condition that has stumped medical professionals across her native India, it causes her to bleed randomly, up to twenty times a day, through her skin, eyes, nose, hairline and even the bottoms of her feet. + Vampyr director Carl Dreyer was so obsessed with details that his assistants rounded up numerous spiders, fed them ants and flies (by attracting them with honey), plus a dead mole, and got them to successfully spin webs in the right places on one of the sets to add atmosphere to the film. + One of the 18th-century methods of preventing venereal disease involved wrapping up one’s genitals in the carcass of a freshly slaughtered chicken. + The working title of David Cronenberg’s Shivers was Orgy of the…

BEATING ROMERO THE ZOMBIE DIARIES Starring Russell Jones, Anna Blades and Imogen Church Written and directed by Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates Dimension Extreme Though completed in 2006, British-made The Zombie Diaries comes to North America in the wake of both Diary of the Dead and [REC]. The timing is a shame because as a result, this zombie mockumentary already seems like a rehash, even though it was actually completed first. While the movie is far too inconsistent to match the unrelenting suspense of [REC], it is at least better than the overblown Diary of the Dead, and when first-time filmmakers can beat George A. Romero at his own game, that’s certainly an achievement. Co-writers/directors Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates focus on a group of documentary filmmakers working on a…

DANCE OF THE DEAD Directed by Gregg Bishop Written by Joe Ballarini One of the few bright spots in this dismal collection is yet another entry in the tired zombie-comedy subgenre, but this one beats the odds and is actually terrifically entertaining. The first half-hour plays out like an episode of 90210, and there are few indications that the film will be anything special, but once the zombies make their appearance Dance of the Dead breaks out some razor-sharp writing, hilarious characters and truly disgusting gore. The characters are broken up into two groups – those who could get dates to the big high school prom and those who couldn’t. When the giant nuclear power plant next to the town seeps waste into the local graveyard, zombie mayhem overcomes the…

FANS OF CLASSIC SILVER SCREEN HORROR ARE NO doubt in a state of bliss right now thanks to the DVD release of several hard-to-find films from those masters of gothic terror, Hammer Films. Icons of Horror 3 (from Sony) is a new two-disc collection of four fright fests from the famed British studio. Presented in widescreen format, these remastered and uncut UK versions feature original trailers but unfortunately little else in the way of bonus features. Despite this, the set still makes for an essential addition for fans of the legendary studio. THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960) Directed by Terence Fisher Written by Wolf Mankowitz In this sexy, rather adult variation of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson story, Dr. Jekyll (Paul Massie) is a bearded, older, unattractive scientist,…

One wonders if when pulp magazine Weird Tales was first published in March of 1923 its creators had any inkling of its longevity – that 85 years later readers would still be clamouring for strange stories? Perhaps more importantly, just what is a “weird tale” anyway? “I see it like this,” says Weird Tales current editorial director Stephen H. Segal. “A great science fiction or epic fantasy story makes you yell ‘Wow!’ A great horror movie makes you either shriek or go ‘Ewwww!’ But a great weird tale should leave you with your jaw hanging open, speechless, because you’ve never seen anything like that before.” During its original 279-issue run from 1923 to September 1954, the magazine focused primarily on fiction. While it was never particularly profitable, it was vitally…

According to Veronique Chevalier, in hell there’s lots of beer, no last call and nonstop polka. For the French-American cabaret singer, this is not a “two outta three ain’t bad” situation. Chevalier actually loves polka, that Eastern European folk music best known ’round here as the soundtrack to Octoberfest or the occasional novelty tune from Weird Al Yankovic. Fortunately for the rest of us, Chevalier also loves scary stories. So her new record, Polka Haunt Us, gives the genre a Transylvania twist. “It’s a spook-tacular compilation of thirteen polkas based on ghostly legends from various regions around the world,” she explains. “We’ve combined polka with indigenous musical forms that correspond with the tales. So for a song about Annie Palmer – the white witch of Jamaica who would seduce and…

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