Table of contents for Issue 85 December 2008 in RUE MORGUE

+ In the weeks following Hurricane Ike, searchers were tasked with finding approximately 200 coffins that were washed out of their graves as a result of the thirteen-foot storm surge. + Magician Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926 of a gangerous appendix, a condition that developed after he’d been sucker-punched several days earlier in Montreal, Canada. + An Australian funeral director was recently found guilty of using his hearse to terrorize a woman; he chased her around Sydney in it in the middle of the night. + Fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was so concerned about being buried alive that he insisted one of his major arteries be severed following his death – just to be sure. + Finnish gaming site Iastenpelit.fi removed an online game called Kindergarten…

HOLD ON TO YOUR SOULS:RUE MORGUE PRESENTS THIRTEEN OF COFFIN JOE'S MOSTUNNERVING FILMS. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) In this film, José Mojica Marins appears for the first time as the character of Coffin Joe. In search of a superior woman to bear a perfect child, he terrorizes a small town, curses the creator of the universe and dabbles with supernatural forces beyond his control. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) In this sequel to At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, Coffin Joe continues his quest for the perfect woman to carry on his legacy. It also contains the notorious sequence of Coffin Joe in hell, which is the only scene in the film that appears in colour. Respected Brazilian director Glauber Rocha declared this film “genius.”…

BELIEVE IT OR NOT. HORROR TIE-INS WERE AROUND LONG BEFORE YOU BOUGHT THET NOVELIZATION OF HOLLOWEEN WHEN YOU WERE A KID… THE TIE-IN NOVEL MAY BE AN OFTEN MALIGNED form of literature, but that doesn’t stop many of us from having fond memories of supermarket racks brimming with a veritable marquee of paperback adaptations. The colourful images and reproductions of movie posters on their covers have for decades attracted curious genre-loving teens like moths to a flame. For impressionable horror fans not yet old enough to indulge in the thrills of R-rated movies, this was the next best thing. “Of course, there are kids who’ll read the book because they’re not old enough to get into the movie,” explains Deborah Allison, a London-based cinema programmer who has written academically about…

CALL THE EXTERMINATOR! QUARANTINE Starring Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez and Steve Harris Directed by John Erick Dowdle Written by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle Screen Gems The next time you wait a month for the landlord to fix your water pressure, you discover mouse droppings in your cupboard or your upstairs neighbours play Rush songs on Rock Band until four in the morning, just remember, things could be worse: your building could be infested with zombies. Lack of an undead clause in your apartment insurance aside, that’s pretty shitty, but shittier yet, you could be locked inside by the authorities. The twist on Quarantine’s simple premise is that the entire film is shot through the P.O.V. of a news camera. Saddled with a human interest story about firemen, Angela…

MOTHER MAY I? PSYCHO (1960) Starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Written by Joseph Stefano Universal The forerunner to the modern horror film, Alfred Hitchcock’s low-budget black and white Psycho is surely one of the most analyzed and influential films in motion picture history. Based on a lurid 1959 pulp novel by prolific author Robert Bloch – which in turn was loosely based on the murderous deeds of real-life Plainfield, Wisconsin psychopath, Ed Gein – the movie was initially met with contempt and harsh critical response. “A blot on an honorable career,” quipped Bosley Crowther of The New York Times. Despite this, the movie became a smash hit with audiences worldwide, and its anti-hero – a mild-mannered motel owner with a dual personality and…

For a genre often marginalized by the mainstream, horror has been suprisingly well-documented. Regularly scan the book review section of this magazine and you’ll soon realize that if it’s scary and on film, someone somewhere has written a book about it. Among the best is David J. Skal’s The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993), a highly respected work that definitively traces horror’s long history, examining its roots in art, literature and myth, as well as how social forces shape movie trends… up until 2001 at least (if you get the newest edition). One of Skal’s admirers is lifelong genre fan Axelle Carolyn. Born in Belgium, Carolyn, 29, worked as a horror journalist, model and actress (including small roles in her husband Neil Marshall’s film Doomsday and the…

MIRRORS (2008) Soundtrack Javier Navarrete LAKESHORE RECORDS Mirrors by Javier Navarrete (Pan’s Labyrinth) is an elegant, dramatically expansive score that captures the kind of emotional subtext and insecurities that get lost when a director spends more time setting up lame shocks than developing characters. So while Mirrors the film may have withered from theatre screens, Navarrete’s music is still worth revisiting for its tender themes (“Ben Carson”) and moments of slowly unfurling unease (“First Night”). The composer’s shock cuts aren’t all-out assaults, and there’s a beautiful interplay between the divine (little chamber and solo piano theme fragments) and the profane (the orchestral gnashing in “Angela’s Death”), particularly when the two factions converse and taunt each other with sometimes brutal results. A beautiful nightmare crafted by another superb Spanish composer. MRH…

Brian De Palma USA – 1974 Since their inception at the dawn of sound cinema, the Universal Monsters (and their copyright-free counterparts) have been revisited throughout the decades more than any other cinematic miscreants. Numerous Universal sequels, Hammer studio’s own distinctly British versions of the characters, Andy Warhol’s art house take on Dracula and Frankenstein, contemporary Hollywood remakes of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy (and upcoming versions of The Wolfman and The Creature from the Black Lagoon) plus numerous international appropriations of the characters make for too many offspring to count. There have, however, only been a few films based on Universal’s 1925 silent chiller The Phantom of the Opera, which starred Lon Chaney as the title character. One version, originally released to theatres on Halloween night, 1974, is not…

jimhorwat.com Jim Horwat scribbles homages to slasher films in a campy cartoonish style that even Jason’s mother would love. Rendered in pen and ink, Howat’s talent for composition and design guides the viewer through a visual maze of mayhem. Get lost in the gory details! monkeygoatboy.com Freak Central is a webcomic about a newspaper crew that investigates supernatural and paranormal occurences. Join Steve (the literal monkey goat boy) and his fellow staffers as they encounter oversized praying mantises, sentient ventriloquist dummies and other creatures in this clever, mostly black-and-white tale. thehorrorsection.blogspot.com Jay Clarke populates his blog with horror film reviews, vintage VHS box cover scans (Lorimar’s Trick or Treat, anyone?) and photos and reports from various Southern Ontario genre events. It’s a smorgasbord of content for horror film fans of…

After 40 years, José Mojica Marins’ alter ego Coffin Joe returns with Embodiment of Evil, the final film in a twisted trilogy that he began in 1964. And this time he has a special weapon up his black sleeve: scriptwriter Dennison Ramalho. Both Marins and Ramalho were working in the limited scene of subterranean Brazilian filmmaking, so it was no surprise that the artists would eventually meet (in 1995) – Ramalho, the eager fan and collector, and Marins, a living legend. The older filmmaker proceeded to guide Ramalho through his own directorial debut. “He has always helped me with my own movies,” says Ramalho, who co-wrote Embodiment of Evil with Marins, “as a mentor, counsellor or even debater. My first short, Nocturnu [1999] is dedicated to him.” Nocturnu made a…

Tie-in novels may be roundly dismissed by critics, but that hasn’t stopped many celebrated writers from plying their craft for these releases, translating (and occasionally expanding upon) someone else’s cinematic vision for the page. Established genre authors, including John Shirley, Tim Lebbon, Elizabeth Massie, Nancy Kilpatrick and Yvonne Navarro, have all written contemporary horror tie-ins. And before them, there were others, including author/editor Dennis Etchison (The Blood Kiss, Darkside), who not only achieved acclaim for his original works, but also wrote some of the most noteworthy tie-in novels of the early ’80s. His written adaptations of such films as John Carpenter’s 1980 ghost story The Fog, the second and third entries in the Halloween saga and David Cronenberg’s 1983 mind-bending Videodrome (the latter three published under the pseudonym Jack Martin)…

OVERLOOKED, FORGOTTEN AND DISMISSED THIS ISSUE: LANCE WEATHERS THE WORST BIG HAIRY DEAL SUBURBAN SASQUATCH Brain Damage Films Wow, my 50th column! Apparently time flies when you’re watching shitty movies. As you might imagine, I’m often asked what the worst movie I’ve ever seen is, so I thought I’d choose three of the very worst… starting with Suburban Sasquatch. When a Sasquatch – a.k.a. a guy in an ape suit and a pair of fuzzy slippers – attacks the residents of a small town, it’s up to a dweeb reporter, a rotund cop and a hot Native American woman armed with a set of magical arrowheads to stop the CGI bloodshed. The film is rife with horribly looped sound effects and sets made out of plastic garbage bags; if you…

VAN OF THE HOUR THE HILARIOUS HOUSE OF FRIGHTENSTEIN: GORY GORY TRANSYLVANIA (1971) Starring Billy Van, Fishka Rais and Vincent Price Written and directed by Riff Markowitz Anchor Bay Nostalgia is powerful, which is why the release of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein: Gory Gory Transylvania brings joyful tears to these bloodshot eyes and kindles warmth in this blackened heart. For those not in the know (or who haven’t read the RM#62 cover story), The Hilarious House of Frightenstein was a brilliant, largely improvised Canadian TV show for kids produced in Hamilton, Ontario in 1971 and aired on various networks over the following 25 years. It starred veteran Canadian performer Billy Van as Count Frightenstein, a self-aggrandizing but clueless vampire whose mission is to make Brucie, his Frankenstein monster proxy,…

DR. WITTY, I PRESUME? Betcha thought I’d go all seasonal for the December issue, didn’tcha? Think again. With only a few exceptions (Black Christmas and… okay, I’m drawing a blank), Christmas-themed horror films pretty much blow, so I’m bah-humbugging the lot of ’em this year. It’s appropriate, however, that I’m devoting this column to a couple of beloved figures from my childhood who showered me with gifts every Saturday afternoon. Monster Movie Matinee, hosted by Dr. E. Nick Witty and his assistant Epal, was broadcast on WSYR from Syracuse, NewYork; my hometown of Kingston, Ontario was well within range, and my bounty was great. Once bidden inside the Monster Mansion, we were greeted by the Doctor – well, part of him, anyway. This dubious practitioner’s face was so horribly disfigured…

The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture Heather L. Duda McFarland What makes a monster? To answer this, we must first decide what is human. This is the main focus in Heather L. Duda’s investigation into the role of the monster hunter. Though originally intended as a dissertation, Duda has lengthened her thesis for the purpose of this technical (yet still accessible) and thoroughly entertaining book. Tracing the trajectory of the iconic monster hunter from the traditional “alienated intellectual” of the Victorian era, as evidenced by Dracula’s Van Helsing, to the self-hating monster, such as Interview with a Vampire’s Louis, she presents a well-rounded history of the ever-raging war between humanity and monstrosity. Duda explains how, historically, monsters have symbolized what we deem most vile, most repugnant – the line…

West Virginia has long been a state purported to harbour unnatural happenings: ghoulish ghosts, beastly bigfoots (bigfeet?), UFO landings and all other forms of backwoods boogeymen. Among this paranormal pantheon, none is more famous or widely celebrated than that of Point Pleasant, West Virginia’s “Mothman.” The Mothman is a cryptozoological creature that was spotted more than 100 times from 1966 to 1967 in Point Pleasant and its outlying areas. Among this man-sized monster’s most commonly described features is a ten to twelve-foot moth-like wingspan emanating from a man-like torso, atop of which rests a pair of hypnotic, glowing red eyes. The creature’s reign of terror was accompanied for a year-and-a-half by a massive trend of UFO sightings, visits from mysterious “Men in Black” and humanoids supposedly from outer space. The…

"ME’RE NOT INTERESTED IN REALISM; we all have day jobs,” sums up guitarist/songwriter Sean Kennedy of his occult/dark fantasy-inspired band Blood Ceremony. Sitting in the front room of his house in west Toronto, his influences are apparent. The walls are adorned with classic horror movie posters, including the Devil’s Bride and Simon – King of the Witches, there’s a bookshelf full of old horror pulp fiction from Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, reference books on the occult, a Blind Dead DVD collection and so on. “There’s a lot [of influence] from the pulp horror school like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and definitely Clark Ashton Smith, whose stories really transport you somewhere very exciting and different; they’re very powerful,” notes Kennedy, citing the band’s song “The Rare Lord” – about…

With so many delicious events already bombarding Toronto’s film festival calendar, one may wonder if the city could sustain an entire festival devoted exclusively to genre film. Well, the third annual Toronto After Dark answered that question with a resounding yes. This year’s festival, which ran from October 17-24 at the Bloor cinema, attracted the largest crowds to date and even sold out four screenings. It was also a chance for Rue Morgue to get first crack at a few notable nasties (not previously covered in the magazine) among the sixteen features that screened. DONKEY PUNCH Oliver Blackburn/UK A gang of enterprising young sailors picks up a gaggle of bouncy British babes vacationing in the Mediterranean. They all get high and head for the high seas on a luxury yacht…

REVERED COMICS ARTIST AND ILLUSTRATOR Bernie Wrightson may be best known as the co-creator of one of comicdom’s most enduring and endearing monsters, the goop-dripping eco-warrior Swamp Thing, but get him talking about horror creatures past and present and he’ll tell you that one monster, the tragic villain of a difficult, philosophical novel written in the early 19th century by a then-obscure female author, trumps them all. The novel: Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. The author: Mary Shelley. The monster is a trickier affair. Often erroneously referred to by his fictional creator’s surname, Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s lumpen creation was never dignified with a first or last name. He is, forevermore, the anonymous beast, the gnarled, shuffling grandaddy of the modern monster. Comic book fans also know that Wrightson consummated a…

LONG BEFORE YOU COULD WALK INTO YOUR LOCAL TOY OR COMIC SHOP AND PICK UP GRUESOMELY DETAILED COLLECTIBLES FROM MCFARLANE Toys or NECA, there were Monsters Scenes model kits. Released by hobby giant Aurora Plastics Corporation in 1971, these torture scene dioramas were a monster kid’s delight and a parent’s nastiest nightmare. Featuring an evil mad scientist, his monstrous, manmade servant, oversized creepy creations, not to mention buxom, scantily clad figures (moulded in flesh-coloured plastic) and terrible torture devices to put them in, they were billed by Aurora as “frightening good fun.” But many parents weren’t amused. In fact, the kits – marketed under the tagline “Rated X…For Excitement!” – aroused the ire of a gaggle of concerned citizens and were soon yanked. Not surprisingly, they have become rare collectibles.…

IT’S NO SECRET THAT HORROR HAS A RATHER DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF sex and nudity in it. Slasher movies, cheesecake vampire films, nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, torture porn and a glut of indie terror features have helped forge a strong bond between boobs ’n’ blood over the years. But as steamy as the sex scenes get, the films generally stay away from full-frontal male nudity and any kind of visible sexual penetration. But there is a newer subgenre that doesn’t shy away from penetration of both the weapon and penile variety. The Urban Dictionary defines horror-porn as “a film genre that combines the techniques of both horror films and porn films to create a total base cinematic experience.” To prove just how base your cinematic experience can be, we have gathered five recent…

BCI ECLIPSE HAS RENAMED ITS BUDGET-PRICED “Welcome to the Grindhouse!” series “Exploitation Cinema.” Other than a slight reworking of the cover art and the addition of some animated menu options, these discs are exactly the same. Each one contains two transfers of vintage film prints and a half-dozen related trailers you might have seen on 42nd Street back in the day. Watch everything individually, or to completely relive the legendary theatrical experience of yore, select the “Grindhouse Experience” option and sit back for an introduction, three trailers, the first feature, a concession stand advertisement, another three trailers and the second feature. Spilled soda, burnt popcorn and cigarette smoke not included. MAUSOLEUM(1983) BLOOD SONG (1983) Mausoleum stars the scream queen who almost was, the lovely Bobbie Bresee (Surf Nazis Must Die,…

TERROR ISLAND Rakie Keig Hadesgate Vampires, werewolves, zombies and a virus-infested island to harbour them all. What initially seems to be an over-ambitious debut from novelist Rakie Keig quickly proves itself a vertiginous nightmare. Thick with carnage, tortuously tense from start to finish and, needless to say, not for the faint-hearted, horror readers will find much to love, and fear, in this monstrous thriller. Jessa Sobczuk THE NIGHTMARE COLLECTION Bruce Boston Dark Regions This fine little horror/dark fantasy poetry collection from Bruce Boston, which includes the delightfully sly marriage treatise “Curse of the Giantess’ Husband,” also features appropriately strange and eerie illustrations courtesy of Russell Morgan. Ever a storyteller, whether in formal or free verse, Boston does not disappoint. Even those who sneer at poetry may want to take…

Remakes and homages reign as the decade lumbers to an end, but when the epitaph is written and we remember that this was a prolific but retread period for the horror genre, will we recall these valiant efforts? VAGRANT Starring Russ Hurley, Sheila Marr and Tim LeMance Written by Charlie Vargas Directed by Lou Vockell OTR Productions The Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration Grindhouse was the not the first film to visually imitate ’70s exploitation, but it is certainly the highest profile. However, there is no one better suited to pretty much nail the concept than a legitimate low-budget filmmaker unfettered by commercial sensibilities or ego. Like many an exploitation film of that storied era, Vagrant is purportedly based on a true story. The plot is best described as Reservoir Dogs…

SILENT HILL: HOMECOMING PS3, XBOX 360, PC Konami Being a huge fan of the Silent Hill series, I’ve travelled to that fog-bound scary-as-shit town far too many times. I’ve fought the skinned demon dogs, battled the twitchy nurses and been hacked to pieces by good ol’ Pyramid Head. Go figure, I couldn’t wait to get my shaky hands on the sixth installment of this series, Silent Hill: Homecoming. As grizzled war vet Alex Shepherd, players explore the towns of Shepherd’s Glen and Silent Hill, trying to solve the mysterious disappearances of his father and younger brother. Featuring a storyline rife with infanticide, mental illness and child abuse, Homecoming presents the perfect balance of puzzle-solving and exploration as you battle horrifying monsters while frantically searching for clues in newspaper clippings and…

MORE BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE. SEE WWW.RUE-MORGUE.COM FOR A COMPLETE LIST.…