Table of contents for Issue 74 December 2007 in RUE MORGUE

TWISTED CHRISTMAS FIGURES $12–$15 Santa’s got his claws out and joins an unholy host of satanic snowmen, demonic deer and evil elves from the warped brains at Macfarlane Toys to add a touch of seasonal malevolence to your holidays. And just look at what Mrs. Claus has been up to with the North Pole! You better watch out at spawn.com. NECRONOMICON TAROT $26.95 From the crazed brain of Abdul Alhazred (via writer Donald Tyson and artist Anne Stokes) comes a beautiful and demented deck which weaves images from Lovecraft’s mythos with classic Rider-Waite tarot symbolism. More Dark Age than New Age, these cards come with a 200-page book to help you get beyond the veil. Find your fate at llewellyn.com. SKELEFLAMINGOS $28 Finally, something to complement your Jason Voorhees garden…

For horror fans who grew up reading magazines like Gorezone or Video Watchdog, Tim Lucas’ Mario Bava biography was something of a fable, an epic project perpetually in the works, so ambitious in scope that it might never see the light of day. But now it’s here, a twelve-pound monolith of text and images 30-plus years in the making: All the Colors of the Dark. The 51-year-old writer’s love affair with the Italian innovator’s work was ironically spawned not from the screen, but from the printed page. “I became interested [in Bava] quite a while before I actually saw the films, because I read about them in Castle of Frankenstein magazine,” Lucas explains. “Joe Dante, who was then a critic for them – this is the mid-to-late 1960s – always…

It was the moment fans had been waiting for. After eleven seasons adrift in space, spent heckling some of the most unbearable genre films ever made, Mystery Science Theater 3000 star Mike Nelson – along with his acid-tongued robot puppet pals, Tom Servo (Bill Corbett) and Crow T. Robot (Kevin Murphy) – managed to escape home to Earth to lead normal lives in the series’ final episode. Although no longer forced to endure films such as Hobgoblins, The Screaming Skull and Monster AGo-Go, the show ended as the three main characters nevertheless found themselves in front of the TV in a tiny apartment, making yet more verbal jabs at trashy movies, echoing the sardonic pleasure we all feel when watching a particularly inept horror flick. Playful irony aside, the long-running…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE LIVES CRAPPILY EVER AFTER THE “SIN” IN CINDERELLA CADAVERELLA Brain Damage Films If you’ve ever thought the classic Cinderella tale would benefit from strippers, motorcycles and reanimated corpses, you’re in for a treat. In this version, Cinder’s a young woman whose life falls to shit when her mom dies and her father marries a demented stripper intent on killing her before she can get her father’s inheritance. Worse, Cinder’s “Prince Charming” rapes and murders her, so her “Fairy Godmother” – a voodoo priest – raises her corpse from the dead to exact revenge. It’s a very low-budget affair but a worthwhile watch due to some good gore, great dark humour and the fantastic twist of a zombie Cinderella. It’s exactly the kind of tale the Brothers Grimm…

GAMEHA IIIPEH MONJTEN (/980) BIRTHPLACE: JAPAN MASS: 80,000 TONNES SIGNATURE MOVE: FLYING SHELL SPLASH VS THEY CAME FROM BEYOND JPAa (1967) BIRTHPLACE: UK MASS: .493-. 986 ELECTRON VOLTS PER PHOTON SIGNATURE MOVE: BRAIN BURROW One of the hardened veterans of the creature feature circuit, Gamera may have seen better days, but he’s been ripe for a comeback ever since Toho started refusing his phone calls. Gamera, Super Monster recycles fight footage from his first seven features, bringing back all his past adversaries for another series of bloody bouts. It’s a nice reminder of past glories, sure, but can Gamera still take on evil aliens and maintain his friendship with all children in what could be his farewell performance? No one seems to know, but teaming up with three cheerful space…

Franchise Follies • Archetypal Tendencies • Spiritless Spectres Hollywood Horror from the Director’s Chair Simon A. Wilkinson McFarland Like many of the sequels he focuses on in his book, Simon A. Wilkinson doesn’t really offer fans anything new. However, Hollywood Horror from the Director’s Chair does present a provocative, third-party examination of some of modern horror’s most beloved franchises. Wilkinson explores how series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even The Blair Witch Project have basically been adopted as bastard sons by big studios that are more interested in profit than creativity, and what these franchises have done to the careers of their directors, with many of them finding themselves pigeonholed in the genre as a result. Though he focuses primarily on a few…

Mansfield is a ghost town. Oh, there are people living here, in the middle of Ohio between Cleveland and Columbus – about 50,000 of them. But even though the power’s still on, Main Street feels abandoned. Arriving on a Sunday afternoon, I drive past row after row of colourful Victorian mansions, once grand but now faded like the paint peeling off their verandas. At the Carousel Park, lonely wooden horses wait for riders, and there are plenty of parking spaces in the town square. The haunted vibe suits my mission: a trip to the Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield’s abandoned state penitentiary. It was made famous to film viewers in the 1990s as the set for The Shawshank Redemption. But for a century before that, its prisoners – alive and dead…

28 WEEKS LATER Soundtrack John Murphy FOX MUSIC John Murphy’s minimalist, seminihilistic theme from 28 Days Later is once again central in his score for the sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie thriller. Like he did for Boyle’s Sunshine, Murphy sticks with his fusion of orchestral samples, acoustic sounds, electronic tones and percussion for 28 Weeks Later, creating weirdly intimate music for a post-apocalyptic world where technology can’t save mankind. Sampled voices, delicate keyboards and acoustic guitar are the emotional anchors, while long streams of washed-out tones, distorted electric guitar and minimalist themes remind us of the disintegrating technological comforts and safeguards. Murphy avoids bombast and sonic overload (electric guitar and drums excepted) in favour of wavering moods, making this a sublimely bleak album (available only from iTunes) that’ll transform…

HIGHEST RATING IS THREE. GRAPHICS: PLAYABILITY: SHIVERS: BLACKSITE: AREA 51 PC, PS3, Xbox 360 Midway It’s inevitable: the aliens are gonna come some time soon and kick our skinny human asses. If you want to see what it might look like before it actually happens, grab this title and prepare for the day they try to pull your larynx through your sphincter. Assuming the role of a grizzled Iraqi war hero, players move into the famed Nevada military base that doesn’t officially exist: Area 51. Here you come face-to-face with some hostile ETs who want to do a whole lot more than phone home. You’ll often find yourself manning a mini-gun on a helicopter gunship or firing from the back of a Hummer as you skirmish through…

CONGRATULATIONS on the 10th anniversary issue, probably one of the best issues of a horror magazine I’ve ever read. I particularly enjoyed the history of Rue Morgue article as a relatively new reader and it’s great to see the magazine still achieves (and exceeds) what Mr. Gudiño set out to do. I also liked the article on the history of [General Mills] horror cereal boxes – where else can you read about such things? Keep up the terrific work and be proud that your dream of a magazine that celebrates horror culture has reached across continents and is now an essential part of my horror collection. Matt Roberts – Canberra, Australia I WAS COMPELLED to pick up your 10th anniversary issue for the following reasons: Clive Barker (one of the…

In the last five years, torture porn has crafted a veritable cottage industry of human suffering and mutilation, glorifying graphic person-on-person violence in order to titillate and entertain theatregoers. Its “victims” have been largely objectified into meaty set pieces, often served up with gratuitous helpings of softcore sexual hijinks and cartoonish violence that’s full of a kind of schoolyard “I can shock you more” one-upmanship between directors such as Eli Roth (Hostel), Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III and IV) and Rob Zombie. But now comes the antidote: Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, a film that explores the human element of torture as it captures the unforgettable abuse waged upon one teenage girl. And unlike many contemporary horror films which falsely purport to be “based on a true story”…

While Mario Bava was never limited exclusively to the horror and giallo genres, it’s here that he excelled. Anchor Bay continues its tribute to the “Maestro of the Macabre” by releasing volume two of The Mario Bava Collection. This set offers eight films covering Bava’s ’70s output almost in its entirety: Four Times that Night (his first and only sex comedy), Five Dolls for an August Moon, Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (one of numerous spaghetti westerns by the director), Bay of Blood, Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil, House of Exorcism (a producer’s reworking of Lisa and the Devil) and the recently reissued Kidnapped (Bava’s first crime drama). All of these films and many of their extras were originally available on DVD from Image, but Anchor Bay has retransferred…

BLOODSOAKED IN BARROW 30 DAYS OF NIGHT Starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston Directed by David Slade Written by Steve Niles, Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson Columbia Rue Morgue declared this film its most anticipated of 2007, and I too floated into the darkened theatre high on expectations for the adaptation of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s groundbreaking vampire comic. If this wasn’t a perfect horror film, there would be no mercy, I would rip it a new jugular. Now, I can’t do it. 30 Days of Night may not be perfect, but it has such perfect parts. For a mainstream blockbuster, it is bold and bloody in its use of violence and gore, and remains true to the original comic in style and substance. Its main flaw…

I oftentimes approach this column with an attitude of digging for gold. Without meaning to disparage an undeniably well-meaning industry, suffice to say that frequently I have to dig quite deep and look where others are not searching. And when I hit the proverbial vein (an apt double metaphor), it enriches my life. Hopefully yours, too. To that point, allow me present The Arrival, an extraordinary graphic novel by Australian artist Shaun Tan. It’s a wordless, Kafkaesque horror about a man struggling to reunite with his family in a world gone to surreal chiaroscuro hell – at least, that’s what I saw when I devoured it. But here’s what makes the book a true Rue discovery: not only is it being aimed at students (publisher’s recommended age bracket: 10-18), but…

DARK HARVEST Norman Partridge Tor It’s Halloween night and young Pete McCormick has one thing on his mind: kill the October Boy. If he succeeds, the pumpkin-headed monstrosity will be dead forever and Pete can finally escape his hellhole of a hometown. Bram Stoker Award-winner Norman Partridge takes readers on a fast-paced fright ride that’s nearly impossible to put down. Last Chance Lance THE MONSTER HUNTERS HANDBOOK Ibrahim S. Amin Bloomsbury Subtitled “The Ultimate Guide to Saving Mankind from Vampires, Zombies, Hellhounds and other Mythical Beasts,” this 200-plus page handbook catalogues monsters and the magical weapons used to kill them. Tedious and poorly illustrated, it’s the latest release to ride the coattails of The Zombie Survival Guide. Even as a kid’s book, the message is to kill what you…

Maintaining a dual life as a blood-splatter expert for the Miami police department as well as methodical serial killer, the title character of Showtime’s Dexter is a study in opposites – embraced by fans of the show for his whimsical musings on his own dark nature. Daniel Licht’s music – now available on CD from Milan and as an expanded iTunes album – is tailor-made for the show’s gruesome sense of humour. “Dexter in a lot of ways touches upon the many directions that my career has gone,” says Licht. “I did start in the thriller-horror genre, and I sort of managed to arc and end up doing comedy.” Licht transcended B-flicks (including sequels to The Amityville Horror and Children of the Corn) with his strong grasp of melody and…

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Running for seven days at the legendary Bloor Cinema – from October 19 to 25 – the Toronto After Dark Film Festival saw attendance rise over 51 percent last year with the draw of more Canadian premieres. Highlights included an opening night presentation of acclaimed rat-zombie film Mulberry Street (RM#69), which took the Toronto After Dark Spirirt Award, a sold out showing of Lloyd Kaufman’s fast food industry-assault Poultrygeist (RM#73) and a closing night screening of the wildly splatteriffic Murder Party (see p.39), making this year’s Toronto After Dark lineup every bit as much bloodthirsty fun as the festival’s highly celebrated 2006 inaugural run. Rue Morguegot a sneak peek at a few titles destined for instant cult classic status, and perhaps one or two doomed to the delete-bin ALONE Thailand…

Weird Stats Morbid Facts + In 1883, when there was a job opening for a hangman in England, over 1400 people applied for the position. + In occupied France during WWII, one of the most popular forms of entertainment for Nazi officers was attending Grand Guignol performances. + It takes 240th of a second for a human body to be rendered unconscious during an electrocution in an electric chair. + During the height of her popularity as TV’s first horror host, Vampira (Maila Nurmi) regularly hit the town with close friend and then-struggling actor James Dean. After his death, the press played up the morbid connection between them, dubbing her the “Black Madonna.” + American Michael Mastromarino stands accused of illegally harvesting bone and tissue from more than 1000 corpses…

Starring Ellen Page, Catherine Keener and Hayley McFarland Directed by Tommy O’Haver Written by Tommy O’Haver and Irene Turner If Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door didn’t punish you enough, there’s another nasty film based on the same harrowing true story planned for a summer release: Tommy O’Haver’s An American Crime. Reining in many of the gorier details of the case, and forgoing The Girl Next Door’s literary and filmic device of having the narrator as one of the perpetrators, An American Crime goes directly to the court records to present its version of the events. Opening with the 1965 trial, the film smoothly shifts into the story of the Likens parents about to travel with a carnival for work, leaving their daughters Sylvia (Ellen Page: Hard Candy) and Jennie…

THE V WORD Starring Arjay Smith, Branden Nadon and Michael Ironside Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson Written by Mick Garris Anchor Bay How can anyone not like a movie with Michael Ironside in it? I mean, he’s right up there with John Saxon (no, I’ll never stop dropping his name – Saxon rules!) in terms of older, badass, cult-cool motherfuckers. From his performance as the trigger-happy, leather coat-clad Richter in Total Recall, to the intergalactic bug-hunting Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers, to Colt Hawker, the lunatic misogynist rapist killer in Visiting Hours, and, of course, the mind-combusting Darryl Revok in Scanners, Ironside rarely, if ever, disappoints. Too bad the same can’t be said for the Masters of Horror episode “The V Word.” Here, Ironside plays Mr. Chaney (in a…

DAN AYKROYD IS NOT A WEREWOLF! TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE (1983) Starring Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks and John Lithgow Directed by Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Joe Dante, et al. Written by Richard Matheson, Josh Rogan and George Clayton Johnson Warner I was sure Dan Aykroyd turned into a werewolf in Twilight Zone the Movie. But no, he’s just a bluish ghoul. Memories of certain films mutate as they incubate in the brain over the years, and like so many movies first watched on video, this one (finally on DVD) has been less polished by the sands of time than ground down by them. Revisiting the world of the Twilight Zone TV show, the anthology begins with a classic morality tale of a modern-day bigot who walks out of a bar…

WHAT THE KATZMAN DRAGGED IN THE WEREWOLF (1956) Starring Steven Ritch, Don Megowan and Joyce Holden Directed by Fred F. Sears Written by Robert E. Kent Sony Along with Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff, Sam Katzman was one of the few Hollywood players that could truly lay claim to a title like “King of the Bs.” But while most trash film fans are only too familiar with Corman and AIP’s extensive catalogue of schlock, Katzman has remained a comparatively obscure figure, despite his long reputation as one of the cagiest B-unit moguls of the studio era. Over his 40-year career, Katzman worked himself up from a lowly studio gopher to a prolific producer of low-budget fare, having a hand in no less than 240 films. Willing to hop on…

Steven Hall did not set out to write the next great horror novel. In fact, quite the opposite. In his first book, The Raw Shark Texts – the story of a lovesick amnesiac hunted by a giant shark – he deliberately tears at the walls of genre convention, churning the thrills and chills with hallmarks ripped from adventure, sci-fi and mystery. It might even make you cry. “The big idea behind the book was to answer the question, ‘Is it possible to write something which would feel like a different book to every reader?’” says the 32-year-old Brit. “So if you happen to read horror fiction, you would find a horror story, but if you were interested in romance or thrillers, you’d find that kind of story. I wanted to…

The concept is as ludicrous as it is successful: a cartoon revolving around five gore-obsessed meatheads who have become the world’s biggest band – the extreme metal outfit Dethklok. Yet, thanks to the talents of creators Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha, Metalocalypse enters its second season as one of the Cartoon Network’s biggest hits. Enthusiasts – metal or otherwise – have become addicted to the foils of vocalist Nathan Explosion, guitarists Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth, bassist William Murderface and drummer Pickles as they bumble their way towards world domination via “brutal” heavy metal. According to 32-year-old Small – a comedian who, like Blacha, has experience writing for a variety of both live-action and animated shows – we have the eloquent musings of gorecore originators Cannibal Corpse to thank for…

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