Table of contents for Issue 75 Jan/Feb 2008 in RUE MORGUE

+ Human decomposition begins four minutes after death. + The first modern piece of fiction pertaining to mummies is thought to be Jane Webb’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a story she wrote while still in her teens. It was published in 1827. + Law of the Bier was an ancient legal ordeal practiced in Scotland that required suspects to touch the corpses of the murder victims. It was believed if the dead body started bleeding on contact with the suspect, he or she was the killer. + In the mid-’60s, at the height of her popularity, Hazel Court (The Curse of Frankenstein) gave up acting to pursue a career as a painter and sculptor. + Last November, a Florida man fleeing police on foot dove into…

This year marks the 40th anniversary of a little monster movie from Pittsburgh that disfigured the face of horror films forever. And much like the exponentially spreading zombie plague itself, unstoppable hordes of Night of the Living Dead imitations continue their assault against mankind. Not being one to sit through these cinematic end times as a mere historical footnote, however, the original instigator himself, George A. Romero, returns to his beloved flesh-eating ghouls with Diary of the Dead, a rebirth of his monumentally influential cycle of “Dead” films. Born out of the frustration of making Land of the Dead (the Universal Pictures-produced 2005 entry in the series), Diary signifies a triumphant return to the director’s low-budget, indie filmmaking roots, featuring a cast of unknowns and a budget that’s a fraction…

Love Dead, Hate Living? Then Rob Sachetto’s your man. Send him a high resolution image of your monstrous mug and he’ll put the zombie bite on you with his pencils, paint and brushes. For just over a year the Ontario-based artist has been zombifying willing victims in gory portraits that look like his clients, only deader. He’s zombified genre notables including George Romero (pictured above), Greg Nicotero and Tom Savini (below) as well as tabloid regulars Paris Hilton, Kevin Federline, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan (for STUFF magazine), metal musicians Scott Ian and Kirk Hammet, and even members of the Rue Morgue staff. “I remember in grade school one of my teachers put a note on my report card that said, ‘Rob needs to focus more on math and spelling, instead…

Another year in fear has come to pass and, like many others, it was overrun by zombie movies: 28 Weeks Later, Fido, Planet Terror, Resident Evil Extinction, plus a legion of indie living dead entries advanced upon us at a steady pace. Satiated but at the same time somewhat bored by flesheating corpse films, horror fans yearned for something more… and got it. Fresh ideas including Korea’s monster-fuelled political allegory The Host, the metahorror of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the apocalyptic dread of Right at Your Door, the gritty nastiness of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door and even the anti-fast food ridiculousness of Poultrygeist loved us and left us. William Friedkin also reappeared with Bug, his underrated meth junkie extreme paranoia vehicle; sophisticated serial killers…

The name Val Lewton is a storied one in horror movie history. The workaholic producer was responsible for such atmospheric 1940s classics as Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher, defying the low expectations implicit in the exploitative titles parcelled out to him by his bosses at RKO. He delivered low-budget but high-quality entertainment, which competed favourably with the increasingly shoddy spook shows cranked out by the studio’s biggest competitor, Universal. That Lewton did so despite his own distaste for horror and dissatisfaction with his lot speaks to both his talent and his tenacity. “Would you be satisfied if you were making movies with titles like The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie?” asks Kent Jones, writer/director of the documentary Val Lewton – The…

VINTAGE HORROR REISSUES THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964) Starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart Directed by Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona Written by William F. Leicester, Furio M. Monetti and Ubaldo Ragona Fox/MGM Just in time for the third big screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s pioneering survival horror novel I Am Legend comes a new DVD reissue of the very first – and arguably best – film version. An Italian-American co-production starring Vincent Price as Robert Morgan, a scientist besieged by hordes of vampires, The Last Man on Earth is a harrowing, apocalyptic vision of the end of humanity, and a meditation on the very nature of monsters. Ignored on initial theatrical release, only now through home video has it achieved the cult status it was destined…

The title of Alex Robinson’s affectionately scathing deconstruction of dungeons, dragons and desperate adult-lescent denial is Alex Robinson’s Lower Regions – and not simply just Lower Regions (think about it). Best part about ARLR: you don’t need to be a D&D fan to enjoy this dungeon-dark fantasy about a warrior maiden and her axe and, briefly, her assistant. Sure, the title’s an intentional joke, and the art’s intentionally cartoony, but Robinson’s masterful manipulation of perspective and proportion makes for action that’s both absorbing and surprising. Clearly, the guy respects his subject matter the way Spinal Tap loves heavy metal. In fact, when these 50 pages aren’t hemorrhaging ogre gore (and the red stuff of a dozen other netherworldly things), they’re hemorrhaging love, brothers and sisters – love. GB Written and…

CANNIBAL MAN (1972) Starring Vicente Parra, Emma Cohen and Eusebio Poncela Directed by Eloy de la Iglesia Written by Eloy de la Iglesia and Antonio Fos Blue Underground As many a gore film have taught us, there are few people problems that can’t be solved at the end of a butcher’s blade. In Cannibal Man – one of two new cannibal-themed Spanish reissues from Blue Underground – Marcos (Vicente Parra) works in a slaughterhouse and lives in a ramshackle house in the shadows of a luxury highrise development. He’s hopelessly in love with Paula (Emma Cohen), but his lowly social status and lack of ambition is an obstacle. While on a date, the couple gets into a heated argument with a taxi driver that ends when Marcos inadvertently kills him.…

FRANK DARABONT really did a number on me with [The Mist]. I wasn’t looking to be overly impressed (the first trailer actually had me giggling a bit the first time I saw it). Not because of the silliness, but I thought it was going to play out too serious. I was mistaken. It was played completely straight and I was absorbed for two hours. I thoroughly enjoyed the setup, then moving right to the claustrophobic supermarket where the meat of the story is. Religious zealots, creepy Lovecraftian baddies and just the scale of enormity of the situation they were in had me hooked. Maybe I’ll change my two cents after letting it digest, but I have to say I don’t think I've ever gotten this much enjoyment out of seeing…

What do you do when the world around you has lost its collective mind? It’s an apocalyptic question thoroughly examined in the new indie film The Signal. Set on New Year’s Eve in the fictional city of Terminus, the film follows Mya (Anessa Ramsey) – a young wife having an affair – as a mysterious electronic signal is transmitted through televisions, radios and cellphones, turning anyone who receives it into a homicidal maniac. A zombie movie at heart that takes a cue from Romero’s The Crazies, The Signal (out February 22 from Magnolia) effectively avoids the clichés of malevolent government agencies, reanimated corpses or technology breaking down, instead focusing on how a few people in a city of millions deal with the immediate arrival of The End. “What if at…

DARABONT DOES IT AGAIN THE MIST Starring Thomas Jane, Laurie Holden and Marcia Gay Harde Written and directed by Frank Darabont Dimension Until recently, if you’d asked any Stephen King fan which of his yet-to-be-filmed works they’d most like to see on the big screen, many would have answered The Mist without a second thought. Though rich in detail and believable characters, King’s 1980 novella is also a study in breakneck pacing, suspense and money-shot horror that throws more slimy, multi-appendaged monsters at the reader than an entire Lovecraft anthology – the thing practically storyboards itself. But after seeing so many of King’s best stories transformed into celluloid crap, fans can be forgiven for approaching any adaptation of this mini-masterwork, even one written and directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank…

THE GORE-MET SCHOOLS US ON FULCI THE PSYCHIC (1977) Starring Jennifer O’Neill, Gabriele Ferzetti and Marc Porel Directed by Lucio Fulci Written by Lucio Fulci, Robert Gianviti and Dardano Sacchetti Severin Fulci’s thriller-cum-giallo The Psychic (a.k.a. Seven Notes in Black) likely holds the record as the longest-running “coming soon” release in DVD history. Rumours of an impending issue stretch back as far as 1996, when Quentin Tarantino announced that his long-defunct company Rolling Thunder Pictures had acquired the rights and would be releasing it to home video. Since then, French label Neo Publishing released a single and a twodisc collector’s edition (without English options) in 2005, the former allegedly bootlegged for the subsequent region-free, NTSC English-language Alfa Digital disc. This release marks the first legitimate English-language DVD. Jennifer O’Neill (Summer…

A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi Kier-La Janisse FAB Press Many books have been written on Italian horror and exploitation and its various subgenres, including massive tomes on the work of directors Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, but few profiles have been penned about Italian actors, let alone an entire book dedicated to one who never had much more than a few minutes of screen time in any given film. Luciano Rossi, who passed away in 2005, should be familiar to Italian cinephiles, having appeared in some 70 films spanning a broad spectrum of subgenres, mainly spaghetti westerns, gialli, crime films known as poliziesco and Nazisploitation. Rossi was a character actor, specializing in sleazy villains who meet brutal ends in such films as Death Walks at…

CANNIBAL FLESH RIOT! Soundtrack Hola Ghost HOLA PETE RECORDS Not to be confused with the cool companion compilation featuring Blitzkid, Ghoultown and the mighty Psychocharger, the Cannibal Flesh Riot! score is coast-to-coast Hola Ghost (a.k.a. ex-Mad Sin/Nekromantix guitarist Peter Sandorff). The score’s chief refrain features a lurking bass line that mingles with sour synthesizers on “Condiment Blues,” while delicate cymbals breathe sinister air into spooky surf tunes such as “Graveyard Blues” and a creepy one-stringer fit for an undead gunslinger (“The Drowning Radish”). Other highlights include “Corpse Rise” (the Goblin-inspired sound of a thousand dead souls pushing against fresh earth) and the venomous psychobilly sucker punch that is the film’s anthemic theme song – the only traditional “song” on the album. Aside from a spattering of inane film dialogue, this…

GRAPHICS: PLAYABILITY: SHIVERS: HELLGATE: LONDON PC EA Games/Flagship Studios The year is 2038 and a huge portal has opened up in the city of London, spewing out twisted demons and other abominations straight from Hell that are intent on sucking your soul from your body and severing your head from your neck. Choosing from six different classes of combatants, including sword-swinging Templars, Cabalists who cast spells and Marksmen who are incredibly effective with military weaponry, players tackle missions such as acquiring demon hearts, all while collecting upgradeable arms and armour. Although the monsters you’ll face are varied and vicious, combat is repetitive, especially while moving through burned-out environments that, while incredibly detailed, offer little variety. Collecting “loot” is the coolest part of a game like this, but a…

Believe it or not, Darren Lynn Bousman is as sick of sequels as you are. The director of the last three Saw films was itching to do something original after spending three successive years building the torture franchise birthed by Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannell in their 2004 original. So he lobbied Twisted Pictures, the production company behind the Saw films, to let him make a movie version of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a bloody “futuristic sci-fi rock opera” – co-created by LA musicians Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich – which Bousman had directed in its original stage versions in LA and New York. “This movie is not normal,” Bousman tells Rue Morgue. “I don’t want people to think this movie is Saw, and that’s one of the…

Boys and girls of every age, would you like to see something strange?” This lyric from Tim Burton’s animated classic The Nightmare Before Christmas could be the opening salvo for almost any of the director’s films. For 25 years, since his first shorts Vincent and Frankenweenie emerged in the early 1980s, Burton has been inviting us into the most unusual of universes, creating some extremely curious creatures, and twisting his weird tales with equal parts whimsy and wickedness. The filmmaker has cast his spooky shadow on so many of the subgenres we love most, including dark fairy tales (Edward Scissorhands), alien invasion movies (Mars Attacks!), cult B-flicks (Ed Wood), ghost stories (Sleepy Hollow) and comic book adventures (Batman), with the kind of sensibility that could only come from a self-described…

Unlike Jack the Ripper, there is still speculation about whether or not England’s other notorious boogeyman actually existed. In two books, writer Peter Haining posited Sweeney Todd as a historical serial killer who slashed throats at his barber shop on Fleet Street around 1800, yet there is there is no concrete evidence to support his claims. No public records are known to exist documenting Todd’s arrest and execution, or that of Mrs. Lovett, the apparent accomplice who would bake his victims into meat pies at her shop down the street. It’s most likely that Thomas Peckett Prest, who first wrote the urban legend into a story (“The String of Pearls”) in 1847, was inspired by the various crimes reported in The Old Bailey section of the London Times. The product…

We live in a Romero world, and there’s no better proof than Babylon Fields, the show that almost became the first mainstream television drama about the undead. Imagine: millions of North Americans tuning into it every week and you’ve got all the proof you need that zombies have become a pop-culture zeitgeist. The show’s pilot, made last year, has the dead returning to the land of the living, minus the cannibalistic urges – a similar scenario to that of the 2004 French film They Came Back (Les Revenants). But here the zombie drama plays out with an ensemble of characters, including a widower cop in a new relationship with a co-worker, a woman whose love – emotional and physical – for her returned husband transcends death, and a mother and…

Demon Layer SUCCUBUS Evil Motion Pictures Horror and sex go together like zombies and chainsaws, and although hardcore shagging in fright flicks died out during the grindhouse era, it’s making a comeback. I was about to toss out my Misty Mundae collection for not being hardcore enough, when I stumbled upon Succubus, which features super-hot goth beauty Liz Vicious. The story follows a museum curator (porn star Raven Riley), who discovers that evil succubus Lilith (Vicious) has escaped from her prison/grave. Naturally, Raven enlists the help of a horny sheriff to stop Lilith’s deadly, sex-fuelled rampage. Though Succubus was supposed to be a vehicle for Raven, it’s Vicious who steals the show in this gory, well-shot porno-with-a-plot. Her nubile young body gives new meaning to the term “Hellmouth.” Body Count:…

Who says horror films don’t have our best interests at heart? After all, at various junctures they’ve admonished us not to Go in the House, Go in the Woods, Go Near the Park, Open the Window, Answer the Phone, Open ’Til Christmas, Look Now and even – direct from the “WTF?!?” file – Torture a Duckling. VCI’s new “grindhouse double feature” (more on the Gword later) presents two lesser-known entries from the Don’t canon, both directed by the late, Arkansas-born, Texas-based S.F. Brownrigg, a second-string ’70s exploitation specialist (his other two horror flicks are 1974’s Scum of the Earth and 1976’s Keep My Grave Open). Given the overlooked gem potential among grindhouse fare from this era (Lemora, Rituals and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death leap to mind), not to mention…

IN THIS ISSUE! THE DEFENDERS #92-#111 by J.M. DeMatteis and Don Perlin Marvel ALEX ROBINSON’S LOWER REGIONS Alex Robinson Top Shelf AMULET, BOOK 1: THE STONEKEEPER Kazu Kibuishi Scholastic/Graphix BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #10 Joss Whedon and Cliff Richards Dark Horse FALL OF CTHULHU V1: THE FUGUE TPB Michael Alan Nelson and Jean Dzialowski BOOM! FREDDY VS JASON VS ASH #1 (OF 6) Jeff Katz, James Kuhoric and Jason Craig DC/Wildstorm We are the creations of humanity itself, physical projections of mankind’s collective unconscious. We exist because man exists; we are, in truth, his dark side given flesh.” In issue #111 of The Defenders, Satan and his devilish brethren dropped what can only be called a hellfire-bomb on Marvel’s superhero universe. This marked the concluding chapter in a storyline known…

VISIONS OF DEATH: RICHARD MATHESON’S EDGAR ALLAN POE SCRIPTS VOLUME ONE Lawrence French, ed. Gauntlet Press If, like me, you were nursed on Roger Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s classic tales, then Gauntlet’s first volume of Richard Matheson’s Poe scripts is a must-have, as it provides essential insight into the making of both The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum – all bookended by comments from Corman and Joe Dante. To the editor: Please do a similar series on Charles Beaumont (Masque of the Red Death) next! Jovanka Vuckovic THE UNDEAD VOLUME 2: SKIN AND BONES D.L. Snell and Travis Adkins, eds. Permuted Press The fourteen short stories and one novella that comprise The Undead Vol. 2 serve to revisit, re-imagine and reinvent the…

As I travel by bus toward the city of Nis (pronounced “Nish”), in southern Serbia, I recall the Western travel myth of going East recounted in Bram Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel Dracula. In the first paragraph of the book we find protagonist Jonathan Harker recounting his coach journey to Castle Dracula: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.” While Harker was describing the Hungarian landscape in his journals, his description of the impact of Turkish rule in the Balkans is still very tangible in this part of Serbia. Nis is an ancient place, a crossroads between Asia Minor…