Table of contents for Issue 68 June 2007 in RUE MORGUE

When I tell people what I do for a living their response is, more often than not, “well, that’s… interesting.” And I’ve experienced this enough times to know they’re not stunned by the fact that I edit a horror magazine, they’re stunned that I am doing it without the benefit of a penis. This subject comes up over and over again whenever I’m interviewed. “Why are there so few women interested in horror films?” The obvious answer: the horror genre is and always has been a giant boys club – girls need not apply. The misconception: it’s a genre women have had very little interest in or know very little about. Women have, in fact, had a hand in the progression of the genre – especially in the arena of…

Zombies are infectious. No, really. Just look at the facts. In the last five years the undead hordes have risen up to become a virtually unstoppable force in the genre. Their lumbering corpses have crept into best-selling novels, comic books, music and video games and their stories told and retold with both seriousness and humour on silver screens all over the world. As a result, the undead are migrating from the familiar spookshows of horror culture to beat at the doors and windows of the mainstream media, and what better vehicle to do so with than the zombie comedy, the most accessible of all undead properties. Enter Fido, a Canadian zom-com that seeks to inject horror into a comedy, rather than comedy into a horror film. But this is just…

DC (released: 1990) It might seem obvious in this era of comic metafiction, but John Ostrander’s brilliant three-issue mini-arc in Detective Comics was ahead of its time seventeen years ago and has aged well enough to fit in seamlessly today. An upstart publisher creates an unauthorized Batman comic wherein the title character is a vigilante who murders; worse, he’s possessed by a demon, and in strange twist, the demon’s agenda is to do good works (as he punishes only the truly evil), hoping to get a hall pass from Hell. Heady enough stuff on its own, but Ostrander includes a “real life” Batman impostor also murdering those who he deems wicked, leaving the comics at the crime scene. Throw in shared pencilling chores by Flint Henry (the metacomic) and Mike…

With eighteen books on film and television published since 1994, John Kenneth Muir has rapidly become one of our genre’s most widely read critics. His indispensible 2002 tome Horror Movies of the 1970s earned raves everywhere, and now he unleashes the 800-page Horror Films of the 1980s (McFarland & Company), a book that could well be the definitive guide to the horror films of the spandex decade. “I think horror film was the only place you would find in the 1980s that was rebelling against ’80s values,” says Muir, who wrote the text with the help of a handful of guest contributors, including horror novelist Scott Nicholson (The Manor) and film critic MaryAnn Johanson. “You had films like Jack Sholder’s Alone in the Dark and John Carpenter’s They Live –…

No one was more surprised that Billy Connelly would don horror makeup to play a flesh-eating ghoul than, well, Billy Connelly. The veteran stand-up comedian was reticent about tackling the role of the undead title character in the Canadian zombie comedy Fido (opening this month in the US), until he read the script. “I didn’t want to be in a zombie movie,” he explains in his familiar Scottish brogue. “I know they have a huge cult and all that, and people really like them but I always find them predictable. It always ends up with people stuck in a wooden house and zombies tryin’ to get in an’ all that – breakin’ down the shutters and grabbin’ people by the throats; it’s not my cup of tea. But when I…

These days, the name Steve Niles is pretty much synonymous with modern horror comics. A huge success in the industry, Niles almost single-handedly revived the horror comic with his breakthrough hit 30 Days of Night in 2002 (RM#34). But the road to the top was long and riddled with discomfiture. Back in the ’80s, Niles was a bass player in a DC hardcore band called Gray Matter. He worked full-time as a comic store clerk to get by but spent most of his time at the counter writing his own stories. After years of struggling to get his work printed, he launched his own publishing company, Arcane Comix, and at age nineteen managed to convince Clive Barker to allow him to adapt the Books of Blood short stories “Son of…

Isolation – Ireland/First Look As we look with dread toward our environmentally unstable future, so too does horror. This is nothing new; back in the 1970s ecological destruction was on everyone’s mind, and it was that fertile ground that cultivated everything from The Prophecy and The Swarm to the oeuvre of David Cronenberg. This brings us to Isolation (RM#53), Billy O’Brien’s squirm-inducing debut born of the mad cow crisis that struck the UK in the late-’90s. Opening with a disturbing scene of a bite injury incurred while elbow-deep in a cow’s backside, the film tells the story of struggling Irish cattle farmer Dan (Hardware’s John Lynch) who has accepted money from a rogue geneticist to inject a couple of his cows with a new growth hormone. It’s all for the…

WHAT HAPPENED? GRINDHOUSE Starring Kurt Russell, Freddy Rodriguez and Rose McGowan Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino Miramax Oh the conundrum that is Grindhouse. Why did it fail? Was it too long? Wrong opening weekend? Was the promise of seeing Tarantino’s balls melt off some kind of a deal breaker? Box-office shortcomings aside, the biggest problem with Grindhouse is consensus. Before starting the project, the filmmakers should’ve decided just how grindhouse Grindhouse should be. They artificially aged their films, chose lurid concepts and dressed them up in retro marketing, yet, no real grindhouse movie had multiple name actors, top-notch digital effects or a budget in the tens of millions. The accompanying trailers for faux films reflect this disconnect between style and substance; Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving looks like…

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War. During three days in July 1863, the armies of the North and South clashed in and around the town, and when the smoke cleared, over 50,000 men were dead and property damage totalled in the hundreds of thousands. With so many lives lost, it’s easy to see why Gettysburg is renowned as one of the most haunted places in North America – simply typing “Gettysburg hauntings” into Google yields close to 400,000 results. Tales of ghosts, phantom sounds, poltergeists and other supernatural activity abound throughout the town and the battlefield, which is now a National Park. A cottage industry of paranormal investigation, ghost tours, lectures and books have sprung up around it, and the town itself…

PLANET TERROR Various Soundtrack OUTSIDE MUSIC When the first trailer for Grindhouse was released, it was to the bump and wail of “Grindhouse (Main Titles),” an immediately catchy paean to sleaze cinema that made legions of movie geeks tight in the pants. No surprise then that the soundtrack to Planet Terror(Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double bill) features several interpretations of the song, combining various measures of sax, synth, sparse piano and other electro effects that quote different eras and moods. His tracks with Graeme Revell, for example, have a modern orchestral feel to them, while the songs done in tandem with Carl Thiel pay tribute to classic John Carpenter keyboards. As well, touches of blues and Spanish guitar mingle with bolder experimentation, from star Rose McGowan’s breathy cover of…

BEYOND BARROW (DARK HORSE) A new story arc (and possibly the last) in the 30 Days of Night universe explores the history of the vampire attacks in the arctic circle. Timed for release with the Sam Raimi-produced 30 Days of Night film this October, it features art by legendary illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz. 30 DAY OF NIGHT: IMMORTAL REMAINS (POCKET BOOKS) Can’t get enough of Alaska’s most famous vampires? Read Niles’ new novel this summer. THE SINNER (DARK HORSE) Niles and Sienkiewicz collaborate again on a comic book Niles describes as a “really, really dark take on super heroes.” SIMON DARK (DC) A modern Gothic adventure featuring a boy with more than one good head on his shoulders, with art by Scott Hampton (Clive Barker’s Tapping the Vein, Spookhouse). CRIMINAL MACABRE:…

If Rod Serling’s Night Gallery hosted three-dimensional sculptures rather than paintings, artist Thomas Scott Kuebler’s creations would fit right in. His full-size, highly detailed figures of monsters, goblins, witches and weirdos look like something out of a creature feature, but are in fact striking works of art that, like the paintings in the television anthology show, tell chilling tales. “My sculptures are just like the paintings in Night Gallery.” Kuebler says. “I tell these little stories with them; I’m like Rod Serling, who comes in and figuratively says ‘picture a man…’ and tells this little paragraph of a story and lets the story take over. That’s who I am as a sculptor, I’m a sculptor of Night Gallery items.” Kuebler caught the sculpting bug as a child, building Aurora monster…

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1966) Starring Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno and Tadao Takashima Directed by Ishirô Honda Written by Reuben Bercovitch and Takeshi Kimura Media Blasters Aside from 1962’s Godzilla vs. King Kong, Japan’s city-stomping kaiju rarely got the chance to mix it up with the monster heroes of Hollywood. It’s only fitting, then, that the very first Japanese-American film co-production would feature a battle between two titans from two hugely popular traditions in opposite corners of the world. Reportedly derived from an idea that effects genius Willis O’Brien hatched for a Kong sequel, Frankenstein Conquers the World (a.k.a. Frankenstein vs. Baragon) is an undeniably eccentric film that completely tosses out Mary Shelley’s classic novel and sends her immortal monster through Toho’s radioactive wringer. At the end…

Ah, that fine line between innocence and oh-so-wrongness. Dead High Yearbook flirts with the latter but sticks to the former – understandable, given that this all-monster year-book parody is part of Penguin’s young readers imprint. It gives its tween-targeted audience plenty of grue for thought no matter how you slice and dice it. And slicing and dicing is the rule of day, as eight short stories (set conveniently around the yearbook volunteers) show us the gradual and complete monstermorphosis – and failing that, murder – of every student at the school. Characters lean towards manga and are cartoonish, but the infrequent EC-quality gore is effective specifically because it’s infrequent. Being a slightly oversized hardback is another nice touch, along with blood-smeared page corners throughout, and dead/undead graduation photos on the…

VINTAGE: A GHOST STORY Steve Berman Haworth Positronic Press Vintage’s gay teen protagonist laments the mundanities of small-town life before discovering he can see dead people (and they can see him), including the ghost of a 1950s high school star athlete. Author Berman amply jacks up the suspense as the mutual obsession between boy and ghost grows, making this another fine addition to the queer fear canon. Monica S. Kuebler THE GOLD BUG Edgar Allan Poe Hesperus Classics Though not one of his most famous detective stories, Poe’s The Gold Bug is surely one of his most unusual. Among its atypical features are pirates, treasures, ciphers, a gold beetle whose venom induces avarice, and – gasp – a happy ending! The reissued story is accompanied by an insightful introduction by…

While still a relatively underground phenomenon, psychobilly, the punkish, ghouledup little brother to rockabilly, is at its most popular. Thanks to the relentless drive of international scene heroes such as Nekromantix, Tiger Army and Mad Sin, many similar bands have sprung up, brandishing double basses, donning costumes or Misfits-style face paint and singing about the undead. Eastern Canada has become a particularly fertile ground for these shuffle-obsessed spectres, with the likes of The Creepshow, The Matadors, The Gutter Demons and the Alley Dukes bolstering the scene. Add Montreal’s The Brains to that list with their twist on that familiar thumping stand-up bass line, shifting drum beat and hollow-body guitar sound. And though they maintain general genre traditions of horror imagery and lyrical content, The Brains actually take it a step…

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Edgar Lee Masters USA – 1915 As we approach the centenary of its publication, Edgar Lee Masters’ dark treasure of funerary verse, Spoon River Anthology, stands nearly forgotten by all but the tweediest of English professors and most literate of goths. Wasting away, perhaps, in the shadow of Poe, this brilliant, bleak and wholly unique entry in the annals of dark American poetry stands alone in literary history as the only narrative told entirely with tombstones. That’s right: tombstones. With the exception of an introduction that sets the lonely and windswept cemetery scene (“All, all, are sleeping on the hill”) and a “Spooniad” afterward, each of Masters’ 214 verses is the epitaph of one dearly departed resident of the fictional town of Spoon River. The collection of headstone carvings makes…