Table of contents for Issue 198 Jan/Feb 2021 in RUE MORGUE

I’m often asked if the Rue Morgue Manor is haunted and I’m sure it is, to some degree. The acoustics are weird. There are hot and cold spots. One time, I was alone in the office and I was sure I saw someone sitting in my desk chair. Before I worked here, someone told me that Guillermo del Toro toured the Manor and flat out refused to go downstairs to the basement due to an overwhelming sense of foreboding juju. That’s really all the evidence I need to reply that yes, the Rue Morgue Manor is quite haunted in fact; behold my second-hand A-lister anecdote and be sure to hit the gift shop on your way out. The truth is, I’m just not very sensitive to what we would call…

1 RAVEN WAITING LIGHT $69.99 USD Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t a fan of ravens back in 1845, but electricity hadn’t been invented yet! Nowadays, we can light up our poetry corners with this beautiful resin corvid light fixture, available in black or white, with an E12 bulb included, and a cord measuring 6.5 feet. Darkness, nevermore! Ravenlights.com 2 JAWS STAINLESS STEEL BOTTLE OPENER $24.95 USD Just when you thought it was safe to go into the beer fridge – crack a cold one with your pal Bruce! This 6-inchlong bottle opener is cast in polished stainless steel and comes in a slide-out box, so you can drink like a sailor. Here’s to swimmin’ with bowlegged women! Factoryent.com 3 THE LOST BOYS TUBBZ DUCK COLLECTIBLES $12.99 USD One thing we could…

HERE’S AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: WHEN IT COMES TO WRITING ABOUT CINEMA, EVERYONE’S QUICK TO SHINE THE SPOTLIGHT ON THE SUPERSTARS AND AUTEURS, as well as those on the other end of the spectrum (think Ed Wood), but much less attention is paid to those who toil in the middle. Take Brian Trenchard-Smith, for instance. He’s made more than 42 films (or “crimes against cinema” as they are described in his trailersfromhell.com bio) and cut more than 100 movie trailers (for everything from Hammer classics to Antony I. Ginnane’s Ozploitation flicks). He also directed Hollywood A-listers Nicole Kidman in her second-ever role (in BMX Bandits) and Zachary Quinto in his first (an episode of TV’s The Others), and yet there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him. Seeking to correct…

AT TOKYO’S BUSTLING SHINJUKU SUBWAY STATION, 54 SCHOOLGIRLS STEP TO THE EDGE OF THE PLATFORM IN UNISON. As an arriving train barrels into the station, the girls clutch each others’ hands, count to three, and leap onto the tracks. This shocking mass suicide kicks off a week-long epidemic of men, women, and children taking their lives around the country. Initially, the police think it’s a passing fad of impressionable youth, but when an underground hacker calling herself “The Bat” tips them off about a website that seems to tally the suicides before they happen, they realize the deaths could be the result of a larger conspiracy. If Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo is a serious-minded rumination using technology as a conduit to highlight humanity’s attempts to connect with one another and to…

MORE'S THE SHITTY PARANORMAL EFFECT PARANORMAL EFFECT Simius Films The paranormal has never really interested me that much; I figure that if ghosts, spirits, souls, or netherworlds were real, we’d all have definitive evidence by now instead of blurry photographs, shitty videos, and second-hand stories. And speaking of shitty videos, this half-assed offering follows a guy and his girlfriend travelling to Japan so she can show him the sights. While there, he blatantly desecrates an ancient forest shrine and angers some kind of entity that follows them home. The result is an experience akin to watching the remake of The Grudge if the director and cast had all suffered severe head trauma and completely forgotten how to direct, act, and edit. If you decide to watch it anyway, bring…

Before last week, had you told me that I would one day see a movie about killer bees that’s even half as spectacularly incompetent, overwrought, and shorts-shartingly hilarious-for-all-the-wrong-reasons as Irwin Allen’s disastrous disaster epic The Swarm (1978), I’d have thought you mad. But when my friend Pat – whose taste for profoundly stinky cheese nearly rivals my own – declared Mexican schlock god Alfredo Zacharias’ 1978 misfire The Bees as essential viewing, I sat up (slowly, so as to avoid dizziness) and took notice (ditto). With its lower budget and absence of big stars, The Bees can’t hope to compete with The Swarm’s pure schadenfreude factor, but its mashup of howl-inducing dialogue and effects with perpetually ping-ponging plot points had me marvelling that it remains a mere footnote in the…

COMMENTS QUESTIONS CRITICISM WEEKLY “THANK YOU” goes out to the best glossy mag in the industry… Rue Morgue helmed by the amazing Andrea Subissati. Thank you for keeping us sane during these COVID Quarantine Blues… JC GREENING, VIA FACEBOOK FINALLY GONNA START making my way through that @RueMorgue’s “movies you missed” list [RM#196]. (At least until the Mario Bava collection drops on @Shudder, then I’m gonna be balls-deep in Bay of Blood.) Starting with 2001’s Wendigo! @ZOMBIEBUTCH, VIA TWITTER WHAT A GROOVY ghoulish day: RM#197 arrives in our mailbox, then we go out to our first movie since lockdown day one! My kind of magic, for sure. DAVID CISCO – DELAND, FLORIDA OKAY, RUE MORGUE MAGAZINE. I read your “50 Horror Films You Didn’t See.” You and I need to…

AFTER A DINNER PARTY WITH FRIENDS, YOUNG COUPLE BABAK (SHAHAB HOSSEINI) AND NEDA (NIOUSHA JAFARIAN) BICKER ON THE DRIVE HOME IN DOWNTOWN LA, their infant daughter asleep in the back seat. When the tipsy Babak narrowly avoids an accident and the car’s GPS breaks down, they decide to stop at the Hotel Normandie for the night, but as the hours wear on and terrifying incidents stack up, morning never seems to arrive. Trapped within the walls of the hotel with its uncanny concierge (George Maguire), Babak and Neda discover the secret to their salvation lies in confessing old secrets they’ve harboured for too long; but is this solution more harrowing than their endless night? Only Babak and Neda know for sure… Such is The Night, a new Iranian/American co-production from…

Behind the Mask “WHETHER YOUR OWN MASK HAS BEEN CLOTH OR SIMPLY METAPHORICAL OVER THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS, IT’S WORTH LOOKING AT HOW SIMILAR KINDS OF COVERINGS HAVE PLAYED A ROLE IN HORROR CINEMA OVER THE YEARS…” If you’ve missed seeing the bottom half of your closest friends’ faces lately, you’re not alone. As we continue to adjust our lives to deal with the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventive face masks have dominated many conversations about public health. As the benefits of masking up somehow became subject to debate, it became clear that many of those stridently refusing to take recommended precautions were choosing to don another kind of public mask – one that was often quite ugly. Whether your own mask has been cloth or simply metaphorical over…

THE ART OF PULP HORROR Stephen Jones Applause Everyone and their grandmother can cobble together a coffee-table collection of horror artwork (and they do), but what makes this one stand head and shoulders above the crowd is that it comes with knowledge, experience, taste, and expertise from noted genre specialist Stephen Jones. He has already proven himself an expert in horror artwork in two previous volumes of this series, The Art of Horror and The Art of Horror Movies, and The Art of Pulp Horror follows the well-established route. First, there’s the expert selection of art, beautifully printed and bound; then, helpful info and commentaries next to each piece; a foreword by a genre dignitary (Robert Silverberg); and finally, accompanying essays by well-chosen contributors (such as Mike Ashley, Lisa Morton,…

CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS SOUNDTRACK Carl Zittrer TERROR-VISION Terror-Vision continues to unearth auditory horror relics and give them a new coat of gloss; the latest being Carl Zittrer’s soundscapes from Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. Perhaps best enjoyed as a time capsule of a cult classic, Zittrer’s composition rides that fine line between music and sound design, acoustic and electronic, but hearing it pulse from your speakers unencumbered by visuals makes you realize how integral it is to the movie. There’s a real organic quality to the music; strange and ambient sounds feel as if they’re bubbling out of the film’s swampy Florida setting, but once the zombies arise, Zittrer’s score blares to life with piercing shrieks and wails that sound like they were taken from Bebe…

We’ve all missed things during this great global pandemic but over here in the Audio Drome, we missed live music the most. Granted, the lockdown provided some artists with some opportunities, but while music fans initially may have anticipated a rise in live streaming events, those hopes were quickly dashed when it became apparent how difficult (and expensive) it is to pull off a quality concert online. Sure, supergroups like Puscifer and even the Dropkick Murphys have the necessary funding to deliver such an event, but anyone on the periphery is likely relegated to streaming performances through their iPhone: not exactly high fidelity. Horror synth innovator Zombi, the band from Romero-land that arguably started the whole horror synthwave movement, found itself in just such a predicament, and so released a…

ISSUE # 198 The language used by the witches in Robert Eggers’ The Witch is mainly Enochian. Six men, including five hitmen, were charged with intentional homicide in China after each attempted to subcontract the killing to another. None of the six defendants carried out the deed and all were eventually acquitted. When acclaimed ghost story writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu died of a heart attack in his native Dublin on 7 February 1873, it was believed he “literally died of fright.” Saint Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida, has sold 6000 alien abduction insurance policies for a one-off fee of $24.95, worth over $10 million in compensation. The company’s fine print stipulates a payout of $1 per year over a 10- to 20-million-year period. People who suffer from allodoxaphobia…

UNLIKE SOME GLOBAL REGIONS, THE MIDDLE EAST DOESN’T HAVE A LONG AND STORIED HISTORY OF HORROR CINEMA, with the vast majority of the area’s notable pre-millennium fright flicks hailing from Egypt, such as 1945’s Safeer gohannam (The Ambassador of Hell). As of the 2010s, however, there has emerged from the Arab world a distinct flavour of horror fare that mixes folklore, fandom, and social drama: a movement that feels as if it’s just on the cusp of reaching full bloom. ZIBAHKHANA (2007) Starring Kunwar Ali Roshan, Rooshanie Ejaz, Rubya Chaudhry | Directed by Omar Khan This Pakistani splatfest sees a van full of young people waylaid by a burqa- clad killer and their family of lunatic cannibals. Though Western viewers are unlikely to catch the film’s homages to the country’s…

BABE IN THE WOODS HUNTER HUNTER Starring Camille Sullivan, Devon Sawa and Summer H. Howell Written and directed by Shawn Linden IFC Midnight Hunter Hunter is 90% of a very good movie; a tense and finely crafted study of a family under pressure, horrific and otherwise. And then, in its final minutes, it throws empathy for its people to the winds for a thoroughly misconceived ending. Nineties horror heartthrob Devon Sawa (Final Destination, Idle Hands, see RM#197) plants the seeds of a comeback as Joseph, living deep in the woods with his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan) and their twelve-year-old daughter Renee (Summer H. Howell). They’re barely eking out a living as fur trappers, with Joseph matter-of-factly explaining the grisly process of skinning to Renee, who has never been to school.…

YOUTH HOSTILE PLAGUE TOWN (2008) Blu-ray Starring Josslyn DeCrosta, Erica Rhodes and David Lombard Directed by David Gregory Written by John Cregan and David Gregory Severin Films Through primarily known for his documentaries (Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson), shorts (“Sweets” in 2011’s The Theatre Bizarre), roles as producer (Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space), and head of Severin Films, some may be surprised to learn that David Gregory once directed a full-fledged horror feature. The first film spearheaded by MPI’s then just-launched production label Dark Sky Films in the late 2000s, Plague Town is a flawed but stylish folk horror- flavoured gore showcase that’s been newly revived by Severin after its unceremonious 2008 rollout. Accompanying their father and his new wife on a…

SEA OF SORROWS Rich Douek and Alex Cormack IDW WOODS Mike Freiheit Birdcage Bottom Books HALLOWEEN MAN #25 Drew Edwards and various Sugar Skull Media BLACKWOOD VOLUME 2: THE MOURNING AFTER Evan Dorkin, Veronica Fish and Andy Fish Dark Horse EARLY HAUNTS T.W. Burgess, Mike O’Brien, David Romero, Brian Coldrick and Bri Neumann manoghosts.com KING OF EDEN VOLUME 1 Takashi Nagasaki and Ignito Yen Press It’s the end of World War I and a former naval officer hires the SS Vagabond, an independent salvage crew, to dive into the North Atlantic waters. The aim: to raid a fortune in gold within a sunken U-boat. The result: awakening a terrifying and deadly aquatic life form. And so begins Sea of Sorrows, a new series from writer Rich Douek and artist Alex…

Saga Press Jeremy Robert Johnson’s latest novel The Loop isn’t quite a mirror of our times; its tale is far too weird, wild, and relentless for that. Yet its themes couldn’t be more perfect for an era brimming with endless fake news, emergent technologies, necessarily rushed science, racial reckoning, and frequent corporate negligence (and cover-ups). The Loop opens with a transcript of a conspiracy theory podcast, before introducing us to Lucy and Bucket, minorities in their largely white and affluent high school, which is located within the picture-perfect tourist town (and now high-tech mecca) of Turner Falls. As if navigating this social landscape wasn’t fraught enough, random, extreme violence begins erupting all around them, first in the classroom and later at a cave party, at which point the horrors become…

GIVEN THE UBIQUITY OF COLOURED VINYL RELEASES DOMINATING SOCIAL NETWORKS NOWADAYS, it’s hard to believe that horror soundtrack music was in a far different place in 2013. Reissue label giants Death Waltz and Waxwork were just releasing their first records, Italian prog outfit Goblin was playing one of its first big reunion tours, and John Carpenter hadn’t even started touring as a composer/rock band. It was in this context, where horror score fandom was in its relative infancy, that J. Blake Fichera’s as well as valuable original relics. Out of this world of rabid fandom Fichera now offers a sequel, Scored to Death 2 Scored to Death was published – one of the most comprehensive collections of interviews with horror composers ever, featuring the likes of Charles Bernstein, John Carpenter,…