Table of contents for Issue 100 May 2010 Special Black 100 Anniversary Issue in RUE MORGUE

Filmmaker Charles B. Pierce (The Legend of Boggy Creek) died March 5 in a Tennessee nursing home of natural causes. He was 71. Pierce is widely credited with pioneering the faux-documentary gimmick used in films such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. His 1973 docudrama-style shocker The Legend of Boggy Creek, made for only $160,000, went on to gross $25 million, making it one of the most successful independent films ever. Pierce returned to the horror genre in 1977 with The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Tim Burton and Night Watch (2004) director Timur Bekmambetov have snagged the rights to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Seth Grahame-Smith’s tongue-in-cheek historical horror novel (see review on p.82) was a hot topic in publishing trades last spring, when it netted the Pride and…

SAY THE WORDS “GENRE ROYALTY” AND ONE NAME IS BOUND TO COME UP MORE THAN ANY OTHER: CHRISTOPHER LEE. Make that Sir Christopher Lee, as the 87-year-old icon was knighted last year, for good reason. With a career that has spanned seven decades and is still going strong, the legendary actor has played everything from swashbuckling pirates, to insidious villains, to revered political leaders. But it is his work in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres that has built his most loyal fan base. Although known to the average modern moviegoer as villains Saruman, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Count Dooku, in the Star Wars prequels, Lee remains – to horror fans, at least – closely identified with the roles he played for England’s Hammer Studios,…

Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross CHARLEMAGNE PRODUCTIONS, LTD. Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross finds Sir Christopher Lee flexing his talents in the musical arena with an homage to King Charlemagne, the First Holy Roman Emperor. Lee is a direct descendant of the King, so who better to recount his medieval tale, especially in the timbre of that elegant baritone? Arranged as five distinct acts, with narration by Lee’s daughter, Christina, to frame the concept, Charlemagne casts Sir Christopher as the King’s ghost with a supporting cast of accomplished singers, who do the lion’s share of the vocal heavy lifting. Lee mostly chant-sings over top of sweeping orchestral flourishes – with the exception of “The Bloody Verdict of Verden” where he bellows about the beheading of 4000…

From Mary Shelley to The Machine Girl, women have always played a significant role in developing the horror genre. And thirteen years ago, Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the amped-up TV version of the semi-obscure 1992 feature film – seemed to put a final stake through the heart of the stereotype of the helpless female victim onscreen. But whether things have changed for women working in the genre – and how female characters are portrayed within it – is still a matter for some debate. “Buffy definitely influenced the way that women are now portrayed in horror movies,” says Nikki Stafford, author of Bite Me: The Unofficial Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Joss [Whedon] posited this idea that girls – who eventually became women – are powerful, intelligent beings…

J-horror. It doesn’t even take a Rue Morgue reader to list off all of its visual characteristics. So mercilessly was the genre milked in the space of a few years that spooky little girls with stringy black hair eventually began popping up everywhere. J-horror. It doesn’t even take a Rue Morgue reader to list off all of its visual characteristics. So mercilessly was the genre milked in the space of a few years that spooky little girls with stringy black hair eventually began popping up everywhere. It really all started back in 1993, when video company employee Norio Tsuruta came up with a way to cheaply and effectively produce horror movies for the video market. “I actually got the idea for a horror piece when I talked to a video…

The advancement of technology has affected no medium more than video games, which have grown into a multi-million-dollar industry that now competes with the Hollywood machine for our entertainment dollars. Horror titles, including Bioshock, Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead, have not only become best-sellers, but have won critical accolades and awards. We asked Richard Dansky, a writer at Ubisoft Entertainment, and Daniel Ramirez, staff writer for horror-video-games.com, to weigh in on the ever-shifting landscape of horror gaming. Why do you think that horror games have grown so popular over the last thirteen years? RD: It’s largely been due to the fact that the technology is now good enough to support more types of horror games. “Survival horror” has been around since at least the original Alone in the Dark,…

As our 13 Years of Fear feature has proven, technology and real-world trauma are the genre’s biggest motivating factors. Because there is no shortage of things to fear or lack of ways to express our anxieties through art – particularly movies, which have become so accessible to everyone, everywhere – the horror fan’s world keeps on getting bigger and badder. Because we connect so strongly, so personally to terror tales, we’re as loyal as ever, too. While this results in sequels and remakes galore, it also means that horror becomes a cutting-edge platform for artists and companies to try new things with less fear of failure. Of course, the more technological we become the more we seek genuine human experiences. To discover what this means, we consulted three experts who…

FOR MANY YOUNGSTERS GROWING UP IN THE 1990S, R.L. STINE’S STORIES WERE A GATEWAY TO THE WORLD OF HORROR. He provided pint-sized readers with a kid-safe doorway to the genre through tales of evil ventriloquist dummies, haunted Halloween masks, malevolent ghosts and monsters of nearly every inclination imaginable. Throughout that decade, school book fairs were overrun by works from the author, who has penned almost 150 Goosebumps titles (aimed at seven- to twelve-year-olds), more than 100 entries in the teen-targeted Fear Street franchise, and dozens of other supernatural young adult novels (including the novelization of Ghostbusters 2). His books have been translated into 32 languages and have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He’s overseen successful stage and television adaptations of Goosebumps, was ranked 36th on the Forbes List…

If you just flipped the page and expected to find another book review, I apologize – actually, no, I don’t. Instead, I’d like to welcome you to my very own musty, dusty corner of the magazine – my library of strange and forgotten tomes, if you will. It’s a place where I’ll unearth treasures old and new. To begin, allow me to recap this year’s World Horror Convention in Brighton, England – a first for the con, which had never left North America until now. If you love scary stories as much as I do, there was no better place to be from March 25 to 28. WHC is many things to many people; for me it is a place to meet authors, network for the mag, pimp my micro-press…

youtube.com (search: Christopher Lee BBC4) If our Christopher Lee cover story has stoked your curiosity, here’s something you can check out for extra credit: a four-part BBC4 documentary that reunited the cast and crew of The Wicker Man for a candid, in-depth look back at the making of the cult classic and the legacy it has spawned. inthegloamingpodcasts.wordpress.com England’s In The Gloaming theatre troupe offers a modern take on the radio plays of yesteryear by injecting large doses of black comedy into their original tales. Visit the company’s blog to download episodes, examine scripts for past productions and track upcoming public performances. Die laughing! horrorsociety.com Does Hollywood horror get you down? Well, the horror society, “your voice for independent horror,” has your anti-establishment tendencies covered. This horror news site features…

MARCUS HEARN HAS THOUGHT LONG AND HARD ABOUT WHAT constituted a Hammer girl back in the studio’s heyday, half a century ago, and the author of Hammer Glamour, a history of the starlets who helped sell Hammer’s particular brand of English gothic romanticism, sees little connection to the waifish actresses who populate modern film. “There was a particular look to a Hammer girl,” he says by phone from England, “and it’s not really the way that many contemporary actresses are encouraged to look. A Hammer girl was voluptuous. She was very curvy, very busty, very tall and very statuesque. A lot of the girls are actually quite chunky. In fact, when Madeline Smith first auditioned for The Vampire Lovers, she was asked to come back when she had put some…

FOR HAMMER FANS NOT CONTENT with merely watching the filmic exploits of Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula, a forthcoming university course will allow them to learn about the legendary British studio and what made its films successful with audiences worldwide. Titled Hammer: The Birth of British Horror, it previously ran as an in-class open-learning program on the grounds of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 2008. Now, the man behind it, writer and film historian Robert Simpson, has retooled it as a ten-week online course (through QUB) with a larger scope, in order to accommodate students outside of Ireland. “I’ve been developing it as a distance-learning module,” he explains. “We got some great feedback, and [also] a lot of frustrated interest from overseas. So now, anyone from anywhere in the world…

MARCH 1997 After testing in Japan, DVD comes to North America. MARCH 10, 1997 TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer premieres. MAY 24, 1997 Black Sabbath reunites with Ozzy Osbourne to headline the main stage at Ozzfest. SEPTEMBER 23, 1998 White Zombie calls it quits. DECEMBER 4, 1998 Gus Van Sant makes shot-for-shot recreation of Psycho. No one predicts the slew of remakes to come. JANUARY 25, 1999 $60,000 The Blair Witch Project premieres at Sundance; goes on to earn $250 million worldwide APRIL 20, 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Blame placed on violent media, dark music and goth culture. JUNE 29, 1999 Slipknot releases its self-titled debut album. OCTOBER 5, 1999 A new Misfits lineup fronted by Michale Graves releases Famous Monsters. NOVEMBER 24, 1999 End of Days is released,…

When Katherine Bigelow – director of Near Dark (1987) – made history earlier this year as the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, for many, there was a sense that it was too little progress, too late. But women continue to stake their claim to horror by writing, directing, performing and blogging; consequently, as Solet observes, “It’s from these ranks that the next generation of filmmakers will come. My hope is that many of these budding fangirls will blossom into an exponentially more passionate new breed of genre filmmakers.” “The LaserDisc format really woke people up to the possibilities of better home video presentations,” says Don May, Jr., the mastermind behind acclaimed restorations of genre classics Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…

1 YOUNG ADULT HORROR While children’s stories have been around for hundreds of years, the market categorization of “young adult” is a relatively new phenomenon. R.L. Stine certainly opened the doors for teen horror in the 1990s with his phenomenally successful Fear Street series, but YA sales didn’t truly skyrocket until the release of the Harry Potter novels and the horror-lite Twilight books, which are notable for having as wide a readership amongst adults as youths. In their wake, the floodgate of YA fiction has split wide open, with teen titles now being amongst literature’s fastest-growing sales demographic. Of course, this has led to a new influx of genre titles – everything from tepid Twilight rip-offs to the much darker, bloodier offerings of Darren Shan (the Cirque du Freak and…

As the face of modern horror cinema has evolved over the last thirteen years, so has the way critics and audiences have embraced the once-marginalized genre films of the past. No longer is critical appreciation reserved for acclaimed art house movies and Hollywood message films, the last decade or so has seen an increased stream of well-researched, often beautifully illustrated cult film books that gleefully reevaluate all manner of sleazy, ugly and crudely fashioned “trash.” Just 30 years ago, dodgy no-budget productions such as The Corpse Grinders, Night of the Bloody Apes and Monstroid were considered unwatchable by most mainstream critics, but that’s changed. Now, even ultra-low-budget directors such as Ray Dennis Steckler and Al Adamson have been reintroduced as authentic auteurs. “We’re talking about creations concocted on the fly…

IF YOU’RE A REGULAR READER OF RUE MORGUEyou’ll have noticed that we’re great admirers of the painted page – as much as we are of the written word and moving picture. Over the last thirteen years, many a candle has been held up to some of the most unique (Kris Kuksi) and influential (H.R. Giger) visionaries alive or dead (Hieronymus Bosch). Looking back at the past 100 issues, you’ll find eclectic examples of artists whose work goes bump in the night (Simon Marsden, XNO, Pooch), gets under your skin (Bob Tyrrell, Vincent Castiglia), invokes the playfully morbid (Jason D’Aquino, Mark Ryden), summons demonic vixens (Coop), immortalizes personal demons (Joe Coleman, Paul Booth) and breathes vivid life into monsters, both classic and contemporary (Basil Gogos, Daniel Horne, Tom Kuebler, Chet Zar).…

ALTERED VISIONS: THE ART OF VINCENT CHONG Vincent Chong Telos While Vincent Chong’s art certainly cribs on the work of Dave McKean, that doesn’t make these eerie and fantastical photo-illustrations any less compelling. This compact hardcover collects twenty of the artist’s works, most of which were commissioned for book and album covers, such as the dark-hued visage of a maniacally grinning man for Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. It pairs them with short blurbs of how each piece came to be, making this a brief but potent portfolio of Chong’s most memorable creations. MONICA S. KUEBLER BURIAL Neil Cross Simon and Schuster Neil Cross’ seventh novel, Burial, is a supernatural crime-thriller that slowly builds tension but fails to deliver on the action. Protagonist Nathan has a murderous secret in his…

There’s nothing new about filmmaking “boot camps” – institutions around the world have offered short, intensive film production programs for years. Visual effects artist Lee Stranahan, with the help of other horror filmmakers, is putting a new twist on the idea, however, with his Horror Film Boot Camp, which debuts this month in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Though Stranahan has organized several filmmaking and visual effects seminars in the past, this is his first attempt at a genre-specific camp. “As an indie filmmaker, horror is a great genre to explore… and I know a lot of people who work in the horror genre and are really passionate about it,” he explains of how it came together. Stranahan’s associates include director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II to IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera)…

In 1997, the biggest horror movie at the box office was Scream 2. Ten years later, a woman could be seen chopping off her victim’s penis and feeding it to a dog in Hostel: Part II. While Eli Roth’s film wasn’t the financial success that Wes Craven’s 90210 horror-lite effort was, it still enjoyed a wide release – an example of just how brutally violent the genre had become. The question is, why? Let’s recall that the ’90s were perhaps the weakest decade ever for horror. Not only were fewer horror films making it to theatres, but the gore and gritty violence that was once so integral to the genre had faded out. Yet just a few years after the decade ended, horror cinema would chart a new course entirely.…

It’s impossible to retrospect on the last thirteen years in horror music without crediting the internet for blowing things wide open. In the late ’90s, your favourite radio station, magazine and music TV channel were still the primary source of new tunes. Today, kids “tweet” on social networking site Twitter about the latest Norwegian black metal album they’ve just downloaded, before finding a new flavour-of-the-week between status updates and brooding self-portraits. Tack on the overwhelming impact of sprawling global arteries that are genre blogs, internet radio stations, independent review sites, online periodicals and digital rabbit holes such as MySpace and Facebook, and the plight of your average horror band has changed immeasurably in thirteen years. “[The internet] truly is a double-edged sword,” says GWAR singer and 25-year music industry vet,…

When Rue Morgue debuted in 1997, horror comics were at something of a crossroads. On the one side you had Vertigo with titles such as Sandman, Hellblazer and Swamp Thing focusing on characterization and truly innovative, epic stories. In the opposing corner were more sensationalistic titles, such as the overrated Spawn and the execrable Lady Death, which placed more emphasis on gore, sex and sudden shocks. And somewhere in the middle was Hellboy, which was starting to garner attention but still a ways away from becoming a sensation. Then a funny thing happened: the comics industry collapsed in on itself. After years of pandering to the collector’s market with silly gimmicks such as variant/3-D/foil/glow-in-the-dark covers, multiple company-wide crossovers and countless first issues, readers began to turn away in droves. Hardest…

It goes without saying that the internet has had a profound effect on the lives of virtually every horror fan. Whether it’s tracking down a copy of a long out-of-print gem or looking up the name of that guy who played that guy who got killed in that movie, if you’ve got access to a computer, then you’ve got access to anything and everything that has to do with the genre. Over roughly the last thirteen years, that access has transformed the world of horror movies, from the most bloated Hollywood productions down to the micro-budget backyard affairs. Once upon a time, fans had to wait for new issues of their favourite horror publications to hit the stands before they’d be privy to insider information on films. Today, it’s difficult…

IN HONOUR OF RUE MORGUE’S 100TH ISSUE, it gives us great pleasure to announce the release of a free, downloadable compilation album we’ve christened Rue Morgue Radio Presents… Hymns from the House of Horror. Thousands of horror bands have graced the pages and airwaves that emanate from this unholy place over the course of thirteen years, more than 300 radio shows and 100 magazines. We put our misshapen heads together and enticed a handful of the many artists we believe best encapsulate the spirit of Rue Morgue into giving us exclusive mixes, previously unreleased tracks, obscure rarities and classic cuts for this morbid mixtape. It’s only available for a limited time so read up on the artists here, then click over to rue-morgue.com or ruemorgueradio.com to download your copy, complete…

ANY REASONABLY COMPETENT HACK CAN DIRECT A BAD FILM; however, it takes a perverse level of genius to make a movie that once reigned at the very bottom of the worst 100 movies of all time list on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com). But such is the 1990 cult classic Troll 2, the in-name-only sequel to the 1986 horror fantasy Troll – and a film that has effectively usurped Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of the most lamentable genre films of all time. So why is Troll 2 so deserving of these unfortunate accolades? “As a bad movie, it fails in every filmmaking principle: bad script, bad writing, bad acting, horrible effects,” explains Michael Stephenson, the child star of the film and director of Best Worst…

Vertigo launches American Vampire with style and, thanks to the presence of Stephen King, much fanfare. Issue one is broken up into two stories; the first takes place in 1925 and introduces Pearl Jones, an aspiring actress in Hollywood who gets more than she bargained for when she attends a swanky party hosted by a big-shot producer. The second story, written by King, takes place in 1880 during an attempted escape by a notorious freshly captured bank robber named Skinner Sweet. The connection between the two tales is merely hinted at (take another glance at the comic’s title for a clue) but it’s obvious there’s a lot more to be revealed. Rafael Albuquerque’s art is excellent in both stories, and he does a great job of giving each tale a…

A NUMBER OF MUSICIANS HAVE TAKEN A STAB AT RESCORING F.W. MURNAU’S 1922 SILENT VAMPIRE CLASSIC NOSFERATU, including Hammer’s James Bernard, metal band Type O Negative and Bernardo Uzeda (for the Murnau Foundation’s restoration). One recent attempt from new label November Fire gives Nosferatu a prog rock overhaul, plus one other additive: dialogue. Yes, Count Orlok speaks! So do Renfield and the rest of the cast, backed by sound effects and a new score crafted by Hobgoblin, a band comprised of members from Neurosis, Skinlab, Sacrilege B.C., and Re-Ignition. A dream project for Hobgoblin’s leader Strephon Taylor, it took two years to complete due to a number of factors: scheduling all the musicians from the various bands into the studio to record, and the complex chore of conforming a silent…

DIRECTED BY TERENCE FISHER UK-1957 MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, in a mountain village in Switzerland, lived a man whose strange experiments with the dead have since become legend.” When those words – written in antique script against a fire-engine red Technicolor background – were flashed on cinema screens across the UK in 1957, filmgoers were unaware they were witnessing the first shot in a war against the staid conventions of the horror film. The picture was The Curse of Frankenstein, and though the lurid reds of the intro distinguished it from the atmospheric, black and white Universal horror classics of the ’30s and ’40s, audiences had no idea what was about to hit them. After all, they were familiar with the gentle, brilliant but misguided Doctor Frankenstein, creator…