Table of contents for Issue 102 July 2010 in RUE MORGUE

FILM + DVD + REISSUES THEY GROW UP SO FAST… SPLICE Starring Sarah Polley, Adrien Brody and Dephine Chanéac Directed by Vincenzo Natali Written by Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor E1 “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family” is a concept that definitely gets put under the microscope in Cube director Vincenzo Natali’s long-gestating sci-fi/horror film Splice. Adrien Brody (King Kong remake) and Sarah Polley (Dawn of the Dead remake) star as Clive and Elsa, hotshot geneticists whose bold experiments splicing together the DNA of various animals have won them acclaim. But when their next challenge – combining animal and human DNA – is thwarted by their corporate benefactors, the ambitious couple goes ahead anyway. The result is Dren, a rapidly growing humanoid…

PARANOIA CREEPS. IT INFECTS AND TAINTS, and is ever present in our current culture of fear and surveillance. It’s also the driving force behind Salvage, a film that takes a British culde-sac and morphs it into a battleground, where soldiers try to contain, control and suppress a deadly secret. “What I loved about the basic premise for Salvage was that it played out in an ordinary, domestic setting,” says screenwriter Colin O’Donnell. “Familiarity is a strong device within horror, and an area I am particularly drawn to when creating stories. The thin line between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and that the façade of our lives can easily be stripped away in a moment, exposing terrifying inner and outer forces. That’s a reality that we all relate to.” The film,…

MENU: MORE MEAT FOR MANIACS H.G. LEWIS 2000 MANICS! (1964) is a favourite ’round Casa del Gore-met, and not a film I was particularly thrilled to see remade. Consequently, I paid as much attention to Tim Sullivan’s 2001 Maniacs (2005), a loose sequel to Lewis’ film, as I have to just about all the other remakes and sequels of the last few years – namely none. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Sullivan got his start in the film business on the crew of The Deadly Spawn (1983), one of my 50 Essential Gore Films (see RM#83), and he’s written for horror publications, so it’s not as if he’s some hack music video director looking to break out. But why revisit such a relatively obscure cult classic? “It gave me…

HE ORIGINAL BROODING VAMPIRE SERIES IS BACK. The legacy of the nearly 45-year-old gothic TV drama Dark Shadows continues with the release of The Night Whispers, an audio drama that its writer/producer sees as a natural extension of the long-running show. “Dark Shadows was almost a radio show in essence,” explains Stuart Manning. “It was made in a small studio with quite limited resources. It was very much driven by sound – music and sound effects, like the ever-present thunderstorms and crashing waves. Dark Shadows was also a suspense show and in some respects there’s a whole level of suspense added to the drama because you don’t have visuals.” Debuting in June 1966, Dark Shadows was a spooky soap opera that aired weekday afternoons and garnered a legion of fans. Yet the…

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COMMENTS QUESTIONS CRITICISM I’M SENDING YOU A PHOTO of a little project that we have done just recently in homage to my absolute favourite magazine… Rue Morgue!!! The shot was taken by my great friend, Miss Colleen Farrell. RICHARD CARDINAL – MONTREAL, QUEBEC IT’S BEEN FOUR YEARS of unconditional love for your magazine. I’ve tried every horror mag out there and I am positive that Rue Morgue is not only the best, but the most complete and exhaustive printed work on all levels of horror. But today I’m sad. RM#101 represented my first total departure from your beautiful magazine. I could not care less about melodramatic ’80s cheese rocker Danzig. True Blood is a better Twilight, but it certainly does not deserve more attention than it already has. I saw…

youtube.com (search: The Undertaker vs. Kamala Survivor Series) If reading this issue’s feature on horror grapplers leaves you throbbing with testosterone, instead of staging a bout of backyard wrestling with your jerk buddies, check out this clip of The Undertaker preparing Kamala for a dirt nap, complete with coffin, during the ’92 WWF Survivor Series. fearnet.com Our US readers will want to keep their browsers tuned to FEARnet as the website’s free, streamable horror movie archive is ever expanding, and now includes newer titles such as The Devil’s Rejects and cult classics including The Beast Within. International users, while blocked from viewing the films, can still access many of the site’s interviews and other bonus vids. hayeshudsonshouseofhorror.blogspot.com Sick of horror movie blogs that only boast sporadic updates? Well, Hayes Hudson…

JAUME BALAGUERÓ ALICIA (1994) Shadow and atonal music set the atmosphere as a masturbating woman gushes blood onto a picture of Christ; then men in fetish gear force-feed her slime before jabbing a tube into her neck while she suckles a biomechanical nursemaid. Balagueró’s monochromatic eight-minute debut deftly channels Eraserhead, Tetsuo and, yup, Cronenberg. (YouTube search: “Alicia Jaume Balagueró.”) DA DIAS SIN LUZ (1995) Jaume Balagueró’s second short, Diassin luz (Days Without Light) is a feature film spanning generations and time zones – crunched into eight minutes! The haunting narrative centres around a boy abandoned by his parents and adopted by a very strange couple as his days of light (i.e. following birth) turn dark and foreboding. Ambitious, gory and perverse. (YouTube search: “Dias sin luz Jaume.”) RG THE NAMELESS…

HORROR AND WRESTLING HAVE MERGED TO THE POINT WHERE GRAPPLERS ARE STARRING IN SLASHER PICS, AND WHILE THIS MAY SEEM LIKE CRASS CROSS-PROMOTION, IT’S RE-ALLY THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION TO A LONG-STANDING TRADITION. Even before professional wrestling became a television staple in the 1950s, promoters delved into the horror world to develop monster characters. Jack Pfefer was one such promoter, credited by many wrestling historians as the top progenitor of its movement toward gimmickry and theatrics. “[Pfefer] was like George Romero and John Waters, mixed with a little Russ Meyer and [wrestling maven] Vince McMahon Jr. in terms of his ‘outlaw’ promotional style,” says pro wrestling scribe Mike Lano, who has been reporting on the sport since 1966. “He thought nothing of buying a ticket to [another] promoter’s legit pro wrestling show…

LONG LIVE THE GRUE FLESH CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (SPECIAL EDITION) (1980) DVD/Blu-ray Starring Christopher George, Catriona MacColl and Giovanni Lombardo Radice Directed by Lucio Fulci Written by Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti Blue Underground Putrid praise to Blue Underground for preserving the mouldering, maggoty charms of Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead in this new Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray. If you’re reading this magazine, chances are you don’t require a recap, but just in case, here goes: the suicide of a priest (Fabrizio Jovine) opens the portals of hell in the sleepy New England town of Dunwich, unleashing hordes of the undead upon its citizens. A psychic (Catriona MacColl), who narrowly avoids being buried alive in the film’s most nerve-rattling scene, and a cigar-chewing reporter (Christopher…

AEROBICIDE! I can’t stress it enough: I really, really fucking hate the 1980s. We’re talking about the most culturally barren decade of the 20th century. Think about it – can you name a worse one? Huey Lewis, Bon Jovi, Kajagoogoo. Miami Vice, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, Cop Rock. Neon, pastels, spandex, hideous hairstyles, fuckin’ legwarmers everywhere, rrretch. And to make matters worse, instead of rebelling against the conformist bullshit peddled by minions of the Mulroney/Reagan/Thatcher axis of evil, most of the younger generation was content to just roll over, spread ’em and take it up the tuckus like a bunch of good sports. Today, the ’80s remain such an embarrassment to all concerned that they’ve even been largely bypassed by that curious but normally reliable pop-culture hiccup, the twenty-year…

TEAM EFFORT TERROR BOOK O’BLOODSUCKERS UNLIFE LESSONS CHRISTOPHER LEE AND PETER CUSHING AND HORROR CINEMA: A FILMOGRAPHY OF THEIR 22 COLLABORATIONS Mark A. Miller McFarland When you mention Christopher Lee, it’s difficult not to think of Peter Cushing as well – and viceversa. That’s because the two icons (and real-life best friends) enjoyed one of the longest running and most successful partnerships in horror cinema – eclipsing even that of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, from whom Lee and Cushing had inherited the mantle of horror luminaries. Though both actors had highly distinguished film careers of their own, some of their most revered projects were those in which they appeared together. In the recently reissued Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema – first published in 1994 and long…

BEHIND THE WICKED WORDS Writing may be a solitary profession, but increasingly authors are sharing their lives online. In the days before the internet – remember those? – I wondered about the people behind the stories. Sure, writers did interviews, and even occasionally wrote books about their craft (e.g. Stephen King’s On Writing), but for the true genre lit geek, there just wasn’t enough out there – it was nothing like with actors and filmmakers. Then the internet changed that – and gave us something even better: authors in their own words, writing about writing, writing about their lives. Everything you ever wanted to know – and more – at your fingertips. Allow me to share some of my favourites. First stop, Storytellersunplugged.com, which keeps me coming back for its…

SOUNDTRACK A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010) Steve Jablonsky WATER TOWER MUSIC After his snarling scores for the Texas Chainsaw reboots, Steve Jablonsky integrates some classical sounds into his latest work. The title theme uses a pulsing motif to capture Freddy Krueger’s smouldering presence; Krueger’s de facto “heartbeat” drifts from a sterile sonic environment into the melodic realm, accompanied by the faint, wafting voices of molested children. That’s more or less the score’s core, around which distant orchestral laments and sudden bursts of industrial shrillness swirl, echo and evaporate. Equally clever are the percussive hits that evoke the synth rhythms of David Newman’s original 1984 composition. Although Jablonsky manages a good balance of orchestral samples and traditional sonic stings, a few cues bear a striking resemblance to Hans Zimmer’s…

In 1996, the first FanTasia Film Festival was hardly a blip on the radar. A lot has changed in the last fourteen years; now one of the most important genre festivals in the world, the 2009 event saw ticket sales soar upwards of 90,000, with screenings of more than 200 films from across the globe. This year’s festival, scheduled for July 8 to 28 in Montreal, features some seriously boundary-pushing international horror. As per usual, FanTasia’s programming will feature a number of premieres and classic fright flicks. This year, besides movies, horror aficionados can look forward to a staging of Stuart Gordon’s one-man play Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, starring Jeffrey Combs. Gordon and Combs will also be on hand to host a special 25th anniversary screening of…

1 AUNT TILLY $14.99 – $89.99 Aunt Tilly is the latest addition to the gallery of Haunted Memories’ resident lunatic lenticular artist Edward Allen. She’s the picture of Edwardian elegance – but catch her at the wrong angle, and you’ll see her chilling, grinning skull and cobweb-draped finery in its true form. Get your haunt on at changingportraits.com. 2 PAN’S LABYRINTH BUSTS $70 each Bring Pan’s Labyrinth home with a bust of The Pale Man or Pan himself. Each poly-stone likeness stands over eight-inches tall and includes autographs from character creator Guillermo del Toro and actor Doug Jones (who played the creatures). They’re San Diego ComicCon exclusives limited to 500 each, but a small quantity will be available after the show. Play peek-a-boo with The Pale Man at gentlegiantltd.com. 3…

MANY PEOPLE HAVE AT LEAST ONE STORY ABOUT MONSTROUS ROOMMATES, BUT TOBY WHITHOUSE, WRITER AND CREATOR OF BRITISH SUPERNATURAL TV SHOW BEING HUMAN HAS MORE THAN MOST. The hour-long program chronicles the day-to-day lives of a vampire, Mitchell, and a werewolf, George, who decide to share a house in order to better fit in with humanity – only to discover that it’s haunted by Annie, the ghost of a young woman who died there under mysterious circumstances. Whithouse began his career as an actor, and started writing in his time between shows. After a number of steady scribing gigs, he was eventually invited to write for the relaunched UK sci-fi classic Doctor Who. The success of that revamped series basically paved the way for Being Human. Before the relaunch, sci-fi…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE GETS HACKED THE PENIS MIGHTIER COCKHAMMER Hack Movies Welcome to the weird, weird world of Hack Movies, the brainchild of truly disturbed writer/director Kevin Strange, who has been pumping out ultra-lowbudget horror-comedies since 2006. His latest, Cockhammer, deals with demented, OCD-afflicted snuff-porn producer Norman Cockhammer, who hires hitmen to abduct hookers. He then carves the women up with a chainsaw during demonic rituals aimed at making him a god. His only weakness is a mystical blade-equipped dildo, which a couple of stoners conjure up – with the help of transvestite demons! – in order to save their slutty girlfriends from Cockhammer’s evil clutches. Rife with rapid-fire jokes, cheesy gore effects and more masturbation scenes than you can shake a soggy Kleenex at – Cockhammer satisfyingly busts guts…

Harpy claws, gargoyle skeletons and stuffed yetis are just some of the fascinating specimens collected over the years by Professor Rufus Excalibur Bell, the Higgins Armory Museum’s Curator of Curiosities, and Benjamin, his backpack-wearing assistant. Now, for the first time, the museum has flung open the doors of his study to allow the public to gawk into the abyss of time and space. If this story sounds improbable, that’s because it is. Professor Bell’s exhibition, running all year at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA, is actually the work of artist and sculptor Hilary Scott, who created more than 100 objects for the installation, with another fifteen recently added. Upon entering Prof. Bell’s second floor study, visitors are transported into a realm of the mythological, the magical and the…

JOHNETTE NAPOLITANO RISES AGAIN “Oh, you were a vampire and baby, I’m the walking dead.”CONCRETE BLONDE MANY NEW MOONS BEFORE TWILIGHT, THERE WAS ANOTHER polarizing vamp film: remember the communal whine about Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise starring in Interview with the Vampire? In hindsight, it wasn’t the worst casting choice in vampire film history (Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker, anyone?) and the 1994 movie turned a whole new generation on to Anne’s Rice’s famed 1970s fang chronicles. For me, though, the introduction to Rice’s work came by way of an album by LA band Concrete Blonde. Released in 1990, Bloodletting dripped Southern Gothic atmosphere, right from the prowling bassline of lead track “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song),” a menacing number as much about the city of New Orleans as any…

GRAPHICS PLAYABILITY SHIVERS HIGHEST RATING IS THREE ALAN WAKE PC, Xbox 360 Remedy Entertainment Alan Wake is a famous crime writer with a big problem. Aside from horrible writer’s block, which has plagued him for the past two years, he’s living in a nightmare from which he can’t wake. Players assume the role of the titular scribe who, while vacationing in the Washington state countryside, has his world rocked after his wife is kidnapped and he finds himself hunted by characters from a book he supposedly penned but doesn’t remember writing. From the creators of Max Payne, and reminiscent of the Silent Hill series, this very dark, third-person shooter’s striking scenery and evocative storyline are sure to appeal to fans of Twin Peaks, The X-Files…