Table of contents for Issue 121 April 2012 in RUE MORGUE

I fell in love under the stars last summer. Yessir, that’s when I rediscovered my affection for drive-in, movies after not having been to one since I saw a triple bill that featured The Craft (1996). That was back in Edmonton, Alberta, and, being that far north, it got chilly after sunset (even during warm days), mosquitoes made it their mission to annoy and the summer nights are short – so short that halfway through the final film the sun came up, turning the screen white and obliterating my view of Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk in schoolgirl uniforms. And that’s just unacceptable. It’s not so surprising that there aren’t any drive-ins left in Alberta. (FYI: Wikipedia notes that last year there were 371 drive-ins remaining in America; I’d estimate…

How do you fight pirates? With strippers and sword-swallowers, of course. In a move designed in part to thwart internet movie piracy, the creative team behind 2008’s Repo! The Genetic Opera are hitting the road with The Devil’s Carnival, a raucous touring show that combines film, music, audience participation and live performances by burlesque dancers, contortionists and other carnie mainstays. The show kicks off this month in Hollywood and will hit a number of US and Canadian cities before winding down in May. Though it’s being called a sequel to Repo!, Carnival actually bears no thematic or narrative connection to the bloody rock opera. “The only connection is the insane team that worked on it and the same kind of ‘fuck you’ attitude,” says Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed both…

1. THE EVIL DEAD / EVIL DEAD II ONE ASH SMASH AFTER ANOTHER 2. WRONG TURN INBREDS’ IMPROVISED ABATTOIR 3. DEAD SNOW BRAIN POPPED AND PLOPPED BY ZOMBIE 4. CABIN FEVER MARCY’S CLOSE SHAVE 5. TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL LOOSE POST: 1, POLICEMAN: 0 6. RITUALS MITZI STRUNG UP AND SEVERELY SEARED TORTURED TAGLINES THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1964) “HALF BONE, HALF BANDAGE AND ALL BLOOD-CURDLING HORROR!” See more of Jay’s work at jayfosgitt.com…

“BLOOD FEAST IS A BLIGHT ON THE AMERICAN FILM INDUSTRY. IN EVERY DEPARTMENT – ACTING, CASTING, PRODUCTION, CAMERA WORK, DIALOGUE – IT IS AMATEUR NIGHT. ONLY THE MOST PUERILE READERS OF COMIC BOOKS WOULD DARE GO SEE THIS PICTURE,” wrote Kevin Thomas for the Los Angeles Times. However, this “amateur” film, made for $24,500, grossed over four million dollars and was the highest earning drive-in picture of 1964. It remains one of the top cult movies of all time. On Valentine’s Day of last year, we lost one of the driving forces behind it, producer David Friedman. He was an exploitation pioneer known as “King of the Trash Film,” who, along with Herschell Gordon Lewis, invented the gore film. Raised in the carnival business, Friedman brought that P.T. Barnum school…

WHILE ITS TITLE IS AN OBVIOUS NOD TO SHAUN OF THE DEAD, WHICH IS ITSELF AN HOMAGE TO GEORGE A. ROMERO’S DAWN OF THE DEAD, director Alejandro Brugués says the biggest influence on his much-anticipated Cuban zom-com Juan of the Dead (which was recently picked up by Outsider Pictures and will begin a limited theatrical run this month) was in fact the adventurous life of his older brother Juan. In fact, Juan Brugués, now a Miami resident, returned to Havana for the first time in a decade during the film’s eight-week shoot in late 2010 to visit his little brother’s film set. “He was hanging around, saying he was the real Juan,” Brugués says with a laugh. Rue Morgue spoke to the filmmaker last September during the Toronto International Film…

SILENT HOUSE Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens Directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau Written by Laura Lau Horror movie hucksterism didn’t die out with William Castle, but it did lose a chunk of its joie de vivre. The real-time experience promised by Silent House isn’t as cool as the possibility of being electrocuted – or, at least, startled – by your own movie seat, but it’s something, and filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who chucked their actors in with live sharks for 2003’s Open Water) pull off the single, uninterrupted-shot gimmick with surprising effectiveness for most of the film’s 86-minute running time. Ultimately, though, this House is built on a shaky foundation, and a clumsy ending brings it crashing down. Based on 2010’s La…

ROGER CORMAN: INTERVIEWS Constantine Nasr, ed. University Press of Mississippi When being interviewed, filmmakers, actors and other movie business folks often fall back into the same tired anecdotes. Facing a question they’ve heard a hundred times before about a project they barely remember, it’s understandable that the same practiced stories get dragged out again and again. Not so with Roger Corman: Interviews, however, a new collection of mostly previously published discussions with the reigning King of the Bs. This superior release avoids that pitfall by featuring sixteen interviews plucked from a span of more than 50 years, offering not only a chance to witness Corman’s development as a filmmaker, but the evolution of his attitudes towards his work. Editor Constantine Nasr has done a fine job of selecting a wide…

SOUNDTRACK THE WOMAN IN BLACK Marco Beltrami SILVA SCREEN Marco Beltrami has written some of his finest work for the various horror remakes he’s scored (The Omen, The Thing), and The Woman in Black is again composed in a style that hearkens back to the rich orchestral scores of the late ’70s. He’s not quite channelling vintage John Williams, but his use of melody is paramount to capturing the unease of characters confronted by myths, legends, ghosts and tactile nightmares. Heavy with strings and woodwinds, there’s both charm and dread in the way Beltrami’s main theme never seems to settle into one staid mood, as in the mercurial “Bills Past Due.” The orchestrations are razor sharp, and the dissonant build-ups are often more frightening than the punctuating stabs. Beltrami also…

RUE MORGUE #120, with an Arrow Vid article on “the Art of Arrow”–apparently my Demons cover is on the contents page! Totally rad! JEFF ZORNOW, VIA FACEBOOK IT’S OFFICIALLY MARCH 1ST, which means February’s @RueMorgue drought is over! Bring on Weird Stats & Morbid Facts and Bowen’s Basement! @JAYSOTKOWY, VIA TWITTER I WAS BUMMED OUT to learn that the message boards on rue-morgue.com have been removed and on top of that I was not overly awed by your recent design revamp of the website. And it was all happening during your issue-less month of February. As I was clamouring for the new Rue Morgue, I couldn’t help but think, “Is the magazine still going to be good?” But after reading Dave’s latest editorial, it’s clear that Rue is still on…

1. ANATOMICAL HEART PENCIL HOLDER $19.95 The Odd Art Collective has come up with a heart-stoppingly original way to store your pens and brushes while you’re waiting for the muse to attack, and whose atria wouldn’t be warmed by a pencil holder shaped like the body’s most important organ? Get stabbed in the art at neatoshop.com. 2. SKELETON COUPLE FIGURINE $285 Show everyone that when you promise “’til death do us part” you mean it and then some. This happy, albeit skeletal, ceramic couple works perfectly as either a cake topper or wedding centrepiece. Each order is customizable and unique, in case you want to showcase your, ahem, inner self on the big day. Get your bone china at skellramics.com. 3. RIP RIDER SKATEBOARD $129.95 This classic toe-pinchershaped deck from…

THE HOUSE THAT JOSS BUILT THE CABIN IN THE WOODS Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Kristen Connolly Directed by Drew Goddard Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard Alliance “If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise…” I appropriated that famous line from something much more benign, but it perfectly sums up The Cabin in the Woods – and the challenges of reviewing it. If you’re familiar with Joss Whedon’s oeuvre, you know that the writer/director has carved a career out of lovingly smashing genre expectations, in TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. And that’s exactly what this film does – in spades. So don’t let that mundane title fool you: there’s a lot more going on here…

William Shakespeare isn’t the first name that comes to mind when thoughts turn to horror. There is, nevertheless, much in the Bard’s work that modern genre writers can look to for inspiration, whether it’s tormented ghosts and apparitions, heaping bouts of madness, doomed romances or copious amounts of bloodshed. Dear Creature, a new graphic novel written and illustrated by Jonathan Case and available now from TOR Books, takes its cue from the Bard – with a smattering of horror conventions – to produce a unique and fascinating tale that manages to be epic, funny, romantic, dramatic, disturbing, horrific, tragic and uplifting. In a word, Shakespearean. “I grew up going to Shakespeare plays as a kid, and trained as an actor in college,” says Case. “I was always interested in performance,…

TORENTOS CHRIS ROBERTS IS NO STRANGER TO THESE PAGES. We ran his Twilight Zone piece, Terror At 20,000 Feet, for our Richard Matheson retrospective (RM#35) and a collage of Vincent Price portraits called Vincent Price Is Right for our art feature celebrating 100 years of Vincent Price (RM#111). Needless to say, we’re big fans, but he also may just be Canada’s best-kept secret when it comes to horror art. By day, Roberts works at a print shop, creating graphics and illustrations for various film and television productions, most recently working with prop departments on Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and the upcoming Total Recall remake. By night, he can be found working away in his art lab, stitching together his love of art history and classic horror. “I had done…

Nothing impresses me more than dogged determination, and Ryan Graveface has demonstrated he may well be the poster boy for the stuff. The sole member of deceptively dark shoegazer act Dreamend, Graveface may be most familiar to RM readers as the bassist/guitarist in experimental psych-poppers Black Moth Super Rainbow (who contributed the song “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” to our first Hymns compilation). With his latest release, however, he is literally and figuratively on his own. And the Tears Washed Me, Wave After Cowardly Wave is the second part to a story the singer/multi-instrumentalist began telling on 2010’s So I Ate Myself, Bite By Bite (both via his own Graveface Records label). Based upon a real-life serial killer’s journal, which Graveface claims to have purchased “years ago…

ZOMBIES!!! MOBILE EDITION Windows 7 phone Babaroga Before undead board games went highprofile with competing Walking Dead titles (RM#119), there was Zombies!!! (from Twilight Creations Inc.), which re-envisioned how table-top games functioned while creating a facsimile of a zombie apocalypse using little plastic 3-D rotters. With a game board constructed during play – players add a new street or building tile and a random number of zombies each turn – no two games are the same. A session can last from five minutes to well over an hour (depending on how many expansion packs are being used) and requires an element of strategy in placing tiles and zombies to hinder opponents. Now, Zombies!!! is going digital with software developer Babaroga (Horror Master Trivia) creating a video game version of the…

WOULD YOU RATHER have an Uncle Fester or a Grandpa Munster? How is this even a question? Grandpa Munster for sure! I always felt like Fester was the least interesting of the Addams clan. ANGELICA VØN MÜNSTER Uncle Fester all the way! The Addams Family was way funnier than The Munsters AND you’d never need a flashlight while Fester was around! ROB MORGANBESSER While I love them both, if pressed, I choose Grandpa! He has magic pills and an awesome lab; Uncle Fester is only good for explosives and the occasional light bulb trick. AZRAEL RENEA Grandpa could get cranky at times, and tended to lose focus on his family when he was obsessed with his experiments and such. Fester never faltered when it came to family; his explosives and…

MONSTERS: THREE FAMOUS SPINE-TINGLING TALES (Wonder Books Inc., 1965) Published during the height of the ’60s monster craze, this 48-page illustrated storybook features exciting, abridged adaptations of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and was an ideal way to introduce youngsters to the works of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Charming and colourful ’60s-era artwork by famed comic book illustrator Tony Tallarico, coupled with lively, faithful adaptations by Walter Gibson make this a great item for classic monster fans. Copies are relatively easy to come by on eBay for $10 or less. MORE CRYPTIC COLLECTIBLES AT RUE-MORGUE.COM…

ON “GHOULDIGGERS,” THE OPENING TRACK OF MINISTRY’S TWELFTH STUDIO ALBUM, RELAPSE, AL JOURGENSEN DECLARES, “I’M NOT DEAD YET!” The song is aimed squarely at the breed of music industry suits that inspired him to establish his own 13th Planet label in 2004 with his wife Angelina, but it also serves as a reminder – if you needed one – that Jourgensen is a survivor. No, really. Not just in the sense that he’s prevailed in the face of heroin-addled adversity or that he’s forged a 30-year career in the fickle entertainment biz as one of the leading purveyors of industrial music, but because he’s technically died three times. And he’s sung about it, through an overdriven effects unit set to a nightmare-scape of precision-guided drum detonations, corrosive guitar riffage, horror…

CORPORATE DOWNSIZING CORPORATE CUTTHROAT MASSACRE MVD Visual I’m always amazed by how movies that have the word “massacre” in the title often have really low body counts. Such is the case with this lame offering from Creep Creepersin (He, Peeping Blog). Set almost exclusively within the confines of a couple of office cubicles, it follows a group of employees forced to stay late one evening by their tyrannical boss, who has announced that she plans to fire two of them before daybreak. More of a horror-comedy than a slasher flick, the cardboard cast of stereotypes (slut, drunk, man-whore, ditz, nerd, creepy custodian) do a shitload of talking and plotting but the slaying doesn’t start ’til the final ten minutes. Combine that with an inability to meet this month’s death quota…

IN THE ALL-TOO-NEAR FUTURE: THE WORLD HAS FINALLY FELT THE KNOCKOUT PUNCH OF ECONOMIC MELTDOWN. IN ORDER TO STAVE OFF TOTAL COLLAPSE, THE ENTIRE GLOBE’S MONETARY DEALINGS ARE NOW OVERSEEN BY A MYSTERIOUS FINANCIAL CABAL KNOWN AS “THE BANK.” Against this backdrop, Detective Inspector Cass Jones (a good cop with very bad habits) is on the trail of a serial killer called The Man of Flies while also trying to solve the murder/suicide of his brother’s family. Jones soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving The Bank, mephistophelean power brokers and his own checkered past. This is the world of The Dog-Faced Gods, a gritty, supernatural police procedural trilogy from UK author Sarah Pinborough, which began with 2010’s A Matter of Blood and 2011’s The Shadow of the…

Chemical Burn Entertainment distributes a variety of low-budget independent films. So let’s have a look at a trio of titles from the Horror & Gore section of their catalogue. The company’s latest release is a British film called Bane, written, directed and produced by James Eaves. The plot draws heavily from ’00s torture porn, namely Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Descent (2005) and Martyrs (2008). Four women are brought into a cinder-block room by a phalanx of men in hazmat suits who inject them with a drug that renders them unconscious. They wake up on army cots in a cell consisting of electrified industrial fencing draped in translucent plastic sheeting, with no memory of who they are or why they’re there. By day, they’re hooked up to electrodes while psychologically…

SINCE 1999, EACH INSTALLMENT IN KONAMI’S SUCCESSFUL SURVIVAL HORROR VIDEO GAME FRANCHISE SILENT HILL HAS featured industrial scores and sound design by Akira Yamaoka, the sonic brain who also created the surprisingly tender main theme for the feature film version of Silent Hill. But after his departure from the company in 2009, the producers needed someone who could maintain continuity with the established musical design for an eighth installment, Silent Hill: Downpour (just released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360). Enter Daniel Licht, the American composer best known for scoring seven seasons of TV’s Dexter and feature films including Thinner, Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines and late entries in both the Children of the Corn and Amityville series. “The main elements that inspired me were the dark, lonely, eerie and frightening landscapes,”…