Table of contents for Issue 153 March 2015 in RUE MORGUE

CINECOUP TO FUND MORE GENRE PROJECTS AMIDSTWOLFCOP SEQUEL CineCoup, the self-professed “disruptive film accelerator” and Vancouver-based studio that brought the horror-comedy WolfCop to cinemas last year, has announced it is pursuing more genre projects, along with a sequel its popular werewolf hit. A second CineCoup campaign launched this February, with the winner to be named at the 2015 Banff World Media Festival in June. CineCoup founder J. Joly says to expect a focus on comedy and genre projects, including horror, this time around. “This model doesn’t work well for a dysfunctional family movie,” he explains. “Horror fans - they support the movie, they support the action figure, they’re really invested super-fans. And, quite frankly, CineCoup is a bunch of nerds. We love that shit.” The first CineCoup campaign, launched in…

ERT I. GORDON DOES EVERYTHING BIG, AND IN A CAREER THAT HAS SPANNED 60 YEARS, HE’S CERTAIN TO BE REMEMBERED AS A FIGURE THAT, AHEM, LOOMED LARGE OVER THE HORROR GENRE. Starting with his 1955 debut, King Dinosaur, the man who became affectionately known as “Mr. B.I.G.” displayed his self-taught attempts at creating on-screen monsters, often aided by his ex-wife, Flora. His earliest camera tricks were crude; for example, in Beginning of the End (1957), he simply filmed grasshoppers crawling on postcards of the Chicago skyline. However, his makeshift ingenuity and skills evolved significantly over his career, leading to the puppets, back projection and realistic miniatures that he used in the 1970s. Aside from giant monsters and a stream of cult and witchcraft-themed horror movies, Gordon also found time to…

OVERLOOKED, FORGOTTEN AND DISMISSED THIS ISSUE: LANCE GETS CAUGHT WITH HIS JAPANTS DOWN BEST CORSET OF ACTION PSYCHO GOTHIC LOLITA Tokyo Shock I’ve long had a crush on Japanese actress Chiaki Kuriyama, who’s best known as the mace-swinging schoolgirl assassin Gogo Yubari in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill – until now! So go-go away Gogo because there’s a new psychotic schoolgirl terrorizing Tokyo who’s captured my heart. Channelling the Gothic Lolita fashion craze that emerged from Japan in the late 1990s, Psycho Gothic Lolita features Rina Akiyama as a schoolgirl named Yuki who goes on a limb-hacking rampage while hunting down the criminals who slaughtered her mother and crippled her father – all while dressed in frilly petticoats, lacey undergarments and a spine-crushing corset. With its up-skirt shots, geysers of…

“Come on over baby, we got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn!” Know what really sucks about living in a basement? Well, a lot of things, actually, but one particularly sucky standout is that when I want to shout something from the rooftops, I can’t. Instead, my only course of action is to lure you down here into my heavenly hellhole with promises of duty-free alcohol and lukewarm Swanson Hungry Man frozen entrees, lock the door, secure the key down my skivvies and implore you to LISTEN THE FUCK UP as I prattle on about one forgotten genre film or another like some delete-bin-dwelling Ancient Mariner. “So what’s the fuss about this time, Bowen?” you’re doubtless asking yourselves with the inevitable collective eye-roll. The fuss, you…

WRAPPED IN PLASTIC: TWIN PEAKS Andy Burns ECW Press This past October, David Lynch and Mark Frost announced they’d be rebooting Twin Peaks in 2016 on the Showtime network, marking the 25th anniversary of the series finale and Laura Palmer’s last prophecy to Agent Cooper within the curtained confines of the Red Room: “I’ll be seeing you in 25 years.” It’s as good a time as any to revisit the series and reflect on its uncanny, enduring influence, and Andy Burns’ Wrapped In Plastic is a smart and indispensable guidebook that will easily whet your appetite in anticipation for the show’s return. The book is the latest in ECW Press’ excellent, highly collectible Pop Classics series, which enlists writers to pen 100 pages on a pop culture topic they’re obsessed…

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA SOUNDTRACK The Laze ONE WAY STATIC RECORDS Phantom of the Opera (1925) may be the most scored silent film in history, given the breadth of original music that has been penned in homage to this gothic classic over the last 90 years. The film has proven to be a magnet for composers hungry to apply their own fusion of classical, rock, jazz, opera and experimentalism to its shadowy imagery. The Laze is no different in laying out a theme, reconfiguring it for the film’s emotional beats and developing their material to ensure we’re really cheering for the mad genius instead of a banal heroine. The score (available in multiple audio formats) certainly sounds like a perfect fit, with The Laze scaling back aggressive rock elements…

RE: SICK TOP SIX: For a list of top six Bloodsucker Buffets, I was really disappointed to see the bar room scene from Near Dark didn’t “make the cut.” One of my all-time favorites. RICK EVANS, VIA E-MAIL YOU WRITE an entire article about the history of stopmotion animation and not even mention Jan Švankmajer or the Brothers Quay [RM#152]? Come on. @JPWENDEL, VIA TWITTER CLEANING MY ROOM and thought I’d lay all my Rue Morgue back issues on my bed like a macabre quilt. @SLASHERCASTTED VIA TWITTER NICE CLASSIC CUT feature on Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” [RM#152], truly one of the most unique and enduring classic rock songs from that era. The only disappointing thing was that the page couldn’t hold more information about how Blue…

GORGEOUS & GORY: THE ZOMBIE PINUP COLLECTION Jessica Rajs Schiffer Imagine your local burlesque troop made a zombie-themed pin-up calendar. Now imagine they collected four years’ worth of calendars and made it into a book. Initially intended as a means to support her local zombie walk, Jessica Rajs’ Gorgeous & Gory contains over 200 shots of alt babes in various stages of decay. The photography is admittedly amateur but the hefty hardcover delivers impressive makeup effects and interesting settings. KEVIN CONWAY GIFTS FOR THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER Helen Marshall ChiZine Publications Tragedy, horror, mythology and magic are close bedfellows in Helen Marshall’s world. Her second collection of short stories features a boy magician who gets sucked into his top hat, a disturbed girl who deeply mistrusts the…

Thanks to Ghost’s rise in popularity, the past few years have seen the emergence of a new trend of occult metal and rock ’n’ roll. (I covered some of the subgenre’s latest bands in RM#146.) But what does occult rock ’n’ roll really mean? Metal and psychedelic rock have always had a natural affinity for the dark arts, from Black Sabbath’s tales of witches and black masses to Venom’s more extreme and cartoonish take on the matter. According to author Peter Bebergal, author of the new book Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock n Roll (Tarcher/Penguin), the occult has played a much bigger role in popular music than most of us know. Bebergal defines the occult as a loose set of spiritual beliefs and practices at odds…

“THERE’S NEVER BEEN ANYTHING AS EXTREME AS VENOM IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN,” EXPLAINS CRONOS, THE GRAVEL-VOICED FRONTMAN OF THE VETERAN HEAVY METAL ACT, OVER THE PHONE FROM ENGLAND. “Once all this type of music was created, it kind of set the bar, and that’s where it ends. Black Sabbath kind of left the door open. There was a lot of things they didn’t do and it was for that very reason that I started Venom in the first place.” From its very beginnings, heavy metal has always held a fascination with Satan, but it was only once Venom arrived that those interests turned to pitch black devotion. Formed in 1979 at the height of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the UK-based band ignited an underground firestorm…

“LIVING LEGENT” IS A PHRASE THAT, SADLY, SEEMS TO BW LOSING RELEVANCE MORE AND MORE EVERY DAY. The stunning young innovators of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s are today’s senior citizens, steadily falling prey to the maladies of old age. That’s what makes Bert I. Gordon so special. He could, perhaps, be called the last man standing. Born in 1922 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Gordon’s love of cinema began at a young age, when he would spend weekends at the movie theatre in downtown Madison, watching and rewatching the double features. His love affair with moviegoing would continue into adulthood but was put on hold when he joined the Army Air Corps during World War II. Afterward, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin and started his own business making television…

WHILE UNDOUBTEDLY A MASTER OF HORROR FOR WRITING AND DIRECTING THE LIKES OF HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING, THEY LIVE AND PRINCE OF DARKNESS, JOHN CARPENTER REMAINS UNIQUE AMONG MAJOR GENRE DIRECTORS IN THAT HE ALSO SCORED MOST OF HIS OWN PICTURES. His creepy, beautiful, minimalist synth scores have taken on lives of their own, generating interest from younger fans discovering the reissued music through labels such as Death Waltz and Mondo, which have been recently re-pressing his soundtracks on high quality vinyl. Currently, there may be as much interest in Carpenter’s music as there is in the films themselves. While the director had a brief stint in the ’80s with his cinematic collaborators, writer/directors Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace, in the rock band the Coup de Villes, 2015…

AN IRANIAN VAMPIRE IN BAKERSFIELD A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT Starring Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi and Marshall Manesh Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour Vice Films As much as we like to groan and moan about the current sad state of bloodsuckers in mainstream cinema, for every Twilight, Underworld or Dracula Untold, there’s an indie release reinventing the vampire movie. Stakeland, Kiss of the Damned, Only Lovers Left Alive and Byzantium are – sorry, here comes the inevitable sanguinary metaphor – the lifeblood of the subgenre right now. Add to that list A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a film that’s as original as it is unexpected. The feature debut of Ana Lily Amirpour – a young, British-born, Bakersfield, California-based woman – has been described as…

If you engage in bad behaviour, you’ll almost certainly come to a bad end. That ancient axiom has been given a new life in horror cinema – especially over the past few decades – as moral arbiters such as Jason Voorhees and Jigsaw deal out death as payback for perceived transgressions. An interesting variation on this kind of character also turns up in the 1973 Spanish shocker A Candle for the Devil, Horror Express director Eugenio Martín’s tale of murderous sisters that considers the role of the righteous executioner. It’s an exploration that’s even more interesting now that Scorpion has released a fully uncut version of the film for North America, restoring about 20 minutes of sex and violence excised in the public domain TV print that’s widely available under…

SARA TAYLOR’S DEBUT NOVEL, BORING GILRS, WON’T DO MUCH TO DEBUNK THE IDEA THAT VIOLENT MUSIC BEGETS VIOLENT PEOPLE. The book, which is due out in April from Toronto’s ECW Press, tells the story of a shy, isolated high-schooler named Rachel. After discovering death metal, she meets Fern, a like-minded soul. Together, they form their own band and even get the chance to meet some of Rachel’s musical idols. The encounter goes horribly wrong, however, and the two girls are left irreparably scarred and hungry for vengeance. A dark, coming-of-age story, Boring Girls is brutal but also exhilarating and bizarrely inspiring. The novel draws from familiar terrain for Taylor, who goes by the moniker Chibi for her day job as lead vocalist of the darkwave rock band The Birthday Massacre…

Indie auteur Adam Ahlbrandt’s ’80s slasher homage Cross Bearer (2012) was a huge hit with the underground horror community. The initial pressing sold out quickly and used copies were fetching $100 on eBay before a reissue by Toetag Pictures late last year. Ahlbrandt – who wrote, directed, shot, edited, coloured and did the sound design for the film – is an immensely talented filmmaker who wrings a lot out of a puny budget. Cross Bearer looks and sounds fantastic; the killer has a unique sackcloth look inspired by Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) and a shout (“Harlot!”) that recalls Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). His hammer delivers the (sometimes repetitive) gore. In a twist on slasher film conventions, Ahlbrandt eschewed the typical middle class twentysomething characters of classic slashers…

ELDER SIGN Role-Playing Dice Game Fantasy Flight Role-Playing Dice Game Fantasy Flight Elder Sign nails the sense of impending doom and frenetic action one would expect from an RPG steeped in the Cthulhu mythos. The game includes a cardboard “clock” that players inch forward three hours every turn; each time it strikes midnight a new Mythos card is drawn, promising fresh terrors and bringing everyone closer to potential demise. The team’s only chance for survival is to take advantage of mystical spells, unique items, forgotten clues and helpful allies that turn the dice favourably and hopefully seal away the horrors with unpronounceable names. Fail and sanity disappears, forcing players to pick new characters and bury the old ones. The ability to rejoin the team with a new character makes for…