Table of contents for Issue 159 September 2015 in RUE MORGUE

I’m sitting in a shadowy, subterranean cavern. A door opens in front of me and a pale old man in a suit emerges, looming uncomfortably close. Then another ghoulish figure appears, and finally a ghostly girl flickers through the shadows before screaming in my face. Suddenly I’m getting a floor view of the room. Fade to black and I remove my virtual reality headgear and headphones. I’d been watching a three-minute horror short called 11:57, which is part of a virtual reality demonstration at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival. It’s intended to give me a taste of the future, but I’m thinking of the past. The technology reminds me of the short films that were made shortly after the dawn of cinema, which had just moved past the simple recording of…

1. NECRONOMICON NOTEBOOK $25 Pen your very own Book of the Dead with this notebook featuring a hand-painted cover cast in high-quality durable resin. The book measures 3” X 4.5” and contains 400 pages for doodling, writing, or taking dictation from Arch-demons of the Abyss. Also comes with a three-pack of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness-inspired stickers! 2. BATES MOTEL DOOR HANGER $15 Hey Norman, let your housemates know when you’re in a welcoming frame of mind – and when it’s best to stay away - with this door hanger inspired by the Hitchcock classic! Measures 3.75” X 12” and made of sturdy pressed wood. 3. BELA BAT SHADES $14.99 Embrace your inner vampire with this pair of stylin’ shades by Spitfire Interiors, featuring metal bats on each of…

IF THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW CREATED BASTARD STEPCHILDREN, THEY ARE SURELY THE FILMS OF DARREN LYNN BOUSMAN AND TERRANCE ZDUNICH. Bousman, director of the first three Saw sequels, and writer/actor/composer Zdunich, created 2008’s Repo: The Genetic Opera, a horror musical with a cavalcade of bizarre and ghoulish characters in a dystopian future where a merciless corporation repossesses organs from those who don’t keep up with their transplant payments. Like Rocky Horror, it was a flop upon release but has since found a dedicated cult audience that dresses up as the characters and performs shadowcasts of it. The duo followed it up in 2012 with The Devil’s Carnival, a tale based on Aesop’s Fables about three lost souls in a carnivalesque Hell being taken through the Devil’s domain by…

Ingmar Bergman once sombrely intoned: "Man is governed by the trauma of his birth and the terror of his dying." If any artist articulated that view it was H.R. Giger (1940 – 2014). The life of the legendary Swiss surrealist is now the subject of a documentary, Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World (out on DVD from KimStim on September 1). The movie, which is peppered with archival footage, follows the creator of the aliens in the Alien franchise during the last years of his life, as he discusses his work, entertains friends and navigates a house bursting with books, reference material (including a lion’s skeleton) and his own paintings and sculptures. Rue Morgue recently met with director Belinda Sallin to discuss her revealing film. What were your objectives with Dark…

IT MAKES SENSE TO INTERVIEW HELLIONS DIRECTOR BRUCE MCDONALD IN A PUMPKIN PATCH. THE FILM IS, AFTER ALL, SET ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT. Plus the town in which McDonald is shooting, Watertown, Ontario, has an annual tourist attraction called Pumpkinfest in October. “It’s a surreal land out here,” says the Canadian director during our set visit. “There are fields and fields and fields of orange, round, fat pumpkins as far as the eye can see. So we thought, okay, let’s set it here.” Out September 18 from IFC, Hellions stars Chloe Rose (Darknet) as Dora Vogel, a small-town girl who discovers on Halloween day that she’s four weeks pregnant. Alone at home in the country later that night, she answers the door to three masked trick-or-treaters. But these are no ordinary…

DRIVE-INS DELETE BINS AND OTHER SINS Have you ever rediscovered a film you hadn’t enjoyed the first time around, realizing years later that you’d just been in the wrong mood? It’s happened to me a few times, but The Carrier (1988) is still the weirdest by far. Here’s why. In fair Toronto we lay our scene: summer, early ’90s, Sunday morning. Hungover like a motherfucker, fighting with the girlfriend all weekend. Me on the couch, hating the world. Her in the bedroom, either sleeping or sulking – I didn’t care which, as long as she did it in a different room. And there, on the coffee table, a VHS copy of The Carrier, a film I had previously passed by in the meagre vid store downstairs from our apartment. In…

THE SUPERNATURAL CINEMA OF GUILLERMO DEL TORO John W. Morehead, ed. McFarland & Company, Inc There are few modern genre filmmakers whose work lends itself more neatly to critical analysis than Guillermo del Toro. From his Spanish-language films (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) to his big-budget Hollywood productions (the Hellboy films, Blade II, Pacific Rim), there’s a constant interplay of histories (real and imagined), mythologies and genre tropes at work. In The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro, eleven writers and academics examine these films using religion, philosophy, mythology, monsters and more. Still, it feels like they’ve only just skimmed the surface of del Toro’s considerable oeuvre. This sense of tunnel vision could be attributed to the fact that nearly all of the essays work with the same three…

BURYING THE EX Joseph LoDuca LAKESHORE RECORDS SOUNDTRAC There’s a crazy stylistic eclecticism that makes Joseph LoDuca’s musical portrait of a zombified ex-girlfriend quite fun, especially when he moves from a mini Young Frankenstein homage in his “Main Title” to later tracks that veer from the composer’s own Detroit roots (keyboard and electric guitars in “Left Alone”) to snarling orchestral avant-garde (“Done With Games”). Strong thematic variations and sharp orchestrations ensure the score never becomes schizophrenic, and while many cues are fairly brief, a few longer tracks offer some fibres of dramatic meat, such as the gentle-tognarled right-turn in “Worried Sick/You Ate My Family.” The briskness of Joe Dante’s directorial style, however, means the music never evolves into anything more than light thriller escapism, making this a fairly modest work…

BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT PS4, Xbox One, Windows, Mac, Linux Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment A beat cop in Gotham, a long day, and all I want is my waffles. But it never ends. “Excuse me sir, there’s no smoking in here,” I say, as I touch his shoulder. That’s when the living nightmare attacks. I fire my gun but it doesn’t stop the creature from slashing at my chest. That messed-up scenario is the opening to the final chapter in the Arkham series. It’s an installment that sees Gotham in the grips of terror as Scarecrow is holding the city hostage with an even more potent fear toxin and, this time, it’s infected Batman. However, the effects of the fear gas have taken on a less horrific tone than they did…

THANK YOU for a great magazine, have been getting it from HorrorBlock for the past few months now. I’m glad I was able to discover it and hope it continues to be a regular of HorrorBlock. Just wanted to mention that in your review of Insidious 3 you say that Whannell killed off Jigsaw in the first movie when in fact he’s alive to coordinate the games in the second movie (also alive in the third as there’s debate about the timeline). Even though the sequels did not do as well, it’s still amazing that a series can go on so long even after the main villain is dead. MARC NOEL, ADDRESS WITHHELD [You’re right, Marc. We meant to say “essentially knocked off.” Thanks for the catch. – Ed.] RM#157…

Cancer Cinema’s upcoming horror-comedy game Bad Taste centres around meat gone bad… so to speak. The indie side-scroller sees police officer Chet fighting off hordes of zombified fast food employees, reanimated roast chickens and a mess of other undead foodstuffs while trying to escape the zombie-infested city of Victoria, BC, before it’s nuked. Producer Celx Requin was able to get Bad Taste off the ground using Steam. The title was greenlit on the popular gaming store/community after the gameplay trailer was posted last March, allowing him and his creative team the freedom to imbue it with the retro Splatterhouse- esque aesthetic adult gamers grew up with. “A lot of the weapons were influenced by horror films,” Requin notes. “You have a Winchester and cricket bat inspired by Shaun of the…

A dead raccoon on a downtown Toronto sidewalk became a viral sensation in July when a makeshift memorial sprung up around it after the city’s Animal Services department failed to clean up the corpse for more than twelve hours. The scene in 1980’s The Shining in which blood floods forth from the elevator took three days to shoot. The term “hybristophiliac” is used to describe those who are sexually aroused by someone who is extremely dangerous, such as serial killers, etc. Anthony Stewart Head (who played Giles on TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is the younger brother of Murray Head, best-known as the singer of the ’80s hit single “One Night in Bangkok.” It was recently discovered that Bishop Peder Winstrup, who had been interred at The Lund cathedral in…

This isn’t the first time Rue Morgue has spilled ink on British illustrator Graham Humphreys, and for very good reason: his inventive and powerful cinematic illustrations continue to be a major force in the world of horror artwork. Since entering the professional design game in his teens, Humphreys’ astonishing career has resulted in a breathtaking array of concepts for movie posters, home video sleeves, LP jackets and more. At once a survivor, innovator and industry leader, he’s truly a legend in the field. To celebrate his monstrous milestone, Proud Galleries is releasing Drawing Blood: 30 Years of Horror Art, a limited-edition book containing 120 full-page plates of Humphreys’ most memorable work. Each of the 500 copies comes with a signed and numbered print, exclusive to the release. “Drawing Blood has an…

Back To The Hood THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN Starring Addison Timlin, Veronica Cartwright and Anthony Anderson Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Earl E. Smith Image Two years before Michael Myers first donned a mask and began slashing up Haddonfield there was the Phantom Killer, a hooded slayer who chilled audiences in the 1976 movie The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Directed by Charles B. Pierce (The Legend of Boggy Creek), it was based on the true-life “Moonlight Murders” case of 1946, in which a masked man murdered five people in the southern Arkansas town of Texarkana. As in real life, the movie’s Phantom was never caught, leaving open the possibility for a return, and this scenario is explored in the new re-imagining of The Town That…

The Miike Shall Inherit The Mirth THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001) Blu-ray Starring Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matasuzaki and Shinji Takeda Directed by Takashi Miike Written by Kikumi Yamagishi and Takashi Miike Arrow Video In 2001, Takashi Miike racked up a jaw-dropping eight directing credits across a variety of genres, including several hyper-violent Yakuza gangster films, the horrifyingly perverse Visitor Q, and the notorious action-comedy gore classic Ichi the Killer. He also squeezed in The Happiness of the Katakuris, a remake of the Korean dark comedy The Quiet Family (1998), which was the first feature film by Jee-Woon Kim, who would go on to make A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (RM#108). But the two filmmakers have vastly different sensibilities, so Miike’s take on the story…

Is there still room in today’s monster-filled horror landscape for traditional ghost stories? “Definitely,” says writer Thom Burgess. “I’ve always found the ghost story particularly terrifying, as they’re just such an ancient form of storytelling - really going back to basics and telling something extremely personal. The thought of something from a different age, totally out of context, haunting and terrorizing somebody without reason and without limitation to physics is a truly unnerving thought.” Burgess is sharing his inner hauntings with readers through Malevolents, a new comic series he hopes will convey the genuine fear and unease that come with a good ghost story. The first tale, “Click Click” (available now), relates the chilling experience of four school friends who are dared to spend the night in London’s most haunted…

As one of today’s most revered dark artists, Chet Zar has become a force to be reckoned with. Like the work of H.R. Giger, Zar’s vision gets under your skin. His monster portraits are both angelic and unholy, and they become even more terrifying when you learn that his paintings could be a conduit into the afterlife. You see, Zar and his entire family see ghosts. All of this is explained in the compelling new documentary I Like To Paint Monsters: The Chet Zar Story. While director Mike Correll keeps the focus trained on Zar’s artistic journey by interviewing his family, friends and collaborators, including Alex Grey of Tool fame, his camera also captures some of the mystery behind Zar as a person. There’s a sense of spirituality, paranormal influence…

With its campy B-horror set up, punk rock costumes, in-your-face sexuality, and rock’n’ roll tunes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show forever changed perceptions of musical stage productions. Its vibrations are felt in off-beat plays such as the’80s Little Shop of Horrors remake and more recently in splatter hits such as Evil Dead: The Musical and The Toxic Avenger. Here are some of the weirder stage productions to give horror properties the old song-and-dance routine. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON – THE MUSICAL (2009) Timed to capitalize on reports of the long-talked-about movie remake, Creature From the Black Lagoon – The Musical opened on July 1, 2009 at Universal Studios Hollywood with original leading lady Julia Adams in attendance. Lasting barely two months, it clocked in at a mere 25…

The Devil has finally gone digital, thanks to rock guitarist and stereoscopic photography enthusiast Brian May and London-based animation studio Unanico. Last year, May, who confesses to a long-term obsession with the early form of 3-D imaging, published a book (along with co-authors Paula Fleming and Denis Pellerin) that showcased a complete collection of diableries, 19th-century French stereoscopic postcards featuring images of skeletons and the Devil living it up in Hell (RM#144). Now, May has teamed up with Unanico to bring the diabolic cards to life in the animated short One Night in Hell, which clocks in at a highly appropriate six minutes and 66 seconds. “We saw the book, Diableries, and we immediately saw that it had a huge potential for bringing the characters to life,” says Paul…

FOUL FORCE-FEEDING 1. INBRED THORACIC MANURE SPEWER 2. THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE GRAFTED GROUP GRAVY TRAIN 3. SE7EN GUT-BUSTING GLUTTONY 4. HANNIBAL KRENDLER CONSUMES HIS CORTEX 5. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD EAT YOUR OWN MEAT AND REPEAT 6. FEED TUBE OF HUMAN FATALITY FAT TORTURED TAGLINE THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1982) “A CRASH COURSE IN TERROR!” FINAL WORDS “DID YOU HEAR THAT FRANKENBERRY CEREAL TURNS YOUR SHIT PINK?” THIS MONTH’S CAPTION CONTEST WINNER IS EROK HELLHAMMER Drop by our Facebook page every month for a chance to have your Final Words!…

The giallo has certainly come a long way from its humble roots as a term coined in the late 1920s to refer to the cheap, yellow-toned paperback mystery novels that littered the shelves of bookstores and news shops in post-fascist Italy. A well-known subgenre in horror cinema today, it didn’t make the jump to film until the mid-’60s, when the term “giallo” started to be used to describe a slick new series of gruesome psychological horror films – including Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace and Ernesto Gastaldi’s Libido (both 1965) – that began to flood Italian theatres. By the beginning of the ’70s, filmmakers such as Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci cemented the look and feel of the giallo with films that were essentially Hitchcockian murder mysteries, but…

AMAD SCIENTIST. CANNIBALISM. A HUNCH-BACKED SERVANT. A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. A young couple’s car broken down outside a spooky castle. A bandaged creature brought to life. With all those elements going for it, 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show sounds like one hell of a horror movie. Except it is not a “horror” movie. It is a deliberately campy rock ’n’ roll musical that started out (and continues to be perceived) as a cult phenomenon, despite earning its parent studio, 20th Century Fox, over $360 million dollars USD (and counting) on a $1.25-million budget. It has inspired episodes of TV shows such as Cold Case and Glee. LGBTQ-friendly memes of said mad scientist arm in arm with his male creation popped up on Facebook when gay marriage was…

GIVEN THE GLUT OF GHOST-HUNTING SHOWS AND SUPERNATURAL FOUND-FOOTAGE MOVIES, IT’S TOUGH TO FIND A FRESH TWIST IN THE PARANORMAL GENRE, which is why Fabien Delage decided to combine the two formats for something new. The Parisian photographer, filmmaker and head of Rue Morgue France created Dead Crossroads, a TV show that sees him and his crew spending the night in the country’s scariest abandoned places. Guided by urban explorer Julien Mazzitelli, Season One (currently on Amazon.com for download, and on DVD in North America this October from Chemical Burn Entertainment) includes trips to a long-empty psychiatric hospital, an old military compound, once opulent but now decaying country manors and even an abandoned castle. They are the birthplaces of urban legends about murderers, cannibals and, of course, ghosts. The tragic…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE ARMS HIMSELF FOR THE APOCALYPSE Isn’t Easy Being Green Screen FUTUREWORLD: CITY OF MASS DESTRUCTION Chemical Burn Entertainment The apocalypse is coming! It might be a nuke, a bird flu or zombie, but whatever it is, it’ll surely be something you won’t want to miss! Also known as G.R. 30K, this film portrays life in the year 30,000, after Earth has survived four atomic wars and a second ice age. Now populated by hot barbarian chicks, mutilated mongrels and cyber-enhanced humans, there’s a battle brewing between the industrial conglomerates that fuel Earth’s last remaining city with food and consumer goods. Made with green screens and computer filters, which give it a comic book appearance, this sprawling mess is hard to watch, harder to follow and, at…

While scary movies usually reflect audience anxieties, these same screen-based horrors have, on occasion, helped shape the way we think about and understand actual suffering. For example, while the term “gaslighting” now commonly refers to a specific kind of psychological manipulation and abuse in which a victim’s perceptions are undermined, it originated with George Cukor’s 1944 thriller Gaslight, which revolves around a husband subtly altering his emotionally fragile wife’s surroundings to make her question her sanity. Hammer’s superb 1961 psycho-chiller Scream of Fear is not only one of the best films ever made around this idea, but it’s also one of the first clear indications that gaslighting had entered the popular lexicon – not to mention psychology journals – for good. Available again on DVD in Mill Creek’s new Hammer…

MUSIC. IT’S UBIQUITOUS TO OUR DAILY LIVES, EVEN WHEN WE’RE NOT DELIBERATELY LISTENING TO IT. It wafts out of speakers in stores and restaurants, buoys the movies and TV shows we watch, and often serves as inspiration for creators, which was the impetus for Savage Beasts, the latest dark fiction anthology from Grey Matter Press. The collection’s call for submissions was simple: publisher/co-editor Anthony Rivera and co-editor Sharon Lawson sought stories that owed their existence to rhythm, melody and lyrics. What ended up between the covers turned out to be a lot more diverse. “The initial thought behind Savage Beasts came not only from the love of music, but also from my own desperate obsession to understand the mind of horror’s best writers,” Rivera explains. “I think the best songs…

Over the past few years, one of the best reasons to buy an all-region Blu-ray player was the UK company Arrow Films. In 2012, the home video imprint moved away from licensing video masters from other distributors to producing masters of their own, and in 2015 launched Arrow Films USA. While its UK fan base remains first priority, Arrow is chucking some meaty bones across the region divide to their North American fans. Case in point: 1976’s Island of Death. Greek director Niko Mastorakis self-released his first film on a region-free PAL DVD in 2003. Image Entertainment subsequently licensed it for an NTSC DVD release; in 2011 Arrow released a PAL DVD; and recently the company put out a new high-definition transfer on Blu-ray and DVD for both the European…

DOES SLAYER REALLY NEED AN INTRODUCTION? The thrash metal icons and purveyors of odes to vampirism, Ed Gein and Satan are one of extreme metal’s true institutions, and yet 2015 sees the dark deities facing the challenge of their career with Repentless, their eleventh studio album, and first since the tragic demise of founding co-guitarist/songwriter Jeff Hanneman – not to mention a new label and changes in production personnel. “For me, all of these things are obstacles,” says Slayer’s other founding guitarist and songwriter, Kerry King, “but at the same time, with all the changes there’s really nothing new we’re looking to do besides move forward. We’re not looking to sound different, we’re not looking to do anything other than put the next record out which fans expect, so –…