Table of contents for RM#194 in RUE MORGUE

There’s a very good likelihood that you’re reading this under the same circumstances as I’m writing it: cooped up indoors at home under lockdown. If you didn’t already know, I live at the Rue Morgue Manor, so I’ve been working from home (or living at work, as is sometimes the case) for several years now, but it’s far from business as usual around here and it’s not easy to put into words. I’ve speculated in the past that horror fans are possibly among the most rational in the face of actual calamity, simply by virtue of the fact that we’ve seen countless disaster scenarios play out in a variety of ways. The endings aren’t always happy ones, but there are usually lessons to be learned. I’m not talking about refraining…

1 MONSTER AND BRIDE BATHROOM SET $25 USD Now that we’ve all worn out our soap dispensers, why not give your bathroom a spooky upgrade with everyone’s favourite monster couple? Handcrafted and made of solid ceramic, Frankenstein’s monster is a cup with a removable toothbrush holder, while his bride dispenses hand soap via pump. Alone, bad… hygiene, good! Sourpussclothing.com 2 WAKING THE DEAD COFFEE SCRUB $18 USD What good are fresh brains if they’re decaffeinated? Add a jolt to your morning shower with this all-natural exfoliant and cleanser, made with real ground coffee beans. Formulated to soften and moisturize skin while the caffeine stimulates blood flow, it’ll add some pep to your undead shuffle. Deathandbodyworks.com 3 BATS KIMONO $70 USD You’ve got bats in your belfry, but what of your…

THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (Charles B. Pierce, 1972) Legendary period docudrama about the “Fouke Monster” in the Arkansas bayou of the 1940s. “Boggy Creek was the big one; possibly the first one. That one went around the world, and it’s still everywhere. When I was a kid, I wasn’t going anywhere near it. I’ve only seen it in later life, but it still holds up.” THE MYSTERIOUS MONSTERS (Robert Guenette, 1975) Documentary in which Peter Graves investigates supernatural phenomena, hypnotism, and cryptids such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Yeti. This was the first film to use the infamous 1967 home movie footage of a loping (apparent) Bigfoot creature, filmed by Roger Patterson. “That was huge to me because I didn’t know that it was fake. It…

NO EXIT VIVARIUM Starring Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg and Jonathan Aris Directed by Lorcan Finnegan Written by Garret Shanley and Lorcan Finnegan Saban Films It’s a funny thing to take something mind-numbingly mundane and exaggerate it to the point of surreal nightmare, but that’s just one of many tricks up director Lorcan Finnegan’s sleeve. Vivarium is the Irish filmmaker’s second feature, a high-concept sci-fi flick that manages to make a sprawling suburban community feel as stifling as a shrink-wrapped hazmat suit. Young couple Gemma (Imogen Poots, Green Room) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) are looking to purchase their first home, and when eccentric real estate agent Martin (Jonathan Aris) tells them about the idyllic suburban community of Yonder, they accompany him to check out unit #9. What they don’t anticipate…

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY HOW MANY UNFINISHED BOOKS HAVE DIED ALONG WITH THEIR AUTHORS, but the number is likely large and unwieldy. It’s not unheard of, however, if a writer is famous enough, for another to come along and see the project through to completion. This is what author Daniel Kraus (of YA novels Rotters, Scowler, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch) did for George A. Romero’s unfinished manuscript for The Living Dead, a book the filmmaker had been tinkering with for nearly twenty years, as Hollywood dished up frustration and personal disappointments. “I was hand-picked [for the project] by Romero’s wife and manager,” says Kraus. “I don’t think I can really put into words what it means. I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was five…

When Universal announced in February that they would be bringing a musical based on Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s Halloween staple “Monster Mash” to the big screen, it struck me as strange that a 1960s novelty song would be made into a mainstream film six decades later. It just goes to show you how much longevity there is to this one-hit wonder, a Universal Monster in its own right! As the story goes, Pickett was a struggling actor raised on classic monster films which he got to see for free thanks to his father, who owned a cinema in Somerville, Massachusetts. He had worked impersonations of Boris Karloff and Bela Legosi into a stand-up comedy act in Hollywood and was playing nights in a band called The Cordials when the idea for…

YES! PASHA NIELSEN “The Hays Code of Studio Era Hollywood isn’t that far behind us and appears to be looming in our future if this sort of censorship continues to go unchecked.” On April 11, 2018, the USA passed the now internet-infamous bills SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) and FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), now known as the slightly less mouthy SESTA/FOSTA bill to combat sex trafficking via the internet. Unfortunately, the effects of these bills have resulted in a frenzy of social media platforms banning any “sensitive” content for fear of sex trafficking charges (long exhale). How does this impact horror? Horror and sex (either perceived or explicit) have always gone hand in hand as transgressive media, with BDSM imagery often crossing over as fodder for monsters,…

RUE MORGUE! If you would have told me a couple of weeks ago that I’d be locked up under quarantine while the world battles a pandemic I wouldn’t have believed you. Thank god for your wonderful magazine that always puts me in a world I want to be in. And I can think of no visual artist better than Graham Humphreys to take me there. Excellent issue! MASON HARPER, VIA EMAIL WHILE THIS DAMN VIRUS messes with the entire world, I was able to get solace from yet another excellent (actually my favourite of the year, so far) issue of Rue Morgue. The article on Graham Humphreys was simply brilliant and is the best I’ve read on an artist since the defunct Cinefantastique dedicated an issue to movie poster artists…

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller Rope sees some Ivy League students murder a fellow classmate not for greed or revenge, but just to prove that they could pull it off. The idea of murders carried out with no real motive other than outsmarting the fuzz has seen countless cinematic variations throughout the decades, including Compulsion (1959), Funny Games (1997 and 2007) and Murder by Numbers (2002) to name a few, but it’s also a story made all the more compelling by the fact that it’s based on an actual case from the roaring ’20s (the last one, that is). On May 21, 1924, nineteen-year-old Nathan Leopold Jr. and eighteen-year-old Richard Loeb, both sons of prominent Jewish families in Chicago, pulled fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks into their car where Loeb bludgeoned him to…

THOUGH CLIVE BARKER’S NOVELLA “THE FORBIDDEN,” ON WHICH CANDYMAN IS BASED, was set in a beautiful housing project in England that later became derelict (England’s Spector Street Estates), filmmaker Bernard Rose transposed the setting of his 1992 adaptation to Chicago’s Cabrini Green, a building complex with an origin story as dark as the boogeyman who haunts it. Not surprisingly, the latest incarnation of the film returns to that noteworthy locale; set in contemporary Chicago, the backdrop of 2020’s Candyman is a place haunted by its history. “The story of Cabrini Green now is a story of erasure, it’s a story of people being displaced, it’s a story of buildings being torn down and new, fresher buildings being put up, and also new faces coming in,” explains Candyman star Yahya Abdul-Mateen…

IN VAULT NUMBER 21 OF A DECOMMISSIONED COLD WAR BUNKER IN CULPEPER, VIRGINIA, LIES THE ONLY EXISTING NITRATE FILM COPY OF FRANKENSTEIN (1910). It rests four feet underground in one of the 124 cold storage vaults beneath the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation. The steel and concrete walls were originally part of an emergency Federal Reserve, built to withstand a nuclear blast and years of nuclear fallout; meaning that the fragile ribbon of 110-year-old film will not only outlast us all, but could outlast civilization. It’s an ironic fate for a film that disappeared soon after its making, and for many decades was believed to be lost forever. The road to finding and ultimately preserving cinema’s very first Frankenstein is a weird one, much like the film…

HELL’S BOWLING ALLEY DEMON DIVAS AND THE LANES OF DAMNATION Happy Cloud Pictures I’ve often lamented there aren’t enough horror movies set in bowling alleys, so finding out that two of my all-time favourite scream queens – Debbie (Chainsaw Cheerleaders) Rochon and Brinke (Slaughter Party) Stevens – are in this sick flick had me wiping down my balls (bowling balls, that is) in preparation for what I was hoping would be a real turkey – which is a good thing in bowling! Set in the dank recesses of a bowling club where a coven of demons feeds on the wishes (and corpses) of unsuspecting employees, it might sound pretty promising, but this epically titled flick quickly degenerates into a never-ending gutter ball of production values. There’s not enough shoe…

'Round About Midnight “DAY THE WORLD ENDED IS A POST-APOCALYPTIC CHILLER WORTH CONSIDERING AT A TIME WHERE IT INCREASINGLY SEEMS LIKE HUMANITY’S LAST GASP WILL BE A PROLONGED WHIMPER RATHER THAN A QUICK BANG.” Everywhere you turn these days, it seems like there’s a general mood of resignation about what the future holds for humankind. Whether it’s concern over climate collapse, fear of mounting public health crises, or anxiety over inequalities laid bare by “late capitalism,” it appears that many of us feel that the planet is on a dangerous cycle of decline from which it may never bounce back. It’s a scenario that significantly departs from past conceptions of doomsday, which have almost always centred on near-instantaneous nuclear destruction. Hitting Blu-ray from Shout! Factory this May, Day the World…

A CENTURY OF WEIRD FICTION 1832–1937: DISGUST, METAPHYSICS AND THE AESTHETICS OF COSMIC HORROR Jonathan Newell University of Wales Press Horror has long been haunted by the High vs. Low dichotomy, not only in terms of whether it belongs to high or low culture, but also regarding its own key effects: subtle, suggested terror is usually considered to be elevated, while explicitness and body horror are mostly condemned as crude. A Century of Weird Fiction, the latest in UWP’s excellent “Horror Studies” series, aims to bridge the gap – or better, show that no gap ever existed, at least in the works of weird fiction’s major practitioners. The five key chapters prove that disgust and metaphysics are not strange bedfellows in the selected writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen,…

ISSUE #194 Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell is an ordained minister and has officiated matrimonies. In 1998, the soccer team Bena Tshadi in Eastern Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo, was struck by lightning while playing, killing all eleven team members. The other team left the scene unharmed. Charlie McGee, the pyrokinetic little girl from Stephen King’s Firestarter, was modelled after the author’s daughter Naomi. The first person in history to ever be killed in a car accident was pioneering Irish scientist Mary Ward, who met an unfortunate end while driving with her family in their experimental “road locomotive steam engine.” It takes five to 30 minutes to drown in saltwater. With fresh water, it takes five to twenty. Christian Bale used Nicolas Cage’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss (1988) as…

MUCH GOES INTO ADAPTING A WORK OF LITERATURE TO THE SCREEN; sometimes the resulting film is painstakingly faithful, other times it’s boiled down to a single idea and rendered unrecognizable. It’s also common for stories to get uprooted from their original locales and transplanted into new territories – such was the fate of the short story that inspired 1992’s Candyman. Like many of the tales in Clive Barker’s legendary Books of Blood (released 1984 to 1985), “The Forbidden” is set in the author’s native England. A rundown, impoverished, heavily graffitied and vandalized Liverpool housing estate to be exact, making it easy to see why Bernard Rose (who was attracted to the story's strong social commentary) and Barker himself considered it a good fit for relocation to the American projects. Both…

“I 'VE NEVER SEEN A BEAR TRACK SO MAYBE THAT’S THE SIMPLE ANSWER. BUT THE PRINT LOOKED ALMOST LIKE A SHOELESS PERSON RIGHT DOWN TO THE FIVE TOES. BUT IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN.… IT MUST HAVE BEEN A TRICK OF THE ASH, OR MAYBE THE WAY IT WAS PLANTED. NOTHING COULD HAVE SUCH A BIG FOOT…”(Kate Holland, Journal Entry #9) Thanks to the success of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and its various spinoffs and adaptations, the name Max Brooks will be forever associated with zombies. In the fourteen years since that breakout book (and the seventeen since its predecessor, The Zombie Survival Guide), between projects like the historical graphic novel The Harlem Hellfighters and tie-in titles for Minecraft and G.I. Joe, Brooks has returned…

THE SKY BURSTS WITH A HEAVY DOWNPOUR PUNCTUATED BY A MENACING RUMBLE OF THUNDER. In the distance, a missionary bell rings with fearful urgency, a warning in the wind… The unsettling overture soon makes good on its promise when the first seismic chords break open a six-minute opus of gothic horror, in which a terrified man is confronted by the Devil. The song, the first track on an album of the same title, also happened to give the performing band its name: Black Sabbath. And with its release in 1970, heavy metal was born… and its father was the Devil himself. From whence did those unholy sounds originate? Did guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, bassist Geezer Butler, and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne all sign a pact with Satan at the…

LOVE IT OR HATE IT, THE SAW FRANCHISE IS ONE OF THE MOST PROFITABLE IN HORROR MOVIE HISTORY, having raked in a cool $976 million in US dollars worldwide since 2004. Even so, Jigsaw is apparently no match for Michael Myers, given that Lionsgate recently decided to move up the release of Spiral from October 23 to May [as of press time], leaving room for Universal’s Halloween Kills to dominate box offices on its October 16 release date. Then again, there may not actually be any Jigsaw in Spiral. The film takes place in the same universe in which John Kramer – a.k.a. Jigsaw – placed so many morally compromised people into his often inescapable traps. But, says director Darren Lynn Bousman, it’s not a story about John Kramer or…

Cullen Bunn has emerged as one of the most satisfying contemporary comics authors and he’s certainly among the most prolific. A New York Times bestselling writer who has penned such comic stalwarts as Venom, Deadpool and Magneto, Bunn’s work in horror has been especially noteworthy, including Unholy Grail, The Damned and the award-winning Harrow County. One of his latest projects is the relaunch of Shadowman for Valiant Comics; a gritty superhero comic set in the heart of New Orleans that gained some notoriety in the 1990s before disappearing in 2002. With its emphasis on voodoo and the occult, Shadowman is poised for a gruesome comeback and is a title tailor-made for Bunn. “Shadowman offers the opportunity to explore many different subgenres of horror,” explains Bunn. “There’s action-horror, of course –…

THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB’S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES Grady Hendrix Quirk Having taken on horrific furniture stores in Horrorstör (2014) and a satanic spin on heavy metal in We Sold Our Souls (2018), Grady Hendrix proves he’s able to tap new veins capably with his latest offering, in which a diverse group of middle-aged women do battle with their local suburban vampire. Touted by the advertising as Steel Magnolias meets Dracula, Hendrix takes a bigger page from Salem’s Lot in crafting this more personal tale set in Charleston, South Carolina, where he grew up. This slice of Southern Gothic centres around Patricia Campbell, stuck in a loveless marriage and growing apart from her two teenage children. She fights off boredom by joining a local book club, but also begins to…

ZOMBIE ARMY 4: DEAD WAR PS4, Xbox One, PC Rebellion If there’s one thing I detest more than zombies, it’s those damn Nazis! If you’re someone who shares my worldview in that regard, the allied forces over at Rebellion have got us covered (in entrails) with their latest splatter-fest, Zombie Army 4: Dead War. A refinement of their Zombie Army trilogy in every way, Dead War is a mayhem-filled co-op experience that’s also great solo fun. Perhaps best known for its Alien vs. Predator games and the Sniper Elite series, the UK-based developer brings players back for blood – Hitler’s blood, to be exact. Turns out that pesky Führer just won’t stay banished to Hell, and it’s once again up to Europe’s finest to put a cork in his…