Table of contents for Issue 163 Jan/Feb 2016 in RUE MORGUE

The first horror story I was ever told came courtesy of my grandmother, who dazzled my pre-naptime ears with a lurid tale that involved child abandonment, kidnapping, imprisonment, cannibalism, murder, immolation and witchcraft. Oh, and candy, because it was the story of Hansel and Gretel. I had a lot of questions for her about the nature of the gingerbread house (“Um, what happens when it rains?”) and was only nominally concerned about the hag because in the friendlier version of the fairy tale that I was told, the witch wasn’t scary as much as she was pitifully foolish, getting duped by a couple of kids into being burned alive in her own oven. Witches didn’t become frightening until The Blair Witch Project came along, specifically the 44-minute made-for-TV companion piece…

On November 5, 2015, custom car creator George Barris drove off into the sunset at the age of 89, leaving behind a legacy of hot rods and iconic vehicles beloved by not just the horror community, but the world of pop culture as a whole. Among the vehicles he designed were the Batmobile from the ’60s Batman television series, as well as the Munsters’ Koach and DRAG-U-LA, the latter of which inspired the Rob Zombie song “Dragula.” Posting a picture of the Koach on Instagram following Barris’ passing, Zombie wrote, “George Barris the man [who] built this amazing car has died. I thank him for his coolness of letting me borrow the Munsters Koach on more than one occasion.” Additionally, in a statement from DC Entertainment, co-publisher and artist Jim…

1.THE DEVIL’S RAIN BOVIDAE BORGNINE 2.ALTERED STATES SEVEN-EYED CRUCIFIED BEAST 3.THE WITCH PURITAN-PUNCTURING BLACK PHILLIP 4.THE ANTICHRIST RUMINANT RIM-JOB 5.DRAG ME TO HELL SEANCE GOES BAA-AAH-AAD 6.THE DEVIL RIDES OUT BRING ON BAPHOMET TORTURED TAGLINE HONEYMOON OF HORROR (1964) “A HONEYMOON OF ECSTACY TURNS INTO A NIGHTMARE…” FINAL WORDS “BLESS YOU.” THIS MONTH’S CAPTION CONTEST WINNER IS EMILY EDWARDS Drop by our Facebook page every month for a chance to have your Final Words!…

WHEN WRITER/DIRECTOR ROBERT EGGERS SOUGHT THE SERVICES OF TORONTO-BASED COMPOSER MARK KORVEN TO SCORE HIS FIRST FEATURE, his instructions were quite clear: The Witch was to be a 90-minute nightmare set in rural 17th-century New England with a distinctly atonal, rustic soundtrack. “Rob wanted a 100 percent acoustic score with absolutely no sound design of any kind,” says Korven. “[It was] an exercise in restraint, especially since it’s a non-orchestral score, so you can’t depend on the orchestra to provide interesting colours for you.” Korven, a veteran composer for film and TV who’s best known by genre fans for scoring the 1997 Canadian sci-fi horror film Cube, was intrigued by the challenge. “Scoring horror is often more stimulating… as long as it’s of good quality. You can almost do anything;…

THERE ARE CERTAIN PLACES IN THE WORLD THAT BECKON TO THOSE WHO WANT TO TAKE THEIR OWN LIVES. In North America, for instance, we have San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, but in Japan there’s Aokigahara forest. The 35-square-kilometre wooded area, which is a national park, is located at the base of Mount Fuji, and has, perhaps not surprisingly, a rich history of demonic folklore associated with it. Each year, more than 100 people venture into Aokigahara’s dense brush planning to die – typically by hanging or overdose – though not all go through with it or succeed. The influx of desperate people has led Japanese officials to post signs along the forest’s trails, with reminders about the value of life and numbers for suicide prevention hotlines. But still the world-weary…

LAB PARTNERS VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN Starring Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy and Jessica Brown Findlay Directed by Paul McGuigan Written by Max Landis Fox The idea of a Victor Frankenstein Igor origin story movie sounds contrived and, well, a bit Marvel-esque. But Mary Shelley’s sole novel has been filmed so many times, from so many angles, why not? Just don’t go in expecting a horror movie. Victor Frankenstein casts James McAvoy (X-Men: Days of Future Past) as the titular medical student. Looking to procure dead exotic animals for his experiments, Frankenstein meets a nameless hunchback (Daniel Radcliffe, The Woman in Black) with uncommon medical knowledge at the circus. Frankenstein frees the enslaved hunchback, gets rid of his hump (that’s right), dubs him Igor (after his missing roommate), and together they work to…

You know that thing where you’re watching a slasher film and you keep seeing UFOs overhead and you’re like “WTF, why am I seeing UFOs in a slasher film, not that there’s anything wrong with shaking up the tired archetype that is the slasher film by adding UFOs, but seriously, WTF?” and then around the half-hour mark you realize those aren’t actually UFOs and it’s just the boom mic? Well, you were probably watching Savage Weekend (officially 1979 but not really – I’ll explain later). Back when TV Guide was a thing, one of their reviewers called Savage Weekend “truly reprehensible,” “distinctly sleazy and offensive” and “borderline pornography.” (Well, testify, Julie Andrews, “These are a few of my favourite things.”) What the reviewer failed to mention (or perhaps even notice)…

MONSTERS AND MONSTROSITY FROM FIN DE SIÈCLE TO THE MILLENNIUM Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown, eds. McFarland We are inseparable from the monsters we create. They are an inextricable part of us, which festers and swells, mutates and grows, and often reflects the worst, darkest and strangest in us. If there is a unifying idea in Monsters and Monstrosity, it is that we both give rise to, and are indivisible from, the monsters that haunt our culture. This thread is woven across all three sections of the book. Additionally, each of the included essays was expertly chosen for its ability to hold a mirror up to all that ugliness and dissect it in productive ways. Many of the figures in the book are familiar; they’re the serial killers and…

SOUNDTRACK THE FINAL GIRLS Gregory James Jenkins VARESE SARABANDE Gregory Jenkins’ The Final Girls score is a deliberate yet refined collage of classic sounds with just a slight underbelly of orchestral emulation, giving this tongue-in-cheek work a bit more dramatic scope. Overt homages include the clipped Friday the 13th “Kill” motif, heavily sequenced synth patterns, and layers of vintage-styled chords reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, plus pulses, chimes and shimmering notes that ripple like water droplets. Yet, Jenkins keeps the score grounded with a main theme tied to a state of reflection – re-examining the past, and soon confronting unwanted conflicts – plus some pretty jaunty variations, making it clear The Final Girls is very much a comedy. In spite of a lagging midsection with too many short music stabs and…

GREAT KRAMPUS artwork on the December edition of @RueMorgue! @DREADDOMINIONS, VIA TWITTER RM#162 LOOKS to be another good issue, been reading Rue Morgue for seventeen months now, it’s really consistent, not read a bad issue yet. @ADRIANJ, VIA TWITTER A BIT FLABBERGASTED by this – the first print review of one of my stories in a major publication [RM#161]. This is the story I’m reading from tonight at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne [in Portland, Oregon]. Thank you, Rue Morgue magazine. NATHAN CARSON, VIA FACEBOOK JUST READ the article on 50 Essential Horror Albums in RM#160. It was very interesting, but I have to make a correction on the review of the Monster Mash album by Bobby “Boris” Pickett. The “Monsters Holiday” cut was not part of the original album on…

After ending the Festival of Fear horror convention in Toronto last year, Rue Morgue has officially launched Dark Carnival, a new Horror Culture and Entertainment Expo, in the neighbouring city of Hamilton. Co-presented with Anchor Bay Entertainment, the event will take place the weekend of July 9 and 10, 2016 at the Hamilton Convention Centre in the city’s downtown core. According to Rodrigo Gudiño, Rue Morgue’s president, Dark Carnival is essentially a reinvention and expansion of the Festival of Fear, which was part of Toronto’s Fan Expo for eleven years. Although Fan Expo attracted a large audience, it was not tailored to horror fans. “Dark Carnival is the show I wanted the Festival of Fear to be right from the beginning,” he explains. The expo will be headlined by Guillermo…

1 VINCENT PRICE BOBBLEHEAD $29.95 We’re frightfully proud to have teamed up with Vincent Price’s estate to bring you our premiere release in the Rue Morgue RIPpers Limited Edition Line of Collectible Bobbleheads! This 7-inch figure is limited to 1500 numbered units and features the Gentleman of Horror waltzing with death. 2 CTHULHU BEDDING $112.98 Cozy up with Nyarlathotep on those long, dreary nights with this Cthulhu bedding by Melissa Christie. Set includes one Queen-sized duvet cover (86” x 86”) and two pillowcases (20” x 30”) printed on 100 percent cotton with eco-friendly inks. Available on white, blue or weirdo-purple fabric. 3 ALTER ORBIS NECKLACE $37.50 Those with an eye for macabre jewellery will love this skeletal necklace to death! Made of fine English Pewter, it measures 3.5” x 4”…

IF YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS COMES PRIMARILY FROM ARTHUR MILLER’S PLAY THE CRUCIBLE, Rob Zombie’s movie The Lords of Salem or old episodes of TV’s Bewitched, then, needless to say, you are labouring under certain delusions. For instance, none of the convicted were burned at the stake (they were hanged; one was crushed to death), not all were women (four men died) and the trials lasted just over a year, although many believe they went on much longer. Published by Little, Brown this past October, Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff’s new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, looks to dispel what she calls the “encrusted mythology” surrounding America’s first true crime story. She details not only what happened – in a nutshell, twenty New England residents were executed as…

IN 2015, WOMEN IN HORROR BARED THEIR FANGS. They did so literally in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which reinvented the vampire movie by setting it in Iran around a blood-drinking girl who wears a chador and rides a skateboard. Our top short film, documentary and one of the indie features all feature woman directing/co-directing and writing/co-writing. Some of the most resourceful female characters appear in our film picks, as well, sometimes escaping, and sometimes enacting revenge. In addition, this year has given horror fans some great returns. The Chin is back with chainsaw in hand, or, rather, on hand; a filmmaker with a run of bad films over the past decade proves he can still tell a great story; a legendary director makes an…

THE ICONIC MOUNT FUJI IS ONE OF JAPAN’S MOST POPULAR TOURIST AREAS, but in its shadow lays one of the county’s most feared places: Aokigahara, better known as the Suicide Forest. Although the government has ceased publishing suicide numbers for the area, a 2011 article in the Japan Times estimated that in 2010, there were over 200 attempts, with 54 of them being successful. In 2004, 108 people are known to have taken their lives there. Many believe the place is purgatory for yurei, angry spirits that roar their suffering through the wind, causing hostile energy to accumulate amongst the trees. My travelling companion and I have come to experience this place firsthand. Our journey begins on one of the forest’s numerous hiking trails, where an old wooden sign states:…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE PUTS THE “ACK!” IN MASSACRE STALKING LADIES LIKE THE ’80s BLOOD SLAUGHTER MASSACRE Wild Eye Releasing There’s something that makes gorehounds like me growl with delight when “massacre” is right there in the movie title. Take Blood Slaughter Massacre, for example. Ten years after a killer wiped out 23 people at a Halloween party, a small town is rocked when the maniac returns. Meant as a homage to slasher films of the ’80s, Blood Slaughter Massacre has it all: girls in the shower, drunken cops, girls in the woods, a masked killer and girls with chainsaws! Though it starts out weak, it picks up the pace with some decent performances, clever kills and a cool retro score that sounds like a John Carpenter cast-off. Only complaint:…

THE MID-’90S WERE HARDLY A BANNER TIME FOR HORROR MOVIES. For instance, 1995 was slammed with forgettable sequels (Leprechaun 3, Children of the Corn 3), and efforts by masters whose greatest works were behind them (think Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn, John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned and Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak) – the era can be likened to a snake shedding its skin, casting off the last remnants of the latex creature explosion kicked off in the previous decade. It makes sense then that the first feature-length entry into the Tales From the Crypt franchise, Demon Knight, didn’t really stand out from the pack. Looking back on it with Scream Factory’s Blu-ray release, the film’s modest success can be attributed to audience fatigue, because it’s probably better than you…

There may be a fine line between love and hate, but the relationship between love and horror is even thinner. Jealous lovers pushed to murder, fatal obsessions, ghosts haunting past partners – horror has always been full of stories that hinge on some kind of deadly relationship. This February, editors Steve Banes and Craig Yoe (Haunted Horror, Weird Romance) are serving up a most delectable Valentine’s Day treat: Haunted Love, a reprint series that collects some of the most bizarre, gruesome and terrifying pre-code comic tales dealing with love and life ever after. “Craig and I had talked about it pretty much from the very beginning of Haunted Horror, and then especially after Weird Romance started up a little bit later,” explains Banes. “We knew we had a good ’n’…

Bricks and mortar built for terror – welcome to the horror movie houses drawn by UK fine artist Candice Tripp. Since 2014 she’s been creating beautiful tributes to iconic genre movie domains, rendered in watercolours, pens and ink. The idea for creepy house portraits started after they had already crept into her other work. When Tripp decided to try to do a standalone house from a horror film, she quickly realized there was ample material to draw from. Her first series features homes from The Amityville Horror, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Psycho. For her second series, she created 31 pieces that range from the obscure, such as the spooky apartment complex in The Sentinel (below, right) and Auntie’s house in the Japanese film House, to dwellings in…

The 1970s was one of the most inventive periods for horror cinema, especially for filmmakers working outside of the Hollywood system. In addition to emerging regional talent such as Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg and Wes Craven, hundreds of other directors were making noteworthy independent efforts at the time, some of which will be collected in Arrow Video’s newly announced American Horror Project Volume 1 box set. The first volume, due in late February, features a trio of otherworldly drive-in treats: scuzzy acid trip Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973), Matt Cimber’s psychosexual thriller The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) and the surreal parental panic of The Premonition (1976), all of which are set to make their Blu-ray debut. “There’s something particularly alluring about the sort of regional, independent genre…

HORROR CONVENTIONS: JANUARY 28 – FEBRUARY 1 HAUNTCON (Tradeshow for haunted attraction and Halloween industries) Birmingham, Alabama hauntcon.com FEBRUARY 5 – 7 DAYS OF THE DEAD Atlanta, Georgia daysofthedead.net MARCH 4 – 6 HORROR REALM SPRING BREAK MASSACRE Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania horrorrealmcon.com MARCH 11 – 13 MONSTER-MANIA CON Cherry Hill, New Jersey monstermania.net MARCH 17 – 20 TRANSWORLD’S HALLOWEEN & ATTRACTIONS SHOW (Wholesalers’ convention, not open to general public) St. Louis, Missouri haashow.com MARCH 18 – 20 HORRORHOUND WEEKEND Cincinnati, Ohio horrorhoundweekend.com MARCH 25 – 27 WONDERCON Los Angeles, California comic-con.org/wca APRIL TBA CTHULHUCON Portland, Oregon cthulhucon.com APRIL 1 – 3 CINEMA WASTELAND Strongsville, Ohio cinemawasteland.com APRIL 1 – 3 DAYS OF THE DEAD Burbank, California daysofthedead.net APRIL 22 – 24 CHILLER THEATRE TOY, MODEL AND FILM EXPO Parsippany, New Jersey…

“VIOLENT SPECTACLE HAS BEEN A CONSTANT IN SOCIETY SINCE THE DAYS OF ANCIENT ROME,” David Kerekes reminds us in his introduction to the new edition of the cult classic Killing for Culture, which he co-wrote with David Slater. “Since the dawn of cinema, images of death and destruction have run alongside the underground trade in explicit sex.” The voyeurism attendant to mediated images of real death is the subject of this brave and exhaustive study. It dissects the human obsession with moving images of death and violence, including the “snuff” film: “a human sacrifice before the camera sold as entertainment,” as Kerekes defines it. Out of print since its first release in 1994, this cult book is now available from Headpress in an edition that is, at a staggering 630…

Dnumerous filmmakers have jackled demonic possession hut none have made a film that crept into our brains the way director William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist did and continues to do. The Vatican Tapes (Lionsgate) and The Exorcism of Molly Hartley (20th Century Fox) certainly try but are more likely to make your eyes roll than to spin your head around. The Vatican Tapes is the slicker of the less-than-dynamic duo. Olivia Taylor Dudley (Chernobyl Diaries) plays Angela (pictured above), a young woman whose unusual behaviour has brought her to the attention of Vatican officials awaiting the coming of the Antichrist. Strange wounds lead her to be hospitalized, then placed in an asylum. Watching over her is Father Lozana (Fury’s Michael Peña, in a cheque-cashing…

For horror film audiences, one of the underlying attractions has always been the power of novelty – to see something unusual or uncommon, depicted larger than life on the big screen. Some of them still work their magic, such as the incredible contortions of Lon Chaney that inspire wonder almost a century later, the twist in Psycho that still subverts horror conventions to this day, or even King Kong, which still thrills with its gargantuan stop-motion primate. But they can also become frightfully common – such as the (regular-sized) gorilla (which became a horror movie staple mostly because it was once an exotic beast rarely seen in North American zoos until after the Great Depression), now-silly William Castle-style introductions warning audiences of the horror they’re about to endure, and underwater…

GOOD HORROR DOESN’T HAVE TO STARTLE OR SHOCK THE READER IN ORDER TO HAVE IMPACT. In fact, it doesn’t have to be grotesque or monstrous, beastly or demonic; nor does it require torture porn or ubiquitous blood and guts. Like all fiction, it need only elicit an emotional response to subtly get under the skin of the reader. And no one does this better than Peter Straub. Rather than focusing primarily on external elements, Straub takes us deeper. His work is like an ornate mirror, allowing readers to find their own reflections in its dark imagery. It’s fitting then that the author’s latest book is titled Interior Darkness. A wide-ranging collection of Straub’s most chilling, intense and compelling tales from the past 25 years, the compilation (out February 16 from…

Italian schlockmeister Umberto Lenzi’s filmography is a mixed bag. Gialli Seven Bloodstained Orchids (1972) and Spasmo (1974) stand as stellar examples of the genre. Then there is the glorious trash of Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981). Then there’s the hilariously awful Dawn of the Dead cash-in Nightmare City (1980), available now on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video USA. For starters, there isn’t much of a plot. A mysterious plane lands at an airport and out of it sprint oatmeal-faced radiation victims to wreak havoc on the city of Madrid. The beleaguered military works to quell this infestation of bloodthirsty lunatics while the government covers it up. Much bad dubbing and risible gore ensues. As terrible a film as Nightmare City is, it changed the rules of the zombie…

There just isn’t enough space to cover all the cool music out there. These days especially, it seems horror music is bigger than ever, from insanely designed vinyl horror soundtracks, to legendary composers making comebacks, to more electronic rock and metal artists being influenced by the genre’s gory glory days. With that in mind, here are some of my personal favourite horror music happenings from 2015, to expand upon our annual Best of List. It Follows was a divisive movie, but everyone loved Disasterpiece’s electronic, retro-horror influenced score. Intentionally or not, it builds on the music in 2013’s Maniac remake, evoking John Carpenter’s pulsing synthesizer and cold atmosphere to create a record that kids were snapping up. It’s official: horror soundtracks are now cool. Speaking of Carpenter, his Lost Themes…

WHILE HORROR SOUNDTRACK MUSIC HAS COMPELLED NUMEROUS ARTISTS TO RELEASE ALBUMS INFLUENCED BY ’80S ELECTRONIC SCORES IN RECENT YEARS, SOME BANDS HAVE BEEN AT IT FOR A WHILE NOW IN THE UNDERGROUND SCENE TO LESSER ACCLAIM. Slasher Film Festival Strategy, a oneman project by South Carolina’s Christopher Ashley, has releashed faux soundtrack music using synthesizers, drum machines and samplers since the late ’90s, and is set to become one of the more recognized names in the scene with its new album Psychic Shield on the Death Waltz Recording Co. label. As Ashley explains, the musical background that led him to the world of soundtrack music began in an unlikely place. “In 1997, I was playing in a noisy hardcore band and was heavily influenced by what was happening with hardcore…