Table of contents for Issue 165 April 2016 in RUE MORGUE

Filth freaks me out. The thought of not always having clean socks available makes me cringe, I’d rather stay up all night than go to sleep without brushing my teeth, and if I see someone walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands, I kind of want to set him on fire. It definitely shapes my relationship with horror, as well. For example, the nastier gore gags in The Walking Dead or Fulci’s Zombie, the slimy corpse pits in The Descent and Phenomena, and the roadkill pile in the House of Wax remake all churn my guts while simultaneously delighting me for their power to do so. Hygiene, or a lack thereof, is central to horror art. As famed philosopher Noël Carroll wrote inThe Philosophy of Horror, or…

George A. Romero, the iconic godfather of zombie filmmaking, is teaming up with New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry (Dead of Night, the Pine Deep Trilogy) for Nights of the Living Dead, an anthology of zombie stories inspired by Romero’s 1968 feature film, Night of the Living Dead. The duo will co-edit the book for Griffin, and each contribute stories to the collection. “When I was ten years old, I snuck into the local movie theatre to see the world premiere of Night of the Living Dead,” recalls Maberry. “That movie had a profound impact on me, and ever since I’ve wanted to work on some kind of creative project with George Romero. Roll forward to my career as a novelist and comic book writer, and about a quarter…

While it’s not unusual for artists to wrap themselves in their influences, Rob Zombie wears his like a skin suit stitched together from all the weird, dark, sticky things he grew up wit It’s a behemoth made up of rock, punk, comic books, creature features, boogeyman movies, haunted houses, cartoons, rubber masks and savage circus folk – all covered in a layer of grime circa his childhood in the ’70s. Those influences have been at the forefront of everything he’s done for three decades now – including new album The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser and movie 31. Rocker, screenwriter, director, designer and visual artist, his career has been a sideshow with multiple tents, which is apt given his roots. To understand Zombie (born Robert Cummings), consider…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE CRASHES THE HOUSING MARKET THE DEVIL IN MISS ANGEL THE LAST HOUSE Wild Eye Releasing I was wondering why actress Joanna Angel is pictured twice on the cover of this DVD but not her name. A peek at the IMDb made it clear: the producers wanted to cash in on her looks and not the fact that she starred in Fuckenstein, Dong of the Dead, The XXXorcist and, personal favourite, Rock & Roll in My Butthole 2. In The Last House, things get really weird for Candy (Angel) and her escort entourage when they’re paid to attend a party in a mansion by three satanic weirdos who intend to kill the girls for their perverse pleasure. Not even cameos by Jason Mewes (Clerks) and Felissa Rose…

While classic horror films often go to great lengths to offer sympathetic portrayals of hideous creatures born in the depths of a laboratory, the same kind of compassion doesn’t often extend to the mad scientists who created them. For a brief time in the 1950s, though, a slightly new breed of psycho physician began to take hold on local drive-in screens – characters with tragic tales that are usually less interested in playing God than in rescuing a loved one. That’s the case with Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Dr. Cadman in The Black Sleep (1956), a fun throwback film that also examines how altruism can develop into an all-consuming monomania. Despite featuring a more modern twist on the mad scientist, The Black Sleep otherwise feels like the horror cinema of…

AFTER 34 YEARS, ONE OF HORROR’S MOST ICONIC CHARACTERS IS RETURNING TO THE PRINTED PAGE. NORMAN BATES, THE MOTEL OWNER WHO harbours the knife-wielding homicidal split personality of “Mother,” first appeared in Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho, which of course led to the classic Alfred Hitchcock film starring Anthony Perkins, released the following year. He was featured again in Bloch’s 1982 follow-up Psycho II (no relation to the 1983 film sequel), which is set two decades later and has Norman escaping from a mental institution by masquerading as a nun. Now, the mother-fixated serial killer returns in Psycho: Sanitarium, by veteran genre scribe Chet Williamson (Ash Wednesday, Second Chance). Out now from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, it’s an immediate sequel to Bloch’s original story that sees Norman housed in…

Spaghetti splatter had bled out both as a genre and staple of the Italian film industry by the end of the ’80s, but over the last few years it has had a quiet renaissance. Dig into RM#123 for an overview of Domiziano Christopharo’s semen-spattered debut, House of Flesh Mannequins (2009), as he figures into two recent releases from One 7 Movies… Krokodil is the Russian street name for desomorphine, a horrific homemade morphine derivative concocted from codeine-laced cold medicine and cooked with such ingredients as phosphorous from wooden matches, hydrochloric acid and gasoline. There are videos online of addicts literally rotting apart as a result of shooting this caustic stew into their veins. Red Krokodil (2013) is the title of Christopharo’s decidedly unusual sixth feature film. In it, a man…

WITH MASTERWORKS SUCH AS HALLOWEEN, THE FOG AND THE THING BENEATH HIS NAME, IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT JOHN CARPENTER OCCUPIES A POSITION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN HORROR CINEMA. Until the day a movie camera once again rolls on one of the filmmaker’s sets, his legions of fans must make do with the not inconsiderable gift of the man’s music. His latest, Lost Themes II (out now from Sacred Bones), is a follow-up to his 2015 debut Lost Themes and marks the second collaboration between Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies (son of fabled Kinks guitarist Dave Davies). A musical sequel, it packs in more of the same darkly layered synths and pulsing drums of its predecessor – a hallmark of the director/composer’s highly influential minimalist sound – but…

I’D LIKE TO REBUT Quentin Tarantino’s quote about directing a horror movie in RM#164. In the Entrails article, Tarantino is second-guessing his ability to make an effective horror film because he feels his sense of humour would get in the way. I believe that it would be precisely because of his ability to use humour to create memorable and lovable characters that would make him a terrific horror director. When a horror movie lacks a sense of humour, I find that it also lacks any rewatch value (with very few exceptions). It’s through connection to the characters that the horror of what befalls them seems harrowing to an audience. The main flaw of most slasher movies is the failure to create empathetic characters, so when the chainsaws finally start to…

CASE NO. 165 In 1704, the first obituary ran in a US newspaper. It was for Jane Treat, a deputy-governor’s daughter who was killed by lightning, allegedly while reading her Bible. Early in his career, Bill Moseley moved to New York City in hopes of getting on Saturday Night Live. The term “deodand” was used in British law up until 1846. A deodand is an animal or object that must be forfeited to the crown because it directly caused the death of a human. In 2014, Samuel Leistedt, a Belgian professor of psychology, set about researching which movie psychopath is the most realistic. His findings were as follows: No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, M’s Hans Beckert and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’s Henry Lee Lucas are moviedom’s…

Rob Zombie promises his new album, The Electric Warlock Acid Witch Satanic Orgy Celebration Dispenser, is his best yet. But Zombie isn’t the only fiend in the band; guitarist John 5, formerly of Marilyn Manson, also brings a monster kid background to the group’s heavy metal horror groove. “It all started with the Universal Monsters,” says the Michigan native of his upbringing. “When I was young I had these books in my school by Crestwood, they were these orange monster books. Those were my bible. That’s where it really started for me, then it got a little crazier when I discovered Alice Cooper and the Misfits.” 5 was still using his real name, John Lowery, and playing for David Lee Roth when he successfully tried out for Marilyn Manson in…

AS FAR AS SAWYER FAMILY PSYCHOS GO, IT’S HARD TO BEAT CHOP TOP, THE SICKLY-LOOKING, SELF-MUTILATING HIPPIE WITH A METAL PLATE IN HIS HEAD. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 role made Bill Moseley a horror icon and fans have long wanted to see the character return. Sixteen years ago, he did, in a movie titled All American Massacre, however, it remains unreleased. Chop Top’s rebirth began in 1999, thirteen years after TCM 2, when Moseley got an offer from Tobe Hooper’s son. “I got a call from William Hooper – we called him Tony – and he had done about a ten-minute scenario for a film set about ten years after the end of Chainsaw 2 that he wanted to shoot to really just show off his computer graphic skills,”…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, SISTERS LULO AND ALABAMA MICELI, DUBBED “THE LITTLE WITCHES” FOR THEIR ABILITY TO SEEMINGLY AVOID BAD juju, renovated a derelict, turn-of-the-century house in Hempstead, New York. Their vision was to create a café similar to the one they had grown up with in New Jersey; inspired by their nickname, so they called it The Witches Brew Coffee House (their regulars have nicknamed it “The Brew”). When the place first opened, however, the locals shunned it like their ancestors would’ve ostracized anyone associated with witchcraft. “They were scared of the place,” recalls Alabama. “They didn’t know what coffee houses were. We had mostly young college kids because adults just would not step foot through these doors. Locals would tell us, ‘Oh, it’s not gonna work here, you should…

In case it’s not already patently freakin’ obvious to you, Dauntless Reader, I’m now pretty deep into that classic-rock-and-body-aches weltschmerz quaintly known as middle age, which is why most of the films I cover in this column date from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s not often that I go spelunking back into even more distant decades, but when I do it’s almost invariably to wring a few guffaws out of such sublimely shite fare as The Giant Claw, The Creeping Terror and The Green Slime. But there’s nary a derisive snort to be had this month – it’s all about the deliciously titled I Bury the Living (1958), a doomy and strikingly original little waking nightmare from the Eisenhower era. It’s largely forgotten today by most people who aren’t Stephen…

TERROR TALES OF THE OCEAN Paul Finch, ed. Gray Friar Press Here comes the ninth part in a series of anthologies edited by Paul Finch that are devoted to various regions of the British Isles: after Terror Tales of the Lake District, the Cotswolds, East Anglia, London, the Seaside, Wales, Yorkshire and the Scottish Highlands, his contributors now dip their pens into the salty, bitter ocean, but this time their stories take them all over the world. Ocean belongs to no nation, and arguably not even to mankind – it is the alien world in our midst, filled with mystery, wonder and, perhaps, monsters. When it comes to the contents of this book, monsters are certainly more prominent than mystique and action is more common than atmosphere, but there are…

We all have those images that stick with us from childhood. For me, it’s a nonsensical yet completely terrifying building consisting solely of stark white stairs and small platforms – no railings, no showers, no beds, no safety. Late last year, I decided to track down the book it came from in order to revisit the story with grown-up eyes. Luckily, this wasn’t hard to do since its title, House of Stairs, matched the picture that’s been scorched into my brain for the last 30 years. Then I hit a snag: the book, written by sci-fi author William Sleator (1945-2011) and originally published in 1974, has been out of print since the early 1990s. Thankfully the Toronto Public Library came to the rescue. As my eyes grazed the teaser text…

PAURA: A COLLECTION OF SCARY AND THRILLING SOUNDTRACKS SOUNDTRACK Ennio Morricone RUSTBLADE RECORDS It’s almost impossible to select thirteen tracks that represent Ennio Morricone’s work within the horror and suspense realms, so Rustblade’s Paura release functions as a curated journey through eerie moods without going too far into Morricone’s most abstract and overtly thematic work. Think of it as a collection of little gems that would cause even uberfans to think carefully about their origins, as the sounds travel through dual electric bass and fast piano hits; jazzy beats and wailing brass evoking a psycho killer; a gentle yet unsettling organ lament, melding electric feedback with gnashing piano wire and surges of counter-punctual strings; or an organized free-for-all of female voices, sustained chords, warbling chatter and devious laughter. Each cue…

An early Alan Moore-scripted horror comic that has been out of print for more than 30 years is slated for a reprint this summer. Rebellion Publishing, the company behind the iconic UK weekly 2000 AD, will release a carefully restored, 190-page collection of the black-and-white horror strip Monster in July, making it the first time readers will have easy access to the hard-to-find comic since its original publication. Moore, best known to horror fans for his hugely influential run on DC’s Swamp Thing in the 1980s and his mind-bending Jack the Ripper opus From Hell a few years later, broke into comics in the early ’80s writing short pieces for 2000 AD and other anthologies. Monster was a product of that period, making its debut in March 1984 in the…

1 DEADLY GROUNDS COFFEE DUO PACK $19 North America’s only “hearse-based coffee company” has a gift for the true java junkie: a two pack of Dark & Deadly and Death by Chocolate. Made with Arabica beans, this is fresh, rich (burial) ground coffee to die for. And that means it’s zombie approved. 2 MONSTER MAKER NIGHTLIGHT KIT $35 Build a beacon for the boogeyman with this paintable and stainable spooky bat-winged, dripping eyeball light kit. Made from wood, acrylic and wire, with LED lighting, monster kids from age 7 to 107 can put it together and customize it to their dark hearts’ content. 3 AUTOGRAPHED THE GATES OF MISERY COMIC $5.50 Enter the Mount Misery Cemetery and thrill to new EC Comics-style tales of terror, created by Matthew Therrien and…

Joining Rob Zombie after the 2006 Educated Horses album, bassist Piggy D – real name Matt Montgomery – is a key cog in the monster machine of a band. Like Zombie and guitarist John 5, D is a lifelong genre junkie, raised on a steady diet of Universal Monsters and horror matinees. He knew he wanted to fuse that passion with rock music after experiencing Alice Cooper on the Trash tour when he was fourteen. “I just wanted to combine the two things I love, the danger and the thrill of rock ‘n’ roll and monsters,” he explains. “It always went hand in hand with me, at least in my impressionable years. I guess the things I’ve celebrated most in my life just crept back in over the years and…

HE SELLS SANCTUARY THE VEIL Starring Thomas Jane, Lily Rabe and Jessica Alba Directed by Phil Joanou Written by Robert Ben Garant Blumhouse Productions As we continue to move through the 2010s, there’s a significant shift in how films are being released. Sure, there are the big tentpole films that cost millions of dollars to make and many more millions to promote. Then there are the smaller pictures, many of which are hitting theatres and video on demand (VOD) in close proximity to each other, often on the same day. Finally, there are the films that bypass theatres all together and wind up on iTunes, VOD services and even Netflix, almost instantaneously. Such was the case with The Veil, a low-budget Blumhouse production starring Thomas Jane as Jim Jacobs, a…

A KILLER KING, A MAD MAGISTRATE AND A WICKED WITCHFINDER ARE A FEW OF THE WONDERFULLY MACABRE ROLES THAT VINCENT PRICE SINKS HIS teeth into for the films in Shout! Factory’s Vincent Price Collection III. Though most of the actor’s essential movies have already received HD upgrades, Shout! digs up five more genre entries – of varying quality – that showcase the talents of everyone’s favourite merchant of menace. MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961) WILLIAM WITNEY One of the more curious movies AIP released is this Jules Verne family fantasy adapted for screen by Richard Matheson. A bright and colourful Victorian era is undercut by the stormy emotions and megalomania of airship commander Robur (Price), who roams the skies in a high-tech air balloon destroying battleships and other instruments of…

THE PORTRAIT OF SAL PULLMAN Lonnie Nadler and Abby Howard Terror-Town.com THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO Enrica Jang and Jason Strutz Action Lab TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION #1 Kenneth Anderson, Gary Burley, William Hazle, et al. Terrier Studios CASEFILE ARKHAM: NIGHTMARE ON THE CANVAS #1 Josh Finney and Patrick McEvoy 01 Publishing CTHULHU WILLIAMS #0 Tim Stiles and Mortimer Glum Big Tim’s Funny Books ALAN MOORE’S THE COURTYARD Alan Moore, Antony Johnston and Jacen Burrows Avatar The shadow of Edgar Allan Poe looms large over the horror genre, not only through the seemingly endless adaptations of his works, but also his universal themes of death and dark romanticism. He has fuelled nightmares for nearly two centuries and continues to inspire new generations of creators. “Poe was such an innovator,” explains…

With the arrival of a new season of The X-Files this year, the legendary series, which originally ran from 1993 to 2002, is on a lot of horror fans’ minds-including Los Angeles’ Iam8bit gallery, which held a group show earlier this year based around the series. Called Conspiracies, Monsters and Mythology: An X-Files Art Show, it featured some of today’s finest designers and painters, including Doaly, Austin James and Anna Bihari, to name a few, and saw the release of cool conceptual pieces such as the very first fully licensed X-Files colouring book, produced by the gallery for the event. The truth about the show is out there, so I tracked down Iam8bit Gallery owners Amanda White and Jon M. Gibson to reveal more about their tribute to Chris Carter’s…

Since their emergence in 2013, experimental rock outfit Voyag3r (pronounced “Voyager 3”) has become one of Rue Morgue’s favourite bands. The Detroit group sounds like the bastard offspring of Goblin and John Carpenter, creating faux-soundtrack music propelled by analog synths, metal guitar and drums. Their name is a clever nod to Carpenter’s sci-fi classic Starman (2014 album Doom Fortress was even pressed on gold vinyl – another reference to the film). And a video featuring a black-gloved killer for the giallo-inspired Il Guanto Nero from that album appeared shortly after its release. Recently, their music was featured in Toronto filmmaker Viviano Caldinelli’s horror short Portal to Hell, the last work of Roddy Piper. This year sees Voyag3r back in the battle chamber with Are You Synthetic?, once again on Bellyache…