Table of contents for #1: 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See in RUE MORGUE

HORROR FANS TEND TO VENERATE THEIR FILMS. That’s why, the average genre lover’s top film list tends to resemble all the others put out by the mainstream. Guaranteed you’ll find The Exorcist, Psycho, The Shining and maybe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre vying for the scariest film of all time. You’ll also probably find the likes of Alien, Night of the Living Dead, Halloween and Jaws on there too, followed by Rosemary’s Baby, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Dawn of the Dead, Frankenstein, The Thing… you know the drill. They’re all essential viewing, but the problem is that we don’t need to be told to watch those movies. We’ve already seen them. That’s where Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Horror Films You Need to See comes in. This is a look at…

1981/USA/91 MIN STARRING BRIAN MATTHEWS, LEAH AYRES AND BRIAN BACKER DIRECTED BY TONY MAYLAM During the slasher boom of the ’80s – thanks to Friday the 13th – a lot of tees were killed in the woods during the hazy days of summer. Following in the steps of Mrs. Voorhees, psychos flocked to the wilderness in slaughterthons such as Madman (1982), Sleepaway Camp (1983) and The Mutilator (1985). But few of these films were as nasty, or earned such a cult following as 1981’s The Burning. Based on the urban legend of the Cropsey (renamed “Cropsy” in the movie) maniac, The Burning tells the story of a summer camp caretaker who is burned beyond recognition during a prank gone wrong. Years later, armed with a pair of hedge clippers, he…

2009/FRANCE, GERMANY, ITALY, CANADA/161 MIN STARRING NATHANIEL BROWN, PAZ DE LA HUERTA AND CYRIL ROY DIRECTED BY GASPAR NOÉ The term “provocateur” – a person who deliberately pushes the envelope in an effort to solicit argument, controversy or backlash – may as well have been invented to describe Gaspar Noé. In 1998, the Argentinian-born French filmmaker’s first feature, I Stand Alone (a.k.a., Seul contre tous), made waves in the film festival world with its brutal portrayal of a disgruntled, nameless French butcher and his relationship with his wife and daughter. Dark, dreary and difficult, the film signalled the arrival of a brave new voice in cinema. With newfound notoriety but little financing, Noé then called upon his friends, Vincent Cassel and Cassel’s reallife spouse Monica Bellucci, for his second effort,…

BURIAL GROUND 1981/ITALY/85 MIN Despite the endless and obvious flaws spanning the film’s 85 minute runtime, Burial Ground possesses a seedy, filthy charm that even the gnarliest Italian zombie flicks couldn’t hope to attain. There’s an ancient prophecy that wakes the dead, a house full of horny thrill-seekers, and then there’s ten-year-old Michael, who is played by a small adult. Why didn’t director Andrea Bianchi hire a child actor? Because having a child chew his mom’s tit off on-camera would have clearly been in poor taste. Burial Ground has everything a zombie fan could ask for, and lots that no sane person would. DEAD ALIVE 1992/NEW ZEALAND/104 MIN Before his Lord of the Rings trilogy reinvented the fantasy epic, taking home eleven Oscars, Peter Jackson gave the world the outrageously…

1961/CANADA/83 MIN STARRING PAUL STEVENS, CLAUDETTE NEVINS AND MARTIN LAVUT DIRECTED BY JULIAN ROFFMAN Homegrown cinematic horror has always flown a little under the radar in Canada, where the film industry tends to champion serious works of drama over genre stories, no matter how well told. So, you’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of the The Mask, a 3-D spookshow that holds the honour of being the country’s first horror film. Before making the movie, director Julian Roffman (1915–2000) had directed the beatnik-themed, youth-oriented crime drama The Bloody Brood (1959), and was known in the industry for introducing videotape to Canada broadcasters, but though he had great success in that business, it was not his passion. “Around 1958 or so, my dad wanted to make feature films,” says Peter Roffman,…

1988/CANADA/103 MIN STARRING DAVID HEWLETT, TERRY O’QUINN AND CYNTHIA PRESTON WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY SANDOR STERN Released amongst a gaggle of sequels to Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, this overlooked Canadian gem stands head and shoulders above other late-’80s fright fare. Based on the 1981 novel by Andrew Neiderman, the film tells of a deeply disturbed young man, Leon (David Hewlett), and the abnormal relationship he shares with his younger sister, Ursula (Cynthia Preston), and an anatomically correct medical mannequin named “Pin.” Isolated as a child by an obsessive-compulsive mother (Bronwen Mantel), young Leon grows up to form an unnatural bond with the life-sized figure, which is housed in the office of his physician father, Dr. Linden (Terry O’Quinn), and used by the doctor to…

2004/USA/95 MIN STARRING ANGELA BETTIS, JULIET LANDAU AND BRENT ROAM DIRECTED BY TOBE HOOPER Toolbox Murders is arguably the movie everyone was waiting for Tobe Hooper to make since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s a love of power tools in these frames – the shrill mad shriek as they close in for the kill – and a genuine vision for putting them to ill use. The delirious throwback splatter of Hooper’s remake is a celebration of the kind of unbounded blood spray that ’70s horror flicks are worshiped for. Written – incredibly – by the same duo who stained Hooper’s name with the abominable Crocodile (2000), Toolbox Murders tells the tale of Nell (Angela Bettis) who moves into a dilapidated apartment with her husband Steven. The place is a rundown…

2009/CANADA/110 MIN STARRING MARC-ANDRÉ GRONDIN, NORMAND D’AMOUR AND SONIA VACHON DIRECTED BY ÉRIC TESSIER French horror films from France are celebrated by genre fans worldwide. French horror films from Quebec, however, are virtually unknown outside of the province. Case in point: 5150 Elm’s Way (a.k.a. 5150 Rue des Ormes), an adaptation of a novel by Patrick Senécal, who’s often called “The Stephen King of Quebec.” Directed by Éric Tessier (who previously adapted Senécal’s Evil Words), it stars Quebec A-lister Marc-André Grondin as Yannick, a film student who falls off his bike while out shooting and seeks help at a very average-looking suburban home. After accidentally stumbling across a bleeding man in one of the upstairs rooms, he’s taken captive by the family patriarch, Jacques, a pious vigilante who kills junkies,…

2006/USA/92 MIN STARRING NATHAN BAESEL, ANGELA GOETHALS AND ZELDA RUBENSTEIN DIRECTED BY SCOTT GLOSSERMAN In the genre, few horses are deader or get flogged harder than the slasher movie. Like zombie flicks, they’re cheap to make, always find an audience, and first-time directors can easily follow their formula. But once in a while along comes a guy like Scott Glosserman, who finds an entirely new way to capture a killer on film. The Bethesda, Maryland native studied film in university (where he wrote a thesis on The Shining in a Conventions of the Horror Film class), before going to work at a talent agency where a friend helped him discover the ideal concept for a first feature. It was a script called Behind the Mask by a fledgling screenwriter named…

2001/SPAIN/95 MIN STARRING EZRA GODDEN, FRANCISCO RABAL AND RAQUEL MEROÑO DIRECTED BY STUART GORDON Those who endorse Stuart Gordon’s grudging admission that he is “the Orson Welles of horror” – a director whose best film remains Re-Animator, his outrageous splatstick debut – obviously haven’t seen Dagon. For this moist and moody pic remains his most accomplished but unjustly underrated offering. An adroit amalgamation of “Dagon” (H.P. Lovecraft’s first published story in 1917) and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), the unified narrative follows Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden), a dotcom millionaire vacationing with his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Moreno) off the coast of Spain. A storm scuttles their boat on the rocks, forcing the pair to seek help in the small fishing village of Imboca. They are soon separated and Paul finds himself…

1976/USA/91 MIN STARRING TONY LO BIANCO, DEBORAH RAFFIN AND SANDY DENNIS DIRECTED BY LARRY COHEN The eminent critic Robin Wood once opined that Larry Cohen was one of the most underrated writer/directors in contemporary American cinema. Those who remain undecided over whether the 71-year-old maverick is touched by genius or merely a purveyor of slack, sophisticated schlock need look no further than God Told Me To for evidence of his daring, polymathic qualities as a filmmaker. A complex, thematically rich, often bewildering picture, it stands as one of the great horror movies of the 1970s, and is almost as unique and difficult to categorize as Cohen himself. Inspired by Erich von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods (which propounds that many of the world’s ancient religions and technologies were…

1972/USA/90 MIN STARRING WILLIE E. SMITH, JOHN P. HIXON AND VERN STIERMAN DIRECTED BY CHARLES B. PIERCE For countless moviegoers and television viewers in the 1970s, The Legend of Boggy Creek was a truly frightening experience. Based on real-life reports of a hairy, ape-like creature said to haunt the boggy bottom-lands of Southern Arkansas, the film managed to blur the lines between the real and sensational aspects of the case, resulting in copious childhood nightmares and huge box-office sales. Boggy Creek was the directorial debut of the late Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Evictors), who put aside a career in advertising to pursue filmmaking. Pierce was living in Texarkana, Arkansas, in the early 1970s and, like most the residents of the area, had been following…

1986/USA/88 MIN STARRING JASON LIVELY, TOM ATKINS AND STEVE MARSHALL DIRECTED BY FRED DEKKER When it comes to quintessential horror from the ’80s, it’s hard to top the 1986 splatter comedy Night of the Creeps. Equal parts sci-fi, horror and comedy, the film begins in the 1950s with an alien parasite invading earth to turn humans into zombies. The threat is contained for decades until two geeky students, Chris (Jason Lively) and J.C (Steve Marshall) steal a frozen body from a campus medical lab as part of a frat initiation, unleashing the little wrigglers, which then infect the nubile bodies of the student body. Zombie hell breaks out on prom night, but luckily a hard-boiled cop Ray Cameron (Tom Atkins) is on the case to shoot first and, well, shoot…

2001/JAPAN/118 MIN STARRING HARUHIKO KATÔ, KUMIKO ASÔ AND KOYUKI DIRECTED BY KIYOSHI KUROSAWA There’s an airless dread that permeates nearly every frame of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (a.k.a., Kairo) – a hushed mix of the unknowable, unsettling and uncanny that sets it apart from the slew of other contemporary Japanese ghost films. Although it features a supernatural threat transmitted through technology, otherworldly stains and a teen movie cast, it flips those all too familiar elements into a horrifying story unlike any other. Although Kurosawa – also known for unorthodox genre films such as Cure and Séance – taught Ju-on creator Takashi Shimizu, and helped produce the first films in that series, his own work is a radical departure from them, the Ringu films and their many copycats. In a decayed, washed-out…

BYZANTIUM 2012/USA/118 MIN Neil Jordan directed Interview with a Vampire, so he knows a little something about making vampire films on an epic scale. For his return to the subject he’s chosen a subtler story, about mother-daughter vampires hunting and hiding their secret lives in a seaside resort town. The magic is in the unravelling of the back story and the spellbinding scenery – hello, waterfall of blood! There are gruesome decapitations for the gorehounds but this one is more of an art film for fans of European movies such as Let the Right One In. Too soon to call it a classic, but a bloody beautiful cinematic jewel nonetheless. CRONOS 1993/MEXICO/94 MIN Before Guillmero del Toro made one of the best vampire films of all time with Blade II,…

1980/USA/91 MIN STARRING ROBERT FORSTER, ROBIN RIKER AND MICHAEL V. GAZZO DIRECTED BY LEWIS TEAGUE If you insist on watching only one “nature-runs-amok” film tonight make sure it’s Alligator. Few horror movies are as subversive and suspenseful as this spirited reworking of Jaws from screenwriter John Sayles and director Lewis Teague. Opening with an adorable pet alligator being flushed down the toilet, Alligator is the story of David Madison (Robert Forster), a balding detective investigating a case involving two dismembered bodies discovered in the sewers. After a fellow officer is eaten by the creature (which has now grown to monstrous size due to the hormone-experiment waste materials dumped illegally into the sewers), Madison attempts to convince the authorities that a gigantic reptile stalks beneath the city. When a missing…

1980/USA/80 MIN STARRING DOUG MCCLURE, ANN TURKEL AND VIC MORROW DIRECTED BY BARBARA PEETERS AND JIMMY T. MURAKAMI “We’ve worked in just about every genre over this period, and we keep coming back to horror and science fiction. They’re perennial,” says charming octagenarian Roger Corman, reflecting on a career in B-movies that began six decades ago. Corman, who spoke with Rue Morgue from his office in Los Angeles, continues to enjoy accolades, including a tribute at the Oscars back in 2009, and recent reissues of titles he produced, dating from his mid-career period in the 1970s and ’80s. Among them, a certain gory creature feature, in which a northern California fishing hamlet is terrorized by sexcrazed sea monsters. Humanoids From the Deep took the sexual themes of The Creature From…

THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW 1983/USA/91 MIN Directed by Mark Rosman, a protege of Brian DePalma, House on Sorority Row is an attempt at a Hitchcockian thriller under the guise of a slasher film. Though many of the kills are off-screen and not particularly gruesome when they are shown, Sorority Row does boast one of the better decapitated head scenes committed to celluloid. Rosman’s photography is lush and beautiful and Richard Band’s orchestral score is a good fit for the film’s Hitchcockian ambitions. But if there is one reason to watch it, it’s the final reveal of the killer, who makes for perhaps the creepiest slasher character of all time. INTRUDER 1989/USA/83 MIN Co-written Scott Spiegel, who served as co-writer of Evil Dead II, Intruder takes place over the course…

BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR 2010/USA/90 MIN If you’re a schlock horror devotee and Rue Morgue’s Editor-in-Chief says, “Dude, this thing is shaping up to be the next Troll 2,” well, you tend to sit up and take notice. With a rumoured budget of $10,000 and the worst CGI effects since, well… ever, self-proclaimed Master of Romantic Thrillers James Nguyen weighs in with his take on Hitchcock’s The Birds, in which everything is blamed on global warming. Nguyen is stingy with action until about the 35-minute mark, but when those eagles and condors get going, the going gets hilarious. THE GIANT CLAW 1957/USA/75 MIN The 1950s presented us with no shortage of giggle-inducing nuclear mutants and giant space monsters, but the titular gangly, dangly, googly-eyed gooney-bird-on-a-wire on offer here – “from…

ARACHNOPHOBIA 1990/USA/103 MIN Long-time Steven Spielberg collaborator Frank Marshall made his directorial debut with this valentine to vintage creature features, which finds a deadly Venezuelan spider stowing away in a US-bound coffin. Once it’s stateside, the amorous arachnid gets it on with a house spider, and a California town is soon besieged by the pair’s deadly offspring. Sans gore but full of ingenious practical effects, Arachnophobia is old-fashioned, skin-crawling fun. THE BAD SEED 1956/USA/129 MIN This dark, edgy tale stars Nancy Kelly as a housewife who realizes her pigtailed, tap-dancing little girl (Patty McCormack) is a coldblooded murderer. Kelly, McCormack and co-star Eileen Heckart all received Academy Award nominations for their performances, making The Bad Seed one of the few horror films to earn multiple Oscar nods. The closing credit…

1968/USA/81 MIN STARRING LON CHANEY JR., CAROL OHMART AND QUINN K. REDEKER DIRECTED BY JACK HILL If ever a film deserved its “cult classic” tag, it’s Spider Baby. Jack Hill’s horror-comedy was shot in 1964, but due to financial and legal mishaps, didn’t hit theatres until 1968 – and then only in a mangled version missing its shocking opening. In its brief theatrical run, though, its demented delights won over enough fans to birth the legend of a funny but frightening horror show you had to see to believe. But seeing it wasn’t easy. Hill, who went on to B-movie infamy with blaxploitation classics such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), lost track of the original print so finding Spider Baby meant tracking down grey market videotapes. “Sometimes…