Table of contents for Issue 81 August 2008 in RUE MORGUE

Look into the daytimers of horror literature fans around the world and the date January 19, 2009, will most likely be circled. Though months away from the high season for new paperback releases and author conventions, the day marks the birth, two hundred years earlier, of Edgar Allan Poe (who died October 7, 1849). Few have more invested in that bicentennial, and the renewed interest in Poe’s work that will follow in its wake, than Vancouver actor, playwright, director and producer Brent Fidler, who has just completed a decades-long labour of love, Poe: Last Days of the Raven, a multi-layered film that explores the links between the tortured author’s life and work. Filmed in BC for a mere $50,000 with the help of Fidler’s friends from the movie and theatre…

+ Until the early 1800s, death by elephant – in which trained elephants slowly and painfully crush the victim – was an accepted form of execution in Sri Lanka. +Actor Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster on The Munsters) also penned several children’s books. + When Dixie Shanahan killed her abusive husband in August of 2002, she didn’t dispose of the body, but opened a window in the master bedroom before sealing the room and shoving a towel under the door. To combat the smell of decay she installed several air fresheners in the hallway. Police discovered the corpse fourteen months later. + Haxan director Benjamin Christensen was destined for a successful career as an opera singer before he discovered that he suffered from a nervous condition that made it impossible for…

Here’s an interesting fact people tend to forget: Pumpkinhead was Stan Winston’s movie, but Pumpkinhead the monster belonged to Stan Winston Studio. In other words, he didn’t make the beast. On that film, for the first time in his accomplished career, Winston handed over design and execution of a hero creature entirely to his crew while he focused on his first-time directing duties. The collaboration between old friends and colleagues equalled fewer speed bumps, which suited the demands and budgetary restraints of the film. The movie’s signature demon was brought to life, cheaply and swiftly, by the team at Stan Winston Studio, which back then included Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Shane Mahan and John Rosengrant, among others. They set upon creating the creature while Winston revised the shooting script.…

A university student named Quaid, who suffers from a phobia that he will one day be axed to death by a maniac, locks a militant vegetarian in an empty room with a piece of rotting meat, then watches the starving herbivore reluctantly confront her carnophobia. Needing more raw data on the science of extreme fear, Quaid then locks a young man suffering from a fear of deafness in a sensory deprivation chamber. From these bleak confrontations with our deepest anxieties, Clive Barker crafted one of the Books of Blood’s simplest, most disturbing tales, “Dread” – now in production with long-time Barker collaborator (Seraphim Films’) Anthony Diblasi in the director’s chair. Working from his own script, the first-time director promises to keep the tale’s stark frame in place. “The story is…

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES THE HAPPENING Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan Fox In the wake of the carpetbombing he endured for 2006’s disastrous Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan must actually be relieved at the very, very mixed critical response The Happening is getting. And while it would be lame to fill my own review with a bunch of other people’s opinions, here’s a little perspective. Roger Ebert praises Shyamalan’s atmospherics and refusal to indulge in “smash-and-grab plotmongering.” The Vancouver Voice dismisses it as “repetitious” and “tepid,” while the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle damns it with faint praise, boldly proclaiming it Shyamalan’s best since The Sixth Sense. And Leonard Maltin… oh, never mind. And me? I was initially relieved that…

COLD HARD CASH pmpecciart.com/CHCIndex.html 19 mins. Funny how a largely unsuccessful film can still spawn a trend, isn’t it? I mean honestly, how many films – new releases and reissues alike – have been proclaimed “grindhouse” by their creators and distributors despite the lacklustre box-office performance of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s eponymous effort? It’s doubly unfortunate that so many of said films fail to deliver the grimy goods, but Mike Pecci’s new grindhouse-style collaboration with the Suicide Girls is a happy exception. Clocking in at a lean, mean nineteen minutes, Cold Hard Cash unfolds thusly: Suicide Girl meets Suicide Girl, Suicide Girls run afoul of mobster who gives Suicide Girls a chance to redeem themselves by collecting a debt for him, Suicide Girls collect said debt, go home, have…

DRIVE-INS, DELETE BINS AND OTHER SINS By now you’re probably used to my frequent (and enthusiastic) bashing of Leonard Maltin, who has become the standard by which I measure all lily-livered mainstream film critics. So it should come as no surprise that he’s not a fan of Charles Kaufman’s 1980 backwoods horror opus Mother’s Day, labelling it “just about the final word in the horror/misogyny genre.” However, top honour for knee-jerk journalism in this case actually goes to Roger Ebert, who shrills in his no-star review, “…the latest reprehensible specimen of the geek film… why anybody of any age would possibly want to see this film remains without an answer.” Well, I’ll tell ya why, Roger, ya great big hysterical girl’s blouse, so listen the fuck up. Here’s what happens:…

Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-Garde David Huckvale McFarland Filmgoers generally place less importance on a movie’s musical score than on other aspects of the production – the philosophy being that music is merely a mechanism to help propel the action along. While that is one of the purposes of a film score, the medium can rise to something more and become a highly valid art form in and of itself. The music employed in the horror movies produced by Britain’s famed Hammer studios from the late ’50s to early ’70s can certainly be called art, and though budgets for these productions were low, the composers who created these pieces were true masters of their field, giving us shocking, beautiful and often highly unusual film scores. And who better…

REAL PEOPLE ALIVE ON STAGE You can do a lot with $5 at Coney Island. A fin will buy you about 70 seconds on Dante’s Inferno – a rickety horrorthemed bumper car ride in the dark. You can ingest close to 2000 calories of chili cheese fries at Nathan’s famous hot dog stand (much scarier than the Inferno) or play enough of Uncle Fester’s Electrocution arcade “game” to win, well, nothing. But for my money, your hardearned cash could be no better spent than on the freaks. Formed in 1986, the Sideshows by the Seashore troupe is a cast of creeps that bills itself as the last true ten-in-one freakshow in America. And what better place to ply their terrifying trade than Coney Island, that “Sodom by the Sea” that…

I WAS SADDENED to hear today that one of my idols, Stan Winston, died of myeloma. I feel for his family since I myself have lost my father, a grandmother and almost an uncle to various forms of cancer. I will greatly miss the joy that Mr. Winston brought to me with his creations, and I also realize that the monsters he created in film pale in comparison to the real horrors of watching a loved one suffer at the hands of cancer. Adam Koetters – address withheld RICHARD GAVIN’S ARTICLE on the Decadent Movement (RM#79) is another sterling example of how your magazine is head and shoulders above the other horror periodicals. You’d never find an article expounding the merits (and horror cred) of Baudelaire and Lorrain in any…

monstrous.com If you enjoyed getting your feet wet last issue with monster website templeofthedemon.com, prepare to dive into Monstrous, purportedly “the largest site about monsters” on the internet. And sure enough, there are pages upon pages of creatures and folklore to slash your way through. From bios of your favourite beasties to vampire-killing advice, it’s all here. weirdtales.net This website may be the home of Weird Tales magazine but for one year it is also the dwelling place of musician/artist Steve Archer’s Lovecraft-inspired artwork. A new ominous painting appears each day on the site, where it can be admired and, if the dark desire strikes you, bought directly from the artist. Cthulhu lives! cottonpopcorn.com If you suffer from coulrophobia, let me be the first to warn you to stay far,…

COFFIN COUCHES The eco-conscious undead will appreciate these couches made from genuine recycled coffins. Each casket can only be used once for human remains – and the couches are thoughtfully stamped with the biohazard symbol, for legal purposes – but that doesn’t mean the living can’t lounge on ’em until the Grim Recycler comes calling. Rest in (green) peace at coffincouches.com. WORMWEIRD TAROT Looking at George Higham’s Wormweird Tarot is like peering into a series of twisted display cases in a travelling museum of the morbid, the demonic and the freakish. Created with divination in mind, the deck features the suits of Nails, Shadows, Flames and Absinthe, and is peppered with succulently surreal images of skeletal figures and mouldering corpses. Deal in the dark arts at poepuppet.com. 30 DAYS OF…

When Clive Barker dreams, he dreams big. While most artists seem content to carve out a comfortable niche in one expressive medium, Barker has harnessed the power of words, film and paint to dream into life a unique alternative universe where legions of metamorphosing and mutating bodies and entities challenge the boundaries between pleasure and pain, both real and imaginary. So it should have come as no surprise when Barker boldly announced in 2004 that he and his creative teams at Seraphim Films and Midnight Picture Show would produce cinematic adaptations of no less than fifteen stories from the collections that launched Barker’s career back in the mid-1980s: The Books of Blood. After watching too many adaptations of his written works compromised (can you say “Rawhead Rex”?) by big-studio meddling,…

During the first few minutes of Rogue, you’d swear you were actually watching the BBC series Planet Earth. Absolutely stunning aerial shots reveal the vibrant vegetation, gorgeous rock formations and graceful rivers of remote Northern Australia. The wildlife, however, isn’t so friendly in Greg McLean’s giant crocodile movie. “I was committed early on to make the kind of film that I didn’t see anymore: a well-crafted horror movie about a big animal on the loose,” explains the writer/director, who made a name for himself with the vicious survival horror film Wolf Creek (RM#52). “This genre has been pretty unfairly relegated to the B and low-budget category for some time now; and I yearned to see that again – [ones] that had real suspense and atmosphere, as well as a solid…

A RAPE/REVENGE ORIGINAL MADAME O (1967) Starring Michiko Aoyama, Akihiko Kaminara and Yuichi Minato Directed by Seiichi Fukuda Written by Tomomi Tsukasa Synapse Films How’s this for a downer: On a lonely stretch of beach, sixteen-year-old Seiko (Michiko Aoyama) is gang-raped by three young thugs and afterwards finds herself pregnant and infected with syphilis. Not surprisingly, the mentally scarred young woman develops a loathing towards the opposite sex. Years later, she’s a well-respected gynecologist in a prominent Japanese clinic. Seiko attentively tends to her patients by day, while roaming the streets at night, in search of suitable candidates on which to exact her revenge. Enticing men with her comely ways, she infects her partners with her disease by making a small incision on their arms and rubbing them with a…

In This Issue! NECROMONICON #1 (OF 4) William Messner-Loebs and Andrew Ritchie BOOM! CHOPPER ZOMBIE Todd Livingston and Scott Keating Devil’s Due CORALINE Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell HarperCollins THE GOON #27 Eric Powell and various Dark Horse DEMO TPB Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan DC/Vertigo HELLBLAZER: THE FEAR MACHINE TPB Jamie Delano and various DC/Vertigo I am having a very hard time getting my head around the bizarre brilliance that is Necronomicon – and that is most assuredly a compliment. William Messner-Loebs. writer of the new BOOM! miniseries launching this month, audaciously assures me it will visit most of the corners of Lovecraft’s fictional universe – in a mere four issues! “That is assuming,” he says, “that Lovecraft’s universe has actual corners.” I have glimpsed issue #1 and…

THE UNDEAD: HEADSHOT QUARTET Christina Bivins and Lane Adamson, eds. Permuted Press The fourth installment in Permuted Press’ highly acclaimed zombie anthology series delivers the shambling goods in spades. Each of the four novellas collected here are well-written, fast-paced and guaranteed to give you goosebumps. Whether you like your zombies silent and shuffling, wading in from the deep blue sea, or culled from a voodoo curse – there’s something here for the living dead lover in everyone. Last Chance Lance FLESH WELDER Ronald Kelly Croatoan Publishing Flesh Welder, set in post-apocalypse Texas, marks author Ronald Kelly’s return to horror fiction after a ten-year absence. The story sees a good-hearted doctor, whose brain was grafted with a welder’s after he survived a terrorist attack, combine skill sets to “rebuild” war-ravaged human…

PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE Starring Tetsuro Sakagami, Elena Probatova and Yukari Fujimoto Written and directed by Andrey Iskanov Unearthed Films War is the great folly of our species: robbery, vandalism and institutionalized murder on a massive scale fuelled by unbridled greed, bigotry and hate. War, the apotheosis of all that is detestable in human character, and an unfathomable tragedy we suffer still, even in the face of possible extinction. The First World War was to be The War to End All Wars, but by 1939 the world was again embroiled in armed conflict. The Holocaust is the most infamous atrocity of this period, overshadowing those committed in the Far East. Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 was known as the Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory of the Kempeitai, the…

Cameron Romero is determined to succeed on his own merits. Though he will always be known as the son of famed horror director George A. Romero, the younger filmmaker is intent on carving out his own distinctive take on the genre. After completing his yet-to-bereleased debut, The Screening (see RM#59), Romero is already putting the finishing touches on his second feature, Staunton Hill, which he hopes will be unique while still carrying on the family tradition of creating smart, intelligent horror films that don’t speak down to their audience. “For Staunton Hill I went back to a more traditional style of horror that I used to watch growing up,” Romero tells Rue Morgue while taking a break from post-production work on the film in Pittsburgh. “This time out, I’ve taken…

The terrifying events that transpired within the cracked, creaking and crumbling walls of the long-abandoned Georgian mansion are, at best, a matter of speculation. Records variously suggest that the house was visited by travelling companions during the Depression, brothers in the 1960s and estate inheritors in the post-millennium. All cases have in common violent death, cruel revenge from beyond the grave and souls borne away on the wings of Hell-bound birds. One of literature’s great works of haunted house fiction, the story is called “Pigeons from Hell” and, Crom and Cthulhu be praised, it will not die. Author Robert E. Howard is most famous for creating Conan the Barbarian. Still, his horror short “Pigeons from Hell” (first published in the May 1938 issue of legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales) has…

JERK-O’-LANTERN THE PUMPKIN KARVER First Look Cucurbitophobia is more commonly known as the fear of pumpkins, so if you suffer from it then rejoice as it is just one more reason not to watch this movie. It centres around a guy named Jonathan, who’s traumatized when a Halloween prank played on him goes horribly wrong and he stabs his sister’s boyfriend to death. A year later Jonathan and sis are heading to their new home in a town called – wait for it – Carver, where they hook up with the standard teen stereotypes (stoner, bimbo, jock and dweeb) for a lameass Halloween party slash-’em-up. Instead of blood and boobs, it’s 87 minutes of inane dialogue, weak killings, pumpkins, pumpkins and more pumpkins. No matter how you slice it (pun…

AGE-DEFYING THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH (1959) Starring Anton Diffring, Hazel Court and Christopher Lee Directed by Terence Fisher Written by Barré Lyndon and Jimmy Sangster Legend Films After exploding onto the horror scene with the 1957 hit The Curse of Frankenstein, England’s Hammer Films firmly cemented their status as the masters of period gothic horror with their 1958 follow-up Horror of Dracula, and then The Mummy in 1959. The studio would again lend its sinister yet elegant touch to another release that year: The Man Who Could Cheat Death. An effectively atmospheric thriller with slight shades of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the film tells of a man who resorts to any means necessary to keep from aging. Despite being 104-years-old, Dr. Georges Bonnet (the icily cool Anton…

Only Child Gauntlet Some horror authors excel at creating blood-curdling supernatural creatures, but not Jack Ketchum. His books have monsters too, but they tend to be human, and that’s what makes them so much more terrifying. Ketchum’s monsters could be your next door neighbours. For that reason, the author’s stories often walk a fine line between horror novels and crime thrillers – a case could be made that books such as The Girl Next Door are not horror at all, but they certainly horrify readers more than many traditional genre offerings do. This brings us to Only Child (originally released as Stranglehold in the US in the mid-’90s), probably the closest thing you’ll ever find to a TGND companion piece. It’s brutal, terrifying in that ever-successful oh-my-god-theywouldn’t kind of way…

THE EYE (2007) Soundtrack Marco Beltrami LOST DREAMS It’s been a while since Marco Beltrami has had fun scoring a smallscale shocker, but as on his score for The Omen, he goes a little retro here and even evokes a vintage giallo by basing his compositions around a melancholic, pop-styled title theme. Steeped with vulnerability and tenderness, the main theme also provides a humanistic anchor against the shrilling orchestral and coarse synth textures in the album’s shock cuts, and since the heroine’s a violinist, there are also some tender string renditions that convey a greater sense of tragedy. Beltrami’s shifts between retro, modernism and classical scoring techniques prove to be appropriately disarming, and despite the absurdly brief “The Concert” cue that closes this album far too abruptly, The Eye is…

Maybe childhood trauma isn’t so bad. As long as you can make a career out of it, getting locked in the basement with roaches and spiders might be your best bet for being an artist. Of course, there’s always that chance that you’ll be pushed too far and run into a crowd one day swinging a butcher knife. So far, Mr. Hyde’s been able to hold it together just enough to build up a loyal fan base for his depraved, maniacal rhymes. But lurking beneath the surface of this New York MC’s stage swagger is a beast… that only he can control. “I had a very strict Italian mother,” recalls Hyde. “She would try to shelter me and keep me under her thumb and not have me watching R-rated movies,…

ALONE IN THE DARK PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Wii Atari Way before gamers were getting the shit scared out of them by inside-out Resident Evil Dobermans, or were venturing into the eerie mists of Silent Hill, one game dominated the burgeoning horror survival game landscape. Sixteen years later, Alone in the Dark is making a welcome comeback with some long-overdue upgrades. The game starts off when your character, Edward Carnby, wakes up in a New York City underground parking lot with a severe case of amnesia. If that’s not bad enough, he soon discovers that the entire city is literally falling apart and that he’s being pursued by abhorrent creatures that can only be killed by fire. A fully interactive environment means that you can pick up or smash…