Table of contents for Issue 92 August 2009 in RUE MORGUE

liveleak.com/view?i=890_1246374233 The Blob’s cousin? The Thing on summer vacation? An egg sac full of C.H.U.D.lings? Apparently the disgusting, throbbing mass featured in this video – allegedly stuck to a sewer wall in North Carolina – is actually a writhing nest of worms, or so the scientists say. More likely it’s special effects and viral marketing (but for what?). Regardless, it’s still the stuff that nightmares are made of. iwantyourskull.com Heads up! This art blog is devoted to the human skull and anyone who has ever “impacted the world with skeletal expression.” Updated daily, the site is a vast resource for artists and collectors. The fine folks behind it also curate an annual art ’zine featuring beautifully reproduced, macabre works from some of today’s top illustrators. ominous-events.com All dressed up but…

1 CRYSTAL HEAD VODKA $42.99 What’s a retired Ghostbuster to do once he’s hung up his proton pack? Pay homage to the legend of the thirteen crystal skulls, of course! In Dan Aykroyd’s case, that means co-creating a high-end quadruple-distilled, diamond-filtered vodka that comes in a skull-shaped 750ml bottle. Get corked at crystalheadvodka.com. 2 DEATH MINTS $2.49 Feasting on the flesh and blood of the living – or the partially decomposed remains of the recently deceased – can leave a walking corpse with hellish halitosis. Fight it with a coffin-shaped pack of Death Mints that’ll keep your mouth cool as the grave. Breathe uneasily at perpetualkid.com. 3 NOOSE TIE $14.99 Feeling the corporate noose growing ever tighter around your neck? Let the world know how you feel with one of…

David Wellington likes to break the rules. He launched his writing career by releasing his revisionist zombie trilogy as a free online serial, then landed a proper book deal for the series after the fact. In those novels (Monster Island [RM#55],Monster Nation and Monster Planet), he re-envisioned the mechanics of the walking dead and imbued them with a brand new mythos. Since then, he’s been busy giving vampires a similar makeover. “Monsters are fun!” explains Wellington of his fondness for the classic creature archetypes. “They have their own agendas and they don’t get hung up on what other people expect them to do or ideas of good and bad or right and wrong. They want something. They aren’t afraid to go out and get it. That’s the definition of a…

Chilling the spines and raising the hairs of listeners from coast to coast, Suspense first appeared on CBS radio in 1942 and became one of medium’s most successful, longest-running programs. Offering thrillers, horror and mystery stories, along with occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy, “radio’s outstanding theater of thrills” attracted luminaries including Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, due to its high quality and first-rate production values. But as televisions became common fixtures in homes across North America, radio stars such as Lucille Ball and Jack Benny considered bringing their hit programs to the new format. Not surprisingly, CBS looked to its flagship anthology franchise as a potential heavyweight for the still-emerging technology. Broadcast live, Suspense premiered on CBS TV in 1949 and ran concurrently with…

IN THIS ISSUE IMPALER William Harms and Matt Timson Top Cow MADAME XANADU #11 Matt Wagner and Michael Wm. Kaluta DC/Vertigo HELLBLAZER #256 Peter Milligan and Giuseppe Camuncoli DC/Vertigo WEREWOLVES ON THE MOON VERSES VAMPIRES #1 OF 3 Dave Land and the Fillbach Brothers Dark House SALEM’S DAUGHTER THE AWAKENING #1 Ralph Tedesco and Caio Reis Zenescope POE #1 OF 4 J. Barton Mitchell and Dean Kotz BOOM! Last month we took a look at zombies, so it’s only fair that we now shift our focus to the zombie’s distant cousin, the vampire. After all, zombies and vampires have plenty of things in common. They’re both members of the living dead club, they maintain a steady diet of humans and both are incredibly prolific within the horror genre, especially in…

IS CHICAGO CURSED? EVERY CITY IS PLAGUED BY CRIME AND NATURAL DISASTER, BUT THE WINDY CITY’S HISTORY IS BLOODIER THAN MOST. THE GREAT Chicago Fire of 1871, the burning of the Iroquois Theater in 1903 and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 are all infamous events that have contributed to Chicago’s reputation as much as deep dish pizza and Southside blues. With such a violent history, it’s not surprising that Chicago is considered one of the world’s most haunted cities. Ursula Bielski knows Chicago’s ghosts well. The author of Creepy Chicago: A Ghosthunter’s Tales of the City’s Scariest Sites and other related books has turned her affinity for her hometown’s spectres into a popular business. For the past decade, Chicago Hauntings Inc. has thrilled tourists and locals alike with…

Issue #62 - $8 Issue #77 - $9 Issue #63 - $8 Issue #78 - $9 Issue #64 - $8 Issue #79 - $9 Issue #65 - $8 Issue #80 - $9 Issue #66 - $8 Issue #81 - $9 Issue #67 - $8 Issue #82 - $9 Issue #68 - $8 Issue #83 - $9 Issue #69 - $8 Issue #84 - $9 Issue #70 - $8 Issue #85 - $9 Issue #71 - $8 Issue #86 - $10 Issue #72 - $9 Issue #87 - $10 Issue #73 - $9 Issue #88 - $10 Issue #74 - $9 Issue #89 - $10…

THANKS FOR TAKING us back ten years to The Blair Witch Project. I am still traumatized from this movie. I want my freakin’ money back. They promoted the movie as being a true story, they got everyone pumped up to see it and it was a homemade movie that was complete crap! I will never forget when it was released to video and the stupid video clerks would tell people in line, “this really happened.” Bull crap! They better not make a sequel, or I will boycott the movie! The worst movie ever made and they suckered everyone and took their money! The producers are thieves and should go to prison! PAUL DALE ROBERTS – ELK GROVE, CALIFORNIA Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Paul, but the sequel…

They have always been here. Vampires. In secret and in darkness. Waiting. Now their time has come. In one week Manhattan will be gone. In one month, the country. In two months – The world. ACCORDING TO BIOCHEMISTS, VIRUSES ARE THE MOST ABUNDANT TYPE OF BIOLOGICAL A ENTITY ON THE PLANET. They exist in almost every ecosystem on Earth; potential microscopic killers that can only reproduce inside a host cell, which gets destroyed and repurposed by the virus, sometimes for nutrition. The disease is then transmitted by an infected organism and, if the virus has its way, it goes on to infect another, and another, and another, until there is no living being left to overcome. These disease-bearing organisms are known as vectors, or in the case of The Strain……

LYNCH’S LOOKING GLASS SURVEILLANCE Starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond and French Stewart Directed by Jennifer Lynch Written by Kent Harper and Jennifer Lynch Magnet Releasing Caution: though touted as horror, Surveillance gives off a standard cop-thriller vibe, complete with suited-up FBI agents Sam and Elizabeth, played by Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond. So then, does Jennifer Lynch’s first feature in fifteen years following Boxing Helena qualify as “horror” solely by dint of a couple of intensely violent scenes and a creepy tone à la her dad’s TV opus Twin Peaks? The answer is yes, it’s psychological horror. And it should be noted that it’s much easier to go the “psychological thriller” or “full-on horror” route than to attempt what Lynch and her co-writer, actor Kent Harper, do here by exploring…

GREG’S DREGS SLIME CITY GRINDHOUSE COLLECTION (1988 - 1999) Starring Robert Sabin, Tommy Sweeney and Mary Huner Written and directed by Gregory Lamberson Shock-O-Rama Disclosure: There’s a quote on the slipcase for this collection of director Greg Lamberson’s films attributed to me that reads “A splatter classic as important as Street Trash or The Toxic Avenger!” I feel that way not just because these films share similar gore galore, but because they’re all very New York-centric. That is essentially what this set is, the films Lamberson made about New York. His first, Slime City (1988), is about an art student (Robert Sabin) who moves into a rundown NYC apartment (Lamberson’s home at the time) and becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil alchemist named Zachary. The gritty inner city…

BEHE-MOTH MOTHRA (1961) Starring Frankie Sakai, Jerry Ito and Hiroshi Koizumi Directed by Ishirô Honda Written by Shinichi Sekizawa, Yoshie Hotta and Shinichirô Nakamura Sony Amidst a pantheon of fire-breathing dinosaurs, flying lizards and three-headed behemoths – not to mention their various robotic incarnations – who would think that one of the most enduring characters in Toho’s kaiju (“giant monster”) universe would be the colourful, Mother Earth-loving Mothra? Sony thinks so, as Mothra’s film debut finally gets its due on DVD with the Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection, which also includes The H-Man and Battle in Outer Space. All three films were directed by Ishiro Honda, the genre’s undisputed master; by the time Mothra was released in 1962, Honda had already directed Godzilla, its sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters,…

ANYONE WHO HAS SPENT TIME TRACKING DOWN some elusive volume by his favourite obscure horror author knows that there are myriad small presses catering to specific genre markets. Some of the best of these indie publishers, such Canada’s Ash-Tree Press, serve readers by resurrecting lost, overlooked and out-of-print classics in high-quality hardcover editions. These are often edited by ardent scholars and purchased by collectors who have an affinity for beautifully crafted volumes, as well as the haunting stories contained within. “We were hearing that lovers of classic ghost stories were frustrated at reading about collections which were difficult to find, and expensive if you did find them because they’d been published in fairly small runs decades earlier,” says Ash-Tree co-owner Barbara Roden of the company’s origins. The Ashcroft, British Columbia-based…

I don’t look like a horror fan. I don’t have any tattoos or piercings, nor do I dye my hair, paint my nails or wear a lot of black. Instead, I have chosen to express myself by channelling my energy – and much discretionary income – into transforming the tiny basement of my urban townhouse into a space that serves as both an office and my personal museum of horror. My obsession with collecting horror ephemera began back in the ’80s with VHS tapes. I grew up in a time when the only way I could get my horror fix was to scan the TV guide and negotiate the necessary time in front of the family set. Consequently, having a library of horror films I could watch at my leisure…

HIGHEST RATING IS THREE GRAPHICS PLAYABILITY SHIVERS NECROVISION PC The Farm 51 World War One is often referred to as The Great War. But let’s face it – there was really nothing ‘great’ about it. I mean, c’mon, there weren’t even any zombies, vampires or huge mechanical robots in it…until now! Necrovision is set in 1916 in the muddy trenches of The Somme. Here, players take on the role of Simon, an American doughboy who is about to discover that war really is hell. Simon’s first mission finds him lost behind enemy lines and facing something far scarier than poison gas and barbed wire: a legion of dead soldiers that suddenly rises up and staggers towards him. If that weren’t enough, he also uncovers a…

On the evening of June 17, monster makers gathered in Hollywood as legendary makeup artist Dick Smith was honoured for his lifetime achievements at a gala event held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The tribute highlighted Smith’s 64-year career of groundbreaking artistry on films such as The Godfather, The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, Ghost Story, The Hunger and Altered States, as well as his flawless old-age work on Amadeus in 1984, which earned him an Oscar. The standing-room-only audience of 1100 helped make this one of the largest gatherings of renowned effects artists, designers and technicians ever assembled under one roof. Representing the effects world were over 60 of the top individuals in the field, including Oscar-winning artists such as KNB toppers Greg Nicotero…

CASE NO.92 • A 34-year-old Bakersfield, California man stands accused of biting his four-year-old son’s eye out of his head and eating it. During the same spree of violence, the man also apparently attempted to chop off his own leg with an axe. • If you watch Day of the Dead closely, when Captain Rhodes is torn apart you can see a zombie yank what appears to be an entire raw chicken from his abdomen. • More traffic fatalities occur in July than in any other month of the year. The second worst month for vehicular deaths is February. • Before finding success as a vocalist, Rod Stewart worked for a time as a gravedigger. • A New York mother was recently arrested after allegedly setting her six-year-old daughter on…

IF YOU WANT A HORROR STORY, LOOK NO FURTHER THAN A NIGERIAN NEWSPAPER. Violence, corruption, kidnappings and even vigilante death squads are what many of the 146 million residents of this West African country deal with on a daily basis. The nation is in the midst of a profound shift, trying like the rest of the continent to shake off centuries of colonial rule and keep a hold on some form of stable non-military democracy. But in the midst of all this strife, Nigerian entrepreneurs have managed an incredible plot twist: creating the third largest film industry in the world. Even more surprising is that many Nigerian movies, at first glance, seem to fall into the horror genre. Affectionately called “Nollywood,” the Nigerian film industry generates thousands of movies every…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE TESTS HIS TOOLS TED NUGENT WOULD BE PROUD DIVINE INTERVENTION Brain Damage Films The crossbow is one of the most underused, underappreciated killing tools in the slasher arsenal. Though bulky and somewhat difficult to reload, it’s also very powerful, silent and works great at long distances. And it just so happens to be the weapon of choice in this sick little flick about a religious nut-job who’s stalking a group of pot-smoking, skinny-dipping twentysomethings in his misguided effort to cleanse the world of sinners – in the process comparing them to Survivor contestants. With decent performances from a cast of mostly unknowns, Divine Intervention is an entertaining low-budget outing that straddles the line between slasher film and dark comedy. Now, if only my prayers would be answered…

It looks like 2009 is shaping up to be The Year of Jason Voorhees. Everyone’s favourite hockey-masked maniac got a big-budget (albeit less than stellar) reboot, a decent two-disc documentary set (His NameWas Jason) and rereleases of his (and mama Pamela’s) first three bloodsoaked adventures. Now the next three special edition installments in the franchise have arrived on DVD and Blu-ray, courtesy Paramount: The Final Chapter, A New Beginning and Jason Lives. Directed with gusto by Joseph Zito (The Prowler), 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter picks up where Part 3 left off, with Jason (an uncredited TedWhite) being whisked off to the local morgue. Not content with cold storage, he returns to Crystal Lake. Naturally, a group of horny teens (including one played by Crispin Glover) have rented…

SLEEP LIKE THE DEAD DUDE, THIS MOVIE IS FUCKED UP! Okay, so that hardly passes as journalism, but it’s really the single most important thing you need to know about Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). It’s fucked up. Really, really fucked up. It’s more fucked up than, I dunno, some variety of really fucked-up thing. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is about a bed that eats people (and fried chicken, and apples – more on that later). The sexy, decadent four-poster with red velvet curtains lies in wait in a stately old stone house out in the boonies and gobbles up any and all unsuspecting travellers who randomly wander in off the road, Goldilocks-style, to grab some shuteye. (Hey, who among us can say they’ve never done…

GAGA FOR GARBAGE • LEROUX’S LEGACY • DROLLERY AND DREAD TRASHFIEND Scott Aaron Stine Headpress Few can legitimately lay claim to the lofty mantle of “trashfiend,” but make no mistake, Seattle-based scribe and musician Scott Aaron Stine is (gooble-gobble) one of us. “So many bad films, so few brain cells” is the mantra that kicks off his latest book, Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s and 1970s, a loving look back at the cheesiest, skeeziest movies, comics and pulp anthologies of the period. It’s not for everyone, but if, like myself, you’re the type who’s happier than a pig in poo to read five-page essays on the glories of The Green Slime, Blacula, The Crater Lake Monster and the filmography of William “One-Shot” Beaudine, this tome’s for you. It…

SOUNDTRACK LAID TO REST Deadbox MOVIESCORE MEDIA Under the nom de plume of Deadbox, Laid to Rest director Robert Hall, editor Andrew Bentler and co-star Thomas Dekker came together to craft their own musical vision of what it’s like to be chased and carved up by a lunatic called Chrome Skull. This downloadable album is far more sincere and chilling than its filmic counterpart, as the screeching violin motif in the opening credits perfectly evokes a single-minded maniac unafraid of soiling his black linen outfit with some viscera, and the bass drones have a nice stalk-’n’-slash feel. The score’s barbed, heavy metal style matches Laid to Rest’s gruesome kills, but there are also some nice pensive moments involving singular piano hits, as well as a brief melodic lament for the…

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