Table of contents for Issue 76 March 2008 in RUE MORGUE

Jonce asked George Romero where he got the idea for Night of the Living Dead. “I stole it – from Richard Matheson,” he replied with a laugh, obviously referring to Matheson’s landmark 1954 sci-fi/horror novel I Am Legend. I love Romero’s honesty, though, because it illustrates something significant about the genre: there’s a huge difference between homage (or inspiration) and outright theft. Sometimes it’s difficult to argue whether something has been borrowed or stolen because there are all sorts of nebulous factors involved. For example, buying the rights to something and bastardizing it isn’t considered theft because those creative rights were purchased from the author. Despite the rage and contempt I felt after seeing I Am Legend (see review on p.38), irresponsible, disrespectful and inexcusable dreck like that gets away…

Since unleashing his outrageous debut No Skin Off My Ass in 91 and with successive art-porn assaults such as Hustler White (1996) and The Raspberry Reich (2004) in his filmography, Bruce LaBruce has gained international notoriety as the enfant terrible of Canadian gay cinema – a reputation that now encompasses horror, with his latest: Otto; or, Up with Dead People. The awkwardly punctuated title (a nod to Herman Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities) refers to the two films within the film. The first one, “Otto,” is a documentary about a boy who may or may not be a zombie. The second, “Up with Dead People,” is a political zombie porno flick. Both films are directed by an avant-garde lesbian filmmaker character named Medea Yarn (an anagram for legendary…

They say the sky’s the limit when you’re writing a script, so let your imagination run wild, which, if you’re making an indie film, is total bullshit. The real imagination involves marrying your key concepts with the reality of your budget. How can you incorporate free locations? Who do you know willing to donate time or equipment? Can your friends act? How can you show a lot for a little? Nick Damici understands this better than most. Not only did he co-write the script for Mulberry Street, he stars in it, and half of the film is shot in his small New York City apartment. “My apartment served as Clutch’s, Charlie and Frank’s, and Kay and Otto’s, with, I think, three repaint jobs plus redressing,” he points out, listing off…

If you’ve never seen any of the Prom Night “sequels,” Gentle Reader, the first thing you need to know is that they bear no resemblance to the original whatsoever. For that alone, let us be eternally grateful. The Edmonton and Toronto-shot Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 (1987) originally had the decidedly non-franchise title The Haunting of Hamilton High, but the re-branding of the film as a would-be Prom Night sequel was a condition of producer Peter Simpson’s distribution deal with the Samuel Goldwyn organization. Directed by Canadian TV veteran Bruce Pittman and scripted by Canuck B-horror stalwart Ron Oliver, the film is very much a child of its time (in the late ’80s, the slasher film was dead and the post Elm Street rubber-reality ghost story ruled the genre).…

“Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.” Hunter S. Thompson Eraditionally, the vehicle that delivers one’s remains to the graveyard is a big, boxy hearse. But if you are a motorcycle enthusiast, one last ride on the open road is the only way to go. Hearse bikes didn’t start out as a sleek alternative to death cabs, though. Their history dates back to World War II, when the sidecar on a Norton motorcycle was removed and replaced with a flatbed for a coffin or stretcher and used to transport casualties or the deceased off the battlefield. Though many different versions appeared over the years, its first practical application as a funerary vehicle was developed in England and Australia shortly after the war, where it…

“On a space station, title substance – exposed to blood – grows into redeyed, tentacled monsters that quickly multiply and threaten to spread to Earth. Not as much fun as it sounds.” – Leonard Maltin’s 2003 Movie & Video Guide. Well, neither is your mama, Leonard, you consummate fucking pussy, so I’ll take it from here, m’kay? The Green Slime – a.k.a. Battle Beyond the Stars, Il Fango Verde, After the Destruction of Space Station Gamma: Big Military Operation (hm… wonder which was the Japanese title?) – is a paradox on many levels. It’s a Japanese film written by Americans, starring American actors (not to mention American extras, most of whom were US military personnel stationed in Japan at the time). It’s a ’50s-style futuristic alien invasion film produced at…

Brian Keene is not just “that zombie guy.” Sure, he wrote The Rising, one of the most successful zombie novels of the last decade, one that helped kickstart the undead revival, but in the years since that book’s 2003 release, Keene’s proven himself a versatile talent in more corners of the genre than simply those that house the corpses of lumbering dead. “The most obvious result [of The Rising’s success] is that I’m no longer ducking creditors,” says Keene, with a laugh. “No, seriously, I’ve seen people credit The Rising, 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead with re-energizing the long-dormant zombie mania. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if so, as a fan myself, I’m honoured. What I do know is that its success introduced me…

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grandguignol.com Curious about Grand Guignol? Well, look no further than this website by Thrillpeddlers, a San Francisco theatre company that translates and recreates the old macabre Parisian stage shows. It also houses a list of plays, a collection of antique promo posters, an archive of books and articles that examine the movement’s history. midnitemoviesdvd.com MGM recently launched this site for their Midnight Movies line. It not only catalogues the dozens of (mostly) double features in the series, it also offers trailers, movie trivia and some spankin’ retro drive-in design. michaelknost.com Meet Noctem Aeternus, a new PDF horror mag that specializes in horror fiction – the first issue contains tales by Ramsey Campbell, Cherie Priest and Michael Laimo – but also includes interviews, reviews, an art feature and regular columns on…

MARVEL ZOMBIES ACTION FIGURES $19.99 You know your zombie virus is good when it infects mutants and superheroes, crosses dimensions and spawns a cottage industry. The latest Marvel Zombies spinoff: ghoulishly detailed action figures of undead Spider-man, the Incredible Hulk and Colonel America – complete with tasty chunks of the Silver Surfer’s body. Do whatever a zombie Spider-Man can at diamondselecttoys.com. STICKS AND STONES ONESIES $20-$24 CAD If the neighbours keep you up all night chanting “hail Satan” and your nanny won’t get rid of her mean dog, chances are your child is the Antichrist. No worries, though – these onesies will skewer the heart of even the craziest priest and keep your demon spawn nice and toasty to boot. It’s all for you, Damien, at mysticksnstones.com. VIRTUAL FORMALDEHYDE/DEAD AQUARIUM…

Maple syrup slashers – those Canadian-made horror pics produced in the wake of John Carpenter’s Halloween – are mostly forgotten, overshadowed by the exploits of their knifewielding American cousins. An exception, though, is the fondly remembered 1980 cult flick Prom Night. It remains a classic example of the slasher genre despite detractors who assert that it’s nothing more than a poorly executed version of Halloween with Carrie and Saturday Night Fever thrown in. “It’s Halloween in a high school. I won’t disagree with that,” confesses the film’s director, Liverpool-born Paul Lynch, noting that John Carpenter’s iconic horror film was itself born from Bob Clark’s Canuck proto-slasher Black Christmas. “Black Christmas led to Halloween and Halloween led to Prom Night.” The film opens with a childhood game gone tragically awry when…

Michael Myers, you Halloweenie, I’m not afraid of you. The last time you gave me the creeps was, well, it was the first time you gave me the creeps. Your franchise stands as walking, stalking, shuffling proof of the law of diminishing returns. Of course, I have seen every installment, because clearly I am a glutton for predictability. Or am I? Students, please turn to p.19 of issue #2 of the comic book miniseries Halloween: Nightdance [pictured], and we’ll see if we can’t all learn something from writer Stefan Hutchinson and artist Tim Seely, who have given the boogeyman back his boogie. Here’s the question you are all asking: What the hell is Michael doing to his victim, and why? “It was only in the original Halloween movie that Michael…

“Aberrant” means to stray from the right or normal way, and that’s just what James Fisher, a Torontobased musician and visual artist set out to do by creating what he calls a “soundtrack adaptation” of Abarat, Clive Barker’s twisted fantasy book for teens. Fisher, who’s familiar to Rue Morgue readers for his Disfigures of Speech illustrations, makes music that invites flattering comparisons to the twisted soundscapes of Mike Patton’s (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Peeping Tom) more experimental output and the octopus-like sampling and mashing powers of drumand-bass guru Amon Tobin. But the influence of those and other new music pioneers doesn’t explain the circus-like, otherworldly ambience of Aberrant. Complete with recurring chicken noises, its ingenious nods to industrial, goth, jazz, classical and avant-garde forms, is that rare beast: a…

Madness, mayhem and the macabre return to the stage of Toronto’s Bad Dog Theatre on March 1, when improv comedy revue The Late Late Horror Show begins its fourth season of late-night lunacy and terror. The high-energy weekly production is a live spoof “horror movie” complete with severed limbs and copious amounts of stage blood. A group of regular performers sponta-neously improvises a 90-minute show from two elements, picked by the audience from two hats at the beginning of the evening: a monster and a location. The actors devise lengthy lists of creatures and venues prior to the show (after discovering that taking suggestions from the audience, although fun, did tend to result in an overwhelming number of vampire and zombie stories). Past titles include “The Desert of the Sirens,”…

As the dust settles, 2007 may well be remembered as the year of the apocalypse horror film. The Mist, The Signal, Diary of The Dead, Right At Your Door, REC and the “re-imagined” I Am Legend all burst through hearts and minds with character-driven, too-close-to-home depictions of society falling apart. Each is further linked by focusing on the very moment that life as we know it begins to shift into a near-animalistic maelstrom of distrust, loss, anger and terror. Upon viewing a succession of these works (well, perhaps not I Am Legend!), it’s clear that our increasingly unstable times have given rise to an urgency and emotional purity not seen in genre cinema since the heyday of Vietnam-fuelled ’70s horror. While Frank Darabont’s masterful adaptation of King’s The Mist deservedly…

Equally admired and vilified, Paul Zaza and Carl Zittrer’s score for Prom Night is anything but typical. Although it contains the expected ominous orchestral cues, includes some sombre pop ballads and rock cues, it has earned its cult following for its outrageous disco songs. Producer Peter Simpson, a man not known to mince words, told Zaza to create six disco tracks as similar as possible to chart toppers blasting from AM radios at the time. Zaza, a Genie Award winner (for Bob Clark’s Murder By Decree) faced what would be one of his most difficult scores to complete. “Peter Simpson had absolutely no concept of the process,” says Zaza. “He told me, ‘We need these disco songs. We can’t [afford] the rights to them, so you’re going to have to…

“Lovecraft’s work has always cried out to be illustrated,” writes director and frequent Lovecraft adapter Stuart Gordon (From Beyond, Re-Animator) in his preface to A Lovecraft Retrospective, a new coffeetable crusher of a book that celebrates the wide and varied works of art inspired by the unspeakable horrors, tentacled beasties, strange locales and indescribable Old Ones that haunt the author’s tales. Covering 85 years of Lovecraftian illustration, the 12 x 15.5-inch book not only celebrates and faithfully reproduces the best artistic imaginings, it also takes stock of lesser and lesser-known works and their own importance to the author’s literary legacy. “I wanted a retrospective from the earliest art to the present day,” explains Jerad Walters, Centipede Press owner and the book’s editor. “I wanted people to have a book where…

Adapting one of modern horror cinema’s most important films for the graphic medium, dream team Mark Verheiden and John Bolton wisely opted to tweak the story of the Evil Dead to suit their own strengths. Writer Verheiden fleshes out the five main characters to terrific success, allowing even the knucklehead Scotty some growth via his telling of a made-up “urban legend” (issue #1). Master painter Bolton is at the top of his game too, cherry-picking the perfect iconic moments for full-page splashes – the decapitation of Kandarian Linda (issue #3) should be turned into a poster immediately. Diehard fans will miss the “Evil Dead cam,” but really, is such a thing executable in the panelled medium? I’m with Bolton: do what you can do, and do it well. And offer…

Michael Norman and Beth Scott TOR Michael Norman and Beth Scott TOR Torrid tales of murder and madness abound in these two volumes of the Haunted America series, both recently released in paperback. Haunted America (the first of four collections of ghost stories from across the continent) was originally published in 1994 and is the strongest of the bunch. Conversely, Haunted Heritage (the last) is a bit of a disappointment if you’ve read any of the others, since it consists of tales that presumably weren’t strong enough to make it into the earlier collections, and also contains a good deal of reprinted material. Haunted America is an eclectic, rambling book, which makes it better for dipping into than for reading straight through. It suffers from the same peculiar organization that…

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