Table of contents for Issue 72 October 2007 in RUE MORGUE

Although a movie sequel to The Thing has yet to appear, the story has continued in the form of comic books, a video game and now a haunted house-style attraction: Universal Orlando’s The Thing – Assimilation. An addition to the Florida theme park’s 17th annual Halloween Horror Nights – running select nights September 28 to November 3 – it picks up 25 years after the events of the film. “The task we placed on ourselves was to continue the story in a completely new way but at the same time we needed familiar aspects to ground it in the mythos,” says Michael Aiello, lead of the creative team behind Assimilation. The attraction, which has been in the works since January, is situated in its own building and uses actors, as…

“It absolutely terrified me. It left such an impression. I think I seriously traumatized myself a little bit,” recalls Todd Cameron – organizer of London, Ontario’s annual Thingfest – of that summer in 1984 when he first saw director John Carpenter’s harrowing tale of alienin-fested isolation. “The very tip of [my interest in The Thing] started when my uncle rented the movie again and made me a copy of it. Being a ten-year-old kid and having my own VHS copy of it, that was my prized possession for years.” Now 32, Cameron has staged the annual Thingfest screening/fan get-together for the past six years. Born out of his desire to see the movie on film, he booked a local theatre, had the manager (who just happened to be a huge…

Forget linear time. Accept the paranormal. Now suit up as one of the seven-member Jericho Strike Squad and venture into a perverse virtual hell to stop an impending apocalypse brought on by an aberrant aborted creation of God. And, oh, in case you’re wondering, this isn’t just any blasé end-of-the-world scenario, this is the end times Clive Barker-style: brimming with monsters, mutation and madness, as well as blood that flows like wine. Jericho (in stores Oct. 23), a squad-based first-person shooter for the Xbox 360, PC and Playstation 3, marks Barker’s third foray into extreme horror gaming, following 2001’s critically acclaimed Clive Barker’s Undying and the never-released Demonik. Fans of the modern-day genre renaissance man will be pleased to discover that he was involved in every step of Jericho’s development,…

Vampires have been scaring humans for more than 300 years. From the earliest nosferatu of European folklore to the monster movie stars of the 1900s, they’ve remained the ultimate predators, immortal. But you’d never know it from watching most of the vamps onscreen these days. Somehow, in the past decade, these creatures of the night have become more like Count Chocula than Count Dracula. Their box-office scaring power consumed by zombies, vampires’ once monstrous personae has been slickly transformed into PG fetish model (Underworld), action hero (Blade) or prom date (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). No slight intended to the Buffyverse, but something is wrong when vampires are the least fearsome denizens in the realm of the undead. This fall, there is one film taking up the noble challenge to give…

Regular readers of Rue Morgue are undoubtedly aware that last September the fates of one Dr. Uwe Boll and our own Chris “Schizoid Cinephile” Alexander became inextricably entwined for all eternity. I was treated to the curious pleasure of travelling to Vancouver with the Schizoid One to witness his brutal beating at the hands of Boll in the highly publicized Raging Boll boxing event/media stunt. I have to admit though, as each one of the filmmaker’s punishing blows landed upon Alexander’s delicate noggin, I couldn’t help but like the mad German. Part of the festivities that weekend included a day on the set of Postal. Neither of us knew much about the loose video game adaptation and we certainly weren’t prepared for what we saw when we got there. First…

OVERLOOKED ARGENTO THE STENDHAL SYNDROME (1996) Starring Asia Argento, Thomas Kretschmann and Marco Leonardi Directed by Dario Argento Written by Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini Blue Underground Every single Argento film from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969) to Opera (1987) has been granted classic status, and every single film since then has more or less been savaged. One of these later period films is due for critical reassessment, however: The Stendhal Syndrome. A woman (Asia Argento) is overwhelmed by the artwork on display in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and experiences a vivid underwater hallucination. Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, she’s helped into a cab by a passerby, Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann), and returns to her hotel. There she discovers that she is Assistant Inspector Anna Manni, a detective…

Just over fifteen years have passed since Todd MacFarlane boldly decided to spawn his own supernatural anti-hero: Spawn, eponymous protagonist of the Image imprint’s flagship title (albeit not the publishing house’s top-seller for quite some time, now). Spawn has suffered, not just from wearing those Ghost-of-Christmas-Past chains, but from too many plot threads. The relentless, beyond-epic scope of the story was in no rush to wrap up and meandered without reason. The skinny: anti-hero Al Simmons was a hitman for the American government who was framed and assassinated; at the moment of his death, a deal made with a demon returned him to Earth to fight in the war against Heaven, resurrected as the all-powerful Hellspawn (Spawn to his friends). A decent enough premise, but one that took over twelve…

THE MEXICAN CINEMA OF DARKNESS Doyle Greene McFarland Pop scholar Doyle Greene continues his exploration of Mexican exploitation cinema with this look at six landmark films. Greene argues persuasively that even the trashiest Mexican cinema has always been about more than wrestling masks and camp Catholic imagery, a contention he backs up with in-depth readings of such films as Daughters of Darkness, The Mansion of Madness and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo. James Grainger EDGEWISE Graham Masterton Severn House When a distraught woman desperately trying to find the fiends who kidnapped her children (and nearly killed her) turns to a Sioux Indian shaman for help, she learns an important lesson: don’t fuck with a Wendigo! Edgewise hearkens back to Masterton’s 1976 classic The Manitou, and is a…

Each issue, I have both the pleasure and pain of determining the content of this space. Usually I have a couple of concrete ideas, or my esteemed editors steer something appropriate my way, but sometimes a column just plops into my lap. It was sitting amidst a small pile of material that had been set aside for my consideration: Inner Depravity Vol. 2. Frankly, I’m no longer shocked by anything I find beneath a Post-It note with “Gore-met” scrawled across it, but the cover art – an extreme close-up of a maggoty, football-laced vagina – certainly piqued my curiosity. Inside were two DVD-Rs (ID Vol.1 was also included) and a double-sided insert featuring the cover shot on one side and a mutilated woman with a large crucifix rammed into her…

FIRST OFF I wanted to say “screw you” Dave Alexander for the comment you made about the movie Underworld, saying it’s a dumb, flashy teen flick. It is nothing like that; did you actually watch the fucking movie? It’s not that bad. I guess you’re just into B-rated low-budget zombie movies. It seems this magazine loves and favours them. Secondly, I agree with what Rachel R. said in RM#71’s Post Mortem section. I would also like to see a female serial killer, someone as psycho as Michael Myers, not just a lesbian like Aileen Wuornos. I think Pamela Voorhees (Jason’s mom) is the only one. This is something that hasn’t been done and I’m not sure why. I also noticed the same ad for Antibodies ran twice. It is in…

+ A pet cat at a Providence, Rhode Island nursing home seems to possess the ability to detect imminent death. The usually unfriendly feline will curl up with a resident when they have less than four hours to live. The cat has been correct more than 25 times during its two-year stay at the home. +In 1965, a young John Carpenter published three fanzines; they were called Fantastic Film Illustrated, King Kong Journal and Phantasm, respectively. +In medieval times it was believed that malaria could be cured by having the patient swallow a spider wrapped in its own web. +Peter Jackson has said that his early films owe the most to Monty Python; he was so obsessed with the show as a youngster that he and his friend used to…

Kurt Russell has a habit of playing reluctant tough guy heroes, due in no small part to John Carpenter’s enduring faith in the actor’s abilities. When the director cast him as Snake Plissken (the extraordinarily sexy badass anti-hero us female cine-nerds live for) in Escape from New York, a cult icon was born, and Carpenter didn’t hesitate to call upon him once more for the role of RJ MacReady in The Thing, a character that was less a bad boy, but still an accidental hero, who just wanted to go up to his shack and get drunk until things started getting weird around the station. As MacReady puts it early in the movie, “Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be.” He’s then forced to take action when…

John Carpenter had scored all of his own films since Dark Star (1974), so it was remarkable that for The Thing he allowed someone else to sit in the composer’s chair. Choosing wisely, he enlisted Ennio Morricone to conjure his soundtrack of cold isolation and seething madness. Carpenter’s recognizable style consists of bass drones, pulses and simple rhythms, often rendered through electronic instruments. Sometimes funky (Assault on Precinct 13), but incredibly atmospheric and perfectly suited for his films of paranoia, his affinity for musical simplicity guided Morricone – who was best known at the time for his Sergio Leone western scores but had been working prolifically in nearly all genres – when the veteran Italian composer delivered a part orchestral, part synth score for the film. The best track remains…

It began, as so many terrifically terrifying events do, with a chain-saw. Twenty seconds of metal grinding against metal, an actual chainsaw blade attempting to cut through a recording studio door, bolts and all – this scream-inducing sound effect was the prelude to the second album from UK metal band Venom. And when fans first put their needles to that slab of vinyl in 1982, unleashing the raw power of an opening title track called “Black Metal,” they could feel that something new had just been born. More than 25 years later, we now know it was something wholly dreadful. Black metal music may have gotten its name from that Venom album, but it has since evolved into a serious subgenre all its own. Cloaked in sonic gloom and with…

Twenty-five years ago, as The Misfits struggled to walk among us with their first studio album and the metal world was mired in makeup, vying for a look that killed, there was virtually no outlet for extreme music, horror-based or otherwise. Enter Brian Slagel, a clerk for the now-legendary California metal music store Oz Records and creator of The New Heavy Metal Revue fanzine, who took it upon himself to form Metal Blade Records as a means of simply hearing his favourite local bands such as Metallica and Slayer. “I’m just a fan and I’m happy to play a role in getting some good bands exposure,” asserts the affable and rather humble 40-something Slagel. “None of us around back then ever thought metal would have become so big and still…

THE NIGHT ROB CAME HOME HALLOWEEN Starring Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell and Daeg Faerch Written and directed by Rob Zombie Dimension When it was first announced that Rob Zombie was remaking Halloween, it seemed like a good idea. Really. Forget the protests of the purists – what other filmmaker cares more about this increasingly ridiculous franchise? No one. However, much like asbestos, Crystal Pepsi and invading Iraq, it was a good idea at the time. So, now that the torches have fizzled and the pitchforks have been put away, let’s examine just what went wrong. There are the usual Rob Zombie film problems: characters who are screeching caricatures, obvious dialogue that actors struggle to make ring true, scenes designed more to accommodate genre icon cameos than to advance the plot,…

Traditionally, the flagship block of short films at Montreal’s FanTasia Film Festival is the Small Gauge Trauma program but that’s really only the tip of the dagger. Over the festival’s three-week duration, there’s a huge array of shorts assembled in additional programs that could easily be looked upon as an alternate short film festival running in parallel to the features. Collected here are three of the more maliciously memorable mini-movies that screened this year as stand-alone entries before accompanying features (which is undoubtedly the ideal way to experience the full impact of a short film). ELLIE 32 mins reluctantpictures.com Massive (by short film standards) at 32 minutes, Matthew Garrett’s Ellie is the sort of short that festival programmers traditionally ignore. But despite the epic length and its pea-soup thick…

CHANEY RINGS TRUE THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923) Starring Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller and Norman Kerry Directed by Wallace Worsley Written by Victor Hugo, Edward T. Lowe Jr. and Perley Poore Sheehan Image A sprawling, plot-heavy tale of romance, cruelty and tragedy set against 15th-century Paris, the 1923 silent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s influential novel is more than just a landmark early horror film – it’s one of the most important and revered silent films ever made by Hollywood. Conceived as a prestige picture for Universal (their biggest of the pre-talkie era), The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a true cinematic spectacle that incorporated a cast of thousands, a meticulously reconstructed Notre Dame cathedral and exhaustive period detail. But perhaps most importantly, it was the film that cemented…

Soundtrack HALLOWEEN Various HIP-O/UNIVERSAL For everyone who has wondered if the world needs a remake of Hal loween comes a new question: does the world need to hear any more Peter Frampton? Rob Zombie might be the only one who thinks the answer to both is yes. The soundtrack to his new Halloween is stuffed with wussy ’70s hits such as Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” and “LoveHurts” byNazareth, retro shock rock from Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and KISS, plus two inspired choices: a reprise of the original film’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and “Halloween II” by the Misfits, all divided by twelve random snips of dialogue. It’s a mishmash fit for the King of Collage that few others will enjoy. Thankfully, Zombie handed the job of redoing Carpenter’s…

TOUCH THE DEAD Nintendo DS Eidos Interactive As if being a prisoner at Ashdown Hole State Penitentiary didn’t already suck enough, after dodging shivs in the weight room and protecting your backside in the showers, the last thing you ever expected was to have to fight off a horde of zombies. Touch the Dead is a first-person shooter where you attempt to escape the prison while gunning down everything in sight. Because this is a Nintendo DS game, players utilize the stylus to point on the screen where they want to shoot. Your handgun has unlimited ammo and you have the ability to upgrade to a shotgun or machine gun (their limited ammunition must be used wisely, however). The problem with this title is that it gets too damn repetitive…

Lordi wraps first horror film When the masked Finnish heavy metal monster band Lordi took first prize at the prestigious Eurovision Song Contest with their anthem “Hard Rock Hallelujah” last year, no one expected the explosion that would follow. The band – which is like a loose fusion of KISS, Alice Cooper, White Zombie, Twisted Sister and GWAR – has since become huge in Europe, sporting a line of Lordi cola, candy, a credit card, dolls, comic books, an entire book about its mythology and now an upcoming monster movie. “When when I was, like, three-years-old and I started drawing pictures, I always drew monsters, so I always have been a huge fan of monsters or creatures,” Mr. Lordi, whose real name is Tomi Putaansuu, tells Rue Morgue on the…

Before The Thing, nobody knew who Keith David was. But horror fans sure as hell remembered him when it was over. As the imposing, not-to-be-fucked-with Childs (introduced in the script as “Six-four. Two-fifty. Black. A mechanic. Can be jolly. But don’t mess.”), David went blow-for-blow with Kurt Russell, and even the negative reviews of the film praised his performance. All the more remarkably, it was – aside from work as an extra – his debut film. “I had a wonderful agent, I auditioned and got lucky,” says David, who considered himself a long shot for the part. After all, he had never heard of John Carpenter when he got the script, and his previous training was in theatre. “I was used to auditioning for plays, not movies. We’re in the…

John Carpenter’s The Thing might as well have been called Rob Bottin’s The Thing. For if it was not for the then-22-year-old special makeup effects artist, whose work on The Howling blew Carpenter (as well as the rest of us) away, the movie would simply have not been the same. His achievements in those heady days were so groundbreaking that after The Howling and The Thing were released, journalists began using for the first time descriptions such as “never-before-seen” and “spectacle” in conjunction with his name and the word “makeup.” His jarring live-action werewolf transformation in The Howling captured a complete anatomical change in reality – no camera tricks – for the first time in horror history. Bottin suddenly found himself travelling across the United States, being interviewed by mass…

Bathory Bathory (Black Mark, 1984) Bathory’s self-titled debut pretty much laid it all down with very raw, primitive-sounding hymns that conjure up satanic imagery and themes to chilling and primal effect. For the Swedish group, it was all about grim atmosphere, which was enhanced by mysterious seventeen-year-old singer Quorthon and the fact that the group did no promo photos, no live shows and rarely any interviews. Not only did they help pioneer the black metal sound, they helped develop the subgenre’s media-unfriendly stance. CB Burzum Hyvis Lyset Tar Oss (Misanthropy, 1994) The most notorious character in black metal history, Burzum’s Varg Vikerness first spurred listeners to violent action (by inspiring church burnings and getting convicted of Mayhem guitarist Øystein Aarseth’s murder). This, the band’s third full-length release, is its crowning…

The comics industry has long mined the fertile fields of horror fiction for tales to adapt, but rarely has a more daunting adaptation been attempted than The Nightmare Factory, a graphic novel based on the works of highbrow horror scribe Thomas Ligotti (RM#48). While Ligotti’s grim and enigmatic stories have long been relished by connoisseurs of outré horror fiction, their peculiar plot structures and introspective tone make them seem unsuited to any medium beyond narrative prose. After all, showing the author’s hinted horrors with the explicitness of more visual mediums seems like a recipe for disaster. But recently Fox Atomic Comics accomplished what many thought impossible: successfully translating the author’s work into a graphic novel. The publisher must have sensed the inherent difficulty of channelling Ligotti’s precise prose into a…

VAMPS AND AMPS GOTHIC VAMPIRES FROM HELL Eclectic When Gothic Vampires from Hell enter a battle of the bands hoping to win a recording contract, they learn first-hand why the music industry is often called “soul-sucking.” The group does get signed but it turns out that the sexy vampires who own the label are more interested in having front man Draven help them enslave humanity as their new vampiric master. If you’re like me and love goth music and goth girls, you’ll be ecstatic that this DVD features songs from Rosetta Stone, Christian Death, Nosferatu and Leaether Strip, as well as some hot, scantily clad vampire chicks. But beware: although the soundtrack rocks, the acting is weak and apparently the entire budget was spent on fake fangs and fog machines.…

If you’re a faithful devotee of this column, you may know that a little film called Fright Night ranks very high on my personal top ten totem pole of terror. See, for me, writer/director Tom (Child’s Play, The Beast Within) Holland’s 1985 suburban retro vampire thriller stands as one of the pivotal excursions into sexually aware, and often quite frightening, vampire cinema. Back in September of 1985 I was on the cusp of my tenth birthday and it was my express desire to celebrate by rallying a few of my finest friends and, with parental accompaniment, see a new horror picture called – you guessed it – Fright Night. Popcorn was bought, seats were filled, lights grew dim, the screen screamed to life and, in a nearly empty theatre, I…

I Was A TV Horror Host John Stanley Atlas Books There’s a homemade scrapbook quality to John Stanley’s memoir I Was a TV Horror Host, which is by turns endearing and infuriating. Stanley, a long-time entertainment writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, also spent six years (1978 to 1984) hosting Creature Features, a weekly monster movie show broadcast by Oakland, California TV station KTVU. Stanley succeeded popular, original host Bob Wilkins and, like his predecessor, forewent the traditionally macabre horror host garb favoured by the likes of Elvira, Vampira and Zacherley in favour of plain everyday wear. Unlike Wilkins, though, he was a knowledgeable genre enthusiast who spent time on the set of the original Star Trek (for the Chronicle) and even directed his own horror film (1978’s Nightmare In…

There are few events more morbidly fascinating than Mexico’s national party with the dead. Día de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead”), the country’s famous cultural holiday, is believed to reunite dead relatives with their living families over the course of three days: October 31, November 1 (All Saints Day, honouring deceased children) and November 2 (All Souls Day, honouring deceased adults). The festival is a 3000-year-old surviving tradition of the country’s indigenous pre-Hispanic people, including the Aztecs, Toltecs, Maya and Olmec. It was originally celebrated for an entire month during August – the ninth month of the Aztec solar calendar – and was said to be presided over by the mythological underworld goddess Mictecacihuatl, known as “Lady of the Dead,” whose purpose was to watch over the bones of…

The task of setting H.P. Lovecraft’s near plotless tales of unspeakable horror, indescribable intergalactic beings, occult conspiracies unknown to conventional historians and architectural vistas that defy Euclidian geometry and human technology to music seems nearly impossible, but a surprising range of rock bands have been mining his work for inspiration since the 1960s. The granddaddy of all Lovecraft bands is the aptly named H.P. Lovecraft, who scored a couple of cult hits with their acid anthems “White Ship” and “At the Mountains of Madness” (inspired by two of HPL’s stories), but a midnight troll through the darker works of Cradle of Filth, Rage, Celtic Cross and many other goth and metal bands will net you dozens of Lovecraft references, including Metallica’s “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should…