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Category Archives: Sinister Seven
April Snellings on January 16, 2012 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 [Rondal Scott, chief cook and bottle washer over at Strange Kids Club, pops in for a Sinister Seven with claymation wiz Lee Hardcastle. This is Rondal's first piece with us, so please return whatever you just swiped from him and make him feel welcome.]
Lee Hardcastle may not be a name that everyone is familiar with yet, but it will be. You’ve probably seen his work without even realizing it – maybe even passed it along to some friends because it was funny (The Thing with penguins, anyone?). Either way, you’re likely to be seeing a lot more of this up-and-coming director. His short film, T is for Toilet, is slated to appear later this year alongside films by Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace, Kill List), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film) and Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) in Drafthouse Films’ The ABCs of Death.
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April Snellings on January 13, 2012 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 Late last year I talked with actor/stuntman Kane Hodder about the biography he had just completed with co-author Michael Aloisi. Unmasked: The True Story of the World’s Most Prolific Cinematic Killer covers much of the territory you’d expect — Hodder’s youth, his first jobs as a Hollywood stuntman, his rise to cult fame as the man in the hockey mask — but it also offers surprisingly candid accounts of a few of the darkest episodes in the actor’s life, including his childhood run-ins with bullies and the near-fatal burn injury that almost ended his career just as it was getting started. I’ve been waiting for the right time to post the interview; I don’t think there’ll ever be a better occasion than 2012′s first Friday the 13th.
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April Snellings on January 10, 2012 |
Category: News and Events, Sinister Seven
 [Fabien Delage, the voice of Rue Morgue France, checks in with a new Sinister Seven.]
France recently carved yet another notch into its genre film festival belt with the first edition of the Paris International Fantastic Film Festival (PIFFF), which took place November 23 – 27 in the heart of the City of Light. The festival boasted a number of special guests, two juried competitions, and an impressive line-up of both feature-length and short films, including a number of French premieres. We managed to catch up with PIFFF artistic director and film programmer Fausto Fasulo during the festival and cajoled him into answering seven questions about the inaugural event…
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April Snellings on December 10, 2011 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 Sunday night marks the premiere of Bag of Bones, the latest in a long line of Stephen King adaptations helmed by director Mick Garris. The two-part mini-series stars Piece Brosnan as Mike Noonan, a writer who retreats to his family’s rural lake house to mourn the death of his wife (Annabeth Gish) and wrestle with a nasty, possibly career-ending bout of writer’s block. While he’s there, Mike has a number of ghostly encounters that might be connected to the disappearance of Sara Tidwell (Anika Noni Rose), a singer who vanished decades earlier. Bag of Bones also features an entertainingly dastardly turn from TV stalwart William Schallert, who has guest-starred at least once in every television series ever made.
Just four days after wrapping a post-production schedule so frantic that it required two editors working simultaneously to finish the film, a friendly and honest Garris offered himself up on the bloodied altar that is the Sinister Seven. (Warning: There are some spoilers in the interview below, specifically in Mick’s answer to my fourth question, so proceed with caution if you aren’t already familiar with the story.)
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Trevor Tuminski on December 7, 2011 |
Category: Audio Drome, Sinister Seven
 From the impossibly heavy and battered desk of frequent Audio Drome contributor “Metal George” Pacheco…
Those familiar with Britain’s doom metal scene are probably well aware of Cathedral, and the band’s penchant for horror-inspired lyricism devoted to such evocative, atmospheric ’70s fare as Armando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series of films as well as the Vincent Price vehicle Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm). What you might not know, however, is that vocalist Lee Dorrian and co. aren’t the only British doom act to cultivate a gruesome horror obsession. Orange Goblin frontman Ben Ward – whose band of hard drinkin’, hard rockin’ reprobates actually spent many years on Dorrian’s own record label, Rise Above – considers himself a horror lifer. In anticipation of Orange Goblin’s seventh full-length, A Eulogy for the Damned (out February 13 from Candlelight Records), Ward was more than willing to endure our famed Sinister Seven inquisition and go deep into the horror movies that have influenced the band and his own insatiable obsession. Read ‘em and weep! \m/G.
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April Snellings on November 16, 2011 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 Tonight might be your last chance to catch Nightmare Factory, Donna Davies’ awesome new documentary about Greg Nicotero and KNB EFX Group. If you’re a horror fan, this is required viewing. Besides offering a nuts-and-neckbolts look at the art (and business) of special makeup and creature FX, Nightmare Factory puts this stuff in a much larger context; it’s a very affectionate look at how guys like Dick Smith, Tom Savini and Nicotero shaped the modern horror film as we know it today. (Hit the jump to check out the trailer.)
If you’re in eastern Canada, you can see Nightmare Factory on The Movie Network tonight at 1:05am. (I believe it’s also available on demand through November 21.) In the meantime, check out Donna’s turn in the Sinister Seven hotseat!
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April Snellings on November 11, 2011 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 [Fabien Delage, our man on the ground in France, spent the Halloween season visiting some of Europe’s most notorious haunted houses. Though he’s been catching some uneasy sleeps in a few places with genuinely unsettling histories, his ghost tour included a stop at Le Manoir de Paris, France’s first North American-style haunted attraction. Fabien’s Sinister Seven with the house’s founder got a bit buried in the holiday frenzy, but, hey, it’s only 355 days until Halloween – maybe this will help get you in the spirit. With apologies to Fabien and Adil, here's their talk.]
The haunted house is a time-honoured Halloween tradition in North America, but it’s a relatively new concept in France. If you were anywhere near Paris for the Halloween season, though, Le Manoir de Paris was the place to be. During September and October, the country’s premiere haunted attraction brought thirteen macabre French legends to life, offering guests a terrifying look at the dark underbelly of the City of Lights. More than twenty actors went through an intensive training regimen to be able to play their character and chase unsuspecting guests through a nightmarish world of phantoms, hunchbacks, gargoyles, murderers and other legendary French fiends.
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April Snellings on October 20, 2011 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 Brothers Jim and Ed Terebus, proprietors of the record-setting Erebus haunted attraction in Pontiac, Michigan, recently and willfully submitted themselves to the indignities of the Sinister Seven. The grisly exchange is transcribed below.
How did you two get started in the scare business?
Jim: After I graduated from Oakland University about 30 years ago, one of my employers wanted to get a recruiting patch, so he made me join the Jaycees. I was operating their haunted house. That was something that had been established in the Jaycees tradition for a number of years, and I was excited about trying new things. I said, “Hey, guys, we’ve got something really great over here.” I was trying to work something out with them for the following year, but at that point the chapter closed and we decided to put together our own haunted attraction.
Ed: At that point, Jim was ten years older than I was. Jim was 28; I was 18 and graduating from high school. I thought it sounded like the coolest thing in the world, so I jumped on board and here we are, 32 years later, and we’ve gone from 1,200 square feet our first year – admission was $1.50 – to 2,800 square feet, to 3,400 square feet, to 9,800 square feet. Then in 1998 we bought the building that Erebus is in now. I actually sold my house, Jim re-mortgaged his, and then in 2005 we got into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest walk-through haunted house. We held onto that for five years until 2009. So we went from being a real tiny haunted house to the world’s largest. And we did in a very short period of time – just 30 years. [Laughs]
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April Snellings on October 18, 2011 |
Category: News and Events, Sinister Seven
 Earlier this month we posted about The Art of Fear, a two-part exhibition of artist films inspired by the horror genre. The first installment, a series of films and videos inspired by slasher and giallo films of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, took place on October 5. The second part of the program, Ghost Stories, goes down tomorrow night (Wednesday, October 19) at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema (136 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211).
These films represent a very different – and very cool – approach to the genre; most of them are unlike anything you’ve seen before. Curator Caryn Coleman was kind enough to let me poke around in her skull a bit…
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April Snellings on September 21, 2011 |
Category: Creepy Culture, Sinister Seven
 After selling out the debut issue of Strange Kid Comix back in April, the gang at Strange Kids Club is back with a second installment, just in time for Halloween. I tracked down Strange Kid Comix editor-in-chief and SKC siterunner Rondal Scott and stared at him without blinking until it got really awkward and he agreed to play a game with me – a game we like to call Sinister Seven. (Hit the jump for a five-page preview of the mag.)
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April Snellings on September 16, 2011 |
Category: Creepy Culture, Sinister Seven
 [P M Buchan drops in for a Sinister Seven with comic book artist and writer Ben Templesmith.]
New York Times bestselling comic book artist and writer Ben Templesmith has won the Spike TV Scream Award, the International Horror Guild Award and frequent Eisner nominations for his work. When you combine that with his reputation for being one of the best-dressed men in comics, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Templesmith is increasing the respectability of comic books as a medium, but his online biography gives a much keener insight into his personality: “Australian. In America. Writer, artist, rider of the Squid. Made career out of Werewolf sodomy and tranny Leprechauns. Eats babies.”
As the co-creator of 30 Days of Night with Steve Niles, Templesmith began his comic career in 2002 with an already-accomplished art style that reinvigorated horror comics after the stagnancy that was Bad Girl art at the end of the 1990s. Arguably the highest-profile artist in mainstream comics to never have worked for Marvel or DC, Templesmith agreed to speak to me about his affinity for dead bodies, booze and squid.
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April Snellings on July 12, 2011 |
Category: Cinemacabre, Sinister Seven
 Certain members of the Rue Crew are still a-feudin’ over the main attractions of the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature – Bowen and I aren’t allowed to “discuss” Death Proof in polite company anymore – but I think most of us can agree that the fake trailers were pretty damn rad. Thanks to the faux-trailer trend inspired by Grindhouse and projects like Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell, vintage genre/exploitation trailers are finally getting the love they deserve.
Keith Hodder, Peter Strauss and Jerrad Pulham are the latest heirs to the faux-trailer throne thanks to Van Gore, winner of the Hobo with a Shotgun fake trailer contest. Their film, a gory, over-the-top homage to the violent shockers of the ’70s, was included with last week’s Hobo DVD and Blu-ray release, so it seemed like a good time to chat up Hodder about the fine art of trailer trash.
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Trevor Tuminski on July 7, 2011 |
Category: Sinister Seven
 From the clunky and scarred steel desk of frequent Audio Drome contributor Metal George Pacheco:
Most revered by fans as Italian horror’s whipping boy – due mainly to his numerous and grisly death scenes – veteran screen and stage actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice has starred in numerous, certified genre classics, the most notable being Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (a.k.a. Gates of Hell) and his debut with Ruggero Deodato, The House On the Edge of the Park, both released in 1980.
I set up a blinding light, shone it right in his face and demanded answers to seven sinister queries about his career, the early goings-on with the forthcoming House sequel, and exactly why the Italian film industry hit a wall and bit the dust back in the ’90s. Enjoy!
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April Snellings on June 7, 2011 |
Category: Creepy Culture, Sinister Seven
 If you don’t watch True Blood, all I can say is this: I accept your decision, but I do not understand it. What’s not to like? It’s got fountains of blood and more sex than you can shake a sex stick at. Sure, it’s over the top at times, but when we’re talking about gore and nakedness, that’s a little like complaining that the bartender got too much rum in your Coke or that, sure, Motörhead is cool and all, but they’re just too damn loud. Plus, it’s backwoods Louisiana setting appeals to my delicate Southern sensibilities.
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April Snellings on May 25, 2011 |
Category: Cinemacabre, Creepy Culture, Sinister Seven
 Do me a favor, will you? Next time you catch me whining about how I don’t have time to write because I have four jobs or whatever, remind me about Greg Lamberson so I’ll shut the hell up.
I don’t know how Greg does it. I like to think of myself as an industrious sort, but poking around on his website (www.slimeguy.com) is enough to make me tired. Not only is he an accomplished and prolific horror novelist – he writes the popular Medallion Press occult detective series known as “The Jake Helman Files,” and his cops-and-werewolves novel The Frenzy Way will get the sequel treatment with next year’s The Frenzy War – but Greg is also the filmmaker behind the 1988 cult hit Slime City and its 2010 sequel, Slime City Massacre. Oh, and he’s a film festival organizer. And an indie film producer.
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