Sinister Seven

[Richard Gladman, founder of the Classic Horror Campaign and the voice of Rue Morgue UK, contributes this Sinister Seven interview with UK actress Dani Thompson. For more on the UK horror scene, be sure to check out RM#134, on stands now! Our special British horror issue features The Wicker Man, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, A Fantastic Fear of Everything, Harold's Going Stiff, Sightseers and much more.]

Dani Thompson is a rising star in the world of British indie horror, appearing in several low-budget shorts and feature films as well as having her own column in digital horror magazine Haunted: After Dark. Her films include Three’s a Shroud (2011), Zombie Women of Satan 2 (2012) and the upcoming slasher flick Serial Kaller (2013) alongside scream queens Suzi Lorraine and Debbie Rochon. Rue Morgue recently caught up with Dani to talk about navigating the bloody waters of the horror business…

The Guillermo del Toro-produced Mama hits DVD and Blu-ray this week (May 7, to be exact), so it seems like a perfect time to share this video Sinister Seven with director/co-writer Andrés Muschietti. The interview was conducted by Fabien Delage, the voice of Rue Morgue France, at this year’s Gérardmer International Film Festival. Fabien and Andrés chatted about turning the director’s popular short into a feature film, working with del Toro, and pulling the strings on Mama‘s freaky human puppets…

[Rue Morgue’s French correspondent, Fabien Delage, recently spoke with filmmaker Alexandre Aja about a few of his high-profile genre efforts.]

Alexandre Aja first turned heads on the horror scene with his fantastically brutal 2003 slasher flick High Tension, before going on to helm gory, big-budget remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha. Aja recently took the reins on the screen adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2010 novel Horns, and served as producer and co-writer on director Franck Khalfoun’s highly anticipated remake of the grungy 1980 cult classic Maniac (out this summer from IFC Midnight).

Rue Morgue recently caught up with Aja to discuss the strange, bloody world of sequels, remakes and adaptations…

[Only a few days left to pick up the March issue of Rue Morgue, which features a cover story on horror legend Arthur Machen! To give you a primer on one of the pioneers of horror fiction, Michael Doyle talks Machen with author Laird Barron (who's featured in our April issue, on stands Monday.)]

Few writers have preserved the spirit of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft with such unerring aptitude as Alaskan-born author Laird Barron. With a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, and two award-winning collections to his name (a third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, will be published by Night Shade Books this April), the 42-year-old scribe has already established himself as the most exciting and powerful new voice in horror literature. Feted as the heir apparent to Machen and the other great masters of weird fiction, Barron shares his profane passion for The Laureate of Evil with Rue Morgue.

[Shawn Macomber checks in from sunny Florida with a new Sinister Seven.]

Jaie Laplante can still vividly recall how he felt exiting a perspective-altering midnight screening of Candyman at the Toronto International Film Festival as a young film student. “It was my first exposure to a genre film that could transcend what we think of as B-movie clichés and be powerful and emotional and upsetting in the same ways I found good art films or finely crafted Hollywood movies to be,” he tells Rue Morgue. Now as the executive director of the Miami International Film Festival, Laplante strives to pay that infernal gift forward with a tastefully curated special block of genre films dubbed Mayhem…

There’s already a Midnight Syndicate Sinister Seven with Edward Douglas from 2011 done by the talented Sean Plummer. So why do another one?

The last interview covered Midnight Syndicate’s movie The Dead Matter as well as their collaboration with Destini’s Beard on the album A Time Forgotten. This time around, we’re going to delve into the duo’s origins. Who cares? You should, if you like Halloween and horror themed music…

[Shawn Macomber contributes this Sinister Seven with Ed Glass-Donnelly, writer/director of The Last Exorcism Part II, in theatres today.]

Considering the epic conflagration that closed out the surprisingly excellent 2010 found footage film The Last Exorcism, director/screenwriter Ed Gass-Donnelly was a superlative choice to call up for resurrection duty: His much-praised 2010 effort Small Town Murder Songs not only deftly dealt with the (sometimes menacing) eccentricities engendered by isolation and religious fervor, it also showcased a bold and evocative style that existed outside of genre boundaries but could clearly be put to good use within them – an essential quality if The Last Exorcism Part II was going to avoid listing into overly self-referential hack-work territory…

[RM contributor Alexandra West checks in with a shiny new Sinister Seven.]

Horror is often relegated to the cobwebbed corners of popular culture. It’s dismissed, misunderstood or deemed a guilty pleasure. But the EMP Museum in Seattle, Washington has given the genre its due. With their exhibit Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film, senior curator Jacob McMurray, along with guest curators Roger Corman, John Landis and Eli Roth, has created an interactive and sensory experience that illuminates the history of horror cinema for gore-hounds and the casually curious alike.

The exhibit incorporates props such as the axe from The Shining, the Xenomorph creature suit from Alien and the Creature From the Black Lagoon’s mask as well interactive elements including The Scream Booth, where photos of shrieking visitors become part of the exhibit, and artist Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monster installation, which invites visitors to turn their own shadows into projected monsters…

Writer, director and producer Don Coscarelli was well ahead of his time when fathoming Phantasm back in 1974. It was a film that tackled multiple phobias, not the least of which included abandonment, bereavement and separation anxiety. Above all, we, the audience, were reminded that “death” was not a slasher, but a stalker – a stalker that we will all inevitably meet. Of course, death’s personification – the Tall Man – demanded some theatricality: A mortician who bled yellow, commanded a fleet of flying, razor-wielding, silver spheres, whose agenda was to abduct the dead and turn them into his personal army of zombie-dwarves – and the same fate awaited any living person who happened to get in his way!

[Fabien Delage, the voice of Rue Morgue France, was mightily impressed with Death of a Shadow, a short film about a man who collects the shadows of the dying. Fabien checks in with a Sinister Seven with the film’s director, Tom Van Avermaet, whose short has been stirring up considerable buzz on the festival circuit.]