RUE MORGUE

Nothing makes this quadragenerian feel older than seeing the kids today online; they dress a lot like I did back in the '90s, but the resemblance ends there. Tikking their Toks, crushing their candy, their relationship to digital technology is something we have yet to fully comprehend – and probably won’t until Elon Musk launches Skynet and my Google Mini achieves full sentience. “Alexa, how close are we to Judgment Day?” “Sorry, I don’t understand. Would you like to hear the first rule of Fight Club?” I’m no technophobe, kids. Like many elder millennials, my first foray into video gaming was the boxy grey-and-white NES system, sold in a bundle with two games, two controllers, and a preposterous plastic gun to shoot pixelated ducks. As a young adult, living on a…

NOW THAT Rue Morgue is turning 25 years this year I wanted to tell you how floored I am. I never thought in my wildest dreams I would still be reading it in 2022 – that’s a major achievement! Your publication has really taken wing, and has changed and morphed throughout the years but has always remained the barometer for what is happening in horror at home and abroad. I remember back in the days when it was a black and white zine – humble beginnings – and yes, I’ve been a reader that long. Congratulations on all you do, Rodrigo, you have changed the landcape for horror around the world and for that and so much more, I salute you brother! ALLAN JAMES POWELL, VIA EMAIL HI ANDREA. Just digging into…

WEIRD STATS & MORBID FACTS During World War II, the US government almost went ahead with “Project Fantasia,” wherein glow-in-the-dark foxes would be deployed to frighten the Japanese. In the UK, the 1932 film Vampyr was the first to receive the “H” classification for “likely to horrify anyone under 16.” The tragic launching of the HMS Albion in 1898, where 38 people were drowned by the resulting bow wave, is believed to be the first disaster caught on film. Chuck “Entertainment” Lamb, a programmer from Ohio, has become famous for playing dead bodies in film and television. In 1908, George Millet died while fleeing the grasp of six young women intent on giving him kisses for his fifteenth birthday; as he fell forward, the point of an ink eraser in his shirt pocket pierced his…

PINHEAD READS PIERCING FANS INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY When Clive Barker debuted his 1987 splatterpunk classic Hellraiser, mainstream audiences must have assumed the exquisitely mutilated cenobites could only have emerged from the darkest recesses of the novelist’s imagination. But as creative as Barker is, he wasn’t alone in his imaginings of the ways in which flesh can be explored, altered, and violated. In fact, when collaborating with his makeup team to design the agents of Hell, Barker had a real-life point of reference: Piercing Fans International Quarterly. PFIQ started as a black-and-white zine distributed at The Gauntlet, America’s first body piercing-only studio, opened in West Hollywood by Jim Ward in the mid-1970s. Keegan Williams of OUT FRONT Magazine described Ward’s work as pioneering the intersection of kink, queerness, and piercing culture, influenced by the…

Canadian-born Sam Snyders found acting early in life: after numerous commercials and voiceover gigs, he landed the role of Tom Sawyer in the 1979 TV show Huckleberry Finn and His Friends. On the strength of that series, director Lew Lehman cast him as the precocious Jamie in his horror film The Pit. In complete contrast to Tom Sawyer, Jamie is weird, anti-social and has some very dangerous associates. When not talking to his teddy bear or peeping on his babysitter, he is feeding the creatures he found in a hole in a nearby forest – and they have rather particular appetites. After The Pit, Snyders quit acting and went back to his first love of dance. After decades of performing, he became a choreographer and then an instructor in his…

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