The People Under the Stairs is a 1991 American comedy horror film written and directed by Wes Craven and starring Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, A. J. Langer, Ving Rhames and Sean Whalen.

Poindexter Williams, known as “Fool”, is a resident of a Los Angeles ghetto. He and his family are being evicted from their apartment by their landlords, the Robesons. Leroy offers to plan a robbery of the Robeson’s residence in order to get medical care for Fool’s mother, who has cancer, and to get even with them. The Robesons, who refer to themselves as “Mommy” and “Daddy”, live in a large home with their daughter, Alice.

Leroy and his associate Spenser take Fool to the house for reconnaissance, posing as a Bear Scout, but Mommy will not let him in. Spenser, posing as a municipal worker, gains entry, but arouses suspicion with Mommy. When the Robesons leave the home, Fool and Leroy became suspicious when Spenser doesn’t return and decide to break in. Fool ventures into the dungeon-like basement and finds Spenser dead on the floor and a large group of strange pale children in a locked pen.

Terrified, Fool flees and reunites with Leroy as the Robesons return; Leroy is discovered and shot to death by Daddy, while Fool is drawn into another section of the house, where he meets Alice. She tells him that the people in the cellar are the former children of her parents who have disobeyed one of the three “see/speak/hear no evil” rules of the household. The children have degenerated into cannibalism to survive…

“A pretense of social responsibility and most of the necessary tension get lost in a combination of excessive gore and over-the-top perfs… House of horrors includes cannibalism, McGill cavorting around in a leather suit and a blood-crazed Rottweiler. Cartoonish villains quickly thaw pic’s initial chill, in the process trivializing the more serious issues (child abuse, poverty) that might have been raised.” Variety

“Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.” Vincent Canby, New York Times

” … a fascinating, fairly successful slice of social horror. It wears its political ideals as openly as a George Romero film (though with more subtlety, thank God) as the film rips into the class system ans social inequality in America. The film markedly compares the miserable lives of the slum residents, who live in overcrowded, crime-ridden buildings and are effectively doomed to a life of poverty and petty criminality, with the luxurious lives of those who own the buildings and see their tenants as barely even human, unwilling to be even slightly flexible when they struggle to pay their bills. The film’s contrast between the black underclass of the ghetto and the white upper class – an upper class morally and mentally rotted through in-breeding, it seems – is present throughout the film, though for the most part Craven avoids overdoing it.” David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Buy The People Under the Stairs on Arrow Video Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.co.uk | DVD from Amazon.com

Arrow Video Blu-ray Special Features:
High Definition digital transfer of the film by Universal Pictures
Original uncompressed Stereo 2.0 audio
Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Audio commentary with star Brandon Quentin Adams, moderated by Calum Waddell
Fear, Freud and Class Warfare: Director Wes Craven Discusses the Timely Terrors of The People Under the Stairs
Behind Closed Doors: Leading Lady A.J. Langer Remembers The People Under the Stairs
Silent But Deadly: Co-Star Sean Whalen on The People Under the Stairs
Underneath the Floorboards: Jeffrey Reddick, creator of The Final Destination series, recalls the lasting impact of The People Under the Stairs
Original Trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Stephen R. Bissette
Collectors booklet featuring new writing on the film, illustrated with original archive stills

” … written and shot without the fear of studio interference, and that shows in the way it gamely switches between playful and menacing tones, action and social commentary – Craven’s exploration of the rich-poor divide making the movie as relevant now as it was in the early 90s. Admittedly, not all of the creative choices work – Fool and Alice’s constant brushes with Prince, the Robesons’ bloodthirsty dog, become grindingly repetitive, for example, and the last third brings with it some glaring plot holes – but it’s a far more interesting, satisfying film than, say, Shocker (1989) or Vampire In Brooklyn (1994).” Ryan Lambie, Den of Geek

“Over the last couple of decades, The People Under The Stairs has shown some staying power in the culture, inspiring a hip-hop outfit of the same name, and it’s distinctly of a time when left-leaning filmmakers were venting their anger over a lost decade. It also affirms Craven as carrier of the Romero torch, a genre director who likes to operate on one more than one level. But there’s a lesson here: You can program meaning into horror, but you have to program some thrills, too.” Scott Tobias, AV Club

“For anyone who likes a good ‘stick it to the Man’ story, or has questioned the hypocrisy of the ‘American Dream’, Wes Craven’s fantastic wry look at how the perfect family life is not always as it seems, The People Under the Stairs, is a must watch. The film which takes the form of a dark and twisted fairytale, not unlike the story of Hansel and Gretel, is compelling and creepy yet still manages to inject humour and optimism into a sometimes hard to stomach subject matter. It is not difficult to see why The People Under the Stairs is such a cult classic, it oozes more originality than you can shake a stick it, is beautifully filmed, and the characterisations of the main protagonists are outstanding.” Stigmatophilia

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Human-Faced Dog (original title: ザ・人面犬 (The Jin-Men-Ken) is a 1990 Japanese fake documentary about an urban myth.

Dave Jackson from the wonderfully entertaining blog Mondo Exploito explains:

Look at that video cover. How could I resist? The cover promises a clusterfuck of prosthetic effects, gore and sleazy shot-on-video cinematography. It breaks that promise something rotten, but before I get into the review, I suppose I should briefly explain what a Jinmenken is. Japan’s urban legends and folklore are far removed from the Western world. There’s the yōkai, of course, but there’s also oddities that pop up every few decades like the Kuchisake-onna. Other than the anus-sucking kappa, there’s no folktale stranger than the Jinmenken, the Human-Faced Dog. I won’t go into too much detail here (if you’re really interested, check out this article), but, in short, the Human-Faced Dog is exactly what its name suggests: a human-faced dog.

The legend of the Human-Faced Dog goes all the way to Tokugawa era Japan. In stories, the Human-Faced Dog is initially mistaken for a normal, mangy dog, but as the unlucky passerby gets closer the human features become apparent. Sightings are always at night, and the dog, if approached, will morosely tell people, “Leave me alone”. The Human-Faced Dog took on a new life in more recent times, its peak of popularity in the late 80s and early 90s, where it was claimed to have been seen on highways, chasing cars at enormous speeds and causing car crashes. This brings us to JVD’s The Human-Faced Dog. Released towards the tail end of Jinmenken fever, this video is presented as a faux-documentary exploring the folklore behind the urban legend. I say faux-documentary, but I don’t know if that’s the right term. The Human-Faced Dog betrays its own format. It’s mostly comprised of terribly fake interviews with goofy characters blabbering endlessly about their experiences with the Jinmenken intercut with footage of a puppet hiding in bushes, then suddenly we’re thrust into a making of said Jinmenken puppet!

The behind the scenes footage is probably the most enjoyable sequence of the whole horrible video, but what the hell is it doing in here? Surely this unintentional metatextual stupidity only takes away from the repetitive scenes of the filmmakers showing a poor dog with a human mask strapped to its head to screaming Japanese schoolgirls? I’m guessing it was required to stretch out the video’s already meagre running time. Despite its whopping original price tag, The Human-Faced Dog runs for less than forty minutes. And much of that footage is drawn out, slowed down and reused with almost every second of screen time feeling like filler. JVD even has the audacity to rewind the entire fucking film during the elongated end credits. Yes, we see everything 

again – backwards and in fast-motion – while an atrocious song plays in the background. There’s a pretty funny moment where a guy in a hat shows his Jinmenken drawings. But sadly, this is followed by a really long interview with another guy in a hat (a different sort of hat, for the record) who stands outside Nakano Broadway and dispenses a bunch of bullshit about the Jinmenken.

Fuck me. I would have been furious if I had of bought this back in 1990 for 7000 yen. The Human-Faced Dog is a confusing mess, which would be fine if it wasn’t so damned boring. This video is the definition of nothing. It’s a worthless waste of a good puppet and certainly a worthless waste of tape. And yes, I’m very pleased this worthless waste of nothing is worthlessly wasting space on my shelf.

Dave Jackson, Mondo Exploito

Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway is a 1993 American horror film written and directed by Kevin S. Tenney. It stars Ami Dolenz (Children of the Night, Infested/Ticks), Christopher Michael Moore, Laraine Newman, John Gatins, Timothy Gibbs and Marvin Kaplan. The film is the sequel to the 1986 film Witchboard.

Paige (Dolenz), a young artist moves into a new apartment. She starts receiving messages through a Ouija board, claiming to be from the former occupant of her apartment, Susan Sydney. The former tenant claims she’s been murdered, but there’s no record of a murder or even her death. Paige sets out to solve the murder and as she gets closer to solving Susan’s death, the death toll rises. Paige soon fears she might be next…

” … weirdly enjoyable on its own small scale terms. Dolenz of course is incredibly beautiful (she looks rather like Sarah Michelle Gellar in much of this film), and does well in a pretty hapless role. The supporting cast is colorful, if awfully hammy at times, and Tenney, as discussed above, stages things remarkably well almost all of the time. Structurally, the film has a few problems, including a too quick possession for Paige and a silly (if expectedly) hyperbolic denouement, and Tenney’s decision to have the board’s “dialogue” spelled out by the various actors actually becomes comical after a while. But Witchboard 2 has probably just enough of a spook factor to further convince those who look awry at Ouija boards to continue avoiding them.” Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com

Buy Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway on Olive Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.com

“This one is very much a product of its time, a sequel geared towards cashing in not at the box office but in the rental store. The cover art (re-used on this release, thankfully) is eye catching and appealing to horror fans but once you get to it there isn’t a whole lot of meat on these bones. Not that it’s a bore or a waste, it’s just unremarkable… but somehow watchable. It’s plenty glossy, nicely shot, has a decent enough score and some appreciable atmosphere towards the end. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but completely fine entertainment.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

“Alright, so this film was much better than the first, but mostly due to better action, more focus on a moderately intriguing mystery, and because of Ms. Dolenz steaming up every scene. But they still had a dumb love triangle, the whole movie could have ended in the first ten minutes if people had enough sense to burn the damn ouija board, the mystery isn’t fleshed out enough and makes little sense, there is some annoying moaning sound you hear every other scene, not enough motive for why Susan is evil and she doesn’t look scary at all, and the film ends with the same retarded zinger the first film had!” Ryan’s Movie Reviews

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The Beast of Bodmin, also known as the Beast of Bodmin Moor is a phantom wild cat purported to live in Cornwall, in the United Kingdom. Bodmin Moor became a centre of these sightings with occasional reports of mutilated slain livestock: the alleged panther-like cats of the same region came to be popularly known as the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

In general, scientists reject such claims because of the improbably large numbers necessary to maintain a breeding population and because climate and food supply issues would make such purported creatures’ survival in reported habitats unlikely. A long held hypothesis suggests the possibility that big cats at large in the United Kingdom could have been imported as part of private collections or zoos, later escaped or set free. An escaped big cat would not be reported to the authorities due to the illegality of owning and importing the animals.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food conducted an official investigation in 1995. The study found that there was ‘no verifiable evidence’ of exotic felines loose in Britain, and that the mauled farm animals could have been attacked by common indigenous species. The report stated that ‘the investigation could not prove that a “big cat” is not present.’

Less than a week after the government report, a boy was walking by the River Fowey when he discovered a large cat skull. Measuring about 4 inches (10 cm) long by 7 inches (18 cm) wide, the skull was lacking its lower jaw but possessed two sharp, prominent canines that suggested that it might have been a leopard. The story hit the national press at about the same time of the official denial of alien big cat evidence on Bodmin Moor.

The skull was sent to the Natural History Museum for verification. They determined that it was a genuine skull from a young male leopard, but also found that the cat had not died in Britain and that the skull had been imported as part of a leopard-skin rug. The back of the skull was cleanly cut off in a way that is commonly used to mount the head on a rug. There was an egg case inside the skull that had been laid by a tropical cockroach that could not possibly be found in Britain.

British author Peter Tremayne‘s 1977 Hound of Frankenstein novel is set on Bodmin Moor.

Wikipedia

The Ripper (1997)

Jack the Ripper. The very name conjures up images of fog-shrouded streets, grisly murder and chirpy, voluptuous Cockney street girls spilling out of East End dens of inequity to meet their fate as the cloaked and top-hatted Saucy Jack searched in vain for the elusive Mary Kelly. In fact, so ingrained is the myth of the Ripper in our collective consciousness that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that this was a very real murderer, who appeared out of the blue in 1888 and, over a few months as summer gave way to autumn, killed five prostitutes, taunting the police with letters and body parts, before vanished as abruptly as he appeared.

The mystery of the Ripper is what keeps the mythology alive – the fact that he was never caught, and that even now, the British government refuse to release the files pertaining to the case (making ludicrous excuses about protecting the families of informers, as if the underworld holds a century long grudge against people who tried to help catch the world’s most notorious sex killer) ensures that all manner of theorising can take place as to the nature of the Ripper’s identity (or identities).

What’s more, the short burst nature of the crimes, their seemingly ritualistic brutality and the mysterious, sometimes ambiguous messages that the Ripper left or sent (“The Juwes Are The Men That Will Not be Blamed For Nothing” message left on a wall, the “Dear Boss”, “Saucy Jacky” and “From Hell” letters and postcards) – as well as the Victorian trappings that lend themselves to gothic melodrama – all lend themselves to myth making and speculation. Over the years, numerous books have claimed to have ‘solved’ the murders, none of them convincing – there was even the dubious ‘dairy’ that purported to have proven the Ripper’s identity, but which inevitably turned out to be fraudulent. It’s a sign of how much the Ripper still grabs our attention that any fresh claim about the murders will still make headlines today [In fact, after this article was posted, crime writer Patricia Cornwell has announced that she can prove that the Ripper was Camden artist Walter Sickert].

The Lodger (1927)

It’s very un-PC and immediately condemned if anyone tries to make a film or TV show about a true life murder in Britain these days. The only acceptable thing is to make a thoroughly serious police procedural docu-drama – a classic recent example being the Fred West film Appropriate Adult – that concentrates on the trial or the investigation and studiously avoids the crimes. Jack the Ripper has long been an exception to that rule. It’s easy to say that this is because of the age of the case, but of course, Ripper films first began turning up within living memory of the case – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, based on the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes was made in 1927.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is the first British Ripper film, although it shied away from actually using the name and ultimately proves to be a case of mistaken identity, as a couple begin to suspect that their new tenant (Ivor Novello) is the murderer known as The Avenger. In the end, he turns out to be a vigilante investigating the case. The film would be remade several times, with the ending tweaked each time. In 1932, Novello revisited the role, but this time the killer – The Bosnian Murderer – turned out to be his twin brother. In 1944, all ambiguity was cast aside, and the lodger, played by arch villain Laird Cregar, was finally outed as being Jack the Ripper. This version was repeated in 1953 (retitled Man in the Attic) with Jack Palance as the murderer. The Lodger’s story was sufficiently universal for a 2009 version to use the premise while dispensing with The Ripper and much of the story, relocating the action to Los Angeles. It’s not a film many people have seen.

Man in the Attic

The Lodger was imitated in Room to Let, a 1948 radio play Margery Allingham that was subsequently filmed by Hammer a year later. In this story, Valentine Dyall is the Ripper, taking a room after escaping from a lunatic asylum. This is the first of three Ripper films from Hammer. In 1971, they made Hands of the Ripper, in which the killer’s daughter is turned into a murderer after seeing her mother die at her father’s hand, while Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde throws several Victorian horror characters, graverobbers including Burke and Hare, into the mix. In this film, the Ripper turns out to be Dr Jekyll, murdering women in order to secure their glands for his experiments.

Both films are rather better than you might imagine based on the description, shot with Hammer’s usual style but also having strong performances and intelligent screenplays. The idea of Dr Jekyll being behind the Ripper killings was later revived in Gerard Kikoine’s astonishingly deranged and slightly kinky, Ken Russellesque 1989 film Edge of Sanity, with Anthony Perkins on top form as Jack Hyde. If you haven’t seen this film because of poor reviews, stop reading now and rectify that immediately!

Edge of Sanity

Appearing a couple of years after the original Lodger film, Pandora’s Box is a German film in which the promiscuous Lulu (played by iconic actress Louise Brooks) meets a sticky end at the hands of Jack. The Ripper’s appearance here is simply as an incidental character, the film instead following its heroine’s moral decline. The two characters would meet again in Walerian Borowczyk’s Lulu, made in 1980.

Pandora’s Box

In 1959, Hammer screenwriter Jimmy ‘the Nasty’ Sangster stepped away from the company to write Jack the Ripper for producers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker, for whom he’d previously written Sadean Blood of the Vampire. Like that film, this was a Hammer-influenced gothic tale, though shot in black and white (apart from a single, gory moment at the climax). In this version, British police inspector O’Neill (Eddie Byrne) is joined by New York detective Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson) to catch the Ripper.

As you can imagine, the film barely bothered to stick to the facts of the case, but it’s entertainingly trashy nevertheless. In common with a number of British films of the time, additional ‘Continental’ scenes were shot for foreign markets, featuring topless showgirls. This version can apparently now be found online…

Sherlock Holmes first met Jack the Ripper in 1965, in A Study in Terror. The combination of the world’s most famous (fictional) detective and the world’s most infamous (real) murderer was an obvious one, and the film is entertaining enough fluff. It loosely follows the facts of the case, with Holmes, played by John Nevill, investigating the murders, an investigation that leads him from the back streets of Whitechapel to the aristocracy. But in common with many Ripper films, it glossed over the horror of the killings while sexing up the victims – middle-aged, toothless prostitutes are played by the likes of busty Carry On queen Barbara Windsor.

Frank Finlay plays Inspector LeStrade, and quite coincidentally would repeat the role in the second Holmes / Ripper movie Murder By Decree. A high spot in the filmographies of both characters, this moody piece sees a starry cast (Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland) caught up in the killings, which soon turn out to be less than random. In fact, they are part of a Masonic plot to cover up the misdeeds of the Duke of Clarence, son of Queen Victoria. This conspiracy leads to the very heart of government, and thanks to the quality of the film, the performances (Plummer is especially good as an emotive, passionate Holmes) and Bob Clark’s direction (he made the film between his horror movies Dead of Night and Black Christmas before wholly commercial movies like Porkys), you are swept along in the story.

Murder By Decree

The Royal connection and conspiracy of high powers had initially been ‘revealed’ by Stephen Knight, who originally used the theory in a 1973 BBC TV series, where modern day Scotland Yard detectives re-examine the case and uncover the truth. Monarchists and skeptics have widely dismissed Knight’s theory, but it’s as valid as any other given what we know (and would certainly account for why the Ripper files remain locked away!). In any case, it makes for great drama, and it’s no surprise that the theory has been dusted off subsequently.

Jack the Ripper (1988)

The 1988 two-part TV movie Jack the Ripper, which teamed Michael Caine and former Professional Lewis Collins as unlikely detectives, worked on a similar theory and 2001′s From Hell – adapted and simplified from Alan Moore’s exhaustive graphic novel – sees Johnny Depp as the absinthe-drinking Inspector Abberline, who uncovers the royal connection while trying to save Mary Kelly (who, in the grand tradition of Ripper films, is played by the rather too attractive Heather Graham). The 1997 film The Ripper dispensed entirely with the middle-men and had Prince Eddy himself as the killer.

Buy Jack the Ripper (1988) on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

From Hell

This royal connection was mocked by comedy duo The Two Ronnies in their much-loved Ripper spoof The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, which showed how far Jack the Ripper has become part of folklore – we could even make family-friendly comedy shows about the murders now.

Of course, most Ripper films were less serious of intent and less concerned with pesky things like historical accuracy than these movies. While there are those who suggest that Jack the Ripper probably killed more than the five women attributed to him – Ripper style murders continued to happen, but for whatever reason any connection was dismissed – many of the films dealing with the character generally ignore the known facts and simply make up their own story, with new protagonists and victims.

Jess Franco’s 1976 film Jack the Ripper is a magnificently lurid and sleazy effort in which mad doctor Klaus Kinski slices the breasts off saucy showgirl Lina Romay, while in José Luis Madrid’s Jack el Destripador de Londres (aka Seven Murders for Scotland Yard), made in 1971, the Ripper has reached 39 (!) victims – perhaps explaining why it’s set in modern day Soho. Spanish horror star Paul Naschy plays the main (but innocent) suspect.

Madrid’s film is one of several that seeks to relocate the Ripper into modern times (well, period sets and costumes cost money…). Some of these films feature copycats, while others have the Ripper reincarnated. 1988′s Jack’s Back, TV movie Terror at London Bridge – with David Hasselhoff – and early shot-on-video film The Ripper (1985) all have Jack’s spirit returning to possess others and carry on his work. None of these films are remotely good. Ripper Man and Bad Karma are more recent, no more impressive examples. Then we have the copycats – Jill the Ripper (2000) and The Ripper (2001) add little to the mythology.

The Ripper (1985)

Of the modern day Ripper films, only Time After Time is worthwhile. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, this is a fun fantasy romp rather than a slasher film, with H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) following Jack the Ripper (David Warner) to 1979 San Francisco after the latter steals Wells’ time machine to escape the police and carry on his work in the future. This is a rather charming romantic comedy, with the Ripper’s activities kept at arm’s length.

Time After Time

Of course, there are numerous other Ripper-inspired films, if only in title. Given that the Ripper name was still current enough in the 1970s to be given to real-life serial killer Peter Sutcliffe — the Yorkshire Ripper — it’s unsurprising that it would be used in many a slasher film – Blade of the Ripper, The New York Ripper, The Ripper of Notre Dame, Night Ripper (aka The Monster of Florence) and the Japanese Assault! Jack the Ripper for instance. Neither is it surprising that the Ripper would be used as a template for unconnected murderers in many a horror and thriller film – after all, he was in many was the first modern serial killer and everyone since has simply been following in his footsteps.

Assault! Jack the Ripper

The character of the Ripper would also pop up in a weird selection of films that were otherwise unconnected to the case, or to horror / thriller cinema. In The Ruling Class (1972), Peter O’Toole imagines himself to be Jack the Ripper at one point; Deadly Advice (1994) sees Jane Horrocks as a female serial killer taking advice from her ‘illustrious’ predecessors, Jack amongst them; Amazon Women of the Moon sees the Ripper exposed as The Loch Ness Monster in the segment “Bullshit- Or Not?”. And the character has turned up – in one form or another – in TV shows as varied as Boris Karloff-fronted horror anthology The Veil, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Fantasy Island, Cimarron Strip, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits and Smallville.

Amazon Women of the Moon

More recently, British TV has delved into the Ripper world. Whitechapel sees a copycat repeating the Ripper killings on the same dates as the original murders, while the current BBC hit Ripper Street is set a year after the murders, with the police investigating crimes that they initially believe to be the work of the Ripper but come to realise are unrelated. In the tradition of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the work of Alan Moore, Ripper Street is mixing up all manner of Victoriana in its stories, including Elephant Man Joseph Merrick. Meanwhile, British-American series Dracula, launched in October 2013, posits that the Ripper killings were in fact the work of a vampire, with a shadowy group constructing the letters and other clues as a way of throwing the police off the scent.

Ripper Street

So it seems that our fascination with Jack the Ripper isn’t going to end soon. Short of the release of the Ripper files and the unlikely unquestioned confirmation of just who he (or she) was, this is likely to remain a mystery that will continue to inspire filmmakers, writers and artists, all of whom can use the story to explore their own beliefs, fears and obsessions.

Now, if only Black the Ripper actually existed…

Feature by David Flint

Buy Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies by Denis Meikle from Amazon.co.uk

Decampitated is a 1998 independent American horror comedy film. It was directed by Matt Cunningham and stars Mike Hart, Jonathon Scott, Thomas Martwick, Steve Ladden, and Cristina Patterson Ceret. It was distributed on video by Troma Entertainment. The film features a nu-metal and punk soundtrack which was released by Glue Factory. It features ten songs, including music from H20, Strife, Coalesce, Sheer Terror, Death-Machine and Hatebreed.

After doing business with a strange travel agent, a group of teenagers head out for a cabin in the Colorado woods. They accidentally crash their car while driving to the cabin, so, while the rest of the group set up the camping equipment, Vince leaves to attempt to locate the cabin. He instead finds the residence of a transvestite, Jake. Jake takes Vince captive. Meanwhile, Garret tells the group of the legend of psycho killer Myles DeCamp, and later that night, Toby’s throat is slit. He survives after the group cover his wounds with duct tape, but the next day, the murderer attacks April, hacking off her arm, and impales Roger…

Some well-orchestrated set-ups, editing and camerawork cannot make up for the puerile, supposedly self-referential humour (fart jokes, Three Stooges slapstick violence - so it’s no wonder Troma picked this up) that soon grate. The juxtaposition of big band music and nu-metal is a welcome attempt to make the movie aurally interesting but the overuse of a ‘surprise’ musical motif is simply painful. The slim ideas in Decampitated may have worked as a short but as a feature the material is over-stretched. And in the 90s, using fear of transvestites is pretty lame. Despite the aforementioned stylish shots and a few laughs that work,, this attempt at a horror comedy is more likely to induce yawns than guffaws.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb

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Frankenstein (also known as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) is a 1994 American horror film directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Robert De Niro and Branagh himself. It also stars Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, John Cleese (Monty Python), Aidan Quinn and Richard Briers. The film was produced on a budget of $45 million and is considered the most faithful film adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The film opens with a few words by Mary Shelley:

“I busied myself to think of a story which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror; one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.”

The story begins in the year 1794. Captain Walton is leading a daring expedition to reach the North Pole. While their ship is trapped in the ice of the Arctic Sea, Walton and his crew discover a man traveling across the Arctic on his own. In the distance, a loud moaning can be heard. When the man sees how obsessed Walton is with reaching the North Pole, he asks, “Do you share my madness?” The man then reveals that his name is Victor Frankenstein and begins his tale…

“The monster has always been the true subject of the Frankenstein story, and Kenneth Branagh’s new retelling understands that. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” has all of the usual props of the Frankenstein films, brought to a fever pitch: The dark and stormy nights, the lightning bolts, the charnel houses of spare body parts, the laboratory where Victor Frankenstein stirs his steaming cauldron of life. But the center of the film, quieter and more thoughtful, contains the real story…” Roger Ebert, full review here

Buy on Blu-ray | DVD | Instant Video from Amazon.com or DVD from Amazon.co.uk

“…Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a work of lavish dedication and skill, yet as soon as the creature is let loose the film becomes rather listless. Branagh, for all his craftsmanship, hasn’t succeeded in tapping the morbid core of the material, the feeling that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in creating ”life” is really a mask for his obsession with death (indeed, he can no longer tell the difference). The key problem, I dare say, is the director’s performance. He plays Frankenstein with all the spirit he can muster, yet he’s too conventionally engaging — his Victor is a kind of fervid yuppie workaholic who never seems truly possessed of a dark side…” Owen Gleiberman, here

“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a worthy attempt to give the story a big-budget makeover but ultimately it collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness, and it was further hampered by a lack of frights.” Bruce G Hallenbeck, The Hammer Frankenstein (Hemlock Film Books, 2013)

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Horrorpedia is offering the chance to win two complimentary tickets to The London Dungeon experience!

One of London’s most popular tourist attractions, The London Dungeon recreates various gory and macabre historical events in a gallows humour style aimed at younger audiences. It uses a mixture of live actors, special effects and gripping rides.

Opening in 1974, in Tooley Street, near London Bridge, it was initially designed as a museum of macabre history. But the Dungeon has become so successful, it has now moved to former County Hall (right next to the London Eye) and evolved into a truly 21st century hair-raising, spine-chilling interactive experience. And there are now Dungeons all over the UK and even in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin.

Yikes! Seems we all love a horrible experience…

To win two complimentary tickets to The London Dungeon (*) simply answer the following question. Which two terrifying mass murderers will you encounter at The London Dungeon?

a) Sweeney Todd

b) Jack the Ripper

c) Ed Gein

Send the correct fiendish answer by midnight on the 1st December with your name and address (which we won’t disclose to any serial killers, we promise) to: mondozilla@googlemail.com

London Dungeon official site

* Only open to UK residents

Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence is a 1993 horror action film, and the second sequel to Maniac Cop, directed by William Lustig and Joel Soisson from a screenplay by Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff). It stars Robert Davi, Paul Gleason, Jackie Earle Haley, Robert Z’Dar, Caitlin Dulany and Gretchen Becker. The film was originally rated “NC-17“, and some extreme violent acts were cut to get an “R” rating.

A priest practicing voodoo resurrects Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), who takes his badge and comes back from the dead to do his bidding. Meanwhile, a pair of cameramen who are hoping to make it big, come across a convenience store robbery, where a police officer named Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Becker) intervenes in a hostage situation, where she manages to wound the suspect, but realizes that the clerk is his girlfriend, and she had let him in purposefully to rob the store. There is a crossfire, and while Kate is severely wounded, she ends up killing the clerk in return. When rushed to the hospital, she is rendered comatose and brain dead, much to the chagrin of investigating officer Sean McKinney (Robert Davi), who had caught the report of Katie using excessive force in a hostage situation, seeming to make the clerk an innocent victim, and in response threatening to free the badly injured Frank Jessup.

Meanwhile, stalking Katie’s progress, Cordell goes to the hospital to watch her. He kills one of her supervising physicians with defibrillator paddles, and the physician set to sign the warrant to cut Kate’s life support, by exposing him to high amounts of X-Ray radiation. The reporters who had framed Kate are then murdered as well…

Buy Unrated Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence Blue Underground Blu-ray + DVD combo from Amazon.com

“Out of all three Maniac Cop films, Badge of Silence is the most misunderstood and underappreciated. This is understandable, as a poor script and studio interference has resulted in an uneven mess in which Cordell almost seems like an afterthought. The main focus of the story is McKinney’s efforts to clear the name of his friend, whilst the powers-that-be attempt to hang her out to dry as an example against police brutality. But the inclusion of Houngan seems a little ridiculous, as this takes the story in a direction that does not fit with the tone and mythology of the series. In fact, this is yet another example of filmmakers being forced to unnecessarily explain the reasons behind their antagonists, usually because all other ideas have been exhausted.” Christian Sellers, Retro Slashers

“Maniac Cop 2 was a pretty fantastic action-horror hybrid and some of what we get here is outstanding but you can definitely tell which sequences were directed by William Lustig and which were directed by producer Joel Soisson, he just doesn’t have the action-chops of Lustig but he gives it quite a shot with the crazy police cruiser vs. ambulance car chase at the end of the movie, it’s completely fucking nuts…” Ken Kastenhuber, McBastard’s Mausoleum

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Christmas is generally seen as a jolly old time for the whole family – if you are to believe the TV commercials, everyone gets together for huge communal feasts while excited urchins unwrap whatever godawful new toy has been hyped as the must-have gift of the year. It is not, generally speaking, seen as a time of horror.

And yet horror has a long tradition of being part of the festive season. Admittedly, the horror in question was traditionally the ghost story, ideally suited for cold winter nights, where people gather around the fire to hear some spine chilling tale of ghostly terror – a scenario recreated in the BBC’s 2000 series Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee reading M.R. James tales to a room full of public school boys. That series was part of a tradition that included a similar one in 1986 with Robert Powell (Harlequin) and the children’s series Spine Chillers from 1980, as well as the unofficially titled annual series Ghost Stories for Christmas than ran for much of the 1970s and is occasionally revived to this day.

A Christmas Carol

The idea of the traditional Xmas ghost story can be traced back to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, where miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts in an effort to make him change his ways. It’s more a sentimental morality tale than a horror story, though in the original book and one or two adaptations, the ghosts are capable of causing the odd shudder. Sadly, the story has been ill-served by cinematic adaptations – the best version is probably the 1951 adaptation, though by then there had already been several earlier attempts, going back to 1910. A few attempts have been made at straight retellings since then, but all to often the story is bastardised (a musical version in 1970, various cartoons) or modernised – the best known versions are probably Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol, both of which are inexplicably popular. A 1999 TV movie tried to give the story a sense of creepiness once again, but the problem now is that the story is so familiar that it seems cliched even when played straight. The idea of a curmudgeon being made to see the true meaning of Christmas is now an easy go-to for anyone grinding out anonymous TV movies that end up on Christmas-only TV channels or gathering dust on DVD.

A Christmas CAROL (1999)

Outside of A Christmas Carol, horror cinema tended to avoid festive-themed stories for a long time. While fantasies like The Bishop’s Wife, It’s a Wonderful Life and Bell, Book and Candle played with the supernatural, these were light, feel-good dramas and comedies on the whole, designed to warm the heart rather than stop it dead. TV shows like The Twilight Zone would sometimes have a Christmas themed tale, but again these tended to be the more sentimental stories.

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The only film to really hint at Christmas creepiness was 1945 British portmanteau film Dead of Night, though even here, the Christmas themed tale, featuring a ghostly encounter at a children’s party, is more sentimental than terrifying. Meanwhile, the Mexican children’s film Santa Claus vs The Devil (1959) might see Santa in battle with Satan, but it’s all played for wholesome laughs rather than scares.

Santa Claus vs The Devil

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the darker side of Christmas began to be explored, and it was another British portmanteau film that began it all. The Amicus film Tales from the Crypt (1972) opened with a tale in which murderous Joan Collins finds herself terrorised by an escaped psycho on Christmas Eve, unable to call the police because of her recently deceased hubby lying on the carpet. The looney is dressed as Santa, and her young daughter has been eagerly awaiting his arrival, leading to a suitably mean-spirited twist. The story was subsequently retold in a 1989 episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV series.

Buy Tales from the Crypt on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

This film would lead the way towards decades of Christmas horror. Of course, lots of films had an incidental Christmas connection, taking place in the festive season (or ‘winter’, as it used to be known). Movies like Night Train Murders, Rabid and even the misleadingly named Silent Night Bloody Night have a Christmas connection, but it’s incidental to the story. Those are not the movies we are discussing here. No, to REALLY count as a Christmas film, then the festive celebrations need to be at the heart of events.

Buy Black Christmas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Two distinct types of Christmas horror developed. There was the Mad Santa films, like Tales from the Crypt on the one hand, and the ‘bad things happening at Christmas’ movie on the other. The pioneer of the latter was Bob Clark’s 1974 film Black Christmas, which not only pioneered the Christmas horror movie but also was an early template for the seasonal slasher film. Some critics have argued, with good cause, that this is the movie that laid the foundations for Halloween a few years later – a psycho film (with a possibly supernatural slant) set during a holiday, where young women are terrorised by an unseen force. But while John Carpenter’s film would be a smash hit and effectively reinvent the genre, Black Christmas went more or less unnoticed, its reputation only building years later. In 2006, the movie was remade by Glen Morgan in a gorier but less effective loose retelling of the original story.

Black Christmas

Preceding Black Christmas was TV movie Home for the Holidays, in which four girls are picked off over Christmas by a yellow rain-coated killer who may or may not be their wicked stepmother. A decent if unremarkable psycho killer story, the film was directed by TV movie veteran John Llewellyn Moxey.

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Also made for TV, this time in Britain, The Exorcism was the opening episode of TV series Dead of Night (no connection to the film of that name) broadcast in 1972. One of the few surviving episodes of the series, The Exorcism is a powerful mix of horror and social commentary, as a group of champagne socialists celebrating Christmas in the country cottage that one couple have bought as a holiday home find themselves haunted by the ghosts of the peasants who had starved to death there during a famine. While theatrical in style and poorly shot, the show is nevertheless creepily effective.

1980 saw Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out), a low budget oddity by Lewis Jackson that has since gained cult status. In this film, a put-upon toy factory employee decided to become a vengeful Santa, putting on the red suit and setting out to sort the naughty from the nice. It’s a strange film, mixing pathos, horror and black comedy, yet oddly it works, making it one of the more interesting Christmas horrors out there.

Buy Christmas Evil on Arrow DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Also made in 1980, but rather less successful, was To All a Goodnight, the only film directed by Last House on the Left star David Hess and written by The Incredible Melting Man himself, Alex Rebar. This generic slasher, with a house full of horny sorority girls and their boyfriends being picked off by a psycho in a Santa outfit, is too slow and poorly made to be effective.

The most notorious Christmas horror film hit cinemas in 1984. Silent Night Deadly Night was, in most ways, a fairly generic slasher, with a Santa-suited maniac on the loose taking revenge against the people who have been deemed ‘naughty’. The film itself was nothing special It’s essentially the same premise as Christmas Evil without the intelligence), and might have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for a provocative advertising campaign that emphasised the Santa-suited psycho and caused such outrage that the film was rapidly pulled from theatres.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Nevertheless, it had made a small fortune in the couple of weeks it played, and continued to be popular when reissued with a less contentious campaign. The film is almost certainly directly responsible for most ‘psycho Santa’ films since – all hoping to cash in on the publicity that comes with public outrage – and spawned four sequels.

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is notorious for the amount of footage from the first film that is reused to pad out the story, and was banned in the UK (where the first film was unreleased until 2009). Part 3 was directed, surprisingly, by Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) and adds a psychic element to the story. Part 4, directed by Brian Yuzna, drops the killer Santa story entirely and has no connection to the other films beyond the title, telling a story of witchcraft and cockroaches, while Part 5 – The Toymaker – is also unconnected to the other movies.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night 3-disc set from Amazon.co.uk

Also made in 1984, but attracting less attention, Don’t Open Till Christmas was that rarest of things, a 1980s British horror film – and one of the sleaziest ever made to boot. Starring and directed by Edmund Purdom from a screenplay by exploitation veterans Derek Ford and Alan Birkinshaw, the film sees a psycho killer, traumatised by a childhood experience at Christmas, who begins offing Santas – or more accurately, anyone he sees dressed as Santa, which in this case includes a porn model, a man at a peepshow and people having sex. With excessive gore, nudity and an overwhelming atmosphere of grubbiness, the film was become a cult favourite for fans of bad taste cinema.

Buy Don’t Open Till Christmas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The third Christmas horror of 1984 was the most wholesome and the most successful. Joe Dante’s Gremlins is all too often overlooked when people talk about festive horror, but from the opening credits, with Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) belting out over the soundtrack, to the carol singing Gremlins and Phoebe Cates’ story of why she hates Christmas, the festive season is at the very heart of the film. Gremlins remains the most fun Christmas movie ever made, a heady mix of EC-comics ghoulishness, sentiment, slapsick and action with some of the best monsters ever put on film.

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Gremlins would spawn many knock offs – Ghoulies, Munchies, Critters and more – but only Elves, made in 1989, had a similar Christmas theme. This oddball effort, which proposes that Hitler’s REAL plan for the Master Race was human/elf hybrids. When the elves are revived in a pagan ritual at Christmas, only an alcoholic ex-cop played by Dan Haggerty can stop them. It’s not as much fun as that makes it sound.

Family horror returned in 1993 stop-motion film A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced / co-written by Tim Burton. This chirpy musical see Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, leader of Halloween Town, stumbling upon Christmas Town and deciding to take it over. It’s a charming and visually lush movie that has unsurprisingly become a festive family favourite over the last twenty years.

Santa Claws

Rather less fun is 1996′s Santa Claws, a typically rotten effort by John Russo, with Debbie Rochon as a Scream Queen being stalked by a murderous fan in a Santa outfit. This low rent affair was pretty forgettable. It is one of several low/no budget video quickies that aimed to cash in on the Christmas horror market with tales of killer Santas – others include Satan Claus (1996), Christmas Season Massacre (2001) and Psycho Santa (2003).

1997 saw the release of Jack Frost (not to be confused with the family film from a year later of the same name). Here, a condemned serial killer is involved in a crash with a truck carrying genetic material, which – of course – causes him to mutate into a killer snowman. Inspired by the Child’s Play movie, Jack Frost is pretty poor, but the outlandish concept and mix of comedy and horror made it popular enough to spawn a sequel in 2000, Jack Frost 2 – Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.

That might seem as ludicrous as Christmas horror goes, but 1998 saw Feeders 2: Slay Bells, in which the alien invaders of the title are fought off by Santa and his elves. Shot on video with no money, it’s a film you might struggle to get through.

Rather better was the 2000 League of Gentlemen Christmas Special, which mixes the regular characters of the series into a series of stories that are even darker than usual. Mixing vampires, family curses and voodoo into a trilogy of stories that are linked, Amicus style, it’s as creepy as it is funny, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that Mark Gatiss would graduate to writing the more recent BBC Christmas ghost stories.

The League of Gentlemen

Two poplar video franchises collided in 2004′s Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, with the great-nephew of the original Puppet Master battling an evil organisation that wants his formula to help bring killer toys to life on Christmas Eve. Like most of the films in the series, this is cheap but cheerful, throwaway stuff.

2005′s Santa’s Slay sees Santa reinvented as a demon who is forced to be nice and give toys to children.Released from this demand, he reverts to his murderous ways. Given that Santa is played by fearsome looking wrestler Bill Goldberg, you have to wonder how anyone ever trusted him to come down their chimney and NOT kill them.

Santa’s Slay

Also in 2005 came The Christmas Tale, part of the Spanish Films to Keep You Awake series, in which a group of children find a woman dressed as Santa at the bottom of a well. It turns out that she’s a bank robber and the kids decide to starve her into handing over the stolen cash. But things take a darker turn when she escapes and the kids think she is a zombie. It’s a witty, inventive little tale.

A Christmas Tale

2006 saw Two Front Teeth, where Santa is a vampire assisted by zombie elves in a rather ludicrous effort. Equally silly, Treevenge is a 2008 short film by Jason Eisener, who would go on to shoot Hobo with a Shotgun. It’s the story of sentient Christmas trees who have enough of being cut down and displayed in people’s home and set out to take their revenge.

Treevenge

Recently, the Christmas horror has become more international, with two European films in 2010 offering an insight into different festive traditions. Dick Maas’ Sint (aka Saint) is a lively Dutch comedy horror which features a vengeful Sinterklaas (similar to, but not the same as, Santa Claus) coming back on December 5^th in years when that date coincides with a full moon, to carry out mass slaughter. It’s a fun, fast-paced movie that also offers a rare glimpse into festive traditions that are rather different to anything seen outside the local culture (including the notorious Black Peters).

Finnish film Rare Exports, on the other hand, sees the original (and malevolent) Santa unearthed during an excavation, leading to the discovery of a whole race of Santas, who are then captured and sold around the world. Witty and atmospheric, the film was inspired by Jalmari Helander’s original short film Rare Exports, Inc, a spoof commercial for the company selling the wild Santas.

Rare Exports

But these two high quality, entertaining Christmas horrors were very much the exception to the rule by this stage. The genre was more accurately represented by the likes of 2010′s Yule Die, another Santa suited slasher, or 2011′s Slaughter Claus, a plotless, pretty unwatchable amateur effort from Charles E. Cullen featuring Santa and the Bi-Polar Elf on an unexplained and uninteresting killing spree.

Slaughter Claus

Bloody Christmas (2012) sees a former movie star going crazy as he plays Santa on a TV show. 2009 film Deadly Little Christmas is a ham-fisted retread of slashers like Silent Night Deadly Night and 2002′s One Hell of a Christmas is a Danish Satanic horror comedy. Bikini Bloodbath Christmas (2009) is the third in a series of pointless tits ‘n’ gore satires that fail as horror, soft porn or comedy.

And of course the festive horror movie can’t escape the low budget zombie onslaught – 2009 saw Silent Night, Zombie Night, in 2010 there was Santa Claus Versus the Zombie, 2011 brought us A Cadaver Christmas, in 2012 we had Christmas with the Dead and Silent Night of the Living Dead is currently in pre-production. None of these films are likely to fill you with the spirit of the season.

So although we can hardly say that the Christmas horror film is at full strength, it is at least as prolific as ever. With a remake of Silent Night Deadly Night, now just called Silent Night, playing theatres in 2012, it seems that filmmaker’s fascination with the dark side of the season isn’t going away anytime soon.

Silent Night

Article by David Flint

Slipknot is an American nu-metal band from Des Moines, Iowa, formed in 1995.

Slipknot is well known for its attention-grabbing image, aggressive music style, and energetic and chaotic live shows. They have specialised in horror-themed imagery, hiding their identities behind masks (although these would be removed in solo and side projects) and having controversial, confrontational and violent lyrics and stage performances, especially in their early days, where performances featured extreme acts such as stage dives from high balconies, projectile vomiting and band members setting each other on fire. They were seen as part of the ‘nu-metal’ scene, though they have little in common musically or stylistically with the likes of Limp Bizkit, Korn, Linkin Park or Papa Roach. The band’s sound typically features a heavily down-tuned guitar setup, a distinctly large percussive section, samples and turntables. Utilizing a variety of vocal styles, their music typically features growled vocals, screaming, rapping, backing vocals and occasional melodic singing.

The band enjoyed a somewhat meteoric rise to success following the release of their self-titled debut album in 1999. The 2001 follow-up album Iowa further increased the band’s popularity. After breaking for their first hiatus, Slipknot returned in 2004 with Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) and once again in 2008 with their fourth album All Hope Is Gone, which debuted at the top spot on the Billboard 200. Additionally, the band has released one live album, 9.0: Live, one compilation album, Antennas to Hell, as well as four live DVDs.

Slipknot was formed in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1995 when drummer Shawn Crahan and bassist Paul Gray started a band named The Pale Ones. The lineup was made up of friends who met through the local music scene. Not long after their inception, Gray invited Joey Jordison to a rehearsal because the band were interested in experimenting with additional drum elements. Jordison subsequently joined the band as their main drummer, moving Crahan to custom percussion. On December 4, the band made their live debut; playing a benefit show using the name Meld.

In late 1995, Jordison suggested changing the band name to Slipknot after their song of the same name. In December, Slipknot began recording material at SR Audio, a studio in the band’s hometown. Throughout their time in the studio, the band were adding samples to their recordings but could not produce these sounds live. After a complicated time with mixing and mastering, the band self-released Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. on Halloween, October 31, 1996.

Slipknot received a small amount of airplay on local radio stations off the back of the demo. However, it did not lead to any kind of interest from record labels, so the band returned to the studio to develop new material. It was at this time that the band sought more melodic vocals for their music. As a result, Corey Taylor was recruited from fellow Des Moines band Stone Sour.

In early 1998, Slipknot produced a second demo featuring five tracks exclusively for record labels. The band began to receive a lot of attention and in February 1998, producer Ross Robinson offered to produce their debut album after attending rehearsals in Des Moines. Soon after, DJ Sid Wilson was recruited as the band’s ninth member after showing great interest and impressing band members. In late June, Slipknot received a $500,000 seven-album deal from Roadrunner Records.

Chris Fehn was brought in on percussion before Slipknot began work on their debut album in September 1998. Partway through the recording process of the album,  guitarist Brainard decided to leave the band.  Slipknot recruited Jim Root to complete their lineup and returned to Malibu to continue work on the album, which concluded in early 1999, allowing the band to go on their first tour as part of the Ozzfest in 1999. The  self-titled album was released on June 29, 1999. Slipknot  developed a large following very quickly mainly from touring and word of mouth.  In early 2000, Slipknot was certified platinum, a first for an album released by Roadrunner Records.

Anticipation for Slipknot’s sophomore effort was intense and in early 2001, the band began recording their second album. Iowa, the band’s second album was released on August 28, 2001, peaking at number three on the Billboard album charts and at number one on the UK album chart. However, in mid-2002, Slipknot went on hiatus for the first time due to internal conflicts, seeing several band members focus on side projects. Vocalist Taylor and guitarist Root revived their band Stone Sour, drummer Jordison created the Murderdolls, percussionist Crahan founded To My Surprise and DJ Wilson went solo as DJ Starscream. At this time, the future of Slipknot was unclear and there was speculation over whether the band had split and the possibility of a third album. Despite this, on November 22, 2002 Slipknot released the DVD Disasterpieces.

Slipknot moved into The Mansion in Los Angeles, California in mid-2003 to work on their third album alongside producer Rick Rubin. By early 2004, work had finished on the album and they began The Subliminal Verses World Tour. Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) was released on May 24, 2004, peaking at number 2 on the Billboard album charts. Slipknot recorded their first live album, 9.0: Live while touring in support of their third album. On December 5, 2006, Slipknot released their third DVD Voliminal: Inside the Nine.

Slipknot’s fourth album; All Hope Is Gone was released on August 20, 2008, debuting at number 1 on the Billboard albums chart.  2009 marked the 10-year anniversary of Slipknot’s debut album; to commemorate the event, the band released a special edition version of Slipknot. Touring in support of the album continued before coming to a close on October 31, 2009, resulting in Slipknot’s third hiatus.

In 2010, bassist Gray was planning to tour with the supergroup, Hail!. However, on May 24, he was found dead in a hotel room in Urbandale, Iowa. The cause of death was confirmed as an accidental overdose on morphine and fentanyl, the latter being a synthetic morphine substitute.

The band released their fourth video album (sic)nesses on September 28, where it debuted at No.1 on the Billboard Video Charts. The DVD features Slipknot’s complete live performance at the 2009 Download Festival and a 45 minute film documenting their tour in support of All Hope Is Gone, and served as a tribute to Paul Gray.

Regarding the continuation of Slipknot, Taylor later told NME that Paul Gray would want them to continue and in that spirit he feels that they should, although he feels “on the fence” about returning to the band. Slipknot returned to touring in 2011 for a small run of shows in Europe. They headlined the Sonisphere Festival and Rock in Rio among the likes of Iron Maiden and Metallica and performed at Belgium’s Graspop Metal Meeting.Taylor stated that the shows served as a “celebration and tribute” to the late bassist. Slipknot founding guitarist, Donnie Steele substituted for Gray in the concert shows, however was obscured from the audience’s view, behind Joey Jordison.

Slipknot hosted their first annual music festival, called Knotfest, which was held on August 17, 2012, at Mid-America Motorplex near Pacific Junction, Iowa (in the Omaha – Council Bluffs metropolitan area) and August 18, 2012, in Somerset, Wisconsin. Other bands that played at the festival were Deftones, Lamb of God, Serj Tankian and more. Among the activities the festival offered as part of its “dark carnival experience” were circus big-top tents, pillars of fire, amusement park rides, burlesque performers, firebreathers, stilt walkers, drum circles made of junkyard cars and graffiti walls. The two shows also debuted a Slipknot museum. On Friday 14, June 2013 Slipknot headlined the Download Festival for a second time. Performing to roughly 90,000 people, the band were twice forced to stop their set, once in the middle of a song, in order to allow repairs to be made to the front barricade, which had split open under crowd pressure.

The band has confirmed that they are currently writing a new record that is expected to be released in 2014. Taylor has described the forthcoming album as “very dark” and a cross between Iowa and Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses). Guitarist Jim Root sat out Stone Sour’s January tour in order to write new music, and it has been hinted that the next record may be a double album.

On December 12, 2013, the band announced through their official website’s homepage that long-time member and drummer, Joey Jordison, has departed from the band after 18 years. No specific reason was given other than personal reasons. The announcement came weeks after the band reportedly began writing new material for a release in 2014. Jordison is currently the drummer for the band Scar the Martyr.

Wikipedia

“Snuff videos showing scenes of murder, mutilation and cannibalism were on sale alongside Disney films at a children’s comic fair… Trading Standards officers believe the video shows genuine footage of chanting, half-naked Amazon Indians butchering a white man depicted as a jungle explorer.”

THE DAILY MAIL, April 1992

“Many serial killers found an outlet for their vivid sexual fantasies in pornography. Ed Kemper scoured detective magazines for pictures of corpses and frequented ‘snuff movies’ in which intercourse is a prelude to murder.”

Newsweek, quoted in THE AGE OF SEX CRIME, Jane Caputi 1987

“There’s a lot of gay people there, gay men, so they have young boys. You get a lot of rent boys there, because they’re offered a load of money, and then they become snuff movies.”

‘Janet’, quoted in BLASPHEMOUS RUMOURS, Andrew Boyd 1991

It’s the darker side of the film business – the claims that someone, somewhere, is producing films which feature genuine murder and torture. Films which are then sold or screened for vast sums of money to wealthy decadents, who are so bored with life that they can only get their kicks from watching the final taboos being shattered… or videos which are circulated amongst underground networks of child molesters and rapists, ensuring that the violation of the victim continues long after their death. The term for these movies is at once shocking in its cynicism, and unforgettable in the horror of its implications: Snuff.

Nobody is entirely sure when the stories began. Some claim that rumours were circulating as far back as the Forties, but the modern fixation with the idea of the Snuff Movie can be traced to that turbulent period as the Sixties crossed over into the Seventies, and long-held ideas of morality began to crumble. In 1961, a film-maker still risked prosecution for showing naked girls on film; a decade on, and cinemas across America were openly showing hardcore pornography. Nothing seemed taboo any more.

To moral campaigners, the idea of the snuff movie seemed both inevitable and useful. Inevitable, because after all, where else was there for the satiated pornographer and his audience to go? And useful, because it provided a potent weapon to use against the libertarians. Even the most liberal minded individual would, after all, consider freedom to murder a liberty too far, and might even be forced to rethink their deeply held beliefs about sexual freedom in the face of such material. And so began a mythology that has, if anything, grown in potency over the years, to the extent that even now, most people unquestioningly accept the existence of snuff movies as proven fact.

Which is odd. Because despite the hysteria, a single scrap of evidence confirming snuff movies has yet to be found.

What we do have are outright lies, assorted apocryphal tales, staggering cases of mistaken identity and several cases of genuine cinematic death which may seem to fit the bill at first, but don’t actually match the precise snuff movie definition.

The first recognised tales of snuff movie production emerged in Ed Sanders’ exhaustive book on Charles Manson, The Family. Manson was known to be fond of filming Family activity, including sex orgies which he supposedly sold. He is also known to have stolen a van full of NBC TV equipment. In The Family, Sanders interviews an anonymous Family associate who claims to have witnessed the filming of what he describes as “a snuff movie” in which a naked girl is decapitated during a pseudo-occult ritual. Although the video equipment was recovered when police raided the Spahn Ranch, no snuff footage has emerged (other Family films have been seen, but consist of nothing more sensational than skinny-dipping). It was claimed that remaining Family members squirreled the footage away; if true, they hid it well. More than a quarter of a decade on, it still remains a secret waiting to be revealed. Sanders also hints at rumours that various members of Hollywood’s smart set were dabbling in animal porn, torture and snuff movies. Again, such footage, if it exists, has never emerged. Years later, the Manson connection re-emerged when writer Maury Terry tied the Family and snuff production into his exhaustive investigation of satanic connections to the Son of Sam murders in New York. Yet again, no videotapes were ever found to back up these claims.

After years of similar unfounded rumours, the snuff movie was dragged screaming into the public consciousness in the mid-Seventies with the release of Snuff. Hyped as being shot “in South America…where life is CHEAP!”. The film implied – no, almost boasted – that it featured a genuine murder, carried out for the camera. Wherever it played, the film was attacked by feminists, anti-porn campaigners and journalists, who had not long before reported on the case of a so-called snuff movie being intercepted by U.S. Customs en route from – where else? – South America.

The protests were not, however, as spontaneous as they might have seemed. In fact, they were as phoney as the film itself. Grindhouse distributor Allan Shackleton was the warped genius behind the whole sorry scam. It was Shackleton who arranged the pickets and wrote the letters of outrage, Shackleton who planted the story of the Customs seizure (no such interception had in fact taken place), gambling that the negative publicity would ensure major box office returns before the film was run out of town. And it was Shackleton who created Snuff out of an unreleased movie called Slaughter.

Slaughter had been shot in 1971 by husband and wife exploitation movie veterans Michael and Roberta Findlay. Attempting to cash in on the Manson Family headlines, it told of the exploits of a hippy cult leader who leads his followers to murder. It was indeed shot in South America (Argentina, to be exact), where film crews, if not life, were certainly cheap. Filmed without sync sound, the resulting movie was a sorry mess, and sat unreleased until 1975, when Shackleton – a hardened showman distributor with an eye for a good scam – picked it up and decided to revamp it into something that could make money. Noting its incoherence, he figured that the only way audiences would sit through the film would be if they were given a reason to accept – even expect – the amateur style. As a snuff movie, Slaughter’s lack of technical skill became a positive boon.

The first thing Shackleton did was to remove the end of the film, presumably thinking that no-one would have bothered following the plot anyway. He also chopped off the opening and closing credits, giving the film a suitably anonymous appearance. He then hired Simon Nuchtern to shoot a new ending in a studio owned by hard-core director Carter Stevens, in which the cameras pull back from the action to show the studio set. The “actress” starts to get it on with the “director”, but is then assaulted by him. He reaches for a knife, chops off one of her fingers, followed by the whole hand, then disembowels her. The fact that this footage is considerably better shot than the rest of the film, that the actress bears no resemblance to the woman seen in the earlier footage, and that the special effects are somewhat rubbery didn’t matter. Shackleton knew that, for varying reasons, people would want to believe it was real. And they did. Many still do, despite the truth about Snuff being widely reported. Some believe out of ignorance; others out of cynicism. Anti-Pornography groups are certainly aware of the reality behind Snuff, but still hold it up as proof that women are being routinely murdered for the camera. It’s in their interests for people to believe that the porn industry routinely murders people for profit.

In fact, Snuff was roundly condemned as a tasteless stunt by America’s pornographers. Producer David F. Friedman, who headed the Adult Film Association of America, begged Shackleton not to release the film. Sex film veteran Friedman, in David Hebditch and Nick Anning’s book Porn Gold, traced the snuff hysteria to early Seventies group called the Campaign for Decency in Literature, headed by Charles Keating, who claimed on TV to have evidence that X-rated film-makers were murdering their stars on film. The producer claims that he contacted the CDL and asked them to hand their evidence to the authorities, and, when nothing happened, contacted the FBI himself, who dismissed the claims.

Friedman also offered a $25,000 reward to anyone supplying evidence of snuff movies. It remains uncollected.

Snuff made Shackleton his expected bundle, and faded into history. But it provided new ammunition for pro-censorship groups and moral campaigners. Now, everyone knew that snuff wasn’t just something old men snorted instead of cocaine.

Years later in Britain, where the film had – naturally – never been seen, it emerged on video with spectacularly bad timing. At the beginning of 1982, the first rumblings of what would become the Video Nasty tidal-wave of hysteria were appearing in the press. As the storm over the availability of uncensored video grew, Astra Video – already prime targets for prosecution after releasing the grossly misunderstood I Spit on Your Grave and David Friedman’s early Sixties splatter movie Blood Feast – added Snuff to their roster of titles, featuring the rather ill-conceived (if somewhat accurate) cover blurb “the original legendary atrocity shot and banned in New York… the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again.” After an outraged Sunday Times article, Astra rapidly withdrew the film from sale, but not before a reasonable quantity had made it to the shops. Tabloid reporters invariably took the film at face value, and the circulation of a “real snuff movie” helped fuel calls for controls over violent videos.

Ironically, slipping out unnoticed on video in Britain a couple of years earlier was a West German rip-off , entitled Confessions of a Blue Movie Star… although the original English language title, The Evolution of Snuff, was far less equivocal. This film was an uneasy mixture of soft porn, documentary and curious moral campaigning – it’s notable as one of the few anti-porn sex films ever made. Supposedly following the career of a German sex starlet who later took her own life, the film suggests that snuff movies are an inevitable symptom of liberal attitudes towards sex. Opening with interviews with various people (including Roman Polanski) who are convinced of the existence of snuff movies, the film reveals its true cynicism and lack of credibility at the end, when it features an interview with a masked “Snuff Movie maker” and then presents an extract from his film. This footage is shocking – grainy, shaky images of a woman seemingly being disembowelled. It looks far more authentic that the footage in Snuff. But it’s also far more recognisable. In fact, it has been lifted from Wes Craven’s brutal 1972 production The Last House on the Left. And although Craven’s movie was condemned by many critics for excessive violence, nobody would suggest that the killings were real…

Although snuff movies would become a standard plot device for film-makers in the Seventies, providing the central or incidental themes in a number of films. Hardcore saw George C. Scott wallowing in the seedy world of pornography, trying to locate his estranged daughter, who he has seen in a porno flick and who, of course, ends up in a snuff movie. Coming from the religiously tortured mind of Paul Schrader, it was a decent film that sadly perpetuated the myth that the porn industry routinely kills its stars.

Similarly, Joe D’Amato’s outrageous Emanuelle in America sees the titular character, played as always by Laura Gemser, investigating corruption and white slavery, at one point watching a ‘snuff movie’ as part of her investigations. The snuff footage in this film is remarkably brutal and realistic – quite what audiences expecting a softcore romp made of it is anyone’s guess.

Last House on Dead End Street is a more impressively disturbing film about a porn producer who moves into snuff movie production. A weird hybrid of sleaze and art, the film for years was the height of cinematic obscurity, only available as fuzzy bootlegs and with no information available about director Viktor Janos. But in 2001, porn director Roger Watkins was revealed as both the director and the star, and the film – which began life as a three hour movie called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell in 1972 before winding up in the current, thankfully shorter, version in 1977 – is now readily available on DVD. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see.

1980’s Effects is considerably less interesting. Shot in Pittsburgh by Dusty Nelson and featuring several George Romero collaborators (Tom Savini, Joe Pilato, John Harrison), this is the tale of a horror film maker who decided real death will be cheaper than special effects. It’s a nice idea, but the film is unfortunately very dull and clumsily produced.

Even worse is Australian film Final Cut, made the same year, in which a pair of journalists gain access to a reclusive media mogul who might be producing snuff movies for his own pleasure. Very little happens and the best thing about the film is the video cover.

Snuff movies – or, rather, snuff TV – also featured in David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory Videodrome, in which the director played with a ‘what if’ idea – in this case, ‘what if the fears of the censors were true/’ in a tale of video-induced hallucinations via a signal hidden inside brutal torture and murder videos being beamed from (where else?) South America.

While these films all explored the idea of the snuff movie, it wasn’t until the Eighties that the phrase and the hysteria would fully explode into mainstream consciousness. As the Seventies wave of liberalism gave way to the Eighties Thatcherite New Morality and hard-line Feminism, it somehow became easier to accept that pornographers – evil, corrupt exploiters of women, every one of them – would cheerfully kill for the cameras. And by the 1990s, British newspaper hacks, bored with the term ‘video nasty’ were starting to use ‘snuff’ as a description for just about any violent movie, culminating in one tabloid notoriously referring to Japanese amine film Akira as ‘Manga snuff’. Now, apparently, even cartoon characters were being murdered for real, despite never having actually existed in the first place!

Feminist writers and moral campaigners both routinely told tales of snuff movies which were dressed up as proven fact, but which were always vague enough to avoid scrutiny. No names, no evidence. Films that the authorities had been unable to see were apparently easily accessed by anti-porn fanatics. And invariably, the public followed suit. Everyone these days, it seems, knows someone who’s mate has seen a snuff movie.

In many cases, these snuff movies turn out to be more indicative of the gullibility of the viewer – or, perhaps, their desire to believe. The Amazon snuff movie reported (in a cynically racist manner) by The Daily Mail, and quoted at the top of this article, turned out to be Ruggero Deodato’s 1979 production Cannibal Holocaust, a film which has been mistaken for the Real Thing in Britain more than once. At least that film, with it’s powerfully authentic pseudo-documentary style, looks the part; more ludicrous was the insistence by Liverpool Trading Standards and various media (including Channel Four News) that Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagous (a tedious horror movie about a cannibal killer lurking on a Greek island), seized during video nasty raids in 1993 was a snuff movie. Similarly, Channel 4 documentary series ran an episode on ‘satanic abuse’, claiming to show footage of killings in occult rituals – in reality, it was performance art footage by Genesis P. Orridge’s Temple of Psychik Youth.

Flower of Flesh and Blood, an episode from the Japanese  film series Guinea Pig, has also convinced many people – including actor Charlie Sheen, who reported it to the authorities after watching aghast. In Britain, an NFT employee was taken to court after customs seized a tape of the film, and only narrowly escaped a jail sentence when experts declared the film to be a clever simulation. And indeed it is. Catering to the Japanese audience’s blood lust, the film is a carefully constructed fake snuff movie – devoid of any narrative structure, it simply shows a woman being killed and hacked apart by a man dressed as a Samurai. However, the film still features standard cinematic devices and full credits, which one would hardly expect to find on evidence of crime, and the DVD edition also comes with ‘behind the scenes’ footage exposing the whole artifice.

In more recent years, the scuzzier end of US shot-on-video sleaze has seen similar ‘recreation’ movies. The likes of Snuff Kill and Snuff Perversions are plotless collections of faked snuff movies, designed to look as real as possible – deliberately crude, basic and often minimalist, these films exist only to appeal to the warped tastes of ghouls who really want to see the real thing but who will, in its absence, settle for these reconstructions instead. There’s certainly no entertainment value to be had from such movies, but one can easily imagine them being taken for the real thing by newspaper hacks, politicians and censorial groups.

A long-standing tradition of the snuff movie mythology was that such films were made in South America, where “Life Is Cheap!”. Unsubstantiated stories of prostitutes and children being smuggled over the border into the US, where they would be raped and murdered by organised rings of snuff film-makers, had circulated throughout the Seventies. By the Eighties, however, the mythology had developed to the extent where these films were happening anywhere and everywhere and were. One of the most insistent claims made regarding snuff movies relates to paedophile rings and satanic cults.

In both instances, the evidence remains non-existent, but has been so widely distorted and exaggerated that most people genuinely believe it. The most recurrent individual tale concerns footage of the murder of Jason Swift and several other children at the hands of a group of paedophiles in the early Eighties. At the start of the Nineties, newspapers reported that the deaths of several children had been videotaped, although there was no evidence to support this. The reports would subsequently resurface with remarkable frequency; the raids which netted Anthropophagous were reported as possibly having found such footage. Not true. And the Powers That Be conveniently float the rumour whenever calls for stricter censorship are made. So it’s worth re-stating for the record: there is no evidence whatsoever that the killings were filmed for any reason, let alone for commercial purposes. No tapes found. No cameras found. No statements from the convicted killers. Nothing.

Various cases in which murderers have filmed their activities have been held up as proof of snuff movie production. In 1985, Californian police found videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng torturing and murdering several women. Many people took these as final confirmation of the existence of snuff movies, but they were wrong. These tapes, shot for the killer’s own personal gratification (much as the Moors Murderers audio-taped and photographed their victims) don’t fit the definition of films being produced for commercial reasons; of people dying on camera for the profit of shadowy underworld figures; of movies which sell to rich, jaded degenerates for thousands of dollars a time. And despite rumours, there is no evidence to suggest that the tapes had ever been seen by anyone other than the two killers.

And tasteless documentary films such as Executions, Faces of Death, True Gore, Death – The Ultimate Horror, Death Scenes, Snuff – A Documentary About Killing and others don’t qualify either, featuring as they do news footage (or, in the case of the Faces of Death series, rather unconvincing reconstructions) of accidents and crime scenes. Salacious they may be; offensive, probably; but hardly snuff movies. The same is true of war atrocity videos (such as the Bosnian propaganda tape that was being sold on the streets of London at the height of the Balkan war) or various medical studies, ranging from surgical operations to post mortems, that have entered into general underground circulation.

Arguably, the closest we’ve come to real snuff movies are the shocking murder videos posted to the internet – be they jihadist executions, murderous drug gangs in Mexico – where life really DOES seem cheap – slaughtering those who have crossed them or Russian murderers filming their killings and then posting them online, these are very, very real. But snuff movies in the accepted sense? They are not being shot to order for money, so no. And interestingly, no one seems to be calling these clips ‘snuff movies’. Perhaps it’s too trivial a term to be used for such obviously real atrocities.

Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support it though, the Snuff myth will never die. There are too many people with a vested interest in keeping it alive. Feminists see snuff as proof of the dehumanising effect of pornography – another level of the abuse of women. Moral campaigners cite snuff as proof that we need stronger censorship. Fundamentalist Christians use snuff as a way of backing their claims of widespread satanic abuse, which could only be stopped by outlawing Satanism. Yet all these groups seem to miss the point. Because even if snuff movies do exist, they exist beyond the law of every nation in the world, and no legal changes will alter that fact. Murder is already a criminal offence.

In almost thirty years of hysteria, there has yet to be a single ‘commercially’ produced mnuff movie found anywhere on the planet. And yet TV programmes like The Knock and CSI can feature storylines about the cracking of a snuff movie ring by customs or the police as if such events are common occurrences.

Mainstream thriller 8mm perpetuated the myth further (the very title of Joel Schumaker’s film shows the lack of intelligence at work – would actual snuff movie makers shoot on film, given the expense, difficulty and risks involved, when video cameras are widely available?) and has been at the forefront of a new generation of movies playing with the myth. Possibly the interesting movie treatment of the subject is Tesis, made in 1996 by Alejandro Amenábar, a thriller that uses snuff movies as a way of examining our fascination with violence and murder, with Ana Torrent as a film student who finds a videotape featuring a snuff movie and decides to investigate its origins. It’s a solid thriller that is smarter than most.

Bernard Rose, director of Candyman, made Snuff Movie in 2005, where a horror film director exorcises the demons of his wife’s murder at the hands of a hippy cult in the 1960s (a neat tie in to Manson) by shooting snuff movies, killing off auditioning actors. Grubbier than you might expect from the director, but fairly mainstream in its approach, Snuff Movie is a decent film but hardly innovative.

Still, it’s better than the likes of The Great American Snuff Film, Snuff Killer or The Cohasset Snuff Film, all of which are throwaway SOV splatter movies that are frankly best avoided. None of these films offer any new insight and instead attempt to trade on the notoriety of the ‘S’ word.

Equally, films like V/H/S and its sequel blur the line between found footage – which of course tries to pass itself off as an authentic document – and snuff movie mythology. Several other films have also touched on the subject, including The Brave, Urban Legends: Final Cut, Vacancy and Sinister, while the idea of internet snuff via live feeds – often tied to ideas of reality TV – have appeared in My Little Eye, ICU and Halloween: Resurrection amongst others.

But let’s remember that these films, good or bad, are simply exploiting a public fear for profit. Like alien autopsy videos, they give a salivating public what it wants. The truth wouldn’t sell tickets at the box office. And in the end, the truth doesn’t matter. Snuff movies will continue to make headlines because they make great headlines, and people will continue to believe in their existence, because people need to believe. It’s an idea that simply seems too good not to be true.

Feature by David Flint

Alan Ormsby has been something of a jack-of-all-trades in the film industry: not only a highly successful and award winning screenwriter, but also director, actor, make-up effects technician and author. And although his career has taken him far from the world of the horror movie, it remains a genre for which he has fond feelings.

As a child, Ormsby grew up watching classic horror and fantasy films like King Kong and Disney’s Pinocchio, and was fascinated by animation. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist, and would hold strange garage shows for the local kids where he told stories and displayed illustrations on huge sheets of paper. After a while, Ormsby graduated to shooting these garage shows on 8mm film, and slowly his interests moved from cartoons to film-making, and acting in particular.

In the late Sixties, he met Bob Clark whilst the two of them were attending the University of Miami. Clark was an aspiring playwright and Ormsby too was developing his writing skills. Before long the two of them were working together on plays, sometimes writing, sometimes directing, sometimes acting. It was the start of a working relationship that would last several years.

When Clark raised a pittance to make a low budget horror film which would become Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, he turned to Ormsby to help him. Although mainly written by Clark, Ormsby would rework elements of the screenplay enough to secure a co-writer credit. He also took the lead role in a cast that was mainly made up of friends and family (Ormsby’s wife Anya took the female lead). On top of this, he also provided the make-up effects for the film, which not only included the expected gore effects but also several zombies. These walking corpses looked surprisingly effective given the low budget and lack of time available.

Children… was successful enough to bring Clark and Ormsby to the attention of a canadian production company who hired them to make another horror film. This time, Ormsby wrote the screenplay for a movie he called The Veteran. Unlike the jokey Children…, this was a dark, fairly low-key tale inspired by J.W. Jacobs’ classic story The Monkey’s Paw, transposed to 1970′s America. In Ormsby’s version of the tale, a soldier killed in Vietnam is wished back to life by his mother, only to return as a zombie in need of blood to live. The film was retitled several times – at one point known as The Night Andy Came Home, it eventually saw release as both Deathdream and Dead of Night in 1972.

In 1974, Ormsby worked with another Children… alumnus, Jeff Gillen, on Deranged, a fairly accurate retelling of the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration behind Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Although the Gein character was renamed Ezra Cobb, the film stuck mainly to the facts, told with a strong sense of gallows humour. A fine twitchy performance from Roberts Blossom and gore effects by a young Tom Savini (supervised by Ormsby) have made the film a cult classic over the last thirty years.

In 1975, Ormsby wrote a book called Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On, which gave kids instructions on mixing fake blood and horror make-up, plus details of how to run effective garage shows, much like those he used to run himself. He also created the doll Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces (a reference to Lon Chaney).

In 1977, Ormsby would provide the make-up for Ken Weiderhorn’s Nazi zombie film Shock Waves (aka Death Corps).

Throughout the 1980′s and 1990′s, Ormsby would work as a writer on a wide variety of films and TV shows. He won acclaim for his screenplay for My Bodyguard in 1980, and returned to horror a year later, writing Paul Schrader’s controversial remake of Cat People. He also worked again with Bob Clark on Porkys II: The Next Day in 1983.

For TV, he wrote science fiction film Almost Human (1987) and thrillers Indecency (1992), The Disappearance of Nora (1993) and Deadly Web (1996), the latter an early cyberstalking tale.

In 1991, Clark asked Ormsby to write and direct Popcorn, a modern horror film that he was producing. Unfortunately, there were a series of disagreements between Ormsby and studio executives, and he left the project (his screenplay is credited to Tod Hackett). In 1996, he wrote crime thriller The Substitute, about a Vietnam vet who goes undercover as a teacher to root out gang violence. Amazingly, the film has spawned three sequels!

Ormsby’s work has slowed down in the last decade, suggesting that he is now enjoying retirement, though he still pops up for interviews about his early work.

Bio by David Flint, Horrorpedia

Robert Lawrence Stine (born October 8, 1943), known as R. L. Stine, and Jovial Bob Stine, is an American writer and producer. Stine, who is referred to as the “Stephen King of children’s literature,” is the author of hundreds of horror fiction novels, including the books in the Fear Street, Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, and The Nightmare Room series. R. L. Stine’s books have sold over 400 million copies.

In 1986, Stine wrote his first horror novel, called Blind Date. He followed with many other novels, including The Babysitter, Beach House, Hit and Run, and The Girlfriend.

In 1989, Stine started writing Fear Street books. In 1992, Stine and Parachute went on to launch Goosebumps.

A Goosebumps TV series that ran for four seasons from 1995–1998 and three video games; Escape from HorrorLand, Attack of the Mutant and Goosebumps HorrorLand. In 1995, Stine’s first novel targeted at adults, called Superstitious, was published. He has since published two other adult-oriented novels; The Sitter and Eye Candy.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Stine has worked on installments of five different book series, Mostly Ghostly, Rotten School, Fear Street, The Nightmare Room, Goosebumps Horrorland and the stand-alone novels Dangerous Girls (2003) and The Taste of Night (2004). A direct-to-DVD movie The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It, starring Emily Osment was released by Universal on September 4, 2007.

Goosebumps Series 2000

1. Cry of the Cat
2. Bride of the Living Dummy
3. Creature Teacher
4. Invasion of the Body Squeezers, Part I
5. Invasion of the Body Squeezers, Part II
6. I Am Your Evil Twin
7. Revenge R Us
8. Fright Camp
9. Are You Terrified Yet?
10. Headless Halloween
11. Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls
12. Brain Juice
13. Return to HorrorLand
14. Jekyll and Heidi
15. Scream School
16. The Mummy Walks
17. The Werewolf in the Living Room
18. Horrors of the Black Ring
19. Return to Ghost Camp
20. Be Afraid – Be Very Afraid!
21. The Haunted Car
22. Full Moon Fever
23. Slappy’s Nightmare
24. Earth Geeks Must Go!
25. Ghost in the Mirror

Give Yourself Goosebumps

1. Escape from the Carnival of Horrors
2. Tick Tock, You’re Dead!
3. Trapped in Bat Wing Hall
4. The Deadly Experiments of Dr. Eeek
5. Night in Werewolf Woods
6. Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter
7. Under the Magician’s Spell
8. The Curse of the Creeping Coffin
9. The Knight in Screaming Armor
10. Diary of a Mad Mummy
11. Deep in the Jungle of Doom
12. Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum
13. Scream of the Evil Genie
14. The Creepy Creations of Professor Shock
15. Please Don’t Feed the Vampire!
16. Secret Agent Grandma
17. Little Comic Shop of Horrors
18. Attack of the Beastly Baby-sitter
19. Escape from Camp Run-for-Your-Life
20. Toy Terror: Batteries Included
21. The Twisted Tale of Tiki Island
22. Return to the Carnival of Horrors
23. Zapped in Space
24. Lost in Stinkeye Swamp
25. Shop Till You Drop…Dead!
26. Alone in Snakebite Canyon
27. Checkout Time at the Dead-End Hotel
28. Night of a Thousand Claws
29. Invaders from the Big Screen
30. You’re Plant Food!
31. The Werewolf of Twisted Tree Lodge
32. It’s Only a Nightmare
33. It Came from the Internet
34. Elevator to Nowhere
35. Hocus-Pocus Horror
36. Ship of Ghouls
37. Escape from Horror House
38. Into the Twister of Terror
39. Scary Birthday to You
40. Zombie School
41. Danger Time
42. All-Day Nightmare 

Fear Street

1. The New Girl
2. The Surprise Party
3. The Overnight
4. Missing
5. The Wrong Number
6. The Sleepwalker
7. Haunted
8. Halloween Party
9. The Stepsister
10. Ski Weekend
11. The Fire Game
12. Lights Out
13. The Secret Bedroom
14. The Knife
15. The Prom Queen
16. First Date
17. The Best Friend
18. The Cheater
19. Sunburn
20. The New Boy
21. The Dare
22. Bad Dreams
23. Double Date
24. The Thrill Club
25. One Evil Summer
26. The Mind Reader
27. Wrong Number 2
28. Truth or Dare
29. Dead End
30. Final Grade
31. Switched
32. College Weekend
33. The Stepsister 2
34. What Holly Heard
35. The Face
36. Secret Admirer
37. The Perfect Date
38. The Confession
39. The Boy Next Door
40. Night Games
41. Runaway
42. Killer’s Kiss
43. All-Night Party
44. The Rich Girl
45. Cat
46. Fear Hall: The Beginning
47. Fear Hall: The Conclusion
48. Who Killed The Homecoming Queen?
49. Into The Dark
50. Best Friend 2
51. Trapped

New Fear Street

1. The Stepbrother
2. Camp Out
3. Scream, Jennifer, Scream!
4. The Bad Girl

Fear Street Super Chiller

1. Party Summer
2. Silent Night
3. Goodnight Kiss
4. Broken Hearts
5. Silent Night 2
6. The Dead Lifeguard
7. Cheerleaders: The New Evil
8. Bad Moonlight
9. The New Year’s Party
10. Goodnight Kiss 2
11. Silent Night 3
12. High Tide
13. Cheerleaders: The Evil Lives!

Cheerleaders

1. The First Evil
2. The Second Evil
3. The Third Evil
4. The New Evil
5. The Evil Lives!

The Fear Street Saga Trilogy

1. The Betrayal
2. The Secret
3. The Burning

99 Fear Street: The House of Evil

1. The First Horror
2. The Second Horror
3. The Third Horror

Cataluna Chronicles

1. The Evil Moon
2. The Dark Secret
3. The Deadly Fire

Fear Park

1. The First Scream
2. The Loudest Scream
3. The Last Scream

Fear Street Sagas

1. A New Fear
2. House of Whispers
3. Forbidden Secrets
4. The Sign of Fear
5. The Hidden Evil
6. Daughters of Silence
7. Children of Fear
8. Dance of Death
9. Heart of the Hunter
10. The Awakening Evil
11. Circle of Fire
12. Chamber of Fear
13. Faces of Terror
14. One Last Kiss
15. Door of Death
16. The Hand of Power

Fear Street Seniors

1. Let’s Party
2. In Too Deep
3. The Thirst
4. No Answer
5. Last Chance
6. The Gift
7. Fight Team, Fight
8. Sweetheart, Evil Heart
9. Spring Break
10. Wicked
11. The Prom Date
12. Graduation Day

Fear Street Nights

1. Moonlight Secrets
2. Midnight Games
3. Darkest Dawn

Ghosts of Fear Street

1. Hide and Shriek
2. Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?
3. The Attack of the Aqua Apes
4. Nightmare in 3-D
5. Stay Away from the Tree House
6. Eye of the Fortuneteller
7. Fright Knight
8. The Ooze
9. Revenge of the Shadow People
10. The Bugman Lives!
11. The Boy Who Ate Fear Street
12. Night of the Werecat
13. How to Be a Vampire
14. Body Switchers from Outer Space
15. Fright Christmas
16. Don’t Ever Get Sick at Granny’s
17. House of a Thousand Screams
18. Camp Fear Ghouls
19. Three Evil Wishes
20. Spell of the Screaming Jokers
21. The Creature from Club Lagoona
22. Field of Screams
23. Why I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts
24. Monster Dog
25. Halloween Bugs Me!
26. Go to Your Tomb — Right Now!
27. Parents from the 13th Dimension
28. Hide and Shriek II
29. The Tale of the Blue Monkey
30. I Was a Sixth-Grade Zombie
31. Escape of the He-Beast
32. Caution: Aliens at Work
33. Attack of the Vampire Worms
34. Horror Hotel Pt. 1: The Vampire Checks in
35. Horror Hotel Pt. 2: Ghost in the Guest Room
36. The Funhouse of Dr. Freek

Mostly Ghostly

1. Who Let the Ghosts Out?
2. Have You Met My Ghoulfriend?
3. One Night in Doom House
4. Little Camp of Horrors
5. Ghouls Gone Wild
6. Let’s Get This Party Haunted!
7. Freaks and Shrieks
8. Don’t Close Your Eyes!

Rotten School

1. The Big Blueberry Barf-Off!
2. The Great Smelling Bee
3. The Good, the Bad and the Very Slimy
4. Lose, Team, Lose!
5. Shake, Rattle and Hurl!
6. The Heinie Prize
7. Dudes, the School is Haunted!
8. The Teacher from Heck
9. Ready, Set… Ghost!
10. Party Poopers
11. The Rottenest Angel
12. Punk’d and Skunked
13. Battle of the Dum Diddys
14. Got Cake?
15. Night of the Creepy Things
16. Calling All Birdbrains
17. Dumb Clucks

The Nightmare Room

1. Don’t Forget Me!
2. Locker 13
3. My Name is Evil
4. Liar Liar
5. Dear Diary, I’m Dead
6. They Call Me Creature
7. The Howler
8. Shadow Girl
9. Camp Nowhere
10. Full Moon Halloween
11. Scare School
12. Visitors

The Nightmare Room Thrillogy

1. Fear Games
2. What Scares You the Most?
3. No Survivors

Goosebumps HorrorLand

• Welcome to HorrorLand: A Survival Guide
• Revenge of the Living Dummy
• Creep from the Deep
• Monster Blood for Breakfast!
• The Scream of the Haunted Mask
• Dr. Maniac vs. Robby Schwartz
• Who’s Your Mummy?
• My Friends Call Me Monster
• Say Cheese – And Die Screaming!
• Welcome to Camp Slither
• Help! We Have Strange Powers!
• Escape from HorrorLand
• The Streets of Panic Park
• When the Ghost Dog Howls
• Little Shop of Hamsters
• Heads, You Lose!
• Weirdo Halloween
• The Wizard Of Ooze
• Slappy’s New Year!
• The Horror at Chiller House
• Claws!
• Night of Giant Everything
• The Five Masks of Dr. Screem
• Why I Quit Zombie School
• Don’t Scream!
• The Birthday Party of No Return

Goosebumps Most Wanted

• Son of Slappy
• Planet of the Lawn Gnomes
• How I Met My Monster
• Frankenstein’s Dog
• Dr. Maniac Will See You Now

Hark

1. The Badlands of Hark
2. The Invaders of Hark

Dangerous Girls

Both story were re-released in 2010 under the name Bitten.

1. Dangerous Girls
2. The Taste of Night

Stand-alone novels

• The Adventures of Shrinkman
• The Beast
• The Beast 2
• Curtains
• Eye Candy
• It’s the First Day of School…Forever!
• A Midsummer Night’s Scream
• Phone Calls
• The Sitter
• Superstitious
• Three Faces of Me
• When Good Ghouls Go Bad
• Zombie Town

Wikipedia

“Closer” is a song written by Trent Reznor and featured on the 1994 Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral.

The music video was directed by Mark Romanek and first aired on May 12, 1994, having been filmed in April of that year. It was cut down from its original length to 4:36. The video was infamous and helped bolster the success of the band. The video shows events in what appears to be a 19th-century-style mad-scientist’s laboratory that deals with religion, sexuality, animal cruelty, politics, and terror. Its imagery was controversial and included:

• A heart connected to some sort of device; the beat of the heart corresponds to the beat of the song
• A nude, bald woman with a crucifix mask.
• A monkey tied to a cross.
• A severed pig’s head spinning on some type of machine.
• A diagram of the vulva/vagina.
• Reznor wearing an S&M mask while swinging in shackles.
• Reznor seated in front of a wall covered in fetish gear, wearing a ball gag.

Several times, Reznor, wearing leather pants, floats and rotates through the air, suspended by invisible wires. There are also scenes of Reznor being blown back by a wind machine while wearing aviator goggles.

These images seem to be inspired by the art of Joel-Peter Witkin, as well as Francis Bacon and George Tooker. The video is also very heavily inspired by the animated short film Street of Crocodiles, with much of the video being a live-action recreation of the sets and scenes from that film.

Uncle Sam is a 1996 horror film directed by William Lustig, and written by Larry Cohen. It stars William Smith (Grave of the Vampire), David ‘Shark’ Fralick, Leslie Neale, Bo Hopkins (Tentacles, Sweet Sixteen), Matthew Flint, Anne Tremko, Isaac Hayes, Timothy Bottoms (The Fantasist, Parasomnia), P.J. Soles (Halloween), Tom McFadden, Morgan Paull, Richard Cummings Jr., Robert Forster (Alligator) and Jason Adelman.

In Kuwait, a military unit uncovers an American helicopter downed by friendly fire at least three years ago. As the wreckage is inspected, Master Sergeant Sam Harper, one of the burnt bodies within, springs to life, kills a sergeant and a major, and returns to an inert state after muttering, “Don’t be afraid, it’s only friendly fire!”

Weeks later, Sam’s body is delivered to his hometown of Twin Rivers, which is preparing for Independence Day. Sam’s wife Louise is given custody of the casket containing Sam’s remains, which are left in the home of Sam’s estranged sister Sally, who lives with her patriotic young son, Jody. Sam reanimates in the early hours of the Fourth of July, and proceeds to kill and steal the costume of a perverted Uncle Sam. Sam then makes his way to a cemetery, where he murders two of three juvenile delinquents who had vandalized tombstones, and desecrated an American flag.

During the Independence Day celebration (which a corrupt congressman is visiting) Sam beheads the third delinquent, kills Jody’s teacher (who had opposed the Vietnam War) with a hatchet, and shoots Sally’s unscrupulous lawyer boyfriend in the head. Despite these deaths, the festivities continue, but are thrown into disarray when Sam uses the fireworks gear to blow up the congressman, and a flagpole to impale Louise’s deputy boyfriend. As this occurs, Jody is told by his mother and aunt that his supposedly heroic idol Sam was in fact an alcoholic psychopath who physically and sexually abused them, and only joined the military so he could get a “free pass” to kill people…

Buy Uncle Sam on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.com

‘Complementing Cohen’s note-perfect string of nationalistic platitudes, Lustig’s surprisingly evocative widescreen compositions are peppered with an absurd parade of Americana—fireworks, potato-sack races, even a morose, wheelchair bound young boy as a ludicrous representation of the stereotypical Vietnam vet—almost all of which become the instruments of death to an amassed populace that feels no qualms about celebrating its own legacy of militaristic vengeance but draws the line if it threatens to soil their bubble of blithe privilege. Oh, and it features a gliding, dreamlike chase scene on stilts that, no doubt to Sam’s chagrin, momentarily thrusts the video cheapie straight into the realm of swooning Euro-horror.’ Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

‘And the pace was slower than expected, building character and mood rather than just having Sam running around killing folks nonstop (which is what I was actually expecting). I appreciate that. There are a couple of “Hi I’m – *killed*” characters, but for the most part they are given a few scenes before being offed, and only one character is killed for no reason (the others are flag burners, crooked politicians, or other “Anti-American” types). Again, this was most unusual for a slasher movie, and even more surprising when you consider the ridiculous concept.’ Horror Movie a Day

‘Theoretically, Uncle Sam’s creators are using the format of the slasher film to make us re-examine our notions of patriotism, of sacrifice, of honor and glory and all that crap, while simultaneously forcing us to come to grips with the idea that most of the alternatives that have thus far been postulated are equally full of shit, and that the people who espouse them are as likely as not be stupid, lazy, selfish, and immoral. In and of itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but anybody with the cognitive horsepower to think in those terms in the first place has probably been thinking in those terms for quite some time, and is likely to be turned off by the fact that Uncle Sam makes its characters on both sides of the issue employ only the worst, least defensible arguments to state their cases, and to couch those feeble arguments in the most simplistic, juvenile terms imaginable.’ 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

Wikipedia | IMDb

“Disarm” is a song by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. It was the third single from their second album, Siamese Dream. “Disarm” was written by Billy Corgan (and produced by Butch Vig) and is one of the band’s most highly regarded songs. Corgan considers it the most personally important song on the album.

The BBC banned the song from appearing on Top of the Pops, because of the lyric “cut that little child”, and it received little radio airplay in the UK. That lyric along with lyrics like “what I choose is my choice” and “the killer in me is the killer in you” has also led to some controversy, as some inexplicably read it as a reference to abortion. Corgan has stated that the song reflects the shaky relationship he had with his parents while growing up. However, even with the ban and the limited radio time, it still peaked at number eleven on the UK Singles Chart..

The music video, directed by Jake Scott (Ridley Scott’s son, Tony Scott’s nephew and the director of the ‘Ménage à trois‘ episode of The Hunger TV series) is black and white and shows the members of the band floating over images of an old gothic house, an old man walking through an underpass while home movie-esque, color footage shows a young boy (Sean Adams) playing outside. Billy Corgan has said that he didn’t want the old man in the video, but Scott insisted. The video premiered on MTV in late 1993 and was immediately placed into heavy rotation. It has since become a perennial on channels such as Kerrang!

Wikipedia

Mike Vraney was the founder of Something Weird Video, an American film distributor company based in Seattle, Washington. On January 2, 2014, he died after a lengthy battle with lung cancer. He was fifty-six years old. His sterling efforts to dig out and release masses of horror and exploitation films have undoubtedly been a major boon to the world of cult cinema, especially as his iconic label — which started out as basically a fan operation — had moved into legitimacy long ago via officially sanctioned DVD releases in conjunction with Image Entertainment and had recently been releasing Blu-rays and their own documentaries. Mike’s passion for trash cinema will be sorely missed.

Something Weird Video specialise in exploitation films, particularly the works of Harry Novak, Doris Wishman, David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis. The company is named after Lewis’ 1967 film Something Weird, and the logo is taken from that film’s original poster art. Something Weird has distributed well over 2,500 films to date. Even when the movies themselves were pretty awful, Vraney ensured fans got their money’s worth by making up themed triple-bills and loading DVDs with masses of ultra-obscure and head-shaking extras.

Vraney was inspired by his teenage job as a theater projectionist. His love for the obscure films that never made it to video prompted him to transfer hundreds of ancient reels of film to VHS and DVD. On the company website, he explained the label’s genesis:

‘In my mind, the last great genre to be scavenged were the exploitation/sexploitation films of the ’30s through the ’70s. After looking into this further, I realized that there were nearly 2,000 movies out there yet to be discovered. So with this for inspiration, my quest began and wouldn’t you know, just out of the blue I fell into a large collection of 16mm girlie arcade loops (which became the first compilation videos we put together). Around the same time I received an unexpected phone call that suddenly made all this real: my future and hands-down the king of sexploitation Dave Friedman was on the other end of the line. This would be the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship for both of us. Dave’s films became the building blocks for our film collection and he has taught and guided me through the wonderful world of sexploitation, introducing me to his colleagues (Dan Sonney, Harry Novak, H. G. Lewis, Bob Cresse and all the other colourful characters who were involved during his heyday) and they’ve been eager to dive into the business again.’

Adrian J Smith

Electric Frankenstein is an American rock band from Whippany, Clifton, and other areas of New Jersey, founded by Sal Canzonieri. Their music is generally considered punk rock, but includes elements of hard rock and heavy metal as well. Because of this, they have sometimes been referred to as AC/DC meets The Dead Boys.

The band was first formed in 1989 out of the ashes of New York City space punk band The Thing, by brothers Sal and Dan Canzonieri (a.k.a., Danny Frankenstein). With Sal on guitar and Dan on bass, their first line-up was with Frankie Orlandoni on vocals, Jim Foster on lead guitar and John Caton on drums. Within one year, Steve Miller took over as singer/vocalist and eventually also played lead guitar. Miller took time off while recording a side project, and Scott Wilkins of Verbal Abuse & Condemned to Death took over vocals for two years, after which Steve Miller returned on vocals and lead guitar. John Steele and Rob Sefcik took over alternately playing drums during the last 15 years.

The band developed a strong following in New York and by 1995, they toured nationally and internationally. After releasing singles on a handful of independent labels, they released their first vinyl EP, The Time Is Now, in 1995 that was released on CD with tracks from 7″ singles as their first full-length album. Since then, they have released over 10 albums, influencing such bands as The Hellacopters, Gluecifer, Turbonegro, and others.

The band’s music and/or legendarily iconographic art has been featured in video games, such as Tony Hawk’s Underground, TV shows such as Viva La Bam, The X-Files, Nitro Circus, Fantasy Factory, Dawson’s Creek, and movies such as Signs, Jackass, and American Psycho 2.

Electric Frankenstein is also the first and only band so far to have a whole art book published of their record covers and concert posters, which were designed by artists such as Coop, Kozik, Johnny Ace, Art Chantry, Dirty Donny, Peter Bagge, and many more. The book, “Electric Frankenstein – High Energy Punk Rock & Roll Poster Art” and was published by Dark Horse Comics (2004).

Discography:

• The Time Is Now (1995)
• Conquers The World (1996)
• Sick Songs (US) / Action High (UK) (1997)
• Spare Parts (1998)
• Rock and Roll Monster (1999)
• How to Make a Monster (1999)
• Annie’s Grave (US) / Don’t Touch Me, I’m Electric (UK) (2000)
• The Buzz of 1,000 Volts (2001) – USA
• Listen Up, Baby! (2003)
• Burn Bright, Burn Fast! (2005)

The band’s somewhat congratulatory Wikipedia entry suggests that they may have had a hand in compiling it. Nonetheless, their horror-themed name, imagery and songs mean they should definitely be featured on Horrorpedia.

Official site

Slime was a toy product manufactured by Mattel, sold in a plastic rubbish bin and introduced in the winter of 1976 consisting of a non-toxic viscous, oozing green material made primarily from guar gum. Different variations of Slime were released over the years, including Slime of differing hues containing rubber insects, eyeballs, and worms and Masters of the Universe Slime for Hordak’s Slime Pit playset in the 1980s.

The late 1970s also introduced a Slime Monster board game; the object of the game was to avoid having your game piece ‘slimed’ on by a foot-tall plastic monster that had slime oozing from its mouth. Other toy companies have produced their own slime such as the “Ecto-Plazm [sic]” sold with select figures in Kenner’s Real Ghostbusters toyline. Playmates’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figure line also had Retro-Mutagen slime sold in containers and included with playsets.

In scientific terms, slime is classified as a non-Newtonian fluid. These are thick liquids that have a variable viscosity, the measurement of the resistance to flow when a shearing force is applied. Newtonian fluids have a constant viscosity depending on their composition. For example, water is always a thin liquid with a low viscosity. Molasses is thick and has a high viscosity. Non-Newtonian fluids, like slime, have a different viscosity based on the amount of force put on them. If a small amount of force is applied, such as stirring them slowly with your fingers, they feel thin and water-like. If a high force is applied, like throwing it against a wall, the resistance is very strong. They are called non-Newtonian fluids because they do not behave as predicted by Newton’s laws. Other materials that also behave like this include ketchup, gelatin, glue, and quicksand. Slime as a toy dates back to the 1920′s, when chemist Hermann Staudinger was researching polymers.

In non-scientific terms, slime was one of the must-haves for any 70′s or 80′s youth. The shocking uranium imbued colours and endless possibilities were simply too much to resist. Alas, as with many of these fantastically marketed toys, the sad truth was soon realised – there really wasn’t anything you could do with it. After five minutes of sneeze-related gags your hands were soon both cold and neon and the clean-up operation had to begin in earnest. Perhaps more than any other substance created, it was doomed to find itself troubling inanimate objects, in my case the family roll-top bureau, the only piece of furniture we had which we were specifically told to be careful around. To compound the issue, the particular strain of slime I had was the day-glo pink with rubber worm trim.

The main components are the polysaccharide guar gum and sodium tetraborate. Instead of the polysaccharide, other alcohol-group containing polymers may be used, such as polyvinyl alcohol, however polymers formed in this way are more often called flubber. It is possible to make slime in the comfort of your own dwelling.

Ingredients

• 1 cup hot water
• 1.5 tsp. Borax (non-toxic/available by laundry detergents)
• 2 cups clear glue
• 2 cups warm water
• 1 tsp. liquid watercolor

What to do:

1. Mix 1 cup hot water and 1.5 tsp. of Borax until dissolved. Set aside.
2. Mix 2 cups of clear glue and 2 cups of warm water together in a plastic bowl.
3. Using a metal spoon, slowly pour Borax mixture into the glue mixture while stirring quickly. Stir until the mixture leaves the side of the bowl. Slime will be sticky. Knead the mixture until it is no longer sticky. The more you work with it the easier it will become.

I have not attempted this and accept no responsibility for mishaps, fatal or otherwise.

Realising that slime alone was quickly being rumbled as even more useless than silly putty, Mattel put the wheels in motion to give the substance more of a purpose. Their big hitter was their Slime Monster board game, a typically baffling affair that consisted of a pleasingly large marauding plastic monster who you had to stop destroying a town. Via a spinner, you worked your way across town in a big too plant a landmine (!) to destroy him. If you were unlucky, the monster would spew slime over the plastic character representing you, ruining the carpet and anything else in its path.

Following later were Slime It’s Alive!, the same sticky goo but with eyeballs and other treats hidden within, the aforementioned pink slime with rubber worms, and Ooze It, an oddly pathetic-looking green monster who when filled with red slime would expel it from various orifices.By 1986, it was a no-holds barred affair, Dissect an Alien was a toy from 1986 where an alien could be cut open, its organs removed, with a bucket of “slime” to serve as blood.

Daz Lawrence

Thanks to stretcharmstrongworld.com and plaidstallions.com for some of the pics.