The 5th and 6th issues of Mark McLaughlin’s The Urbanite were devoted to “Strange Relationships” and “Strange Fascinations” respectively, and included stories by Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Ligotti, Melanie Tem, M.R. Scofidio, Hugh B. Cave, Andy Cox, Joel Lane, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Caitlín R. Kiernan. There were two editions of Joseph K. Cherkes’ Haunts: Tales of Unexpected Horror and the Supernatural, and it celebrated its 10th anniversary with issue 30. Pulphouse also made a brief reappearance with two issues from editor Dean Wesley Smith, and Lisa Jean Bothell’s Heliocentric Net featured fiction, poetry, art, book reviews and an interview with Stephen Mark Rainey, the editor of Deathrealm magazine.
Rainey’s Deathrealm itself managed four issues in 1995 with fiction by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Manly Wade Wellman, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Douglas Clegg, and a collaboration between Norman Partridge & Wayne Allen Sallee, interviews with Nancy Kilpatrick and Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner’s final column. Lin Stein’s Dead of Night also put out four issues filled with fiction, interviews with Frederick Pohl, Thomas F. Monteleone, Nancy Kilpatrick and David Bischoff, plus an article on horror by J.N. Williamson.
Australia’s impressive small press magazine Bloodsongs, edited by Steve Proposch, published two issues that included interviews with Ellen Datlow, Ron Dee and the late Karl Edward Wagner, profiles of Lucy Taylor and Clive Barker, and the final two parts in Robert Hood’s knowledgeable survey of zombie films, along with book and magazine reviews and some variable fiction of the splatterpunk variety. Not quite so glossy, Kyla Ward and David Carroll’s Tabula Rasa: A History of Horror also managed two issues from Down Under devoted to “Splatterpunk” and “Classic Monsters”. These included interviews with David J. Schow, Stephen Jones, Kim Newman and Les Daniels. However, the editors announced that they were putting the magazine on hiatus with issue 7 to concentrate on other projects for the next couple of years.
The 14th issue of Aurealis: The Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, included an article “The Quest for Australian Horror” by Steve Paulsen and Sean McMullen. W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook 29 featured fiction by Peter Tremayne and Darrell Schweitzer and poetry by Brian Lumley; Peggy Nadramia’s Grue 17 included stories by Wayne Allen Sallee, Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Norman Partridge, and there were also new issues of Midnight Graffiti and Margaret L. Carter’s The Vampire’s Crypt.
Aberrations edited by Michael Andre-Driussi described itself as an “adult” SF/fantasy/horror magazine and published ten issues that included interviews with Lois Tilton and Neil Gaiman. Glenda J. Woodrum’s annual horror fanzine Shapeshifter! was billed “for mature readers only”, while New York University’s The Horror Society published the first edition of Funeral Party, a very impressive perfect-bound magazine featuring various interviews (including Chas. Balun and Dennis Paoli), fiction (by Buddy Giovinazzo, J.B. Mauceri-Macabre, and others) and articles (on H.R. Giger, The Grand Guignol etc.).
As well as holding monthly meetings with special guests, The Preston Speculative Fiction Group also published two issues of Kimota, a selection of fiction, poetry, articles and essays edited by Graeme Hurry. Contributors included Stephen Gallagher, Mark Morris, Stephen Bowkett, Peter Crowther, D.F. Lewis, Bryan Talbot, Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock. The Velvet Vampyre, subtitled ‘The Journal of The Vampyre Society’, was an attractive magazine with a real club feel and just one of the benefits for vampire fans who were looking for like-fanged enthusiasts.
The British Fantasy Society continued to offer its members value-for-money with a regular, bi-monthly Newsletter edited by David J. Howe and Debbie Bennett; Dark Horizons No.36, a mixture of stories and non-fiction edited by Phil Williams; Mystique: Tales of Wonder 6, a collection of fantasy and science fiction stories edited by Mike Chinn, and such story chapbooks as Annabelle Says by Simon Clark and Stephen Laws, and a rare reprint of Colonel Halifax’s Ghost Story by S. Baring-Gould.
Necronomicon Press’s award-winning Necrofile published four more issues under the triple threat of editors Stefan Dziemianowicz, S.T. Joshi and Michael A. Morrison. The magazine continued to present some of the most insightful reviews in the horror field, along with Ramsey Campbell’s often hilarious column, “Ramsey Campbell, Probably”, and “think pieces” by Simon MacCulloch, Mike Ashley, Stephen Jones and Darrell Schweitzer.
For H.P. Lovecraft fans there were two issues of Lovecraft Studies edited by S.T. Joshi, three issues each of The New Lovecraft Collector (issue 10 featuring a useful listing of all HPL’s appearances in Weird Tales) and Robert M. Price’s Crypt of Cthulhu (including a Peter Cannon special), plus one issue of S.T. Joshi’s Studies in Weird Fiction. On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations was a collection of essays by Lovecraft scholar Steven J. Mariconda, with an introduction by Joshi.
New fiction booklets included The Final Diary Entry of Kees Huijgens by “Jozef P. Janszoon and D.E. LeRoss” (aka William R. Stotler), a very Lovecraftian début about bizarre architecture that leads to dark dimensions; The Sixth Dog by pulp magazine veteran Jane Rice; Don D’Ammassa’s horror story Twisted Images illustrated by Robert H. Knox, and a revised edition of Tales of the Lovecraft Collectors by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., which included four stories from the diary of a (fictional) HPL collector. Tales of Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith collected twenty-one related stories restored from the original manuscripts by editor Will Murray with Steve Behrends.
Also from Necronomicon Press was a chunky chapbook, The Core of Ramsey Campbell, which was an informative bibliography and reader’s guide compiled by the author along with Stefan Dziemianowicz and S.T. Joshi. Not only did it contain complete listings of books written and edited, short fiction and poetry, but also notes on his work by Campbell and a delightful preface by Peter Straub. The NecronomiCon Program Book, published to commemorate the second NecronomiCon held in Danvers, Massachusetts, included an appreciation of Guest of Honour Ramsey Campbell by Straub, plus an article and story by Campbell.
Campbell’s Twilight Tales from Merseyside was a collection of four short stories, “The Companion”, “Calling Card”, “The Guide” and “Out of the Woods”, read by the author on audio cassette. The ninety-minute tape was produced by Necronomicon Press Audio/A-Typical Productions. Also from Necronomicon Press Audio came Clark Ashton Smith: Live from Auburn: The Elder Tapes, a collection of home recordings of the author reading eleven of his poems, with an introduction by Robert B. Elder and an accompanying booklet featuring cover art by Gahan Wilson.
Telstar’s Talking Books series included 10 Tales of Terror: From the Graveyard (nicely written by newcomer Paul Finch) and 10 Chillers for Children: Don’t Turn Out the Light, read by Bernard Cribbins, Colin Baker, Joss Ackland, Kate O’Mara, Patsy Kensit, Fenella Fielding and others.
Mike Ashley and William G. Contento’s The Supernatural Index: A Listing of Fantasy, Supernatural, Occult, Weird, and Horror Anthologies appeared as a thousand-page hardcover from Greenwood Press, priced at $195.00. It contained a bibliographic listing of more than two thousand anthologies and their contents from 1813-1994. J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography compiled and annotated by Gary William Crawford was another Greenwood Press publication, as was Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic by Linda Badley, an examination of the horror film drawing on various critical approaches.
Classic Horror Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, contained essays, bibliographies and review extracts on twelve eighteenth and nineteenth-century authors considered by the editor to be the most important in the field. These were Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, along with more interesting choices such as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. Bloom also edited Modern Horror Writers, which followed a similar format as a guide to the work of Robert Aickman, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, Walter de la Mare, L.P. Hartley, William Hope Hodgson, Shirley Jackson
, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Richard Matheson.
Borgo Press’s Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, by Darrell Schweitzer, featured eleven interviews with Robert Bloch, Brian Lumley and others, while The Monsters in the Mind, by Frank Cawson, looked at how the Monster had been shaped by society throughout history, from Greek texts to the work of Jane Austen, de Sade and Thomas Harris. An eccentric little volume from Skoob Books was The R’Lyeh Text edited by Robert Turner, which purported to be a transcription of material from The Necronomicon, with a preface by George Hay and an introduction by Colin Wilson.
The Secret of the Sangraal collected thirty-nine rare essays by Arthur Machen, with an introduction by Raymond B. Russell; White Hawk Press’s Return to Derleth: Selected Essays, Volume Two, edited by P. James Roberts, contained seven essays about the author, editor and co-founder of Arkham House by Basil Copper, Sam Moskowitz, Frank Belknap Long and others, illustrated by Eugene Gryniewicz and Frank Utpatel; and Betty T. Bennett’s Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley collected together 230 letters by the literary mother of Frankenstein. Henry James: A Literary Life was a critical biography by Kenneth Graham.
Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu’s classic study of vampires, In Search of Dracula, was reissued in a “wholly rewritten and updated” edition, and Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves was an academic study of how vampire literature is transformed by social and cultural change.
Actress Janet Leigh teamed up with Christopher Nickens to write Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. Immoral Tales by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs was aptly subtitled ’Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956-1984’. A fascinating volume packed with rare stills and posters, the book covered the work of such cult directors as Jesus Franco, Jean Rollin, José Larraz, Jose Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre by David Skal and Elias Savada was a slightly disappointing look at one of Hollywood’s more elusive directors, but it was still much better than John McCarty’s The Sleaze Merchants: Adventures in Exploitation Filmmaking, which actually offered seven essays and eight interviews by other writers about such low budget auteurs as Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ed Wood and David DeCoteau.
Laughing Screaming, by William Paul, was a study of horror and comedy in modern Hollywood. The second revised edition of The House of Horror: The Complete Hammer Films Story, by Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry, looked at Britain’s most popular horror studio, and Dissecting Aliens: Terror in Space, by John L. Flynn, was an apparently unlicensed examination of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Alien trilogy.
The fourth revised edition of John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again contained more than five thousand reviews of science fiction, fantasy and horror movies, while Chas. Balun’s More Gore Score: Brave New Horrors reviewed 141 films and helpfully rated them on their gore quotient.
Spectrum 2: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art was the second stunning annual collection from Underwood Books, edited by Cathy Burnett and Arnie Fenner with Jim Loehr. It contained some of the best artwork from the previous year, with more than two hundred pieces reproduced in full colour by Marshall Arisman, Ian Miller, J.K. Potter, Brian Froud, Les Edwards, Jim Burns, John Bolton, Bob Eggleton and Phil Hale, including the recipients of the annual Chesley Awards presented by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.
A Hannes Bok Showcase from publisher Charles F. Miller boasted another great selection of the pulp artist’s work, both in black and white and colour, with a personal foreword by Frederik Pohl. Alien Horizons: The Fantastic Art of Bob Eggleton was another volume in Paper Tiger’s attractive series of art books, with text by Nigel Suckling and a selection of Eggleton’s SF and horror paintings, including his covers for Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series.
From Texas-based Mojo Press came a graphic collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell Tale Heart, illustrated by Bill D. Fountain. The same imprint also published Weird Business, edited by Joe R. Lansdale and Richard Klaw, which collected twenty-three graphic adaptations of stories by Poe, Robert Bloch, Poppy Z. Brite, F. Paul Wilson, Chet Williamson, Michael Moorcock, Nancy A. Collins, Norman Partridge and Howard Waldrop, amongst others.
Joe R. Lansdale once again teamed up with penciller Timothy Truman and inker Sam Glanzman for Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such. Again set in a bizarre Old West, it was DC/Vertigo’s five-issue follow-up to the creative team’s 1993 hit, Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo.
Dark Horse’s Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor series contained illustrated adaptations of some of co-editor Ellison’s best tales, along with an original story written around the cover art of each issue. The same company also produced an unremarkable adaptation of the movie Species, written by Dennis Feldman and illustrated by Jon Foster and Brian Kane.
Roger Corman kicked off his new line of Cosmic Comics with Death Race 2020, the sequel to his 1976 movie, Death Race 2000. He followed it up with a pair of three-issue series, Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats, based on the cable TV movie, and Welcome to the Little Shop of Horrors.
Topps Comics’ The X Files series quickly improved after its first couple of issues, and the company also produced a series of one hundred illustrated Universal Monsters trading cards, covering the classic films Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth and The Incredible Shrinking Man. The cards were written and edited by Gary Gerani, with Forrest J. Ackerman and Ronald V. Borst as creative consultants, and featured artwork by Basil Gogos, Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Williamson. The reverse of each card also boasted a fascinating reproduction of a poster, lobby card, movie still or production artwork.
According to boxoffice results published in Variety and Screen International, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever was undoubtedly the year’s top genre film, grossing more than $184 million in the US and an impressive $30.4 million in the UK. Val Kilmer and Chris O’Donnell’s Dynamic Duo were overshadowed by bizarre villains Jim Carrey (The Riddler) and Tommy Lee Jones (Two-Face), and it was nice to see horror veteran Michael Gough once again recreate the role of Alfred the butler.
The movie was followed in the charts by Apollo 13, Interview With the Vampire, Stargate, Disney’s Pocahontas, Casper, Waterworld (which surprisingly grossed more than half of its $175 million budget back), Congo, Mortal Kombat, Outbreak, Species, Star Trek: Generations, and the unjustly dismissed Judge Dredd (a boxoffice disaster costing around $100 million, it did better in the UK where the character originated). Late releases such as Toy Story, Goldeneye, the overrated Se7en and Jumanji, also did very well. Overall, six of 1995’s top ten worldwide grossers made more money overseas than in America, but the British boxoffice take of the top twenty films was still down more than 30 per cent over the previous year’s total.
Taylor Hackford’s version of Stephen King’s novel Delores Claiborne was infinitely superior to director Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler, made for producer Harry Alan Towers and loosely based on a King short story. Clive Barker’s audacious Lord of Illusions failed to find an audience, while Bill Condon’s Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, based on a story by executive producer Barker, disappointed fans of the first film. Carlo Carlei’s Fluke and Lewis Gilbert’s old-fashioned ghost story, Haunted, the latter executive-produced by Francis Ford Coppola, were both based on novels by James Herbert, and Dean Koontz unsuccessfully tried to have his name removed from the credits of TriStar’s Hideaway, claiming that the film only dimly resembled his book.
Among some of the more interesting genre films of the year were Terry Gilliam’s nightmarish Twelve Monkeys; Gregory Widen’s apocalyptic The Prophecy; Ernest Dickerson’s enjoyable Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Night; Anthony Waller’s Mute Witness, which spent nine years in production; Victor Salva’s Powder, which benefited from a great cast that included Mary Steenburgen, La
nce Henriksen and Jeff Goldblum, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s astonishingly surreal The City of Lost Children (aka La Cité des Enfants Perdus). Spike Lee executive produced Tales from the Hood, which attempted to once again revive the anthology format, and Mickey Mouse confronted a mad scientist in Disney’s spoof cartoon short Runaway Brain.
Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction and Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, the latter executive produced by David Lynch, were both low-budget reworkings of the vampire legend, while John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish was another low budget fantasy that was well received. John Carpenter’s reputation was unfairly damaged by the boxoffice failure of both his remarkable In the Mouth of Madness and the creditable remake of Village of the Damned (which starred actor Christopher Reeve, who in 1995 was left paralysed from the neck down after a freak horse riding accident). Wes Craven didn’t fare well at the boxoffice either with his Eddie Murphy vehicle Vampire in Brooklyn, and he also executive produced the low budget SF thriller Mind Ripper.
Virtual reality did not catch on, and Johnny Mnemonic (based on the story by William Gibson), Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Virtuosity, The Net, Hackers and TV’s VR.5 all flopped, while spoofs of the genre failed to work as well, as evidenced by Mel Brooks’s Dracula, Dead and Loving It with Leslie Nielsen as a clumsy Count, and David Price’s lame comedy Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.
The year’s superfluous sequels included Carnosaur II, Circuity Man II: Plughead Rewired, Darkman II: The Return of Durant, Highlander III: The Sorcerer (US: Highlander: The Final Dimension), Nemesis 2: Nebula, Scanners: The Showdown (UK: Scanner Cop 2: Volkin’s Revenge), Leprechaun 2 (UK: One Wedding and Lots of Funerals) and Leprechaun 3, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, Project Shadowchaser: Beyond the Edge of Darkness, Watchers III, Xtro III, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Witchcraft 7.
Also quickly relegated to the video shelves were such titles as Blood and Donuts (a Canadian vampire film featuring David Cronenberg), Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak, Digital Man, Embrace of the Vampire, Exquisite Tenderness, Fist of the North Star, Galaxis (UK: Terminal Force), Metalbeast, Frank LaLoggia’s Mother, Savage Harvest, Screamers (based on a short story by Philip K. Dick), Sleep Stalker, Star Quest, Ticks, and Don “The Dragon” Wilson battling modern-day vampires in Night Hunter.
The Best New Horror 7 Page 5
