AFTER DARK FILM SET TO BECOME A PLAY TO DIE FOR In an age when most of the horror movies being adapted for the stage are transformed into ironic musicals (The


Human Centipede) or given a trendy cross-dressing twist (Carrie), sometimes the edgiest decision you can make is to present a straight-up adaptation of a film. This October, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s The Rage of the Stage Players has set its sights on a movie with little name recognition: The Butcher Brothers’ The Hamiltons. Released in 2007 as part of Lionsgate’s After Dark Horrorfest – 8 Films to Die For series, The Hamiltons follows


a stranger-trapping family with a big, if poorly disguised, secret. “The Hamiltons seemed like an ideal fit for The Rage of the Stage Players because the film itself flows very


much like a stage play,” says James Michael Shoberg, co-executive producer/artistic director for the theatre com- pany. “It also fascinated me in that the majority of it plays out like a simple family drama, albeit a quirky one, but with the added layer of a horror twist.” Quirky has been the fringe company’s calling card since its inaugural production of The Absolution of Dreams


youtube.com/watch?v=QuMBwujSkXk Long before director Jason Eisener blew folks away with Hobo with a Shotgun, he shot this dead clever 37-second bumper titled The Num- ber to Heaven for Austin’s 2009 Fantastic Fest genre film festival. You probably already know that you should never trust a monster, but here’s yet another reason why.


comicsalliance.com/2010/11/16/ children-draw-h-p-lovecraft-cthulhu/ Artists and filmmakers alike have long lamented the difficulty of translating H.P. Lovecraft’s oddly described monstrosities from printed page to vi- sual image. Kids, however, don’t overthink this stuff and here’s proof in the form of a small gallery of children’s drawings based on the Cthulhu mythos and more!


sexandmonsters.com This quirky online comic by Will Penny only offers up one or two new strips each month, but the premise makes it worth looking up. Each full- colour, four-panel vignette focuses on the ways monsters might interact with the human world should they actually exist, such as completely mis- understanding the phrase “Chinese takeout.”


cfcows.com Sports and horror may seem like strange bedfel- lows, but Axel Kohagen is trying to change all that with his online serial novel The Cedar Falls Hoose- Cows, about a baseball team that not only has a murderer on its roster, but is also being haunted. Home run or foul ball? May depend on how you feel about America’s favourite pastime.


reignofblood.net Reign of Blood is a turn-based RPG that mainly plays out via text and the occasional image. Create a vampire, join a coven of other players, and then duel with people from around the world or com- plete quests to improve your stats and gear. Also available: various mini-games and forums for those who prefer in-character roleplaying over standard hunting and killing.


Compiled by MONICA S. KUEBLER Got a Roadkill suggestion? Email a link to: roadkill@rue-morgue.com


in 2002, which drew the attention of beloved genre tough guy Tom Atkins (The Fog), among others. Since then, the players have taken well-received stabs at re-imagining several classics of the page and screen, including The Wizard of Oz, which they set in a mental institution. After seeing The Hamiltons, Shoberg messaged The Butcher Brothers, nom de guerre of directors Mitchell Altieri


and Phil Flores, through Facebook. “They were both kind and receptive to the proposal,” he says, “and seemingly ecstatic over the prospect of my


adapting their script for the stage.” Not only is this the most contemporary story the troupe has tackled, it’s also the only non-original story they’ve


performed that hasn’t been staged by other groups around the world first. Says Shoberg: “It still feels so surreal to me that such a rare opportunity was granted to a warped little fringe theatre company such as ours.”


A.S. BERMAN entrails Gene Colan, the artist famous to horror fans for his


work on Marvel’s The Tomb of Dracula series in the ’70s, died June 23 at 84, after suffering from cancer and liver disease. Though he tackled everything from Batman to Captain America in his career, Colan’s dream- like “painting with pencil” visual style was enthusiasti- cally embraced by fans during the 70-issue run of The Tomb of Dracula. Colan and writer Marv Wolfman took the Count from menacing to heroic, adding the character of Blade, the vampire hunter, to Marvel’s stable of he- roes in the process. Colan also worked on DC’s short- lived Night Force in the 1980s (also with Wolfman), and 1987’s The Spectre reboot.


Long-time horror and science fiction anthologist and


editor Martin H. Greenberg died June 25 at age 70, after a long illness. Throughout his career he worked with Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Isaac Asimov, among many others. Roughly 2500 anthologies have been credited to him in some way, including Nightmares on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger's Seven Sweetest Dreams, Vampire Detectives, Werewolves and All Hell Breaking Loose.


In June, several fans of Edgar Allan Poe won the op-


portunity to pitch in on the $483,000 restoration of a cottage in the Bronx, New York, Poe’s last place of res- idence before his death in 1849. Fans from across America submitted Poe-inspired paintings, poetry and other works to win the chance to assist in the refurbish- ment of the house, which will open to the public later this summer. Winners’ creations were put in a time cap- sule and sealed in the walls.


It was recently reported that some of Norway’s new


diplomats are trained in the finer points of the country’s black metal music scene, in response to enquiries fielded by those in its foreign service missions world- wide. While this rise in public awareness has been at- tributed to Dimmu Borgir’s May performance at the Oslo Spektrum arena, the upcoming 20th anniversary of key events in the True Norwegian Black Metal movement, including the 1992 church burnings and the murder of Mayhem founder Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth the fol- lowing year, may also be responsible.


Haley Joel Osment, star of 1999’s The Sixth Sense,


returns to horror in Wake the Dead, the forthcoming adaptation of the 2004 graphic novel by Steve Niles and artist Chee. This modern retelling of the Frankenstein tale will be one of the first movies produced by Slasher Films, the studio founded by former Guns N’ Roses gui- tarist Slash last year.


The US Supreme Court recently struck down a 2005


California ban on the sale of violent video games to those under eighteen. Speaking for the majority in the court’s 7-2 ruling, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote “California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none.” He went on to cite the circulation of Grimm’s fairy tales to children. “The basic principles of freedom of speech and the press, like the First Amend- ment’s command, do not vary when a new and different medium for communication appears.”


A.S. BERMAN


RM10


D R E A D L I N E S


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