Just in time for Halloween, Hugo Emmerzael is joined by filmmaker Connor Sen Warnick and horror writer, scholar and critic Mike Thorn for two avant-garde horror gems from 1989, both newly restored in 4K. E. Elias Merhige’s black-and-white creation myth Begotten, long passed around as the ultimate cursed text of obscure horror, meets Stephen Sayadian’s gleefully sexualized, unofficial sequel to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Along the way: drone horror, creepypasta, a theory about hand job scenes, porn as avant-garde cinema, and why horror doesn’t always need to explain itself.
Vinegar Syndrome is re-releasing Night Terrors in two gorgeous limited edition cases.
Both special limited edition sets come with spot gloss hard slipcases + slipcover combos and include 40-page perfect bound books). Only available on the Vinegar Syndrome website and select indie retailers.
A criminally underseen later work from master of horror Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist), 1993’s NIGHT TERRORS (aka Tobe Hooper’s Nightmare) sees the legendary director reunited with his Eaten Alive stars Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Mangler) and William Finley (Sisters, The Phantom of the Paradise), with the former turning in an incredible dual performance as Paul Chevalier and the Marquis de Sade himself in a series of atmospheric flashbacks. Packed full of erotic scenes, surreal visuals, and sadomasochistic set pieces, Vinegar Syndrome is thrilled to present this too-long-neglected opus from one of the horror genre’s most revered craftsmen, painstakingly restored in 4K for its disc debut and served up with lashings of newly-produced bonus features.
Bonus content:
Commentary track with film writer Scout Tafoya
“Femme Fatale” (16 min) – an interview with actress Alona Kimhi
“Writing Pains” (20 min) – an interview with co-writer Daniel Matmor
“Dressed for Excess” (19 min) – an interview with costume designer Rona Doron
“Sounds Alarming” (17 min) – an interview with supervising sound editor Gregory King
“Not Holding Back” (27 min) – an interview with critic and author Kim Newman
Trailer
40-page perfect-bound book (limited edition only) with writing by Steven Thrower, Mike Thorn, and Fred Barrett
From the minds of horror master Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist) and writer Stephen King (The Shining) comes a terrifying and darkly comedic vision of technology gone mad: THE MANGLER (1995). Starring horror legend Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), along with Ted Levine (The Silence of the Lambs), and voice work by actor Jim Cummings (Winnie the Pooh). Packed with outrageously gory and bizarre set pieces along with impressive visual effects, Vinegar Syndrome is excited to present the UHD debut of this supremely strange and entertaining 90s horror classic, presented in a stunning new 4K restoration of its original 35mm camera negative, in its extra gruesome unrated version, and loaded with extras including an extended new making-of documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew.
directed by: Tobe Hooper starring: Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor, Jeremy Crutchley, Vanessa Pike 1995 / 106 min / 1.85:1 / English 5.1 Surround + 2.0 Stereo
Additional info:
2-disc Set: 4K Ultra HD / Region A Blu-ray
4K UHD presented in Dolby Vision High-Dynamic-Range
Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative
New commentary track with editor David Heitner and film critic Alison Foreman
New commentary track with film critic Scout Tafoya
“Waking a Brutal Beast” (46 min) – a brand new making-of documentary featuring interviews with writer Stephen David Brooks, actors Robert Englund and Jeremy Crutchley, and special effects team Scott Coulter, Scott Wheeler, and Todd Masters
Behind-the-scenes footage
Still gallery
Theatrical trailer
TV spot
40-page perfect-bound book with writing by Mike Thorn, Chris Cabin, and Ariel Esteban Cayer (limited edition only)
“Cronenberg is sometimes reductively described as a body horror filmmaker, but Cosmopolis is something else: a definitive work of body politic horror, a diagnosis of a civilization whose heart and brain are failing, filmed in this country by one of our greatest artists, fourteen years before we were ready to understand what he was showing us.”
As Her Private Hell hits U.S. theaters, Mike Thorn sat down with Nicolas Winding Refn to discuss Her Private Hell, the unconscious, fantasy, the process of artistic exploration, and more.
“Stand by Me finds its thematic core in the friendship between Gordie and Chris, who both perform masculine toughness to protect their mutually innate sensitivity.”
Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932) Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947) Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948) The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) Pushover (Richard Quine, 1954) Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1982) Mike’s Murder (James Bridges, 1984) Cold Heaven (Nicolas Roeg, 1991) Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992) Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994) Torment (Claude Chabrol, 1994) Double Team (Tsui Hark, 1997) Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002) How Do You Know(James L. Brooks, 2010) The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022) Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Guest-edited by horror scholar and fiction writer Mike Thorn, this robust issue presents six feature essays, two works of original fiction, a dossier of retrospective reviews, and two essays in our student forum. Feature essays cover both literature and the moving image from a broad range of perspectives. From reorienting human and more-than-human animal perspectives in the essays by Poulomi Choudhury, Dru Jeffries, and Britt MacKenzie-Dale, to epistemological and ontological shifts in the way we think of human and more than-human ecologies in the essays by Zoë Anne Laks, Jenni Makahnouk, and William Taylor, and the Introduction by Mike Thorn, the contributions to this special issue explore the challenge of thinking beyond harmful anthropocentric and hegemonic capitalist world systems.
For the first time, this issue of Monstrum includes original fiction. In “The Playground,” celebrated horror author Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Under the Poppy, Straydog) traces a shift in ecological sensibility to what might be called a necessary violence. And with “Cogno,” Mike Thorn (Darkest Hours, Peel Back and See) brings us into the terrifying world of tech-bro longevity at the expense of … maybe everything.
A selection of retrospective reviews considers literary and cinematic texts that strive to reorient human and nonhuman animal perspectives, including a critical reassessment of the (anti-)anthropocentrism in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), the vegan aesthetic of Rob Zombie’s films via House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and the brutal struggle against becoming-animal in Stuart Gordon’s grim King of the Ants (2003).
The student forum includes two essays by emerging scholars that continue the issue’s investigations of radical otherness. A product of the SSHRC-funded “Horror Ecologies” workshop by CORERISC held in summer 2024 at Dawson College, Emerson Reault’s essay reads Ginger Snaps as a trans allegory, reconsidering the film’s metaphorical “curse” as less one of becoming a woman, than that of an understanding of one’s embodiment. In their essay, Luka Romney looks at radical empathy for the “animal” Other via Julia Kristeva’s concept of herethics in two of Larry Cohen’s most provocative 1970s films, It’s Alive! (1976) and It Lives Again (1978).
In this interview, we chat with Ramsey Campbell about creative instincts, happy accidents, eerie children’s tales, and so much more.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. His latest novels are Fellstones, The Lonely Lands, The Incubations and An Echo of Children. His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull, Fearful Implications, and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) as well as The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly, while Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is a book-length study of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Atrocity Exhibition – J. G. Ballard
Great Short Stories of the World – Barrett H. Clark and Maxim Lieber, eds.
“A Dark-Brown Dog”; The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
The Man Within – Graham Greene
“The Residence at Whitminster” – M. R. James
Rosemary’s Baby; The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin
Tales of Mean Streets – Arthur Morrison
Lolita; Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
“The Telltale Heart” – Edgar Allan Poe
At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub – Bill Sheehan
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
The Rupert Bear series – Herbert Tourtel & Mary Tourtel
“Afterward” – Edith Wharton
At Night, White Bracken; To Those from Below – Gareth Wood
Hosts Josh and Jamie and special returning guest Mike Thorn kick off SPOOKTOBER by discussing two different eras of largely faithful Stephen King adaptations: Mary Lambert’s playful, colorful and yet still effectively upsetting and morbid realization of PET SEMATARY (1989) and Lawrence Kasdan’s attempt at keeping a straight (expensive Hollywood production) face while King bizarrely remixes many of his career-long obsessions in the painkiller induced fever dream of DREAMCATCHER (2003).
