Last year, a young Edmonton filmmaker was convicted of a savage killing that mirrored the plot of his low-budget horror movie. The details were almost too disturbing to be true. In 2008, Johnny Altinger, a 38-year-old pipeline worker, was lured to to a residential garage for a supposed date with a girl he had met online. Altinger was then bludgeoned and stabbed to death before his body was dismembered and discarded, piece by piece, in a city sewer. Now, there’s a book out that offers new insights into the case.

A generation ago, young horror fans had to “read up” to adult authors such as Stephen King. Now novelists such as Barry Lyga are tailoring gore for a teen audience. In I Hunt Killers, Lyga attempts one of the more daring concepts in recent years by a young-adult author.

In this spooky, atmospheric debut novel, readers enter a sterile, off-kilter world of horror — sort of — that is more David Lynch than Stephen King. Read the review of Threats by Amelia Gray.

Horror has been so dumbed down in recent years that it’s a minor miracle when a movie in this genre actually gives you something to ponder. Read the review of the horror movie, Intruders.

Interplay founder Brian Fargo spoke to Ripten recently about the much anticipated RPG, Wasteland 2, the sequel to the over twenty year old game that heavily influenced the development of the Fallout series. However, in that same interview, Fargo stated that publishers in the indsutry often treat their developers very poorly with overly strict release schedules and too much creative control over the developer’s vision.

As part of their programming shift, Netlfix has been developing several projects, one of which is an adaptation of the debut horror novel from Brian McGreevy called Hemlock Grove. The novel hit bookshelves on March 27th and the upcoming television series, co-written by McGreevy with his writing partner Lee Shipman, was developed by producer Eli Roth and Gaumont International Television, with the former also attached to direct.

Clive Barker, legendary author of horror stories and director of horror films, has announced on his web site that he’s currently “in talks” to bring his 1990 movie Nightbreed to the small screen.

The first volume of Terry Moore’s creator-owned horror comic, Rachel Rising, has arrived in stores an online in the form of a collected edition, Rachel Rising Volume 1: The Shadow of Death.

In an entirely appropriate casting move, MGM has picked 15-year-old Moretz to star in a new take on Stephen King’s 1974 classic horror novel Carrie.

An open letter to Hollywood Horror: We write for the attention of all Hollywood producers, writers, and most certainly directors of horror cinema over the last couple of decades. Quite a lot of you have been responsible for a serious crime, too-often committed against us, the paying horror audience: incompetent and complacent film making.

Looking Back at Giallo: A Primer – A sub-genre of the mystery/thriller/crime story and a cross-over from horror, giallo had its roots in the American and English mystery novels of the early twentieth century. The works of mystery writers Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and American detective writers James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler began being published in Italy in 1929.

Book Review: Mr. Glamour by Richard Godwin – Madness and psychosis has many forms. Surfing the internet you often come across many strange and bizarre behaviors that are eerie and horrific, but we rarely have those occurrences happen to us or those we know.

Dracula’s contract to see the light of day 100 years on – The original legal contract, hand-written by Stoker himself and which has been kept under lock and key, is to be published in a new version of the vampire tale. It reveals the terms dictated by Stoker – who studied law but never practised – in negotiating a 20 per cent royalty fee for the book on 1 May 1897. This was remarkable at the time and is more than modern authors and their agents can command with the current standard of 10 to 15 per cent.

Stan Lee puts himself into his latest comic book – Stan Lee is barging into the pages of his own comic book as a character based on himself who rubs elbows with superheroes – call it a cameo for the reality TV age.

Book Review of Black Wings of Cthulhu – Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) heavily influenced a generation of horror authors including Stephen King and Robert Bloch, but today’s genre fans are far less acquainted with his work. (Which is understandable – Lovecraft’s fiction has always seemed like something you study rather than something you read.) Hitting American bookstores this week, editor J.T. Joshi’s Black Wings of Cthulhu pushes the author back into the horror limelight with 21 new stories set in Lovecraft‘s patently bizarre universe. And while I’ve never been Lovecraft’s biggest fan, I have to concede that this is a very well done collection.

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