Features

Budgets of Blood: How Splatter Propels a World of No-Budget Filmmaking

For every successful foray into Hollywood there’s 100 cash-strapped nightmares making use of ingenuity and offal. The rogue visionaries with a passion for film so strong that no empty pocket could ever prevent them from sharing their goopy artistry.

A Prayer for The Acid Nun

The long, strange trip through grief, horror, shock and sleaze that brought cartoonist Corinne Halbert to her psychosexual, nunsploitation anti-heroine.

The Web Burns: Fighting to Save The Internet Archive

A contentious court battle could define how much control major publishing houses have on our digital landscape and the future of libraries.

The Hall of Horror Zines

Lurking beneath Famous Monsters and Fangoria, a brood of horror zines rose from the ink and grime. Learn the history of Psychotronic Video, Sleazoid Express and the Gore Gazette within... THE HALL OF HORROR ZINES!

Review: New Mythologies

The stories in Kym Cunningham's poems literally grow from women’s bodies. It takes time to connect, to unpack the rearranged speech and to try and find meaning that goes beyond the surface stories.

Review: Remnants

Céline Huyghebaert’s latest work, translated by Aleshia Jensen, explores the gap left by the death of her father. A melange of form informs the process of understanding the author and her father.

Folio: Bridget Moser on the Uncanny and that Skeleton with Hair

Folio asks artists and curators to gather works made with unexpected materials and adapt them for the printed page. In this issue we speak with Bridget Moser about the uncanny, the unsettling, ‘cursed images’ and a hair covered skeleton of her creation that got under people’s skin.

Review: The Closer

You don’t have to be inside baseball to appreciate Jason Smith’s The Closer, a noir potboiler knocking dingers into the highly detailed background.

Review: Tear

Tear creates a superimposition of architectural and mental space characteristic of psychoanalysis, where physical spaces become symbolic of psychological states. A deeply gothic novel somewhere between Henry James and Shirley Jackson.

Review: How To Say Hello

Max Morris' Gary Panter-esque edu-comic should resolve all of your greeting related problems in the post-lockdown world.

Review: Para-Social Butterfly

Designed and executed like a VTuber’s fever dream, Para-Social Butterfly adapts well-worn avant-garde and modernist poetics to stranger-than-fiction internet subcultures to present a surprisingly sympathetic critique of life under the ubiquitous influence of celebrity.

Review: Café 24-hour Loneliness

No need to flag down a server — your bill has arrived. This zine’s six poems come stuffed inside an authentic leather restaurant bill holder. They’re typed on thin strips of paper that mimic receipts, and all end with “CUSTOMER COPY.”

Review: 3 Essays on Late-Career Jack Kirby

Andy Brown, a scholar of Kirby and founder of Conundrum Press, has collected three of his essays regarding Kirby’s work after the 'King of Comic' bitter departure from Marvel.

Review: Houseplants in Horror Films

Paul Cooke's fanzine makes you ask yourself: Did the houseplant witness the horror? Do its descriptive factors foretell the torture in the final act? Or am I creating sinister campfire stories in my own mind?

Review: Pixel Dog’s Purgatory in Hell

Pixel Dog discusses a wide range of topics from capitalism to lo-fi music in a playful and often dark critique. A snarky satire that will resonate with the left-leaning and jaded across generations.

Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Kim Fu has an uncanny talent for capturing the subtleties of interpersonal relationships between lovers, between mothers, between perfect strangers in the dark, between ourselves.

Review: The Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist

Kris Rose paints a picture of how renting Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Waxwork brought feminism to their suburban sanctuary.

Review: Video Stores Still Exist!

Lunchmeat VHS' survey of surviving American video stores reveals a hidden purpose behind these defiant movie paradises.

Was The Zodiac Killer A… ZINESTER?!?

A new book theorizes that the infamous Zodiac Killer was determined to spill more ink than blood.

Issue #97