“I’m really appreciative of all the SAW fans,” says actress Betsy Russell, who has been a mainstay of the Lionsgate horror franchise ever since her surprise appearance in SAW III. She adds, “The reason they love SAW so much is because of the heart and the soul it has underneath all of the bludgeoning, traps and torture.
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With an Indian summer-esque wind blowing through the open window, this writer drove across the long, menacing bridge into the southeastern section of Philadelphia, PA, on the way to Fright Factory. A part of the 
With a chill in the air, crisp leaves on the ground, and a feeling of tricks and treats just around the corner, Fango made its way to Glenn Mills, Pennsylvania to visit 
ENTER THE VOID, currently in release from IFC Films (opening this Friday in Boston and Portland, OR), is like a Stan Brakhage-infused TRON death trip. Just as James Cameron waited years to get his blue-cat opus off the ground until the technology caught up with his vision, filmmaker Gaspar Noé (pictured) had to do the same to depict this trancelike journey through the neon tops of Tokyo. It took plenty of CGI mapping to capture his images, and lots of rendering to get the DMT hallucinations of the film’s protagonist just right.
Kevin Tenney, best known for the popular 1980s fright flicks NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and WITCHBOARD, returns to the genre with BRAIN DEAD, a zombie comedy opus that splatters onto DVD this Tuesday, October 26 from Vicious Circle/Breaking Glass. FANGORIA spoke with the busy Tenney, whose NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (now on DVD and Blu-ray from Entertainment One) got the remake treatment this year with Tenney himself onboard as producer.
It’s hard to imagine Danny DeVito’s utterly revolting Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot in Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS without thinking that maybe his bizarre persona had at least something to do with how he was raised. In fact, his story was not one merely of botched upbringing, but total abandonment. And if one has to point fingers, you could look no further than Oswald’s icy-cold mother, played by character actress and acclaimed theater veteran Diane Salinger. Now, Salinger is traumatizing—and worse—a whole group of unlucky kids as the vile Miss Darrode in director Darin Scott’s festival-award-winning DARK HOUSE, now available everywhere as part of the 
The cinematic and TV career of Richard Matheson—one of the most important scribes in the history of the genre—gets his due in Matthew R. Bradley’s comprehensive RICHARD MATHESON ON SCREEN: A HISTORY OF THE FILMED WORKS (McFarland; $45; on sale now). The tome examines the horror/sci-fi trailblazer who imagined a world overrun by vampires (the novel I AM LEGEND, filmed three times and the impetus for the modern zombie film); allowed Kevin Bacon to see dead people in STIR OF ECHOES; for TV, terrorized Karen Black with a Zuni fetish doll in TRILOGY OF TERROR, William Shatner with a gremlin on THE TWILIGHT ZONE and Dennis Weaver with a malevolent truck in DUEL, directed by a novice named Steven Spielberg; and scripted the initial 1960s Poe cycle for director Roger Corman and AIP, to name a few. Besides the 40-plus films and 50-plus TV shows either scripted by Matheson or adapted from his fiction, the celebrated author achieved full cultural acceptance when THE SIMPSONS spoofed his work on four separate episodes. Chronicler Bradley, who has written extensively about Matheson before in articles and books, spent the last 13 years putting the interview-heavy RICHARD MATHESON ON SCREEN together, and Matheson himself penned the foreword.
Unlike slasher and splatter flicks where all the fear comes from the outside, in the more subtle psychological horror subgenre, terror tends to come from within. RULE OF THREE, the psychological thriller directed by Eric Shapiro and co-written by Shapiro and lead actress Rhoda Jordan, is a film noir piece that shows what happens when the disturbing menace emerges from deep inside us. The film debuts on DVD today from Big Screen Entertainment, after a two-year festival run.