The book is due to be released on 30th April 2021, with pre-order links, forthcoming on Amazon and the Sinister Horror Company website.


Satanic Armageddon blub:


The forces of evil, led by Satan's disciple, were massing worldwide to overthrow democracy.


Throughout the UK and Europe the forces of evil were gathering to destroy democracy. 


Bombs, shootings, vehicles mowing down unsuspecting pedestrians in the streets. Death and destruction were rife.


Military and police were stretched. A terrorist, reputed to have a connection with the Dark Powers, was organising a massive army of fanatical murderers. He had to be located and killed before sheer evil ruled the world. 


There was one man who just might be able to achieve this, John Mayo, known as the Man in the Black Fedora. He is summoned out of retirement by Counter Terrorism Command and given the task of achieving a seemingly impossible mission against overwhelming odds.


But that’s not all. We have two more titles from Guy we are currently putting the finishing touches to.

Late summer will see the release of a short story collection entitled From The Dark Hours. This collection features both new stories and rare older stories, with some familiar characters to GNS fans popping up along the way. Expect the terror in these tales to feature ghosts, savage animals, hunting and malicious forces both natural and supernatural.


Then as the year draws to a close we will be releasing the last book that Guy worked on. Unusually it was a collaboration, and it speaks volumes about his enthusiasm and drive that even in his eighties the pulp horror legend was still up for trying new ways of working. The novel, entitled Beheaded, is a collaboration with J. R. Park, author of Mad Dog and Punch. 


More details on these titles will be announced as they are finalised.

Not one dark tale but many, this anthology offers twisted versions of traditional fairy stories by some of the best in the genre. The contemporary tales are interspersed with some of the originals collected by the Grimms, demonstrating just how dark they could be. It includes stories by Neil Gaiman, Angela Slatter, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Tanith Lee, Peter Crowther and Robert Shearman, among other stellar names. My favourite is ‘The Silken People’ by Joanne Harris (quoted above), a concise piece that nevertheless packs a huge punch. It’s a cracking anthology, and another reminder, if one were needed, that some fairy tales are definitely not for children.

A. J. Elwood studied literature and history, which everyone assured her would never have any direct relevance to what she ended up doing with her life. She remains fascinated by those times when people could believe in things we think of as madness and have perfectly good reasons for doing so. An early obsession with fairy tales has stayed with her and she loves to pen stories that hopefully contain a little bit of magic and often more than a little of the strange. She also writes under Alison Littlewood.

Captivated by books and stories, Rose dreams of a more fulfilled life, away from the confines of the Sunnyside Care Home where she works to support herself and her boyfriend. She hopes the situation will be short term.

Charlotte Favell, an elderly resident, takes a strange, sinister interest in Rose, but offers an unexpected glimpse of enchantment. She has a mysterious and aged stack of letters about the Cottingley Fairies, the photographs made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle, but later dismissed as a hoax. The author of the letters insists he has proof that the fairies exist; Rose is eager to learn more, but Charlotte only allows her to read on when she sees fit.
​
Discovering she is unexpectedly pregnant, Rose feels another door to the future has slammed. The letters’ content grows more menacing, inexplicable events begin to occur inside her home, and Rose begins to entertain dark thoughts about her baby and its origins. Can this simply be depression? Or is something darker taking root?

SPAWN: WEIRD HORROR TALES ABOUT PREGNANCY, BIRTH AND BABIES, edited by award-winning author and anthology editor Deborah Sheldon, will be released worldwide by IFWG Publishing Australia on 3 May 2021. Spawn is a selection of the darkest Australian fiction penned by established authors and fresh new voices. The stories range from the gothic and phantasmagorical, through the demonic and supernatural, to the dystopian and sci-fi.
​
In this four-part series exclusive to Ginger Nuts of Horror, most of the contributors have agreed to pull aside the curtain and reveal the inspiration behind their nightmarish tales.
“Part Two” includes insights from writers Sean Williams, Paul Mannering, Samantha Murray, Robyn O’Sullivan, and Geraldine Borella.


Sean Williams on “Family Unit”

It would be somewhat scandalous, perhaps even incriminating, to suggest that “Family Unit” is based on real life. Like all stories, though, there is a certain amount of the real contained within. It is also, if you squint at it just right, one of the most personal stories I’ve ever written.
Perhaps that’s why it was so damned hard to write. I recoiled from even starting it out of feelings of dismay, shame, and horror that only (perversely) made me want to write it more. Not until the final of many deadlines arrived did I put pen to paper and finally get the ghastly thing down.

In a sense, “Family Unit” is itself a horrific offspring that I won’t disown, but am glad to have out of me at last.

The wellspring of this story resides firmly in the body horror caused by natural ageing and unnatural pain, and also in a deep-seated desire to gestate and give birth to a child of my own. There’s some of the loneliness and agoraphobia I felt as a young man, along with a healthy dose of the sexual desire and unrequited love that…well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? I solemnly swear, though, that I’ve never kidnapped or physically harmed anyone. And as for being rich, now or ever, forget it. But I’m in these pages, and so are some people I’ve loved or hated, although I obviously won’t identify them. I had no intention of cutting so close to the bone with “Family Unit”, but the story required it of me, and was better for it.

The house and its ruin are real and so are the graveyard and the view. Many years ago, it was my habit to park in that very spot to drink hot chocolate and admire the sprawling grid of lights below in the company of a woman I loved. The sight is wasted on the dead, you might say, but I think it’s fitting. The Stoics would approve of this reminder of one’s mortality and one’s place in the universe.

My medical research soon proved that the procedure Liddy Thorrold undertook would likely be impossible, but to hell with facts. The question is the main thing: “Why would you want to try it?” That’s what kept me awake for so long, rehearsing this story over and over in my mind before finally getting it on the page. What could possibly so important…to make you do that?
Love. That’s what I settled on. And family.

Little else is responsible for so much horror in the blood-soaked history of our species.

http://seanwilliams.com/


Paul Mannering on “The Still Warm”

When people ask me about why I write horror, I tell them, “I grew up on a farm.” The wise simply nod at that point and nothing further need be said. Those who grew up in the safe and civilised confines of a city tend to not understand what I mean.

Farms are places without filters, where children are exposed to the un-sanitised reality of life from an early age. My most vivid childhood memories are of strong family bonds, hard work, sex, birth, death. As children my older siblings and I midwifed pigs, cows, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, and even a few ducks. My parents were academics by trade (dad was a marine biologist before heading inland) so they believed in educating us with objective facts than the shield of subjective emotion.

For every birth, there was a death; pet lambs, proudly paraded at the annual country school’s pet show in spring, were proudly served as roast dinner the next winter. We watched on with interest as animals were butchered or put down due to injury and illness.

My mother was a physiotherapist (now retired) and she had actual human bones (a spine, a hand) that she used as part of her practice for educating people about joints and injuries.

When I was of an age to be potentially curious about such things, my parents asked if I had any questions about sex. I wracked my brain for hours trying to think of something I didn’t know. I understood the fundamentals of human biology. I knew that bulls and cows, boars and sows, dogs and bitches, all Did It the same way that I was peripherally aware grownups did and that’s where babies come from.

Those years of practical exposure to the potential horrors of life and death didn’t desensitise me to horror. Instead, I found myself more perceptive and less emotional. Of course, that awareness isn’t without its dangers. When my partner at the time was in the final stages of labour, a nurse asked if I was okay. I replied, “Yeah, it’s just like pulling calves.” A casual observation that quite rightly got me punched to the floor by my son’s mother.

We have all experienced powerlessness and times of impotent rage when terrible injustices are done. Knowing exactly how grim life can be gives me a framework to write horrific things. Not horror to revel in, or to take ghoulish delight, but to explore what it means to be human in situations where truly awful events take place.

It is why the horror that truly makes me shiver with the thrill of unease is the horror of the unnatural, the unexplained and the emotional forces unleashed when humans are pushed so far from comfort and certainty that they bring forth consequences that cannot be explained in the matrix of normal experience.


Samantha Murray on “The Hot-and-Cold Girl”

Ah pregnancy, isn’t it fun?

Maybe fun is not quite the right word. I know some people feel it to be wondrous and joyous and exciting, and perhaps it can be all of these things, sometimes. When I was not pregnant, and badly wanted to be, it was a much-desired and romanticised state.

For the most part though, I found pregnancy to be uncomfortable and weird and discombobulating.

The physical side of course—my internal organs all shifting around to make room for this new interloper, my ligaments loosening, my centre of gravity shifting, my lungs squishing up so that my breathing became shallow. And the weird undulating and alien distortions my stomach went through as the child grew inside me. All of this.

And perhaps too a more philosophical point that I felt keenly—for the first time my body was not working predominantly for me, was not putting me first. This little time capsule carrying an assortment of my genes was all-important and consequently I was now less-important, a carrier, a vessel, and somewhat more disposable—a means to an end.

If the baby needed nutrients my body would strip them from my blood no matter if it left me tired and deficient, my hair brittle with the lack. It came first, it got it all.

It may be beside the point that if given the choice I would have said of course, “Yes, take it, take it all, put the baby first!” But there was no asking, just an inexorable shifting of priority.
All of these feelings, give them just the slightest nudge, tweak them and twist them just a bit, and they tumble easily into horror.

And this is not even mentioning the birth—with the pain and the blood and the screaming!
And later, when my newborn child cried, and my breasts leaked milk, all by themselves, bypassing my rational sense of self all together, beyond my conscious control, just purely responding in a way that was raw and primal and somewhat disturbing.

All of it was crying out to be turned into a story to submit to the fabulously dark Spawn anthology, and became “The Hot and Cold Girl.”

https://twitter.com/samanthanmurray


Robyn O’Sullivan on “Expel the Darkness”

When I first read the intriguing title of the proposed anthology--Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies—I had no intention of submitting a story. However, memories from my days as a maternity nurse in the mid-1970s surfaced and, over the next week or so, I was plagued by story ideas. I gave in and started to mess around with plots involving the possible outcomes of ingesting unknown substances during pregnancy. After much rumination and mulling over different scenarios, I hit upon a likely premise.

My protagonist would be young and inexperienced. Even so, for my story to be feasible, isolation from family had to be a major part of the backstory; therefore, the character would need to be in a different country. This factor meant that the setting was crucial. Should it be a major city? Maybe Paris or Rome. Perhaps a rural area such as Provence or Tuscany… That’s when I hit on the perfect place to stage my horror tale.

About 20 years ago, I holidayed in rural Italy, staying in a farmhouse near a beautiful medieval village. Despite the passage of time, memories of that glorious region are strong and clear. Rolling hills, vineyards, delicious wine. A piazza, a palazzo, a duomo. Narrow cobbled walkways, stone houses, window-boxes overflowing with scarlet blooms. I knew these recollections would enable me to conjure an evocative location.

I was finally ready to write my story about a young Aussie in Europe. I hit the keyboard. Created a plot plan. The story flowed. The narrative played out. I had intended to stick to my plan. But, in the end, the final scene surprised me.

So, happily for me, mulling over that intriguing title--Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies—turned out to be “heaven-sent” because my story was accepted for inclusion.

http://robynosullivan.com


Geraldine Borella on “My Sweet Porcupette”

Who doesn’t have an horrific birth story to tell? Well…me, actually. My two baby boys arrived in a fairly textbook, non-horrific manner, two and a half years apart, both healthy and happy. (I was lucky, I guess.) And while no stork was involved in either of their deliveries, there was also no forceps, suction cap, 72-hour labour or emergency caesarean section either. Still, I’d heard the awful woes of other mums and knew there were many, many frightening stories to tell.

When presented with the challenge of writing a body-horror short (something I hadn’t done before) for Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, I wanted to highlight the lengths a mother will go to in order to protect her child. I also wanted to add the element of surprise, and give the reader a journey to embark upon.

I started by researching difficult births and found a wealth of information on human and animal birthing stories. The human stories I’d invariably heard of before, but the animal stories fascinated. For instance, here’s an interesting fact to make your insides quiver: around 15 percent of spotted hyena mothers die during their first time of giving birth, as they have phallic-like genitalia that can tear apart. Frightening, huh? And then there’s the shingleback lizard. She gives birth to 1-2 baby lizards that take up a third of her overall bodyweight. Fancy giving birth to a second grader, anyone? Because that’s what it would be like.

My research got me thinking and daydreaming, plotting and scheming, and I was off and away. The story unfurled quite naturally from there, (no gas or epidural needed), as I drew upon the love I have for my own children to show the fierce protectiveness that motherhood brings. In the end, I think I managed to birth something quite satisfyingly horrific—“My Sweet Porcupette”—and I hope you enjoy it.
​
https://www.facebook.com/geraldineb4

A collection of new and exclusive short stories inspired by, and in tribute to, Shirley Jackson.


Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and readers.


This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, will bring together today’s leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson.


Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Hand, Cassandra Khaw, Karen Heuler, Benjamin Percy, John Langan, Laird Barron, M. Rickert, Seanan McGuire, and Genevieve Valentine. The full collection includes:

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of Event Horizon and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than a hundred science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year, Lovecraft’s Monsters, Fearful Symmetries, The Doll Collection,, The Monstrous, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, Black Feathers,  Haunted Nights (with Lisa Morton), and Mad Hatters and March Hares (stories inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There). Forthcoming are The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea, Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, and The Best of the Best (covering the first Ten volumes of the Best Horror of the Year series).

She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, on Facebook, and on twitter as @EllenDatlow.
​
She’s also won ten World Fantasy awards, in order:
The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, ed (St. Martin’s Press)
The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, ed (St. Martin’s Press)
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Fourth Annual Collection
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, ed (St. Martin’s Press)
Ellen Datlow for editing, Special Award-professional
Little Deaths, Ellen Datlow (Orion)
Silver Birch Blood Moon
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds.(Avon)
The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Editors (Viking)
Salon Fantastique
Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds. (Thunder’s Mouth)
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
Life Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention.
Ellen was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre.” She lives in New York.
​

Welcome to our intermittent horror news round up.  This week we bring you a special horror movie round up.  Featuring news on In a Foreign Town, Brain Freeze at this years ​The Fantasia International Film Festival, Sam and Mattie make a Zombie Movie, which looks to be the feel good horror film of the decade, and news of one of the most brutal films we have reviewed, Beyond Fury from director Darren Ward. 

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About In a Foreign Town


​The film started its successful and fruitful festival run where it premiered at the LA Shorts International Film Festival, made its international debut at the 2019 Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF),and won 2nd Runner Up at the 2020 Final Frame horror short film competition sponsored by StokerCon and the Horror Writers Association.


About In a Foreign Town
In a Foreign Town is a short horror film based on the stories of acclaimed horror author Thomas Ligotti. The story follows a troubled man – played by Yuri Lowenthal (Spider-man Ps4, Love, Death + Robots, Sarah Connor Chronicles) – who recalls a strange childhood journey to a town with no name and the horrifying apparition that has followed him ever since. A first-class cast and creative team bring Ligotti’s surreal, disturbing dreamscapes to life. The short was shot over 5 days at Butcher Bird Studios, the Universal Studios backlot and on location in Hollywood and Downtown LA.


Michael Shlain, In a Foreign Town’s Director, says, “Ligotti’s stories speak to an experience of dread, alienation and nameless anxiety that I believe many of us can relate to today. We are very excited to be working with the team at ALTER to bring In a Foreign Town to a wider community of horror fans.”


About Michael Shlain
A former agent turned writer-director, Shlain’s work has traversed the realms of comedy, high-tech action, and the inner world of dreams and nightmares. Shlain is a co-founder of Butcher Bird Studios, a premiere creative production studio in Los Angeles. He has directed a wide range of narrative, branded and commercial content for clients including Twitch, Nat Geo Wild, and BBC America. Shlain is currently busy producing a series based on In a Foreign Town.

About Thomas Ligotti
Often named as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti is recognized as a modern master in the genre of supernatural horror. His first volume of stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, prompted the Washington Post to dub him as “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction.” Steady acclamation of his works culminated when Ligotti was named a recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Following award-winning graphic novel adaptations of his writing by Fox Atomic Comics, he became one of the few living authors whose books have appeared in the prestigious Penguin Classics series. Among these titles is The Conspiracy against the Human Race, a wide-ranging survey of pessimism in philosophy, psychology, and horror literature. This work has been cited by the creator of the HBO series True Detective as a key influence on the show’s expressions of pessimistic thought, which have been viewed as being among the elements that accounted for its popularity.

About Butcher Bird Studios
Butcher Bird Studios is a premiere full-service creative production studio founded by multi-faceted director-producer-creators Steven Calcote, Jason B. Milligan, Luis Reyes, Michael Shlain and Travis Stevens. From Virtual Production to live-streaming and interactive formats, Butcher Bird harnesses razor-edge technology to tell engaging cinematic stories for a global audience.

Butcher Bird’s original productions include the independent horror comedy feature Better off Zed and the world’s first live interactive sci-fi adventure series Orbital Redux.

Orbital Redux premiered on Legendary/Nerdist’s Project Alpha channel and will be re-released on Gunpowder & Sky’s sci-fi channel DUST in summer 2021.

About ALTER
ALTER is a horror brand for novel and grounded stories exploring the human condition through warped perspectives. Giving voice to emerging, diverse and established filmmakers, ALTER’s owned and operated channel is distributed across YouTube and Facebook, with more than 25M monthly uniques, where three short films or series are released each week. In addition to curating and distributing award-winning content, ALTER develops unique stories with some of the most innovative minds in the genre through its ALTER Studio projects - which are not bound to a particular platform or format.

In October, ALTER, along with Executive Producer Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider-Man), premiered Part 2 of the horror series “50 States of Fright”, starring Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”), Travis Fimmel (“Vikings”, Warcraft: The Beginning) and Christina Ricci (“Monster,” “Z: The Beginning of Everything”). In 2019, the BAFTA-nominated horror short, The Blue Door starring (Gemma Whelan - Game of Thrones, The End of the F***ing World) premiered on ALTER, and earlier this year it was also announced that “Moreau”, a sci-fi TV series that puts a modern spin on the classic novel, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” by H.G. Wells has gone into development and will be written by Zack Stentz (X-Men: First Class, Thor, Rim Of The World). In addition, the psychological thriller “Horror Accidental”, based on the Japanese TV drama series, ‘Horror Accidental 1&2’, will be brought to life by writer and director Evan Daugherty (‘Divergent,’ ‘Tomb Raider’).

The Fantasia International Film Festival will be celebrating its 25th edition as a virtual event accessible to audiences across Canada, with a dynamic program of scheduled screenings and premieres, panels, and workshops running from August 5 through August 25, 2021, once again using the leading-edge platform created by Festival Scope and Shift72.


As the summer approaches, the festival will be following advice from local health authorities, with the possibility of also adding a range of flagship physical events to the lineup.

Last summer’s virtual edition was a phenomenal success, screening to 85000 spectators and amassing a record amount of media coverage, with 475 accredited journalists from around the world covering Fantasia and its titles. The lineup showcased 104 features, a quarter of which were World Premieres, with the majority securing distribution out of the festival, with highlights including THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND selling to Netflix, COME TRUE to IFC, THE PAPER TIGERS to WellGo USA, ANYTHING FOR JACKSON to Shudder, PVT CHAT to Dark Star, and MINOR PREMISE to Utopia.

For the creation of its 25th anniversary poster art, pictured below, Fantasia has once again turned to the talents of renowned illustrator Donald Caron. Taking inspiration from Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s beloved LONE WOLF AND CUB, Caron has created a work that not only acknowledges the key role that Japanese culture has played across Fantasia’s history, but also one that hints and honours our upcoming edition’s embrace of Japanese cinema as a core cinematic theme.

​Fantasia is proud to be opening its upcoming edition with the World Premiere of a major Québécois genre feature - Julien Knafo’s BRAIN FREEZE. First pitched at Frontières, the festival’s world-renowned international co-production market, the film is a smart and stylish zombie comedy that slyly comments on social concerns both domestic and universal, telling the tale of an environmental disaster that leads to a fast-spreading virus ravaging a wealthy gated community off the island of Montreal. BRAIN FREEZE joins the ranks of recently-released cinema that holds an eerie mirror up to our collective experience even though scripted and shot pre-pandemic. While production on the winter-set chiller was abruptly halted four days before completion following Quebec’s lockdown, shooting was miraculously able to wrap the following summer. There could not be a more perfect film for Fantasia 2021 to kick off with! Following the World Premiere on August 5th, BRAIN FREEZE will see theatrical release throughout Canada on August 13th from Filmoption International.

Produced by Barbara Shrier (THE YEAR DOLLY PARTON WAS MY MOM, MÉMOIRES AFFECTIVES), the film stars Roy Dupuis (LA FEMME NIKITA, THE ROCKET), one of Quebec’s leading actors for the past three decades who celebrates his 50th feature with this role, alongside Iani Bédard (MON AMI WALID). The impressive cast is rounded out by an array of acclaimed figures in Québec cinema, including Marianne Fortier (AURORE), Anne-Élisabeth Bossé (LAURENCE ANYWAYS), Mylène Mackay (NELLY), Simon-Oliver Fecteau (BLUFF), Stéphane Crête (DANS UNE GALAXIE PRÈS DE CHEZ VOUS), Mahée Paiment (LES BOYS), Louis-Georges Girard (MAFIA INC), Claudia Ferri (BAD BLOOD), and Jean-Pierre Bergeron (SUR LE SEUIL).

Equally gorgeous as it is bloody, BRAIN FREEZE presents a clever take on corporate greed, the growing rift between the haves and have-nots and a government in crisis that uses a zombie outbreak to express its truth and succeeds at being both a charming horror comedy, coming-of-age tale, and a story of unexpected friendship in hazardous times.

​The 25th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival will be presented by Videotron in collaboration with Desjardins, and will be made possible thanks to the financial assistance of the Government of Quebec, SODEC, Telefilm Canada, the City of Montreal, the Conseil des arts of Montreal and Tourisme Montréal.

Fantasia’s full programming lineup will be announced in several waves across the coming months.

For more information, visit us on the web at www.fantasiafestival.com

What happens when two best friends with Down syndrome rally their hometown of Providence to help realize their dream of making a horror film? The documentary Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie captures this inspiring story of unfiltered optimism and barrier breaking, overflowing with gallons of fake blood and DIY spirit. Gravitas Ventures will release Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie April 6 on a number of digital and cable platforms, including iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, Google Play, Spectrum and Cox.

“I don’t think I’ve ever smiled more while watching a movie in my life,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Farrelly (Green Book), who serves as executive producer. “Sam and Mattie are superstars!”

Since they met at the Special Olympics, Sam Suchmann and Mattie Zufelt have forged an unbreakable bond fueled by their passion for movies. Sam and Mattie pitched their idea of the ultimate cinematic experience to all who would listen: a racy teen zombie flick they proudly proclaimed would be “the greatest movie ever,” exploding with sex, gore, and more over-the-top violence than you can shake a machete at.

They convinced Sam’s older brother Jesse and his band of filmmaking friends to join them in bringing their film to life. The only rule: the duo’s original artistic vision must remain intact. This meant Sam and Mattie would storyboard, script, produce, cast, and star in their dream project: Spring Break Zombie Massacre.

“This is just one of those magical stories,” says co-director and director of Spring Break Zombie Massacre Bobby Carnevale. “We started out thinking we’d be filming their movie with iPhones and ketchup, but Sam and Mattie’s big dreams were infectious, so everyone offered to pitch in. The fact that we ended up with such an incredible film proves that when you bring the right people together, you can do anything.”

With Jesse narrating the journey, Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie chronicles the unique and often emotional challenges of this independent film production and the unexpected triumphs along the way. Living the dream finds the team launching a successful Kickstarter campaign, attracting the attention of Farrelly, and landing television interviews all over the country, including a raucous guest spot on Conan. The documentary culminates in the ultimate payoff: presentingSpring Break Zombie Massacre to the world. 

Proudly unconventional, totally honest, and a little punk rock, Sam & Mattie Make a Zombie Movie spotlights an underdog story like no other. It shatters disability stereotypes and celebrates the creative power of neurodiversity. Ultimately, the film challenges viewers to reach for the stars themselves, echoing Sam and Mattie’s personal mantra: “Rock on, go wild!”  ​

Beyond Fury will be released on BluRay April/May 2021 in North America and DigitMovies are releasing June/July in Italy from Darkside Releasing

Director Darren Ward had this to say about the film 

The film completes my very brutal and bloody crime trilogy, and is my homage and love for 70's/80's Italian cinema (Sudden Fury 1998, A Day of VIolence 2010).  BEYOND FURY was shot on a blackmagic camera in RAW 2.5K with Arri primes lenses.  Production was over four years from April 2014 - November 2018.

Beyond Fury stars Italian Horror legend Giovanni Lombardo Radice (Cannibal Ferox, City of the Living Dead, House at the Edge of the Park), Dan van Husen (Spaghetti Western veteran, Band of Brothers, Nosferatu), Jeff Stewart (The Bill, Dead man Running, Lake Placid 4), Dani Thompson, Gary Baxter, Glenn Salvage and many more

We screened a workprint (Missing over 200 vfx and sound design) at WEEKEND OF FEAR, Germany in 2019 and Won the Silver Glibb, Audience Award for best film.  The workprint was also screened at THE ROMFORD FILM FESTIVAL in 2019, it was nominated for 7 awards, winning 2 (Best supporting Actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice & Best Director)

Post-production was finished March 2020 and then COVID hit.....We got to the finals at the 2020 Italian Horror Fest (last 5 features out of 360).  Due to play at this years Horror-On-Sea festival, but again due to Covid moved to January 2022!

Space is frightening.


When I was young, in my teens, I read 2001: A Space Odyssey. One evening, I got to the bit where HAL refuses to let Dave Bowman back into the ship. That moment affected me. Not specifically because of the computer AI gone wrong, but more because the writing conveyed the vastness and uncompromising dangers of space itself. The vacuum and emptiness, the way in which we try to picture or imagine that.


The idea resonated with me deeply. As a child, I’d suffered from night terrors, something we’d managed to link with when I’d been running a fever. I would fall asleep and then dream I was in deep space, floating in front of planet, an asteroid or something else. What scared me about that was that I couldn’t determine how far away the object was, whether I was falling towards it, or how big it was. My mind kept trying to reconcile all of those issues but couldn’t. All I knew was that I was insignificant in comparison. A tiny object hurtling or not hurtling towards something huge or incredibly small. That’s what always panicked me.


When I was very young, the fevered visions had made me delirious and terrified. As I got older, they became a strange trip that I enjoyed. They were always so vivid and powerful.


2001: A Space Odyssey caught me in a moment when I was still young enough to remember the fever terror. The writing took me right back to that place, being half awake, half within the dream. 


I remembered that feeling when I started writing my 2020 novel, Fearless. There was something I felt I absolutely needed to convey about space. Something about the way in which that vast emptiness is totally uncompromising.
In the 21st century, Humanity has something of an uneasy relationship with nature. We see aspects of our environment as things we need to conquer. Sometimes that view is justified, sometimes it is not. We say we want to understand our world, but for some that understanding is a way to master and control everything around us. 


Space is not something you ever really control. You might move through it, survive it, exist within it for a short time, but that great nothing contains none of the fundamental elements we need to survive.


Our understanding of space has gradually improved. The public perception and visualisation of the environment comes to us through movies. Whilst scientifically we might know you cannot hear anything in space, we still remember the screaming engines of a TIE-Fighter, or the low rumble of the Nostromo. We still suspend our disbelief when we watch those films, but they aren’t real to us anymore, or at least, they aren’t what we think space is like when we actively think about it.


Instead, the real images of astronauts and cosmonauts in space that we get from NASA, SpaceX and other agencies show us people living in cramped conditions, trying to manage the vagaries of micro gravity, or fumbling around outside in huge unwieldy suits that protect them from vacuum and radiation.


That cramped claustrophobia is a huge contrast to the vastness I mentioned before. The safety of tight spaces, their pressurized context is a quality that can bee useful to a writer. The safety of a spaceship or a space station can be threatened or flipped. The fragility of its hull, escaping oxygen, a fire, all of these things risk the brittle equilibrium. Additionally, reversing that safety and using the confines as part of a vicious fight between characters serves to add something to the moment. Characters are trapped, they cannot escape as escape beyond the walls leads to a cold dark empty where nothing survives.


All of these environmental qualities can add so much to a scene, or a moment within a story set in space.


The way in which an author writes tends to emphasize the different qualities of their story. Approaching Fearless, I had a selection themes that were important to me. The portrayal of disabled characters in a science fiction story was probably the biggest priority. I didn’t want the story of my principle character, Captain Ellisa Shann, to be about overcoming her disability to achieve something, those kind of narratives have become something of a trope. Instead, I wanted Shann’s story to be about who she is, as she is. She was born with no legs. There is technology that can assist her, but she lives in a zero-gravity environment and is comfortable with being as she is. That was important to me. 


Other characters then provided an opportunity for me to explore different attitudes. Ensign April Johansson has a ‘plug-in’ mechanized prosthetic arm. Her attitude to her disability isn’t the same, she has adjusted her self-image to include the prosthesis, so when it breaks, she finds herself struggling to adjust. 


However, where both characters, and indeed, several other characters in the story of Fearless find common ground is in their healthy respect for the dangers of space, and the way in which they experience trauma.


The tag line for Fearless on the front cover gives the reader a very clear idea of where we’re going: “They thought it was a rescue, they didn’t expect a war.” He genres of military science fiction and space opera explore and describe the circumstances of violent combat. In some, there is a triumphalism, or a romanticisation of those moments. 


An area which I feel is less explored at times is the effect of war on the individual. The moments of danger that force a person to narrow their world view down to good vs bad or them vs us, has an effect on how we are. When soldiers revisit their actions in the aftermath of those moments, then the emotions kick in, and the self-criticism comes out. 


This is another horror that deserves exploration, not in a cheap ‘for kicks’ way that might lead to excessive introspection, undue angst or a self-absorbed story, but a way that offers a very human exploration of tragic circumstances. The cost of our actions, on who we are, the effect of them on how we are in our lives as we move forward is very important. This is trauma. How we deal with our trauma is an essential part of who we are. 


Captain Shann’s story is a story of struggle, sacrifice, loss and trauma. But her personal story doesn’t end with trauma. Again, there is a type of story where the writer puts away their heroes when the quest is done and they have suffered for their happy resolution, to leave the next problem to the next generation, etc. That’s also not for me. For me, characters who have lived through trauma and found a way to cope – not overcome or forget completely, but cope – are interesting characters, layered characters with depth. 


At times, the trauma comes back. That can be a positive or a negative. Experience teaches us lessons we might never learn otherwise. 


I have recently agreed a contract with Flame Tree Press for the sequel to Fearless. It’s called Resilient and continues the story of Captain Ellisa Shann and her crew as they come to terms with what happened to them in the first book and move forward with their lives. I can promise readers more scenes in space, where the uncompromising vast emptiness will make a return, and where individuals have to make the same kind of emotionally difficult, life or death decisions as before. There are other themes too. An exploration of identity, of worth, agendas, politics, power, all the big themes a writer can try to examine in a story with large enough scope. The claustrophobic tension of the first book can’t be repeated, but it does play a part in the second, as the perspective widens to establish the context of humanity’s colonial efforts in 2118 AD. 


Not anything especially new in some of that, you might say. I might say the same. But every time, I write about space, that fever dream comes back to me, taking me back to those nights when I woke up in a sweat, crying, reminded of my insignificance in the void.