Part One: Rodrigo's Morgue


Rodrigo Gudino, California, raised in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico, and currently calls Mississauga, Ontario his personal Canadian burial, er, stomping ground. An endless supply of horrific ambition, Rodrigo is responsible for launching and publishing one of the world's premier horror magazines, Rue Morgue, as well as masterminding Rue Morgue Radio, Cinemacabre Movie Nights in Toronto, along with the country's largest horror convention, The Rue Morgue Festival of Fear. Rodrigo has degrees in both Literature and Philosophy and since appointing Jovanka Vuckovic as Rue Morgue's Editor In Chief, is happy to be spending more time making movies worth screaming about with plans to expand deeper still into the dark world of horror culture and entertainment. Join us as we discuss his film work, what it takes to succeed in the precarious world of publishing, why the ability to scare the hell out of people just might make this world a better place to live in, and more.

For the Fear Zoners who might be hearing your name for the first time and - god forbid - learning about Rue Morgue for the first time, how about a bit of a rundown of how the magazine started out and how it got its big break on the streets of Toronto?

Well, I started at Rue Morgue magazine back in 1997. I was in the music business at the time and I wanted to do something else, I really cared about and I had this idea of a magazine that dealt with horror, but was mere cultural and delved into art and comic books and games and toys even fashion and all of the things that surrounded horror movies, so it wasn't just specific to horror movies. I think at the time I had the distinct impression that horror magazines were more about horror movies. Shortly after I started, Rue Morgue started getting very popular. I was able to launch a monthly night film called the Cinemacabre Movie nights here in Toronto. The magazine started its own radio show which I produce; I started that in (about) 2004, called Rue Morgue Radio. The Festival of Fear has grown out of that which is a horror convention. In the early days it was just this magazine about horror culture and entertainment, but I guess it's like that even now, just a little bit bigger.

What was it that separated Rue Morgue from other publications of its time back then and now as it pretty much sets the standards for what a dark culture entertainment magazine is all about? I mean it's gotta be about more than sheer content, isn't it?

I had run a student newspaper before when I was at the University of Toronto so I knew a bit about publishing and writing and editing. I put a lot of money I didn't have in the magazine and it was something I was delivering on the streets of Toronto. I took it to specialty stores and such. I also sent it around to industry types and people who I had met in the music industry and so on. I think it was not necessarily only the content, but the quality of it. Even when you look back on those early issues, which have been sold out for a long time, they certainly don't compare to the current issues that we have out now but even for an indie publication that was black and white at the time it was professionally put together. There was a lot of attention to detail, content and layout and so forth. Again, it wasn't as ambitious or colourful or as multi-faceted as it is now, but there was definitely a level of professionalism which I think spoke very strongly to readers and also spoke very strongly to the horror industry. I remember early on I got a call from Jay Douglas at Anchor Bay and he basically told me that it was hands down the best horror magazine he had seen and I think that was the very first issue I ever published so it kinda got around, y'know?

The magazine never was bought or picked up by anybody. It's still independent. It just grew over time and what I did is decided to re-invest into the magazine. Rather than just being content to live off of it, I decided I could put the money back into it and continue to struggle, but struggle on a larger scale. Through that philosophy it grew over time and found a wider readership. I think one of the reasons why it's successful and I guess why it has a good reputation among readers and horror fans is that our approach is unique, not necessarily that it's better than other magazines, but it is unique and has a very strong personality. All of our writers have a very strong personality. We try to look at the genre from an adult perspective. I think a lot of magazines market their product to teenagers, to people they think are largely horror film consumers. Teenagers don't work at Rue Morgue. We're all in our twenties and thirties. We try to make the magazine for ourselves. Even from the very beginning I always used myself as a barometer and I think that's kinda worked. I think that's really sort of the key.

How do you and the Rue Crew keep your brains and enthusiasm fresh month after month after year even when it seems you've covered all to be covered from every possible angle?

One of the ways we keep it fresh is because we have such a broad approach that there's always new things. If we were just about the movies then I think it would have just gotten stale a long time ago. We're always trying to find unique artists or people trying to do something in the comic book world or new books, old books. We also do a lot of retrospective stuff when we get into the nostalgic, and games and the whole culture as well as films, obviously, independent and mainstream, and even stuff that is technically not horror, but is of interest to a horror fan. For example, the movie called THE IRREVERESIBLE. Really, there is so much to talk about that I think we all are of the opinion that there is so much we have yet to uncover. I think that readers have responded because there are a lot of people out there doing interesting things so when they read in Rue Morgue that we cover stuff off the beaten path, they tend to let us know about it. We get a lot of stuff sent here that takes us off guard and that's stuff we wanna put in the magazine.

From a more practical level I suppose, is everybody here does a variety of things. I'm not of the philosophy to pigeon-hole people into one thing. I think when people are involved in different aspects of something rather, than for example, laying the magazine out, or editing a particular part of the magazine, if they're into programming the films, the Festival of Fear, even the film end of things, which I'm doing now. It keeps it fresh for everybody. It keeps it interesting and keeps them more interested at the end of the day.

Over the years, RM has certainly become a bit of an asexual beast within its own right with the internal spawning of such entities as the RM radio, the RM FOF, and the RM Radio show. How have these add-ons helped to shape what RM stands for, and is there anything else cooking on the burners that the future doesn't yet know about?

The immediate future is in film which is going to open a lot of doors for a lot of things. I'd probably be very interested in doing, or have been interested in doing in the past, a line of books and a line of different things, like getting into different aspects of the genre at Rue Morgue Records (such as) releasing albums. But yeah, I think the immediate future is film and that's going to open the door to a lot of different areas. I've always been of the opinion, rather than grow quickly, to grow it slowly but with an eye for quality and maintaining what we're known for. There's going to be lots of stuff. At this point, RM Cinemas is really my movies, but I don't want it to just be my movies. I want it to be other people's movies. I hope to be able to get together a group of very interesting directors and people who are on the cutting edge and bring them together under Rue Morgue Cinema and eventually have them make movies under the banner. But we'll see how long that's gonna take. Like I said, I like to move slow and make deliberate footsteps forward and make sure I don't fuck things up because it's easy to do that at any time, right?

If the iconic success of the RM magazine is any indication of the vitality and influence of the journalistic dark side of literature, then perhaps the all too frequent birth and fast death cycle of so many smaller press publications is an indication to how delicate and vulnerable the business of publishing horror is. In opinion and experience, where do you think all these dead publications have failed as compared to the rare few that are successful enough to still be struggling after the first few crucial years of operation?

First of all, horror publications are not any less or any more vulnerable than any other publication as a whole. Sure, you can look at a publication like Maxim and say to yourself, well, that's a bigger demographic than horror because Maxim is about chicks and semi-clad girls and everybody loves those. Y'know, guy culture and stuff which is probably bigger than horror culture, but there are more Maxim type magazines out there, so therefore their competition is a lot stiffer than a smaller industry such as the horror industry. From what I know, really the horror magazines are not in any unique place with respect to whether they're going to survive or whether they're going to fail. So think it's a sort of publishing reality that most magazines do fail, and I think the reason for that is that probably a lot of different unique reasons in each case. I think a lot of them aren't introducing anything new to the market so they kind of overestimate their own particular vision or what they are actually introducing to the market. If it's something that already exists then it's going to be infinitely more difficult to get off the ground. For example, if Rue Morgue happened to be a movie magazine, then the competition with Fangoria would have been a lot stiffer because they are primarily a horror movie magazine. The fact that Rue Morgue was significantly different from it certainly helped us out because Fangoria has been around for a lot longer than we've been around.

Secondly, with publications, no matter what you're publishing whether you're doing American Bowling or horror or pornography, ultimately you're in publishing which means that you need to know how to write sentences and how to edit and how to make things look good and the spelling has to be (correct). So in other words, the technical aspects of the industry have to be adhered to. A lot of the times you have very professional magazines that have way too many errors and they never get taken seriously and I think that certainly hurts them.

It's really just a matter of understanding marketing and how to make something out of nothing. This is something that applies to filmmakers and book publishers and people who are making comics and even people in bands. They have to make people care about what their doing because there's a million people out there with bands and books and comic books and stuff. So it's kind of like knowing how to invest the energy, time and money in getting people to know that you exist and then after that they may decide whether they like you or not, if they like what you're doing or decide to buy what your doing and support your magazine or not.

So, I think in the publishing industry, certainly in magazine publishing there's a tendency to underestimate those things. A lot of people who publish a magazine think 'well, I'm not in a band. It's a magazine, it's a different thing. In a sense, it's not a different thing. It's the same thing. It's a product that needs to be exposed and it needs to be cultivated and it needs to be targeted to a specific market. I think those are some of the reasons that perhaps some magazines have a tendency to fail.

NEXT: THE DEMONOLOGY OF DESIRE!