First published back in March of 2021, issue ten of ‘Splatterpunk Zine’ was compiled and edited by Jack Bantry, offering up another blood bucket full of A5 black & white pages, packed with more stories, articles, reviews and interviews of uncompromisingly violent horror and gore. The zine was made available for purchase via Bantry’s ‘Splatterpunk Zine’ website.

Editorial – 1 Page
Editor and all-round-Splatterpunk guru, Jack Bantry, opens up this next issue of the zine with a short introduction whetting the appetite for new Splatterpunk publications upon the horizon.

Faca o Splatterpunk For a da Lei Novemente; or, Make Splatterpunk Outlaw Again – Sean Leonard – 3 Pages
Punk rock drummer, author, and horror reviewer, Sean Leonard, who’s the man behind the labour-of-love website ‘Nervousmaker’, provides a passion-fuelled crash-course in Brazilian horror cinema. The article starts out covering the film movements – ‘Cinema Novo’ and ‘Cinema de Invenção’, before moving onto ‘Pornochanchada’ (Brazilian sex comedies) and its inevitable blending with horror. At this point Leonard jumps off the proverbial precipice, enthusiastically covering the low budget films from Felipe M. Guerra, Rodrigo Aragao, and the Astaroth Producoes team, before leaping into the works of Gurcius Gewdner, and then Petter Baiestorf.

Honestly, if nothing else, this article gets you exploring a shit tonne of low-budget Brazilian horror flicks. All these names were new to me, and Leonard’s brief descriptions of the Brazilian films are enough to whet any diehard splatter fan’s appetite. But it’s the passion that Leonard exudes about this delightfully niche area of horror cinema, which gets you furiously Googling all these ingeniously titled movies. Honestly, this article will lead you down a rabbit hole of excitable discovery. It did for me!

Horror Music – Aaron Beatup – 3 Pages
Vocalist for the punk/rap/ska band ‘Deadbeat At Dawn’ – Aaron Beatup – delves into the world of punk bands who blended their raw music with the blood-soaked horror genre. Here, Aaron offers up a series of short, snappy lowdowns on the horror-infused work of Quincy Punx, The Cramps, The Misfits, Voorhees, Antiseen, The Damned, Zombina & The Skeletones, Send More Paramedics, Headstone Horrors, and Autopsy Boys.

It's a passionate and well-informed overview of horror-inspired punk acts, with Aaron often pointing you in the direction of his personal favs along with their must-hear albums. Gotta say, it’s good to see SMP getting a mention, with their last album ‘The Awakening’ receiving a much-deserved nod of approval. Altogether an interesting and informative read, once again bubbling with passion for the subject matter at hand.

Write What You Know – Bracken MacLeod – 6 Pages
Devin Brandner had gone too far this time. With three simple words scribbled on the whiteboard, his intention was clear. Those three words were clearly designed to provoke them. “Rape Is Boring”. Brandner was a bully and a pig. To be honest, Jenna didn’t know why they all put up with it. His writing classes weren’t anything special. But today’s performance was the last straw. So, she’d walked. Goodbye Devin Brandner. Goodbye writing class. She’d washed her hands of the whole thing, once and for all. Or so she’d thought, until Grant Foster turned up at her door with a bottle of chardonnay and some juicy gossip about Brandner’s latest assignment. An assignment to push the boundaries even further…

Borish bullies are always a good resource for a gritty splatter story. Here we have a writer’s class, where the teacher is breathtakingly misogynistic and appalling brutish. A particularly fertile ground for some splatter deviance. For the tale’s opening, MacLeod paints the scene of this chauvinistic standing to absolute perfection. Purposefully provoking you. Angering you. Steering something deep in your gut. With teeth clenched, the tale then carries you along to another deeply saddening view of male behaviour. The result of laying down all this emotional kindling, something somewhere between ‘Fight Club’ (1996) and ‘I Spit On Your Grave’ (1978). A fucking angry, but damn rewarding read.

The story includes a full-page illustration by Robert Elrod.



Fort Bragg – Dan Henk – 5 Pages
Darrin lived in a brick duplex with his family. A military base surrounded by overgrown woodlands, hiding the decaying remains of old training grounds and demolished WWII facilities. Or at twelve-years-of-age, that’s what Darrin had been led to believe they concrete carcasses were. But all those hidden secrets contained in the surrounding woods fascinated him. Their lure was too much. He had to explore them. Which was how he came to discover the old mildew-encrusted concrete foundation, with the shallow flight of stairs descending downwards into the gloom below. At the bottom, a small door hidden by a mush of dead leaves. What lay beyond that door, a mystery that had been locked away for decades. Another secret that Darren just had to explore…

Dan Henk’s an author who just loves to play with creepy, semi-conscious dreamlike nightmares. In doing so, he effortlessly establishes this sinister atmosphere of eerie intrigue. Dark secrets hidden in the gloom. Witing for Henk to hold a fading torch beam to these horrors. Oh yeah, and Henk also loves to mix in dark sci-fi! The end result is something akin to ‘X-Files’ with a far, far darker tone to it.

For this story we have a young twelve-year-old lad brought into this creepyass equation. With the short being titled ‘Fort Bragg’ it’s a pretty safe assumption the military base in the story is said facility (now known as Fort Liberty). Interestingly, Fort Bragg is a recurring setting for Henk’s stories. We saw it feature heavily within his novel ‘The Black Seas Of Infinity’ (2011), and now we get to explore the secrets around the encircling woodlands. What Henk brings to the table for this is some properly sinister sci-fi craziness. Insanely atmospheric and a properly downbeat twist-ending. Trust me, this one’s such a good read!

The short was first published back in October 2020 as a standalone ebook short story.

This reprint of the story includes a suitably fitting full-page illustration by Dan Henk (which was also used for that issue’s cover art).



Like A Hole In The Head – Christine Morgan – 10 Pages
Doctor Miles Rutherford wasn’t expecting Greyholme Asylum to be quite the modern state-of-the-art facility that it was. Neither did he expect Doctor Sophia Harlowe to be the attractive, well-kept, professional that she clearly was. The asylum was perhaps the most advanced, well-presented, and well-run facility the good doctor had visited in all his time as a medical professional. Which was why it was such a shock to hear about an ice-pick lobotomy having been recently performed there on one of the young patients. The practice was so out-dated and considered barbaric by all practitioners. Furthermore, the recent procedure had been a complete failure. It’d only made the patient more volatile, violent, psychotic, and dangerous. Which was why they’d called upon Dr Rutherford for help. Although also completed outdated, Rutherford was one of the few remaining doctors to gave experience with the potential next course of treatment. The only option they saw left…trephination. They wanted the good doctor to saw a hole into the patient’s skull…

US author Christine Morgan’s short story is a wicked slab of grisly body horror, landing somewhere between the infamous birth and lobotomy scenes from within ‘Alien’ (1979) and ‘Re-Animator’ (1985) respectively. Outside of the explosive, splatter-shock ending, the rest of the short is nothing short of a truly captivating read. The prose and dialogue are so wonderfully written, they just draw you in. Honestly, it’s only a short, but even within the minimal page count, Morgan successfully establishes vivid portrayals of her two main characters – the Dr Rutherford and then the violent, psychotic patient himself. Indeed, in the build up to the explosively gory finale I’ve alluded to, the short flitters back and forth between the perspectives of these two principal characters, with the prose altering significantly to reflect the staggering, stuttering, struggling, thought pattern of the inflicted patient. And this works so, so well. Ingeniously conceived and expertly delivered. Altogether, just a damn good story.

The story includes a full-page illustration by Jim Agpalza.



Head Trippin’ In Mexico – K Trap Jones – 5 Pages
They were driving back from a kick-ass spring break vacation, when Hunter’s bladder announced it couldn’t go another second without sweet release. The approaching flickering white neon light of a gas station declared itself to be Hunter’s saviour. The second the boys pull in; he was off and running for the public bathroom. The cheap Mexican tequila which he’d lived off over the past week, sloshing around in his stomach and bladder. Although Hunter could never have foreseen what this desperate dash into Mexico’s most unsavoury of restrooms would lead to. The absolute insanity that would follow, taking him racing to a cliff edge, and beyond…

Holy-fucking-shit is this a good fucking read! For the final short in the zine, we’re given a short offering from US author, K Trap Jones, which is clearly more than a tad inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’ (1971), to the point that even the main character is called Hunter! Anyway, for his story Jones delivers a hallucinatory trip that’s as insanely chaotic as it is utterly compelling. An escalation of wild happenings, that keeps getting worse. Sort of like Peter Berg’s ‘Very Bad Things’ (1998), only on some shit-strong acid. The thing is, you don’t know what’s real or not…well, not until the end that is. The result of this is an insanely captivating and utterly hilarious read, battering your senses, from start to finish.

The story includes a full-page illustration by Robert Elrod.



Book Reviews – 4 Pages
Cruel Summer – Wesley Summer
Blood Relations – Kristopher Triana
The Magpie Coffin – Wile E Young
Along The Path Of Torment – Chandler Morrison
One Bloody Thing After Another – Joey Comeau
Visceral – Christine Morgan & Patrick C Harrison
Until Summer Comes Around – Glenn Rolfe

Other Reviews:
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